“How much do I owe you, Mr. Bragg?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Our mutual friend has already taken care of it.”
11
The next day took me by surprise. It was Saturday. What with running from the tekkies, trying to free that lame-brained Evans kid from the fell clutches of the county cops, and all of the attendant difficulties with Sue Gillis, I had lost track of time—or the day of the week, anyway.
I got to the office a little after nine and was surprised to find the door locked. That meant Mrs. Fenton hadn’t arrived yet; Well, that seemed kind of funny. I let myself in and checked the answering machine for messages. There weren’t any. If Mrs. Fenton was sick, she would have phoned in by now. She may not have been very likable—her constant air of fussy disapproval sometimes annoyed me—but she was dependable.
So I made the coffee and settled down to read the newspapers. I hadn’t been at that very long when the telephone rang. Expecting it to be Mrs. Fenton, I was a little surprised when I recognized Stash Olesky’s voice at the other end of the line. Hadn’t we finished our business? Or was this something else?
“I tried you at home, Charley. Didn’t expect to find you at the office today. I hope it’s nothing too pressing.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“You were coming over to our place today—remember? The Michigan-Michigan State game?”
I glanced up to the top of the page of the Free Press.
My God, it was Saturday, wasn’t it? No wonder Mrs. Fenton wasn’t around. “To tell you the truth, Stash, what with all that’s going on, I’d forgotten about it completely.”
“Listen,” he said, suddenly serious, “I hope you’re not holding that business with the Evans kid against me. No hard feelings?”
“No, no, no, certainly not. I’ve pulled too many fast ones myself to be put out by that. And I must say that was a pretty speedy little maneuver. Your timing was impeccable.”
“Oh, you mean the Annual Conference of Southeastern Michigan County Judges? That was just something I’d be more aware of than you would be.” He paused. “But how about it, Charley? Should be a nice little TV party. Not a mob of people, just a few. Some of them you know, and some of them you don’t. Come on by. You’ll have a good time. Lorraine’s cooking up a big spread for halftime.”
“Yeah, well, Stash, the only thing is that when we made that date, I thought Sue would be available, and she’s not.”
“The Evans thing, huh?”
“No, we got past that. But they’ve got her back on those gruesome child murders.”
“I thought they took her off. Sent her home.”
“Yeah, but they brought her back. It’s a pretty small force, as you well know.”
“Okay, then, Sue can’t make it. I might have to run out anytime, myself. And I hope that’s how it works out. It’ll mean there’s a break in the case. But what do women know about football, right? Come without her.”
“I’ve got a conference with a client at eleven.”
“Just so you’re here by one. That’s kickoff time. One o’clock, Charley. See you then. You know the address.”
And before I could offer any more excuses, he hung up.
The client I was meeting was Mark Conroy, and experience told me that when somebody really begins to open up, they soon find they have a lot more to tell. And if he didn’t, then I had a few questions that might stimulate his memory. But what we really had to talk about was his proposed course of action, what could be done and what couldn’t. He would be trying to persuade me to come along and take part in this plan he’d worked out with Tolliver. I’d be trying to persuade him to drop it completely.
Conroy would be driving out to Pickeral Point, alone, and coming to my office. Whether we’d talk here or not, I wasn’t sure. Once bitten, twice shy. After all, I’d been out of the office more than eighteen hours. Somebody could have paid another visit during the night and rewired the place.
I closed up the Free Press and put it aside, then I hauled out a clean pad from the drawer and began making notes for my meeting with Conroy. About halfway through, my mind drifted off to more subjective matters. It bothered me a little that I had lost track of the day of the week. Was I such a workaholic that I just trudged off automatically to the office like some sort of programmed automaton? I hoped not. But then, this Conroy thing was big. Big politically, big news, and big in the sense that it was going to be damned tough to beat. It was going to take all I could give it, and that meant seven days a week.
That wasn’t the question, though. For the better part of a year, my life had revolved around Sue Gillis and the office. The man said that what you needed for happiness was love and work. I had both, so why wasn’t I happier? I’d never really thought much about it before. Since I’d moved up here to Pickeral Point, I’d been so busy putting my life back in order that I hadn’t really noticed how much it had shrunk in the process. In the old days the booze had fueled a manic cycle that had lasted just about two decades. A long time. Take away the booze, and there was sure to have been a downturn. I didn’t regret that. I made up for it by hard work, trying to build up this small-town practice so that it would support me, pay Mrs. Fen-ton’s salary, and the office rent.
And, perhaps against all odds, I had succeeded in coming back from the abyss. After I’d won the Angel Harwell murder case, the clients came waddling in like a string of ducks on the shores of Lake Michigan. The Dr. Death trial had brought me a fair share of acclaim, too, and then there was the personal injury case I managed to finesse. I didn’t have the gold Rolex and the red Rolls anymore, but I had recovered a large part of my self-esteem, something no one can put a price on. And I was off the booze, one day at a time.
But now, with my confidence mostly restored and with an ongoing involvement with a woman who was first-class all the way, I seemed to want something more. Maybe it was the confinement of small-town life. Maybe I missed the glamor and the glitz of my glory days in Detroit. Or maybe it was something far deeper, something I couldn’t even define. Maybe inside me, somewhere hidden and unknown, there was a time bomb ticking, waiting to explode.
I decided to talk about it to Bob Williams. He was a friend. He was also my professional listener, my sponsor. It might be worth dinner to him. And I’d make it a point to look in on Stash Olesky’s TV football party. My circle of friends and acquaintances was really pretty limited—clients, people in the justice system, and whoever might show up at an AA meeting. There had to be more to life.
My sit-down with Mark Conroy turned out to be a walkabout. Even after Mr. Bragg’s thorough cleanup, Conroy was inclined, just as I was, to be distrustful of my four walls. I wondered how long it would take me to feel completely comfortable in my office again.
“What do you say we take a walk?” I suggested.
He nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
I took him down River Road, and for the first block he seemed moderately interested in a couple of the old mansions on the left. He also kept an eye open for any suspicious vehicles along the way. But gradually he warmed to the subject at hand, and in no time at all he was talking as freely as he had in his Cadillac the morning before. He had some interesting things to say, though, and for the first time he revealed himself in ways I never would have guessed.
He began by saying he had the feeling that they had failed to convince me on the matter of the mayor’s complicity in the drug trade. I confessed I still had a few doubts on that count.
“What would it take, Sloan?”
“More than an informant you’ve got so tight by the balls he’d be willing to tell you anything you want to hear. How do you know he’s not just buying time to organize his departure? How do you know he hasn’t left town already?”
“Because LeMoyne’s got somebody sitting on him, somebody undercover, somebody we trust.”
“Every minute of the day?”
“Every minute of the day.”
“That must look a little s
trange. How can you be so sure you can trust him?”
“It isn’t a him, it’s a her, and that’s why it doesn’t look so strange. I trust her because LeMoyne trusts her. Any cop who would put herself in that sort of situation commands trust.”
“For that matter, how do you know Tolliver is on the level?”
I could tell I was getting to him. That was my intention. I wanted him to see the holes in this plan of his. (Plan? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like so much wishful thinking.)
“Sloan, look, I don’t know how it is for you, but in my business there are certain people you trust all the way, and certain people you don’t.”
“You seemed to trust Timmerman up to a point. You trusted the Mouse all the way. Your record isn’t exactly infallible, you know.”
He looked at me darkly and said nothing. Staring ahead then, he just .kept plodding along. While Conroy was not, as far as I could tell, one of those arrogant individuals who thought himself above criticism, he obviously didn’t like to be reminded of his lapses in judgment. None of us do. It occurred to me at that point that this might turn out to be a very short meeting. I didn’t want that, and so I spoke up.
“Okay, look,” I said, “maybe that wasn’t exactly generous of me. We probably ought to start this discussion all over again.”
“Oh no.” He shook his head emphatically. “You didn’t say anything I haven’t told myself over and over again in these past few weeks.”
“We all make mistakes. Looking back, I have to say that the first twenty-five years of my adult life were one big mistake.”
He responded with a thin smile, walked on a bit, and then: “You look at me, my color—not black and not quite white—and you can see the source of my problem. Or maybe I should say the source of my confusion. My mother was white. She was tough, and strong, and capable, and she gave me a real sense of my own worth. She never told me who my father was, but she never allowed any doubt in my mind that I was welcome in her life. We got through all of that illegitimate shit better than any mother and child ever did. I really believe that. I grew up right up the river in Port Huron, but I knew she was from Detroit, had family there she never knew. It was just the two of us, but that was all the family I ever needed. She made a good living for us keeping books for one of the shipping companies up there, and she sent me to college, Michigan State, and died while I was in my senior year—cancer—and she never even let me know that she was sick.
“But out of college and with her dead,” he continued, “I headed straight for Detroit and the police academy. I had some idea I was going to investigate those relatives, find them, confront them, and give them holy hell for what I supposed they’d done to her. I found them, all right, her mother and father in Southfield and two brothers in Royal
Oak, but by that time I was getting on with my own life, and they just weren’t worth bothering with, the hell with them.”
“Good decision,” I put in at that point.
“They were just ordinary people,” he said, “and she was probably as dissatisfied with them as they were with her. But I have to say, Sloan, that the way she brought me up, good as it was for me as a boy, it didn’t really prepare me for life in Detroit.”
“Why? How do you mean?”
“I mean that she brought me up thinking that color didn’t matter and I found out in Detroit that it did.”
“That’s kind of an understatement.”
“So I guess I chose to be black, while before that I chose to be white, or maybe not consider it at all. I married black—a woman even more ambitious than I was, if that’s possible. My partners were black. And if the overwhelming majority of those we pursued and arrested were black, well, that sort of rounded out the equation.
“But then a funny thing happened. While I was on a TAC Squad operation, one night ten years ago, Ralph Smerka saved my life.”
“The Mouse.”
“Yeah. He didn’t just pull me back or push my head down, he stepped in front of me and took one in the gut, one that would have hit me, or anyone else of normal size, right in the chest. So I was his for life, which made us more or less best friends. And he was white. So I had to sort that out. Timmerman came along and volunteered his services. And then Mary Margaret turned me inside out, and … Well, you know what happened, or you must have a pretty good idea.”
Conroy was as close to sounding human as I had ever heard him. His honesty was almost unsettling.
“We’ll work out the details later,” I said.
“Betrayal is what happened,” he said, his voice firm.
“And it looks to you like a conspiracy.”
“Something like that. Call it an unorganized conspiracy.”
“Timmerman’s white?”
“That’s right. So now I’m thinking black again, and LeMoyne is my man. I do trust him, Sloan. He’s a crude, tough, mean, old-fashioned cop, just the kind I’m not—or so I’ve told myself ever since I entered the academy. But he’s on my side, and he’s come up with a way to help me out of this mess I’m in. Listen, you think I’m blind to all the difficulties with this scheme of his? Certainly it’s got holes in it. But right now it’s the best shot I’ve got, so I owe it to LeMoyne and to that cop who’s baby-sitting the pigeon to give it a try. They’ve stuck their necks out for me. I owe them.”
“And you feel I owe them, too?”
“That’s for you to say. Your presence tonight would be appreciated.”
It was my turn to remain silent for a while, quite a while, as we continued our amble down River Road. Traffic seemed to have picked up, cars whizzing back and forth in both directions, people rushing to get through their Saturday errands before the big game began. Fully half the houses in town would be shut down tight through the afternoon, their occupants settled before television sets, participating global village-style in a fall ritual, Michigan versus Michigan State.
There was a little park at the next corner. I led Conroy off the sidewalk and down a path to a bench on one side of it. This had been the only vacant lot there on River Road. A few years before, the town of Pickeral Point had acquired the property and done a little to improve it—put in grass, some playground equipment—and christened it the George Romney Memorial Park. On this raw November morning, it was empty except for two kids, about eight and nine, playing on the swings. They were bundled up against the cold, but from what I could see, they looked like brothers. Neither of them paid us any attention.
Conroy gave me one of his thin smiles as we sat down on the park bench. From there we had a close view of the river. We watched a freighter northward bound. There was something almost majestic about it—an object that big, so close, moving along so slowly. He seemed to sense it, too. We both kept quiet until it had passed out of sight. Only then did he speak up.
“Let me tell you a story, Sloan,” he said. “It’s one that you’ve heard before, read in the newspapers, but I’ve got a few comments on it you ought to hear.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
“You remember some years ago, you were still in Detroit at the time, there was a van found downtown on a riverside parking lot? Well, it wasn’t exactly ‘found.’ Nine-one-one got an anonymous call telling us it was there and that we should take a look inside. I was working late that night—I worked late a lot of nights back then—and so I went out on it with the Mouse. We weren’t the first on the scene. A patrol car in the area had been dispatched right away. But when we pulled up, the two uniform cops were still arguing about opening up the back doors of the van to take a look inside. They’d taken their time because one of them thought that what was inside might be a bomb. Not a wild idea at all. He wanted to call out the bomb squad. Well, I took responsibility. I had a hunch, and I was acting on that hunch, and since I was still playing supercop, I sent everyone back behind the patrol car and opened up the van myself. You know what I found, don’t you? You remember?”
These rhetorical halts were getting on my nerves. I signale
d for him to get on with his story. But yes, he was right. I remembered what was in that van. There was no one in Detroit who didn’t.
“The doors weren’t locked.” He seemed a little obsessed, as if he had to get this out, no matter what it cost him. Cops have these stories, and they have to tell them. “All I did was give the doors a quick pull and jump back, like maybe I was afraid of a bomb, too. But there was no bomb, just a bad smell. The light was bad. I called for a light, and one of the patrol cops shined his flashlight inside. At first, I thought it was a joke. I thought maybe somebody had stolen a butcher’s van and phoned it in as sort of a prank. It was a pile of raw meat, cut and stacked loose on the floor of the van. But then we saw the heads. Just tossed off to one side, two men and a woman. The raw meat, it was body parts—legs, arms, torsos, a pelvis separated from a torso, hands, feet.
“The cop holding the light let out a yell and dropped it. His partner threw up all over the Mouse, and me, I just picked up the flashlight and looked again. I thought I’d seen everything, but I’d never seen anything like that. And of course it got better afterward. You remember, don’t you, Sloan?”
It was a rhetorical question.
“It turned out that it had all been done with a chain saw. The woman, at least, had been shot dead first. That was the coroner’s report. We got IDs on them and knew what it was about—drugs, crack in this case. And knowing the victims, we had a pretty good idea who was responsible. It looked to be territorial—kids trying to bust into the big-time; the oldest of them was just twenty-two. But where had it taken place? Where was the butcher shop? The van was clean, stolen the night before from out in Birmingham someplace. So we had to find the crime scene. And what happened? The janitor up at the Democratic Party Club called us up and said somebody sure made a mess in the basement. That was what they’d used for their slaughterhouse.
“The Democratic Party Club.” Conroy’s voice was getting tighter. “Now, you tell me, Sloan, who is the head of the Democratic Party in Wayne County?”
The Judgment Page 21