Frag Box

by Richard A. Thompson

  “Sausage biscuits,” said Anne.

  “And some red.”

  “And a bottle of wine,” said Anne. “Glenda here has a lot of things to tell me, don’t you dear?”

  “I’ll curl your fucking hair, is what.”

  “There’s a sweetheart. Run along, Herman.”

  ***

  Forty-five minutes later I was back, with the finest gourmet sandwiches that the SuperAmerica in Lowertown had plus a bottle of red wine so cheap, I wondered if it was safe to drink. I picked it mainly because it had a screw top. I figured if I had gotten one that needed a corkscrew, Glenda the Witch might just have opened it with a brick and wound up drinking the broken glass. Somebody once told me that was the homeless person’s equivalent of having it on the rocks. The guy who told me that thought it was a joke.

  When I got back, Anne Packard was sitting on a large rock, letting Glenda talk into a hand-held tape recorder, nodding encouragement now and then. They stopped when they saw me.

  “Did you get the good stuff?” said Glenda.

  “Did you earn it?”

  “She did, Herman. Go ahead and give it to her.”

  Glenda opened the bottle first and had a big slug. She paused and looked off into space for a moment, as if she was pondering some great truth, and then she had another, bigger than the first. Then she screwed the top back on and made the bottle disappear somewhere inside her layers of clothes. Finally, she dug greedily into the paper bag with the sandwiches.

  “How many ketchup you get? Looks like two.”

  “That would be because two is what it is.”

  “Didn’t your mama teach you nothin? Something’s free, you take all of it you can get.” Her face darkened and she rummaged harder. “Ketchup, mustard, salt, napkins. Them are staples, man!” Her voice was rapidly escalating to hysteria-pitch.

  “I’ll remember, Glenda.” To Anne, in a much lower tone, I said, “Time to leave.”

  “We’re not quite done.”

  “I’m afraid we are.” I gently took an elbow and tried to steer her away. Meanwhile, Glenda was working herself up to full frenzy.

  “Next time? What the hell good’s that do me, that ‘next time’ shit? You go back and get the rest of that stuff now, or I’ll kick your ass, is what I’ll do.” She was screaming now. “Who the hell you think you are anyway? You come down here with your fancy clothes and your camera and shit, and you think you can cheat me. You think I’m nobody but…”

  We walked away and left her ranting. When we got back up on high ground, Anne said, “What on earth was that all about?”

  “Apparently Glenda is a mean drunk. Also a bipolar one, with maybe a touch of schizophrenia or alcoholic dementia here and there.”

  “But she only had the two drinks.”

  “You don’t have a lot of experience with winos, do you? After enough years of pickling their brains in the sauce, the well-known trend of ‘increased tolerance’ starts to go the other way. They might go through a quart a day for years, and then one day they find they can get higher than a kite just by licking the cork.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Well, yes. Life on the street is terrible. Maybe that’s what you ought to be writing about. Not that it’s exactly a new topic.”

  “So are you telling me that all the stuff I just got from her is just drunken delusions?”

  “No, I’m not. She’s probably never really sober, but she was at least dry when you were taping her. Did she say she was dry when the soldiers came to the gulch?”

  “I think so. She had a lot of stuff to say, most of it totally beside the point, but I think she said that, yes.”

  “Then you should be all right. The cops would write her off because they couldn’t count on her in court, but you don’t have that problem.”

  “No, I only have the problem of getting two corroborating sources. Sometimes I think it might be easier to be a cop.”

  “Do reporters actually do that, that two-source business?”

  “I do.”

  Back downtown, we went up into the skyway system at its eastern end, through the lobby of the former Buckby-Meers Building, where I’m told there used to be a real Foucault pendulum. I’ve never figured out what purpose it served, taking the pendulum out. A block or two farther on, I pointed to another deli and gave Anne an enquiring look. She pointed to her watch and shook her head, no, and we headed back toward her office.

  “So what do you think?” I said. “Do you have a story?”

  “Oh, it’s a story, all right. But I can’t see what it’s about yet. It’s at the stage we call holding a monster by the tail. I still need the hook, something to hang it all on. Until I get that, I really can’t write it.”

  “That makes sense. I don’t know what it’s all about, either, but I intend to find out.”

  “Well, when you do, give me a call. Here’s my card, with my direct line. I’ll write my cell phone number on it, too.” She proceeded to scribble as we walked, looking up from time to time.

  “And here’s my office,” she said. “So I’ll say goodbye now. Pam, would you please give this gentleman back his box?”

  “Some people from his office came and picked it up, Miss Packard. They said he needed it right away.” She smiled sweetly, as if she were expecting a pat on the head.

  “What did they look like?” I said.

  “Well, like you two, sort of. Business people. Not crooks or anything.”

  “A man and a woman?” I said. “Dark, severe clothes, very formal, superior manner?”

  “Yes, that sounds right. So they were your people, then?”

  “No, they were not. I think they were spooks, actually, but I would definitely like to see the tapes from your surveillance cameras for that time slot.”

  “I don’t know if we can do that.”

  “Herman,” said Anne, suddenly very serious, “that wasn’t it, was it?”

  “What wasn’t what?”

  “Don’t be cute. Was that Charles Victor’s box, the one everybody is supposed to be looking for?”

  “No, it was a decoy. And somebody just bit on it.”

  “But you know where the real one is?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Now you’re being cute again.”

  “Let’s say I can lay my hands on a box that used to belong to Charlie. He thought it was important for somebody to keep it for him. I have never looked inside it.”

  “Is that my hook?”

  “I won’t know until I look inside it, will I?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You can go with me to get it, if you want. First, though, I think we should go visit your friend at the County Morgue.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “I’m Charlie’s sole heir. I can claim his personal effects, whatever they might be. And I should do so before they all get shipped off to some lab that won’t tell us what they find.”

  “Pam? Sign me out for the rest of the day.”

  Chapter 11

  Fire in the City

  Anne’s contact person down at the Morgue turned out to be a young lab technician named Brian Faraday. It was obvious that it made him very nervous, having us back in the restricted spaces. It was also obvious that he was totally infatuated with Anne and would do almost anything to keep from displeasing her.

  Looking at Charlie’s body didn’t tell us much, apart from the fact that both life and death had been very cruel to him. His meager collection of personal possessions wasn’t just a fountainhead of information, either. Brian wouldn’t let me have any, but he let us have a look at them, in a zippered plastic bag that was on its way to the evidence room in the main cop shop. So apparently they were calling it a homicide, after all.

  There wasn’t much there. There were his original army dog tags, of course. Why he had kept them all this time, I couldn’t imagine, but I knew the police had used them to ID him more tha
n once before, since he had held neither a driver’s license nor a Social Security card. There was a small comb with a few teeth missing, a pocketknife, a combination can opener and corkscrew, a few coins, a dirty bandanna. Half a candy bar. And an ace of spades from a deck with the horse-head insignia on the back. The death card he had told his lawyer about.

  “Air Cav,” I said, pointing to it.

  “Are you an expert on military insignias?”

  “Not even slightly. But that was Charlie’s old outfit. He had a shoulder patch on his fatigue jacket, just like it.”

  The bag also contained some kind of key, a stubby little brass thing, very thick and solid.

  “I don’t suppose we could get something to drink,” I said to our host. “Coffee or a soda, maybe?” Anne gave me a perplexed look and I nodded my head ever so slightly, trying to cue her to go along with me.

  “Um, you’re not going to hang around here or anything, are you?” said young Brian, even more nervous than before.

  “No, no. I, ah, just got a little queasy, looking at poor old Charlie back there. I could really use a little drink of something to settle my stomach.”

  “Maybe a can of pop?” said Anne. “Thanks so very much, Brian.”

  And the moonstruck lad was off in a flash. As soon as he was out of sight, I dug a stick of gum out of my pocket, peeled the wrapper off it, and made two quick imprints, one each of the end and side of the key. Gum was hardly the preferred medium for a pattern, but it was what I had. Then I held the key out to Anne with the face that had a serial number on it toward her.

  “Shoot,” I said. “Close-up, if you can.”

  “I can.”

  She shot three quick pictures of the key and we immediately stuck it back in the plastic bag. Then I put the stick of gum back in its wrapper and slipped it into my shirt pocket, where it wouldn’t be too likely to get bent out of shape. As I was tucking it away, the lab techie came back, bearing a hopeful smile and a can of iced tea.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath. “Why did he pick tea? I really hate tea.”

  “Not today, you don’t,” said Anne, out of the corner of her mouth. Out loud, she said, “Oh, that’s so thoughtful, Brian. Thank you again.”

  While he beamed at her, I put a tiny bit of the nasty brew in my mouth and a bunch of it down the drain of a service sink. My memory was dead-on correct, for a change; I really do hate tea. I pretended to drink a bit more and then asked Brian the thing that had been eating at me.

  “What happens to the body?”

  “We keep it for a while, until we know for sure if the detectives want any other tests done. After that, if nobody comes to claim it, we cremate it.”

  “You burn it.” I didn’t like that idea at all.

  “Well, that would be how you cremate somebody, yeah.”

  “Yeah but I mean…” I drew in a deep breath.

  “It’s not like he’s going to feel it, or anything.”

  “Don’t we have something like Potters’ Field in Minnesota? I mean—”

  “Cremation,” he said, folding his arms and shaking his head. “We do it right over there.”

  He pointed at something that looked like an antique furnace, bulky, rusty, and machine ugly. In fact, it looked a lot like the furnace from my old pad in Detroit.

  And suddenly, there it was. With a gasp and a chill, I had tripped back to a time and place I was sure I had left forever, never wanted to think about again. I was back in Detroit in the blistering summer of 1967. I was fourteen years old, and in a broken-bottle landscape backlit by burning buildings, I was running for my life.

  ***

  You hear the term “Rust Belt” a lot these days, but I don’t believe in it. A lot of the old factories along the Detroit River have moved out or just shut down, but Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant and GM’s Cadillac factory farther to the north are still cranking out shiny chrome-trimmed monsters, the railroads are still busy feeding the iron giant and hauling away its products, and the diners and bars and dance halls are full every night. Everybody works and plays. Everybody is singing Motown, and everybody is buying tickets to tomorrow. Life is good.

  Pretty good, anyway. The folks who have good jobs work hard and get by. Those who can’t break into the unions or the decent housing, which mostly means blacks, don’t. They tend to be some of Uncle Fred’s best customers, since their chances in the normal world are rotten to none. Sometimes that translates into despair but just as often it morphs seamlessly into rage. And sometimes the two are hard to tell apart. When the heat goes up in the center city, there seems to be plenty of both.

  There are neighborhoods where a white boy like me has no business wandering around on his own. And there are others where no kid of any color wants to let the sun go down and find him still on the street. That’s too bad, since a lot of my Uncle Fred’s customers are in those neighborhoods, and sometimes it’s my turn to help with the collections.

  Besides the normal bookie business of taking bets on horse races and sports contests of all kinds, my uncle also sells tickets to the New York lottery, since Michigan doesn’t have one of its own. He lets me take the orders on the phone. I copy down the requested number and read it back to the caller, along with their name and address. When I’ve sold twenty or so, I call one of half a dozen numbers for our layoff men in New York itself, and he calls me back a little later to confirm that he’s bought the actual tickets. We charge our customers five dollars for a fifty-cent ticket, don’t mess with the quarter or dollar tickets at all. In the unlikely event that the customer’s number actually hits, we split the winnings right down the middle. I’ve only seen that happen once, and I was dumbfounded to hear an out-of-work upholsterer’s helper bitching about only getting thirty-five thousand dollars.

  On a good day, when nobody wastes my time with a lot of chitchat, I can sell a hundred and twenty tickets, make a record of who I sold them to, and get the actual tickets bought, some thousand or so miles away. My pay for all that is ten percent of the markup, or forty-five cents a ticket, which translates to fifty-four dollars a day.

  That is just purely one hell of a lot of money for a teenage kid, more than enough for me to have my own place, upstairs over a rundown hardware store on the near West Side. Fred calls it “a two-room flop, upstairs over a used paint store,” but it’s a big deal for me. I don’t intend ever to go back to high school or to my mother’s house up on Seven Mile, with its floating array of boyfriends whom I refuse to call stepfathers. I intend to be a mojo numbers man, just like my uncle.

  We have several freelance contractors working at collecting the five bucks a pop from all those customers, and I don’t know what their cut is, except that it’s more than mine. But that’s okay, because their job is tougher.

  Once or twice a week, Uncle Fred tells me to tag along with one or another of them, just to see all the facets of the business close up, practice for the day when I’m big enough to pinch-hit at any position. For those trips, I don’t get paid anything. It’s just on-the-job training. I carry a sturdy leather gym bag to put the money in and a baseball bat to protect it with. Uncle Fred doesn’t let me carry a gun.

  I usually go with a big Irishman about twice my age, named Gerry Phearson, or Jerp for short. He’s ten feet tall and has baseball mitts for hands and bulldozers for feet, and everybody says he looks like John Wayne with stringy red hair. They also say that if you get him mad enough, he can kick a hole in a cinder-block wall or bite the numbers off a billiard ball.

  He likes me. When people say, “Hey Jerp, who’s riding shotgun for you today?” he will tell them, “Me little brother, boyo, and don’t you be giving him no grief, or I’ll let him break your kneecaps for you.” We drive around in a beat-up ’59 Mercury and park any damn where we like.

  The heat wave this July is brutal, and we have all the windows down and wet rags on our heads. Swamp Arabs, Jerp calls us. I think we look so totally stupid, we’re cool. We’
re overdue to collect on about a hundred bucks worth of tickets up in Highland Park, where the first big Ford plant was once, and over on the near West Side. There were some riots over there a couple nights ago, and we stayed away from the area to let it cool down. On Twelfth Street, right in the heart of the neighborhood, the cops made an early morning raid on a blind pig, and a hundred or so drunk customers decided they would rather attack the cops than stand around waiting for a fleet of paddy wagons to show up and take them off in chains. To hear the news reports, it turned into a major war.

  But we’ve had blowups before, between angry blacks and angrier white cops. The situation ought to be cool enough to touch by now.

  Rounding the corner off Grand Boulevard onto Dexter, I can see that cool is exactly what it is not. A huge crowd of blacks, mostly young men, is swarming over the street, while behind them, buildings are going up in flames, one after another. We might have another ten minutes before the whole sky is covered with dirty brown-black clouds and the cinders come raining down everywhere. Off to the east, I can see the flashing lights of some fire trucks, but it’s obvious they’re never going to get through the mob.

  There’s gunfire now, too. I can’t tell if any of it is aimed at us, but there’s a lot of it.

  “Jerp, I hate to be the one to say it, but maybe we should get the hell out of here.”

  “We’ve still got collections to make, lad. It sets a bad precedent, letting a fish off the hook over a little thing like a riot.”

  “What about the guns?”

  “Which ones?”

  Which ones? Is he crazy? “The ones that seem to be going off all around us just now.”

  “Ah, those. Sort of like Sunday in Belfast, isn’t it? Makes a body homesick, it does. Now, if one of our customers had a gun, that might be different. I’d have to make him eat it, wouldn’t I? But these guns have nothing to do with us at all, at all. The jungle people are shooting up their own, most likely. Or they’re shooting the cops, which of course would be a terrible shame.”

  I can see there’s no point talking to him. He’s got himself set on showing me how unflappable he is, I guess, and once he makes up his mind, you might as well argue with a statue. Typical Irish, my Uncle Fred would say. Rock solid from the ground up, right through the brain.