Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  On December 28, John and a couple of friends had carried her down the stairs of the Homewood Manor and taken her to Detroit Receiving Hospital, Dr. Al Miller’s supposed employer. He sure knew the right people at the hospital, John later said. Dr. Miller smoothed the way for her admission. When Dawn arrived in the emergency room, the receptionist was expecting her. She didn’t have to wait like many other walkins who weren’t dying on the spot.

  Receiving, the city’s leading trauma center, specialized in gunshot victims and other urban casualties. Physicians wasted no time with Dawn. The abscess had tunneled into her leg and was threatening her femoral vein. As they prepared her for surgery, Dawn signed a release giving surgeons permission to amputate her leg if necessary. Then she changed her mind. She’d take her chances on the table.

  The surgical team cleaned the abscess. They found the femoral vein damaged, but not permeated. If she would have waited another night, she probably would have bled to death. They repaired the blood vessel but left the leg open to drain. Dawn would have to pack her own dressings for many weeks to come. She was in the hospital ten days and regularly received Demerol, a drug similar to morphine, for pain.

  Money was in short supply back at the Homewood as John Fry’s young money-maker was undergoing repairs. After a night in jail, John’s warrant problems were temporarily behind him. Cheryl Krizanovic turned tricks but kept the proceeds for herself.

  Dr. Al Miller was on vacation.

  When he returned, he visited Dawn every day in the hospital. He said that he had left Receiving and been transferred to an administrative job at the psychiatric unit in nearby Harper-Grace Hospitals.

  Dr. Miller had a predictable routine on his visits. He eyed her hospital chart and told her she was “making good progress.” Dawn later commented his bedside manner seemed somewhat staged.

  Near the end of Dawn’s stay, hospital staff began decreasing her pain killer. The Demerol had warded off heroin withdrawal after the surgery, but now the young drug addict felt the calling of her habit.

  Finally, Dawn asked Al to drop off some money to Cheryl or John. John was to get heroin, Dilaudid—anything—and bring it to her in the hospital. She was bogue. She was sick.

  Cheryl Krizanovic met Dr. Miller in front of the Homewood. He grinned behind the wheel and handed Cheryl a Comerica Bank envelope for the drugs.

  “You know, Cheryl, sometimes I wish we would have met before I met Dawn,” he said. “I think you and I could have gotten real close.”

  Cheryl accepted the compliment without protest but had no plans to make time. She still was angry at John Fry for leaving her, and she wished Dawn would go back to Harper Woods. But she wasn’t about to break a rule of the streets. Cheryl Krizanovic did not shoot moves on another girl’s sugar daddy.

  Then Al asked, “How long have you known Dawn?”

  “A while. A few months.”

  The regular wanted to know more. Where was Dawn from? What “type” of girl was she? Was she “nice”?

  Cheryl gave him one-word answers. If Dawn wanted him to know anything, she figured, she could tell him herself.

  “Well, Cheryl, tell me about this guy John,” Dr. Miller continued. “Dawn’s in love with him, isn’t she? How long have they been living together?”

  “I don’t know anything about it, Al.”

  This guy John, she thought. You mean, my brother?

  She knew John Fry’s sibling scam wasn’t as believable as her old boyfriend thought. Sometimes John thought he was so clever, but he was transparent.

  This trick Al, Cheryl thought, knows what’s going on. He’s not as gullible as John thinks.

  On another night Dawn Spens came up with a different plan. She called John Fry and told him Al was dropping by with some money. John said the dealer down the hall was out of dope.

  “Then have Al take you to the dope house and drop you off with it here,” she said.

  Fry protested. The trick was a goof, he said.

  “This is taking the date relationship too far. I don’t like the idea of a trick knowing my business.”

  Dawn pleaded with him on the telephone. It was OK, she said. Al knew all about drugs. Al could be trusted.

  Later that night John Fry jumped into the passenger’s seat of the black Buick and the two men drove off into the night. Dr. Miller told John Fry he liked to be called Al. He didn’t like the formal title of “doctor.”

  “Al, you look like you got some sun on your vacation,” John said. “Your complexion looks real good.”

  “John, it’s the canyon. I do it every year.”

  His vacation was an annual ritual, Al said. He met his brother in Arizona and the two of them hiked deep into the Grand Canyon. There they met an old miner who kept a pack of mules. They took the mule team into isolated parts of the canyon.

  “We spent a lot of nights just listening to his stories and drinking Jack Daniel’s around the campfire.”

  Al said he had been doing it for years to get away from the pressures of medicine.

  “It’s kind of like a purging process I have to go through.”

  Fry later told a friend, “I could almost hear the 20 Mule Team Borax theme playing.”

  Then Al began talking about a drug-smuggling problem at Harper-Grace Hospitals. He’d been telling Dawn the same story. He knew of a group of physician’s assistants who were stealing morphine from stock. They were supplying it to street sources through a network of cabdrivers.

  “Here, John, I’ll show you,” he said.

  Al turned up Second Avenue in the direction of Wayne State University and then came back toward downtown on Third. He pointed out what he said were unmarked cars parked near Jumbo’s and the Sweetheart Bar, two hooker hangouts.

  “Those are cops, John. They’re watching the cab deliveries from Harper.”

  John had some friendly advice, though he later found out the story was completely fabricated.

  “Don’t you get involved in that shit, Al. I’ve been around this kind of thing all my life, and you definitely don’t want to do time.”

  “Oh, no, no. But I do know a lot about it.”

  When Al finished his tour, he handed Lucky Fry a hundred dollars. They stopped in front of a dope house a half mile from the Homewood. John went inside and returned with ten packs of mixed jive.

  Dr. Miller dropped John off at the hospital. Fry gave three packs of heroin to Dawn and kept seven for himself. John cooked Dawn’s in the bathroom. The rest was made easy by her hospital IV line.

  “It didn’t make sense,” John said later. “The trick said he lost his wife because she was a dope fiend. Now he’s helping Dawn cop drugs.”

  27

  “Dawn Marie Spens! Like where have you been, girl!”

  Jackie Brown couldn’t believe it. She had found her old girlfriend, who had been missing for nearly nine months. She’d heard through the grapevine that Dawn Spens was in the hospital. It was true. There she was, and she looked in pretty bad shape.

  “What happened to you?”

  “An aneurism.”

  Jackie had no idea what that was, but Dawn said the problem started when she fell on the ice. She pulled back the bandage on her leg. Jackie saw a hole as big as a silver dollar. God, she thought. You’ve got to be kidding.

  “They’ve got me on morphine,” she said.

  Her old girlfriend looked stoned, or worse. She hadn’t shampooed in days. She was chain-smoking Marlboro menthols. It was all too predictable, Jackie Brown thought. Dawn Spens had found the shit end of the stick again.

  Jackie had heard the recent rumors in Harper Woods, but she wasn’t about to interrogate her old friend. She wondered about Dawn’s boyfriend, Donnie Carlton.

  “I’ve got a new boyfriend,” Dawn said. “Oh, and he’s thirty-eight.”

  “He is?”

  She seemed proud of her acquisition but quickly switched subjects.

  The two shared a lot of memories. They began when Dawn’s family moved just
down the block when Jackie was four. At eight, they smoked their first cigarettes together—a pack of True Blues Dawn stole from her mother. They smoked themselves sick.

  Dawn got away with that one. But most of the time she wasn’t so lucky. She was always getting grounded—for stupid things, Jackie thought. Dawn’s younger sister Patty had asthma and got all the attention. Dawn got attention, but the wrong kind. All Dawn had to do was give her sister a surly look and the Spens household went into a seven-day lock-down.

  For thirteen years Jackie lived only a few houses away. But she never did figure out how that Spens household operated. She rarely saw Dawn’s mother and had no idea what she did with her days. Her father was gone a lot. When the parents were both away Dawn invited her to visit. It wasn’t her idea of home. The place always was strewn with clothes. Full ashtrays were everywhere. Dirty dishes filled the sink.

  Jackie recalled Dawn’s adolescence unfolding in a predictable cycle of slight ups and heavy downs. But Jackie could never get her friend to talk about it. She gave up trying. Dawn Spens was just that way—quiet, self-contained, but always disturbed about something.

  The two of them cut loose for a while. Jackie liked to call those early teen years their “experimentation with delinquency.” Dawn earned the distinction of being the first student in their class to be suspended for smoking cigarettes in school. Then they discovered drugs—marijuana mainly, then downers and hallucinogens such as mescaline. They smoked joints on their way to class in seventh and eighth grades.

  Dawn even smoked up a couple of times during movies in science class. Once she set her desk papers on fire. The science teacher was livid, demanding to know how it started. Jackie figured her girlfriend would be suspended. But after class Dawn had a talk with the instructor, and nothing happened. Dawn had always been good at identifying and tapping compassion in people.

  And here I am, Jackie thought, feeling sorry for her again as she puffs her Marlboros. There were no flowers or cards. Where was her family? Where was her boyfriend?

  Jackie would have liked to know what happened after Dawn left Harper Woods to live with Donnie Carlton. Jackie couldn’t bring herself to probe for the details, though she visited Dawn three times.

  “So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” she asked during the last.

  Dawn said her boyfriend was from Tennessee and they would probably move there. But first, she might spend some time at her mother’s place in Windsor.

  “I’ll probably be at my mother’s,” Dawn said.

  When she left, Jackie Brown suspected she might not see her friend again for a long time.

  28

  Donald Scott Carlton, a young prisoner with the cocky, glazed-eyed looks of actor Sean Penn, was bumming cigarettes from a visitor in the Macomb County Jail one afternoon and talking about his old girlfriend Dawn Spens.

  “Like, the first night we went out I was high on mescaline, weed, cocaine, and was drinkin’. I just sat there against the door of her car. I just leaned up against it all night long and just stared. Like, I practically stared a hole right through her head. I knew right away we were meant for each other.

  “The first time Dawn’s dad seen me, me and Dawn were sittin’ in the living room watching TV.

  “He came walkin’ in and said, ‘You ain’t good enough for my daughter, get the fuck out of my house.’

  “Me, I was just into getting high and going out with the guys. I was shooting dope from the time I was fifteen. I was singin’ in a rock band, and a lot of it was going around. Dawn did a lot of pills—Valium, downers, Tylenol 4s, whatever she could get.

  “Whenever we got high we just went nuts. Once I was behind the wheel, and me and Dawn got into an argument. The car got up to seventy miles an hour and we were flyin’ down this street.

  “I said, ‘Quit it, bitch!’ and slapped her.

  “We hit the curb and went up on the grass and had a flat tire. She was wild.

  “Well, there were a lot of problems going down with her dad. He used to beat her and didn’t let her talk on the phone. He’d hang up the phone while she was talkin’ to me and smack her. She finally got sick of it and decided to get out.

  “I really didn’t have anything to do with it. I’d moved downtown. She said she’d rather be with me than her family.

  “At the time I was runnin’ an arcade at Woodward and Montcalm and makin’ pretty good money. I’m skimming a little off the top, too. That’s how the criminal mind works. There’s a lot of scams downtown.

  “She was freaking out because people down there were always coming up to me for drugs. She was real confused, and I just told her not to worry about it.

  “She’d say, ‘How can you live down here? Let’s move somewhere else.’

  “But I didn’t want to because the money was good down there. All the time we were together, I didn’t let her know I was shooting dope. So when she moved down, she found out—I think from Monica, a hooker down there.

  “So Dawn says, ‘If you’re goin’ to do it, why can’t I?’

  “And we fought because I didn’t want her doin’ it. Mixed jive and Dilaudids. Dawn had Monica cop for her.

  “So I said, ‘You might as well not do it behind my back.’

  “And we started gettin’ high together. The money we had would go to that. Instead of going out for food, she’d want to stay in and get high.

  “And I said, ‘If you want money to eat, go get some money.’

  “She was real good at it. Her looks for one. She just used to talk, kind of lead a guy on and talk him out of some money. It was mostly on a borrowing basis. And then she’d come up with this ‘poor innocent me’ bit: ‘I don’t have this and that. We can’t eat and we can’t get that.’

  “And they’d give her money—the guys who hung around down there. She once got two hundred dollars from this guy Pat, who was a carpenter.

  “She’d say, ‘I got kicked out of my house.’

  “Dawn could rap. She really had a mouth on her. But I wasn’t saying, ‘Go sell yourself.’

  “One day we had a party of about six people in our apartment at Montcalm and Park.

  “This guy said, ‘I know a couple of guys who would pay her.’

  “And I thought about it, and she heard it. But I said no.

  “She said, ‘Why not? It can’t be that bad.’

  “And we fought about that. Finally, one day we were broke, and I wanted to get high, and she wanted to get high.

  “And I said, ‘Fine, go ahead and do it.’

  “It was a guy I knew from the arcade. He drove a nice car, an Imperial, I think. He was about thirty-five. I’d seen him doing tricks with girls. And I waved him over and said, ‘My girl’s looking for some action.’ So I told him to drive around the block and pick her up.

  “She acted like it was nothin’. That kind of freaked me out. She didn’t say she didn’t want to do it again, or like, yuk. But then I told her she had to take a bath before she got in bed with me, you know, to wash the guy off. And that freaked her out.

  “She started getting close to Monica. Then I got her a job at this store and I know she was turnin’ tricks with guys at the store. She was getting pretty good money at first, fifty to sixty dollars.

  “The drugs and prostitution really made us get along bad. We got into some fights, and I smacked her around … It was something that would go on between us. We’d get in an argument, and she’d just keep it up and keep it up until I got so aggravated I’d smack her … All we did is fight … She wouldn’t go to bed with me.

  “One day I was walking down the street and calling these queers all kinds of names—fags, bitches—and that really got them mad. Later on they came running after us with brand-new baseball bats. I got hit. And they beat the shit out of me in the street and dragged me into the building and beat the shit out of me in there.

  “They finally quit ’cause somebody was beating on the door. But I went to the hospital, and Dawn never came and see
n me or nothin’.

  “Lucky came into the picture before that. I saw him a couple of times before that. Lucky and a guy named Russ seemed to think they would take over for Dawn.

  “I said, ‘No way, you’re crazy.’

  “But every time they’d see Dawn, they’d try to talk her into going with them.

  “So then after I got out of the hospital me and Lucky and Russ made friends. This was their little plan, and I fell for it. They said they had this house, and they wanted me to be the house manager for them. You know, when the girls bring their tricks to the house, make sure nothing funny goes on. Dawn would come in with a guy and go to the room, and I’d just sit there. I hated it.

  “Then Lucky would come back and con her out of some money, but actually he was tryin’ to pimp her. And she’d bring me one Dilaudid and buy Lucky four.

  “So I told her, ‘Fuck it, let’s leave.’

  “And she said, ‘I don’t want to go. I’m making lots of money.’

  “I said, ‘Yeah, but you’re giving it to him. You ain’t spending it on me or on us.’

  “And she said, ‘But I’m making money for me.’

  “Anyway, then she asked Lucky to take me back downtown because I was beating her ass a lot. He took me for a ride back to the apartment downtown.

  “He said, ‘Don’t come around, or I’ll kill you.’ I haven’t seen her since.”

  When he was finished with his story, Donnie Carlton held out his right arm, displaying a crude jail tattoo: “Dawn.” He was serving four months for car theft. He’d just turned twenty-two. Before he was twenty-three, he would be doing time for murder.

  29

  Dawn Spens was released from Detroit Receiving Hospital January 10, just in time for her nineteenth birthday the next day and another shopping trip with Dr. Al Miller.

  She returned to apartment 202 lugging a load of new boots, sandals, designer jeans, and a purse with a 1984 daily pocket calendar tucked inside. She’d also bought John a gray leather jacket. He tried it on, then slouched on the couch to examine the calendar.