Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  Then she felt silly for saying anything. She’d seen too many movies. She’d been in Detroit too long.

  In early June, Dawn got good news. Follow-up ultrasounds showed no sign of a thrombus on her heart. Doctors planned to release her on June 10, but Barbara Tacoma wouldn’t be there for the discharge. She was returning to Grand Rapids.

  The medical student stopped by Dawn’s room to say goodbye. She was happy the girl finally had gotten serious about getting help. Barbara Tacoma wished her well. It was nice, she thought, to leave Detroit on a good note.

  Later it soured considerably. Dawn Spens, she was told, refused help when the hospital’s social services department offered her treatment for drug addiction.

  45

  Jan Canty wondered if there wasn’t some kind of springtime conspiracy afoot to foil her husband’s recovery. And Al wasn’t helping his own cause either. Already he was back to work.

  “We need the money,” he said. “And it will be good for me to get back into my routine. I really feel, you know, at loose ends without my schedule.”

  Then, only five days after his discharge, she got a disturbing call at home. It was Al. He wanted her to pick him up at the Fisher.

  “Jan, my car’s been stolen.”

  She was upset. Al mistook her anger as being directed at him.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said.

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “You just don’t need this kind of pressure right now … What happened?”

  He said that the Regal had been snatched on West Grand Boulevard, right outside the Fisher. Running late from a visit to the prosecutor’s office, he’d left it at a meter instead of parking the car in the building’s garage.

  She guessed something about the car made it attractive to thieves. When he first got the Buick, the wire wheel covers were stolen. He complained about that for weeks. It was uncharacteristic of him to be so irritated that long about anything.

  They had a good talk when she picked him up. A little rational-emotive thinking was in order. They lived in a large urban area, she and Al reasoned, and statistically these things were bound to happen. It was just a matter of time before they too would be victimized. They could get by without the car. Al could use her new Thunderbird.

  Police eventually recovered the Buick. It had been stripped of its radio, battery, wheel covers, and other easily fenced items. It was repaired in three weeks and returned.

  But the second week in June, the Regal was stolen again. They had just finished processing the paperwork on the first claim. This time, Al said, the car had been taken outside Detroit Receiving Hospital, where Jan worked. Al said he’d stopped there on his lunch hour to visit one of his patients, who was ill after recent surgery. The car was recovered a few days later. The same items were stripped.

  Al seemed more accepting. They tried to joke about it.

  “Well, we sure know the claim routine,” he said.

  But Jan felt something was closing in on her. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she felt more vulnerable than at any time in her life. On Good Friday her parents’ home in Arizona had been burglarized. Now the car, twice. All this on top of Al’s hospitalization. It was as though some hidden force was at work in their lives. She felt compelled to act.

  She urged Al to have alarm systems installed on both the cars and the house. The home security system cost three thousand dollars, but she saw it as a good investment. With Al’s hours and her coming and going, the big Tudor was too easy a mark for thieves.

  Jan also decided to document their valuables. She’d made photography her hobby since she got out of postgraduate school. Now she put it to some practical use. She loaded up her Pentax and shot photos of every room in the house and each office in the Fisher suite. She arranged the pictures, by room, in a small album, listing furniture, valuables, and their worth on an adjacent page. She stored the album in the Fisher, the negatives in a dining room cabinet. Al was impressed by the effort.

  While Jan fought paranoia, Al eased day by day into his predictable patterns. She could see he still wasn’t sleeping well. Sometimes he sweat heavily in the night. He said he’d switched to decaffeinated coffee. But then she discovered he’d compromised on that promise. He had concocted a new blend of half and half.

  Within a month after his release he was filling his days with work again and his spare time alone with his own thoughts. He lingered alone in his home office or headed directly from a late patient session to his tub. There were fewer walks to Lake St. Clair and more time spent in front of the TV. Several times she cozied up to him, rubbed his shoulder, and asked him what was bothering him.

  “I’m working on it in therapy,” he said.

  Al was seeing Dr. Awes once a week, and for that she was grateful. He never talked about his therapy, but she sensed it was doing him some good. The psychiatrist had tapered him off the lithium prescribed by doctors at University Hospital. And though Al was approaching the same stressful pace Jan felt had gotten him into trouble in the first place, he was doing much better than during those first awkward days after his release.

  One night, when she felt he was ready, Jan told him about the trauma she’d gone through with the bills during his absence.

  “Al,” she said. “I need to know about the money, where it is, you know?”

  “Well, what do you need, Jan?” he said. “How much? Let me see what I can come up with.”

  No, she didn’t want money, she told him. She wanted to know their financial standing. Did they have savings? Were they overextended? Shouldn’t she have a list of his accounts?

  “Well, Jan,” he said. “We’ve got an IRA. We’re set. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Al, it’s just not a very wise way to do things,” she countered. “I have to be included. What if you got into a car accident?”

  The discussion ended as others had on that subject many times before. He promised he’d show her his financial system when he got time. It was all very complex, he said.

  She thought, what’s the big deal? It’s not as though I’m some gold digger preparing to take a steam shovel to his net worth. But she felt uncomfortable pushing the point.

  Once Jan realized she couldn’t keep him from working, she urged him to pursue some diversions, to take some time for his hobbies. As for his quest for paving bricks, he had all he would ever need. She suggested he work on his cars.

  Through the years Al had usually disappeared into the garage on his day off to tinker. Even more, he enjoyed being around car buffs. They went to meets at the fairgrounds and the shows at Cobo Hall. They had seats for the Detroit Grand Prix. On Friday afternoons he used to go to one of several classic car shops on the east side and shoot the breeze with its owner.

  But that all stopped when he turned fifty.

  Jan was pleased when one Friday afternoon he followed her suggestion. He put on a pair of blue jeans, saying he was going to trade some parts. That’s what he liked best—wheeling and dealing the rare parts back and forth with other collectors. He would sell quite a few in the next few months.

  Jan saw it as a good sign. She knew his enchantment with automobiles went back many years. A child’s car called a Jeep Junior he’d built at twelve was in the garage collecting dust. He had carted it with him over the years from one residence to another. Now he had five adult toys. Most of them were classics in various stages of restoration: an old Studebaker, a ’32 Miller Indianapolis race car, a ’41 Hollywood Graham, and a ’32 Ford Cabriolet, the one they’d been chauffeured around in on their wedding day.

  Then there was the red Porsche, the only one that ran well enough to drive. Al said it was a replica of the sports car James Dean was driving at high speed when he was killed. He never let Jan behind its wheel, though he knew it was her favorite.

  “Jan-Jan, the car is too dangerous,” he always said.

  Yet Al often took it out. Sometimes he even sped off in the rain with the top down, though the wipers did
n’t work.

  That didn’t make much sense. If it’s so damned dangerous, she thought, why does he keep getting behind the wheel?

  46

  Frank McMasters looked at the man in the fetal position on the floor of his living room and wondered if maybe he had judged his old nemesis too harshly.

  At first he doubted John Fry really wanted to get clean. Before, such proclamations were nothing more than diversionary tactics. They bought him time—time to figure out a new angle on Cheryl, time to come up with some face-saying move.

  “Frank, everything is just coming apart around me, man,” he’d said when he telephoned from Detroit. “Does the offer still stand? Can I come up to your place to clean up?”

  “Sure, it still stands,” Frank had said. “But no fuckin’ around this time.”

  And John hadn’t tried to leave, even when his body was paying him back for every fix. Frank never saw him in worse shape than on May 23, the day a friend drove him to Alanson from Detroit. An open cavity ran down his middle finger into the web of his swollen left hand. It looked like a drug abscess to Frank and Cheryl. But John said he had been shot. He also had an infected abscess in his foot.

  “Mixed jive—in pusher packs of ten every hour,” John said. “My body’s burned up, man.”

  Frank and Cheryl wanted to take him to the hospital. But John had insisted on kicking first. They put a small mattress on the living room floor. John gave Frank thirty of his last thirty-five dollars. He asked Frank to buy three bottles of Jack Daniel’s. As he withdrew from the heroin, John drank nearly a fifth a day. The rest he poured on his infected hand. Frank couldn’t help but laugh. Even while going cold turkey, Lucky Fry had a flair for drama.

  But Frank knew exactly what John was enduring. Frank had been addicted to morphine as a teenager. He still got deep satisfaction from the knowledge that he hadn’t shoved a dope spike through his skin in more than fifteen years, or even smoked a joint. Seeing John on his floor reminded him again why.

  Frank’s house in Alanson was as good a place as any to detox. The two-bedroom was built on the edge of the vacation village known for its nearby hunting and fishing. The house was left to him by his late father. Except for the flow of tourist traffic between Petoskey and the Mackinac Bridge, nothing much ever happened in Alanson. Frank liked it that way. He’d driven trucks out of Detroit but preferred the construction jobs that came and went with the seasons in the north.

  What a junkie’s soap opera it had been since he met Cheryl and John. Frank sometimes wondered why he put up with it. But he sensed a basic decency in Cheryl. If only she could stay away from John and the dope. Her old boyfriend seemed to have cast some kind of spell over her. He’d given up trying to understand.

  Several times Frank and John almost came to blows when they first met. Once Frank told John if he ever hit Cheryl again, he would show him what a real ass kicking was like. Another time John suggested they take their differences outside. Frank walked out into the middle of the street. “I’m out here, John, waiting for you,” he said. John never came out.

  But those tensions left when John met Dawn. Now John seemed to have a genuine concern for Cheryl. That was the important word—seemed. It was part of the enigma of Lucky Fry. Only John knew what John was thinking, and Frank wasn’t even sure about that.

  Frank did know that John, among other things, was a habitual bullshitter. But there was something about John he liked. If only he didn’t expend so much energy substituting BS for what he possessed in real talent. John could be a captivating conversationalist. He had a philosophical approach to life. But often it was convoluted.

  John lived by a self-defined code of ethics—subject to change if the situation required it. “You know that’s not me, Frank” and “That’s not my way, mon” were favorite expressions. The big question was: What was his way?

  Lucky Fry would be the first to admit he was a pimp, a junkie, a thief, and a con artist. But this, John always reasoned, was not entirely of his own choosing. It was generated by the failings of those around him. Every time he tried to free himself from the lifestyle with a grand plan—invariably an illegal one—it backfired and he ended up back in prison. The streets were the only place he could cope.

  Frank had seen John try to go cold turkey once before, more than a year ago. On the second day Frank had handed John a weed whip and put him to work on a two-foot growth of grass out front. John spent the day hacking away, trying to sweat the dope out. He almost stumbled into a bog on the edge of the property.

  “I wouldn’t go in there if I was you,” Frank yelled, half kidding.

  “Why?” Fry asked.

  “It’s quicksand and stuff in there, and I’m not sure where it’s at.”

  “Oh yeah,” John said. “Good place to bury somebody, ain’t it?”

  That was quintessential Lucky Fry, always scheming about something he never really planned to do. The next day John headed back to his own trap. He couldn’t take the withdrawal and went back to Detroit and the drugs.

  But there were no plans like that this time. After John was up and about, he talked about the last three months. He told Frank all about Dr. Al Miller and the five-thousand-dollar payoff. The money hadn’t even lasted a full two weeks.

  “It’s just as well I’m up here while Dawn’s in the hospital,” he said. “The man paid me to be somewhere else, didn’t he? But we were doing a thing behind his back.”

  John talked about his brother’s death. He broke down and cried. “My father hates my fuckin’ guts,” he said. “And I hate his. Jim was all the family I had.”

  Later, Frank and Cheryl drove him to Northern Michigan Hospital in Petoskey for his hand. He was admitted immediately.

  John Fry called Dawn Spens at least daily from Frank’s house and later his hospital room. He made six hundred dollars in long-distance calls, all charged to Frank’s number. John wanted to make sure she was getting clean back in Detroit.

  Soon John was boasting to Frank and Cheryl that Dawn had kicked her habit. He seemed pleased that all was going well for Cheryl as well. John wondered how much work was available in the north. He talked about relocating.

  When Dawn was released from Receiving Hospital, she told John she didn’t want to stay alone at the Homewood Manor. John agreed. It was better she put some distance between herself and the drugs in the Cass Corridor. Dr. Al Miller, Dawn said, would pay for a room for her at the Congress Inn, a motel popular with truckers on the border of Detroit and Dearborn.

  “Well, when I get back things are going to be different,” John told her as he sipped on a Jack Daniel’s and Coke that Cheryl had smuggled into his hospital room. “I’m clean. You’re clean. We don’t have to go through all this horseshit no more.”

  John was released from Northern Michigan Hospital on a Monday in mid-June. Doctors had saved his hand with a skin graft that connected his third and fourth fingers. Healed, it looked like a mutant hand, as though two fingers grew together.

  Fry was supposed to rest a few days, then return to the hospital on Friday so a surgeon could remove the graft. Frank was working a nearby construction job. John and Cheryl spent the day alone talking about old times. John Fry was clean, and Cheryl felt some of his old magic stirring inside her again.

  Later that day, John called Dawn at the Congress Inn and asked her to catch a bus to Petoskey. She told him she would telephone him later. The call never came. That evening, John telephoned Dawn a half-dozen times. There was no answer in her room. He quit trying after 2 A.M.

  At breakfast the next morning he still wasn’t getting an answer. John decided to do some investigating. Cheryl watched him make the calls as she cooked eggs for her old boyfriend. First he called a friend in the Homewood Manor.

  “Cheryl, she was downtown last night,” he said after hanging up.

  John was dialing another number, that of a heroin dealer across the hall from apartment 202. He had Cheryl speak to him.

  “Dawn was in and out of th
ere all night last night,” she told John. “He thinks she still might be in your apartment.”

  “Put her on, man,” Fry barked.

  Cheryl watched as Fry’s face turned a dark shade of red as she handed him the telephone. It always scared her when he got like that.

  “What the fuck are you doin’?” he said when Dawn got on the line.

  “… You’re supposed to be clean.

  “… What’s all this bullshit you been layin’ on me?

  “… I don’t give a fuck if you don’t want to talk about it.

  “… You’re gonna talk about it.

  “… You bitch.

  “… No, don’t even try it. It’s too late for that. Don’t move. I’ll be home tonight.”

  John Fry slammed the phone and paced like a caged grizzly in heat. Cheryl kept frying eggs. Then he made another flurry of calls. Afterward, he explained to Cheryl what had happened: Dawn had been using since the day she got out of the hospital. Dr. Al Miller had picked up three packs of dope himself that day and had taken it to her at the Congress Inn.

  “I’d like to beat that motherfucker until he can’t walk,” he said. “Cheryl, I need money.”

  He wanted to catch a bus to Detroit. Cheryl reminded him of his doctor’s appointment. His fingers were still hooked together. He was in no condition to travel with that heavily bandaged hand, she said.

  “Please, Cheryl,” he said. “Give it to me. I’ve got to get back to Detroit.”

  Cheryl had never heard John beg her quite like that for anything. She’d never seen him so helpless. She would have thought his mother was still alive, calling him from her deathbed in Detroit. She wished John had given her the kind of love and concern he was showing for Dawn.

  Cheryl fetched the only money they had, forty dollars in rolled quarters on Frank’s dresser. Later that day she took him to the bus station in Petoskey. When he boarded the Greyhound, John Fry was still clean.