Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  47

  The psychopath is egocentric.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Henry Ford Community College lectures

  Many times John Fry would explain what happened after he returned to Detroit and found Dawn Spens at the Congress Inn. The basic story never varied.

  “A friend had picked me up and dropped me off at the motel,” Fry recalled in one detailed version. “When I got there she was sittin’ and waitin’ on me. I was hot.

  “She had told me after the second week in the hospital she wasn’t using anymore—just strictly Tylenols and what they were giving her in the hospital. I found out different about that, too.

  “Come to find out—and I verified this through other people, not just her—Al is picking up dope for her from the day she got out of the hospital. It was like he wanted to keep her strung out, have a hold on her. I also later found out that Gene Johnson had tried to shoot a move on her. His name was on the motel room bill. He knew what kind of money we were getting from Al.

  “When I confronted her she said, ‘Aw, baby, I’m sorry.’ She started crying.

  “I said, ‘What the fuck happened?’

  “She said, ‘You not being here … I was depressed.’

  “She claimed she thought I left her.

  “She said, ‘Al came out here one day and brought me three packs of dope, and I started hitting it.’

  “I said, ‘Wait till I get my hands on this punk.’ I said, ‘Is this how it’s going to be? I did you a favor by going to Frank’s. I went through all these changes to get clean. Frank was going to get me a job. I gave all that up to come back, because you start using.’

  “She said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  “I said, ‘Fuck that. It’s too late now for that. We can’t change what has already happened.’

  “Then she said, ‘I want to quit.’

  “I said, ‘Good, I got seventy-five Tylenols.’

  “The doctor had prescribed them for my hand and they make it easier to kick. And, at the time she was only doing three packs of mix a day. Al had come out that day. He gave her five hundred dollars. He wasn’t going to be back until the following Tuesday. It was the weekend of the Grand Prix. So I kept her away from the drugs all weekend. I fed her the Tylenols.

  “The day he came back out, they left. They were gone about an hour. I’m laying out by the pool. I was still not supposed to be around. When I went back to the room she had three or four packs of dope.

  “I said, ‘What’s the point of me going through all these changes, giving you my Tylenol 4s? And I need them for the pain in my hand. I thought you wanted to quit. Get out of it. Quit working.’

  “Then, I don’t know why I did it, but I did. And, I was clean. I said, ‘If you want to be dope fiends, we’ll be dope fiends. If you want to be a dope fiend, I’ll be a dope fiend with you.’

  “I’m tellin’ you, man, that’s how much I was in love with this fuckin’ chick. She had the dope, so I took off all my clothes and laid back in the chair.

  “ ‘Hit me,’ I said. ‘Come on, hit me.’

  “So then we started back into it …”

  48

  They didn’t argue this time about the money. Gladys Canty, she told herself, you’re not going to play that old, cracked record again. She dated the check July 2 and noted “loan to Alan.” Then she handed her son the check for $1,650.

  He’d said his stay at University Hospital put him behind in his fees from patients, and his own doctor bills were coming due. The last thing he needed, she thought, was more pressure. Gladys Canty was worried about Bus’s practice. If her husband was alive, she thought, he’d be worried as well.

  Al Sr. had taken such an interest in their son’s career when he was alive, she would have thought it was his own. First he complained about Al Jr.’s thesis revisions for his doctorate at the University of Michigan. “What in the hell do they want from him?” he said as Al Jr. struggled for several years to satisfy the committee.

  Then he wanted to spearhead the fight with the Lansing bureaucracy to get Al Jr. licensed by the state board of psychology. In 1970 he endorsed Al Jr.’s application. He informed them he’d personally supervised Bus for nine years, writing:

  “The applicant is my son. As director of the Psychiatric Clinic of the Recorder’s Court in Detroit for the past twenty-one years, I have had ten psychologists under daily supervision. My standards are high. This applicant was expected to and did meet these standards.”

  When the state refused to certify Al Jr. at the top level of “consulting psychologist,” Al Sr. exploded. The board claimed Al Jr. lacked enough postdoctoral experience and even ordered him to cease his private practice.

  But Al Sr. suspected otherwise. He was always very sensitive about the fact that he headed the court clinic without a Ph.D. He suspected some of his colleagues talked about it behind his back.

  “They’re doing this to Alan to get at me,” he stormed.

  He urged his son to appeal the ruling. Al Jr. went to the capitol in Lansing, alone. She suspected he was afraid of what his father might say to the bureaucrats. Bus struck a compromise that allowed him to practice at the lower certification level until he received the higher ranking two years later.

  But Al Sr. remained unsatisfied. He urged Bus to be certified by the American Board of Professional Psychologists—the top credential available, one that would give him a national standing. After much work and testing, the results came in.

  She remembered that day as one of the most significant in Al Sr.’s life. He toasted his son at a Thanksgiving dinner in front of Jan and her parents.

  “This is a great day,” said Al Sr., lifting his glass. “My son has passed his boards.”

  Everyone at the table was impressed. She couldn’t remember how Buster reacted, but she knew his father was quite moved by the moment. He was sliding into ill health. He didn’t have long to live.

  Mrs. Canty didn’t want to see all that effort by the two of them sabotaged by illness. She couldn’t believe what a stroke of misfortune he’d had with his health. Then his car was stolen. No wonder his moods had become so unpredictable.

  On some of his regular visits Buster was exuberant. One day they took a walk around the block, and he spotted a man playing with his dog in his backyard.

  “Hello, sir, how are you?” he yelled out. “It’s sure a wonderful day, isn’t it?”

  His spontaneity caught Mrs. Canty off guard.

  “Why, Bus, you don’t even know the man,” she said. “Why are you so friendly today?”

  “Oh, Ma, I’m friendly to everyone,” he said. He grinned like a young boy who’d just caught the biggest fish at summer camp.

  On other visits he was largely silent, absorbed in thought. She wondered if he was troubled about something besides his recent misfortunes. Several times she had asked him, “Buster, are you and Jannie getting along OK?”

  “Oh sure, Ma, you know we get along great,” he said.

  But often she caught him daydreaming. It would happen right in the middle of one of their conversations.

  “Bus … Bus, are you listening?” she would ask.

  “Sure, Ma,” he’d say. Then he’d come up with the right response. He’d heard every word she’d said.

  It was as though that active mind of his was divided in two, she thought. One side kept track of the present and the other was off somewhere else. Gladys Canty had no idea where.

  Maybe the $1,650 would ease the stress and help him get back on track.

  49

  Dawn Spens and Dr. Al Miller picked out the car together at a used car lot on Detroit’s east side. It was a 1975 white Thunderbird, but in good shape for its age. Al paid for it in cash following the Fourth of July weekend. The cost was $1,600 and some change.

  John Fry made a mental note. Dawn’s new car wasn’t the first Thunderbird that had commanded the trick’s attention. Once, after his Buick Regal was stolen, Al arrived in a 1983 red Thunderbird to pick up
drugs for Dawn in the hospital. John noticed the car’s immaculate gray leather interior. His nostrils detected a hint of perfume. John had been skeptical of Al’s story that he was a widower since the day he heard it.

  “He said it belonged to the daughter of the guy he worked with,” he later told a friend. “But I figured it might be his old lady’s car.”

  One of the first uses of Dawn’s T-bird was a quick trip up to Alanson. Cheryl and Frank hadn’t been getting along since John’s visit. When Cheryl offered to cover the gas, John and Dawn drove up and got her. She booked herself into a room at the Congress Inn.

  John and Cheryl often took off in the Thunderbird to avoid Al during his lunchtime visits to Dawn’s room. His routine was as predictable as his support. He paid her daily for her company. He tipped her more often than not. He never showed on Sunday. Every Monday he paid her room and telephone charges, which ran nearly $200 a week.

  But by putting Dawn up in the Congress Inn, Al had succeeded in distancing Dawn from Cass Corridor prostitution only to locate her in a better-paying market. The motel, located near I-94, drew plenty of road-weary truckers with its large parking lot built for their big rigs. The girls could snag dates right outside the room. If action was slow there, a “ho stroll” waited just across the nearby Detroit city limits on a stretch of Michigan Avenue dotted with topless bars. Pressure from Mark Bando and others in the Cass Corridor already had prompted many of the better-looking women to relocate there. Tricks were paying in the $50-$75 range.

  On her first night back in Detroit, Cheryl Krizanovic made a half-hearted attempt to flag a date on Michigan but couldn’t go through with it. Clean, she found herself too timid to work. The next day she found herself in Dawn’s room with a syringe of cooked heroin in her arm. She complained the high wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Then she went out and got herself another pack of dope.

  One week later, Frank McMasters showed up at the motel in his pickup truck. When Cheryl refused to return to Alanson, he booked a room. Over the next two months he would make the five-hour drive between Alanson and Detroit a half-dozen times, trying to persuade Cheryl to return.

  On his first stay, Frank finally got his first look at the doctor he’d heard so much about. At first he’d wondered whether John had exaggerated Dr. Miller’s role in supplying Dawn’s habit. Then one day Frank, John, and Cheryl sat in his truck and watched as Al arrived in his Buick to visit Dawn. John had been complaining all morning, waiting for money and drugs. After Al left, they went back to her room. Dawn had $80 and three packs of heroin. The two of them hadn’t left the motel. He decided John wasn’t bullshitting.

  Others witnessed Al’s readiness to supply Dawn’s habit. He often accompanied her when she copped Dillies from a small-time dealer working out of a room at the motel. One time, when Dawn was short on money, she used Al as a credit reference. She called him at his office and handed the phone to the dealer.

  “Give her anything she wants,” Al said. “I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

  John had vowed they would no longer use the mixed jive that had perforated their bodies in the Cass Corridor. They would shoot prescription Dilaudid or a better-quality heroin.

  “If we’re going to do drugs, it ain’t gonna be no fuckin’ garbage,” he told Dawn.

  John secured a connection in Hamtramck for so-called “raw heroin.” It was not as pure as the name implied but had a higher opiate content and fewer pollutants. Impressed with the quality, John planned to do a little dealing himself.

  Al’s plans included moving Dawn from the motel to an apartment. He had a building in mind near the Fisher Building, one that he’d lived in himself during college, he said. Dawn stalled him. She searched through newspapers for something else. John had yet to formulate his next move.

  In late July, Dawn picked out a flat in a quiet Polish neighborhood in Hamtramck. She and Al looked at the apartment together one lunch hour. Then he brought a Comerica money order to her for a $250 security deposit. The next day he brought her another $250 money order for the first month’s rent. He left the payee’s line blank.

  It was the only time Al had ever given her anything but cash. John Fry noticed a woman’s signature on the checks when she showed them to him. It was Jan Canty.

  “Who’s the broad?” he asked.

  Dawn said she had asked Al the same question. “He says it’s the woman who sometimes answers his phone and does a little typing in the office.”

  Financially, at least, it was turning into a very good summer for Dawn Spens, now that Dr. Al Miller was led to believe he had her to himself. She had her own car, a place of her own waiting in Hamtramck, and—at a conservative $100 a day—a $31,000 annual income, delivered six days a week tax-free. All she needed was some furniture.

  Her sugar daddy had been urging such a setup since he first started seeing Dawn regularly. Finally, Dr. Al Miller had everything in place.

  50

  Such a person may want to enslave others or to enslave the partner in particular … This tendency may take the form of molding or educating the victim, as Professor Higgins in Pygmalion molds Eliza … It is particular to sadistic relationships of this kind that keeping a hold over the victim is of more absorbing interest than the person’s own life.

  —KAREN HORNEY,

  Our Inner Conflicts

  An executive secretary named Betty Noble and her husband, Ed, were driving through the New Center one Sunday in July when she noticed the pedestrian walking near the Fisher Building.

  “My God, Ed, that looks like Alan Canty,” she said, pointing.

  “Do you want me to go back?” Ed asked.

  A dozen mental snapshots from her late teens, not all of them pleasant, came to her mind. Alan Canty, she thought—what a lesson he had been in the wily ways of a spellbound man. More than thirty years had passed since they dated, but still she’d never met another man so cleverly determined to secure her affection.

  They met one winter at a YMCA dance. She was a slim junior with auburn hair at Denby High School. Al was a senior at Southeastern. She was intrigued by his outstanding manners, stylish clothes, and his automobile. Car ownership was uncommon among the boys she knew.

  They lived only a few miles from each other, but in much different worlds. Al’s Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood was called “little Venice” because of its boat canals and custom homes just across the border from Grosse Pointe Park. It was a neighborhood of professionals, and she knew from the newspapers that his father was a big shot in Recorder’s Court. Betty’s turf was blue-collar, and her father an hourly worker at General Motors.

  He never did like Al, and she should have listened to her dad. He said he had “a look that couldn’t be trusted.” But Betty found him boyishly charming on the first date. They went to the Woods Theater in Grosse Pointe to see a movie. But when it came time to buy the ticket, Al had no money.

  “My mom gave me five bucks,” he apologized. “But I left it in the pocket of my other shirt.”

  He praised her for putting up with his forgetfulness, and they hit it off from there. They dated for more than a year. At first everything was normal enough. He took her home to meet his parents. She was very nervous that day. The home was quite stylish, full of paintings and antiques. She had the feeling his father was psychoanalyzing everything she said. She felt ill at ease in the presence of such a well-known psychologist. His mother was quite proper, giving some of the history behind the art objects in her home during the visit.

  “And this,” Betty remembered her saying as Mrs. Canty held up one, “is one of Alan’s favorite antiques.”

  Betty thought it appropriate he had a lead part in The Royal Family, his high school play. He even took fencing lessons to prepare for the part.

  Al made the typical advances of most teenage boys. They parked near the Detroit River but never got farther than necking in his car. But Betty saw him as a loner. He didn’t seem to have any friends. She also saw his temper. Once, when he was del
ayed by slow service at a gas station, he tried to run down the attendant.

  She suspected he was spoiled. When he went off to Hillsdale College, he often wrote of opulent parties and the large allowances students got from their parents. Often he made the three-hour drive from Hillsdale to see her on school nights. She typed his term papers for him, but he didn’t put much effort into his schoolwork. He frequently was late with his assignments, but it was no wonder, with all the time he was spending on the road.

  She began to feel uncomfortable around him. In time it became clear to her that Al Canty had designs on something other than her body. It started subtly at first, then accelerated.

  He insisted on determining in detail where they went, when they would get there, and what they would do when they did. He corrected her diction and suggested impressive words for her to use. He told her how she should carry herself and how to wear her hair. He insisted she wear certain clothes. He was particularly adamant about her shoes, forbidding her to wear high heels.

  Eventually she felt as though he was trying to fashion her into a woman of higher social status. She started feeling like an object, like one of his mother’s prized antiques.

  “I mean, he was focusing his whole life on me,” she later recalled. “As though I was his only purpose in life.”

  Then one day a neighbor reported to her father that Al broke into their house one night while the family was gone. The neighbor spotted Al in their basement, rearranging the laundry on the clothesline. When he was confronted, Al denied it.

  “This boy has to go,” her father said.

  And Betty Noble was sick of trying to live up to Al’s standards. One day she told him it was over. She returned his graduation picture, his gifts, and all the letters he wrote. She assumed that would be it, but she misjudged him. He pulled out the biggest diamond ring she’d ever seen. At least it looked like a diamond. To this day she wondered if it was real or fake.

  “I was going to marry you,” he said. “I even bought the ring.”