She stuck to her intentions. He returned the following weekend from college. He had a lump on his arm. He said it was cancer. He begged for pity, again asking her not to break off their relationship. The following week she got a telegram. The return address was from Mayo Clinic. He said he was there. He was dying. The cancer had been confirmed by doctors.
Betty showed the telegram to her father, who promptly relieved her feelings of guilt. Her dad pointed out Mayo Clinic was in Rochester, Minnesota. Al had put the return address in New York.
Then Al Canty frightened her. He showed up in her school parking lot and stood at odd hours outside her house. One day he walked into her school while she was at her locker between classes. He threatened to make a scene unless she left with him. He grabbed her by the arm. It hurt as he pulled her from the school.
For three hours he drove her all around Detroit in his car, trying one argument after another to win her back. Secretly, she only disliked him more. Betty begged him to take her to her after-school job. She was already late. Finally, he did.
Her dad was livid.
“Alan Canty’s father needs to do a little work on his own son,” he said. Then he called Al Sr. up.
“You’re going to have to keep your son away from my daughter,” he told him. “Are you aware your son has been driving home from college every night to see her?”
The senior Canty was very polite. He said he would take care of the problem. Betty hadn’t seen Al since—until this day, walking across West Grand Boulevard.
“Betty, do you want me to go back?” her husband Ed asked again.
I wonder what Al’s up to these days, she thought. But Betty Noble decided she didn’t want to find out.
“No, that’s OK,” she said. “Just keep driving.”
51
Jan Canty didn’t know what to make of it. For years, everywhere she looked in and around the big Tudor there were unfinished projects. Now, in just one summer, she would have thought the crew of “This Old House” had arrived to film an episode.
Following the burglar alarm crew came the painters … and the landscapers … and the window installers … then the painters again … and the furniture deliveries … and the bricklayers. At the center of the undertaking was W. Alan Canty, who after years of indifference to needed improvements was attacking the home-beautiful production like a director with a hot new script.
But the focal point was Al’s antique-brick driveway. Two brick masons had been on their hands and knees for weeks, carefully placing the precious stones in a precise pattern stretching from the garage to the street. For seven years the pile of bricks had grown behind the garage as Al brought them home by the trunkload. Before he called the masons, weeds were growing through the middle of the mound.
It was one of the eyesores that started the recent disagreement they had about the house. For years Jan did what she could to bring the big Tudor back to its original elegance. She’d painted and wallpapered. She’d hunted for antiques to complement the decor, buying an antique gas stove and an old oak icebox for the kitchen. She’d installed new electric outlets. She’d removed paint from hardwood doors and trim until she smelled the stripper in her food.
But Jan felt as though she was refilling Lake St. Clair one drop at a time. Only two bedrooms were done—their master suite and a guest room. The living room wasn’t fully furnished. Al’s home office was outdated, featuring what she once quipped was “early basement decor.”
The basic upkeep was impossible for a working couple. One Friday she decided to trim the eight-foot-high hedge that enveloped the wrought-iron fence around their corner lot. She had an electric trimmer, but still it took her two full days. By Sunday night, her arms felt as though she had been pumping iron all weekend with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
She began questioning the wisdom of owning the place back in 1981 after she got her doctorate. She approached Al about selling it back then. It would simplify their lifestyle, she said. They would have more free time to travel. But he balked completely. Several times since, they had discussed it. Then it turned into their only standing argument.
When she brought it up again several weeks after he got out of the hospital, Al was not only more determined than ever to keep it, he was offended by the proposal.
“I’ll have no part of that,” he said.
“But it’s just too big. We really don’t need it, Al. And, it’s never going to get done.”
Sure, it was designed by Albert Kahn, the architect of the Fisher. Sure it was beautiful.
“But Al, you’re hardly ever home to enjoy it anyway,” she continued. “This is crazy. Let’s just sell it and get something we can manage—just you and me.”
“I’ll have no part of that,” he said.
Jan thought, why is he being so damned obstinate? She was tempted to take a firm stand right then and there. She knew if she really showed displeasure with him, he would wither into that embarrassed, boyish demeanor. She felt he’d probably do anything to please her when he got like that. But she knew her conscience wouldn’t tolerate it. After all, she was trying to take pressure off him, not heap it on.
Now Al had responded with the home-beautiful effort. As she watched him directing the brick masons one Friday, Jan began to realize what a bundle of contradictions her husband was. For years he’d done nothing around the house. Now he was masterminding every project in sight. One minute he could be aloof, the next as childish as a preadolescent boy. He kept the most disorganized office records she’d ever seen. But he maintained a clinic schedule so rigid that it determined within the quarter hour when he ate and slept. He insisted on such exact timing, but then he was always ten minutes late.
She thought of others: He was a disheveled dresser, but he had other meticulous habits, like his coffee brewing. He made a ritual of washing the coffeepot but got upset if she washed the stained thermos cup. He liked to buy and sell old car parts but wouldn’t lay a wrench to them himself. He came from one of the most proper families she’d ever met. But he himself didn’t own a tie. He preached openness and understanding, but he guarded his financial matters like Fort Knox. He was often rushed and hurried. But then he would soak in the bathtub for hours. Even her mother had noticed the baths on a recent visit.
“Where’s Al? It’s time to eat,” her friend Celia Muir said when their backyard barbecue was ready.
“Celia, Al’s in the bathtub,” Jan’s mother said. “He’s taking a bath—again.”
God, she thought, the contradictions were everywhere. He fancied himself an intellectual, yet he couldn’t wait for his copy of People Magazine. He was a vocal critic of TV entertainment who knew all the latest Hollywood gossip. He was a psychologist, a proponent of short-term cognitive therapy. But Al Canty himself was seeing a psychiatrist who practiced the long-term therapy of free association.
The thought led her back to University Hospital, and the horrifying scene in the admission room. That’s it, she thought. He’s trying to prove to me—to himself—that he’s capable. I should have guessed it. Maybe I’m judging him too harshly.
Her theory seemed more logical as she watched him return from work every evening. Each night he examined the handiwork of the bricklayers. He seemed to find satisfaction in each freshly laid row. She remembered how he’d kept lists in the basement of each brick’s urban origin. He had a half-dozen or so samples labeled, too, their printed histories available upon request.
What a crazy, eccentric hobby that was, she thought. It had all started after his father died. He got the idea from the redbrick streets around Elmwood Cemetery, where Al Sr. was buried. When workers began ripping them up and trucking everything away, Al began his pilgrimages to the old cemetery to fill up his trunk.
“I’m not stealing them, Jan,” he said once. “They’re just going to use them for landfill anyway.”
Finally, he was getting them all in place. She sensed it gave him a great deal of satisfaction.
52
T
he psychopath is potentially dangerous.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Henry Ford Community College lectures
“GET UP, PUNK! I got somethin’ for you!”
Lucky Fry’s voice shook the house like a big clap of thunder. His Western shirt strained at the snaps as blood pumped his chest and biceps and flooded his face bright red.
The guy named Ike was in his underwear, sprawled on the couch for the late movie. He turned just in time to take John’s right paw flat across his face.
“I said get up, bitch! You like to fuck with women and kids. Come on, fuck with me!”
The guy named Ike lunged for his pants. John went for a nearby table. It groaned and snapped as John tried to break off a leg for a club.
Frank McMasters wanted to run for shelter when he saw Lucky Fry get like that. Ike was running too, across the room for the door. He was still in his jockey shorts when he bolted into the hot August night.
All John would have needed was a baseball bat, Frank thought. He hated to think what John would have done to the man with his favorite toy.
John was on a mission when he asked Frank to accompany him to his late brother’s house on Clayton that night. Earlier he’d discovered that Jim’s old girlfriend Janet was living there with the twins and turning tricks for Ike. John found the refrigerator empty, the twins dirty, and Janet crying in the living room. He pressed her until she told him what happened: Ike had locked the twins in their bedroom during a two-day bender. Unable to get to the bathroom, the twins had messed their pants. Ike rubbed their faces in their soiled underwear as punishment. When she complained, he punched her in the eye.
“I should have killed that dirty slimy sonovabitch,” John said. He still was pacing around the living room.
Frank had no doubt John would have if Ike had made the wrong move. John often spoke about the “uncontaminated personalities” of children, and most gravitated to him as to a balding teddy bear. They liked his funny faces and smirky smile, and he was especially protective of his twin niece and nephew since Jim died.
Most of the time, Frank knew Lucky Fry to be pretty laid-back. In fact, often he’d seen John embrace the role of peacemaker when other dope fiends got irrational. His rapport with kids added to the image. People that didn’t really know him, people like Ike or the trick Al Miller, could easily misjudge him as just another stoned, aging hippie living out his years on the street.
But Frank McMasters knew John also had a temper that could strike without warning, like a cyclone when the atmospheric conditions were just right. Frank wondered if Ike realized how close he’d come to booking a drawer in the Wayne County Morgue. A slight shove or a casual insult would have done it.
Once Frank saw a simple slap in the face from Cheryl turn the tornado loose. She hit him during an argument back at their old house off Michigan Avenue. That was the first time Frank saw the bulging chest and crimson face. John picked up a baseball bat. He bypassed Cheryl in favor of the entire house. He swatted the Louisville Slugger through two lamps, then turned a couple of wooden chairs to kindling. He pounded a jewelry box into a pile of splinters. He was working on the plaster and wall lath when Frank ran over to get John’s brother. It took three men to tackle John and hold him down. On the floor he came to his senses.
“Boy, I guess I fucked up, didn’t I,” he said.
John explained later that he couldn’t stand to be hit. “My old man hit me with anything he could get his hands on. Axe handles. Sledgehammer handles. You name it. Ever since, I just go out when any motherfucker lays a hand on me.”
But Frank also had seen an offhand attack on John’s self-styled sense of dignity push him over the edge. Once they were sitting in a diner off Michigan, waiting for Cheryl to return from the streets. When she walked in the door a man patted her rear on his way out. The guy was at least six feet and over two hundred pounds. That time John’s shirt button flew across the table.
“She deserves respect,” he cursed. “Motherfucker should not put his fuckin’ hands on her unless he’s payin’ for it.”
John stalked out of the restaurant, walked up behind the lug, and slapped him on the ass. When he turned, John boosted him off the cement with one uppercut. He was already unconscious when he hit the sidewalk.
Frank knew never to challenge John Fry when he blew up like a blowfish. Otherwise, John was harmless, though he frequently talked tough, made homicidal threats, and reminisced about past battles. According to John, he’d single-handedly taken on rival motorcycle gangs, wasted Vietcong in Nam, and worked under contract for the Mafia as a hit man. Frank had heard a dozen or more stories from John about the men he’d supposedly killed. Frank figured he told such tales to command respect from others on the street. The dope fiends bought it, but he didn’t.
The stories also were ploys to control his girls, Frank had decided some time back. The first time Cheryl ever left him and stayed in Alanson she was convinced John would kill her. She said she had once watched him carve up a black dude for insulting a friend outside a bar. He ran off bleeding, but later they heard he died. That seemed feasible, considering John’s hatred for blacks.
But then Cheryl told him that John had served ten years in Jackson for murder. She said John had killed a state’s witness right in the courtroom. Frank thought it all a little farfetched. He asked a county sheriff’s deputy to run a record check. John Carl Fry had served at least ten years all right, but all for small-time, nonviolent crimes. From then on, Frank saw John’s ongoing body count as just another one of his fantasies.
“Frank, I’ve got to spend a few days laying low at your place,” he said one time when he showed up in Alanson unexpectedly. “I killed a guy the other night.”
“Right, John,” Frank said. “Who was it this time?”
53
By summer’s end, there seemed no limit to Dr. Al Miller’s gullibility. The Hamtramck apartment for Dawn Spens was only another “squeeze play,” as John Fry was fond of calling their schemes to extract cash from Dawn’s sugar daddy.
The first $250 of Al’s apartment deposit money went to groceries. John Fry wanted the refrigerator and cupboards well stocked for his late brother’s twins. When a friend asked what happened to the second $250, John Fry chuckled and pointed to the tattoo on his arm.
“Tweety Bird got drunk.”
Following John’s eviction of Ike, John and Dawn left the Congress Inn and moved into Janet’s house. The two-story sat on a shabby block of Clayton bordering a southside warehouse district. Even then, Dawn talked Al into providing $1,200 for furniture for the apartment she would never occupy. The move to Clayton was only temporary, she told Al. Her girlfriend Janet couldn’t take care of her kids and a four-bedroom house alone.
But Al never complained, even when the twins disappeared one day. John paid a southside mother to take care of the preschoolers in her home. He didn’t want them around the operation he was planning to set up.
“No more fuckin’ around,” he told Dawn. “You wanna be a whore, then I’ll be you’re pimp. But we’re gonna do it right.”
In two weeks, John transformed the house into a prospering dope and trick pad. John dealt heroin in one bedroom. In the others Dawn, Janet, Cheryl, and other prostitutes turned tricks. Fry rented rooms to other Michigan Avenue prostitutes for five dollars a date, but he wasn’t after the five spot. He knew once the johns paid the girls, the money would end up in his hands for dope.
Over the next two months Cheryl Krizanovic would alternate her residence between the Congress Inn and the home on Clayton. In another effort to convince her to return to Alanson, Frank McMasters came to Detroit for a week in late August.
One day Frank was visiting Cheryl when Dawn yelled through the house, “Hey, fuckin’ Al’s comin’ over.” Frank had always wanted to meet the doctor face-to-face. He knew Dawn had to be milking the man for very large sums of money. Frank had watched John repeatedly give Dawn the choice: Get money from Al, or work Michigan Avenue. Dawn alwa
ys preferred the former. John told Frank privately he would just as soon have Dawn Spens on the street. Frank could tell John resented Al. He still blamed the trick for providing her with drugs while he was cleaning up in Alanson.
When Dawn made the announcement, a half-dozen drug addicts in the house responded in a well-practiced drill. Paraphernalia was put away. Empty beer cans were picked up. Bedroom doors were closed. Everyone took seats in the living room.
Al came in the back door. Frank, John, and Cheryl were hiding in a bedroom off the kitchen. Frank, dressed in a well-creased pair of dress pants and sports shirt, put on a businessman’s demeanor and pretended he was one of Cheryl’s tricks.
“Baby, don’t be in such a hurry to leave,” Cheryl called as Frank left the bedroom. He was face-to-face with Al, startling the trick somewhat.
“This is Al Miller, Dr. Al Miller,” Dawn said sweetly. “He’s a real good friend of my family.”
Al relaxed with the introduction.
“Frank, it’s very nice to meet you,” he said. He was very formal.
Frank watched as Al headed toward the stairway with Dawn But when the doctor made a point of stopping in the living room, Frank couldn’t help but notice a personality change. Al stopped and struck what appeared to be a pose. As the doctor looked over the half-dozen addicts, he nodded his head up and down slowly. He reminded Frank of James Dean.
“What’s happenin’,” he said.
Frank never had seen anything quite like it. He thought, what is this, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? The man actually thinks he’s part of this—part of the action. He obviously doesn’t realize how foolish he looks.
“Frank, I told you the fuckin’ guy was a goof,” John said later.
But John, Frank soon found out, could look pretty comical himself during Al’s visits. He went to any length to avoid him. Periodically the doctor would drop by without calling. When his Buick Regal was spotted out front, John hovered like a baseball runner in the middle of the house, waiting to see which door Al chose to enter that day. As Al knocked on one, John would run out the other.
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