Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  Buster was in high spirits when he called at noon, but overly concerned that she hang on to that card.

  “Ma, you save your cards, don’t you?” he said.

  He knew she did, she said.

  “Oh, that’s nice, Ma.”

  He said he and Jan were busy preparing for a visit from her parents from Arizona, but that they would make time to visit her.

  “Jan and I will be coming over on our bikes some Sunday soon,” he said before hanging up. Gladys had never known her son to ride a bicycle to her house.

  At 2518 Casper, there had been another jagged night of partying, even while a child slept innocently in Dawn and John’s bedroom. The previous evening, the couple had stopped to see Fry’s distant cousin Sue Stennett. Her sevenyear-old daughter Tonya Sue begged to spend the night with her “Uncle John.” Fry reluctantly relented. As the couple left with her daughter, John told Sue Stennett her daughter would have to come home early. He wanted the house clear of any guests.

  “I’m trying to get some money out of Al,” he said. “I’m expecting Al to arrive with a large amount of money.”

  Tonya Sue was dropped off back home around noon Saturday, the child reporting that Dawn and the man named Al had given her a ride. That lunch hour Al gave Dawn $40 in $10 bills, the prostitute would later say. He didn’t linger at the kitchen table or take time to read the morning newspaper. In a half hour he was back at the Fisher Building.

  John Fry spent the early afternoon out and about, visiting dope connections three times to buy cocaine and a handful of Tylenol 4s. Neither he nor Dawn had visited the methadone clinic in two weeks.

  At 3 P.M., Al was wrapping up a session with a psychologist he supervised. The colleague found his supervisor pleasant and relaxed. At 3:30 P.M. Al phoned Jan. He told her he would come home right after his last session, which ended at 6 P.M.

  “I think I’ll stop at Kroger on the way home to pick up some coffee,” he added. The grocery store was en route to his home.

  At 5:15 P.M. Al began an appointment with his last patient of the day, a woman who received therapy three times a week and knew his habits and demeanor well. Sometime during that forty-five-minute session the phone rang. The patient later said she believed the caller was a female. As Al tried to end the phone call he became increasingly disturbed, so much so that the patient herself was jittery by the time he hung up. The psychologist apologized for the interruption.

  “That was a very manipulative patient of mine,” he said angrily.

  At 6:30, the quick steps of a pair of engineer boots broke the silence in the empty hallway of the Fisher Building arcade. A few minutes later the black Buick sped down the ramp of the building garage. A garage attendant waved to the psychologist, but Al had no time for pleasantries. The attendant later said Al Canty looked “upset.”

  The car drove off into what had turned into a suffocating Saturday. The air swelled with humidity and the temperature was nearly ninety; it was the kind of night Detroiters pray for a rainstorm to take the fevered bloat from the soiled air.

  It had been eighty-four weeks and three days since the psychologist saw the young prostitute standing on the corner of Peterboro and Second. Whether he was returning to the bungalow on Casper willingly or unwillingly, the fact remained that W. Alan Canty was broke. He had a $440 negative balance in his checkbook. But it was a paltry debit compared to what he owed a list of creditors that included his office landlord and the vigilant Internal Revenue Service.

  Dawn Marie Spens’s sugar daddy had no sweetness left. Somewhere between his last patient and his arrival on the south side, Al Canty decided to fortify himself with a couple of stiff drinks.

  A nineteen-year-old southsider named Jimmie Carter was returning from a trip to the corner store when he saw the black Buick pull up to him on Clark Avenue well before sunset. The man he knew as John Fry rolled down the passenger’s window.

  “Hey, mon,” he said. “You want to buy a watch?”

  John was holding a gold Seiko. Carter peeked into the car. The girl he knew as Dawn Spens was in the backseat. Behind the wheel was a man in glasses. Carter later identified him as Al Canty.

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five dollars.”

  Carter went into his sister’s house nearby and returned with the cash. When he handed John the money, he noticed the two men had switched positions. Lucky Fry was in the driver’s seat.

  Sometime between seven and eight o’clock, John’s imposing figure appeared in the small hallway of the bungalow. He and Al could see each other through the open doorway of the bedroom. Al was sitting in a chair next to Dawn, next to the dresser where they kept their works, a few feet from the mattress where they slept, just across from the doorjamb where a baseball bat rested against the wall.

  An open pack of cocaine sat on the dresser. When Dawn finished with the syringe, she handed the works to her boyfriend. Al remained seated as John repeated the routine for himself.

  As the drug took effect, Dawn ran into the bathroom, leaving the two men behind. As she retched into the toilet, she heard voices building in the bedroom. First there were postured comments, then insults. As the argument increased in pitch, Dawn stood up and walked around the corner, facing the open bedroom door.

  Al was eye to eye with John Fry, yelling, “It’s my money, I can give it or I can take it. I can do whatever I want to do. If you don’t like it, fuck you. I don’t have to justify anything I do to you.”

  Al stomped toward the bedroom doorway. John was partially blocking his way. Al shoved him with a one-handed push to his shoulder. John gave only slight ground, but a stool behind him clipped him at the calf and he fell backward. When he came to his feet, his chest was blown up and his face was bright red. He was gripping the Louisville Slugger with both his hands.

  There were at least three blows, maybe four. Two hit home just above the right ear, another across the forehead as Al’s tortoiseshell glasses flew across the room. The cracks of the bat sent ten intersecting fracture lines across Alan Canty’s skull like the outstretched fingers of a lightning bolt.

  Dawn Spens ran from the house after the first blow, hearing the smacks of the others behind her as she reached the front porch. Any of the three could have been fatal. The psychologist collapsed onto the floor. Blood spread across the surface of his brain and rushed into the vessels behind his eyes. He was convulsing, twitching, senseless. But he would take a few minutes to die.

  Fry stood over the body, his hand still gripping the bat.

  “Get up, motherfucker!” he thundered. “Get up!”

  When Dawn returned inside, she kneeled over the body with Al’s stethoscope, placing the sensor on his back. She heard the thumping of her own heart.

  “I can’t tell, John.”

  Fry ordered her to leave the house.

  “Get the fuck out! Just get the fuck away from me.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Fuck it. I don’t care. Go make some money.”

  She went up to Vernor Highway and turned two tricks at thirty dollars each, performing the sex acts in the tricks’ cars.

  John sat on the stool next to the body and smoked a cigarette, eyeing the body as he puffed. He decided to wrap Al’s head in a blanket and drag him into the bathroom. He lifted the psychologist into the bathtub, propping his feet higher than his head. Then he slit his throat.

  “I cut his throat to try and get some of the blood out of him,” he later said. “I don’t know why. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  After John covered the body with the blanket he heard footsteps on the porch. At first he thought it was Dawn returning.

  Outside, furniture merchant Robert Saleh rapped sharply on the screen door. He’d returned to the bungalow as promised, armed with a baseball bat and expecting another twenty dollars. When no one responded, Saleh pushed open the door and stepped a foot or two inside, clutching the bat in his hand.

  As he scanned the living
room his eye caught a cigarette resting in an ashtray. A stream of smoke wavered upward from its tip. He heard only a few birds chirping outside at the coming dusk. Something told Saleh to call it a night.

  John could feel his own blood surging through his chest as he waited in the bathroom for the visitor to leave. Then he took the car keys to the black Buick, locked the house behind him, and went looking for Dawn. He found her sitting on a stool at a Coney Island on Vernor. They visited the dope house and bought cocaine, and also some heroin. By the time they returned to the house on Casper, John had come up with a plan.

  “He’s dead,” he later recalled. “I would never have done it if he was alive. But I’m thinking, the guy has got to go. There’s no doubt about that. He can’t stay here. But there’s an apartment house behind us. There’s houses on the side. And there’s people movin’ in that neighborhood twenty-four hours a day.”

  Fry loaded up a syringe with a speedball. The coke provided the energy, the heroin the numb. He reached into the kitchen drawer and grabbed a knife, the long one with the serrated edge and the Ginsu trademark on the black handle.

  In the bathroom he pulled off Al’s boots, then the socks. He struggled with the green pants and the new sport shirt, finally tossing them in a growing pile on the bathroom floor.

  Then John took off his own shoes, pulled his T-shirt from his muscular torso, and slipped off his jeans. He didn’t want his own clothes stained with blood.

  John stepped into the bathtub stark naked, placing one knee on each side of Al’s body. His own skin met the corpse’s flesh as he went about the task. Perspiration sparkled on his bald head beneath the harsh bathroom light and bright Formica walls.

  Exactly where Dawn Spens was, what she did, and what she saw that night would be left to the courts and her own conscience. She later said she was away turning tricks. John later maintained she was sitting on the toilet seat, assisting him with the packaging during the grisly task.

  It was about ten-thirty when he began.

  First John took off the head, followed by the hands, cutting them just above the wrist. He cut off a foot, applying the Ginsu just above the ankle. The severance was so precise, a medical examiner later would fit the two pieces back together like a puzzle. The other foot followed. He was surprised by his fast progress.

  “It was easier than you might think,” he later said.

  The head, hands, and feet were wrapped in newspaper, which was then folded with the kind of sharp creases found in a butcher shop. These packages were placed separately in four green plastic garbage bags, the head and feet in separate bags, the hands put together in one. John wanted something to carry all the body parts that could potentially identify Al Canty’s body.

  “Where’s that fucking brown bag?” he cursed.

  The parachute satchel that Al once used to tote Dawn’s gifts during her hospital stays became Al’s own makeshift body bag. When it was full, the valise was placed in the refrigerator.

  Fry broke for a cigarette. Then he finished the job. He cut the legs and arms from the torso, stacking them in one end of the tub like logs. He put each leg in a separate bag and the arms in one sack. He wrapped the trunk in the bedcover and triple-bagged the bundle. He carried bag after bag to the back landing of the bungalow. In another garbage bag he put the knife, the baseball bat, and Al’s clothes. He wanted one more item.

  “Where’s that fucking thermos?” he asked out loud. “They find that thermos, they’re going to expect to find him sitting here.”

  After it was bagged, he washed himself in a laundry tub in the basement.

  By midnight Dawn was scurrying around the house, packing. She stuffed their clothing into plastic bags and gathered up her photographs, bill receipts, and other paperwork, heaping them by the handful into a cardboard box. The carpet was cut from the bathroom floor and the hallway, leaving only foam padding. Another portion was sliced and lifted from the bedroom.

  “I’ve got to take care of something,” John said. “You clean up. If you see any bloodstains, clean them up.”

  Dawn carried a bottle of bleach into the bathroom and washed out the bathtub. She could hear John’s footsteps on the back stairs as he loaded the trash bags into the Buick parked in the back alley.

  John stopped at garbage dumpsters in alleys throughout the south side. He muscled the torso into one off Buchanan near Thirty-fifth Street. He tossed limbs into another behind a gas station off Springwells near I-75. He dropped the baseball bat, Ginsu, and other damning evidence behind a market at Lafayette near Livernois. When he returned, he toured the bungalow.

  “I walked through the house,” John said later. “It looked pretty much in order to me.”

  After the car was loaded with their belongings, Dawn lifted the brown satchel out of the refrigerator and carried it to the trunk of Al’s car. John paused in the kitchen before they left. He filled a syringe with what was left of the coke and pushed the needle into his arm just off the tip of the tattooed Harley-Davidson wing. A stream of blood squirted onto the kitchen floor.

  “Come on, we’re going up north,” he said.

  On their way they stopped to drop off the keys for the bungalow with a friend, telling him he could take whatever he wanted from inside. Thirty minutes north of Detroit, they stopped again. John parked the idling Buick on the berm of the Joslyn Avenue exit. He wanted a pillow from the trunk for Dawn, who had started to doze at his side.

  As he rummaged, he noticed the shine of a green garbage bag in a far corner of the trunk. He grabbed the oblong bag with both hands and hurled it off into the weedy embankment of the freeway ramp. Dawn poked her head out the window.

  “Whatya doin’, babe?” she asked.

  “Just throwin’ away some garbage,” he said.

  Jan Canty had sat down in front of the TV at 7:30 P.M., right after she put out hamburgers and freshly sliced onion on the kitchen counter. From the start she was captivated by the three-hour concert special called “Live Aid.” She watched Sting and Phil Collins sing “Long Long Way to Go” and “Driven to Tears.” She listened as Led Zeppelin alumni Robert Plant and Jimmy Page reunited for “Stairway to Heaven.”

  Then it hit her. It was dark outside. She walked into the kitchen and looked at the clock Al bought her for Christmas. It was 10:30.

  Al, she thought. Where is Al?

  The clock must be wrong, she thought. She walked from room to room, checking other timepieces in the house. The shudder started somewhere in her upper body, then struck home deep in front of her lower spine. God, she thought, it’s been three hours. How could I have failed to realize it was so late? Al never fails to call when he’s held up, never.

  Jan phoned his Fisher Building office. Then she phoned the security desk. He’d signed out at 6:30.

  She walked to the living room window, as though that would somehow make the black Buick come gliding down Berkshire. She found herself fighting off panic. She went into Al’s home office and called the Muirs. Their eldest daughter answered. John and Ces were at a movie. She took a message.

  As she sat in Al’s overstuffed chair she thought of the cash Al carried in his pants pocket. She called the Grosse Pointe police, asking them to check the Kroger grocery store parking lot.

  “He was supposed to stop there for coffee.”

  “Sure, ma’am,” the officer said.

  She phoned the Detroit police. They told her to wait twenty-four hours. Then the Grosse Pointe police phoned back.

  “No,” the officer said. “There’s no sign of a Buick like that in the parking lot.”

  She began imagining things, none of them good. Maybe, she thought, he had a car accident on the way home. She called the Michigan State Police, which patrolled the Detroit freeways. She gave the dispatcher his plate number.

  “No,” the trooper said. “We’ve had no reports.”

  Jan wanted to go somewhere, go looking. No, she thought. He might call. I’d better stay home. She moved to a chair near the living room
windows of the big Tudor and waited. She stirred with every pair of approaching headlights. She was sure some were even slowing to turn. It was as though the cars were deliberately taunting her.

  By midnight, she could take the anxiety no more. She called a neighbor for help. Together they drove down to the Fisher Building but found everything was in order at the suite. It was almost too orderly. She could see Al had tidied up a few things before he left.

  They drove back to Grosse Pointe Park. Jan tried to ignore the ever worsening scenarios that played in her head. She thanked her neighbor for the company, then let herself into the house.

  The big Tudor never felt so empty. She waited this time on the leather couch in their living room, again keeping her eyes on the front windows.

  Jan first noticed the lightning flashes from a distance, as though enormous camera bulbs were going off on the other side of town. Then the rain began falling. As the wind picked up it flailed the droplets against the glass. She’d heard that pelting before, against the window at University Hospital fifteen months ago.

  The storm only reminded her all the more of Al. He always loved weather like this, she thought, but she’d always found it so frightening.

  Soon the winds were whipping the big elms with fifty-mile-an-hour gusts. Through the leaded glass Jan watched the lightning bolts crack the sky in intersecting grids. With each flash she could see a sky that was a vivid green.

  She hoped it wasn’t a tornado and tried to shake the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.

  78

  Frank McMasters pulled on his robe and shuffled across his bedroom to investigate the gentle rapping on his window.

  “Cheryl, you’ll never guess who’s here.”

  Cheryl Krizanovic looked up, then felt the muscles across her big tummy tighten. She was six months pregnant with Frank’s child, but it wasn’t the baby having its regular Sunday morning kick.