Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  “I figured I had at least a seventy-two-hour grace period,” John said.

  Frank learned later why John Fry was so adamant about turning over the wheel. He had four arrest warrants on statewide police computers—for shoplifting in Petoskey, contempt of court in Allen Park, assault and battery in Detroit, and a traffic violation in Saginaw, one of the towns they’d just passed.

  Frank McMasters still could see John’s reckless drive through Detroit and their brush with the trooper. Shit, he thought. Maybe that’s why everyone called him Lucky.

  81

  Tuesday morning W. Alan Canty’s picture hit the streets. On its second front page, the Detroit Free Press carried a story along with a photograph copied from the back of Al’s book Therapeutic Peers. It was a portrait from his thirties. He wore a turtleneck and a pair of black horn-rim glasses. The headline: PSYCHOLOGIST DISAPPEARS AFTER LEAVING OFFICE.

  Afternoon police-beat reporter Betsey Hansell picked up the Canty story the night before while chatting with a friendly sergeant in Police Headquarters. There, the city’s twelve precincts reported dozens of cases day and night to an information control center. But the name Alan Canty stood out.

  “You ought to check into this Dr. Canty,” the sergeant told the reporter. “He used to teach at the police academy. He was quite a flamboyant character.”

  The mix-up between father and son was further muddled as Hansell sat in the police department newsroom listening to a Free Press librarian read clips to her over the telephone. Dr. Canty’s background, the librarian said, included expertise on criminal sexual psychopaths and LSD experimentation for the CIA.

  Another clip she read in the Alan Canty file did in fact quote Al Jr. The 1975 story was about hypnosis, keying on the news angle that a psychiatrist was hypnotizing witnesses on the case of missing labor leader Jimmy Hoffa. One expert quoted liberally in the story on the effectiveness of hypnosis was psychologist W. Alan Canty. Somehow, as reporter and librarian raced to meet deadline, that clip prompted another mix-up.

  The lead paragraph on Tuesday’s story: “A Detroit psychologist who hypnotized witnesses in the search for missing Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa and who tested LSD for the CIA has been missing since Saturday.”

  Even as a missing man, Al Canty seemed to be fashioning illusions as his identity remained clouded by his father. The basic information, though much of it inaccurate, generated a flurry of television reports. Jan Canty provided TV stations with the picture of her and Al standing on the brink of the Grand Canyon.

  “He likes to go to the same restaurants,” she told one Minicam. “He likes to go to the same grocery stores …”

  One TV report led off with footage of Jimmy Hoffa. “It was ten years ago to the month since Hoffa was last seen getting into a car outside a suburban Detroit restaurant.” Soon the Canty case would command the kind of widespread curiosity associated with the former Teamsters leader. Al Canty would join Jimmy Hoffa in the ranks of Detroit’s most baffling crime stories, but for entirely different reasons.

  The media attention relieved some of the frustration that had pursued Jan since that night filled with lightning and green sky. At least people are looking for him now, she thought. Her parents flew in from Arizona, pushing up their scheduled visit a couple of weeks. It wasn’t until they had arrived on Monday night that she realized how out of touch she had become with her own needs.

  “Jan, what’s this?” her mother asked, arriving in her kitchen.

  The Saturday night hamburgers were still on the kitchen counter. Onions and lettuce she cut were brown and wilted. She suddenly realized she hadn’t eaten in two days.

  With her father in tow, Jan went to the Fisher Building Tuesday afternoon. She saw a couple of her patients and fielded calls from Al’s.

  One of the callers was Ray Danford. He wanted to see her, so she told him to come to the office. He arrived just ten minutes before a patient’s appointment.

  Ray Danford wished he had a stiff drink as Jan closed the door in the consultation room, leaving her father outside in the waiting room. His lip was shaking. He felt like the stammering boy of his youth.

  “Did—did Al tell you about these dopers he was hanging out with?” he stuttered.

  Ray tried to tell her about the drugs and Dawn and John and the south side and Al’s visits every day. But he found himself speaking in fragments. Jan just kept looking at him in disbelief as he tried to get it out.

  As he left he was nearly in tears. He wanted to tell Jan what he figured had already happened. He wanted to tell her that he was convinced his old friend was dead. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  Jan Canty’s mind wandered as Ray mumbled about some drug addict Al was treating. She found it hard to concentrate with a patient scheduled only a few minutes away. Drug addicts. The south side.

  Who, she thought, is this man talking about? Not Al. She thanked him for coming. He’s as traumatized as I am, she thought.

  After the patient left, she decided to tackle the money. A lot of Al’s bills were due. She thought of his evaluations at the Wayne County prosecutor’s office; she thought of a private attorney Al had said owed him money for forensic work.

  Her father offered to call both to see about payment. He was pale when he reported back. The prosecutor’s staff said they had never seen W. Alan Canty, let alone given him any cases. As for the private attorney, he reported no dealings with Al.

  He must not have talked to the right people, she thought. Then she began thinking about other things Al had said recently. Jan didn’t like the pattern she saw falling into place.

  82

  Greg Osowski dismissed any hope of more than six hours’ sleep as he reached for the ringing telephone late Tuesday morning.

  “Hi, Greg, this is Suzy Q,” she said. “Woke your ass, didn’t I?”

  Single, the cop gave his home phone number to his best snitches.

  “Buy me lunch. Might have somethin’ for ya.”

  They agreed to meet at 1 P.M. on the south side.

  Osowski already was taking the missing case personally. He liked to look at his two dozen informants as growing infants he was teaching to walk. But for months they all had been falling on their butts. He felt like a proud father—one of them was now taking some giant steps.

  The way it was shaping up, Lucky Fry and Dawn Spens were running in turf he knew well. Besides his connections in the Corridor, his own house was only a half mile from the Michigan Avenue strip where Dawn turned tricks. His next tip from Suzy Q put the couple right in the neighborhood where he grew up.

  The hooker was waiting for him in the Cruise Inn Bar on Vernor Highway near Springwells. He bought her a bag of chips and a screwdriver.

  “They call the trick The Doc,” she said. “And, The Doc is a good John, Greg.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They live right near here, on Casper, I think it is.”

  “Can you do better than that?”

  “Let me call you this afternoon.”

  Osowski left a twenty-dollar bill on the bar rail in front of her.

  “Hey, Greg,” she said, grabbing the twenty. “Watch yourself. Lucky is a crazy motherfucker.”

  “Why? Does he carry a gun?”

  “He doesn’t have to carry a gun,” she said.

  Dan Hall, Al Canty’s fellow car buff, was watching a 6:00 news report on the missing psychologist as his family sat around the kitchen table in his Bloomfield Hills home. Hall wondered now if Al would ever make their lunch date. The newscast mentioned police were looking for Al’s 1984 black Buick Regal. Hall turned to Jim Campbell, his son-in-law.

  “I’ve ridden in that Regal they’re looking for,” he said.

  Campbell flashed on what he saw earlier that day on Detroit’s south side as he supervised a crew laying a fiber-optic line near the Grand Trunk Railway. He saw a black Buick parked among some debris near the tracks.

  “I saw a car like that today—all burned up,” he said.
>
  Hall suggested Campbell call the police.

  “Naw, I’m sure they’ve checked it out.”

  “Jim, you better call anyway.”

  Hardly a half hour had passed since Greg Osowski had taken the call from Suzy Q. Dawn Spens and John Fry lived “one or two doors down” from Pitt, she told him, then she went one better than that.

  “They were trying to unload The Doc’s car on Monday,” she said. “Supposedly it’s fucked up over on Federal somewhere.”

  Before he could find a partner for the outing, the precinct phone rang again. Osowski listened to the caller from Bloomfield Hills. Jim Campbell wasn’t quite sure of the name of the street where he saw the burned car.

  “It begins with an F,” he said. “Near the railroad tracks and Livernois.”

  “Federal?”

  “Yeah. In a field, across from the warehouse there.”

  Osowski pulled a fifteen-year veteran named Robert Carroll from his desk and headed toward the location.

  “Greg,” he said. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but you run with the ball.”

  When Osowski saw the blistered car near the tracks he sensed they were about to score.

  Nothing was left inside the Regal but bare seat springs and charred metal framing. They copied the vehicle ID number from under the hood. Minutes later they fed the vehicle number into the Fourth Precinct computer and waited. It was nearly 9 P.M. when the printer chattered out the response.

  After notifying Homicide and Armed Robbery, the two cops returned to secure the burned Buick. They were met there by five scout cars and a canine unit poised to search the area. Just after 10:30, Osowski and Carroll were back in their car, heading in the direction of Casper and Pitt.

  “Call the station,” the dispatcher said.

  Osowski pulled into a police Mini Station on Vernor, one of many small, volunteer-staffed units scattered in neighborhoods throughout the city. They were only a long block and a half from the bungalow on Casper.

  Inside, Carroll cradled a telephone, while Osowski found himself eavesdropping. A volunteer was shooting the breeze with a burly guy who had just dropped into the storefront operation. Osowski heard the visitor say “The Doc.”

  His name was John Oliver Bumstead.

  “Yeah, I know Lucky Fry,” he said.

  “Bob, let’s not blow this,” Osowski told his partner. “Let’s call the boys at the big store.”

  Later, Osowski would write it all off as Polish luck.

  Celia Muir escorted her best friend out of the big Tudor for a long walk as evening fell on the Pointes. They strolled down Berkshire, then along Windmill Pointe Drive. They found themselves glancing in the driveways and looking at cars as they passed. Celia even had found herself looking up the aisles of a grocery store earlier in the day.

  In time, they were able to nurture a few lighthearted moments. Celia even prompted a laugh out of Jan. Then her friend stopped suddenly. She heard Jan’s breath rush out.

  “Look!”

  Celia’s eyes focused on the figure a hundred yards away on the sidewalk ahead. Through the summer haze she could see him, his shoulders seesawing with each step. He’s walking our way, toddling our way, Celia thought. His head was topped with red.

  They stood there frozen for a few seconds, watching the figure approach. Then they began breathing again. Somebody else owned that distinctive Al Canty walk. Jan wanted to go back to the big Tudor.

  “I thought that was Al,” Jan said. “I thought that was Al, coming home.”

  83

  The child who is sometimes licked, and on other occasions barked at by the family dog, really never knows where he stands with the animal: just as the child who is sometimes praised and at other times punished for what he views as similar behavior will have difficulty determining what is expected of him.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy

  A soft-spoken public relations consultant named Doris De Deckere was telling a friend over lunch about the name in the newspapers. She met W. Alan Canty when he was in high school. The teen showed up one day outside his father’s office in the Recorder’s Court clinic, where she worked as a secretary at the time.

  “I was alone in the office. Young Alan Canty came in, though I didn’t know who he was at the time. He asked for Dr. Canty. And he was so nervous—so obviously nervous—that I perceived him to be disturbed. I said that Dr. Canty would be right back, that he was with one of the judges.

  “Well, he was really agitated and pacing back and forth, saying, ‘When do you think he’s coming?’

  “So I went back to his office and called the judge’s chambers and said that there was a disturbed young man downstairs who was asking for him, and I thought it important he come and see him.

  “When Canty did, and spotted his son, he said, ‘Jesus Christ. What are you doing down here? What do you want?’

  “It had something to do with the dentist. Then he took him into the office and yelled and yelled and yelled. I mean it was just really horrible. It’s not the sort of temper you expect to see between father and son, especially in a business place. You might expect some controlled anger. But he knew I was there, and there were no holds barred. I mean, he really and truly blasted this kid and called him lots of names, including ‘stupid’ …

  “I haven’t forgotten it because it was so shocking to me. And I felt an incredible sense of stupidity that I didn’t know it was his son. I thought how stupid to call him ‘disturbed.’ And maybe I was to blame for the railing he got. It was one of those incidents where when you think of it, your blood runs cold.

  “But the man always spoke very disparagingly of his son. He never spoke of him with any great love; he never spoke of him with any pride. The only references I ever heard was that he wished his son was doing something else; he wished he was smarter; he wished he was … you know, ‘that damn son of mine.’ If he got that kind of thing at the office, I can imagine what he got at home.

  “So, I’m reading about all this in the newspapers that the young Canty was missing and I said to my husband, ‘Look at this. I haven’t seen this man in years. Isn’t this funny? It brings it all back to me again.’

  “And I wasn’t surprised. When you diminish somebody, and they feel they have no self-worth, you lay them open to seeking the level of self-worth they have. If it’s nothing, that’s the level they seek.

  “I turned to my husband and said, ‘You know, they’re gonna find him in some garbage dumpster somewhere.’ ”

  84

  The successful interrogator must be a convincing actor. He must learn how to play several roles.

  —ALAN CANTY, Sr.

  “The Psychological Training of Police Officers,” 1953

  The week Homicide took over the Alan Canty case, its top cop, Gilbert Hill, was getting his teeth capped. Seven months earlier the inspector had made his acting debut as Eddie Murphy’s boss in the film Beverly Hills Cop.

  Gil Hill, a lean black man with penetrating eyes and a penchant for three-piece suits, snagged the role when Hollywood producers showed up in his office one day, looking for inspiration for the film sets. They found plenty in the dark-oak-and-cork-trimmed confines of the homicide section.

  For fifty years the face of child killer and sex deviate Merton W. Goodrich and the tall headline CATCH GOODRICH greeted visitors at the door. It was part of a framed display of news clips on the 1932 case. Nobody in Homicide knew who first put them up, and nobody knew why they still remained. But the charge and photo set the tone of the section’s fifth-floor offices in Police Headquarters. Goodrich’s odd mug was anyone’s stereotype of a twisted killer.

  Hill’s dental work was in anticipation of more film work. He’d already lost his favorite role when he became supervisor of the section’s fifty detectives, who probed more than six hundred killings a year. The promotion took him out of the daily case-cracking routine, where his skills once earned him a spot on
a task force imported by Atlanta to solve its rash of child killings. Hill still couldn’t resist getting involved when a hot case came down the pike.

  The first paperwork on the Canty case showed up next to a pack of Kools and a cup of black coffee on Hill’s desk Wednesday morning. The inspector already had one of his best investigators involved, a thirty-eight-yearold detective named Bernard Brantley.

  Sergeant Brantley was Hill’s successor as the head of the section’s special assignment squad, a group of a half-dozen detectives who probed police shootings and high-visibility cases. With his paunchy frame and balding head, Brantley looked more suited for a desk in City Hall than for one of the toughest jobs in Homicide. It was a deceptive demeanor.

  “Outright brilliant is what he is,” Hill once said of him. “He ain’t scared of nothin’—not even me.”

  Brantley watched his boss slide his preliminary report back to him across that kind of well-greased track of compliments late Wednesday morning.

  “We’re going to call it a homicide, even though we don’t have a body. It’s all yours, Bernard.”

  Brantley should have suspected as much. It was his first day back on the noon-to-eight shift following an all-night rotation that had introduced him to the Canty case in the first place.

  When Brantley arrived at the sweltering Vernor Mini Station the night before, he found John Bumstead surrounded by more than a dozen question-shooting cops who had packed the storefront, anxious to get a piece of the action. Bumstead said that he heard Fry and Spens were at the Morrell Apartments, trying to raise money to get out of town.

  “Well,” Brantley said. “If Fry is at the apartment building, and this guy is saying he probably killed him, let’s go get him.”

  Cops covering the back exit heard a chorus of flushing toilets when Brantley and eight officers made the location. Some tenants obviously mistook their arrival as a drug raid.