The Devil's Only Friend
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Authors: Mitchell Bartoy
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Contents
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For my wife
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the gracious support I've received from Phil, Patricia, and Megan Abbott. The folks at the United States Postal Service have helped in so many ways that it would be impossible to list them here. In particular, I'd like to thank Terry Traylor and Cindy Tobias for their understanding and encouragement. To my family, to the APWU, to Bonnie and Joe and Margo and Robin and all that gangâmany thanks are due.
PROLOGUE
Detroit, Michigan, 1944
While the city went up in flames, while the Negroes wrecked their own shops and the cops and the National Guard shot and beat down the mobsâwell, I got the hell out of there. I cooled my heels for a couple of weeks and took in some sun. I drank beer and rested in a place where nobody knew me, and to pass the time I walked along the shore of Lake Huron, out at the very tip of Michigan's thumb. For a day or two I tried to figure out the angles, what the nasty business would mean for the future. But it was too much for me, and so I just stared out at the waves breaking against the rocks and the pebbled sand and the big freighters crawling along at the horizon. When I got back to Detroit, I found that I was still a free man, in spite of all I had and hadn't done. As an officer of the law, I had sworn an oath to protect, to serve, to uphold the laws that had been hammered out by the earliest men of the city. But it had been many years since I had been so green and so full of myself that I could give away my faith so easily. I had fallen away.
I walked into the police headquarters on Beaubien, and it didn't get me arrested. Nobody said a word to me as I walked up the stairs to Captain Mitchell's office.
Looking back, I guess I could have found something more to hash out with him. There were things left to be straightened out. Mitchell had been close to my father, as close as anyone had ever been. I knew there were things he might have told me that would sink into the vat of dead memory if I could not find a way to sit and talk to him. He might have told me that Fred Caudill was a good manânot just to say the words but to tell exactly how my father had found a way to be a good man. Mitchell might have been able to show me the choices my father had made, what he had taken, what he had left. I was just simpleminded enough to come upon an interest in history in my middle thirties. But the big riot had left things bitter between us, and I hadn't really come to the captain's office to talk. It might have seemed like the only honorable thing left to do; but my lack of imagination meant that it was just the simplest. I flipped my detective's badge in its charred leather case toward him and turned away from that part of my life.
It looked like I was all set up. I was feeling like I could do anything I wanted. There was still a little money left from the botched deal with auto baron Jasper Lloyd, and I thought I might have a chance to settle in with a good woman. For a short time, at least, it looked like they weren't going to call me in for any of the blood I had spilledâI knew enough to make it ugly for them if they did.
I kept thinking back to that moment when I walked out of headquarters. It was early enough in the day that the July heat wasn't deadly. I was breathing easy, and I could have chosen to follow any path. No obvious thing would trip me up. For the first time in a dozen years or more, there was no reason for me to care where I was or what the clock had to say. The air was fresh as the air ever gets deep inside an industrial city, and I tried to ignore the faint trace of worry that dogged meâhad I been kidding myself? I had managed to shrug off a boatload of trouble, but maybe I couldn't slip out of my own scarred skin after all.
I didn't go to see Eileen right away. It was a Sunday, and I knew she'd be home. I walked and walked, meandering with my one eye up and down the streets of Detroit, from time to time spying a corner where I'd cracked a wino's head or an alley I'd chased through with my brother TommyâTommy, who'd gone halfway across the world to get himself killed. On foot, as I'd been for so many years as a beat cop, you can smell out a city, or at least the small part of it you can get to before your dogs give out. Tucked in the nooks and crannies between the big buildings of downtown, in apartments and flats along the back alleys, people were cooking. Most of the men were either gone overseas to fight or else working their seventh day on the lines, but the families that were left were sitting down to an early Sunday supper. It only made me think how few friends I'd made in my thirty-six years.
Finally I took the bus up Campau and got off at Davison. I came along the alley that ran behind the auto dealer and the garage with gravel crunching under my hard shoes. The rose bushes that Eileen kept along the alley drooped with old blooms. I thought she might be out in the back, working at the yard, but there was no trace of her. Inside the garage they were pounding out fenders, patching up cars that would have to stay in service until the war could be won and the factories could turn again to making new models. I walked over the little patch of grass in front of Eileen's place and stepped up onto the big porch.
I knew what kind of man I was just then. It hit me. As my finger pressed down onto the button of the doorbell, it came to me
for the first time
that Eileen probably thought I was dead. When the riot broke, she knew I was right in the thick of it; and I hadn't been decent enough to send word to anyone that I was all right. While I was gone, while I was taking fresh air in Caseville, walking on the beach, I'd thought of herâbut I hadn't ever considered what she might be feeling for me.
I could see it plain enough when she opened the door. For a moment as the wave of emotion seized her, it seemed that she could not quite tell which of her three lost men was standing before her. Was it her husband, my brother Tommy, who had been killed in the war? Her only child, Alex, a boy of fourteen, who had been driven away by my bungling? I was the third man, the last choice, reasonably, but I had changed. She had seen me wearing the glass eye before, of course, but now it was as if she couldn't quite place me. Because of all the sorrow she'd been dragged through, she held herself back from feeling for a killing second.
Then she stepped through the screen door and fell onto me. The way she was shaking, I thought she would tear us both to pieces. I wrapped myself around her and held tight, but I felt the shadows of doubt and guilt I had not managed to bury. I wondered if there was anything that could still hold us together.
CHAPTER 1
April 6, 1944
In general I don't care to hear any word of advice, and I do my best not to give any out.
But there's just the one thing.
If you've managed to work yourself into a good job, steady work, the kind of a spot where you can keep a little respect for yourself, you should think for a time before you chuck your detective's badge at your captain's chest and walk out on the whole thing. That's how I found myself in a little rented flat in a three-story building on the east side, whiling away the hours and whittling away at my dwindling stash of money.
After the riot and all the mess of the previous year, I thought I knew what I'd be doing. I thought I might take a little job to keep me occupied. I had a vague idea that I could carry on a regular affair with Eileen. But it wasn't so. Through the summer and the fall of 1943, I prowled around the city and continued to eat myself up inside. With Eileen I'm not sure how it happened; it was like a record that had skipped off track. It wasn't right from the beginning, and then thoughts of Alex and Tommy and my father got to be heavy enough to darken everything. Gradually she soured toward me.
I moved from my rented house, which was too big for me, into a tiny flat. Then I spent so many hours stewing out on my little landing on the fire escape that I knew everything about the neighborhoodâeverything that could be noted along the interior of the block, along the alley that all the buildings backed into. I watched as daughters crept out for secret meetings with boyfriends; I noticed that husbands were more likely to smack their women as payday drew near and money grew tight; I came to know where the rats hid from the light during the day. You see a clearer picture of how people live when you look into their back windows.
Even with all the old ladies peeking through their curtains and all the old gents scouring the riverfront for Nazis night and day, Detroit was still a place where you could be left alone. I wasn't sure if any of my neighbors knew anything about me or what I had done. They knew my name, most of them. But you can't ever tell what people will say about you, you can't control how people will talk. I was just glad to be able to sit unmolested on the little landing on the outside fire stairs, halfway between my floor and the floor above.
I brought up a quarter sheet of plywood to keep the legs of my little kitchen chair from going through the grate. Though the rail was loose and rickety, it was wide enough for me to rest a can of beer or a cup of coffee on it. During the day, and just after school let out especially, the neighborhood kids chased up and down the fire escape and the alley, but then they were called to supper, and things were quiet enough for me to sit and think. Usually I crept out as dusk took hold.
Then one evening in April, after I had weathered the worst of the Michigan winter and early spring, sitting out sometimes even as the snow whipped through the alley or settled softly over me like a blanket, I swung out my window thinking that I'd be warm enough to sit till the moon crawled away. But as I started up, I felt the buzz that jolts you when you realize you're not alone; there was a man I didn't know sitting above me in my chair, the orange tip of a cigarette bobbing between his lips. The pale light from the street lamps down below threw a shadow over his face, but there was a weak flickering glitter in his eyes. I couldn't very well back down the stairs in such a case, and so I clomped up the remaining steps and said hello.
“This your chair?” he said, rising. “I guess it is.”
“That's all right,” I told him.
He got up stiffly and stepped clear. “I can't do right by stealing another man's chair.”
There wasn't much to do but sit down. The slender stranger stood with his back against the stair rail for a time, pulling smoke from his brown cigarette and pluming it outward. The steady wind that came through the alley drafted the smoke quickly upward, spiraling away. I was wearing a work vest to hold off the coldâa vest that had been my father'sâbut this fellow just stood there in his shirtsleeves. Fred Caudill would have glad-handed him; he'd put out his hand as a natural thing to any man, friend or stranger, who came within ten feet of him. My brother Tommy would have put out the mitt, too. I sat and let my eye go out into the distance.