The Devil's Own Rag Doll (24 page)

Carpet.
The word screwed into my brain. This was not new information. I knew well that the body of Jane Hardiman was covered with fibers, looked on all the bloody parts to be fairly sprouting fur, and it was easy enough to guess that she had been transported in a carpet to Pease's place. Tossing a body in broad daylight, there wasn't much else that would do the trick. A carpet was the thing.

I took the steps slowly, submerged in thought. A dead girl, a dead father, a dead partner; missing eye, missing fingers, missing nephew—and the face of another man, one of many victims of the so-called Black Legion, floating up from the back of my mind like a bloated stiff at the bottom of the Detroit River, waving in the current. Floating up: the face of a man found murdered in a gully downriver, found wrapped in a carpet, too. Found to have been tortured to death, his face battered with a ball peen hammer till most of the teeth were gone, parts of the shattered jawbone raking out through the skin.

I stood at the top of the narrow staircase and gripped the rail. Ten years ago, maybe. Bad days for everybody, 1933. A young Communist, involved in the struggle to organize the autoworkers, had been taken for a ride by the Legion. So what? In those days, no one cared about any Reds. I remembered it as well as I could remember the first time I had smacked a baseball over the playground fence. All the boys in the squad room had laughed about the poor Red. Laughed and showed around the picture in the
Free Press
that showed the Red's movie-star-pretty fiancée and said that they'd have to pay her a visit. I could still picture her little mouth, her pressed hair. The picture looked like a movie still. That girl was the only reason I remembered the dead Commie at all.

But now I remembered another thing, something many had found laughable, too. The carpet they had used to roll the body was brand spanking new, still had a tag on it. Stupid or full of balls or both; that was how it was with the Legion in those days. They traced the carpet right back to a little mill here in town. Things being what they were, nothing came of it. As a matter of routine, I could remember, the police rousted the owners of the mill, made a bluster over it till the papers settled off.

The carpet mill, I remembered now, could not have been more than two or three blocks from the alley where Bobby Swope found his early end—within running distance. The memory kept surging up through me, through my blood till my fingers throbbed.
The carpet mill had been owned by Clyde Rix, brother of Barton Rix. Barton Rix, Barton Rix.

I was so busy thinking that I wasn't looking out when I burst through the door from police headquarters, and so I was not prepared to meet the line of dark faces in fancy-cut suits heading toward me. The Reverend Horace Jenkins led a pack of three assistants or bodyguards like a shark pulling pilot fish in its wake. The hired meat looked as big as Jenkins but didn't have the confidence. Jenkins looked like a man on his way up.

“Detective Caudill! Just the man I'd like to have a word with.” Jenkins stopped, and his flunkies fanned out behind him.

I fought the urge to duck away and let Jenkins talk to my backside. “Take it up with Mitchell. You've got nothing I ain't heard before.”

“Oh, I think I do.”

I fought the urge to sink my fingers around the colored man's Adam's apple. That look of smiling good health begged to be notched down.

“A man's nothing if he doesn't look out for his family, isn't that right, Detective?”

“Hell with you, nigger,” I said.

One of the men behind Jenkins lurched forward, apoplectic. The veins in his neck bulged over his tight bow tie.

Jenkins put out his arm to block the smaller man. “All right, Mr. Noggle. Plainly Mr. Caudill is not an educated man.” Jenkins let his eyebrows rise, but his smile did not diminish. “I may be a ‘nigger,' as you say, Detective, but I am at least able to carry on a civilized conversation with another man. And where I come from, that makes me a better man than you. How does that make you feel, Mr. Caudill, to think that a colored man is better than you?”

“Noggle? I know you, Noggle,” I said. “Still beating up on your wife?”

“Mr. Caudill,” said Jenkins, “we're all entitled to our mistakes. Clearly Mr. Noggle has made his share, perhaps more than his share. He's had some trouble with the bottle, it's true. But is your view so petty, Detective, that you can't believe a man can change for the better?”

I looked from Noggle to Jenkins. “Are you going to jerk my kielbasa all morning, or are you going to spill what you got to spill?”

“Can we walk?” Jenkins laid out his hand, smooth palm up, toward the sidewalk.

I grunted, and we began to walk slowly. The rest of the men followed behind, just out of earshot. Since Jenkins fell naturally to my left, I could not see him as we walked abreast; but in the game of jousting confidence, it would have been bad form to object.

“I'll be brief, Detective, since I know you have things to accomplish—criminal investigations and such, service to the good citizens of our city. Early this morning—very early, at a time when most decent folks are in bed—some of the brethren at our church along State Fair interrupted a pair of white youngsters painting a crude little sign on the front door of the building. An image quite unflattering to our Negro brethren. Now, one of the cowards ran off like a yellow cur, but the other we managed to pull into the church for a little scare.”

“Call in a complaint.”

“We're not foolish enough to think that such a complaint would be worth the effort. But what's of interest to you, I think, Mr. Caudill, is that though the young man wouldn't tell us his name, we're quite certain it was your nephew Alex.”

I stopped walking.

“I see I've told you something you didn't know. That gorilla mask of yours could use some practice.”

“Did you hurt the boy?”

“Nothing broken, I trust. Certainly nothing as serious as what Toby Thrumm had to endure.” Jenkins let his smile go and now looked at me with a blank, almost serene expression. “We let him go, and he ran off.”

“Thrumm got a busted nose from me, that's it. Less than he had coming.”

“I'm well aware that Toby Thrumm is no angel. And I'm certainly aware that you didn't use the whip on him. But what I don't know, and what I must know, is what you're planning to do about all of it.”

“Last I heard,” I said, “you've got no more say about what I do than pigeon shit on a statue of Lincoln.”

“Things are changing, Detective. We may not live to see it, but things will change.”

“Things are always changing. So what? What's that got to do with you parading around here like a rooster, telling me what to do?” I realized that my tone was almost without anger. He had me interested.

“I haven't tried to tell you what to do. What I'm trying to ascertain, Mr. Caudill, is what side of the fence you fall on. Are you doing what you can to settle the situation here, or are you a part of it? May we assume that you're trying sincerely to get at the bottom of things, or are you prepared to stand back and let it go on?”

“What I do is my business. But since you let me in on something, I'll try out being civil, see if it fits me. That boy Thrumm, I don't give a damn about. You, I don't give a damn about. Big-shot Hardiman can go piss off a bridge for all I care. But that little girl didn't deserve what she got, and neither did my partner. See? Now all that means is I got a few things to settle. And you leave the boy to me. That's all I'm ever going to have to say to you.”

“Can we walk a bit more?”

The anger had blown out of me, but I was still thinking about Clyde Rix's carpet mill. I looked Jenkins over. He held his hands clasped behind his back, and this made the buttons of his boxed shirt pull over his beefy chest.

“I'm on a schedule,” I said. “Just spill what you got to spill.”

“Something's in the air,” said Jenkins. “Can you smell it?”

“I'm not a coon dog,” I said.

“Talk and more talk. It's always there in the background. In fact,” he said, “you might say that talk is my business. Lately in Detroit the whispers in the shadows have turned to words of hate and race war.”

I shrugged and turned my palms up. “But I don't care about any of that,” I said.

“You do care. Of course you do. You've lost your partner. You've shown an odd concern for young Jane Hardiman. Clearly you have deep feeling for your nephew Alex. Can you fool yourself into thinking that all of these things aren't related?”

“Where's your profit in all of this?” I blurted. “Where do you fit in?”

Jenkins looked disappointed. “We all have so much to lose—and I know that the burden will fall most sorely on the Negro population if we can't stem this violence. It always does. Now I ask, do you have so much left in the world that you can afford to turn away as it goes up in flames?”

My teeth clamped down. I turned abruptly and stalked off toward my car, cutting crosswise over Beaubien to make it hard for them to follow me.

Jenkins called after me, “Perhaps we can be of assistance to you, Detective!”

I kept walking, my eye now nailed forward into a tunnel of vision, thinking only of Alex, a carpet factory, and a little girl who died before her time.

CHAPTER 14

On the way out to the carpet mill, a cop directing traffic stopped me with a white-gloved hand, then whirled and let the cross traffic go. After a moment, the cop turned toward me again and peered into the glass. His white teeth flashed in a sneer of recognition; he formed a mock gun with one white-gloved hand and popped it off in my direction, and then he turned away. It might have been a good-natured gesture or a veiled threat. But I thought,
That's it. I might as well go home and sit out on the porch with a beer. They'll come for me if I don't come to them.

I let out a long, slow breath through pursed lips and let the resignation wash over me, teasing out the kinks from my aching neck. Why not? It was simpler to let all the worry about the future go slack. I considered a quick visit to Eileen to see about the boy. But I reminded myself that the best way to care for Alex was to find the festering sore at the bottom of the trouble.

I leaned over and pulled half a box of slugs from the glove box. I dumped the bullets into the inside pocket of my jacket because I couldn't stand to have the weight bouncing against my thigh. Twice I stopped and turned around to make sure that no one was following me, but I felt that the effort was wasted. It seemed that every eye behind every curtain in town and in every darkened doorway knew me and would relay news of my whereabouts to all concerned—a great spider's web of alliances I had not the ability or the desire to understand.
Fair enough,
I thought.
The bigger the better.
Let them all gather round. If I could not hope to grasp the entire thing and make it right, I would burn like a poker of white-hot iron into the belly of it.

I trolled by the alley where the runt had cut Bobby and followed the street for two blocks more, turned west—there it was, another block away, closed up and falling to pieces. The old building looked to me like it had been built before the end of the last century. It could not have been closed more than a year or two, but already nature had begun to reclaim it. Greenery sprouted in patches all over the packed dirt drive and the gravel lot, and the surrounding area had not been mowed or tended for some time.

I drove twice around the block, looking the place over from all angles, and then parked the car. After dragging an old flashlight from under the seat and testing the batteries, I left the car and stepped toward the building. I took a slow walk around the perimeter and found no obvious trace of recent entry. Cigarette butts lay strewn about a small sunken truck bay, shielded from direct view from the street. Kids, probably, sneaking smokes. All the windows were closed and whitewashed on the inside, the doors padlocked, no fresh scratches on any of them. I had never possessed the patience for detail work and could not see a reason to start.

Without checking to see if anyone was watching, I leaned into one of the doors to gauge the strength of the locks. The padlock and the hasp were flimsy, meant only to present an obvious discouragement to idle hoods. The deadbolt felt solid, though, sunk into the old wooden beam like an anchor. It was too high up for me to kick through it; but one, two, three heavy shots with the shoulder on the opposite side of the door sent the upper hinge splintering away. Two heavy forearms hitting at that side ripped loose the bottom hinge, too, and the door scraped away over the floor till it hung only by the twisted hasp of the padlock. I went in.

There was no smell. No human smell. The clouds of dust I had stirred up now swirled in the light thrown in from the highest windows. I found no obvious trace of recent habitation or activity, no sour smell of men drinking, smoking, scheming. The place felt so peaceful that I didn't feel the need to pull out my gun. After waiting a moment for things to settle, I made a circuit of the building, looking down into the dust as I went. Bits of rat shit here and there, thin trails and tiny footprints wavering across the floor, but no footprints, no empty bottles, no cigarette butts. The dried carcass of a bird, gone so long it no longer smelled, lay below a window dotted with tiny holes in the whitewash, where the bird had slammed against it trying to escape.

In a big, open area, where they might have cut the carpets and bound up the edges, I stepped over the wide grate that covered a trough cut in the floor. I wondered what kinds of chemicals were dumped in the process of making carpets, and what place downriver they had fouled during the mill's years of operation. No matter. I walked across and felt that it might be nice to live in such an open, airy place. You could just take a piss right in your living room, right down into the sewer. Scanning the edges of the grate, I wondered if the rats were coming up from it, if the holes were big enough. I'd once been told that a rat could squeeze through an opening the size of a quarter. With the forefinger and thumb of my bad hand, I made a circle about the size of a quarter and peered through it at the grate. Plainly now, at my feet, I saw that someone had recently removed the grate and gone into the well below the floor.