The Devil's Own Rag Doll (6 page)

“Sure,” said Johnson.

Walker nodded somberly.

“You heard about Jane Hardiman? Riding accident?” Bobby looked the pair over.

“It's too bad. I met her once,” Johnson said. “Funny girl.”

“She's not funny any more,” I said. “Murdered.” I saw Johnson's predictable look of surprise, sincere concern. Walker's expression did not change. He only nodded.

“How do you mean she was funny?” asked Bobby.

“I met her when she was sixteen, I think. She just seemed funny. She was always making jokes but didn't seem happy. A real looker, too.”

“It wasn't just that she was killed,” I said.

“That's right,” said Bobby. “We'll spare you the details. Maybe you didn't read in the social column, Johnson, about how young Jane Hardiman liked to hobnob on the poorer side of town. On the colored side. We found her in an apartment toward the west end. You know this area, Walker?”

“I've been there, yes.”

“We had a tip she was with a colored boy named Donny Pease. Now this is just a small-time thief, lately out of St. Louis, with a big smile and flashy clothes—a zoot-suiter, you know the type. So we ran down the tip, and he was gone before we could get there.”

“So,” said Johnson, “you think this Donny Pease—”

“Don't start in with the thinking just yet, Johnson,” I said. “You're here to keep your mouth shut and do the grunt work for us.”

“That's right,” said Bobby. “We just want you two to go over to his apartment building, knock on all the doors, sniff out what you can find about where Pease might have gone. After that, just keep on knocking down the street and see what turns up. And for God's sake, keep it close to the chest. All we're looking for is anything about Donny Pease we can find. Nobody said anything about the girl. As far as anyone should know, there's no girl involved in any of this. You can understand how all this could be hurtful to the Hardiman family.”

“What should we tell people if they ask why we want Pease?” asked Johnson.

“Tell them he's wanted for buggery,” I said.

“No, no! Jesus, Pete. Tell them it's traffic tickets or some such. Drunk and disorderly.” Bobby slugged down the last of his coffee. “One thing, though. You fellas remember when you're talking to these people, you can expect that every last one of them is going to try to lie to you. That's the way it works when you're in the uniform. If they start talking, let them keep talking until they say something funny, and then you'll have something on them.”

I continued to search Walker's passive face for any trace of emotion. I would have been relieved to find anger flashing in his eyes or a smirk or a look of disgust. It would not have angered me to see Walker looking bored. The lack of reaction told me only that Walker was smart but not which way he leaned. I looked carefully at his tired eyes and wondered what he thought of me. If it was on his mind, he kept it buried.

“Walker,” I said, “you have any acquaintance with Donny Pease?”

“Not to my recollection, no.”

“Colored folks tend to stick together, isn't that right?” I asked him.

“That's fair to say,” he said, measuring his words. “But just the same—”

“It's only natural,” said Bobby. “You can't expect Walker to know every Negro in the city.”

I choked down the words that wanted to pour like hot gas from my mouth. “Maybe,” I mumbled, “maybe Walker could ask around, that's all.”

“You can do that, can't you, Walker?” said Bobby.

“I'm willing,” he said. “But from how you talk about Pease, I don't think anyone from our church would have any familiarity with him.”

I kept quiet for the next few minutes while Bobby laid out our plan for the day. Then we all stepped from the little room and walked up the narrow stairs to street level. Bobby kept close to Walker and made an effort to chat amiably on the way. After a few steps, I took Johnson's elbow, drew him aside, and let Bobby and Walker walk on ahead.

“Listen, Johnson,” I muttered quietly. “I got something for you. If you see a tall, skinny colored boy, about thirteen, big eyes like a cow, maybe name of Joshua, you let me know, all right? He'll be shaking like a leaf, probably. Maybe wearing his pants too big, hoisted up with a belt. You find out what you can, you don't do anything, you just let me know. And keep it under your hat. Don't say anything to Walker or Swope about it either. You follow?”

“Sure,” he answered. “But what—”

“And don't ask me any questions until I see whether you can handle that much.”

CHAPTER 4

As Bobby drove through the gates of the Grosse Pointe Shooting Club, I hung my arm out the window and dangled my hat. “Some joint,” I said. I took in the heavy, ivy-covered facade of the old building and listened to the popping of pistols and shotguns from the range out back. “Looks like a funeral home.”

“This is where the big money comes to socialize.” Bobby rubbed his palm over the panel of his car door. “There's more money changing hands here than in any of the big offices downtown. Mark my words, Pete,” he said. “Pretty soon I'll be kicking up my heels in a place like this.”

“When you get rich.”

“When I get rich, that's right. It's in the works, Pete. Someday remind me to tell you about the little thing I'm running on the side.” Bobby tightened the knot in his tie and smoothed his sparse hair close to his pate. “A little foresight, that's what it takes. You think Lloyd or Chrysler got rich, excuse my French, standing around with his thumb up his ass, working for somebody else? This police thing is just a temporary stop for me, mister, on the way to something better.”

I mulled it over. I knew that Bobby had been with the department since he was twenty or twenty-one, and so the temporary stop had stretched to something approaching twenty years. And though I had been paired with Bobby for only a short while, I had heard derisive references to his moneymaking schemes and failed side jobs for years.

I said, “Money's just sitting around waiting for you to find it, eh?”

“That's exactly right. You have to train yourself to see it. It's everywhere. Every little thing you see is just floating on a river of it. It's like a fish floating along in the water. If he never says to himself, ‘Hey, what's this stuff I'm floating in?' then he's never going to be able to take advantage of it, you see? And another thing,” he said, fluttering his hands for emphasis, “it's always about money, no matter what anybody tells you. Not just in business but in every other thing. Every bit of crime that gets done in Detroit or anywhere, it all comes down to money. You follow the money, and you'll always get to the bottom of things.”

“So somebody's getting rich off this dead girl, is that it?” I felt disgust well up. “Big market for dead little girls around here?”

“Jesus, Pete, don't get hot. I just said that, at the bottom, it's all money. I don't say I can attend to every detail. I'm letting you in on some of my stuff, that's all. I thought you might appreciate it. Listen, I know they all like to get a laugh out of me in the locker room. But let me ask you, do they laugh when they consider the number of good collars I've brought in? Is there anybody else with a nose for the dirty stuff like I've got?”

“Take it easy,” I said.

“I'm just telling you, it's like a shell game. Keep your eye on the money. God knows there's a lot of it floating around here. It seems like you just don't care about it enough to really think about what it can buy for you. You don't let yourself care.”

“If I had money, I'd go down to Rocco's every night and buy me a big porterhouse and a sweet potato, put some brown sugar and cinnamon on it and some butter and dig in. Wash it down with a bucket of Stroh's. I'd do it every night till I got sick of it.”

Bobby shook his head slowly and slipped a finger under his collar to ease the pinched skin of his neck. I thought I caught a glimpse of real fear in Bobby's eyes but laid it off on the brightness of the midday sun and the play of light and dark in the car.

“Money makes you slippery, Pete. It gives you a little insurance, a little room to angle when they come after you, see? If you've got money, you can use it to get more for yourself than you would have if you started out with nothing and put in the same amount of work and sweat. I'm not just being greedy, Pete. You know I've got Anna and the girl to think about. But it's no sense being a sap about it. If you can at least get a handle on what's going on around you, if you can figure out what makes everybody scramble, then you're halfway there.”

I gave him the eye for a moment and then said, “Halfway to where?”

“Don't get hot about it, Pete,” said Bobby. “I'm just trying to help you out.”

We left the car on the big circular drive. As we stepped into the cooled air of the building, I whispered, “I told you it's like a funeral home.”

The place had been carefully modeled after an English gentleman's club, with heavy dark paneling over the walls, dark leather furniture, subdued light, and submissive waiters carrying drinks on silver trays to lounging old men reading financial papers. Shelves of leather-bound books lined one entire wall, broken only by the stone hearth and fireplace, idle now. A bank of windows, tiny panes of beveled glass, looked outdoors onto the rear of the club, over the target range and back to the hill beyond the trap and skeet areas. I took a moment to orient myself and realized with a smile that any stray bullets or shot making it over the hill would probably land over the city boundary in Detroit proper.

We found Roger Hardiman on a fieldstone patio out back, barking orders to a colored boy, who tried frantically to load clay pigeons into a trap quickly enough to suit him.

“Pull, damn you!”

The boy let loose two low-flying pigeons. Hardiman followed the first sharply with his shotgun, blasted the thing to dust before it had gone thirty yards, and blew apart the second just as it reached the crest of its flight. I studied the executive's sweating forehead, his leather-shouldered shooting jacket, his fancy colored shooting glasses. Another man might have been attending to family matters, to funeral arrangements, or to his own grief after losing his only daughter, the apple of his eye—but Hardiman, I could see, approached things from his own angle.

“Mr. Hardiman, sir,” said Bobby.

“Swope, you've finally made it, I see.” Hardiman broke the gun over his elbow. He pulled the two hot shells expertly with his glossy fingernails and dropped them to the patio. To the colored attendant he said, “Lose yourself, boy, we've got some things to talk about.” He drew a bright white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow.

“Caudill, is it?” he said, extending his hand. “I have come to understand you have quite a reputation.”

I returned Hardiman's powerful grip, met his look. “I didn't know I had a reputation.”

“I knew your father as well. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“It seems you don't know much,” said Hardiman.

“He doesn't let on,” said Bobby. “Mr. Hardiman, sir, we won't take up too much of your time—”

“No, you won't. I called
you
here, remember? I've some things to say that couldn't be spoken last night with my wife present. What progress have you made?”

“We've got two men canvassing the neighborhood. They'll turn up something, I'm sure. We're about to see what we can do to track down Toby Thrumm, a known associate of Pease.” Bobby held his hands clasped together like the director of a funeral home.

“In other words, you've nothing at all. A whole day has gone by and you've nothing at all.”

“That's right,” I said. I sized up Hardiman. Natural-born salesman, confident, pushy, the worst kind: believes what he's selling, entirely oblivious to anything but what's on his own plate. “Pease probably skipped out by now.”

Hardiman turned his attention from Bobby to me. “You think it's possible that Pease went back to his people in the South?”

“Likely. If you get hooked up with something like this, no matter how much of a dope you are, you know how hot it's going to get.”

“What sort of authority do you fellows have to go down there and get him?”

“None,” I said. I wasn't about to lower my head or put my eye aside for him.

“Well, listen. I've got a thousand dollars—that's five hundred apiece—if you'll get that jigaboo and bring him back here for me.”

“And then what happens to him?” I tipped the brim of my hat back and stared down my nose at him.

“You leave that to me.”

“You got some other flunkies you can pay to do your dirty work so your pansy hands don't get bloody?”

“Pete!” said Bobby. “Take it easy!”

“Listen here, Mr. Caudill. My hands have seen their share of blood. Unlike you, I know how to wash up afterward, and I've the social grace to think of it as an imperative. My concern is directed by a head for business. If it makes sense for me to a job myself, I do it. If a job doesn't require the use of the skill I might bring to bear, I shop the job out to someone whose time isn't as valuable as mine. Now, I could buy ten of you with what I keep in my petty cash account. With one telephone call I could have you sweeping streets and cleaning sewers in Hamtramck. So no matter how tough you think you are, you're only getting half the picture. Without money, without a wide circle of influential friends and a deep involvement in the community and its running, you're nothing. Nothing. Rootless like a dry leaf blowing.” Hardiman pulled in his breath deeply and let it out as he put his handkerchief away. “Now, I want that nigger found and brought to me. If the two of you can't use the money, I'll find someone who can.”