FOUR

During the February doldrums, when only the rusty brown of the snow brings color to Michigan, I’d mounted a feeder on my solitary tree to attract goldfinches and cardinals. By spring it had begun to attract squirrels as well, so I’d bought a pole, put the feeder on top, and cut off the limb I’d hung it from to discourage the rodents from scampering along it and dropping onto the feeder from above. I’d underestimated their gymnastic skills; the seeds were gone every morning, proving that it’s possible for a creature that measures ten inches from nose to tail to bound a dozen feet straight out from the trunk, execute a triple somersault, and land straight up in the middle of a feast.

I bought a box of three-inch spikes and drove them through the roof of the feeder with the points facing up, an iron maiden effect more psychological than physical. The assaults continued. One morning, standing at the kitchen window drinking coffee, I watched a medium-size gray squirrel shinny up the pole from the ground. That led to my adding a fat slick stovepipe to the pole, which worked until the night something dug the pole out of the ground and dumped it over on its side.

“Raccoon,” said the Animal Control officer I got on the telephone. “Squirrels aren’t that smart. Coons are problem solvers. What you want to do is trap them. Can’t shoot ’em in the city.” He sounded resigned to the fact.

The live box trap I bought caught a seriously disgruntled black squirrel, which I loaded, trap and all, into my trunk and drove out to a wooded area in the suburbs and set free. It hopped into the underbrush without a rearward glance.

The next day I found the trap turned upside down and the hatch open; something much bigger than a squirrel had managed to overturn it and let gravity do the rest. I borrowed a jack handle from the Cutlass and inserted it through the holes in the cage to anchor the trap to the earth. I found a sullen raccoon inside it the following morning, as big as a terrier. It tore up the carpet in the trunk and made a mad dash for freedom when I let it out in the wooded lot.

Two squirrels and a raccoon and a half later (the adolescent looked cuddly, but just missed sinking a fang into my hand when I tipped up the hatch before it took flight), I called Animal Control again and listened to twenty minutes of Dr. Dolittle before a voice came on, different from the first. “You want to call a private service,” this one said.

“What’ve they got that you don’t?”

“Manpower. The city tossed a coin and it came down on catching murderers.”

Critter-B-Gone sent a man who paced off my lawn and used the onboard computer in his prison van to estimate a hundred dollars to erect an electric fence. I said, “All this started with a ten-dollar feeder and three bucks’ worth of millet. Now I’m thinking of taking out a second mortgage. What else you got?”

“Tranquilizer darts; but you can’t afford ’em. No one can. It means paying a man to stake out the place all night and, believe me, you got more raccoons than we got men.”

“What guarantee can you give me on the electric fence?”

“You’ll fry one or two. The rest’ll just dig under.”

“Someone must be able to afford something. I see feeders all over and not a rooftop sniper in sight.”

He smiled wearily. He had a long, humorous, tired face under a Tigers away cap with a horseshoe brim. “If anyone could it’s Aretha Franklin. The soul singer? She’s got all the money in the world and the worst critter problem in three counties. It’s like they painted a target on her house.”

I had a premonition. “Where’s she live?”

“Up in the ’burbs. Plenty of woods.”

I resolved to find another refuge for my wildlife.

The morning after I met with Lucille Lettermore, I used a spade to build a berm around the base of the feeder, then drank coffee and smoked over the Reliance Investigations report. Randolph Severin, the detective who’d put the cuffs on Joseph Ballista for the Stackpole bombing, hadn’t let any grass grow under his feet before he lit out with his retirement cash to Portage Lake, one of a chain of bodies of freshwater held together by Livingston County, and sunk it in a marina. Michigan registers more boats than any other state, but most of them spend their time on the shoreline of the Great Lakes. Livingston was still wilderness then, and the investment would have fallen within the modest means of a career cop who’d taken early buyout.

Much had changed since. Detroit continued to empty out, and real estate in the wealthier suburbs had priced itself out of the budgets of the middle bracket. Speculators had moved northwest, turned roadside vegetable stands and rustic vacation cabins into chain stores and McMansions, and soaked the desperate hordes from the southeast hundreds of thousands on the dollar for the privilege of commuting three hours round-trip to make the money they needed to keep up the mortgages. Catering to the waterborne carriage trade, Severin stood to have recouped his original stake many times over, provided he hadn’t drunk it up early.

I was hoping he had. I stopped at the bank to cash my check and put some in my wallet to prime the pump.

I tried Barry’s number again from the road and got the machine again. An overnight assignment might mean hair extensions, a three-day beard, and a Brooklyn accent. He got around his disabilities on undercover duty not by concealing them, but by emphasizing them, with wheelchairs and walkers and a clumsy prosthetic hand that suggested he’d lost more than two lousy fingers. The thought was encouraging. Cloak-and-dagger detail usually put him in a good mood. From the start he’d preferred to work the field and let someone back home splice his infinitives and reel in his participles.

I was dressed for the lake country, in a navy sports shirt, gray flannels, and deck shoes showing wear. While the tank was filling I popped the nifty little hatch below my glove compartment to check the Chief’s Special and speedloader for shells. I considered clipping the revolver to my belt under my shirttail, but a police background is a chronic thing; if Severin sold guns, he’d know all the tells, and you only get one chance to make a good first impression.

The day was made for rusticating. A brutal winter had obliterated spring, followed by a summer on the good old order, with a Crayola sun on a construction-paper sky and half-naked sunbathers sprouting on the roofs of student housing. School was out, but the nicer the weather, the lighter the exodus home to cut grass and clean gutters. Laid-off line workers sat on front porches in their undershirts, sucking on longnecks at eight A.M., nursing their grievances, and waiting for their big break on Cops. In Detroit there’s something for everyone between Memorial Day and the Labor Day blowout.

I entered I-96, the Jeffries, against the tidal flow of traffic from the west. In a little while the barbed wire and billboards thinned out and the miniature Great Walls began, shutting out housing developments from the whistle of tires on the interstate. An odd farmhouse or barn sprang up in the spaces between, with a bulldozer in its future. You wondered where they expected to grow the ethanol. Farther along, trees grew in clumps like broccoli, in squares of evergreens for sale at Christmastime, then in straight rows along the apron, where members of the local deer population stained the pavement with their blood. Orange plastic barrels crowded out traffic lanes, braided westbound with eastbound past portable concrete dividers to keep the strands from colliding head-on, and signs warned of fines and jail time for running over construction workers, but we were all going too fast to read them. We never slowed down except to stop for bottlenecks or to let some piece of grubby yellow equipment cross. Half-finished overpasses made apostrophes against the sky. It will be a pretty state when they get it finished.

At Howell, home of the Ku Klux Klan and the annual melon festival, I traded the expressway for a winding two-lane blacktop where the scenery restored my faith in country stores and schools not surrounded by chain link, where imperturbable rabbits munched on blue lupine without even pricking their ears at the close proximity of wheels. I’d been dead wrong about Bisbee, Arizona. The opposite of Detroit is only a tank of gas away.

The village of Pinckney greeted me with a scent of tuberose and Unguentine; someone had laid it between tissues sometime around the Bay of Pigs. I pulled onto a patch of baked asphalt in front of a corner market to confer with a county map. That led me to another serpentine stretch of blacktop past more trees and shards of blue water flashing between the trunks. I turned left after a couple of country blocks and crept along a line of shaded cottages separated by manmade canals connected to a broad expanse of lake until I came to a sign pegged into a patch of crushed limestone with yellow lightbulbs stuttering all around the edge:

RANDY’S MARINA

Boats for Sale and Rent

Boating Equipment

Snowmobiles

Camping Supplies

A long low building with chalky white siding and a privy roof stood at the end of a downward-sloping driveway with a 1970 Ford pickup parked off to one side and next to it a new van with a satellite dish mounted on top. A row of canoes and kayaks leaned against the long wall, chained together like convicts through loops on their sterns. What I assumed to be the advertised snowmobiles slumbered under a tarpaulin tied with Gordian bowlines to iron rings sunk in a concrete pad, awaiting their season. SPORTING EQUIPMENT SOLD HERE, read a faded banner stretched across the lintel above a screen door, between vertical rows of decapitated bass and gar pikes nailed to the siding to dry in the sun like shrunken heads.

I braked beside the van, killed the engine, got out, and pulled my shirt away from my back, where it had stuck like cellophane. An inland breeze cooled the sweat under my arms, carrying a potpourri of sun-slapped water and diesel exhaust. A Jet Ski razzed out on the lake.

Cigarette smoke nipped at my nostrils, blown out the open window on the passenger’s side of the van, where a furniture-moving type in a black T-shirt sat resting a meaty forearm on the ledge. WXYZ-TV covered both doors and the front and rear fenders in letters two feet high. His muddy brown gaze slid my way without curiosity, then returned to the screen door.

I pulled it open against the pressure of a spring and let it shut behind me with a bang that sounded like the last day of school. A copper bell tied to the inside handle with twine jangled, just in case the noise couldn’t be heard clear across the lake. I waited just inside for my eyes to adjust to the shady dim light. Steel-framed windows fronted the water, but they were covered by bamboo shades that rolled down from the top to cut the glare and heat.

“You shot past it,” graveled a voice deep inside the gloom. “What you want to do is turn around, go back to the main road, backtrack a mile, hang a left on Darwin, and that’ll take you straight to it. Can’t miss it—if you don’t sneeze.”

“Thanks!” A chirpy female voice; on-air talent on the hoof, with enthusiasm in case lots. I made way for a trim brunette in a silk blazer and skirt and another man built to the same scale as the one they’d left in the van, in a polo shirt and tan Dockers that hammocked his belly. They swept past me with even less interest than their companion outside, and left a mix of squash blossoms and Old Spice in their wake.

The interior of the shop looked bigger than it seemed from outside, despite a clutter of fishing rods, forty-pound bags of water softener salt in stacks, and racks of Swiss Army knives and plastic lures in blister cards hanging from hooks. The floor was built of two-foot-wide planks salvaged from some long-gone farmhouse or granary, and twelve feet of glass counter separated me from the man who’d given directions to the TV crew.

He was a thick-barreled party with white hair chopped short and stiff as wire brush, seated on a tall stool plucking at a snarl of glistening nylon line the size of a bowling ball. From that angle I couldn’t see his face, but he had on a green twill worksuit with a RANDY’S MARINA patch ironed to one shirt pocket. You could buy a cap with the same patch on its crown from a bunch of them stacked like nesting dolls on the end of the counter.

“What’s the story, they biting upcountry?” I asked.

“Hell.” He didn’t look up.

“Excuse me?”

He broke up some rocks in his throat. “Fourteen people year round and a little pissant inn, but twice a year it’s news. Halloween’s the other time.”

“Oh. Hell, Michigan. I didn’t realize it was around here. What’s the draw this season?”

“ ‘Just how hot is it in Hell?’ This the second crew got lost looking for it this week. Channel Four beat them to it. I expect Channel Two tomorrow or the day after. That’s what’s happened to the news.” He tore a loop free with a jerk. The line looked like piano wire and should have sliced his hand open to the bone, but the skin of his palm looked as thick as the leather patches sailors wear to stitch canvas. “I should’ve said three times. I forgot January.”

“When it freezes over.”

“Then there’s April fifteenth, when folks come for the postmark on their tax returns. I guess we got us a lively little concern at that.”

I grinned. “Darwin Road leads to Hell?”

He looked up then. “Think they’d get it?”

At seventy and change he was more robust-looking than Joey Ballista, but the particular shade of magenta on his bunched, razor-scraped features indicated that any of his arteries could pop any time. His circulation system was one big sheet of bubble wrap. I took out my folder and spread it on the counter. His eyes lingered on me another second, then went to the photo ID that came with the license. He ignored the honorary Wayne County sheriff’s star I carried with it for the bling.

“I almost applied myself,” he said, returning his attention to the tangle in his lap. “It was tough sledding those first few years. I rented five canoes total; two of ’em sunk. Local punks set fire to the place the first winter. One morning I came in and the pontoon I rented out to parties was gone. Deputies found it two days later busted up below the Delhi rapids.”

“You didn’t miss much. The job wouldn’t keep you in fish hooks.”

He wasn’t finished. “Third year, this shaky bastard from Detroit put a shotgun in my back when I was out planing the dock and marched me in the back door to clean out my firearms stock. My wife was alive then, filling in at the counter. Saw us through the window, loaded a forty-four mag the way I showed her, and shot a piece out of the door frame as we were coming in. I hit the floor, as much to get out of her line of fire as because of that shotgun. He dropped it—it was a bluff, busted firing pin—and ran for the lake with Doris running after him, potting away with that big mag. When the deputies showed up he wouldn’t come out of the water until they took it away from her.

“Thirty-seven years on the force, fifteen with the racket squad, I never fired my piece once outside the range. I had to retire and come out here for gunplay, what do you think of that?”

“It tells me you were a pretty good cop.”

“That was the turning point. People started buying up the lakefront, knocking down the shacks and putting up houses big as airplane hangars. You got a place on the water, you need a boat and everything that comes with it. Doris got sick and died just as we were showing a profit. What’s your story?”

“No retirement in sight yet.” I put away the folder. “Joe Ballista.”

“I heard he died.”

“Me, too. He didn’t get the message.”

He’d stopped tugging on the line. Now he went back to it. “All the wrong people are still alive.”