I sat in the parking lot with my hands on the steering wheel, deciding whether to wait for Mihalich to make his pitch to Corbeil or head straight to the Huron Valley Men’s Correctional Facility and try suckering my way in with the lawyer’s card when my phone rang and it was Barry.
“Busy?” he said.
“Just plumbing the depths of the impossible. What you got?”
“Plenty, in person. Squat, over a cell. You’re buying me lunch.”
“Where?”
“Place called Carver’s, on Winder. Know it?”
“I know Winder. When?”
“Now. I’m starving.” He went away.
Restaurants have been pouring back into the city ever since it came out of bankruptcy. They’ve set up in vacant filling stations, lumber mills, warehouses, halfway houses, firehouses, churches, chop shops, storefronts, studios, scrapyards, and school buses; restaurants, in a pinch; but for the most part any extinct enterprise that never served up anything more edible than communion wafers. Carver’s, at least, had selected a place in the food category. It occupied an old meatpacking plant, close enough to the Eastern Market to smell the onions that were destined to go with your steak if you dined there Saturday, still moist with earth. The new management had left the life-size poured-plaster cow grazing on the flat tar roof.
Under it, a local Rembrandt had decorated the cinder block front wall with a trompe l’oeil likeness of Hit City, U.S.A., the humble home of Motown Records, the label that launched a thousand swindles. The artist had an architect’s eye for detail and no skill in basic anatomy: The figure leaning out one of the painted windows might have been Martha Reeves or Mushmouth. No one was paying me to find out what that had to do with dining out. A wooden sign shaped like an oversize meat cleaver hung by staples from a stanchion with CARVER’S scrawled on it in ragged letters, starting large and bold on the left and slanting to small and crabbed on the right, with dried paint spidering down from them like tear-streaked mascara. The effect was amateurish and stone-cold deliberate.
Spring rain started just as I pulled into a spot on the street two blocks down, blown at an angle from the direction of the river, a gift from Canada that never stops giving. It looked like tinsel and numbed my face like a backhand slap. I stood my collar on end and leaned into it. By the time I got to the entrance my eyelashes were as brittle as crystal stemware.
Dripping and waiting just inside the door for my eyes to grow accustomed to the change in light, I got a whiff of something that smelled more like a slaughterhouse than a place where meals are cooked and served. When my pupils caught up it looked like it smelled. Sides of meat hung from iron hooks slung by chains from the ceiling, rib cages exposed and glistening with blood still in the process of congealing. The room had the raw chill of a Michigan November. Commercial-grade reefers exhaled Freon with a hollow hiss from somewhere high on the walls. At a long butcher block table, a corps in paper hats and spattered aprons armed with steel cleavers and blue-edged knives cut loins of beef and pork into thick slabs and paper-thin slices, the blades gliding through gristle and bone like lasers.
A black muscular party in a spotless white T-shirt and ducks spotted me from his post at the end of the table, where he’d stood supervising the operation with tattooed arms crossed, and hastened my way, swaying from side to side in a sailor’s roll.
“I’m sorry, sir. We’re closed.”
I said, “Somebody gave me a bum steer, so to speak. I was told this was a restaurant.”
“It is, but we don’t open till six.” He crossed his arms again. A teal-colored mermaid popped her pink nipples on his right biceps.
“I’m meeting someone. Blond guy with a Dutch leg.”
“What’s a Dutch leg?”
“Something you might get if you lose your grip on your cleaver.”
“Oh, him.” The arms dropped to his sides. A head that could have worn a scalding cauldron for a hat tilted toward a door at the back, rough oak planking with iron bands.
The atmosphere changed abruptly on the other side. Round-backed chairs perched upside-down on circular oak tables polished to a soft shine under bowl fixtures suspended by chains from heavy beams. A horseshoe-shaped bar separated the dining room from rows of glass bottles and cut-crystal lit softly from behind like a display of expensive perfume. Barry Stackpole sat at the only table that was dressed for business, with silver setups and linen napkins on white cloth. A squat faceted glass stood at his elbow. I drew out the chair opposite him and sat. As I did so I caught a gust of brandy and triple sec.
“Sidecar,” I said. “A little early for you.”
“Not for you. A guy your age shouldn’t drink alone.”
He looked more collegiate than usual in a white V-neck sweater with gold Chief Justice Rehnquist stripes on the arms over a soft burgundy flannel shirt; Archie Andrews imbibing on a fake ID. We shared the place with a female bartender, who came over and asked what I wanted to drink. She was dressed for off-duty in sweatpants and a Red Wings jersey, with her brown hair twisted into a ponytail. She didn’t look old enough to drink a cocktail legally, much less mix and serve one.
I looked at Barry. “I thought you were starving.”
“I am. I ordered a Reuben. It pays to get in early here, like at the airport.”
“Sorry about the slow service,” the bartender said. “The cook had to stoke up the stove and the waitstaff comes on at five. Mr. Stackpole caught us with our pants down.” It was hard to tell from her expression if she was kidding or sore.
I said, “I’ll have the same.”
“And to drink?”
“Same also, only leave out the lemon juice and liqueur.”
“Just brandy then.”
“If you want to get technical.”
“Separate checks?”
I said no.
“What do you think of the place?” Barry asked when she left.
“In here’s okay. Out front it looks, smells, and feels like Jeffrey Dahmer’s basement.”
“Worst culinary mistake since they installed a king-size replica of the human alimentary canal in the U of M Hospital cafeteria. The owner’s under the impression Detroiters like things real. Only Detroiters are too smart to fall for impressions. I give it six months.”
“How do you rate special service?”
“I got him a spread in Hour Detroit. He sank fifty grand in the joint. Rumor is that’s what changed hands when Whitey Bulger was killed. I figured anyone who rendered that kind of community service deserved a break. Best corned beef in the city. Point cut; none of that extra-lean wet sawdust for me.”
“Still quivering, no doubt.”
The bartender brought my drink. I waited until she returned to her station. “What’d Kopernick do that stuck him in a doghouse so bad he had to come to me to get him out?”
“It’s not as juicy as the Reuben, but juicy enough. You remember that casino suicide last year?”
“Which one would that be?”
“Funny; but it’s rare. Usually they stew over it at home for a day or so, but this one happened on the spot. Off-duty cop dumped a bundle at blackjack and shot himself at the table. It happened at Motor City.”
“I must’ve been out of town. Score zero for the metal detectors.”
“A patron at the same table gave him CPR, but he wasted his breath of life. The slug had plowed a path from the roof of the mouth to the back of the skull, which is where it came to a much-deserved rest. Anyway the Good Samaritan bought him fifteen minutes till the EMT arrived, so he got to be a hero about as long as you did after the bank job.”
“At a guess, Kopernick was the Samaritan.”
“Probably the first time he got to use it since training, or wanted to.”
Our meals came, steaming hot on black bread with pickle spears and battered fries. I was hungrier than I thought. I took a bite before asking the obvious. “So what’s the jam?”
“He was on duty, and it wasn’t his beat.”
“Ah. Sticky wicket when the department needs the good press.”
A fork poked at a pile of fries distractedly. His starvation seemed to have passed. “There’s no press in this town. If there were, they wouldn’t accept the crime figures the chief hands out every January. In my day we kept our own count. And we kept asking questions until the official version of a deal blew out like a cheap recap. Anyway, Stan the Man’s eighteen months away from his thirty. What are the odds in all that time he won’t trip over his own flabby brain and wind up checking names against a clipboard in the lobby of the Penobscot Building?”
“About the same as the building standing that long.” I used some of my brandy. “So the part of Kopernick’s brain that’s not so flabby tells him he needs to put his face in front of a gang of cameras on a prominent homicide case. That way the city’s looking the other way when he trips.”
“The theory fits the facts. The facts being he’s up against it major league or he’d never go to you for the boost.”
“Thanks, Barry. Tell ’em to poleax dessert on me.”
“How you gonna play it?”
“Right down the middle, like Pickett’s Charge.”
“Statue of Liberty play? You?”
“Why not? You can only make an end run so many times before they catch on.”
“Still think you can turn Kopernick into a double agent?”
“Maybe. Also I’m getting brittle in my senior years. I can use a big strapping fellow to help me across the street.”
“And drop you down an open manhole.”
He ate half his corned beef and got a container for the rest when the ponytailed bartender came back with the bill. “The homeless guy who hangs out in the alley will appreciate this,” he said, scooping it into Styrofoam. “He’s Irish.”
Back out in the charnel house the team was slicing side meat off a hog, parting the white flesh with long straight sweeps like a scythe. The man with the tattoos greeted us with a tortured smile; it was close enough to the dinner hour to put on his evening manners. He asked if we enjoyed our meal.
I said, “Okay, only I’m a vegetarian now.”
The rain had turned to sleet, rattling against the pavement like dice in a cup and stinging the back of my neck like yellowjackets. Of course the sun shone throughout, the sadistic son of a bitch.
I drove back to my building to crunch the brain. I got part of it done on the way, but thinking without result is like labor without accomplishment: It doesn’t count as work, only waste.
I was still at it halfway up the stairs before the character loitering in the foyer registered.
He’d stood with his back to me, reading the wall directory. If I knew him at all, it was as one of a couple of hundred people I’d met who left no more impression than a foot in a slush puddle; after all, how much can you get from a man’s back? But it was just another reminder that I’d lost ground. Time was when I’d have braced him for taking up space in a part of the building that was designed just to walk across on the way to somewhere else. That year I was sharing the building with a webmaster for a mail-order warehouse, a designer of corrective footwear, a rookie wedding planner, and a floral consultant; no one worth stalking, just me.
At the second-floor landing I turned and went back down, stepping up the pace as if I’d forgotten something in the car. He was gone by then, of course. Why should both of us ignore our instincts?