WHEN DOC ENTERED THE OFFICE Monday morning, Maynard Ance was poking through an ashtray with the eraser end of a pencil looking for a smokable butt. Finally he found one an inch and a quarter long, sniffed at it, made a face, and threw it and the rest of the contents into his wastebasket. Spotting Doc then he grunted and fished inside a side pocket of his trousers. His arm went in almost up to the elbow. “Count that.” He tossed a roll of bills the size of a softball at Doc.
Doc reported thirty-two thousand in hundreds and fifties.
“’Kay, go down to Frank Murphy Hall and bail out those M-and-M’s the cops arrested at the armory. Bring back what’s left.” Ance poured himself a cup of coffee.
“They’re clients?”
“As of about twenty minutes ago, when their p.d. called. Drug dealers are a good risk, generally speaking. They can raise the cash in a hurry, and they don’t stiff you on account of they may need you again. ’Course, they stand about a seventy-two percent better chance of getting dead at an early age than your average citizen, but the payoff’s worth the gamble and it’s all in cash. No sense bothering Uncle Sam.”
Doc pocketed the bills, then switched them to his other pants pocket. They made too big a bulge on the side where he carried his keys. “Have they been arraigned?”
“No, otherwise I’d know the amount. Here are the names.” He tore a page off his telephone pad and gave it to Doc. “Wait till they’re all out of the courtroom before you pay the clerk. That way you won’t have to give any of them a ride. I need you back here in case something comes up.” He studied Doc’s face. “Doesn’t look like Taber laid a glove on you. I heard you mixed it up yesterday.”
Doc was a little in awe until he remembered that Ance owned half of the Acropolis. “Just a scuffle. He’s a mean drunk. He said you fired him.”
“I’ve fired him before. This time I mean it to take. I can’t go around picking up jumpers in cabs because my ride didn’t show. It makes me look like an amateur. How’d it go with Joycie?”
“Fine.” He couldn’t help grinning.
Ance read him immediately. “I hope you took precautions. We don’t need any little Stefaniks running around taking all the fun out of the bail business.” He sat down at his desk and picked up the telephone.
A gray-haired bailiff taking a cigarette break on the steps of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice directed Doc to the courtroom where the arraignments were taking place. Doc dawdled over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, then went on up and found a seat in the last row of the gallery. The seven members of the Marshals of Mahomet who had been arrested for attempting to disrupt the fundraising banquet were brought out one by one. Doc knew only Austin Yarnell, George McClellan Creed, and Epithelial Lewis, none of whom looked particularly cowed by his circumstances; it would take more than the dowdy blue coveralls of the Wayne County Jail to take the strut out of Needles Lewis with his wispy moustache and checkerboard haircut. Standing by the public defender waiting for the large black judge to look up from his papers, he craned his head around, spotted Doc, and grinned fit to split his head in two. Doc couldn’t help smiling back.
Doc couldn’t help smiling, period. On the way in to work he had remembered to stop at a florist’s and send roses to Joyce Stefanik’s apartment in Royal Oak, where they had spent all Sunday afternoon and part of the evening listening to the rain stroking the roof and trying to match it with some strokes of their own. The sex had been awkward and sloppy and embarrassing like sex everywhere, and even more so because Doc was out of practice; and immensely satisfying. Joyce had an athletic body, tanned all over—she said she spent more time at the tanning parlor in the next block than she did at home—and, so far as Doc could determine from an exhaustive inventory, no inhibitions. Afterward they had showered, gone to dinner in Royal Oak, and parted in the foyer of her building with a long kiss and an agreement to go out again next week. He didn’t know whether he had Taber to thank for tipping the balance. Retracing these things the next day you never knew where they would have led had one or two items been out of sequence.
He wondered if Joyce would still write her article.
Needles was the last of the M-and-M’s to be arraigned. Bail was set at twenty-five hundred dollars. As the officer was leading him out, Doc went up to the clerk, got an accounting of the total bond for the seven Marshals—it came to $25,000, including Yarnell, who had had a bench warrant out for his arrest for failure to appear on a cocaine possession charge and whose bail was consequently set at $7,500, and a member Doc didn’t know who had five thousand slapped on him for an incident in the police van on the way to headquarters—and armed with his receipt climbed into the Coachmen and drove down to the jail, a slab of gray granite covering an entire city block that made no attempt to look like anything but what it was. The black-enameled bars in the windows were as big around as Doc’s ankles.
His instructions from Ance had ended twenty minutes ago. He waited another half hour for Needles. When he appeared, having traded his county blues for khaki parachute pants and an old green corduroy shirt unbuttoned to expose his smooth hairless chest, Doc offered him a ride. He shrugged, handed the clerk a receipt for his gold watch, chains, and a couple of hundred dollars in folded tens and twenties, and accompanied Doc out the door.
“Where can I drop you?” Doc asked, turning the key in the ignition.
Needles directed him to a men’s clothing store on Gratiot.
“Buying a suit?”
“I live there.” He slouched down and rested his head on the back of the seat.
Doc cracked the window on his side. His passenger smelled of that sweet dispenser soap they used at the jail.
The store occupied the ground floor of a two-story brick building of thirties vintage and had the look of a place that had always been there, acknowledging the changing scene by replacing the old baroque cash register with a computer and cautiously adjusting the lapels and cuffs on the mannequins in the windows. Illuminated indirectly by tracks aimed at the walls and not at all through the plate-glass front in the perennial shade of taller buildings on all four sides, it was a cube of gently bred silence sandwiched between a deep pile carpet the color of the blood of an earlier generation and thick cork panels in the ceiling. When the door opened a gong sounded that might have been under water. Entering with Needles Lewis, Doc felt the same muting sensation he had felt upon stepping across the threshold of the Brown & Kilmer Funeral Home.
A beautiful old man almost as tall as Doc in a gray flannel three-piece that looked as soft as smoke, with a mane of thick hair to his collar and a spade-shaped beard, both too white not to have been helped along chemically, started their way across the carpet, then saw Needles and stopped. Doc was sure he bowed. Needles passed him without saying anything, embroidering a path between racks of suits and shirts stacked on shelves and trousers hung by their cuffs in rows like hanging files, and went through a door at the back marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Doc followed hesitantly. He wasn’t sure he was expected to, but Needles had made no sign of farewell.
Behind the door the store’s elegant facade disintegrated rapidly. A twelve-foot hallway with brown linoleum worn down in patches to the concrete slab beneath led past tall fly-specked windows that Doc realized when he looked through them were the backs of two-way mirrors offering a view of the dressing rooms. He had heard that such things existed in some establishments to prevent shoplifting, but this was his first evidence of them, and he resolved never again to try on a pair of trousers in a store.
Around a corner and up a steep flight of stairs with a rubber runner that looked as if it had been used to sharpen knives, and Doc stopped abruptly on a dim landing to avoid colliding with Needles, who had paused to knock on a door without markings. The knock was a complicated one; Doc was still working it out when the door opened two inches. No light came out from the other side.
“Me,” Needles said. “I brung someone.”
“Who?”
“A friend. His name’s Doc.”
Doc was aware he was being scrutinized. After a moment a switch snapped and light knifed out onto the landing, dazzling him. The door opened the rest of the way. Doc followed Needles on through.
The apartment, if that’s what it was, took up the whole second floor, with doors leading to what were probably a bedroom and bathroom. A buff-and-blue rug that looked Eastern and expensive covered the hardwood floor to within four feet of the walls, which were painted a luminous blue that hurt Doc’s pupils, still adjusting from the gloom of the landing. The sofas and upholstered chairs looked new. There were two refrigerators, a stove, microwave, and two-basin sink, a TV with a forty-eight-inch screen, a CD stereo on a shelf with four six-foot speakers spotted around the room, and a waist-high counter with a Formica top covered with beakers and a Bunsen burner and other items Doc had seen in old mad-scientist movies. He was a moment figuring that one out. He didn’t have to figure out the folding card table in the corner with its assortment of semi-automatic pistols and what looked like an Uzi knocked down into a dozen components. There were boxes of cartridges everywhere, even on the sofa cushions.
The man at the door closed and locked it. He was black, not much taller than five feet, with a large, close-cropped head and the compact hard-muscled frame of a circus acrobat in a blue knit polo shirt, gray twill slacks, and what looked like alligator shoes dyed to match the slacks. Doc figured the shoes alone had cost more than either of his own two suits. The man was holding a square black MAC-10 machine pistol that looked something like a toaster on a handle. He was perhaps nineteen.
“Sure he ain’t wearing a wire?” he asked Needles.
“Sure. Whyn’t you clean this place up? You expecting a fucking war, spicks gonna come up here from Colombia and tip over the block?”
“I seen him someplace. Thirteen hundred, maybe.”
“Jesus Christ, he bailed me out. He works for Maynard Ance. This here’s Doc Miller. He played ball.” To Doc: “Sylvanus got busted once on account of a snitch was wearing a wire. Now he frisks his mama.”
“Wire caught fire, that’s why they didn’t get enough to keep me.” Sylvanus was showing all his teeth. He had a lot of jaw and it looked like the grille of an old Buick. “Jump around and slap his chest like a big old bird. His cop friends thought he was getting done. Bust in and throw me down and kneel on top of me and screw they pieces in my ears, call me nigger and motherfucker. Judge throwed it all out. No probable cause, he said. I had sixteen kilos in a suitcase under the bed.” He changed hands on the MAC-10 and stuck out his right. “I’m Silly Dee.”
“That’s his rap name,” Needles said. “Sylvanus Porter don’t rhyme so easy.”
Sylvanus broke off the handshake, deposited the machine pistol on the card table, and moved to a more formidable weapon, the stereo, switching it on. The floor thumped to the beat of recorded synthesizers. Bouncing with it, he sang: “I’m Silly Dee / and it seems to me / crack’s just the way / we stay in the play / ’cause the white man barks / we can’t play his park / ’cause we’re just too dark / ’less we gots the green / to make his team.”
He was starting a second chorus when Needles flipped off the machine. “Sylvanus got M. C. Hammer scared shitless. Meantime he’s the best cooker in town.”
“Cooker?”
“We don’t grow that shit.” Sylvanus jerked his thumb toward the chemical apparatus on the counter.
He’d retreated into his earlier dark mood. No musician liked to have his performance interrupted.
Doc asked, “Do they know downstairs what you’re doing up here?”
Needles had opened one of the refrigerators. He offered Doc a Stroh’s, got turned down, and took one for himself, using an opener under the sink. “What they know don’t mean shit. M-and-M’s own this building.” He put away a third of the bottle’s contents in one swig.
“I didn’t know the Marshals had that kind of money.”
Needles and Sylvanus laughed. It was almost as loud as the synthesizers had been. Needles carried his beer through one of the doors, leaving it open behind him. A moment later clothes started flying out into the room: suits and shirts and leather jackets, silver Windbreakers and silk blazers, flocks of knits, schools of sharkskins, herds of ankle-length fur coats. Eelskin boots and Italian shoes with buckles and pointed toes, Reeboks in every color and size from nines to double-digits like basketball players wore, Nikes for muddy days, patent-leather pumps for evening in a town that had no nightlife. In a couple of minutes the rug was covered, colors splashed all over like a light show. Needles came out in a pair of red bikini underpants, pulling on an Adidas T-shirt and swilling Stroh’s, kicking clothes. “I growed up on Mt. Elliott,” he said. “Sylvanus was Erskine. Summers we went barefoot. Winters—winters was big; then we got to wear our brothers’ shoes that didn’t fit them no more. I was twelve the first time I seen anybody wearing a suit and tie outside of television. He axed me for directions. You got a father?”
“Just barely,” Doc said.
“I never did. Sylvanus didn’t neither. Yarnell’s old man been locked up in Marquette since Yarnell was six. Creed’s old man bust his heart working at Ford’s. Closest thing I ever had to a father called himself Fly. He said he seen Superfly twenty-six times. He was fourteen when I met him, had him a green Testarossa with blocks tied to the pedals because he couldn’t reach them with his feet from behind the wheel. You could cut your finger on his lapels. Cash? Used to give it away in handfuls like hard candy because he said the bulge broke up the line of his suit.”
“Glittered when he walked, huh?”
“Yeah. Yeah!” But he didn’t get the reference. “When the sun come out and hit his rings that boy shined like a new car. Oh, Fly was something to see.”
“Was he selling crack?”
“No, that wasn’t around so much then. He was dealing that Mexican brown heroin. Trouble was, so was somebody else, and they couldn’t get together on who was to do his dealing where. One day this old rusty piece-of-shit El Camino come round the corner on Mt. Elliott and sprayed metal all over. Fly got one in the neck, he bled dry before the ambulance ever come. They hit a little girl, too, and my best friend, Jimmie. The doc at the free clinic pried the bullet out of his leg, Jimmie carried it around for a good luck piece.”
“What about the girl?”
“Oh, she was meat before she hit the sidewalk. That’s what done it, you know what I’m saying? I mean to me.” Needles had selected a pair of jogging pants with a silver stripe on one side from the pile on the floor and paused as he was stepping into them. “It wasn’t them clothes or the rings or that car of Fly’s. I figured if the same bullets that done for him didn’t know any better than to do for that girl too there wasn’t no sense in nothing. So I might as well have the clothes and the rings and the car.”
He pulled up the pants and tugged his T-shirt out over the elastic waistband. “Let me tell you something about that El Camino. I was there and I seen it coming for just the longest time, like it was just hanging there. Floating, you know what I’m saying? Fly and that little girl, they never seen nothing. If you can see it coming, don’t worry about yourself. It ain’t for you.”
Doc remembered to look at his watch finally. “I better go. Ance expected me back a long time ago.”
“Tell him thanks. We be around in a week or so and square up.”
“I was wondering about that. How come if you’ve got so much cash you couldn’t put up your own bail?”
Needles stuck a bare foot inside a Reebok Blacktop and sorted through the pile for its mate. He was grinning. “That’s the thing about cash. One day you got more of it than you got pockets to put it in. Next day it’s just gone. Clean up all this shit, will you, Sylvanus? You could lose a woman in here.”