The Devil's Own Rag Doll (15 page)

I asked, “What are we into?”

“Barton Rix was on the beat where Swope got killed.”

Barton Rix.
I rolled my back toward the window and stared hard at Mitchell.

“So you can guess the situation,” said Mitchell, “without thinking too much about it. I know that you've known Rix since the old days. I need to figure out if I can trust you to handle things with some tact from here on out.”

“It won't take much tact for me to put a slug between his eyes,” I muttered.

“One thing we know, it wasn't Rix that killed Swope.”

“You don't think he knew what was happening there? Three guys socking up some poor nigger in an alley, that doesn't sound like Rix to you?”

“Sure it looks like something Rix might be involved in. But does that mean you should just run right over and commit felony murder? Can't you stop and think what it might mean?” Mitchell was half out of his chair, leaning toward me. “Do you think Rix is smart enough or sneaky enough to put anything like this together? Think for a minute. Think. He's got no more initiative than you do.”

I lowered my eye and felt like sleeping. Maybe it was a dream coming on, a nightmare; I let my mind come up with the idea that Mitchell wanted.
The Black Legion.
My memory wandered back ten years or more to the leanest years: 1931, 1932. Even then we had been overrun in Detroit by poor southerners looking for work. They came up on the rails, hoping to land a nice job at one of the auto plants. For a lot of those crackers and hill people, the only thing they could hold on to to make themselves big was that they weren't niggers. Even before that time, during the years following the Great War, the beginnings of the Legion had taken root. They splintered off the Klan up here in Michigan, and for a time it seemed that the Legion might overrun everything. At least fifty murders, I knew, could be laid at the foot of the Legion, and probably more, since the stiffs were usually the wrong color. The bulls didn't spend much time investigating murders on the dark side of town, especially in those days. There were other things happening in Detroit, too many starving and living on the dole to worry about a few less nigger mouths to feed. I guess I knew about the Legion as much as any outsider. Certainly many men on the force were members, or would have been, if they could have stood for the hokey ceremonies and were willing to pay the dues. Though I never cared enough about it to find out, it was understood that a number of city councilmen, state lawmakers, and judges were members or sympathetic to the Legion.

But the Legion has gone to dust,
I thought. Or so the story was told, after the murder of a white man, Charles Poole, in May of 1936. Dayton Dean, the triggerman, had embarrassed the Legion by singing his canary head off for a grand jury. They had taken Poole on a one-way ride because he had supposedly beaten his wife on occasion. That was how it was with the Legion. They weren't particular about who they smacked around. They hated Negroes first and foremost, but they also hated the Catholics, the Jews, and especially the Communists, all swarming around Detroit during the Depression. Poole's wife was in Kiefer Hospital giving birth to their baby when the Legion took him, and she later denied being beaten altogether. The papers went wild, of course, and the publicity forced a scramble to stamp out the Legion. It only went as far as the level of the goons, though, because it was clear that further investigation would implicate many powerful men, judges, state senators, and police officials. They put up twelve of those lamebrained crackers on trial, and convicted eleven of them on Dayton Dean's testimony.

And Barton Rix, a patrolman like me at the time, on a beat, was rumored to have been in the third car, I now remembered.
The car that didn't make it to the Poole murder because it was caught at the Rouge River drawbridge.
Without the rope they carried in the third car, the lynching party was unable to hang Poole. So Dean shot five holes into him with a pair of semiautomatic pistols.

I chewed on it for a while. I couldn't pull together what it might mean down the road because my mind was half taken thinking about Bobby. What Anna had told me made me feel that I needed to go back over all the times I had spent with Bobby to figure out if they meant what I had thought they meant. And now, with the suggestion that the Legion—it had been a dirty time. It was all beyond what I could do to sort it out.

But a smile crept to my lips. I fished down into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled up the chain and the bullet that had rolled from Bobby's hand while he was dying. I rolled it around my palm with the index finger on my bad hand. A bullet on a little chain, kept inside the lapel: the calling card of the Black Legion. I had forgotten. A whole world I had forgotten. But now the two, Rix and the bullet, came together to spark certainty in my mind, like two words matching up in a crossword puzzle. And another thing: The Legion boys, I remembered, were deeply involved in busting up the unions in the old days; though we never spent much time investigating such things, it was standard practice to blow up houses of organizers. Just around the time I lost my eye in an explosion. I tossed the bullet on the desk toward Mitchell.

Mitchell picked it up. “Who does this belong to?”

“I guess Bobby pulled it off the runt that killed him.”

“So this is evidence, then.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess you'll have to decide about that in this case.”

Mitchell dangled the bullet by the chain. “We won't find any prints on it now, that's for certain.”

I sat quietly, rubbing the pink nubs of my bad hand, waiting. I figured, the way things were, it was just me. There wasn't a person on the earth to trust, at least until things shook down enough so that I could see who stood to lose what. I kept my head low and peered up through my eyebrow at Mitchell.

“You're wondering,” said Mitchell, “if you can trust me.”

“Don't worry about it, Captain. I don't trust any man that doesn't get his hands dirty when he works.” I watched him with a slack expression.

“Make up your mind, Caudill. Do it quick. I won't sweet-talk you. If you don't think you can act like a detective on this one, go along with me as far as it goes, then you're out. I can put you anywhere you like, directing traffic, helping little old ladies across the street. If you're in, you'll do just what I tell you and be happy with what information I think you need to know.”

“You figure the Legion is trying to come back up?”

“I can't imagine how it could be done these days. It looks like a few of the Legion punks trying to pull a few things over while we're busy thinking about other things. That's the best guess I have.”

“You're just guessing?”

Mitchell let his shoulders roll. “Where I can't find good information, I make my best guess. This requires a modicum of faith, nothing more.” His black eyes seemed to smolder at me. He said, “I'd like to see this case wrapped up before the first day of summer.”

“But that's—”

“It's almost a week. What do you think you can pull together if you spend the week sober? Can I trust you to make an honest effort or not?”

I looked down at my hands and studied my nails while I thought it over. I couldn't feel anything hinky in Mitchell's manner, but I knew the captain was hard enough to lie without a flicker of feeling if necessary. It hardly mattered; whatever percolated below the surface, the situation stood as it was regardless of what I knew about it. Either I was being played for a sap or I wasn't. Either Mitchell was in on it or he wasn't. And now that blood had been drawn on my watch, I'd sink my teeth into it and shake until things fell loose. If I had only a week to make the whole thing good—I'd have to find a way to do it. Though I could not be sure that I would get to the real root of things, I knew at least that I would drag more than my share down with me to hell. When it was done, they'd remember my name.

“I'm in,” I said.

“One last thing,” said Mitchell. “You leave Rix to me. I'll ask around, see what he's been doing on his own time. If you go anywhere near him, you're out. I'll send the men after you myself. There's no way I could gloss over something like that. That's all. Now go on, clean yourself up. You look like a wino.”

“If Rix turns up dirty,” I said, “not you or anybody can save him from what he's got coming.” I stood up slowly and felt the coolness of my damp clothes. Without another word, I turned and left Mitchell's office.

I tramped slowly down the stairs and left the building. Then I fired up the car and turned out onto Beaubien, my blood thick.

CHAPTER 9

Wednesday, June 16

I could not say why I had obeyed Mitchell's orders. Instead of tracking down Barton Rix, I had spent the remainder of the rain-soaked day poring over all the photographs of the Legion I could find in Records. My eye regretted it. The strain of looking so closely at so many pictures made the eye feel dry and tired. I hadn't slept well. And I was afraid that somehow the sight of all those unlucky faces might erase the image I kept in my mind of Bobby's killer—the runt who had been able to change me into a partial man.

When that search came up dry, I further taxed my vision by reading the entire report of the coroner's inquest on Bobby. He had bled to death, and very quickly. The short incision had been only about three inches deep, enough to open up a major vein and to spill Bobby's stomach and bile duct.
He was weak in the belly,
I thought.
Too skinny. A solid layer of fat and he might have been all right.
Then I thought,
That runt can handle a knife; he knew just where to put the blade.

And now, though the new day promised to be clear, there was no feeling that the rain had refreshed anything. I worked at the congestion that was always on my chest, now and again hacking up a glob and spitting it out the car window. The rawness of my throat made it fail to close off properly, so that every sip of water or coffee seemed to dribble into my lungs. With my addled brain and everything else I was choking down, this sense that I couldn't even breathe properly made my teeth clench and my neck ache. My shoulders wanted to pull up to my ears. No matter how often I emptied myself, I always felt like I needed to piss, and my legs were weak.

I wanted to visit Eileen. It was the lure of a pretty woman, a friendly face, a decent home. I thought that I could just step into it like any other man, like a regular man. The idea played in my mind like a nice storybook or a cinema show that could have a happy ending. Mornings, I could wake up to a hot breakfast, I could pull up my tie and slip into my neatly pressed suit, and I could hop on a streetcar to my office downtown, like a regular man. Maybe there would even be a little one, a bright-eyed girl with a curl in her hair to toddle on my knee when I came home in the evening. On weekends, we could drive up north to a little cottage on a lake, and the little one could play in the sand while I taught Alex how to hook a fish. Eileen would wave at us from the beach, her face hidden by the shadow of a floppy hat, her legs and shoulders freckling in the sun.

But I could not allow such thinking. I knew it could never be true for me. However it fell, I knew that my own life could never work as a happy story. I was born without the confidence or the courage or the faith to imagine myself a happy or fulfilled man. I carried my own trouble with me; and if I went to visit Eileen, if I set myself toward making some kind of life with her, I knew that, as things stood, I'd just bring trouble to her as well. Still, I had the choice: I could steer the car toward Eileen's house, or I could try to negotiate my way forward in the case, try to settle the scores it seemed I had accumulated, by finding out what I could from Anna. There was a third choice: I could just drive away from Detroit and try to make a new life somewhere else. And finally the fourth choice, as always the last desperate choice available to anyone: I could take my own life as my father had. I didn't want to, really, as roiled up as things were, and it made me wonder what my father's state of mind had been to make that monstrous decision.

As I pulled up to the curb in front of Bobby's house, I was thinking about how Bobby always seemed so frail beneath the bluster, how long and thin his fingers were, how his hands looked like they had never done a day's labor.

I walked up and knocked on the door.

Anna opened it and gestured for me to enter. In her face and her way of walking there was nothing like the stiffness that had stood between us while Bobby lived. It was like she felt that her admission of the previous day had cracked apart the need for any show between us now. I lingered in the doorway because my feet didn't seem to want to go in.

“Lucy, honey,” Anna called, turning from me, “why don't you run next door to sit with Mrs. Koppel for a little while. Mr. Caudill wants to talk about adult things now.”

I stepped aside to let the little girl skip past me out the door. She was pretty but had a small mouth and thin lips. Her blonde pageboy was fluffy and frizzy, and the natural curl lifted into the air. As in the past, she didn't greet me or even look at me as she passed. I didn't watch her go.

“Step inside, Pete. I have coffee made.”

Though I had been inside the little bungalow any number of times, still I stumbled as my eye adjusted to the dimness of the interior. I turned my head back and forth to make a picture of the place—but nothing had changed. The house was the same, but I couldn't get my feet to move like I wanted them to. I moved to the little table in the kitchen, where Anna Swope tippled a bit of Canadian Club into two cups of hot black coffee. I sat down across from her.

“You are glad you didn't come to the church after all. Old ladies clucking about what the world has become,” Anna said. “And talking behind their breath.”