Detroit Noir

The coffee break by Melissa Preddy

Grandmont-Rosedale

“Oh, miss!”

“Miss!”

“Waitress, could we get some service down here?”

More cream, more ketchup. Tuna on toast, ham on rye, two slices of cherry pie. I slapped down one heavy white crockery plate after another like a blackjack dealer at a full table, my lace-up oxfords treading sideways, crablike, on the Coke-sticky linoleum floor behind the counter.

Welcome to the lunchtime shift at Cunningham’s.

Clinking cutlery and the snapping of streamers attached to the store’s giant fans created a background hum that sometimes made me strain to take in the orders for egg salad, iced tea, and Vernors.

It was August 1 of a sizzling summer and no one was ordering the patty melt.

Payday, no less. Which meant that every stool would be occupied for at least two hours straight, as the drugstore’s flush-with-cash shoppers hovered like vultures and those seated pretended not to see waiting patrons’ reflections fidgeting in the big ad-plastered mirrors that hid the kitchen from view.

Finally, around 2 o’clock or so, the counter was mostly clear and the pockets of my celery-green apron — our uniforms matched the tile on the store’s façade — drooped with their welcome load of nickels, dimes, and the occasional quarter. I packed a tumbler with crushed ice, topped it off with water, and sipped.

Grabbing a copy of Photoplay from under the counter, I fanned myself for a minute before glancing at the bleached-blond starlet on the cover. That’s when it dawned on me: It was two days now since Marjorie had been in for her customary coffee and cigarette. We had been kicking around some ideas for Saturday — maybe go to a show, maybe even ride downtown to check out the fall fashions just appearing in Hudson’s showrooms.

I peered through the window, trying to catch a glimpse of her in the storefront manicure booth at Kay’s Beauty Nook across the street, but the bustling sidewalk crowd blocked my view.

One of the redeeming features of this job — aside from the tips, which really were pretty good if you were fast on your feet like me and not above a little flirting with the guys and fawning over the women — was the movie screen — like view of this busy shopping district where Grand River sliced through Greenfield Road at a forty-five-degree angle.

Triangle-shaped Cunningham’s jutted out into the intersection and the wide windows on both sides of my counter gave me a better view than Jimmy Stewart had in last year’s Hitchcock hit, Rear Window.

Buses chugged up and disgorged patrons for the beauty parlor, the funeral parlor, dress shops and dentists, bakers and shoemakers and hardware merchants.

Not Detroit’s most posh neighborhood, this westside district was far from the worst, either — just a solid Main Street — style shopping center about seven miles down Grand River from the city’s skyscrapers.

Montgomery Wards’ cupola, revolving door, and ritzy awnings lent the neighborhood a bit of big-city flair, while across the street Federal’s and Woolworth’s appealed to the budget trade.

The busy intersection pulsed with secretaries and factory workers, housewives from the nearby neighborhoods, teachers and students from the schools down the block. On a clear day you could almost see the Penobscot building, but a lot of my customers felt no need to trek downtown. It was all right here.

I’d come to Detroit a couple of years ago to nurse a sickly cousin. She was long gone, but I was still behind this counter — mostly 9 to 6, sometimes the late shift. With that wide-angle view I could spot the regulars on their predictable rounds, like the players in my own private movie.

The daily drama unfolded with the breakfast trade.

There was Mrs. Boyd, the raven-haired pet shop lady, who showed up promptly at 9:15 every weekday for her poached egg, wheat toast, and tea. Woe betide the cook if her yolk was broken.

Today, she was exchanging small talk with Mr. Giles, the head floorwalker on Wards’ second floor. While awaiting his daily oatmeal and cream, he’d snatch a napkin from the chrome dispenser and polish the walk-to-work perspiration from his steel-rimmed spectacles. I often maneuvered to seat them side-by-side, envisioning a romance between the animal-loving widow and the courtly merchant, but so far my meddling had only spawned dry comparisons of inventory ledgers.

The neighborhood beat cop, Mick — short for the less pronounceable Michlewandoski — took his usual turn through the store and then stopped to exchange news with the security guard from the bank across the street. Mick’s report was usually pretty tame — a broken window, a bit of shoplifting — and I had the impression he liked it that way. As always, the guard was late and wolfing his ham and eggs in order to take up his post by 9:30.

Missing today was Carl Strachan, who managed the Thom McAn shoe store down the street and stopped in most mornings for a BLT. Blessed with the leading-man looks of John Gavin and a healthy helping of offhand boyish charm, he capitalized on both and the result was possibly the liveliest love life west of Woodward. Most of us single women who lived and worked around the intersection had been lured once or twice by the salesman’s spiel.

Carl, as he constantly bragged, kept a boat docked down in Wyandotte. While a sail on the breezy, cool Detroit River sounded like heaven, I could never quite bring myself to accept. There was something sly about the way he knelt in the shoe store, turning what should have been a two-minute fitting into a stealthy caress of my nyloned feet and ankles. Girls who did set sail with Carl said he dropped the Cary Grant act once they were beyond swimming distance from shore, and made it clear he expected a lot more than a goodnight kiss for his troubles. Some were dismayed at his brutish insistence and their own vulnerability out on the choppy waters. Others had the night of their lives on the blankets in Carl’s floating love nest. Myself, I didn’t fancy becoming just another notch on his mast.

There were plenty of other curiosities among my customers, but you get the general idea. And the passersby on the street, whose names I never knew, rounded out the cast.

There was the sultry brunette who spoke only Russian but showed up twice a week to Kay’s for her shampoo and set; the gaggle of gossips who never failed to check out the weekly dress sales at Lerner’s and Three Sisters; the harried-looking mothers dragging red-faced kids up the narrow stairway to the dentist’s chair.

Gingham-dressed cleaning women emerged each morning from Woolworth’s with a fresh supply of Bon Ami and ammonia; efficient church ladies bustled in and out of Holy Cross Lutheran. Veiled mourners trudged up the steps at Bishop’s. Brylcreemed delivery boys jostled doting grannies who clutched string-tied cardboard cake boxes from Ralph’s Bakery.

Weekdays around 4 o’clock, you could set your watch by the cluster of tool-and-die men who wiped greasy fingers on bandanas as they pushed their way into Leonard’s Bar &Grill for thirty-cent bottles of Stroh’s and bloody-rare ground rounds.

And Tuesday through Saturday, there was Marjorie’s Doris Day — platinum bob bent over a customer’s bright talons in the window at Kay’s.

“Okay if I take my break now?” I asked the cook. He nodded, so I stepped around the counter and pushed through the glass doors onto the simmering sidewalk.

Inside the salon it was even steamier, the hair dryers fighting a losing battle with the humidity. Kay was doing a manicure on a longtime client at Marjorie’s station. She was clearly rusty, fumbling in exasperation with the unfamiliar tools and supplies.

“Is Marjie sick or something?” I asked.

Kay wielded her emery board laboriously, not looking up. “This is the second day she’s missed without calling. I don’t know if she’s sick, but I can tell you one thing: She’s fired.”

“Such a sweet little thing,” chirped the customer, a mousey little woman I’d mentally dubbed Peachy due to her perennial choice of lipstick and nail polish hues. “It’s hard to believe she would just run off on you. Hope she’s okay.”

I looked around the room but the other operators, taking their cue from Kay, continued their work in silence.

“If anyone hears from her, please let me know,” I said. “You know where to find me.”

Back inside Cunningham’s, I leaned against the ledge in the phone booth and leafed through the directory. Marjorie and I were after-work buddies, just shopping and the movies, that sort of thing. But I knew she lived a bit south, off Plymouth Road somewhere, with her parents and younger sister.

Here it was — John Sklar, 9980 Asbury Park, Vermont 5-2537.

I wrote the number on the back of an order slip but didn’t dial the phone. A brisk rap on the open booth door startled me and there was the drugstore boss and pharmacist, Mr. Smith, frowning and jerking his head toward the far end of the counter. Some of my best tippers were taking their customary seats.

There were a handful of the neighborhood’s bigwigs, including the banker, the undertaker, the pastor, and the dentist — their daily get-together was a years-long tradition. Smith joined them as usual on their afternoon break.

It had been a busy day for them too. Payday check-cash-ers swamped Mr. Littmann’s corner bank. Families were taking advantage of the summer break to get teeth pulled and cavities filled, Dr. Foster said. And of course there was never any shortage of work for Mr. Bishop, especially in this kind of heat wave.

In a nod to the weather, they wanted iced tea instead of coffee — though Dr. Foster, with an exaggerated look around to make sure no clients were watching, switched his order to a large Coke.

I obliged him with appreciative laughter, hoping it didn’t sound too fake, and pocketed their dollar bonus. Then as usual I drifted away and they drew closer, talking business deals or gossip in lower tones.

The others looked more frazzled by the heat than amused. Mr. Bishop tamped his pack of Chesterfields on the counter and then lit up, exhaling the smoke with an exasperated sigh. Banker Littmann wiped his brow and then painstakingly refolded his handkerchief. Reverend Gruenwald looked miserable, plastered inside his black suit and tight collar.

When my relief finally arrived at 6:00, I went down the wide, worn oak stairs to the staff rooms in the basement. Alone in the ladies’, I shrugged out of my damp Dacron uniform, peeled off the white stockings, and drenched a stack of pleated brown paper towels, wiping my sweaty skin from forehead to ankles. I redid my French twist and slipped into the full-skirted cotton dress in my locker, then wiggled bare, sore feet into flat sandals. Toting my soiled clothing in a paper sack, I crossed Greenfield and slowly strolled around the corner. No one familiar was in sight and it took just a minute to slip down an alley and up the wooden stairs to the apartment above Leonard’s.

Jerry, one of the bartenders, was waiting with a bottle of Canadian Club and a bucket of ice. Smiling, he pulled his necktie off over his head and began to unbutton his shirt.

Later, while he dozed beneath the ceiling fan, I stepped into my slip and perched on the arm of a chair near the wide-open west window. Miles distant, probably over the infamous De-HoCo — Detroit House of Corrections — prison in rural Plymouth, black clouds swelled with the weathercasters’ promised thunderstorm heading our way.

It was near dusk and people were happily milling the streets, enjoying a respite with ice cream, window shopping at shuttered boutiques.

The door at Leonard’s swung open at rhythmic intervals, letting out blasts of “Little Darlin’” and other juke box hits.

One girl drew my attention, as she walked slowly away from the intersection. Despite the heat and the twilight, she wore a dark green chiffon scarf tied beneath her chin, and cat’s-eye sunglasses. If her step had been more chipper, I’d have thought she were a starstruck teenager attempting the Hollywood look, but her pace was slow and her chin hung low.

My curiosity was answered when she turned the corner and headed up the steps to Bishop’s.

I shuddered and sipped my tepid whiskey. What a night to have gloomy dealings with the undertaker, in contrast to the midsummer carnival atmosphere of the business district. As I watched, the front door of the sprawling brick Victorian opened and she slipped into the dark foyer. You’d think they could turn a few lamps on.

By contrast, the white blinds at the windows of the funeral home’s rear quarters — a recent addition to the original house — were lit up like a hospital operating theater. In a way, that’s what it was. The embalming room.

How often I’d grimaced lately, trying to tune out Bishop as he boasted with relish to his cronies, between bites of oozing cherry pie, about the envious modernity of his facilities. As I watched the shadows moving behind the shades, I recalled his loving description of the gadgets and techniques he used on the dead. Littmann, who’d lent him the money, seemed fascinated by the inner workings of the mortuary, and Dr. Foster asked lots of questions, with the air of one scientist quizzing another. The reverend always looked a little queasy, though.

The thunder had moved closer when Jerry stretched and dressed and joined me at the window with a fresh drink. I told him about Marjie.

“Yeah, I heard,” he said. “Lennie told me the cops were asking around, but no dice. She’s probably just shacked up with some guy you never heard of.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Her parents keep her on a pretty tight rein. She went out with Carl a few times, but who hasn’t? And I know she has a thing for that guy Steven, the pressman for the News. That’s about it.”

“Well, she ain’t with him,” Jerry said, tightening the knot of his tie. “He’s downstairs right now — or was. Want to come see for yourself? I got to get back.”

I wasn’t in the mood to strike up a chat with the shy, dapper workman who sipped many an afternoon milkshake at my counter. His job was wrestling the giant rolls of paper onto the presses, and disposing of the heavy hollow cardboard cores. Aside from Steve’s surprisingly savvy clothes sense, I thought him dull, but Marjie had chosen to interpret him as the strong, silent type. She’d taken to delaying her late break to coincide with his, and for a time he seemed awkwardly flattered by her sparkly admiration.

“But Jer, do me a favor. If that Steven is still down there, ask him what he knows about Marjie, okay?”

He sighed elaborately but I knew he’d come through.

When the coast was clear I hurried down the alley and headed home. Abruptly the storm began and I dashed down Bishop’s driveway. Cutting through the yard beside the funeral parlor would shave a block off my rainy walk.

Hurrying past the portico, I was surprised to see Mr. Smith and the pastor huddled there. About to hail them, I was caught in the headlights of a Lincoln Town Car as it swung into the driveway at a fast clip. Littmann was behind the wheel and I jumped sideways to get out of his way.

Smith was obviously startled to see me.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” he asked irritably.

“Better get on home and out of this weather,” the reverend added more kindly.

Littmann just gave me a nod as he hustled by and the trio stomped the rain off their shoes before crowding through the funeral home’s side door.

Next day, no Marjorie.

After lunch I forced myself to dial the phone and was connected with Mrs. Sklar. Yes, she said, it had been three days now since Marjie had been home. No, there had been no arguments. Yes, the police had been called. No girls matching her daughter’s description had turned up in hospitals or, God forbid, the morgue.

“What do you think has happened?” I asked gently.

“Her sister thinks she might have eloped,” said Mrs. Sklar, but fear eclipsed hope in her voice. “We didn’t think she knew any boys that well. Did she?”

I told her the truth — that maybe sometimes when she was supposed to be out with the girls, Marjie dated a couple guys around the intersection. But as far as I knew it was all very casual — a hot fudge sundae at Sanders, a burger at the Fairlane bowling alley, a couple of drinks at Leonard’s.

“She’s a nice girl,” I assured the older woman. “That’s why I’m kind of worried about her.”

Mrs. Sklar, at first reticent, now poured out information in an anxious rush. Marjie had been quiet and absentminded for weeks. The police had learned she’d drained most of her savings out of the bank. Her sister had startled her in the room they shared, trying out the look of a sheer lace veil over her white-blond hair. As best they could tell, one small bag and a few garments were missing from her room.

“But she didn’t take her grandma’s pearl cross,” Mrs. Sklar burst out. “Ever since she was a little girl, she planned to wear that cross on her wedding day. It’s still in her jewelry box. And her best nylon stockings, that she was saving for good, are here. None of it makes sense … Where is my baby?”

I promised to keep asking around.

Hungry despite the heat, I helped myself to an egg salad sandwich, an iced tea, and a newspaper. On an inside page the headline Reward caught my eye. It seems that Miss Irene Ballard, twenty-four, hadn’t been home to Dearborn’s 503 °Curtis Street in more than a week.

The bespectacled dry cleaner’s assistant had boarded the Greenfield Avenue bus, headed for the Grand River shopping district, the article said. She hadn’t been seen since. None of her clothing was missing, but her bank account had been drained.

The ponytailed blonde had a serious expression behind tortoiseshell frames in the blurry newspaper photo. The princess collar of her white blouse was buttoned to the throat. She looked vaguely familiar. In fact, I’d swear she’d been in the pharmacy lately. I recalled my envy of those shiny blond locks, which obviously hadn’t come from a bottle.

Looking up, I could see Mr. Smith puttering in his mezzanine-level dispensary and realized that his cronies hadn’t been in yet for their usual break. In fact, my next customer was Jerry, stopping by for bottle of aspirin and a Coke before starting his shift behind the bar.

“Hey, I got some news for you,” he said. “You said that girl’s name was Marjie, the one who’s missing?”

I nodded.

“Well, I was wrong last night,” he said. “The woman the cops were looking for is Angie, not Marjie. Angela something — worked a few blocks down at Novak’s Bar. So I guess we got two missing girls in the neighborhood, eh?”

“Three if you count this one,” I said, pointing to the folded newspaper.

We looked at one another, perplexed.

“It’s kind of like last winter, remember?” Jerry said. “Those two sisters from over on Lyndon — what was that, February, March? They never turned up, did they?”

It rang a bell. Pretty brunettes, so they got some write-ups in the crime blotter. The family lived a block or two behind Ward’s. Something about one girl gone and then her older sister disappearing a few days later. But I wanted the scoop on Marjie.

“What about Steven?” I asked.

“He claims he wined and dined her a couple of times — even sprang for Chinese at Victor Lim’s downtown — but that was about it. Says he doesn’t know where she skipped to, and acts like he doesn’t care.”

Jerry washed down two tablets with the last of his cola and swiveled off the chrome-trimmed stool.

“You coming up tonight?”

“I think so,” I said. When he left I stood there for a moment, absently tearing up the cotton puff from his aspirin bottle, then made up my mind. Had a word with the cook and headed for the back of the drugstore.

Up a half flight of steps was the pharmacy, Smith’s domain. I knocked and pushed open the door. Surrounded by the bottles and boxes of his trade, he was grinding away using a mortar and pestle. “Yes?”

“Mr. Smith, I’m not feeling well. It’s a pretty slow afternoon at the counter — Bill says he wouldn’t mind serving. Would it be okay if I took off early today?”

He obviously wasn’t happy but there wasn’t much he could say. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “Oh, by the way, what were you doing over at Bishop’s last night?”

Taken aback, I explained that the driveway was my usual shortcut. “I couldn’t help but notice the pastor and Mr. Littmann there too,” I added. “And I see they aren’t here today. Did someone in the neighborhood pass away?”

“No, no,” the pharmacist said, “just one of our regular committee meetings last night — Chamber of Commerce business, you know. Mr. Bishop is kind enough to host us from time to time.”

“That’s nice,” I said dutifully. Then I showed him the folded newspaper page.

“Wasn’t this girl in here a week or so ago?” I asked. “Don’t you recognize her?”

My boss glanced at the paper and shrugged. “Not offhand,” he said. “I don’t memorize every face that walks through the door.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “It’s just that she’s the third girl in the neighborhood to go missing. I thought if we could help police with a clue — if she’d been ill or picking up a prescription …?”

At that Smith stopped grinding and looked up, eyebrows raised. “I suggest you leave the detective work to the professionals. And weren’t you saying you didn’t feel well?”

I took the hint and left. As I passed Bishop’s, a funeral procession wheeled out of the mortuary lot. The undertaker himself stood at attention, hand over heart, until the black-curtained hearse was out of sight. Then he relaxed and, whistling, marched up the steps of his elegant home.

That night, I swished sore feet in a dishpan of ice water at Jerry’s and told him about my afternoon.

Right after leaving the drugstore, I’d strolled over to Lyn-don Street, where two-story wooden frame houses were cooled by the shade of tall elms. Some elderly porch-sitters directed me to the Toltecci residence, home of Grace and Theresa, the missing high school girls.

Their mother let me into the dim front room. The girls had been gone since early March. First Grace, sixteen, had failed to return home from what she called a movie date with her school friends. Soon it was learned no such plans existed.

Theresa — pronounced Treesa — was relentless in searching for her sister, grilling friends and acquaintances, showing Grace’s photo around the shopping district, trying to retrace her sister’s trail. All she learned was that Grace had been urgently seeking work in the shopping center, filling out applications at the dime store, the ice cream shops, the tea rooms — any place that might hire a high schooler for washing-up chores and the like.

Naïvely, the younger girl had even stopped at the bank and asked to apply for a loan.

The family was stumped. Grace had always been content with her dollar-a-week allowance and the wages from a few babysitting jobs. What could she need so much money for?

Later that ghastly week, Mrs. Toltecci said, Theresa too had failed to come home. The police did the best they could — Mick kept going door to door for blocks around, even on his days off — but no leads turned up. No bodies either, which left the grieving parents in a wretched limbo, balanced between hope and despair.

Leaving her, I took the long way around to Thom McAn’s.

“Missed you this morning,” I said as Carl shoehorned a pale-pink pump onto my left foot. “Heat got your appetite?”

The salesman shrugged. “Guess so. How does that one feel?”

I got up and walked around the store, modeling the shoes and watching his expression in the tilted mirrors.

“I’ll bet you’re heading out on your boat tonight,” I said. “Any chance of me tagging along? Marjie said it was fabulous.”

His answer was a raised-eyebrows stare.

“Wasn’t she out with you last week?” I pressed, smiling. “I could’ve sworn she said you two had a date. Or am I thinking of Angie, that girl from down at Novak’s? You dated them both, didn’t you?”

“Not lately,” he dodged, deadpan. “And sorry, but I’m not sailing tonight. How are the shoes? Shall I wrap them?”

“It’s funny, them both being missing,” I said as he wrote up the order. “And that girl from Curtis Street. They say she was headed this way.”

His long lashes flickered. “Missing? I didn’t know. How awful for their families.” With that automatic smile, he handed over my receipt and the crisp brown bag. “See you around.”

Dismissed, I ambled along the sidewalk, trying to think. Five girls — that I knew of — vanished in the last five months. Nice girls, who worked, lived at home with their parents, and weren’t engaged or going steady. And no corpses had turned up.

Ronnie, one of Marjie’s pals from the salon, was coming toward me.

“Any news?” she said. “Mick the cop was in again asking questions. At least no unclaimed bodies match hers — so far — he said.” Ronnie was holding out for the elopement theory, though like me she couldn’t imagine who the groom was. And deep down we both doubted Marjie would do that to her mother.

“But I did see her going over to Holy Cross a few times,” Ronnie added as the light changed and she stepped off the curb. “I don’t know why, but it seemed like she was always running across Grand River to the church lately.”

A devout Polish Catholic seeking solace in a Lutheran chapel? That was a new one on me.

Jerry said the bar was buzzing today with talk of the missing women. Mick had alerted the precinct’s detectives and two gray-suited, crew-cut guys had been canvassing the intersection.

“Are they starting to doubt it’s coincidence?” the bartender said. “Outwardly they’re saying it’s just routine. But Mick told me they’ve got a clerk going back through records, looking for similar cases over the past few years. Especially where no bodies have turned up. The thing is, none of these girls had anything in common. Think about it.”

Some of them knew Carl, I said. “I could see him shoving a girl out of a sailboat if she started to be a nuisance. We know he dated Angie and Marjie; for all we know Grace could’ve fallen for him too. Or that girl from Dearborn — she shopped around here. I am positive it was her in the drugstore. Maybe she bought shoes around here too.”

We went back and forth. Steve could probably stuff corpses into those heavy newsprint tubes, for that matter, Jerry said. But it was doubtful he’d crossed paths with the younger girls.

It was the money that puzzled me. Mick told Jerry that all of the older girls had gone missing with several hundred dollars on them. Grace had seemed in a big hurry to earn some money. And Theresa had vanished trying to find out why. Was someone touting a get-rich-quick scheme? Or offering “modeling” contracts to pretty young women?

Jerry went to refill our gin but his paring knife slipped on the lime rind and deeply gashed his fingertip. We both froze for a minute, watching the thick dark blood well out and drip on the corrugated drain board. He fished out his handkerchief and I folded it around some ice and pressed it on the cut. Within moments a bright red stain seeped across the bleached white cotton.

The heat and the gin made me light-headed at the sight. My thoughts swirled.

Blood. Money. Missing women. Shadowy silhouettes on blazing white blinds.

The ice burned the palm of my hand and my stomach churned.

I knew.

“Jesus, you gonna stand there and let me bleed to death?” Jerry teased. “Run down to the kitchen, okay? They’ve got bandages and gauze and all that in a locker on the wall.”

Bleed to death. That’s what my friend had done. And all the girls before her.

I felt my pockets for change and ran downstairs. The barroom was smoky and congenial. Someone shoved the quarter tray forward and pool balls clattered down their chute.

The phone booth was empty. I put my icy-cold finger over the 0 and turned the dial.

“Oh, miss. Could we get some more butter here, please?”

It was nice to be the one being waited on for a change. I savored another bite of my Delmonico and added a little more chive-flecked sour cream to the baked potato.

Mick was picking up the tab. He knew I’d turned down the Ballard reward and insisted on treating me and Jerry to a white-tablecloth dinner a few miles down the avenue at Carl’s Chop House.

I leaned back in the curved red-leather booth and sipped my wine. What I really wanted was more details. Mick wasn’t supposed to talk much since the trials hadn’t started yet, but we promised to be discreet.

“Of course, we all thought you were goofy at first,” he repeated for perhaps the tenth time. “Why would well-off guys like them get involved in that kind of scheme? Then we thought about the money potential and, well, it seemed worth asking around.”

Buddy, a longtime waitress at Novak’s, was the first to crack. Seated at one of the tavern’s red-checkered tables, she told detectives she’d been in trouble once too, and she told them who had recognized the symptoms and offered to help her out of it. When Angie had the same problem, she sent her to the kindly dentist at the intersection.

Then, Mick said, one of Irene Ballard’s girlfriends told a similar tale. She said it was well known up and down Green-field that Mr. Smith could help you out of a fix.

And Marjie, who had apparently succumbed to Steve after all in the backseat of his ’49 Ford, heard from a girl at Federal’s that the Reverend Gruenwald was understanding about these matters.

Grace, of course, applied for a bank loan and got a different kind of assistance there.

“And Theresa?” Jerry asked.

“She found out what was going on,” Mick said, forking up some dessert. “A lot of girls around the intersection knew about Bishop’s. They kept it quiet because, well, because of a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I kind of thing. When we realized the volume they were doing, it was obvious the money — a girl or two a week at $400 apiece — made it worth the risk.”

Shaking my head with chagrin, I said, “I thought I knew everything that went on around there, and I never suspected a bit.”

If only Marjie had told me.

I imagined the terror of those veiled girls being led past the plush parlors of the funeral home through the service door and into the cold, clinical embalming room. The heavy chemical odors. The sinks and the drains. Being ordered to disrobe and to climb upon the same table where hundreds of corpses had been shed of their lifeblood. The curt orders and the pain and fright when one’s own red fluid started to flow.

Jerry squeezed my hand and smiled. Mick was talking again.

It might never have come to light, he said, if it weren’t for some newfangled equipment Bishop installed. I cringed as I recalled his boasting and Foster’s animated questions; obviously embalming gear wasn’t all he was buying with Littmann’s generous bank loan.

“Don’t forget, most of the girls made it out okay,” Mick added. “Between them, Bishop and Foster had the anatomical know-how; the other three supplied the patients. The vast majority of women were in and out with no problems.”

Then things started going sour. Grace wasn’t the first but she was the closest. Theresa, who shared a room with her sister and had noticed her bouts of nausea, figured out the scheme and confronted the undertaker.

“She had a couple of hypo marks on her arm and neck,” Mick said. “It wouldn’t take much embalming fluid to put her out. And of course he had the perfect setup for hiding unwanted corpses.”

Detectives yearned to dig up every casket Bishop had closed for the past couple of years, to find out how many carried an extra occupant. They had found Theresa in with an elderly woman way over at Mt. Olivet, and poor Marjie stuffed beside a middle-aged man right up the avenue in Grand Lawn.

But Bishop’s mortuary helper, Stan, realizing he could face a murder rap or ten, was likely to turn state’s evidence, Mick said.

“At least it’ll help us narrow things down,” said the cop, waving to the waitress for the check. “But there are going to be a lot of gravediggers busy between now and the trial.”

The scandal was keeping me hopping too. In the weeks since the news broke, complete with grainy newspaper photos of the manacled businessmen, Grand River and Greenfield had become a regular tourist attraction.

The new pharmacist, a white-tuniced Wayne State grad, was appalled but had to admit it was great for business. Everyone wanted to see Bishop’s lair, light a candle at Holy Cross, and stop for Coke or a tube of toothpaste at Cunningham’s infamous drugstore.

Gawkers edged out the regulars at my counter, prying for details between bites of tuna or grilled cheese. I obliged as best I could and my uniform pockets bulged with extra-big tips from grateful curiosity-seekers. But I tried not to glance out the window to my right, where Marjie’s storefront booth was dim and empty.

A lot of my quarter tips found their way out to St. Hedwig’s Cemetery in the form of a wreath of pink roses, which I carried one day to my friend’s shiny new gravestone. I sat for a while and talked to her about the usual — the fall fashion’s at Hudson’s, and the new show Jerry was taking me to one night, and how nice it was to get a break from the heat. Somewhere down there she was lying still, wearing her grandmother’s pearl cross and the new nylon stockings she was saving for good.

Snow angel by E.J. Olsen

Grand Circus Park

In late December, Mrs. Rose Erwell passed away slightly ahead of schedule. She’d been diagnosed with Stage IV bone cancer back in August, and the only thing they could do for her was increase the painkiller dosage in the IV drip every week. Palliative care, it’s called, and it usually means keeping the patient too stoned to care about the terrible pain. The way her doctor told it later, Mrs. Erwell’s condition “had not yet progressed to its terminus,” and she was scheduled for a few more months of suffering before the motor shut down. He backed it up with a bunch of statistics.

In the previous three months, seven terminally ill people in Detroit died before they were supposed to. Being of sound mind and failing body, these seven folks elected not to wait for their respective conditions to reach the ultimate conclusion and ended their lives with very strong narcotics. Not street poison, but clean, prescription-grade pharmaceuticals. End of suffering. They simply floated away on a pink cloud of dope. In all seven cases, the friends and relations of the patient were sympathetic to the decedent’s wishes, but ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. In all seven cases, the cause of death was a combination of drugs other than what was prescribed for the patient. In all seven, the last visitor these people had was a man who wore a Roman collar; a man who called himself Father David.

We were double-parked at Downtown Coney Island. My partner, Tucker, was outside in the unmarked while I was accepting an illegal bribe from the proprietor in the form of lunch. Gus Manos loved to see cops in his joint. All that blue was good insurance. In the sixty-odd years he’d been open he’d never been robbed. An absolute miracle in Detroit. An ancient, grease-spattered Philco was tuned to WJR, and it told us that the Pistons dropped another game to Cleveland. Gus shook his head and shrugged. I shrugged back, and thanked him for the food. As I reached for the door, my partner’s immense frame blocked out the dull winter daylight.

Tucker was a man of few words. He was tall and wide, like a human vehicle. He wore his hair very short, but it didn’t look paramilitary like so many of the rookies these days. He was quick and light on his feet, and in all the time I’d ridden with him, I never heard him curse or even raise his voice. In fact, he hardly talked at all. It was kind of like working with the Buddha.

He held up his cell. “Priest.”

Tucker drove. We hit I-375 and had the Coneys gone by the time we took the McNichols exit. The address was on Dequindre above Seven Mile. The neighborhood was mostly ranches. Aside from the bars on all the windows and doors, it could have been a suburb anywhere. Not so remarkable if it wasn’t a pocket surrounded by the urban prairie that was reclaiming the city. The areas just a few blocks west of Mrs. Erwell’s trim little beige home were filled with pheasant and possum, most of the homes long since demolished or fallen in. All that was left was a grid of streets, sidewalks, and light poles squaring off fields of weeds as tall as a man. It was spooky to see how fast all traces of us disappear.

We pulled up behind the van marked WAYNE COUNTY CORONER and headed up the walk. The infamous Jack Kevorkian certainly had his detractors back in his day, but the “right-to-die” pathologist also had his supporters. Tucker and I met one in the person of Mrs. Nora Combs, sister of Mrs. Erwell. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded and cranked up before were we halfway to the door.

“My sister was ill and sufferin’. No earthly reason to make a lovely human being go through all that pain. No earthly reason.”

We stepped onto the porch and flipped our badges.

“I knew you were police. Why else would a white man and a …” she looked Tucker up and down, “dumptruck be coming to visit Rose?”

The corner of Tucker’s mouth tightened. I’d worked with him long enough to know that this passed for a smile. I gestured at Tucker, then myself.

“Sergeant Tucker, Sergeant—”

She waved me off. “Come on. They’re back this way.” She disappeared inside the house.

We followed and stepped into a neat living room. A floral-patterned couch with matching recliner faced the picture window. Both pieces wore plastic slipcovers and looked showroom new. In the corner opposite the recliner a wooden TV table held an old nineteen-inch Zenith complete with rabbit ears. We heard Ms. Combs’s voice calling us from a hallway off the living room and headed that way.

Two guys from the coroner’s office stood murmuring in the corner of a bedroom. They nodded when we walked in. A huge four-post bed dominated the room. The wood was dark and polished to a proud shine. In the center of the bed, a tiny brown woman lay under an enormous antique quilt. Thin wisps of gray hair fanned out on the pillow beneath her head. Her mouth was pulled in slightly at the corners, as if she were smiling at some pleasant memory. Mrs. Rose Erwell looked for all the world to be asleep.

There was a small nightstand beside the bed, and it was filled with prescription drug bottles. The coroner guys were watching me now. I looked at them and raised my eyebrows. The one in charge, a gray brush cut named Marty, flipped though his notebook.

“Decedent is one Rose Mary Erwell, age seventy-nine.” Flip. “Chondrosarcoma, advanced. Treatment was basically pain management at this point. Mrs. Erwell wasn’t responding particularly well to either the treatment or her ultimate prognosis. Her primary care guy,” more flipping, “a Doctor Bainbridge … recommended antidepressants.” Marty looked serious. “Patients facing end-of-life conditions sometimes have problems with depression.”

Tucker rolled his eyes.

I said, “Please tell me no one is surprised that the terminally ill don’t go out singing and tap-dancing.”

Marty smirked and shoved the notebook in his shirt pocket. “Cause of death was likely an overdose of something strong, like the others, but we’ll need the autopsy to confirm.”

I pointed to the bottles on the nightstand. “Could it have been this stuff?”

Marty shrugged. “It could have been. Any of her pain meds would’ve stopped a rhino. But the home nurse …” he pulled out the notebook again, “Shauna Collins, company is General Hospice … says all the heavy stuff is accounted for. Right down to the pill. The lab guys were here and they dusted everything. Said the only prints on the bottles belonged to the decedent and the nurse.”

“Where did the lab guys go?”

“Had another stop. Said to call them if you need details, otherwise their report will be ready tomorrow.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

They zipped up Mrs. Erwell and carted her to the van outside.

We poked around for a minute, then I looked at Tucker.

“Where’s the nurse?”

Tucker shrugged.

We caught Marty before he pulled away. Nurse Collins had called her company to report the death and they’d sent out a car to pick her up.

“The guy behind the wheel said he was her supervisor. Said she’d already given you guys a statement, and gotten your okay to take her in for a company deposition. Some internal procedure thing.”

I didn’t say anything.

Marty looked stricken. “Oh shit. I bought a line, didn’t I?”

Tucker tried not to appear exasperated.

I gave Marty a sympathetic smile. He felt bad because he should know better. “Don’t worry about it. They’re doing corporate CYA, but this will cost them.” I waved him on.

Tucker called in and sent a couple of squad cars over to collect the nurse and her supervisor. General Hospice wouldn’t like that, but interfering with a police investigation is serious. You step on the playing field, you’re in play.

Ms. Combs was crying softly when Tucker gently touched her shoulder. She shook her head and pulled away. “All right. Ask me the damn questions.” Mrs. Combs was angry about being questioned, but she told the truth like all the others. She was not present when her sister died (doctor appointment). She had not met the priest yet (planned to do so), as his visits began only recently (last two weeks). She only knew that the priest had been “recommended” by someone whose identity Mrs. Erwell would not divulge to her sister. After eight of these, it was sounding like a script. But not fiction; the thing was set up so the relatives didn’t get their hands dirty, and therefore couldn’t be charged as accessories. An act of kindness for those left behind to deal with the mess. It almost made me feel warm inside.

We thanked Mrs. Combs and walked out to the car. As we pulled away, I could see her in the rearview, holding herself on the front porch and frowning in the cold gray afternoon. Another old woman whose world had just gotten smaller by one. I looked away from the mirror and drove.

It turned out that General Hospice had a compelling reason to try and sequester Shauna Collins: She was not actually a nurse. Instead of hiring actual RNs or licensed hospice workers, General Hospice recruited former retail workers through a company website and sent them out to medicate their terminal clients. Armed with three days training and a cheap cell phone, Shauna was to follow the medication schedule provided by the company. If things got dicey, she was to call in to the actual trained medical personnel at headquarters. For this, she was paid ten dollars an hour; no benefits. Not surprisingly, General Hospice was making record profits. In the end, a whole bunch of GH executives were arrested at their beautiful homes in Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe.

You should have seen their faces.

We spent the morning of the next day in the police headquarters. I pushed paper around my desk for a while, then Tucker and I grabbed an unmarked and headed out to question Mrs. Erwell’s neighbors. Outside, the sky was the color of a fading bruise.

“Snow coming,” said Tucker.

The cell phone chirped just as we were headed for the 375 entrance ramp. There was a homicide over off Gratiot, on the city’s near east side. Since we were the closest detective car we picked up the slack. I made the siren whoop a couple of times while Tucker cut off a bunch of gesturing commuters. We hit the grill lights and rocketed out Gratiot.

Gratiot was the old artery out to the east side and its storefronts were sturdy monuments to the durability of the past, even as they died slowly in the present. Ugly signs defaced the old buildings, offering nothing more than pagers, liquor, or the sucker bet of the Lotto. Former neighborhood banks anchored major intersections, but now they were charismatic churches or strange shadow-economy shops that seemed to fade in and out with the seasons. Some of the places had been empty for most of my tour of duty. And that’s further back than I want to think about.

We turned north on Joseph Campau street. Most of the homes in this neighborhood were over a hundred years old. They sagged, slowly sinking into the ground, exposed wood graying in the cold wind coming off the river. Many were simply gone; replaced by vacant lots, trees, and the tall weeds known locally as “ghetto palms,” their fronds brown until spring. Driveways went nowhere, broken sidewalks marked off irrelevant property lines, light poles supported winter-dead creepers. In the summertime, the vegetation would make this urban neighborhood appear rural. Detroit was slowly reverting to the landscape that the French settlers knew, and I wondered how long it would be before the residents began farming again.

It started to snow. Thick flakes floated down, and I knew a blizzard was coming without being told. You grow up in Michigan, you get to know these things. Two cruisers were parked outside a two-story wood frame that was sloughing off the dark green paint of forty years ago. Three uniforms, all women, stood chatting next to one of the cruisers. They stopped talking as we walked up.

Tucker and I flipped our badges.

“What’s up?”

A uniform by the name of Biggs spoke up. She was pretty, with big brown eyes and freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her hair was pulled into tight braids under the uniform cap. She was all business.

“The call came in as a 187. A Gerald Holloway. But a neighbor who apparently knew Mr. Holloway stopped us on the way in and told us it was not a homicide but a suicide.”

Tucker’s eyebrows rose. “The neighbor still around?”

Officer Biggs gestured to an old woman standing on the porch of a ramshackle house across the street. She wore an ankle-length down coat which she clutched at her throat as she stamped her feet in the cold.

“Her name is Helen Bates and she said she was the one who checked up on Mr. Holloway. Apparently, he didn’t have anyone else.”

“You said she checked up on him. Was he sick?” I asked.

Biggs nodded. “Cancer. He was going downhill and she basically played nurse for him. She said he was in a lot of pain.”

“Why did she say it was a suicide?” I asked.

“Mrs. Bates said it wasn’t his time yet. Said he was suffering, but apparently not close to passing yet. She said she’d buried three siblings and she knew what cancer looked like.

That’s a quote.”

Tucker shot me a glance.

I said, “The neighbor mention anything about a visitor?”

Biggs got a look. “Matter of fact, she did. There was this priest who’s been stopping by for the past couple of weeks …”

It was identical to the other eight cases — nine now, counting Mr. Holloway. But we’d never had two in one week before. I wondered if the good Father was beginning to enjoy his work.

A telephone pole next to our car was covered with the carcasses of a dozen or so stuffed animals, gray and wet and dead after a long time outdoors. Stapled above the limp bunnies and puppies was a faded scrap of cardboard. I stepped closer. The cardboard still had a couple of flecks of glitter stuck to the edges, and the washed-out magic marker lettering was faded, but legible.

We miss you, Ty!

Sometimes I hate this fucking city.

The Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament was the mother church of the Archdiocese of Detroit, a classic gothic fortress that rose above Woodward. We found Archbishop Wojciechowski in the sanctuary of the cathedral. He was wearing an Adidas tracksuit and giving direction through hand gestures to a pair of guys buffing the marble inlaid floor surrounding the altar. The sound of the buffing machine bounced around the hard surfaces of the cathedral interior and he waved us to a door behind the sanctuary. After a couple of turns backstage, we stepped into a spacious, comfortable office. The Archbishop closed the door and gestured to a couple of plush chairs. He sat behind an enormous desk that looked enough like mahogany to be the real thing. The sound of the floor buffer was a distant memory.

Archbishop Wojciechowski’s face said he was expecting us, so we got right to it. I started to explain that we were simply following up on every possible lead, and he waved me off.

“No explanation necessary, detective. The church will do whatever it can to assist the police in stopping these terrible crimes. I assume you’re going to ask if one of the priests of the Archdiocese might be responsible?”

“It’s my job.”

The Archbishop leaned back and made a steeple with his hands, I kid you not. He smiled wearily and explained that the Vatican was very clear on what he called “culture-of-life issues.” Suicide, assisted or not, was a big no-no. And no one who called himself a priest would take part in such a sinful act if he wanted to remain a part of the One True Church.

As soon as the moral high ground had been staked out, Archbishop Wojciechowski said he would instruct all clergy in the Archdiocese to make themselves available to answer our questions.

“My secretary will get you a list of contacts.”

On the way out, Tucker caught me dipping into the holy water font. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it. I took one last look at the castle and walked to the car.

The snow had intensified while we were talking to the Archbishop, and there was already a couple of inches covering Woodward. Cars had their headlights on and traffic had slowed to a slippery crawl. I sat in the unmarked while Tucker cleared the snow off the windows with a long brush. He’s very conscientious about that sort of thing. I would have used my coat sleeve.

The call from 1300 came in just as Tucker slid the car into traffic.

“This is Detective Stan Greenway. We got a pair of lowlifes down here telling a story you might want to hear.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“We grabbed ’em runnin’ shorties around the Brewster-Douglas. Whole lotta rock. They were smartasses until they found out the kids aren’t taking the brunt of it. Distribution, minors involvement, large-quantity possession. They had a change of heart and started talking about a certain at-large clergyman.”

“No kidding? What are their names?”

He paused. “You remember the Williams twins?”

The Twins. Ronnie and Lonnie. Legend had it that the identical Williams brothers got their criminal start in the old Young Boys, Inc. gang while still attending Birney Elementary. YBI was the brainchild of some west side thugs who used school-aged children to push heroin and coke. The kids were too young to do any serious time if they got caught, and YBI frustrated the department for a long time. At its peak, YBI was the largest drug ring in Detroit, providing nearly forty percent of the city’s supply.

When YBI finally went down, their rivals Pony Down (named for the popular gym shoe) moved in. War broke out and the homicide rate shot up, but the Twins read the writing and defected to Pony Down. YBI strongholds like the Herman Gardens and Brewster-Douglas projects went to the Ponies and they enjoyed top-dog status for a while.

Pony Down was busted up by the Feds in ’85 and the Twins again managed to dance away without being tied to anything serious. They were now in their late thirties, a little older and slower. Prison would be harder for them.

We hit the lights and skidded down Woodward.

The Motorola was going a mile a minute like it always does when winter weather comes down hard. Traffic patrols shifting to accidents. The commuters get pissed when they can’t do their normal eighty miles an hour and start bashing into each other. I turned the radio down and concentrated on helping Tucker see through snow that fell sideways.

1300 Beaubien Street, Detroit Police Headquarters, is a grim citadel that sits on the edge of Greektown’s ethnic theme park. The building is old and crumbling, and sometimes I think the only thing holding it together is sweat and tears and fear. The collective pain and trauma of thousands of cops, thugs, and victims seeped into the walls like some kind of bad shellac.

We grabbed a space in the lot across the street and half-skied to the door. Inside, we shook our coats, stamped the slush from our feet. The interview room was painted an awful shade of government green that died back in the ’60s. Ronnie and Lonnie sat behind the table opposite the one-way glass. They were cuffed together, and a long chain ran from the cuffs to a steel loop set in the floor. At first glance, Ronnie and Lonnie were a pair of working Joes; jeans and thermal Ts under flannel shirts. Both wore heavy work boots and grubby ball caps on their heads. The days of the flashy tracksuits and pristine sneakers were gone. The Twins, like dealers all over the city, had learned to dress to blend in. Detroit kids laughed at the sharp-dressed, colors-wearing thugs in places like L.A. Called them “targets.” The new uniform of the day was no uniform at all.

The Williams brothers raised their heads as Tucker and I walked in. Greenway spoke to them.

“Tell the detectives what you said earlier, about the priest.”

Either Ronnie or Lonnie said, “We know who he is.”

I said, “Which one are you?”

“Lonnie.”

“Okay, Lonnie. Who is he?”

Lonnie looked at Ronnie, then back at me. “His name is David Wilkins. Ronnie and I know him from the old days.”

“He run with Pony Down?”

“Yeah, later on. He’s younger than us. This dude Ray-Ray brought him in when he was just a shorty. He was Ray-Ray’s cousin.”

“Ray-Ray?” asked Greenway.

“Ray Bonaventure. He’s dead. Got sent up in ’86. Some cracker busted his head in Jackson.”

“Okay, tell us about David Wilkins,” I said.

“Not much to tell. Ray-Ray brought him in because he didn’t have nothin’ else. His dad was long gone, and his moms was real sick. She couldn’t work or nothin’, so David had to Pony up to get some money.”

“So why do you think this David Wilkins is the priest?” Greenway asked.

“It was the thing with his moms.” Lonnie looked at the floor. “She had the cancer real bad. Real bad. And David couldn’t get nobody to do nothin’ for her. They’d give her some pills and shit, but never enough. David said she was hurtin’ real bad.”

“Didn’t she see a doctor?” I asked.

“Yeah, but it was the free clinic, you know? They tried to help her with assistance and shit, but it wasn’t enough to get her the right medicines.”

Ronnie added, “Or enough medicine. She needed more pain pills but she just couldn’t afford ’em. At first, David would tell us how she would be screamin’ sometimes cuz it hurt so bad. But after a while, he stopped talkin’ about it. He got real quiet.”

Lonnie said, “Way we heard it, took a long time for her to die. She was sufferin’.”

“The way you heard it?” asked Greenway.

“Yeah, cuz by that time David had stopped comin’ around. We just didn’t see him no more. We heard he was on the bottle, on the weed, on the pipe, every damn thing. Can’t blame him after that shit with his moms. We thought he was gonna show up DOA.”

“But he didn’t?”

“Naw,” said Ronnie. “He showed back up at our crib.”

After the seasons had changed a couple of times, David appeared on the Twins’ doorstep one day. He was clear-eyed, clean and sober. The Twins described his demeanor as friendly, quiet, and serious. After some small talk, he told them he wanted drugs. “Not that street shit,” he’d said. He gave them a list; heavy stuff, major-league painkillers and narcotics. Large quantities. They negotiated a price and a pickup time and he left.

“Okay,” I said, “so where can we find David Wilkins?”

Ronnie surprised me. “Downtown. He’s staying at that old theater building on, what is it, Bagley …?”

He looked at his brother, who nodded and said: “United Artists.”

“Yeah, that’s it. He’s staying there.”

“He’s staying in the United Artists Theater or the office building?”

“The office building. At the top.”

I was skeptical. “At the top of the building? And what about the security guard?”

Ronnie and Lonnie traded smiles. “He is the security guard. Some dude out in Bloomfield Hills hired him. He’s got a cot and space heater up there.”

I looked at Tucker, then Greenway, who shrugged. We all went out.

Greenway spoke first. “I know it seems too neat, but the other stuff they’ve been giving us has been straight. I think they’re serious about not doing the hard time.”

Tucker said. “I think so too. I bet they’re thinking about some of their old crew who got sent up back in the day. They played both sides, you know. YBI, then Pony Down. Could be that they know they wouldn’t get a very warm welcome inside.”

“Does anyone?” asked Greenway.

He had a point.

It was still mid-afternoon, but the heavy snowfall made it seem like dusk already. The commute had become a nightmare; businesses were closing early and sending their people home. The streets were fast clogging with snow and cars spun out in every intersection we passed. It was going to be a long rush hour.

The old United Artists building stood eighteen stories above Bagley Street on a flatiron-shaped plot. The narrow end of the flatiron faced Park Avenue, with Grand Circus Park just across the street. At one time, the area was the city’s theater district and Detroiters could stroll to any number of ornate movie palaces. The Fox and the State were rescued from the wrecking ball and refurbished, and the Gem had to be moved from its original location to be saved. Most of the other old theaters were either gone or falling to ruin.

Like many of the vacant towers in downtown, the UA had been invaded by all types over the years. Squatters, bottle bums, and under-medicated street psychotics all left clues to their maladies in the nests they vacated. Recently, the monoliths had become destinations for self-styled urban explorers and curious suburbanites. They posted photos of the crumbling towers on websites, attracting more and more to come and visit the Urban Failure Amusement Park. The police insisted that the building owners seal off the entrances and provide security to keep the junkies or thrill-seekers out, and the owners mostly complied. It seemed that David Wilkins had found a way to exploit this situation and hide in plain sight.

We pulled up on the Bagley side and tracked through the virgin snow that drifted under the old marquee. Most of the doors to the theater lobby were covered with painted plywood and sealed, but the owner had installed a steel security door to allow access to the building when necessary. Tucker tried the door, but it was locked. He pulled a small leather zip-pouch from his coat pocket. Lock picks. I stepped back from the door and looked up and down the street. We had the block to ourselves. I raised my eyes to the building façade and scanned the windows. Nothing.

Tucker popped the lock. We slowly opened the door, and a backwash of foul air hit us. The smells of mold, mildew, building rot, and piss swirled around and it occurred to me that breathing the air might be hazardous to our pulmonary health. Tucker pulled a small but powerful flashlight from his pocket and we stepped inside.

The once-beautiful theater lobby was a disaster of standing water, shredded plaster, and piles of rubble. Something, maybe a rat or feral cat, splashed into a corner and disappeared through a tear in the plaster. We gave the lobby a pass and looked for the entrance to the office tower. After fumbling along dank hallways, we found a stairwell off an elevator lobby that stretched far upward into the musty air. Tucker shined his light. Dust and God knew what else floated through the beams. The stairs were piled with bottles, clothing, fast-food wrappers, and assorted trash. We chose our steps with care and started up. It would be almost impossible to stay quiet as we crunched our way up, and the noise would probably alert any residents to our presence. All we could do was try to minimize our footfalls and maybe the bird wouldn’t flush until we were close enough to grab him.

About five floors up, the garbage thinned and we stopped to listen to the building. Silence. We kept climbing. At floor ten, we stopped again. Still no sounds from the floors above. At fifteen, we stepped out into an office corridor that didn’t look much different from the day its last occupant packed up back in ’75. Marble panels lined the hallway and dark hardwood trim detailed the offices. One of the rooms was piled high with battered steel desks. We searched the whole floor and found nothing but empty offices and dust.

We climbed to the sixteenth floor and into an eerie red glow. A blood-red hand was painted on the window of the elevator lobby, and it cast the room in crimson light. A few years back, the UA became a favorite for local graffiti taggers and street artists. These guerilla Picassos were inspired to cover the building’s windows with unusual and brightly colored images. The UA became a kind of modern folk art symbol. Too bad for art. A powerful local real estate developer acquired the UA for some unspecified future venture and immediately set about “cleaning up” the windows. Either they had missed a couple of windows, or the artists were coming back.

We moved down the hallway. Tucker was ahead of me and he stopped by a blue-colored doorway. He waved me over and nodded in at what had been an office. An attempt had been made to clean the window, but a light aqua tint persisted and the room washed in soft blue light. A bed was laid against one wall, and there were several pairs of shoes lined up along the bottom of a bookcase filled with hardcovers, paperbacks, and magazines, all shelved as neatly as a library. On the other side of the bed was another set of shelves that held toiletries and john paper. A fine coating of dust covered everything and it looked as though the occupant hadn’t been home for a long time. A Free Press next to the bed was dated July 2000. We moved on.

The seventeenth floor was empty. All of the hallway and office walls had been removed, the entire level stripped down to the thin concrete support columns. Snow fell past the naked windows in the dimming afternoon light. We moved carefully through the huge empty room, the columns breaking up our sight lines. Tucker suddenly stopped and nodded toward the far corner. There was a doorway to another stairwell, a twin to the one we’d climbed. I glanced back at my partner, who looked impatient. He nodded at the corner again, at something beyond this other stairwell. Off in the shadows, I could just make out the flat panel of a hardwood-trimmed wall. As we got closer, I could see a darkened doorway with an open transom. One of the level’s old offices had been left intact. Tucker and I knew this was where we would find David Wilkins.

We came up on either side of the old room, guns drawn, flashlights out. There was no door in the frame and nothing to stop us from moving in quickly, guns covering opposite ends of the interior. Nobody home.

An old army cot and space heater stood at one end, just as Lonnie had said. A couple of milk crates had been turned over to make a table for a hot plate, and a battered old pot hung from a nail in the wall. Empty soup cans and paper waste filled a tiger-striped trashcan that said Bless You Boys! on the side. Opposite the room from the cot was a stack of cardboard cartons.

Tucker pulled up the flaps of the topmost box and looked inside. I stood with my back to the doorjamb so I had a clear view of both Tucker and the empty floor beyond. Tucker held up quart-sized containers filled with tablets, capsules. The names were dull in the flashlight beam, but I made out Dilau-did, Percocet, and several other Schedule I and II drugs. It was the mother load.

I was about to say something smart, when we heard a scrape coming from the stairwell just outside the office. We froze. The scrape came again, then became footsteps pounding up the flight. We flew out of the room guns first. The pounding crossed the floor above us. We took the stairs two at a time.

As with the level below, the eighteenth floor was stripped bare. Even the windows had been removed. Dimming light leaked in from the holes that once held windows and snow flurries drifted across the concrete floor. Through the window openings we could see the façades of other empty buildings, their edges softened in the falling snow and the late afternoon dusk.

We were running for the footfalls echoing in the opposite stairwell when we heard the boom of what sounded like a heavy door.

“The roof,” said Tucker between breaths.

Across the floor and up the first flight, we paused at the landing to listen. There was only the silence of the falling snow. The roof door stood partially open sending a thin shaft of light into the upper flight. Through the gap, we could see footprints trailing away in the thick snow. Tucker crept up the stairs and spread his large hand against the steel door. He looked back at me. I nodded and raised my gun. Tucker slowly pushed open the door.

We could see the entire rooftop. It looked like a frosted cake with all the snow. Tucker stepped though the doorway and for a moment the stairwell went dark. Then he was out, moving deliberately, his head fixed straight ahead. I followed, ranging off to his right. The flurries were coming thicker now, but I could still see my partner. And beyond him, David Wilkins, the priest.

Wilkins stood at the eastern edge of the roof. His back was to us and his long black coat hung nearly to the snow. He was framed on both sides by the empty towers that surrounded Grand Circus Park, and in the distance we could see the orange glow from the new baseball and football stadiums.

“David.” My voice was only a hoarse whisper and that surprised me. Or maybe the thickening snow ate the sound. Tucker stood about ten yards to my left. He was looking at me, his eyebrows raised. My mouth was dry and I swallowed to get some spit going.

Tucker turned his head and said, “David Wilkins,” in a clear voice that carried over the rooftop.

When I remember the moment, I am struck by the silence. The vacant towers around us seemed to bear witness through their dark windows. Streetlights glowed from far below, and the falling snowflakes softened the hard edges and planes of the concrete that surrounded us. Wilkins seemed to cant forward, then disappeared over the edge. I looked up into the sky, into the snow. There was a flapping sound as his coat caught the wind on the way down.

It sounded like wings.

The night watchman is asleep by Joe Boland

Downtown

Mitchell, the other night watchman at the Guardian Building, was a moonlighting cop. The night Stoner started, Mitchell gave him the once-over — height and build, age, haircut — and decided that Stoner must be a moonlighting cop too.

Stoner let him think what he wanted.

“You from the Northwest District?” Mitchell asked.

“I’m from Downriver,” Stoner said.

“Well sheeit,” Mitchell said, putting a twang into it.

Mitchell was an enormous black man, and Stoner wasn’t certain if he was trying to be funny. When Stoner didn’t laugh, Mitchell said, “Don’t wanna double in your own bunk, huh?

That’s smart, rook. I’m from Farmington Hills. You from Taylor-tucky? Wyan-tucky?”

“Beautiful Brownstown,” Stoner said.

Mitchell seemed to decide that Stoner wasn’t going to be trouble.

“Oh no,” he laughed. “You in beautiful Brownstown now.”

Stoner was from Wyandotte, twenty miles south of Detroit. His family and most of his neighbors were originally from Tennessee, not Kentucky. He’d really only been to the city a few dozen times before, for Tigers or Red Wings games, or to check out the casinos when they first opened. His idea of the city came from the news, and from the bad word-of-mouth he heard every day. As far as he could tell, Detroit hadn’t changed much in his lifetime. It was no longer the nation’s murder capital, but it didn’t seem like a city on the rebound either. He always thought of it as dirty and abandoned-looking, and a couple new buildings and stadiums downtown didn’t do enough to change his impression: You were still only a block or two away from being surrounded by black people who hated you.

He had never been in the Guardian Building before, an office highrise two blocks from the Detroit River with a tiled façade the color of light coffee and a lobby like a cathedral. Stoner had to admit it was beautiful.

Mitchell walked him through the building. At first Stoner was apprehensive, wondering if the tour was going to be an excuse for Mitchell to talk cop-shop with him, but Mitchell only seemed interested in talking on his cell phone, which rang every few minutes. Half an hour after their shift began, Mitchell put a hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Listen — you got this, right?”

Stoner nodded. “I got it.”

“Just do like the flashlight stiffs on your beat,” Mitchell said, backing away. “You know. Pretend you a cop.”

Stoner’s second cousin, Hawkins, had gotten him the job. After work, Stoner waited for him at the bus stop near the corner of Woodward and Larned, on the west end of the Guardian’s block. Hawkins guarded a bank building on West Grand Boulevard in the New Center area, ten minutes north of downtown. Stoner stood around for twenty-five minutes, staring at the statues along Woodward — Joe Louis’s fist, the crouching naked man who was supposed to be the Spirit of Detroit — before Hawkins pulled up.

Hawkins’s Grand Marquis Brougham — white-on-white, rust-shot, passenger-side mirror hanging down, driver-side mirror missing — might have been one of the cars jamming Hawkins’s family’s driveway, or up on cinder blocks in their side yard, back when Stoner and Hawkins were kids.

He handed Stoner a warm tallboy in a paper bag. “How was your first night, sweetie?”

“This about the time you’ll be getting down here, man?”

Hawkins laughed. “Don’t worry about it, bitch. Nobody’s gonna fuck with you, not in this uniform.” He made a right onto Jefferson Avenue, taking the Lodge to I-75 South. “I thought you were a cop myself.”

Stoner decided to let it go. He didn’t like standing around a bus stop, but the alternative was waiting inside the building for Hawkins to pull up to one of the entrances and honk the car horn. He didn’t want Mitchell or the guards who relieved the both of them or the neighborhood patrolmen to know that he didn’t have a car of his own.

It was the Motor City, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a man didn’t have a car?

It was a temporary situation — he’d get his truck running again soon enough — but there was no need to make it worse by pissing off Hawkins.

Stoner didn’t really know him anymore.

“I think you’re gonna like it,” Hawkins said. “And remember, this is just getting a foot in the door.”

Hawkins was talking about his big plan again: to start his own security company. “There’s gonna be more call for security work than ever. First we get in the hotels Detroit’s building. Then you get contracts with the bigwigs who come to stay in the hotels. When they’re looking for a bodyguard to travel with them when they fly to China and shit, they’re gonna say: Get in touch with the people at the Book Cadillac, the Pontchar-train, their security force was the bomb.”

Hawkins was the only night watchman at his building. Stoner pictured him pacing the empty building alone, hiding his beer from the janitor, reading every inch of the Free Press or the News, listening to the radio through the night, dreaming his dream of founding a world-class security company.

They were friends in childhood, then drifted apart — helped along by Stoner’s mother, who dismissed Hawkins’s family as “country.” He barely remembered Hawkins in high school: a solitary figure, starting to get heavy, reading Soldier of Fortune magazine when he thought no one was looking.

Stoner felt a sudden emptiness thinking about it. He took a long swallow of his beer.

“Yeah, I’d like to get Mitchell on board too,” Hawkins said.

“Oh yeah? You talk to him about it?”

“No, dude, but he’d be great. It would be cool to get a cop on board, especially at the beginning. It’d help, too, to have a brother, you know, help us get situated in Detroit.” Hawkins lit a cigarette. “And Mitchell’s from Oakland County, too, up there with the richies, so he knows how to talk to people.”

“He thinks I’m a cop,” Stoner said. He filled Hawkins in, repeating the conversation he’d had with Mitchell, at Hawkins’s insistence, word for word.

“And you played along?” Hawkins laughed. “Well, I hear the man’s getting married soon, going over wedding shit all the time. His brain’s probably fried. You’re gonna hafta set him straight — not now, but sometime.”

Mitchell introduced Stoner to the neighborhood patrolmen as a cop too.

Red and McSmith, both high-yellow black men in their forties, stood with their fists on their hips, regarding Stoner dubiously, as Mitchell said, “Stoner’s on the job, down in Brownstown.”

“That so?” Red said.

“We’re going to the Lafayette,” McSmith said. “You want a Coney dog, Mitchell?”

That night Stoner told Hawkins he wanted to come clean before it was too late. “They didn’t buy it.”

“It’s too late,” Hawkins said. “Listen, if push comes to shove, tell everybody you’re a dispatcher.”

“What if they quiz me? What’s a seven twenty-one? ”

Hawkins was certain it wouldn’t happen.

Two nights later, Red and McSmith pulled up next to Hawkins’s Grand Marquis at the bus stop as Stoner was walking up to the car.

Stoner tensed. He could see that Hawkins already had an open beer between his legs, and was reaching down to grab a beer for Stoner out of a bag on the floor of the front seat.

They had already settled into a pattern, driving around the city after work, drinking beer in the early morning hours, Hawkins giving Stoner uninformative tours of various sights Stoner didn’t even want to see in daylight, putting off heading for the freeway home just a bit longer each day.

With the mirror on his side of the car missing, Hawkins hadn’t noticed the cops. McSmith was resting an arm on the open window in the passenger seat of the patrol car, noting the absence of the mirror, and hearing the country music that Stoner noticed was, regrettably, coming out of the stereo.

“Hey!” Stoner called, trying to draw everyone’s attention.

“Hey, rookie,” McSmith said, without looking in his direction.

Hawkins sat up and looked at the cops and killed the radio. He slowly placed his hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, a gesture meant to be ironic and hostile, lost on no one.

“Stoner, this your car?”

“It’s mine,” Hawkins said, looking out the windshield.

“You need to do something about the mirrors, my man.”

“And the body,” Red said, leaning over.

“Yeah,” McSmith laughed. “Looks like a junkyard toilet. Stoner, see your buddy gets some mirrors, y’hear?” They pulled away.

Stoner got in the Grand Marquis.

“Fucking assholes,” Hawkins said.

“Man, don’t fuck around with those guys.”

“Fucking Dee-troit police. Bunch of thugs. They just love to fuck with white people. The only time they go into the neighborhoods where their own people are killing each other over crack is when they need to make some quick cash.”

Stoner had seen the stories in the News and the Free Press lately, and Hawkins had filled him in with details that hadn’t made the newspapers. Detroit residents reporting shakedowns by cops — or people claiming to be cops. The mayor’s personal security detail — made up entirely of cops who’d been on the football team with him in high school — escorting visiting rap stars to after-hours clubs. A stripper who’d performed at a party at the mayoral residence, Manoogian Manor, turning up in a dumpster.

To Hawkins the stories were gospel truth. They explained why he’d been rebuffed whenever he tried to talk to any of the cops up in the New Center about coming on board, becoming a partner in his security company venture.

“They don’t want to get in bed with Whitey. Might knock ’em out of line for that cushy job at the motor pool, or sitting in a car outside the Manoogian on permanent overtime. Might fuck up their payments from the union in the next round of layoffs or the next strike. That’s their whole ambition, dude.”

Stoner knew that trouble was coming, but he wasn’t certain what to do. The money that was, in his mind, earmarked for his truck repairs kept going to Hawkins, for gasoline and beer. What was he going to do, not give his cousin gas money? He knew he should turn down the beer, make some noise about heading home when Hawkins started driving around aimlessly at night, make excuses when they pulled into their usual final stop, the bar down by the Ford plant in Wyandotte that never seemed to close. There had to be an easy way to get Hawkins to take him home after work. Stoner needed to separate himself — start drinking less, stop sleeping through all the daylight hours, fix his truck — without crushing his cousin’s spirit any further.

He just didn’t know how to do it.

A few nights later, the Grand Marquis Brougham was already idling at the bus stop when Stoner arrived, the patrol car sitting behind it, Red in the passenger seat this time. McSmith was behind the wheel, writing Hawkins a ticket.

Red watched Stoner walk toward the patrol car. “Hey, rookie.”

“We were gonna take care of that this weekend,” Stoner said, hoping this was about the mirrors.

“Know what I was gonna do this weekend?” McSmith asked, without looking up from his writing. “Titty-fuck Pamela Anderson.” Red laughed and shook his head. “Now I hear that Kid Rock gone and marry her.”

“We don’t see a lot of daylight during the week,” Stoner said, thinking of his dead truck. “You know how it is.”

McSmith didn’t look up. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.”

“How about one break?”

Red shrugged. “He’s already writing, Stoner.”

“His money’s kind of tight, man.”

McSmith handed over the ticket. “Then pay it for him, rookie.”

“Just go slow,” Stoner said to Hawkins back in the car.

Hawkins pulled up to the light. His face and neck had turned bright red. He made the right onto Jefferson.

“It never fails. Give ’em a badge, they bust on a honky.” Hawkins tipped his beer.

The cops gave a short burst on their siren, a single whoop. Stoner looked back: The patrol car was right behind the Grand Marquis.

Hawkins spilled his beer down the front of his uniform. “Fuck!”

“Just be cool,” Stoner said.

Hawkins pulled to the curb. McSmith appeared at Hawkins’s window.

“I don’t know about Brownstown,” he said, with a certain theatrical relish, “but here in Detroit? We frown on open intoxicants.”

Stoner’s door opened. “Come out here, Stoner,” Red said.

Stoner climbed out of the car and followed Red to the middle of the sidewalk. They turned and watched Hawkins hand the rumpled grocery bag filled with beer out his window.

“Your buddy on the job?” Red asked.

“No.”

Red shrugged. “Army buddy?”

“Kid I grew up with,” Stoner said.

“Well,” Red said. His voice had become gentle. He nodded back in Hawkins’s direction, inviting Stoner to follow his gaze and contemplate the battered car and the sullen young fat man in the soiled uniform. “You’re all grown up now. Right?”

He’s my cousin, Stoner wanted to say.

He knew it was too late.

For a cop, Red didn’t seem like a bad guy, and being black, he might have understood about family; and he seemed to be making Stoner some kind of offer — square your shoulders, join the club.

Stoner had blown him off, though, and dissed his cousin in the bargain. It was too late to take any of it back.

“They’re just fuckers, all of them,” Hawkins said, back behind the wheel. “I hope they choke on that beer.”

“I thought you wanted to be a cop,” Stoner said.

“What? ”

“Didn’t you want to be a cop? I thought I remember you say—”

“When?”

“I don’t know — high school?”

“Oh hell, that’s possible.”

They drove in silence.

“No, wait. Kill a cop. I said I wanted to kill a cop,” Hawkins said, deadpan, then laughed at his own joke.

Stoner didn’t join him.

The laughter broke into a cough. Hawkins cleared his throat. “Bunch of short-sighted motherfuckers. This is what I keep running into. I’m looking for a partner — not even a real partner. You’re my real partner. I need a cop to liaison with the cops. I need a cop like a car dealership needs a washed-up Lions receiver. These idiots would rather take their pissant pensions and drink themselves to death in the La-Z-Boy. They’d rather play their little games, take their penny-ante scores. Like there’s anything special in pushing people around with your uniform. You wanna see how special it makes you feel? We could get out at the next intersection.”

Stoner had a bad feeling: He knew exactly what Hawkins was getting at.

“I’m serious. You look like a cop to me.”

“That’s just the uniforms, in the dark.”

“That’s what I’m saying.” Hawkins dragged on his smoke. “I think we oughta take a little walk around, see what we can do.”

“Man, what are you talking about?”

“We wouldn’t have to be good cops, dude,” he said, grinning now. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

Hawkins had turned the wrong way leaving downtown. He looked lost, but seemed too angry to care. Stoner was looking for the freeway, any freeway, spotting a section of one now and then, like a man in a desert might see water. The on-ramp was nowhere in sight.

They were driving west on Rosa Parks Boulevard, a two-lane artery through some bleak residential neighborhoods. Hawkins looked left and right, and spotted a boarded-up corner party store up ahead, covered in tags. It was the only thing they’d seen that passed for a landmark. Hawkins turned up the street, pulled to the curb, and killed the headlights. “Come on,” he said, shutting off the engine and taking the key out of the ignition. He picked his uniform cap off the dashboard, stepped out of the car, and closed the door.

Stoner got out of the car. Standing up, he felt shaky, and realized how crazy the scene with Red and McSmith had made him feel; sitting in the car since then had only made it worse.

Hawkins was pulling on rain gear: a poncho, a bonnet for his cap, both gray. The gear covered up the security company insignia on the uniform, and left his holster and badge to the imagination.

Stoner was amazed: At that moment, Hawkins looked just like a cop.

He followed him up the center of the dark street.

“Just keep talking,” Hawkins said. “Normal voice. Have a conversation, like you’re not afraid of anything, and you won’t be.”

Stoner looked in the broken front window of the first house on his right as they walked past. Moonlight shone right through from a window in the rear. He told himself they were all empty — it was a carnival attraction, the haunted street — and that he was calm and ready.

It wasn’t working.

Hawkins asked him how the Tigers had done the night before, knowing Stoner read the sports section during his lunch break.

Stoner laughed. The fact that Hawkins cared nothing about sports made his prompt to start talking seem even more ridiculous. But he launched into what he could remember of the newspaper account of Jeremy Bonderman’s fourth-inning meltdown on the mound, and Hawkins feigned interest, and soon Stoner noticed his pulse had stopped racing.

He was beginning to feel pretty good when a figure came from the shadows and slanted across the street up ahead of them.

“POLICE,” Hawkins yelled. “HOLD UP!”

The man stopped and looked back, then turned away from the sight of Hawkins barreling toward him and took a couple of loping steps, without gaining any ground, before Hawkins crashed into his back and sprawled him over the hood of a Lincoln Zephyr.

“Hold up, hold up,” the man sputtered. He was lifting his arms straight above his head, like a diver. Hawkins was doubled over on top of him, catching his breath.

“Hands on the hood,” Stoner said. “Please.”

He looked around. The shouts, the whistle of Hawkins’s uniform as his thighs collided during the sprint, the tackle into the car had all sounded to Stoner like gunfire in the quiet. But no lights had come on anywhere in the block. When he glanced back, Hawkins was holding a small, wet-looking wad of money in front of the man’s hollow eyes.

“Where you headed with this, huh?” Hawkins said, panting. When he’d gotten his wind back, he pushed off the hood of the car, then grabbed the man’s arm and spun him around. “Go on.”

“My aunt’s. My aunt’s house.” The man stood there, hugging himself. Stoner could see he was waiting, halfheartedly, for his money back.

“Go on now,” Hawkins said, making a shooing motion.

The man stood a second longer, his lips working like he might cry, then he turned and walked up the street.

“Jesus Christ,” Stoner said.

“Did you see his hands?” Hawkins asked, holding up his own to look at them. “His fingertips were black, like, down to the second knuckle. Must be he’s one of them cutting the copper wire out of the streetlights and shit.”

“Fuck you!” the man shouted back at them.

Stoner jumped. The man had stopped at the end of the block, but once he’d gotten their attention, he turned away and continued walking.

Hawkins laughed.

“Let’s get out of here,” Stoner said.

“Yeah,” Hawkins replied. “Come on, let’s get a beer.”

Back in the car, Stoner drank a beer in two swallows while Hawkins started the engine and drove away. He grabbed another beer, and Hawkins pulled a pint of whiskey from beneath the driver’s seat. Hawkins took a swallow and handed it to Stoner, then flipped the wad of cash at him. “Looks like about twenty bucks. Count it.”

It was a five and thirteen ones. “Eighteen.”

“Is that all?”

The elusive on-ramp appeared suddenly on their right, and Hawkins aimed the car down it.

Stoner peered over at him. Disheveled, still winded, he looked near collapse, like he’d been up for days, yet he still seemed angry, full of determination.

For his part, Stoner felt like he’d been in a fight that ended before he was able to throw a punch.

“The problem,” Hawkins said, “is that these people don’t have a lot of money, because they spend whatever they can get on drugs.”

They exited the freeway and drove through Greektown, finding their way to Jefferson Avenue. Soon they were heading alongside the Detroit River, a mile east of the Renaissance Center; on their right, gated communities with their own shopping centers; across Jefferson, empty lots and liquor stores, hand-painted sandwichboards advertising bait.

“Did you see the artist’s drawings in the paper, the plans?” Hawkins got a cigarette going. “This is all gonna be part of the new riverfront, and here there’s gonna be office and retail and residential all together, like retail on the ground floor, offices and condos upstairs. This is where we need to put the office. I’m telling you, man, we’ve got to act now. The Super Bowl. The All-Star Game. Terrorists coming over from Canada. There’s big money to be made.”

Stoner looked out over the river. He had to admit it was a nice view. “What’s the plan?” he asked.

The crack house sat in weeds and gravel on a street off Grand River and the Jeffries. Wet trash lined the curb between the parked cars. Several newer cars and SUVs were standing, engines idling, and silhouettes moved through the dark between the vehicles. Voices, low and harsh, carried through the night air. Then someone turned up the walk to the front door of the house.

Hawkins stepped away from the window. “Here comes another,” he called.

Not so loud, thought Stoner, standing in the kitchen. He looked down at the man in the chair, haphazardly bound with bungee cords and duct tape, and caught the guy reading the irritation on his face. He’ll try to play us against each other. Stoner took a step toward the chair.

“You ain’t police,” the man said, just before Stoner forced the gag back into his mouth.

Now Stoner was truly exasperated.

“You think?”

He backed up against the wall and waited. The weight of his Maglite was dragging it slowly down out of his fist. When there was no sound from the front room for too long, he edged around the corner and stage whispered, “What’s up?”

Hawkins was back at the window, his hair standing on end. Stoner glanced around the room: Hawkins’s uniform cap lay upside down on an arm of the ratty sofa.

“I think he saw me.”

“He see the cap?”

“I think so. He turned back.”

“Ah, fuck.”

“Easy,” Hawkins said. “They may’ve just remembered they never saw the other dude come out.”

“Let’s go now.”

“And do what?”

They’d searched the house, but found only forty dollars, and no drugs at all. The man in the kitchen wasn’t talking.

“You’re right,” Stoner said. “Let’s stick to the plan. If we knock out all the runners, maybe the rich white suburbanites will hop out of their SUVs and come to the door themselves to get robbed.”

“Chill the fuck out.”

Stoner left Hawkins at the front door and went to the bedroom to check on the first guy who’d knocked on the door, the one Hawkins had hit on the head repeatedly with his Maglite. He found the man on the bed where they’d left him. He was sitting up, alert enough to mutter something about swelling, and to call Stoner a fucking cracker. He was a kid, really. He didn’t look good. His eyes kept trying to close.

“Shut up,” Stoner told him.

“Gimme back my money, you prick.” The kid sounded disgusted; then, suddenly, he slumped back against the wall and his chin dropped to his chest.

Stoner moved closer, but couldn’t bring himself to reach in and check for a pulse. He stood over the kid until he was satisfied that the kid’s chest was actually rising and falling in the dark, that he wasn’t just willing himself to see it happen.

Hawkins called his name from the front of the house, again too loudly.

He was moving toward Hawkins’s voice when something started banging against the outside of the front door.

Hawkins stood at the peephole with his palms flat against the door. Stoner put his hand on Hawkins’s shoulder, and Hawkins took one step sideways, not moving his palms, as if he were bracing the door.

“Just pulled up,” Hawkins said.

Stoner ducked between Hawkins’s arms and put his eye to the peephole, just as the man on the porch began to speak. He ducked again, instinctively, at the sound of the guy’s voice, then slowly lined his eye up with the peephole and looked out.

The man stood with his hands clasped behind his neck and his feet apart, in the stance of someone about to be handcuffed, but he was alone. The black cat between his feet, once Stoner’s eyes adjusted, became an oily-looking gym bag.

“What the point havin’ a cell you don’t answer it?” the man said.

“Fuck’s he talking about?” Hawkins hissed into Stoner’s ear.

“This some unnecessary bullshit,” the man continued, his head back, addressing the night sky.

Stoner could just make out a dark SUV behind him at the curb. “See if anybody’s in that truck,” he whispered to Hawkins.

Crouched by the window, Hawkins shook his head.

Stoner reached for the deadbolt with his left hand, grasped the doorknob with his right.

Hawkins scrambled around to the other side of the doorway, hefted his Maglite over his head.

“Tell him to bring it in,” Stoner said.

“BRING IT IN!”

Stoner yanked the door open.

The man on the porch did not step inside.

When three seconds had passed, Stoner and Hawkins collided in the doorway.

“Oh, hell no,” the man on the porch said. His hands were dropping from behind his neck. He seemed to be caught between kicking the bag and reaching to grab it when Stoner swung the Maglite into the side of his head.

They met at the Ford plant bar the next afternoon. Hawkins was talking to the pretty bartender as she worked a rag over the top of the bar.

“Hey, Stoner, tell Kiley what part of Detroit you work in.”

“The Central Business District.”

The bartender laughed convulsively, held the back of her wrist to her mouth, trying to stop.

“See? What I tell ya?” When she moved away to draw a beer for Stoner, Hawkins leaned toward him and said, “We gotta go back.”

“Where?”

“What? Come on. Thanks, Kiley.” Hawkins picked up both of their glasses and started walking toward a booth.

“Eddie, did you see the newspaper?” Stoner’s own voice sounded crazy to him, almost as crazy as Hawkins did.

“Yeah, I saw it. One of those crackheads had the decency to call an ambulance like you told them.”

“And?”

Hawkins sat down. “And — everybody’s in Detroit Receiving with a headache?”

“And the fucking FBI is in town investigating the police department.”

“That just means the dickheads the bagman was looking for are gonna be laying low.” Hawkins drummed the tabletop, grinning widely. “Fucking three grand, dude!”

Stoner sat down, shaking his head. “Think about it, man. Even the cops who’re total jackoffs have got to be thinking about finding the guys who took down that house, before Internal Affairs tries to pin it on them.”

Hawkins nodded. “They’re closing ranks. But that’s what always happens when some shit hits the news. I’ve been doing this for three years, remember.”

“Doing what for three years?”

“Been a security man three years.”

“They gotta be looking at the patrolmen,” Stoner said, thinking aloud, “because who else is gonna go to the trouble for a few hundred bucks?”

“We did better than that.”

“They don’t know how much we got. We took three thousand off the guys they’re looking for. And those guys have got to be looking for us.”

He waved the folded Detroit News he was still carrying.

“And now the FBI is watching everybody,” Stoner added.

“They’re looking for dirty cops, not for us.”

“They’re looking for dickhead cops. They have no idea that they’re looking for cops as dirty as the cops we ripped off.”

“Still — they’re looking for dirty cops, so the dirty cops will lay low.”

“Yeah, well, that’s also pretty good incentive for the good cops to find us, don’t you think?”

“That’s why we have to act fast. We have time for one more score, while they’re still all bumpin’ dicks.”

“Man, what are you talking about? You want to shake down another house?”

“I want another gym bag.”

Stoner looked into his cousin’s crazy eyes and laughed. “Dumb luck, man.”

“We need two months’ rent. Stationery and business cards. I’m telling you, dude, we’ve got to act now. The Super Bowl. The All-Star Game. Terrorists coming over from Canada. There’s big money to be made.”

Stoner thought about the money again.

He’d already set aside a grand from the bag — a third of the take, less than a full share. That was money enough to fix his truck, or make a down payment on another used car. His cousin could keep the rest, and five hundred of Stoner’s share, and put it toward the business. He’d help him tonight, because he could see there was no way Hawkins wasn’t going, but that would be the end of it.

“There’s no way we can know about another house that’s paying off those cops. What do you want to do, stake out the entire fucking supermarket?”

“No, dude. We don’t have time. We gotta do the same house.”

They went that night.

They turned off Grand River Avenue onto Fullerton and moved in a grid, staying at least two blocks away from the street the house was on. Hawkins drove slowly, with the headlights off and the windows rolled down. They both sat leaning forward, watching and listening.

Stoner thought it was a good strategy, but it was hard to see much: The houses were set too close together, the spaces between filled with overgrown shrubs and bedsprings.

Finally he saw yellow police tape poking through the backyards. “Stop,” he told Hawkins, pointing.

Hawkins put the car in park and killed the engine, right in the middle of the street. “That’s not the house,” he said finally.

“It’s not, is it?”

“Nope,” Hawkins said. “Wrong side of the street. Too far down.”

“Think something else happened?”

“What do you think?”

“I think they moved them to this house, here, then called the cops.”

“There must’ve been something in that house. I mean, we didn’t find shit. But there was some shit in there they did not want to give up, or there was too much of it to move.”

“I think they’re still in business, at the other house.”

“Man, those guys didn’t seem together enough for this.” Hawkins sounded scared.

Stoner shook his head. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I think you’re right,” Hawkins said.

“Let’s try someplace else. Let’s try southwest Detroit. Along Michigan Avenue somewhere.” Stoner held his wristwatch up to his face, but without any working streetlights, it was too dark to read it. “What time is it?”

Hawkins poked a finger at the dashboard radio, as if he’d forgotten the ignition was off and was trying to summon the digital clock.

“Let’s just go,” Stoner said.

Hawkins turned the key in the ignition, and country music, badly distorted at full volume, blasted out of the speakers and pinned them back in their seats.

They both shrieked like girls. Their hands collided, trying to turn the radio off.

“Jesus Christ!”

They looked at each other and laughed in the sudden quiet, true partners at last.

“Man,” Hawkins said, listening, “not even a dog barking.”

“Guess we didn’t wake anybody up.”

“I wonder why they don’t like dogs.”

They came to the end of the block, and a dark four-door with its headlights off slammed into their front end, spinning the Grand Marquis ninety degrees.

Four broad-shouldered men, moving the way cops moved, scrambled out of the car. They said nothing Stoner could hear. They were dressed nothing like cops. The car looked nothing like a cop car: It looked like one of the cars jamming the Hawkins family’s driveway, or up on cinder blocks in their side yard, back when Stoner and Hawkins were kids.

The man who’d gotten out of the driver’s seat shot Hawkins in the chest, twice.

Stoner opened his door and fell to the ground. There was nowhere to go. He crawled underneath the Grand Marquis.

“Oh no,” a voice said, chiding, “no-no.”

Stoner felt hands close around his ankles.

“Cover this bitch!”

Stoner was dragged backward. His shirt bunched up under his armpits. He got a hand up to grab at the underside of the car, but whatever he managed to close his palm around immediately burned him, and he let go. He was in the open. They dropped his ankles. He tried to turn onto his back. Someone planted a boot between his shoulder blades.

“Got a wallet,” one of them called from the other side of the car. “Got ID.”

Someone patted Stoner down, put fingers in his back pocket. His wallet came out.

“Got his too.” The boot lifted off his back. “ID, got it.”

“Where’s the bag?”

They kicked him in the ribs. It took his breath away.

“It at his house, your house?”

“Mine,” Stoner managed to say.

Was there any chance they might not shoot if they thought he really was a cop? What had he said to Mitchell?

“I’m from Downriver,” he said, but this time it sounded like a plea.

“Fucking cracker,” the man said, and shot Stoner in the back of the head.

Our eyes couldn’t stop opening by Megan Abbott

Alter Road

She always wanted to go and there was no stopping her once she got it in her head. Her voice was like a pressure in the car, Joni’s mother’s Buick, its spongy burgundy seats and the smell forever of L’Air du Temps.

Joni was game for it and I guess we all were, we liked Keri, you see, we admired her soft and dangerous ways. So lovely with her slippery brown hair lashed with bright highlights (all summer spent at the Woods Pool squeezing lemons into her scalp), so lovely with her darted skirts, ironed jeans, slick Goody barrettes. She was Harper Woods but, you see, she transcended that, so we let her slide, we let her hang with us, even let her lead us sometimes, times like this. Her mother put every dime of her Hutzel Hospital nurse’s salary into her daughter’s clothes, kept Keri looking Grosse Pointe and Keri could pass, pass well enough to snare with her pearl-pink nails, fingers spread, a prime tow-headed, lacrosse-playing Grosse Pointe South boy, Kirk Deegan, hair as blond as an Easter chick and crisp shirts with thin sherbet-colored stripes and slick loafers, ankles bare with the fuzz of downy boy hair. Oh my, did she hit the jackpot with him. Play her cards right, she could ride him anywhere she wanted to go.

None of us, not even anyone we knew, was supposed to cross Alter Road, even get near Alter Road, it was like dropping off the face of the earth. Worse even than that. The things that happened when you slipped across that burning strip of asphalt, the girl a few years older than us — someone’s cousin, you didn’t know her — who crossed over, ended up all the way over on Connor, they found her three days later in a field, gangbanged into a coma at some crack house and dumped for dead, no, no, it was three weeks later and someone saw her taking the pipe and turning tricks in Cass Corridor. No, no, it was worse, far worse … and then it’d go to whispers, awful whispering, what could be worse, you wondered, and you could always wonder something even worse.

But there Keri would be, nestled in the backseat, glossy lips shining in the dark car, fists on the back of the passenger seat, saying, Let’s go, let’s go. C’mon. What’s here, there’s nothing here. Let’s go.

How many nights, after all, could be spent sloshing long spoons in our peanut butter cup sundaes at Friendly’s, watching boys play hockey at Community Ice, huddling down in seats at Woods Theater, popcorn sticky on our fingers, lips, driving around trying to find parties, any parties, where new boys would be, boys we’d never met, but our boys, they all wore their letter jackets and all had the same slant in their hair, straight across the forehead, sharp as ice, and the same conversation and the same five words before your mouth around beer can begging for the chance to not talk, to let the full-mouthed rush of music flood out all the talk and let the beer do its work so this boy in front of you might seem everything he wasn’t and more — how many nights of that, I ask you?

So when Keri said, Let’s go, maybe we let ourselves unsnide our tones, let our tilted-neck looks loosen a bit, unroll our eyes, curl into her quiet urging and go, go, go.

When he was around, Joni’s brother, he’d buy us beer, wine coolers, and she’d hide them in the hedgerow underneath her bedroom window until we needed them. But he was at Hillsdale most of the time, trying to get credits enough to graduate and start working at Prudential for his dad. So there was Bronco’s, right off the Outer Drive exit, and you could buy anything you wanted there, long as you were willing to drop twelve dollars for a four-pack of big-mouth Mickey’s, or a tall 40 of Old Style, the tang of it lingering in your mouth all night.

Bronco’s, it was a kick, the street so empty and the fluorescent burst of its sign rising like a beacon, a shooting star as you came up the long slope on I-94. Sometimes it made your heart beat, stomach wiggle, vibrate, flip, like when the manager — a big-bellied white guy with a greasy lower lip — made Keri go in the back with him, behind the twitchy curtain. But he only wanted to turn her around, only wanted to run his fingers studded with fat gold over her chest and backside, and what did any of us care? It was worth the extra bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill he’d dropped in our paper bag. Hell, you always pay a price, don’t you? Like Keri said, from the dark of the backseat, how different was it from letting the Blue Devils football starters under your bra so you’d get into the seniors’ party on Lakeshore where the parents had laid out for six cases of champagne before heading to Aruba for the weekend? How different from that? Very different, we said, but we knew it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t only Bronco’s. Bronco’s was just how it started. Next, it was leaving a party on Windmill Pointe, hotted up on beer and cigarettes and feeling our legs bristling tight in our jeans and Keri saying, Let’s go that way, yes, that way, and before we knew it, we’d tripped the fence.

Goddamn, Alter Road a memory.

We pitched over the shortest curl of a bridge, over a sludgy canal not twelve feet across, and there we were. But it wasn’t like over by Bronco’s. It was just as deserted, but it didn’t look like a scarred patch of city at all. The smell of the water and trailers backed up onto the canal, abandoned trailers, one after another, rutted through with shimmering rust, quivering under streetlamps, narrow roads filled with rotting boats teetering on wheels, mobile homes with windows broken out, streets so narrow it was like being on the track of a funhouse ride and then, suddenly, all the tightness giving way to big, empty expanses of forlorn, overgrown fields, like some kind of prairie. Never saw anything like it, who of us had? And our breath going fast in the car because we’d found something we’d never seen before. And it was like our eyes couldn’t stop opening.

We’d let the gas pedal surge, vibrate, take us past sixty, seventy on the side streets, take the corners hard, let the tires skid, what did we care? There was no one here. There was no one on the streets. All you could see was shivering piles of trash, one-eyed cats darting. What did it matter? There was no one left. I tell you, it was ours.

But Keri, she kept finding new streets and her voice, soft and lulling, the Grosse Pointe drawl, bored-sounding even when excited, hot under the eyes, all that. She’d say — and who were we to decline? — she’d say, Turn left, turn left, Joni, there, Joni, there, and we’d find ourselves further in, further in, down the river, the slick brew of the canals long past now, and trembling houses cooing to us as the wind gasped through their swelling crevices, their glassless windows, their dark glory. That’s the thing Keri showed us. She showed us that.

It’s beautiful, she said without even saying it.

If we’d all been speaking out loud, we’d have never had the guts to say it.

And eventually, we saw people.

First, a stray cluster of figures, young men, walking together. A man alone, singing softly, we could hear, our windows open, radio off, we wanted to hear. Do you see? We wanted to hear. He was singing about a lady in a gold dress.

A woman, middle-aged, clapping her hands at her dog, calling him toward her, the dog limping toward her, howling, wistful.

But mostly small fits of young men standing around, tossing cigarette embers glowing into the street.

At first, Joni’d pick up speed whenever she saw them, chattering high-pitched and breathless, about how they’d try to jack her mother’s car and take it to a chop shop — there’s hundreds of them all over the city, there are — and in twenty minutes her mother’s burgundy Buick Regal would be stripped to a metal skeleton. That’s how it works, she’d say. That’s what they do.

None of us said anything. We felt the car hop over a pothole, our stomachs lifting, like on the Gemini at Cedar Pointe.

Then, Keri: This time, Joni, go slow. Come on, Joni. Let’s see what they’re doing. Let’s see. And Joni would teeth chatter at us about white girls raped in empty fields till they bled to death, and we let her say it because she needed to say it, had to get it out, and maybe we had to hear it, but we knew she’d go slower, and she did.

And then we’d be long past Alter, past Chalmers even, into that hissing whisper that was, to us, Detroit. Detroit. Say it. Hard in your mouth like a shard of glass. Glittering between your teeth and who could tell you it wasn’t terrifying and beautiful all at once?

His voice was low and rippled and yeah, I’ll say it, his skin was dark as black velvet, with a blue glow under the streetlamp, and he was talking to his friends from the sidewalk and we could almost hear them and God we wanted to and there was Keri and she had her hands curled around the edges of the top of the car door, window down, and he was looking at her like he knew her, and how could he? He didn’t, but he couldn’t miss that long spray of hair tumbling out the window as she craned to get a better look, to hear, to get meaning.

“You lost, honey?” is what he said, and it was like glass shattering, or something stretched tight for a thousand miles suddenly letting loose, releasing, releasing.

“Yes,” was all she managed to whisper back before Joni had dropped her foot down on the gas hard and we all charged away, our hearts hammering …

… and Keri still saying, Yes, yes, yes …

You have to understand, we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know anything at all about conditions, history, the meanings of things. We didn’t know anything. We were seeing castles in ruin like out of some dark fairy tale, but with an edge of wantonness, like all the best fairy tales.

Keri, by the lockers Monday a.m., doors clattering, pencils rolling down polished halls, she leans toward me, cheek pressed on the inside of my locker door, swinging it, rocking it. She says, Remember when Joni drove the car real slow and let us get our eyeful and he looked at me and in his eyes I could see he knew more than any of us, more than all the teachers at school, all the parents too, he knew more in that flashing second than all the rest of everyone, all of them sleeping through forever in this place, this marble-walled place. In his eyes, what I could see was he was someone more than I could ever be.

Keri, she tells us, first date with Kirk Deegan, he resplendent in Blue Devils jacket and puka shell necklace from a December trip to Sanibel Island, he winds his way from his hulking colonial on Rivard to her faded one-story in Harper Woods, can smell the pizza grease from the deli on the corner and he won’t come inside. No, he stands one foot on the bottom porch step, Ray-Bans propped, and says, “Nah, where would I fit?”

I should’ve seen it coming because who wanted to keep doing the same thing, which was fun at first, but where could it go, in the end? You couldn’t get out of the car. It was for kicks and you did it until the kicks stopped. This time, it worked like this: Joni started dating a De La Salle boy and he had a car anyway and evenings were now for him and I was starting up tennis and there were new parties and Keri, we saw her more like a long-haired flitter in the corner of our eye. We barely saw her at all. She was there in the Homecoming Court, glowing in her floral dress, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still. Face so frozen for all the flashing cameras, for all the cheering faces, for all of us, for everybody.

It was her last of everything that year. It was her last. You could kind of see it then, couldn’t you? It was there somehow, making everything more special, more like something, at least.

Later, at the dance, willowing around Kirk Deegan, he towering over her with that bright wedge of hair, the black-watch plaid vest and tie, that slit-eyed cool, he who never let another boy come near, even touch her shoulder, even move close. What boy ever kept me so tight at hand? What boy? I ask you. He loved her that much, everyone said it. He loved her that much.

Sidling up to me in study hall, eyes fluttering, red, Keri’s voice tired, slipping into my ear. How was the party? she’s asking. Was Stacey mad I didn’t go? I just smiled because of course Stacey was mad, because Keri was supposed to come and bring Kirk, because if Kirk came, so would Matt Tomlin, and she was angling for Matt Tomlin, was so ready for him she could barely stand it.

Where’d you guys go? I asked. And she gave me a flicker of a smile and she didn’t say anything. And I said, Did you and Kirk … and she shook her head fast.

I didn’t see him. It wasn’t that.

And she told me Kirk was too wasted to go anywhere, showing off some old Scotch of his father’s and then drinking three inches of it, passing out on the leather armchair like some old guy. So she took his Audi and went for a drive and before she knew it she was long past Alter Road, long past everything. Even the Jefferson plant, the Waterworks. She said she drove all around in his car and saw things and ended up getting lost down by some abandoned railroad.

She was crazy to be doing it and I told her so and she nodded like she agreed, but I could tell by the way she looked off in the other direction that she didn’t agree at all and that all she’d realized was that she wouldn’t bother telling me about it anymore. But she didn’t stop going. You could feel her rippling in her own pleasure over it. Like she was someone special who got to do things no one else did.

I met some people a few weeks ago, she said. They invited me to a party at this big old house, I don’t even know where. You could see the big Chrysler plant. That was all you could see. The house, it had turrets like a castle. Like a castle in a fairy tale. I remember I wanted to go to the top and stand in the turret like a lost princess and look out on the river, waving a long handkerchief like I was waiting for a lover to come back from the sea.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I never heard anyone talk like this. I think it was the most I ever heard her talk and it didn’t make any more sense than Trig class to me.

The house was empty, she said. The floors were part broken through. My foot slid between the boards and this boy, he had to lift me out and he was laughing. They were playing music and speakers were all over the house, one set up on an old banister thick as a tree trunk and everyone dancing and beer and Wild Irish Rose, wine so red like bloodshot eyes and smoking, getting high, and the whole place alive and I danced, one of them danced with me, so dark and with a diamond in his ear and he said he’d take me to Fox Creek, near the trailers, and we’d shoot old gas tanks, and I said I would, and he sang in my ear and I could feel it through my whole body, like in lab when Mr. Muskaluk ran that current through me in front of the class, like that, like that. It was this. I could do anything, no one cared. I could do anything and no one stopped me.

“What did you do, Keri?” I asked, my voice sounded funny to me. Sounded fast and gasping. “What did you do?”

Anything, she whispered, voice breathless and dirty. Anything.

Did I have time for that, for that kind of trashiness? Don’t you see, Joni said, she’s Harper Woods. She may look Grosse Pointe, she may have one on her arm. But that’s a flash, a trick of the eye. Deep down, she’s five blocks from the freeway. It all comes back. You can fight it, but it comes back.

So we dropped her and it was just as well because lots of things were happening, with boys’ hockey starting and everyone’s parents taking trips to Florida and so there were more parties and there was the thing with the sophomore girl and the senior boy and the police and things like that that everyone talked about. Other stuff happened too — I’d dropped out of tennis and then dropped back in — there was a boy for me with a brush of brown hair and the long, adam-appled neck of a star basketball player, which he was, and I took him to Sadie Hawkins’s dance and he took me to parties and to parents’ beds in upstairs rooms at parties and slid his tongue fast into my dry mouth and his hands fumbling everywhere, and his car, it smelled like him, Polo and new sneakers and Stroh’s, and when it was over and I smelled those things, which you could smell on a dozen boys a day, it was him all over again, but then before I knew it, it was gone. He was gone, yeah, but the feeling that went with it too. Just like that.

Please, please can you drop me somewhere? Keri said, and we were in the school parking lot and her eyes rung wide and fingers gripped the top of the car door.

Okay, I said and even barely seeing her for months, a quick hello in the hallways, a flash in the locker room, me on my way in, she on her way out. To Kirk’s? I asked.

She said no. She said no and shook her head, gaze drifting off to the far end of the parking lot. Further than that. Further than that.

And then I knew and I told her it was my father’s car and if I got a scratch, he’d never buy me the Fiero come graduation and she promised it would be okay and I said yes. Against everything, I said yes.

So she was next to me and the sky was orange, then red as the sun dropped behind the Yacht Club, its gleaming white bell tower soaring — when I was a kid I thought it was Disneyland — I was going to take her. I felt somehow I had to.

Where are we going? I’d say, and she’d chew her gum and look out the window, fingers touching, breath smoking the glass. She was humming a song and I didn’t know it. It wasn’t a song any of us would know, a song we sang along with on WHYT, a song we all shouted out together in cars. It was something else all together. Plaintive and funny and I thought suddenly: Who does she think she is in my father’s car singing songs I don’t know in her white Tretorns and her pleated shirt and hair brushed to silk, whirling gold hoops hanging from her ears? And she thinks she can just go wherever she wants, do things in other places, touch more than the surface of things, and then keep it all inside her and never let anyone see in. Never let any of us.

You can drop me here, she was saying. We were at the foot of Windmill Pointe.

You just want me to leave you here? I asked, looking around, seeing not a soul. In Grosse Pointe, especially these its most gleamy stretches, the streets were always empty, like plastic pieces from a railroad set.

Yes, she said, and waved as she began walking toward the water, toward the glittering lighthouse.

Wait, Keri, I said, opening my door so she could hear me. Where are you going?

And she half turned and maybe she smiled, maybe she even said something, but the wind took it away.

When I saw her in school, I asked her. I said, Where did you go? What were you doing there? She was putting on her lip-gloss and shaking her hair out. I watched her eyes in the mirror magnet on the inside of her locker door. I thought maybe I’d see something, see something in there.

She watched me back, eyes rimmed with pale green liner, and I knew she had to tell someone, didn’t she? What did it count to run off the rails if you didn’t tell a soul? I looked at her with the most simpering face I could manage to make her see she could tell me, she could tell me.

But she didn’t now, did she? And that was the last time, see? It was the last of that flittering girl.

“Her cousin’s letting her drive her Nova, you should see it,” Joni was telling me. “I saw her in it. Do you think she’s taking it there? Next thing you know, we’ll be driving down Jefferson to go see the Red Wings game and she’ll be rolling with some black guys.” Joni was telling me this as we squeezed together on the long sofa at a party, beers in hand, Joni’s face sweaty and flushed, bangs matted to foreheads, chests heaving lightly.

I said I didn’t think she went at all anymore. I told Joni she wasn’t going at all. I didn’t want her to know. It was something between us. And, truth told, if she’d asked me, I’d’ve gone with her still. But she didn’t ask me, did she?

It was in the aching frost of February and I was coming out of a party on Beaconsfield and I saw her drive by. I saw the blue Nova and I saw her at the wheel and I saw which way she was headed and maybe my head was a little clogged from the beers, but I couldn’t help it and I was in my dad’s car and I headed toward Alter Road. She was long gone, but I kept driving and I thought maybe I’d see the car again, especially once I hit the ghostly pitch over the bridge at Alter and Korte Street. How many beers was it, I thought I could hear the squeal of her tires. The only sound at all, other than the occasional sludge of water against the creaking docks over the canal, were those tires. I thought it had to be her and I stopped my car, rolled down my windows, couldn’t hear anything so figured she stopped. Did she stop? I edged past the side streets and ended up back at that shell of a trailer court, those aluminum and wood carcasses, like plundered ships washed to shore. And that was when I thought I saw her, darting around the bowed trees, darting along like some kind of wood nymph in a magic forest, and yet it was this.

I could admit, if I let myself, there was a beauty in it, if you squinted, tilted your head. If you could squeeze out ideas of the kind of beauty you can rest in your palm, fasten around your neck, never have an unease about, a slip of cashmere, one fine pearl, a beauty everyone would understand and feel safe with. But I wouldn’t really do that, not for more than a second, and Keri, she would. It was like this place she’d found was Broadway, Hollywood, Shangri-La, and she would make it hers.

I parked my car and got out, the wind running in off the lake and charging at me, but I went anyway. That beer foaming my head, I just kept going. Who was going to stop me? I was going to see, see the thing through. I wasn’t going to tell, but I was going to see it for myself.

Wading through the golden rod, studded with scrap metal, with shredded firecrackers, flossy crimps of insulation foam, there I was. The trailers all edged in rust like frills peaking from under a dress, but as you got closer, it wasn’t so dainty and there was a feel in the air of awfulness. All of it, it reminded me of places you’re not supposed to be, they’re just not for you, like when we went to that house, when we were in Girl Scouts, to deliver the Christmas presents to the family on Mt. Elliott, and everyone told us, Just watch, they’ll have a big TV and a VCR and they’ll be lying around collecting welfare with tons of kids running around, and that wasn’t what happened at all, and remember how the baby wouldn’t stop shaking and the look in the mother’s eyes like she’d long ago stopped being surprised at anything, and the plastic on the windows and the leaking refrigerator, we weren’t supposed to be there at all, now, were we?

This, it was like that, but different, because this had that lostness but then too in place of sad there was this hard current of nastiness and dirtiness and badness, sweaty, gun-oil, mattress-spring coil throbbing, stains spreading. My eyes skating over the abandoned trailers and thinking of the things happening behind the bulging screens, the pitted aluminum. The sky so black and the vague sound of music and the feeling of teetering into something and then it getting inside you, feeding off you, making you its own.

There was a laugh then and it struck me hard right through the swirling muzz in my head, but it was warm, rippling, and it broke up some of the nastiness for me, but not enough.

Coming from one of the trailers, a faded red one with a rolling top, like a curling tongue. There was something glowing inside and there was music.

I felt my ankle twist on a bottle curved deep into the earth. I could hear the music, a thud-thud, bass tickling me, promising things, and I walked closer, I just did.

I walked closer like I could, like I was allowed, even as this was no place for me. That tickling laugh kept rolling itself out, felt like long fingers uncoiling just shy of me, just shy of my body, hot and itchy under my coat, aching for the cold wind ripping off the water and instead this runny canal, a ditch swelling.

And then there it was.

Soft, high, sweet, Keri’s own laugh.

Like when we watched a funny movie or when we watched Joni make cross-eyes or when we danced in our bedrooms, singing, singing until we thought our lungs would burst.

But then turning, turning like a dial and the laugh got lower, throatier, and I could feel it prickling under my skin, then sinking through me, down my legs, along the twitching pain in my ankle, straight into the ground.

Reaching under my feet.

And in my head, I could see her face and she’s lying on a stripped mattress, hair spread out beneath, a windmill, and she’s laughing and twisting and squirming, her head tilting back, neck arching, and who knew what was happening, what was happening to draw that throaty laugh from her, pump that bursting flush into her cheeks, face, God, Keri, God, all kinds of dark hands on her, she at the center of some awful white-girl gangbang. All those hands touching her white white-girl skin. These are the things I thought, I won’t claim otherwise.

I was standing ten seconds, a minute, who knew, the cold snaking around me but not touching. I could’ve stood forever, twenty feet from that trailer, watching. But then. But then. The sound.

A hinge struck and I could hear and there it was, I could see they weren’t in the trailer but on the other side of it and there I was, back to the mangled sheet metal, sidling around, and that’s when I saw the bonfire that made the glow and I hid behind the tinsely branches of a half-fallen tree and I watched and I saw everything, or figured I did.

There were two black guys and a white guy and there was a tall black girl with a dark jacket on and I could see it had gold print struck in it and then I saw it was a letter jacket, Keri’s letter jacket from volleyball, and the girl was climbing on the picnic table and that was where Keri was and she was dancing. She was dancing to the music from the radio they’d brought and one of the black guys, Keri was saying something to him as she danced, and he was laughing and watching her and I could tell he was the one she was with, you could see it in his eyes and hers, it was vibrating between them.

She was there in the Homecoming Court, resplendent in her floral dress, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still.

And the black girl joined Keri and the girl had a can of beer and so did Keri and the guys, they were shouting and they were lightly rocking the table, and the white guy was tipping a bottle of something into his mouth and singing about how some girl was his twilight zone, his Al Capone, and I could smell the pot and a lot was going on like at any party and it seemed like maybe more, but I was watching Keri and Keri’s face, it was lit from the fire and it was a crazy orange flaring up her cheeks and she was wearing her long cashmere muffler from Jacobson’s, coiled around her neck, flapping tight in the wind, and she was dancing and the fire lit her hair and I could see her face and it was like I’d never seen it before and never would again because things made sense even if they didn’t because there was something there that I felt twenty years too young to understand, no, not too young, because I couldn’t understand it because she was fathoms deep and I would be driving along Kercheval in fifteen minutes, driving to my family’s three-bedroom colonial and tucking myself in and hoping the boy would call and thinking about the next party and here was Keri and she was fathoms deep and I was…

I couldn’t have known, watching her there, watching her dancing and looking like that, feeling that way, that she would be gone by finals, by junior prom even. I never said a word about what I saw and I never told her to watch out either, even though, the way I was, I could only see it as she was going for broke and it could turn out any number of ways but most of them bad. But even if I had tried to warn her, to hold her back, it wouldn’t have mattered because I would’ve told her to watch out for the wrong things, the wrong places. I couldn’t have known, watching her there, that two weeks later she’d be driving a drunken Kirk Deegan home late after a postgame party, driving him in his Audi and coming into the Deegan garage too close to the wall and shearing off the side view mirror. I couldn’t have known Kirk Deegan would get so mad and push her so hard against the garage wall and her head hitting that pipe and then turning and hitting the edge of the shovel hanging and what must have been a sickening crack and her falling and her dying and her dying there on the floor of his garage. Her dying on the floor of his garage and him there, too dumbstruck to call the police, an ambulance, his parents, anyone, for a half hour while she was there, hair spread on the cement floor like a windmill and then gone forever. I couldn’t have known that. But one way or another I did.

Honesty above all else by Dorene O’Brien

Corktown

I’ve never told anyone this story, and I’m only telling you now because Mrs. O’Leary is dead. You don’t need to know my name — what’s it matter? I grew up in Cork-town, live in the same Carpenter Gothic on Church that my great-grandparents lived in. Against all odds, Corktown has survived — bravery, gentrification, the luck of the Irish? But back in ’99 when it happened, everything was going to hell. You couldn’t count on things anymore the way the Carmodys and the McNallys could count on trains to plow into Michigan Grand Central to the south and scatter tourists onto the doorsteps of Limerick’s Pub and the Lager House, or Tiger Stadium to the north to draw crowds like ants to spilled sugar. The Tigers were a magnet for suburbanites, who’d line their Cadillacs and Cutlasses up and down Michigan Avenue, the money bursting the seams in their pockets. My family inherited a parking lot on Trumbull, but that well ran dry when after a century of major league ball in our neighborhood the Tigers just trotted off, leaving behind a sad and hulking mess that nobody wants. The stadium’s still there, eight years later, a painful reminder of a better life, though out of loyalty or homage it’s the only abandoned building on Michigan that isn’t carved up, burned out, or sprayed with State Boyz and Plato tags.

Listen, I’m not going to get nostalgic; I’m not going to bend your ear about the heyday when bleacher creatures and CEOs focused on the same thing — warm hot dogs, cold beer, and a Major League pennant — or how Michigan Avenue suddenly popped bright when the outfield lights snapped on. I could see them from my bedroom window; I could hear the crack of the bat and I always pretended it was Kaline or Horton, the guys my father said were heroes, giving the opposing team pure hell. Why am I telling you this? Because people’s low-level fear after the depot closed turned into full-on panic when Tiger Stadium shut down, when Corktown’s seemingly sturdy bookends fell, crushing us under their collective weight. People grew sad when they realized they could no longer describe the boundaries of their city as anything within a one-mile radius of the pitcher’s mound, and they grew hopeless when they watched Reedy’s and the Gold Dollar get nailed up tight, graffiti-splattered boards covering multi-paned antique windows crafted by their Irish ancestors nearly two hundred years before. People change when they watch their heritage being obliterated, when they walk past vacant buildings every day, when they feel the luster fading from their lives. They do desperate things. I’m not making excuses for Mrs. O’Leary, who had the best intentions, after all; I’m just telling you how it was.

When our Trumbull lot closed I was out of a job, which was bittersweet for my father, who didn’t care for his twenty-two-year-old daughter collecting money in parking lots but who could also cast his eyes across the cars and calculate the night’s take in mere seconds. For a while I just kicked around Detroit, thinking with my associates degree in Business Administration I might get a part-time office job in the Fisher Building, hopefully near the top floors so I could watch the peregrine falcons loop and dive into the chaos below. What did they see from their skytop perches? Not the smoke from the Seven Sisters; those stacks had been detonated three years before in ’96. I wondered what the falcons thought of the sixteen-story dust cloud that turned their daytime sky dark for three full minutes after the Hudson’s Building on Woodward was imploded two years later. Then I realized that what they thought mattered about as much as what I did.

Jefferson Avenue looked so much brighter than Michigan Avenue as I traipsed along in my mid-heeled shoes, resumé tucked into the small briefcase my father used on insurance calls. Why was I relieved when told I was overqualified for the receptionist’s job at the ad agency in the Ren Cen, when Du-Mouchelles said they’d prefer to hire someone with knowledge of Royal Doulton pottery, when the dental office in the Fisher Building never called back? My father said I’d been ruined for indoor work, that working outside even in inclement weather beats the hell out of typing letters in the nicest office. He was right. At night I’d sometimes walk to the lot for old times’ sake, past the Corktown houses with their crumbling Queen Anne turrets, Georgian Revival roof lines, Greek columns — what were the city planners thinking? Things that were once charming became irritating. The antique buildings felt old and lifeless, the formerly vibrant skyline a jagged silhouette in the pre-night dusk, the family-owned bars a haven for punk and goth wannabes, their pink rubber miniskirts and chain-draped leather dresses hiked up for the jump onto handmade mahogany barstools. The bars that were trying to weather the economic storm — LJ’s, Casey’s Pub, the Parabox — did it by offering dirt-cheap drink specials, and kids sporting neck corsets, rhinestone sunglasses, and platform boots studded with more straps and buckles than a straitjacket, would sweep through Corktown for a quick buzz before moving on to the night’s real adventure at St. Andrew’s or City Club. They wrapped their tattooed hands around the brass bar rail, slipped their studded tongues into the tall pilsner glasses, and we felt violated. They were the dark infiltration of the outside world. Part of me understood — I was young, I went to college with kids like this, I saw their need to be provocative — but the timing was just bad. Everything was falling apart, and they seemed to be leading the charge. Well, Mike Ilitch and Dennis Archer led the charge, and the painted and hole-punched kids, like entitled vultures, picked at the carrion in their wake.

My loyalty to Corktown and the fact that the intermittent classes I was taking at Wayne State weren’t going to pay for themselves led me to O’Leary’s Tearoom at Brooklyn and Porter, where I took a job waiting tables and reading tarot cards in the afternoons for rich ladies from West Bloomfield or Northville who had nothing better to do than to seek out the novelty of a town that they were too dim or too dismissive to see was drowning before their eyes. They lifted the homemade shortbread to their lips with soft, tanned hands and tapped manicured nails against off-white china cups as they sipped Irish Breakfast tea while waiting their turn at the tarot table. Mrs. O’Leary was the true psychic, though, had worked hard to teach me the cards herself, but she never ever read for these women. She served their scones and muffins with a smile, poured their tea while exchanging pleasantries, but later she would say what small, sad lives they lived, that she couldn’t read for them because she’d have to tell the truth. Honesty above all else was her motto, and the motto of her mother and her mother’s mother, ad infinitum, traveling in the minds and sensibilities of the O’Leary women from across the Atlantic, remaining intact all the way from County Cork. The words, in Gaelic, had been carved into a wooden plaque and hung over the front door of the tearoom. Locals can handle it, she said, the Irish are strong, practical, resilient. But if she told these women the truth, they’d never come back, and then where would we be? That’s why I read for them. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in the truth, I just wasn’t a good enough psychic to see it. What I saw clearly were the women’s designer clothes and leather shoes, their diamond-studded watches and sharp haircuts, and their lives didn’t look small to me, but, as I said, I was never able to see the things that Mrs. O’Leary did. Telling this story now makes me miss everything: the weed-smothered Trumbull lot, Tiger Stadium glowing like an earthbound constellation, the tearoom with its lace doilies and antique spoons, Mrs. O’Leary with her black tooth and her visions of misery.

She did not see good things in Detroit’s future; she said she dreamed of flood waters gushing over the banks of the Detroit River, a tidal wave as tall as Cobo Hall consuming Grand Circus Park, then fanning eastward to smother Greek-town and westward to our very doors, water rising to overtake the front steps of Corktown’s crumbling worker’s cottages. She stared at the window, and it was as if she could see the nightmare being projected there. “Begorra,” she said, fingering the Celtic cross over her breast, her eyes far, far away, “there was a torrent on Porter, and we were in it, you and me, the tearoom gone, my china cups bobbing around like corks.” After noticing my horrified expression she smiled. “Ah!” she said. “Just a silly dream. It’s this casino stuff’s got me thinking too much.”

Despite the fact that citizens had twice voted against it, the mayor had just granted a license to MGM to build a casino in Detroit, and Mrs. O’Leary said she’d be damned to hell and roasted crisp before she sat back and let them build.

“They’re all crooked,” she’d said, the Free Press and Detroit Monthly spread across the table before her. “Politicians steal our money and give it to these greed mongers. This one’s mother died, this one’s wife’s having an affair. What do they care as long as they can build their casino? Come here and look at what they’re doing to your city.” She made me read about the latest political graft or look at the smug grin of a socialite newly arrived on Detroit’s small glamour circuit. “Look at that,” she’d say, poking her chubby finger into the face of the offender, her tone bursting with rancor. Sometimes I’d see her pull out the White Pages, address an envelope in her looping cursive, and drop her business card inside, and I’d wonder who was on the receiving end of her selective advertising. But she wrote many letters: to her family back in Cork, to the newspapers, to watchdog groups, to the mayor’s office. Though I was young, my future not necessarily tied to Corktown, even I understood her anger over its recent state, her worry over the fate of her business. Mrs. O’Leary, for her part, was convinced that if the MGM people knew how desperate the people of Detroit were — Who’s going to put fifty dollars down on a blackjack table? They’ll come in and rob the place, that’s what they’ll do! — they would thank the mayor kindly and be on their way.

“Go read their tarot,” I said. “Tell them they’ll be sorry.”

“You can laugh,” she countered, “but these businessmen wouldn’t bring their families here if they knew how dangerous it was. They wouldn’t want to open a casino if something happened to stop them. And this is a place where bad things happen.” I laughed at her naïveté, for I wasn’t too young to know that there’s no stopping the push of capitalism. Actually, the casino was just the latest impediment in her drive to save Detroit: She was working to have Archer impeached, the new Tiger Stadium — she would not say the words “Comerica Park” — boycotted, and Mike Ilitch run out on a rail.

This is the history of the story I’m trying to tell you, the thing that happened in the tearoom, the thing that I can tell you now that Mrs. O’Leary is dead. All that fear and sadness drove Mrs. O’Leary to do what she did, but who’s to say that under similar pressure you wouldn’t have done the same thing?

It should not surprise you, then, that he appeared before us on a desperate night, for there were many desperate nights in Corktown after the close of the ’99 season. Perhaps I should have taken as portents what I dismissed simply as the manifestations of a dying city as I walked to work that day: a man running down Trumbull with a pair of crutches under his arm, a woman pushing a baby stroller full of empty bottles, a car without a passenger door cruising slowly up Leverette. That night the sleet was driving down, little needles piercing the gray snow below, and even though the tart smell of cabbage was making me queasy, the drone of the rain and the six-block walk home kept me there long after I should have left, flipping cards in a Hearts and Spades game against my employer. We were on display at Mrs. O’Leary’s favorite linen-covered table in the front window of the tearoom, which always made me feel like a target at night, but Mrs. O’Leary seemed oblivious to the paranoia of a fearful mind. Is it an indictment of Mrs. O’Leary’s psychic ability to say that when the doorbell chimed we both gasped? Why? Because we hadn’t expected anyone, of course; we couldn’t imagine anyone strolling around in the knifelike torrent. But there he was.

The man who stood before us looked as if he’d just walked out of a movie — chiseled features, dripping trench coat, brown fedora. We stared at him, and Mrs. O’Leary said, “I’ll get the tea.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t need any tea.”

“Yes you do,” she said. “Sit down.”

The man — he couldn’t have known, the cards weren’t out — sat at the tarot table, far from the dark front windows. “My car broke down on Bagley,” he said as Mrs. O’Leary placed a teacup before him, and by the way she smiled, showing only the lower left corner of her blackened tooth, I knew she didn’t believe him. Though she had a stockpot of food warming in the kitchen, she never offered him any — do you see what I mean about the way she knew things?

The man took a small sip of his tea and smiled. Later I’d learn that she’d put two fingers of Ballantine’s in his cup, that she knew he needed it, and you didn’t have to be a psychic to see that he was thankful. Mrs. O’Leary nodded at me, as if we’d earlier set up a system of communication that would tell me exactly what to do, but my psychic abilities, as usual, failed. Though she’d been teaching me the tarot for two months, I still struggled. I knew the meaning of the cards — I’d memorized them as easily as I’d mentally charted who owned each car in the Trumbull lot — but when I had to transplant their meanings into the lives of the people who sat before me, their fear and exhilaration always seemed to short circuit my intuition. She nodded again, then turned to the man, who had removed his hat to reveal a thick head of red-blond hair, and said, “Why don’t you have your tarot read while you wait?”

He looked at her expectantly, as if that is precisely why he’d come, as if she’d read his mind. I recall thinking that I had read his mind too, just then, that my skills had kicked in, that my intuitive antennae were finally picking up signals from the psychic airwaves around me. I was suddenly convinced that he had come to us deliberately, desperately, and I knew then that I would be the one to save this poor soul, this gorgeous man. Is arrogance not the downfall of the fool? Before Mrs. O’Leary could stand up, I had stationed myself across from him and pulled the tarot pack from its green silk pouch. That she believed me incapable of doing any real harm seemed clear when she poured herself three fingers of Ballantine’s and embarked on a game of solitaire at the small table where she had been winning all night. Perhaps that was yet another missed sign?

“All right, then,” I said to the man before turning on the tape recorder. “For five dollars you can buy a cassette of the reading.” This was something the rich ladies loved, for they’d often repeat the same questions, their recall apparently faulty.

Mrs. O’Leary, her back to us, sighed heavily and shook her head, and the man stared at me like I was insane. He then shrugged and draped his wet coat over a vacant chair beside us, and I imagined I could smell the taunting rain and bitter smoke in its folds, fear seeping into my nostrils like ammonia. I started turning cards immediately after he’d cut them, eager, too eager, I see now, to test my newfound skills.

The first card was the two of Wands, a lone, lost man with his back turned, the card of mortification. This card meant that the man before me had received news, bad news. Next came the Empress, crowned in stars and robed in gold, signaling his involvement with a strong, wealthy woman, but isn’t that common amongst handsome men? At any rate, I turned the third card, a reversed Ace of Pentacles, a gargantuan hand clutching an oversized coin and symbolizing the dark side of wealth.

“You’ve had some bad luck,” I said, hoping for some type of acknowledgment from him, but he was like a stone.

I turned more cards: The four of Cups, an inconsolable man, then the two of Pentacles: fear, obstacles, romantic entanglement.

“There is a woman,” I said. “She is raven-haired. She is powerful. She is tormented.” Of course, I didn’t know for certain that the woman in charge of his troubles was raven-haired — only Mrs. O’Leary would know that — but I think it was a safe bet that a woman was at the root of his unhappiness, for my father had always said a woman is at the root of most men’s unhappiness, and I pretty much had a one-in-four shot at getting hair color right.

The man’s tension was wreaking havoc on my psychic radar, and it shut down entirely when he whispered his first question: “Is she going to kill me?”

The women from Grosse Pointe and Bingham Farms never asked questions like this. They wanted to know if their husbands would be promoted, if their sons would get into Yale, if they would be safe under the scalpel during plastic surgery. I turned the seven of Cups, which is merely a dark child. “Not yet,” I said. “Maybe never.”

Next came the eight of Cups, the child growing.

“But she’s thinking about it.” How else can one read that sequence? Mrs. O’Leary, God rest her soul, was no help at all, staring into the abyss framed by the window and humming “Danny Boy” while thumbing the handle on her Prince Albert china cup.

The reversed Queen of Swords was next. It had to be the woman, right?

“She’s here,” I tapped the card, recalling the textbook definition in the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. “This queen has intentions that, in the reversed position, can not be exercised.”

The man looked from me to the card and back again, frowning.

“She’s upside down,” I said. “Immobilized. Her sword is useless in this position.”

He tilted his head. “I see,” he said, absently running his fingers along the belt of the trench coat beside us before downing his remaining tea. What did he see? I wondered, and I had to stop myself from asking.

I then turned the King of Swords, handsome, troubled, the least wealthy of the four kings.

“This is you,” I said. Who else could it be?

“And?”

And I was blank. Nothing. “And you’re in some kind of trouble.” It was an idiotic thing to say — you didn’t need a tarot pack to figure that out — but it was also safe. Was I in over my head? Should I have summoned Mrs. O’Leary out of what I thought was her liquor-induced complacency, admitted to having nothing more than a good memory for the cards, ended the reading right there? Certainly, but there’s no use in posing those questions now (though on the blackest nights I often do).

I turned the six of Pentacles, prosperity, followed by the Knight of Pentacles, more prosperity, and then I sat there staring at the cards as if the characters on them would speak, waiting for something to happen. Then it did.

“This Knight of Pentacles,” Mrs. O’Leary murmured from across the room, “is your queen’s husband. A dangerous man.”

“But he’s not a king,” the man argued.

I stared at the cards, the King of Swords lying beside the Queen of Swords on the table. “You’re her king,” she answered, “without a kingdom.”

I remained silent and next turned the ten of Swords. Let me make it clear that no one told me to do that. No one told me to turn another card, but I did.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“He’s on the ground with swords in his back. That doesn’t look like nothing.”

Mrs. O’Leary put her head down then. At the time it meant little to me, but now, before I take my sleeping pills, before I ask myself why I didn’t walk out of the tearoom and not look back, before I blame the closing of the stadium for what transpired, the vision of Mrs. O’Leary folding her head forward, as if in prayer, haunts me. The man knew, even if he didn’t know for certain, what even I could see: This was the card of horrific death.

“Tell me,” he said.

“It’s bad.” I stared at him. “I see the raven-haired woman.” And I did. Was it the night? Was it the sudden appearance of this troubled man in this troubled neighborhood with his questions of death that triggered a vision more clear than if she’d been standing before me in the flesh? I saw her, or I called her up from some deep place of knowing: a thick bowl of black hair sprouting from a sharp widow’s peak, blunt red talons, a smile like a blade in her teeth. “It’s bad,” I repeated.

“Yes,” he said, leaning back in his chair and setting his chin like a man about to take a punch. He stared at the cards intently, almost as if he could read them, and said, “It’s bad.”

My heart constricted, and I understood for the first time the true depth of Mrs. O’Leary’s burden: How could she channel all this pain and heartache? No wonder she drank Ballantine’s, no wonder her tooth had rotted from the toxic news that had washed over it each time she read a tarot. My head was pounding, and I had to remind myself to breathe. “Maybe this is enough for now,” I said.

The man nodded at the deck in my hand, and as I slowly turned the next card, an upside-down knight wielding a large gray sword, Mrs. O’Leary said, “The reversed Knight of Swords spells doom. Do you want another card?”

The man nodded again, and it was then that I realized how little he’d spoken.

“Are you certain you want another card?” Mrs. O’Leary was staring at the plaque above the door looking like misery propped up in a chair. She could not have seen the cards from where she sat, even with her glasses on, but as I turned the most feared card in the tarot, the skeleton coming to claim on his white horse, she said, “Death may not be imminent, but it is present.”

“I know,” he sighed. “I know.”

Next came the six of Swords, the symbol of painful journey, and I dared not recite the definition of the card as it appeared in this sequence: “Your death will be violent.” But I didn’t have to, because Mrs. O’Leary did.

Mrs. O’Leary was never comfortable telling clients that tarot readings are for entertainment purposes only, that they are not to be considered financial, legal, or psychological counseling, but we always did. And that’s what she told the detectives who showed up at O’Leary’s three days after the skeleton slipped the tape into the pocket of his trench coat and threw a fifty on the table.

“I heard on the news,” she said. “But I can’t help you.”

“Well, you can’t claim client privilege,” said the elderly detective in a cheap suit as he pulled the tape from his briefcase and slid it across the table. “Who’s the other voice on the tape? Doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s mine,” she said, “there’s no one else here does tarot. It’s a cheap tape, bad quality.”

Through a crack in the saloon doors that opened onto the kitchen I watched the detectives exchange looks.

“It was just a wee bit of fun,” said Mrs. O’Leary with badly played nonchalance. “He came in to get out of the weather.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound very funny to me,” said the detective with the acid trip necktie. “Does it sound funny to you?” he asked Cheap Suit, who shook his head.

“See that? Neither of us finds it funny. Maybe we lack a sense of humor, but for some reason we just don’t find murder funny.”

When I saw Mrs. O’Leary crumple to the chair before enlisting the exaggerated brogue she engaged only under the most stressful circumstances, I wanted to rush out of the kitchen and take the blame for something horrible, something I didn’t yet fully understand, for a death I could have prevented. But I didn’t.

“Sounds to me like Mr. Donegan felt he was going to be killed,” said Necktie. “Now, how do you suppose he came to that conclusion?”

“Aye, he knew it when he walked in.”

“You sure didn’t help matters.”

“I’m not here to change the course of fate,” said Mrs. O’Leary.

“Did you discuss anything you didn’t get on this tape?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“As me great-grandmother used to say, ‘He wasn’t the talkin’ sort.’”

“Well his trap’s sure zipped now,” said Cheap Suit.

“We found this in his coat pocket,” said Necktie as he held up a small white business card. “Where do you suppose he got it?”

“Me cards are there on the table,” said Mrs. O’Leary, nodding. “Who’s to say?”

Necktie then unfolded the front-page Free Press article describing the murder of Victoria Lanni, the wife of MGM casino CEO Terrance Lanni, with a tiny corner photograph of her very handsome killer, Bruce Donegan.

“Maybe,” he said, “this will jar your memory.”

She stared at the photograph, then touched it. “Nothing,” she said.

“So he thought Mrs. Lanni was gonna kill him,” said Cheap Suit as he wiped his eye with a yellowed handkerchief. “Why do ya think she’d do a thing like that?”

Mrs. O’Leary shrugged.

The detectives glanced at each other. “You never saw him killing her?” said Necktie, and I felt Mrs. O’Leary staring at me through the thick wooden door, her voice softening to a whisper.

“I just saw death,” she said.

“Strangulation?” said Necktie. “Trench coat belt?”

“No. Dirtier, nastier. I don’t know what. And I saw it on him. All over him.”

“Well, you’re good then,” said Cheap Suit. “’Cause Lanni’s got some dark pals in prison.”

When the detectives left, I rushed from the kitchen to find Mrs. O’Leary still seated at her favorite table near a pile of magazines she’d quickly gathered when she saw them enter.

“I only needed her dead,” said Mrs. O’Leary. “Poor lad.”

She shifted the papers before her, and that’s when the image assaulted me. That’s when I saw the article I’d read the month before only to satisfy her, the one in which casino chairman Terrance Lanni’s wife denies having an affair with a handsome local, the one that speculates she will lose her fortune if the affair is confirmed, the one that’s wrapped around a color photo of a woman with a thick bowl of black hair sprouting from a sharp widow’s peak, blunt red talons, a smile like a blade in her teeth.

Did Mrs. O’Leary know that the following month Terrance Lanni would resign as MGM Grand’s CEO after his wife was strangled to death in their Riverfront Towers apartment, that Bruce Donegan would bleed to death in a dark corner of the prison’s laundry room after being stabbed twenty-six times? “It was bound to happen,” was all she’d say, though I still wonder if things would have been different had I not turned that fateful card, if I’d refused to continue the reading, left my post at the table and ran home under a black sky that would bleed ice for the next two days. If, if, if. Despite her visions and machinations to save Detroit, the following year Mrs. O’Leary’s tearoom closed as the casinos opened, and she packed her china sets and her wooden plaque for the long journey back to Cork.

Her obituary said she was a member of the Gaelic League and a secretary of the local Preservation Society, known for the cuisine she served at her long-term Irish tearoom in Cork-town. She will be missed, the article stated, for her kindness, her generosity, and her willingness to help everyone who crossed her doorstep. Mrs. O’Leary died yesterday, and today I can tell a different story.