City Primeval

16

CAROLYN WILDER’S HOME on Van Dyke Place, off Jefferson, had been built in 1912 along the formal lines of a Paris townhouse. During the 1920s and ‘30s it had changed from residence to speakeasy to restaurant and was serving a limited but selective menu-for the most part to Grosse Pointe residents who knew about the place and were willing to reserve one of ten tables a week in advance-when Carolyn Wilder bought it as an investment, hired a decorator and, in the midst of restoring a past splendor, decided to move in and make it her home.

Standing in the front hall, facing the rose-carpeted stairway that turned twice on its way to the second-floor hall, Raymond said, “It looks familiar.”

The young black woman didn’t say anything. She stood with arms folded in an off-white housedress, letting him look around, the lamplight from side fixtures reflecting on mirrored walls and giving a yellow cast to the massive chandelier that hung above them.

“You look familiar too,” Raymond said. “You’re not Angela Davis.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re… Marcie Coleman. About two years ago?”

“Two years in January.”

“And Mrs. Wilder defended you.”

“That’s right.”

“We offered you, I believe, manslaughter and you turned it down. Stood trial for first degree.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll tell you something. I’m glad you got off.”

“Thank you.”

“How long ago was Clement Mansell here?”

There was a pause, silence. “Ms. Wilder’s waiting for you upstairs.”

“I was just telling Marcie,” Raymond said, “your house seems familiar, the downstairs part.” Though not this room with its look of a century later, plexiglass tables, strange shapes and colors on the wall, small areas softly illuminated by track lighting. “You do these?”

“Some of them.”

The room was like a dim gallery. He was sure that most of the paintings, not just some, were hers. “What’s this one?”

“Whatever you want it to be.”

“Were you mad when you painted it?”

Carolyn Wilder stared at him with a look that was curious but guarded.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I get the feeling you were upset.”

“I think I was when I started.”

She sat in a bamboo chair with deep cushions of some dark silky material, a wall of books next to her, Carolyn half in, half out of a dimmed beam of light. She had not asked him to sit down; she had not offered him a drink, though a cordial glass of clear liquid sat on the glass table close to her chair and a tea-table bar of whiskeys and liqueurs stood only a few feet from Raymond.

“Marcie married again?”

“She’s thinking about it.”

“I bet the guy’s giving it some serious thought too. She live here?”

“Downstairs. She has rooms. Most of it’s closed off though.”

He turned from the abstract painting over the fireplace to look at her: legs crossed in a brown caftan-some kind of loose cover-her feet hidden by a hassock that matched the chair.

“Are you somebody else when you’re home?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“You go out much?”

“When I want to.”

“I have a hard question coming up.”

“Why don’t you ask it?”

“Are you working at being a mystery woman?”

“Is that the question?”

“No.” He paused.

He was aware that he had no trouble talking to her, saying whatever came to mind without wondering what her reaction would be or even caring. He felt a small hook of irritation, standing before the woman in shadow, but the irritation was all right because he could control it. He didn’t want to rush the reason he was here. He would hit her with it in time; but first he wanted to jab a little. She intrigued him. Or she challenged him. One or the other, or both.

He said, “Do you still paint?”

“Not really. Once in a while.”

“You switch from fine art to law… On impulse?”

“I suppose,” Carolyn said. “But it wasn’t that difficult.”

“You were divorced first-is that where the impulse comes in? The way the divorce was handled?”

She continued to stare at him, but with something more in her eyes, creeping in now, something more than ordinary interest. She said, “You don’t seem old enough to be a lieutenant; unless you have an M.B.A. and you’re somewhere in administration. But you’re homicide.”

“I’m older than you are,” Raymond said. He walked toward her chair, moved the hassock with his foot and sat down on it, somewhat half-turned from her but with their legs almost touching. She seemed to draw back against the cushion as he made the move, but he wasn’t sure. He could see her face clearly now, her eyes staring, expectant.

“I’m almost a year older. You want to know what my sign is?” She didn’t answer. He picked up the cordial glass and raised it to his face. “What is it?”

“Aquavit. Help yourself… but it’s not very cold.”

He took a sip, put the glass down. “You watched this lawyer handle your divorce, thinking, I can do better than that… Huh?”

“He agreed to their settlement offer,” Carolyn said, “practically everything, let my husband have the house, a place in Harbor Springs, charged ten thousand and billed me for half.”

Raymond said, “And treated you like a little kid who wouldn’t understand anything even if he explained it.”

Her eyes held. “You know the feeling?”

“I know lawyers,” Raymond said. “I’m in court about twice a week.”

“He was so condescending-he was oily. I couldn’t get through to him.”

“You could’ve fired him.”

“I was different then. But at least it turned me around. I actually made up my mind to get a law degree-listen to this-and specialize in divorce and represent poor, defenseless, cast-off wives.”

“I can’t see you doing that.”

“I didn’t, for very long. I decided if I wanted to work with children I should work with real children. I even felt a tinge of sympathy for that jerk who represented me; he’d probably become conditioned to vacuous outbursts and treated all his women clients exactly the same. Eventually I found my way into the Defender’s office and Recorder’s Court.”

She was more relaxed now, not making a pretense of it.

“I’ve always liked to watch you,” Raymond said. “You never seem to get upset. You’re always prepared… full of surprises for the prosecutor.” He placed a hand on the brown cotton material covering her knee.

Her eyes, still calm, raised from his hand to his face.

“But you’re fucking up, Carolyn, and it isn’t like you, is it?”

“If I tell you Mansell was here this evening,” Carolyn said, “it means I’m not going to discuss his involvement in anything until you produce a warrant and he’s placed under arrest.”

“No, it means you’re telling me a story,” Raymond said. “Clement wasn’t here.” He watched her expression; it didn’t begin to change until he said, “He was outside my window at 6:30 P.M. trying to blow my head off with an automatic rifle. Otherwise-if he was here at the same time, then Clement’s into bilocation. And I’m getting off the case.”

Carolyn took her time, as if studying him before she said, “You saw him?”

“No.”

“How many people, do you think, you’re directly responsible for sending to prison? In round numbers.”

“I don’t know-five hundred?”

“Then count their friends, relatives-”

“Lot of people.”

“You have the gun whoever it was used?”

Raymond shook his head.

“Do you have the gun that killed Guy and the woman?”

Raymond almost smiled. He said, “Why?”

“You know you’re not going to get Mansell unless you can produce the murder weapon and prove it’s his and even then you’re going to have a tough time. On this new allegation, a suspicion of an attempt-what have you got? Did anyone see him? At 6:30 it’s already dark. Where are you going to even look for a witness?”

“Carolyn,” Raymond said, getting used to saying the name. “Clement wasn’t here.”

“What I said to you on the phone,” Carolyn said, with a hint of irritation now, in eye movement more than tone, “is not something you can enter as evidence, even if you recorded the conversation. You know that, don’t you?”

“You lied,” Raymond said.

“God damn it-” She seemed to come up from the cushion, but in the next moment she was composed again. “If I don’t care to admit I made a statement, whether to protect my client or because of the particular interpretation I believe you might give the statement, then I’ll rephrase it to the best of my ability and memory.”

“Why did you lie?” Raymond said.

“Jesus Christ, are you dense or something?” Finally with a bite to her tone, “If you intend to use whatever I said then I’ll flatly deny it.”

Raymond got up, giving her a chance to breathe, maybe bring her guard down a little. He went over to the tea-table bar, found a cordial glass and concentrated on pouring aquavit into it, up past a crisscross design in the crystal.

“I’m not threatening to use what you said in court. I’m not threatening, period.” He sipped the clear liqueur from the rim of the glass and came back to the hassock, watching the glass carefully as he sat down again. “All I’m trying to do”-looking at her now-“see, I have a feeling that Clement, that time in your office, scared you to death… holding something over your head. He called you this evening and did it again. Scared you to the point of covering for him. Then you have a couple of these and calm down and you’re the lawyer again and you start using words on me, try and dazzle me with your footwork. But it doesn’t change Clement, does it?”

She said quietly, “I can handle Clement.”

He wanted to grab her by the arms and shake her and tell her to wake up. Fucking lawyers and judges who used words and a certain irritating tone and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it…

Holding the cordial glass helped. He took a sip and placed it on the table next to hers. It was hard, but he was going to play this with her. He said, “A man by the name of Champ who packed a Walther P .38 thought he could handle Clement and Clement took him out. Remember? Three years ago. I’ll bet Judge Guy, calling the nine-eleven in his car, the judge thought he could handle him too. Clement’s holding something over your head, he’s threatening you or extorting you and you’re letting him do it.”

Carolyn picked up her glass and he knew she was going to dodge him.

“He did tell me something interesting,” Carolyn said. “That you want to meet him somewhere and have it out. Just the two of you.”

“He said that?”

“How else would I know?”

“There are stories,” Raymond said, “the cop takes off his badge and they settle it man to man in the alley. If you think it’s like that-no, this is Clement’s idea. You look at my living room window you’ll see he’s already started.”

“You’re saying, what, he challenged you to-what amounts to a duel?”

“He didn’t give me his card or slap my face or anything, or give me a choice of weapons; but it looks like he leans toward automatic rifles. This is your client I’m talking about. The one you can handle.”

Carolyn said, “What’re you going to do about it?” Quietly but with new interest.

“I’m gonna keep looking over my shoulder, for one thing,” Raymond said. “I’m not gonna turn a light on with the shades up.”

“What does the department say about it?”

“The police department?”

“Your inspector, commander, whoever you report to.”

“I haven’t told anybody yet. It just happened.”

“Are you going to?”

“I’m gonna report the shooting, yes.”

“You know what I mean. Are you going to tell them Clement challenged you?”

Raymond paused. “I haven’t thought about it.”

“What’s the difference in the way you look at Clement Mansell and the way I do?” Carolyn said. “I tell you I can handle him. You imply to me, in effect, the same thing, that it’s a personal matter.”

“There’s one big difference,” Raymond said. “I’ve got a gun.”

“I know. That’s why I think the idea appeals to you,” Carolyn said. “Mano a mano. No-more like High Noon. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. You have to go back a hundred years and out west to find an analogy. But there it is.”

He thought of the girl from the News.

He said, “I don’t know-” and paused. In his mind the allusion to a western scene, the street, men with guns approaching, dissolved and now he saw kids playing guns in a vacant lot near Holy Trinity, before the places where they played disappeared beneath a freeway, seeing the same kids in school then, a little blond-haired girl named Carmel something, on a dismal fall afternoon in the fifth grade, dropping a note on his desk that said I Love You on ruled paper, like an exercise in Palmer Method-kids sharing secrets-a long time ago but still clear in his mind, part of him now as he sat in dimmed light with someone else who had a secret. He wondered if she had close friends or someone she spoke to intimately.

She said, “What don’t you know?”

“I thought of that, it’s strange, what you said. When I was talking to Clement he kept making the point that I wasn’t any more interested in upholding the law than he was in breaking it-”

“He said that?”

“Yes, that it was a personal thing between us that didn’t have anything to do with other people.”

“Did you agree?”

“I said, ‘A long time ago we might’ve settled this between us.’ And he said… ‘Or if we thought it might be fun.’ ”

Staring intently she said, “You haven’t told this to the people you work with. But you’ve told me.”

She came up from the silky cushion, close to him now but closed in on herself, arms against her body, hands clasped on her knees.

“You said the other night in my office, ‘Can I help you?’ You said it twice. Both times, the way you said it, I came so close to telling you, I wanted to-”

Her eyes were brown, the pupils dilated in the dim light, making her eyes appear dark and clearly defined, like eyes in a drawing that were accentuated, inked in except for a small pale square to indicate reflected light, a soft sparkle.

“Everybody,” Raymond said, “has to have somebody to tell secrets to.” He liked the delicate line of her nose, the shape of her mouth and saw where he would go in and take part of her lower lip, biting it very gently.

She said, “I make assumptions-I think I know you, but I don’t. You say, ‘fine art.’ You say, ‘if he’s into bilocation… ‘ “

Raymond said, “But he isn’t, is he?”

She didn’t answer.

“Let me help you.”

She continued to look into his eyes, into the deep end of a pool, gathering courage-

“Carolyn, I give you my word…”

She said, “Hold me… please.”