City Primeval

27

RAYMOND THOUGHT OF Madeline de Beaubien, the girl who overheard the plot and warned the garrison Pontiac and his braves were coming to the parley with sawed-off muskets under their blankets and saved Detroit from the Ottawas.

The house could have belonged to one of her early descendants, an exhibit at Greenfield Village that people walked through looking into 19thcentury rooms with velvet ropes across the doorways, a cold house despite amber reflections in the hall chandelier and a rose cast to the mirrored walls. The house was too serious.

That was it, Raymond decided. The house didn’t see anything funny going on or hear people laugh. Marcie told him solemnly, a funeral-home greeter, Ms. Wilder was waiting for him in her sitting room.

An audience with the queen. No more, Raymond thought, mounting the stairway, not surprised to find her in semidarkness, track lighting turned low, directed toward squares of abstract colors, Carolyn lying on the couch away from the lights. She told him he was late and he asked, For what?

He let himself relax and said, “Let’s start over.”

“You were going to leave in a few minutes,” Carolyn said. “That’s what you told me.”

“I know, and then we got into something. What’s the matter with your voice?”

He did not see her face clearly until he turned on the lamp at the end of the couch away from her and saw the bruise marks and swelling, her mouth puffed and slightly open. Carolyn’s eyes held his with a quiet expression, her eyes blinking once, staring at him, blinking again, waiting for him to speak.

“I told you,” Raymond said.

Her expression began to turn cold.

“Didn’t I tell you? No, you can handle him, no problem.”

“I knew you’d have to say it,” Carolyn said, “but I didn’t think you’d overdo it.”

“You didn’t? Listen, I’m not through yet,” Raymond said. “If I can think of some more ways to say it I’m going to, every way I know how.”

She said, “You’re serious…”

“You bet I am. I told you, don’t fool with Clement, but you did anyway.”

“I misjudged him a little.”

“A little …”

She began to smile and said, “Do you feel better now?”

He said, “Do you?” Then surprised both of them.

He went to one knee to get close to her and very gently touched her face, her mouth, with the tips of his fingers. He said, “You don’t want to be a tough broad.” She said, “No…” and slipped her arms around him and brought him against her. The faint sound that came from her might have been pain, but he didn’t think so.

He said, “I want to tell you something. Then we’ll see if we’re still friends, or whatever we are. I didn’t plan this. As a matter of fact, I came here I was a little on the muscle. I was gonna listen, try to be civil and get out.”

“What happened?” Carolyn said.

He liked the subdued sound of her voice.

“I don’t know. I think you’ve changed. Or I’ve changed. Maybe I have. But what I want to tell you, I think you’re too serious.”

She didn’t expect that, or didn’t understand what he meant. “He beat hell out of me…”

“I know he did,” touching her face again, soothing her with his voice and his fingers. “I’m not gonna say it any more, you know who he is… Tell me why he’s going to the bank tomorrow.”

“He made me give him a check. All the money I had in the account.”

“How much is that?”

“Over six thousand.”

“What did you say one time, he’s fascinating? I’m sorry, I’ve got to quit that… Did you stop payment?”

“No, I’m going to file on three counts and get him for assault, extortion and probably larceny from a person. He took more than a hundred in cash.”

“Hold off on it,” Raymond said. “Let me bring him up on the homicides, then you can file all the charges you want.”

“You’ll never convict him,” Carolyn said, “unless you have more than I know about.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“Not when he was here; at least he didn’t show it. But when I heard shots and looked out the bathroom window-I thought it was the police and I remember thinking, Wait, as I went to the window, I want to see him killed.”

“Really?”

“It was in my mind.”

“Did he have a gun then?”

“Yes, shooting back at them. It was an automatic, a fairly good size. But who are they?”

He told her about Skender, Toma. She knew something about Albanian blood feuds and now wasn’t surprised. “On the phone you thought I wanted to file against them on behalf of Clement, while I’m thinking of all the ways I want to see him convicted.”

“Let me do it,” Raymond said. “I’m close. In fact, it could happen tonight, as soon as I hear something.” Looking at her, thinking of Clement, he said, “Did he… molest you?”

Carolyn began to smile again, her eyes appreciating him. “Did he molest me?…

“Come on-did he?”

Her mood became quiet. “Not really.”

“What does that mean, not really?”

“He touched me…”

“Make you take your clothes off?”

“He opened my robe-” Carolyn stopped, she seemed mildly surprised. “You know what I’m doing? I’m being coy. I’ve never been coy in my life.”

“No, you’ve been too busy impressing yourself,” Raymond said. “Tell me what he did.”

“What’re you trying to do, analyze me? He felt me up, but we didn’t go all the way.” Now Raymond smiled and she said, “You think you have insights, is that it?”

“Maybe, if that’s the word. I don’t expect to see something and then look and say, uh-huh, there it is. I try to look without expecting and see what’s actually there. Is that insight?”

“You’re sly,” Carolyn said. “I think I have you down and you slip away.”

He said, “You have me down… where? It’s like filling out an Interrogation Record of an Information for Arraignment, you know what I mean? Sometimes the form isn’t big enough, or it doesn’t ask the right questions.”

“You think I presume too much,” Carolyn said, “see only what I expect to see. Is that it?”

“I don’t know, we can talk about it sometime.” He was tired and wasn’t sure if he should close his eyes.

“If I make presumptions,” Carolyn said, “what about you?”

“What about me?”

“We were making love and you said, ‘I know you… ‘ “

“I didn’t think you heard me.”

“What did you mean?”

“Well, it was like I saw you. Not what you do or who you believe you are, just you. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know…”

“But you didn’t say anything, did you? I think you changed back after that and I didn’t know you anymore. You became the woman lawyer again who thinks she has to be a tough broad. But look what happens to tough broads.” Raymond was silent a moment. “Let me take care of him, Carolyn.”

When Hunter called Raymond was sitting on the couch with Carolyn’s legs across his lap, both tired of words, on safer ground now but still intimately aware of one another. Carolyn asked if he had always lived here, trying to picture him in another life, when he wasn’t a policeman. And Raymond said, “In Detroit? No, I was born in McAllen, Texas. We lived in San Antonio, Dallas. We came here when I was ten.” She asked, almost hesitantly, if his father was a farmer and Raymond looked at her and smiled. “You mean, was he a migrant? No, he was a barber. He was a dude, the way he dressed, wore pointed patent-leather shoes.” The phone rang then, Raymond waiting for it. He lifted Carolyn’s legs and got up. “My dad was fifty-seven when he died.”

Hunter said, “Mansell called back, just now. He wants Sweety to bring him the gun.”

“Where?”

“It got complicated. Sweety told him he was going to a family thing at his mother’s-trying to hurry Clement up, get it over with. Clement tells him to take the gun along with him. Sweety says he isn’t gonna touch it. If Clement wants the gun tonight he has to come in the next half hour.”

Raymond said, “What difference does it make? The key’s under the mat.”

“Yeah, he told Clement that,” Hunter said. “But what he did was confuse the issue with this going to see his mother and Clement says, okay, he’d just as soon get it tomorrow anyway, sometime in the afternoon.” Hunter waited. “You still there?”

“You’re gonna have to get Sweety out of there for a while,” Raymond said, “keep the story straight. Clement could check, he could still come tonight.”

“I don’t think he will. It’s something he has to do, but it’s the kind of thing you put off,” Hunter said. “Wendell get hold of you?”

“Not yet.”

“He talked to Toma. Toma says he’ll kill the guy if he sees him. In other words, fuck you. But he slipped and gave us one. Skender’s Cadillac’s missing and Toma thinks Mansell’s got it.”

“Where’re you?”

“In the bar.”

“He could go in there tonight. I don’t mean with the key. He could come in the alley, through the yard, go in a back window.”

“Is that right?” Hunter said, very patiently for Hunter. “It turns out the flat next to Sweety’s is vacant, so MCMU’s spending the night there. Is that close enough? What’s the matter, you got a guilty conscience-I’m out here working my ass off, you’re with a broad?”

When Raymond returned to the couch he stood looking down at her, uncertain, removed from where he had been only a few minutes before. He said, “My mother’s name was Mary Frances Connolly.”

He saw Carolyn’s face against a blue pillow, composed, looking up at him. She said, “Really?” a little surprised.

“You want to know what she did?”

“She was a schoolteacher,” Carolyn said.

“No, she was called Franny and operated a beauty shop in the Statler Hotel, when it was still there.”

Carolyn said, “Do you know what my mother did? Nothing. Why don’t you sit down?”

He lifted her legs and got under them, sitting low in the couch, his head against the cushion.

“You want to go to bed, I’ll get out of your way.”

“No, stay here. You’ve watched me, but I haven’t watched you,” Carolyn said. “You like your work, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Raymond said.

“You don’t get tired of the same thing every day?”

“Well, nobody likes surveillance; but outside of that it’s usually, well, each one’s different.”

“There’s surveillance and there’s lying in wait,” Carolyn said quietly. “I think you’re setting Clement up.”

He was touching her bare toes, feeling them relaxed, pliable. “You’re not ticklish, huh?”

“A little.”

“That’s the way you are in court, very cool. All the pros make it look easy.”

“I said, I have a feeling you’re setting Clement up.”

“And I have a feeling he knows it,” Raymond said, “so it’s up to him, isn’t it?”

“But you seem fairly certain he’s going to come.”

“He’s gonna do something, I know that.”

“How do you know?”

“We looked each other in the eye,” Raymond said.

He smiled and Carolyn said, “My God, you haven’t grown up either.”

Raymond worked his head against the cushion, getting comfortable. “I was kidding.”

She saw him against lamplight, his eyes closed, simply himself now. She said, “No, you weren’t.”