City Primeval

4

WHEN SANDY STANTON first told Clement about the Albanian, Clement said, “What in the hell’s a Albanian?”

Sandy said, “An Albanian is a little fella with black hair and a whole shitpile of money he keeps down in his basement. He says in a safe inside a hidden room. You believe it?”

Clement said, “I still don’t know what a Albanian is even. What’s he do?”

“His name’s Skender Lulgjaraj-” pronouncing it to rhyme with Pull-your-eye.

“Jesus Christ,” Clement said.

“And if I spelled it you wouldn’t believe it,” Sandy said. “He’s a little black-eyed doll baby that loves to disco. Owns some Coney Island hot dog places and tells me about all this money he’s got every time I see him.”

“How many times is that?”

“I been seeing him at discos for months. Dresses nice; I think he’s doing all right.”

“Well, let’s go over and have us one with everything,” Clement said.

“Wait till I find out if he’s for real,” Sandy said. “Skender wants to take me to the race track.”

That had sounded pretty good. See what kind of a spender the Albanian was. Clement would tag along in Sandy’s other boyfriend’s car and Sandy would introduce him later that night-like they just happened to run into each other.

Except Clement ran into something else.

Del Weems wasn’t exactly Sandy’s other boyfriend, but she was staying in his apartment while he was out of town giving management seminars. Clement was staying with her.

Clement had never met Del Weems. He prowled around the man’s apartment learning about him: studying weird prints and pottery and metal sculptures the man had acquired as a member of the Fine-Art-of-the-Month Club and trying on the man’s Brooks Brothers clothes, size 42 suits, size 36 pants, the length not too bad but the bulk of the garments obscuring Clement’s wiry 160-pound frame. Sandy said he looked like he was playing dress-up, trying on his dad’s clothes. She said a boy with his build and his tattoos ought to stick to Duck Head bib overalls. They’d laugh and Clement would come out of the bedroom wearing yellow slacks and a flowery Lily Pulitzer sports jacket Clement said looked like a camouflage outfit in the war of the fairies and they’d laugh some more: the thirty-four-year-old boy from Lawton, Oklahoma, and the twenty-three-year-old girl from French Lick, Indiana, making it in the big city.

Sandy had met Del Weems when she was a cocktail waitress at Nemo’s in the Renaissance Center (and had quit after six months because she could never find her way out of the complex with all its different walks and levels and elevators you weren’t supposed to use-like being in Mammoth Cave-you looked way up about one hundred feet to the ceiling, except the RenCen was all rough cement, escalators, expensive shops and ficus trees). Del Weems was a good tipper. She started going out with him and staying over at his apartment, at first thinking Clement would love Del’s specs: forty-seven, divorced management consultant, lived on the twenty-fifth floor of 1300 Lafayette, drove a black Buick Riviera with red pin-striping, owned twelve suits and eight sportcoats; she hadn’t counted the pants.

Clement had asked what a management consultant was. Sandy said he like put deals together for big companies and told corporate executives-the way she understood it-how to run their business and not fuck up. Clement was skeptical because he couldn’t picture in his mind what Del Weems actually did. So when the man went off on this latest seminar and Clement came to stay, he pulled the man’s bills and bank statements out of the teakwood desk in the living room, studied them a few minutes and said shit, the man didn’t have money, he had credit cards. Clement said, You stick a .38 in the man’s mouth-all right, partner, give me all the money you been raking in off these fools, and what does the chicken fat do? Hands you his visa card. Shit no, it had to be cash and carry. Ethnics were the ones, Clement said. Ethnics, niggers, anybody that didn’t trust banks, had a piss-poor regard for the IRS and kept their money underneath the bed or in a lard can. Ethnics and dentists.

That’s why the Coney Island Albanian sounded good-if Clement could ever get close enough to check him out. In the meantime, cross off the chicken-fat consultant as a score, but use his place to rest up and get acquainted with the finer things in life. Drink the man’s Chivas, watch some TV and look out at the twenty-fifth-floor view of Motor City. Man oh man.

The Detroit River looked like any big-city river with worn-out industrial works and warehouses lining the frontage, ore boats and ocean freighters passing by, a view of Windsor across the way that looked about as much fun as Moline, Illinois, except for the giant illuminated Canadian Club sign over the distillery.

But then all of a sudden-as Clement edged his gaze to the right a little-there were the massive dark-glass tubes of the Renaissance Center, five towers, the tallest one seven hundred feet high, standing like a Buck Rogers monument over downtown. From here on, the riverfront was being purified with plain lines in clean cement, modern structures that reminded Clement a little of Kansas City or Cincinnati-everybody putting their new convention centers and sports arenas out where you could see them. (They had even been building a modernistic new shopping center in Lawton just before the terrible spring twister hit, the same one that picked Clement’s mom right out of the yard, running from the house to the storm cellar, and carried her off without leaving a trace.) Clement would swivel his gaze then over downtown and come around north-looking at all the parking lots that were like fallow fields among stands of old 1920s office buildings and patches of new cement-past Greektown tucked in down there-he could almost smell the garlic-past the nine-story Detroit Police headquarters, big and ugly, a glimpse of the top floors of the Wayne County jail beyond the police building, and on to the slender rise of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, where they had tried to nail Clement’s ass one time and failed. Clement liked views from high places after years in the flatlands of Oklahoma and feeling the sky pressing down on him. It was the same sky when you could see it, when it wasn’t thick with dampness, but it seemed a lot higher in Detroit. He would look up there and wonder if his mom was floating around somewhere in space.

Sandy stayed with the Albanian all night and came home to the high-rise apartment about noon with a tale of wonders-a secret door, a room hid-den away in the basement-aching to tell Clement about it.

And what was Clement doing? Reading the paper. Something he never did. Sitting on the couch in his Hanes briefs, scratching the reddish hair on his chest, idly tugging at his crotch, hunched over and staring at the newspaper spread open next to him, his mouth moving silently as he read.

“You reading the paper?”

Clement didn’t even look up. Now he was scratching the bright new blue and red tattoo of a gravestone on his right forearm that said In Memory of Mother.

“Hey!”

Hell with him. Sandy went into the bedroom and changed from her silk shirt and slacks to green satin jogging shorts and a T-shirt that said, Cedar Point, Sandusky, Ohio. She looked about seventeen, a freckled, reddish-blond 95-pounder with perky little breasts. Sort of a girl version of Clement, though a lot better looking. Not the type, at first glance, some management consultant would keep in his stylish apartment. But look again and see the fun in her eyes. It gave a man the feeling that if he turned her little motor on she’d whirl him back to his youth and take him places he’d never been.

Back in the living room she tried again. “You still reading the paper?”

You bet he was, every word for the second time, wondering how in the world he hadn’t recognized the judge last night-the face with the little tango-dancer mustache staring up at him from the front page. He had shot and killed Judge Alvin Guy and didn’t have a thing to show for it. Not even peace of mind now. If there wasn’t a reward for shooting the little dinge he ought to get a medal, something.

Sandy Stanton said, “Well, I saw the secret room and I saw this little safe he’s so proud of. I think me and you could pick it up without any fear of getting a hernia. But it was weird. I mean the room, with all these cots folded up and a fridge, one tiny room like full of canned goods… Hey, you listening or what?”

Clement sat back on the couch, exposing the pair of bluebirds tattooed above his pure-white breasts. When they had first met three and a half years ago at a disco, Clement had said, “You want to see my birds?” and opened his shirt to show her. Then he’d said, “You want to see my chicken?” When Sandy said yes he pulled his shirt out of his pants and showed her his navel in the center of his hard belly. Sandy said, “I don’t see any chicken.” And Clement said, “It’s faded out; all that’s left is its asshole.”

He nodded toward the picture in the paper. “You know who that is?”

“I saw it,” Sandy said. She looked from the bold headline, JUDGE GUY MURDERED, and the grinning photograph to Clement’s solemn face. Her mind said, Uh-oh, what does he care? And edged toward the answer, saying, “He couldn’ta been a friend of yours. Why you taking it so hard?”

Silence.

Uh-oh.

Sandy said, “Hey, quit biting your nails. You want to tell me something or’s it better I don’t know?”

Clement said, “Wouldn’t you think they’d be a bounty on the little fucker? A reward you could claim?”

“Who could claim?” Sandy waited while Clement bit on the cuticle of his middle finger, left hand, like a little boy watching his dad read his report card.

“You know how many people,” Clement said, “would pay money-I mean real money-to have this done? Jesus.”

“Maybe somebody did pay.”

“Nuh-uh, it was done free of charge. God damn it.”

“Oh, shit,” Sandy said, with a sigh of weariness. “Don’t tell me no more, okay?”

She was in the kitchen, Clement was still scratching, biting his nails, staring at the grinning ex-judge, when the security man in the lobby called. He was an older colored man that Sandy liked to kid with, calling him Carlton the doorman. They didn’t kid around today, though. Sandy came out to the living room.

“Maybe they come to give you the medal.”

Clement hadn’t even heard the buzzer. He looked up now. “Who’s that?”

“The police,” Sandy said.