Left Field Read online

  Time to roll again. On a rainy, steamy Tuesday afternoon, I gathered up the papers and took off in the Crown Vic.

  It’s hard to describe how bombed-out the city had gotten, starting slowly in the post-WWII letdown, then with the increasing speed of an avalanche or an epidemic. Magazine stories and TV programs sought to show the destruction and dissolution in pictures, but you tended to look at those and go, Oh, well, it’s bad, but they selected these images as the worst of the worst to make the very legitimate point that racism, ghettoization, forced busing, white flight, generational poverty, cronyism, and corruption had caused all this.

  But no. It really was as bad as all that. Seeing one burned-out, empty high-rise apartment building that once had housed hundreds of people and been worth millions of dollars is a sad thing. Just about any major city has a few of those. But to see bunches of them—miles of them—is the unbelievable, gob-smacking difference.

  To see a place that once had been an intact neighborhood now a meadow with one or two houses standing like a couple of forgotten chess pieces, the rest having been burned, then bulldozed into their basements, plaster, bricks, carpet, roof trusses, and all, so that at least from a distance it all looks level and junkies can’t hide there—to see miles of that as well—the only way to keep your sanity is to accept it and try to see a way forward. Looking back, when it came to Detroit, was lethal.

  Parts of downtown were coming back, due in large part to entrepreneurs launching fabulous new ventures, from eateries to retail and manufacturing. The customers they drew also benefitted the die-hard businesses that hadn’t given up all along. This phenomenon was getting deservedly favorable press, and I crossed my fingers that the new businesses wouldn’t get driven off by the city bureaucracy.

  It’s the neighborhoods that got hit the worst. In this altered reality, you start to do what humans ordinarily do, which is differentiate. You draw not just generalizations but distinctions, when for instance you’re looking at a building:

  Neglected but livable.

  Horrible but livable.

  Basically a wreck but may be able to provide decent shelter.

  Basically destroyed, probably without utilities.

  Basically destroyed, without even windows and doors.

  Rubble.

  The first two addresses on my list were a bit north of the trying-to-hang-onto-its-old-aura cultural center—that is, the few-block radius encompassing the Detroit Institute of Arts, the main library, and Wayne State. One address was on Woodward, the other on the John C. Lodge expressway service drive.

  I went to the one on Woodward first. I had lived nearby during my Wayne State years and had hung out in a few of my friends’ apartments in that building, which was called the Casa del Cielo. The name would lead you to expect Spanish or maybe Moroccan design elements, but it was a good old workmanlike redbrick building, four floors, with maybe ten studios and one-bedrooms per floor. I remembered the pressure toilets, the two-spigot faucets, the radiators, and the bay windows with cool built-in bookcases below the ledge.

  I hadn’t bothered to notice the building much lately, perhaps numbed by the pervasive decay of that north Woodward corridor. I used to enjoy foregoing the expressways and using Woodward as the showcase artery it once was; these days I avoided it with guilt, as if it were a decrepit, elderly, distant relative.

  Students and others of slender means—single laborers, young couples—had populated its floors. I remembered the creepy basement where the laundry machines were.

  I parked the Crown Vic on a side street and walked around to the recessed front entrance. The rain had turned to the kind of drizzle that feels like it could go on all day. I didn’t bother with an umbrella. The cute little café and the shoe-repair place that had flanked the building’s main entrance were gone, their voids boarded up with gray plastic panels. That cobbler had resoled my Weejuns once, for only two and a half dollars. I remembered that. Pointless, unartistic graffiti fouled the panels. The front doors of the lobby evidently had been torn off by drunken giants and replaced by panels of the same gray plastic. I couldn’t tell how they’d been fastened to the masonry.

  Oddly, a thin slot had been sawn out of one of them and marked mail in stenciled white letters. I peered into it but saw only darkness.

  I dodged across Woodward to survey the upper floors from a better angle. About 60 percent of the windows had been smashed, and a black fire scar ran up the southeast wall from the fourth floor. I crossed back and walked the perimeter. A steel security door in back looked like every back-alley steel door in the city: intact but as if someone had tried to break it down with a dead dog loaded with bricks. No doorknob, just a tight lock with a flange to slip your fingers into, to lever the door open. The few back windows were secured by steel mesh panels.

  OK.

  The next building, over by the Lodge, appeared similar in many dreary details, except it had no hand-hewn mail slot. In spite of the drizzle, drug deals were going on all over the block, and I detected no friendliness in the gazes that were directed my way. The other two buildings where supposedly scores of DeMedHo employees lived, on the east side, were pretty much the same. I drove by without bothering to stop. At none of the buildings did I see any human coming or going.

  For the hell of it, I drove past Shirlene Cord’s home address, which was the penthouse in the Froisart Building, one of the best addresses downtown. I cruised by, seeing the sleek awning, the potted topiary, and the white-gloved doorman, all looking pert and perfect.

  A bit of a contrast.

  I swung around to Lafayette Coney Island for a dog with everything and a Coke. There’s this special hot-dog culture in Detroit. God knows how it got going, but there are all these places that sell hot dogs with chili and onions on top. It’s a nourishing little meal. They call them Coney Islands. I know Coney Island is an amusement park in New York. Do people live there? Is it like a place too? Do they eat hot dogs prepared in this style? How did such a style take root in Detroit? And why? When people come to visit Detroit—like yeah, all seven of them last year—you take them around and they see a place that says “Coney Island,” and they feel that doesn’t make any sense and they ask you about it and you feel stupid because you can’t explain it and you feel like you must live in this stupid place where the hot-dog stands try to rip off the glamour of some place in New York that doesn’t even seem all that glamorous.

  You shrug and buy them a Coney Island and they love it. That’s all I know.

  I ate at the counter then bought a couple of extra ones and went over to Flora’s. She hadn’t been answering her phone or her door to me, but I persisted. I’d been hoping maybe some family or old friends would take an interest in her, try to reach out to her now that she was alone. Hell, I hoped an old flame or somebody like that might even show up. She was at the age where stuff like that happens. You know, where you get widowed or something, and then you go off in search of that first love you spurned for the wrong reasons thirty years ago.

  I pounded my signature pound, shielding the bag of food from the wet with my body. This time Flora answered, looking terrible.

  “I have Coneys!” I said.

  “I only came to the door because I want you to understand that I don’t like you anymore.” She shaded her eyes into the gray sky as if she hadn’t seen daylight in weeks. I was shocked to see how haggard she looked, but more than that I was shocked that she had on a white men’s T-shirt and—unbelievably—blue jeans. No makeup, no jewelry, no hairstyle. She’d pushed her hair back with a gray elastic headband like I wear sometimes when cleaning house. You get them in packs at the drugstore.

  I’d never seen her like this. Her vintage dresses and jewelry were such a part of her that it was like they were her.

  “I have Coneys,” I repeated. “It’s perfectly fine for you to not like me. I know you like Coneys, though.” I felt the paper bag. “They’re still hot. Can you smell them?”

  She sighed, wanting to just take the
bag and tell me to leave, but not even in her present state could she bring herself to be so rude. “Oh, all right,” she said, opening the door wider.

  I know people grieve in their own ways. When someone important to you dies, you lose your appetite for a while, and you can get weird for a while. Everybody’s allowed that. But Flora and Domenica Pomeroy had been weird as fuck since I knew them, so I was concerned as to what level of weirdness Flora might be achieving, here in her sadness.

  As Flora passed near me, I tried to detect if she had alcohol on her breath. Didn’t seem so, but in the library, where she wanted to eat, there was evidence she’d been enjoying her blended whiskey. She mixed a couple of highballs for us without asking if I wanted one. Canadian Club and ginger ale—Canada Dry, not Vernors. A relaxing drink with a Coney Island in the middle of the day, I had to admit.

  She started to tell me how pissed off she was at me, but I said, “Save it and let’s eat.”

  She did. I’d brought plenty of paper napkins. I don’t know why she never liked to eat in the kitchen or dining room—both well tricked out—but for Flora now, it seemed she was retreating into the library, her safe place. Nothing really wrong with retreating into the arms of Shakespeare, Milton, Welty, and Chandler. Not a badly padded cell to want to crawl into.

  I wasn’t hungry, having just eaten a dog myself, but I made a dent in a second one.

  The books surrounded us with their friendship.

  But then there was Donna’s bloody painting leaning against the far wall, like the opening of some diabolical tunnel.

  “That looks a little less than cheerful,” I observed.

  Flora shrugged, her mouth full of Coney dog. “Wow, that was good,” she said, wiping her mouth neatly. Her grooming was fine, I realized. She was clean and brushed; she just wasn’t done up.

  “Flora,” I said, “how are you, really?”

  She gazed off and finally said, “All right.”

  “Has anybody else been around? Friends, family?”

  “No. Just the fella down the street. He wants the listing.”

  “He’s a real estate guy? Are you going to sell this place?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should consider it.”

  She looked at me in horror.

  “I’m just saying maybe a change would refresh your life. You had to have thought of what you’d do once—you were alone.”

  Somberly, she said, “It’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “I’m too old.”

  “No way! What are you, fifty-five? Sixty? People meet people all the time. You could—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” She shook her head in a kind of paralytic, repetitive way, and I realized I was pressing her too hard.

  “Look, I know you need to grieve,” I told her. “Lots of times the outside world wants to come in too fast—doesn’t want to let you be.”

  “Boy, you said it.” She swirled the ice cubes in her glass. “Want another?”

  “No, thank you. All I want to say is watch the booze and think about what’s next.”

  She appeared to do just that, holding up the liquor bottle as she refilled her glass. She watched it flow over the ice. Then she sat there thinking and sipping. She glanced at me again then looked closer. “Where did you get that mark?”

  My chin cut was almost healed, but it was still a red line. “Playing ball.”

  “Playing ball? Playing baseball?”

  “Softball. You remember I’m on that team?”

  “Yes,” she said, a strange light coming into her eyes. I couldn’t tell if she was thinking about Domenica and the bat and Abby, or what. It was as if she were seeing something in the past and remembering it, her lips moving slightly.

  “Hey,” I said, “I need to go see Blair and Donna. I need their help with something.”

  “What—help with what?”

  “Nothing you’d be interested in, believe me.”

  “No, what?”

  “I gotta go.” Pleased that I’d managed to engage her and whet her interest in something outside herself, I took off.

  Blair and Donna were home as usual. One thing I appreciated about their place was the quiet. Flora’s purchase of Donna’s painting had cleared up the house’s utility bills, so they now had water and electricity, but still being basically broke, the kids didn’t want to use any more juice than necessary. So no tunes, no TV. When it’s quiet, you can think.

  The two of them were so isolated they hadn’t even known the outcome of the Abigail Rawson investigation. After accepting a cup of coffee served in their huge kitchen, I filled them in.

  “Thanks,” said Blair. “We’ve felt a bit haunted by that.”

  “Wow,” said Donna. “That old lady was a force to be reckoned with.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Old broads kick ass. Except when they get mixed up and whack the wrong person.”

  Donna tilted her head. “A technicality.”

  “A fairly important one, I would submit.” I sort of let that dissipate. The kitchen had so many windows it was pleasantly bright even this rainy day. Then I said, “I have other business.”

  They were attentive.

  I said, “Flora’s in a funk. Would you try to look out for her a little bit?”

  “Oh! Well, uh, yeah!” Blair said. His Jesus beard was heart shaped and caught the sun like auburn Brillo.

  “Some new art might bring her out of it,” suggested Donna.

  I thought of her bloody canvases and said, “Very possibly. But maybe just inviting her over for a cup of coffee, that sort of thing.”

  “What else is on your mind?” said Donna with remarkable keenness.

  “I’m working on an investigative piece for the Motor City Journal on corruption in the city.”

  “So you’re not an art journalist.”

  “Not specifically, Donna. Anyway, there’s a department head who’s screwing the taxpayers by inflating her payroll. I’ve got information that paychecks are going to phantom employees, and…well—”

  “Will you get to the point?” Donna sure could be prickly.

  I got out my notebook. “I need your professional squatting skills.”

  ----

  At dawn the next morning, Jackie, Donna, and I silently approached the Casa del Cielo. We had on junky pants and sneakers and carried nothing in our hands. Just a few friends out for an early stroll, perhaps on our way to breakfast at the soul food café down the block. The rain had stopped, and the skies were clear. I hoped that at least from the back, Jackie, with her broad shoulders, might be taken for a guy. Blair had gotten a lead on a fire sale at an art-supply shop, so he planned to go on that errand this morning, after making sure us gals knew what we were doing.

  First light was creeping over the city; the pigeons were starting their quarrels and reconciliations; the early delivery trucks trundled along; a lone runner chased his shadow up Woodward, his arms and legs shining with sweat, though the day hadn’t heated up yet.

  The early air in Detroit always smells good, even when you know it’s gonna be a scorcher. If there’s a breeze, you can smell the river, its green dampness suggesting adventure and the movement of all things, like the breath of the earth.

  We slipped into the Casa’s back alley, which was deserted except for the rats. We kicked around some trash, and they eventually decided to move out of our way. “You really OK taking time off work for this?” I asked Jackie.

  She just looked at me. “This is like work. I’m just not getting paid.”

  Donna was along because she wanted to see the inside of the Casa. We approached the rear, mesh-secured windows. “This one could work,” I said. Donna returned to the alley’s mouth to keep a lookout. Swiftly I withdrew a can of WD-40 from the pocket of my baggy pants, shook the can, then sprayed each of the bolts that held the mesh in its frame.

  “You don’t usually have to break the mesh to get through,” Blair h
ad told me. “WD’s easier.” I waited a few minutes then drew an adjustable wrench from another pants pocket and went to work on the bolts. Jackie took out her wrench and helped. After another few minutes, we lifted the mesh from the window and set it behind some trash cans. A tow-truck driver once had given me a slim jim that had gotten too bent for him to use, but I’d straightened it and brought it along, tucked into the side of my left Chuck Taylor, secured around my calf by a rubber band. I got this out and worked it into the window frame, and with a sharp drive upward from Jackie’s elbow, it flipped open the vertical window latch.

  I signaled to Donna, who ran to join us. Jackie boosted Donna and me in and followed, easing one leg over the sill, then getting the body in, then bringing in the other leg.

  “I’m so glad you asked for my help on this,” said Jackie quietly.

  “I thought you might enjoy it.”

  He smile brightened the gloom as we moved away from the window. “My heart’s pounding like crazy.”

  The interior of the Casa del Cielo looked about like you’d expect: peeling paint, junk lying around. We stood and listened; the place was silent and quite dark. “Glow sticks,” I said, as we moved away from the window. I handed out the chemical light sources I’d picked up for us at a hardware store, and we snapped and shook them. They gave off an innocuous yet fairly bright greenish radiance. I’d hit on the idea of glow sticks and tested them during my little capers for the Pomeroys. The unique thing about them is you can direct them by shielding one side with your hand or arm. And of course you can turn them off by slipping them up the sleeve of your sweatshirt. A strong flashlight works great, but it’s a double-edged sword. A cop who catches a glimpse of a flashlight beam in a vacant building might, if sufficiently bored, decide to investigate. Then there’s neighbors and God knows who else.

  It was the “God knows who else” that concerned me.

  We moved along a service corridor toward the lobby. “Masks,” I said. “I’ll lay my life there’s asbestos.” The masks had been a Blair suggestion.

  “No doubt,” said Jackie, stepping over a pile of broken boards.