Left Field Read online

  We got out our dust masks, also from the hardware store, and pinched the metal strips tightly across the bridges of our noses. Now we looked like a gang of slovenly doctors.

  Jackie said, her voice only a little muffled, “You need a microscope to tell for sure, but given the age of this building, you can take for granted that that—” she gestured with her glow stick to a place in the ceiling where plaster had fallen down in patches—“is asbestos.” Fluffy, fibrous gray stuff bloomed out like it was trying to become stalactites. I took a careful look.

  She added, “It’s inert, so long as you don’t stir it up and breathe it in.”

  Awful gouges in the walls told us that electrical wiring had been ripped out everywhere, no doubt for the copper.

  As soon as we reached the lobby, I remembered it being tiled in gorgeous Pewabic, with a huge starburst mosaic in the center of the floor. Now it was half smashed and begrimed by a tarry substance. The whole lobby looked like angry Vikings had raised their kids there. The bank of lovely old mailboxes had been smashed, half torn out, the pieces thrown around. Lots of shattered liquor bottles of course. Broken furniture had been dragged in either from the street or down from the apartments above. Other stuff had found its way in from the street, like paint-bucket lids, chunks of concrete, rusted clumps of chicken wire. Toys for the insane.

  We stopped frequently to listen. Nothing.

  “Locked up too tight for the derelicts to trouble with, I guess,” I said.

  Donna said authoritatively, “Plus, serious squatters wouldn’t pick something right on Woodward, so exposed.”

  I went to the boarded-up gap where the front doors had been. Someone had built a plywood box over the mail slot. It had a little access door secured by a burly padlock.

  Casting a glance at the dark staircase, Jackie said, “This building has been abandoned, then opened and vandalized and scrap stolen out of it of course, then secured again. I suspect whoever owns it has gotten involved.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “The fact that important mail comes through here—the only reliable way to do that is to, like, bribe a landlord or be a landlord.” She was enjoying herself.

  “I expected to find the place teeming with squatters,” I said, “people who let Shirlene use their ID to get on the city payroll, then signed over their checks to her in exchange for a cut. That’s a lot of logistics, though. A lot of moving parts.”

  Donna wandered around taking photographs, using just the light from our glow sticks. “This place rocks,” she murmured.

  “Well, it used to,” I said. “You can see it used to be really graceful.”

  She gave me the kind of look you’d give a pathetically stupid person.

  I started for the stairway, but Jackie stopped me, saying, “You can’t assume those stairs are safe.”

  “Right,” said Donna.

  “Oh,” I said, drawing my foot back from the first step.

  “You’ve got to think of this stuff,” Donna said, severely.

  We did an inspection and found the main staircase to be built of iron, and it seemed intact except for the torn-off banisters—where had they gone, and how?—so we went up and spooked around the upper floors. All the doors had been removed from the apartments. “Oak or mahogany, presumably,” Jackie said. Donna, still snapping pictures, concurred. The smashed windows had admitted snow and rain to ruin the paint, plaster, and floors. Pigeons had nested inside, and I figured raccoons must be in the picture somehow or other. Maybe Raquel eventually would make her way here. That thought gave me a bit of funky comfort. I had forgotten the sturdy oak floors, now warped and ugly.

  “This is heartbreaking,” I murmured.

  “This is exhilarating,” Donna said coldly.

  “Oh, get over yourself,” I said.

  She stopped and gave me a hard look. “What’s your problem?”

  “Aren’t you sick of ruin porn by now?”

  “There’s ruin porn, and then there’s ruin porn,” she said imperturbably. Jackie stifled a laugh.

  We returned to the lobby. “As it happens,” I said, “city paychecks are due out in two days.”

  ----

  Two early brights later, a Friday, Jackie and I took up a position in the doorway of a boarded-up storefront across Woodward from the Casa. Dressed as indigents, we sat on upended five-gallon buckets and shot the breeze all morning, waiting for the mail carrier. I’d skipped breakfast so I could more effectively turn a hollow stare on whoever might come along and need a silent rebuffing. Also, I had rubbed some dirt from the McVitties’ rose bed on my face and hands, and put on a pair of pants that were too short and wide for me. I held them up with a knotted length of orange extension cord.

  “You look quite fetching actually,” Jackie told me, appraising my hoodie, which I’d made uglier by dribbling bleach on it. She’d messed up her hair and glued it upright, so that it didn’t move in the stiff breeze that was blowing.

  “Thanks. I appreciate what you did with your hair, but you look too healthy.”

  She responded by sticking her leg out at an awkward angle, as if disabled.

  “That’s better,” I said.

  “You’re terrible.”

  “The world is terrible.”

  When the mail carrier came along, I whipped out my camera and zoomed in on the fat bundle of envelopes she pushed into the slot. I clicked off a couple of shots. I’d finally picked up a digital model, though my good old Canon SLR still occupied a place in my heart (and my closet). The new digital one was a Canon too. Brand loyalty helped me make the transition. “Surely somebody’s gonna pick these up today,” I said. We moved our stakeout to the alley. We’d erased our break-in by simply shutting the window after ourselves then replacing the security grate.

  We took up a position a little ways down from the Casa’s back door, next to a huge rusting waste-oil tank. We got ready to pretend like we were doing a drug deal in case anybody should come along (aside from a police cruiser, which would certainly be an aberrant event). After an hour, Jackie said she was getting too hungry, so I urged her to run over to the soul food restaurant and grab a carryout of peas and greens. She trotted off, and I watched and waited.

  A black Corvette slung itself into the alley and stopped at the Casa’s back door. A little white guy got out and looked up and down the alley. I was sitting right there, hunched on my bucket and looking directly at him, but as a street person, I had become invisible. He unlocked the door and went in, carrying a black briefcase. I snapped pictures of the car. Because the front of it was pointed at me, I couldn’t get a shot of the license plate. I didn’t want to move right then.

  Jackie hustled up the alley from the other end, and I told her what was going on. I positioned my camera on my knee to discreetly get a shot of the guy when he came out. Jackie got excited when she saw the car. “I think…” she started to say. “I think I might—”

  The man emerged, carrying his briefcase.

  “I know that guy,” she said. “He owns half the shitpits in this city.”

  23

  After I got a shot of the license number, we sprinted for the Crown Vic, and I fired it up. I kept the Corvette in sight as it headed down Woodward then took a right on Warren. “He’s going to the other address near here,” I said. “I bet you a million dollars. What do you know about this guy?”

  “His name is Ward Amherst, but it was originally like Sherman Budzinski or something.”

  “So upper-crust.”

  “Yeah. He’s crooked as hell, but he’s smart, and he understands how the city government really works. Some of his friends have been indicted, but he hasn’t.”

  “For what? Hang on.” I braked and cornered hard. Amherst wasn’t going particularly fast, just a guy on his rounds, but I tried to hang back then had to gun it when he got too far ahead.

  “Oh, bribery, I guess. The kinds of shit you’d expect. God damn, this is unbelievably fun!”

  Indeed. Mr. Fake-Amherst
stopped his car in front of address #2 on my list and ran in with the briefcase, holding his keys in front of him as if to hurry the process. Because he hadn’t been driving all that fast, I realized he was rushing now because he didn’t want to leave his alluring car on that street for a second longer than he had to. That’s the downside of driving something like that in Detroit. Not that your ten-year-old Buick is absolutely safe either, frankly.

  We watched him come out and drive away. Jackie said, “We gonna keep following him?”

  “No. If he’s going where I think, we’d probably lose him on I-94 anyway. We’re gonna stake out a different place.” I set the Crown Vic on a course for downtown. “How do you know this guy?”

  “I’ve inspected some of his buildings during deals. He’s actually pretty cool. I mean, he knows the score and doesn’t try to throw his weight around.”

  Conveniently, there was a spot on Griswold with a view of the Penobscot Building’s entrance. I slid the Crown Vic into it, and while we waited, I used my phone to look up property records. Sure enough, all four addresses for the phantom employees belonged to Fake Amherst.

  “He’s either going to bring the checks here, or Shirlene’s going to leave and meet him somewhere.” I’d noted her car in its usual restricted-zone spot.

  “I don’t get all the monkeyshines,” Jackie said.

  “They believe they’ve made it opaque by using the four different apartment buildings. But that didn’t really add any complexity, you know? I mean, you can hide four peas under four cups, but that’s not the same as hiding one under a cup, one in a bear’s stomach, one in Italy, and one in a bag of pebbles.”

  Jackie thought for a moment then said, “That was really good, Yoda.”

  “Yeah,” I said, sort of surprised myself. “Thank you.”

  “She’s modest too,” she murmured to herself.

  “Shut up.”

  “Those checks are instruments, and they have to be cashed. Let’s see what Shirlene does.”

  “She could have a bunch of online bank accounts.”

  “She probably does. I’d bet some of the phony employees have direct deposit, I’m sure she’s got that figured out somehow. Maybe also with this guy as a helper.” I knew the police could look into that if they wanted to. But there was no way Lieutenant Sorrel would take that on, given his very probably intimate friendship with Shirlene Cord. Unless, that is, I gave him something really compelling, incriminating, and startling.

  “She does as she pleases,” I said, “but today I bet she stays on the job until five o’clock.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I’m getting a feeling of how she does things. She’s a small-timer who clawed her way into a bigger life, and she’s still nervous at times. Today is payday, and she’s not gonna leave work early. I could be wrong.”

  Jackie and I waited. After a couple of hours, we took turns dashing into a diner for the bathroom and to grab coffees.

  “Why wouldn’t she just have her imaginary employees opt for their checks to be sent to the office in the first place?” Jackie asked, when we were enjoying our coffees.

  “Well, that would make it possible for the secretary or somebody else to see what’s going on.” I thought for a moment. “Hmph, I wonder if we’re retracing Abby’s steps, you know? Did she do all this already, and the evidence was in that camper?”

  “Wow, yeah. Maybe. Except—”

  “Right, except there was some kind of trouble with the medical providers as well, though it doesn’t seem like the Happy Van could be involved. Dr. Briggs set my mind at ease when I basically confronted him about it. I think those old folks in Palmer Woods must have misinterpreted something Viv or Dr. Briggs told them. I wish Lou and I had gotten deeper into those records when we burgled Shirlene’s office that day.”

  “I am so impressed you did that. Lillian, you really have…guts. And my God, I wouldn’t have had any idea how to begin to investigate this whole thing.”

  I gave no sign of how thrilled that made me. “Well, my guts get me in trouble sometimes.”

  “Yeah, but…” Jackie sat there in the thinker’s position, just like the guy in front of the DIA, elbow on knee, chin on hand. “My life has been too circumscribed. I haven’t…gone after everything I want.”

  “It’s never too late, that’s my motto,” I said, though I had the same secret fears everybody else does about that issue.

  At two minutes past five, Shirlene Cord and the secretary exited the building and went their separate ways. Shirlene got into her red sportmobile and zoomed off. We followed.

  I looked over at Jackie, who was obviously enjoying herself, her fist clenched on the passenger handhold. In former police cars like this one, the handholds were always beefed up. I smiled.

  “Beats living in a cubicle.”

  “You said it.”

  The rush-hour traffic made it easy for me to keep Shirlene in sight. She went home, steering the BMW into the Froisart Building’s garage. I couldn’t find a parking spot positioned right enough to watch both the front and garage entrances, so I pulled over down St. Antoine, and Jackie and I split up. She lounged across the street from the garage entrance, and I took the front. I hung out in a doorway a little ways down the block and peeped out.

  Fifteen minutes later, the black Corvette pulled up at the front awning, and Fake Amherst got out, briefcase in hand. He hurried in and came out a few minutes later. I snapped photos of him coming and going. Then I trotted all the way around the block to meet up with Jackie, so as not to pass in front of the building.

  “So the question is,” I mused, as Jackie and I loitered around the garage entrance, “did Fake Amherst cash the checks for Shirlene and deliver the money, or will she convert them herself?”

  “How big was the briefcase?”

  “Good point. It was the same one. Not that big.”

  I ran and got the Crown Vic, and just as I slowed down to let Jackie in, the red BMW surged out of the garage. I paused for my love to jump in, and we took off again.

  If somebody isn’t expecting to be tailed, they won’t be on the lookout for it. Shirlene Cord must have done this little shuffle a hundred times. Traffic density and tempo worked in my favor. You always get your unexpected slowpokes and your aggros, but in general driving in Detroit isn’t bad. Shreds of the polite Midwest still cling to the exoskeleton. The only annoyance during this segment was a motorcyclist who ran up on my rear a couple of times. I hate those little crotch rockets with their damned high-pitched whine. Give me a plain old deep-throated, oil-leaking Harley any day. Eventually the bike peeled off, and I had Shirlene to myself.

  The destination this time was Kenny’s Kash Kastle, a payday loan and check-cashing place on the west side. Kenny’s windows were filthy but his lighted sign, which included a crude scene of Kenny (presumably) throwing cash to happy people, blazed bright. We watched Shirlene, carrying a pink leather fashion tote, hurry in. The establishment was mighty crummy, a hole in the wall where the working poor and the welfare poor got cash advances on their paychecks, bought money orders, and wired money to relatives who needed to pay for somebody’s operation back in Tallahassee or Oaxaca or Belgrade.

  Shirlene came out smiling, swinging the empty tote.

  We watched her go, and I ducked into the establishment. The proprietor, behind thick bulletproof plexi, was smiling widely, almost in a post-blowjob way. I pretended I needed info on his fees, and he pointed to the overhead sign that listed everything.

  I returned to the Crown Vic and told Jackie, “Well, the guy seems crooked as Fake Amherst, and obviously she paid him a share of those checks to consolidate—basically launder—them for her. I suppose she’s got just one big check in her purse now, or the money’s been wired somewhere else.”

  It’s funny how transforming dirty money into clean is such a challenging process. Check cashing is pretty low-tech, which sometimes works just as well as anything.

  “What’s next?” said Ja
ckie, as I cranked the ignition.

  “We could go over to the casino, I guess, and watch Shirlene Cord gamble away enough money to feed half the city for a month, but screw it. I’m gonna go home and think this over.”

  If you’re from some normal place, you might wonder at the blatant extent of Shirlene’s payroll fraud. How could headquarters not notice this? Maybe somebody at city hall did pick up on it but just didn’t care. Or just didn’t want to tip somebody else’s gravy boat, especially if that somebody else had strong ties to the mayor, which Shirlene did—I mean, hairdresser to the bodyguards’ wives? How much tighter can you get? Plus add in dating a police lieutenant, and what do you have? Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the dailies had run a shot on the party pages of Lieutenant Sorrel escorting Shirlene to a benefit dinner for the long-time-coming Coleman Young memorial and perpetual flame, to be constructed on the waterfront. That was just a week or so ago.

  Seeing the way things really work in a place where corruption has taken deep root will make you cynical, which I somewhat am. But then you meet up with an honest soul, like Lou, who sets strict principles on her skullduggery, and you feel better.

  ----

  Things with Jackie were—what? Can I say “good”? Good is such a weak word when you’re talking about a relationship. A relationship, especially a young one, needs to be “great!” or else. And we had that problem. But we also had Abigail Rawson as a common tie, and neither of us wanted to let that one go.

  We got together after games a lot and on most weekends. I have a foolish, enthusiastic heart, and it was about our third time together when I told her I loved her. She said it back. But you never can fully trust it when somebody says it back after you’ve said it first, not right away. Because ninety-eight percent of people say it back automatically. Did I love her, really? All my life I’d wanted to give myself to someone I could really connect with, someone who got who I was and how I saw the world. Someone who could thoroughly know me and, in spite of that, still love me. Someone who would feel safe enough with me to let down all those stupid fences and forts we build and hide behind. I know there have been times when I’ve said “I love you” out of sheer optimism.