Lucky Stiff Read online

  But now I did. I picked up the phone.

  "Uncle Guff, hi. Lillian here. How are you?"

  "Fine, you?"

  "Good, real good. How's Aunt Rosalie?"

  "Good." His voice always sounded as if its edges had been softly scoured. "Gonna take her to the eye doctor in a few minutes."

  "On Saturday? Anything wrong?"

  "Just a checkup. They got weekend hours over there."

  "OK, I'll take just a sec. Listen, I'm going to ask you about a long time ago." With older people it's best if you get them started shifting mental gears early in the conversation.

  "Yeah?"

  "It's about Mom and Dad. OK? Do you have any clippings from when they died? Did you keep any stuff like that?"

  I heard him clear his throat. "No."

  Generally, he was a man of few words.

  "Oh. Well, then, do you have anything from the fire department?"

  I heard him inhale through his nose, then exhale. "Why would I have anything from the fire department?" It was clear I had absolutely freaked him out. We had never, ever talked directly about these things.

  "Well," I said, "I mean, like, they investigated the fire, right? They figured out what caused it. They always have to do that." I waited. "Right?"

  Pause. "Right."

  "Well, I mean, maybe there was a report of some kind, and I don't know, I thought maybe you'd have a copy of it."

  "It was the fryer."

  "The deep-fryer overheated or something, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, I guess it's the 'or something' part that I'm interested in. You're probably wondering what I'm—"

  "I have to take your aunt to the eye doctor."

  "OK, well, it's just that I bumped into Duane Sechrist, this kid I used to know in the neighborhood, and we were talking about old times, good and bad, you know, and I realized that I hadn't ever seen anything about the fire, never read Mom's and Dad's death notices, you know, and I thought I'd like to take a look at all that stuff. Now that it's been over for so long."

  He said nothing.

  I plunged on, "And I'm wondering about Daddy and Duane's dad, remember Bill Sechrist?—who was Dad's Navy buddy? The guy that saved his life in the Navy?"

  "No."

  "Uh," I said, "you never knew the Sechrists, never met them?"

  "No."

  "I thought maybe you would've met them. Bill Sechrist, anyway. His wife stayed home a lot. I thought you might've met him around the bar, you know. But you knew about Bill Sechrist saving Daddy's life, right?"

  "I never knew that guy."

  "Gee, I'm surprised."

  Silence.

  "Well, OK, Uncle Guff, I gotta run along too. Want to do early-bird bowling again Tuesday?"

  "Yeah."

  "OK, I'll call you."

  "OK."

  .

  The mighty Detroit Public Library had helped me out many times in the past. I went over there with my notebook.

  Detroit was a two-newspaper town in my youth, two real newspapers, the evening Detroit News and the morning Detroit Free Press. Then times got tough and somebody invented joint operating agreements and everybody felt cheated.

  I requested the microfilm reels from both papers for two weeks starting from the day after the fire. At the viewer I ran up the headline in the News:

  Fire Guts Bar, 3 Dead

  The story was on the front page, and there was a photo alongside.

  Fire swept through the Polka Dot Bar at the corner of Casimir and Mulhouse Sts. in the city's Delray neighborhood last night, killing husband-and-wife owners Martin James Byrd and Sophie Marie Byrd. A third victim is presumed to be a female employee.

  "It was a triple tragedy," said Capt. Dennis Purtzer of the DFD. The blaze began on the ground floor of the 2-story building, according to Capt. Purtzer. Investigators were working to determine the cause, he added.

  The Byrds' 12-year-old daughter, Lillian Woodruff Byrd, asleep in the family's apartment above the bar, was rescued by firemen. Her parents' bodies were found near the door to her bedroom.

  "It looked like they were trying to reach her when they were overcome by smoke," said Capt. Purtzer.

  My heart flipped and clenched. Tears flooded my eyes. I took out a handkerchief and bawled quietly. (Now you know my middle name, which is Uncle Guff's real name. His baby brother couldn't pronounce Woodruff, so he was stuck with Guff forever. At least they didn't name me Lillian Guff Byrd.) After a few minutes I read some more.

  A third body recovered by firemen was burned beyond recognition. Bystanders suggested the third victim was a barmaid who had worked at the Polka Dot for years. Efforts to identify the victim were to continue today.

  "It went up just like that," said Hiram Bowers, an eyewitness. "I looked out my living room window and I saw a flicker over there. By the time I realized the place was on fire, it was too late."

  He attempted to enter the building, he said, but was pushed back by the heat. "It's a real shame," he said. "They were the nicest people you could know. They're in God's hands now."

  The photograph showed the building in flames, a dramatic night-fire photo. I studied it. It had been taken from the viewpoint of the rear alley. The windows of the bar glowed white, and flames shot upward from them into the black sky. The flames lit up the back alley. There was smoke, but it didn't really show up in the picture except as black spaces above the flames.

  There was nothing in the photo to suggest the fire department had gotten there yet. The first truck would have pulled up to the front of the building. If the DFD hadn't arrived, this photo had been taken very soon after the fire got going. I recognized our garbage cans. It gave me a peculiar twinge to look at the photo, knowing my parents and I were still inside at that point.

  There was a car parked down the alley, its rear end just visible in the fire's glow. A light-colored Dodge, it had a large dark spot on the trunk. The credit line read, "Photo by Earl C. Raymer. Special to the News."

  "Oh, no way," I muttered. I strained to see the photo better. Did the dark spot on the trunk resemble Lyndon Johnson? The image was unclear. My magnifying glass didn't help.

  When you think about it, it's amazing that the microfilmed photographs were legible at all. First the negative was exposed and developed, then a print was made from it. Then the print was shot through a screen so that it could be reproduced by a million tiny dots on the newsprint. A plate was made of the whole newspaper page, then the newspaper was printed. Then a copy of it was photographed in miniature in the microfilm process, and I was viewing an enlarged projection of the copy on a ground-glass screen. When I thought about all that, I marveled that I could make out anything.

  If that was Bill Sechrist's car, that placed him at the scene of the crime. Trix or no Trix.

  There was nothing in the Free Press that day, the paper having gone to press before the time of the fire. But the next day there was a story, also on the front page. It confirmed Trix Hawley as the third victim and featured two photographs. One was of the front of the bar with streams of water gushing; the other was taken from the alley, about the same vantage point as the photo in the News. It showed a fireman hauling a narrow bundle over his shoulder, descending a ladder, and it revealed the darkness of the alley. The car was gone. The bundle over the fireman's shoulder, of course, was me.

  I remembered the upside-down sensation of being carried. I remembered the roughness of the fireman's coat. I remembered trying to grab something. I remembered being set on the ground. The fireman's face was not visible in the picture.

  "Thank you," I whispered.

  Chapter 6

  Suddenly I had a lot to do. I printed out the articles and death notices and jotted a few things into my notebook for handy reference. I noted Trix's full name, Patricia Lynn Hawley, as well as her husband's name, Robert N. Hawley, as well as the name of the photographer who took the shot of the Dodge in the alley. I wrote down a couple of questions for Duane and some more for
Uncle Guff.

  I wanted to get into some archives that wouldn't be open until Monday, so I fired up the old Caprice for a ride. I drove all the way downtown, then drifted through the streets on a southerly course.

  It's funny how a car will either fit into a neighborhood or stick out. My 1985 Caprice, in conservative evergreen, used to be a police car, an unmarked car for plainclothes detectives. I kept it clean and running, but barely. It continually needed spare parts; rust was encroaching into the body panels from the wheel wells. Although I'd never made use of the shotgun brackets in the trunk, the car's history made me feel tough and proud. Many a cop butt had beaten down the upholstery, many a cigarette had been squashed in the ashtray, many a pizza crust had been tossed out the windows. Many a sigh had been heaved in that backseat.

  For a few years after I drove my car away from the auction block, it looked like the vehicle of an old person who liked it and was too cheap or broke to buy a new one. After a few more years, with the Caprice model changing drastically in appearance, my car looked older still—verging on vintage, a car an enthusiast would own. Yes, a Chevy buff who was hanging tight onto this one, with a plan to customize it into a lowrider and then drive it to Los Angeles and sell it for a fortune to some gang dude.

  Now, I had to admit, it looked like a ghetto car. The car of an impoverished person trying to keep up appearances. The rust was not fixed, the body not Bondoed and repainted. But I hadn't let things totally go. The backseat was not piled with trash, the roof never played host to bird droppings for long, the wipers and taillights worked.

  If my pride in the Caprice were to diminish, however, it would descend to the last rung of used cars—the outcasts, the hulks condemned by neglect to the category of true eyesore. Rust and bad dirt—tree sap, bug guts, tar—would engulf it. It would stop running of its own accord, humiliated into flatlining.

  Well, I was talking about cars belonging in neighborhoods or not. The Caprice had long been a misfit in Detroit's swanky northern suburbs, and had recently experienced snubbing in my humble zone of Eagle. But in the neighborhood of the Polka Dot, the car would have fit in when new, and it fit in now.

  I cruised slowly down Casimir Street. I hadn't been down it in years. No need; it wasn't on the way anywhere. As a grownup I'd driven by the site of the Polka Dot once or twice during periods of depression, topped off by a trip to the cemetery.

  I pulled over and got out about a block away from our old corner. I locked the Caprice and walked. The day was bright and warm, the air still. Such weather in, for example, a forest, makes the forest especially lovely, but no weather could make that neighborhood lovely. The sunlight fell on the scene like a harsh wash. In the absence of a breeze the air smelled stale. The concrete was egg-carton gray, the buildings worn and morose. A few peeling wood-frame houses sagged behind weeds and broken fences. Sparrows scratched listlessly among the weeds. The masonry facades of the commercial buildings were eroded, their windows filthy or painted over or broken out. The stench of urine wafted from a doorway. I glanced in and saw a pile of liquor bottles and trash. Illegible, joyless graffiti marred the door itself.

  A scraggly old dude perched on a thin metal window edge, arms folded, head bowed. The former baby clothes store was now a liquor store. A turbaned dude smoked a cigarette in the dimness of that doorway.

  I haven't mentioned that the Polka Dot was razed after the fire. The building next to it, an apartment low-rise, had been saved. For a long time the small footprint of the Polka Dot's lot was unoccupied; it had been junk-strewn and vacant the last time I visited.

  Today, though, I saw that some advantage was being taken of that plot: a taco truck was parked there, broadside to the street, awning out, freehand sign propped. TACOS GOOD FOOD. A tempting smell came from it.

  "Hi there," I said to the proprietor.

  He tipped his chin toward me in a friendly way. He wore a Detroit Red Wings cap and an oversize Western shirt with snaps.

  "Two tacos, please," I said, reaching into my pocket.

  "For drink?" His large hands were already busy making the food.

  "Oh. Coke. You got Coke?"

  He nodded. "Coke."

  I handed him the money and he handed me the food and a paper napkin.

  I sat at a folding table beneath the awning and ate and drank. Looking up, I noticed something I hadn't ever before. It was something about the sycamore tree that had shaded the Polka Dot's front windows. A soft black scar ran up the trunk and disappeared into the summer branches. I realized that it was a scorch mark, an old mark. That fire had burned hot.

  I pictured myself telling the taco man, "I used to live here." Since I had just bought something, he would give me a polite look.

  With more intensity, I would say, "Here, right here on this spot."

  He would nod and say, perhaps, "Yeah."

  Then I would look at the dirt and weeds and feel lonelier than I already did.

  .

  On Monday morning I drove over to the Detroit News offices, went in through the main lobby, and asked to see someone in the research department. A pleasant manchild with a flurry of purple hair came down and escorted me up to his domain. As the elevator compressed our spines, he assured me the archives would cough up what I wanted. His name was Burt.

  "Yeah," I said, "but the credit line says 'So-and-so, special to the News.' It wasn't a staff photographer."

  "Mm, in that case we probably don't have the negative. We might, but probably not. We'll have the print, one print, I bet. Let's see."

  In a few minutes I was holding a black-and-white 8-by-10 of the shot down the alley. The picture was good and sharp. Even without my magnifier I could tell the car was the Sechrist-mobile. There was the gangrenous patch of rust on the trunk lid, shaped exactly like LBJ's profile: high wrinkled forehead, long mournful nose, knoblike chin.

  I let out a long sigh. "That's the car," I said aloud. "I can't believe it."

  Burt stood by, attracted by my intensity. "What's it all about?" he said.

  "Oh, just…I was involved in a…Oh, Christ. In a long story that's getting longer by the minute." I studied the picture some more. To my dismay, the license plate was obscured by the top of one of the garbage cans in the foreground. There was no way to know whether the depth of field would've allowed the plate to be legible anyway. The car was in focus, but not perfectly. The photographer had focused on the middle of the flaming building; the oblique angle of the shot permitted most of the scene to be in focus. It was a good news picture.

  "Do you have the negatives?" I asked.

  Burt shook his purple pelt. "Just that shot."

  "How 'bout a contact sheet?"

  "Let me check for sure."

  He returned with a wide file envelope and shook out its contents on a table: the other photography for that day's issue. We sorted through it.

  "Nope," he said.

  "I see." I drummed my fingers. "So if I want to see this guy's other shots from that night, I have to find him, right?"

  "Right."

  "Burt, do you recognize the name? Earl C. Raymer? Like, did he do a lot of photography for the paper back then?"

  "You know, that name does sound familiar. He probably did some other work for us."

  Freelance photographers, like news stringers, crawl around the city, looking and listening. When they come across breaking news, they're on it like black on coal. Earl C. Raymer was probably the first journalist to the scene, having noticed flames leaping into the sky over the treetops as he drove along the nearby artery of Fort Street. He spun his car down side streets, slammed on his brakes, ran around to the trunk, and grabbed his camera.

  He would have quickly moved all around the scene—all around the building—shooting a few rolls of Tri-X, working for the most dramatic angle he could get. He would have used a tripod because he would have wanted to make long exposures in the dark night: a half second, maybe even a whole second or two. He would have made the same shot with different exposure
s. He might have added a flash to fill in some detail. Very possibly he snapped a shot that showed the Dodge's license plate. Did he hear my mother screaming?

  That night was good luck for him: The fire produced fatalities, so the story and photo ran prominently.

  I went home and called Duane.

  "I'm working on this, buddy," I told him. "Listen, I'm trying to remember something about our conversation the other night. Didn't you tell me that your mom and dad were supposed to go on a vacation for a week in the U.P. after they dropped you off at camp?"

  "Yeah, they did. I've been thinking about that too—like, maybe my dad used that time away from home in his plot against my mom somehow."

  "Do you know exactly where they were supposed to go?"

  "My dad said they were going up to the Soo Locks. I do remember my mom looking uncomfortable at the thought of being so far from home for that long."

  "Did they have luggage in the car?"

  "I guess so. I guess they must have…yeah. I remember this brown suitcase of my mom's. Yeah."

  "OK, now Duane, I want you to think about your mom. Her habits. Did she like downers? Did she take them sometimes?"

  He blew out his breath.

  "Duane, are you with me?"

  "Yeah. I'm thinking. She did take pills."

  "It strikes me that she was exactly the kind of woman with exactly the kind of problems doctors used to give tranks to."