The Devil's Own Rag Doll

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Copyright

  For my mother

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel could not have been completed without the help, encouragement, and sharp criticism of dozens of people. For their enthusiasm and support and for their leap of faith on my behalf, I am deeply grateful to my agent, Andrea Somberg, and to my fine editor, Ben Sevier. Dorene O’Brien has offered years of solid friendship and keen analysis. Dr. Renata Wasserman and so many others at Wayne State University helped to make the book possible as well. I am especially indebted to Christopher Towne Leland for his boundless generosity, trenchant commentary, and simple kindness. Lastly, of course, I must thank Julie Bartoy, my patient and long-suffering wife, and my fantastic children, Jackson and Allison, who are present in every page I write.

  CHAPTER 1

  Thursday, June 10, 1943

  Detroit

  Bobby Swope looked over at me and grinned with smoke curling out between his long teeth. “Just remember, Pete, first thing, these niggers are always going to lie to you.”

  “It ain’t just the niggers,” I said. “Seems like nobody can talk straight anymore.”

  “So long as you remember,” said Bobby. “You keep it at the back of your mind that he’s going to be putting on a show for us, that’s all.”

  I ran a finger around the inside of my collar. I had worn a tie just as tight and a heavier, darker shirt as a uniformed officer, but the new shirts and suit jackets I had to wear as a detective seemed to cut into me more sharply. It didn’t help that June had brought thick heat so early in the year.

  “Well,” I told him, “I don’t figure on thinking about it too much. I’ll go along, just so long as you keep it simple for me.”

  Bobby blew more smoke through his big yellow teeth. “Okay, okay. We just go in, see what he knows, right? Not too complicated. I’ll do the playacting, and you can just put that mug on him. He tells us what we need to know, we find the girl, and that’s thirty-five easy simoleons for you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It sounds simple.” Simple enough: Big-shot auto company man Roger Hardiman had a daughter with a taste for trouble. Young Jane Hardiman liked to run around with the shines on the dark side of town, hitting the nightspots in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. We were to find the girl, put a scare into whoever she was with, drag her home to the mansion in Grosse Pointe, and collect the money. A little side job Bobby had cooked up. With Bobby, though, you never knew when the shit started to flow. Bobby thought he had a line on the job even before we walked into it. We had driven to the edge of Black Bottom to roust a local character named Toby Thrumm, who would tell us just where to find the girl. At least this was Bobby’s expectation.

  But though I had been made a detective only a little more than a month earlier, I knew from my own long time of shaky luck that nothing ever turned out to be so neat or tidy. My new badge lay heavily on the underside of my lapel as I reached in to unhook the leather strap that held my gun in the shoulder rig. I guess I took in my breath in a way that let on how it struck me.

  “Hardiman’s on the level?” I asked. “You’re sure about it?”

  “I’ve got a line on him,” Bobby answered. He narrowed his eyes and squinted through smoke over the rounded hood of the auto. “I know him well enough, I guess. You can bet your good eye he can afford what he’s paying us.”

  Bobby always kept so many pots simmering that I couldn’t blame him for being cagey, even with me. He was so affable that you had to let it go.

  Hell, I thought, even I don’t let on everything I know. That Hardiman girl …

  I could remember when Black Bottom didn’t look half bad, but now it had gone to seed. Maybe the war had pulled something away. But stepping back from it, I knew it was just the way things worked. All the houses needed something: a coat of paint, a new roof, caulk on the windows. It wasn’t a place where you could afford to let your guard down. But the tenants and the landlords couldn’t figure out who’d pay for any repairs, and so water ripped hell out of every old building, running down and sneaking into the tiniest crack, freezing and thawing or just soaking into unprotected wood, softening and weakening. The renters couldn’t see putting any money into a place that wasn’t theirs, and the landlords never had a reason to set foot in such a bad part of town. If the rent didn’t come, they just called in the muscle to dump the tenants, and a dozen other colored families would line up for the empty place. With the war on, nobody from the city or the department had any interest in the situation, not down in Black Bottom or Paradise Valley, where it was only colored folks piled up on top of each other.

  We left the car and stepped onto the sagging porch of Toby Thrumm’s place. The wood felt soft under my heavy shoes. In the colored district where Toby Thrumm rented the bottom flat of a leaning wood house, we stood out like ghosts—but Bobby preened like he was stepping onto a stage. He shook out his jacket and straightened his tie as we stood on the porch. Then he rapped a bony knuckle on the door, loud and happy like he was selling brushes. I shifted my weight back and forth behind him. The scalp on the top of his head looked pale and weak below the thin black hair. Through his clothes you could see how his bones were set, shoulders and elbows angling without any meat. I was half again as wide as he was. We kept waiting, and I kept shifting, and the loose boards under my feet creaked and pulled at their nails.

  Bobby rapped again, and kept rapping until the heavy bolt rasped back.

  After a moment, the handle turned and the door opened a sliver. The crack grew slowly until the blinking yellow eye of Toby Thrumm appeared. It was hard to make out any expression from just the one eye, but I saw it look sharply out, scan Bobby quickly, then flutter a little as it lit on my own dark mug. The door opened a bit more and the inside chain pulled taut. “Well,” Thrumm said, “what’s it all about, fellas?”

  “What’s with the chain, Toby? Worried about hooligans?” Bobby flicked his cigarette at the chain, dusting the threshold with gently falling ash.

  “Well, it’s a war on, I heard somethin’ ’bout that. Maybe there’s enemy agents about or—”

  I slipped past Bobby and shouldered through the doorway without pulling my hands from my pockets. The chain pulled loose from its mooring in the dry wood of the doorframe, and Thrumm staggered backward with his hands fluttering up to his face. I kept moving and muscled Thrumm to a seat on the sofa. I wasn’t muscling him to be hard so much as to keep things moving. Slogging through trash can easily take up a whole day, and still you end up with nothing but trash. I stood close to Thrumm for a few moments until Bobby could catch up. With the sunny windows at my back, my face lay deep in the shadow of the wide brim of my hat, and I didn’t move to let Thrumm get a good look. His rheumy eyes sneaked toward
Bobby a few times, and I could see that it wasn’t the first time they’d been in a room together; but I kept it to myself. Thrumm’s tongue darted over his shipwrecked lower teeth to wet his lips.

  Bobby nudged a bit of splintered wood aside so he could close the front door and then moved slowly toward Thrumm. He pulled off his hat and glanced about for a clean place to put it down. Finding none, he held it by the brim and tapped it lightly against his leg. He said, “We’d like to ask you a few questions, Toby. Is that all right?”

  “Well,” said Thrumm, “you—you all know me—they know me down to the station. I’m always willing to help out—”

  “Save all that malarkey.” Bobby kept his usual grin but squinted at Thrumm. “We’re not selling tickets to the policemen’s ball.”

  I hovered nearby until it was clear that Thrumm would offer no resistance. Then I stepped away and started to form a picture of the dim little flat. My anger eased and my attention spread out, and I noticed that the place reeked of sour milk, smoke, and salami. I kept quiet, and I suppose that was why Thrumm kept glancing at me, stealing looks at the black patch over what used to be my eye.

  “Like I say, fellas … don’t I know you from somewhere?” Thrumm tried to compose himself. He tried to sit up, but the sofa was too soft. Then he tugged vainly at his open fly, crossed his legs, and said, “I don’t guess you got some badges you could show, right? Everybody got some kind of badges these days, don’t they?” His eyes skated about, never meeting Bobby’s for any time, now and again darting to the telephone table near the kitchen. I picked up on Thrumm’s nervous concern and let myself drift that way.

  Bobby hiked up his foot to the arm of the sofa and pretended to wipe a smudge off the shiny leather of the lighter part of his two-tones. You could see the well-worn leather sap tucked into his garter and the top of his sock, as well as a good portion of white skin, blue veins, and patchy black hair.

  “Just one thing to get straight, boy,” Bobby said. “We don’t like having to deal with all the backwoods country shit that’s been coming up here lately. Especially criminal trash like yourself. If you want to leave Grandmaw down on the farm in Shitville, Mississippi, and come up here sniffing for work, we can’t stop you. It’s still a free country, so they say. But while you’re here, you’ll do things our way, right?” Bobby scratched up and down his shin. “We’re all set up here to take away everything you ever thought you had in this world. We do it every day to folks better made than you. It’s like a system, the way we do it. Try to think about how it might be if we locked you up for a few days and you came out to find your stuff all gone and somebody else living in your house—and if you found yourself blackballed at all the factories.”

  “Oh, yassuh. Yassuh.”

  Bobby looked at him sharply, then softened his expression, leaned close, and grinned. He dropped his foot to the floor and began to show a little drawl in his speech. “Let’s not be funny, Toby. You can see that my partner here, Detective Caudill, is an unhappy man. You can see how his face hangs. I’ve tried to get him to look to the brighter side of things, but he just doesn’t seem to lean that way. I don’t think he likes niggers as much as I do. He doesn’t like anybody, as far as I can tell. I guess he’d just like to get out of this stinking hole as soon as he can. So you can see that he’d appreciate it if you’d answer the few simple questions we have just as fast as your little brain can start to turn over.”

  “I see how it is,” said Thrumm, giving me the eyeball. When he saw me turning toward him with some heat, he quickly looked away. “Seem like that’s the way it always is.”

  I turned away and pretended an interest in the decor. I was afraid that my cheek might start twitching, because I always got tickled when Bobby started in with a spiel. Whether or not Bobby’s act was effective, it was always good for a laugh. Bobby’s ridiculous tough-guy routine wasn’t all that different from the slick, breezy attitude he used in dealing with people with money or position. Maybe it was because I knew him, but neither routine seemed convincing. It was like he learned his words from watching movies, and he was willing to try anything out, even if it couldn’t fairly sit on his jumbled bones and his weasel face. Somehow he got by, though. With me it was easier and duller: I treated everybody the same kind of bad, and I didn’t care that nobody liked me.

  While Bobby worked Thrumm over with talk, I let my mind bring another thing forward. I had caught a whiff when I busted in: opium, probably, or some kind of doctored marijuana. Thrumm looked half gone with it right now. From the way his eyes jittered, I could see that he was plenty spooked, but I couldn’t tell exactly where the stash would be. Next to the telephone table there was a battered china cabinet with no glass in the doors and a collection of knickknacks arranged on the shelves. I pulled my right hand from my pocket and picked up the salt-and-pepper sets one by one, tipping them over, pretending to read the bottoms. Every one of them had at least some remnant of salt or pepper inside. Judging from Thrumm’s lack of reaction, I knew the china cabinet held nothing of interest.

  “We need to find Donny Pease,” said Bobby. “We’re told you know where he stays.”

  “Fellas, I ain’t seen Donny Pease in six month. Tha’s the God’s truth.”

  Even with only one eye, I could see that he was lying. When I heard Thrumm slipping in and out of the hayseed lingo, I wanted to smack the shine off his oily face, try out a little amateur dentistry on his ragged teeth; but I let Bobby keep working him.

  Bobby said, “We’re told you tipped a few drinks with him last Saturday over to the Forest Club.”

  “Who said that? That’s a lie.”

  I picked up a salt shaker in the shape of a country boy with a straw hat. With one quick motion I turned and threw the shaker through the plaster and through the lath wood of the wall just over Thrumm’s head. It was closer than I had intended, the missing eye playing hell with my depth perception. Thrumm didn’t have time to flinch. I glowered at him long enough to see the eyes get big under his pomaded, plaster-flecked hair. Then I turned back to the cabinet to thumb through a stack of photographs: smiling Toby Thrumm, half toked, some women, a few other colored men standing around an alley. Back home, backwoods, Deep South. I thought of Thrumm with some disdain. But the photos brought up a twinge of regret in me. Whatever his faults, Thrumm was a man who could feel easy, who could make and keep friends and enjoy himself.

  “There’s no sense lying to us,” Bobby told him. “I’ve got the time to stay right here breathing on you until you tell me exactly where to find Donny Pease. We’re on the public payroll.” Bobby pulled out a pack of smokes from his jacket and offered one to Thrumm. “No sense making Detective Caudill break out a sweat this early in the day. If he starts to sweat, you start wishing you were a cool breeze.” Bobby leaned close to offer Thrumm a light and spoke in a whisper. “He’s wound up tighter than a dress on Rita Hayworth.”

  “Well,” said Thrumm, licking his lips again, “last I hear, he’s staying with a woman two doors up from the Forest Club, you know, on Hastings over there, on Forest and Hastings.”

  As I stepped next to the telephone table, I could see that Thrumm was almost ready to jump up from the sofa.

  “Don’t lie to me!” Bobby almost laughed.

  “I don’t lie! If it’s one thing I ain’t, it’s a liar!”

  “You already lied to me once, at least,” Bobby said, running his hand back amiably over his forehead. “Why would I figure you’d beat that habit so fast?”

  I stood before the telephone table and angled myself so I could make out Thrumm squirming at the edge of my sight. With my right hand I picked up the handpiece, listened, and put it back, then ran a finger over the edge of the table. I still hadn’t taken my left hand out of my pocket.

  “I ain’t so stupid as you all try to put on me. Donny Pease been known to have a temper on him, that’s all. You put me in a hard place. But I guess he ain’t so much to me, now that I think on it a while.”

  “B
ecause you understand,” said Bobby, “if you send us over there and we find out you’re yanking our dicks, we’ll be back here pretty quick, and plenty hot.”

  “Well, I don’t know he’ll be there,” Thrumm said hastily. “That’s just what I hear.”

  I felt Thrumm’s eyes nailed onto me; I was right on top of whatever he was worried about. So I pulled my left hand slowly from the pocket and gave Thrumm a good long look at it. Pink flesh, bright and shiny where the two littlest fingers should have been anchored to the mangled palm. A lobster claw. With the claw I fingered over Thrumm’s war production ID badge from the Packard aircraft engine place, the money clip filled out with small bills, and his keys. I started to pull open the little drawer in the table. I figured it to be some kind of dope, but since we had no intention of taking Thrumm in, I wasn’t about to go through the trouble of actually finding anything.

  “Two doors up? What’s the woman’s name?” Bobby asked.

  “Listen, I ain’t, I ain’t exactly sure about that.” Thrumm squirmed, and strained his attention toward me. “You know how that goes. So thick with extra women around here now with the war and all, they lookin’ all the same to me.”

  “Well, let’s put it this way. Some advice. If we have to come back here, you’ll want to be somewhere else.” Bobby stood up and shook down his clothes to a proper hang. He looked down at Thrumm but let his eyes go out of focus, as if considering something carefully. Then he gestured to me. “Let’s get out of here. If we hurry, we can finish all this before lunch.”

  I let my lips curl a bit. I left the drawer as it was, picked up the telephone, and ripped the cord from the base. Then I turned and followed Bobby right out the door. As I trudged to the car through the rising heat of the cloudless day, I thought about what Thrumm had said.

  Bobby said, “We’ll take it around the block and up the alley and see if Toby Thrumm’s a rabbit like I think he is.”

  Nobody else ever drove if Bobby Swope was around. He fished the keys from his pocket and we roared off, pretending to be hot for Hastings Street. But Bobby drove around to the next street, parked, and cooled for a few minutes, time enough for Thrumm to throw a few things in a bag. The alley was quiet enough. I guessed that there were plenty of white folks off playing tennis somewhere, getting rich by renting out the broken-down houses to all the colored families. They were jammed in tight in the Bottom and in Paradise Valley, jammed in, as I had read somewhere, as tight as Calcutta. And more Negroes were coming all the time, hitching up from the Deep South or riding over from Chicago or Cleveland to grab a job at one of the big auto plants or making airplanes at Willow Run.