the cemetery.”
I watched from the doorway as they weaved down to the street. A light was on in the home of the Chrysler block assembly inspector who lived across from my house. Two more damaged guests leaving the Walker place, Ruth. He must throw one hell of a party.
After a while a car started up down the street and mumbled away. I got a flashlight then and went out and poked through the junipers under my kitchen window until I found Moss’s pistol, another Walther GSP threaded for a suppressor. I put it along with Wessell’s gun in my car so I wouldn’t forget to take them to the office and found some cardboard to tack over the broken pane. Before I went to bed I added the window to the list of expenses in my notebook.
The telephone rang once again, but this time the caller gave up after six.
14
E AST D ETROIT IS an angry child, connected to the mother city by a steel umbilical cord and despising every inch of it. Bordered on the south by the Detroit leviathan, on the west by the sprawling General Motors playground of Warren, on the north by the essentially featureless Roseville, and on the east by the turquoise swimming pools, exclusive storefronts, and overcrowded berths of St. Clair Shores, it’s a landlocked community that yearns to be an island and lacks only the business, industry, self-awareness, and courage to secede. Every generation or so it signs a petition to dump the Detroit from its name and votes against doing so. Of all of the city’s dozens of boroughs, East Detroit alone refuses to accept its dependence as inevitable; but always in rhetoric, never at the polls.
That morning it was a November town, gray as rock mold and bleaker than Sunday in Toledo. A dusty snow had been falling since dawn, but the sidewalks and pavement were too warm to sustain it and the flakes sailed and spun like paper cinders on the ground currents and dissolved when they touched down.
Pedestrians, what there were of them, hurried along with their hands in their coat pockets and their chins inside their collars, on the theory that wherever they were going had to be better than where they’d been. They weren’t going where I was.
The address Herbert S. Pingree had given me belonged to a row of empty HUD houses off Gratiot with blank autistic windows and what remained of an office block constructed at the turn of the century, with faded brick fronts and iron fire escapes and on the east end squares of shredded wallpaper in different patterns and colors where the rest of the block had been torn away from a common wall; a crazy quilt of separate lives forgotten, like the silhouettes of vaporized victims burned into a wall in Hiroshima. I parked in a spot where I could watch the locals vandalizing my car from the windows and went inside.
The linoleum in the foyer, marbled with filth, peeled away from my heels when I lifted them. Most of the white plastic letters were missing from the wall directory. The elevator was vintage Otis with a cage and four dimples in the matted carpet made by the stool where the operator used to sit and work the handle before buttons were installed. That was a loss. I could have used a garrulous old man that morning with a weather eye for a hungover detective and a sure-fire cure. The car bellowsed and shuddered up the five stories to Pingree’s floor, missing it by eight inches. I stepped out into a dim hall smelling of stale cigars and secondhand ideas. A building with character, the landlord would call it.
A hardwood floor in need of sanding and varnishing, plaster walls that had been patched and then touched up with paint a shade off the original. Anonymous offices dark behind their beveled glass panels. Spotty legends on doors flanked by vacant rooms: APEX DENTAL SUPPLY; BARLOW GREGG, ATTORNEY AT LAW; PEERLESS VIDEOS; KARL’S KARAVAN OF KOMIX; UNIQUE NAILS AND ELECTROLYSIS . The sad monotonous gauntlet of Zeniths, A-1s, and Acmes that collect at the nadir of capitalism like flotsam in a
I watched from the doorway as they weaved down to the street. A light was on in the home of the Chrysler block assembly inspector who lived across from my house. Two more damaged guests leaving the Walker place, Ruth. He must throw one hell of a party.
After a while a car started up down the street and mumbled away. I got a flashlight then and went out and poked through the junipers under my kitchen window until I found Moss’s pistol, another Walther GSP threaded for a suppressor. I put it along with Wessell’s gun in my car so I wouldn’t forget to take them to the office and found some cardboard to tack over the broken pane. Before I went to bed I added the window to the list of expenses in my notebook.
The telephone rang once again, but this time the caller gave up after six.
14
E AST D ETROIT IS an angry child, connected to the mother city by a steel umbilical cord and despising every inch of it. Bordered on the south by the Detroit leviathan, on the west by the sprawling General Motors playground of Warren, on the north by the essentially featureless Roseville, and on the east by the turquoise swimming pools, exclusive storefronts, and overcrowded berths of St. Clair Shores, it’s a landlocked community that yearns to be an island and lacks only the business, industry, self-awareness, and courage to secede. Every generation or so it signs a petition to dump the Detroit from its name and votes against doing so. Of all of the city’s dozens of boroughs, East Detroit alone refuses to accept its dependence as inevitable; but always in rhetoric, never at the polls.
That morning it was a November town, gray as rock mold and bleaker than Sunday in Toledo. A dusty snow had been falling since dawn, but the sidewalks and pavement were too warm to sustain it and the flakes sailed and spun like paper cinders on the ground currents and dissolved when they touched down.
Pedestrians, what there were of them, hurried along with their hands in their coat pockets and their chins inside their collars, on the theory that wherever they were going had to be better than where they’d been. They weren’t going where I was.
The address Herbert S. Pingree had given me belonged to a row of empty HUD houses off Gratiot with blank autistic windows and what remained of an office block constructed at the turn of the century, with faded brick fronts and iron fire escapes and on the east end squares of shredded wallpaper in different patterns and colors where the rest of the block had been torn away from a common wall; a crazy quilt of separate lives forgotten, like the silhouettes of vaporized victims burned into a wall in Hiroshima. I parked in a spot where I could watch the locals vandalizing my car from the windows and went inside.
The linoleum in the foyer, marbled with filth, peeled away from my heels when I lifted them. Most of the white plastic letters were missing from the wall directory. The elevator was vintage Otis with a cage and four dimples in the matted carpet made by the stool where the operator used to sit and work the handle before buttons were installed. That was a loss. I could have used a garrulous old man that morning with a weather eye for a hungover detective and a sure-fire cure. The car bellowsed and shuddered up the five stories to Pingree’s floor, missing it by eight inches. I stepped out into a dim hall smelling of stale cigars and secondhand ideas. A building with character, the landlord would call it.
A hardwood floor in need of sanding and varnishing, plaster walls that had been patched and then touched up with paint a shade off the original. Anonymous offices dark behind their beveled glass panels. Spotty legends on doors flanked by vacant rooms: APEX DENTAL SUPPLY; BARLOW GREGG, ATTORNEY AT LAW; PEERLESS VIDEOS; KARL’S KARAVAN OF KOMIX; UNIQUE NAILS AND ELECTROLYSIS . The sad monotonous gauntlet of Zeniths, A-1s, and Acmes that collect at the nadir of capitalism like flotsam in a
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