The middle-aged men who sat with their $7.50 Heinekens at the little round tables in the shadows of B.J.’s Office hadn’t made their fortunes by pursuing things that were easily available. The dancers, of course, were easily available; the waitresses were not, or at least not as obviously so. To bed a slinky young woman who peeled off her clothes before men as routinely as she poured herself a morning coffee was one thing. To seduce a waitress- especially that pretty college student named Gracie-now that was something else.
Midway through her second semester at Wayne State, Gracie stopped going to classes. She moved out of her dorm and into an apartment in the Bricktown neighborhood near downtown Detroit. She continued to work at B.J.’s one or two afternoons a week. Her nights were given to other employment that paid her much more. There was a man, a very rich man, many years her elder, who paid her rent and bought her things. After a while there were other men, other apartments, more money and things.
“So she was a hooker,” I said.
“Of a sort,” Trixie said. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t strictly about having sex for money. Grace became very good at satisfying a particularly difficult-to-satisfy customer. And, unfortunately for her, she came to enjoy it. At least for a time, she enjoyed it at least as much as the customers.”
“Jesus. What kind of customer?”
“Please be respectful of the Lord’s name.”
“Sorry.”
“Tell me, Gus. Are you familiar with sexual bondage? Autoerotic sex asphyxiation?”
From the Lord’s name to autoerotic sex. This woman was tough. I studied her face for any sign of weariness. There was none. She looked to be in her sixties. I wondered if she merely looked older than she was because of the past life she had led.
“I’ve heard of it. Can’t say I’m familiar.”
“You’ll see.”
“So,” I said, “this whole anonymous donor thing was bull.”
I pulled out my wallet and showed Trixie the clipping I’d cut from the Pilot of March 18, 1980. She scanned the article quickly, smiled wanly at the picture. “Look at her,” she said. “Just a child. Can I keep this?”
“It’s yours,” I said. “Whoever paid her tuition was really a”-I searched for the word-“a recruiter.”
“Essentially. Small-town girls from troubled homes, out of sorts in the big city. We had two others at the center. Grace brought them to me.”
”Goddamn b-excuse me.”
“That’s all right. All these guys were bastards.”
She pushed open the door to the room on the left and let me step in before her. The room was lit by the flat afternoon light coming in through the window facing the street. The first thing I noticed was the poster on the wall at the head of the single bed. Red Wings star Sergei Fedorov was spraying ice and snow at the camera in a sideways hockey stop. He wore a bright red jersey, number 91, and a wide smile on his boyish face. Beneath the poster a red bedspread was emblazoned with the Red Wings’ white winged-wheel logo. Three foot-high stacks of Red Wings game programs sat on a trunk at the foot of the bed.
A small desk and a chair stood next to the bed. Atop the desk was a red plastic cup filled with pencils and pens, a photograph in a standing frame, and a single piece of construction paper.
I stepped over and picked up the photo frame. Eddie McBride-Gracie’s late father, cousin and drinking buddy of my own father-reclined across the backseat of a boat, shirtless, in a yellow bathing suit that set off his deep tan. On his lap sat a baby girl with reddish curls and a cloth diaper. She was smiling.
There was no picture of Gracie’s mother, Shirley McBride.
I set the photo down and took up the sheet of paper. It held a pencil drawing of a hockey player with his arms and stick raised over his head in celebration of a goal. It was crude enough to have been rendered by a child, but I supposed it could just as easily have been Gracie’s work.
“Whose room is-was this?” I said.
“Grace,” Trixie said. “Grace slept here.”
“When she wasn’t at the center?”
“Here mostly, at least the last couple of years. Until she went back up north.”
I went to the closet on the opposite wall and slid the doors open. The hangers were filled with simple cotton dresses and jumpers and frilly tops. The floor was covered with pairs of shoes piled on one another. There were pumps and flats and mules and slingbacks, sneakers and moccasins, clogs and knee-high boots and flip-flops and slippers. I shoved the door closed and turned back to Trixie.
“Except for that, looks like a boy’s room,” I said.
“Grace loved hockey. Loved the Detroit team, that player especially.”
Fedorov, one of the Wings’ Russians, was a gifted skater who could play as well as anyone in the world at either end of the ice-when he wanted to. Some nights he played as if he didn’t much care. I wondered if his occasional ambivalence appealed to Gracie, whether she saw whatever struggle she was going through mirrored in her hockey hero.
“I had no idea,” I said.
“Why would you?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving on the street outside. I turned and saw the back end of a blue sport-utility vehicle sliding slowly past the house.
“What?” Trixie said.
“Nothing.”
I moved to the foot of the bed and started riffling through the first stack of programs on the trunk. I was looking for one from that Detroit-versus-Chicago playoff series when I thought I had seen Gracie. But Trixie grasped my shoulder and pulled me toward the door.
“Come on, I don’t have all afternoon.”
She left the door to Gracie’s room open, stepped across the hall, and produced a pair of keys that unlocked the two locks on the door to the other room. She pushed the door half open and stood across the threshold. “Gracie called this her dark room,” she said.
“Not for photography, though.”
“No.”
I peered into the room, couldn’t see a thing. I looked at Trixie. “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Did Gracie have a son?”
Trixie held my gaze for what seemed like a full minute. Then she looked away. “No,” she said. “Grace…” She looked back at me. “Her employer said she couldn’t be pregnant. But Grace let… let the baby go. It was her choice.”
“What employer?”
Trixie looked at me again. “You’ll see.”
“I will? What about that drawing in the other room?”
“Part of her rehabilitation was volunteering at a local grade school. The kids in Melvindale love the Red Wings, too.”
So Darlene was right about the abortion. I thought of the baby shoe Gracie had hidden in the Zam shed. Something approaching sadness swelled then receded in the pit of my stomach.
“When did she have it?”
“What?” Trixie said.
“The abortion.”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t think Grace would want me talking about it.”
“Grace is dead.”
“Not yet. Not to me, at least. And not to you, either, or you wouldn’t be here now, would you?”
“Do you talk in riddles with the women at the center?”
“Do you want to see what’s in this room or not? If you prefer, we can leave right now and you can go chase down whoever was outside the bedroom window.”
Trixie didn’t miss a trick. “All right,” I said.
She stepped aside and let me pass.
