I didn’t bother asking the guy for what I wanted. He’d tell me I needed to come in, and I didn’t have time.
“Listen, do me a huge favor. Just tell her-yell it out if you have to-that Gus Carpenter is on the line. She’ll want to talk to me.”
“Sir, this is a place of business, I can’t be-”
“Look, look, you’re right,” I said, changing strategy. “I’ll just come in. Let’s see… I got twenty minutes. I’ll be there in five. I have a pretty big request and I hope it doesn’t keep you there late.”
“Sir, you might want to consider-”
“Or you can just put Nova on the line and forget it.”
He thought about it. “Hang on.” He put me on hold.
A minute passed. The phone clicked. A big sweet voice came over the line, louder than it needed to be. “Where the hell you been, sugar?”
“Nova,” I said. “How’s Michael? Is he playing for the Lions yet?”
She had helped me a thousand times when I was working in Detroit. You needed a friend like Nova Marie Patterson in the Wayne County Clerk’s Office, where a reporter seeking public records was treated with all the respect of a rat scrounging in a trash can. I brought her chicken paprikash from Al’s Lounge. I told her she was way too nice to be working at the clerk’s office. We talked about her boy, Michael, who wanted to play in the NFL. He was tiny for his age, his head too small for the smallest helmet. Nova blamed the drinking she’d done as a teenager, when Michael was born. She drank sloe gin, “but not slow, if you know what I mean,” she’d told me. She was clean now.
“Oh, my Lord, I hope not,” she said. “He plays for the Lions, he’s going to get killed.” She laughed. “So where’ve you been, stranger? Thank you for the tickets, but I want to see your handsome face.”
I smiled and leaned over and grabbed my beer. I had a hockey buddy who knew a guy who knew a guy who worked for the Lions, and every season I sent Nova two tickets.
“Long story,” I said. “Basically, I had to get back up north and take care of my mom.”
“You’re such a good son. Are you going to come see me?”
“I wish I could. That’s why I called. I need a favor.”
“Well,” Nova said, “I am obliged to tell you that the stated policy of the Wayne County Clerk’s Office is to respond within forty-eight hours to written requests submitted in a timely fashion.”
“That’s what you tell all the boys.”
She laughed. “What do you need?”
I read her the addresses for Gracie and Vend. She put me on hold.
I sipped my beer and looked around the bar, tapping my foot to the jukebox, Bob Seger’s “Heavy Music.” Cigarette smoke twisted through the stilled blades of the ceiling fans. TVs flickered silently across the back of the bar between the potato chip racks, the glowing booze bottles, and the fifteen-dollar Nasty Melvin’s T-shirts. A pool table stood near the front door where my hockey pals and I once had sat, as many as twenty of us from both teams, after hockey games. Every night I promised myself I’d have two beers and get out of there, and every night I’d be begging our favorite barmaid, Double D, for one last pitcher ten minutes after she’d bellowed out last call.
It wasn’t home, but it felt like it for now.
Nova came back on the line.
“Where you at?”
“Where do you think?”
“Never mind, I don’t want to know. All right, I got your stuff.”
I took out my notebook and pen. “Go ahead.”
She told me the house on Harman with the Blessed Mother statue in front was owned by Jarogniew Andrzej Vend. It had been purchased in 1986 for $48,500. The taxes were current.
“And the other one’s in foreclosure, isn’t it?”
“How’d you know?”
“I’m a reporter, Nova.”
“Oh, yeah.”
It didn’t make sense, though. The house I had visited didn’t look like one Gracie was planning to give up. It looked like she herself might have visited it recently. She’d come back to Starvation five or six months before. If she had planned to return for good, why wouldn’t she have sold the house? Why would she have let the payments slip?
“And who’s the owner?” I said.
“Hang on.”
I heard papers rustling, then the muffled sound of Nova’s voice calling out to someone in her office, “Goodnight, Robert. Have a good one.” Then she said to me, “Man, this place… no matter how many times I get it all shipshape, somebody comes behind me and messes it all up.”
Shit, I thought. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s all right, I got it here, just one second…”
Before she could say another word, a fleshy hand wearing a gold ring and matching watch grabbed me by the wrist and pulled my arm away from my ear.
“What the fuck?” I said.
I turned to see the man with the moon-cratered face who had stepped out of the blue Suburban on Harman Street. With his other hand, he snatched the phone out of my hand and set it back in its cradle. I tried in vain to remove myself from his grip. He smiled, revealing a lower jaw of teeth as yellow as a hamster’s. “You will come with me,” he said. He turned me toward the door.
“Hey!” I yelled in the direction of the bar. “Help!”
A second man, almost as big as Crater Face, had stepped between me and the bar and was saying something to the barmaid in a language I did not understand. I heard her laugh as Crater Face shoved me stumbling out into the parking lot, where the first thing I saw was a light flick on inside a large vehicle parked in the dark alley behind Nasty Melvin’s-the Suburban.
I remembered I still had my beer and tried to swing it at Crater Face but he snapped my arm back behind me so hard I thought it might tear loose from its socket. “Motherfucker!” I screamed, and I felt the beer being removed from my hand and looked up to see the second man hold it up in front of my face, taunting me, before he threw back his head and swallowed it in one gulp.
“Ha ha ha,” he said.
Crater Face reprimanded him in that foreign language and pointed at the Suburban.
They forced a pillowcase over my head and pinned me between them in the backseat. A third man drove. Inside the pillowcase, the smell of sweat, someone else’s sweat, made me gag. We might have driven for two minutes or ten minutes or half an hour. The second man started to say something and I felt Crater Face reach across me and heard the thump of his fist against the second man’s chest. The rest of the ride was silent.
The vehicle came to a stop. We had parked. I heard the doors opening. Someone yanked me out.
A hand rough with calluses shoved me forward by the back of my neck, holding the rancid pillowcase tight to my head. There was a short flight of stairs then a walk down a dark corridor. Then we were on an elevator. I counted eight dings before the doors opened again.
They shuffled me down another corridor. We stopped and I heard the men whispering and then an unfamiliar woman’s voice, blurting from an intercom. There was a clicking noise and the sound of a large glass door whooshing open. We entered. We turned left and then right and then they stopped me and sat me down in a chair. I felt leather soft on my palms, smelled cigar smoke.
The pillowcase came off.
A man sat against the front of a desk, his legs crossed, facing me. He leaned slightly forward, his shaved head pale as a winter moon. Smoke wafted from a cigar in an ashtray to his right.
His black T-shirt clung tight to his flat belly and muscled chest. The shirt was emblazoned with the silhouette of a woman wearing a fireman’s helmet and swinging on a pole; a logo encircling
her read, THE PUMP ROOM. SOUTHGATE. REDFORD. MOUNT CLEMENS.
The man tilted his head to the left, sizing me up. I saw the crescent scar on the side of his neck. I recognized
