“Keep talking, Franklin,” I said. “Just keep digging that hole.”
“And then, get this, Alex. Say he hits that ball, what’s he gotta do then? He’s gotta run all the way down to first base. What is that, like ninety feet?”
“Ninety feet, yes. Very good.”
“Ninety feet the man has to run! And if he wants to try to stretch that into a double, that’s a hundred and eighty feet!”
“A football player with math skills,” I said. “What a bonus.”
“Where you going, anyway?” he asked.
“Receiving Hospital,” I said. “This is the best way.” I was going south down Brush Street, deep into the heart of downtown Detroit. The heat from the day was still lingering there on the streets, long after the sun had gone down.
“Best way if you don’t want to get there in a hurry,” he said. “You should have swung over to St. Antoine Street, go right down by the Hall of Justice.”
“Nah, this is faster,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I grew up in this city, friend. What do you know?”
“See, we’re here already,” I said. I pulled around to the back of the building near the emergency room entrance.
“We would have been here and gone by now if you’d listen to me.”
“The day I listen to you is the day I retire,” I said. We walked into the place, expecting the usual chaos. But everything seemed quiet. There was a woman in the waiting room, holding an icebag against her cheek. Across from her a man sat doubled over, hugging himself and gently rocking. A nurse was looking through a stack of files at the reception desk. She looked up at us and did a double take. Either I was just too damned good-looking or Franklin was just too damned big.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Franklin said. “We’re police officers.”
“In case you’ve never seen the uniform before,” I said. “Don’t mind my partner. He’s an ex-football player.”
She didn’t seem too amused by either one of us. “You want Eh”. Myers,” she said. “Take a seat.”
We sat down in the waiting room and watched the woman shift the icebag around on her cheek. Somebody had given her quite a shiner.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “Are you all right?”
The woman looked at us. “Do I look all right?”
“No, ma’am, I guess you don’t. Is there anything I can do?”
The woman shook her head.
“Did your husband do this to you?”
She shook her head again.
“Because if he did-”
“Just leave me alone, all right?”
“Ma’am, I’m just saying-”
“I don’t want to hear what you’re saying, all right? I don’t want to hear it.”
I put my hands up in surrender and settled into my seat. We sat there for a long time. From outside we could hear the sounds of the city, a dog barking, a siren wailing in the distance. Detroit was always at its worst in the summer, but tonight it was really simmering. The heat was even worse than usual. And the bus strike was still on. There wasn’t even a Tiger game to watch because of the All-Star break. I didn’t see how the emergency room could be so empty. I kept waiting for those big double doors to burst open with fresh casualties.
“So tell me, Franklin,” I said. “Have you ever tried to hit a fastball?”
Franklin just looked at me.
“Have you ever had somebody throw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour right at your head?”
“Keep trying, Alex.”
“I’m serious, Franklin. I’m trying to enlighten you here. You obviously have no appreciation for other sports. I suppose I can understand that, though. I mean, basically, what did you do when you were playing football? You were an offensive tackle, right? So let’s see. You crouched down and you put one hand on the ground. And then when the quarterback said ‘hut!’ you stood up and hit the guy in front of you. Am I right? Oh no wait, it was more involved than that, wasn’t it. Sometimes the quarterback would say ‘hut-hut!’ and you had to be smart enough not to stand up and hit your guy until the second ‘hut.’”
Before he could say anything, Dr. Myers came into the waiting room. “I’m sorry, Officers,” he said. “Please come this way.” When we stood up I slipped the woman with the icebag a piece of paper. It had my name and Franklin’s name on it, and the phone number for our precinct. I didn’t expect her to call, but I figured that was about all we could do for her that night.
The doctor led us out of the waiting room into a small lounge behind the reception area. He was a thin black man, with a meticulous doctor’s air about him. There was a slight Caribbean lilt in his voice. After we turned down the coffee and doughnuts, he finally told us why he had called the police.
“There’s a man who’s been coming in here,” he said. “Pretty regularly. Although you never really know when he’s going to be here. He’ll come in every night for a few nights running, then he’ll disappear for a few days. Then he’ll show up again. He’s obviously very disturbed, probably paranoid schizophrenic, although I couldn’t say that for sure. I certainly don’t have the time to try to talk to him.”
“What does he do when he’s here?” I asked.
“Mostly he just sort of… this is going to sound strange. Mostly he hides.”
“He hides?”
“We used to have this big plant out in the waiting area. You know, like a palm tree? He always used to stand behind it. Eventually, we had to take the plant away. He was scaring the patients.”
“You have security guards here, don’t you?”
“We have some,” he said. “Not nearly enough. Whenever we called them, as soon as they showed up, he’d be gone. It’s like he had a sixth sense about it.”
“When’s the last time he was here?”
“He was here earlier tonight,” he said. “He had a doctor’s coat on this time. I think he must have stolen it from our linen closet. He was walking around the examination rooms, pretending to be a doctor. One of the nurses stopped him, and he just said something like, ‘Just act natural, nurse. I’m undercover.’”
I looked at Franklin and shook my head. “Great.”
“We’re accustomed to having some pretty odd people around here,” he said. “It comes with the territory. But this man is becoming very disruptive.”
“Do you have any idea what his name is? Or where he lives?”
“We don’t know his name. But I think we know where he lives now. As soon as the nurse called security, he disappeared again. But the guard saw him on the street and followed him. There’s an apartment building about eight or nine blocks up, on the coner of Columbia and Woodward, right before the freeway. He saw the man go in, but he didn’t see which apartment he went into.”
I wrote the address on my pad. “What does this man look like?” I asked. “How will we know it’s him?”
“Oh, you’ll know,” he said. “In that neighborhood, he’ll be the only white man in that building, I’m sure. And if that’s not enough, all you have to do is look for the wig.”
“The wig? What kind of wig?”
“The man wears a blond wig,” he said. “One of those big blond wigs that come out to here.” He held his hands a foot away from his head.
“Big blond wig,” I said as I wrote it on my pad. “Anything else?”
“He’s a crazy white man and he’s wearing a big blond wig,” he said. He sounded tired. “What else do you need?”
We found the apartment building on the coner of Columbia and Woodward. With all the work they had been doing in the downtown area, you didn’t have to go too far to see the “real” Detroit, the Detroit where Franklin and I spent most of our time either handling domestic disputes or responding to reports of gunfire. The building had looked nice in its better days, you could tell, but those days were long gone.
“How we gonna do this?” Franklin asked.
