He looked at me. “Are you not giving me the grand tour of all the reasons why I should think Detroit is a bad, bad place?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
I kept driving, straight toward the lights of downtown.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I need to do this. I need to show this to you. All of it.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m with ya. Hell, maybe you need to show it to yourself Go back over your whole life. You ever think of that?”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud.”
“I’m serious, Alex. Have you been back here since you got shot?”
I drove past Tiger Stadium and our little motel and the Lindell AC, where this whole evening had started.
“Where did it happen?” he said. “Is that where we’re going?”
“The man at that hospital,” I said. “He lived up here on Woodward. We went to see him. We went to tell him to stop bothering people at the hospital. That’s all we wanted to do.”
I drove north on Woodward, past the City-County Building, where we had been that afternoon, straight toward the corner of Woodward and Seward.
“He shot us,” I said. “He shot Franklin first. Then me. I watched Franklin bleed to death on the floor next to me.”
We drove through Grand Circus Park, empty on a cold April night.
“I should have drawn my weapon sooner,” I said. “I didn’t do it in time.”
We stopped for a red light at Adams Street.
“They took two bullets out of me, but they had to leave the third one,” I said. “Franklin had a wife and two little girls. I didn’t go to the funeral. I was in the hospital. When I got out…”
The light turned green. I didn’t move.
“I drank a lot. Jean divorced me. I took disability, moved up to my father’s cabins in Paradise. It took me fourteen years to be able to sleep at night without taking pills.”
From behind us, a horn blew.
“I finally saw the man who shot us,” I said. “In prison. I finally saw him face-to-face.”
The horn blew again. I took my foot off the brake, touched the accelerator.
“This is the first time I’ve seen the building. Where it happened. This is where it happened.”
Grand Boulevard. We were a few blocks away. I held on tight to the steering wheel.
“I could have drawn my weapon, Randy. I could have shot him before he shot us. It was my fault that Franklin died.”
We came to Seward Street. I stopped in the middle of the intersection. The same horn blew behind us again. But I didn’t care.
Where the apartment building had once stood, there was now only a construction fence. The ground inside the fence was covered with straw.
“It’s gone,” I said. “The building is fucking gone. They tore it down.”
We were two blocks away from where they were building the new stadium. This whole corner had been mowed down. The whole block. Half the city, it seemed. Torn down to make way for a new stadium and casinos and God knows what else.
The horn kept blowing behind me.
“Can we get out of here before we get killed?” Randy said.
I drove through the intersection, hung a left on Euclid and another on Cass, back to Michigan Avenue. Back to our motel and the Lindell AC. We’d sit right at the bar this time. If those two men were still there, Randy would buy them drinks. If we were lucky, we’d catch Johnny Butsakaris’s eye and call him over, and I’d get to hear Randy’s story again.
“Alex,” he said, “I’m sorry about what I said.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you in the bar. I’ll never do it again.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t hit a curveball.”
“Randy,” I said. “I’ve got a question for you.”
“Ask away, my friend.”
“Was that really vodka and root beer in that glass?”
“It was indeed. The slinky.”
“You really are crazy, you know that? I mean, I’ve said it a million times, but you really are crazy.”
“Of course I’m crazy,” he said. “Why else would I be here?”
CHAPTER 7
We didn’t get up quite as early as we had planned the next morning. But then we hadn’t planned on staying so late at the Lindell AC. My head was throbbing when I got up, and it didn’t look like Randy was feeling any better. The one thing I had going for me was the fact that I had refused to try his stupid slinky. So at least I wouldn’t be tasting vodka and root beer all day.
And whatever had happened between us the previous night, that was done and gone. Like when you have a rough game one night and you forget all about it before the game on the very next day.
After a couple hot showers and some aspirin, we were new men. We headed out into another Michigan April day, with gray clouds and a cold wind whipping down Michigan Avenue. We went east to Woodward, then north toward the library. We stopped at a flower shop and Randy went in to pick out something nice for the lady at the library who had been so helpful to Leon. Randy came back out with enough flowers for a wedding reception.
“First-class all the way,” he said. I just shook my head and kept driving. A few blocks later, we parked in front of the Detroit Public Library. It was a massive building of stone, the same shade of gray as the sky. When we walked into the main lobby and asked about the Burton Historical Collection, we were sent to the opposite side of the building, where the doors opened onto Cass Avenue, on either side of a huge globe. We took a right and found the room. The collection itself, mostly reference material from an entire century, was stored in bookshelves both here on the ground floor and above, on a balcony that ran along three of the walls. The fourth wall was all windows. Across the street, we could see the Detroit Institute of the Arts. There were flags advertising a van Gogh exhibit. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered reading that van Gogh was left-handed. Another crazy southpaw.
We found the librarian who had worked with Leon over the phone. She was a trim black woman in her fifties, with the eyeglasses and the hair in the bun that all librarians are required to have. But there was a sparkle in her eye that said something a little different. Randy buried the poor woman in the flowers before I could even tell her who we were.
When she had jungle-chopped her way out of the flowers, I introduced ourselves and gave her Leon’s warmest regards.
“Such a nice gentleman he was,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “You gave him a lot of information.”
“Yes, but I promised I’d keep thinking about it,” she said. “I took it as rather a personal challenge. Finding someone you haven’t seen in thirty years. And with such a rare last name like Valeska, I was sure I’d be able to find something. I’m afraid the only other option I have left is to go through the old newspapers to find a birth announcement. As Mr. Prudell and I were discussing, if we had the parents’ names we’d have a good chance of finding some immigration records.”
“We tried to find her birth certificate,” Randy said.
She laughed at that one. “Not in this state,” she said. “You wasted your time.”
A few minutes later, we were both sitting in the microfilm room, looking through all of the birth
