La Donna Detroit Read online

  They were in trouble, though. He knew that. And something told him that the biggest part of his trouble was his cousin Carmie. The handsome lad was visibly shaken. They could not go home, not yet. There was no reason for them to go home. They weren’t expected. They had been shooed out to play, and normally that meant they would be outside until near dark, when Carmie’s mother would stand on the porch and call, over and over again, “Carmie! Bertie!”He talked to Carmie and got him to calm down.

  They found a cold puddle of water, where Bertie was able to wash the blood and dirt off Carmie’s and his hands and faces and bare legs. The blood on their clothes he rubbed with dirt. Then they went for a walk. It was only a few blocks over to the railroad viaduct; they often played over there, although warned against it. They hung around there until a train came by and flattened some pennies they had put on the tracks. Then they walked to the filling station on Crooks Road and got a couple of Cokes and shared an Oh Henry! candy bar.

  Carmie was in pretty good spirits by now. It was as if he had forgotten what had happened in the bunker. But as they walked back toward the neighborhood, Bertie pointed out some important things. When Porky White’s buddies got out of school they would go to the bunker and they would find their leader. The cops would be notified. They would question the gang boys, who would deny having killed Porky. Maybe the cops wouldn’t believe Porky’s friends, but they might also come around and question Carmie and Bertie, and any other kid who lived in the neighborhood. Maybe the cops had some way of knowing that Carmie and Bertie had been in the bunker. Maybe there were fingerprints or something. Bertie didn’t know. They had heard about fingerprints and stuff on the radio, in Gang Busters and The Shadow. Maybe there was something they didn’t even know about, that detectives could use to find out who had been in the tunnel. Maybe they would be caught.

  Bertie wanted to alarm Carmie, because he was genuinely worried on just these lines, but he didn’t want him to be too scared. Still, he had to be scared enough to keep his mouth shut. And so he made him swear that, no matter what, he would say exactly what Bertie said, even if the cops split them up and asked them separately. And what they would say was that they had gone out playing, had gone to the viaduct, had put pennies on the tracks, and then went to get pop at the filling station. And that was that. They didn’t know what time it was because they didn’t have watches. One thing they hadn’t done, they hadn’t gone anywhere near the woods. They had always been told to stay away from old man Crooks’s woods, so they never went near. That was their story. Bertie wished he had thought to take the hatchet, to throw it away, down a sewer or something.

  It began to rain.

  This much of the story Umberto recalled with ease, even after fifty years. Indeed, he knew this story, at least to this point. There were other details, he was aware, but he had forgotten them. If he worked at it, however, he could recall—he thought—that nothing ever came of Porky’s murder, or death, or whatever you want to call it.

  Did they ever find the body? He was not sure. He supposed they must have. Some time after this, it may have been within days or weeks or even months, they had moved away. He remembered his uncle Dom saying Crooks Woods wasn’t a good place for them to live and all the other grown-ups laughing. His other uncle was there, he recalled, Uncle Gags. That was his special uncle. Uncle Gags was somehow closer to him than Uncle Dom, Carmie’s dad, although he didn’t actually live with them. He came around a lot. Bertie didn’t know why, then.

  The move may have had something to do with Porky. But he was sure that, at the time, he had not connected the events. Still, Uncle Gags had taken him aside at some point and asked some questions about Porky. He couldn’t remember what the questions were. It wasn’t anything like, Did you do this? Or even, What happened? Or, Were you there? Bertie’s answers apparently satisfied Uncle Gags.

  Anyway, they moved. Bertie remembered feeling tremendously relieved, happy to move to the city, to the east side. He still lived with Carmie and his family. They were his family. Aunt Sophie was like the mother he’d never had. And then he didn’t remember much of anything until Uncle Gags’s funeral.

  Uncle Gags had been killed, shot by another man. Lots of men came to the funeral, dressed in black suits. Very important men, it seemed. There were a lot of flowers; the body lay in a casket in the front room, dressed in a suit with a flower in the lapel, the hands crossed on the chest. The men drank whiskey and beer and smoked cigars. The women talked. There wasn’t much crying. The priest came and they all drove in big cars to the cemetery, where the casket was lowered into the ground. For some reason, Bertie was treated with some solicitude, which he didn’t understand at the time. Older women hugged him and said they pitied him. Men shook his hand and patted him on the back and shoulder and said he should be strong.

  2

  Birds of Prey

  Ezio Spinodi was in trouble but he didn’t know it. He was like a sparrowhawk who sees a songbird sitting on a barbed-wire fence and makes a casual pass. The songbird turns out to be a shrike that chases him down in a thicket and beats his brains out. He saw Helen Sedlacek, a pretty, diminutive woman sitting in a Colorado ski bar in one of those pricey new concrete hotels in Winter Park. She wasn’t dressed like a skier or a local, but he would have noticed her anyway, because he’d seen her earlier, on the Amtrak train from Salt Lake City to Denver, and he’d seen her get off in Granby, just a few miles northwest of here.

  It wasn’t some huge surprise; Ezio was looking for her. He’d been sent by Humphrey DiEbola, the Detroit mob boss, to find her and Joe Service. When they got to someplace useful, like Denver, he was supposed to call in for further orders.

  Ezio, popularly known as Itchy, was a moderately cynical man—he was a Detroiter. Further orders would mean only one thing, Ezio felt. But it was significant that he hadn’t been given the order from the start. So he was cool. He was not about to drop the hammer until he heard the command.

  Only, they hadn’t gotten to Denver. Joe Service had been taken off the train in Granby in an ambulance. It looked to Itchy like he’d had a stroke, or a heart attack—some kind of fit. Surprising—such a young man. Maybe it had been dope, cocaine or something. Joe had been accompanied by a cop from Detroit, Itchy knew him—Detective Sergeant Mulheisen. If Joe’s fit had incidentally removed “Fang” Mulheisen from the scene, Itchy could not complain, even if it complicated things. But he believed he had obeyed his right instincts in not following Joe and Mulheisen, rather than the babe. He’d definitely gotten the feeling that Humphrey was more interested in the babe than in Joe Service. Not that Itchy believed for a nanosecond that Humphrey had a letch for this babe, no matter how young and good-looking. This babe must have her mitts on some loot. That was his theory. There is a prevailing cynicism among Detroiters. They have an image of themselves as unsentimental, can-do people. They say: Screw pretty … does it work? To hear them talk, the rest of the world is more or less Disneyland. Of course, genuine cynicism gets nothing done; a real cynic doesn’t believe in anything, much less that something will “work.” So maybe Detroiters are just pseudocynics. Severe skeptics. Beauty is a hard sell, but there are some takers. The point is, practicality is poured on one’s morning pancakes.

  Helen Sedlacek was no less a Detroit girl than Itchy a Detroit guy. Born and raised on the east side, she had gone to Dominican, a Catholic girls school, graduated from Michigan State University, started her first business in Birmingham (once a suburb, but now the epicenter of the Detroit municipal zone). She had definitely eaten Motor City molasses on her hotcakes. Which is not to say that she hadn’t her soft, feminine side.

  Helen was about thirty, small, slim, and dark. She had gallons of black hair, with a silver skunk stripe rising from her right temple. She had a boy’s physique and she was strong and lean-muscled. Fearless and brave; sweet and demure. Everyone has at least two sides: how they see themselves, versus how others see them. At least two, more like dozens, especially as the years go by.
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br />   At one point, when she was about fourteen, Helen had acquired the nickname Sonya. Schoolkids aren’t notably discriminatory when it comes to ethnic origins. Or rather, they are very discriminatory, but careless: they don’t distinguish between a Yugoslavian and a Russian, especially if both countries are part of what was then called the Iron Curtain, or the Red Menace. No Serbs or Croats in those days, before the walls came tumbling down. She was known as Sonya Bitchacockoff.

  She wore nothing but black, and her black hair was long and generally draped over her pale face. She tended toward capes and hoods. She read poetry, especially Anna Akhmatova, and even affected an accent—“Vot do you vant,” she would mutter. Or, with a wave of the hand, “Leaf me alone.” To her credit, she genuinely liked Akhmatova’s verse, although she was more attracted by the legendary image, and she enjoyed correcting the pronunciation of the name by her teenaged friends—“Perhaps you muss be Slaf,” she would say, pityingly.

  But the “Bitchacockoff” tag was derived from a bizarre incident. It hardly needs to be said that teenagers experiment with sex; it’s required. She had a couple of girlfriends with whom she discussed the varieties of sexual experience, a lot. Each pretended to a greater experience than they possessed. They were all virgins, but denied it. One of them, a rapidly developing girl of Italian extraction, even claimed that she had “gone down” on her boyfriend.

  “It’s not bad,” she claimed, “just kind of salty and a little sweetish-sour at the same time. You have to be careful not to gag, when it goes down your throat.”

  “You mean you let him come?” the others asked.

  “Oh, no! Ugh! I could never do that. I mean when it pokes the back of your mouth, you know?”

  One night a bunch of them were parked in a van, down by Windmill Point. One of the boys had stolen a bottle of his parents’ booze, a fifth of Southern Comfort. It was sweet and palatable to their youthful tastes and soon they were all more or less tipsy, if not drunk. The toughest of the boys, Cazzie, started talking about oral sex. There was a lot of snickering and giggling, boasting, and the conversation evolved to the point where he dared the girls—there were three of them, including Helen—to show their nerve by “going down.”

  The other girls seemed at least cautiously willing to try, but Helen balked. She wasn’t against a lot of kissing and feeling, even a furtive hand job, but she wasn’t going to actually allow some boy to penetrate any of her orifices—not in front of other people. The boys, however, were intensely excited by the idea, naturally. The Southern Comfort had emboldened them all, lowered their inhibitions or, at least, had provided them with an excuse if it actually occurred. But not Helen.

  “I want to go,” she insisted, straightening her clothing.

  “Aw, c’mon, Sonya,” Cazzie said. He pulled her to him. “A little blow job never hurt anybody.” He had actually unzipped and produced a throbbing penis that was about ready to explode. The other kids were thrilled and joined in.

  “Do it!” they cried.

  Cazzie, encouraged and sexually maddened, grabbed Helen by the head and forced her face to his groin. He was strong and clearly intended to force her to do it, thrusting his rigid organ at her lips.

  With a snarl, Helen opened her mouth and then clamped her little, sharp teeth onto the end of his penis, biting down as hard as she could. The boy screamed and cuffed her head away. He howled in agony, then rage. Helen spit blood into the boy’s face. That was a brilliant gesture.

  Cazzie was so concerned with wiping his face—he wasn’t sure that the spittle wasn’t semen, an unsettling thought—and tenderly cosseting his penis that he didn’t strike her again, or kick her out. The others were scared and the driver quickly started the van and drove to Helen’s home. “You bitch!” Cazzie roared when they pushed her out of the van in front of the house.

  It was an instant legend. But for Helen, the significant thing was that she had acted spontaneously. She analyzed her behavior incessantly. It was so unlike her, she felt. What was she thinking? She saw herself as poetic, introspective, though daring and unconventional. She entertained the idea that she ought to have made at least a feint at performing the act, and then to have recoiled in disgust. That would be the way to do it. Later she might advertise her disgust, so everyone would know she’d had the nerve, but she’d loathed the act.

  Or she ought to have become hysterical from the start, perhaps. To have made a scene that would startle the other kids and awaken them to the enormity of what was being proposed. That probably would have worked. Even as far gone as Cazzie was in Southern Comfort and sexual arousal, he should have remembered who her father was. Yes, she could have invoked her father, the gangster. She’d already had some experience with that: often enough, she’d had to endure a definite social coolness, a certain notoriety, from some of the more snobbish kids. What was the good of having a mobster for a father if he couldn’t protect her, at least with his reputation?

  Her friend Julie, also from a mob family, had shared this semi-ostracization with her. Julie, however, had been in the van. It occurred to Helen that if Julie hadn’t been there, the mob threat might have worked. But it was less easy to invoke when Julie was present. Julie, after all, was the one who had confessed that she’d gone down on her boyfriend.

  So, faced with the apparent approval of her peers, faced with the penis itself, she had chosen violence. And she had chosen it, she had to recognize that. It wasn’t just an automatic reaction. She had opted for attack. That surprised her. To say nothing of Cazzie and the others.

  Now she was a teenaged legend: Watch out for Sonya, she’ll bite your cock off. Before she was thirty she had done a lot more than that. She had killed men and not by accident. Intentionally. Murdered the boss of Detroit’s mob, no less. She had all but leaped into the back seat of his Cadillac to blast him with a shotgun. In Montana, where she had gone to lie low with her lover, Joe Service, she had been tracked down and attacked by a hired killer. She had shot him to death in a bloody hot springs. Bitchacockoff, indeed—how about your head?

  On the flip side, Helen thought of herself as a good, loving, and dutiful daughter, an ordinary, ambitious, and modern young woman. She’d founded her own consulting firm, she’d been successful in the most mundane of ways. She never thought of herself as a killer. Sure, she had killed, but only once on purpose. The others she dismissed as accidental. She was not sorry for having blasted Carmine Busoni. He deserved killing. He had ordered the death of her father.

  In her education she had been told by the nuns and the priest that “Thou shalt not kill” was absolute, it applied across the board. But there were exceptions, obviously. It wasn’t ever applied to soldiers in battle. And you couldn’t be blamed for killing in self-defense; in fact, not to resist was seen as a kind of betrayal of one’s self, one’s group. And in her family, the principle of revenge was respected.

  She didn’t recall ever having a conversation with her father in which he said, “Honey, when someone kills a relative it’s your duty to kill him.” But there had been many stories recounted by her father and her mother in which exactly that principle was illustrated and approved. The only thing was, these events had taken place in the Old Country and, romantic posturing aside, Helen wasn’t enthusiastic about the Old Country. Her parents’ tales of the Old Country bored her—why couldn’t they stick to the present? They weren’t in the Old Country anymore. So some Bogdanovich, say, angry at a seduction of his wife or daughter or sister, had waylaid and killed a Simonich. Three or four generations of Simoniches and Bogdanoviches have to kill each other? Not in America.

  She had pondered this after her father’s death. There seemed to be a vague but important reservation that the revenge code applied particularly in the Old Country, not here. She thought it had something to do with the prevalence of family and clan traditions over there, and possibly with the doubtful legitimacy of successive governments. There, governments—the State—were not seen as adequate, reliable, or even just. In
America, presumably, it was different. For Helen, there were no family stories about revenge in America where the initial act of treachery had occurred in America. Except maybe for hillbillies in Appalachia.

  She considered the frequent accounts of gangland slayings where revenge was invoked by the perpetrators. Big Sid and Mrs. Sid would usually shake their heads disapprovingly and say, “Those Sicilians.” The Sicilians, then, were to be seen as crude, primitive people—Old World hillbillies, still addicted to a system in which clans and families had reserved the final act of justice to themselves. In the Old Country, sure: revenge was a duty. Here: no. Those Sicilians, they forget that they aren’t in the Old Country anymore.

  Nonetheless, when her father was slain by Carmine’s orders, shot down by a nameless, faceless, hired assassin, Helen Sedlacek clearly saw that justice was left in her hands. The police were helpless, hopeless. She felt that the investigating officer, Detective Sergeant Mulheisen, was unconcerned, possibly incompetent. And when she encountered the private, independent investigator for the mob, Joe Service, she found a sympathetic and attractive man who would help her obtain justice. She prepared almost religiously for her act of retribution and was thrilled when she was able to carry it out effectively, with Joe’s help.

  Since then, events had taken unexpected turns. She had soon resigned herself to the fact that her old, straight life was now closed to her. By now, she was caught up in more complex situations, for which she didn’t always feel prepared. Joe Service had warned her about this. The mob, he’d said, would feel that they had to respond to her act of simple justice—it was the old code. They would pursue her. And they had. But she had prevailed.

  Helen did not have the common attitude toward the mob. It wasn’t the stuff of movies and novels for her. It was familiar. She knew the people involved, some of them intimately. She wasn’t awed by them, not very impressed, even. She knew many of these people to be stupid and ignorant, incompetent. They had names and faces for her: half-witted James who drooled, incredibly vain Guido who wouldn’t dance at parties because he wasn’t good at it, neurotic Ari who was sure he was too short, hopelessly fat and blundering Nick who wouldn’t go swimming because he was ashamed to be seen in swim trunks. She knew these dorks.