Shot In Detroit Read online

  That was true; he was always slow to leave.

  We were headed for the conversation where I asked Bill why he was still with me given his list of complaints. But given my current project, any discussion of strengths and weaknesses was better left unvoiced. I had left my exact ambitions regarding the photographs somewhat vague with him and wasn’t sure why.

  Bunny made her way back into the restaurant. We finished our lunch, driven to a familiar and almost comforting silence. We only needed Charles in Charge playing on the screen behind us—rather than the start of a Lions game—to feel completely at home.

  I drove Bunny home fifteen minutes later and then made my way to the nearest post office to buy stamps and mail additional prints to a new client living in Michigan’s thumb. The guy had entered the annual Port Huron to Mackinaw sailboat race last summer and I’d been there to capture it: a bunch of rich guys in their forties, wearing Dockers and loud Bermuda shorts, hoisting beers. The boat was named The Merry Widow. I made sure to capture that piece of information. If the beer drinking went on too long, the prophetic name might have helped me to place the photograph on the front page of the Freep.

  Coincidentally, Ted, the freckled Ferndale gallery owner with the fox-like fur on his back, stood in front of me in line at the post office, several packages under his arm. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in weeks, not that he hadn’t been on my mind. The value points I’d amassed were still on my scorecard.

  “Hey, how are you doing, Miss Violet? Fancy meeting you here.” He looked down at his packages ruefully. “Didn’t sell a single piece of this guy’s work. I thought it would fly off the walls. Ah, Detroit, I hardly know ya.” He shrugged, an arm shooting out to capture a tube beginning to slide from under his other arm. “Don’t want any of these babies getting swept up with the day’s trash. The artist will accuse me of holding out on him if they don’t arrive in Saugatuck safe and sound. Seemed pretty dubious when I told him I didn’t sell a single canvas—especially after we slashed his prices.”

  I remembered feeling that same way in March and wondered if it ever occurred to Ted his gallery might be at fault. Or him? Maybe his unctuousness kept buyers away. Everyone has a shop they avoid because the proprietor turns their stomach.

  Ted moved up to the counter, dispensed with his packages, and turned around. “Still snapping pictures of hotels on their way to the wrecking ball?” His foot was tapping a beat on the floor.

  Shaking off his caustic tone, I said, “Speaking of my work, Ted, I wonder if you have time to look at what I’ve been up to lately.” I hadn’t planned on showing the photos to anyone this soon, but chance seemed to have intervened.

  “Sure, bring a sample over to the shop. I can usually make room for something new. It is new, right? You’re not still working the disappearing buildings act?” He propped an elbow on the counter, waiting while I bought my stamps.

  Counting to three, I said, “No, I told you. It’s new.” On sudden impulse, I added, “Doing anything now?” I shoved on my sunglasses, hoping to hide any desperation in my eyes. “Only take a few minutes to run over there.”

  He looked at his arm, realized he wasn’t wearing a watch, and shrugged. A man without a watch or a cell in his hand couldn’t be in a hurry. “Actually, now’s fine. I could use a little pick-me-up after breaking the guy’s heart.” He nodded toward the front counter where the six cardboard tubes sat forlornly. “Hey, it’s not only a roll in the hay you’re after, is it? You can level with me.” He grinned in a way almost certainly meant to be seductive.

  “Give me a—” I said, starting to get angry. I was about to tell him the last time had only been a mercy fuck on my part, when I stopped and smiled. “What kind of stuff did he do?” I motioned toward the counter, hoping the tubes weren’t filled with photographs of dead bodies in fancy suits. “The guy from Saugatuck?”

  “Sadly, it’s a series of crayon drawings. Yes, you heard me right,” he continued. “John used a lot of action figures in his pictures. Superman, Spidey. The occasional interspersing of rather alarmingly graphic violence with the superhero dolls makes for a dramatic canvas. Or so I thought.” He sighed heavily. “Hard to persuade many adults in an economy as depressed as Detroit’s they couldn’t walk into their kid’s room and rip similar stuff off the walls. Well, it seemed like a good idea last fall when I was over in Saugatuck for a vacation.”

  He continued to stand there, his foot still tapping the same tune. Was it “Yankee Doodle Dandy”?

  “So now is good?” What the hell! Any work following a series of crayoned pictures of Aquaman would probably appear saleable. “You can follow me home.”

  “I know the way.” There was no mistaking the glee in his voice.

  I rolled my eyes, but he couldn’t see them.

  In my apartment, Ted stood looking silently at the photographs until I thought my head might explode. “Shit,” he said at last. “This stuff’s gonna make you. It’ll make me for being the first to hang it. No one else’s seen it, right?” He whistled lightly. “Talk about edgy. This stuff’s on the outer ledge of edge.” He put the fourth photograph down, picking one up again a second later. “You could probably get a show in a bigger and better venue. Chicago. Maybe even Manhattan.” He put his fingers to his lips. “Sh! Forget I said it. I’m your man.”

  “Better than ghostly apartment buildings on Cass Corridor, huh?” I was dissing myself here, but the censor was on a break.

  “Baby, these are in a different universe.” He looked around. “Got any more?”

  I shook my head. “It’s been a little slow.”

  He laughed sharply. “Wow, you have grown jaded. Next you’ll be taking matters into your own hands and hunting men down.”

  Little did he know about my treks to Belle Isle. He looked at the picture of Obabie again. “Who turned you on to these guys?” Suddenly a new thought occurred to him, and I watched it cloud his face. “They are dead, right? It’s not a gimmick?”

  “No gimmick. I’ve got a friend who’s a mortician. In a pinch, he asked me to photograph that first guy to send back to his family overseas.” I motioned to the rugby player. “I liked how it turned out—at least the subject if not the actual photo—and asked him if I could do a couple more. I did the first one under poor conditions—that’s why it isn’t as good. Fell in love with the subject matter from the outset though.”

  “Who wouldn’t? Does he always dress them up like this? Your mortician friend?”

  “Unless they want something more subdued. Most of them like it. Their families, I mean. It makes their last appearance special. Like they weren’t totally vanquished by death.”

  “Too true. Most dead people look like they died from boredom. Not this bunch though.”

  He sat down at the work table and looked at the pictures again. “Never knew morticians had shticks, but this one’s a killer. Pardon my words. Played right into your hands, didn’t he?” His eyes had a knowing look. “Did you know about it before you started screwing him? His manner of burying the dead, I mean?”

  “Hey,” I objected. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m not that conniving. Bill and I had a personal relationship long before we had a business one.”

  “I remember how that one goes.” Now Ted rolled his eyes. “Look, if you’re serious about this, I’ll gladly show them.”

  He reached into his back pocket for his calendar. It was a cheap one from Hallmark with a puppy on the white plastic cover. No fancy technology for Ted. This cast more doubt I’d picked the right guy. But I couldn’t bear to swap the quick deal now for a better deal later. The bird-in-the-hand philosophy ruled my life. Disastrously.

  “I’m serious.” I could feel the beat of my heart in my ankles.

  He was flipping through the pages. Frugality had led him to buy a two-year calendar and he struggled to find the right year. I sighed inwardly, wondering again if I was setting my sights too low.

  “You’ll need at least a dozen photos,” h
e said. “We’ll want to fill a wall. Less, we’d have to place them too far apart.” He shook his head. “And we don’t want to do that ’cause we want it to look like a rush. A rush of death.” He paused. “Like what happens in Detroit. Did you hear Rush Limbaugh said being a soldier in Iraq wasn’t much different than being a black man in Detroit?”

  Like I listened to Rush Limbaugh!

  “I could probably get twelve over the next few months.” Could I? Could I keep Bill onboard till then?

  “I guess if the prints were bigger, we could make do with fewer,” Ted continued, “but I don’t know—eighteen by twenty-four inch seems right. Bigger might be repulsive or unseemly, taking it out of the realm of art and pushing it somewhere else. Smaller and they’d look like morgue shots and a guy already thought of it.”

  “I think you mean mug shots.” Idiot.

  “Well anyway, this is the right size.”

  “That’s what I thought too—after a few experiments,” I said, sitting down on the stool next to him and picking the photo of Willis Dumphrey up. “Size is important. Scale is why Paris will always be more beautiful than Vienna. This was the guy who got shot in Travis Slack’s restaurant a few weeks back.” Blank face. “You know, the one where the cook and bartender both died.”

  “No shit!” Ted said, looking at it carefully. “They’re not all celebrities, are they? I don’t know about doing celebrity deaths. Turns art into a freak show.”

  “He was a bartender at Slack’s restaurant. Nobody famous.”

  “Sure, I remember the news story now. Did they ever nab anyone for it?”

  But before I could answer, Ted had whipped out his pocket calendar again. “You know, I have a nice hole in my schedule in late November. What’s it now? June? Think you could come up with the twelve in five months?” He shook his head. “Probably impossible, right? Impossible if you’re gonna limit yourself to black men. Young black men. Too bad—though I think it’s the way to go. Nobody wants to look at the elderly, dead or alive.”

  Although Ted was saying aloud the things I thought, he was a first-class prick.

  “And women would be—I don’t know—more problematic,” he continued. “I guess if you got stuck, you could do men up to age fifty or so.”

  “I’ll get enough young ones. Don’t worry.”

  “But no kids, right.”

  “Absolutely not. And don’t worry. I’ll have enough in time for a show in November.”

  He laughed. “Sounds again like you’re planning to take them out yourself. Like some goddamned vampire. Or a serial killer.” He wiped his sweaty forehead.

  “With the camera, Ted. Don’t get excited.”

  I sounded calm, in control, or at least thought I did. Actually, I was icy with fear and excitement. “Put me on the schedule.” My heart was pounding at each pressure point. Surely he must hear it. “Bill’s got friends in the business. If I need more men, I could go to them.”

  This was the first time I’d thought of this solution. Of course, no one else suited them up the way Bill did. No one had his panache. I could hardly mix in the typical blue-suited, church-going corpse with Bill’s Mardi Gras boys. Or could I? Maybe one or two as a contrast?

  Ted stood up, his stool scratching the floor as he pushed it back. “Well, let’s see what happens over the next couple of weeks. Have to put you on the schedule by the end of August or so. Ads need to go to the printer. I have to publicize it. And in this case, I’d be doing us both a favor by advertising widely. Maybe even radio ads. Let’s give it till Labor Day or so and see what develops.” He smirked at his pun.

  “Won’t be a problem.” Or would it? Was I overly optimistic about death in Detroit?

  “Now how can you know that? What if the bodies dry up?” He saw it too.

  “In Detroit? I don’t think we need to worry.”

  “You’re full of confidence.”

  “I have to be.”

  As he walked down the stairs, I saw a bit of hair poking out of his collar. Good, that part of the deal was over. I knew what fur was like on a hot day. In fact, Allure Furs had given me the first taste of what my eventual passion would be.

  “Look at the subject, think about it before photographing, look until it becomes alive and looks back into you.”

  Edward Steichen

  Mr. Polifax hired me to work the counter at Allure Furs in the fall of my junior year in high school. I didn’t like the looks of Arvin Polifax from the moment I walked into his foul little shop. He was the most hairless man I’d ever seen and walked with his midsection thrust out, the rest following behind in a slithery crawl.

  But I was tired of being poor. Working after school was widespread in the eighties and early nineties; parents, suddenly pressed for cash to buy little Carrie or Jason designer clothes and electronic gadgets, found reasons to endorse the employment of children. Businesses were discovering teens could sell shoes, tote heavy trays, and check out videos practically as handily as adults. Plus, bottom line, you could pay them a lot less. You didn’t have to think about medical plans or vacations either. Newspapers ran articles on how working part-time taught teens skills that would be invaluable as adults. It was the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, after all. Preachers told their congregations God wanted them and their offspring to be rich. It was in his Plan for them. We were sick of Carter’s self-sacrificing, frugal philosophy from a decade earlier. Even the high schools began to back it with work/study programs that allowed early dismissals.

  Few would’ve guessed a shop selling furs could look so down on its heels and still succeed, but Allure Furs managed it, squashed between a movie theater with a torn marquee showing second-run films and a donut shop with a missing “u” in its sign, dating from the nineteen thirties. Dont, as the sign spelled out in electric green letters, seemed to warn off potential customers. And the warning stuck. The trio of businesses attracted little interest except for an early-morning donut rush and the Saturday evening midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. With no incentive for entry, Allure Furs managed to avoid customers for days at a time, and I learned quickly how to sleep on my feet or read a paperback under the counter.

  The noise from the theater and the sugary, yeasty smell from the donut shop turned out to be two of the many negative aspects of working at Allure Furs. Hours after I left each night, the incessant hum of the movie soundtracks still played in my head. My clothes carried the combined scents of popcorn and yeast. Animals, ignoring significant discouragement, followed me home.

  “Sure you can be here by two on weekdays and ten a.m. on Saturdays?” Mr. Polifax asked at the interview, brushing the nonexistent hair from his face for the tenth time. “Last girl didn’t turn up till three most days. Then she used the time to read romance novels under the counter.” He made a face and sneezed wetly. “You a reader?”

  “I hardly ever read,” I assured him, stepping incrementally back.

  Twice now he’d put a hand on my arm, the last time several inches above the elbow. But worse than his strangely smooth touch was his breath. Perhaps he’d hung around his pelts too much.

  “No talking on the phone either,” he said suddenly, remembering another errant clerk I guessed. “Don’t have any boyfriends across town, I hope? Birmingham, Ann Arbor?”

  “No boyfriends.” I waited for another question, but Mr. Polifax had run out of queries and hired me on the spot. It seemed like a better deal than hawking pizzas or shelving library books.

  Initially my duties included manning the front counter, answering the phone, ringing up sales. The sales came mostly from storage fees and the occasional purchase of accessories. Never for a purchase as consequential as a coat. Three months passed. After the first week I brought a paperback along, but I never made a phone call, and I showed up on time each day. It was god-awful boring but hardly demanding work. Often the time passed without a single customer coming into the shop. The storage fees must carry the business, I decided, or perhaps sales took place on the frequ
ent trips Mr. Polifax made. Invoices for new furs sold in the shop were rare. I’d expected autumn to be the prime season for buying a coat, but not at Allure Furs.

  “Violet.”

  It was Mr. Polifax, rushing out of the backroom. I hadn’t known he was back there. Often he didn’t come into the showroom at all, letting Myrtle, his bookkeeper, run things.

  “Lisa’s down with the flu. I wondered if you might step in for her tomorrow.” Lisa, the regular model at Allure Furs, was a skinny blonde, who wore too much makeup, staggeringly high heels, and fancied herself the next Elle Macpherson. She seldom deigned to talk to me, preferring the petting she received at the hands of Mr. Polifax and Myrtle. Lisa was a year younger than me, but the world-weary look of a middle-aged woman was already in place.

  “A customer’s coming in around two on Saturday, and he’ll want to see the furs on a model.” Mr. Polifax looked at me critically. “Can you do something with your hair, Violet? Maybe put it up? No, it’s probably too short for that,” he said, running a hand across the nape of my neck. I managed not to shiver. “I’ve never understood why young girls cut off their hair.”

  He sighed as if it were one of the tragedies of life. “Well anyway, ask Myrtle for advice.” He motioned with his head toward the backroom, a hand on his hip. “Try to look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Do you know who she is?”

  I nodded. Did he think I was the biggest dope in the world?

  “Good,” he said. “That’s the kind of look we strive for here. Classy.”

  It was hard to reconcile Lisa’s choice of makeup and hair style with Audrey Hepburn’s. Maybe he’d shown Lisa pictures of Lana Turner instead. “Go see what Myrtle can do with you.”

  Though Myrtle’s wildly permed hair and penchant for wearing jewelry made from shells, bird feathers, and fish skeletons were hardly selling points for credible beauty advice, I dutifully walked to the backroom where Myrtle spent her days performing the miraculous bookkeeping tricks that kept Allure Furs afloat. She seemed harried, suspicious, and ruthless all at once.