Three wheels jumped the curb. Two front wheels from one car, one from the other. Then everything stopped dead. Franklin flipped on the lights as he pulled up behind. I jumped out and checked on the drivers. Your first priority, of course. Make sure nobody’s seriously hurt.
There was a woman in the car to the right. She was black and heavyset, and there was a cross hanging from her rearview mirror. The car itself was a junker. An old Plymouth Horizon that was once blue, now half Bondo and primer. It was the kind of car you could buy in Detroit for three hundred dollars back then.
Her eyes were closed, her hands folded in front of her. She jumped as I rapped on her window. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
“I’m fine,” she said as she rolled down her window. “That car just came over, Officer. Right on top of me. I didn’t have time to stop.”
“You just relax a minute,” I said. “We’ll be right back to talk to you.”
I went to the other car. It was a gunmetal gray Saab, and I’m pretty sure the floor mats alone were worth more than the Horizon. The driver was pounding the steering wheel with both fists. When he saw me, he threw open his door. I had to jump back to avoid getting hit in the knees.
“Take it easy,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“I never saw her,” the man said. He was wearing a suit, and his tie had been loosened. “She came out of nowhere.”
“Well, no,” I said. “She was right behind you. I wouldn’t call that nowhere.”
“I looked before I switched lanes. Then boom! I don’t know how it happened.”
“You obviously didn’t see her. A turn signal might have been useful there, by the way.”
“I did signal, Officer.”
“We were right behind you. You didn’t signal.”
“I assure you I did.”
Okay, I thought, so this is how it’s going to go. Like the old Marx Brothers line, Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?
“Let me just get your license and registration,” I said. “And your insurance information.”
Franklin had called us in as “busy with a property damage accident, no injury.” Now he was taking care of the woman in the other car. It was my luck to have Mr. Happy here. He said a couple of half-audible things about the city of Detroit and then about women drivers, and I admit that made it a little easier to write him a ticket for improper lane change. He took that about as well as I thought he would, taking down my badge number and promising me I hadn’t heard the last of him.
The tow trucks finally came. By the time we had finished up all of the paperwork, most of our morning was done. Just another busy day in downtown Detroit.
When we were back in the car, I sat there shaking my head for a while. Franklin kept looking over at me.
“Nice guy, huh?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Every time somebody acts like that, you take it personally. It’s gonna eat you up, you know that.”
“I’m not taking it personally.”
“You’re just a badge to guys like that. You stand for something they need to get mad at.”
“I know, okay? Can we just move on?”
“Yeah, with you not talking for the next few hours. That’ll be fun.”
“You sound like my wife now.”
Franklin didn’t respond to that. Not at first. We just kept rolling down the street.
“I know we’ve talked about this before,” he finally said. “So there’s no use going over it again.”
Meaning that’s exactly what we were about to do. If the car had been going a little slower, I might have been tempted to jump out.
“Seriously,” he said, “you know this job is hard enough, even if everything is squared away at home.”
“I know. Believe me.”
Franklin and his wife had two young daughters. It all got to be a bit too much sometimes, and I’d hear him complain about it. But I knew he went home a happy man every night. Or day or afternoon, or whenever the hell our rotating shifts would end.
“Is Jeannie still going to school?”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s almost done.”
“So she’ll have her degree. In art history.”
Oh, we’re going to get the full platter today, I thought. Art history being to real areas of study as baseball is to real sports.
“I know I’ve kidded you about that before,” he said, surprising me, “but she’s just getting that paper, right? I get it. She wants to have a degree, finish what she started. Then go on to the next thing. I totally get it.”
“I’ll tell her you’re on board.”
He looked over at me.
“I’m trying to tell you something important,” he said. “Will you just cut it out and listen for a minute?”
“I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
“I know we work crazy schedules. I know we can bring the job home with us sometimes. No way around that. But you gotta work through that every single day and you gotta find each other. You know what I’m saying? Every day, Alex.”
“That’s hard to do when I don’t even see her.”
“So that’s why you call her. You set a time and you make it happen. Just see how her day is going, tell her you’re thinking about her. That’s all it takes.”
This was back before everybody had a cell phone. This was back when you had to find a phone connected to a wall and you maybe even had to drop some change into a slot before you could talk to somebody.
“You stop talking to your woman,” he said, “you’re halfway out the door.”
“She has an hour between classes today,” I said. “She’s usually in a lounge where I’ve called her before. So I’ll do that today, all right?”
“Don’t do it for me. Do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Okay.”
“Do it because I’m a smart man and I know what I’m talking about.”
I didn’t get a chance to answer that one. The sergeant came over the radio and asked if we had cruised by Roosevelt Park and the train station yet.
Franklin picked up the transmitter. “We’re on our way, Sergeant. We had to handle an accident.”
“Copy that.”
We cut west on Michigan Avenue, passing Tiger Stadium. There’d be an early game that day. A getaway Thursday game before a road trip. Some of the other cops from my precinct were already out there on the street, getting ready for the sudden heavy traffic and the crush of pedestrians. I nodded to a couple of them as we rolled past.
Then we turned down through Roosevelt Park, really just a flat open field with a few trees and walking paths around the perimeter. The park looked quiet, making me wonder what all the fuss was about. There were probably five hundred vials of crack changing hands all over the city at that moment, and here we were making sure no dogs were taking a dump on the grass.
We made the loop in front of Michigan Central Station, eighteen stories tall, maybe the most beautiful Beaux Arts building in the city. When I came here as a kid, the main waiting room was still open, with the arcade and the shops and the mezzanine and everything else. I’d look up at the high ceilings and think this was the fanciest place I’d ever seen. My father told me this used to be the heart of the city, people arriving on those trains from all over the country.
Now it was half closed down, with only a few Amtrak trains coming through every day. There was some talk about reopening the whole thing, making it look like it did in the glory days, but for now, it was just left hanging in limbo.
We were about to head back out when I noticed a car parked along a side street, just west of the station, by the redbrick church, almost hidden by the high weeds and sumac trees. We pulled up behind the car and hit our lights. I got out and kept an eye on the two male occupants in the front seat. Franklin looped behind me and took the passenger’s side. I went to the driver’s window and rapped on it.