“It was the only peace and quiet I’ve had in two days,” I said. “Come on, let’s go.”
We left the truck and went into the first building.
“Where are we going?”
I looked through the papers Leon had sent with us. “State Office of Vital Records,” I said. We looked on the board by the elevator and found it. VITAL RECORDS, THIRD FLOOR. On the ride up the elevator, Randy started humming.
“Positive thoughts,” he said. “Confidence. Charm.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Make sure you mention that you’re a private investigator. That should help, right?”
“I’m not telling anybody I’m a private investigator,” I said.
“Well, then just look him right in the eye and smile. Or her.”
It was a her. Maybe fifty years old, glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked like the attendance officer at a junior high school.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for some information.”
She looked at me.
“Here’s my card,” I said. I took out one of the cards Leon had given me, the cards with the two guns on them. I put it down on the counter in front of her.
She looked down at it, then back up at me. “What did you do to your eye?” she said.
“A little accident,” I said.
“What kind of information?”
“There’s a woman,” I said. “We believe she was born in Detroit in 1952. Her name is Maria Valeska. Or was. It may have changed.”
“Nice name,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We were wondering if we could see her birth certificate. It’s extremely important.”
“Birth certificates are not public records,” she said. “Not in the state of Michigan.”
“I understand that,” I said. “I was hoping…”
She kept looking at me.
“You see, it’s very important…”
Nothing. She was a statue.
“We really need to find her…”
A statue carved in white granite. Wearing a blue cashmere sweater.
“I understand that marriage licenses are public,” I finally said. “Could we try that?”
“Year of marriage,” she said.
“I’m not quite sure of that,” I said. I looked back at Randy.
“After 1971,” he said.
“After 1971,” I said.
“It costs seventeen dollars to do a search on a particular year,” she said. “Four dollars for each additional year.” She produced a form and put it on the counter. “Fill this out.”
“Thank you,” I said. I took the form and looked at it. The first line was for the name of the bride, the second for the name of the groom. “Do you need the groom’s name?”
“Yes,” she said. “We need the groom’s name.”
“We don’t know the groom’s name,” I said. “We’re not even sure she got married in Michigan. Or anywhere, for that matter. We were just hoping…”
She went into the statue routine again.
“Please,” I said. “If you can’t help us, just say so.”
“I can’t help you,” she said.
So we left. I left my card there on the counter to torture her with guilt.
“You could have tried helping me,” I said as we rode the elevator back down to the ground floor. “You could have thrown that famous Randy Wilkins charm into the situation.”
“Wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “That woman was impervious to charm. You did good, though. You were smooth.”
“I’m gonna smack you,” I said.
He laughed. “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch. We can celebrate our first total failure. Then it’s on to Detroit!”
It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon when we made Detroit. The interstate goes straight into the middle of the city, then takes a big side step west, right behind Tiger Stadium, then remembers what it’s supposed to be doing and turns back south toward Toledo. At least that’s what it once did, before they started tearing everything up to make room for the new stadium. With a big part of 1-75 closed, we had to bail out at Gratiot and make our way down the side streets to Michigan Avenue. It was a strange feeling, driving around my old hometown. There’s no traffic in the Upper Peninsula, no streets lined with buildings on either side for miles on end.
“One of the new casinos is gonna be over there,” I said as we drove past First Street.
“Casinos in Detroit? Really?”
“The first one doesn’t open until this summer,” I said. “So relax.”
“And a new stadium, too?”
“Next year,” I said.
“It’s like they’re tearing up the whole city and starting over,” he said.
“We might as well get a motel around Corktown,” I said. “If that’s where the old address is.”
“Get someplace nice,” he said.
“We’re just gonna sleep there,” I said. “We don’t need the Hilton.”
“Get the Hilton,” he said. “I’m paying for it.”
“Next stop, the Hilton,” I said. As soon as the stadium was in sight, I pulled into the first motel I saw. The Motor City Motor Court.
“What is this supposed to be?” he said.
“The Detroit Hilton,” I said. “Go check us in.”
While he went inside, I stood in the parking lot, trying to shake out all the kinks in my body from the six hours in the truck. Across the street, a block away, the southeast comer of Tiger Stadium rose into the afternoon sky like a gray battleship. The Tigers were still losing ball games out on the West Coast, would go to Minnesota to lose some more games there, then finally come back here to Detroit for their first loss at home.
“There she is,” Randy said when he came back into the parking lot. “They’re not really going to tear it down, are they?”
“I don’t think they can,” I said. “It’s a national landmark. But they won’t be playing baseball there anymore.”
He shook his head. “Greatest ballpark I’ve ever seen.”
“I know,” I said. Tiger Stadium doesn’t look like much from the outside. Just tall gray walls, rounded at the corners. When you go into the place, you realize why it has to look that way from the outside. Because the inside is a world of its own. It’s totally enclosed, the only stadium in the majors with an upper deck that goes all the way around the field. With the overhang in right field, where Al Kaline played. The light towers on the roof, where Reggie Jackson hit that ball in the 1972 All-Star game. The broadcast booths in back of home plate, so close to the field that the guys up there can hear the catcher and umpire talking to each other. Eighty-one more home games, and then it would be all over.
“Come on,” I said. “While we still have some of the day left. Show me where she lived.”
We walked east on Michigan Avenue. There was a big car dealership across from the stadium, and then a little corner bar and a dry cleaner. We passed a block of little brick houses, where during the season the owners would sit outside on their lawn chairs, watching the people make their way toward the stadium. Some of them would make a little money by letting cars park in their driveways. With the new stadium opening up next season, that was about to end.
“Leverette Street,” Randy said. “It’s right up there. God, Alex, this feels kinda weird.”
“I wonder why,” I said.
“Lindell AC is one more block down, right? Whaddya say we go have a drink first?”
“We’ll go there later,” I said. “Show me the house.”
We walked south on Leverette, right into the heart of old Corktown. It used to be a Polish neighborhood, and this street was probably the high end of the market back then. Most of the houses were two-story Victorians, and every single one of them looked restored and freshly painted. A sign on the comer read CORKTOWN, DETROIT’S OLDEST NEIGHBORHOOD.
“God, where’s the house?” he said. “It was two forty-one. That much I remember. Here on the left side, in the middle of the block, close enough to Michigan Avenue that you could see the sign…”
We passed a man mowing his lawn, which, from the size of the lawn, would take him about three minutes. There were thousands of blocks just like this one all through Detroit and into the suburbs. Just enough room for a house, a driveway, and maybe five hundred square feet of lawn in the front, another thousand square feet in the back. Just like the house I had grown up in over in Dearborn. Just like the house I had bought after I got married, over in Redford. If I had stayed down here, I’d still have the same kind of house.