The Devil's Own Rag Doll by Mitchell Bartoy Page A

with a nose for the dirty stuff like I’ve got?”
    â€œTake it easy,” I said.
    â€œI’m just telling you, it’s like a shell game. Keep your eye on the money. God knows there’s a lot of it floating around here. It seems like you just don’t care about it enough to really think about what it can buy for you. You don’t let yourself care.”
    â€œIf I had money, I’d go down to Rocco’s every night and buy me a big porterhouse and a sweet potato, put some brown sugar and cinnamon on it and some butter and dig in. Wash it down with a bucket of Stroh’s. I’d do it every night till I got sick of it.”
    Bobby shook his head slowly and slipped a finger under his collar to ease the pinched skin of his neck. I thought I caught a glimpse of real fear in Bobby’s eyes but laid it off on the brightness of the midday sun and the play of light and dark in the car.
    â€œMoney makes you slippery, Pete. It gives you a little insurance, a little room to angle when they come after you, see? If you’ve got money, you can use it to get more for yourself than you would have if you started out with nothing and put in the same amount of work and sweat. I’m not just being greedy, Pete. You know I’ve got Anna and the girl to think about. But it’s no sense being a sap about it. If you can at least get a handle on what’s going on around you, if you can figure out what makes everybody scramble, then you’re halfway there.”
    I gave him the eye for a moment and then said, “Halfway to where?”
    â€œDon’t get hot about it, Pete,” said Bobby. “I’m just trying to help you out.”
    We left the car on the big circular drive. As we stepped into the cooled air of the building, I whispered, “I told you it’s like a funeral home.”
    The place had been carefully modeled after an English gentleman’s club, with heavy dark paneling over the walls, dark leather furniture, subdued light, and submissive waiters carrying drinks on silver trays to lounging old men reading financial papers. Shelves of leather-bound books lined one entire wall, broken only by the stone hearth and fireplace, idle now. A bank of windows, tiny panes of beveled glass, looked outdoors onto the rear of the club, over the target range and back to the hill beyond the trap and skeet areas. I took a moment to orient myself and realized with a smile that any stray bullets or shot making it over the hill would probably land over the city boundary in Detroit proper.
    We found Roger Hardiman on a fieldstone patio out back, barking orders to a colored boy, who tried frantically to load clay pigeons into a trap quickly enough to suit him.
    â€œPull, damn you!”
    The boy let loose two low-flying pigeons. Hardiman followed the first sharply with his shotgun, blasted the thing to dust before it had gone thirty yards, and blew apart the second just as it reached the crest of its flight. I studied the executive’s sweating forehead, his leather-shouldered shooting jacket, his fancy colored shooting glasses. Another man might have been attending to family matters, to funeral arrangements, or to his own grief after losing his only daughter, the apple of his eye—but Hardiman, I could see, approached things from his own angle.
    â€œMr. Hardiman, sir,” said Bobby.
    â€œSwope, you’ve finally made it, I see.” Hardiman broke the gun over his elbow. He pulled the two hot shells expertly with his glossy fingernails and dropped them to the patio. To the colored attendant he said, “Lose yourself, boy, we’ve got some things to talk about.” He drew a bright white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow.
    â€œCaudill, is it?” he said, extending his hand. “I have come to understand you have quite a reputation.”
    I returned Hardiman’s powerful grip, met his look. “I didn’t know I had a