“Mostly he just sort of… this is going to sound strange. Mostly he hides.”
“He hides?”
“We used to have this big plant out in the waiting area. You know, like a palm tree? He always used to stand behind it. Eventually, we had to take the plant away. He was scaring the patients.”
“You have security guards here, don’t you?”
“We have some,” he said. “Not nearly enough. Whenever we called them, as soon as they showed up, he’d be gone. It’s like he had a sixth sense about it.”
“When’s the last time he was here?”
“He was here earlier tonight,” he said. “He had a doctor’s coat on this time. I think he must have stolen it from our linen closet. He was walking around the examination rooms, pretending to be a doctor. One of the nurses stopped him, and he just said something like, ‘Just act natural, nurse. I’m undercover.’”
I looked at Franklin and shook my head. “Great.”
“We’re accustomed to having some pretty odd people around here,” he said. “It comes with the territory. But this man is becoming very disruptive.”
“Do you have any idea what his name is? Or where he lives?”
“We don’t know his name. But I think we know where he lives now. As soon as the nurse called security, he disappeared again. But the guard saw him on the street and followed him. There’s an apartment building about eight or nine blocks up, on the coner of Columbia and Woodward, right before the freeway. He saw the man go in, but he didn’t see which apartment he went into.”
I wrote the address on my pad. “What does this man look like?” I asked. “How will we know it’s him?”
“Oh, you’ll know,” he said. “In that neighborhood, he’ll be the only white man in that building, I’m sure. And if that’s not enough, all you have to do is look for the wig.”
“The wig? What kind of wig?”
“The man wears a blond wig,” he said. “One of those big blond wigs that come out to here.” He held his hands a foot away from his head.
“Big blond wig,” I said as I wrote it on my pad. “Anything else?”
“He’s a crazy white man and he’s wearing a big blond wig,” he said. He sounded tired. “What else do you need?”
We found the apartment building on the coner of Columbia and Woodward. With all the work they had been doing in the downtown area, you didn’t have to go too far to see the “real” Detroit, the Detroit where Franklin and I spent most of our time either handling domestic disputes or responding to reports of gunfire. The building had looked nice in its better days, you could tell, but those days were long gone.
“How we gonna do this?” Franklin asked.
“How do you think?” I said. “We knock on doors.”
“I was afraid of that.”
We started on the first floor, Franklin taking one side of the hallway and me the other. If anyone answered our knocks at all, it was usually a woman’s frightened face peering out at us, a child or two or three behind her. On the second floor, one woman was finally willing to help us. “That white boy, you mean? One with the wig? He’s up on the top floor somewhere. Craziest man I ever seen.”
We thanked her and went right up to the top floor. “She saved us a lot of doorknocking,” I said. “We should do something for her.”
“Nothing we can do,” Franklin said. A place like this always hit him a little harder than it did me. Detroit was his home. I only worked there.
The first door we knocked on, we found our man. He opened the door just a crack and looked out at us. The blond hair stood several inches over his head.
“Police officers, sir,” I said. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”
He looked at me and then at Franklin, and then back and forth again a few times without saying anything.
“Can we come in?” I said.
“Why?” he said. His voice was dead flat.
“So we can talk to you,” I said.
“Why do you want to talk to me?”
“Just open the door, please.”
“Does he have to come in?” The man nodded toward Franklin.
“This is my partner,” I said. “His name is Franklin. My name is McKnight. Can I ask you your name?”
“Ha!” he said. “Nice try.”
“Sir, open the door, please,” Franklin said. The man jumped at the sound of his voice.
“What do you want?” he said. “Why are you here?”
“We’ve just been to the hospital,” I said. “They tell us you’ve been harassing people there. Now, can we please come in for a moment and talk about it?”
He slowly opened the door. I took stock of him as I stepped into the apartment. Five foot nine, maybe, a little overweight. He had blue jeans on, old but clean, tennis shoes, and a sweatshirt. No glasses, no facial hair. He would have looked almost normal if he didn’t have that damned wig on. “Harassing?” he said. “They said I was harassing people? Is that what they said?”
The apartment was small. One table with three chairs, a couch that probably folded out into a bed. A kitchenette and a small bathroom. A single lamp burned in the corner, giving a stingy glow to the rest of the room. No light came from the window. We weren’t even sure he had a window, because all four walls were completely covered with aluminum foil.
We just stood there and looked at the place. Finally, Franklin said, “Who did your decorating, the tin man?”
The guy looked at Franklin, pure hatred in his eyes. A little bell went off in the back of my mind. I knew something was wrong, but at the time I just assumed the guy was a simple-minded bigot. I didn’t think about what else could be going on inside his head.
“There’s a good reason for the aluminum foil,” he said.
“Yeah, I heard about this once,” Franklin said. “It’s to keep the radio waves out, right?”
The man shook his head. “Radio waves? You think aluminum foil keeps out radio waves? This is for microwaves.”
“Microwaves,” Franklin said. “Of course.”
“You said your name was McKnight?” he said to me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Would it be possible perhaps to have this…” He looked Franklin up and down. “… this individual step outside. I’d be happy to talk to you alone.”
“No, that would not be possible,” I said. I knew that Franklin had a long fuse, but I was starting to get a little worried. If our roles had been reversed, I would have already been fighting the urge to bend the guy’s arms behind his back and cuff him.
“I don’t get it,” the guy said. He started to rock back and forth from one foot to the other. “The two of you. Are you really partners? Do you work together every day?”
“All day long,” Franklin said. “Sometimes we even drink from the same drinking fountain.”
“This is very interesting,” he said. “This could be valuable information.”
“All right, sir,” I said. “I’m going to sit down.” I took one of the three chairs and sat down at the table. “My partner is going to sit down, too.” Franklin kept looking at the man, then finally sat down next to me. “Please, sir, have a seat.”
The man sat down.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“My last name is Rose,” he said. “That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
“No first name?”
“First names are personal names,” he said. “If you know somebody’s first name, you have power over him. I’ll never make that mistake again.”
Franklin folded his arms and looked at the ceiling.
“I understand you’ve been spending time at the emergency room at Memorial.”
“Is that what they told you?”
“Yes, that’s what they told me.”
“I may have stopped by there. Once or twice.”
“They say you’ve been there quite often.”
“And you believe them,” he said.
“Never mind them,” I said. “Have you been there?”
“I suppose I must have,” he said. “If that’s what they told you.”
“Mr. Rose, you’re not making this very easy.”
“Do you two really spend all day together?”
“Oh, good Lord,” Franklin said. I could tell he had heard enough. “What the hell is wrong with you, anyway? You’re down there at the hospital scaring people all day long, acting like a lunatic. I mean, if you’re crazy, be crazy. That’s fine. Go see a shrink. If you’re doing drugs, get in a program. Do something for yourself. Or just sit up here in your tinfoil room, I don’t care. Just don’t be bothering people at the hospital, all right? They have enough problems down there without you hiding behind the plants. And what’s the deal with that wig, anyway? You look like that rock singer. What’s his name, Alex? The guy with the hair.”