The restaurant was just down the street from the casino. A Greek place, believe it or not. We got a table upstairs, and Janet ordered us some wine.
“This is on me,” I said.
“Think again, mister. You’re the one who drove all the way down here.”
We put that fight off for later. I sat there and drank my wine and looked at her. There was a calmness to her face that I had found appealing from the first moment I had seen her. She was up in the UP, trying to solve what would turn out to be multiple murders, going back years. Yet there was always this air of self-assurance about her.
I liked her hair, too. The way it framed her face.
“Remind me again,” I said. “How old are you?”
She laughed at that one. “Is that your opening line on all your dates?”
“So this is a date, you’re saying.”
She shook her head, but she was smiling. “God, we really don’t know each other very well, do we?”
“We never got the chance. We were both so preoccupied when you were up there. Then you had to go.”
“Yeah, I made you promise to come down and take me to dinner,” she said. “I have to admit, I was starting to think you never would.”
“I’m sorry. I should have come down sooner.”
“So why now?”
“One of the last collars I made when I was down here,” I said. “Right before… I mean right before I left the force… It was a homicide over in the old train station.”
“You’re the one who caught him?”
“Eventually. I ID’d him, anyway. Was there when he was finally arrested. He’s getting out this week, so I got the courtesy call. Not that I think in a million years that he’ll be coming for me.”
“Then why did you need to come down here?”
“I got talking to the old sergeant,” I said. “He said I should come down and see the place. So I figured what the hell.”
“Ah, so it wasn’t just to see me.” She had a little smile on her face as she said it.
“A few reasons put together,” I said. “Just call it that. Keeping my promise was the best reason of all.”
She looked over her wineglass at me, like she wasn’t quite buying it.
“I spent a few hours driving around today,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
“I know. It’s not like I spend a lot of time in the neighborhoods, but…”
“Why are they all leaving, Janet? It’s turning into a ghost town.”
“Well, I’ve worked on more than a few corruption cases,” she said. “Not that Detroit is the only city where it happens, but you’d be amazed. We seem to have elevated it to an art form.”
“But that can’t be the only reason.”
“The city is broke, Alex. I mean, absolutely flat-out busted. They can’t even keep all the streetlights on anymore. They can’t run the buses. They want everybody to pick up and move closer together, basically cut the size of the city in half.”
“And do what with the rest?”
“Hell if I know. Urban farming? Just let it go wild? Some of the city’s half wild already.”
“Yeah, I heard about the bears living in the abandoned buildings.”
“I think that’s just an urban legend.”
“Oh, really? It seemed like such a good deal for the bears.”
“Just the fact that it sounds almost believable,” she said. “That we’d really have that many empty buildings and so much open space…”
“I can’t believe how many burnt-out houses I saw today. That’s one thing we always had to deal with. But then they’d come through the next week and knock them all down. Sometimes even rebuild.”
“They don’t need people to set fires anymore,” she said, looking out the window, like she could take it all in from where we were sitting. “The city is burning itself down.”
“How do you mean?”
“In the summertime, when it’s dry… Sometimes the power lines will come down and start fires. There was one day a couple of years ago, you couldn’t even walk down the street without choking on it. There were hundreds of houses burning down all at once.”
“All right, we have to stop talking like this,” I said. “There must be something good going on around here.”
“The Tigers have a nice new stadium.”
“Oh, don’t get me started on that. I don’t care how beautiful Comerica Park is…”
“It’s not Tiger Stadium. I know. I grew up here, too, remember?”
We drank a toast to Tiger Stadium. Then to the old Olympia Stadium, the redbrick building where Gordie Howe and the Red Wings once played. We toasted the Bob-Lo Boat that took kids down the Detroit River. We toasted Vernors Ginger Ale, back when it was as strong as rocket fuel. We toasted Greenfield Village and the automobile shows that would bring classic cars and hot rods from all over the world coming back home to the Motor City, to cruise up and down the streets all day long and into the night, while thousands of people gathered along the sidewalks and parking lots to barbecue and drink beer and argue about which cars were the best.
We had our dinner. We eventually got around to talking about our past relationships. It turned out we were both married once, something else I didn’t know about her. We started getting closer to the present, and to the unspoken question about what might still happen between the two of us. Even that very night.
“You live really far away,” she said as we had our dessert. “You’re aware of that, right?”
“Yes, I am.”
“It would be next to impossible to do much else besides what we’re doing right now.”
“If we both stay where we are, yes.”
“This is nice, though. I’m glad you came down.”
“I’m glad, too.”
“But tell me the truth,” she said, looking me in the eye. “Why are you really here?”
I had the same two or three answers I’d already given her. I didn’t have the one single answer that would really satisfy both of us.
In the end, after we battled over the bill and finally ended up splitting it, we got up and walked outside and into the night. We didn’t go into the casino. We just walked down the sidewalk, back to the People Mover. Back to her car and to my truck. She hugged me and gave me a quick kiss. Nobody said a word about us spending the night together, and I have to believe that maybe we were both a little relieved that it never came up. I promised her that I’d see her again soon.
She hesitated as she opened her car door. “Are you sure you’re not thinking about moving back down here? Somewhere we could see each other more than once or twice a year?”
“Well,” I said, “let’s just say I now have one more good reason to do that.”
She came back to me and gave me another kiss.
“You’re damned right you do.”
Then she got in her car and she drove home.
I stood there under the streetlight for a while. Then I got in my truck and drove down Michigan Avenue. A police car cut in front of me, lights and siren going, and for one second my old instincts told me to follow the car so I could help out. It was these same streets, after all. For eight years I had done this.
I turned off into a parking lot next to the first bar I saw. It was just a concrete box, as far away from the Glasgow Inn as you could imagine, but it was all I needed that night. I sat at the bar with a double Scotch and looked at my own face in the mirror.
You will always be alone, I told myself. That’s just the way it is.
When I finally left that place, I knew it had been too long a day, with a little bit too much to drink, for a five-hour drive back home. I’d thrown a toothbrush and a few things into a bag, not making any kind of plan, just being ready for whatever happened. I drove a few blocks down to the little motel on Michigan Avenue where once upon a time you could open the drapes and look down the street at the gray walls of the stadium. The stadium was gone now, as I kept proving to myself every time I drove by it that day, still surprising myself every time. But the little motel was still there and now I suppose it was officially the most forlorn place in the world, with no special view from your window to set it apart.