We had coffee in her kitchen. I had brought along my map of Detroit, and I spent a good part of the morning figuring out just how far a young Tremont would venture from his mother’s house, and where Darryl would go to find him.
I shook my head and drew a big circle, with Ash Street at the center. It was a good-sized piece of the city, from downtown all the way up to Wayne State. It was basically the western half of my old precinct.
“I know these streets,” I said. “I drove on them every day. That same summer he went away. So where the hell is the breadbox?”
She got up and grabbed the phone book. Then she sat back down and looked up “Bakery” in the Yellow Pages.
“There’s a bakery over on Cass,” she said. “Kinda far, but no, this is one of those organic places. I don’t think that was around then.”
“I imagine not.”
“Here’s a bagel place by the college. Did they even have bagels back then?”
“In New York, yes. Michigan, I’m pretty sure, no.”
She went through the rest of the listings.
“There’s just no other bakery in the area anymore,” she said. “Of course, I’m not surprised. Most of the businesses are gone now.”
I looked at her. “Say that again.”
“Most of the business are gone now.”
“So we need to go back in time,” I said. “Look up bakeries in old phone books.”
“Where are we going to find those?”
“Where do you think?” I said, getting up from the table. “You feel like taking a ride with me?”
I held open the passenger door for her. My truck was a little high off the ground, but she hauled herself up with no problem.
“I can’t remember the last time I rode in a truck,” she said. “Not since my man ran off.”
“Sounds like the worst move any man ever made.”
She smiled at that. “You got that right, Mister.”
She put her seat belt on, then sat with her purse in her lap as I drove us over to the Detroit Library. We parked and went inside, found the reference desk, and asked for the old editions of the Yellow Pages. I remembered being here once before, at this very desk, asking to see the old city directories. I was hoping that once again the trusty reference librarian would come through for me. Ten minutes later, Mrs. King and I were sitting at one of the big tables, looking back in time.
“There was so much more of everything,” she said as she took a quick run through the book at random. “Even back then, when it felt like we were already hurting.”
There wasn’t much to say to that. So I asked her to go to “Bakery” and start reading off the entries. I had a pad of paper to write down any that sounded promising. There was the Wagner Baking Company, of course. We’d already been down that road. We found another old bakery that had been on Michigan Avenue, and another that had been up on Warren Avenue. There was nothing else within reasonable walking distance from Ash Street.
We thanked the reference librarian and got back in my truck. Then we went and searched for the address of the old bakery on Michigan Avenue. It was west of the stadium site, on a block where someone had been taking old abandoned storefronts and painting them bright colors.
“Someone’s going to town here,” she said. She nodded her head toward the building in the center of the block. “That one’s got the windows you’d expect to see for a bakery, huh? Put those nice cakes right out front for people to see?”
“Did you ever come here to buy bread? Or anything else?”
“Not that I can remember.”
As we sat there pulled up against the curb, I couldn’t help but look out across the opposite side of the street, where the old train station rose a few blocks away from us, high above everything else.
“All right, let’s check out the other one,” I said, pulling back into traffic. We turned on Rosa Parks and went up to Grand River. It was the one diagonal street in a neighborhood full of east-west and north-south. When we got to the intersection with Warren Avenue, it was yet another illustration of just how badly this city had fallen apart.
“I remember this,” she said, pointing to the southwest corner, where there was now nothing but a buckled slab of concrete in the ground. “There was an auction house here, and a place to buy tents and awnings and things.”
“I think the bakery was half a block this way.” I took the turn around a great brick building that had probably once been a manufacturing site. The sign on the top of the building now advertised ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE. At ground level someone had spent many hours spray-painting an elaborate set of graffiti and garish cartoons.
I couldn’t find the actual address for the bakery. Whatever building it had once lived in was now long gone.
“No breadbox here,” Mrs. King said as she looked at the empty lot. “There’s nothing here at all.”
“We’ve got a couple of possibilities now,” I said. “Although that last one down by the station feels a little more promising. Coming up here, that’s the opposite direction entirely.”
“What are we going to do next?”
“You’re going to go back home. You never know when Darryl might just show up there.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do my favorite thing in the world,” I said. “Sit around and wait.”
I took her back to her house. Then I went back to the Michigan Avenue site by myself to scout it out. There was a pawnshop on one corner, then the old storefronts, then a bar on the other corner. There were two more bars across the street. It was quiet now in the afternoon, but I had to figure this block would really pick up after dark.
I circled around the block. There was parking behind the buildings. I could keep making a loop around the block, watching for Darryl King, or for the car he was driving, assuming he was still in his aunt’s car, a ten-year-old powder blue Pontiac Bonneville with a big dent in the front right quarter panel. Or else I could get out and walk around on foot. Either way, I’d have to keep my eyes open.
If it was later in the day, I would have just stayed there and gotten ready for my midnight watch. But I still had hours to kill, so I ended up going back up to the other location. I still wasn’t feeling like this was nearly as promising, but I parked my truck anyway and walked around on the empty streets. There was an auto parts store next to the old empty bakery site. Next to that was one of those “wholesale distributors” where you can buy office furniture, light fixtures, refrigerators, probably even a kidney if you hit them on the right day.
This can’t be the place, I thought. I turned to go back, already thinking about when I would grab something to eat. Then I saw the railroad bridge.
It was a block to the north, down a little one-way side street. As I walked closer, I saw that it was actually two separate bridges for two separate, parallel sets of tracks, about thirty feet apart. There was a sidewalk that ran under the bridges, and as I walked along it I found what seemed like a decade’s worth of trash and dirt and a few halfhearted attempts at graffiti.
There was a thin trail that sloped up from the sidewalk into the gap between the two bridges, where it disappeared into a thick mass of sumac trees. It was the last thing I wanted to do at that point, but the train tracks were here, right here behind the site of an old bakery, and I couldn’t make myself ignore that fact. So I bent down to clear the lowest branches and pushed myself through the underbrush, following the trail as it led up a short slope to the higher ground between the tracks. This little sumac forest was protected on either side by the tracks, and it ran from this street all the way to the next street a block away, where the train tracks crossed over another set of bridges. It wasn’t a place you’d expect to find any people, not in this forgotten strip of real estate, yet the ground was littered with candy wrappers and condoms and hypodermic needles and God knows what else. I was just about to turn around and get the hell of there. That’s when I saw the remains of a little shed at the end of the trail.