Easy Prey

by Dan Ames

Especially after a long day of practicing law.

  He could get really intrigued by the different bottles he used to pick up on the way home. Sometimes, he would have three or four glasses at the store as samples.

  Within a year, what he liked to call The Big Slide had happened. From wine, to liquor, to cocaine to heroin to homelessness.

  It had taken more than a year, but within that fateful decision to get serious about drinking, he had lost it all. An investment portfolio that was nearing the one-million-dollar mark. A big house in Bloomfield Hills. Two cars, one of them a Jaguar.

  To this. A bench in an empty park in downtown Detroit.

  It had gotten cold, too, and former attorney Angelo Flores had a sweatshirt covered by a tattered Hugo Boss suit jacket. His jeans were filthy and his feet were encased in two pairs of socks and an old pair of high-top basketball shoes.

  If only his old law partners could see him now. They actually had, come to think of it. A few months back a pair of them, decent guys, had come to see him, begged him to go to treatment.

  He had refused.

  Angelo Flores wanted no charity.

  He just wanted heroin. Fast. Pure. Heavenly.

  It was the only thing he lived for anymore.

  Speaking of…

  Angelo stood up and set off in a purposeful stride toward the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. It was where plenty of lawyers still hung out and also drug dealers and the families of drug dealers. Sure, there were plenty of cops around but he had scored here many times.

  And he needed it again.

  As fate would have it, it was Angelo Flores’s lucky day.

  Within minutes, he had met a fellow junkie, but one in much better shape than him, with an unbelievable offer. In exchange for showing him a good place to shoot up, Angelo could have some of his dope.

  With his skin crawling for a hit of the drugs that were now so close, Angelo quickly took the man to a building that had been in the process of being converted to lofts. Money had run out however, and renovations had stopped.

  And Angelo had moved in.

  He’d watched a man punch in the security code to the building, and had filed it away. Once he tested it and he’d gone in. There was no furniture, but there was a roof and some of the plumbing worked. The plastic sheets worked for bedding.

  But best of all, it was a super safe place to shoot up.

  He covered the keypad so his new friend couldn’t see the code, and they both went inside. Angelo led him to a room on the first floor that had carpet installed.

  They both took up seats on a pile of Tyvek wrap.

  “Thanks, man,” his buddy said. “I’ve been thinking about this for so long.”

  He shot up, then handed the needle and dope to Angelo who did what he’d been nearly tearing off his skin to do.

  The last thing Angelo thought, as he began to nod off, was that his friend didn’t seem to be affected by the heroin.

  At all.

  In fact, as Angelo’s own eyes began to close the last thing he saw was his friend wearing a clear, happy smile.

  Chapter Seven

  My sister had never met a man who could stand up to her.

  It was a pretty tall task, I had to admit. If I wasn’t her brother, I’d probably be intimidated by her no-bullshit, gun-wearing presence. But since I was her brother, I knew the sly humor she often hid behind a gruff exterior. Oh, the humor wasn’t there all that often, but when she unleashed it she could be funny as hell.

  The fact that she was romantically liberated often meant she ended up at my house, hanging out with Anna and the girls, and out of necessity, me.

  She actually followed me back to my house after we were done interviewing Christine Ingells.

  Home was a modest colonial in a modest part of Grosse Pointe. Well away from Lake Shore Drive and its plethora of multi-million dollar homes. It was made with common brick and sported black shutters, white trim, a couple of nice white columns holding up the little roof over the front door and the landscaping always looked nice because Anna took care of that. If I was in charge of landscaping, there’d be mostly brown grass and a few dying plants.

  I parked in the driveway because the garage held Anna’s car and a bunch of furniture we were either going to reupholster, refinish, or recycle.

  The back door to the house was up a short flight of stairs that led to the back porch, which was really quite small with just enough room for a couple of chairs. My grill was off to the right of the porch.

  I unlocked the back door and Ellen followed me inside.

  “Hello!” I called out and without waiting for a reply, went directly to the fridge and took out two bottles of beer. I cracked the tops and handed one to my sister.

  “To Dave,” I said and we both drank.

  Anna walked into the kitchen and saw both of us.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  I set my beer down on the counter and walked to her. “Dave Ingells died,” I said. Anna’s beautiful Italian face registered shock and surprise. She took a deep inhale of breath before letting it out. “What?” she said. “How?”

  “We don’t know,” Ellen said from behind me. She walked over to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair and sat down. I joined her, and Anna did, too.

  “Oh no, did you tell Christine?” Anna asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How is she doing?”

  “About as badly as you would expect,” I answered.

  Ellen was checking her phone. “Shit,” she said. “I gotta go.” She pushed her unfinished beer across the table to me, but Anna snared it before I could grab it.

  I knew better than to ask what Ellen had seen on her phone.

  “Let’s talk tomorrow,” I said.

  “Sorry I have to run, Anna,” Ellen said. “And for leaving you here with him.”

  There was never an occasion where she couldn’t rib her brother. I didn’t mind.

  “Take care,” my wife said.

  Once the back door closed, Anna turned to me. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  So I filled her in on what I knew and what I’d seen at the crime scene, along with how Christine had reacted to the news.

  “I’m glad she has so much family here,” Anna said. “How awful.”

  Anna had gotten to know Dave and Christine fairly well. They were our friends. And I could tell she was struggling with the news.

  “It doesn’t change anything,” I said. “But most of the time these kinds of things aren’t random. There’s more to what happened.”

  It was something that was never far away. When you shared a border with one of the most dangerous cities in the world, like Grosse Pointe did with Detroit, there was always fear that one day all hell would break loose. And it occasionally did. There were plenty of times a burglar from Detroit would decide to set up shop in Grosse Pointe. The problem was, Grosse Pointe’s police department was really quite good. In no small part because of my sister.

  “Oh God,” Anna said. “This is going to be awful. I feel so sorry for the kids. I’ll have to see if someone has setup a meal schedule. I can make them some lasagna.”

  We both took drinks from our beers. “We’ll have to talk to the girls,” I said. Even though our daughters were still young, they would probably need to be told about Dave’s death, before they heard misinformation at school.

  “Are you going to help Ellen?”

  There was no doubt in my mind that this was going to be a murder investigation. But I had no idea if Ellen would want or need my help. Probably not on both counts. I had come in handy when it came to breaking the news to Christine, but that would probably be all of the involvement my sister would want me to have.

  “Probably not,” I said. “But–”

  A strange, troubled look appeared on Anna’s face.

  “What?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Probably.”

 
; “Oh God,” I said. Grosse Pointe was awful when it came to rumors. A small, tightly-knit community often generated a lot of gossip. “What have you heard?”

  “You know Judy Platkin?” Anna asked quietly, as if someone was listening behind the couch. “She owns Village Toy?”

  I searched my memory. I’d been to so many parties with Anna, mostly involving parents of our daughters’ classmates that I sometimes had trouble remembering them.

  Village Toy was the only toy store in Grosse Pointe proper. I’d been in there a couple of times, but it was really overpriced, even though they did have some hard-to-find stuff.

  Judy Platkin? I tried to put a face to the name. Finally, I did. A tall, square-shouldered woman with a pretty, if somewhat severe face. A brunette if I recall.

  “I think so,” I said. “Looks sort of like a pioneer woman?”

  Anna nodded.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  Anna sighed. Finally, she spat it out.

  “I heard Dave was diddling her.”

  “Diddling?” I asked.

  “You know, sleeping with her,” Anna said.

  “No way.”

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you. I figured it was bullshit, and it probably was. Or is. Or whatever.”

  I had known Dave for the better part of twenty years. No way he was cheating on Christine.

  “Who told you that?”

  Anna shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t remember. It was during a group coffee, I think Fran organized.” Fran was Fran Daggett, a neighbor who lived just down the street. “Someone mentioned Judy Platkin and then someone else mentioned Dave being seen with her. You know Grosse Pointe. That’s enough to get a rumor started. He was probably just shopping in the store.”

  I suddenly lost interest in my beer and I spent the rest of the night in a little bit of a fog. It was depressing. Not only was a good friend of mine gone, but I knew how Grosse Pointe operated. The rumors would start. Not that Anna was one of those kinds of people, but I knew there would be plenty of whispers. It made me wonder about how well you could really know anyone.

  Dave had stuck with me through thick and thin. After I had been kicked off the police force for handing a young man back to his eventual killer, most of my friends wanted nothing to do with me.

  Except for Dave.

  Not only had he sought me out, I knew he had defended me as best he could. Of course, what I’d done had been indefensible, but still, I had appreciated his efforts.

  Now, I had a chance to return the favor.

  Something I intended to do until I had an answer.

  Chapter Eight

  I’ve always been an early riser. It started when my daughters were young. I would get up to do the early morning feeding and then I would just stay awake. After awhile, I found I had come to enjoy the silence of the morning, a house in which no one was stirring and a big cup of coffee in my hand. Some mornings I would work, others I would just sit and stare out the window.

  This morning was one of my stare-out-the-window periods. I was thinking about Dave and how you never knew when, where or how the Grim Reaper might come to take you. He hadn’t been the first in our friend group to pass away. There had been Brian Koshak, taken by prostate cancer. Another had been laid low by Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  But when someone your own age died, it created a jarring sensation. All of the canned expressions about not taking life for granted never did the experience justice. As I sat there, the steam from my coffee curling up in front of me, I vowed to extract every ounce of life I possibly could from every moment of my existence.

  My cell phone buzzed and I glanced down. I had set it on the armrest of the chair with the idea that it was pointless as no one was going to call me at this hour.

  But I was wrong.

  It was Ellen.

  I slid my thumb on the screen to accept the call and raised the phone to my ear.

  “Are you up early or did you never go to bed?” I asked her.

  “Sleep is overrated,” she answered. “Did I wake you up? Interrupt a sex dream involving you and Raquel Welch?”

  “Raquel Welch?” I asked. “She’s like seventy years old now.”

  “You’ve always had weird fetishes, John.”

  “I might need another cup of coffee to deal with this conversation.”

  I heard a ruffle of papers.

  “Too bad. Here we go,” she said. “Dave died of strangulation, plain and simple. No other signs of trauma to the body. No evidence of a struggle. No fingerprints, hairs or fibers.”

  “Wow, that’s bad news,” I said.

  “Sometimes the absence of evidence is proof of something by itself,” she pointed out.

  True.

  “Time of death?” I asked.

  “Fairly safe to say he died Thursday night right around midnight.”

  “Had he been drinking?”

  “No sign of alcohol or drugs.”

  I thought about what she was telling me.

  “So you’re saying someone strangled Dave and he didn’t put up a fight even though he wasn’t drunk or incapacitated?”

  “He could’ve put up a fight, but he didn’t have any marks on his body to indicate that.”

  “What about the rope around his neck?”

  “No prints, garden variety rope.”

  “Shit, you’ve got a whole lotta nothing.”

  “Exactly. Nada.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “We’re still waiting for his cell phone records, which may give us a better idea of where he was or at least had been before he wound up in that alley.”

  My sister was really pushing the boundaries of acceptable sharing of information for the chief of police in a murder investigation.

  “Is that why you’re telling me this? You want me to share what I’ve found?”

  I suddenly realized she had called me from her personal cell phone and she was probably at home, not the office. This was a totally off-the-record kind of conversation.

  “Dave had a lot of friends here in Grosse Pointe, and they’re putting a lot of pressure on the department to find out what happened,” she admitted. “So yeah, if you’ve got anything, it would be helpful.”

  I filled her in on the rumor that Dave might have been diddling Judy Platkin.

  “Diddling?” Ellen said. “What are you, a grandma?”

  “I like the word diddle,” I said. “It sounds fun and innocent, like a sweet childhood game of some sort.”

  “Oh Christ, why did I bring it up?” she said. “What about Judy Platkin?”

  “Nothing about her related to Dave,” she said. “Look, I gotta run. Try not to get yourself shot if you continue to look into this. You probably don’t have life insurance and I can’t pay for a funeral right now.”

  “Just put me in your garden,” I said. “Every meal you’ll think of me.”

  “You are a walking bag of fertilizer.”

  Chapter Nine

  Like all small business owners, I worked far longer hours than your typical 9 to 5 cubicle monkey. What a horrible term. Although, to be honest, I felt a certain empathy for cubicle monkeys. Quite a few friends of mine had wound up in corporate America, trapped by a big mortgage and forced to keep the boss’s butt clean.

  It was part of the reason I’d become a cop, not wanting the dead-end corporate job. That hadn’t worked out very well, though. Being a PI had its challenges, especially in the getting paid category. Sometimes it was feast or famine, but lately, I’d been doing just fine. I was happy, and Anna seemed happy.

  That was all that mattered.

  Anyway, Saturday morning found me making a big pancake breakfast for the girls. Isabel and Nina loved my pancakes – I poured the dough into the pan in custom shapes, mostly faces. It was like I was drawing freehand with pancake dough.

  And then, since both of them had back-to-back piano lessons that Anna always took them to, I used the opportunity to slip away into inves
tigating my friend’s murder.

  The village was quiet on a Saturday morning, mostly people going to Starbucks or the bagel store for caffeine and carbs. There was a good name for a business. Caffeine & Carbs – full-bodied coffee with plenty of assorted bread products to go along with it. Screw all those low-carb people!

  I made a mental note to suggest it to Anna. I’m sure it would be filed under Bad John Rockne Ideas.

  It was a folder that was pretty thick.

  My first stop was at Village Toy. It was a cute little toy store, full of most toys you could buy at Target for half the cost. They claimed to have hard-to-find stuff, but I’d been in here once when the girls were younger and left without buying anything.

  Now, I pushed through the doors into the store and went to the cashier. She was a young woman, maybe even a high school student, wearing a Grosse Pointe South sweatshirt and yoga pants.

  “Is Judy in?”

  “Yes, I am,” a voice said behind me.

  There was an open doorway and the edge of a desk I hadn’t noticed behind a tower of board games.

  Judy Platkin stood in the doorway. She was probably in her mid-to-late thirties, with a wide, oval face framing two eyes the color of rich ebony. She was beautiful in a severe way, but her liberal use of lipstick plumped her lips and softened her appearance.

  “John, isn’t it?” she said. She stuck out a hand and I shook it. It was warm, with a strong grip that seemed to linger for a moment too long.

  “Yes,” I said, pulling my hand back. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “Not at all, come in,” she said. She walked behind her desk and I took a moment to admire her figure. She had on a tight black skirt and her legs were encased in black nylons. A white blouse, also somewhat form-fitting, put her modest cleavage on full display.

  It was odd because when I had met her previously, I’d remembered a rawboned woman who had seemed almost grim. Now, she seemed more curvaceous and was exuding a raw sexuality I found surprising.

  “I’m sure you heard about Dave Ingells,” I said.

  “Yes, it was shocking.”

  Her face didn’t show any surprise or deception. It was a blunt expression. Very open. Alluring even.