Driving fast now and often changing lanes, she raced through an amber light at 7 Mile Road and had Charlie wondering if she had somehow made him, as he half-ran a red to stay with her.
No, he decided, she was just in a hurry, and now she had him talking to himself. “Jesus Christ, lady, he ain’t gonna start without you.” And when she cut off another car in her haste to change lanes: “Watch it, fella. We got one bitch in heat.”
At 8 Mile they crossed the city limits, passing an American flag hanging limp on a wide grassy island that now separated the traffic flow, going and coming. “Welcome to Eastpointe” said the sign under the flagpole. Except for this broad traffic island filled with large old trees, he thought there was nothing special about this strip: a banquet hall, an old neighborhood theater (still hanging on in this age of the multiplex), Tubby Submarines, a bowling alley, a Chevy dealer, an Italian restaurant. Lots of wops out this way. He knew Susan would disapprove the slang, but he liked the sound of “Lots of wops.”
Yeah, the commercial enterprise was doing a little better than what they had just cruised through on the city-side of 8 Mile. But there was nothing all that impressive here, nothing to set it really apart beyond the fact that it was lily-white, and you just stopped seeing black folks on the street. A few in cars driving someplace, probably with a much better idea of destination than he had, following this hot-looking broad so anxious to get out of her skirt. She had been forced to slow down for the moment behind three side-by-side cars doing no more than the speed limit.
So Eastpointe. Actually East Detroit until last year when some enterprising, image-conscious leaders got a referendum passed that incorporated the mellifluous new name, borrowing from their high tone neighbors along the lake, to seem more separate and apart from the cursed city with which it shared a common border, a city whose dope, crime, corruption, poverty, entrenched unemployment, incompetent schools, inadequate services and racial polarization had made it seem the epitome of American urban despair. Really, he couldn’t blame them.
The gal in the green Escort finally managed to dodge between two of the slower moving cars and was on her way again, racing across I-696 into Roseville. Charlie stepped on it to split the same two cars and hit the intersection just before the light changed. For a while Roseville seemed a copy of Eastpointe, both older suburbs without room for new development, but generally the farther you got from Detroit, the greater dedication to commercial consumption.
More auto dealerships now, a good-sized shopping center and a plethora of restaurants and fast food emporiums—Taco Bell, Burger King, Little Caesar’s, Long John Silver’s, Church’s Chicken. Finally, the Escort slowed as it neared a large, well-kept, two-story building. The big sign in front said Eastbrook Manor Motel. The car’s right turn signal began flashing.
He slowed as the woman turned into the motel lot, moved all the way to the back, and stopped in front of the main building. The motel was well back from the street and, sheltered by several large elms, had a secluded air.
Pulling into a second driveway, he parked next to the office. From there he could see the woman get out of her car, walk to a first-floor room in the building’s center, and knock on the door. Her entry came so quickly that he got his binoculars up in time only to see the door close with the number 15 on it.
Leaving the Nova he walked to the office. Inside he found a young man dressed neatly in shirt and tie, reading a book with a yellow marker in hand. The young clerk seemed surprised to see the well-built black man in a white short-sleeve shirt over beige slacks moving to the counter. He put down the book (Small Business Fundamentals) and got to his feet.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Yeah, I’d like a room.”
“Fine, sir. How many will there be?
“Two of us. Actually, I’d like a specific room, if that’s possible. Number 15. It’s got kind of a sentimental value for us. If you know what I mean.” Charlie winked.
The clerk grinned politely, looking down at his computer screen and fingering the keyboard a few times. “Oh, I sure do, sir. But I’m afraid 15 is already occupied.”
“Really? Say, what’s the name on that? Maybe my friend’s already here.”
“Is your friend a gentleman, sir?”
“Ah, no, she’s not.”
“Then I’m sure it’s not your friend, sir.”
“Too bad,” said Charlie. “Well, how about one of those right next to it, fourteen or sixteen. At least we’d be close.”
The young man looked down at his computer screen again. “No, I’m sorry, sir, but those are taken as well.”
“Well, damn.” Charlie turned and looked out the window at the rooms in question. “Some lucky day. How about right above it? Room 25?”
The clerk answered this time without even looking at his computer. “No, sir. I was thinking of that one too, but it’s also taken.”
Charlie tried looking puzzled and annoyed. “I can’t believe this. It’s two in the afternoon, there’s two cars in your lot, and all these rooms are taken.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.” The clerk paused, then raised one finger as if he’d just thought of something. “Sir, let me check just one thing on 25. I’ll be back in a moment.”
He turned and left through a door behind the reception desk, closing it firmly. Charlie leaned across the counter, hoping to make sense of what he saw on the computer screen, but it contained only a photo of the motel.
Turning, he gazed out the window at 15. The clerk was back in about a minute.
“We’re in luck, sir. There was a cancellation on 25.”
Charlie knew there was something not right about this, but as he stood there nodding, he also knew the only alternative was to walk away. “Okay. I’ll take it.”
Chapter 23
He imagined her eyes closed, her body naked and glistening in the misty spray, Cherry Baker luxuriating in a warm shower, with a man’s hand reaching to soap and fondle her tits. He did not have to imagine her moan, or the fervent words that followed.
“Oh, baby, when you touch me, I get so excited my knees feel like water. It’s like I’m just gonna fall on the floor.”
With earphones on, Charlie sat cross-legged on the tile floor of the bathroom in room 25. With two of what Susan called his toys—a highly sensitive listening device he had dropped down an air duct and a micro-cassette tape recorder—he monitored the conversation, such as it was, in the shower below.
At the moment, over the hissing spray, Cherry was saying, “I’ve never felt like this before with anybody. Not ever. Here, can I do this for you?”
The hiss increased until a man groaned, and her voice asked, “Do you like that?”
Listening intently, he watched the cassette wheels turn on the floor next to him. And then suddenly he saw the barrel of a large black automatic move directly to his left temple. The earphones were ripped off his head, a man’s foot clad in a fancy-cut dress shoe stomped on the recorder, stopping it permanently, and a powerful hand grabbed his shirt and the back of his neck.
“Get up, motherfuck!”
On his feet, the hand still clamped tight on his neck and the nose of the automatic stabbing his back, he silently cursed his own reckless stupidity. It was not like he hadn’t warned himself. Forced out of the bathroom and up against the nearest wall, he got a brief look at a second man—white, fat and dressed in a business suit—holding another automatic on him.
“Okay, nigger boy,” said the man with the hand on his neck, “hands on the wall and spread out down here.”
He kicked Charlie’s ankles apart so that he was spread-eagled against the wall and, apparently putting his gun someplace, began to frisk Charlie with both hands. He quickly found and removed the .357 from a holster under the white shirt at the small of his back.
“Well, nigger boy packs heavy.” The fellow behind him stepped back.
“You know, nigger boy,” said the second guy in a strange, high-pitched voice, “you look tired to me
. I think you need a little nap. Spread out on the bed face down.”
After hesitating for a second, Charlie straightened up, turned from the wall and got his first good look at his captors. The fat man holding the gun on him now was about his own age. The other prick, shoving the .357 into his waistband next to the black automatic, was younger, about six-three, and so muscular he looked as if he might burst the seams of his navy blue suit with any substantial move. Both were dark complected, maybe Italian.
Charlie stared at the fellow with the squeaky voice for a moment, then said, “I’m not sleepy, you wop asshole.”
“Oh, cute!” said the fat man, surprised and angry. “Very cute, nigger boy. But I said get on the fuckin’ bed or I’ll make you so fuckin’ sleepy, you’ll never fuckin’ wake up.”
Charlie stared again without moving. “That’s a limited vocabulary you got there, wop boy.”
The guy’s small dark eyes narrowed. “You fuckin’ piece of shit!” he said moving toward Charlie, who waited just long enough to slap the gun so hard that it flew across the room. He buried a vicious left hook in that sloppy gut and without pause threw a powerful right into the muscle man’s face as he reached for one of the items in his waistband. Then he kicked him cleanly in the groin.
One more kick to wop boy’s head, and he was reaching for his Magnum when the door to the room opened, and another well-dressed thug was moving in, gun-in-hand, trying to make sense of the room’s disarray. Charlie bum-rushed the 10 feet between them in about a second, grabbed the guy’s gun hand with his left and delivered his right to the point of the chin, knocking him back through the doorway and over the balcony railing to fall from the second floor and land flat on the Nova’s roof.
Glancing back in the room, Charlie saw the muscle guy stirring. On the balcony he bolted to his right for the nearest stairway, but another gunman was heading up. Sprinting back to his left toward a stairway at the far end of the building, he got about halfway before spotting still another armed fellow nearing the top of those stairs.
He stopped, swung over the railing, dangled for a second, then dropped to the ground just as someone on the balcony opened up with several rounds from something silenced. Landing well, he ducked under the balcony, dashed 20 yards to an opening between buildings and raced through the passageway toward the back end of the complex.
With a surge of his old confidence he was in the process of telling himself he still had it and was home free. Then two more high-fashioned gun-toters suddenly appeared from around a corner 15 yards in front of him. He whirled to find no exit from this passageway except for where he had entered, and that was being filled at the moment by two more of these armed assholes in suits and ties. So, yeah, game over.
Chapter 24
At first the room had only a few fuzzy lights, but gradually vague shapes appeared, slowly resolved themselves and finally came into some woozy focus. After a while he decided he was probably in a motel room, but, if so, it was one set up for someone’s special pleasure. A king-sized bed, a well-stocked bar, and a furniture grouping that included a projection TV, two armchairs and the couch on which he currently resided. Sitting on the edge of the bed and standing next to the door were the fat guy and the hulk.
Seated in the chair across from him was a man he recognized as Steven Monelli.
Bruises burned on Charlie’s face, and he winced a bit from the pain in his side as he shifted on the couch. He’d been beaten and maybe also drugged. Monelli was reading through a file-folder on his lap, but he finally looked up at Charlie.
“Feeling better?”
He stared at Monelli for a while. “No.”
“You will shortly. The drug they used is very safe.”
“Thanks so much.”
“Good, Charlie. That’s the attitude.”
“The fuck am I doing here?”
“You tell me, Charlie.”
With considerable discomfort he moved to a sitting position on the couch. “I told your assholes. It was a simple wandering wife case. I followed her here and walked into a war.”
Monelli offered something that resembled both a smile and smirk. “It’s not nice to invade other people’s privacy, Charlie.”
“I can’t help that. I do it for a living.”
“That’s what I understand. In fact while you were resting, I had a little profile run, so now I know all kinds of interesting things about one Charlie Watts.” Monelli gave him a full-fledged smile this time and held up the folder.
Charlie said nothing.
“It says here you’re thirty-four, a former college football star, former cop in the narcotics unit, currently a down-on-his-luck private detective. You share a flat on the westside with an attractive girlfriend, a social worker named Susan Cole.”
Monelli paused. Charlie said, “Pretty boring.”
“It gets better. Twelve years ago, it says here, you fucked up a very promising career in pro football by getting involved in a betting scandal at a university in California. Some years later you fucked up again, Charlie, getting yourself bounced off the police force here for holding on to a little too much drug raid cash. Thereafter you bounced through a number of jobs—garbage man, hospital orderly, factory worker—suffered the break-up of your marriage and saw your ex-wife and two sons move off to California.”
Charlie didn’t like the way his life sounded in brief review. “So what’s the point?”
“The point is,” said Monelli, speaking slowly and with a steady stare, “I could use someone with your background and skills.”
Charlie leaned back on the couch. “I got a job.”
“Now don’t be bullheaded, Charlie, just because my staff was a little unpleasant with you. One on seven, and from what I hear, you gave just as good as you got.”
“I told you, I got a job.”
“Some chicken-shit job.” Steven Monelli’s voice remained pleasant. “Spying on frustrated young women.”
“Hey, we can’t all contribute handsome threads to the social fabric of our time.”
Monelli smiled again. “So you’re verbally gifted as well. You could do well with me, Charlie.”
Charlie glared at the man. “Steven ‘The Bank’ Monelli. Only surviving son of old-line mob boss, Michael ‘Cigar Mike’ Monelli.”
Monelli’s smile held its wattage. “How about it? Come work for me.”
“Sorry, I just like running my own show.”
Monelli paused and looked like he’d decided something. “Well, that’s understandable. You ever change your mind, just give me a call.” Rising from the armchair, he offered Charlie his hand.
Eying him for a while, Charlie got up slowly from the couch and finally shook the man’s hand. Then he walked slowly to the door, glancing with no interest at the fat guy sitting on the bed with a smirk.
Monelli called after him. “Oh, Charlie, one more thing. It would really put young Mr. Baker’s mind at ease to learn that his wife is in fact spending her time volunteering down at the church.”
Charlie stopped and turned. “There’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“What’s that, Charlie?”
“Why a guy like you, who could have any kind of place you wanted—romantic cottage on a lake or anything—why you come to this fuckin’ motel.”
“I come to this fuckin’ motel, Charlie, because I own it. It comes in handy in all kinds of ways, and it keeps things anonymous. I like that.”
Charlie moved again for the door.
“See, you could learn things from me, Charlie.”
“Yeah,” said Charlie, his hand on the doorknob, his eyes on the young muscle guy standing next to it and trying to stare him down. “I’ll let you know if I ever want to learn them.”
Outside room 15 he walked into the cool night air and headed for his old white Nova parked close by. Getting in, he stopped to gauge the new dents in his roof and tried to calculate the cost of having them fixed.
Chapter 25
There was sti
ll no marker on the grave, just the bald dirt cover and, at the head, a small discolored teddy bear and a clear glass vase filled with dead flowers that had toppled onto the bear. On the monitor, propped up on the grass with a tape box, John was positioned so you could see the gravesite over his left shoulder. It was fuzzy, but you could tell what it was back there.
With considerable respect for her judgment and skills as a producer, Frank could not recall his last serious disagreement with Fay. But they had actually argued earlier when he arrived and, with the crew setting up in front of the grave, found her carrying a fist full of wildflowers she had picked from a patch nearby to replace the dead stalks in the vase.
“Fay, you can’t do that,” he had said.
“Of course I can.”
“No, really, you can’t.”
“Frank, what’s wrong with it? Anybody might have come along and put these here. I’m just doing it first.”
“But anybody hasn’t come along, and you’re doing it for your own reasons—to make the picture look better.”
“No, it just looks so damn sad this way, and it’ll look bad for the family. I talked to the father yesterday, and he’s still completely broken up. He was in tears on the phone with me. Said he can’t bring himself to come here. Came once and that was it.”
“Hey, it is so damn sad, and that’s the way it should look, just the way it is. Am I right, fellas?” He had turned to Marty, standing next to the camera and James, the pudgy, black audio tech, fussing with the wireless mike equipment.
Marty: “Frank’s right, Fay.”
She had opened her mouth wide before responding. “Marty, you agreed with me completely. You said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
“Yeah, but now that I hear what Frank’s saying, I think he’s right.”
James had said, “Give it up, Fay.”
And so she had, and now, with the wildflowers on the grass at her feet, she stood behind Frank, who sat with John a yard away, both of them on folding chairs. She was watching the monitor, jotting his questions on a clipboard and noting the time code from the camera.
Admission of Guilt (The detroit im dyin Trilogy, Book 2) (The Detroit Im Dying Trilogy) Page 7