August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “Eleanor Paget’s body,” Danbury said. “And don’t be callin’ me no ‘Tubby McGlutton,’ nay-gro.”

  “Oh, please, Ray,” Bobby scolded. “You’re twenty pounds overweight. You smoke two cigars a day. And I’m sure, like every other over-forty black man who just has to show how successful he is in Detroit, you probably have three Courvoisier and Cokes three times a week at the Pontch. Oh yeah, son, I got a cold storage drawer with your name on it.” After eviscerating Danbury and taking a breath, Bobby said “Paget’s pretty straight-up stuff: GSW to the right temple. Bullet followed an upward ten-degree trajectory and exited through the top right of her noggin. Only bit of weirdness was the force she used to press the barrel of the gun to her temple. Enough to cause pretty deep bruising. Then again, it’s weirdness I’ve seen before. People really angry with themselves. Or some people feel a little more push commits them to the act.”

  “May I see the body?” I said.

  Bobby made a grand gesture. “After you.” I led the way toward the cold concrete and steel autopsy room.

  There was a rumble of angry voices near the morgue entrance. The doors burst open and five men in suits tumbled in. The man in the lead was Detroit Police Chief Horace Renard, a tall, lean black man with round wire-rimmed glasses. He looked more professor than cop. Renard was followed quickly by Aaron Spiegelman—the man I’d seen enter Eleanor Paget’s compound three days earlier as I was talking with Frank the security guard. The other suits carried the water for Renard and Spiegelman.

  “This is an atrocity!” Spiegelman shouted.

  “What would you have me do?” Chief Renard said calmly. “Grosse Pointe can’t handle it. If anything we’re honoring a longstanding professional agreement and performing a decades-long courtesy.”

  One of Spiegelman’s lackeys blew his cookies at the sight of naked, dead and mangled bodies. On wobbly legs he staggered out of the room.

  “Look at this place.” Spiegelman pointed a quivering finger toward Eleanor Paget’s body in the autopsy room. “Oh, my God! God! She’s—naked!”

  “That’s generally how we do autopsies here,” Bobby said to Spiegelman.

  Chief Renard gave Bobby a look. Bobby shrugged, crossed his arms over his broad chest and leaned against a bank of body drawers.

  “You’ve got her lying between—what?—a crack whore and some guy who probably got stabbed robbing a liquor store! This is unconscionable!” Then Spiegelman directed his rigid forefinger my way. “And him! What’s he doing here?”

  Chief Renard cut his eyes to Danbury. Danbury said, “Mr. Snow was one of the last people to see Paget alive. Thursday afternoon. I find a visit with the dead often shakes the truth out of the living. Once we’re done with him, we’ll be talking with you, Mr. Spiegelman.”

  I was about to speak in my own defense when Spiegelman shouted, “She killed herself! It was a suicide! Why does—why does anybody need to see her like this?”

  “Your concern for her modesty is touching, Mr. Spiegelman,” Chief Renard said. “But as I’m sure you know, any time a weapon is involved—suicide or not—we investigate. It’s what the citizens who pay our salaries expect of us.”

  Spiegelman got chest-to-chest with Renard, looked up into Renard’s wire-framed eyes and said, “I want her out of this horror show in the next twelve hours, Chief. If you don’t meet that time frame, I will involve the bank’s attorneys, Eleanor’s personal attorney, the district attorney, the mayor, and city council. Am I understood?”

  “Clearly,” Renard said, seemingly impervious to Spiegelman’s threat. “And if you would, please make yourself available for an interview within the next twelve hours, okay?”

  Incredulous, Spiegelman caught the eye of a member of his entourage, an older man with a shock of white hair. The man nodded once. I assumed from this quick exchange the man with the white hair was Titan Investments Securities Group’s general legal counsel. Spiegelman backed away from Renard, turned and walked out of the morgue with his remaining lackeys.

  Renard sighed, lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Mr. Snow, under any other circumstance I would shake your hand and welcome you back to the city which wrongfully castigated you. However, in the prevailing situation I would suggest you give a full statement to Captain Danbury which I will then read with interest and heightened scrutiny. After that, I would suggest you stay easily accessible for any further questioning.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, forcing myself not to salute.

  Renard turned his attention to Danbury. “Ray, this could get real ugly real fast. Do what you have to do to close this out quick and clean.” Renard peered over the top of his glasses and in a low, calm and intimidating voice said, “And let’s have ballistics do a full work up on that fucking gun this time, okay, Ray? No games, no politics, no bullshit, n’k?”

  “Yessir,” Danbury said.

  I could feel the prickly heat of Danbury flushing from where I stood.

  “Control the press on this thing,” Renard concluded.

  “Yessir. I’ll put Cowling on point.”

  “And Bobby?” Renard said after heaving a heavy sigh. “Turn that creepy goddamn music off.”

  Bobby grinned and nodded.

  After Renard left, we went into the autopsy room to observe Eleanor Paget’s remains, although there was little to discuss except whether Bobby should run a GSR test—for gunshot residue—and a tox screen. The remaining bit of cop inside me surfaced and told Bobby he should run the tests; Danbury gave his cursory chain-of-command approval. It was difficult looking at Eleanor lying on a metal slab. Naked and eternally quiet. It was even harder to look at her and know that maybe I could have done something.

  The dead were once again defining me.

  Nine

  The 14th Precinct was run out of a once-impressive late-1800s fieldstone mansion on what’s known as the Woodward Spine. At one time the precinct was an urban showplace. A proud example of repurposing Detroit’s unique architectural past for a promising future.

  After decades of Detroit’s economic misfortunes, missteps and mishaps—most tied to the dwindling fortunes of the automotive industry, a craven and inept political system and the willful abandonment of the poor and disadvantaged—the precinct started to fall into disrepair. I used to work out of the 14th. And even with the leaky ceilings, warped floors and cracked walls, I loved the place. It smelled like a history of French settlers, horse stables and hard-earned pride.

  Now, with the recent opening of the department’s new multimillion-dollar downtown headquarters and a rebalancing of the city’s shaky spreadsheets, the 14th would soon be an abandoned stone husk.

  I spent an hour in Ray Danbury’s cramped, drafty office briefing him on the meeting I’d had with Eleanor Paget. He took meticulous notes, as he’d always done. The only point that pricked his ears and gave pause to his pen was my impromptu lunch with FBI Special Agent O’Donnell.

  “FBI? No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Damn,” Danbury said, his eyebrows arching. “And you ain’t been back but a minute.”

  About forty minutes in my phone rang. This time the ringtone was George Clinton and Parliament’s “Give Up the Funk.”

  I asked Danbury if I could take the call. Slightly irritated, he said I could.

  “You alone?” Skittles said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

  “Yes,” I said. “But never lonely.”

  “I been inside the belly of the beast, man—that Titan bank,” Skittles said. “Five fuckin’ hours in an amusement park.”

  “Listen,” I said brightly. “Can you call me back in about thirty minutes? I’m right in the middle of something. So call me back and let me know which amusement park you went to.” I disconnected. “My cousin Paolo,” I said to Danbury, offering no other explanation for the call.

  “Paolo?” Danbury said, his eyes narrowed. “I thought I’d met everybody in your family.”

  I gave a ca
sual shrug and smiled. “You know us blacks and Mexicans. Always an aunt, uncle or cousin in the wood pile.”

  “‘Paolo,’” Danbury said scratching his salt-and-pepper stubble chin. “Ain’t that Italian?”

  The fact that one of my first reconnections in the city was with Skittles, a notorious hacker and social media prankster, was the one thing I would hold back from Danbury. And besides, I didn’t know his real name, physical description or location, so why bother?

  At the end of my interview, Danbury sat back in his chair, thoughtfully swiveling back and forth. The gears were whirling, but soon they would engage.

  “That’s it?” he said.

  “That’s it.”

  He held me in his hard gaze for a few seconds. “No hard feelings?”

  I looked at the photos of his children, Marquis and Chantelle, from the gap-toothed innocence of elementary school to the joyful arrogance of college. And there were pictures of his wife, Yolanda, beautiful, smiling, content.

  “No hard feelings,” I said.

  I stood and we shook hands.

  Before releasing my hand, Danbury said, “Please don’t forget—I know you, August. You like a damned pit bull: teeth sink in, jaws lock and you ain’t satisfied until somebody’s ass been chewed off. Eleanor Paget is lookin’ like a suicide, pure and simple. Ain’t nobody’s ass needs chewin’ off. And whatever guilt you might be feelin’ over dead-ass Eleanor Paget ain’t gonna put the bullet back in the chamber.”

  I offered a weak, unconvinced smile and nodded. “Do me a solid, Ray—”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to do you a solid?”

  “Check out a kid named Jimmy Radmon for me,” I said. “Black, eighteen, about five ten, five eleven, maybe one forty.”

  “And I would do this for you—why?”

  I shrugged. “Because you think I’m aces?”

  Danbury exploded into laughter then told me to get the fuck out of his office.

  Before leaving the station I walked back to the morgue. Bobby was in full autopsy gear, walking around the Y-cut open remains of Eleanor Paget and speaking into a digital tape recorder. In the background, Son House was singing “Death Letter Blues.”

  Bobby stopped recording his notes once he saw me.

  “Mind if I don’t shake your hand?” I said.

  “Lightweight.” Bobby took off his latex gloves, pitched them in a nearby medical waste container and gave me a stern look. “You know you’re just a citizen now, right?”

  “José Blow.”

  “And providing you with information on this or any other open DPD case constitutes a serious ethical and legal violation of my sworn duties and responsibilities as the lead coroner for Wayne County.”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay,” Bobby said smiling. “Glad we got that out of the way.”

  Bobby warned me a rush job like this might yield very little in the way of revelations. The hole in the top of her head was the obvious cause of death. And the weapon and the display case would likely bear her fingerprints and no others.

  “Tell you the truth, August,” Bobby said, “this’ll probably be a twenty-minute job. Half-hour tops. Save for the lab work. Only question I have is who the hell was her plastic surgeon? Stem to stern, labia to boobs, cheekbones, eyes, hairline. Not that she needed it. Basic bone structure’s uncompromised. Tits were mostly transmuscular. Kind of like a new paint job and rims on a cherry ’67 Corvette.”

  “You’ve been in this job too long, Bobby,” I said.

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  “She didn’t much like people,” I said, looking at the quiet repose of her opened body on the steel table. “Frankly, I don’t think she liked herself much. Maybe plastic surgery was her way to reshape herself into a person she could halfway tolerate.”

  Bobby said, “The fuck do I care? All I’m saying is when she opened the chute, she left a Class A chassis with some Grade A aftermarket parts.”

  “Wow. You are just one classy guy.”

  “That I am,” Bobby said, grabbing my hand and shaking it. “And I think I got a little, you know, hippocampus on your jacket there.”

  I looked at the tiny glob of grey goo on the sleeve of my coat.

  Bobby suddenly bellowed with laughter and said, “It’s oatmeal, for crissakes!”

  I flicked the glob of oatmeal from my sleeve to the floor, where it no doubt began mingling with a sluice of microscopic human debris.

  Even though I knew he would, I admonished Bobby to be as thorough and discreet as possible when it came to Eleanor Paget. Bobby was well versed in the political value and inestimable power of discretion. Even in the bowels of the city morgue, the Lead Coroner for Wayne County had to tread lightly and with no small amount of stealth. Science was science. But politics often times trumped science.

  Danbury had a young, fresh-faced patrolman drive me home, an olive-skinned Chaldean kid named Aswan, probably ten minutes out of the academy.

  “You like bein’ on the job?” I asked.

  “Love bein’ on the job,” Aswan said. “A lot of the shop owners see me, a Chaldean, and they feel comfortable. Like they’ve got somebody on the inside that’ll take care of ’em.” He paused, shrugged, then said, “Then again, some of the older ones—especially the men—see me and think Mukhabarat.”

  Halfway back to Mexicantown I was, for whatever reason, given to thoughts of family dinners. Maybe it was Aswan’s half-eaten lunch riding between us—a shawarma sandwich and a Styrofoam cup of sweet herbal tea.

  I’d been raised primarily on Mexican food—homemade tortillas and enchiladas, chipotle-crusted pork chops and tamale pie with dill and cilantro cream sauce. My mother was an incredible cook and my father was eternally grateful for her expertise in the kitchen.

  Of course, there were those few days in a month when she deferred to my father’s Alabama homeboy tastes: fried chicken, ribs, collard greens, red beans and rice, coleslaw with chopped apples and raisins and red-skinned potato salad with too much yellow mustard. The three of us would sit at our small dining room table on the southwest side of Detroit, eat and laugh. My father would engage us with tales of his youth and his southern upbringing. My mother was an equally gifted storyteller, and she painted lush and colorful pictures of Zacatecas in the north of Mexico where she was born.

  There were, of course, the occasional Chinese carryout or cold leftover dinners we each ate alone in separate and sullen rooms after my mom and dad had argued. Their arguments were few and far between—usually about money, my behavior or grades. They were usually quickly resolved, followed by passionate late-night and early-morning making up that tested the tensile strength of mattress springs while simultaneously scaring and amusing their young son down the hall.

  Tonight, I felt like Chinese in a quiet room.

  Once Aswan the Rookie dropped me off at home I went out and got some General Tso’s, shrimp fried rice and wonton soup from one of the many hole-in-the-wall restaurants near Wayne State University. I was lying on my sofa by the fireplace and eating with chopsticks from the small collection of small white boxes when Skittles called.

  “An amusement park, man!” Skittles said breathlessly. “Five hours in a damned amusement park!”

  “Aren’t you a little old for cotton candy and tea cup rides?” I said.

  “No, see, man, you ain’t gettin’ it,” Skittles said frantically. “An amusement park is an elaborately encrypted heuristic system set up to mask and protect a real system. It’s got all the mechanisms and mechanics, bells and whistles of a real system. It tells you everything and it tells you nothing. It’s a security maze set up for guys like me. But the further you hack in, the more complicated the rides and attractions. Any one of ’em could trigger a rabbit hole—a type of mirror program designed to move backwards through your forward steps, record them steps and obliterate any and every system you used to get in. Only brothas I ever seen use algorithms and encryptions this wicked be some Ukraine dudes that even the Ukraine
s don’t even know about. Dude! I barely got out with my digital nuts!”

  “You’ve dealt with these guys before?” I said.

  “Run into ’em once or twice,” Skittles said. “They operate out of the Ukraine, Slovenia or Latvia. At least used to. Was known as ‘Protocol One.’ Then ‘The Determinant.’ Started out like me—bunch of guys fuckin’ around, hackin’ for shits and giggles. Moved into hacktivism. Greenpeace and save the mothafuckin’ whales kinda shit. Then something happened. Went dark for about a year. Then I’m seein’ code from the Protocol One and Determinant days poppin’ up all over the fuckin’ place. Like it’s lookin’ for a place to nest and do some real damage. Server-to-server. An hour here, a week there. Worms, Trojans, really nasty malware, spoofed access and cloned security codes—all that shit. I ain’t about no real damage, man. I’m a hacktivist, not an anarchist. I’ll stir the pot but I ain’t about to set the kitchen on fire.”

  I half understood what he had said, but wholly understood what he was feeling.

  Fear.

  “So, like, anyway,” Skittles continued anxiously, “this Titan system’s got traces of Protocol One and the Determinant all up inside it.”

  “Bottom-line it for me,” I said. “In English.”

  “Bottom line is Titan’s got more system than any small bank should ever have,” Skittles said. “Rolling algorithm encryptions that maybe you’da seen at Lehman Brothers before the shit went globally bad.” Skittles paused. I gave him a few seconds to calm down. Once his breathing settled, he said, “You know what happened when I ran this past a couple like-minded brothas in the Czech Republic? They hung up on me!”

  “Gotta love the Information Age,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” Skittles said. “Ain’t no damned Information Age no more. That died on 9/11. Next day was the birth of the Infiltration Age, Snowman. This is some crazy, scary shit. What inna hell you got yourself into?”

  I told him I didn’t know.