August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “At my age, Mr. Snow, I have little interest in career fulfillment, social justice or workplace fairness,” Mayfield said with a soft smile. “I do, however, covet a peaceable stability, quiet contentment and the occasional midwinter escape to a place with palm trees and glow-in-the-dark drinks.”

  “You mind one more question?” I said.

  “Depends on the question.”

  “Where were you the evening Eleanor Paget died?”

  Mayfield held her smile and said, “At a women in business conference at the Detroit Athletic Club. Eighty to a hundred attendees. Of that perhaps fifteen or so black women. And of that, perhaps four or five my age. Shouldn’t be hard to verify. Easier if you’re a member. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Shall I look into a membership for you?” she said.

  “My dance card’s pretty full right now,” I said. “Maybe another time.”

  I thanked her again, lowered my forearm and let the elevator door close between us.

  After several seconds of gliding descent, the elevator doors slid open and I emerged into the lobby. The huge security guards at the elevators saw me and the black one said, “Have a nice day, sir.” I told him to do the same. The young black woman at the reception desk noticed me, smiled and said, “Have a prosperous day, Mr. Snow.” I said that I would and wished her the same. Walking to the glass revolving entrance doors I noticed the two lobby security guards, including the guy with wire-rim glasses, putting me squarely in their sights. I winked at them and said, “Keep up the good work, fellas!”

  I liked Kip Atchison for the murder of Eleanor Paget primarily because I thought the guy was an egocentric sack of shit.

  Then again, if being an egocentric sack of shit were a prosecutable crime, there wouldn’t be a soul sitting in the US Senate.

  I walked from Titan Securities Investments Group to Schmear’s Deli. It was a bright, cool day and even the polluted city air felt much fresher and more honest than what I’d been breathing in Atchison’s office.

  I shot the breeze with Ben for a while. He got busy, so I made time with his waitresses. I ate a plate of scrambled eggs with fresh jalapeños, tomatillos and lox, and a toasted salt bagel, and drove home feeling like the only thing I’d accomplished was a good lunch.

  On my way home I called Rocking Horse and said I needed Skittles to call me. A young woman with a serious New Jersey accent said there was no one there called “Skittles.” I told her I was a little tired of this routine. She thanked me for calling and hung up.

  As I drove past the Home Depot near Mexicantown, I saw my neighbor from across the street, Carlos Rodriguez. He, along with four other Mexicans, got out of a white Ford F-250 Crew Cab. After they’d retrieved their tool belts from the truck’s bed, the truck drove off, leaving the men, splattered with drywall mud and sawdust, standing in the fall chill.

  Five minutes away from my house, my phone rang. The ringtone this time was Eminem’s “Not Afraid.” Skittles. I answered and, after a brief-to-nonexistent greeting, I told him what I needed.

  “Seriously?” he said. “You want me to ‘visit’ Digital Defense Home Security?”

  “I’m not comfortable asking you to do this, but—”

  “Hey, man,” Skittles said. “No problem. It’s just—you know—I’m between a couple, uh, you know, things right now.” I heard a girl laugh in the background. “Thirty minutes. Forty tops. Home security companies are usually pretty easy to hack. Usual fee. Same place.”

  “Usual fee. Same place,” I said before thanking him.

  “By the way,” Skittles said. “There’s a package at your house, Snowman. Use the red one first.”

  “Condoms?”

  Skittles laughed and hung up.

  On my way home, I’d picked up a tail. A black Cadillac Escalade with blacked out windows. Obviously they weren’t concerned about subtlety. I was fairly sure it wasn’t my FBI friends, who were a little more discreet in their Chevy Suburbans.

  About a mile from my house, the Escalade gunned its massive engine, passed me and continued on its merry way.

  There was a small box wrapped in brown paper at the foot of my door. No address. No markings or stamps. A small package of Skittles candy taped to the top.

  I opened a bottle of Negra Modelo, then I opened the package: it was a shoebox and inside were six prepaid cell phones. Burners: good for two or three calls, outgoing or incoming, then you drop the SIM card in the gutter and the phone in somebody else’s garbage. One of them began ringing.

  The red one.

  I answered it.

  “So it works?” Skittles said.

  “It works.”

  “Cool,” he said. “We out.”

  I tossed the red cell phone on my sofa and stashed the rest of them in my upstairs bedroom closet.

  Halfway through my beer, I began having misgivings about what I was into. Instead of having Skittles hack into Eleanor Paget’s home security company’s video and log archives, maybe I should’ve been sending Digital Defense Home Security a résumé. Maybe I should have been considering being one of the guys in a black suit in the lobby of Titan Securities Investments Group.

  Anything but what I was doing.

  You like a damned pit bull, Ray Danbury had said. Teeth sink in, jaws lock and you ain’t satisfied until a piece of somebody’s ass been chewed off.

  I certainly didn’t have to work anymore. Even with the money I’d pissed away on travel, refurbishing my childhood home and several other houses in the old neighborhood, furniture, a few new pieces of clothes, Frank the Grocery Bagger’s education, Jimmy Radmon’s modest salvation from a life of low-end crime, a couple of sizable offering plate donations to St. Al’s Catholic Church and taking care of my friend Tomás, I still had more money than I could ever imagine spending in three lifetimes.

  I gave brief thought to what Carmela and Sylvia had said earlier about two of the empty houses east of them on Markham: buy them, renovate them, flip them. I had absolutely no desire to become a real estate mogul, and flipping property these days in Mexicantown was just seeing the other side of a beat-up penny.

  But it was something that didn’t require a gun and poking around in the business of the dead and the dying.

  By early evening I was hungry, so I made a quick fajita, grabbed a glass of orange juice and turned on the local TV news.

  It was mostly the same news that I’d left behind over a year ago: Little kids being hit by stray bullets. Worthless mothers crying. Worthless moms’ boyfriends in handcuffs. Reporters asking, “How do you feel about your dead baby?” There were the same old stories about Detroit’s tsunami of financial woes and the city council clowns who were still running the circus. There was the sports report which, when it came to the Detroit Lions, sounded like a dismal passage from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. And the obligatory in-depth analysis of why U of M lost to Michigan State instead of why Michigan State had won.

  Then there was the wrap-up news story. “More news is coming out of the wealth management and investment firm once run by Eleanor Paget,” the news anchor said. “Today, one of the company’s longtime officers announced his retirement: Chief Financial Officer Aaron Spiegelman.”

  They ran video of Spiegelman announcing his retirement. Standing next to him in Titan’s downtown headquarters was Kip Atchison. Spiegelman looked like a whipped dog. Frail. Confused. Drained. Certainly not the attack dog I’d met several times. He stood at a podium bearing Titan’s logo. He was a small, wiry man but he’d always seemed to be tightly coiled, ready to pounce at any given second. Now, standing at the podium, he looked sunken into his already small frame. His skin was ashen, his eyes red and swollen. He tried to speak but eventually Atchison took over.

  “This has been a pretty tough month for our company,” Atchison said. “Eleanor Paget’s untimely death. And now Mariana Spiegelman’s accident. Aaron has been a great friend to the company over the decades. And now he feels the time has come to fully, comp
letely dedicate himself to his wife’s recovery.”

  At one point Spiegelman gave Atchison a furtive glance. It lasted less than a second. But in that half-second I saw something I’d seen before: The guilt of having inadvertently sacrificed a loved one’s life on the altar of ego. The desperation of wanting a single fateful moment back. And the unspeakable fear of unimaginable consequences.

  I’d seen his look in a thousand people.

  I saw it nearly every day in the bathroom mirror.

  The station cut to the weather.

  I went online and searched for reports on Mariana Spiegelman’s accident: She had fallen down a flight of stairs at the family home in Grosse Pointe Park. Broken ribs, punctured right lung, broken arm. The worst of her injuries was bleeding in the brain. She’d had emergency neurosurgery to stop the bleeding and doctors were keeping her in a medically induced coma.

  I didn’t have to dig much deeper than the Detroit Free Press business section to find out that on the night of Mariana Spiegelman’s supposed accident Kip Atchison was fifteen miles away at a restaurant in Bloomfield Hills with twelve business associates, the mayor of West Bloomfield and the comptroller of Oakland County.

  I was beginning to like Atchison even more for Eleanor Paget’s murder.

  Over the next couple days I did as much research as possible on Titan’s history and recent acquisitions. Most of the information was public knowledge. Quite a lot of it was mired in the cryptic language of the financial world: macro and micro economics, banking analytics and international market trends.

  One thing did become clear, however.

  Titan, according to a below-the-fold article in Crain’s Detroit Business, had been working with an acquisitions “consultant” for the past year, hired at about the same time Kip Atchison joined the company.

  Apparently no one other than Kip Atchison knew who the consultant was.

  I gave all of this information time to simmer and make its own synaptic connections.

  I spent the next several days working out, firing off boxes of ammo at a local gun range and flexing my Mexican cooking muscles in the kitchen. I made my mom’s chicken with ancho chile and red sesame seed sauce—Pipian Rojo del Norte—twice, never quite approaching the soulful perfection of hers. Frustrated after my second attempt, I made my dad’s fried chicken (Bisquick with heavy cream and egg mixed with a dash of red peppers, brown sugar and ginger) and mashed sweet potatoes with curry powder and garlic, which turned out much better.

  I took some of the food across the street to the Rodriguez house.

  Carlos Rodriguez cracked the door open. It wasn’t hard to see he had his trustworthy Louisville Slugger at his side.

  “Si?” he said.

  “I’m your neighbor from across the street,” I said. “August Snow.”

  “Yes,” he repeated. “I know.”

  “We hadn’t properly met, so I thought I’d introduce myself.”

  From behind Rodriguez I heard a young boy’s voice say, “Quién es, Papa?”

  “Nobody!” he told the boy in Spanish. “Go back to your mother! Don’t you have homework?”

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t want to be a bother. I just cooked way more than I can eat, so—”

  A young woman appeared behind Rodriguez. In Spanish Rodriguez admonished the woman—apparently his wife—to get away from the door. His wife said it was rude of him to leave me standing there and that he should invite me in. He said she was crazy. And she, once again, called him rude—only this time with a quiet force that overpowered him.

  “Come in,” he said begrudgingly.

  Inside, the house was cold. There were only a few furnishings. Their son—eight or nine—sat on the floor wearing his winter coat and reading a textbook. The boy looked up at me, smiled a megawatt smile and said, “Hi!”

  “I apologize for my husband,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “We’re new here. We don’t know many people. And after that young man—the drug dealer—”

  “I understand, ma’am,” I said. “There’s no reason for apologies. And the drug dealer’s no longer dealing drugs.”

  “See?” Mr. Rodriguez said to his wife in Spanish. “Los negros all look out for their own.”

  “Carlos!” his wife replied.

  “Not always, Mr. Rodriguez,” I said in Spanish. The two looked at me, stunned that I’d understood. “Neither do Mexicans. I know. I’m half of both. Truth is I just came by to introduce myself.” Then I looked at their son and said, “You like fried chicken and mashed potatoes, compadre?”

  “Si, señor!”

  I handed the serving dish to Mrs. Rodriguez. “Didn’t mean to start anything. If there’s something I can do, let me know.”

  “We are good,” Carlos Rodriguez said curtly.

  His wife smiled at me and said, “Gracias, Señor Snow. It’s good to have you as our neighbor.”

  I left.

  At home I called Tomás and told him about the Rodriguez family. I asked him if he and Elena could drop by and introduce themselves just to make them feel more comfortable in the neighborhood.

  “Aw, Jesus, Octavio. I don’t know. I hate that smalltalk, meet-the-neighbors bullshit. That ain’t me.”

  “Okay. No problem,” I said. “Let me talk to Elena.”

  “You fight dirty,” Tomás said.

  He agreed he and Elena would introduce themselves.

  Of course, Tomás, being who he was, asked if that was the only reason I wanted them to meet the Rodriguez family.

  “Just a feeling,” I said.

  “Last time you had ‘just a feeling,’ it cost you your job,” Tomás said. “Stop having these goddamn feelings, jefe!”

  On an overcast and cool morning, while I was doing a rigorous third set of deltoid reps at the Broadway Y with 140-pound weights, a small, dark room at the back of my brain decided to suddenly throw a shade up and let in shards of blinding light.

  I raced back to the house, showered and dressed. Then I got in my car and broke several speed limits getting downtown.

  I found FBI Special Agent O’Donnell enjoying a Maurice Salad at Schmear’s Deli. On the table in front of her bagel were several newspapers—the Detroit Free Press, the Chicago Sun-Times and The Washington Post.

  “Print media is dead,” I said, sliding into the booth across the table from her.

  “How’d you find me?” she said with some irritation.

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “I detect things.”

  “You were a detective,” she said, putting her fork down and dabbing the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “And seriously—nobody likes you.”

  “Even you?” I feigned heartbreak.

  “Jury’s still out. So why are you here giving me agita?”

  I leaned forward and whispered, “You give a shit about Eleanor Paget’s death.” I paused for effect and smiled. There are certain facial tics and eye movements that give a person away when truth or lies, anger or fear have stepped on a nerve. O’Donnell had no tells. And the hand I was playing was a bluff. Still, it was a good bluff and I needed to know what hand she was holding. “You’re looking for Titan’s consultant.”

  After several long seconds, O’Donnell said, “Can I buy you an iced tea? They make a nice green iced tea here.”

  “Thanks, no. My colon’s fine. Thanks for the answer,” I said with a smile. Then I stood, fully prepared to walk out into the chilly October day.

  “Sit,” O’Donnell said.

  I did.

  O’Donnell took a couple sips of water, picked up her fork and toyed with half her bagel. Then she looked at me hard and said, “You found me here. Think you can find your way to my office?”

  “Drive slow,” I said. “I’m not so good at following highly trained professionals.”

  O’Donnell threw a ten on the table and muttered, “Asshole.”

  I assumed she was referring to me.

  Twenty-three

  O’Donnell’s office was on the fourteenth floor
of the Federal Building on Michigan Avenue in the city. It was the antithesis of the offices I’d seen at Titan: small and crowded with file cabinets and cardboard boxes, two computer monitor screens flickering and a small flat-screen TV with a continual cable news flow, the sound muted. Still, no SportsCenter.

  Mounted on the walls were pictures of felons, critical reports and updates from Washington D.C., Quantico and other field offices. And there were the requisite framed photos of the FBI’s director and the president of the United States.

  “Love what you’ve done with the place,” I said, looking around.

  “Shut up and sit down.” She edged past a stack of cardboard boxes and sat behind her OfficeMax metal desk.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  We sized each other up for a few seconds. I smiled. She, not so much. Then O’Donnell sighed. “You stuck your head into a hornet’s nest and I’m not sure if I like it there.” She took a moment before picking up her phone and punching three buttons. “Dan?” she said. “My office.”

  Ten seconds later a young, lanky white guy entered O’Donnell’s office. He was in short sleeves, his shirt collar unbuttoned and tie loosened.

  “Mr. Snow, this is Special Agent Dan Cicatello,” O’Donnell said. “Dan, you may have gathered Mr. Snow is the pain-in-my-ass I’ve occasionally referred to in our morning briefings. He’s the one who gave us the head’s up about Titan’s ‘amusement park.’”

  Dan thanked me for the tidbit on Titan’s computer system.

  “You have access to a guy named Donell Avalon McKinney,” he said. Apparently he saw the blank look on my face. “Skittles.”

  I’d never known Skittles by his legal name.

  “Hacker legend,” Dan said with no small amount of admiration. “Guy really, truly knows his stuff. Elegant, innovative, insidious. I mean he’s really—God—he’s—”

  “Dan,” O’Donnell said calmly. “Focus.”

  “Right, right, right,” Dan said quickly. “Sorry.”

  O’Donnell asked him to give me a high-level—read as “redacted”—download on Titan’s computer systems and how it related to their investigation.