I stood in the cold, shivering, and watched them drive off, committing the make and model of their vehicle and its license plate number to memory.
I wasn’t shivering from the cold.
Once I got back inside I wasted no time calling Vivian Paget at her home in Traverse City. I had hoped Colleen would answer since Colleen appeared to be the emotional rock.
“Hello?”
It was Vivian.
“Hi, Vivian,” I said brightly. “August Snow.”
“Yes,” she said with a light, welcoming voice. “I remember. Have you picked out a painting yet from my website? I’d still love to give you one.”
“I’ve been to your website twice,” I said. “You really make it hard to choose. You do incredible work.”
“You’re kind,” she said with a modesty that verged on heartbreaking.
I made up a story about just wanting to apologize for having alarmed her with my last call, which had not been my intention.
Then I asked if I could say hello to Colleen. Vivian said, “Oh, yes! I’m sure she’d be disappointed if I didn’t let her talk to you.” I heard her call out Colleen’s name.
After a second or two Colleen’s voice came on the line.
“August?” Colleen said. “Any more news on Viv’s mother?”
I asked if she could talk without Vivian hearing. She said, “Just a minute.” There was silence for a few seconds before Colleen said, “What’s up?”
I told her what was going on, no sugarcoating. I said my investigation into Vivian’s mother’s death had rattled some very sensitive and dangerous nerves. I recounted my visit from Brewster and his thick-necked bodyguard, which had resulted in a thinly veiled threat. Then I asked Colleen if she could handle herself with a firearm.
“I got no problem with guns,” Colleen said. “I was raised on a farm. Hogs and chickens. You didn’t kill, you didn’t eat. What’s this really all about, August?”
“Some people may want to contest a large part of Eleanor Paget’s will,” I said, choking down the urge to blurt out the full, bloody truth. “And that means maybe friendly, maybe not so friendly negotiations with Vivian.”
“And let me guess,” Colleen said. “You’re the kind of guy who’d rather err on the side of suspicion and paranoia instead of faith in humanity?”
“It ain’t paranoia if they really are out to get ya,” I said. “You set with guns?”
“Got a Remington Versa Max Tactical and a Browning Citori Lightning twelve gauge that belonged to my father,” she said. “I’m better at fishing, but I can shoot.”
“I’d suggest you put the rod and reel away for now,” I said.
Colleen also had a Remington 1911 R1 semiautomatic pistol. All of her guns were kept safely locked away. She knew the combination to the locker. Vivian didn’t. Vivian didn’t like guns, but she understood and respected Colleen’s Northern Michigan farming background and her familial association with weapons.
I told her if I got any more information I’d call. In the meantime she should consider herself on alert. Colleen said they had a good relationship with the local and state cops and that she would ask for extra patrols around the house, the adjacent five acres of their land and the woods across the road.
“I’m gonna talk to a friend of mine about coming up,” I said. “He’s a good guy and he knows how to handle himself.”
“You think we need a man to defend our honor?” Colleen laughed.
“I think you’re probably well-equipped on a number of levels,” I said. “But you have to admit: it’s hard to argue with having a fresh set of eyes just as a precaution.”
There was silence between us for a moment. Then Colleen said, “You’re not telling me everything.”
“Hard to trust somebody you don’t know,” I said. “But sometimes those are the only people you can trust. And if not me, then go with your instincts. What do your instincts tell you?”
There was a sigh at the other end of the line. “I’ll get a room ready for your guy. That and extra ammo.”
I ended the conversation by telling her that I’d call again with details, but it had to be on her phone. I suggested she do a security assessment of the house and their adjacent land as soon as we were off the phone. She said she would. I apologized again and she said once the air cleared, she and Vivian wanted me up for a visit that didn’t involve guns. “Just good food, a few laughs and a lot of homemade honey vodka.”
“Wow. Lesbians and moonshiners,” I said. “Life on the edge.”
I asked Colleen how Vivian had been lately in view of her mother’s recent death. Colleen said she’d been good. Almost relieved. Free, even.
I lied and said, “That’s good.”
We hung up.
Then I called Frank, the ex-security guard I’d met at Eleanor Paget’s estate.
“How’s the exciting world of bagging groceries?” I said.
“Fucking wonderful,” Frank said. “S’up, Mr. Snow?”
“August,” I said. “How would you like a working vacation?”
“What’s the catch?” he said. In the background I heard a muddled voice over a speaker announcing the arrival of fresh strawberries—with your Kroger Plus card, you could get two packages for a deeply discounted price.
I told Frank what the catch was.
“Jesus,” Frank said. “You got a talent for lighting fires, August.”
I asked him if he had any guns. He did. I asked him if he had any problems with lesbians. He didn’t—“Like there ain’t enough in this world drive a person batshit.” I asked him if he had any problems with any of this. “Only problem I got is my car, man. Fuckin’ oh-five PT Cruiser. Thing barely gets me here. I know it ain’t up for no trip to Traverse.” I told Frank not to worry. I’d have a car ready for him at Hertz.
“Could be something,” I said to Frank, “could be a lot of nothing. Just might turn out to be a nice two-week fall color tour for you.”
“Ain’t known you for too long, August, but I’m betting it’s something.”
I told him I’d give him a stipend. Frank asked what a stipend was. I told him and he said I’d already given him enough money. And this wasn’t about the money anyway.
“In the army,” Frank said, “I had real objectives. Clear goals. Actual targets. Easy to lose your way back in the world, man. And I think I been losing mine.” His voice moved away from the phone. “Hey, LaKisha? Listen, I just quit, okay? Tell Larry for me. Thanks, babe.”
After the call to Frank, I checked out my front door for damage: a few scratches around the brass keyhole. I’d have to look into a little more security.
There was a tentative knock at the kitchen back door. I had my Glock in my hand.
“Mr. Snow?”
Radmon again.
I opened the back door and his eyes scanned around me, looking for the men he’d seen earlier. I invited him in.
“Cable TV sales guys,” I explained. “When I say I don’t want Premium HD movie channels, I fucking mean it.”
I was sitting in one of the visitor’s chairs in Ray Danbury’s office at the 14th Precinct. He was feverishly flipping through reams of papers that had collected on his desk.
“What are you looking for?” I said.
“The memo that says I fucking work for you,” Danbury sarcastically replied.
I’d brought the gun I’d extracted from Brewster’s bodyguard to Danbury and asked him if he could run a trace on it. Simple request. Simple task.
“You still looking into this Paget thing?” Danbury finally said, sitting back in his chair. Draped across the back of his chair was a heather-green wool suit jacket. I imagined the jacket added to the sartorial splendor of his slate-grey monogrammed shirt, expensive-looking olive-green silk tie and heather-green pocketed vest. The only thing that didn’t go with the ensemble was Danbury’s gut spilling out at the bottom of the vest.
“It’s gotten a little more interesting,” I said.
I told Danbury everything
, save for my current dealings with the FBI. As I talked, he nodded and thoughtfully rubbed a forefinger across his bottom lip.
I finished telling him what I knew and where I thought things were heading. When I was done he said, “Close the door.”
I did.
For a minute he stared at the gun in the plastic bag I’d brought him. “Sure you’ve told me everything, August?”
“I may have left out a few details,” I said.
“Like any shit involving the FBI?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Listen,” Danbury said, his voice low and serrated. “I really don’t care about you and your fed buddies so long as it doesn’t embarrass me or this department. Been through enough the past ten years. But you start giving me or this department the stink eye and you and I are done, amigo. I join the rest of the department in wanting to see you hamstrung and horsewhipped. You see what I’m sayin’?”
I nodded.
Danbury grabbed the plastic bag that held the bodyguard’s gun. “We’ll talk in a couple days. In the meantime, cool out in Mexicantown. Renovate some more houses. Get yourself a little half-black Latina with big titties. Anything but whatever you’re into. You feel me, August?”
I stood, reached across his desk and shook Danbury’s hand.
“Nice suit,” I said. “Next time you should see if they have it in your size.”
Twenty-five
“They’re squatters.”
Tomás sat at my kitchen island sipping a beer. He and Elena had made a visit to the Rodriguez family across the street.
“He’s legal, his wife and son ain’t,” Tomás continued. “Been on hard times. Found the house here and moved in, keepin’ things on the down-low. Rodriguez does pick-up construction work. I think he’s mad you gave this Jimmy Radmon kid work he could use.”
“Makes sense,” I said. Tomás would drink beer if nothing else was around. Lucky for him I had a fifth of Jose Cuervo Silver cooling its heels in my refrigerator. I poured him a chilled shot. “I’d be mad at me, too.”
“He jimmied the electrical,” Tomás said. He sipped the shot and nodded approvingly before knocking it back old-school. “Heating’s another thing. Cold as hell in there. Not good for anybody, especially the boy. Elena lives for shit like this. They’re her mission now.”
“And you?”
Tomás laughed. “I’ll do what I can when I can. But don’t no man want another man trying to show him how to be a man.”
I nodded.
Tomás asked how this thing with Eleanor Paget was going and I told him I honestly didn’t know. I said I’d had visitors. “Sounds like you could use some backup, compadre,” Tomás said.
“Maybe,” I said. “If you’re up for it.”
Tomás grinned. “Got nothin’ else to do.”
My next stop was Beaumont Hospital in Grosse Pointe.
The emotionally exhausted, sunken Aaron Spiegelman I’d seen on the local TV news a week ago was even more depleted as he sat by his wife’s hospital bed.
Mariana Spiegelman lay in the quiet repose of one floating weightless inside a coma. The top of her head was wrapped in gauze and her oxygen came from a clear plastic tube curling from her cheeks to her nostrils. There were monitors near her bed that provided a cold calculation of how alive she was.
Although the room resembled any other hospital room, there were touches that made Mariana Spiegelman’s clinical surroundings softer, less sterile: Floor-length white lace curtains over the rectangle of window. A dark wood side table with a vase bearing yellow and orange mums. A Turkish rug, two bentwood rockers and an antique brass Stiffel floor lamp. Someone had done her hair and had applied a tasteful touch of makeup to her face.
Spiegelman sat in one of the rockers wearing a wrinkled pair of khakis, worn Sperry Dockside shoes and a blue Lacoste tennis shirt. He’d been casually rocking back and forth and reading John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to his wife: “‘The law, instead of cleansing the heart from sin, doth revive it, put strength into, and increase it in the soul …’”
I brought flowers and a book: Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses: Love Poems. Spiegelman saw me and stopped reading. His eyes filled with tears. Quickly he wiped them away and in a low, hoarse voice, said, “Why are you here?”
I walked tentatively into Mariana Spiegelman’s room. “I heard what happened. Whatever our history, Mr. Spiegelman, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your wife.”
He stared at me through wet, red eyes before nodding to a small table in the corner of the room. “You can put the flowers there. Someone will put them in a vase.”
I handed him the book, and he suggested we leave his wife’s room and go for coffee in the hospital’s cafeteria.
We sat at a table in the cafeteria for a long time without a word between us. Spiegelman looked even worse in the sterile, white light of the cafeteria. He’d been a wiry man, but now he looked gaunt, nearly skeletal. His normally clean-shaven face bore grey stubble. Occasionally he blew away the steam rising from his coffee, but he didn’t drink. Just as well. Hospital coffee is often in need of serious nursing.
Just when I was convinced Spiegelman had slipped into his own coma, he looked up at me and said in a thin voice, “Whatever you want to hear from me, you won’t. You should leave.”
Said like a man who wanted nothing more than to lay bare all secrets and sins on any altar that would have them.
“You don’t have to say anything, Mr. Spiegelman,” I said. “I just wanted you to know how sorry I am about your wife’s accident.”
His eye twitched and his lips pursed. The word “accident” settled on his brain like the needles of a thistle.
“Read her some of the poetry,” I said, taking a sip of the brown coffee-water. “My father loved reading Neruda to my mother and she loved the way his voice sounded on the words.”
Spiegelman nodded.
We sat in silence for a while longer. I thought about leaving, but something told me he needed someone sitting across from him. Someone who, even in silence, could hold the tether and keep him from floating any further into despair. Finally, staring at his coffee, he said, “Do you think it’s possible to be in love with two women at the same time, Mr. Snow?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, then after a tentative sip of coffee, said, “I loved Eleanor. Very much. I know what people said about her. What she did. How she treated people. But still …”
I reached across the table and put a hand on his shoulder. Tears fell from his eyes and splashed on the table. He hunched under the weight of his painful silence. I stood to leave him alone with his grief. I stopped when he said, “I don’t know what to do.” He drew in a ragged breath then continued. “She—Mariana—she always straightens my tie in the morning. Sometimes she’ll laugh and say, ‘When will you ever learn to tie a tie?’ Then she’ll kiss me like I’m—the only one.” He looked up at me, his eyes wet. “They’ll come for you, Mr. Snow. Eleanor was just the beginning. I—I didn’t want to believe her. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. They—they’ve never had it this hard.”
“Detroit’s a hard city,” I said. In all likelihood “they” meant Brewster and the ex-military security detail nested at the bank.
“I said no the first time,” Spiegelman said, staring at his cup of coffee. “A briefcase full of cash. All I had to do was walk away from thirty years of building a business. Threw them out of my house. The second time, same offer, less money in the briefcase. Atchison came with them. I said no. This is the third time. No money and—my wife—here.” He paused, then sucked in another breath. “If I’d only—”
“None of this is your fault, Mr. Spiegelman,” I said. “The people who hurt your wife—the ones who killed Eleanor Paget—they’re going to pay.”
Spiegelman gave a laugh that was somewhere between abject defeat and utter absurdity. “What can you do about any of this? These people?”
For a moment dark and bloody thoughts
brewed in my mind, the pit of my stomach. Then, an unexpected flutter of light: from somewhere in the cafeteria, the sound of children laughing. I turned and looked: two kids and a woman I assumed to be their mother sat at a table playing a child’s card game. As I looked at them, happy in a place I suspected rarely saw happiness, I said almost absentmindedly, “When I was a kid I was pretty lucky at a game called La Pirinola. Four or five kids—cousins, neighborhood kids—each brings a bag of nuts or some chocolate, loose change, maybe comic books. One player at a time spins the pirinola, which is like a dreidel. When it stops spinning a face-up side tells you pon, or take: take one, take two, take zero or toma todo—take it all—from the other kids.” I returned my attention to Spiegelman. “I’m gonna take it all from these bastards.”
Spiegelman slowly nodded as he looked down at his coffee. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Those men. All they were supposed to do was—warn you. Make you leave Eleanor alone. Leave her memory alone.”
The men who had come to Tomás’s house.
“One of the security guards at the bank said he knew some people,” Spiegelman said. “I told him just a warning. Gave him money. Nothing else was supposed to happen. Nobody else was supposed to get hurt.”
“Which security guard?”
“Max,” Spiegelman said. “No. Dax. Dax Randolph. Brown hair. Grey at the temples. Wire-rim glasses.”
I stood and said, “Read your wife some poetry tonight.”
Absentmindedly, he nodded.
I left, not knowing what to do or how to feel about Spiegelman. His love for Eleanor Paget inadvertently put me—put Tomás, his wife and their five-year-old granddaughter—in Titan’s cross hairs.
On the drive downtown I got a call from Frank.
“Dude!” Frank said. “A Cadillac ATS-V? You rock!”
Frank was about forty-five minutes into his four-hour, 260-mile drive along I-75 North to Traverse City. Apparently he was enjoying the car I’d reserved for him.
I asked Frank if he had everything—and by everything I meant guns and ammo. Frank ticked off the short list: A Baretta M9, a Ruger LC9 and a Springfield M1A rifle. He had licenses and ammo for all except the Springfield rifle, which had been his father’s and was of more sentimental value than anything else.
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