August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “Okay, let’s try this,” I said. “When did you know about Vivian Paget and her father?”

  She stared at me hatefully for a few seconds before her eyes filled with tears. She blinked and the tears ran down her cheeks, pooling at the corners of her mouth.

  “It wasn’t hard to see something—awful—was going on,” Mayfield finally said. It took her awhile to compose herself. “How can anybody—anybody!—do that to a child? A child for God’s sakes!” Mayfield took a breath. “I told Eleanor what I suspected and you know what she did? She slapped me! Told me to mind my own damned business!”

  “And wha’d you do?” I said.

  Mayfield smiled. It was a malicious, self-satisfied smile. “I slapped her back.” Her voice was low and coarse. “Then I went to her husband. Told him I knew what he was. What he was doing. He ranted and raved. Called me a ‘know-it-all nigger.’ Then he collapsed into tears. Said something was wrong with him and he needed help. I told him the only help he could expect was from the police if he ever touched Vivian again. That’s the same time Eleanor started getting all this plastic surgery. It wasn’t about her daughter being—violated—it was about her losing her charms.”

  “And you parlayed what you knew into an ironclad employment contract?” I said.

  “My ‘ironclad contract,’” she said with no small amount of disgust. “I didn’t ask for it. Didn’t use Vivian as a bargaining chip. It was offered and I took it. With conditions. Vivian was to go away to a boarding school. Away from him. Away from her. Then she was to spend her summer vacations with me and Dez here or in Europe. We were that child’s parents, Mr. Snow! Me! I was her mother.” Mayfield took a moment. Then she said, “Eleanor didn’t even see it as blackmail. She saw it as an agreement between two smart women.” Mayfield paused. “She and her husband deserved each other. They each deserved what they got.”

  “Which brings us to you,” I said.

  “I told you—”

  “Yeah, I know what you told me,” I said. “A women in business conference at the Detroit Athletic Club. Yeah, there was a conference that night. But you showed me to a door you knew I couldn’t get through. Even if I was a member. You may not like Atchison, but you learned a lot from him in his short tenure: If you’re gonna lie, go big and wear other people like camouflage.”

  Again, Mayfield slumped back in her chair and after a moment thick with silence said, “When did you know?”

  “Couple days,” I said. “There was a second glass of wine at her house the evening you killed her. You left without removing the glass. Probably panicked. Lucky for you, a young Mexican housekeeper scared of being deported cleaned that up for you. But I didn’t know until Traverse City. Some of your letters to Vivian. Especially the last letter. The phrasing: ‘You’re free of her now,’ or, ‘She’s gone and now you can get on with your life.’ Not exactly the way somebody talks about the death of a friend of over thirty years.”

  Rose Mayfield’s eyes filled again with tears. She wiped them away and stared at me. “‘Friend.’ I’m embarrassed I ever thought of the Great Eleanor Paget as a ‘friend.’ She was intolerable, arrogant, vindictive and self-aggrandizing with a penchant for manipulating people, for eating their souls. She ate mine—feasted on it!—for over thirty years.” Mayfield pointed to the awards and citations on the wall. I stood and walked around the room, closely examining the framed honors and decorations. “All of it—useless,” she said.

  Some were her husband’s, but many belonged to her. An undergraduate degree in Finance from Wayne State University. Master’s in Business Administration from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. A Master’s Degree in Economics from University of Detroit Mercy. There were photos of her in cap and gown, embraced by her late husband. Photos of her in a different colored cap and different colored gown being hugged by Vivian Paget and Colleen.

  “That office should have been mine,” Mayfield said as I continued to look at the decorations, degrees and citations on the wall. “Ten years ago, it should have been mine.”

  I walked back to the chair next to her and sat.

  Mayfield told me she’d talked to Eleanor a number of times about advancing in the company. A management position. A leadership role. Something befitting her years of commitment and her education. She never leveraged what she knew about Eleanor Paget’s husband or her daughter. The time was never right or a position “didn’t quite suit her.”

  Instead of a career path, she was given more money, over and above her lucrative contract agreement. And when Mayfield’s husband got sick—pancreatic cancer—the extra money came in handy. His agonizingly slow death brought her to the brink of exhaustive collapse. And when he did finally die, Eleanor Paget gave Mayfield an expenses-paid two-week vacation to Paris.

  Still, the promotions never came. The professional recognition never materialized.

  “The last time I asked her for a promotion to the finance group,” Mayfield continued, “she said, ‘Oh, honey, let’s be honest, shall we? The people we deal with, they’re just not comfortable with a black face in front of their money.’ Then she laughed!”

  “The straw that broke the camel’s back?” I said.

  “If such an insult were the straw that broke this particular type of camel’s back, then I fear every black, brown, red and yellow back in Detroit would’ve been a hundred years’ broken by now,” she said. “Was it infuriating? Yes. Humiliating? Most definitely. But a reason for me to kill her?” Mayfield cocked her head and gave me a wry smile. “Mr. Snow, I have advanced degrees in economics and finance and over thirty years at the bank. Time and education enough to acquire twenty million dollars of the bank’s money in five offshore accounts. For that amount of money, Mr. Snow, feel free to call me nigger in any language you wish.”

  “Then why?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  Mayfield’s eyes narrowed and she smiled. “That you’ve been a part of this particular Paget legacy from the minute you first stepped in her house to inform her that her vile husband and his child lover were dead. She had very little faith in the Detroit Police Department. But you proved her wrong. And for her that was both exhilarating and worrisome. Exhilarating because she had a particular soft spot for handsome young men like you who didn’t back down from her bombastic personality. And worrisome because those same traits might reveal the truth of how her husband and his whore died.”

  “Vivian shot them,” I said. “I already know that.” I edged forward in my chair. “Are you telling me Eleanor somehow had me taken off the murder investigation because I got too close to naming Vivian as a suspect? She pulled all those strings to protect Vivian?”

  “Not protect,” Mayfield said. “Use. Your Captain Danbury was deep in her pocket. Her money bought your removal from the murder investigation. Her money bought the early release of the gun. She knew Vivian’s fingerprints would probably be on the shell casings still in the gun. And that was her weapon of last resort to bring Vivian into the bank. Family meant little to Eleanor. Legacy, on the other hand, meant everything. And she would not see that legacy die with her.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “She would have blackmailed her own daughter to—”

  “My daughter!” Mayfield shouted. “Vivian’s my daughter! I raised her! I protected her from the horrors of her own flesh and blood!”

  “And that’s why you shot her?”

  Mayfield glared at me for a long time. “That’s why I shot her.” Her look softened after a moment before she said, “What would you have done?”

  I didn’t answer.

  There was no answer to give.

  She was quiet for a long time, staring off into space. And that suited me fine; I needed a moment to process having played an unwitting role in someone else’s elaborate game.

  After a while, she took in and released a deep, heavy sigh.

  “I suppose you’re gonna take me in,” she said.

  I stood a
nd said, “I’m not a cop. Truth of the matter, Ms. Mayfield, is I really don’t give a shit what happens to you. You killing Eleanor Paget has unleashed hell on me. My friends. Vivian and her wife. That’s all I care about right now.”

  I turned and started for the door.

  I heard the click of a gun hammer behind me.

  “Do you believe in God, Mr. Snow?” I heard her say.

  I turned, looked at her and said, “In my own way, yes.” A snub-nose Smith & Wesson .32 was trembling in her right hand, the barrel pointed at me.

  “Not very acceptable for a black woman my age to say,” she began, “but I don’t. How could there be a benevolent God with children like Vivian being raped by their own fathers while their mothers turn a blind eye? How could a loving God just—just sit back and watch the horror of what people go through every day? Me! What I went through for thirty goddamn years! No, Mr. Snow. You make your bones in the here and now, not the happily-ever-afterlife.”

  “See, here’s the thing,” I said, walking towards her. “I’ve already lost everything I really cared about. My parents. A woman I was going to marry, who was shot while buying a half-gallon of goddamn milk. My job. You killed Eleanor Paget for Vivian and twenty million. Me? I got twelve million bucks and everything I’ve ever really wanted is either in the ground or wondering why the hell I ran. So, yeah. Do me a favor—pull the trigger. Because God or no God—I just don’t fucking care.”

  The gun trembled in her hands and tears flowed from her eyes.

  “Do it!” I shouted. Staring down the black maw of the gun barrel, I realized I really didn’t care one way or another if she pulled the trigger. If she did, all the pain, all the disappointment and loneliness would be gone. There would no longer be aching memories of the deaths of Mo and my unborn child. No bloody memories of Afghanistan. No memories of a desired future with Tatina.

  If Mayfield didn’t pull the trigger, then God or no God, I would make it my life’s work to scorch this fucking earth starting with Brewster.

  Slowly, she lowered the quivering gun and eased the hammer against the strike plate.

  I turned my back to her and said, “Maybe I’ll get around to talking about you to the cops in a day or two. All depends on whether or not I’m alive after tonight.”

  I got to the foyer and looked at the staircase where her two pieces of luggage sat on the landing. Like a zombie, she followed me into the foyer.

  “Mouthwash,” I said staring at her luggage on the staircase landing.

  “What?”

  With my back still to her I said, “You probably didn’t expect the blow-back when you pulled the trigger. Probably got some blood and brain matter on you. In your mouth. You never quite get rid of that taste. Mouthwash helps. Scotch works better.” I held up my wristwatch for her to see, pointed to the dial and said, “Tick-tock, Ms. Mayfield. If you’ve got a plane to catch, I’d suggest you dry your eyes and drive your car.”

  Then I opened the front door of her house and left.

  As I walked to my car I suspected that in less than thirty minutes, Rose Mayfield would be in the wind. On a flight to where the warm sun shone and palm trees swayed lazily in salt water breezes. Two more flights and she just might be beyond tracking. Her money untraceable.

  As I was about to open my car door I heard a single gunshot from inside the house.

  I got in my car and drove away.

  Thirty-six

  By nine forty-five that evening, I’d eaten six pieces of bacon, two fried eggs, two pieces of whole wheat toast, some raw broccoli and a banana. Simple, unadorned food consumed purely for the energy it would provide for the evening’s festivities. Protein, potassium, slowly metabolized sugars.

  Everything us natural born killers need for a night’s bloody work.

  I did a weapons check.

  I had my Glock auto and my Smith & Wesson .38. I still had one of Tomás’s rifles and plenty of ammo for all three. I’d retrieved my bulletproof vest and marine utility knife from my storage unit.

  Before leaving the house, I tried calling Skittles one last time. I tried all six of the burner phones he’d given to me.

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t like Skittles to go dark on me for so long. I’d pulled him into something that computer skills and snappy repartee couldn’t get him out of. And unfortunately it was necessary for me to pull him in deeper.

  But there would be time enough to worry about getting a hold of Skittles. Right now, it was time to run another bloody gauntlet at a building on the southeastern edge of Mexicantown called Rocking Horse.

  I called Tomás. He and Frank were strapped. They had discussed their plan in detail, primarily flanking me high and low and remaining as invisible as possible. They had nearly emptied Tomás’s basement weapons locker. Nothing was off the table. Tomás had introduced Frank to Elena. They sat with her and brought her up to speed on the situation and how they planned to end it.

  “How bad?” I said.

  “Bad enough,” Tomás said, laughing. “I may not be getting any Latina lovin’ for a month. Ain’t but a minute in married man time. Like the old saying goes, ‘Time on the vine makes the fruit sweeter.’ She thinks after all this time I’m reverting to the old ways. I told her this time the old ways were the only way to help out a good man.”

  “That would be me?”

  “Si, asshole.”

  “I don’t want to mess things up with you and Elena, Tomás—”

  “Not gonna happen, jefe,” Tomás said. “Elena and me raised a teenage girl in this house. And if that shit didn’t break us, nothing will, man.”

  “And Frank?”

  “She shouted at him like he was a five-year-old boy caught with a lit firecracker. Tore him a new asshole in Spanish. Then told him after this was done he was going to help me paint the upstairs hallway. All he said was ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘No, ma’am’ and ‘Yes, ma’am’ again.”

  “God bless good parenting and the US military.”

  “We good to go, compadre?”

  “Let’s set it off, mi amigo.”

  It was ten-thirty. An hour and a half before I was to meet with Brewster to hear whatever his unacceptable last offer was. For a party like this, there was no shame in arriving early.

  I loaded up my car and headed to Rocking Horse .

  Over the past fifty years, all of the nearby factories and shipping docks had been shuttered in this part of Mexicantown. Most of the working-class brown and black neighborhoods collapsed in on themselves from years of neglect or fires long ago burned out. It was a very good place for very bad things to happen.

  LifeLight—the charity street lighting organization Rose Mayfield had created through Titan—had yet to make its way this far south. Most of the streetlamps had fallen into disrepair, stripped of any copper wiring, leaning into their demise as monuments to a declining population, a dysfunctional city government, forgotten dreams and lost hopes.

  There was a long way to go in this part of Mexicantown: Four hundred yards in any direction from the whitewashed three-story artist studio was devastation. Rusted train tracks overgrown with weeds where freight trains hadn’t run for thirty years. Freight roads where no freight had arrived in over forty years.

  Chernobyl, American-style.

  Even so, there were still the harvesters of the few remaining, barely functioning organs of these five or so abandoned city blocks. The heroin-, meth-and crack-addled vampires who trolled the night in search of new veins in which to sink their yellowed fangs.

  I parked several blocks away from Rocking Horse, near a closed dry cleaner and small reopened neighborhood bar that promised good food and local bands (including the infamous “Unicorns over Saigon”) on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I checked my phone. A text from Tomás: “No time for RH surveil. Action at NW corner of factory. 5 bogies. F and me inside.” I waded through the darkness toward Rocking Horse. It was eleven-fifteen.

  The heavy steel security door at the back of the building wa
s cracked open. I brought out my Glock, tripped the safety off and eased my way in.

  Save for a few safety lights, the cavernous building was dark. I made my way through the makeshift coffee bar where a broken antique Italian coffee roaster sat on the concrete floor like some fossilized prehistoric beast. A small conference room with an odds-and-ends assortment of old office furniture was to my left and to my right there was an open space filled with the tools of lithography: hand-carved printing blocks, jars of paint, typesetting machines, a few desktop computers and printers.

  Still nothing.

  Cautiously, I ventured upstairs.

  More darkness. More cold wind whistling through cracks in the cement and windows that hadn’t been caulked, boarded or duct-taped.

  There was a large open space on the second floor. Painters’ easels, cages full of supplies, a makeshift library, more printing equipment, lithographs hung to dry on clotheslines, a couple of sofas that had seen better days.

  Beneath a safety light was a chair.

  Slowly, I made my way to the chair. A lime-green Nike running shoe lay near the chair. On the floor surrounding the chair were blood splatters. And in the shadows near the chair lay the body of a young woman, her wrists and ankles bound with zip-ties. A single gunshot to the center of her forehead. She’d been beaten before her execution. Against all marine and police training, a knot tightened in my stomach. Muscle-memory had me make the Sign of the Cross over her.

  On the chair was a walkie-talkie.

  I picked up the walkie-talkie and said, “Brewster?”

  “Good,” Brewster said. “Now we can begin. The abandoned factory fifty yards northeast of the building you’re in. If you are not here in sixty seconds then I kill the very young Mr. McKinney. Your time begins—now.”

  He had Skittles.

  I pocketed the walkie-talkie, rushed down the flight of steps and back out into the cold night. The fifty-yard distance from Rocking Horse to the abandoned factory to the northeast was riddled with overgrown weeds, garbage and debris. Several rusting carcasses of automobiles caught what pale moonlight there was, adding to the post-apocalyptic landscape. Navigating to the looming hollowed-out skull of the factory was all the more difficult because of the eight-foot chain-link fence topped with rusting razor wire. It was an obstacle course with the added challenge of a ten-degree rise.