1 Motor City Shakedown

by Jonathan Watkins

Darnell glanced superstitiously out where Malcolm had disappeared back into the crumbling blocks of Detroit. His manicured fingers started pushing numbers on the cell phone.

  *

  Allen’s voice was an impatient growl.

  “Wait, hold on. You mean he gives a shit?”

  “S’what I’m saying. The man was serious.”

  “Well, that’s just insane. What’s it matter who wants the job done?”

  “To him? It matters.”

  “I don’t know how plugged into reality your pet psycho is but, um, maybe you ought to point out he’s already been putting people down for us.”

  “No, I probably ain’t going to mention that. He ain’t nobody’s pet. You need to understand that, Cap’n.”

  “I’m not a fucking Captain, Darnell.”

  “Yeah, okay. Just, you know, my man twigs to you and yours…that’s gonna be a problem. A real problem.”

  “Listen—“

  “Cuz he ain’t no pet. And he’s got strong opinions about, you know…”

  “Cops. He hates cops. Color me shocked.”

  “Not just cops. Institutions. Systems. Man’s got a very spooky philosophy about human beings, is what I’m saying. He’s different.”

  “I know what he is. He’s just another in a long line of guys like him. As long as everything happens like you say, I don’t give a shit what’s in his head. Or in yours. Next time you get all scared by the boogieman, call your mother. This phone is emergency only.”

  “You keep it in mind is all I’m saying, bro.”

  “All you’re saying, bro, is good-bye. Ciao.”

  *

  Darren was in his booth at the back of Winkle’s Tavern, using a black marker to label a pile of manila folders with titles like “Motions”, “Evidence”, “Laws and Cases”, “Investigation”, “Billing” and, finally, “The Big Story”.

  The front entrance door swung open and became a rectangle of bright morning light amidst the gloom of the bar. Theresa’s substantial form appeared, followed haltingly by Isabella.

  He waited, but Issabella didn’t move any further than where she stood in the entranceway. Theresa had made her way behind the bar and was unscrewing the lid off a big blue coffee can.

  “She alright?” Darren said, hushed.

  “Hung-over, I think.”

  “Oh.”

  He heard Issabella say something, but it wasn’t loud enough for him to understand. He was about to push himself out of the booth and walk down to her when she started moving. Slowly, her head turning to look at every corner of the bar, she made her way down to Darren.

  She tossed her purse down and sat across from him. She glanced at his labeled files, then stared at him. She seemed utterly calm, and Darren wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not.

  “Hey, good morning” he said. “Looks like you celebrated too much. I don’t blame you. This is your first really big case, isn’t it?”

  Nothing. She stared, but he might as well have been talking to himself.

  He started over, hesitantly.

  “Izzy, I—“

  “My name is Issabella, you half-wit.”

  “Well, of course. I know your name. “

  “Shut. Up.”

  “Hey! Listen, I—“

  “Not Izzy Bright. ‘Izzy Bright’ is a question. ‘Izzy Bright’ is a question you ask about a man. A man who doesn’t seem bright in even the most generous application of the word. A man like you. I could ask Theresa over there, ‘Izzy Bright?’ And if I was looking at you when I asked her, she would know exactly what I meant. But there is no Izzy Bright practicing law. Not with you, not in this town, probably nowhere in all of the country is there a lawyer named Izzy Bright.”

  Darren held his hands up in front of him in a placating gesture.

  “Loud and clear,” he said.

  She remained fixed and frozen.

  “Issabella,” he said.

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “Issabella,” he repeated again, softly. He put out his hand. “You’re right to be mad at me. I haven’t treated you very professionally. With your name. With the way I got you on the case. I know. I was up all night thinking about that.”

  Her stony mask faltered and she looked like she was listening to him for the first time since sitting down. He kept on, pushing out the words he’d known he was going to have to say.

  “All I can say is that it wasn’t malicious. Sometimes I get too caught up in the moment and I start talking without processing it like I should. That’s not an excuse, though. You deserve to be called by your name. It’s a beautiful name, Issabella, and I’ll use it from now on.”

  He watched her transform. She looked down at his extended hand; back up at his sincere expression. She deflated. The storm that had been gathering in her eyes swirled, dimmed, and evaporated.

  “Thank you,” she managed, and shook his extended hand. His palm was warm, the fingers long so that their tips touched her wrist lightly as their hands enclosed. Her pulse skipped under his touch, once, before those fingers slid away and they weren’t touching anymore. But his eyes stayed on her—large, expressive eyes that seemed to be taking all of her in.

  “Questions,” he said, “You have them. Give them to me.”

  Theresa appeared and set two mugs of coffee down in front of them. Issabella breathed in the steam from her mug and smiled.

  “Life saver,” Darren said fondly to Theresa.

  “That’s me,” she said and went back behind the bar. She sipped her own mug of coffee and laid out a copy of Us magazine in front of her. She made a show of flipping through the glossy pages, but she wasn’t really reading.

  Theresa drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and half-listened to the two lawyers talking across the booth. She had watched the girl lawyer lay into Darren and had decided she liked her for having done that. It showed she wasn’t some doormat in a skirt. Even more encouraging was listening to Darren’s apology.

  ‘She don’t know it,’ Theresa Winkle mused from her perch above Butts the Ashtray Unicorn, ‘But he’s on the hook. All it took was a girl to give him a good one right between the eyes.’

  *

  Issabella watched Darren as he talked about Vernon Pullins, and decided she understood him a little bit better. In the few minutes he spoke, Darren doodled a handful of drawings on the front of a manila envelope, twirled a straw’s wrapper around his pinkie, and drained his mug of coffee. Left with nothing in easy reach that remained un-manipulated, he returned to the doodling. But his eyes never really left hers for more than a moment or two, and the things he was doing with his hands seemed nearly unconscious.

  ‘He’s a high processor,’ she decided. ‘One of those people whose minds are running in three different directions. All this fidgeting is probably to keep him focused on what he’s talking about. Or he’s got some crazy drug habit. Please don’t let it be a crazy drug habit.’

  “And, believe it or not,” he was saying, “Vernon owns a couple crematoriums.”

  “He’s a business owner?”

  “Yep. Has one here in Wayne County and another up in the U.P. somewhere. Loaded, is what his brother told me. I met him this morning. Eugene. Nice guy. No mullet or anything, and quite a bit older than Vernon. Has a contract with the county.”

  “The brother?”

  “Hmm? No. Vernon. I guess his crematorium burns the John Does and all the unclaimed bodies for the county. Not a bad business I guess. I mean, you know, it’s ghoulish and all that. But people are always dying, so I guess it’s recession-proof.”

  “Darren.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why did you want me on this case?”

  And there it was. She had gotten past her original exasperation with the animated, self-confident Darren Fletcher. She had gotten past the embarrassment of the previous day. But Issabella still couldn’t understand why he had gotten her assigned to the case as a partner. She had no reputation in the community of local lawyer
s. She’d been practicing for a handful of months and, with the exception of a few misdemeanor cases, hadn’t been in court at all.

  Darren smiled at her slyly, and his eyes lit with mirth. He stood and buttoned his suit jacket.

  “You’re right,” he said. “We should get moving and start working. Let’s take my car.”

  “That’s not what I said,” she protested, standing and following Darren toward the door. Theresa nodded at her briefly from within a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “I know,” he said. “But I’m not answering any more questions until you answer one for me.”

  He held the door open for her, and then they were out on the sidewalk among the boarded-up windows, graffiti tags and iron security-grates.

  Darren stopped next to a black Lexus sedan parked on the curb. He spun on his heel and Issabella had to come up short to avoid running into him.

  “So are you going to come on board? Or am I going to drive you back home and tell Chelsea to take you off it?”

  She felt herself freeze there on the sidewalk, under his steady gaze.

  “Wait. You still haven’t told me—“

  “Yes or no,” he said, a playful smile appearing on his lips. “Take the unbelievably good assignment. Or don’t. But it’s time we hit the bricks and started thinking about getting Vernon ready for a vigorous defense. Unless ‘we’ is really just ‘me’. So, out with it, fair Issabella.”

  She took a deep breath, shut off all the ‘but’s’ and ‘what if’s’ that tried to crop up and push her back to her office and the mountain of farmed-out documents waiting for her there.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “I accept. But I still have question.”

  He put a hand in the air, stalling her, and his other arm reached into his jacket. While he fished around inside it, his grin widened. He looked like a curly-mopped, mischievous boy about to spring some gag or trick he’d been preparing all day.

  When his hand reappeared, it was only holding a check, which he placed in Issabella’s hands. It was a check made out to her, for “legal representation, retainer”, and signed by Vernon’s brother, Eugene Pullins.

  Her mouth went dry and she couldn’t do anything but stare down at the little fortune in her hands. She counted the zeroes, then recounted them. It was more money than she had ever made at one time, on anything. It was more than she had reasonably expected to make all year doing document review.

  At length, she managed to look up again at Darren. He was standing there with a triumphant and beaming grin. He chuckled, and the chuckle grew into outright laughter. After a moment Issabella realized she was also laughing. The both of them laughed together in the gathering afternoon sun, alone on the sidewalk.

  “But I’m appointed,” she whispered, afraid that if she said it too loudly, the check might disappear with a cartoon poof of smoke.

  “Appointed to a retained case,” he corrected. “Did you think you’d be getting the flat county fee?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Silly girl.”

  “I still have a lot of questions,” she said.

  “Sure. Questions are good. Issabella?”

  She looked at him.

  “I’m glad you’re with me on this. Lawyering’s a hell of a gig, isn’t it?”

  She nodded and stared at the check again.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess it really is.”

  *

  Darren peered out Issabella’s office window and took a sip of his giant hazelnut latte. He’d picked it up after dropping her off to get her car so he could follow her there.

  He absently wiped the foam from his upper lip and squinted across the street.

  “You know…” he said, still staring out the window.

  “Ugh. Yes. You don’t have to say it,” Issabella muttered. She grabbed up the big pile of manila folders from firms where lawyers weren’t expected to write cogent arguments, and dumped it unceremoniously in the bottom drawer of her desk, where it landed with a thud. She kicked the drawer closed and immediately felt better.

  “That building is…ominous.”

  “Yes,” she said, and sat down behind her desk, “I know.”

  “It’s like your office is in the shadow of a vampire’s tomb or something.”

  She ran her hands through her hair in frustration and a soft groan escaped her lips.

  “It’s positively looming…” Darren whispered. “You should move. That’s got to be bad luck, or at least a dark sign or something. It’s like some oppressive metaphor—“

  “No, it’s not,” she said flatly, and made a sharp gesture for him to sit in the chair across from her. “It doesn’t say anything other than that all I could afford to rent was an office under the ugliest building in Detroit. It’s not a curse or a bad sign. Sit.”

  Once they were both seated across from one another, Darren seemed at a sudden loss for words. He had talked freely and absently throughout their car ride to her apartment in Canton, about figuring out the ‘Big Story’ of Vernon Pullins’ legal case, about the need to hit the ground running and get as much pre-trial investigation done as possible before Vernon woke up.

  “Once he’s awake again— God, I hope he wakes up --they’ll arraign him on charges. And then it’s off to the ballgame. You and me, Iz—Issabella, we need to hustle and start poking into everything about his life, about what happened at his house, who called the cops, what people heard and saw, who this cop is that died in there…”

  He had rattled on and on. With Vernon in a coma, the prosecution’s case was stalled. It allowed the two of them time to perform a lot of work without being under the ticking clock of court dates. As he had continued to map out all the various things the two of them had to tackle, Issabella grew more and more excited.

  This was why she had gotten into criminal law—the opportunity to pound the ground and chase down witnesses, to flesh out a full story of events and find out what was a lie and what was a useful lie. Criminal law held the promise of high stakes and high drama.

  Now, though, Darren was more subdued and he seemed content to look pleasantly at her and sip his gigantic latte. His two speeds appeared to be ‘frenetic’ and ‘inscrutable’.

  ‘He’s like a top that just spins like crazy, winds down and stops until something gets him spinning again.’

  “So,” Issabella said, at last, “you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Hmm? What one?”

  “Why did you want me on this case?” she said, and knew that it sounded weak, like she doubted herself. But she prided herself on being pragmatic and self-aware. The truth was she had never tried a felony case. She knew she had the brains, the knowledge and the skills to succeed at any criminal case thrown her way. But he didn’t know that. Couldn’t know that.

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Not so complicated, really. There were only two lawyers in Wayne County who showed up and barged into Vernon Pullins’ hospital room. I was one. And you, kiddo, were the other.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re taking me on because I just happened to be around? That’s the most reckless thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “You’re right. It was because you’re lovely and I like how you smell like soap.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Of course not. Look, any answer won’t be good enough for you, because none of my reasons are that I know of your long and storied career as a criminal lawyer. Because, ah, you don’t have one. I think it starts here. With me and this case. So just accept that I saw something in you that told me you were the person to partner up with on this case and leave it at that, alright?”

  Issabella relaxed. He was right. She would let it go and be content that he had picked the right lawyer.

  “Alright.”

  “Great. So here’s how I think we should divide the labor…”

  He started laying out their priorities. She listened and took notes and made suggestions of her
own. He took them in stride, considered them, and they came to agreements on particulars. It was a professional conversation between two people who seemed to mesh together well when talking strategy. Issabella was thrilled to be engaged in that way and she was proud of the things she pointed out that he had never considered-- seemingly small things that, if ever brought to court, would become big things. He smiled and nodded along and the two of them could have been mistaken for long-time colleagues.

  Yet, all the while an ember of nervous warmth refused to cool inside her stomach. He had looked at her with such an honest expression, really looked at her, and told her she was beautiful (no, lovely, he had said, which was even nicer than beautiful, really) and that…that hadn’t been a lie for her benefit, she knew.

  She wasn’t sure how that made her feel, yet. But the little warm ember inside didn’t go away, so she chose to let it be and continued talking with him.

  *

  He came in the dark, scaling the eight-foot fence and avoiding the snare of barbed wire atop it with a nimble grace. Thick shadows pooled all about the storage yard, and he disappeared into them.

  In time, he came to a stop in front of one storage unit. His thick fingers worked the combination lock.

  Moonlight poured into the storage unit as Malcolm heaved its metal door up on its track. He stood there, silhouetted in the entranceway, and listened. He could hear the insect-hum of an electrical transformer somewhere nearby in the maze of units. Beyond that, fainter, the cough of traffic along Mack Avenue.

  It was very late, and he had seen no other living souls since arriving at the unstaffed Save n’ Store. Still, he listened. Far away, a car’s horn blurted. A dog barked.

  Eventually, he was satisfied. He produced a small, black Maglite and depressed its rubber-sheathed button, bringing it to life. The storage unit was full of neatly stacked cardboard boxes. None of them were labeled. It didn’t matter. Malcolm new exactly what he needed, and where it was.

  The flashlight guided him to the back of the unit, throwing leaping shadows across the walls as he moved. He stopped and put the flashlight in his mouth, holding it between his teeth.