Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  “If he calls, FBI will get it,” Theresa said without looking away from the road. “And they’ll swoop in and get him safe. So stop worrying about that.”

  Issabella nodded, accepting the truth of it. But the prospect of throwing the phone away was no less terrifying. It seemed to her as she held the little device in her hands that she was staring at the last connection she had to Darren. It might ring. It might be him. It might be him asking for help from her. If she threw it out the window, she was throwing that scenario away with it.

  She stifled a sob before it could become a bout of tears. The wind whipped her hair into her eyes.

  “You want me to do it, Izzy?”

  Issabella took a deep breath, held it in her chest and flung her phone out the window. She balled her hands into fists and focused on Judge Hodgens’s words. Open the drapes, and clean up your mess.

  “Good girl. So what’re we doing now?”

  “I guess we have to go see my Dad.”

  “He woke up?”

  Issabella cranked the window back up and crossed her arms.

  “If he hasn’t, I’m going to slap him until he does.”

  A long pillar of ash fell off the end of Theresa’s cigarette and settled on her generous bosom. She brushed it away idly.

  “FBI has people watching your old man?”

  “That’s what Agent Schultz said.”

  Theresa guided the van onto an exit ramp, turning them back around toward the hospital.

  “Guess I can figure out a way to distract them,” she mused.

  “I still can’t believe you slashed his tires,” Issabella chuckled, letting the memory and thrill of her escape from protective custody carry away the dread she’d felt at throwing the phone away.

  “Yeah,” Theresa agreed. “But you don’t know me that well, Izzy. You’ll see—I’ll figure out something even crazier than that for the hospital.”

  She gave Issabella a reassuring wink, and they rumbled on.

  Chapter Eleven

  His home had burned.

  When the Detroit TAC Team, under the command of Lieutenant Allen Phelps, stormed the southern tower of the derelict Brewster Williams Housing Project, Malcolm Mohammed had not hesitated to set his world ablaze.

  For most of his adult years, Malcolm had been the only living soul still carving out an existence inside the monolithic old tower. Deep in its heart, he had converted two of the little apartments into his den. There, he had practiced his art in solitude and seclusion.

  Over those years, the space he’d made for himself became heavily cluttered with his life’s work. Hundreds of sketch books were stacked along the walls. Framed pieces of his finished work leaned and lay all about the otherwise empty rooms. He had furnished his home with no more than a bed, a dresser for his clothing and a refrigerator.

  All else had been dedicated to his Great Work. He had perched himself at his work station and put what he regarded as honesty upon page after page, canvas after canvas. He worked in pencil, in ink, in paint and in charcoal. He traced the expressions of broken people, and splashed the existence of derelicts and junkies onto the page. If any citizen with a bent toward art appreciation had wandered into Malcolm’s lair while it was still intact, they would have found themselves trembling at the treasure trove spread haphazardly about their feet. It was the life’s work of a man with a singular vision, an opus dedicated to revealing the ugly, poisonous underbelly of society—and all of it kept there, hidden away with him in the abandoned project, never to be displayed on a clean white gallery wall or put up for auction to rich people who smugly hung words like “benefactor” and “patron” about their necks.

  The little paper soldiers had put an end to it all. As soon as he was alerted to them, watching them march their way up the stairwell toward his home, Malcolm had shifted into survival mode. He pushed a dozen five-gallon gas cans into the positions he had long ago decided upon in the event his tower fell under siege. Calmly, moving in an exact and unhurried fashion, Malcolm had rigged his fishing line-and-ignition contraption between the doorknobs of the apartment and the gas cans.

  His final act, before slipping away into the shadows of the tower’s belly, was not one he had ever planned. In an unexpected and impulsive act of preservation, Malcolm had taken his most recent piece of art—the one he had been busy completing when he first noticed the police-soldiers infiltrating his home—and hidden it away.

  Now he stood among the ashes of his yesterdays.

  His gasoline-fueled hatred had exploded. It was born into the world the moment the first TAC Team member breached his lair, a gusting hunger of fire and concussive rage. It had swept and scoured every inch of his home, spilled out into the neighboring apartments and the hallway. It had raged and licked hungrily through the building until at last the city’s fire engines had brought it under control and, after that, extinguished it all together.

  Malcolm walked about the blackened remains, his paint-stained workman’s boots kicking up ash and soot as he surveyed the ruins of his life. The walls sagged surreally, in some areas bare to the studs where the drywall had either been wholly consumed or washed down to the floor by the firemen’s hoses. The floor was a muck of foul-smelling remains, a swamp of what was left of his framed work and the sketch book library, all of it sloughed into an incoherent and chalky paste.

  Malcolm did not dwell on the desolation of his life’s labor. He’d known with a keen certainty exactly what would become of his work when he rigged his gasoline trap. There had been no question that he was setting fire to the one thing that animated him, that gave him purpose and direction in this world. It had been a suicide of his soul, a conflagration of spite—a refusal to ever compromise his autonomy in the slightest.

  Moving among the remains, he knew that he would do it again without so much as a moment of indecision.

  He wound his way through every room, his expression empty, the black pebbles of his eyes never dwelling on any one thing. Once he’d surveyed the entirety of his former home, he walked back to the kitchen and stood before the burned skeleton of the refrigerator. Its thin plastic skin had curled and melted away, leaving a scorched metal box with no handles.

  Malcolm pulled the freezer door open.

  It was empty. He stared into the interior for a moment, then took a step backward and surveyed the desiccated lengths of the kitchen. There, on the muck-covered floor: two perfectly intact plastic ice trays and a bag of green beans.

  The authorities had peered into the refrigerator once the blaze was vanquished, and haphazardly cast out the freezer’s contents in their search of the room.

  Malcolm peered back into the freezer, and his expectations were buoyed by the unmarred walls of that cubicle. The interior had not burned. He extended big, thick-fingered hands, delicately probing. They were hands that, despite their size, could guide a pen or brush with exquisite precision. The bottom of the freezer compartment was a thin aluminum sheet. Malcolm worked his fingers under its lip, gently, edging the plate up and away, finally pulling it wholly out.

  His breath caught in his throat as he saw the paper lying there, unburned and whole. He had been finishing his years-long project of rendering the sickly decline of a homeless woman named Toofy when the paper soldiers raided his home. Some part of him had compelled him, worked against the pragmatic desire to escape in quick fashion, and sent him slipping her unfinished portrait under the lip of the freezer’s floor.

  This was the only reason he had returned now.

  But as he lifted the single sheet of paper from its fire proof cradle, Malcolm’s anticipation melted. He was not holding his preserved artwork. It was something else—a single piece of common typing paper.

  He glanced over his shoulder and listened. Nothing stirred in the derelict tower, and there was no movement but his own. If this was a tr
ap of some stranger’s design, there was no sign of it that he could discern.

  Malcolm held the sheet of paper close and read its contents. Whoever had found his secreted drawing and replaced it with this paper had a loose and looping handwriting, his message to Malcolm scrawled with a black, felt-tip pen:

  I can be thorough, I guess. When I get something stuck in my head, I mean. Not always. Most of the time, I’m kind of the opposite. But I found your drawing I guess is what I’m saying. Very nice, by the way. I mean that. Why did you live here? I hope you’re not crazy. Living in an abandoned building seems crazy. But this is Detroit so who knows, right? Anyway, I can’t let it go. Someone generally smarter than me keeps telling me to, but I can’t just walk away when I don’t know who you are. Did you kill Allen Phelps? They found him in Canada, tied under a dock in the water. I guess it was very ugly. I’ve managed to find out that Allen Phelps is the reason your home here is burned up. And another one of his SWAT people was burned up too and left in a garbage dump. And they say Allen said your name is Malcolm Mohammed. Is it? Were you part of that mess with them? I just want to know. I won’t tell anyone I was here. I won’t show your very nice drawing to anyone else. Is it Toofy? It looks an awful lot like her. I was her lawyer a handful of times when she got nabbed for solicitation or possession. They found her dead in the winter, on a park bench. A cop I talked to called her a bumsicle, and I almost punched him in the face. Did you kill my client, Malcolm? Did you kill Vernon Pullins? Flip this over, because I’m running out of room.

  Malcolm flipped the page over.

  Anyway, I just want to know. I want to know if you were involved in what happened to me and my partner. I want to know if I have to worry about you. I’m going to keep Toofy and not show her to anyone. You can have her back if you want. But you’ll have to come and talk to me first. My name’s Darren Fletcher, but I think you know that already, don’t you? If you do, you probably know where I drink. I’ll buy you one if you’re willing to talk to me. I don’t talk to cops and they don’t know I put this here. Unless you’re a cop reading this now. Christ. Look, if you’re some cop reading this I don’t have any intention of talking to you. This isn’t how I wanted to say this but I don’t have another sheet of paper and I don’t want to leave and come back with a new note or anything. I’m going to run out of room again, so I’ll sum it up.

  If you’re the person who drew Toofy, I’ll give her back if you talk to me.

  If you’re a cop, I’m a lawyer and I won’t talk to you.

  Malcolm stood there in the wreckage of his world, and continued to stare at the sheet of paper long after he had read and digested its contents. He was a shadow among deepening shadows as afternoon gave way to evening, silent and still.

  Eventually, he folded the paper in half and slipped it into the interior of his worn Carhartt coat.

  When he at last stirred, walking out and away from the apartment, down, down, into the expanse of unkempt lawn at the base of the tower, out into the crumbling ruins of the city, he never spared a look back. Yesterday was gone.

  * * *

  Gunther Kriegs buckled his belt and reached around on either side of his prodigious belly to pull his suspenders back up over his shoulders. He considered throwing his suit coat on, but left it where it lay in a heap on his office floor.

  “That was rather frantic,” Francine purred. She’d hiked her skirt back down and was perched on the edge of his desk, patting her big mane of chemical-blond hair back into place. She favored him with a broad, mocking smile. “Something got you worked up?”

  “I’m sorry, Honeybee,” he said, tucking the ends of his shirt in, his breath still coming in short, sharp gasps. Francine was right. He had been frantic. He’d been selfish and direct, and the entire affair hadn’t lasted more than a couple minutes. She’d leaned over, propped up on her elbows, and he’d just become some sort of thrusting mechanism.

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “Just complications. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Home or work?”

  “Just business. People not doing what they’re paid to do. Don’t worry about it, Honeybee. It ain’t you.”

  She shrugged and smoothed the front of her skirt.

  “You can make it up to me,” she teased. “Frederik’s? Some steak and drinks? Maybe another roll in the hay after?”

  It was tempting. Francine was fun. Her late forties had arrived, and her hips were a good deal wider than when he’d first hired her to run the office more than a decade ago, but her love of fun times and easy pleasure had not dimmed. Even now, when she smiled up at him, the crinkling of crow’s feet and laugh lines did nothing to dim her beauty. She was a woman who wore fake nails painted bright red, who didn’t ever get self-conscious eating in front of him, drank beer instead of wine and saw sex as fun times and nothing more.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’d love to, but Carol’s in from her Pennsylvania trip. If I don’t sit around the house with her and listen to her family drama it’ll be fireworks and accusations.”

  Francine eased her rump off the desk and started buttoning the top buttons of Gunther’s shirt. She made a little-girl pout.

  “Not fun, Daddy.”

  “It can’t all be fun and chuckles.”

  “For some of us it can.”

  She had his tie in her fingers, and she looped it with easy expertise, not looking at what her fingers were doing.

  “She’s making dinner. I can’t.”

  “Tell her you’re working. Better yet, I’ll call her and say you had to drive off to some meeting. City inspections. City inspections never fail. I’ll say you were just fit to be tied, and stormed on out in a huff. She’ll tell me about her trip and I’ll keep you in my mouth the whole way to Frederik’s.”

  As she purred those plans, her right hand whispered down the front of his shirt, over his big belly, and came to a rest on his crotch. One of her long fingernails ran up and down, up and down.

  “See? You do want to.”

  Gunther let out a moan as her hand grabbed hold of him through his pants.

  “Fuck. Alright,” he breathed in a throaty whisper. “Alright. But stop that or we’re not getting out the door. You go call her and I’ll finish up in here.”

  Francine planted a kiss on his lips and whirled away, making a show of swishing her wide hips as she retreated out to the reception area of Burton and Kriegs Development. He watched her until she was out of the room. He heard her lift the phone off its cradle and shortly after that she was talking in the chatty and familiar way of one woman speaking to another.

  Gunther eased down into his chair and rolled it up to the desk.

  Everything was in its place. He’d gotten caught up on invoices and payroll. He’d fired off missives to the insurers, the City of Phoenix and the Maricopa County Board of Development. The Amber Vista crew was back on schedule now that he’d had a sit-down with the subcontractor handling the sewer hook ups. That had been an ass-chewing, bellowing and threatening affair, so he’d done it before lunch. Shrinking other men down to size gave Gunther an appetite.

  His eyes wandered down, drawn to the little drawer at the bottom right of his desk.

  Go through it again, he insisted to himself.

  He closed his eyes and ran through the day in minute detail, mentally checking off everything he had told himself he would accomplish. He scanned the signed paperwork on his desk. He checked his email to see if he had missed any important correspondences. Fuck it. You’ve covered your bases, Champ. Work hard, play hard. Every headache and complication in the world will still be waiting here in the morning.

  He pulled the drawer open and withdrew the gray metal lockbox where he kept his personal supply of cocaine. Inside was a plastic Ziploc sandwich bag bulging with the white powder. He paused, listening to Franci
ne cheerily lie to his wife. The part of him that told him to put the cocaine back, tell Francine to change her plans, and head home to his domestic duties was very small.

  He had a line tapped out on his desk a moment later, and he huffed it with the practiced swiftness of a man who had been managing and negotiating with his habit for years.

  He had a second line down, and was waiting for Francine to finish with his wife so he could share it with her before they hit the road. He remembered her promise and leaned down to scoop his suit coat off the floor. His prescription of Viagra was in the jacket pocket.

  When he straightened back up, a man was standing in his office.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Shh,” the man said, softly.

  He was a little older than Gunther, maybe pushing sixty. He was tall and lean and pale and dour. He was gray, his suit was gray, and his eyes were gray. His wallet was black, and when he flipped it open, the badge inside was gold and it said “FBI.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “No,” the man said.

  Gunther’s eyes swept down to the desk and the line of cocaine resting between him and the FBI agent. And next to that, the bulging bag of felony-quantity joy dust.

  “Don’t,” the agent said, and raised a stilling hand in the air. “You touch any of that, and it’s a felony. Destruction of evidence. So, let it just sit there. Let it be. You just lean back. There we go. Easy.”

  The tall, gray man stepped around the desk and came to a stop at the big office window. He ran a finger along the cream-colored vertical blinds, sending them idly knocking against one another. He seemed very calm, and that made Gunther very nervous.

  “Do you have any firearms in this office?”

  Gunther opened his mouth, but again the man raised a stilling hand in the air.

  “Don’t lie. I might already know the answer.”

  “There’s a pistol under the desk,” Gunther blurted, and hated himself for how quickly he said it. He was panicking. He needed to get his bearings, fast.