Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  Schultz was convinced of it. The kidnapper was some sort of monster, a sort that did not particularly care about money. What he did care about was a mystery, but Issabella suspected it was something horrific, something that involved hurting Darren and hurting her.

  “We pay it, then,” Theresa said.

  “With what?”

  “Darren’s rich.”

  Issabella looked out over the expanse of city skyline and knew that what Theresa said was true. Darren was rich. Inexplicably rich.

  “What we need is to just get them to let Darren get the money,” Theresa went on. “If we can convince them that all they have to do is keep him safe and have him come up with the money, then maybe we...maybe we say they get it and they get your dad and we just get Darren back. Right? Isn’t that right?”

  Theresa’s voice broke with a sob as she asked the question and Issabella reached out reflexively, putting her hand over Theresa’s. None of this had been her fault, any more than it had been Izzy’s. Theresa, she realized, was very much in the same place as her—desperate to be of use, flailing about to find some way to do the improbable, to find the path that lead to Darren staying alive and whole.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Izzy said, and as she said it her fear subsided. For the first time since Darren had disappeared, that awful terror that had lived inside her, that shadow-self that only wanted to cry and scream and run amok, was utterly silent.

  “You sure?” Theresa said and drew her hand away to wipe at her nose. “You don’t have to. I don’t mean what I said before. I can do it.”

  “No. I’m going up there.”

  It was the truth. Issabella would do it. Even though he was the last man in all the world she wanted to see, much less speak with. He had been dead, in her mind, for as long as she cared to remember. A ghost, really. An insubstantial thing that she might glimpse for just a fraction of a moment when she was lost in memory, before disappearing again when she forced her mind away.

  That’s where Howie belonged, in the half-light of nearly forgotten disappointments.

  Climbing those stairs and rousing him with demands would mean that he was a man, not a ghost. Her father. Still alive. Still creating new tragedies for her to deal with.

  “Maybe we should both go up,” Theresa said. “Like bad cop, good cop. I can get scary on him.”

  “So can I, Theresa.”

  There was only person to blame. There was only one person who had answers.

  Issabella was going to get those answers, one way or another.

  * * *

  Morning’s light crept over the Shrine of the Learning Tree, slowly advancing and reclaiming the room. Darren smiled despite his exhaustion when the sun touched his cheeks, carrying him up out of a troubled half sleep.

  It had taken a long time for Solomon to grow tired of Darren’s tales of disease and neglect, and he’d felt his voice grow weak and withered toward the end. Solomon eventually stopped asking questions, stopped insisting on more elaboration. The big man had stood transfixed throughout the entire storytelling, but after an hour—or what Darren guessed was an hour—the bald, looming kidnapper seemed to draw in on himself. As Darren’s stories wound down, he thought the man standing over him had somehow been sated, his bizarre appetite fully fed. When Darren had stopped talking altogether and the dark room was silent, Solomon seemed to be wholly within himself, rooted on his feet with his vision directed inward. Had he overloaded the menacing freak? Had he fed him so much that now Solomon was like a glutton following a great feast—half awake and luxuriating in each morsel and sip he’d consumed?

  Whatever the truth was, Darren had been forgotten. He entertained no thoughts of a sudden crafty exit, however. His hands and wrists were numb from being tied too tightly behind his back. His ankles, similarly bound, ached and his legs kept cramping and uncramping on the unforgiving cement floor. He could have struggled. He could have wiggled and jerked and prayed for some fault in his bonds.

  But he had spent every bit of energy he had in the long, colorful bout of telling tales. Once he’d recognized that Solomon was gone away in his own head, Darren sank back to the soggy floor and let his aching forehead rest against the cement. He slept, but he did not rest. He dreamed of burning chemical tankers belching poison. He dreamed that he was buried in the book mound, left there until his skin and his organs decomposed and he ran like ink over the pages, feeding the Learning Tree with new tales of Detroit’s long decline.

  Now, as he squinted into the sun’s glow and those unsettling dreams receded, he realized that it wasn’t the sunlight that had brought him back into the world. There had been a sound. Still groggy and shot through with a terrible weariness, he was unsure what that sound had been. His stomach was a tight knot of hunger. His thirst was like a living thing inside him. It occurred to Darren that Solomon didn’t have to shoot or bludgeon him in order to kill him. There would be a point where the lack of water would become critical, and his body would accelerate the process of shutting down.

  Far away, somewhere in the levels of the building beneath the room, another sound. A door? He couldn’t be certain. Darren stared across the room, past the Learning Tree, where a single dark doorway stood. He was seized with the notion that any second a group of blue-uniformed men could appear in that doorway. They would have guns and vests and radios. And behind them, outside, there would be ambulances. Medicine. Water. Safety and sanity and the promise that his life wasn’t over. He stared into the shadows as if he could will his saviors into existence. They would rush in, guns drawn and held at the ready. They would train their sights on Solomon, standing there like a statue beneath the Learning Tree and—

  Solomon was staring at him.

  The kidnapper hadn’t moved while Darren fitfully slept. In this light of morning, Darren could see him clearly for the first time. Solomon’s skin wasn’t just glistening from moisturizer. It was pink and angry, as if he were covered in a rash. His skin looked...raw. As Darren looked on, Solomon slipped his hands down into his pants’ pockets. The kidnapper cocked his head in a quizzical gesture.

  “Were any of those things true?” he said softly. “The things you told me about?”

  Darren forced himself to look Solomon in the eye. In a steady, if hoarse, voice he said, “Every word.”

  “Then why do you live here?” It was said very quickly on the heels of Darren’s lie, as if part of what Solomon had been doing while standing statue-like in the darkness was formulating a list of interrogatories about Darren’s horrific stories.

  He’s cross-examining me, Darren realized with an unsettling certainty. And I can’t remember half of the things I told him last night. His eyes just narrowed. You saw that. He thinks you’re stalling. You are stalling. Fine. But do it while talking, right?

  “I don’t,” he said. “I live in a penthouse far above all of this.”

  “But you work here. You work with the animals that live in the streets and gutters and Dumpsters, don’t you?” Solomon’s cruel smile returned, all teeth and ill will, and Darren saw the lantern-eyed shark Theresa had described from her bar—the predator. “Now don’t lie, counselor. I know a little about you and the girl. You’re a couple of...what do you want to call it? Do-gooders? Little courtroom crusaders? You two get the crummy criminal cases. The junkies and shit birds and mud people of this place. Isn’t that right?”

  “We get the poor.”

  Solomon chuckled.

  “Well, toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.”

  Darren felt his eyes trailing behind Solomon to the doorway. He forced himself to stop, to keep his attention on his captor. He strained to hear any other noise from inside the depths of the Book Depository, but there was nothing. Just a silence that, as it grew longer, dashed his hopes of a miraculous rescue.

  “And you and this cunt,” Solomon continued, pausing to gauge a
ny reaction his insult might have had. “You and her, you stay safe and clean way up in your tippity-top tower and just come down here to make sure the filth stays on the streets. You...you’re like a perpetual shit machine, the two of you. You make sure this open wound keeps bleeding out into the world. And then you skip on up to your clean, safe spot and shower it all off and fuck like bunnies and just laugh and laugh and laugh...don’t you?”

  The cruel smile had turned down on the edges and the raw pink of Solomon’s face was flushing deeper. His emerald-green eyes were narrow slits, and Darren knew he had made a terrible mistake. Yes, he had fed the lunatic the exact meal he had been hungering. But once he was full, he hadn’t remained standing there in place for more than an hour because he was satisfied. Darren could see it in the rushing flash of malice that shined through Solomon’s glare, and in the way his mouth twisted with righteous indignation.

  While Darren had dreamed of decomposing in the book mound, Solomon had been constructing his own inner justifications for making sure that dream came true. He’d been rationalizing Darren’s murder.

  “It’s not that simple,” Darren said, careful to keep his voice calm and his expression untroubled.

  “And while you’re washing all that grime back down into this fucking sewer of a city, what do you think happens?” Solomon was working himself up to what Darren knew he meant to do. His voice was rising, the wind-chime falsetto closer to something like a shriek. “The stink spreads. It grows. It gets into everything. Don’t you see that, you rotten son of a bitch? Don’t you see it?”

  “I only see you and me, Solomon. Just you and me talking.”

  Solomon’s hands shot up and out of his pants’ pockets. His right hand was holding what looked like a curved piece of ivory. When he unfolded the blade, Darren saw it was a straight razor.

  I love you, Izzy. I love you and I’m so sorry, baby.

  “It gets into everything!” Solomon shouted. His hands balled into fists at his sides, the blade of the razor quivering as if rage was infusing the metal with its own dire intent. “And now it’s in me. The filth. This city. Everything. And I can’t get it out. I can’t clean it out fast enough. And you’re helping it!”

  “She wants me alive!” Darren shouted back, seizing on the one thing he remembered that might forestall the frenzied thing quivering above him. When he’d heard the perfumed woman say Solomon’s name, just before the chloroform had carried him away again, she had made it clear Darren was not to die. She had been thinking about the money, he assumed.

  “If you kill me, Solomon, there’s no money. You understand? You get nothing if I die. Howard blew it all. I’m the only one who can get that money back to Arizona. Just me. And the woman you’re working with knows that. You know that.”

  Solomon took a step forward and crouched down on his heels. He was perched directly over Darren, his face a mask of ugly outrage and bluster. The Solingen’s winking length of blade was inches from Darren’s face.

  “Fuck her,” Solomon hissed. “And fuck you. You want to know the truth, you dumb dead thing? You want to hear a joke? I’ll tell you. You’ll love this. If that little slattern manages to get a dime out of this nonsense, you know where she’s going?”

  Solomon leaned closer, until his little even teeth were hovering just above Darren’s ear. His voice dipped to a whisper.

  “She’ll be bathing in the Caribbean sun. Howie will be back cooling his heels for life in an Arizona box. You’ll just be a body turning to mush in this piss-stink room. But what about me? Where would I go, counselor? I’m not going to some banana-factory resort to sip piña coladas and hump local girls. Not this busy little bee. Do you know where I’m going? Can you guess? I bet you can. I’m going to visit your little girlfriend and turn her into—”

  “Solomon!”

  The lunatic wheeled around on his heel and was halfway to his feet when the gunshot erupted around Darren, bouncing and reverberating off the concrete walls of the Learning Tree’s Shrine. Solomon jerked and the Solingen flew out of his fingers. A second gunshot roared through the room and Solomon collapsed in a heap.

  As the huge man dropped from Darren’s view, he saw the rush of starlings and grackle leaping from their silent perches among the Learning Tree’s limbs, scattering out into the morning sky. Then he peered past the tree and its mound, and saw the woman who had shot Solomon to death.

  She was stepping forward on shaky legs, gripping the gun with both hands, but waving around without focus. She was middle-aged and put together like a woman who would wear a very lush and inviting perfume. Her dark hair looked expensive, her skin rich and tan. Her cream slacks and tawny blouse looked comfortable, far better suited to an afternoon lounging around on a yacht or in a high-end restaurant than to murdering a crazy man in the heart of Detroit’s squalor.

  As she drew to a halt on the other side of Solomon’s body, Darren could see the high anxiety in the woman’s large eyes and in the way she stared at the corpse like it might leap up and attack her without warning. Her whole body was shaking.

  “Hello, Samantha,” Darren said. “It is Samantha, right? Samantha Ortiz?”

  She looked like she was coming out of a dream and stared at him dumbly. The gun was still held out protectively in front of her, aimed at nothing in particular. Her nails were painted an earthy brown and each had a tiny clear gemstone affixed to it.

  “What? Yes. Yes, that’s my name.”

  “Fantastic. So, I think you poisoned my client. Honestly, I was a bit put off about that. More than a bit, really. I’m pretty protective about my clients. But you, well, you did just do me a huge favor. Huh-uuge. So let’s maybe call this all even, yes?”

  His conversational tone seemed to work, because as he kept talking she slowly came back into herself. She lowered the gun, took a deep breath, and then slipped the gun away in a small gold and silver purse that hung from a narrow strap on her shoulder.

  “You’re a bit chipper for a man who just almost died.”

  “I bounce back quick, it’s true.”

  “Good. You’re going to need to.”

  Her hand dipped back in the purse and when it came out she had a cigarette and lighter. She lit the cigarette and drew in a long pull. She let it out in a stream and cocked one hip while looking at him with a newfound calm.

  “It’s not over,” she said flatly.

  “I know.”

  “How much money can you get right now?” she said and casually flicked the ash over Solomon’s body. “How much and where is it? If it’s enough and I get it, I won’t kill you. It’s that simple.”

  Darren told her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You’re faking.”

  Issabella stood at the foot of the bed and said it loudly. With the bedside lamp off and the curtains pulled, the bedroom she shared with Darren was a dim, shadow-laden space. Howard was a featureless mound beneath the comforter, only the tips of one hand peeking out from under it.

  “You’re faking,” she repeated, louder still. “You were awake when we brought you up here and you haven’t had time to just fall dead asleep. Sit up. Sit up and look at me, you unbelievable coward.”

  Howard did not move. She curled her fingers into fists and felt herself vibrating with rage.

  “Dad, get up and look at me! How can you...how can you be this weak? It’s inhuman. You’ve ruined people. You’ve ruined people’s lives. And now you don’t have the spine to—”

  Howard stirred and Issabella started at the sudden movement, as if her image of him as a ghost from long ago had become tangible, real, and whatever revealed itself from beneath the sheet would not bear the face of her father.

  But it did. Howard Bright shrugged the comforter down to his waist and sat up in the bed. And there he was, a tan, time-creased, graying version of the man she remembered. T
he man who had cooked her pancakes in the morning when she was a child. The man who’d let her paint his nails and, once they were dry, had trekked down to the weedy pond in the woods behind their yard and taught her how to skip stones, taking his time to pantomime the proper throwing angle, his shamrock-green-tipped fingers holding the stone while she giggled at how marvelously ridiculous he was.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said.

  “You’re right,” he answered. “You’re absolutely right. Izzy, I’m sorry and you are right about everything.”

  “I don’t care about sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t know the first thing about how little I care about your sorrys or your lies or anything else. I’m going to get Darren back. And you’re going to help me do that.”

  Howard scratched his head of unkempt hair and gingerly touched the bruised flesh around his nose and under his eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” he admitted and let his hands fall back into his lap. He looked exhausted, burned down to the wick—a man who had been beaten in a bar fight, incarcerated, possibly poisoned, then struck by a moving van.

  That series of events played through Issabella’s mind in a flash and she seized on the one she was uncertain of.

  “Did that woman who visited you in jail poison you?” Howard gave a shallow nod of his head and a bleak grin touched his lips.

  “Cleaning chemicals,” he whispered. “That doesn’t matter anymore. I want to do the right thing, now. I’m done. No more trying to get away with anything. Izzy, if you’ll listen to what I have to say, I think maybe I can make everything just stop.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” she said with as much threat as she could put in her voice without it rising into a shout. “If it means turning you over to them, that’s what will happen. I will give you to them. You need to understand that.”

  She could see surprise and hurt flash across his eyes, but it disappeared as quickly as it came. Howard nodded his head and looked down at his hands.