Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  “I don’t know what else to tell you. I wish I did.”

  “You can tell me why she didn’t put a hole in your head,” Schultz barked, and pointed an accusing finger at Darren’s chest. “And you can tell me what you know about Howard Bright escaping the hospital and getting clean out of town without anyone noticing a white man running around town with his ass hanging out of a hospital gown!”

  “Look—”

  “You know what? Get out,” Schultz snapped, holding his hands high in surrender. “Thanks for the note. And thanks for feeding me a line of bullshit to go with it. You want those two degenerates running around free as the breeze? Fine. I’ve got no problem washing my hands of this entire mess. So go on. I’ve got other cases. Cases where the victim doesn’t do everything in his power to shove a stick up my ass and turn me into a puppet.”

  At the elevator, Darren reached in his suit coat and brought out the phone he’d purchased that morning as a replacement for the one Solomon White had taken from him.

  “Izzy? Hey, baby. No, it went just fine. I don’t think we’re drinking beers together anytime soon, but it sounds like he’s done with us. It’ll stay open because of the parking lot attendant who got murdered, but I think we don’t have to worry about getting hauled in for more questions again. Like I said, let’s just let it go. Forget about it. Yeah. So, anywho, I was thinking maybe a vacation is in order now that—”

  The doors opened and Darren stepped in without looking up. He collided with another person as they were exiting the elevator and he heard the sound of something smacking against the floor.

  “Gah. Hold on a second, kid.”

  The fresh-faced agent who had accompanied Schultz into the Shrine of the Learning Tree was stooped over, picking up bags of what looked like Chinese take-out from off the hallway floor.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Darren said. “Can I help you—”

  “No—”

  Darren reached down, but the young man had gathered the bags hastily back into his arms, holding them against his chest.

  “I’m fine,” Lorenz insisted, so Darren took a step back into the elevator. As the doors began to slide shut, the agent’s expression brightened with recognition. “Hey, you’re the vic from last week! Look, I need to ask you—”

  “Nice ring. Harvard, huh? Congrats.”

  The doors slid shut and Darren was descending back to the world.

  * * *

  Issabella used a gardening spade to tamp down the last scoop of dirt over the grave she’d dug for Miss Kitty in the little strip of lawn in front of her apartment. It was where she had first noticed the elusive stray. She used the backs of her hands to blot at her eyes, which were bright with moisture.

  Darren put a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get her back,” he said softly. “The hazard cleaners said it would be a health code violation.”

  “No. God, no, don’t apologize. I couldn’t have seen her the way she must have looked.”

  “You think those tulips will take? Seems like the wrong time of year.”

  Issabella straightened and peered down at the little plot of dirt.

  “If not, I’ll plant them again next year. Either way, it’ll be Miss Kitty’s flower bed from now on. She’d like it. She destroyed the flowers I used to have out here.”

  They went inside and settled together on her couch. The window in the kitchen that Solomon White had broken was boarded up. Issabella stared at it for a long while and wondered if she wasn’t going to feel safe in the apartment anymore.

  “Let’s stay here tonight,” she said. “I want to get used to it again, but not alone.”

  “Is there shared nudity in that invitation?”

  “Again? You know, a girl has limits.”

  “I think captivity triggered some primal instinct to do the deed. Like a survival instinct, maybe.”

  She ran her hand through his curls and put her head on his shoulder.

  “God, I’m still so mad,” she admitted.

  “I know.”

  “And Mom? You should have seen her. She wasn’t off the plane more than five minutes and her gossipy old coworkers at the library are calling her and feeding her every ugly thing they read in the papers. I’ve never seen her that upset, not even right after he abandoned us. You need to go see her. I think she wants to apologize, like it’s somehow her fault.”

  “I’ll set her straight on that account,” he assured her, and slid down so that his head was in her lap and his ankles hung over the end of the couch. He grinned up at her through his stubble. “You know, we could take a note from her playbook, though.”

  “Hmm?”

  “A vacation, Izzy. I’ve been saying this.”

  “I know. But there’s work and—”

  “And the tickets are already bought, kid. Three first class seats to the Seashell Resort in Saint Lucia. We leave next Tuesday. Two weeks of overpampering with the overprivileged.”

  “Three seats?”

  “Theresa,” he explained. “She was willing to go all O.K. Corral for me, so I think we need to bring her along and let her loose on cabana boys and elderly vacationers.”

  Issabella was quiet. She stroked his hair absently and eventually her gaze returned to the boarded-up window in the kitchen. She thought about what she had almost lost, what she did lose, and all of the horrible anxiety that filled her and fueled her through those three hellish days.

  She leaned down and kissed his forehead where a smaller Band-Aid had replaced the big bandage. The skin around that spot was still purplish, but Darren wasn’t lapsing into unconsciousness or drooling uncontrollably, so she’d decided he wasn’t suffering any more brain damage than he’d already incurred before they met.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Cool. I’ll tell Theresa tomorrow when I see her.”

  “She’s a good friend.”

  “Yeah. She’s made out of gold.”

  “What am I made out of?”

  He smiled and closed his eyes like he was settling in for a night’s sleep.

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is, I like to kiss it and rush at it with my man parts.”

  “Well that doesn’t narrow it down at all, does it?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  His head was round and perfectly smooth, with two little eyes above a pinched mouth. In his tan beach shorts and bright Hawaiian top, his forearms and calves were visible—pasty white and covered in thick tufts of coarse, black hair.

  Darren watched him from his umbrella-topped table on the other side of the Seashell Resort’s huge outdoor pool. The man in the Hawaiian shirt didn’t look particularly tall, but he was big in the shoulders and chest. Brutish, Darren thought, with oversized hands that looked ill-suited for any task that might be considered delicate.

  As Darren looked on, the man sipped a piña colada through a straw and smiled a bit too obviously whenever a bikini-clad vacationer walked past his chair.

  “What are you looking at?”

  Darren reached over and stroked Issabella’s cheek with the back of his hand. Despite her strict regimen of dousing herself in sunscreen every chance she got, her cheeks and nose were touched with a pink flush and her shoulders were pinker still.

  She smiled at his touch and closed her eyes. For what seemed like the hundredth time in the past several days, he thanked whatever unseen force was looking out for him that he was alive to see that smile.

  “Nothing,” he answered. “I was just thinking about how nice it feels to be here with you.”

  Issabella nodded in agreement and selected a grape from a wooden bowl of assorted fruits. Darren took a wedge of pineapple and bit into it.

  “Have you seen Theresa?” she said after a while.

&n
bsp; The man in the Hawaiian shirt finished his drink and was waving at the poolside waitress.

  “Hmm? Theresa? Not since breakfast.”

  “Me neither. I think she won a lot of money last night off that group of dentists that are having the convention. I didn’t know she was a card shark.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “She said one of them was cute, too.”

  Darren watched the girl bring the man in the Hawaiian shirt another tall drink.

  “Yeah? You think she went to find him?”

  “This is my guess, yes.”

  Darren made a show of stretching and let out a long yawn as he stood up.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Just a walk,” he answered. “I need to get the blood moving around. How about it? You fancy a late-morning stroll on the beach?”

  Issabella made a face and shook her head.

  “Uh, no. Some of us appreciate our skin and don’t intend to let it turn to leather. You go. But don’t get distracted. We’re supposed to meet Theresa for lunch in the Coconut Room in an hour.”

  “Reservation for three?” he said. “Or do you think we should make room for an allegedly cute and now cash poor dentist?”

  “I already called and added one just to be safe.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me, either,” he said and leaned down to kiss the pink tip of her nose.

  He was only a few paces away when she called his name. Darren turned around and she was folding herself into him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed herself against his skin, her cheek cool on his chest.

  “You don’t have to go for a walk.”

  “Izzy...”

  “You could just stay and not leave my sight.”

  Darren held her long enough that he caught people glancing their way out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t care. She needed this. He did, too, he knew. He needed to know, now and then, that she was real and he was not still lost to dreaming in the shadow of the Learning Tree.

  When she slowly pulled away, he saw there were tears in her eyes. She wiped at them and forced a smile.

  “Jeez, I promised I was done with this business.”

  Darren reached out and cupped her chin in his hand.

  “I love you, Issabella Bright,” he said. “I’m not going to leave you ever again.”

  A look passed over her that he couldn’t read.

  “I guess that’s cool,” she said after a pause.

  “What is?”

  “Doing that here. It’s a good place for it, all in all.” She brightened and landed a playful punch on his shoulder. “You never told me you love me before. I mean, I know you do. I knew that. But this was the first, like, formal time you said it. And that’s good. This is good. You can go on your walk now. You cheered me up.”

  “I said it before. You just weren’t in the room to hear it, kid.”

  “That’s weirdly cryptic.”

  “I won’t be long. Order me a fruity drink, will you?”

  Just beyond the pool, the cement deck ended at a set of steps that lead out onto the beach that lined Rodney Bay. Out there in the blue, sailboats were scattered about, little white triangles that bobbed along with the lazy, windless current.

  He took off his sandals. The sand of the beach wasn’t too hot for bare feet yet, and he liked the feel of it as it shifted and gave. He walked on past a row of wood-framed and linen-curtained beach cabanas, finally coming to a stop in an empty area of the beach. Resort beach chairs and recliners lay about, but he chose to sit down under a coconut tree. With his back against it, Darren stared out at the water until the man in the Hawaiian shirt sat down beside him in the sand and said, “It’s a hell of a place, ain’t it? I haven’t ever seen so much fine, tanned ass all together. If they’d advertise that instead of the sunshine I bet they’d never have an empty room.”

  The man sat cross-legged and wiggled his big, dirty toes in the sand. That close, shoulder to shoulder, Darren realized he’d been right. The man was not particularly tall, but he was massive through the shoulders and chest, a bulk of muscle and fat built on thick bone.

  “Joe Link,” Darren said.

  “Darren Fletcher,” Joe agreed. “You want me to just lay it all out for you?”

  “Yeah. I have a date soon.”

  “She’s a pretty gal. Shame about her daddy.”

  Darren looked in his eyes to see if Joe was poking fun at him, but there was no humor to be seen.

  When Darren didn’t say anything, Joe scratched at his unshaven chin and said, “Afternoons, they find a reason to get out of the house. Sometimes errands and sometimes just having some drinks down at a little beer shack on the dock. How are you going to get over to that side of the island?”

  “A boat.”

  “You don’t want some hired hand around to be a witness if things go bad on you.”

  “There won’t be. I know my way around a boat.”

  Joe grew a knowing grin.

  “Sure you do. Your last name’s Fletcher, so I guess they had you in Little Captain’s School soon as you could walk, didn’t they?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You know, Luther don’t sail anymore. He got his pilot’s license, though. Even bought himself a nice little plane—”

  “I don’t want to hear about my brother, Joe.”

  “See, that’s funny. Because he was the same way when he told me I should go ahead and do this work for you. ‘Joe,’ he says, ‘Whatever he asks, get it done. But don’t ever tell me about it. I don’t want to know.’ And me, I guess I find that a bit peculiar, seeing as his kid brother just survived getting himself kidnapped and all.”

  Darren felt himself growing quarrelsome just hearing his brother’s name. He didn’t want to imagine Luther Fletcher soaring the skies in his own private plane like some master of the universe. That his brother was not locked away in a cell was, for Darren, a singular injustice.

  “So they’re out in the afternoon,” he prodded and was grateful when Joe took the hint.

  “Yep. Like clockwork. They have a dip in their pool after breakfast. Then it’s usually time for some naked horseplay. The Ortiz gal’s got a set of tits to die for. Fake? Sure. Real ones don’t stand at attention and salute like that. But does anyone care about real or fake anymore?”

  “I don’t care about hers, so let’s skip it.”

  Joe chuckled and reached into his shirt’s breast pocket. He came out with a can of chewing tobacco and wedged a large wad of the stuff under his lower lip.

  “Okay,” he went on, slower now that he had to enunciate around the glob in his mouth. “So when they’re done slapping fannies it’s usually about noon and the two of them bug out for a few hours. Maybe they go for more drinks down at the dock. Or they snorkel around in the ocean. Yesterday they went zip-lining in the jungle. I’ll give it to them, at least they’re having a hell of a time spending your money.”

  “It isn’t about the money,” Darren said softly.

  Joe looked incredulous. He spit a brown line into the sand, wiped his chin and said, “Not about the money! You sure you’re a Fletcher?”

  Darren stared at him in silence and watched Joe’s incredulity give way to recognition.

  “Oh,” Joe said. “Oh. Right. A little coldhearted revenge is the name of the game.”

  Darren felt himself grow a tight, humorless smile.

  Joe spit another line into the sand and looked out at the ocean.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess maybe you are a Fletcher.”

  * * *

  Issabella watched as Darren finished securing the lines of the rented sail boat to the little public dock. He nimbly leaped up onto the planks and turned around to stare
down at Issabella with a triumphant grin. He was shirtless—dressed only in sunglasses, blue swim trunks and flip-flops.

  “You can say it,” he crowed.

  “I have no idea what you mean,” she replied coolly. She plucked a lacy wrap up off the deck and secured it around her bikini bottoms.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Fine.”

  She shouldered her purse and he helped her up onto the dock beside him. He leaned back down and lifted a tote bag up from the deck of the boat.

  “Well?” he said once they were facing each other.

  “Fine, you’re an excellent navigator—”

  “Captain. An excellent captain.”

  “An excellent captain,” she said through clenched teeth. “And I was wrong to say that you would drown us in the ocean.”

  Darren laughed. His skin was several shades darker from their week of leisure in the sand. The wound to his head was nearly gone and he had become an animated, enthusiastic vacationer the last few days. Whether drinking in the pool, playing cards with Theresa and herself or galloping along the ocean’s edge, Darren had a vibrant light in his eyes. He seemed more enthused each morning, as if he knew that each day on the island was leading to something even better. This morning, his unbridled anticipation had crested and she’d found herself hustled along on his impromptu sailing excursion.

  Issabella felt herself smiling up at him.

  “So, I’m off,” he said. “I shall make merry with the locals and carry back to you all manner of rare treasures.”

  Issabella nodded and held her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. She peered all around the little bay he had sailed them to. It was several miles to the south of the Seashell Resort, and was starkly different than that exclusive, corporate-owned locale.

  Here, the steeply sloping scallop of land that rose up out of the waters of the bay was ornamented with dozens of large rambling mansions peeking out from the heavy vegetation. Each one was different than the last, and many sported garish colors that somehow fit the tropical locale. A handful of restaurants and bars occupied the land at the water’s edge, and farther in a small tourist town with shiny white roofs was visible.