Detroit Noir

by E. J. Olsen

  "I would've, if they asked. Why should I cover up for a squirt like Orson Childs?" He spoke the name with an effete accent.

  "No reason, except they might look at it as motive for murder. You made a deal to save Mark's life, Childs reneged, so you decided to repossess."

  He paused in mid-guzzle, swallowed. "Jesus, that's cold."

  "It should be. I just took it out of your refrigerator."

  "I mean what you said. So why'd I wait four years?"

  "Murder plots have been known to stew a lot longer than that."

  He drank off the second half and flipped the can toward the basket. It wobbled but didn't fall off, as some of the others had. "Do I look like somebody who'd wait that long?"

  * * *

  I drove away from there, yawning bitterly and hoping Barry Stackpole's lights would be out so I could go home and go to bed. But Barry lived without sleep, a journalistic vampire who that season had sublet lodgings downtown, five minutes from each of the city's three legal casinos. He had a theory that the owners were building a Mafia outside the Mafia, with no ties to what the gaming commission interpreted as organized crime, but with all the benefits attendant. He might have had something, at that; the owners were exclusively male, and the mob is not an equal opportunity employer. Traditional gangsters had taken one of his legs, some fingers, and put a steel plate in his skull, so he was less than reasonable on the subject of thugs incorporated. In that vein of mind he'd hacked into every hundred-thousand-dollar bank account between Puget Sound and Puerto Rico. Thirty minutes after I dropped in on him and his computer arsenal, I found out Orson Childs had been selling off his family's stock for five years, trying to bolster investment losses and personal indulgences, from Childs' Plaything to a racehorse named Lightyear that couldn't hold its own beside a California redwood. I promised Barry a case of Scotch and left him to his obsession of the season.

  The rest was as glamorous as it gets. I caught a few hours' sleep in my hut on the west side of Hamtramck, got up at the butt-crack of dawn with black sludge in a thermos, and camped out across the street from the Childs house in Grosse Pointe. That morning happened to be trash collection. I was out of the car the second Truk wheeled the household refuse bin to the curb and started back up the drive, puffing smoke from one of the cigarettes I'd given him.

  I worked fast, because the trash truck was snorting its way up Lake Shore Drive, the collectors evaluating the inventory for personal aggrandizement before feeding it to the crusher. I found what I wanted among the empty single-malt bottles and plain garbage, put it in my trunk, and went home to hose off and change. Rich people are never available before 9:00 anyway; not even rich people who aren't really rich, mathematically speaking. In America, even the broke are divided into classes.

  Truk let me in with no expression on his face to indicate he knew me from anyone else who came to the door. He didn't even glance at the red and blue gym bag I was carrying. After a little absence he came back and led me through a room I hadn't been in and outside to a flagged courtyard where Orson and Clarissa Childs sat in fluffy white robes drinking coffee; Mrs. Childs's out-of-focus gaze said there was as much Kentucky as Colombian in her cup.

  The houseman faded and I set down my bag, which clanked when it touched the flagstones. Childs, looking up from the Free Press, glanced back at it, then at me. Portrait shots of the shooting victims bordered a grainy picture of the murder scene on the front page.

  "Anything new?" he asked. "There was nothing on the radio that wasn't there last night."

  "There wouldn't be. The press doesn't know yet about the kidney."

  The woman started, spilling coffee on the table. Childs folded the paper and laid it on the vacant chair. "It didn't have anything to do with what happened. I assume you've been talking with Worden."

  "What happens to Mark's trust fund now that he isn't around to collect it?"

  "It goes to his heirs and assigns. Before you go any further, you might want to consider the penalty for slander."

  "What lawyer would press the case after your retainer check came back from his bank?"

  The couple locked gazes. He blinked first. She set down her cup with a double click.

  Childs said, "You should be having this conversation with Worden. He's an angry man and simple. His thought processes are easy to predict when he thinks he's been cheated. Not that there is anything to whatever he told you. Buying organs is shaky from a legal standpoint."

  "So's murder. His shotgun tests clean. How about yours?"

  "I don't own a shotgun."

  "Not anymore. You decided to get rid of it after you used it on Mark and then his roommates to make it look like he wasn't the only target."

  He lengthened his upper lip. "Evidence?"

  "Me, for starters. I'm a witness." I leaned down, unzipped the bag, and took out one of the pieces I'd retrieved that morning. The barrel had been cut into eight-inch lengths, then split down the middle. When I laid it on the table, Mrs. Childs squeaked, got up, and half ran inside, holding a hand over her mouth. I let her. "If I'd known this was what you were slicing up last night, it would've saved me a dive in your dumpster. No wonder you jumped when I walked in on you."

  Childs turned his head slowly from side to side, as if he were trying to get out of my shadow. "Assuming that's where you found it, what's it prove? You can't trace scrap."

  "You know a lot less about shotguns than you do about metalwork. Cutting up the barrel's a waste of time; it's smooth, leaves no striations on the pellets. In order to connect the weapon to the murder, all the cops have to do is match the firing pin to the marks on the shells found on the scene." I was holding the bag now. I took out the heavy Browning receiver and laid it on the table. The incriminating evidence was intact.

  He stared at it while I let the bag drop with the rest of the pieces inside.

  "Planting that high-grade pot was smart," I said. "It should have been coke or heroin, but maybe a man in your circumstances doesn't know how to go about finding them. Smart, and stupid: It diverted the investigation, but it put it in the hands of a narc named McCoy, who'll have all the upper-end dealers in the area in his data bank. The one you bought it from will turn you if it means ducking four charges of homicide."

  "It's true," he said. "I don't know much about dope or shotguns."

  "Don't say anything, Orson. All you did was buy marijuana."

  I turned around. Clarissa Childs was standing in front of the door to the house with the twin of the chopped-up Browning raised to her shoulder. The barrel looked as big as a culvert.

  "He wasn't lying to you, Mr. Walker," she said. "Orson has never fired a shotgun in his life. My first husband taught me how to hunt. I've been putting game on the table for years."

  I thought about the revolver in my belt. She read my mind. The shotgun twitched. I held my hands out from my body,

  "Clarissa—" Childs began.

  "I said don't say anything!" She kept her eyes on me. "Nothing that ever came from Hank was any good. His son was defective; even his kidney didn't fix what was really wrong with Mark. After everything Orson and I did for him, he turned his back on his education and ran away. Why should he fall into money when we've got three mortgages on this house?"

  "Clarissa?" This time his throat throbbed with warning.

  "Drop it!"

  We turned our heads together. Childs sat motionless, staring at Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler, Rick McCoy, and three uniforms standing with sidearms pointed at the woman with the shotgun. I'd called them early enough to avoid a standoff, but they must have taken the long way around the house.

  "Drop it!" Thaler shouted again.

  Clarissa Childs hesitated, then lowered the shotgun. The officers were advancing when she swiveled the butt down to the ground, jammed the muzzle up under her chin, and tripped the trigger with the toe of her slipper.

  "We got a partial off that air conditioner knob that puts the mother on the scene," Thaler said while my statement was bein
g typed up. "For what it's worth."

  "It closes the case. That must be worth something to someone."

  She was drinking tea again, from one of those mugs they sell downstairs with the police seal on it. Headquarters is running a boutique to catch up on repairs. Today she had on a grayish-pink suit; ashes of rose, I think they call it. She looked less tired. "All we've got on Orson Childs is attempting to destroy evidence. I don't think we can make accomplice after the fact stick. Some mother, huh? I used to think there was something to maternal instinct. I thought I was missing something."

  "Not wanting kids and killing the one you have don't walk under the same sun."

  "Plus three other mothers' sons just for garnish. Sometimes I hate this town. Other times I just dislike it a little."

  "It started in Grosse Pointe."

  "It's all Detroit." She worked the tea bag. "I'd sure like to know how you confirmed the Childses had money troubles. If I thought you knew your way around a computer I might ask the boys in white-collar crime to keep an eye on you."

  "You don't have to log in to run a bluff."

  "On," she said. "You log on to the Internet, not in. But you knew that. You're overdoing it."

  "The less people think you know, the better for you."

  "If that's true you'll live forever."

  I said nothing.

  She said, "I know about you and Barry Stackpole. You two are the evil twins of amateur law enforcement." She took out the tea bag and dumped it into her wastebasket. "Any questions?"

  "None I can think of."

  "Well, you know what they say about curiosity." She sipped.

  PRIDE

  BY P.J. PARRISH

  Brush Park

  Tonight I have the windows open to catch what little breeze there is, and as I lay in my damp sheets, my face turned toward the gauzy glow of the streetlight outside, I can hear them. The lions are roaring.

  It starts low, a moaning prelude. Then it builds, drifting to me in my bed with the shifts of the heavy August air, until it becomes a distant but full-throated roar.

  Aaaa-OUUU. Aaaa-OUUUUUU.

  I listen, my body tense, until it finally dies into a series of staccato grunts.

  Huh, huh, huh.

  I am two miles away from the lions, safe in my basement studio apartment just a block off Woodward Avenue. I know the lions are secured behind a moat. They are fed twice a day, cosseted by their caretakers at the Detroit Zoo. They want for nothing.

  So why do they roar at night?

  It starts again.

  Aaaa-OUUU. Aaaa-OUUUUUU.

  I look toward the corner where the yellow-white beam from the streetlight falls across the bureau and brings the steel of my gun to life.

  I press my palms over my ears and close my eyes.

  Baker was waiting at my desk when I got to work the next morning. He had made my coffee for me.

  "You look like hell," he said, holding out my chipped white mug. The rim still had yesterday's lipstick on it, but I didn't care.

  "I couldn't sleep," I said.

  "You need to do something about that," he said.

  I nodded as I sipped the coffee. He had even remembered the Splenda. After four years riding together, it made me feel good that he remembered how I took my coffee. My ex had never seemed to get that one down.

  "Drink up, we have a call," Baker said.

  I looked at him over the rim of the mug. "How bad?"

  He held my eye for a moment but didn't say anything before he turned away to pick up his jacket off the chair. That explained the waiting coffee. It was going to be a really bad one.

  We drove through a sticky morning rain, moving away from the Central District station house on Woodward. For once, I hadn't put up a fight when Baker told me he was going to drive. I just sat back in the seat, watching the slow sweep of the windshield wipers.

  Baker took a right into Brush Park. A century ago, the neighborhood had been home to the city's elite. But now it was block after block of decaying Victorians, weedy empty lots, and the collapsing brick caverns of abandoned boarding houses. We called it The Zone, the nickname coming from the government E-Zone program that was funneling millions of dollars into Detroit's decaying core. The E stood for Empowerment, the politicians said, and there were signs of life here and there—a new Blimpie over on Mack, an old factory being converted to lofts, a few rehabbed mansions reclaimed from ruin. And at night, when the Tigers had a home game, the southern horizon burned bright with the lights from Comerica Park. But for most of the people here, the empowerment hadn't trickled down enough to ease the pain of their daily lives. To most people in The Zone, E still meant empty.

  Literally empty, I thought as I stared out the window.

  Over the past couple decades, in the name of renewal, whole blocks of blighted and burned-out houses had been demolished, leaving vast stretches of weeds and grass. Untrimmed trees formed tunnels over the pocked streets. Wild pheasants had taken to roosting in the rafters of the rotting houses. The Zone had the aching loneliness of an abandoned prairie town.

  As we turned onto John R, I found myself looking for the small reminders of the lush life that had once thrived here. A set of stairs leading up to nowhere, the ornate carvings still visible in the crumbling concrete. A listing red brick chimney covered with the creeping pink blooms of wild sweet pea vines. A rusted stop sign standing sentry on a corner where no one came anymore.

  But then, the surprise of a lone house, bars on the windows and plastic flowers in the yard. And another, its sagging porch strung with Christmas lights. People hanging on, barricading themselves in their homes against the drug dealers and prostitutes, waiting for the city fathers to figure it all out.

  I stole a look at Baker's Sharpei profile, with the ever-present mint-flavored toothpick hanging from his lip. None of this ever seemed to bother him. He was driving slowly, like he always did, a sharp contrast to my own gas-brake-gas-brake style. Baker kept an even flow on most everything. Even on calls like this, even when he knew what we were going to see.

  "How old?" I asked.

  "Four months," he said.

  The rain had stopped by the time we pulled up to the house. There was a small crowd gathered by the steps, women mostly, their arms crossed over their chests or clutching kids to their thighs. The low tire-whir of the nearby Fisher Freeway filled my ears.

  Baker turned toward me. "You ready?"

  Usually someone—often the mother but on rare occasions the male in the house—takes the child to the emergency room. Driven by a fleeting clarity of what they have done, they hope that the limp body in their arms can be miraculously transformed back into a baby.

  That was not what had happened in the house on John R.

  When the responding officers arrived, the child was still in its bed. By the time I entered the blue bedroom, the eyes of three stuffed animals—a bear, a rabbit, and a zebra—looked down upon an empty crib. With its broken slats, it resembled a wooden cage.

  Baker nudged me, indicating I should step aside to let the photographer do his job. The camera flash brightened the blood on the yellow tangled blanket. The air smelled of sour diapers.

  I heard a woman crying. Between her sobs, she whispered the name Tommy. I followed the sound back to the living room, pulling my notebook from my jacket.

  The woman sat on a green sofa. When her eyes came up, she focused first on Baker, then on me, making that female-to-female connection. I knew from experience she had some vague hope that I was the one person in this group of stone-faced strangers who might understand why her baby died at the hands of her man. I resented it and I wanted to slap her. Instead, I sat down next to her.

  "What was your son's name?" I asked.

  "Justin."

  "And your boyfriend's name?"

  "Tommy Freeman." It was his name she had called out from the bedroom, not her baby's.

  "Do you know where he is right now?" I asked.

  "Probably at his brother's."
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  I took down all the information in my small notebook. I wrote slowly, postponing the final part of my interview, the part that in all my years as a cop had never gotten any easier. I learned a long time ago that these woman often changed their stories when they realized that their boyfriend or husband was going to go to prison. Sometimes, they recanted everything. Sometimes, they took the full blame themselves.

  I set a small tape recorder on the scarred coffee table near the woman's knees.

  "Can you tell me what happened?"

  "The baby stressed Tommy out. He works nights, and the constant crying …"

  I nodded, my eyes closing over a burn of tears. I knew I wouldn't cry. I had this way of absorbing tears back inside my head. Baker once told me that if I didn't let them out once in a while, they'd back up into my brain and begin to ferment. He had meant it as a joke, but I didn't laugh.

  "Please don't hurt him when you pick him up," the woman whispered.

  I said nothing and stood up. The creamy scent of formula was in my nose and I took a look around. A blue plastic baby bottle sat on the end table.

  "You'll need to go with the officers down to station, ma'am," I said.

  She looked to me in confusion. "But I didn't do anything."