Martinez, not quite knowing what to make of me, excused herself and walked back to the meat counter.
“Making the IA beast with two backs, Cowling?” I said, voicing faux disappointment. “Really?”
“You are such an asshole, Snow,” Cowling grumbled.
Leaning into Cowling, I whispered, “Mixed babies are sooo beautiful, don’t you think?”
Wading through the early June heat and thick humidity back to my Caddy, I felt a bit guilty for having busted Cowling’s chops: Very apparent on the left side of his neck near the curve of his shoulder was a long, ugly scar from a bullet that had chewed through his flesh while he fended off some very bad people in a valiant effort to protect his superior, Detective Captain Ray Danbury. Danbury had died. Cowling got the promotion he’d always wanted and never quite deserved. And the two of us were left on opposite sides of a man we had both held in high esteem.
Since Danbury’s death, Cowling and I had something of an unspoken understanding between us; for the sake of our dead friend’s memory, we would dial back our animosity toward each other.
The Honeycomb Market was what “dialed back” looked like.
Even though the air was thick with humidity and the white noon sun reveled in its skin-shearing, climate-changing dominance, I figured there had to be a few Mexicans out and about. After dropping my purchases off at the house, I ambled back out to the car.
Jimmy and Carlos Rodriguez, Jimmy’s equal-share renovation and house-flipping partner, were heading down the street, their skin glistening, tool belts hung like spaghetti-western gunslingers. Since I wasn’t in the mood to talk renovation plans, costs, materials or proposals, I moved quickly to my curbed Caddy.
“Yo! Mr. Snow!” Jimmy yelled.
“No time, guys!” I said, waving. “Gotta go!”
I belted myself in behind the steering wheel as I accelerated away from my house, down Markham Street, onto I-75 north toward the city and away from adult responsibility.
Four
It’s hard to complain about Michigan’s suffocating June heat and humidity when you see black kids squealing and laughing alongside German tourist kids in the spouts of water at the Fountain at GM Plaza. Or shirtless black and brown teen boys standing dutifully behind wheelchair-bound grandmothers or grandfathers, everyone smiling up at the descending cloud of cool spray from Isamu Noguchi’s Horace E. Dodge and Sons Memorial Fountain.
There are the picture-takers and brick-readers huddled beneath the shadow of Ed Dwight’s full-sized Underground Railroad sculpture of a runaway slave family at the last stop on their arduous journey. Even in their frozen bronze stance, the sight of this family looking across the Detroit River to the hope and promise of Canada is moving.
Considering Detroit was built in large part by Native and black slaves, they had every right to stare longingly across the river to the promise of Canada.
Look hard enough at the feet of these sculpted runaway slaves and you’ll find a reddish-brown brick engraved with these words: Still searching. Still hopeful. The Snow Family.
Once upon a time the three-and-a-half mile Detroit riverfront behind the General Motors Renaissance Center headquarters might have been considered the River Styx: a post-apocalyptic sluice of illegally dumped garbage, washed up sewage and rotting fish seasoned with a dash of mercury and a soupçon of lead. Abandoned buildings along the river served as mausoleums for the bodies of the murdered and the forgotten homeless. It was an open, grey-water grave where dead dreams and lost hopes floated belly up.
Now, with a tenuous revitalization in full bloom, the riverfront had been transformed into a scenic, well-manicured length of greenspace where people strolled, rode rented bikes, casually ate lunch and watched sailboats tack and ride wakes churned up by freighters.
Just up from RiverWalk, near Riopelle Street, there are shiny doors, one red and one blue.
Behind either is a world of hurt.
I was on the second floor of Club Brutus, behind the red door, which bore the Japanese kanji character for “Redemption.” Club Brutus is a high-end health and fitness club with panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the bright expanse of RiverWalk, the Detroit River and, across the river, the sprawling red brick distillery for Canadian Club where Al Capone and the Purple Gang made their Prohibition-era liquor deals. I was wearing a marine blue karategi—the traditional Japanese karate uniform—with black belt.
I was also wearing a bruise just beneath my left eye that would soon become a sickly purple thanks to the club’s owner, Apollonius “Brutus” Jefferies.
“Wow,” Brutus said as we slowly danced around each other on the mat. “I expected better from a young man.”
“Yeah, well, sadly I’m getting exactly what I expected from an old man,” I said. “Soft hits, slow kicks and not a takedown in sight. Ain’t you supposed to be good at this?”
Brutus laughed as he circled me. “Boy, I’m ’bout to beat you like a rented mule.”
Brutus Jefferies was dark-skinned, tall and broad, with a four-inch braid. I wasn’t quite sure if he suffered classic male-pattern baldness with his monk’s fringe or if he purposely cut his hair this way because he’d seen too many Akira Kurosawa movies.
In the spacious white dojo, there were large red-framed black-and-white photos of Tsutomu Ohshima, Yasuhiro Konishi and Gichin Funakoshi. There were also red-framed photos of black karate masters—Moses Powell and Ronald Duncan, and Fred Hamilton. And there were framed posters for black karate movies like Black Dynamite and Black Belt Jones.
“Surprised you wanted karate today,” Brutus said. Sweeping right kick. Violently disturbed air an inch in front of my nose. “Thought you might want to get in some boxing. Work on that lame right cross. Now yo daddy? Oh, that man had him some right cross!”
Boxing was the pain concealed behind the blue door. “Maybe another time,” I said. “Right now, I need to work on these skills.”
“So, what’s going on in Mexicantown these days?” Brutus said. Right round kick, left round kick, punch, punch. “Word is them ICE suckers swoopin’ down lookin’ to hook some fresh brown meat.”
Sweep kick, punch, lapel grab, failed throw, push off. “Just some petty feds with cereal box badges and a weak beef.”
“Yo daddy’d be redder than a baboon’s swollen butt over this nonsense,” Brutus said. Punch, knee thrust, punch, kick. “You don’t care they might snatch up some of your neighbors?”
“I care,” I said feeling one of my ribs ache from the last kick. “And if it comes to that, then I’ll make something pop.” Kick. Kick. Leg sweep. No contact. Brutus danced lightly away. “Until then, I got my social security number and marine discharge papers.”
“That don’t sound like ya daddy,” Brutus said. Punch to the chest. Lapel grab. Hip into me. Hit the mat hard. Roll and up again. More ribs throbbing.
“I’m not my daddy.”
Brutus grinned. “Oh, I think you more like him than you’d care to think, young blood.”
Heel of a hand to my chest. Attack. Wrist grab, twist. Ass-over-head. My full weight crashing to the mat hard. Right heel zooming toward my face stopping an inch from my nose.
Done.
Brutus pulled me up and we bowed to each other.
One of us was out of breath with a few stars dancing in his eyes.
It wasn’t Brutus.
“Better,” he said.
We walked down a lazily curving staircase to the first floor, where lawyers and doctors, deal makers and politicians were lifting weights, jogging on treadmills or climbing on Stairmasters while watching CNN, Fox News or Bloomberg Television. In one glass partitioned room, people were “spinning” on stationary bikes. In another, people were doing twisty-turny-stretchy things on yoga mats.
I saw the dumpy-and-grumpy judge who presided over my wrongful dismissal trial plopped on a bench wip
ing sweat from his brow.
He saw me.
From his brief and weary look, I had the feeling he’d presided over a thousand trials since mine, enabling him to forget who I am.
“Holy cow, Brutus,” I said. “How many ballers you got up in this crib?”
“All of ’em, now that you here, kid.”
In Brutus’s glass enclosed office, he stepped on a treadmill fit flush to the floor and behind a black wrought-iron standing desk.
“Really?” I said. “A treadmill at a standing desk?”
“Locomotion is life. Sitting is dying.”
A fit blonde woman maybe in her forties and wearing Club Brutus-branded royal-blue spandex entered, smiled at me and handed Brutus a stack of mail.
“Thanks, Geneva,” Brutus said, then donned a pair of reading glasses and flipped through the mail. “You want a juice or something, Young Snow? Smoothie?”
“Thanks. No.”
“You sure?” Geneva said with a radiant smile. “We make ’em fresh and certified organic.”
“I’m kinda wanting an eight-slice Buddy’s ‘Detroiter’ pizza and beer right now.”
“Sorry,” Geneva laughed as she left. “Can’t help you there.”
Apollonius “Brutus” Jefferies had been a cop at the same time my dad was on the Force. They had been good friends. They’d even squared off against each other in police boxing leagues. Twenty years into a decorated career, Brutus was shot twice. A failed beer-bunker robbery on Woodward Avenue perpetrated by two liquored up and drugged out teenagers. After a touch-and-go surgery, Brutus had lost a quarter of his stomach, a piece of his right lung and a lot of his weight. He was the living dead.
In an effort to bring himself back from his dark suspension between life and death, Brutus bought a thirty-by-thirty rattrap of a building along Jefferson Avenue. A few donated heavy bags, speed bags and spit buckets and he was in business—mostly with off-duty cops who felt achingly sorry for Brutus, a bag-of-bones struggling to lift ten-pound dumbbells.
My father may have felt sorry for Brutus. But he never let on.
Brutus struggled, fought, pushed and prayed himself back to the land of the living, one ten-pound dumbbell at a time. And now, twenty years later at the age of sixty-five, he was the poster child for healthy living and Club Brutus was where Detroit’s elite paid big money to work out.
Brutus had given me the “Friends and Family” membership discount since he had known my father. Of course, part of my amazing bargain was agreeing to teach underprivileged kids beginning karate at an after-school class in the fall. Brutus even threw in a free pair of his personally branded Nike trainer shoes.
Yeah, I have money.
But come on: Free Brutus-branded Nikes!
“Sure you don’t want nothin’ from the salad bar?” Brutus said.
“Sounds good, but I can’t,” I said, looking out at Detroit’s 1 percent making a bid for immortality on ellipticals and stationary bikes. “I’m having lunch with Bobby Falconi.”
“Colored kid over at the coroner’s office?”
“One and the same,” I said. “Though I’m prone to think only old Negroes like you use the term ‘colored’ anymore.” I stood, reached across the desk and shook Brutus’s big, powerful hand. “Thanks for the workout, old man.”
“Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it, young blood,” Brutus said, grinning. “Stop dropping your shoulder when you’re coming in for a strike. Trust your opponent’s aggression to be your source of energy. Stillness is your power, son.”
“Any other words of wisdom, sensei?”
“Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for small miracles. And always wear a condom.”
I showered, shpritzed on a little Clive Christian C for Men cologne (just in case Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera or Wahu were waiting for me outside), and changed into a grey Nautica polo shirt, Buffalo jeans and well-worn tan Cole Haan leather loafers. On my way out, I ran into one of my new neighbors: Trent T.R. Ogilvy.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were following me,” I said.
“Why would I ever wish to do that?”
“Isn’t Club Brutus a little out of the price range of a charitable foundation community organizer?”
“It is,” Ogilvy said brightly. “Fortunately, Mr. Jefferies—Brutus—was looking for a yoga instructor and I answered the call. You’d be astounded how generous wealthy women can be after a bit of the old Downward Dog.”
“Have a good day, Mr. Ogilvy,” I said.
“You as well, Mr. Snow,” Ogilvy said. “Oh, and should you look in your rearview mirror and happen to see an eight-year-old silver Prius, that’s me attempting to follow your Caddy.”
I left Club Brutus for lunch with Bobby Falconi.
Five
Marie Antoinette took a header off the Ambassador Bridge this past Sunday.
The infamous seventeenth-century French queen, Archduchess of Austria and wife of King Louis XVI, had narrowly missed the bow of the lake freighter Norquist-Jannak, its twenty-two-ton break-bulk cargo of iron ore five days out from the Port of Duluth-Superior.
Reaching a terminal velocity of seventy-three miles per hour, Her Majesty the Queen slammed powdered wig-first into the steel-grey channeled waters of the Detroit River. The concussive impact snapped her neck, fractured her right orbital and dislodged the eye from its socket. The Norquist-Jannak’s giant propellers churned the queen under for a bit, catching the hem of her ornate gown, unspooling layers of petticoats but sparing her the indignity of being sliced into bloody chunks.
The bridge had been backed up that day. Nothing new; over a quarter of the merchandise traded between the US and Canada crosses over the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit to Windsor, Ontario. The nearly hundred-year-old structure is constantly choked by trucks laden with goods.
Congested as the decaying bridge was, the only eye-witnesses were the usual unreliable ones. No one could recall seeing the seventeenth-century French queen get out of coach, carriage, van, or car, except one witness who swore Madame Déficit had emerged from a blue Toyota Camry and entered the US duty-free shop, presumably to buy cake and champagne. No such car was found and neither the US nor Canada’s duty-free shop’s closed-circuit security camera had recorded an ornately dressed French queen entering or leaving the premises.
No one from the bridge management company, US Border Patrol, Coast Guard or Homeland Security had anything official or unofficial to say about Ms. Antoinette. Bridge video and lane photo surveillance on both sides—equipment rumored to be the same age as the cameras Charlie Chaplin used to film City Lights—had yet to reveal the queen’s point of origin or provide a clue as to her motivations.
Word was whoever delivered the queen to her final destination had a stolen Nexus pass, allowing them to quickly enter and exit the US and Canada. Maybe the guard was more engaged in finding a four-letter word for “rodomontade” than checking out his two-hundredth vehicle for the day.
A young black woman who worked in a five-by-five toll booth on the American side apparently busted out laughing when interviewed by a couple of Detroit cops. They’d given her a description of the woman and asked if she remembered such a person.
“I think I’d remember some cray-cray white girl dressed like some dead-ass queen,” she’d said.
Until yesterday, it had not been determined whether the queen’s demise was in the legal province of the US or Canada. The Windsor and Detroit police departments had cooperated fully with each other, and with Homeland Security, the FBI and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Eventually, the Windsor Police Department’s considerable lack of resources and eagerness to blame Detroit for all North American crime precipitated the conclusion that the dead queen was in American jurisdiction.
“Jesus, Bobby,” I finally said. “Coroners have the best stories.”
Bobby—Dr. James Robert “Bobby” Falconi of the Wayne County Coroner’s Office—and I were enjoying an eight-square Buddy’s “Detroiter” pizza—cheese, pepperoni on top, tomato basil sauce, topped with shaved parmesan cheese and magical Sicilian spice blend.
Actually, I was the one enjoying the pizza. Bobby, lost in thought after relaying the story of Marie Antoinette, picked at the antipasto salad.
“It’s not funny, August,” Bobby said. “I did the work-up on the girl. She was eighteen, nineteen tops. Can’t tell because nobody can find anything on her: no dental records, nothing in AFIS. Like she never existed!” Bobby flopped back against the padded seat of our booth. “I’m having an acquaintance go over the girl’s costume. She’s at U of M, my friend. A forensic fiber and fabric specialist.”
“Somebody actually majored in that?”
“Works mostly with archeologists.” Bobby was still twirling the same piece of salami on his fork that he’d been twirling for the past five minutes. “Auction houses establishing authenticity and provenance. Some police consulting work.”
I took a sip of my lemon water. “I take it everybody wants this one closed out fast?” Bobby was quiet for a moment, stirring his iced tea with his straw. Then he looked at me and said, “By ‘everybody’ I’m guessing you mean your old DPD comrades in arms. Jesus, August—it’s not what it was after you were fired. After your trial. They made cuts through the bone and into the marrow. I mean if I hadn’t agreed to an eight-percent salary cut, I’d have been God-only-knows where. They could hire a hundred new beat cops and forty detectives tomorrow and still be short staffed. It’s a mess, August. And the bean counters are scrutinizing each bean as if it were the last. So, yeah—everybody wants this one closed out fast. Some freak chick that got too high and topped herself.”
“Everybody,” I said, “except you.”
Lives Laid Away Page 2