Lives Laid Away

by Stephen Mack Jones

  Bobby said, “I’ve seen enough bodies to populate a city. Tag it and bag it, slice and dice. Dictate notes. Go to lunch. That’s my day.” He paused, drew in a ragged breath of air. “Sometimes—you see a body and you want to know their story. This may sound stupid—but sometimes I can—feel—these people—this girl—wanting me to tell their story.”

  Bobby took a minute to eat some of the salad and a small piece of the pizza. Then he tossed his napkin on the table and stared at it for a long moment. Lifting his eyes to me he said, “She was raped. Systematically. Repeatedly. Vaginally and anally. Three different semen samples in her stomach. Degraded by river water forced in her system on impact.” He fell silent, then barked out a laugh.

  With tragicomic timing, our waitress stopped at our table and asked if everything was all right. I said we’d take the check and could we have a couple carryout boxes.

  Bobby and I were quiet after she left.

  Then he said, “Fucking hell, August, I’m still cataloging the drugs that were in her: methamphetamines, MDMA, traces of hallucinogens.” He smiled suddenly, a malevolent half-smile. “You were a sniper, right? Afghanistan?”

  “Yeah,” I said, uncomfortable with the darkening path our conversation was taking.

  “Me?” Bobby said. “Army intelligence. Iraq and Afghanistan. I, uh, assisted with some . . . unique interrogation methods on enemy combatants. One of the favorites was the Rollercoaster. Barbiturate injection in one arm—five minutes later, amphetamine injection in the other arm. One minute, you’re out cold, the next—boom!—shocked awake, heart racing, flop sweat. Four of those and an enemy combatant would confess to the Kennedy assassination. Or his heart would pop like a needle to a balloon.”

  “Why you telling me this, Bobby?”

  “Because I think that’s what they—whoever ‘they’ are—did to this girl,” Bobby said. “Put her on the Rollercoaster. Whoever did this, she was their fucking plaything. She wasn’t human to them. She was a chew bone to a pack of Rottweilers.”

  “What the hell was she doing on the Ambassador Bridge?” I said.

  “You’re the detective,” Bobby said. “You tell me.”

  “Maybe she was being transported,” I heard myself say. “Another location. Another party. Risky considering bridge security even at its crappiest. Could be whoever was moving her—if you go with that scenario—had a Nexus card; no stops, straight through. Didn’t expect a traffic jam. Maybe she escaped. Or they ditched her. Somebody having suffered that much abuse with that many drugs in their system—maybe she was susceptible to a suggestion of suicide. Get rid of a problem without straight up first-degree.”

  “She’s Hispanic,” Bobby said, almost absently.

  “What?”

  “The girl,” he said. “She’s Hispanic. That much I know.”

  He reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper folded into quarters. Unfolding it, he positioned it in front of me: the girl on a slab, pristine white sheet covering her from the chest down.

  In life she’d probably been very pretty.

  Now, she simply looked impossibly pale and eternally sad.

  “Eighteen or nineteen,” Bobby said again. “Somebody’s daughter. Jesus.”

  I turned the photo face down, not wanting our waitress or other patrons to see it. Not wanting Bobby to look at it and worry about his eighteen-year-old daughter, Miko, some seven hundred miles away in Boston at the Berklee College of Music.

  “What do you want me to do, Bobby?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe show it around your neighborhood. She’s Hispanic. Maybe undocumented. Maybe somebody knows her in Mexicantown.” His tired, red eyes searching mine, he said, “Maybe somebody’s looking for her. Somebody’s got to be looking for her, right?”

  I refolded the grim photo and reluctantly slipped it in my pants pocket.

  “I’ll ask around,” I said. “No promises.”

  “I’m too old for promises,” Bobby said. “I just need somebody to make a goddamn effort.”

  Our congenial waitress brought our check and a couple carry-out boxes. Smiling up at her, I said, “For medicinal purposes, I think we could use two Founders Porter beers.”

  Six

  Eighty-eight degrees, 40 percent humidity. Air quality index at 163.

  If you live off of the I-75 South Highway like me, you’re essentially breathing diesel exhaust through a wet wool blanket.

  I gave a brief thought to visiting my parents—much cooler in their oak-shaded graves—but nixed the idea. Grief is addictive. As an addict, I had to admit my dependence before I could move on.

  Moving on is exactly what I did at the house of my godparents, Tomás and Elena Gutierrez.

  I was about to mount the steps to their front door when I heard music and laughter at the back of the house. Los Lonely Boys, “Diamonds.”

  Tomás and Elena were working in their garden. More accurately, Elena was working in the garden, turning over the black soil, weeding, planning trenched lines where the tomatoes, peppers, onions and chives, kale and spinach, basil and cucumbers would go.

  “Hey,” I called out to Elena. “How come the fat guy’s not helping?”

  She laughed. “He’s more help there than he would be here, Octavio!”

  “I got a shovel,” Tomás grumbled. “Don’t make me use it upside your head.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Shrek.”

  “You want coffee?”

  “Who made it?” I said.

  “Me.”

  “Pass.”

  “Pendejo.”

  I finally accepted a cup of his gritty, nearly chewable coffee and we sat on the porch, watching Elena work in the crushing heat. She looked like an Inca princess, onyx-black hair in a thick braid falling over her right shoulder while her bronze skin reflected the rays of a sun jealous of her beauty. It was like watching a myth or a fairytale; a drop of her sweat on the black soil and flowers would bloom in colors only gods and goddesses could see.

  My mother, years before her death, had painted Elena, her best friend, in her garden. Maybe it was the heat, but I could swear I smelled the linseed oil of my mother’s paints, the seasoned wood of her palette . . .

  Between Tomás and Elena under a blue sky, I suffered a brief but all too real sensation of envy. They had something I was yet to experience, even with Tatina; that casual, seemingly inconsequential silent bond that is the essence of a life of love.

  “When are you gonna put an awning over this porch?” I said to Tomás after a sip of his road tar coffee.

  “Awnings are for pussies,” Tomás said. “We’re Mexican! We don’t need no stinkin’ awning!”

  “You’re not afraid of skin cancer?”

  “Skin cancer, mi amigo,” Tomás snarled, “is afraid of me.”

  I’d come for a reason, but a lump had formed in my throat. I wasn’t quite sure if it was because of what I had come to ask or if it was a congealed bit of Tomás’s coffee. I finally found the courage to say, “I need to show Elena a photo.”

  “So show her the photo,” Tomás said dismissively. Then, eyebrows furrowed, he said, “Wait a minute. What photo?”

  “A girl.”

  “A girl?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A—dead girl.”

  “Jesus, Octavio! You’re kidding me, right? You want Elena—my wife—to look at a picture of a dead girl? What’s Elena got to do with this dead girl?”

  “I need to know if Elena recognizes her,” I said. I told him about the Hispanic girl in the Wayne County morgue. The dark theatrics of her short, abused life and high-dive death. How a friend of mine couldn’t let this young woman become another nameless body lowered into a mud, root and stone potter’s field grave.

  Elena was the hub of the entire Mexicantown community. Depending on who needed her, she
was an altar, a confessional, a bullhorn or a sledgehammer, fighting for the rights of the people in our neighborhood. She knew everyone. “How many baptisms and christenings has she dragged you to, Tomás? How many quinceañeras? Trials and parole hearings? Mom-and-pop restaurant openings? Funerals?” I took a breath. “It’s a long shot she knows this girl. But I need to know. Then we—I—can be done with it.”

  Tomás gave me a long, hard look. “Elena’s always been her own woman. Probably seen and stood up to more shit than me—and I’ve seen and stood up to a lot of shit, Octavio. Still, I’d be lyin’ if I didn’t tell you I feel like I got an old-fashion, macho husband’s duty to protect his woman.” He took a moment to glare at me. “And let’s be honest: Things always start small with you—‘Oh, yes, ma’am—I’ll look into that little thing for you!’ and ‘Oh, yes, sir—I’ll fix that tiny problem for you!’—and these ‘little’ things always end up being mutant fucking atomic alligators chewing everybody’s ass off. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Just looking to give my friend some closure.”

  “Ain’t no fucking such thing as ‘closure,’” Tomás said bitterly. “Closure is white-folk bullshit. Aw, shit. There it is.” He pointed a thick forefinger at my face. “Them puppy dog eyes. You’re a junkie! You need a fix.”

  “What the hell are you—”

  “A mainline hit of self-righteous hero bullshit.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake—”

  “See! Right there!” Tomás said, jabbing his forefinger at the bridge of my nose. “You need to be somebody’s hero on account of you think you’re the only option for justice in this fucked-up world. Problem is, while you flyin’ around with a cape, guys like me tend to get punched in the throat and shot in the ass.”

  “I’m not asking for anybody’s help—”

  “That’s just it!” Tomás said. “You never do!”

  “What’s going on up there?” Elena said, shielding her eyes from the sun with a gloved hand.

  “Octavio wants my permission to show you something upsetting,” Tomás answered.

  “Perhaps,” Elena said, planting her wrists in her waist, “you should inform Octavio that I’m in my fifty-third year of being a grown woman. One who happens to possess an undergraduate degree in Secondary Education and masters in Institutional Management.” As is the case with many Hispanic mothers, grandmothers and godmothers, Elena seamlessly transitioned from English to rapid-fire Spanish the more fervent she became. “Also, inform the child that I have spent more time tear-gassed and arrested at protests than el bebé spent in the Marines.”

  Tomás glanced at me. With a wry smile, he whispered, “Oh, you done stepped in it now, cabrón.”

  Elena pointed a finger at the ground in front of her. “Get down here now, Octavio!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I could feel the photo of the dead girl, a dense, solemn weight, in my pocket, as I closed the distance between Elena and myself.

  “Anything new on the undocumented front?” I said in an attempt to avoid my mission.

  “Everyone’s asking,” Elena said, her voice lowered. “Everyone’s scared. Old Hispanic men who fought in Korea or Vietnam, they’re scared! The mayor’s not returning my calls. And the Police Chief—”

  “Renard?”

  “Yes,” Elena said. “He says he doesn’t have the manpower to enforce any detention orders. But this is the fédérales anyway and what Renard does or doesn’t do won’t amount to much.” Elena took off her gardening gloves and fanned herself with them. “I went to Eastern Market the other day. Ventitaglio’s Produce. The Latinos who worked there? Gone. Now? Teenage white boys who’ve never seen produce fresh from the earth trimming lettuce!” Elena gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m doing what I can, Octavio—but this? This is an eclipse no one saw coming.”

  “What about those immigration attorneys you work with?”

  “Ara Tarkasian and Bill Showalter? Ara’s serving five days in County for contempt of court because he hid an undocumented Honduran woman who’s lived here for eight years. And Bill’s fighting disbarment charges from the US attorney general’s office for claiming privilege on files of a young Somali man’s case. A young man who, by the way, has a three-point-eight academic average at U of M in biochemistry. These are the people we’re throwing out? I pray to God every day, Octavio. But I can’t see His plan. And—I don’t know if I’m up for this fight.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Elena.”

  “Well, Octavio,” she said with a bit of edge to her voice, “I certainly think I’ve seen enough to know when a fight is at an end.”

  “I need to show you a photograph.”

  “It’s bad, yes?” she said.

  “It’s bad, yes.” I sucked in a deep lungful of hot, humid air and said, “A girl. I need to know if you know her. Maybe around Mexicantown.”

  Elena quickly made the Sign of the Cross. “Okay.”

  I could see in the micro-changes in the set of her jaw and shoulders that she, not unlike most people, would never be prepared. For a split second I wondered about myself: I had seen a number of bodies in different states, both in Afghanistan and as a cop in Detroit. And with every corpse, I had felt my humanity—my ability to feel empathy or sadness, pity or outrage—recede into shadows. For a moment, watching Elena gird herself, I felt ashamed—embarrassed—that a portion of my ability to feel sorrow and mourn the unknown dead had receded into the impassive shadows of whatever remained of my soul.

  I took the photo out, unfolded it and showed it to Elena.

  After a moment, Elena brought her eyes to mine. “I’m going in, Octavio,” she said calmly. “This heat. I’ve been working the garden for two hours. I—need a shower. Then we’ll talk.”

  Elena let her gardening gloves fall to the tilled earth, then walked past me to the house.

  “The fuck’s going on,” Tomás angrily whispered to me in the kitchen. With a paring knife, he sliced oranges, lemons and limes for a glass of sangria. I could hear the water in the pipes from Elena’s shower upstairs. “She walks right past me, not a word. The fuck did you say to her?”

  “I think she knows the dead girl,” I said.

  Tomás flashed the glistening paring knife in my face. “You know I don’t like her being upset, Octavio. You know this. But you come and show her a picture of a dead girl? Jesus!”

  “I was kind of hoping—”

  “Let me tell you something, pendejo,” Tomás said. “You and ‘hope’ are like gasoline and a fucking blow torch. I can’t wait for the day when you don’t give a shit about hope!”

  Against my better judgment, I said, “There’s something else going on, Tomás.”

  “Oh, like this ain’t enough?” Tomás dropped the paper-thin slices of lemon and lime in a tall glass. From a pitcher he poured Elena’s homemade sangria into the glass, then slowly ran a slice of orange around the lip. “I’m taking this to Elena,” Tomás growled. “You wait your sorry ass right here. And don’t be using that time to think up any new ways of upsetting my wife, okay, cabrón?”

  Carrying the glass of sangria as if it were the Blood of Christ, he went upstairs. Five minutes later Elena came downstairs barefoot and wearing a thick terry cloth robe. Her hair was wrapped in a towel turban.

  Elena and I looked at each other for an uneasy moment. Then she drew in a deep breath and said, “What happened to her?”

  “Jumped from the Ambassador Bridge.”

  There was little sense in recounting the grotesque details. The story of the girl’s leap into infinity had run three days earlier, saturating TV, radio, newspapers and online news. Reportage included, for whatever reason, a primer on who Marie Antoinette was. But soon the story of the leaping queen was buried beneath an avalanche of other stories as humanity continued its plummet into ever-thickening mud. “Her name was Isadora Rosalita del Torres
. Nineteen. Undocumented,” Elena finally said “Worked some of the small shops on Vernor. Part of a small group of undocumenteds I was working with. Lived a hard life in Mexico City. Saved enough for a coyote to get her across the border. Nearly suffocated in an eighteen-wheeler parked behind a Walmart outside of San Antonio. She’s a—was a smart girl. Good . . . girl.”

  Elena was trembling.

  Seeing Elena this shaken was unnerving for me. Aside from my mother, Elena was one of the strongest, most resilient people I’d ever known. I’d borrowed from her strength when both my mother and father died. I’d been given sanctuary in her unbreakable spirit when I was fired from the DPD and during my whistleblower lawsuit trial. She knew my heart, my mind and spirit. She had helped nurture them since I was a kid.

  Now, facing each other, this pillar of iron and the foundation for what bravery I might have shown in my life revealed another aspect of who she was: delicate and vulnerable, subject to the same fears, faults and failings of all the other mortals beneath a common sky.

  And that scared me.

  “I got Isadora—Izzy—a job in a restaurant in Ann Arbor,” Elena continued. “Ara—my attorney friend—he was working her case. Next thing I know—the restaurant’s been raided and—she’s gone. Scooped up. Hard enough to track somebody with family here. Izzy—she had nobody.”

  “She had you,” I said.

  “A lot of good that did her,” Elena said, fighting back tears. “Sometimes—they just go. They get scared and they just—go. And there were—are—so many others depending on me.”

  Tomás came down the living room staircase and made his way to the kitchen. Elena quickly wiped tears from her eyes and cheeks and attempted a smile.

  “I’m good,” Elena said. “I’m okay.”

  “You’re okay, huh?” Tomás said gruffly. Unsettled by his tone, Elena and I stared at Tomás for an anxious second or two. He was holding a small black leather purse. He reached in and pulled out a Sig Sauer P290 semi-automatic handgun. “This what you callin’ ‘okay’ these days, woman?”