by Sheena Kamal
I don’t bother looking at maps, because there’s too much in the world that seems incomprehensible to me right now to pay attention to street signs and operate a moving vehicle at the same time. I just follow the GPS on my phone until I arrive at the address on the postcards. The two-story brick house must have been nice once, but its glory has faded over time, in tune with the decline of the entire city. From a quick web search last night, I found out that this neighborhood in southwest Detroit used to be a predominantly white area, but is now more mixed than it had been in its heyday when Americans had dreams and the Motor City was the place they came to live them.
The man who opens the door looks as ancient as the paint chipping off the porch and is so heavy that the walk to the door seems to have taken up the store of strength that he has left for this evening. But his eyes are sharp and clear as he looks at me standing in his doorway. Behind him I can see a little girl peeking out. She puts her finger to her lips. A request for my silence.
I ignore her and focus my attention on the man. The sun is setting just over my shoulder, cradling us both in soft pink light. I don’t say anything for a moment. Now that I’m here I wonder if perhaps he’ll see something of my father’s features on my face. I stay silent, a part of me hoping for recognition.
“Who the hell are you?” he says, by way of greeting.
“My name is Nora Watts. I think you knew my dad, Samuel.”
His startled gaze sweeps over me, taking in my jeans and hooded sweatshirt, and the way I stand with my right shoulder angled slightly back and my left foot a half a step forward. Like a fighter. He moves back and is about to close the door in my face. “I don’t know who that is.”
I stick a foot in the doorway to buy myself some time as I search my coat pocket. I pull out the postcards that were sent to my father, held together now by the scrap of blue silk, and show them to him. “Do you know who sent these? They came from this address.”
He pretends not to look at the cards, but I know from a tiny shift of his gaze that he has seen them. “Get out of here. I’ve got nothing to say to you.” I take an unconscious step back at the fury in his voice. He slams the door in my face, but not before I see a hint of something that I recognize in his expression. Something that looks a bit like despair. I linger on the porch for a moment, staring at the little girl who is peeking through the curtains at the nearby window. I would bet the rental car that I have recklessly declined to put additional insurance on that he has not only seen the postcards before, but that it was his hand that addressed them.
Because when I asked him if he knew my father, he lied flat out to my face. I’m almost certain of it. It’s that little bit of intuition that I used to get when someone lies rearing its head again. The ability that used to come so easily to me now only trickles through in dribs and drabs, but there is enough of it still left to make me wonder at the man who has just slammed the door in my face.
The little girl opens the window and beckons to me. Her brown hair is piled into a messy ponytail at the top of her head and she’s wearing eyeglasses with blue frames that keep slipping down her nose. She has a lollipop in her hand, which she now offers to me. I don’t know how to assess the ages of children, never having been a part of Bonnie’s upbringing, but I think she might be just slightly older than a toddler. Maybe kindergarten age. I take the lollipop, unwrap it, and hand it back to her. “For you,” I say.
“Sanks.” Her two front teeth are missing and she has a slight lisp. She pokes her tongue through the hole and grins at me. I may have just encountered the most adorable creature that has ever existed.
“Is that your dad who answered the door?”
She shakes her head.
“Your grandad?”
She nods.
“Does he ever leave the house?”
That gets me a deep gut laugh, the way that children do, that is as surprising as it is delightful. If anything could melt this cold heart of mine, it would be a laugh like that.
“We go to school,” she says, still grinning. Then she puts her finger to her lips again, waits a moment while she listens to a sound inside, then goes back to smiling at me. It’s astounding to learn the young age at which girls start keeping secrets from the alpha males in their lives.
“Do you like it? School?”
Another headshake.
“That’s okay,” I tell her. “You don’t really need it. You’ve got to make your own way in the world, you know what I’m saying? Don’t end up like me. Be your own person. Follow the money.”
She nods very seriously at this piece of unsolicited wisdom. I unwrap the blue silk ribbon from the postcards and hand it to her. “Walk extra slow tomorrow when you go to school, okay?”
I step off the porch and head back to my rental car, which I parked around the block. When I get to the spot, it takes me a minute to realize that the Impala is well and truly gone. Stolen. Disappeared. I cross the street toward the bus stop nearby. The people under the shelter make no attempt to create space. They stand there with their eyes carefully empty, knowing full well that my car vanished in front of them, but nobody’s willing to discuss it. Just an everyday occurrence. Nothing special about it.
11
Brazuca watches from his car as a frail effigy of Sebastian Crow drifts slowly around the park with Whisper at his heels. It’s near ten p.m. and they are the only figures in sight. Crow stops at a bench, puts a hand on the back of it for support, and coughs into the sleeve of his jacket for several long seconds. Then he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and they make their way back to the town house across the street.
Brazuca feels an inexplicable fury toward Nora for dragging him into this. Wasn’t there supposed to be a dog walker? He should have just passed the whole thing off to Warsame, who, with a remarkable sense of prescience, has once again gone off the grid on some assignment or another. It takes Crow a full minute to climb the steps to his front door. Whisper waits patiently at the bottom until he’s on the landing, then bounds up to join him.
The image of Crow, bent over a bench and in pain, lingers. Brazuca doesn’t manage to shake it until nearly an hour later, standing outside the upscale Gastown restaurant that Clementine’s dealer Priya had mentioned.
“You going in or what?” says a woman behind him. She’s dressed like a showgirl, with big curls and heels so high her feet are contorted at almost a ninety-degree angle.
Brazuca steps aside to let her pass. “Sorry.” She doesn’t look back at him, though, or even acknowledge that she’s heard.
He walks to the twenty-four-hour vegan diner across the street and sits at a window booth with a view of the front entrance and windows of the Lala Lair.
Picking slowly at something called a supergrain power salad, he keeps an eye on the window. Just past midnight, a slim East Indian man wearing tailored slacks and a mock turtleneck steps out of the Lala Lair, careful to keep out of view of the camera mounted above the front entrance, lights a cigarette, and makes a phone call. For the past two nights, Brazuca has been watching the man do this exact thing. Yesterday, however, he’d ordered a quinoa burger instead of a power salad and his stomach has yet to forgive him.
A woman in a slinky blue dress, with a glittering purse, slides into the seat across from Brazuca. “Hey,” she says, yanking up the front of her dress.
Brazuca blinks. It takes him a full second to recognize Clementine’s sister. “Grace, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’ve been at the Lala Lair every night this week. Such a fun name to say, don’t you think? The Lala Lair. Lalalair. Try that three times in a row. Do you like my dress?”
The dress in question is very fitted everywhere but up top and meant for someone with cleavage. “It’s nice.”
“Liar. It’s god-awful. Can’t stay up no matter what I do. It’s my sister’s,” she explains. She looks down. “This purse, too. You know, I think I’m gonna keep this one. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, my sister. Her tits w
ere fake, so she probably didn’t have to worry about filling it out.”
“You shouldn’t be over there,” he says, nodding to the upscale lounge across the street.
“Well, I couldn’t stay away, could I? I heard you and that other slut talking by the elevators. Yes, I was listening at the door. What was I supposed to do? Not eavesdrop on her dealer? She mentioned the Lala Lair and I figured it had something to do with Cecily. Somehow. What have you found out? And why are you at this hippie diner instead of across the road?”
“A man’s gotta eat,” he says, his voice flat. She doesn’t have to know that he’s already been in there, scoped it out, and tried to glean as much information as he could without drawing unwanted attention.
They stare at each other. Under the layers of garish makeup, inexpertly applied, her expression is serious. She pulls a flash drive from her purse and passes it to him. “I have a friend in criminology at UBC who’s been looking into drug traffickers for his thesis. He gave me some material on Wild Ten.”
“Don’t call it that. You’re just romanticizing it.”
“It is the street name for it,” she insists. “He says it’s relatively new, but it’s catching on. There are these underground drug labs in China that make bootleg fentanyl. They’re also playing around with the chemical structure of the drug and creating new versions, as well. Like Wild Ten. Makes it really hard to regulate.”
He passes the drive back to her. “Grace—”
“I want to know what happened to my sister as much as you do. And not because I’m collecting a paycheck,” she says, clearly unaware that when it comes to digs like that, he’s practically Teflon. Everyone’s got to make a living. They can’t all be urban planners.
The waitress comes over with a bill and Brazuca pays in cash. When she leaves, he gives Grace a hard look. “You know what happened to your sister. She overdosed and died. End of story. You shouldn’t be here or across the street, either. Go home, Grace.”
“Don’t tell me where I should be,” she hisses.
“I’m serious. Don’t you have school or something?”
“We had sex once, you asshole. You don’t get to talk to me like that. I’m a grown woman. I can be wherever I want.” She slides off the chair clumsily, slinging the fancy purse over her shoulder, and curses as the chain strap gets caught in her hair. “Jesus,” she says, as she walks toward the ladies’ room, attempting to untangle it.
As soon as she’s out of sight, Brazuca leaves the diner and crosses the street. With the hood of his jacket up, he stumbles toward the alley, allowing his limp to throw him off balance. Bracing a hand on the brick wall in the alley behind the Lala Lair, he swears as his zipper gets caught and he struggles to get it free.
A sleek BMW pulls into the laneway, picks up a passenger who has just exited the back door to the bar, and honks at him to move. He raises an arm automatically to cover his face from the glare of the headlights and flips the driver the finger.
The passenger window rolls down and the man in the turtleneck tries to get a good look at Brazuca, who is partially shielded by his hood. “Move.”
“Yeah yeah, just a sec, dude.” Brazuca’s voice is gruff, as nondescript as he can make it. He pushes away from the wall and walks toward the street, where he immediately slips into the shadows of a doorway. When the car turns onto the road, lit from a streetlight just off the alley, the license plate is perfectly visible. He snaps a quick photo with his phone. “Gotcha,” he says quietly, though no one is there to hear him.
He makes a call to the same number he texts the photo to. The voice that answers the phone is both confused and angry. “What the fuck?” mutters Detective Christopher Lee from the Vancouver Police Department. “You know some of us have real jobs to go to in the morning.”
“Nice to hear your voice, too, sweet cheeks. Need a favor. You owe me.”
“You gave me one tip in all the time you’ve been off the force. One.”
“Sometimes one is all you need. Sent a plate number to you. Driver picked up the manager of the Lala Lair.”
There’s a brief silence as Lee turns that around in his mind. “The Lala Lair, eh? Yeah, heard some whispers back when I was in the Gang Unit.”
“Find out if there are still whispers?”
“What’s that, Your Majesty? You’re buying beer this weekend?”
“Yeah, okay,” says Brazuca, who never bothered to tell his old partner that he’s an alcoholic and, apart from a recent relapse, has been mostly sober for two years. “I’m buying beer. I’ll let you get back to your beauty sleep.”
“Damn right,” says Lee. “Just because you’ve let yourself go doesn’t mean we all have to.”
Pulling his hood closer to his face as he rounds the corner, Brazuca sees a woman in an ill-fitting dress hailing a cab. She’s not wearing a jacket, and has her arms wrapped around herself to ward off the chill in the air. Even though it’s been a mild fall, it’s not exactly weather to forget your jacket in. But it’s possible she’s not thinking clearly these days. “Gotta go,” Brazuca says to Lee.
“You could have waited till morning for this shit.”
“You were up anyway.”
There’s a click on the other end of the line as Lee hangs up. The cab zips past the woman without stopping. “Asshole!” she shouts. When she notices Brazuca walking toward her, she angles her body away.
“Hey,” he says. “Wanna make me feel like a whore?”
Grace turns back to face him, narrowing her eyes. “You know, sex work is no joke. It’s a lot of people’s livelihoods. You shouldn’t be poking fun at it.” This is said with absolutely no acknowledgment of the fact that she’d started this kind of comment, back at her sister’s fancy apartment, paid for by the man Clementine was sleeping with.
“Who’s laughing?”
She shrugs. “As long as we’re on the same page.” Then she slips her small hand into his, he suspects more for balance than anything else, as they make their way to his car parked in the lot down the block. She directs him to the English Bay condo. On the elevator ride up, she opens his jacket and steps into his arms. He can see right down the front of her dress, which is probably her intention.
He could get used to women using him for sex, he realizes. And at least she’s honest about it. But still, he can’t quite figure her out. She seems like too sensible a woman to let grief overtake her like this. Seems people have become more complicated or he has become simpler. But he doesn’t understand how either could have happened without some kind of advance warning.
12
The clock on my phone tells me that it’s a new day, but my body refuses to believe it. Trying to get back to my motel using public transit last night sapped most of my energy, and now I’m back on it. In the past I have maligned public transportation in Vancouver, which, I now see, was grossly unfair. When it comes to clusterfucks, getting around Detroit takes the prize. And the bureaucratic nightmare that is trying to report a stolen rental car in Detroit has defeated my fighting spirit. I am, for the moment, without wheels. After three buses and a heated argument with someone who appeared to be a transit official, I arrive back at the house.
It was a good thing that I started out before dawn, because I get there just in time to see the man and the adorable imp from yesterday walk down the street, heading in the direction opposite from mine. There is an elementary school about a ten-minute walk away, but the man doesn’t seem particularly light on his feet and the little girl has made me an implicit promise that I hope she keeps. On the outside, I have twenty minutes to half an hour to find what I’m looking for.
As I knock out the basement window with a hammer wrapped in a towel I have stolen from my motel, I hope that people on the street will be as unobservant as they were yesterday while my car was jacked. When the man of the house opened the door yesterday, I didn’t see an alarm panel by the doorway. Just because I didn’t see it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there somewhere, but there are certain
risks I’m willing to take. It’s a long way down from the window to the ground and I know my bad ankle can’t take the pressure, so I lower myself as far as I can and drop down on my good leg. For the most part, the thick leather gloves I’m wearing have protected my hands from the broken glass edging the frame.
From a quick glance, the basement is full of junk and old sports equipment, so I try my luck up the stairs. On the dining room table I find a stack of bills addressed to Harvey Watts, but nothing in the way of personal correspondence. The little girl has invaded all rooms here with her artwork and her toys. There is no safe place on this floor for a man’s personal belongings, so up I go again. There are two bedrooms on the second floor and a third that has been converted to an office. Because I don’t have much time, I go straight to the office.
It could be dumb luck that I find what I’m looking for right on the floor by the desk, or it could be that, after I left yesterday, Harvey Watts took a trip down memory lane and didn’t bother to put the files away after he was done. Maybe he wanted to have his memories handy, the way that people sometimes do when the past comes knocking.
In any case, here in this battered briefcase are the documents of my father’s life. There are several photos of two boys growing up. I realize that the man who slammed the door in my face must be his adoptive brother. I only have enough time to do a cursory check on the briefcase before the door opens and closes downstairs. Outside the windows, the gutters are so rusted I don’t think they’ll hold my weight. I slip quietly into the hall and down the stairs, hoping that Harvey has missed his breakfast and that I can just head out the front door.
