August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  I turned my headlights off and parked the car a half block away from my house.

  Then I checked my Glock. Full clip, one in the snout.

  Just as I got out of my car, the neighbor across the street emerged from his house carrying a baseball bat. With a thick Mexican accent, he hollered to the man standing by the car, “What are you doing here? There are children here! Go away!”

  The black man standing by the car turned to look at the Mexican man on the porch.

  Then he pulled a gun.

  Before he could raise and level the weapon, I had my Glock pressed against his temple. The tires of the other car squealed and screamed off into the darkening fall evening.

  “Nice night to be somewhere else, isn’t it, asshole?” I said.

  The young man began trembling. He shifted his eyes to get a look at me, but it was obvious he didn’t want to move too much for fear of having his head explode clean off his shoulders.

  “Yes, sir,” the young man said.

  I turned my attention to the Mexican man standing on his front porch with the baseball bat.

  “My name’s August Octavio Snow, sir,” I said to the man on the front porch. “I’m your neighbor across the street.”

  “Carlos,” the man said.

  “Nice to meet you, Carlos,” I said, still pressing the barrel of my gun against the young man’s temple. “It’s pretty cold out tonight. Why don’t you go inside and get warm. Tell your family everything’s all right because it is, okay?”

  After a moment, Carlos nodded and went back inside his house, but he stood by the darkened living room window watching me and the young drug dealer.

  I turned my attention back to the young black man. “Now, then, what’s your name?”

  “Jimmy,” the trembling young man said. “Jimmy Radmon.”

  “You sellin’ drugs, Jimmy Radmon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, not anymore. At least not around here.” Then I said, “What are you? Seventeen? Eighteen?”

  “Eighteen, sir.”

  “Eighteen’s too young to die, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jimmy Radmon said. He swallowed hard. “Too young to die.”

  “Tell you what, Jimmy Radmon.” I eased the gun out of his hand. It was an old, battered .32 and light, probably no bullets. “You seem like a smart kid. So here’s the deal: you come around here again selling drugs, I’ll kill ya. Then I’ll toss your dead body in an abandoned house two blocks over and let the rats feast off your corpse. How are you with a paintbrush and power tools?”

  Confused, Jimmy Radmon turned his head to finally get a full look at me and the gun that had been pressed against his temple. “What?”

  “Simple question: You any good with a paintbrush and power tools?”

  “I—yeah—I done some work,” he said nervously.

  “What’s your rate?”

  “My what?”

  “Your rate,” I repeated. “How much you charge an hour?”

  “Man, I’m ’bout to shit my mothafuckin’ pants and you askin’ how much I charge an hour?” he said. “Brotha, I be chargin’ whatever you willin’ to pay.”

  “Good,” I said stowing both guns away. “Now empty your pockets.”

  He did: three dime bags of marijuana, couple baggies of coke, couple baggies of crystal meth. All of it now at his feet.

  “You’re not very good at selling drugs, are you, Jimmy Radmon,” I said looking at his car, a rusted-out 1998 Pontiac piece-of-shit.

  “Second time out,” he said, lowering his head in shame.

  “Last time out,” I said. “You a corner boy?”

  “A what?”

  “You answer to anybody?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “Just tryin’ to get over’s all. Ain’t nothin’ for niggahs in Detroit.”

  I took him by his upper right arm and walked him to the middle of the street underneath a streetlamp. Then I shouted, “Hello, Markham Street neighbors and friends! My name is August Octavio Snow and I live at 2324 Markham! I’d like your attention just for a moment!” A few lights came on. A few curtains parted. A door or two cracked open. After a minute or so, Carmela and Sylvia stepped out onto their porch. Four others followed.

  “Everybody,” I said, “this is Jimmy Radmon.”

  Carmela waved and said, “Hello, Jimmy.”

  “Jimmy was going to sell drugs in the neighborhood. I’ve convinced him to follow another, more promising career path. In a couple days, Mr. Radmon will be painting a few rooms in my house and maybe doing some repair work. If he’s any good, I’d like for you to give him a chance. If he sucks, let’s just say you won’t have to pay his bill. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy your evening.”

  “Can Mr. Radmon take a look at our water heater?”

  It was Carmela again.

  I looked at Jimmy Radmon and said, “You know anything about water heaters?” He nodded. “Well, Jesus, don’t just stand there—go take a look at it.” I pushed him toward Carmela and Sylvia’s house. “And remember: I know places where your body would never be found, Jimmy Radmon.”

  “How much do I charge?” he whispered back to me.

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll cover you on this one. A hundred if you fuck it up. Three hundred you set the ladies’ water heater right and leave them wanting to feed you milk and cookies. Stay away from their brownies. Come back to my house in two days. We’ll talk about the other houses around here that could use work.”

  He took a few more steps toward Carmela and Sylvia’s house before stopping. He half turned to me and in a low, shaky voice said, “Thanks, man.”

  I spent the next couple days unpacking bags and boxes and sifting through the storage unit I’d rented before leaving on my post-trial international drinking binge. I bought a few pieces of furniture for the house, starting with one of those high-tech select-your-number beds. I added a forest-green leather sofa, a large flat screen TV (what’s a home without ESPN in hi-def?) and a nice sound system so I could listen to some of my mom and dad’s old CDs and 101.9FM, Detroit’s NPR affiliate. Rounding out things, I brought in a few pieces of my old life to make the place feel a little bit more like home: my dad’s Arts and Crafts paddle-armrest chair and some of my mother’s art.

  The former drug dealer Jimmy Radmon had managed to fix Carmela and Sylvia’s water heater and I paid him three hundred cash. He said they had more work for him—which I couldn’t imagine since I’d already completely renovated the house before flipping it.

  “Don’t look at me, man,” Radmon said with a big, theatrical shrug. “They don’t like the kitchen cabinets and they want me to install new ones they done bought.”

  I laid another couple C-notes on top of the ones in his hand and grumbled, “Those are nice cabinets I had installed, goddammit. There’s nothing wrong with those cabinets.”

  “They women, man,” Radmon said. “Old, but still women.”

  Soon after he left, I made a run to a place in the southern, most-decayed industrial corner of Mexicantown, a building that had once been a shipping and receiving warehouse. The building—cryptically named Rocking Horse—was now mostly revitalized, a small miracle achieved by an influx of artists. Three floors of open-concept artist studios, meeting rooms and makeshift coffee bar and kitchen. Against all odds, the Rocking Horse building was mostly resurrected from the dead, brick by brick, wire by wire. Young painters and sculptors, photographers and guerrilla filmmakers, all at great personal risk, reclaimed the corpse of the building. They battled the rats and swept up the used needles, the shattered brown bottles, the empty malt liquor cans, the vomit and shit, both human and animal.

  When I had worked Eleanor Paget’s husband’s murder/suicide, Rocking Horse is where I’d originally gotten in contact with Skittles. He was considered something of a hacker legend. The Banksy of black hat computing.

  I was greeted at Rocking Horse by a young, white, pudgy hippy-wannabe guy with a patchy black beard
meticulously making a cup of coffee at the studio’s makeshift coffee bar.

  “You here for the Kresge thing?” the tubby barista said, a grin peeking through his unkempt beard.

  “No,” I said. “I need to talk to Skittles.”

  The bearded barista wasn’t very practiced at lying; his eyes widened, he shifted nervously and his furry lower lip quivered. It was oddly refreshing to see such innocence. “Who?”

  “Just tell him we need to talk,” I said smiling at the man. “Pronto, mi amigo.”

  Inadvertently, the man nodded.

  I left.

  Saturday afternoon, I went to the Boll Family YMCA downtown on Broadway. This was a YMCA no one could have imagined ten years earlier, especially in the heart of the city: bright, sleek and spacious, everything the northern suburban private health clubs wanted to be save for diverse and socially responsible. I’d joined soon after returning to the city.

  Of course, I was old-school Y and the variety of New Age weight equipment initially confused and angered me. When did weight-training equipment start looking like the torture machines of the Spanish Inquisition?

  I was standing in front of a piece of machinery called a deltoid catalytic isometer and trying to figure out just what the hell it was. There were illustrations on the side of the machine showing how to use it. I imagined the illustrations were done by the same half-wit who did instruction manuals for Ikea.

  A tall, well-toned, tanned and impossibly vivacious white brunette wearing an array of expensive and revealing spandex offered to help me figure out the machine.

  “Frankly,” she said slowly, assessing me from head to toe, “I don’t think you need the DCI. Your delts look pretty—you know—developed. If you don’t mind my saying.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Your delts are nicely developed, too. So what’s your favorite workout?”

  After a wheatgrass and apple smoothie that seriously tested my gag reflex, the brunette—a web and mobile apps security customer relations manager named Beka Something-or-Other—invited me back to her apartment on Woodward Avenue in the redeveloped Midtown area to show me her favorite workout, which involved a lot of pelvic thrusts, squats and lifts. Primal hunger without a modicum of emotional connection. Occasionally during our workout I thought about a dark-skinned woman I’d known in Oslo.

  This was nothing like Oslo.

  This was a welcome distraction. An escape from myself.

  Afterwards I went back to my house, showered and thought some more about Oslo beneath the jets of hot water. Then, in an effort to feel at least partially grounded, I brewed a pot of rich black coffee in my folks’ old percolator.

  Later that evening my phone rang, but it wasn’t my regular ringtone. It was the Four Tops classic Reach Out.

  I answered it.

  “Yo-yo, Snowman,” Skittles said brightly. “How’s the land of the living and the dead treatin’ ya, bro? And you like that upgrade?”

  “What upgrade?”

  Apparently for sport Skittles had tracked my travels abroad. Amazing the information one credit card can provide. Finding that after a year away I’d booked a flight back to Detroit from Oslo, Skittles had upgraded me to first-class flight accommodations on Delta. Naively, I thought the upgrade was simply a credit card reward.

  “Bring me anything from Mumbai, Bruges or Oslo?” he said.

  “Smiles and memories.”

  “Damn,” he said.

  “I didn’t exactly leave here to go on a shopping spree, Skittles,” I said. “That being said, I may have something nice for you.”

  I told him what I needed and how much I’d pay, including his usual required perk: a Costco-sized box of the actual Skittles candy. He seemed genuinely excited, not necessarily at the prospect of hacking into Titan Investment Securities Group’s computer system—that was something he could have done after sucking down a bowl of Cambodian hash. No, it was the prospect of actually being paid cash in addition to a few weeks’ worth of Skittles candy.

  “Thanks for taking the job,” I finally said. “Not many people willing to reconnect with me these days.”

  “You was always cool with me,” he said. “Ain’t about a thang, Snowman. Just remember: cash be kang. All other suckas can hit the bricks with they dicks in they fists.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Hacker and poet. A real renaissance man.”

  Later, sitting on my new forest-green leather sofa, I looked through family photo albums: My mother and father picnicking on Belle Island. Vacationing in Traverse City and Alabama and south of Mexico City. Their wedding. Me as a baby with my dad’s badge pinned to my onesie. Thanksgivings and Christmases. Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexicantown. High school and college graduations. My dad saluting me at my graduation from the academy.

  Family albums go better with scotch.

  Or a gun.

  At around seven o’clock Sunday morning there was a succession of heavy knocks on my door. I did what any citizen of the City of Detroit would do after hearing a succession of knocks on their door at seven o’clock in the morning. I racked one in the barrel of my gun and looked through the narrow windows of my front door.

  It was Ray Danbury.

  Eleanor Paget was dead.

  I felt my heart skip a beat. I fought the urge to make the sign of the cross, partially out of shock and partially out of guilt. I’d blown off a person’s real concerns based on their social and financial stature.

  Danbury was very interested in knowing where I had been Saturday night. I told him.

  “That’s it?” Danbury said. “No clubs, parties, orgies?”

  “Nope.”

  “Damn. You ’bout the dullest millionaire I know.”

  “I’m the only millionaire you know.” I peered over his shoulder. “Where’s Cowling?”

  “You kids don’t play well together,” Danbury said. “I drove myself.”

  I offered Danbury coffee, which he waved off. Looking around, he nodded his approval. “Needs a lady’s loving touch. I’m all about that TV, though.”

  On the way downtown, I asked Danbury how Eleanor Paget had died. As he guided the unmarked cruiser through northbound I-75 traffic like a seasoned Formula One driver, he told me it had been a single GSW to the head. It looked like suicide, but since this was Eleanor Paget all the i’s had to be dotted and the t’s crossed.

  “And the gun?” I said.

  “Oh, you gonna love this,” Danbury said. “Remember the gun her husband used to top himself and the girl? The gun I nearly got my ass in a sling for?”

  I did. A nickel-plated limited edition Smith & Wesson .38 with a rosewood grip. Before I was able to confirm a suspicion, Danbury, under pressure from Eleanor Paget and her team of lawyers, had released the gun to the family. This was the shit bucket Danbury had alluded to at Schmear’s Deli. The mess he didn’t want any lawyer—defense or prosecution—poking around in at my trial.

  “Same gun,” Danbury said. “When I released it to Paget couple years ago, you know what she did?” Danbury paused for dramatic effect then said, “She had a display case made for it. Cherry wood with gold inlay. Italian marble base. Had it in a room off the library. Brass plate underneath. You know what the plate says? ‘The Bastard’s Last Gift.’”

  Danbury exploded with laughter, then he shook his head and said, “Yeah, buddy-buddy. The rich truly are different from you and me.”

  “I am one of the rich now,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Danbury said. “But I know where yo high-yellow ass come from, so you can’t be runnin’ no bougie game with me, nigga.”

  Eight

  Through the Wayne County Morgue’s autopsy room speakers, master bluesman R.L. Burnside was singing “.44 Pistol.”

  Eleanor Paget’s washed and naked body was laid out on a shimmering stainless steel autopsy table. Lying next to her on separate tables were the remains of three other former human beings patiently awaiting the medical examiner’s professional attention.

  O
n the ride downtown, Danbury said Paget’s body was discovered in the library where we had met three days earlier. She was found by the young Hispanic woman who had served me coffee. The Grosse Pointe Police Department had followed standard procedure by begrudgingly calling the DPD for professional assistance.

  “Most of her head’s still there,” Danbury said. We were in the viewing room just outside the morgue examination room waiting for Bobby Falconi. Danbury poured himself a cup of road tar coffee that had been cooking for a couple hours. He added three packets of sugar, a splash of cream, stirred with his thumb, then sucked the coffee from under his nail.

  “Time?” I said.

  “Falconi says late Saturday or early Sunday morning. He’ll know more later.”

  “.44 Pistol” was fading out and Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” was fading up as Dr. James Robert Falconi, Wayne County Chief Medical Examiner, entered the viewing room wearing an impeccably ironed white lab coat. Bobby Falconi was a black man in his early fifties who looked twenty years younger. He shaved his head, which made him look all the more imposing, and he had a jagged one-inch scar over his left eye. He would tell you he got the scar in an ugly fight at a strip club on 8 Mile Road. Truth is he got it when a beaker in the Trace Lab exploded.

  Bobby was the toughest looking nerd you’d ever meet.

  He saw me, grabbed my hand and shook it enthusiastically. On the lapel of his lab coat was a large round pin that bore a photo of a pretty high school girl in cap and gown.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said grinning. “Long time, kiddo.”

  “Long time, Bobby,” I said. I pointed to the photo button. “That can’t be Miko, can it?”

  “Sure is.” Bobby proudly tapped a thick finger on the button. “Off to Julliard in a week. Full ride for viola and composition. You have no idea how weird it is to have a black child who thinks, ‘Yeah, boy! Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven! Now thems ma niggas!’”

  “She must get it from the missus,” I teased.

  Bobby laughed, then his eyes narrowed and he scanned me from head to toe. “Damn, August. Sorry what happened to you, man. Somebody had to take the fall for being honest in this city and, tag, you were it.” Then he brightened. “So what brings you and Tubby McGlutton”—he nodded to Danbury—“to my Little Den of Decomp?”