August Snow

by Stephen Mack Jones

  I thanked Skittles and told him I’d leave his pay at Rocking Horse. Plus the usual two-week supply of Skittles candy. I said I’d also leave some fresh fruits and vegetables from Eastern Market because Man did not live by sugar alone.

  “What are you?” he said. “My fuckin’ mother?”

  He said if I wanted him to go any further, the price was triple. No candy. No fruits or vegetables. Just go-bag cash.

  Takes a lot to spook Skittles.

  Takes a lot to spook me.

  Guess we were both feeling a bit spooked.

  Ten

  I’d eaten very little of the Chinese. Being the child of parents who believed wasting food was a sin, I put the leftovers in my new refrigerator, confident it would make for a good, if slightly unorthodox, breakfast. Maybe a General Tso’s omelet.

  I stared at my new TV suspended over the living room fireplace and listened to Charles Barkley take a hot steaming dump on the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant’s legacy. Normally, I would have been doubled over laughing at anything that came out of Barkley’s bombastic mouth. But I was thinking about Eleanor Paget—a woman who, by all indications and accounts, was a mean-spirited, greedy, dictatorial megalomaniac. Someone capable of turning numerous people to stone by virtue of a simple, unblinking blue-eyed stare.

  While vilified and excoriated by many, Paget was equally revered by others: The Detroit Institute of Arts held her in the highest esteem for her multimillion dollar donations and exhibition sponsorships. Her wildly successful thousand-dollar-a-plate black-tie fundraisers and well-publicized speeches acted as a safeguard against anyone who dared think the two billion dollars in art and antiquities at the Detroit Institute of Arts was a quick-sale remedy to the city’s mounting bankruptcy debts.

  To Children’s Hospital she was an angel of mercy for her gifts of money, purchases of state-of-the-art medical equipment and her full payment of hospital bills and funeral expenses for as many as forty children over the past five years. For whatever she may have been behind closed doors, she knew how to smile a Mother Teresa smile and embrace sick kids when the camera shutters clicked or video cameras rolled.

  She was good at the theatrics of being magnanimous.

  After the ugly and very public death of her husband and his underage paramour, Eleanor Paget needed good PR. Helping sick kids, battered women, an art museum and homeless Iraq and Afghan war vets helped to counteract not only the transgressions of her philandering husband but also the longstanding and very tangible animosity between those with money—who were few, mostly white and ensconced in suburbs like the Grosse Pointes—and those without money, mostly black and Hispanic, who had seen the open sore of Detroit fester year after year.

  She was a sanitizing strip of gauze over the deep and bleeding lacerations inflicted by herself and her peers. Barons like her had mined their gold in the heart of a dark-skinned city, then left when the mines were played out.

  Ten months after my investigation into her husband’s murder/suicide, I’d been fighting for my professional life: Detective Sgt. August Octavio Snow v. Detroit Police Department and the Office of the Mayor. Through an intermediary, Eleanor Paget had offered to pay for a high-powered legal defense team out of Chicago to represent me. I’d declined.

  Now she was on a slab in the city morgue with holes to her right temple and the top left of her head.

  At nine o’clock I got a call.

  “He’s clean.”

  It was Ray Danbury.

  “Who’s clean?”

  “Your boy—this LaJames Lewis Radmon you wanted me to check out,” Danbury said. “Couple minor traffic violations. No arrests, no warrants.”

  “Thanks, Ray.”

  “‘And if you give yourself to the hungry/And satisfy the desire of the afflicted/Then your light will rise in darkness/And your gloom will become like midday,’” Danbury said. “Isaiah 58:10. Your daddy quoted that more than once at the end of the bible study group at the Fourteenth Precinct. This Radmon kid. He’s your charity case, ain’t he?”

  “Dad was in a bible study group?”

  “Lots I suspect you don’t know ’bout your daddy,” Danbury said, a strange wistfulness in his voice. “Lots I suspect you don’t know ’bout me, either.” He paused for a moment. Then, his voice normal again, Danbury said, “Anything else I can do for you? Shine your shoes? Pick up your dry-cleaning?”

  “A deep-tissue massage might be nice,” I said.

  Danbury disconnected.

  At 3:15 a.m. Monday I found myself awake with a cup of black coffee in my hand, thinking about how Eleanor Paget’s death might define me.

  My phone rang.

  “You awake?”

  It was Bobby Falconi from the Wayne County Coroner’s Office.

  “Seems I am,” I said. “What’s up?”

  In the background I could hear Frank “Honeyboy” Patt’s “Bloodstains on the Wall.”

  “I just finished Eleanor Paget’s autopsy and got the labs back.”

  “And?”

  “Yeah, well, it looks like suicide,” Bobby said. “But there’s a couple small things that don’t add up, at least for me.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as she was a diabetic,” Jack said. “Type One.”

  “So?”

  “So why would a Type One diabetic take a low-dosage ACE inhibitor and an injection of Humulin, washed down with maybe two ounces of white wine—a Chardonnay—fifteen minutes to a half hour before shooting herself in the head?”

  Some diabetics, Bobby explained, were prescribed ACE inhibitors to keep their kidneys healthy and their blood pressure under control. Humulin was simply regular-acting insulin.

  “Does that sound like a suicidal?” Bobby concluded.

  “What else?” I said.

  “Hey, listen.” Bobby sighed heavily before speaking again. “Maybe it’s late—or early. But the GSR on her right hand? Looks like it was—I don’t know—applied. Where you’d expect voids in patterning, there aren’t any. I’d never swear to that on a witness stand, though. It’s just too inconclusive.”

  I asked him if he was including this information in his official report.

  “Yeah, of course,” Bobby said. “You know the routine, August. But everything I’ve given you is just gonna look like standard stuff on a report. It’s not what I put in the report. It’s how it’s interpreted. Any cross on a witness stand and my balls would be in my throat.”

  “Tech guys find anything at the scene?”

  “Maggie from CSU says they were thorough,” Bobby said. “Fingerprints from the house staff, Paget and a couple business associates. A few old, unreadable smudges on the display case the gun was in. Nothing missing. House safe was untouched with forty K in cash, some old bearer bonds, high-end jewelry and unremarkable documents inside. No indications of an intruder.”

  “You know if anybody called her daughter?” I asked.

  “She’s got a daughter?” Bobby said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Vivian. Maybe in her mid-to-late twenties. I take it you don’t know.”

  “Nope,” Bobby said. “That’s sad. She look anything like her mom?”

  “Spittin’ image.”

  “Well, I guess she’s lucky in one respect.”

  I thanked Bobby and we hung up.

  Everybody wanted Eleanor Paget in the ground as quickly as possible: The board of directors at her bank. The Grosse Pointe police. And the Detroit police. The only people worried that she was gone too soon were now quietly panicked that their direct line to her ample wallet might be finally, summarily cut off.

  Eleanor Paget was now a part of local legend. One gun, three people: her husband, her husband’s young mistress and now Eleanor herself.

  Apparently I was the only one who had the nagging feeling that Paget had received assistance in her rocket ride to the afterlife. And that maybe—just maybe—I could have helped her instead of walking away.

  And at 3:35 a.m. Monday morning, I hea
rd my father’s voice echoing in my head.

  “We are defined by those we could have helped and chose not to …”

  Eleven

  In Michigan—somewhere between the end of summer and fall’s beginning—there are rare days of grace. Noon’s warmth lands lightly on the skin and evening’s cool air is welcomed through open bedroom windows. Today marked the end of such grace. Today, fall introduced itself with a decisive chill.

  The sun was still bright but, not unlike me, it was rising later in the morning. Splashes of color were revealing themselves in the trees along the street. Most telling was the late night frost slowly steaming off the grass as the morning sun crept over the horizon.

  Parked outside of my house was Jimmy Radmon’s rusting Pontiac.

  With a cup of coffee in hand, I walked outside and peered inside the car; Radmon was asleep in the back seat. I knocked on the window. He awoke with a start then, seeing me, rolled the rear window down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

  “Well, I was sleeping,” he said.

  “You live in your car?”

  Radmon said nothing.

  I nodded to the house. “Come on.”

  Fifteen minutes later Jimmy was hunched over a plate of my huevos rancheros with sausages, toast and black coffee. For a skinny kid he could pack it away.

  After he ate I asked him what his story was. It wasn’t anything you haven’t heard or read about a thousand times before: didn’t know his father, wished he hadn’t known his mother, quit high school, amazingly smart with no prospects.

  Welcome to the life of a young black Detroit kid. He told me Carmela and Sylvia were having him start on installing their new kitchen cabinets today. I was still a bit stung over the ladies’ opinion of my taste in decor, but it worried me more that I actually cared so much about goddamn kitchen cabinets.

  I gave Jimmy another couple hundred and told him to find a semi-decent hotel or motel until he got back on his feet. I would have invited him to stay under my roof, but I was just getting used to my own mostly sober company.

  “You mind I axe you somethin’, man?” Radmon said.

  “Axe away.”

  “You rich or somethin’?” he said, looking at the money I’d placed in his hand.

  “Or something,” I said. “Here’s the deal, Jimmy. I’m thinking about buying a couple more houses on the street. You play straight with me, you’ll make a decent living helping to renovate ’em. You fuck with me or anybody on my street—and this is my street, compadre—and I will end you. We clear?”

  “You’re him.”

  “What?”

  “That ex-cop, right?” Radmon said, his eyes wide as if he’d just met a celebrity. He pointed at me. “I knew it! You’re him! Oh, damn!”

  “No autographs,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I gotta go.”

  “Shit, I knew it was you!” He raised his hand for a high-five.

  I didn’t high-five him. Instead I gave him a spare key to the house and said, “You can shower, shit and shave here this afternoon after you take care of Carmela and Sylvia. You find something in the fridge you want, have at it. Except for the booze. Don’t touch my TV. When I get home, you’re gone. And if anything’s missing—”

  “I know, I know,” Radmon said. “You’ll ‘end’ me.” Then Radmon narrowed his eyes at me and said, “I don’t fuck my friends, man.”

  “You’re like me, kid,” I said. “You don’t have any friends.”

  A week had passed since Eleanor Paget’s death. People had been interviewed. Official reports had been written, emailed and filed. The local TV news had breathlessly reported her death. She’d been unctuously eulogized in all the newspapers for her generosity and compassion. The new Detroit mayor—the city’s first smilin’ Irishman in fifty years—had spoken at length about what Eleanor Paget had meant to the revitalization of the city. And various industry leaders had issued statements praising Eleanor Paget for her business acumen and commitment to the Greater Detroit community.

  Everyone feigned missing poor Eleanor Paget.

  I’d purchased a black Perry Ellis suit, black Cole Haan shoes, white shirt and mourning-black tie. I had requested a few special alterations that seemed to rouse a scowl of curiosity from the short, balding tailor with bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows and an Eastern European accent. It was, of course, extra to have the suit altered in time for Eleanor Paget’s memorial service. But with Marcus at the needle, the suit looked and felt impeccable. With his expert alterations, you wouldn’t even know I was packin’ heat.

  I hadn’t been invited to the memorial service, but it felt only right to go and pay whatever limited respects I had for the woman. My appearance might upset a few of the luminaries, but as this was a memorial service at Grosse Pointe Unity Salvation Presbyterian, I doubted anybody would punch, shoot or shout profanities at me. More likely, two or three security guards with the look of inbred Ivy League frat brothers would quietly ask to speak to me outside. I would more than likely look up at them, smile and say “No,” leaving them scratching their blond heads and wondering what the hell else to do.

  It was a bright, blue-sky day, maybe fifty degrees. There were the occasional white caps on the Detroit River kicked up by a chilled fall wind. A rustred freighter slogged its way north on the river, past several small aluminum fishing boats. Two sailboats bounced on wakes as they tacked out of the freighter’s lumbering path.

  Grosse Pointe Unity Salvation Presbyterian was a looming white stone structure set maybe a hundred well-manicured yards off Jefferson Avenue. For decades it had looked less like a church and more like a pristine militarized outpost that said to all outsiders, “This far, no farther.”

  Still, the Catholic my mother had instilled in me had me automatically making the sign of the cross at the three-story carved marble sculpture of a Brad Pitt-looking Jesus crucified on the front of the church.

  Parking was, of course, valet.

  I took my valet ticket from a young, chinless guy, bounded up the steps and was stopped at the tall double doors of the church by another young guy who looked like he’d just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. He smiled at me, glanced at his iPad and said, “Your name, sir?”

  “He’s with me.”

  I turned.

  “Captain Raymond Danbury, Detroit Police Department,” Danbury said, grinning at the young man and showing his badge. The Abercrombie-wannabe glanced at his iPad, touched the area by Danbury’s name, and said, “Welcome, gentlemen. We have rosebud boutonnières inside for you.”

  As we ascended the remaining steps, Danbury said under his breath, “Jesus. You got a couple brass ones.”

  In the white and gold anteroom, two young, freckled women pinned white rose boutonnières to our lapels, gave us nicely printed and leather-bound programs and handed us off to another male model type.

  “Do they clone these guys?” Danbury whispered to me.

  About two hundred Detroit luminaries had already gathered in the cavernous church. The memorial service was about ten minutes from starting, so most attendees—all dressed in couture black—were on their smartphones, feverishly checking email and making last minute mission-critical business calls, or collected in small huddles making lunch plans that involved either business, politics or both.

  Money-changers at the temple.

  In front of the long white marble altar was a large framed photo of a grinning Eleanor Paget exposing perhaps more cleavage than acceptable for a solemn affair. Behind the photo positioned on the center of the altar were her remains in an ornate gold and white enamel urn.

  Sonuvabitch.

  She’d been cremated.

  Instead of walking down the center aisle and finding a pew, Danbury gently placed a hand on my forearm and we stopped walking. I turned to him. He was holding his fake smile admirably.

  “Two niggas walk into a Grosse Pointe church,” he said quietly. “One nigga says to the other, ‘What’chu think Jesus woul
d say about us bein’ all up in here?’ The other nigga looks around at the white folk staring at them and says, ‘I don’t know, but I think we ’bout to find out.’”

  I grinned. “That’s pretty funny.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Danbury said. “But you know what ain’t funny? You showin’ up like you own the goddamn place.”

  Before Danbury could say anything else, Aaron Spiegelman, Titan’s CFO, appeared at Danbury’s side. “What is he doing here?”

  “He’s my guest, Mr. Spiegelman,” Danbury said. “Miss Paget had great respect for Mr. Snow. I believe she would have—”

  “How dare you presume what Eleanor—Ms. Paget—would have wanted? You’ve overstepped your bounds, Captain,” Spiegelman said, raising a forefinger to Danbury’s nose.

  “Mr. Spiegelman,” Danbury said calmly. “I don’t much like people putting their finger in my face. Now unless you intend to spend the next hour of this solemn service with that finger jammed up your prissy little ass, I’d suggest you remove it right damn now.”

  Spiegelman lowered his quivering finger. “This isn’t over.”

  “Yes,” Danbury said with a smile, “it is.”

  Spiegelman spun on his heels and rejoined a group of people who had stared with interest at the proceedings.

  “Just like old times, huh?” I said brightly to Danbury. “You. Me. An appreciative public.”

  Danbury scowled at me.

  Then he stormed off, finding others to talk to among the mourners, who included Detroit’s new mayor, Grosse Pointe’s mayor, the police commissioners of both cities, and several chosen representatives of the auto companies, software companies, real estate mortgage companies, hospitals, various charity organizations and the art museum.

  A handsome, well-dressed black woman in her late sixties approached me. She smiled a genuinely pleasant smile, extended her hand and said, “Rose Mayfield, Kip Atchison’s executive secretary at Titan.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “We met at Eleanor Paget’s a couple weeks ago and once prior to that a couple years ago.” I took her hand and we shook.

  “My late husband knew your father,” she said, smiling up at me. “He often said your father was a man of honor. And I know you by reputation. I’m sorry for what the force and the old mayor’s administration did to you, Mr. Snow.”