“Well, it was the same spot where I first met him,” I said for the tenth time. “I was worried and naturally I went back to the place since I knew he liked to sit there. He would drag a—”
“So you’ve said,” Inspector Bates said, interrupting me. “Did it occur to you to tell Inspector Saad where Olsen might be found since you were ready to go right to it?”
“I didn’t go looking for him—not exactly. I passed by the spot on my way to the car—after I’d given up. Sort of stumbled onto it.”
“What was it you wanted from Derek today, in particular?”
“It seemed like a good idea to see how he was after Inspector Saad told me he was missing. And to make sure he wasn’t going to pull some stunt and get us both into trouble again. I felt obligated to his mother. I knew she’d be worried…”
“And did he get you into trouble? Was that the problem?”
The questions went on and on.
Two hours later, Saad showed up and Bates gave him her seat, reassuming her earlier placidity, donning the facade like the familiar sweater you leave on the back of a chair.
I felt like kicking her in the shins, watching the intelligent face of minutes earlier turn bovine. But I turned my attention toward Saad instead.
“You know if I had anything to do with Derek’s death, I wouldn’t have run down a cop in the storm and led him to his body. I would’ve avoided the police. Avoided a situation like this. I would’ve headed home, putting as much distance between us as I could.”
It was difficult to explain my actions, much less put the right spin on them. My words had never counted for so much before.
“I think if you murdered Derek, you’d have done exactly what you did,” Saad said, shaking his wet coat out and hanging it up on a coat tree. “Run down a cop as quickly as possible. You saw me minutes earlier, unintentionally, of course, and once I could put you on the island at the right time, what choice did you have?” He shrugged as if I knew what he meant.
“What?” My tongue was thick and it felt like his words were coming at me through water. “What?” I repeated.
He sat down, using the same towel I’d used an hour or two earlier. “Well, it’d be useless for you to tell us you were elsewhere this afternoon once we’d run into each other. So why not look like the Good Samaritan and alert the cops?” He nodded to himself, satisfied with his scenario. “Knock Derek over the head with a fallen limb and then run for help.”
“Is that how he died?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Well, I didn’t do it. No matter how it looks. I felt responsible for making sure he was okay, you know.”
I knew a million people on TV crime shows, in novels, and in life had claimed this throughout the ages, but it was true. Surely some, like me, were telling the truth.
“I liked Derek. He was one of the few people who ever tried to help me.” I was embarrassed to be saying this to a stranger. “Why would I kill him?”
“Maybe he was the only witness to what you were up to. You could’ve hired him to kill people, and later decided to get rid of him. Especially after you saw he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut. When you realized you’d picked the wrong guy to partner up with.” Saad reared back in his chair and looked supremely satisfied. Each creak of the chair’s base made me see red.
“You think I could handle a geobag? They must weigh a hundred pounds.”
“I saw the camera equipment you tote around. What does that weigh?” He looked me up and down. “And you’re a fairly tall girl. Muscular.” He looked at my legs, my arms. I wasn’t used to being assessed for my strength, and I flinched. “If Derek could haul one up from the shore, so could you.”
“Woman,” I said testily. “I’m a woman. I haven’t been a girl in twenty years. Can I go now?” I added, getting up. “We’ve been through this till my head hurts.”
“Yeah, I guess. Once we get information regarding how and when it happened from the coroner’s office, we’ll need to talk to you again.”
He rose too. We both knocked a little water off his coat as we nudged by the coat tree. Saad peered out the window.
“About stopped out there.” It was dark; most of the street lights were out.
“I guess no one would drive me back to my car? It’s about a mile from here.”
“Sure. We can take you back.”
He motioned to a sergeant at the desk, who followed me out the door. We drove to my car in silence, both afraid to say a word.
I wasn’t home more than twenty minutes when Bill called. “Know I said we should take a break from this wretched business, but I have another body.” He laughed hollowly, dully. “Guess I felt obliged to call. Got me trained.” He paused. “Besides, sooner this is over, the better. Weary of it as I am.”
Despite extreme fatigue, I felt a shiver go down my spine. I’d been considering calling Bill, filling him in on Derek’s death, but put that idea on hold.
Bill wouldn’t be burying him; Derek was white and headed for a resting place in the suburbs. And he’d certainly be lying in the police morgue for days first, gone over by the entire staff probably. So Bill might not hear about Derek’s murder and my part in it until the next morning when the papers got a hold of it—if I was lucky. I should tell him first, but once again I didn’t do what I should. Was it because of my desire to add to my portfolio or my desire for Bill? To not tell him something he wouldn’t like hearing.
“Be right down,” I said, repeating the words I’d uttered so many times now. My energy level inched up a bit.
“I won’t be here. I’ve got a dinner engagement with a client.”
“Rattlesnake Club again?”
I wondered if he took clients there often. The staff seemed pretty familiar with him. How upscale had his business become? Or was it a woman?
“No. This dude wants Mexican. We’re meeting at Evie’s Tamales.”
Evie’s Tamales sat in the city’s southwest corner—a good place to find mostly inauthentic Mexican restaurants, cheap and tasty, but slightly more authentic Mexican grocery stores, day laborers for the area’s landscaping businesses, and a sampling of the city’s most bona fide gangs, Bill grunted, and a few seconds later, hung up.
Ancil Battle, the dead loan officer, and I spent an hour or two alone, an unusual occurrence. If Bill couldn’t stick around, he usually made sure one of his people was hovering over me. But today his personnel was tied up, and I had Ancil to myself.
I’d learned enough about the application of cosmetics to the “beloved” by now to make my own adjustments. I went for Bill’s kit and touched up Ancil’s lips a bit. They looked chalky and two small spots, probably errant cover-up, dotted the neck of his shirt. I managed to remove them and to get Ancil looking right. I doubted Bill had prepped this body. It seemed like a second-rate job. It was hard to say why, but it wasn’t up to Bill’s usual standards. The clothes were perfunctory, a gray suit with a pale peach shirt and tie. His shoes looked wrong for the suit, too square-toed. Ancil wouldn’t be the star of my eventual show, but he’d have his place. His tiny moustache refused to lie flat, and I put a dab of hand moisturizer on it and brushed it. Being alone with his body, touching him with no one standing over me, I started to shake.
The vision of the other body I’d found a few hours ago at Belle Isle—Derek’s—kept running through my head. What invasive procedures were going on with his frail body as I worked over this one? Whenever the image of his body, sticking out from under that bag like a turtle’s, rushed back over me, I began to shake harder. But finally the work itself helped to steady my hands. I wondered what Mrs. Olsen was doing; how she was coping with his death. I thought of Derek’s neighbor, the one who fell in the lake, and the dog who returned to the spot. Who was around to mourn Derek? I knew so little about him.
Ancil Battle was another guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the start of this project, I’d expected to photograph men who died because they were running drugs, in
a gang, stealing cars, in a gunfight. But the majority had been defenseless men unfairly slain by disease or circumstance. Well, Bill and I would see they fared better than the average murder victim. Bodies didn’t bother me per se, no. But the random and senseless accretion going on in Detroit did. I wonder how Mrs. Battle, if there was one, would feel if she saw me sharing these intimate moments with her husband. He looked like a man with a spouse—cared for and loved. Or perhaps there was a mother at home.
When I’d finished with the preparations and had taken an adequate number of photos, I sped back home, crying again. I didn’t realize I was weeping until I turned on the windshield wipers and noticed rain wasn’t the problem. Suck it up, girl. Be an artist.
Bill’d be out for an hour or longer so there was no sense waiting around for him or his call. I took a bath, worried more, and popped a Xanax. As I waited for sleep to come, the guy upstairs started to run on his treadmill. The pounding in my head was almost as bad. I looked up into the mirror and what I saw wasn’t pretty. I got out of bed, ready to run up the stairs and ask Ben to give it up. The mirror seemed to vibrate with the force of Ben’s feet, looking at one point like it had shifted slightly. But before I could rise, I fell asleep somehow.
“We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Do you know you’re in the Free Press, Six? Not one of your delightful photographs of implosions or corpses—but an endearingly grisly item nonetheless. The story didn’t give your name, but it’s you, right? ‘An area photographer on Belle Isle as yesterday’s storm broke discovered the body…’” His voice tailed off.
“Oh, swell. Nice piece of news to wake up to.” Thank God it was Diogenes on the line and not Bill. “No name mentioned, right?” I thought he’d said that, but I was half-asleep.
“Right. I know you don’t get a newspaper, so I thought I’d better call. Helping the police with their inquiries, huh? That’s what the article says. ‘An area photographer, on Belle Isle as yesterday’s storm broke, discovered the body and is currently helping the police with their inquiries.’”
This was the phrase I’d dreaded hearing and here it was in the newspaper. Di paused. “You actually found his body? The kid you mentioned, right? Eric?”
“Derek. Derek Olsen.”
“I knew it was you right away. What the hell were you doing on Belle Isle in that storm? The restaurant still doesn’t have power back. Didn’t have an appointment to fix you up, did we? Turkey Grill time? Didn’t get any messages.”
“I was down there poking around.”
I wished he had fixed me up though. This news, when paired with my sins from the night before, immediately produced a headache that made daylight lethal.
“Poking around? Doesn’t sound plausible. Not in that storm. We all ran down to the basement and huddled together for the duration. Sirens were going off, for God’s sake.”
“I was already there when it blew in.” I took the phone into the bathroom with Di still talking in my ear. Babbling on about how crazy I was not to have an attorney, how stupid it was I couldn’t tell Bill I loved him. That I was willing to settle for—well, whatever it was I settled for.
“This was the kid you told me about, right?” he repeated. “The freaky guy who builds sand castles from found objects?”
“Sculptures. Yeah. I was down there. Doing, I don’t know what,” I repeated. “Maybe looking for him; I don’t know. His mother—well, she’s the kind of woman who makes you want to do good by her.” I laughed nervously. “So I was poking around the spot where I last saw him. And there he was—under one of those bags the Parks Department uses for erosion. Probably the same one he dragged up to sit on.” The vision of him there came back to me. My brain had photographed it more saliently than any camera could.
“From what you’ve told me so far, I thought he was probably the kind of guy who crawled out from under a rock.” Di could usually get away with sarcasm, but today he caught himself. “Lord love a duck. I don’t believe I said that. That was nasty. My need to make a joke when I’m talking to you can outpace good taste. Or humanity even. That’s the kind of relationship we built as kids. Maybe it’s time to change it.”
“Except he didn’t,” I said, ignoring the apology and the observation. “Crawl out. He was splayed like road kill.”
I could still picture him with all four limbs extending. Funny how many of my recent days had been about arms and legs. Or hands and feet.
“Squashed like a roach,” I added.
“Enough analogies. I got the idea from the newspaper’s photo. You’ll flip out when you see what a piss poor photo it is. Should have let you take it.”
“Now that wasn’t likely to happen. I was holed up at the harbormaster headquarters with an interrogation team by the time the photographer arrived, I guess.” I thought about it for a minute. “Same damned cops as last time. The other day, back at my place, it was a fairly polite interview, but yesterday it was an interrogation. No chitchat, no niceties.”
“Poor baby.”
“Can I get back to you later? We could actually talk about your life too. Topics other than what’s going on in my part of the world. What’re you doing after you close tonight?”
“I can probably get out of here by nine or so. It’s Tuesday.”
“How about Greektown? Apollo’s?” I stifled a chortle, knowing his thoughts on Detroit’s Greek cuisine. He grumbled a bit but gave in. One of his biggest gripes was that every restaurant in Greektown served the same terrible Americanized version of Greek food. “It’s been bastardized over the years, but a semi-ambitious chef could make a trip to Athens and reinvent their menu. French and Italian chefs do it all the time. But not those guys. They sit on a menu invented in 1935 like it was handed down by…Plato.”
I always countered with the argument that Detroit’s American Greeks were used to their own version of the cuisine and would fight any change.
“It’d be better to risk losing a few customers. At least they could take pride in their kitchen. Half of them serve canned peas and rice with each entrée. When was the last time you ate canned peas anywhere else?”
After hanging up with Di, I thought again about calling Bill. He’d probably seen the Freep by now, and if he hadn’t, I’d have to tell him about it. Either option seemed unattractive. Maybe I should put distance between us. He probably wouldn’t notice my absence. When did he stop noticing me? I slapped the poor me thoughts out of my head and thought about what to do.
I decided to take a look at the photos I’d amassed for my show so far. Maybe it’d take my mind off what I saw yesterday. Derek. Would he have come to this end if I left him alone? Possibly. He did poke around on the island looking for stuff to hang. But certainly I pushed him into more dangerous territory. This was a consequence of allowing more people into my life. They went and got themselves killed.
I hadn’t looked at my output in a week or two. I put the extra leaves in the dining room table up, pushed it against the wall, and propped the pictures up. In some cases, I wasn’t positive the shot was the one I’d eventually use. I had several acceptable choices for a few of the men.
Rodney Jones, the rugby player. I’d probably use the photograph in the show out of sentimentality, but its quality was not nearly as good as the rest. Not with its graininess and the glossy background from the prep room that made it shimmer. What made it stand out, however, was the sheen and flamboyance of the rugby uniform and Bill’s hand in making Rodney look more vibrant than a corpse had any right to look. There’d been no trauma to his body. He looked perfect—if dead. If I ever put together a book, it’d be good enough to include.
Willis Dumphrey, the bartender from Slack’s Shack, elegant in the ex-mayor’s tux. This might be the best photo overall, though I still hadn’t found the right location at Bi
ll’s place in terms of lighting and angle when I shot it. It looked a bit tentative. But Willis, unlike most of the other men, had come into his own. His face was filled out. He looked confident and peaceful despite his sudden death.
Ramir Obabie, the guy who overdosed. Bill did the best he could with Ramir, but a lifelong drug habit took its toll.. I remembered Bill saying he’d dressed him for his last dance—saying he liked dancing. I’d bet it had been a long time since this man had the energy to dance.
Barry Johnson, the paralyzed victim of West Nile virus, dressed in a stock car racer’s colors. In his photo, you couldn’t tell he’d spent his last years in a wheelchair. It felt inauthentic—a pretense that he’d died in a car race. I couldn’t photograph him in his chair, but this charade—that he was still a virile man—well, I’d never have allowed it had he been my son. It looked like his parents were ashamed of him. Or was I just thinking what would’ve worked best for me? Whereas they were thinking how he wished to be remembered.
Cajuan Grace, the photo I was forbidden to use, looking like a handsome but angry rapper—even in death. The baseball cap, worn at an angle, of course, had been cut and pinned to the fabric lining of the casket so it would lie flat. Bill told me later the photographer they’d called in asked them to dress and redress him half a dozen times—each outfit different.
“I almost threw the guy out,” Bill said, “but his sister calmed me down. Said Cajuan himself went through such a routine each time he played a concert, said he was more worried about his clothes looking right than he was about the music.”
Albert Flowers in his marine uniform. Wearing a pair of glasses at his wife’s insistence. I removed them for a few of the shots, but went with this photo with him wearing them in the end. For a youngish man, he had deep pockets under his eyes.
“Wife says he hated those pouches,” Bill said. “Never took his glasses off because of it.” Albert was right to think he looked younger in glasses.
Peter Oberon, the fireman, also in uniform. His crushed chest was padded into normalcy. He had the look of a hero. His bear-like body probably cost him his life.
Shot In Detroit Page 17
