Shot In Detroit

by Patricia Abbott

  The recognizable graffiti I saw, and some of it was on the sides of houses, was so steeped in symbols and mysterious squibs I couldn’t begin to decode it. Either it was hopelessly enigmatic or the work of children. In several places, primitive murals of village life in an alternate universe covered old tags. A street filled with stacks of cement pipes for a new sewer line was heavily sprayed, each cylinder of cement with the same seemingly innocuous O and A, linked by a squiggly, blue line. The O could have meant Olsen, but I doubted it. It looked freshly sprayed and Derek had been dead for days now. I climbed out of the car once or twice and took several photos, although none seemed promising.

  It was starting to rain and I headed back to the car. For a grand finale, I swung by Holy Redeemer Church, the heart of Detroit’s Hispanic community. An elderly woman was washing the front steps with a scrub brush and a bucket of detergent. It looked like an act of respect or contrition rather than a paid assignment.

  I was much too undereducated in tagging to know what to look for. Maybe a trip with Di was worth considering. Maybe I could corral Saad into showing me around—he’d expressed gratitude.

  Next, feeling empowered by my trip through gangland, I headed for Oakwood Hospital in nearby Dearborn.

  “I’m looking for an Athena Grace,” I told the elderly man at the information desk.

  “A patient?” he said, poising his fingers over the keyboard and looking through his reading glasses at the screen.

  “A nurse.”

  The flow of people through the lobby muffled my words and he put a hand to his ear. “Personal business?”

  “No, it’s about her work with diabetic patients. I’m doing a piece on it for the newspaper.” I whipped out the press pass I only got to use once or twice a year. “She’s done research in that area.”

  Apparently unimpressed by cutting-edge research, the man gazed at the press pass stoically and nodded, his eyes returning to the screen. “What’s the name again?” I told him and he typed it in. “Nope, not at Oakwood-Dearborn anymore. Been reassigned to the endocrinology department downriver. Trenton.” He looked up. “Need the address?” Not waiting for an answer, he clicked and a map came off the printer in seconds. He handed it over, looking past me to the next person in line.

  I was about to put a foot on the gas pedal a few minutes later when the cell rang. It was Bill. My heart did a little jig as I answered.

  “Hi.” His voice hovered between warm and cool. “Why was your phone turned off?”

  I started to tell him I’d been in a hospital plastered with signs about turning off cell phones, but thought better of it. “Didn’t know it was off. Sorry. Something up?”

  “Usual stuff. You’d have to get right down here though.” He paused. “I was late getting to him and now—well, you know the story.”

  “Be there in twenty minutes. No, wait. I have to go home for the Deardorff. Don’t want to use anything else at this point. Damn. Can you give me an hour?”

  “That’s the outside limit. If I’m not around when you arrive, he’s the one in white.”

  “White? Like a bride?” I took a deep breath, thinking of the finished photo already. “Why white?”

  “You got me. Parents picked it out from my wardrobe. Supposedly the suit belonged to a jazz musician, back in the sixties, I think. White satin with pearl buttons. I got it on eBay last year.”

  I whistled. “Hey, we haven’t bumped into each other in a while, Bill.” Would he get my euphemism? “Could you hang around for a few minutes maybe?”

  “Maybe a few. Got a million things to wrap up.”

  “I’ll be quick.”

  Maybe there’d be time to tell him. How long could it take to say, “Hey, Bill, I’m partly black.” Or “Hey, Bill, I have a contract for you to sign.” Or “Hey, Bill, who’s this Athena Grace you’re hanging out with?”

  Bill was waiting in the hallway when I lumbered in with my equipment. “Anything wrong?” I asked. He’d never waited in the hall for me before. He looked antsy.

  “Not really. His parents are in there with him. Let’s give them a few minutes alone.” He herded me into his office. “Two guys murdered their son for a pair of twenty-dollar sunglasses. Thought they might cost as much as two hundred, and how could they pass up getting a nickel bag of coke. Can you believe this rotten world?”

  Bill started to put out a hand but then pulled it back. I felt a chill—had I become untouchable? “Look, I’ve gotta take off.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been an hour and a half since I called.”

  “Traffic. On the Chrysler.” I’d flown considering the number of cars on the freeways, the number of lane closures, the accident. “Maybe we can get together tonight? Tomorrow night?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got Marcus Denton to see to tonight. And tomorrow night—well, I should drive up to Saginaw and see Mom. You know how it is.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t believe a word of it. “Maybe later in the week?”

  He nodded, relieved. “I’ll give you a call once I get past a few of these events.”

  He was halfway out the door, never having so much as hugged me, smiled, or asked me a question. It was hard to remember what exactly he knew about it’d been so long. What had we talked about back in the days when our relationship was going well? Or at least better.

  Suddenly, he looked back. “What’s this? Number ten or eleven?”

  “One or the other,” I told him, not sure how many of the photographs were legal. “I’m not keeping an exact count. Bad luck,” I added inanely.

  “I’m thinking ten. Ten seems like a good place to end it, Violet. Tell Ernst, you’re ready.”

  “I’d planned on twelve,” I almost whispered.

  He sighed. “But it’ll be wrapped up in a few weeks?” I nodded. “Can’t say I won’t be relieved. No, way more than that.” His eyes softened. “I mean it’s been interesting at times, and a few of the families have actually taken comfort from the pictures, but still.”

  “Still, it’s not your style.”

  “Nope.” He put his hand on the doorknob. “Good luck with Marcus. I think you’ll be pleased.” He shook off the words. “Sounds heartless, but what doesn’t with this project of yours. That’s what tears it for me.” He looked at me hard. “If I’d said no early on, would you have stopped bugging me? Would that have ended it?”

  Before I could answer, he was gone. I crept back and found Marcus alone in his casket. He was gorgeous. Even in my state of despair over Bill, I could see it. Sunglasses? A monster had killed this man for his sunglasses.

  “If I could tell a story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.”

  Lewis Hine

  “You do realize this is a Looney Tune scheme,” Di said, sitting across the table in the only non-trendy coffee shop in Royal Oak, Detroit’s hippest suburb for the under-forty set. “A scenario you’d see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. A plan without parallel even from you.”

  “Isn’t Bugs Bunny a Warner Brothers cartoon?”

  I’d reached a level of desperation where ideas like this one came to me unbidden. Desperation had taken my common sense prisoner. I needed to tell Bill about a hundred different things. Have him to myself—alone and uninterrupted. With her out of the picture.

  Di’s beautifully Botoxed forehead would have wrinkled if it could. He settled for a finger on his chin. “Are you sure this Athena Grace is the only thing standing in your way? God, I love her name.”

  We’d hunted the streets in Royal Oak until he found this dumpy leftover coffee shop from the nineteen forties on a side street. The coffee served inside the unimaginatively named Coffee Pot bore faint resemblance to the liquid found at Starbucks or its clones. The uniformed waitress poured mud from an ancient percolator, which hissed a doleful warning. She overshot Di’s cup, but cleaned it up handily with a sponge smelling of Clorox and grease. The Coffee Pot’s only patrons were a pair of portly construction workers and a woman seeming anxious for the bar next door
to open.

  “Who knows? Anyway, I think I’ve got every aspect covered,” I said, when the waitress had gone. “And you owe me a caper. Remember why?” I was sure he wouldn’t.

  “I owe you a caper? Do you know how ludicrous that sounds?”

  “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? Remember the time you thought Alberto was having a romp? I sat outside a house in Ypsilanti, camera in hand, for days. Turned out to be his aunt’s house or something.” I’d forgotten my recent surveillance wasn’t the first.

  “Oh, right. Six or seven years ago?” He shook his head. “Scared the old lady to death, didn’t we?”

  I nodded. “Okay, are you sufficiently caffeinated?”

  “More of what you told me on the phone? I feel like I’m in a nineteen forties movie with Barbara Stanwyck and Ralph Meeker.”

  “Who? Well, anyway, pretend you are if it puts you in the mood. Anyway, the first step in my scheme is to have Athena Grace paged at Oakwood-Trenton Hospital. Right?”

  He nodded, half-heartedly at best. I handed him the telephone number.

  “And when she picks up, identify yourself as Wilson Bluett, an administrator from the Cleveland Clinic. That name ought to make her sit up. Tell her Dr. Singh suggested you call her.” I jabbed at the names below the telephone number. “She’ll recognize Singh’s name. He’s a famous endocrinologist in Cleveland. They were on a medical panel together at a conference there last year.”

  “Where the hell did you get that name? Wilson Bluett? Am I also to be a doctor?”

  “Uh, huh. Dr. Wilson Bluett actually works at the Cleveland Clinic. I found his name on their website. With any luck, Athena’ll be on the road in an hour or two, taking advantage of the deluxe accommodations we’re providing.”

  “We?”

  “Well, me.”

  “You’re forking out the dough?”

  “I’ll tell you about it in a minute.”

  Di took a sip of his coffee and shuddered. “And all this subterfuge for an evening with Bill? You must be pretty damned horny or desperate to come up with this—what did you call it—caper? And how can you be sure this is the woman who’s standing between you and Bill? Hadn’t things begun to go bad before she turned up? Maybe it’s your pursuit of the gallery of death that did it.”

  I ignored him. “After identifying yourself as Dr. Bluett, tell Athena the scheduled speaker for a symposium at the clinic is a no-show and you’re hunting for a speaker to take his place.”

  “And why would Ms. Grace be qualified to step in for such an esteemed speaker? I know she’ll ask that sort of question.” He shook his head and started picking crumbs up off his plate with his finger and eating them. Suddenly aware of what he was doing, he pushed the plate aside.

  “Tell her you read a paper she presented at a conference last year and the subject dovetailed nicely with the symposium’s topic: ‘Caring for Pre-Diabetic African-Americans.’ Tell her it’ll be a smallish group—a few doctors, lay people, and nurse practitioners—so she doesn’t get overwhelmed and say no.” Forgetting my opinion of my first sip of coffee, I took a second sip and sputtered.

  “And you’re booking both a hotel and airline tickets?”

  “You can offer her an airplane ticket to Cleveland, Di, but I think she’ll probably drive. It’d take much longer to drive to Metro, go through the security hoops, fly to Cleveland, and then taxi in from the airport. I’ll make hotel reservations at the Hyatt near the clinic. Say the room will be under her name and she’ll be reimbursed for the room and meals when she comes into the clinic in the morning. The speaking fee will be two thousand dollars.”

  At that moment, it actually seemed that this would take place—much as the script dictated. Even the dicier parts.

  “Wow. You pay well at the Cleveland Clinic.”

  “Does two thousand seem too high? The only speaking fees I could find online were for people like Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. You can’t imagine the amounts they pull in.”

  “How about fifteen hundred? Too high might make her more suspicious than too low.” He let out a breath. “I can’t believe I’m helping you plan this.”

  “It should be mid-morning tomorrow before she figures it out. I can see her sitting in the lobby of her hotel in Cleveland, waiting for a car that never comes. Plus she’s stuck with the hotel bill in the end. Bitch, she deserves it.”

  “Geez, Vi. You don’t even know for sure she’s sleeping with him. I think you’ve taken a dive into the deep end of paranoia.”

  I shrugged stubbornly.

  “And then what? Won’t she come running home to Bill with tales of how she was duped?”

  “She’ll blame it on an administrative screw-up, or maybe professional jealously she can’t place. No reason to associate me with it. I bet Bill’s never once told her I exist.”

  He was silent for a long moment, beating his fingers on the Formica, various expressions flitting across his face.

  “What is it?” I asked worriedly. “Did I forget something?”

  He shook his head. “We can try this, Vi. Maybe we can pull it off.”

  “Great!” I wanted to believe it.

  “But I think it’d be much better if you took the leap and found out where you stand with Bill. How long can you avoid admitting what you feel? How long can you avoid asking him what he feels?”

  “Pretty long it seems. I don’t like to ask a question unless I know I’ll like the answer.”

  “You can’t always control things, honey. Not the ones that matter.”

  “It’s worked so far.” But I didn’t believe this and looked away.

  “Call Bill. Tell him you want to see him tonight. Ask him to come up. Keep it simple.”

  “He’s shown no inclination to come over in a long time. Gave me an excuse about going to see his mother when I suggested he come over earlier this week.”

  “He’s been distracted by his mother’s illness and his own situation. Give him another chance before you resort to—this.” He patted my hand. “Say you need to see him tonight. Look, forget this idea. It’s got disaster written all over it. It’ll make you look bad if he figures it out—which he will. Like a schemer, or a psycho, or at the least, a desperate woman.”

  “I still think it could work.” I did. Kind of. I wanted Athena far away and feeling as foolish as I’d felt seeing them walk out of Tiffany’s.

  “I’ll keep my script in hand in case it becomes necessary, but I bet Bill will come through for you without the shenanigans. Ask him.” Di looked down at his empty coffee cup. “This whole plan is cheesy. Screwy and cheesy.” He waved the empty cup at the waitress. “It might play out in reel life, but not in real life.”

  I still hadn’t told Di about my father, and I wanted to…badly. But it seemed like a story I should share with Bill first. Or something I needed to further digest. Maybe Di’d say, “So what?” Was being one-quarter black even worth mentioning in Detroit?

  Despite misgivings, a few hours later, I called Bill, fighting back severe nausea as I waited for him to pick up.

  “Any plans for the evening, Bill? I know you said you were tied up, but I thought I’d try again.” Inspiration hit me on the spot. “They had nice steaks down at Wigley’s down at the Eastern Market today.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “It’s been a long time, Bill. The guy with the Hitler mustache at Hirt’s was asking for you. I picked up those ginger cookies you like. The ones with the lemon icing.” The steaks had actually come from my neighborhood Kroger’s and the cookies as well, but I knew mentioning the Eastern Market would soften him up. A Detroit booster to the core.

  “Bet the last of the tomatoes are showing up about now.”

  “It’s all pumpkins, squash, and mums,” I said. “Summer’s over.”

  He cleared his throat. “I guess I can put this other stuff on hold. Sure, baby. I’ll be there.”

  “It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than that the lion tamer becomes a lio
n tamer.”

  Dorothea Lange

  It was a really good thing I hadn’t returned the sharkskin dress because I’d need something spectacular to get Bill’s attention. Though only a short time had passed since I bought it, it didn’t fit as snugly. The travails of the last few weeks had winnowed me down another half-size. When I finished with my makeup and hair, I looked down and thought immediately of Mr. Polifax at Allure Furs. He would’ve liked this look. I could’ve sold a few furs for him in this dress—if any of his special clients had let me keep it on.

  I called Di for cooking instructions.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never broiled a lousy steak,” he said. “What the hell do you eat?”

  “I don’t think many single women fix themselves steaks.” My strong preference was for food that didn’t require cooking.

  “But maybe they might cook one for their family or friends—”

  “If only I could find a friend who wasn’t always shaking his finger at me.”

  So Di instructed me on how to broil a steak. His directions included seasoning the meat, but the solitary seasoning in my nearly empty cabinet was salt. Inspiration hit, and I dribbled bottled vinaigrette on the meat and let it marinate, worrying only slightly that the dressing might have expired. I decided it was already too late to check for a date on the bottle so why torture myself over poisoning us. I knew how to make a salad, how to bake a potato. It’d do. Hopefully the main attraction would be me, in and out of the pewter-colored dress.

  This was my aim: to win Bill back, to make him love me again. Or want me, at least. And if the evening went well, better than I’d any reason to hope, I might introduce the idea of Ted’s contract. And maybe, just maybe, I’d share the story of Howl Heart. Oh, what an agenda I’d set myself.

  I wasn’t too sure about how the story of my father would go over. Or if I could tell Bill without getting it wrong—fumbling a detail or emotion that suddenly sprang up. I didn’t know what he’d think. Maybe he’d be amused. Maybe he’d say, “So what?” Maybe he’d help me work through some complex emotions.