Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  “You will in court.” I rose, facing him. “Let’s be honest. All you’ve got is a couple of incidents of absent-mindedness a first-year law student could tear apart, and even then it’s your word against Borden’s. My psychiatrist will examine him, the state’s psychiatrist will examine him, they’ll each find exactly what they want to find, and they’ll cancel each other out in court. In the end all you’ll gain is a whopping bill from your lawyer, possibly court costs too, and no title to Seth’s shop. Still want to go through with it?”

  The obstinate expression remained on Scott’s face, but his shoulders sank ever so slightly. “None of this would be necessary if the old fool would just sell.” He was still angry, but not at me. “Did he tell you what I offered him for that pile of bricks?”

  I said he hadn’t. Scott quoted an amount. My surprise must have showed, because he inflated before my eyes.

  “You see?” he roared. “I have a syndicate behind me, with money to burn. Would you turn down a chance to retire and never have to worry about money for the rest of your life? Borden did, and without blinking. If that isn’t evidence of diminished capacity, you tell me what is!”

  I picked up my briefcase, composing myself. A lawyer’s first duty is to do what he can to keep his client out of court, and I’d given it my best shot. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you when the judge speaks his piece.”

  Mrs. Scott accompanied me to the door. Her face showed strain.

  “It’s true what Burton said,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t have gone out on a limb like that with his investors if it weren’t my father. I know what you think of me. I’m sure it’s what the whole town will be thinking when this gets out, but it isn’t true. I just want to do what’s best for Father, put him someplace where he won’t harm himself. He won’t move in here, he was adamant about that.

  “I worry about him, all alone among those power tools. You can see that, can’t you?”

  I went out without committing myself.

  Back at my office, I asked Sharon to get Fred Petrillo on the line. Fred was an assistant to an assistant at the State Bureau of Records and owed me a favor.

  “Fred, this is Matt Lysander. Can you find out for me who C. Burton Scott’s partners are over at Scott Developments?”

  “I wasn’t aware he had partners.”

  “Nor was I until about half an hour ago. A man who balks at a fifty-thousand-dollar fine doesn’t make the kind of money offer he just told me about without wincing. Someone’s backing his play.”

  “I’ll get right on it. Hour soon enough?”

  “Dandy.” I hung up, wolfed down a candy bar for energy, and beat it down to Seth Borden’s shop.

  The proprietor was in back, refinishing an old desk that hardly seemed worth the bother. The floor around his feet was a litter of discarded tools under a mulch of wood shavings. A bare bulb swung from a cord above his head, slinging shadows over the cold walls. They weren’t as ancient as they appeared. A couple of decades earlier, Seth had turned bricklayer and had redone the whole shop from top to bottom. But like everything else about him, his remodeling carried a built-in patina of age that a forger of art masterpieces would have given his artistic eye to duplicate. The place might have been crane-lifted from Rome and lowered square into the American Midwest with not so much as a brick lost.

  After we exchanged greetings, I asked Seth about his recent lapses. He scowled, sighting along the edge of a drawer he was sanding.

  “I said I forget things sometimes. And I didn’t see June when I passed her on the street. These here glasses are for close work. Sometimes I don’t get around to taking them off. I bet even the President does that now and again.”

  “One case of diminished capacity at a time, please,” I said. “Why’d you turn down Scott’s offer?”

  “Didn’t want to sell. I said that.” He blew sawdust off the drawer.

  “It’s a lot of money. You could buy a chain of shops and still take a trip around the world.”

  “I like it here.”

  “That’s not good enough. This is a money-driven society. It’s going to look bad at the hearing when they ask you why you said no and that’s the only answer you have.”

  Seth slid the drawer into place—it fit perfectly, of course—and straightened.

  “My father built this shop with his own two hands. I been working in it sixty years. There’s still some things you can’t buy.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s the truth. I can’t put no varnish on it that would make it better.”

  I let it go for the time being. Everybody lies to his lawyer.

  “Will you submit to a psychiatric examination?” Before he could protest I said, “I’ve a friend, Dr. Casper Fyfe, whom I’ve worked with before. He’s good.”

  Seth swapped out his spectacles for a pair of safety glasses and picked up an electric sander. “Do what feels right.”

  He plugged in the sander, driving me out with the noise.

  • • •

  “Brace yourself.” Fred Petrillo sounded smug over the telephone. “Two years ago, controlling interest in Scott Developments was snapped up by Global Enterprises.”

  I replaced the receiver. I don’t remember if I thanked him; I was in shock.

  Global Enterprises was a subsidiary of that organization with a five-letter name beginning with an M we’re not supposed to talk about any more. It represented the organization’s push to crack legitimate business, but from the number of vice-presidents who had shown up in automobile trunks at airports recently, it was clear that tactics hadn’t changed since Prohibition. I filed the knowledge away for possible use later. At the time I had no reason to believe I’d need it soon.

  Sharon showed Casper Fyfe in two days later. Grinning at her over the remains of my family-sized pizza, I folded the cardboard, chucked it into the wastebasket, and grasped Casper’s hand. She glared back and closed the door harder than necessary on the way out. Sharon was a fitness freak.

  “You aren’t losing any weight.” Casper sat down.

  “I grow fat in the saddle, like Napoleon. What you got?”

  “You won’t like it.” Lanky and balding, the psychiatrist wore the obligatory hornrims and had a square jaw that must have offered a tempting target during his college boxing days. “In this doctor’s opinion, Seth Borden is something less than stable.”

  “We should both be so crazy.”

  “I’m serious, Matt. You know I don’t joke about my work.”

  My heart dropped a notch. “Give me the details.”

  “It isn’t senility. To put it in layman’s terms, he suffered a trauma somewhere in his past that drove him permanently off center. If I had a couple of years I could probably find it, but that won’t help you.”

  “Just how screwy is he?”

  “Psychiatrists don’t recognize that term,” he chided. “There’s enough abnormality to provide Scott’s attorney with plenty of ammunition. His heart’s not too good either, my stethoscope tells me, but that’s beside the point. Any testimony I gave would do your case more harm than good.”

  “You think it will affect the judge’s decision?”

  “I don’t know. It’s an informal hearing, and Morton’s presiding. He’s emotional. Maybe a plot by the mob to gain a foothold in Roseacre will sway him our way, but you’re the expert on that.”

  Casper recommended a psychiatrist to refute the generalities advanced by the state shrink; after which we parted company. I dialed Fred Petrillo at the capital for documentation to back up my forthcoming disclosure. The newspapers were going to fall in love with me.

  The hearing went as I’d expected. Scott’s lawyer scored points with the psychiatric testimony based on three visits with Seth Borden, a few of which I was able to knock down despite the handicap of my own expert’s never having met the subject. I introduced Seth’s ledger and balance sheets by way of showing that he was capable of operating his business. Judge Morton seemed unimpres
sed. At that point I’d hoped to present character witnesses who could swear to the old man’s stability, but it turned out he had no close friends. Scott’s man rested his case. Then I brought out the big guns.

  News that organized crime had its eye on Roseacre played hell with decorum. Spectators babbled; Scott leapt to his feet, cursing me. A photographer burst a flashbulb in my face. Morton’s gavel handle cracked while he was pounding. I rested my case. The hearing was recessed until the afternoon.

  When it convened again, Seth was absent. Scrubbed and wearing an old suit frayed at the cuffs, he’d left after the morning session, muttering something about work do to. I sent Johnny, my best gofer, to the old man’s shop to find out what was keeping him. After twenty minutes the boy returned, alone and white-faced. He whispered in my ear.

  I rose. Morton’s ice-blue eyes impaled me.

  “Your honor, I’ve just learned that my client, Seth Borden, is dead.”

  June Scott gasped. Then the tears came.

  Her husband put an arm around her awkwardly. The gallery buzzed.

  “He was found collapsed on the floor of his shop moments ago,” I continued. “A doctor is there now. It looks as if Mr. Borden suffered a heart attack—brought on, perhaps, by the strain of this morning’s proceedings.”

  Judge Morton adjourned the court.

  Public outcry was fierce when June Scott acquired the building from probate, but since an autopsy definitely established natural causes in the old man’s death and no criminal acts could be traced directly to Global Enterprises, the law withdrew. June lost no time in ceding the property over to Global.

  The day the shop was set to come down, Sharon put through a call from C. Burton Scott. He sounded upset.

  “Meet me there, shyster.” The receiver clicked in my ear.

  The site was right around the corner from my office; but then most things are, in our little town. I found Scott in a hardhat and shiny blue suit standing outside a fence erected to keep out gawkers. His face was taut and pale. He seized my arm and steered me through the gate into the gutted shell of Seth’s shop.

  The wrecking crew had carted away everything worth salvaging, then gone to work with sledgehammers and crowbars. I was dragged stumbling over bricks and broken mortar, past hardhatted workers standing around idle, to a gaping hole in the south wall. Scott let go of me to snatch a flashlight out of an employee’s hand, switched it on. The hard white beam lanced the darkness inside the cavity.

  I can’t say I was surprised. The trauma in Seth’s past, the extensive remodeling, his unwillingness to sell when he knew it would mean the shop’s destruction, formed a pattern I had worked with often. I hadn’t said anything because there was nothing to be gained by doing so. That cost me trouble with the police later.

  Dental records confirmed it after two days, but from the start there was no doubt that the broken skeleton lying crumpled in one corner of the ruined wall belonged to Bedelia Borden, Seth’s money-mad sister, dead these twenty years.

  Saturday Night at the Mikado Massage

  I’m partial to underdog stories; who isn’t? I enjoyed researching this one.

  • • •

  The ironic thing about the night Mr. Ten Fifty-Five died on Iiko’s table was that she was supposed to have that Saturday off.

  She’d asked for the time three weeks in advance so she could spend the weekend with Uncle Trinh, who was coming to visit from Corpus Christi, Texas, where he worked on a shrimp boat, but the day before his bus left, he slipped on some fish scales and broke his leg. Now he needed money for doctors’ bills, and Iiko had volunteered to work.

  The Mikado Massage was located on Michigan Avenue in Detroit. On one side was an empty building that had once sheltered a travel agency. The Mystic Arts Bookshop was on the other and shared a common wall with the Mikado. There was a fire door in this wall, which came in handy during election years. When the mayor sent police with warrants, they invariably found the bookshop full of customers and the massage parlor empty. On the third Sunday of every month a man came to collect for the service of keeping the owner informed about these visits. Iiko had seen the man’s picture under some printing on the side of a van with a loudspeaker on the roof. Detroit was the same as back home except for no Ho Chi Minh on the billboards.

  Although its display in the Yellow Pages advertised an all-Japanese staff, the Mikado’s owner, Mr. Shigeta, was the only person in residence not Korean or Vietnamese, and he was never seen by the customers unless one of them became ungallant. He was a short, thick man of fifty-five or seventy with hair exactly like a seal’s, who claimed to have stood in for Harold Sakata on the set of Goldfinger and had papered his little office with posters and lobby cards from the film. One of them was supposed to have been signed by Sean Connery, but when Iiko began to learn to read English she saw that Sean was misspelled.

  She had been working there four months. She made less than the other masseuses because she was still on probation after a police visit to the Dragon’s Gate in the suburb of Inkster, which had no fire door, and so she gave only massages, no specials. She kept track of the two months remaining on her sentence on a Philgas calendar inside her locker door.

  The man she called Mr. Ten Fifty-Five always showed up at that time on Saturday night and always asked for Iiko. Because he reminded her a little of Uncle Trinh, she’d thought to do him a kindness and had explained to him, in her imperfect English, that he could get the same massage for much less at any hotel, but he said he preferred the Mikado. The hotels didn’t offer Japanese music or heated floors or scented oils or a pink bulb in a table lamp with a paper kimono shade.

  Normally, Saturday was the busiest night of the week, but this was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, when, as Mr. Shigeta explained, the customers remembered they were family men and stayed home. Mr. Ten Fifty-Five, therefore, was the only person she’d seen since early evening when Mr. Shigeta had gone home, leaving her in charge.

  Mr. Ten Fifty-Five was duck-shaped and bald, with funny gray tufts that stood out on both sides of his head when he waddled in from the shower in a towel and sprawled facedown on the table. He often fell asleep the moment she began to rub him down and didn’t wake up even when she walked on his back, so it wasn’t until she asked him to turn over that Iiko found out that this time he’d died.

  Iiko recognized death. She’d been only a baby when the last American soldier left her village, but she remembered the marauding gangs that swept through after the Fall of Saigon, claiming to be hunting rebels but forcing themselves upon the women and carrying away tins of food and silver picture frames and setting the buildings on fire when they left. Iiko’s brother Nguyen, sixteen years old, had tried to block the door of their parents’ home, but one of the visitors stuck a bayonet between his ribs and planted a boot on his face to tug loose the blade. Iiko hung on to her mother’s skirt during the walk to the cemetery. The skirt was white, the color of mourning in Vietnam, with a border of faded flowers at the hem.

  When Iiko confirmed that Mr. Ten Fifty-Five’s heart had stopped, she went through his clothes. This was much easier than picking pockets in Ho Chi Minh City, where one always ran the risk of being caught with one’s hand in the pocket of another pickpocket. Iiko found car keys, a little plastic bottle two-thirds full of tiny white pills, a tattered billfold containing fifty-two dollars, and a folding knife with a stag handle and a blade that had been ground down to a quarter-inch wide. She placed it and the money in the pocket of her smock and returned the clothes to the back of the chair. The tail of the shabby coat clunked when it flapped against a chair leg.

  Iiko investigated. There was a lump at the bottom where the machine stitch that secured the lining had been replaced by a clumsy crosshatch of thread that didn’t match the original. This came loose easily, and she removed a small green cloth sack with a drawstring, whose contents caught the pink light in seven spots of reflected purple. When she switched on the overhead bulb, the stones, irregular ovals the size
of the charcoal bits she swept weekly from the brazier in the sauna, turned deep blue.

  She found a place for the stones, then went out into the little reception area to call Mr. Shigeta at home. He would want to know that a customer had died so that when the police came they would find nothing of interest except a dead customer. While she was dialing, two men came in.

  Both were Americans. One, a large black man with a face that was all jutting bones, wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and a Pistons jacket. He towered over his companion, a white man with small features and sandy hair done up elaborately, wearing a shiny black suit with a pinched waist and jagged lapels. Their eyes continued to move after the men had come to a stop a few feet from the counter, searching the room.

  “Sorry, we close,” Iiko said.

  She was standing in front of the sign that said OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT.

  “You’re back open,” said the sandy-haired man. “Long enough anyway to tell us where’s the fat bulb guy that came in here about eleven.”

  She shook her head, indicating that she didn’t understand. It was not entirely a lie. The sandy-haired man, who did almost all the talking, spoke very fast.

  “Come on, girlie, we know he’s here. His car’s outside.”

  “The stuff ain’t in it, neither,” said the black man.

  “Shut up, Leon.”

  “Not know,” said Iiko.

  “Leon.”

  The black man put a hand inside his jacket and brought out a big silver gun with a twelve-inch barrel. He pointed it at her and thumbed back the hammer.

  The sandy man said, “Leon’s killed three men and a woman, but he’s never to my knowledge done a slant. Where’s George?”

  “Not know George,” she said.

  “Keep it on her. If she jumps, take off her head.” The sandy man came around the counter.

  Iiko stood still while the man ran his hands over her smock. She didn’t move even when they lingered at her small breasts and crotch. He took the fifty-two dollars and the knife from her pockets. He showed Leon the knife.