Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  “Izzy, calm down.”

  “I’ve got to get to court.”

  His hand squeezed.

  “Izzy, it’s alright.”

  Reality poured back in and she stopped turning the key. She’d been about to bolt, she realized. Not from Darren. From what he’d said. From yesterdays she hadn’t thought about in forever.

  “Darren, my father is—”

  “Howard Bright,” he repeated. “Smiles a lot. Makes friends easily.”

  That brought her around. He squeezed her shoulder and tucked a loose strand of hair behind the curve of her ear. His smile was soft.

  “But he asked me to call him Howie,” he continued. “Handsome guy. Bit of a bullshitter. You want to hear my story?”

  Issabella leaned forward until her head was resting on the steering wheel. She closed her eyes and dreaded the word forming in her mouth. Yes meant life was going to get very complicated. Yes meant a very painful talk with her mother, and emotional turmoil all around. Yes meant she was plunging into something, some trouble the scope of which she couldn’t know. But it involved Darren now. It involved Darren and the glad-handing narcissist who’d abandoned her and her mother years ago. There wasn’t a single part of Issabella that wanted to say yes.

  She looked at him, let out a weary sigh, and said, “Yes.”

  * * *

  Darren and Howard had ensconced themselves in one of the round, red leather booths at the back of Roast, working their way deep into a shared inebriation when Howard laid a photograph of his daughter on the table between them.

  “I had to get back here,” he said. “Those sons of bitches threatened my little girl, Darren. I couldn’t just run for cover and hide.”

  The pleasant warmth and giddiness Darren had been enjoying evaporated. He found himself leaning forward, his attention telescoping on to that little square photo. Issabella was walking out of their office building, dressed in her blue blazer and skirt. Her green umbrella was perched over one shoulder. Her hair trailed like a stream of honey in the wind.

  That was last week. She came over and her hair was wet. Just the ends of it. I told her it was cute and we ate Chinese takeout on the terrace. She said she likes to listen to the rain...

  When Darren finally looked up at Howie again, his good humor had vanished. A stillness had replaced it, a seriousness that hinted at a deep capacity for wrath. It was not an aspect of Darren Fletcher that saw much sunlight, but it was there, beneath the easy quips and quick smiles in which he usually dressed himself.

  “Who took this photograph, Howard?” he said, and stabbed one finger down on the picture, pinning it to the tabletop.

  “I don’t know—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Darren, look—”

  Their waitress appeared out of the mix of people standing in chatting clumps around the floor, a pretty girl who had told them she was in nursing school once they’d transferred from the bar to the booth. The music had been turned up after the dinner rush had been replaced with the late hour drinkers. Roast had ceased being a restaurant at some point during that transition, and would remain a bar for the remainder of the night. Clumps of young professionals sipped drinks and laughed, collars unbuttoned and ties hanging loose.

  Howie smiled at the girl and nodded agreeably when she asked if they wanted another round. Darren kept his eyes on Howie, his mouth a thin line of impatience.

  “What the hell are you even doing here, anyway?” he snapped when the waitress had disappeared. “Why didn’t you call her the minute you got this? Or the cops? How long have you had this photo, Howie?”

  Howie slumped back against his seat and put his hands in his lap. He peered down at them for a silent moment before he looked back at Darren with obvious discomfort.

  “She hasn’t even spoken about me at all, has she?”

  “Izzy? No. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “Darren, you never wondered where her dad was? You’ve been seeing her for almost a year, working in the same office, and you’ve never even asked her what happened to her father? Seriously? You don’t seem that oblivious, frankly.”

  Darren shrugged, temporarily distracted from his initial impulse to grill Howie about who had taken the photo of Issabella and, more importantly, where to find that person. He lifted his empty glass to his lips and chewed a piece of ice.

  “I guess I’m not that good with niceties,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t think about things like Mommy and Daddy and grade school and all that. I’m interested in who she is now, not how she became that way.”

  He hadn’t meant to sound defensive, but as he said the words he realized that was exactly how it sounded. He was rationalizing. Why hadn’t he ever asked? Or even wondered?

  Because today is today is today. The rest is just shadows. Remember, Darren? Remember when we decided that, all those years ago? No tomorrows and no yesterdays. Don’t explain. Tend to the puzzle of the now, counselor.

  The waitress returned. Fresh drinks were laid out in front of the two men. They regarded each other silently while she gathered the empty glasses. She cast a puzzled glance at them as she turned away.

  “I need to know who took this photo.”

  “You think I don’t want to know that just as badly as you? Jesus, Darren, she’s my little girl.”

  “How much do you owe the developers in Maricopa? How much did you steal from that building fund, exactly?”

  “It’s not—”

  Darren leaned, slapped the tabletop with his open palm.

  “How much?” he repeated.

  “Six hundred and three thousand dollars,” Howard said, slumping farther, his voice full of a soft resignation.

  Darren pressed on, insistent.

  “And how much is left?”

  Howard looked at his hands. Darren almost lunged, nearly wrapped his hands in the man’s collar to shake the words out of him. Instead, he plucked the photograph off the table, slipped it into his breast pocket and leaned back in the booth.

  “The three,” Howard finally said.

  “You spent six hundred thousand dollars? In what, a month, right? How? You...you can’t spend six hundred thousand dollars in a month, Howard. There’s no—”

  “Vegas,” Howard murmured.

  “Is that a joke?”

  “Jesus, I wish it was.”

  Darren put his drink to his lips and drained the glass in one long swallow. Then he was on his feet.

  “I’ve got to go find her,” he said, his voice thick. Inwardly, he knew he shouldn’t have had the last drink. He was past warm, rolling down into real inebriation. Down in the shadows of the booth, Howard’s outline was blurry.

  Darren was about to turn on his heel and march out, one hand already fumbling in his suit coat for his phone. He’d call her outside, away from the cacophony of pressing bodies. He’d make sure she was safe, and go to her.

  Something hit his back, pitching him forward on unsteady feet. Behind him, someone said, “What the fuck, man?”

  When Darren turned around, two of the over-served were tangled together, shoving each other and shouting drunken threats. Out of the corner of his eye, Darren saw Howard scooting out of the booth. Then one of the two brawling drunks took a swing at the other, missed wildly and punched Darren in the side of his neck.

  Despite all probability, a clear and quite sober thought formed in Darren’s mind, even as he lunged forward with his hands balled into fists.

  Here we go, I guess.

  In the middle of the chaos, as the number of people making the decision to get involved in the melee increased with each ill-aimed blow and drink-sloshing shove, Darren spied Howard. The genial, blue-eyed glad-hander yanked someone off Darren’s back, disappeared for a moment as more bodies presse
d in, then reappeared to help the dazed lawyer to his feet.

  “We have to go,” Howard shouted, his nose bleeding freely.

  Blue and red lights strobed through the plate glass windows. A fist whistled past Darren’s ear and took Howard fully in his already damaged nose. Issabella’s father pitched backward, flailing down to the floor with the vacant expression of a poleaxed cow.

  Darren threw an elbow back into the face of the man who had just knocked his girlfriend’s father unconscious. Police were pouring in through the front door. For a moment, he considered grabbing Howard and trying to drag the man back to the kitchen doors. Maybe there was a way out back there.

  Someone punched him in the back of the head.

  Oh, fuck it, then, he thought, and kept swinging.

  * * *

  “You got in a bar fight,” Issabella said in quiet disbelief. Still sitting in the little gravel lot, her hands were holding the steering wheel at the ten and two positions, as if she might drive herself away from the story Darren had told.

  “Yes.”

  “With my father.”

  “Indisputably,” he agreed.

  “And he’s still over there,” she said, staring at the stone and cinder block county jail across the parking lot from them.

  “I don’t actually know. If so, he was in a different tank than me. But there were a lot of people arrested, so maybe they had to fill a couple of the big cells.”

  Issabella started the car.

  “You don’t want me to go see if he’s still in custody?” Darren said, fidgeting with the yellow envelope holding his personal effects.

  Issabella pulled out of the parking lot and aimed the Buick away from the jail. Her expression was bleak.

  “What I want, Darren, is to call my mother and let her know the man who abandoned her isn’t dead. Just in jail. And then I’d like some time alone to think about whether or not I want a life where my boyfriend drinks too much, works too little and isn’t embarrassed by getting locked up on a semi-regular basis.”

  “I didn’t go looking for your dad, Izzy,” he said. “He came looking for me.”

  “Yeah, well, trouble always does, doesn’t it?”

  * * *

  Three blocks later, Issabella stopped at a red light. The downtown traffic burped along around them—the shops, bars and casino of Greektown managing to hold on to the illusion that Detroit was a place people wanted to be. Two blocks farther on, reality would reassert itself with broken streets, shambling homeless and cavernous stone relics.

  “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “No worries.”

  “It’s just...”

  “A lot to take in?”

  “Yeah.”

  The light turned green and she rumbled forward.

  * * *

  Solomon White stood in the mirror above the sink in the hotel room, completely naked, his antique Solingen straight razor held lightly between his fingertips. The film of moisture from his shower had long since evaporated, leaving his pale skin stretched tight across the mass of ugly, bunched muscles that clung to his large frame. Outside, the crush of traffic on I-75 reverberated, but Solomon couldn’t hear it over the thrum of blood in his ears.

  “Get out!”

  Her voice had cracked with fear, jumping an octave. He closed his eyes and saw her again, saw the shotgun’s barrel wavering in her unsteady grip. He saw the black pool of the barrel’s interior, a perfectly machined circle containing the gift of both life and death inside it. If the coin flip inside the woman’s head had fallen the other way, Solomon would have ended in an instant.

  “GET OUT!”

  Her eyes were wild, round saucers of terror. Her lips trembled.

  Solomon looked down at himself. Nothing.

  It was her grotesque appearance, he knew. Theresa Winkle was a brutish, rotund beast. Seeing the fear contort her features did nothing to arouse him. He’d tried. He’d stood there for half an hour, replaying the morning’s encounter again and again, waiting for a rush of blood to his groin, for any sign of a stirring. When that failed, he’d mentally rearranged the memory so that she was young and pretty and innocent. But that made the memory a lie, and Solomon could not arouse himself to a fiction. Those days were long gone, when he could slake his desires with his own imagination.

  So he relented, abandoning the futile exercise. Instead, Solomon began his other ritual, the one that was accomplished every day without fail: he used the shimmering silver blade of the Solingen to shave his entire body.

  Not that there was any evidence of hair on him that could be seen by human eye—Solomon hadn’t failed to perform his daily ritual in years. But he knew the hair was there, insistent, sprouting in invisible increments, threatening to become real and rough to the touch...threatening to collect grime and bacteria and oils, to become thick and full of odors.

  So he set about his daily work. He shaved his torso and under his arms. He shaved his legs, the knuckles of his toes and fingers. He shaved his pubic area and his buttocks, his face and his scalp.

  Only his eyebrows and lashes were left untouched, and only because he knew he must function in the outside world. Shaving those would leave him looking bizarre and terrifying to anyone who laid eyes on him, so he maintained the discipline necessary to resist the urge to completely, truly transform himself.

  He cleaned the blade, rubbed himself down with baby oil from foot to scalp, and began to get dressed. There was much to do, out in the world, among the thing called humanity. He felt calm and centered as he laced his shoes and chose a dark blue tie from a second suitcase on the nightstand.

  The pig in the bar should be forgotten.

  The thought came to him fully formed, and as soon as it materialized he knew he would be wise to heed it. He knotted the tie neatly under his chin, centered and straight.

  She’ll go squealing her scary story. You don’t need more from that one. You don’t have to look at her again, or smell the stink of that place. You’ve washed it all away, down the drain.

  He was clean, too, hollowed out and gleaming. He was shining and pure, and eager to find new things among the caverns and taverns of the dying city. He was eager to meet someone out there and, hopefully, make new memories.

  Memories he could use.

  Chapter Four

  Issabella collapsed into the overstuffed leather recliner, stared out the living room window-wall of Darren’s ridiculously upscale penthouse apartment and tried not to think about the handgun he’d left on the kitchen counter. Despite having spent many days and nights in Darren’s sky-bound home, she couldn’t manage to become accustomed to a view that bordered on majestic. Darren Fletcher, the man who lurched from one calamity to the next, had managed to find the single best view of Detroit in existence, and buy it for himself.

  She still didn’t know how. Before they had met a year ago, Darren’s law practice had consisted of a phone and a booth in the back of Winkle’s Tavern. He’d been taking court-appointed work representing indigents, likely making a little less than what he owed to his bar tab. Yet here he was, perched atop the Fort Shelton Tower in a two-story apartment that sported a marble bath, an ivy-draped terrace and a kitchen with enough stainless steel to make most gourmet chefs feel at home.

  Darren Fletcher was still an enigma. He didn’t talk about his past, and seemed incapable of comprehending the concept of a future. They dined together, laughed often, made love and occasionally even worked together. But she didn’t really know where he came from, or how he got to be here, roosting in luxury just beneath the clouds.

  You’re just avoiding the issue.

  And that was true. She’d been more than happy to let Darren keep his secrets, content to enjoy his company and the easy, casual fun they’d both shared over the last months. So why dwell on i
t now? Why did it irk her and leave her feeling a creeping twang of resentment somewhere in the back of her mind?

  Because the man who abandoned you as a child just shoved his way back into your life, and brought some sort of danger with him.

  That was bad enough. But he’d gone straight to Darren, not to her or her mother. Like a magnet, the father she knew nothing about had aimed himself straight at the equally inscrutable man she was sleeping with. The last thing Issabella was willing to entertain was the notion that she had sought out, despite all rational likelihood, a man like her father.

  So she stood up, turned her back on the panorama and walked over to the kitchen counter and the handgun that was laying there next to a wooden bowl full of green and red apples.

  After locking the front door, including the chain lock, Darren had insisted on a patrol of the apartment. He’d checked the terrace, the bathrooms and the entertainment room with its aquarium sunk in the wall behind the bar. He checked the closets, the laundry room and the bedrooms, all of it done while pulling her along behind him, his hand clasped firmly in her own, as if he was scared she might wander off and fall prey to the hidden dangers he was ferreting out.

  She had snapped some sarcastic quips about his sudden show of paternalistic protectiveness, but inside she felt a warm affection for Darren’s concern.

  Then he’d come back down from the bedroom and set the handgun in front of her.

  “You’re kidding. Darren, relax. Not everything my Dad says is guaranteed to be true, you know. He was always so full of—”

  “Safety is off. Just point it at the door if anyone shows up. Or you can do like I asked and come wait in the bathroom while I shower.”

  “You can’t be taking this seriously.”

  His expression was flat and calm, a somber earnestness making him very still.

  “There’s nothing more serious than you being safe,” he said. “If someone comes to the door, point the gun at it and yell as loud as you can. I’ll be here.”

  Then he kissed her cheek and bounded upstairs, leaving her with the ludicrous image of him streaking downstairs, naked and covered in soap to protect her from...