Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  ...from someone who took a photo of you. Someone who’s been watching you.

  The idea was disquieting. Standing there looking at the hunk of metal Darren had set on the counter, Issabella no longer found his concern amusing. Someone had been stalking her, watching her, while she had gone about her day oblivious to his existence. She could have been grabbed on that street when she’d hustled to her car to get out of the rain. She’d been on her way to see Darren and share drinks with him on the terrace. But if the man who had taken her photo had been of a different mind, she might have wound up somewhere entirely different.

  Issabella picked up the handgun. She held it out in front of her like she’d seen in movies, careful not to touch the trigger. It was a lot heavier than she had guessed it would be. She’d never held a gun, much less fired one, and the thing seemed far more real and dangerous now that it was pressed in her fingers. It felt like a machine well suited to its purpose, heavy and solid and deadly.

  When her phone vibrated, Issabella yelped, fumbled and dropped the gun on the carpet. It landed with a deep thud, but didn’t go off. Her heart jumping into a high gear, she stared at the weapon lying there and imagined how it might have discharged in an eruption that would have sent Darren racing down to her in a wild panic. She felt silly and stupid.

  The phone vibrated again. Issabella groped around inside her blazer, retrieved the disruptive little gadget and put it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Bella! How are you, dear?”

  A pang of anxiety replaced her embarrassment over dropping the gun. The sound of her mother’s voice over the phone reminded her that she had a very difficult and uncomfortable conversation ahead of her.

  Her father had never signaled that he was leaving. There had been no big argument, no storming out with a hastily packed suitcase in tow. There had been no note detailing his reasons. There had only been a summer afternoon when Issabella was ten years old, when she came home and found her mother worried that she hadn’t heard from Howard all day. It took a week before her mother began to signal that she understood the truth. Howard Bright had driven away with all his family’s money, their only car and the love of two girls: the one he’d romanced since high school and the one they’d made together.

  “Bella? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah. Yes. I’m here, Mom.”

  I’m here and, guess what? So is Dad! Surprise! Also, someone he stole money from is stalking me. And my boyfriend was in jail again. Because of Dad. Soo...how’s work? Keeping busy?

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and decided to marshal on.

  “Listen, Mom, we need to talk. I’m going to drive down there, okay?”

  “Drive down? Issabella, what on earth—”

  “Mom, I have to—”

  “Are you going to drive that tired old Buick into the Caribbean, dear? I don’t think it’ll make it past Kentucky to be honest, but you never know. What do we need to talk about? Are you okay? Are you in trouble?”

  The Caribbean. Inwardly, she managed to both groan in embarrassment and sigh in relief. She wasn’t going to have that conversation today after all. Her mother was on a cruise ship, drifting around the placid depths of the Caribbean for two weeks.

  “No trouble,” she breathed, hearing the stress in her voice evaporate. “Jeez. You know what? I got turned around and forgot the trip was this week. I was all ready to come down there and vent about work. I feel terrible.”

  “Why on earth would you feel terrible? You know I don’t mind listening to you.”

  “No, about forgetting.”

  “Bella,” her mother’s voice became pragmatic. “I don’t care if you forgot about my vacation. You weren’t invited on it.”

  Issabella chuckled and felt better. The conversation shifted to things like piña coladas, dolphins and the men “of a certain age” who were swaggering about the cruise ship with an eye out for women like Issabella’s mother.

  “It’s flattering, yes. Of course. Who doesn’t like a little attention? But these men, Bella. The way they strut around and wink at every woman they see, like they’re in their twenties, but with their bellies and their bald heads and dentures. Part of me wants to take them home and feed them, and the other part just feels embarrassed for them...”

  Issabella didn’t mention anything about Howard or Darren or the photograph, instead making one silent promise to herself: Whatever Howard Bright had gotten himself entangled in, however bad the situation really was, she was going to make certain that he wasn’t able to share that trouble with her or anyone else she loved.

  Issabella was going to throw her father out of town, for good. And she was going to get it done before her mother ever stepped foot back in Michigan.

  * * *

  Freshly scrubbed, Darren transformed from rakishly charming to strikingly handsome. He had changed into a pair of black slacks and a maroon dress shirt hung from his shoulders, untucked and unbuttoned. His mop of dark curls was still damp and as he leaned against the kitchen counter munching grapes in his bare feet, Issabella felt a not uncommon urge to grab him, fold him up, put him in her purse and keep him there for herself.

  “I guess maybe you shouldn’t have a gun,” he said.

  “Well, not that one.” She sniffed. “It’s too heavy.”

  “They don’t make them much smaller. And the ones that are don’t have any stopping power.”

  “Isn’t getting shot by a bullet enough stopping power?”

  “You’d think so,” he said, and popped another green grape into his mouth. “But not always. I read about a guy who took five shots from a small caliber and still managed to strangle the guy who shot him. Adrenaline, maybe? Or maybe he was just gigantic? Or, really, the paper might have just left out that he was only shot in one leg all five times, and the shooter was really, I don’t know...frail? You know, maybe I didn’t read that. That might have been something from a movie. Like The Terminator, or something. God, good movie. I saw it maybe a dozen—”

  “Darren, you’re doing that thing again.”

  “The point is this, you shouldn’t have a gun.”

  “Or I should have a really big one. For the stopping power.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Perfect logic. Why do you even have a gun, anyway?” She asked, and stole one of the grapes from the bunch he’d place in front of him. “You never seemed like the type.”

  “It’s Detroit, Izzy,” he said, and kept chewing. Then he stopped and shot her an alarmed look. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “What?”

  “You never had a gun in that little office on the west side?” he said in disbelief. “In that neighborhood? Alone? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I don’t like guns.”

  “Neither do I. But I still own some. Izzy...it’s Detroit.”

  “You say that like the word alone makes your argument self-evident.”

  “It does!”

  “Well, I’m not getting one. And our office is downtown now. Nobody’s getting jumped or shot or mugged on our block. And when I’m not there I’m here or at my place in Canton. So your point is moot. The People rest.”

  “The People?”

  “The Pretty Charming People. Me.”

  Darren leaned across the counter and kissed her lightly on her nose.

  “We have to talk about your father,” he said softly. “And about how you won’t argue with me about your safety.”

  She wound her arms around him, underneath the shirt, and put her ear against his chest. His skin was still warm from the shower. He kissed the top of her head. “We should just call the cops,” she whispered. “Shouldn’t we?”

  “It’s Detroit,” he said again, like that simple statement held all the answers.

  “And yo
u don’t trust them. Right?”

  “Detroit cops don’t solve problems, kid.”

  “You’re saying you want to find the man who took that picture yourself?”

  He leaned back and cupped her chin in one hand. He didn’t blink, and his stubbled jaw was set in a firm, uncompromising frown.

  “I’ll find him, Izzy.”

  “Darren—”

  “And when I do, I’m going to feed him that photograph.”

  She remembered sitting in a little crematorium office, when Darren had gotten the call that someone had murdered their first client, Vernon Pullins. The irreverent, seemingly absent-minded Darren Fletcher had vanished before her eyes. The man who had replaced him was a still, focused bundle of fury.

  That man, she realized, was holding her now.

  “This all just seems...unreal,” she whispered, her ear pressed against his chest. His fingers stroked through her hair. “I just want him to go back to wherever he ran off to and forget about him again. I don’t want him to come back, Darren.”

  “Was it that bad when he was around?”

  “No. Not really. He was fun. He liked to make me laugh and he was really good at being goofy, so I loved him for that. You know, the way a kid loves the parent who can act like a kid. But he would disappear. He’d be gone for days, and it would just be me and Mom, with her crying and me trying to make her feel better. I don’t know. It was terrible whenever he left. But he’d always come back. Sometimes with a black eye. Sometimes in the back of a squad car. And they’d fight and scream at each other, but he’d put on his big charming smile, and she’d eventually forget all the anxiety he was causing us. She’d be in love again, and we’d all be happy. Until he wandered off and disappeared the next time.”

  Darren put his hands on her shoulders and leaned back, looking her in the eye. “I’m sorry I never ask about these things,” he said. “I don’t mean not to. I just don’t think about them a lot. I guess I should have asked before.”

  “It’s fine.” She sighed. “I don’t talk about it because it’s not pleasant. You don’t need to hear this sort of garbage.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Talking about it won’t make it go away.”

  “Maybe I can make it go away,” he said, and his mouth curled with just a hint of his ever-ready grin. “The people your father owe want money. I have that.”

  “No.” She took a step back, unwinding from his embrace, and held a stalling hand up in between them. “Okay? No.”

  “They sent that photo to scare him, Izzy. To scare him into paying what he owes. If that amount shows up in their hands, the whole thing just goes away.”

  Issabella frowned and opened her mouth, but clacked it shut again when she realized she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to say. She spun on her heel and marched away down the hall that lead to the terrace.

  She sat on one of the black wrought iron chairs among the draping ivy, staring out at the downtown skyline. Minutes passed, and when Darren appeared on the terrace, he had a drink in one hand. He sat across from her, sipped his drink. They stared out at the towers of Detroit—some of them lit with life and industry, but most reduced to empty shells, their windows boarded, their stone skins stained green and heavy with moss.

  “You refuse to talk about how you got to be so rich,” she said finally, slowly, trying to be as precise as possible. “And I can live with that. I don’t care if you’re rich or poor or in-between. You know that.”

  “I do,” he said, acknowledging a simple truth. He sipped his drink and crossed one leg over the other.

  “Good.”

  “But?”

  “But you put up all the money for our office. And when things are slow, you’re making up for it from your own accounts. We refuse anything but criminal defense, which I’m fine with. It’s what I want to do. But the lights are still on in the office and in my apartment because you’re padding us at the end of the month with your own money.”

  It was true. The cold, simple fact was that criminal defense was a money loser. People who could afford to pay a lawyer were, by and large, not in need of a criminal lawyer. Were there executives out there in the world who were finding themselves entangled in criminal charges? Sure. Bad decisions and dangerous impulses were not exclusive to the poor. But when some white-collar Joe needed to get his son a lawyer to fight the kid’s date rape charge, he went to the family attorney who did his will, or to the high-end firm that did all of his company’s contract work. They went with what they knew, and their money went with them.

  In the months since she and Darren had partnered up, the majority of her work had been bargain-basement court appointments and the occasional drunk-driving factory worker. There had been no cases that paid enough to justify the cost of their well-appointed boutique office in the heart of downtown.

  “I believe in what we’re doing,” Darren said, filling the silence. “And if I believe in something, I don’t care what it costs.”

  “And now you’re offering to bail out my dad. And it just feels like I’m turning into some kind of charity case.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No it’s not—”

  “Izzy, it’s okay. If you have a problem with it, then consider it dropped. I was just saying if this thing with your father is serious enough—if anyone could really get hurt—I could just see about paying these Arizona people. That’s all I was saying. It isn’t charity if it keeps you safe, and it’s not an insurmountable amount.”

  “Six hundred thousand dollars isn’t insurmountable. Okay. Good to know.”

  “I keep cash on hand,” he said, and shrugged. He rattled the ice in his glass and favored her with a sly grin. “And I’d put up everything I have in this world to keep you safe, Izzy. I’d steal a king’s fortune for you, kid. The sapphire from an emperor’s crown to keep you here with me.”

  She stared at him with his easy smile and his big brown eyes, slouched languidly upon his perch above the city, and she groaned in resignation.

  “Ugh.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Ugh, because now we’re not arguing anymore.”

  “We’re not?”

  “No, you bumped us out of that with the chivalrous talk and that stupid, charming smile.”

  “Bumped us into ‘now we’re having sex’ territory?”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s my favorite of territories, you know.”

  * * *

  The Ford Ranger was from Florida, had a broken A/C, needed an oil change and was a little too small for Solomon’s oversized frame. He hadn’t been in Michigan more than four hours before he exchanged the Florida plate for one he took from another Ranger parked in a bar parking lot in Monroe and then exchanged that one with yet another from a Ranger he found on a side street on Detroit’s west side. As long as he was in Detroit on this business, the process would continue with enough frequency to keep him confident that he wasn’t driving on a plate that had yet been reported stolen.

  He guided the little pickup truck up the freeway as the gloom of evening thickened around the towers and tanks of the processing plants ringing the south of Detroit. To his eyes—which had never beheld the industrial landscape of the Rust Belt—it was like something from a science fiction flick. Smoke stacks and electrical towers thrust up all around. Huge steel containment domes squatted in the soot—and oil-stained earth. The air was thick with a chemical taint he could taste in the back of his throat, and the sprawling yards of industry held an electrical charge that strummed and vibrated like a song played in a pitch you could not hear, only feel in the small of your back and just behind your eyes.

  Detroit, he decided, was filth personified. Solomon shuddered at the notion that the electrical cords of the landscape might skip suddenly, break their incessant rhythm, and
spark a chain reaction. He saw himself shrouded in a blanket of chemicals, an oily patina of industrial disease. He imagined the landscape roiling with poisons and heavy metals, a conflagration, a Fordpocalypse. And Solomon in the heart of it, all of his purity and hollow cleanliness no match for the juggernaut of ruin, the inevitable reign of filth.

  The Ranger carried him away, into the desiccated lengths of the city, but it did not carry him away from the unease he felt over this churning corner of America’s yesterday. He yearned to be back in Phoenix, where the desert air was so hot and pure it sucked the moisture out of you as soon as you stepped outside. The desert was clean.

  Several turns later, Solomon parked three buildings down from the two-story brick law office of Issabella Bright and Darren Fletcher. He killed the engine and reclined the seat. This early in the evening, there were still people milling about. Not like a real, living city where the downtown streets were bustling with activity until after the bars closed—but enough that he had no intention of doing his business just yet. He was someone people remembered.

  He’d considered making this next visit at the home of the lawyer boyfriend, Darren Fletcher. But one quick loop around the Fort Shelton Tower had put that plan to rest. The underground parking garage had a guard in a booth, and the public entrance was similarly staffed at all times. A rich man’s fortress, it was bolstered and secured against the ugly reality of the rest of the town. He’d done a Google search and looked over the building’s website. The first two floors offered a five-star restaurant, a full-service gym and spa and even a concourse of assorted shops. The Fort Shelton was designed to be a self-contained luxury environment for its privileged occupants, a place where they could exist without venturing out into the threat of reality if they were so inclined. Solomon couldn’t think of any way to get up to the penthouse without leaving distinct evidence of his passage, so he abandoned the idea.

  But what he dwelled on now as the evening darkened into night, was that Darren Fletcher was definitely a man who would pay. Howard Bright’s daughter was renting a modest place in some quiet little suburb an hour from Detroit. He’d been there, too. If anyone close to her father was going to have ready access to a large sum of cash, it would be the guy living at the very height of that tower of luxury.