“Yeah, but there’s no good backstory about it. I was coming off a killer hangover at the time and the picture of the guy pretty much summed up how I was feeling when I saw it at the tattoo parlor,” Peter said. “Sure, I knew your dad. What can I do for you?”
“I need information about Duke.”
“You need information about your own father?”
“I don’t know much about him. Duke took off when I was seven. I don’t care what happened to him. But I believe whatever my father was mixed up in at the time you knew him could be connected to my brother’s disappearance. My brother, Ben, was abducted when he was nine.”
“I’d heard about what happened to Duke’s boy. Your brother was never found?”
“No. It’s a cold case.”
“All right. I’m not sure how I can help you, but if you’ve got questions, shoot,” Peter said, and led the way toward the door behind the sushi bar.
“I appreciate your time. First off . . . ,” Julia started to say as the door closed behind them, but her words got lost as Peter shoved her against a wall and then started to pat her down with more expertise than a TSA handler.
“What the hell is this?” Julia demanded.
“Sorry,” Peter said in a thoughtful tone. When the body search was done, Peter dumped out the contents of Julia’s bag on the floor.
“Hey, what are you doing? I’m not carrying and I’m not wired,” Julia said.
“That’s what they all say.” Peter combed through Julia’s wallet and pulled out her license and her press pass, which he studied until he shoved both documents back inside Julia’s purse.
“Well, you’re definitely Duke’s kid. Who are you working for?” Peter asked. He offered Julia a smile, but then pulled out a knife from his back pocket and snapped open the blade. “I liked your father, but if you’re trying to set me up, I’m afraid I can’t extend any favors to his daughter.” Peter backed Julia up against the wall and ran the smooth side of the blade across her cheek. “Pretty girl. It would be a shame to have to carve you up.”
“You try and cut me with that, you’re done. The cops know I’m here,” Julia bluffed. “And for the record, I’m not working for anybody, and I don’t care what kind of front you’re running. I’m trying to find out what happened to my brother.”
Peter looked up at Julia’s face and seemed to study her, unblinking, until he pulled away and slid his knife back in his pocket. “All right. I think you’re being straight with me. We can talk in my office.”
“Let me make one thing clear. If you ever pull a knife on me again, I’ll make sure your so-called business and whatever you’ve got going on here is shut down.”
“Aren’t you Duke’s little firecracker? Come on.”
Peter led the way down a narrow hallway until he reached a door with a security pad mounted on the wall next to it. Peter then plugged in a series of numbers that deactivated the alarm and went inside. Julia followed him and did a quick assessment of the room, which consisted of a scuffed wooden desk, two folding chairs, and stacks of boxes that lined the walls.
Peter caught Julia studying the boxes and sat down on his desk, facing Julia with his arms crossed in front of his chest. “Mind your business, or I’ll mind it for you.”
“Like I said, I’m not interested in what kind of business you’ve got going on here. How do you know my father?”
Peter motioned for Julia to take a seat, but she kept standing. “Ancient history. It must have been my second lockup when I first met your dad. I was a kid, probably around twenty-five, when I met Duke. We were both serving time at Macomb Correctional Center. Your dad wasn’t in there long, though. Just a couple of months, as I recall. Anyway, I was working a couple of guys in a card game. They caught on that I was conning them, and they were about to jump me. Your dad had a pal who was King Kong huge in there. Duke was always real good at making friends. Duke sicced his giant friend on the two guys and saved my ass. What else do you want to know?”
“My dad was working a job in Indiana when my brother went missing. It sounded legit, like maybe Duke was trying to go straight. He was working for a flooring company. His foreman gave my dad an airtight alibi the night Ben was abducted, and the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Office cleared him as a suspect. I’ve worked with the deputy who was the lead investigator on my brother’s case through the years, and I trust him.”
“You trust the deputy, but you shouldn’t trust your dad. The thing about Duke’s alibi, it was fake. The man Duke was working for owned the foreman. That’s how he got off,” Peter said. “Your dad wasn’t anywhere near Indianapolis at the time your brother went missing. He was here in Detroit. I saw him myself that day and later that night. Sounds like a bunch of people have been lying to you.”
Julia tried to keep a straight face as a fresh burn of anger moved through her.
“What do you know about what happened to my brother?” Julia demanded.
“Not a thing. Duke told me about it after the fact.”
“If you’re lying to me, you’ll regret it,” Julia warned.
“Tough one, aren’t you? But if you make a threat like that to me again, you won’t be walking out of here.”
“Who was my father working for? I need a name.”
“Not coming from me. I’m trying to do business in this town again, and I don’t want trouble.”
“What kind of business did you and my father do together when you got out of prison?” Julia asked.
“Your dad was an excellent salesman. I located the product, he made the sales.”
“Are we talking drugs?” Julia asked.
“No. Drugs are a dirty man’s business. Your dad was working a real estate scam for a while, trying to sell bogus properties down by the Detroit RiverWalk before it was developed. He had a buddy who was a maintenance guy in one of the buildings down there. He’d give your dad the key after hours, and Duke would show these hapless idiots around the place, acting like he was a real estate agent or something. But that didn’t go far, so he used his skills to help me unload some of my product, usually electronics, that I lifted from shipments down at the port.”
“The man my father was working for who gave him the phony alibi, he was in on this with you?” Julia asked.
“No. He was involved in a different type of sales, you could say. You said Duke took off when you were a kid. You still must’ve been upset when you heard about the fire.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know your parents are dead, right?”
“Sure,” Julia lied, backtracking as not to show her hand again. An old, tucked away memory rushed back as Julia recalled a police officer coming to her aunt Carol’s house when Julia and Sarah were living there after their parents took off. Her aunt had scooted the girls upstairs to talk to the officer, and when Julia came back down, the officer was gone, but her aunt was sitting at the center of the kitchen table, crying, likely over the news that her sister Marjorie’s body had been found, Julia now realized. When Julia had asked what was wrong, her aunt had composed herself and promised everything was “Fine, just fine.”
Julia tried to process the secret her aunt had kept to the grave as an unexpected image of her mother sparked through her mind: beautiful Marjorie Gooden, with her thick, black hair and lovely smile, which she had lost to booze. Julia looked away from Peter over the unexpected painful memory, but he seemed to sense a shift in her demeanor.
“Memories can be brutal. Especially if a good one surfaces about someone who’s done you wrong. Lots of times, I’ve seen suckers go back to the people who’ve hurt them because they remember a single act of kindness, like an abused dog that runs away, but then returns home to the bastard that’s been beating him, because the dog remembers the asshole petted him once. Still, whether you hated your dad or not, you must have been upset when you heard your parents died. There were rumors, though, lots of them, that Duke got out and may still be alive. That’s my theory.
I think he’s been running fast under the radar all these years. Did Duke ever try to contact you?”
“No. I haven’t talked to my father since he walked out on me when I was seven. Tell me about the fire.”
“I can tell you what I heard. A week after I got the news your brother was abducted, your dad fell completely out of sight. Two weeks later, a car registered to Duke was found burned to a crisp in an abandoned lot in the boonies, with two bodies inside. You hear things on the street. I had a real good source that said the cops couldn’t get a positive ID on Duke, since all the teeth had been pulled out of the dead guy’s mouth. But they found Duke’s wallet, with just his license inside, a couple of feet away from the car. They were able to ID your mom, though. You want a drink? You look like you could use one.”
Peter reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled out a bottle of scotch and two filmy tumbler glasses. He poured one to the fill line for himself and belted the contents back without waiting for Julia’s response.
“You know, you don’t look like your sister. What’s her name again?” Peter asked.
“Sarah. You know her?”
“That’s right. Sarah, the blonde. Tight little body like yours, but she’s older, or looks that way. Booze and drugs will do that to you. I ran into her recently, and she started asking the same types of questions you did, but not about your brother. Seems like she wanted to find Duke to make him pay for running out on her. She seemed pissed when she found out he was dead.”
“That sounds like Sarah. You saw her in Florida?”
“Florida? No, at the Renaissance House. I was locked up the last time for arms possession and intent to sell, but I was drunk when the cops did the sting. They added insult to injury, making me serve time and then having me go to AA meetings once a week when I got out.”
“My sister is at the Renaissance House in Detroit?”
“That’s the place. I tried to ask her out for a drink after the meeting, but she turned me down. Her loss. You know, I lent your dad something before he took off and he never returned it. Did Duke have a storage unit or anything where he stashed stuff?”
“A storage unit? We could barely afford rent. I can’t imagine my father had the money to pay for something like that. At least he never mentioned it.”
“Your father never tried to reach out to you after he took off?”
“No. And that was fine with me.”
“Maybe now, but I doubt that’s how you felt when you were a kid. Children always want to be with their parents, no matter how bad they treat them. Little girls look up to their daddies.”
“My father was never my hero. Thank you for your help, Mr. Jonti. If you remember anything else about Duke, please give me a call,” Julia said, and slid her business card across the desk.
Peter filled his glass halfway this time with scotch and raised the glass to Julia just as a fist banged against the office door.
“Peter,” the waitress from earlier said in a panicked rush from the other side of the door. “There are two men out front with badges. They don’t look like ordinary cops.”
“Could be ATF. Damn it.” Peter shoved the bottle of scotch and the glass back in the drawer and pulled a tan sports coat from the back of his chair. He threw the blazer on, which didn’t help him look any more presentable than he did without it. His fingers beat a fast rhythm against the keypad to deactivate the alarm.
“Do yourself a favor,” he told Julia. “Go out the back door and don’t come back. But if the rumors are true that Duke is alive and he looks you up, you let me know. That bastard owes me.”
CHAPTER 7
The Renaissance House was a prettied-up name for a not-so-pretty substance abuse center on East Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit. The facility was across from Erma Henderson Park and sandwiched in between a dumpy McDonald’s and a cheap cell phone store, which displayed a female mannequin clad in green neon shorts and a matching tube top holding a fake bedazzled phone to her ear.
Julia was familiar with the Renaissance House from her beat. It was a no-frills, state-subsidized facility where people who were arrested for drug and alcohol charges wound up in a trade-off to expunge or lessen their charges if the judge laid that option on the table. For most addicts, it beat jail time.
At the entrance, Julia hesitated, second-guessing her decision to see Sarah, but, ultimately, there was no other choice but to confront the only accessible link to her past. Julia put her bullshit meter on high alert and went inside.
A female receptionist, who looked early twenties with dyed blue hair and an elephant tattooed on her inner wrist, was engrossed in a self-help book. She sat behind a thick glass partition and didn’t look up as Julia stood waiting to get her attention. Julia counted to ten and then knocked hard on the glass between them.
“I’m here to see Sarah Gooden,” Julia said.
The receptionist came slightly to life and gave Julia a robotic stare.
“You have an appointment?”
“Sarah will see me. I’m her sister.”
“I need to see your driver’s license.”
Julia dug through her purse and pushed her license through the partition.
The receptionist studied it for a few seconds and then took a slow walk to the copy machine.
“Sarah is in group right now,” the receptionist said, and shoved Julia’s license through the space between the glass when she was done.
“Tell her I’m here, please. It’s important. She can miss a few minutes of her therapy session.”
“Sarah isn’t a patient. She’s a group leader.”
“A group leader,” Julia repeated, feeling immediately sorry for anyone Sarah was trying to help.
“Come back in twenty.”
“I can’t. It’s an emergency. This will only take a few minutes, I promise. Just tell her that I’m here.”
The receptionist, who obviously had to cultivate a high-bullshit monitor herself to work in a place like this, studied Julia and then put her book down.
“Okay. I’ll tell her.”
The receptionist flashed an ID card in front of yet another locked door, which led her into the bowels of the place.
Julia’s instinct was to get the hell out of there before she brought any more trouble on herself, and that’s all Sarah had pretty much ever been to Julia: TROUBLE, with every letter uppercase and in screaming bold.
Sarah had gone into foster care as a teenager after their aunt Carol had taken the girls in when Duke and Marjorie had abandoned their daughters following Ben’s abduction. Julia knew her aunt had no choice but to give Sarah up after she wound up in trouble with the law for shoplifting and drugs. The last straw was when Sarah stole money from their aunt Carol’s wallet. Sarah’s pattern with drugs and brushes with the law had continued long into adulthood. Sarah had continually declared her sobriety as an adult when all she was trying to do was hustle Julia for cash. After Logan was born, Sarah and her boyfriend had shown up at Julia’s house carrying a stuffed teddy bear, in the guise of wanting to see the new baby, but as Sarah visited with Logan and Julia in the nursery, Sarah’s boyfriend staked Julia’s house and stole her credit card information and jewelry. When Julia had figured out what had happened after tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of charges were racked up on her credit cards, Sarah threatened she would come after Logan if Julia went to the police.
Julia looked at the exit sign and knew seeing Sarah again went against any fiber of sanity and self-preservation she possessed, but Julia resigned herself that if she was going to find out anything more about Duke that could possibly lead her to Ben, she was going to have to work Sarah by playing nice, like the times when she was civil to a source she detested deep down in order to get a story.
The door to the facility buzzed open and a much healthier-looking Sarah than Julia remembered strode into the room. Sarah was seven years older than Julia, forty-four, and attractive, still with her lean build. Julia gave her a quick assessment and had t
o admit Sarah looked good. Sarah’s once waist-long, blond hair was cut into a professional-looking, shoulder-length bob, and she’d lost her previous trademark low-cut, tight outfits that screamed for attention. Instead, she wore a pair of flowing tan pants, flat sandals, and a sleeveless, loose white top, which was closed at the neck.
“Look, if this is about me being back in Detroit, you don’t have to worry or file a restraining order. I’ve been back in the city for over a year, and see . . . no trouble to you,” Sarah said, and held her hands wide, in an “I’m innocent” gesture. “I’d give you the line about how I changed my life and I’m clean and sober, but you’ve heard it before, and it was always a lie. I was a piece of shit and treated you worse than one. I’m clean now, but I’m not going to make you try and believe me.”
“You’re like a counselor here?”
“A group leader, and a good one.”
Julia made herself hold her tongue, because she really wanted to tell Sarah she probably cleaned herself up to look like a rehabilitated, model citizen so she could scam some vulnerable men in the Renaissance House and help them part with their money.
“You want your cop buddies to come by and talk to me to be sure I’m not going to come knocking on your door, feel free. You know where I work, obviously. I’ve got to go back to group.”
“Hold on. I’m not here to drill you about why you’re back in Detroit. As long as you leave my kids and me alone, I don’t care.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I need to talk to you about Duke and Ben.”
“I guess pigs really do fly,” Sarah said. “Ginny, ask Bud to take over for me.”
The blue-haired receptionist, Ginny, who was now back at her desk in the reception area, nodded and picked up the phone.
Sarah pulled her employee badge out from her pocket and flashed it in front of the security sensor. “Follow me,” she told Julia.
Julia trailed her sister down a long, sterile corridor, passing about a half-dozen meeting rooms and a depressing-looking cafeteria, until they reached the back of the building, where Sarah flashed her badge once more and led Julia outside to a rear alley.
Worth Killing For Page 8
