Lives Laid Away

by Stephen Mack Jones

  “The hell are you doing?” I whispered.

  Without breaking concentration Tomás whispered, “Los ojos!”

  The “Evil Eye.”

  Thirteen

  We were taken to the 14th Precinct, but we weren’t booked.

  Rather, ICE agent Foley had a few words with the DPD desk sergeant, pointed to us, then left.

  The desk sergeant—a short, stout, balding white guy with the name Kosinski—escorted Tomás, Ogilvy and me from the recently renovated lobby to the dungeons below.

  “Are we being charged?” I said as we descended to the cages.

  “Nope,” Sergeant Kosinski said. “Just cooling you off, as per the vanilla ICE guy. Would you like me to charge you? Kind of a badge of honor for the three stooges?”

  “You’re not really intimidated by us, are you?” I said.

  “What is today? Sunday?” Kosinski said. “Naw, see, around here we alternate days to be intimidated by tough guys like you. Me? I’m Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Sorry.”

  While the city had invested a sizable amount of money revitalizing some of the older precincts like the 14th in an effort to make them more “camera ready” for the press, the subterranean holding cells hadn’t seen a red cent; they were still medieval and smelled of several decades’ worth of sweat, urine, clogged toilets, blood and vomit. Somewhere was the sound of water dripping and an ancient ventilation system threatening to die a gruesome death.

  The three of us, locked in one of three cages, settled in.

  Tomás and I had experienced such incarceration before.

  I wasn’t sure about Ogilvy. He appeared to take our situation in stride, sitting on the bench in lotus meditation position.

  “You okay, big guy?” I said to Tomás.

  “Somebody’s gonna pay, Octavio,” Tomás said. “Somebody’s got to pay.”

  After a while, Tomás stared at Ogilvy and said, “What’s with the hair?”

  I may have blushed with momentary embarrassment, but I had to admit the question had crossed my mind.

  “Well, I suppose I’m a bit of an Akira Kurosawa fan,” Ogilvy said with bright enthusiasm and still holding his lotus position on the bench.

  “Akira Who?”

  “Japanese filmmaker,” I said. “You’ve seen The Magnificent Seven?”

  “Who the hell hasn’t?” Tomás said. “He made that?”

  “No,” I said. “He made the movie The Magnificent Seven was based on—The Seven Samurai.”

  “My choice of hairstyle,” Ogilvy said, “is based on the hairstyle of the noble Japanese samurai military class from around AD 790. Beneath the hair, they adhered to a strict code of ethics, behavior and loyalty. The Bushido.”

  “The guys with the swords and flip-flops?”

  “Exactly!” Ogilvy said. “It’s emblematic of my aspirational belief system: Honor. Integrity. Humility. Generosity. A reminder of who I should aspire to be on any given day.”

  “Still looks goofy,” Tomás mumbled.

  “Be careful insulting our cellmate,” I said. “He’s more dangerous than he looks. Check out the tattoo on his left forearm.”

  Even in the dim, flickering light of the holding cells, it was easy to see Ogilvy’s discreet bluish tattoo of what looked like a winged sword with an unfurling banner beneath that read “Who Dares Wins.”

  “You’re the first in five years to take full and apparently informed note of it,” Ogilvy said. “Other than a Portland barista who asked who the tattoo artist was.”

  “I suppose you told him Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II?”

  “Something like that,” Ogilvy said, grinning.

  “So, you’re a badass, huh?” Tomás said to Ogilvy.

  “Former badass,” Ogilvy said. “British SAS. These days I prefer helping people become organized badasses to meet their personal life goals and community needs.” Ogilvy laughed, then said, “Might I assume you’re something of a badass yourself, mister—”

  “Gutierrez,” Tomás said. “Tomás. Some folk call me El Sepulturero.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sakes! Nobody calls you ‘The Gravedigger,’” I said.

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Never seen someone shatter a jaw with one punch,” Ogilvy said. “Impressive.”

  “You handled yourself pretty well back there, too,” Tomás said. “Thanks for, you know, tryin’ to help the ladies out.”

  “I’m English on my da’s side and Scottish on my mum’s side,” Ogilvy said. “Gallantry and raising hell’s in the blood, mate.”

  “Hey,” the man in the next cell groaned. “You—you fuckers shut up.”

  He was dressed in an expensive suit and was lying on his cell bench. Occasionally he moaned and burped while nursing his right eye with the broad end of his tie.

  “You okay?” I said to him. “You want me to call someone for you?”

  The man struggled into a sitting position and tried to focus me with his one good eye. He adjusted his one-eyed focus and grumbled, “Fuck you, nigger,” then laid back on the bench. Ogilvy, outraged by the epithet, started reply to the man until I touched his arm, smiled and said, “I’ve been inoculated. Leave it.”

  After an hour of playing “What Movie Is This Line From?” we had our first visitor for the day: Detective Captain Leo Cowling.

  Cowling was dressed in his summer finest: A powder blue linen suit, navy blue monogrammed shirt and tan silk tie. The shoes were tan buckskin loafers. Capping the look was a cream-colored Panama straw hat and a shiny gold shield hooked to his alligator belt.

  He was also wearing a grin that stretched nearly ear to ear.

  “Lord, Lord! It must be Christmas ’cause it ain’t my birthday!” he said, stepping up to the bars of our cage.

  “Howdy, Leo,” I said. “Long time, don’t care.”

  “Oh, this is just too good,” Cowling said. Reaching into a coat pocket, he retrieved his iPhone. He held it out for a selfie with the three of us in the background.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  I put my arm around Tomás’s shoulders and he put his arm around mine. Ogilvy, not knowing exactly what was going on, quickly got into the spirit of things and laid his head on Tomás’s shoulder.

  “Friend?” Ogilvy asked of me concerning Cowling.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Foe?”

  “Not exactly.”

  We grinned and simultaneously flipped Cowling the bird.

  Cowling took several pictures.

  “By the time my lawyer’s done with you,” the well-dressed man in the adjoining cell snarled at Cowling, “there won’t be enough of your coon ass to hang from a goddamn tree.”

  “Oh, you absolutely must tell us who this gent is,” Ogilvy said to Cowling.

  “And you are?”

  “Benedict Cumberbatch,” Ogilvy said. “An associate of these ruffians.”

  “No accounting for taste,” Cowling said. Then he nodded to the man in the next cell. “Nice little Muslim girl with a pretty floral print hijab, just sitting on a Campus Martius bench, reading a book, waiting for the bus. Wayne State student. Anyway, Mr. Charm School here had one too many at lunch. Sees Muslim girl. Starts yelling some really awful things at her.”

  Tomás, deciding to have a bit of perverse fun, stood close to the bars we shared with the man’s cell, and began whispering to him in Spanish.

  “This is America, you dirty spic!” the man yelled at Tomás. “Talk fucking English!”

  “Did the girl hit him?” I asked in reference to Charm School’s puffy black eye.

  “He might have tripped and fell on my fist,” Cowling said.

  “Tell this wetback shit stain to shut up or swear to God, I’ll shut him up!”

  “Oh, now you just hush,” Cowling said dismissive
ly to the man.

  “Goddammit!” the man shouted. Suddenly he charged at the bars between us. Both hands and arms came through to our side—just before his head slammed into one of the iron bars.

  The man, unconscious, fell back, landing hard on the concrete floor.

  “Oh, my God,” Tomás said. “That was—beautiful.”

  “You are a genius at provocation, compadre,” I said, slapping Tomás on his shoulder. Then to Cowling, I said, “Any prints from that file I gave you?”

  “Nothing usable,” Cowling said. “Frankly, I wish there was. Don’t much care for grown-ass folk who got the time and inclination to draw nasty, psycho shit like that.”

  An hour later, FBI Special Agent Megan O’Donnell showed up, greeting us by saying, “Whichever one of you knuckleheads just pissed himself does not ride with me.”

  The three of us pointed to the unconscious man in the next cell.

  The guard unlocked our cell.

  “Whoa, hold on, bucko,” O’Donnell said, placing her hand firmly on Ogilvy’s chest. “Who the hell are you?”

  “He got tangled up with us at Café Consuela’s,” I said.

  “Just enjoying a bit of lunch is all,” Ogilvy said. “Suddenly things go tits up!”

  “I’ll vouch for him,” I said.

  “Like that means something?” O’Donnell said.

  Tomás and I signed papers and retrieved our weapons, and O’Donnell drove us back to Mexicantown.

  She dropped Tomás off first.

  Elena ran out of their house and leapt into his arms. They kissed. Suddenly, Elena pulled out of the kiss and slapped Tomás hard across the face. Arms flailing, the two argued in Spanish until they were inside the house.

  Then we dropped Ogilvy off just down the street from my house.

  “Strange times, eh?” Ogilvy said, climbing out of the back seat.

  “Strange times,” I agreed. “I’ve got a sixteen-year-old Islay whisky at the house. We should talk sometime.”

  Once Ogilvy closed the door, O’Donnell said, “You got scotch at your house?”

  She sat at my kitchen island staring at the tumbler of Lagavulin I’d poured her.

  “Café Consuela’s was on a pre-approved ICE watch list,” she said. “Foley had nothing to do with planning the raid. And Elena just happened to be there, talking with Dani about her sister’s son—undocumented, hiding and scared.”

  “Swear to God, O’Donnell,” I said. “Another raid like that and fuck you and your little junior detective’s group—I’ll put Foley and Henshaw down—”

  “Another girl turned up dead, August,” O’Donnell said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Hispanic. Eighteen, nineteen. Dressed like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz right down to the ruby slippers. Washed up near Zug Island. She’d been—branded.” O’Donnell quickly knocked back her glass of scotch. “Swastikas.”

  Fourteen

  To my knowledge, no one has packed fried chicken, potato salad and beer for a nice summer picnic on Zug Island since 1876.

  In fact, I doubt anyone has enjoyed a lazy sun-and-sand day on Zug Island since furniture and real estate entrepreneur Samuel Zug first drained 334 acres of swampland to create his exclusive River Rouge family get-away. By 1886, the affluent Zug family—exhausted from battling the ravages of flooding—sold the island in the biggest American real estate deal of the decade for $300,000.

  The island hasn’t fared any better in over 100 years. It’s become its own circle in a Hell even Dante could not have imagined: Gaping, red-mouthed blast furnaces and grim mountainous fields of coal, coke and iron ore. Tall chimneys belched out thick, dark clouds while generations of men took the black, sooty air deep into their lungs. Generations of rain water runoff helped turn the surrounding river water into a murky, poisonous soup.

  Even now communities near Zug Island complain of a consistent, low thumping sound emanating from the island . . .

  . . . like maybe the devil’s heartbeat.

  The remains of the second Hispanic girl, branded seven times with a swastika, had been steeped in the acrid chemical stew of the River Rouge near Zug Island, which had exacerbated her decay and left little if anything to point to her killer or killers.

  “You making a link between the girl’s murder and this white whale thing?”

  “Circumstantially, yes,” O’Donnell said. “She was fantasy dressed and there were traces of barbiturates and amphetamines in her system. At least what was left of her. Problem is, if the news media sinks its fangs into this thing then we’ve got a serial killer panic on our hands. And that could muddy the already-dirty waters.” She polished off her second scotch. She didn’t request more and I didn’t offer. “I need you to get to those people I asked you to talk to, August. I do it and nobody talks. They just size me up for a thong and four-inch Lucite heels. You do it—a disgraced cop—and maybe they’ll feel an affinity with you and open up.”

  “I think it’s only good manners not to call me a ‘disgraced cop’ while drinking my sixteen-year-old malt. Just for future reference.”

  “Sorry,” O’Donnell said, uncharacteristically. “Just find out what they know. And I need to know before anymore shit hits the fan.”

  Shortly after O’Donnell left at the onset of evening, I got a call from Tomás.

  “You home?” he said.

  “Yeah. What’s—”

  He disconnected.

  Five minutes later Tomás was pounding on my door.

  “You knew,” he said.

  “Knew what?”

  “About Elena! About her and this ICE guy, Foley! And the priest and all that secret bullshit at LaBelle’s! And nobody told me nothing!”

  “Listen—” I said in a calm voice.

  That’s as far as I got before Tomás put my lights out.

  When I came to on my living room floor, it was night.

  Standing over me, a thick fist clamped around a bottle of Negra Modelo beer, was Tomás.

  “’Bout goddamn time,” he said. “I didn’t hit you that hard, Tinkerbell.”

  “How long?” I said.

  “Long enough for me to catch the last inning of the Tigers and Cubs.”

  I struggled myself off the floor, shook my head to clear the cobwebs and leaned against the back of my sofa. There was a little blood from my nose and, though I could feel my nose throbbing, it wasn’t broken.

  “Who won?”

  “Cubs,” Tomás said. “Eight to three. Ain’t our year. You wanna beer?”

  “And a shot,” I said. Now I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of Tomás’s jagged and callous knuckles. “Tequila. You hit me, goddammit! In my house!”

  “Yeah, well, you deserved it, you little punk-ass.”

  Even though I knew it would do little to appease Tomás, I explained why I kept Elena’s involvement with the White Whale Club a secret. And I suggested Elena had every right to a private life, even within her marriage, and to decide her own adult fate. A suggestion that was met with dismissive grunts and the occasional punctuation of a disbelieving “bullshit.”

  I knocked back my shot of tequila, and then we took our beers and sat outside on my porch steps.

  It was a warm night. Maybe low eighties with thick humidity.

  Neither of us said anything for several minutes.

  We just looked at the houses along Markham Street, listened to dogs barking in the distance and the continuous whoosh of night traffic on I-75 and the nearby Ambassador Bridge. Above the neighborhood was a waxing crescent moon in a mostly black and starless sky, the stars having been washed out by I-75’s nocturnal glow.

  Tomás finally pointed to Carlos’s house across the street and said, “Elena told me about his wife and kid being forced into hiding. How’s he doing?”

  “Not good,�
�� I said. “He spent a long time up here without them. He finally gets ’em here and now this. He’s trying to keep busy and Jimmy looks out for him. But—he’s not doing good.”

  Tomás nodded, took a long pull on his beer. “My pops? One hard-workin’ sonuvabitch. Jesus, that man could work! The family? Started out harvesting apples, moved on to asparagus and beets, lettuce and peppers, melons. Hated watermelons!” He took a moment, and another swig of beer. Craning his neck, he looked up at the night sky. “My younger sister, Angie—she worked harder than me. My mamá and Angie. Like machines. Sometimes, my pops, he’d beat the livin’ shit outta me.” Tomás laughed, full and long. “He’d say, ‘This is your family, you little bastard! You work hard for family!’ Then when he was done whippin’ my ass he’d say, ‘You think that hurt? Wait till gringos get a hold of your lazy brown ass!’” Again, Tomás laughed, but this time in the pale light coming from inside my house I could see his eyes flooding with tears. “Sundays would come. Him and Mamá sitting at a rickety table in some migrant motel or farmer’s roach-infested migrant housing. Mamá counting the money, writing shit on a scrap of paper. Then I hear my pops whisper, ‘Can we do it?’ After a couple minutes, Mamá would touch his arm, smile and say, ‘Si.’ Then he’d turn to me and Angie and say, ‘I think we should get some ice cream. You guys think we should get some ice cream?’ Same man who beat the shit outta me, he’s got his arm—brazo grande y fuerte!—around my shoulders. And we’re eating ice cream.”

  “These days,” I said, “he’d probably be arrested for child abuse.”

  “Fucking white people,” Tomás said with a slight laugh and shake of his head. “They ruin everything, don’t they?” Then he took a deep breath and said, “He taught me how to be a man. How to be strong for family. Protect the family. Showed me how important the right woman is. A woman that sees bigger dreams—bigger possibilities—in her man. A woman that knows how to patch you up, lift you up and get you back in the fight. I got that in Elena. More than that in Elena. She’s the only reason I kinda believe in God, Octavio, ’cause somebody like Elena don’t come from random. Angels ain’t accidents.”