A Devil's Bargain Read online

  “Did you win any at trial?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Aww. That’s sad.”

  “They were all actually guilty, believe it or not. I sleep alright.”

  “So I need to see five more dead guys and then it’s iron stomach time?”

  “I hope in your long and interesting life you never see another single one.”

  Issabella scrunched her nose, smiled and kissed the tip of his chin.

  “That’s sweet, I guess. I get butterflies when you act paternal. We should go talk to Theresa.”

  “Notice anything about the body?”

  She stared around him, into the murk of the weed-choked field behind Winkle’s Tavern. Darren watched her, watched the way her face settled. She was fully back, he decided, so he waited for her to lay it out.

  “He’s white and late forties,” she answered after a little while. “Less than six feet tall but not by much. Wedding band. His suit wasn’t off the rack and looked tailored. But comfortable shoes. Not office shoes. Thick soles. Walk-around shoes. They don’t match the expensive suit.”

  “Nice. I didn’t notice the shoes. What else?”

  “Smoker. I could smell it coming off him. Clean fingernails. No wounds on the hands. No sign that he struggled. His face looked calm but I don’t know what that means. Maybe dead people’s faces do that, you know? I bet they would, since the muscles would kind of go slack, right? Either way, it didn’t look like he fought his killer.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, someone stabbed him in the neck. There’s that.”

  “Yeah. There is that.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Why? You noticed something else? You did, didn’t you? Ugh. You’re going to lord it over me, too. This is a game, isn’t it? You’ve decided this is one of our games now and you’re already a step ahead because I got faint-headed with a dead guy. My first dead guy and it already sucks.”

  Darren shrugged, gave her his best smirk, and said, “You’re probably right. We should go talk to Theresa now.”

  * * *

  Theresa Winkle was behind the otherwise empty bar when Darren and Issabella walked in the front door. Issabella took a seat near Butts the Ashtray Unicorn while Darren paused in the doorway long enough to lock the deadbolt. Theresa ambled down to them.

  She was a short, heavy woman with a tremendous bosom, a round blunt face and long, straight, dark hair. As Darren sat down across the bar from her, his expression softened in the way that real and abiding affection has on a man.

  “There’s a dead guy in your back yard, baby.”

  “Yeah. I told you that on the phone, Fletcher.”

  “I’ll take a Crown and Seven before you sit down.”

  Theresa stubbed her cigarette out in Butts’ back and put her hands on her hips. Her blue T-shirt read I Don’t Know Karate But I Bite. She fixed her eyes on Issabella.

  “You need a drink, too, Izzy?”

  “You know, I think maybe I do,” the young woman admitted.

  “I’ll make something fruity for you, princess.”

  “Oh good. Can you put a little umbrella in it? Those are so adorable.”

  “I don’t have none of those.”

  “I’ll soldier on then,” Issabella deadpanned.

  Theresa favored her with a grudging smile before turning her back on them. She started pulling bottles of liquor from the wall. Above the three of them, seventy-seven unicorns of all variety dangled from the ceiling on lengths of fishing line. Amid the rows of bottles, more figurines and statues of unicorns. In the booths that lined the far wall, still more horned beasts glued and affixed. All in all, there were more than a hundred unicorns residing in Winkle’s Tavern.

  Darren looked around as Theresa clinked glasses together. After a moment he spotted what he was looking for and pointed toward the far end, near the back of the bar. Beyond, through a doorway, was Theresa’s Spartan living space.

  “The green one,” he said. “wth the silver horn. That’s a new addition.”

  “Yep,” she answered without turning around. “I rescued him from a secondhand shop out in Taylor last week. I hedged for a bit on him. Not everyone wants to get adopted out to Detroit, you know? But I figured he’d adjust, so I put him down at the end so he has his own breathing room. He’ll get used to the city life, I figure.”

  She set a glass of blue liquid down in front of Issabella. Darren held up a hand before she could put his drink down in front of him.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I need twenty bucks.”

  “What?”

  “Give me a twenty, alright? Don’t argue.”

  Theresa rooted around in the front pocket of her jeans and came out with a wad of bills. She separated them until she found a twenty, plucked it up and set it down in Darren’s outstretched palm.

  “Here,” she said.

  “Great. Consider this our retainer. We are now your lawyers. Everything we say from here on out is strictly confidential.”

  Issabella took a tentative sip of her blue drink and said, “This tastes like cotton candy. Also, that’s the worst retainer I’ve ever heard of.”

  Theresa nodded. “Yeah. It’s a cotton candy vodka. They got every flavor now. There’s a red jellybean one too, if you start getting adventurous on me.”

  Theresa set Darren’s drink down and lit another cigarette while she settled onto her stool across from him.

  “Perfect,” he said and slid the twenty-dollar bill back across the bar to her. “Keep the change, doll.”

  Theresa stuffed the bill back in her pants’ pocket, huffed two lines of smoke out her nostrils and said, “I don’t need a lawyer, Fletcher. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Darren and Issabella exchanged a look.

  “What?” Theresa said.

  Issabella tented her fingers in front of her and said, “Of course you didn’t kill anyone, Theresa. But that has nothing to do with if you need a lawyer or not. There’s a dead man thirty feet behind your bar. He looks to have been murdered. There are no other businesses or un-abandoned homes on this block. Just your bar with you inside it and no customers to throw you an alibi. You need a lawyer until this is over.”

  Theresa frowned and blew smoke.

  “Fine,” she groused.

  “Yeah?”

  “I called you two, didn’t I? I found the dead guy and I called you and sat here waiting. So, okay. I need a lawyer. Fine. What’s next? How do we do this? Do we call the cops now?”

  “No,” both lawyers said in unison.

  Theresa looked from one to the other.

  “No cops? What’re we doing? We hiding him somewhere and just shutting up about it? I don’t have a shovel so unless you two brought one with you I’ll have to make a run and buy one.”

  “We don’t hide dead bodies,” Issabella said and cast a withering, sidelong glance at Darren. Darren smiled innocently at her and remained silent.

  “Right,” Theresa said. “Course not. What do we do then?”

  Issabella reached down into the leather satchel slung over her shoulder and came out with a yellow legal pad and a pen.

  “I’m going to ask you a lot of questions. Tons of them. More questions than I’ve ever asked you about anything. When I run out of questions and there is nothing more to learn, then we call the cops and report the body. Sound fair?”

  Theresa nodded her head and said, “Sure. Ask away.”

  Darren slapped the bar top and stood up. He drained his glass in a long gulp, set it back on the bar, and said, “Okay, great. That’s settled. Izzy, you’ve got this nailed down. Theresa, hand me that big red flashlight you keep back there. I’m going to go ogle a dead body while you two chat.”

  * * *

&nbs
p; The Packard Clipper was a fixture. Darren didn’t know when it had first been abandoned in the lot of untended grass behind Winkle’s Tavern. To him, it had always been there, a blot of rust in the distance whenever he walked through the bar’s front door. The Clipper’s wheels were gone. Its undercarriage was sunk into the earth and weeds grew up all around it. No glass remained in its windows. It was a relic, a rusted heap moldering in a nondescript corner of the equally moldering metropolis.

  Darren heaved the passenger-side door open. A grinding squeal leapt into the air as the disused hinges gave way to his effort. The tall, lean lawyer hunched down into the rotted leather seat.

  He sat still for a long moment, staring through the hole where the windshield used to be, at the back door to his friend’s tavern.

  “This can’t be good,” he said softly and ran his long fingers through the mop of dark curls atop his head. He was a disheveled man, unshaven, gaunt, whose suits were always wrinkled, always looking to have been fetched from a pile on the floor and tugged into as an afterthought. Handsome, despite the lack of care, with large bright eyes, Darren Fletcher had the look of a wolf in winter, sniffing the air for that next meal, confident something sweet lay ahead, no matter the scarcity of the everyday.

  “Anyway...my name’s Darren,” he said. “I like moonlit walks on the beach and needlepoint. That’s about it. Okay, your turn. Wait, hold on a second...”

  Darren reached into his wrinkled suit coat and brought out a silver flask. He uncapped it and took a long swallow. His eyes got a little watery and he looked to his left at the dead man who was stuffed into the driver’s seat of the Clipper.

  “I’d offer you a swig, but you’re well past that, aren’t you? Poor bastard.”

  The dead man was poured forward in the seat, his head propped up by the Clipper’s steering wheel. His face was pointed away from Darren.

  “You’re shy, I guess. That’s okay. Let’s start with the basics, like what’s your name? And did you come here to try and hurt my friend?”

  The dead man wasn’t going to confirm or deny anything, so Darren took another swig from his flask and stared into the darkness around them.

  “You’re in my seat, by the way. It’s okay. I’m not getting territorial on you. But I used to come out here and sit where you’re sitting. Not recently. I’ve driven this old hunk of rust all over the place. Wherever I wanted to go, I’d just put my hands on the wheel and zoom! There I was. I think the last time I was driving, I wound up in Egypt. I drove her all up and down the pyramids and across the desert. The next day I woke up three hours after I was supposed to be in court, so they banned me from the appointment list for a while.”

  Darren frowned at the memory and slipped the flask back inside his suit coat. He pushed the button on the big yellow flashlight Theresa had given him. He waved the beam over the sagging dead man.

  “I guess that was an overshare, wasn’t it? Well, enough about me. Let’s find out about you.”

  With his free hand he rifled the corpse’s pockets. When he felt the hard presence of a gun holstered under an armpit, Darren let it be. He felt around some more. Found a billfold. Extracted it and settled back in his seat.

  “Let’s hope you’re not a cop,” he said and spread the black leather billfold over his lap. He plucked out an Illinois driver’s license. “Gil Sharps. That’s a good name. Fifty-two years old. Alright. No police officer’s badge and that’s good news for all concerned, right?”

  There was fifteen dollars in the mouth of the billfold. Darren began pulling out the dozen or so plastic cards wedged down in the pockets opposite the driver’s license. He had examined three of them when he pulled the fourth.

  He stopped.

  He held the card between two fingers. It was perfectly black, with no writing or markings of any sort, and was thicker, heavier than the rest. His eyes got sober and his expression grew stern, even bitter.

  “Of course,” he whispered to Gil Sharps and killed the flashlight’s beam. “Of course that’s what you are.”

  * * *

  The homicide detective said her name was Tamara North and handed her card to Issabella while her crime scene team settled into their roles around the Packard Clipper and Gil Sharps’s corpse. A pair of floodlights atop poles were carried over to the scene. Their battery packs hummed to life and the Clipper was bathed in a harsh light.

  Issabella slipped the card into a pocket and waited while Detective North produced a notepad and pen from inside her blazer. She was a big hard block of a woman with a close-cropped Afro, a bulbous nose and tired, jaundiced eyes. When she looked around the dark lot behind Winkle’s Tavern, it was perfunctory and without a hint of actual interest. With pen poised above paper, she sighed deep, as if she were exhausted and said, “Alright, counselor. Go.”

  “What?”

  Detective North didn’t look up.

  “Your story,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I don’t have a story.”

  The jaundiced eyes slid slowly up and came to rest on Issabella.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” the cop said. “I know you and this Winkle woman got your story straight before you called us in. Great. Congratulations on that. Now this is the part where you tell me the goddamned story the two of you agreed on. So go.”

  Issabella forced a polite smile and laid it out. Her client, Theresa Winkle, was the proprietor of Winkle’s Tavern. At ten thirty, she’d closed the bar early since there were no customers and went out to a fast-food restaurant.

  “Yeah? What’d she drive?”

  Issabella pointed toward the street and the detective followed the invisible line her finger made.

  “Did you see the rusted old seventies van with the faded unicorn painted on the side? With the starburst coming out of its horn? That’s what she drove.”

  Detective North arched a brow and said, “No shit? I saw that when we rolled up. I figured it was abandoned.”

  “Nope.”

  “It actually runs?”

  “It seems increasingly resentful about it each time, but yes it runs.”

  “Where’d she eat?”

  Issabella told her and handed the receipt for the meal to the detective, who slipped it into her notepad. Issabella continued. Theresa came back to the bar around eleven or a little after. She was getting ready to go to bed when she noticed that the back door of the bar looked wrong.

  “What do you mean by that? Wrong how? And what do you mean about bed? She’s sleeping in this place?”

  “It’s her home. She has a room in the back. The back door looked like someone had messed with it. She took a look and she saw that the doorjamb was bent. She’s been broken into three times in the past. She knows what it looks like when someone uses a pry bar to try and force the door open. She was checking to see if the door was still locked when she heard someone make a sound outside, behind the bar.”

  Detective North had been writing in her notepad. She paused and said, “What kind of sound?”

  “Like a moan. Distressed. Her words to me were ‘sounded like a guy got hit with something.’ That was enough of a warning that she went back and retrieved the shotgun she keeps behind the bar for protection. Then she opened the back door and peeked out. There’s a light above the door with a motion sensor but it didn’t come on. We think it has been disabled, but haven’t touched it.”

  “Good,” Detective North said.

  “And that’s it,” Issabella finished. “She didn’t see anyone. She called out a couple times and then she saw a man inside that old car back there. When she got close enough to see the blood around his neck she went back inside the bar and called her attorneys. We came out to check on her and then we called you.”

  Detective North nodded and slipped the notepad and pen back in her blazer pocket. One of her crime sc
ene technician’s jogged up to her and whispered something in her ear that Issabella couldn’t make out. Detective North nodded again and the man jogged away.

  “Well that all sounds peachy,” North said. “Here’s what happens now. You stay right where you are and shut up until I tell you to stop shutting up. While you’re doing that, we’re going to turn your client’s bar inside out and upside down. Where’s the other one?”

  “The other one what?”

  North scowled and rolled her eyes.

  “The other lawyer. You said the Winkle woman called her lawyers, as in more than one. Where’s your partner, genius?”

  “You’re incredibly rude, Detective.”

  “Rude is my best. You don’t need to see my worst. So you sit tight right here and—”

  “Get a warrant.”

  North curled her lip at the word and said, “Hold on. What?”

  “That car and the dead man inside it aren’t on my client’s property. I checked. The property line is six feet west of the car. If you want to come in the bar then go get a judge to say you can.”

  “The damaged back door is part of the crime scene,” North said. “We’re getting in the bar. You have to know that.”

  “I do, as a matter of fact,” Issabella answered, grinning widely. “You were always going to get in. But you’ve been rude without cause. So now you get to go wake up a judge at two in the morning. My client and I will be inside waiting when you’ve got the warrant, Detective.”

  Issabella turned on her heel and marched back inside Winkle’s Tavern.

  Theresa was smoking a cigarette and flipping through a glossy celebrity magazine at her roost behind the bar. Darren was sitting across from her, silent and brooding. He’d been that way since returning from looking at the dead body.

  Issabella sat down beside him and said, “Well, the detective is a Grade A jerk and you’re doing the quiet pondering thing you do before you suggest that I agree to do something professionally and personally reckless. I’m already in a bad mood, so maybe you should just speed up the process and tell me now.”