Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery) Read online

  So he’d put a deep fear in the woman who owned the bar that the lawyer seemed to spend most all of his time occupying. He’d wound her up, knowing she’d aim her fear at Darren Fletcher. Now he would bring that fear to a boil.

  In the bed of the Ranger, something made a low angry sound. Solomon chuckled. The thing in the bed rustled, thumped against the metal walls.

  Solomon felt exultant as the evening thickened into night, his confidence swelling as the light went out of the world. They were lawyers, after all—a pair of citizens, who operated by the rules citizens agreed upon so the world could seem safe and governed by order. They had never encountered someone like him. They hadn’t faced the orchestrated, focused terror he knew he could deliver.

  This Fletcher would pay just to put an end to it.

  Chapter Five

  When Howard Bright sat down on the other side of the Plexiglas barrier in the Wayne County Jail visitor’s area, there was no sign of his very bright smile. A wide bandage was secured over his nose with surgical tape. Dark, ugly crescents of bruised skin hung beneath both his bloodshot eyes. His jail jumpsuit was neon orange and dirty.

  He lifted the phone receiver off the wall and squinted at Darren. “How the hell did that happen?” he said.

  “It did get out of hand pretty quick, didn’t it?”

  “Someone broke my fucking nose, Darren,” the older man wheezed miserably. “Out of hand doesn’t even cover it. One minute I’m grabbing you, the next I’m in an ambulance with two cops looming over me. They slapped a Band-Aid on my face and hauled me in front of a judge. I’m getting charged over this.”

  “That won’t stick,” Darren said, offhanded, the tone he took with clients who were fretting over the wrong issue or some irrelevant fact. “They’re threatening breach of peace and disorderly conduct, but who’s going to point any fingers at you? You were still knocked out on the floor when the cops grabbed me. This’ll go away. If I threaten to run the preliminary exam, they might fold. If I actually run it, this is kicked.”

  Howard let out a short bark of laughter.

  “So you’re my lawyer after all.”

  “Looks that way, yeah. I’m putting up your bond, and then we need to talk.”

  Howard frowned.

  “Darren?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why are you out there? Instead of in here? You’re not even facing charges, are you?”

  Darren shrugged.

  “You’ve got some kind of pull?” Howard said. “You know somebody?”

  Darren sighed. This wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.

  “A judge,” he snapped, weary. “She runs the circuit court. I post bond. They keep the bond and toss the case. I get an earful from her the next time I’m in her chambers. It’s actually very unpleasant, to be honest.”

  “So you get locked up for being drunk...a lot? Is that your thing?”

  Darren stared at him. Was Howard trying to be a father for Issabella now? Was he getting vetted by a man in a jail jumpsuit?

  “Howard, it’s a little late for this talk, don’t you think?”

  “Why isn’t Izzy here to do this? Why’d she send you?”

  “You know damn well why. She doesn’t want to see you. Can you blame her?”

  Howard deflated, the indignation he’d been working up evaporating as quickly as it had appeared. He shook his head faintly.

  “No. I don’t suppose so. Jesus...this is all a nightmare. I feel like the world’s just going to swallow me up. Darren, you have to get me out of here. I need to talk to her. I need to put things right.”

  Fat chance, friend.

  He and Issabella had woken early that morning, having come to an agreement about what they would do. Darren would handle Howard Bright, because Issabella was certain that if she saw him she wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to claw her way through the Plexiglas and fix a death grip around her long-missing father’s throat. Instead, she would stay in Darren’s apartment with the door locked, and research what she could about her father’s business dealings in Maricopa County. Specifically, she would look for the names of the men who had been involved in his development project. The men who were looking to get their money back.

  Darren was agreeable to all of that, until he was on his way to the jail. Half way there, Theresa called him. His friend was not a woman prone to exaggeration or high emotion. She was a rock of a person. Her story, and the thin edge of fear that trilled in her voice as she told it, were still racing around in Darren’s mind as he stared at Howard.

  “You’re getting out, Howard. Then we’re sitting down and sorting this out. Any reconciliation you might have on your mind is going to have to wait. You understand?”

  “Look—”

  “No. Okay? No. They’ve threatened my friend. And they’ve threatened Izzy. You’re getting out to answer my questions, and nothing more. You don’t like that deal? Fine. Sit in here and enjoy the company. Make sure to try the bologna sandwiches they’ll serve for lunch tomorrow. I’ve been waiting for someone to sue over the red mold inside those, though it doesn’t sound like you could afford my retainer.”

  He saw that Howard recognized just how on edge he was, because the older man just nodded sheepishly, slump-shouldered.

  “Okay. You’re right, of course.”

  “Good. It’ll take maybe an hour. I’ll meet you on the steps outside.”

  “How’s my daughter, Darren?”

  “Pissed off.”

  Darren hung up the phone and walked out.

  * * *

  The deputy at the bond window was a middle-aged black woman with wide hips, an improbably large bosom, and an expression of bored disinterest so acute Darren assumed she had spent long hours practicing it in a mirror, refining her flat, dead stare and disdainful frown until every muscle in her face radiated apathetic boredom.

  “He ain’t going nowhere,” she muttered, as if the effort to put the words into the air was more than she was comfortable expending.

  Darren paused midstroke, his pen held over the signature line of the check he had been about to write. He looked up into her face.

  “What does that mean?”

  The deputy shifted her weight from one hip to the other, her stare half-lidded, on the verge of sleepiness.

  “Means he has a hold.”

  Darren frowned and folded his checkbook shut. He slipped it into his suit coat’s pocket, thinking the issue through.

  “Another state,” he said finally, not a question. Howard had been in Michigan only a matter of days. Whoever was putting a hold on his release would be from somewhere else. “Is it a probation hold or a department of corrections?”

  “Don’t have to tell you that,” she said. “We done? There’s people in line behind you.”

  Darren had been a lawyer in Wayne County for eleven years, and the ugly indifference of the system was nothing new. The judicial system was full of deputies, court clerks and probation officials who were doing little more than riding their paychecks and putting in their days until they could claim their pensions. These were not people animated by a purpose to achieve goals beyond longevity of employment. They were the collective face of bureaucracy, the disinterested, obstructing front line of impatience.

  So instead of arguing, or showing any sign of agitation, Darren mentally groped around in his vast closet of affectations, came out with a wide, engaging smile, and put it on.

  “Of course,” he said, his eyes bright with easy friendliness. “Anyway, you’ve been a tremendous help. Just tremendous. I bet this can get tiring. I don’t know how you do it. You know, I wanted to be a police officer when I was a little kid. Is that why you do it? Was it always what you were looking to get into?”

  As he affably rambled on, Darren leaned one elbow o
n the counter, like he was getting comfortable, ready to engage in a casual conversation. Like he had nowhere else to be. The deputy blinked several times, a crack in her armor appearing.

  “I bet the hours are terrible aren’t they?” he went on. “Night shifts, swing shifts, all that. Yikes. Me? I’m way too undisciplined for that. I tend to roll on into the office just shy of noon, know what I mean? But I guess the benefits make up for it, right?”

  Someone in the line behind him said, “Come on, buddy.”

  The deputy’s bored expression had melted into honest frustration. Darren made his smile widen, his eyes crinkle with camaraderie.

  “The way things are today, you can’t really go wrong with a job that’s got actual health benefits. I mean, you look at me. I’m a lawyer and all that. But I chip a tooth? Heaven help me. If a dentist will even bother to see me, he’s going to bleed me dry, guaranteed. Gahr-ohn-teed. It’s a real shitter. You’re lucky. County benefits. Wow.”

  The same person behind him made a loud huffing sound and said, “Look, buddy, we all got places to be here.”

  Darren peered around. There were maybe a dozen people in line behind him, crowded into the short, florescent-lit hallway that terminated at the bond window. Twelve sets of eyes regarded him with outright hostility.

  “Sir, this young lady is helping me out,” he said. “Just as soon as she’s done helping me, I’m sure she’ll be just as happy to help you. No hurry.”

  He turned back to the deputy, mouth open and ready to launch back into whatever stream of consciousness gobbledygook came out. Then he saw the surrender in her eyes, and clacked his mouth shut.

  “Corrections hold,” she hissed. “Arizona. We done?”

  Darren picked his briefcase up off the floor and gave her a wink.

  “We done, hon.”

  * * *

  Darren took the Crown and Seven Theresa mixed for him and drank a long swallow. He set the glass back on the bar, stared at his bleak reflection in the mirror and said, “Crud.” He had his tie loosened into a limp line, his collar unbuttoned. His eyes were dark pools.

  Theresa settled down on the stool that was her usual perch behind the bar and tapped her cigarette into Butts the Ashtray. Butts was a unicorn, pink and plastic, his back hollowed into a receptacle for his namesakes. He was frozen in mid gallop, as if caught racing for the exit.

  “That bad, huh?” she said.

  “He’s got a prison hold. The only way to get him out is to get the case dismissed or, God forbid, hold and win a trial. If he pleads or gets a guilty verdict, that’s a violation of his Arizona parole and when Michigan’s done with him he gets shipped right back down there. Hell, if he doesn’t have permission to be out of state, it’s a violation no matter what we do...”

  Darren was sitting across from Theresa, and the shotgun was laid out on the bar in front of him. He’d checked it over, confirming it was loaded, and gone over the steps she needed to know in order to fire it through someone’s face. She nodded along and, all in all, seemed far more comfortable with the notion of discharging death at another human being than Issabella had.

  “Never would’ve figured Izzy had a jailbird old man,” the big woman mused. “Seemed more like her dad would’ve been a lawyer or dentist or whatever, you know? Preppy.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “But that’s just because she’s pretty and polite. She’s deeper than what you see. She has character.”

  Theresa shrugged and didn’t say anything. She sipped a glass of Pepsi between drags on her unfiltered Pall Mall. Smoke curled around her like a shifting blanket.

  “Anyway, it just makes things more complicated,” he said. “I figured I could spring Howard and get the right answers out of him. We identify the parties...then, I don’t know. Christ, maybe I should just call the cops. But I don’t want to. I just want to get in the same room as this son of bitch and—”

  “No you don’t,” she said, her voice quiet and thick with the memory of her encounter.

  Darren pulled himself out of the mirror and looked at his friend. Normally stoic, Theresa’s face was ripe with remembered fear. He leaned toward her and slid one hand across the bar until it encircled hers. He squeezed gently and offered her a sympathetic grimace.

  “I’m sorry you got pulled into this.”

  “That’s the scariest guy I’ve ever seen, Darren.”

  They were quiet for a little while, until she finally withdrew her hand, got up and fixed him a second drink. A small smile, which was the only variety Theresa owned, appeared on her face.

  “I guess this makes me a damsel in distress, huh? Never figured to be one of them.”

  “I think the Pall Malls and the shotgun disqualify you from that office.”

  “Probably right.”

  “I mean, the unicorns help your case,” he mused, gesturing at the herd of figurines that decorated every surface of the room, all of them glued or otherwise affixed to their station. “Damsels are fond of unicorns, right?”

  “So you could maybe argue the point is what you’re saying.”

  “I’d give it a shot, sure. ‘Your Honor, my client’s lack of breathless bosom heaving notwithstanding, she does in fact cavort with fairy-tale beasties.’ That’d be my opening salvo. I’d get you damsel status.”

  “For a fee.”

  “No, no. You’re pro bono, all the way. I owe you too much for the booze to ever charge you a fee.”

  “You don’t owe me nothin’, Darren.”

  He finished his second drink, set it down and took the shotgun up in his hands.

  “Not so,” he said. “I owe you a safe place and the promise that this freak who scared my best friend gets his due. Pack a bag, baby. You’re staying at my place until we sort this mess out. We’ll bring this here peacemaker with us, little lady. Onward, to Fort Darren, a sanctuary no criminal can scale. Let’s go.”

  Theresa stubbed her cigarette out in Butts’s back and shook her head.

  “Darren, I—”

  “Skip the protestations. I’m gonna have enough of those from Izzy when she twigs to the fact that I won’t let her leave the apartment. I’ll need you to be my voice of reason to help keep her from getting ideas about rushing out and dealing with things herself.”

  Theresa’s smile reappeared, and she shuffled off to the back rooms she’d converted into her living space when she inherited the bar from her father. In a few minutes she reappeared with a laundry bag slung over one shoulder and her big canvas purse.

  “You know,” she said, “you can’t just move everyone into your apartment and go run around town tryin’ to be a superhero. Cops might be a good idea.”

  Darren held the front door open for her.

  “I’m still considering it.”

  Theresa locked the front door and they started off toward Darren’s black Lexus.

  “But you probably won’t.”

  “Cops don’t help people. They show up after the fact, when the damage is already done.”

  She shrugged her bags into his trunk and took his keys from him. She fiddled around with the driver’s seat controls until it was slid back enough for her, settled in and started the engine.

  “Fort Darren?” she said.

  He pointed out the windshield with one finger and declared “Onward, fair damsel. To the Tower of Fletcher, post haste—wait, wait. Pull over. Geez. I forgot to grab the Crown Royal. Fort Darren is low on provisions.”

  * * *

  Special Agent Isaac Schultz knelt down on one knee in the foyer of Issabella Bright’s and Darren Fletcher’s law office, amid the broken glass and blood. Around him, three Detroit Police Department uniforms talked in low whispers and milled about, none of them yet asking the obvious: What interest did an FBI Agent have in the local burglary and vandalism of a downtown offi
ce space?

  “Anybody call the building owner yet?” he said, to nobody in particular. One of the cops cleared his throat and stepped closer.

  “We were about to,” he said. “But you, ah, you got here so fast...”

  “That’s fine,” Schultz said, straightening up. He looked up the stairs that began in the center of the foyer. They terminated in the middle of a second floor walkway that went left and right. On one end was Darren Fletcher’s office, on the other was Issabella’s. Centered on the wall above the stairs, so that anyone mounting them would see it, was a framed newspaper front page detailing how the lawyers had uncovered a police-led drug smuggling operation.

  Schultz’s eyes lingered on the headline while memories of that ordeal played in his mind. He still wasn’t satisfied that he knew who all the players had been, or that every guilty party had been prosecuted. But that was the way, too often. Too often, you only glimpsed a portion of a conspiracy and by the time you might suspect there was more to it than what you’d been able to discover, the deals were already made and you were on to the next case, the next emergency.

  His gaze trailed away, coming to rest a few feet beyond the framed newspaper page. On the wall leading to Issabella’s office, a smear of blood.

  “Is...” he started, but the words hitched in his throat. Is she up there? Am I going to have to see Issabella Bright’s corpse? But he didn’t say any of that. He stared at the dots of blood that lead from the foyer, up the stairs. He stared at the ugly red smear on the wall.

  He didn’t wonder why his heart was thundering.

  He’d met her a handful times, even had a pleasant lunch together and negotiated a good deal for a troubled young witness to the drug-smuggling operation detailed in the framed news story. Somewhere in those too brief interactions, he’d taken to her. Not just as another professional navigating the criminal justice system. Sure, she’d been impressive in that way. But there was something more, for him.