I’d eaten very little of the Chinese. Being the child of parents who believed wasting food was a sin, I put the leftovers in my new refrigerator, confident it would make for a good, if slightly unorthodox, breakfast. Maybe a General Tso’s omelet.
I stared at my new TV suspended over the living room fireplace and listened to Charles Barkley take a hot steaming dump on the Los Angeles Lakers and Kobe Bryant’s legacy. Normally, I would have been doubled over laughing at anything that came out of Barkley’s bombastic mouth. But I was thinking about Eleanor Paget—a woman who, by all indications and accounts, was a mean-spirited, greedy, dictatorial megalomaniac. Someone capable of turning numerous people to stone by virtue of a simple, unblinking blue-eyed stare.
While vilified and excoriated by many, Paget was equally revered by others: The Detroit Institute of Arts held her in the highest esteem for her multimillion dollar donations and exhibition sponsorships. Her wildly successful thousand-dollar-a-plate black-tie fundraisers and well-publicized speeches acted as a safeguard against anyone who dared think the two billion dollars in art and antiquities at the Detroit Institute of Arts was a quick-sale remedy to the city’s mounting bankruptcy debts.
To Children’s Hospital she was an angel of mercy for her gifts of money, purchases of state-of-the-art medical equipment and her full payment of hospital bills and funeral expenses for as many as forty children over the past five years. For whatever she may have been behind closed doors, she knew how to smile a Mother Teresa smile and embrace sick kids when the camera shutters clicked or video cameras rolled.
She was good at the theatrics of being magnanimous.
After the ugly and very public death of her husband and his underage paramour, Eleanor Paget needed good PR. Helping sick kids, battered women, an art museum and homeless Iraq and Afghan war vets helped to counteract not only the transgressions of her philandering husband but also the longstanding and very tangible animosity between those with money—who were few, mostly white and ensconced in suburbs like the Grosse Pointes—and those without money, mostly black and Hispanic, who had seen the open sore of Detroit fester year after year.
She was a sanitizing strip of gauze over the deep and bleeding lacerations inflicted by herself and her peers. Barons like her had mined their gold in the heart of a dark-skinned city, then left when the mines were played out.
Ten months after my investigation into her husband’s murder/suicide, I’d been fighting for my professional life: Detective Sgt. August Octavio Snow v. Detroit Police Department and the Office of the Mayor. Through an intermediary, Eleanor Paget had offered to pay for a high-powered legal defense team out of Chicago to represent me. I’d declined.
Now she was on a slab in the city morgue with holes to her right temple and the top left of her head.
At nine o’clock I got a call.
“He’s clean.”
It was Ray Danbury.
“Who’s clean?”
“Your boy—this LaJames Lewis Radmon you wanted me to check out,” Danbury said. “Couple minor traffic violations. No arrests, no warrants.”
“Thanks, Ray.”
“‘And if you give yourself to the hungry/And satisfy the desire of the afflicted/Then your light will rise in darkness/And your gloom will become like midday,’” Danbury said. “Isaiah 58:10. Your daddy quoted that more than once at the end of the bible study group at the Fourteenth Precinct. This Radmon kid. He’s your charity case, ain’t he?”
“Dad was in a bible study group?”
“Lots I suspect you don’t know ’bout your daddy,” Danbury said, a strange wistfulness in his voice. “Lots I suspect you don’t know ’bout me, either.” He paused for a moment. Then, his voice normal again, Danbury said, “Anything else I can do for you? Shine your shoes? Pick up your dry-cleaning?”
“A deep-tissue massage might be nice,” I said.
Danbury disconnected.
At 3:15 a.m. Monday I found myself awake with a cup of black coffee in my hand, thinking about how Eleanor Paget’s death might define me.
My phone rang.
“You awake?”
It was Bobby Falconi from the Wayne County Coroner’s Office.
“Seems I am,” I said. “What’s up?”
In the background I could hear Frank “Honeyboy” Patt’s “Bloodstains on the Wall.”
“I just finished Eleanor Paget’s autopsy and got the labs back.”
“And?”
“Yeah, well, it looks like suicide,” Bobby said. “But there’s a couple small things that don’t add up, at least for me.”
“Such as?”
“Such as she was a diabetic,” Jack said. “Type One.”
“So?”
“So why would a Type One diabetic take a low-dosage ACE inhibitor and an injection of Humulin, washed down with maybe two ounces of white wine—a Chardonnay—fifteen minutes to a half hour before shooting herself in the head?”
Some diabetics, Bobby explained, were prescribed ACE inhibitors to keep their kidneys healthy and their blood pressure under control. Humulin was simply regular-acting insulin.
“Does that sound like a suicidal?” Bobby concluded.
“What else?” I said.
“Hey, listen.” Bobby sighed heavily before speaking again. “Maybe it’s late—or early. But the GSR on her right hand? Looks like it was—I don’t know—applied. Where you’d expect voids in patterning, there aren’t any. I’d never swear to that on a witness stand, though. It’s just too inconclusive.”
I asked him if he was including this information in his official report.
“Yeah, of course,” Bobby said. “You know the routine, August. But everything I’ve given you is just gonna look like standard stuff on a report. It’s not what I put in the report. It’s how it’s interpreted. Any cross on a witness stand and my balls would be in my throat.”
“Tech guys find anything at the scene?”
“Maggie from CSU says they were thorough,” Bobby said. “Fingerprints from the house staff, Paget and a couple business associates. A few old, unreadable smudges on the display case the gun was in. Nothing missing. House safe was untouched with forty K in cash, some old bearer bonds, high-end jewelry and unremarkable documents inside. No indications of an intruder.”
“You know if anybody called her daughter?” I asked.
“She’s got a daughter?” Bobby said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Vivian. Maybe in her mid-to-late twenties. I take it you don’t know.”
“Nope,” Bobby said. “That’s sad. She look anything like her mom?”
“Spittin’ image.”
“Well, I guess she’s lucky in one respect.”
I thanked Bobby and we hung up.
Everybody wanted Eleanor Paget in the ground as quickly as possible: The board of directors at her bank. The Grosse Pointe police. And the Detroit police. The only people worried that she was gone too soon were now quietly panicked that their direct line to her ample wallet might be finally, summarily cut off.
Eleanor Paget was now a part of local legend. One gun, three people: her husband, her husband’s young mistress and now Eleanor herself.
Apparently I was the only one who had the nagging feeling that Paget had received assistance in her rocket ride to the afterlife. And that maybe—just maybe—I could have helped her instead of walking away.
And at 3:35 a.m. Monday morning, I heard my father’s voice echoing in my head.
“We are defined by those we could have helped and chose not to . . .”