“I know you’re not an idiot. So I guess that just makes you stupid.”
Thirty minutes northwest of Detroit I got a call from my accountant, Liz Garshaw. I’d known Liz since we were students as Wayne State. We’d slept together a couple times, but decided we had more going with each other as good friends who talked about who we’d slept with.
Liz had been tracking my expenditures and she wasn’t happy.
“Europe and Asia I can understand,” she said. “And the St. Al’s donations, fine. So are the investment properties, though I’d have to argue your dubious choice of locations. But come on, August. Big checks to random guys? The large cash withdrawals? What’s going on? Please tell me these guys aren’t bookies!”
“They’re not bookies, Liz.” I didn’t tell her about the check I’d just written to Big Jake.
“Then what?”
“Nothing you need to know about.”
There was silence at the other end of the line. Then Liz said, “Are you all right?”
“Never better.”
“Liar,” she said.
I thanked her for her concern, told her I was on the road and we’d sit down sometime soon over too many cocktails to talk about my fiscal irresponsibility and our love lives.
Once you get past the strip malls, dismal grey sprawl of factories and ugly traffic entanglements, the drive north along I-75 in October can be beautiful. In the clear, cold light of late afternoon, the trees crowding the roadside catch the light and flicker their innumerable tones of red, orange and yellow. The farms, working or not, all look like Currier and Ives lithographs.
My rental Caddy was equipped with Sirius XM satellite radio. A nice option for long drives—no obnoxious ads for divorce attorneys, discount meat shops, energy drinks or—my favorite ad—a titty bar in Romulus, Michigan, called Stump Grinders, “where our proud amputee military veterans always get half-price drinks and buffalo wings.”
But this time, instead of listening to satellite radio I brought some of my dad’s old CDs: Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Stanley Clarke, Marcus Belgrave, Koko Taylor and Etta James and, for the more contemplative moments, Earl Klugh. I also brought along one of my father’s Lynyrd Skynyrd CDs—an odd choice for a black man since Lynyrd Skynyrd’s often associated with white motorcycle gangs who drink too much bourbon and salute the Confederate flag. My dad was from Alabama and he loved Skynyrd. Took him back to the better parts of his growing-up years. And when things got bad in Bama his favorite Skynyrd song became “They Call Me the Breeze.”
Occasionally when I was young, after considerable research on my father’s part (including musty old copies of The Negro Motorist Green Book) regarding where a black man could safely lay his head in Northern Michigan, my mom, dad and I would pack up and make a weekend journey north in Dad’s beloved Oldsmobile 98. We would stop at Hollandbeck’s Apple Farm just north of Saginaw and get hot cider, warm cinnamon donuts and a bag of small apples. My dad would bullshit with Mr. Hollandbeck—a squat, blotchy-skinned white man with a Santa beard and belly. My mother would talk with Mrs. Hollandbeck, who was short and round, the perfect Mrs. Claus counterpoint to her husband. My mother’s conversations with Mrs. Hollandbeck were halting and filled with impromptu sign language and gesticulations; Mrs. Hollandbeck was proficient at her native Dutch and able to hold her own in German, but English proved a challenge for her and her Spanish was nonexistent. They seemed, nevertheless, to enjoy each other’s company.
I was usually left to wander the edge of their property, where the unorganized forest met the perfectly aligned rows of apple trees. Sometimes there were other kids pitching small apples into the forest.
“Maybe you see deer come for dem apples,” Mr. Hollandbeck once told me. He smelled like sweat, beef and powerful cheese. “Sometimes—you toss one in, look real hard—maybe you see—a reindeer. And maybe he got de red nose, yah?”
I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be stopping at Hollandbeck’s Apple Farm today, searching for Rudolph one small apple at a time. Today the beauty of a fall drive to northern Michigan held no more promise than that of blood spilling on fallen leaves.
A four-hour drive north was four hours too long, so I mostly took the speed limit signs as passive-aggressive suggestions.
I called O’Donnell and told her the situation. That I had seen Brewster, a.k.a the Consultant, at the cemetery. And how, if Brewster were the creature of habit I thought he was, taking a run at Vivian was next on his bloody agenda if for no other reason than to cow me. I gave her the license plate number of Brewster’s black Cadillac Escalade and said she could find one of his bodyguard’s machine pistols in my house, which she was more than welcome to with the proper warrants. She listened patiently while I gave her what I knew, occasionally saying, “Yeah,” “Okay” and “Mm-hm.”
Then she said, “Where were you earlier today, August? Around one o’clock.”
My stomach knotted. This was the first time she’d called me by my first name. And her question sounded like the beginning of an interrogation.
“I was at a friend’s house,” I said. “I drove there after visiting my parents’ graves and a brief stop at my house.” I gave her the name of the cemetery. I did not give her Tomás’s name or address. I told her the groundskeeper at the cemetery—Big Jake—would confirm this. “What’s going on?”
“What did you and Ray Danbury talk about in his office earlier today, after you were brought in from the bank? Before I got you.”
“Goddammit, O’Donnell—”
“Maybe you’d better pull off the road.”
“What’s going on?” I shouted.
I heard O’Donnell sigh heavily. “At one-fifteen this afternoon, Captain Raymond Lewis Danbury was fatally shot on the city’s east side. He’s dead. Danbury’s gone.”
My heart clenched and my vision blurred for a second.
“Considering your bank escapade this morning and the loud horsewhipping he gave you, DPD’s laying even money it was you,” O’Donnell said. “There’s an APB out on you.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said, hearing how shallow and distant my voice was. “He was—Danbury was my friend.”
“I know,” O’Donnell said. “I had to ask.”
“And Cowling?” I said. “Lieutenant Leo Cowling? Danbury’s driver?”
“Got off a couple rounds,” O’Donnell said. “Took three. Neck graze, shoulder, lower abdomen. He’ll live. Says it was a black Cadillac Escalade.” She paused. “What do you drive, August?”
“You’ve followed me enough to know the make, model and license,” I said. “And no, I don’t have any other vehicles.”
O’Donnell said she’d do what she could to calm nerves at the department and have the APB pulled. Realistically there was little she could do. At least without tipping the delicate balance of her single largest case.
“You need to get out in front of this thing, O’Donnell,” I said. “You don’t, then I will flip the whole cart over and set it on fire.”
“August, I’m trying to be your—”
“I don’t have any goddamn friends.”
I disconnected.