by Bryon Quertermous
Howard told me three things before he died:
1. His last name was also Howard
2. The love of his life was a Ukrainian chat girl named Elsa
3. He was psychic
The first two turned out to be true, but I had my doubts about the third one.
I picked Howard up in front of the arrivals area at Detroit Metro Airport a few minutes after 1 a.m., and he was in a chatty mood. It wasn’t particularly hot, we were coming off a nasty two-week heat wave, but he was sweating profusely and looked like a raw ham squeezed into a sausage casing.
“You seem like you’re a good listener,” Howard said as we left the buzzing, lighted area of the airport.
With an undergraduate degree in theology, one failed year as a pastor and four more years as a parole agent, you could definitely say I like to listen. Now I was a part-time rideshare driver, part-time private detective and part-time parent wondering if anyone was ever going to listen to me.
My normal route didn’t usually include the airport because everything about it was overly complicated and I didn’t need the money enough to deal with the hassle, but picking up rideshares was a nice way to pass the time.
“This would be a terrible job if I didn’t,” was all I said.
He seemed willing to fill in the conversational void, and I was thankful for the distraction. “Today’s my birthday, and I’m here to meet my girlfriend after her show tomorrow night. She told me if I get here in time tonight, I should stop by and say hello.”
He droned on from there and wanted my advice on whether he was being scammed. At first, I found myself internally mocking him for being so naive and a bit of a pervert, but eventually I started feeling bad for him and then wanting to protect him.
“I’ve been sending her money, not a lot, but, you know, a few hundred bucks here and there, and all I want is to see a photo of her that isn’t, you know, staged or whatever. Because it’s my birthday.”
“It doesn’t sound great for you,” I said, trying to keep my eyes on the road while also trying to convey through eye contact how important it was that he not go to that club tonight. “Not only do I think you’re being scammed, I think they might try to set you up when you meet her and try to rob you...or worse.”
“I thought the same thing, too, and thank you for being honest, but you have to see some of these texts she sent me. They’re not, you know, they’re not just sexy. She tells me about her day and her family and... Elsa, she’s the love of my life, she’s seen some of my other girlfriends and tried to talk me out of it, but this one, she thinks this one is the real deal.”
“The love of your life isn’t your girlfriend?”
“She lives in the Ukraine and can’t really ever leave, so she encourages me to...jeez... I mean you’ve probably...have you heard this stuff before?”
“Not in this job, no,” I said. “But before this, I—”
“You were a pastor. Is that what this is all about? You think I’m some kind of—”
I slowed down the car just as we were getting onto the expressway and had to merge into the fastest lane and almost got rear-ended before I regrouped my thoughts.
“How did you know I used to be a pastor?”
“I’m kind of psychic,” he said. “That’s why—”
“Are you trying to scam me? Because you picked the wrong guy.”
“I know exactly who I picked,” he said.
I didn’t like the way he said that, but he didn’t say anything else, and we drove the rest of the way to his hotel in silence. When I pulled up to the hotel, he didn’t get out.
“Happy birthday, Howard. Enjoy your time in—”
“We’ve still got half an hour or so before the club closes,” he said, “and it’s just down the road there a bit.”
“I, ah, that’s fine, I don’t have a problem taking you there, but I don’t know how to make it work in the app. You could—”
“I don’t care about the app. I can give you cash. We can do this under the table or whatever.”
“Okay. Are you hungry or anything? We could—”
“Are you worried about me?”
“I just have a bad feeling about all of this,” I said. “I really don’t think you should go to that club tonight.”
Howard handed me a wad of cash and smiled. “You’re a good man, Casey, but I have to see her. I have to know.”
I didn’t say anything, but I could see in his face that he was waiting for me to make one more move. A move both of us knew I would make. Howard knew more about me than he had any business knowing, but all I could think about was how guilty I would feel if I heard later he’d been hurt at the club and I didn’t try to stop him.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
He didn’t say anything as we drove down Middlebelt toward the Mile High Club, but he seemed relieved rather than smug that he’d manipulated me into doing his bidding.
When we pulled into the club, there were more cars in the parking lot than I would have expected that close to closing.
“You ever been to a place like this?”
“Jesus hung out with whores and tax collectors,” I said, getting out of the car and going around the back to the trunk. “God finds us where we need Him.”
“That’s not really an answer. I just want to make sure you’re not going to stick out and make this harder on both of us.”
I opened the trunk and pulled a handgun and magazine out of a hard case, loaded it and clipped it to my pants under my shirt.
“I’ll be fine.”
We headed inside the club and I was pleased to see a friendly face at the door.
Dezzie Kline left the parole division a year or so before I did so he could become a PI and have a more flexible schedule for his kids. When my marriage finally fell apart for good, he helped me make the same transition. With him working security here, I felt more comfortable about Howard’s chances.
“My buddy Howard here is supposed to meet a friend of his after the show, one of the girls,” I said, handing him the flyer Howard had given me along with enough cash to cover our admission and a generous tip. “Could you let her know we’re here?”
Dezzie looked at me for a second, I assumed, trying to figure out if I had an angle on this or if it was really as dumb as it sounded. He was taller than me by several inches and had the hardened stare that came with years of cop work before his parole job instead of my years of spiritual wandering. Finally, he smiled tightly and waved us in.
“Grab a drink and I’ll send her over when she’s free.”
The next half hour was more enjoyable than I could have imagined, with Howard throwing money around to any girl who passed our way, interested more in finding out about them and their lives than seeing them dance. He drank from a massive pink cup refilled twice with some swirling booze concoction, and I nursed a surprisingly good old-fashioned and watched.
Between flirts, Howard told me about his life and how he made his money and why he felt the need to fall in love with exotic dancers and foreign chat girls rather than the sorts of women other men fell in love with.
“I like to make people happy,” he said, minutes before the lights came up at closing, “and it always seems like once a guy gets married, he stops trying to make other people happy. I like meeting new people and selling them a car if they need one, buying them a ticket home if they need one, or helping a girl in trouble make a new life for herself.”
I finished the last of my drink and looked around to see if I could spot Dezzie anywhere. Howard had the giddy smile of a kid at a birthday party waiting for the clown to show up.
“Does it ever go to the next level though with these girls?” I asked. “Or is it always on a stage or in a chat room or whatever? Sorry if I’m getting too personal. I don’t drink very often.”
“I was never good with the ladies, and never really got around to doing what boys are supposed to do in college. The summer after my senior year I came home from school early to surprise my family, but instead I surprised an intruder who was attacking my sister.”
Before he could finish his story, a leggy woman with more grace than beauty materialized in our booth.
“Howard,” she said, “happy birthday, and you brought a friend. Is it his birthday, too?”
“He’s here to make sure you don’t have some goon in the bushes to knock me on the head and steal my money.”
“Casey Carlisle,” I said, extending my hand across Howard’s ample chest toward her.
“Misty Maize,” she said. “And I would never hurt Howard. I love Howard.”
Howard. Not Howie or H&H or any other kind of nickname. She sounded genuinely happy to be with him, but I also realized we were in a strip club where her livelihood depended on guys like Howard believing that.
“That’s her real name, too,” Howard said. “She showed me her birth certificate and everything because I was sure it was a made-up name.”
“You really didn’t stand a chance, then, did you?” I asked, immediately regretting how petty it sounded.
Misty frowned and hung a suspicious gaze on me, but Howard took the bullet and tried to defend me. “Casey here used to be a pastor, so he thinks this stuff is icky or whatever, but he’s a good guy. Real worried about me.”
“Pastor to protector?” Misty asked.
“Long story,” I said, “but you’d be surprised what comes up in a search for ‘what to do with a theology degree if you don’t believe in God.’”
“Well, I’m starving,” Misty said, standing and pulling Howard by the arm out of the booth. “Let’s go over to the Ram’s Horn for some pancakes.”
Howard nodded and looked over at me. I shrugged. Dezzie escorted us out and locked the door behind us. I wanted to see if he was up for catching lunch in the next few days, but he seemed eager to get us out of there, probably so he could get back to his kids before he had to pay the nanny or babysitter overnight rates.
“You have a car?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Had a friend drop me off. Something with my transmission or whatever.”
Howard’s eyes lit up. “You need a new car? I can get you anything you need.”
“Right now, I need something starchy in my stomach and a giant cup of coffee,” Misty said. “We can talk cars later.”
I drove them the three blocks to the Ram’s Horn and offered to stay in the car while they went in and ate, but they insisted I join them. We all had pancakes and shared from a plate of mixed breakfast meats. Misty and Howard had coffee; I had Diet Coke.
An hour later, I dropped them off at the hotel, convinced not only that Howard was safe with her, but that she really was one of the loves of his life.
The next day was a Thursday, and it was raining heavily when I woke up. I figured I’d stay in bed all day watching movies and trying to enjoy my new bachelor life, but that plan went out the door when a pair of cops knocked on my door asking me about Howard. One of the cops was in uniform and the other was wearing black cargo pants and a polo shirt with an embroidered badge on one side and the name Wilson on the other.
“You drove Mr. Howard to a hotel and then to a strip club,” Wilson said. “But only the trip to the hotel showed up in the app Mr. Howard used.”
I wanted to know how they knew that so quickly. There was no way they got a warrant for the phone that quickly, so somebody must have told them. But I also wanted to help, for the time being, so I told them what I knew and gave them a full recap of the night’s events.
“What time was it when you dropped them off at the hotel?” Wilson asked.
“I wasn’t really paying attention to the clock,” I said, “but it was late. Maybe 3 a.m.?”
“Maybe?”
“I wasn’t keeping a journal or anything. Didn’t think it would be important. Why are you asking?”
“Did you talk to Mr. Howard at all after you dropped him off at the hotel?”
“No. Why are you asking me these questions?”
Wilson looked at the uniformed officer, who gave no response at all.
“Mr. Howard killed a stripper named Misty Maize in his hotel room this morning after what appears to be a lovers’ quarrel and then killed himself. We’re trying to tie up any loose ends that might be—”
“Misty was the love of his life. He wouldn’t kill her. It was his birthday.” Even as I said it, I knew how naive I sounded, but I was trying to justify my involvement and pretend like I hadn’t been absolutely played by Howard.
The cops nodded condescendingly and left their cards so I could call if I thought of anything important. I threw the cards in a bowl by the door where I kept my keys and loose change and went back to bed. My body wasn’t used to staying out that late, and the rain made it easy to justify trying to catch up on those missed hours of sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, my imagination tried to reconstruct the scene in Howard’s hotel room and see if there was a way I could have stopped it.
My phone buzzed several times, but I ignored it and tried to watch TV instead. A few minutes into a Hallmark mystery movie, my cable went out. When I reached for my phone, I saw two missed calls and a text message from Howard, plus two more missed calls from a number I didn’t recognize. I’d put Howard’s number in my phone before going to pick him up in case he tried to contact me, and I hadn’t gotten around to deleting it yet. Had the cops misidentified the body in his room and Howard was still alive?
My phone buzzed again, and I hesitated briefly before finally answering.
“Howard didn’t kill that girl,” a woman with a vaguely Russian-sounding accent said. “He’s being set up, and you need to stop it.”
I initially wondered how she got my phone number, then I realized that I had given it to Howard as part of the rideshare app, so we could keep in contact for the pickup, and he must have given it to her so she could check up on me if anything happened.
“Elsa?” I asked.
“You were to protect him. That’s why we... I’m sending you link to a secure video line. Check your email.”
She hung up, and I tossed my phone next to me on the bed. It seemed Howard had been a bit modest about his love’s computer skills when he called her a chat girl. Part of me wanted to go and grab one of those business cards from the bowl out front and call the cops and tell them what just happened, but I knew that would only make me look crazy and there was no reason for them to believe anything other than a lovers’ quarrel gone wrong between a stripper and a creeper in from out of town at a sketchy airport hotel. Except I spent my entire adult life trusting my instincts on when to believe the best in people, and I had every belief that Howard and Misty were good for each other.
I went to my computer, signed into my email and found the message Elsa sent me from Howard’s account. The link took me through a number of authentication hoops before finally dumping me to a video site that looked like every porn site I’d ever seen. A second or two later, a woman wearing jeans and a flannel shirt with her blond hair tied up in a messy ponytail entered the screen.
“Casey?”
“You were feeding Howard information about me in the car, weren’t you?”
“I wanted to make sure he was safe. Most drivers we scanned seemed fine, but it was a lucky stroke to find a God man who also worked in social services and carries a gun.”
“Who are you? Where are you?”
“I am a matchmaker, from a long family line of matchmakers, like in your Hello, Dolly!, right?”
“That’s not quite the way Howard described you.”
“We’re not a small village now. I’m not matching men with women for goats. Your American men are coming to my country and taking our women and many men here arrange that without tradition and the women...”
Her accent was thicker now, with hints of German as she described this, and her facial expressions tightened into a fierce pinch in her brow.
“My mother is traditional. My father is technical. I am best of both worlds, and I protect my loves. Howard was my love.”
“You seem to know everything going on over here. Can’t you check the security footage at the club and the hotel and figure out who killed him?”
“I saw the same things you saw,” Elsa said. “Someone needs to ask the people around the cameras what they saw and heard.”
I crossed my arms and leaned back in my bed against the headboard. Nothing about this sounded right, but I knew myself well enough to know that I wouldn’t let this be. I was going to go asking around anyway, so why not be in good with someone who might be able to help me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll talk to some people.”
I had Elsa send me over everything she had on Howard and Misty—friends, family, possible enemies, travel itineraries, text messages, voice mail transcripts—and printed it out and took the stack of pages to my couch to read. I sifted through as much as I could before I was overwhelmed; I was going to have to leave my apartment to make any further progress.
The Skyway Suites looked like a botched copy of a Vegas hotel from the 1980s with four stories of gold-tinted glass that formed a lopsided pyramid without the pointy cap at the top. I didn’t see any police vehicles as I pulled up to the front entrance where I dropped Howard and Misty off less than eight hours ago, but it didn’t look like the place was reopened for guests either. The automatic doors slid open as I approached, and I headed to the front desk to see if anyone would talk to me.
A lumpy old white man with wispy hair and yellowed features appeared from an office to my left and stepped in front of me. “We’re not taking any guests right now.” He coughed. “Sorry.” He held his arm over his mouth as he unloaded a robust wave of coughing.
“I’m here about the shooting,” I said.
“Cops already came and went, so you’re a weirdo or a reporter and I ain’t talking to either, so—”
“I was their driver,” I said. “I took them out to breakfast and then I brought them back here and they ended up dead and I can’t help but wonder what I could have done differently.”
The man softened his posture and waved for me to follow him back into the office. “Can’t tell you nothin’ I didn’t already tell the cops, but if it’ll make you feel better to talk about it, I won’t turn you away.”
“I drive a car part-time, but I’m also a private investigator, and I just can’t match up the two people I hung out with and dropped off here with a murder-suicide.”
He drooped the right side of his head into his chest and rolled his shoulders. “Didn’t sound right to me either, but I can’t see in no man’s heart, and it wouldn’t be the first time a nice man killed a nice woman over sex.”
I followed up with a few more rote questions to justify my effort coming to the hotel, but I was already resigning myself to the fact that I was chasing a dead end and the simplest answer was the only answer. Then he said something that poked at my brain.
“Go back,” I said. “What did you say about the gunshots?”
“They’re gonna haunt the place and drive me out of business.”
“You said you just heard one shot the first time though, and then you heard another one later, right?”
“Probably gonna hear one every hour from here to eternity.”
I thanked him for the help and went back to my car where I scrolled through my missed calls to the number I hadn’t recognized and dialed. Dezzie Kline answered.
“She tried to call you first,” Dezzie said, taking a bite of his omelet at the same Ram’s Horn I’d been to with Howard and Misty, “but you didn’t answer, so she called me.”
“I’m not used to staying out that late and passed out when I got home. What happened?”
“I don’t know the specifics, but she said they were fooling around, even though he said he couldn’t do the deed because of his heart, and she kept pushing him and pushing him...”
“He had a heart attack.”
Dezzie nodded. “She’s a good girl,” he said, “but she’s not the most stable dancer at our club, and she’s been known to get into trouble with the guests once in a while.”
“Then why’d you let her go home with my guy?”
“He had you.”
“I wasn’t going to stay in the room with them.”
“By the time I got to her she’d already shot herself in the heart...she had a gun in her purse and...”
“That was the first shot the manager heard. What was the second?”
Dezzie sighed deeply and moved some of his omelet around on his plate without taking a bite.
“She has a family, they’re good people, and they tried to help her and now they don’t have anyone. If they found out she went out like that...that guy didn’t have a family, nobody who loved him, and I figured I’d—”
“Make her the victim?”
Dezzie shrugged.
I told all of this to Elsa later that day over a secure line and she cried.
“I loved him,” she said. “I didn’t have to meet him to love him, and she didn’t have to push him. They didn’t need to be physical for it to be love either. We’ve got this whole thing all messed up and everybody thinks it has to be physical and we’ve lost the beauty of chaste love.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“His killer has to pay for this.”
“Misty already took care of that herself, and I don’t think Dezzie—”
“Not them. Didn’t you read papers I sent?”
“There was a lot.”
I heard her sigh, and then she disappeared from the screen. A few seconds later the background changed and then I was looking at a newspaper archive site. The story was about the attack on Howard’s sister.
“He told me about this when I asked him why he was attracted to girls he couldn’t touch,” I said.
“He told you everything?”
I read through the entire story and got to the part Howard hadn’t told me about. “He had a bullet in his chest. From the person who shot his sister.”
“From the person who killed his sister.”
“So the killer’s in jail, then?”
The background changed again to a different story.
“He was a child, and was only in a child’s jail until twenty-one,” Elsa said. “He’s man of God now, like you.”
Ronald Depp, the man who killed Holly Howard and shot her brother, leaving a bullet in his heart, had been seventeen years old and was sentenced to a juvenile facility until he turned twenty-one, when he was released. He was now known as the reverend Gabriel Justice of Metro Triumphant Tabernacle Ministries in Detroit.
“I’m no man of God,” I said.
“Goodbye, Casey Carlisle.”
The next day, I received $5,000 in my online wallet account from Heart&Soul, Inc.
A week later I received an email link to a newspaper story about a one-car accident on the Davison Expressway that killed Reverend Gabriel Justice. Alcohol didn’t appear to be a factor, but police were looking at a possible glitch in the operating system of the electric vehicle the reverend had been driving. At the end of the story was a link to an online fundraising site for funeral expenses, and I clicked through and donated $5,000.