Broken Monsters (13 page)

“That's magnanimous of you.”

“I am a generous man,” Timor says, but the atmosphere has turned colder. “I will wave to you from the deck when you are pulling some dead drunk out of the water, then. Now, if you will be kind and excuse me. I have a poker game to return to.”

In the car on the way back, Stricker taps the steering wheel with his thumbs, a bass line of annoyance. “You shouldn't do that.”

“I know I pushed, but he wasn't about to have us whacked. As he said, it's not worth sabotaging his business.”

“I mean you shouldn't flirt. What's wrong with you?”

“What?” Gabi laughs at the preposterousness of it. “He invited me on his boat. I shot him down. What do you think the appropriate reaction would have been?”

“This is why female cops get a bad reputation.”

“You could have said exactly the same thing.”

“He wasn't looking at
my
tits.”

“You're putting this on me?”

“Do you know what Mike Croff calls you?”

“Sure. He's told me to my face. Twofer. Latina
and
a woman means I get all the advantages, right? So the department can look more progressive.”

“Threefer. Because you're all that, and pretty too.”

“Well, don't you say the sweetest things. You're not so bad yourself, Stricker. You could be the department poster boy. What does that say about you?”

“Mike says the media is gonna
love
you when it comes to the press briefing. You play it right, you could be heading on up the chain.”

“What do
you
think, Luke? I don't deserve to be officer in charge? I didn't earn this?”

He keeps his eyes on the road, the deserted streets spottily lit up by half-working streetlights. “You were first on the scene,” he says, coolly. “Cards fall where they fall.”

If Gabi
had to give the debriefing a score, it would be a D minus. Lots of leads with no concrete answers, petty bickering because everyone wants this and everyone is tense. Not even the box of donuts Sparkles has the initiative to bring in from Heidi's Kitchen eases things.

Approximate time of death: somewhere between three and five p.m. on Friday afternoon, probably at the bus stop, which, despite the police tape, has already been turned into a memorial, with bunches of flowers and teddy bears tied to it.

Cause of death: a very precise blow to the back of the neck, which severed the vertebrae. Could be a nail gun, or the kind of bolt gun slaughterhouses use on livestock before they slit their throats. Twenty-nine slaughterhouses registered in Michigan, ten within the city limits, mainly around Eastern Market. Two hundred and seven hardware stores in Detroit alone. They're doing tests on pig skulls with various instruments to try to narrow it down.

Results on the adhesive and the blood found at the bus stop are still outstanding. She has put in another priority request.

In the meantime, she's gone back to the case files of the original gang shooting Daveyton was caught in, but it was a drive-by, and the shooter was never identified.

Unfortunately, the history makes the story sexier for the media. There are already calls coming in, begging for details. The parents have requested that photographs not be released to the press in their entirety.

“Straight up,” Joe Miranda says, quietly, so everyone has to pay attention when he talks. “The journalists have to toe the line on this one. They can share what we tell them to and not a hair more.”

Ovella Washington has compiled a depressingly long list of individual members of racist hate groups in the state. “Online posturing, mostly,” she says. “A lot of ‘Trayvon had it coming' and ‘Renisha deserved to die' and generally feeling sorry for themselves and whining about how the black man is keeping them down. Daveyton's name came up on the forums only once—‘One less nigger to worry about.' If his killer was a crazy racist, he's not bragging about it online. The neo-Nazis are more worried about running drugs. They'll talk the talk, but I don't think they'd want to risk bringing the police down on them with a stunt like this.” She taps her file with her glittering nails. “In conclusion, I think it's highly unlikely it was the work of an organized group, but it could have been a loner within a group.”

“So we can't rule out that race might be a factor.”

“There's a lot of hate out there. What you can do is get me some brain bleach to get the horrible shit I had to read out of my head.”

“What about the satanists?” Boyd says.

“Couldn't find any. There is an all-female roller-derby team called Satan's Hotties. They don't believe in God or Satan and they definitely don't do any occult rituals.”

“Then it's a dumb name,” Boyd mutters.

“I've also spoken to local members of the Wiccan and pagan communities, who were frankly offended. I've got the address of a local botanica if you want to talk to a santeria priest. They sacrifice animals sometimes.”

“Sacrificing goats to kids doesn't seem like such a big jump to me. That voodoo shit gives me the creeps,” Mike Croff says.

“Man, you are one dumb, uncultured motherfucker if you think voodoo and santeria are the same thing.”

“Oh, touchy. You a believer, Ovella?”

“Manners, both of you,” Miranda says mildly, but it's enough to get them both to shut up.

There's a sullen silence, and then Marcus volunteers, “I went back to have a look at that graffiti where the body was found, like you said, Detective Versado. There's a mural of a teenage girl's face painted at the end of that tunnel, so I looked into it. It's a memorial—one of her friends painted it after she fell off a roof and died.”

“Okay, so?” Gabi asks.

“Well, Daveyton died. Or nearly died the time he was shot. Could be a link. The killer could be making a statement about dead kids. It doesn't have to be race-related.”

“Seems like a reach. Sorry, Sparkles.”

“Thought I'd tell you anyway. There's also a pink square drawn in chalk on the wall, close to where the body was. Has to be recent, because chalk would wash away.”

“Good work,” Gabi says, “I'll make a note.” Actually, she's impressed—they have to go wide at this stage. The kid could be a contender.

Stricker chips in, a little frosty, she thinks. “I found you a taxidermist. She's been in Cleveland, teaching, but she just got back if you want to talk to her.”

“I definitely do,” Gabi says. They might even have lab results back by then.

“I also spoke to the sideshow people. They got a fire-breathing act and contortionists and acrobats and puppets. They do not have a freak show. The manager asked if they should consider it.”

“Now would be a bad time to start. How are the hunters' records looking, Boyd?”

“Great. Real great. Only nine hundred and ninety-eight thousand four hundred and fifty-three licenses to go!”

“That's not what you're really doing.”

“Nah, I'm looking at hunters with animal-cruelty raps. It means they've killed buck out of season or shot undersized animals. Two arrests in October, but there are a handful every year. I've put the word out about any unusual kills, hunters going for yearlings. But you also got to remember that there are fifty thousand car accidents a year involving deer. Our man could have hit it by mistake. Or on purpose. What I'm saying is the deer is a bust.”

“What about its stomach contents? Any unusual flora?”

“I'll go back to the ME,” Boyd grumbles.

And she's retrieved the bloody newspaper that was used to stuff the cavity and scoured every page. Random sections ripped from the
Detroit Star
over the last few years. Sparkles is going through the subscription list and cross-referencing against their other leads.

Now that the word is out, several precincts have phoned in with cold cases that are not vaguely related. “But it's a black kid,” they whine, trying their luck. “It's a man with an old bullet wound.” “Her body was found in a field where deer were grazing.”

They still have not found the rest of the remains.

The mayor's office has sent someone over to take an official statement. They are hoping that the DPD will be able to handle this with due care and sensitivity to the family, and without panicking parents of school-going kids everywhere.

“In other words, can we please make sure we don't get another corpse with a deer's ass sewed onto it,” Miranda says, and shuts it down for the day.

Jonno has
spent half his life chasing the next big thing, trying to find a new hook, a new angle, a new spin, but now he realizes that people don't want novelty—they want the reassurance of familiarity. No one wants to be challenged, no one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation. Back me up here, bro. Help me keep believing the thing I already believe.

The wise man gives the people what they want, more of the same, slightly repackaged. Look: it's exactly the same shit you've seen before, but this time with a different camera angle and more explosions! Emphasis on camera angles. It's easier to catch people's attention with moving pictures, Jen has assured him, and he hopes to hell she's right, because he's just dumped the last of his savings on an expensive laptop with editing software and a fancy lens for his iPhone.

He might be aging as well as George Clooney, but the camera does not love him in anything like the same way. The screen shows him a face that he doesn't recognize in the mirror, softening under the chin, his ears bigger than he realized. Old man's ears. He'll be growing hair out of them next.

If it was just his male pride, he might be able to get over it. Men don't need to be pretty to be on-screen like women do. But the words don't come out right either. As soon as she points the iPhone at him, he fluffs it. He's tried writing the script beforehand, but his delivery is flat. He can't say the words the way he knows they sound on the page. It's some malevolent distortion in the camera. Revenge, because technology knows he hates it and it reciprocates the feeling. But he's trying, fuck knows he's trying. He's standing in front of a house that's been turned into whimsical sculpture, plastic leaves coating the walls, Adam and Eve holding hands above the doorframe. This is not his thing.

“Detroit's art scene is…ergh. Shit. Take it again. Okay. The city might be dying, but Detroit's art scene is burgeoning—”

“Don't use that word,” Jen interrupts him.

“What?”

“You're trying to be too clever. This isn't writing.”

No shit, Jonno thinks and gives her a salute. “Yessir, Marshall McLuhan!”

“Too clever again. Try smiling.”

She holds up the mic, like an ice cream cone, and he bares his teeth obediently.

“Less fangs,” she says. He tries a different smile, which seems just as fake. He tries to put a spark in his eyes that will reach right through the screen and keep people watching for longer than the first twenty seconds, which is when most people click away, she's told him.

She's done all the research about viewing stats and advertising, and how if you get more than a hundred thousand views, YouTube will let you use their studios, maybe send you a fancy camera. She has shown him videos of people playing video games, for Christ's sake, who pull in a hundred
K
a month in advertising and a pretty boy in South Africa who makes a million a year with cutesy prank videos about his dog or how much he hates the beach.

“High culture then,” Jonno complains.

“He gets flown around the world. He does mall appearances. Girls scream like he's Justin Bieber.”

“That's not me, baby. That's never going to be me.”

“No, but you're smarter than him. You have something to say. You just have to
say
it.”

She's set up the video channel, even designed a logo for him, in between waitressing and DJing. Which is more than he's accomplished this week.

Sure, he's sent out story pitches to all his old contacts and some new editors, too. The problem is he didn't just burn his bridges when he left New York, he blew them up and napalmed the river.

You can miss a deadline or two, even three. You can fail to reply to increasingly frustrated, angry, disappointed emails, as long as you get back to people eventually, grovel, cite personal tragedy. (And that's true, he thinks, fiercely, before his troll can get a word in. It
was
tragic. It
did
fuck him up.) But to fail to deliver after they've granted you clemency? And become a repeat offender? He's on a dozen shit lists. It would take a miracle to get him back into writing, which is the only reason he's let Jen talk him into this.

The upside: she's spending more time at his place, which means he has to keep it tidy. Which in the peculiar psychology of humans immediately makes him feel better about himself (not like he doesn't know this: “5 Quick Fixes to Instantly Boost Your Mood”). Getting laid also helps. The downside is that he feels like now he has to carry all her expectations.

When really what you want is for her to be carrying
your
expectations. Little Jonno or Jen junior. Hey, have you asked if she has the genetic kind of diabetes?

He was the one who wanted out. He accused Cate of getting pregnant on purpose to catch him. Like he was the fish of the day—and such a great prospect at that. Self-employed writer, living in a shitty apartment in Queens and thinking about moving to Jersey because the rent was getting too expensive, creeping up on forty with nothing to show except sixteen thousand words of the great American novel—which he refused to let her read.

Meanwhile, she actually had a career. Brand manager for an upmarket fashion e-tailer. She managed to get him commissions for their content portal: “The Tweed Resurrection” (actual title they used), the best-kept secret breakfast spots in Martha's Vineyard. Which helped pay the rent until he missed a deadline because he was hung over, and got snarky with the editor via email. And the truth was, he resented having to rely on Cate's goodwill.

He wanted her to go for an abortion. It was the sensible and responsible and absolutely right thing to do. They'd only been dating for eighteen months. And sure, maybe he'd made a dumb joke about all the free shit they'd get if they married, but he didn't mean it like that. Not yet.

He looked up all the information online. Easy as pie. If it was six weeks, they could have it taken care of right away.
Like a mafia hit.
He tried to tell her about it in their neighborhood vinoteq, how you could insert some pills and forty-eight hours later, problem solved. They could order pizza, watch some movies—he'd take care of her.

“You make it sound like a date,” Cate said. “Or a bad bout of 'flu.”

Through the windows, they could see a film shoot under way in a sectioned-off part of the street with cameras and cranes and a lunch table set up under an awning.

“Wonder what they're shooting?”

“Car crash,” she said, pointing out the dented BMW with a motorbike lying next to it. A hefty man was showing the actor in black leathers how to roll across the hood of the car. Again and again. This is how you do it.

“Like our relationship,” he tried to joke.

Cate rolled the stem of her glass between her fingers. She'd ordered sparkling water, not wine. “I'm keeping it,” she said, her gray eyes clear. “I'm thirty-eight, Jonno. I might not get another chance.”

Over the next six weeks, they broke up, got back together, broke up again. He said some shitty things. Accused her of using him as a sperm bank. She retorted that he was the last man on earth she would have
chosen
to get sperm from. He demanded a paternity test. She said only if he signed a waiver that if it turned out to be his child, he rescinded all rights to see it.

Fear makes you ugly.

She went to the first scan without him, sent him an audio file of the heartbeat. Like white noise or the rush of traffic. It was nothing, he told himself. Good luck with that, he texted back.

He woke up next to some girl he'd picked up in a bar, and had his big revelation. He'd been trying to make it for twelve years in this city, and this was all he had to show. This crummy apartment with no kitchen sink, so he had to wash the dishes in the bathtunb, and a girl from Cincinnati, not-quite-pretty-enough-to-be-a-model, with the same hungriness in her, wanting in to all of it: the bright lights, the parties, those secret breakfast spots he wrote about for other people. It's all a lie, he wanted to tell her. They've got bouncers for people like you and me. We might get in the door, but we'll never be part of that world, not really. He'd been trying for so long. New York wasn't made for creative people anymore, and maybe there came a time you needed to give up your fantasies and concentrate on the important stuff.

Like love. Like a family.

And then, just when he figured out what he really wanted, Cate miscarried. No pills from Planned Parenthood required. The body's way of dumping a nonviable fetus. Like bad stocks.

Twenty percent of women miscarry in the first trimester. Millions of people go through this every day, she told him. It's part of the human experience. That made it worse—the pain wasn't even unique.

She got over it. He didn't.

He became obsessive, trawling through all the pregnancy sites: “At eleven weeks, your baby is now the size of a fig.” Or a lime or a muscadine grape, whatever the fuck that is. All those edible babies. One point six inches. The hurt seems bigger than that.

He begged her to take him back, in a fucking Starbucks near her work. Cate was composed even while she was crying. He tried to explain. He cataloged all the ways he'd been stupid and scared, and that it was the process he had to go through to get here. He was committed now. They could try again. She leaned over the table to take his hand in both of hers and said, “Oh God, Jonno. I think we've dodged a bullet, don't you?” And then she got up and put twenty dollars on the table to cover their coffees—way too much and, besides, he'd already paid at the counter—and walked out of his life, and didn't return his calls or texts or emails—all the ones he tried not to send.

It all unraveled after that. He'd open up his computer and the blinking cursor was so fucking oppressive, he'd click away to his browser. Jesus, why did they have to make it blink?

He played online games and watched a lot of porn. The games got dumber. The porn got darker and more fucked-up. He recognized this as a symptom of his own numbness. He listened to the audio file of the heartbeat of a ghost.

He let the phone ring and ring. He didn't call his friends back. He didn't call his parents or his sisters. He missed a whole slew of deadlines. He missed payment on his rent. Two months in a row was all it took.

He came home to find the locks changed and his stuff in boxes outside the front door. Half of it had been stolen already. He dumped the rest on the steps in front of the building, took his laptop and a bag of clothes—the nice stuff Cate had scored for him as part of her employee freebie benefits—and bought a last-minute plane ticket to the most fucked-up place he could think of.

If he'd been braver, maybe he would have gotten into hard-core drugs, fallen from grace and ended up literally in the gutter. But this felt like more of a dramatic statement. A pilgrimage of failure to the country's Mecca of ruined dreams. His friends thought he was nuts. He sent them a group message and didn't reply to any of theirs. Fresh starts don't come with expired relationships attached.

He didn't really expect to find anything here, though. He didn't anticipate falling in love, let alone getting the chance to reboot his whole life.

If he can just get it right for the damn camera.

“Okay. Okay. Are you rolling? I'm here in the Powerhouse District in Detroit, where artists are working on the Dream House project. It's taken three months of preparations to transform these rattraps—”

“I don't think you should say rattraps,” Jen interrupts him. “It sounds disrespectful.”

“Fine,” he says, brushing his hair back. “Pickup?”

“Okay, but fix your hair.”

He smoothes his hair, takes a breath and starts again. “I'm here at the Powerhouse District in Detroit, where a group of visionary artists have spent the last three months working hard to transform these derelict
death traps,
” he raises his eyebrows for emphasis and she pouts at him, “into astonishing works of art.”

“Maybe you should do it less like a local news channel. People like humor.”

“You didn't like my death-trap joke?”

“They want to see you, Jonno. You have to let them in.”

“I hate this.”

“We'll edit it. Start with an image of superweird art with music and a voice-over. It'll be cool. Trust me. Okay, look at me, not at the lens, it'll seem more natural.”

WWCD. What would Clooney do?
Good question. He sticks out his jaw, raising it to hide the flabbiness underneath and cocks his head, just a little. Attitude. That Clooney insouciance, like he's just goosed the bride.

“These are the things you know about Detroit,” he says, counting off on his fingers. “One. The whole city went bankrupt. Two. It's full of derelict death traps that look pretty if you photograph them in the right light. Three. Eminem.”

Jen nods vigorously and mouths “Awesome.”

“But there's a group of exciting young artists who aren't letting any of those things get in the way of their vision.”

“I'm Jonno Haim.” It sounds good. “And I'm going to walk you through the preparations on the Dream House project. Hopefully without breathing in too much asbestos or having the roof cave in on me.”

“Cut.”

Jen flings herself onto him and covers his face with kisses. “See! I knew you'd be brilliant.”

He kisses her back. He loves her enthusiasm, her faith in him, her sweetness. He always was a good bullshit artist.

And he really hopes Cate sees this.