Megan Abbott: Detroit Noir

He took my hand in a hickory grip. He wore his hair to his collar and a soul patch in the hollow of his chin. I figured he was working undercover with a Wild West show.

“What else?” Thaler said.

McCoy flipped the other bag onto the table. We didn’t have to open to smell what was inside. “In the fridge.”

“Nothing harder?” Thaler asked.

“The gunner left with it if so. But if my honker is working this isn’t nickel-bag stuff. There’s right around six or seven grand in there.” He had an accent, Arkansas or farther.

“How’d he miss it?”

“Maybe he found another stash and stopped looking.”

“Okay. Tag both bags and get them to the Poindexters downtown.”

“Who’s McCoy?” I asked when he left with the evidence.

“Narcotics. He caught the squeal and hitched along. He thought the same thing you and I did when it came down.”

“I did then.”

“You saw the pot. Either a buy went wrong or word got out the stuff was here. You’ve seen it before.”

“Not over pot. Not even the premium kind. Someone who knows his way around a shotgun might stick them up, but he wouldn’t cut loose for anything less than heroin, or high-grade coke on the outside. He was methodical, if not professional.

And any idiot who’s ever seen Cops knows enough to look in the refrigerator.”

“McCoy’s people will run a check on the stiffs as we make them. One of ’em will cash back.”

“That sounds like racial profiling.”

“Not if it turns out it’s Childs.”

“His family never said anything about drugs.”

“That’s reliable.” She raised and plunged the tea bag a couple more times; the contents of her cup were nearly black. “You’re out at first base, Walker. If you think Homicide rides its fence you don’t know anything about those cowboys in Narco.”

I dragged in everything but the filter and put it out in a carton of moo shu pork. “I told you I’m not as curious as I used to be.”

“You were more convincing the first time.”

Mark Childs was the product of a broken home; the home in his case being a nine hundred square foot house in old Del-ray. At age three he’d traded it for a Cape Cod on Lake St.

Clair, with grass and clay courts and a skiff tied up at the dock out back with Childs’ Plaything scripted on its transom. Orson Childs, Swedish on one side, English on the other, with equal shares in Volvo and British Petroleum, had adopted Mark after his mother’s divorce and her marriage to Orson. If I understood right, Orson’s own mother had commemorated the occasion by endowing the boy with a trust fund that after nearly fifteen years of compound interest looked like the annual budget for the state of Rhode Island.

The houseman, a fine-featured Micronesian in a white coat, left me standing in the entrance hall while he found out if anyone was home at 11 o’clock on a weeknight. It was a room meant for standing, despite the presence of a row of straight shieldback chairs and an antique oak hall tree with a bench. I got the nod finally and followed him into a carpeted living room with a sunken conversation pit and Mrs. Childs drinking from an umbrella stand in a white leather armchair. She was a horsey-looking woman of fifty, not horsefaced but the type you pictured riding to hounds in a red habit and lack helmet, and to hell with the animal rightists, in a gray silk blouse, black stirrup pants, tasseled loafers on her bare feet; fencerail-lean with high cheekbones and straight auburn hair swept behind her ears. She’d been crying. She offered me a drink. I said no thanks and she threw out the houseman with her bony chin.

I remained standing. “I’m sorry.”

“Why should you be? You didn’t kill him. Did you?” She had a flat Midwestern accent. In those surroundings, with her features, it should have been New England, but then she’d been married to a construction worker before Orson came along.

“Have the police been here?”

“They just left. They were polite; sincere, even. They asked if Mark was into drugs. I said no. They didn’t believe me, but they were polite about it, so I didn’t throw anything at them. I suppose we owe you money.”

“We’re square. You gave me a three-day retainer but I only used two days. Actually, it’s your husband I wanted to talk to. Is he around?”

She said he was in his workshop and gave me directions.

Then she swirled the ice in her glass and drank from it and I stopped existing.

It was a metalworking shop in a small building behind the house, a shed that was supposed to be an old carriage house that had been converted into a shed but had always been a shed. It was one of the newer estates in Grosse Pointe, less than sixty years old; no vintage auto money there of the Dodge and Ford and Durant type. I knocked, but it was noisy inside, so I let myself into a room filled with blue smoke and the sharp stench of scorched metal and sparks from Childs’s cutting torch. He was a hobbyist who made sculpture from rescued driveshafts, leaf springs, and gold dental retainers scrounged from salvage yards and dumpsters behind schools. At the moment he was cutting up a length of steel pipe clamped in a vise bigger than my head.

I waited, hands in pockets, not wanting to startle him while he was handling dangerous equipment. When he saw me he jumped a little anyway, then tipped up his visor and screwed shut the valve on the acetylene tank. I said I was sorry about Mark.

“Yes.” He spoke in clipped tones: stiff-upper-lip Brit by way of Vancouver, where the American branch of his family emigrated after the colonies declared independence from England. “I consider our transactions at an end, barring outstanding expenses. If you’ll submit a statement, we can put an end to this sad business.” He produced a checkbook from a hip pocket. He had it on him with a leather apron.

“We’re fine,” I said. “I just wanted to clear up some details before I type my report.”

“Clarissa’s the detail person. Why don’t you come back when she’s in a condition to answer your questions?”

“Stepfathers tend to be more objective considering their wives’ children. Was there anything about Mark’s behavior that suggested he might have been into the drug scene?”

He tugged off his gauntlets. He was a good-looking man creeping up on sixty, with a receding hairline and a long upper lip fighting the old battle between pickled youth and premature old age. “I liked Mark,” he said. “I couldn’t really love him, because he came to me fully assembled, but I think we might have been friends if I hadn’t married his mother. It never occurred to me he had anything to do with drugs, but then I didn’t pay as much attention to that sort of thing as I suppose I should have. It would explain some things, wouldn’t it?”

“Things such as what?”

“Well, his poor academic performance and his running off. He wasn’t a rebellious boy. He was a sickly child, always on some kind of medication. Maybe that’s where it started.”

“His real father might know something.”

“Hank? I doubt it. They haven’t seen each other in years.”

“That’s what he said when I called to ask if Mark had moved in with him. Then he hung up.”

“That’s Hank Worden. I suppose I should be grateful he’s such a miserable son of a bitch. He’s made me look like the ideal husband by contrast.”

I thanked him and thought of some more words of sympathy, but he had his gloves back on and the visor down and was firing up the torch for another go at his project. People grieve all sorts of ways.

The houseman was standing in the path between the house and the workshop when I let myself out. His hands hung at his sides and his white coat glowed blue under a mercury light mounted on top of a tall pole.