Megan Abbott: Detroit Noir

“We talk,” he said.

He asked me to call him Truk. That was the name of the archipelago where he’d grown up; he said his real one was even harder to pronounce than it was to spell. His room in the walkout basement contained popular fiction on the shelves and stacks of People . I guessed he read them to improve his English. He sat cross-legged on a neatly made twin bed, showing bare ankles and the smooth brown line of his throat when he tipped his head back to draw on the cigarette he’d bummed.

I smoked and waited in a wicker armchair and wondered how old he was, thirty or sixty. His bowl-cut hair was glossy black, but Micronesians are a long time going gray.

“Police?” he asked.

“Private,” I said.

His face crumpled into a wrinkled mask. Sixty, definitely. “I don’ know what this is, private. ”

“It means I can’t shoot if you run away from me. Apart from that the work’s the same.”

He smiled, showing gold teeth and smoothing out his face. Thirty, maybe. “I thought Mark is dead before this.”

“Bad habits?”

He puffed and said nothing. He didn’t inhale, just filled his mouth and let it out like cigar smoke. His grin set like plaster of Paris. Forty, probably. I got out a twenty, folded it lengthwise, and held it up between two fingers. He drew his lip down over his teeth and shook his head.

I started to put it away.

“Kidneys,” he said.

I stopped. “What about them?”

“Like he didn’t have none. None that worked.”

“He didn’t die because his kidneys failed. His kidneys failed because he died.”

“I mean before. Three year, four. He got a new one.”

“His mother and stepfather didn’t mention that.”

“He didn’t get it from them.”

“Who donated it?”

He dropped the filter into a jar lid on the nightstand and asked for another cigarette. I tucked the twenty into the pack and flipped it onto the bed. I’d guessed the answer, but I might have to come back for more later.

He pocketed the pack with the bill inside. He didn’t take out a cigarette. “His father, the real one.”

“The mother’s type didn’t match?”

He shrugged.

I said, “I heard Mark and his father weren’t that close.”

He smiled again and patted his pocket.

I misunderstood. “That’s all you get. I’m dipping into capital.”

“Money’s what I meant. They pay.”

“Hank Worden sold one of his kidneys? For how much?”

He lifted and dropped his shoulders again. I asked him how he knew about the deal.

“I didn’, then. Later, Worden comes back, drunk, loud. Mr. Childs he say, ‘I call police.’ Then he leave.”

“What was he mad about?”

“I think maybe he wants more and Mr. Childs says no. I guess. My English is not so good as now.”

“Was Mrs. Childs here at the time?’

“She is out. It is after the operation, she goes to see Mark in the hospital.”

I got up and put out my cigarette in the jar lid. “Anything else?”

“Nothing else. I hear you talk to Mrs. Childs, I think maybe you want to know.” I was at the door when he spoke again. “You no police?”

“When’s the last time a cop gave you money?”

He lifted his bangs to show me a thin white scar on his scalp. “Sixteen stitch, ten year ago. All I ever got. So why you want to know about Mark?”

“I’m more curious than I thought I was.”

The radio news had more details on the victims in the apartment. Du’an Reeves, twenty, was a sophomore at Wayne State. Gordon Samuels and LeRon Porter, both twenty-one, were juniors. Porter had done short time in County for nonpayment of child support to a seventeen-year-old former girlfriend in Redford Township. None of the others had a record, including Mark Childs. The police were still investigating drug connections. I switched off.

Hank Worden, Mark Childs’s father and Clarissa Childs’s ex, lived in a bungalow that needed a new roof on West Vernor, the old Delray section, now mostly Mexican. The disrepair wasn’t uncommon in houses where construction workers lived; the work is all outgo and no income. His lights were on at midnight, so I knocked on his door. I had my gun with me on a hunch, but I didn’t need it to get in. I accomplished that by sticking my foot in the door and pushing a twenty through the gap.

He sat in a quagmire sofa drinking Diet Pepsi from a can, a man in his middle fifties but fit, tan from rugged outdoor work, in jeans and run-down tennis shoes and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He had all his hair, splintered with silver, and from the look of him it was easy to see why his kidney passed muster. But you don’t have to socialize with a vital organ.

“So you got the boy killed.” That’s what he opened with.

I remained standing. All the seats in the place looked like sinkholes and I didn’t want to have to wallow my way out of one to clock him. “According to the cops he was dead almost before I started looking for him. Do you want to fight? I sure don’t. It’s been a day.”

He shook the last drops onto his tongue and tossed the can toward a raveled straw laundry basket heaped over with empties. “I don’t want to fight. I been in fights and I never got a thing out of them, not even the sense to stop picking ’em. Last time I saw Mark he was in Pampers. I know I ought to feel something, but I don’t. Bastard, ain’t I?”

“Who told you, the cops?”

“They make the family rounds when something like this happens. Greasers next door get a visit every time one of their uncles gets squiffed. They got more uncles than a rabbit. Ought to loan ’em out to colored boys that got no daddies.”

“You thought enough of Mark to give him a kidney.”

“First thing I thought when they told me. ‘Well, there’s a piece of me wasted.’ You know about that, huh?”

“I told you, I’m a detective. So what about it?”

“That was strictly a business deal. Ten thousand bucks and all expenses paid. See, Mark and me was a perfect match. Is that a hoot? Clary took him when she left and she had less in common with him than me.”

“Ten grand doesn’t go as far as it used to. That was true even three or four years ago. So you went back for more, and Childs threw you out.”

His face darkened under the tan. “That what he said?”

“It’s what I heard.”

“I ought to go back up there and bash in his skull with one of them nutty statues he makes out of scrap.”

I didn’t like the way he said it. He was too calm. “If the cops heard you say that, they’d be down here tossing the place for a shotgun.”

“Go ahead, it’s in that closet. I used to bring it along when I had a job in the country, in case I saw a deer. Now I just keep it around to punch holes in the sky on New Year’s Eve.”

It was a Remington twelve-gauge in good condition. The barrel smelled oily and there was a little dust in it when I turned it toward the light. It hadn’t been fired recently. I put it back. “Of course, it could be one of a set.”

He made a kazoo with his lips. “I can barely afford to buy pop in six-packs. Get me one, will you? Take one for yourself. I ain’t had a real drink in twelve years; that’s why my kidney was so rosy pink.” He took one of the two I got from the refrigerator in the kitchenette and watched me snap the top on mine. “If Childs told you I got greedy, then he’s a liar on top of a deadbeat. I only went to that barn of his to get what was promised me. That check he wrote me ought to be tied to a paddle with a string.”

“It bounced?”

“Man, I had to duck when I tried to cash it.” He popped open his can. “I guess his insurance took care of the hospital bill, but I don’t go in to get carved on just for the rush.”