Left Field Read online

  Was this one of those times? I thought Jackie was terrific. She was beautiful, fun, athletically accomplished, professionally successful—ran her own business as a commercial real estate inspector. And yeah, I know, nothing’s perfect. But I found myself thinking about her, longing for her, the usual lovesick behavior I got into, fantasizing about a happy future together. Her smile never failed to positively undo me. It—the smile—was every cliché in the book: the sun rushing up over the horizon, a starburst, a Pepsodent commercial.

  Jackie and I enjoyed each other, and we esteemed some of the same things, like violent movies and Scotch, but she wasn’t that into reading, except for the Calico Jones books, or going on hikes. There’s a particular swamp with an ancient trail I like to hike, but Jackie got bored in the woods. Still, she wasn’t a wuss. She liked to go on long runs (which I sucked at) on the hot summer roads, and she often challenged her agility by ducking under and jumping over obstacles. One time when we were at the Ann Arbor art fair, she took three long strides and jumped over an outdoor café table, her trailing leg clearing the empty cups on it by inches. She was pleased that I was impressed.

  I clung to her interest in the Calico Jones books. I’d just finished Three Clues in Deadhorse, in which the incredibly gorgeous, fabulous, successful private detective Calico Jones completes her mission, in the face of tremendous opposition and danger, of retrieving a set of ancient encoded sealskin scrolls.

  She delivers them to a secret conclave of Original Peoples’ shamans, thence to the Parliament of Canada, because the scrolls reveal how the native people had gotten screwed out of the Northwest Territories by an ivory trading company aided by a cadre of crooked Mounties long ago. I won’t spoil the searing, heart-clutching ending for you, but I will confide that it involves a narwhal that has been trained to impale the enemies of a particular tribal chief; an American pop star with an incurable spine disease; a bipolar Member of Parliament; and a leaky kayak. Calico manages to save the day with nothing more than her .45 semiautomatic, a laser beamsplitter, and her wits. What a story.

  Now that Flora wasn’t reaching out to me to do detective work for her—I think I’d done enough, figuring out that her mother inadvertently had committed homicide, don’t you?—I was making ends meet by taking freelance editing jobs and doing occasional stringing for the dailies.

  I’d cleaned up Raquel’s crate and washed up her food and water dishes and put all that away. I was surprised at how sad that made me.

  The Grinders had a game one Sunday on Belle Isle against the Gratiot Tap Room Dudettes. They’d managed to adopt a decrepit field near the center of the island—Belle Isle being sort of an heirloom fingerling potato of land in the river between Detroit and Windsor—and spruced it up nicely. It’s always more comfortable by the river in the summer, and everybody was enjoying the breeze that wafted like a cool silk scarf.

  We played, and the boxy, cheerful Happy Van was there, with Viv and Roland Briggs rooting for their weird daughter’s team, and lucky it was, because one of the Dudettes sprained her ankle rounding second. This happened quite late in the day—we were held up getting started, because the Dudettes were still weed-whacking the field when we arrived; then we got into an extra inning to break the 8–8 tie, and it must have been around nine o’clock because the sun was setting. I’d said hi to Dr. Briggs at the beginning of the game—he liked to chew the fat with the players between batting practice and the first pitch. He’d taken to kidding me about my Chuck Taylors, which he called my Bill Laimbeer shoes. Laimbeer was said to have been the dirtiest player in the NBA, but I always had cheered for him because he was a Piston. Dr. Briggs and I always made sure to include the awkward, quiet Christy in our camaraderie.

  Viv came out to take a look at the Dudette’s sprained ankle. A couple of her teammates helped her to the Happy Van, and shortly afterward she emerged, Ace-bandaged and hobbling. Sunday-evening, one-last-breath-of-fresh-air-before-going-home traffic was roaring all over the island.

  A few minutes later, the game wrapped up tighter than the limping Dudette’s ankle when Carmen smacked a liner to right to bring home Maggie from second. Dr. and Viv Briggs came over and slapped us all on the back before taking off in the Happy Van. I tell you all these details because they’re important. Because that night everything changed.

  Jackie had an early flight to some building inspectors’ conference in Denver, so I headed home solo, electing to go through downtown, which on a Sunday night was quiet and quick. As I rounded Grand Circus Park and headed north on Woodward, I saw a commotion of police lights, so naturally I slowed down to look. The whole street was blocked off, and though it was fully dark now, the police had augmented the brightness of the nearby Fox Theatre’s gorgeous neon gryphons with floodlights on high stanchions. When they do that, you know something deadly just went down. I pulled over and grabbed my camera. Doing this at night, I always thought of Arthur Felig, better known by the pseudonym “Weegee,” one of my journalistic heroes. If only I had his eye and his guts. If only the dailies anywhere still did.

  Walking up to the scene, I saw a low red sports car that had tried to make love with a utility pole. Closer up, yep, a BMW, its front end split to the firewall.

  An ambulance stood by, but the medics were just hanging around, checking their phones and jawing. The crime-scene guys were taking pictures. Evidently the body or bodies hadn’t been removed from the car yet. As I circled closer, I wondered, Why all the fuss if somebody simply crashed? The badges were talking to a couple of people who were babbling excitedly about what they’d seen. Gawkers jostled more or less politely behind the yellow tape, hoping to get a look at a stiff. The muggy night air felt like warm water.

  A couple of techs started to put up a curtain around the car. Another carefully approached the driver’s door. My pulse quickening, I ducked under the tape and got close enough to see the deflated, condom-like white airbag; the crunched engine compartment; and an impressive, still-glossy hairdo peeking up from the steering wheel in all its spun-licorice beauty.

  The driver’s-side window had been shattered out; crumbs of glass sparkled on the pavement like evil hail. The door was more or less intact. Here and there the red paint showed small, perfectly round silver discs, which I realized were holes. A crouching tech was setting evidence markers at a bunch of places on the pavement. I saw a few tiny black elliptical shadows on the ground and realized that small spheres would cast shadows like that; I looked closer and made out what had to have been buckshot. A young patrolwoman grabbed my arm and hustled me behind the tape. “You know better,” she said, somehow charming in her scolding. I gave her a warm smile and started to ask a question, but she stepped away and continued to patrol the perimeter.

  After photographing what I could, I asked the gawkers what had happened.

  “Motorcycle assassination,” said a thin guy in tinted aviator glasses.

  “Did you see it?”

  “No.”

  The guy was tricked out in a flat-brim cap and a leopard-print undershirt, but he wasn’t at all young; he looked forty at least. He took off his shades, and the crowd sort of parted between him and me.

  “How do you know, then?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t see it, I heard it.” He talked in a blur. His thin body moved in place like an underwater reed. “Rice-burner motorcycle you know that zzzeeee! It slowed down then the shot, boum! Then I heard a skid and metal and then kabaaammm the crash, that car decelled final, final.”

  I said, “You say the shot went boom, not sharp like a pistol?”

  He shook his head.

  “More like a shotgun?”

  “Shotgun, oh yeah. But he wasn’t a very experienced shooter, I’d say.”

  “How come? It appears he succeeded.”

  “Something happened, because he didn’t get away on the bike until a minute later. He fell off! That guy over there, who’s talking to the officer right now, he said the recoil knocked the dude right off that bike! That was
the skid! I wish I’d seen it! But he did get away, and that I did hear, zzzeeeee!” He flung his hands outward like a revival preacher.

  An unmarked car zoomed up. The driver threw it into park and jumped out. It was Lieutenant Sorrel in gray sweats. His face was cold stone under the police kliegs, before he strode through the curtain. I kept back with the crowd. All the cops went silent; everything went as silent as the nighthawks circling above, drawn by the brightness, the white chevrons on their underwings drawing arcs over the city.

  24

  At home, listening to some Brahms chamber music on the gramophone, I went over and over the characteristics of DeMedHo and Shirlene Cord and at last realized why and how Shirlene’s payroll scam worked: DeMedHo wasn’t an essential city function like the fire department or sanitation; it was an extra thing, a benefit not everybody was entitled to, a benefit you had to apply specially for, and there were no set criteria for who would get accepted into the program. It would seem Shirlene Cord herself had cherry-picked applicants and set them up with services enough and done PR enough so that everybody knew about DeMedHo, but nobody understood exactly how it worked. Perfect. The Beaux Arts Trio’s chords swelled around my flat like an affirmation.

  My phone rang, and it was my animal buddy Billie, keeper of the motliest home menagerie you’ve ever seen. She used to take care of Todd when I went out of town or on some half-assed stunt where I might get arrested. “I heard your raccoon got out,” she said.

  “Lou must have called you.”

  She paused, then reloaded her voice in a way I knew well. “Lillian,” she said slowly, like water flowing over moss, “don’t you think it’s time to—”

  “No!”

  “You need a new companion.”

  “No, Billie.” My blood boiled up. “There will be no replacing Todd,” I insisted fiercely, “and that’s it. That. Is. It.”

  “OK, easy, honey. I understand.”

  ----

  It was five days before I got to talk to Sorrel. I took a chance on showing up at police headquarters and asking to see him.

  Sorrel’s office was spartan. Desk, file cabinet, window ledge were all piled with files and stacks of printouts, but it all looked organized. An earth-mover-sized hex nut served as a paperweight atop a stack of stuff near the door, another on his desk. The lieutenant’s face looked drawn and shiny, as if he’d gotten too close to a hot furnace. I expressed my sympathies and he thanked me. He was wearing a pair of sharp navy dress slacks and a white shirt with a silver-blue tie. I noticed that the most worn hole on his black leather belt was pulled through the buckle: he’d definitely lost some weight this week.

  “How’s the investigation going?” I asked, leaning on a chair, not having been asked to sit.

  He just looked at me. Cops always like to let you know they don’t have to answer your questions. He probably wasn’t in charge of the investigation of the motorcycle-assassination murder of Shirlene Cord anyway. He said, “Do you have anything for me? I have a feeling you do.”

  “You know Shirlene was a gambling addict.”

  He smiled a little in spite of himself. “I guess you could say that.”

  “Well, gambling’s fun,” I said generously. “I tailed her to the casino a few times.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because something was really fishy about DeMedHo.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, aren’t you curious as to where Shirlene got all the money she threw around? For all I know, she’s got a yacht and an estate in the Canary Islands or something.” I fiddled with the strap on my purse and looked out his open door into the detective division for a second. I figured he knew everything there was to know about Shirlene Cord, but then again, love can be blind, even a cop’s love. The standard buzz of burbling phones and voices, punctuated by the occasional sharp laugh, felt reassuring. Cops doing their job against all odds. A heavy-hipped woman in a flowered muumuu sat hunched on a chair next to a detective’s desk, apparently giving a statement. She talked to the floor while a cop made notes. I saw only her lips move; she seemed to be saying, “I never knew, I never knew…”

  Sorrel didn’t say anything, and I ventured forward, “I mean, I know the city paid Shirlene well, but…” You see, I couldn’t tell Sorrel everything I’d found out about Shirlene’s payroll fraud without risking Lou’s and my necks for stealing all those documents. Live in the shadows, die in the shadows, you know?

  “What are you saying?” the lieutenant demanded.

  “I think Shirlene could have scammed tens of millions of dollars out of the city is all I’m saying.”

  “Well, if you haven’t noticed, she’s dead now. You happy?”

  “Come on, Lieutenant. You know there was something dirty about DeMedHo.”

  He turned his back to me and gazed out his dirty window, high over the dirty city. “I don’t know a city department that’s being run right.” He turned to face me. “Including this one.” To make sure I knew he meant the police, he gestured wearily toward his door. “I’m not shocked by anything. Look, all I can say is, if there were irregularities at DeMedHo, everything should get squared away by the new department head.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Word is the mayor’s going to appoint a Dr. Roland Briggs.”

  “Dr. Briggs!”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, he runs the Happy Van—you know, one of the providers for DeMedHo. They were at Abigail Rawson’s funeral, the doc and his wife.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “I know Dr. Briggs from way back, he was my pediatrician, and I think he’s a helluva guy. If anybody can put some accountability and honesty back into that department, he can. I wonder if he’ll shut down the Happy Van, to avoid a conflict of interest.” Remembering Briggs’s pending deal on that pharmacy in Inkster, I said, “Maybe he’s getting out of medical practice altogether.” I thought for a minute. “Didn’t you investigate him, or them, regarding Abigail’s death? I mean, of course there wasn’t anything connecting them with the death, I just thought—”

  “Right, there wasn’t anything.”

  “OK. But gosh, this does make me think about the politics of the situation, you know. I mean, in any political assassination you always have to look at the successor, but—”

  “You mean this Briggs,” Sorrel said sharply.

  “Yeah, but that strains even my suspicious mind.”

  “Where were you that evening?”

  When a detective asks you that question, even though you’re innocent, your heart bumps sideways for a second. I got hold of myself and told him about the softball game on Belle Isle, and I told him I’d seen the aftermath of Shirlene’s murder. “I saw you drive up,” I added.

  “You—”

  “Yes, and come to think of it, you can cross Dr. Briggs off your list, because he was at the game too. We were still playing when—it happened.”

  “You saw him there?”

  “Yeah!”

  “And he saw you there?”

  “Yes! This is ridiculous, Lieutenant.”

  He gave me a cold look, and I figured it was time to go.

  That night at home, as usual when I’m pondering an unsolved crime, I tried to think like a cop. Who would benefit from the sudden, violent death of the homophobic Shirlene Cord? Perhaps any number of people, starting with the characters around the fringes of her gambling life. The casino was legal, of course, but maybe she owed somebody money. I had no idea about her family or friends other than Sorrel. She could have been a drug addict who’d run afoul of her dealer or another addict. But Shirlene didn’t give off the functioning-addict vibe to me. Besides, that’s something Sorrel would have picked up on. Would he have risked his reputation and career by hanging out with a junkie?

  Sorrel himself could have performed the hit. Now that was a thought. A crime of passion? Had she spurned him, cheated on him? Had they quarreled? But if he’d wanted to kill her, he�
�d have had the luxury of planning, of taking her to some remote place and just shooting her in the back of the head and walking away.

  A random hit? Even in a city as feral as Detroit, such a thing didn’t make sense: it had been too cool, too stylishly done, except for the bobble of the assassin falling off the bike. Still, he—or she, who knew?—had gotten away clean.

  ----

  The next Grinders game was the playoff semifinals, Sunday night at Jayne Field, us against the Rocket Café Robins. If we lost to them, we’d be out, and they’d play in the championship game against the last team in the other bracket. The Robins were the only team not to have a hard-ass sounding name. That was deceptive, though; the Robins were anything but cute. Their manager was a crunch-faced bleached blonde who worked those women like dogs, running sprints until the moon came out. I got to the field early to do my stretches. I saw the white, perky Happy Van pull up and ran over to see if Dr. Briggs was in it. He was. I went up to the driver’s window. “Doctor!” He rolled it down, and cool air slid from the cab over my hand on the door. I said, smiling, “Is it time to say congratulations?”

  He smiled back uncertainly. “What do you mean?”

  “A little lark told me you’re on the mayor’s short list for director of DeMedHo. That true?”

  “Well…mercy…yes,” the doctor said, his round face reddening, “though it isn’t definite yet. I mean—it’s not public yet. Who told you?”

  “I’m just so glad somebody with principles is going to take over. But won’t you miss being a doctor?”

  “Sure I will.” There was my answer about conflict of interest. He stared off through the windshield for a minute. A phone mount clung to the dashboard beneath the mirror. Instead of a phone, a small coffee-stained notepad was crammed onto it, addresses written in a hasty hand. His and Viv’s rounds. “I’m sure not in it for the money,” he said. “But I’ll be able to do a whole lot more good.”