Mr. Paradise Read online

  Last night he’d made a run with Sergeant Jackie Michaels, forty-three, to the Prentiss Hotel on Cass. “Home to hookers, winos and crackheads,” Jackie said. “My neighborhood, Frank, when I was growing up. I might even know the complainant.” In some ways Jackie reminded him of Maureen. They’d been rookies together working out of the Tenth, the black girl and the white girl close friends, both from the street; nothing surprised either one.

  The complainant at the Prentiss Hotel was Tammi Marie Mello, W/F/49, lying on the stairway landing between the fifth and sixth floors. Apparent cause of death, the evidence tech said, a single gunshot wound to the back. “Yeah, I remember her from when I was a little girl,” Jackie said. “Tammi Mello, been selling that big ass of hers all her life.” They followed a trail of blood up the stairs and along the hall to 607 where a uniform stood by the open door, Jackie Michaels saying to Delsa, “Do you thank God like I do they’re stupid? Or stoned or lazy or generally fucked up?” The occupant of 607, Leroy Marvin Woody, B/M/63, unemployed bus driver, sitting by himself hunched over, a nearly full half-gallon of Five O’Clock gin next to him, ashtray full of cigarette butts, blood on the front of his white T-shirt, seemed in a nod. He didn’t respond to Jackie saying, “What’d you kill that woman for, Uncle? She make you mad? Say something mean and you lost your temper? Look at me, Mr. Woody. Tell me what you did with the gun.”

  •

  In the morning, after the call from Harris at the scene of the triple, Delsa had his coffee and got ready for work.

  The car they gave him to use was a dark blue Chevy Lumina with 115,000 miles on it and a Service Engine Soon light that was always on. He parked on Gratiot, a block from 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters for the past eighty years, the worn-out nine-story building hemmed in by high-rise wings of the Wayne County jail, the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice and, a few blocks south against the sky, the Greektown Casino.

  Most of Homicide was on five.

  Delsa walked past Seven’s squad room to the end of the hall and the office of his boss, Homicide Inspector Wendell Robinson, a cool guy, twenty-eight years with the Detroit Police. Wendell was up on the triple, he’d stopped by the scene on his way in.

  “Frank, it’s over by Tiger Stadium, that famous old ballpark of no use to anybody.” Wendell had hung up his trench coat and now stood by his desk, still wearing his Kangol cap, this one beige. Wendell had been wearing those soft Kangols as long as he’d been here, longer than Samuel L. Jackson had been wearing his backwards. He said, “Right across a parking lot’s a White Castle. You can smell those beautiful sliders with the onions fried on ‘em, seven in the morning. How we doing?”

  Delsa wanted to remind Wendell that he needed people. With Seven’s regular lieutenant in Iraq working for army intelligence, two on furlough, one home with her new baby, his executive sergeant, Vinnie, gone to Memphis to question a witness, Squad Seven was down to three: Delsa, Richard Harris and Jackie Michaels.

  But Wendell wanted to hear about the shooting out on East Eight Mile at Yakity Yak’s two nights ago.

  “Where are we, Frank?”

  “I’ve got a guy housed at the Seventh,” Delsa said, “Jerome Juwan Jackson, also known as Three-J. He’s twenty, a weedman on and off, went down a few times in his youth, wears Tommy Hilfiger colors with his cargo pants hanging off his ass.”

  “I know him,” Wendell said, “without ever having seen him.”

  “Yeah, but Jerome aspires to be ghetto fabulous and I’m helping him make it.”

  “He give up anybody?”

  “Let me tell it,” Delsa said. “Jerome and his half-brother Curtis they call Squeak? They’re at Yakity’s to see the bouncer. They want to hire a couple of strippers for a party they’re having and the bouncer can arrange it.”

  “Get ‘em some white chicks,” Wendell said. He took off his Kangol, sailed it like a Frisbee at the coat tree and missed.

  “Jerome calls them titty bitches. He said he had to be honest with me, he was smoking blunts and sipping Rémy all day, so that evening wasn’t clear in his mind what happened.”

  “You ask him did he want to be a witness to this gig or a defendant?”

  “I did,” Delsa said. “See, Harris’d already had Squeak in the pink room. Squeak claims he didn’t know the shooter, but Jerome did, and now Jerome’s looking over his shoulder.”

  Wendell said, “Tell me who he gave up.”

  “Tyrell Lewis, T-Dogg. Deals weed and blow, set up his girlfriend in a hair salon with crack money. That night at Yakity Yak’s he’s giving her a hard time about something. They’re in the parking lot and he’s got her against a blue Neon, yelling at her, getting rough. A guy comes out of the bar, five-five, one-fifty, has his dreads in a ponytail. The guy’s all hair and he’s stoned. Comes to the lot and says to Tyrell, ‘Get your bitch off the car.’”

  “It’s his car,” Wendell said.

  “No, we had that wrong. Tyrell stops abusing his girlfriend and pulls a nine out of his jacket. The little guy with the dreads pulls his nine, levels down on Tyrell and says, ‘I got one too, motherfucker.’”

  Wendell said, “And got killed for showing off.”

  “You want to let me tell it?” Delsa said. “Another guy comes out of the club and starts yelling at the two gunfighters, calling ‘em punks. ‘You nothing but punks playing with guns.’ Tyrell says, ‘You think this is a game, huh,’ and shoots the guy five times. Jerome says, ‘Yeah, ‘cause he punked him out in front of his baby’s mama.’”

  “Another one popped for nothing,” Wendell said. “You pick up the little fella with the hair?”

  “Nobody knows him or ever saw him before.”

  “Gets a man killed and takes off. You say it wasn’t even his car, this blue Neon.”

  Delsa said, “You know whose it is?”

  “You may as well tell me.”

  “My witness, Jerome.”

  Wendell sat down at his desk without taking his eyes from Delsa. “You’re looking at a way to use it.”

  “I wrote up two witness statements. In one of ‘em it’s Jerome who says to Tyrell, ‘Get your bitch off my car, motherfucker.’”

  “What about the little fella with the hair?”

  “He’s gone. I don’t mention him in this version. Then I have Jerome say in the statement, ‘He pulled a nine and I pulled mine.’ When I read the page back to Jerome I stopped there and said, ‘Man, that sounds like rap, “He pulled a nine and I pulled mine.” Who’d you get that from, Ja Rule, Dr. Dre?’ Jerome says no, he must’ve thought it up as he told what happened.”

  “He knows he didn’t say it,” Wendell said. “Does he know you know he didn’t?”

  “He doesn’t care,” Delsa said, “he sees himself with a new image. In the statement he names Tyrell as the shooter and tells what he did after that. Got in his car, went home and smoked a blunt. I asked him to read the statement and if the information’s correct sign each page.”

  “Looking him in the eye,” Wendell said.

  “He signed them.”

  “I bet he did, and pretty soon he’ll believe it. Tells everybody on the block what he did and becomes a street legend. Stood up to a gangbanger and pulled on him. You pick up Tyrell?”

  “Jerome says he works half days at the Mack Avenue Diner in Grosse Pointe Woods. We’ll pay a courtesy call to the police, stop in the diner for breakfast, Violent Crimes outside and scoop him up.”

  “Jerome’ll testify in court?”

  “I don’t want him to. The prosecutor can use Jerome to offer Tyrell second degree, the best he can do. Tyrell will get something like six to fifteen and do the whole bit, ‘cause he’ll fuck up inside. I want the word to get around Jerome refused to testify. Stood up to Tyrell, dissed him to his face, but will not disrespect him in the man’s court. Be a traitor to his kind by helping to send Tyrell down.”

  “You sound like an old-time Black Panther,” Wendell said. “What’s this ‘his kind’?”

 
“Assholes,” Delsa said, “the kind we bring in here every day and lie to each other, asking questions and taking statements.”

  “What you’re doing with Jerome,” Wendell said. “Setting him up to be an informant, huh? Does he know it?”

  “Not yet. I’ll pick him up later on, bring him here for another talk. See where he stands on ratting out people he knows.”

  “What’s his incentive?”

  “Tell him there’s money in it.”

  “It could work once or twice,” Wendell said.

  “The one last night,” Delsa said, “the hotel on Cass, the guy couldn’t explain the blood on the carpeting. Jackie asked him how he got blood on his shirt and he said, ‘Oh, Tammi hugged me and she has a tendency to bleed.’ Tammi’s the complainant. He shot her for taking twenty-eight bucks off the dresser. The man’s son, and a guy he sells crack with in the lobby, came up to get rid of the body. They got partway down the stairs and left her.”

  “Too much like work,” Wendell said.

  “I guess.”

  “What else? The guy sitting in his car on St. Antoine.”

  “Talking to his wife on the phone,” Delsa said. “She hears three shots. We’ve got no witnesses, nobody to focus on. And we’re still looking for two white guys going around shooting black drug dealers. They should stick out like they’re wearing signs, but we’re not getting anywhere.”

  “The guy out by Woodmere,” Wendell said, “back of the cemetery. What’s a man thinking, he shoots another man thirteen times?”

  Delsa said, “What’re any of them thinking.”

  3

  EARLY EVENING MONTEZ TAYLOR WAS IN THE MAN’S brown Lexus leaving downtown Detroit by way of East Jefferson. His phone rang. Montez brought it out of his tan cashmere topcoat, muted gold tie against dark gray underneath, and said, “Montez.” Always Montez, because it always could be Mr. Paradise.

  It was Lloyd.

  Meaning the man had told Lloyd to call and have him pick up something like booze, cigars, porno movies. Montez didn’t wait to hear what it was, he wanted to talk and said, “I’m at the office checking on that little girl’s new there, Kim? Tony Jr. comes along with his big ass, wants to know what I’m doing. I said picking up his daddy’s junk mail. He tells me soon as the old man’s gone I am too. I said, ‘What about my benefits, my bonus, my Blue Cross?’ Junior says, ‘You got to be kidding.’”

  Lloyd said, “Like you didn’t know they gonna throw your ass out in the street.”

  “Hey, I was fuckin with him. What’s the man doing?”

  “Watching his show, Wheel of Fortune. He wants you to pick up some of those Virginia Slim 120’s, the real long ones. The girlfriend’s coming this evening.”

  Montez said, “Wait now.” Stared at taillights running away from him in the dark, realized he was slowing down, and punched the gas pedal to catch up. Lloyd was mistaken, getting old. “You’re thinking of last night she was coming. I told you, I went to pick her up, she wasn’t home.”

  “That’s why she’s on for tonight,” Lloyd said.

  “He never said a word to me she was coming.”

  “He told me and I’m telling you. So stop and get the fuckin cigarettes,” Lloyd said, and was gone.

  Montez replaced his personal flip phone and brought out a cheap cell from the inside pocket of his suit: this phone to use when he called the number he jabbed in now with his thumb. A woman’s voice he recognized said hello. Montez said, “Lemme speak to Carl.” The woman’s voice said he wasn’t there. Montez asked where he was and if he was coming back. The woman’s voice said, “Who knows where that shithead is.” Said, “Don’t call here again,” and hung up.

  Montez said, “Fuck,” out loud, turned left off Jefferson, oncoming cars blowing horns at him, screeching tires, cruised up Iroquois to the middle of the second block, turned into the circular drive and eased up to the front entrance.

  He used his key to step from the eighty-year-old Georgian facade into the gloom of dark furniture, heavy chests and tables, chairs nobody ever sat on, old paintings of woods and the ocean, scenery, light coming through trees, the clouds, nothing going on in the pictures. All this old shit would be gone once the man was. He’d said, sounding pissed, none of his kids wanted to live in Detroit, happy to be out in West Bloomfield and Farmington Hills. So he was giving the house to someone who’d lived in the inner city all his life and would appreciate it. The man sincere, rewarding Montez for ten years so far of faithful, ass-kissing service.

  But then just last month:

  Montez explaining to the man how he could turn his study into an entertainment center with a big plasma TV screen on the wall, the latest kind of sound system, all hi-tech shit, and the man said, “I know your game, Montez,” his mind working on and off, “you want me to pay for how you’d fix it up.”

  Then like getting punched in the stomach:

  “Montez, I’ve changed my mind about giving you the house.” Saying he was sorry but not sounding like it. “I know I promised it to you …” but now his granddaughter Allegra, Tony Jr.’s married daughter, thought bringing up her kids in the city would be a stimulating experience. The man saying, “And you know when it comes to family …”

  Montez saw what he had to do. He shrugged, showed the man a sad kind of grin, said, “I can’t compete with little Allegra”—being cute getting the bitch anything she wanted—“and can appreciate her wanting to live in the inner city, even with crime the way it is here, it’s way more stimulating than Grosse Pointe.”

  “Ten to one,” the old man said, “Allegra sells it before she ever moves in. I know her husband John wants to move to California, get in the wine business.”

  Fuck. Another punch in the gut. Montez made himself shrug and grin, knowing the man would have to offer him something else instead. And he did.

  “You’ll get a check in the form of a bonus from the company,” the man said, “so your name won’t come up in the will and cause a commotion.”

  This time Montez could not shuck and jive the man with a shrug and grin. He stared at the man that time last month, stared and said, “Mr. Paradiso, do you believe your son would actually give me anything?”

  The man didn’t care for that. It was like being talked back to. He said, “If I tell my son you have something coming, you’re gonna get it, mister.”

  His serious tone and that “mister” shit meaning the conversation was over. Except Montez could not leave it there. He had to ask the man:

  “When you’re gone, how you gonna make Junior do what you want?” Paused and said, “When he don’t give a fuck what you want anyway?”

  Blew it. The man didn’t say another word. Went over to his big double-size easy chair full of pillows and sat down in front of his old TV console, like a piece of furniture in the living room.

  •

  Where he was now.

  Mr. Paradise shrinking and going frail with age, strands of white hair combed just right to cover his scalp, the man watching the end of Wheel of Fortune, Pat Sajak and Vanna White busting their ass to stretch the conversation through the closing seconds.

  “Vanna doesn’t give him much help,” the man said. “She can’t wait to say ‘Bye’ and wave to the audience. What she’s good at.”

  He was wearing a warm-up suit, the dark blue with yellow piping. He had glanced at Montez coming in the room and gone back to Pat and Vanna.

  Montez said, “Chloe’s coming tonight, huh?”

  “Yeah—you get the cigarettes?”

  “Not yet. You want me to pick her up?”

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

  Montez could say not always, but this was edgy enough. He said, “What time?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  Montez waited a moment. “You know I didn’t have any idea she was coming?”

  The man was watching a sappy ad now about Mr. Goodwrench. He said, “Don’t forget the cigarettes.”

  “Come on, Mr. Paradise, do I eve
r forget anything?”

  The man looked up at him and said, “You forget who you are sometimes.”

  Lloyd, in the white shirt and black vest he wore with a black bow tie, was in the dining room clearing the table. He said to Montez coming in, “Put something in your hands.” Montez picked up the bottle of red, down more than half, and followed Lloyd to the kitchen.

  Montez saying, “He still got the bug up his ass.”

  “You’re the one put it there,” Lloyd said.

  “How come I didn’t know his girl’s coming?”

  “You still on that?”

  “What if I’d gone someplace?”

  “You’d have gotten permission, wouldn’t you? Ask Mr. Paradise sir was it all right? He’d tell you no, you got to pick up his ho,” Lloyd said. “Least he’ll be in a good mood later on. You see what he’s wearing? His ath-e-lete suit. Means we gonna have some cheerleading tonight.” Lloyd said to Montez walking out, “The ho’s gonna bring another ho to do it with her.”

  Montez went out the back door and cross the yard toward the garage thinking, Jesus Christ, two of ‘em now. He brought out his special phone, the cheap one, and punched the number he’d tried in the car. When the woman’s voice came on, the same woman saying hello like she hated answering phones, Montez said from a hard part of his throat, “Don’t fuck with me, Mama.” She hung up on him. He put in the number again, listened to it ring and ring until Carl Fontana’s voice came on saying he was out and to leave a message. Montez said, “There’s no game tonight. Understand? Call me by nine.”

  That was all. He knew better than to get his name and too much of his voice onto tape.

  4