Broken Monsters (25 page)

Officer Marcus
Jones is trying to type names into the onboard computer in Detective Boyd's car, cross-referencing names from the spreadsheet of the participating artists they got from the curator, three pages of eight-point font. He's typing them in one by one to pull up their criminal records, if any. He wriggles his neck, still stiff from Gabi's sleeper couch, and it cricks audibly.

“Damn, son!” Boyd is impressed. “You too young to have your bones clicking like that. You should see a chiropractor.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“I heard you stayed over at Versado's. You get in there?”

“What?” Marcus drops the file and scrambles between his legs in the footwell to retrieve it.

“Fine woman is all I'm saying. Divorced too. Bet she could use some company.”

“I slept on the couch after taking her daughter home.” Then he unbends. “She's a good-looking woman.”

“Careful, son,” Boyd turns cold. “That's a superior officer you're talking about.”

“But you said…” Marcus is flustered.

 Boyd laughs. “Don't worry, I'm fucking with you. She's a mess, same as the rest of us. Fine po-lice though. Take my advice, kid, don't date within the force. But don't date a civilian either. You want someone who understands the terrible hours and the drain of the job. A nice paramedic or a firefighter.”

“Lot of attractive firefighters?” he says.

“Smokin'.” Boyd snickers at his own joke. “They'd love you, Sparkles.”

“You say so. Hey, you want to hear what I've found so far?”

“Hit me.”

 “Running the names from the list, I've got a painter with a felony charge for carjacking. A musician with a restraining order for stalking his ex-girlfriend, and the artist who made the Bone Hall.”

“Was that the one with the skulls and bones? Seems like a fit with our man's other work to me. You got an address? I think we should do that one first.”

“Yes, sir.” Marcus pulls up the details and types them into the GPS.

But the day is a washout. The artist who did the Bone Hall takes them through to his casting studio, his wife following them anxiously, carrying their baby on her hip. He makes his pewter models out of plaster of Paris, molded from a plastic skeleton he bought from a science shop. He shows them the pictures of the Capuchin Crypt in Rome that inspired him. “It's about mortality—how short our lives are, how the dead are always with us. And it looks cool.” He was out of town the night Daveyton was killed, interviewing for a job as an animator at a company in Chicago. “Art doesn't exactly pay for diapers,” he says.

The former carjacker is a biker-type with tattoos and graying hair. “I was nineteen and stupid. Haven't so much as run a red light since then.”

They work their way through the same list of questions with everyone: Where were you, who were you with, ever do ceramic work, do you know the Lafonte family or Elizabeth Spinks? Ever work with transglutaminase?

The man with the restraining order is living with the girlfriend who took it out. They have the ravaged bony look of dope fiends, and Marcus has no illusions about what people out of their minds on meth are capable of. Not usually given to elaborate forward planning, though. They pick their way into a room with a sagging mattress, everything littered with beer cans.

The woman climbs onto the man's lap. She's not wearing a bra under her faded black top, but not even Boyd can bring himself to look.

“I was with him all night, officers. Same as every night.” She sticks her tongue down his throat.

“Why'd you get a restraining order on him, then?”

“It's performance art,” says the man. “We like to push the boundaries of sexuality and social norms.”

She chimes in. “It was commentary on how you can't legislate love.”

“So you wasted the court's time and police time for your art?”

“I'm afraid so, detective. Do you want to punish me?” She offers her wrists to be cuffed with a gruesome pout.

“You know how many women need a restraining order and don't manage to get one?” Boyd is livid.

“I'm sorry you weren't there for our performance last night—you'd definitely have had to arrest us. Public indecency.” She grinds on her boyfriend's lap by way of demonstration.

“I see your name on a complaint form again, I will have you arrested for obstruction of justice. C'mon, Sparkles, I've had enough of this shit. We're done.”

“You sure you don't want a closer examination of our piece, detectives?” the skank calls after them.

Boyd drives them back to the precinct, complaining all the way. “You think you've seen it all.” He shifts his weight onto one butt cheek and lets off a massive fart. “That's what I think of them.”

Marcus winds down the window, choking and laughing at the audacity of it.

“Don't laugh, kid. Special privileges. Comes with getting your detective's badge.”

“I'm supposed to go back to patrol soon,” Marcus says, serious now. “My partner's out of the hospital. They had to take his appendix out, but he's gonna be back at work next week.”

“And you want to stick around.”

“I like it,” Marcus says. “It feels like what I'm supposed to be doing.”

“Don't sweat it. I think Detective Versado will find a way to keep you on this until it wraps up, don't worry. And don't let the other guys give you shit. I know we rag on you about being her mascot, but you're doing good work, kid. Maybe we'll see you in Homicide proper in a few years. Now get out of my car cuz I need to fart again. And if you thought the first one was bad, this one's going to blow the roof off. I don't want to have to tell Versado, yeah, sorry, I killed the rookie with poison gas.”

“You don't got to tell me twice.”

“Go home, Sparkles, get some rest.”

“Yes, sir.”

But the next morning, he sees his error—the fine print he missed on the back of the last page of the spreadsheet. It's because he's so sleep-deprived, all of them, running on empty, trying to piece this together. And hey, it's probably nothing. Another dead end, but he'll check it out on the way into the station, so he has
something
to tell Versado.

Marcus pulls up outside the house in a quiet street of mostly abandoned homes in various states of disrepair. This one somehow looks resentful, he thinks, like a man with his shoulders hunched up.

He rings the doorbell, but there's nobody home, then tramps around to the yard past the dirty slit window of the basement, but the high blank walls block his way. He gets that same ugly feeling as when he saw Daveyton under the bridge, and he knew that it wasn't a dead dog or a trick of the light off a trash bag.

He shouldn't have come here on his own, he thinks, reaching for his phone in his top pocket, his fingers brushing against the merit ribbons.

“Mr. Haim,”
the lady detective says, calling in via the call-forwarding number he set up for his YouTube tip line, which means she's seen the video. Crap. “You seem to have given me the wrong phone.”

“You know, I realized that when I got home. I'm so sorry. It was the heat of the moment. All the excitement.”

“I'd appreciate if you could bring me the correct phone, and also take down your video.”

“I would, but I'd need a court order.” He doesn't point out that she could send YouTube a simple “inappropriate content” notice, and they'd take it down faster than a how-to-breastfeed video.

“We can discuss that when you come down to the station.”

“Do I need to bring my lawyer?”

“Do you think you
need
a lawyer?”

Uh-oh. Tough-cookie alert.

He does not take a lawyer down to the station, because he figures he has more chance of persuading her to give him access for
Murder48
on his own. She invites him for a friendly chat in one of the interrogation rooms. She leaves the door open, and offers him a coffee, which he declines, but takes as a good sign. It is not.

He shoots the phone across the table at her and she takes it, flicks through the video folder and tests some of the footage.

“Anything else you're withholding?”

“No, officer.”

“
Detective.
You know you've compromised this investigation, you shit bag? You've set us back thirty-six hours, because what, you needed to get your little video out?”

“I'm doing my job, same as you. You wouldn't take the footage off a TV crew.”

“It's not
a job
. It's jerking off. You're like the kid in the playground yelling look at me! Look at me! Do you know what I spent the whole of my Sunday doing, while you were wanking online?”

“Working a murder scene?”

“Tagging and bagging things that might or might not be evidence. Trying to hunt down four hundred people. Showing the parents the remains of their child down in the morgue and trying to explain why someone would do this to him. Do you know what that was like? Did you think about them before you put your sensationalist crap up? How they would feel?”

“The people have a right to know,” he flusters.

“That's all you got? ‘The people'? Fuck you.”

He blinks. “Isn't there supposed to be a good cop?”

“We're short staffed.”

The jowly black detective Jonno saw Saturday night—the guy must have bribed his way through his last physical—sticks his head in. “Versado. You got a phone call.”

“Take a message, Bob.”

“It's important. I think you better take it.”

“Excuse me a moment.” She pushes away from the table and leaves, taking his phone with her.

“Everything okay?” Jonno asks the fat guy with his most winning smile.

“None of your fucking business,” he says, and walks away.

“Hey,” Jonno calls after him. “Hey! Can I change my mind about the coffee?”

It's fifteen minutes before she comes back. Long enough for Jonno to have composed several possible pieces in his head. “10 Most Outrageous Alibis.” “10 Ways to Entertain Yourself in a Police Interrogation Room” (thinking of top-ten lists is number three on the list). “10 Photos You Should Have Deleted off Your Cell Phone Before You Handed It to the Cops.” Like the ones of your girlfriend wearing only her tattoos.

When the detective comes back, she looks even more tired and mad than before. She sits down and shoves a piece of paper at him. “This is a list. Of times and dates.”

He examines it. “Yeah?”

“I'm going to need you to provide proof of your whereabouts on every single one of those occasions.”

“10 Reasons You Should Always Bring a Lawyer with You.
”

“Wait. Am I a suspect?”

“I don't know. Are you? You moved to the city three weeks ago. You needed a clean slate, according to your blog. Did something happen in New York that made you leave in a hurry?”

“I don't blog about every single little detail of my life.”

Especially not having his heart and guts wrenched out so that they drag along behind him wherever he goes. This isn't working, he thinks. He's going to have to change tack if he wants her onboard for the show. Although, hey, she's not the only detective in the pig house. “Was that your daughter on the phone? Is everything all right?”

She ignores him. “You'll need to provide phone numbers of witnesses who can corroborate your whereabouts.”

“I can see how you'd be worried as a mom, with what happened to that little boy last week. Abducted right out of school. Aren't you working that case?”

“Lead investigator. As you no doubt read in the
Detroit Star
this morning.”

“Is this part of the same investigation?”

“Murders happen every day in Detroit.”

“But you're saying the thing in the garden was definitely a body? I heard the boy was cut in half.”

“I can't comment on that.”

“Can I quote your ‘no comment'?” he asks, exasperated.

“You can fill in that list.”

“You know we're on the same side, Detective Versado.”

“No, you're interested in getting a story and I want to get the bad guy.”

“Isn't that the story?”

“It will be if you stay out of my way.”

Layla's hands
are shaking. In her head, she had imagined confronting Travis in the middle of the gymnateria in front of everyone, a public humiliation. Exactly what he deserves. She hadn't expected to find him out here on his own, sitting on a car in the parking lot, cutting class like she is, because she's too upset to sit still.

His knees are spread wide, as if he can't quite find the right position for them. Too much leg, too much boy. Baby face on a man's body.

“I've been looking for you,” she says.

“Well, girl, you found me.” He takes a drag on his cigarette, holding it between his knuckles, like something he saw in a movie.

“Stand up,” she says, kicking his sneaker with her shoe. She has been stewing about this all weekend, in church with her aunt and her cousins, listening to the choir dancing and singing, checking her phone obsessively for a message from Cas until her uncle threatened to confiscate it.

“What for?”

“Because I have something to say to you and I don't want to talk down to you.”

“Aight,” Travis says, getting to his feet. He drops the cigarette, his limbs all loose angles. “Is this about your friend? Cuz we were drunk, just fooling around.” He laughs uncomfortably. “I didn't mean anything by it. Why you being so uptight? It was a joke.”

“You sexually assaulted her! And you've been sharing that horrible video.”

“So what? We didn't make it.”

“It's disseminating child pornography, you moron.”

“Disseminating shit! It's on the Internet.” He looks scared, though. And young.
And dumb and full of come,
her brain finishes the mantra. “Besides, they didn't do nothing except take some pictures. It's not like they
raped
her.”

Layla loses it. “You stupid fucktard.” She swings her schoolbag at the side of his head. He ducks, laughing as she swings her bag at him again.

“Whoa! Come on now.”

“You fucking asshole. You fucking shit. You fuck.” She's whomping him with her bag with every sentence, yelling through tears.

Someone shouts “Fight!” and the upstairs windows of the chemistry lab fill up with kids' faces, shouting encouragement.

“Get him!”

“Hit her back! You gonna let a bitch wipe the floor with you?”

“What are you doing to him?” CeeCee screams, bursting out the main doors. She gets between them, and shoves Layla to the ground. “Oh, baby. Are you okay?”

“Ow, shit.” Travis spits a bloody chip into his hand. “Fuck. You knocked my tooth out!”

“You psycho bitch!” CeeCee snarls, and Layla, still down, raises her arm to fend off a blow that doesn't come. Above, kids are leaning out the windows, filming on their phones. People are streaming out of the building, forming a half circle around them, but no one does anything, waiting for the drama to play out. Spectators until the principal, Mr. Clarkwell, wades through, snapping at the kids to get back inside, right now.

Travis spits a rope of bloody saliva.

“He was asking for it,” Layla says, gingerly getting to her feet. She's not sorry. She's not. She stoops to pick up her bag and the stuff that's fallen out of it, including a cracked ashtray. Curved glass like a seashell, rainbow colors running together. When she comes back up, Travis has a strange expression on his face. His tongue works against his cheek, and then he spits out another tooth.

“Oh my God,” CeeCee says, not without glee. “Bitch, you are in such fucking trouble.”

“What in the wide world is happening here?” Mr. Clarkwell says, pulling Layla back, as if she was still trying to get at Travis.

“I didn't even hit him that hard.” She clutches her bag to her chest.

“Guh,” Travis says and three more teeth tumble into his hand. His eyes are wild.

“Travis?”

He retches. Vomit and blood and more teeth, yellowy white, clatter onto the cement.

And all Layla can think is that they don't look like they do in the toothpaste commercials.