The Avocado Kid won the 2016 ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD for Best Mystery Short Fiction and originally appeared in the June 2015 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. © Scott Mackay, 2015
The Avocado Kid
By
Scott Mackay
As Detective Michael Grandy answered the phone, his mind remained half on the chest X-ray he had undergone yesterday at Henry Ford, the result not yet available despite two calls to Dr. Sameem’s office.
“Grandy, Homicide.”
He was thinking it would be Dr. Sameem with the bad news, but it turned out to be a colleague, Bynum, and with Bynum it was always about one thing.
“We’ve got one. Is Nico in front of you?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because until we get a handle on this, I don’t think he should know.”
“Who’s the victim?
When Bynum told him who the victim was, Grandy understood that he had to get out of there before they talked further.
“Can I call you outside?” suggested Grandy. For cover in front of Nico, he added, “I need a smoke.”
“I thought you were giving that up.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Did you hear back about your X-ray yet?”
“No.”
“How’s the cough?”
“Bad.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like road kill.”
Grandy put the phone in its cradle and stared at his partner, Nico. Nico studied the latest scores on his Detroit Red Wings app, his dark brow straining toward the bridge of his nose, his small eyes fierce with concentration. The wind unleashed a particularly vicious snow squall against the window, but Nico didn’t look up – he was all Red Wings today.
“I’m going outside for a smoke,” said Grandy.
“Go.”
To allay the man’s nonexistent suspicions about whether his on-again-off-again fiancée had been bludgeoned to death last night in the Chaffee Elementary schoolyard, Grandy said, “I’m glad you guys are getting back together. I don’t think I’ve said that yet.”
Now Nico looked up. “You never know with Sherry.”
“You mean it’s not a done deal?”
“She keeps telling me it’s over with Padgett. Which means it isn’t.”
Grandy sighed and stated the truth. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about Padgett anymore.”
Outside, before he called Bynum, he withdrew his cigarettes, took one out, stuck it in his mouth, lit it, and inhaled. Immediately he felt the nagging pain in his left lung that had forced him to go see the doctor in the first place. Had to quit, had to quit, had to quit. But maybe it was too late. Maybe his chest X-ray would come back with cancer. In which case, another cigarette wouldn’t matter.
He smoked, brooded, then threw his half-finished cigarette into the collecting snow and mashed it out with his foot.
He took out his cell and called Bynum.
Grandy had to know for Nico’s sake. “So how bad is she?”
“Put it this way,” said his colleague. “You wouldn’t want to be showing Nico her autopsy photographs anytime soon.”
“Is she recognizable?”
“As a human?”
“God.”
“Dr. Fujita thinks a possible skull fracture.” Bynum pondered. “I wonder where loverboy was at the time.”
“You mean Padgett?”
“Because I hear she was breaking it off with him, and getting back together with Nico.”
After some thought, Grandy offered the following. “I sure hope Padgett knows how to hide.”
“Why?”
“Because the Red Wings lost last night.”
At Chaffee Elementary School, sitting in his car before he got out to investigate the scene, the craving for nicotine became so strong he slapped himself in the face to make it stop. Had to quit, had to quit, had to quit. Then took out his cigarettes and lit up.
He looked at his gut. That was the other thing. How did that gut happen? Was the gut the reason Ilona, squad secretary, wouldn’t look at him? He inhaled deeply, felt a twinge in his left lung, and wondered how he could compete when he looked the way he did.
He got out of his car, feeling so fatigued by the last few weeks of lung trouble he wanted to lie in the snow to get his strength back. Willpower made him put one foot after the other. A rookie lifted the tape, and he waddled across the playing field toward the scene.
The school was L-shaped, framing the playing field on the south and west sides. The playing field surface, over the past few days, had frozen, melted, frozen, and was now treacherous with bumpy footprint impressions. Against this exceedingly uneven surface, his metatarsals acted up – every step he took was painful.
Bynum, tall, black, old, came over, having the same difficulty he was. He motioned at the ice. “Can you believe this?”
Grandy became uncharacteristically optimistic. “Maybe she fell?”
Ominous certainty came to Bynum’s voice. “She didn’t fall.”
Grandy waved vaguely at the neighborhood. “Any witnesses?”
“Not yet. We’ll recanvas in the morning.”
Where the two wings of the school met, police stood with flashlights over Sherry Fountain’s sheet-covered body.
He and Bynum headed over.
As he got to the body, Grandy said to the officers, “Matherly, go sit in your car. Your nose is turning blue. Stennett, get coffee and donuts, my treat.” And gave Stennett ten bucks.
The officers departed, leaving Grandy and Bynum at Sherry’s feet. Grandy leaned over and pulled the sheet aside.
Nico’s on-again-off-again fiancée who taught Grade Three at Chaffee Elementary had her coat, sweater, and shirt ripped away. Her blonde hair, usually so carefully arranged, was a shapeless bloody mess. Her face had been badly beaten – gashes, contusions, swelling – and a left-sided concavity suggested the skull fracture Dr. Fujita had already theorized about.
Grandy inquired about the most obvious mystery. “What was she doing at the school so late?”
Bynum was staring at the victim with the blank and uninquisitive eyes of a detective who had one year left before retirement. “I have no idea.”
“Have you talked to the school staff?”
“I left a message with the principal. He hasn’t returned my call.”
“The school is empty?”
“Yes.”
“Not even a janitor?”
“Not even a janitor.”
Grandy looked around, his stomach growling for the donuts Stennett was getting, then turned his attention to their victim.
“Any physical evidence?”
“You mean other than that she was beaten to death?”
“Yeah.”
Bynum shrugged, then grasped, still not caring too much, what with the three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day countdown now in progress.
“There could’ve been footprints in an earlier layer of snow. But by the time I got here, they were buried under this new layer.”
Grandy thought, taking a few drags on his cigarette, nicotine jumpstarting him like it always did.
“The principal gets back to you, tell him school’s cancelled tomorrow.”
Nico didn’t take it well. His dark, broad-shouldered, Athenian partner sank to his chair. He nearly missed going down, had to shift at the last second in order not to fall. It certainly got to Grandy, once he delivered the news, the way his partner said her name over and over again, “Sherry… Sherry… Sherry,” like the eponymous Four-Seasons song of 1962.
Then came the characteristic distraction seen so often in those left behind, the confusion, the not knowing what to do next. Nico got up from his chair, walked down the aisle, and looked out the dark window at the street, where cars, trucks, buses, and pedestrians went by in the cold Detroit dusk. Ilona, the squad secretary, was now staring at Nico as if at a car accident. Grandy couldn’t help glancing. God, she was beautiful. God, Latvian women were beautiful.
Nico tapped the sill a few times, turned around, and sucked his lower lip into his mouth. He then let out that chapped and squarish piece of facial anatomy, scratched his badly-shaven chin, looked at Grandy, and decided to bypass the whole part about getting justice for Sherry and concentrated instead on getting revenge.
“Padgett’s behind this.” The man’s certainty was colder than the sub-zero temperatures outside. “You know that, don’t you?”
Nico was anything but distracted now. In fact, Grandy thought he needed some additional distraction in order to stop him from looking like a homicidal maniac, so he tried to shift Nico’s focus to the big mystery of the investigation.
“You have any idea why she would be at school that late at night?”
But this just served to intensify Nico’s homicidal drift. “She was at the school?”
“Yes.”
Anger, simmering, now boiled over. “That’s a trick she used to play with Padgett. They went to the school late at night.”
“Oh. So you think she went to the school to meet him?”
Again with too much certainty, Nico said, “I know she did.”
“But I thought you and Sherry were getting back together, and that it was over between her and Padgett. So wouldn’t it be unlikely she went to the school last night to meet him? Maybe she went for some other reason.”
“No.” The vengefulness in Nico’s dark Mediterranean eyes took on a glimmer of consternation. “Look at her track record, and tell me if I’m wrong.”
He had to admit, Sherry baby didn’t have the best track record. “Then we’ll definitely check into Padgett.”
Nico nodded as if they were going out to the car together. “Let me get my gun.”
“Me and Bynum will check into Padgett,” Grandy clarified. “Not you.”
Nico looked betrayed. “Mike, come on. She was my fiancée.”
“I’ve already talked to the chief. He says no.”
“She went to the school to meet him. I gave you your first lead.”
“She likely did, and we thank you for your lead. But the chief wants you to take bereavement. Starting now.” He struggled to contain the situation with a joke. “Particularly because the Red Wings lost last night.”
Nico jumped from Kelvin zero to Fahrenheit four-five-one, and, with no warning, punched his computer monitor. The monitor tilted, balanced for a second on the edge of his desk, then crashed to the floor. Everyone grew still, a statuary garden of shocked manikins. Bynum. Erskine. Carrozzier. Lowe. Phelps. Ilona. Especially Ilona, who, unlike the rest of them had generally been insulated from the violence of the street.
After a respectful interval, Grandy eased Nico past his outburst by delicately pressing for specifics. “That’s the only reason Sherry would go over to Chaffee?”
Struggling through some hyperventilation, Nico said, “The supply room. That was their place. With the colored construction paper, the crayons, and the gold stars.”
Unexpectedly, tears came, a hard thing because Nico was generally made of pre-cast ten-inch concrete blocks, and it was awkward to see concrete cry. Grandy again looked at Ilona, simply because he had to look at something else besides Nico’s less-than-manly performance. Ilona nodded encouragement. At first Grandy didn’t get it. But then he waddled stiffly over, his gut preceding him, put his hand on Nico’s shoulder, and expressed the department’s standard condolence.
“We’re sorry for your loss.” With Ilona watching, he felt it came out wooden, so he tried again. “We’re really sorry for your loss.” His second attempt was worse than his first.
Obsession, as acute as strychnine poisoning, came to Nico’s drying eyes. “Did you take your own personal crime-scene photographs on your phone like you usually do?”
Grandy hesitated, then warned. “Nico, you don’t want to see the photographs.”
“I want to see the photographs.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Mike, show me the photographs.”
“Nico, no.”
“Show me the photographs. I want to see what that piece of garbage did to her.”
“We don’t know he was a him, a her, or a what. We have no evidence Padgett was there. The snow’s covered everything.”
“You tried calling him?”
“We’ve tried calling him. Nobody’s picking up. We couldn’t leave a message because his mailbox is full.”
“Did you go over to his apartment?”
“We drove to his apartment. He wasn’t there.”
“I know where he goes. I followed that cockroach everywhere. I know every hole he hides in.” Nico got up. “I’ll find him, Mike. Don’t worry.”
“Nico, what did the chief say about bereavement time?”
“We all mourn in different ways, Mike.”
He and Bynum met Principal Garry Irby at the school the next day. Irby was a short, heavy-set black man in a dark blue overcoat. He had a mustache with strands of gray. They met in front, and Irby was standing on the salted steps personally telling any children who missed the fan-out phone calls that school was closed for the day.
A number of other teachers were there: Ms. Torres, Mrs. Niemann, Mr. Minton, Miss Zavala, and Ms. Barnett. All five were subdued, cold, and Ms. Tanya Torres in particular looked scared. He couldn’t help studying Ms. Torres for a number of moments as Bynum carried out the introductions and outlined to Irby some of the essentials of what the two of them needed to accomplish that morning. Tanya Torres was short, dark-complexioned, Hispanic, but with some black blood, and she was pretty in a way that reminded him of Ilona. Naturally she was upset and anxious like everybody else, but again he detected what he had to define as a personalized fear of the situation. That made him think she knew something.
He was about to pull her aside to talk to her when her cell phone rang and she stepped to the curb to begin a conversation in Spanish. He turned his attention to Irby, thinking he would have to talk to Ms. Torres later.
“Can you take us to Ms. Fountain’s classroom?” Grandy asked the principal.
Irby took them up the steps into the main front hall. The inside of the school needed paint, some plaster was coming down, and glass from the trophy cabinet had been replaced with a piece of cardboard. The tiles on the floor looked as if they hadn’t been waxed in a long time, and somewhere pipes clanked as the antiquated heating system tried to warm the corridor.
In Sherry Fountain’s Grade-Three classroom, Grandy asked Irby, “Is that the victim’s purse on her desk?”
Principal Irby peered. The purse was a black-and-white Gucci knockoff.
“It’s hers.”
Grandy put on latex gloves and went over.
He looked through the purse and found the usual things: a wallet, chewing gum, an iPod with earplugs attached, a bottle of Tylenol, a calorie counter. Grandy now speculated that the reason she had come back to the school last night was not to meet her former lover, Padgett, but because she had forgotten her purse.
When he floated this theory to Bynum, his colleague said, “Anything taken from the wallet?”
Grandy looked. “No. All her cash and credit cards are there.”
“How much cash?”
Grandy counted. “Three hundred and change.”
Bynum nodded. “I would come back for that much.”
Grandy turned to the principal. “She usually forget her purse?”
“She usually puts it in a bigger bag with lesson plans and study guides when she leaves. Maybe she thought she had it.”
Grandy considered, then turned his attention to the next item of the investigation.
“I guess we better take a look at the schoolyard in daylight.”
Out in the schoolyard, Grandy couldn’t make much sense of anything – three hundred kids walking around in snow, or at least slush, and then the slush freezing, then more snow coming and covering it all, and who could tell what was what? As with the inside of the school, the outside was unkempt – money for full janitorial staff, so Irby told them, had ceased, and they had just one janitor for three area schools.
“Look at this litter,” said Bynum.
“The janitor must hate these kids,” said Grandy.
As the schoolyard was a frozen, bumpy, and ultimately unrevealing expanse of ice, all they had to go on was the litter that covered the place. The wind had blown the litter everywhere. Grandy walked over and lifted a chocolate-bar wrapper. He next found a wax-coated paper cup with a plastic straw sticking through the top. Then a potato-chip bag. Then a red licorice wrapper. Then a triangular pizza-slice paper plate.
“From the convenience store across the street?” Grandy speculated to Bynum.
“And the pizza joint on the corner.” Bynum was staring, his eyes poised between astonishment and disgust. “I don’t know how these kids can eat this stuff. My reflux would riot.”
Grandy maneuvered carefully around the snow-covered ice, his left metatarsal acting up again. All the litter was kid litter. He lit a cigarette, and, two or three nicotine blasts later, it came to him: what piece of litter didn’t belong? That’s all they had to find.
“Some grown-up litter might help,” he postulated.
Bynum got it a moment later. “That just come to you?”
“It’s the nicotine talking.”
Bynum had apparently been going over another angle. “By the way, I phoned Padgett’s sister.”
“You did?”
“She tells me the breakup between Sherry and her brother was a go, always a go, that there was no way he would have agreed to meet her here last night. She tells me he was going to catch the red-eye to California last night. To be with his ex-wife, as a matter of fact. They’ve had a reconciliation, and that’s the whole reason he and Sherry are breaking up in the first place.”
“So he dumped her?”
“Yes.”
“Nico said it was the other way around.”
“She’s lying to him.”
“So in other words, she couldn’t have Padgett, so she went to her fallback.”
“Poor Nico.”
They looked for a while more.
Grandy finally found an anomaly in the litter that might in fact be a lead.
“Take a look at that.”
They went over and found an upscale sandwich slip with a half-eaten avocado and Swiss on artisan inside. The slip had a Harpo-Marx logo, and the sandwich itself, what was left of it, even though now frozen, looked fresh, as in, fresh yesterday. Grandy lifted the sandwich with his evidence-handling gloves, and looked at the logo, then peered at the avocado.
“No kid’s going to eat avocado unless you point a gun to his head.”
Bynum was studying the Harpo-Marx logo. “You know this place?”
“I try to stay away from places where the food is actually good for me. But, yeah. I know it.”
They drove the twelve blocks to Harpo’s.
A man named Shahir ran the place.
“Yeah, sure. I know him. He comes in two or three times a week and orders the same thing every time, avocado and Swiss on artisan.”
“He got a name?” asked Grandy.
Shahir had to think. “Colby?”
“That his last name?” asked Grandy.
“No. His first.”
“No last name?” asked Bynum.
“I imagine. But I have no idea what it is.”
“Was he here last night?” asked Grandy.
This time, Shahir didn’t have to think. “Came by around six-thirty. Like he usually does.”
“In a vehicle?”
“No.”
“Ever see him in a vehicle?”
“No. In summer he rides a bike.”
“What’s he look like?”
Shahir thought, then motioned at Grandy. “About your build.”
“So. Fat.”
“I didn’t want to say.”
“Black, white, other?”
“White. The whitest guy I’ve ever seen.”
“Do you know what direction he went once he left the store?”
Now Shahir looked as if Grandy was asking him to produce a miracle. “I was making sandwiches.” Then he brightened. “But if you want, I’ve got video. It’s in the back.” He turned. “Lydia, come to the front. I’ve got to go to the office for a minute.”
The long shot of the possible suspect buying an avocado and Swiss on artisan at Harpo’s was shown to Principal Irby at Chaffee Elementary a short while later. Irby tensed forward and peered at the heavyset white man with short blond hair in a gray overcoat.
“That’s Colby Hines. Used to be the full-time janitor here before the cutbacks came. He wouldn’t leave Tanya Torres alone. Now Tanya has a restraining order against him.”
While Bynum went out to the hall to have the office run Colby Hines on the police database, Grandy finally had his chance to talk to Tanya Torres.
He again couldn’t help thinking she looked a lot like Ilona, only a Hispanic version, and it took him a few seconds to get over the resemblance, not only the woman’s looks, but how he himself – the tough-guy cop who did all the TV talking for the squad because he had nerves of steel in front of the cameras – didn’t have the guts to ask the squad secretary out for coffee, even though he was probably dying of lung cancer and wouldn’t get too many more chances to ask anybody out for coffee.
In talking to Ms. Torres, he made a helpful discovery.
“He had a thing for Sherry, too,” she told him. “After he got fired, Sherry and I would walk to our cars together because he would always be hanging around outside waiting for us. Warm weather came along, and Colby would take off his shirt and follow us on his bike when we went to the pizza place for lunch.”
“Could you describe him?”
She peered at Irby’s Education Diploma on the wall, considered, then gave it to Grandy succinctly. “Think flabby potato, and that’s what you have.” He tried not to let it bother him, this Hispanic version of Ilona talking about flabby potatoes, because that pretty much described his own physique, but it bothered him anyway. “Scared us half to death.”
Meekly, and with some trepidation, he asked, “The flabby potato part?”
“More that he had a temper. A bad one. He would rant. He said all he wanted to do was have coffee with us, and that it was unfair we wouldn’t give him a chance, and that we shouldn’t hold it against him that he was a janitor. Believe me, it had nothing to do with him being a janitor. I’ve dated janitors before. They just didn’t rant. Now I have a protective order.”
When Bynum came back from the hall, he summarized for Grandy the suspect’s sheet.
“We got not only the protective order Ms. Torres filed, but a vehicle license suspension and jail time because of a road-rage incident. He assaulted and hospitalized another motorist.”
“So he’s had practice turning people into mush.”
“Yeah. I also got lucky with the recanvas.”
“Oh. So that’s where you went. I thought you’d gone to get us avocado sandwiches.”
“No. Didn’t you hear? They can drive a person to kill.”
“Have any luck with the recanvas?”
“I have a witness.”
There were still days on this job... “The chief isn’t going to let you retire.”
“Mentally, I’ve been checked out for a while now.”
“Like since the day you started. But you still have a witness.”
“I do. One of the neighbors came forward. Gavin Pinedo. He lives down the street at 87. Been in the neighborhood his whole life. Used to talk to Hines before they let Hines go.”
“So he knows Hines well?”
“He could pick Hines out in a line-up.”
They brought Pinedo to the principal’s office and showed him the CD-Rom of Colby buying the sandwich. Pinedo, long curly hair brushed back from his forehead, mustache, soul patch, tattoos curling up wrists onto forearms, said, “That’s him. No doubt about it.”
“You’re sure,” said Grandy.
“A hundred-percent. I know the guy. He’s a real maggot.”
“So what did you see last night when he came to the school?” asked Grandy.
“He followed Ms. Fountain into the schoolyard through the far entrance.
“The Hasting Heights entrance?”
“Yeah. He got maybe ten yards in and started running after her. I had to leave for work. But before I got in my car, I went over to make sure everything was all right. I called to Ms. Fountain. She said she was fine. So I left her with that maggot, and now I regret I did.” Then, with some resentment, Pinedo added, “He threw a rock at my dog once.”
Grandy called downtown and spoke to Patrol Commander Lockyer.
“Pick this guy up, okay? He’ll be the one who looks like a flabby potato.”
“I was nowhere near the school last night,” said Hines when they finally brought him to Homicide.
“We have a witness.”
“What witness?”
“And your sandwich was lying beside the victim. The avocado one. Considering your history with the girls, and the way you were let go, plus our eyewitness account, once I get this DNA match on the avocado back from the lab, you’ll be toast. Artisan toast.”
“You’re going to arrest me?”
“I already have.”
“For what?”
“Murder. Unless it was an accident. Maybe she fell on that ice. That ice was treacherous. I nearly fell on it myself. If you told me she fell, that would be a different story.”
The transformation that came over Hines was profound. He saw an out. And he grasped for it. Forgetting a fall to the ice would cause a single contusion only, not the vicious and ultimately superfluous injuries found on the victim, Hines walked unwittingly into Grandy’s trap.
“I was talking to her. That’s all. Then she fell. That ice was bad.”
“And you didn’t call the police?”
“I have a restraining order. I’m not supposed to be near the school.”
“Let’s see your hands.”
Hines went white. Even whiter than the whitest white guy Shahir at the sandwich shop had ever seen. The ex-janitor lifted his hands to the table as if they were made of a substance three times denser than lead. His right hand, dominant on most perps, and dominant on this one, was heavily bruised, scratched, and in this case, his middle and ring fingers were buddy-taped.
Grandy leaned back in his chair, opened the interview-room door, and called.
“Officer Lyles, can we have the Medical Examiner order a hand x-ray on this scumbag? We’ll be needing it for evidence.”
Grandy unexpectedly had another suspect to the interview room later that morning. And he also had another surveillance recording to watch.
After he had questioned the suspect, Grandy, feeling in want of a cigarette badly, thinking that because of his chest X-ray he had perhaps cut back too optimistically and needed to make up for lost time, stared at his partner, Nico Katsoulis, with some minor disillusionment as his partner tried all the usual evasions.
“I was nowhere near the Park-N-Fly last night. I was at the rink. The camera panned me more than once.”
“The Park-N-Fly has a camera, too.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“You think the camera lies?”
“It must, because I wasn’t there.” With mounting dismay, Nico said, “Mike, don’t tell me you’re forgetting the Ciccarelli thing.”
“Of course not. And for that I’ll always be grateful. You saved my life. But she wasn’t going to the school to meet Padgett. She forgot her purse, that’s all.”
“Padgett was going to the airport. If that’s not classic running, I don’t know what is.”
“Oh. So you know he was going to the airport? I thought you said you weren’t there.”
“Mike, come on. Enough with the traps.”
“Then what about facts, Nico? Padgett was going to the airport, you’re right, not because he was running but because he was reuniting with his ex-wife in California. He was dumping Sherry, not the other way around. He was catching the red-eye to be with his ex-wife. We checked into it. With his sister. And now we have texts between Padgett and his ex-wife to verify. Things were dead as dead could get between Sherry and Padgett, at least from Padgett’s point of view.”
“He was going to the airport because he was running,” insisted Nico.
“And you ran after him. Nico, when are you going to learn to control that temper of yours? It’s been a problem for a while now. Like since you were born.”
Nico’s voice rose. “I had nothing to do with Padgett’s murder.”
Grandy, just wanting to speed things up so he could have a cigarette, and also because he had gone from minor to moderate disillusionment as he heard Nico use the most tired denial in existence, leaned forward and started the recording.
The camera captured a section of gray snowy Park-N-Fly parking lot from twenty feet up, point-of-view downward from a stanchion. The two cars, Nico’s and Padgett’s, were already there, Padgett’s in front, Nico’s behind. The two men were talking. Padgett looked like he was trying to explain something to Nico, moving his hands up and down, pointing vaguely in the direction of California.
Nico looked as if he were about to enjoy bereavement on his own terms.
He shoved Padgett. Padgett backed away.
Apparently annoyed by this act of self-preservation, Nico, like a hockey goon, pulled off his winter gloves and went at the man’s face. Padgett slipped on the ice and fell. Nico kicked him in the stomach. Padgett lay on his side, half-curled, writhing. Nico went to the back of his cream-colored Ford Explorer, got a tire iron, came back, and beat the defenseless man over the head until Padgett didn’t move. Then Nico gave Padgett one last punishing blow by lifting the tire iron high into the air and bringing it down on the side of Padgett’s head with all his might.
“He shoots, he scores, right Nico?”
Nico at first said nothing.
He then proceeded to more than moderately disillusion Grandy.
“He was going to get away. He was at the airport running. You had nothing on him. I had to stop him.”
Grandy went from moderate to major disillusionment, something that took considerable doing in a homicide cop of his seasoned pedigree.
“The only reason we had nothing on him, Nico, is because we’ve arrested and charged another perp. I wish you would have waited until we could have done our work.”
Nico grew still, his face turning the color of the ice at the Joe Louis Arena, his dark eyes shining with a Zamboni glare.
“What perp?”
The words fell from his mouth like the pigeons that occasionally fell from the sky over the Edsel Ford Freeway on a smoggy day.
Grandy sighed, now entirely disillusioned. “You should have just taken bereavement the way normal people do.”
After he finished booking Nico, Grandy headed outside for a smoke.
As he stepped into the wintry air, he felt unsettled. His mind kept circling back to the Ciccarelli thing, how, because of Nico’s actions, he was alive today, then circling forward, how, because of his own actions, Nico was going away to prison for the rest of his life.
He lit a cigarette and didn’t enjoy it, especially when he coughed and coughed, and finally coughed up blood. He thought the blood had to be karma getting back at him for ending Nico’s life. He tossed the cigarette down, mashed it with his tassel loafer, and decided it was the worst cigarette he had ever smoked.
The blood, of course, prompted him to again call Dr. Sameem to see if his X-ray result had come back.
Dr. Sameem, as it so happened, was between patients, so took his call.
“Mike. Good. I’m glad you called. I left a message at your home number, but you haven’t gotten back to us yet.”
“I generally leave the place to the cockroaches.”
“Oh. Okay. Anyway, we got your X-ray result back. Sorry for the delay.”
Then came the expected forewarning pause.
Grandy offered grim encouragement in the form of his usual black humor. “Go ahead, doc. I’m not that eager to live anyway.”
The doctor again paused, possibly to psychiatrically evaluate this remark. “I take it you’ve had a bad day. You sound a little down.”
“Actually, my day has been stellar, as in, it’s gone super-nova.”
“Oh. Well. Then I’m sorry to have to make it worse.” The doctor continued to keep him in suspense with another pause. “I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”
“I figured that. I’m coughing up blood.”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
“So? Your official diagnosis, doc?”
“You have an infiltrate in your lower left lobe.”
Even though he had been preparing for it, he struggled to get over the shock of actually hearing it. “So what do I do now? Chemo? Radiation?”
Sameem paused. “What? No. I’m afraid you misunderstand me, Mike. It’s a pneumonic infiltrate, not a cancer.”
Grandy struggled to get over further shock. “Pneumonic?”
“You have an occult bacterial pneumonia, Mike. You’re really quite sick. I honestly don’t know what you’re doing at work.”
“Pneumonia?”
“Yes. But don’t worry. I’m going to call in some antibiotics. And I’d like you to get some rest over the next two weeks. That’s an order, so if your unit commander gives you a hard time, I’ll fax a note. You’ll never knock it out of your system if you don’t rest. And I wouldn’t smoke while you’re sick, either. Smoking will just aggravate your symptoms. In fact, I’m thinking this is just the thing you need to stop smoking altogether. Remember we talked about smoking-cessation medication last time? Would you like to go that route? I don’t think I have to warn you about the dangers of smoking.”
But the doctor warned him anyway, launching into his standard destructive specs on tobacco: four thousand chemical compounds, four hundred toxic substances, causing not only lung cancer but also chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, angina, heart attack, stroke, atherosclerosis, coronary thrombosis, cerebral thrombosis, stomach ulcers, macular degeneration, mouth, esophageal, bladder, cervical, pancreatic, and kidney cancers.
“Not to mention bad breath,” added Sameem.
Then the doctor enumerated other smoking-related ailments – and there were a lot.
As Sameem bullied him like never before, finally underscoring that future pneumonias because of his smoking were now all but inevitable, fear of quitting, stronger than the fear of cancer and of the pneumonic infiltrate that was heckling his left lung, anesthetized his body like an overdose of lidocaine.
“Uh … I don’t think I’m ready to quit just yet, doc.”
“Cigarettes are going to kill you.”
“I’m hoping to die in the line of duty before I get lung cancer.”
“And have you been taking your Paroxetine?”
This medical sideswipe caught him off guard. “What’s that one for again?”
“For depression.”
Grandy tried to blunt the edge of his noncompliance by making a joke of it. “I’ve been too depressed to take it.”
Later, after he had written his reports on Nico and Hines, and was leaving headquarters to go home, he felt that his life was in a slow miserable descent. He should have been happy – he had, as in the Ciccarelli thing, eluded death once more. But he didn’t feel happy, and not because he wasn’t taking his Paroxetine.
No.
It was because of Sherry, Sherry, Sherry baby; because of Padgett, who hadn’t stood a chance against the hockey goon with the tire iron; and because of Nico, especially Nico, grieving alone for his own wasted life and for the life of his fickle bride-to-be in a Wayne-County jail cell.
He lifted Kleenex to his mouth. Coughed. Saw more blood. But it was blood that couldn’t hurt him. And that made him feel a bit better – a momentary blip upward from the slowness and miserableness of it before he continued his downward spiral once more.
He threw the bloody Kleenex into Carrozzier’s wastepaper basket, could have thrown it in his own, but was feeling ornery, so threw it in Carrozzier’s instead just to bug Carrozzier. Then he got up to go.
He was aware that, as he walked out, they were all looking at him – Bynum, Erskine, Carrozzier, Lowe, Phelps, Ilona, especially Ilona – watching him warily, like he was an entity apart because he had put his best friend away for life, even though his best friend had saved his nicotine-saturated hide during the Ciccarelli case.
The only thing he could do to stop his slow miserable descent, he reasoned, other than taking two caps of Paroxetine with his five-o’clock beer, was pull a Colby Hines and at last ask Ilona out for coffee.
So, in his trench coat, his two-piece merino from LeConte’s, and his tassel loafers, he went up to her, feeling ridiculous because of the ridiculous way he felt about her, and asked her what the other flabby potato had asked the two teachers at the school.
“Ilona, would you like to have coffee with me sometime?”
She squirmed – yes, literally squirmed – surveying him with cautious blue eyes.
“You mean, like on a date?”
“Like on a date.”
After she rejected him with the expected polite but embarrassed words that still nonetheless hit Grandy like the verbal equivalent of a mustard gas attack, he turned and walked away, feeling like a fool, feeling again ridiculous, but also as if he had regained some integrity. At least he had gotten his crazy Ilona thing out of his system, just like he was going to get the pneumonia out of his system.
He was going out the front door onto Beaubien Street when he saw the television people, here to get from Detective Michael Grandy, twenty-one-year Homicide veteran, the story of how he had chosen the gutless way out by betraying his best friend instead of the laws of his country. He retreated. He stood in the foyer for several seconds, his left lung hurting as it worked hard to absorb the necessary oxygen from the damp cold air just inside the door. Then he went back in through the building all the way to the rear, and exited via the Clinton-Street doors.
The steps were salt-sprinkled, icy, and collared by unshoveled patches of snow. A small blue spruce in the scrap of lawn to the right looked diseased, not at all like a Christmas tree, and was presided over by a low gray sky. He thought that’s what the inside of his lungs must look like, that low gray sky, only speckled red with blood clots. Festive, almost.
He took out his cigarettes, coughed, stuck one in his mouth, lit a match, and was about to put the match to the tip, but before it got all the way, he stopped. Of all the horrors Dr. Sameem had listed, the one about bad breath now stuck. And so his initial split-second decision to quit – a decision that uncharacteristically stuck as well – was a shallow one, motivated by how he thought Ilona probably rejected him because of bad breath.
The wind blew the match out.
He tossed the match down. He tossed the cigarette to the snow. He took out his pack – maybe ten cigarettes left – crushed it, and, winding up, tossed them as far onto Clinton Street as he could, feeling a pinch at his flabby-potato shoulder joint.
He pulled out his cell and called Dr. Sameem’s office.
Sameem’s secretary, Naheeda, answered.
Naheeda said, “He already called it in. He wanted it to be there for you.”
“I’m not talking about the antibiotics.”
“No. This is for the smoking-cessation stuff. He thought you might change your mind. And he’s ordered more Paroxetine as well.”
As he descended the steps to the road and turned right toward the parking lot at the rear, slipping his cell into his pocket, hoping the media hounds wouldn’t come round the side to dissect, misquote, and de-context him, he remembered how he had once been told that everybody quit for a specific reason.
Bad breath.
My God.
He was a shallow, shallow man.
Then the door opened behind him.
He turned.
Ilona, with her Latvian eyes, stood at the top of the concrete steps.
“Sorry about that,” she called. “I hope you weren’t hurt.”
“Don’t worry. Not even I’m attracted to myself.”
“I remembered something my father once said.”
“What’s that?”
“That you didn’t do life justice unless you tried everything. I never knew I would have liked mussels otherwise.”
This left him floundering. “You’re comparing me to a plate of mussels?”
“What I meant to say, everything’s an opportunity.”
It took him a moment. “So. Coffee?”
“As long as you don’t smoke. And as long as we go to some place healthy.”
He stood there in the slush staring at her, feeling karma again. “I know a place where they sell avocado sandwiches, and I hear they’re pretty good.”
END