The Car Bomb (The detroit im dying Trilogy, Book 1) (8 page)

“
Christ, let’s not start that again.”

“
Good idea.”

They drove in silence for a while. Finally, he said, “Tell me something. You’ve known Billy as long as I have, right?”

“
Almost. I met him at that freshman tea dance he claims not to remember.”

“
All right, so tell me this. Is Billy O’Bryan capable of taking a bribe?”

Marci turned in her seat to look at him. “A bribe? Like in exchange for keeping somebody out of jail or something?”

“
Yeah, that would be a bribe.”

“
Uhmm...sure, I think so.”

“
Really. I’m amazed you say that so easily.”

“
Why? There’s always been something unscrupulous about Billy.”

“
Unscrupulous? You’re just saying that because you think he’s a womanizer.”

“
I
know
he’s a womanizer. But that has nothing to do with it.”

“
What do you mean, you
know
he’s a womanizer? Has he ever come on to you?”

“
No comment.”

“
No comment! That means he has.”

“
No, it means no comment. It means I have absolutely no intention of talking to you about who has or has not come on to me, and what, if anything, I’ve done about it. Not with someone with your track record, Frank. Besides, as I said, it has nothing to do with why I think he’d take a bribe.”

He decided the track record conversation should be avoided at the moment. “So why then?”

“
Because Billy’s greedy. And lazy. And capable of rationalizing almost anything.”

He shook his head. “Jesus, I always thought you liked him.”

“
I do. But none of us is perfect. You should hear what I really think of you.”

Mid-afternoon was always the busiest time in the newsroom. In his shirt-sleeves Frank was pounding away at a computer keyboard as if it were an old-fashioned manual. Francine walked up and handed him a sheet of paper.

“
Frank, here’s the info you wanted on Randal Byrd.”

“
Hey, Frankie, let’s see.”

“
The case came up two years ago. He was originally charged with possession of a kilo of heroin with intent to deliver. But that was thrown out when they ruled his car had been searched illegally, and he was left with a possession charge of less than a gram. His attorney—oh, you wanted his attorney’s name—ah, Sam Dworkin.”

"Suspenders."

“
What?”

“
That’s what they call him: Sam ‘Suspenders’ Dworkin. He always wears ‘em.”

Francine nodded. “Well, Suspenders got him off with two years probation.”

“
Okay, and the judge?” Frank was moving a finger down the sheet.

“
Oh, right. William J. O’Bryan was the judge.”

He said nothing but produced a low hum for a few seconds.

Francine continued: “And here’s something else. This guy Anthony Peoples, the one they’re looking for in that car bombing? Well, you said there might be a drug connection because his cousin was some big dealer? So I looked Peoples up too. And they had him on a murder charge six months ago that was also tossed out for a lack of evidence.”

“
Peoples?”

“
Yeah, the funny thing is he had the same attorney and the same judge. Dworkin and—what’s his name—O’Bryan? They were on his case too. Isn’t that weird?”

He leaned back and gazed at the ceiling for a few seconds. “Yeah, very weird. Anyway, good job. Now go call the police chief for me. Tell him we know this guy Peoples was charged with murder. And we wonder if there might be a connection with the car bombing.”

Francine pointed to the paper. “Right. And here’s Randal Byrd’s home address and phone number.”

“
Francine, you’re beautiful.”

“
Thanks, Frank!”

As Francine left, he grabbed a phone and, staring at the sheet of paper she just gave him, punched in a number.

He listened for several seconds and then spoke with a casual tone. “Hey, is this Randal Byrd?”

He listened with a furrowed frown. “Well, this is Frank DeFauw at Channel 5.”

The furrows deepened. “Hello? Mr. Byrd?” Frank hung up and got to his feet while rolling down his shirt sleeves.

As he walked away he caught Dennis Clark’s eye. “If I’m not back in an hour, call out the cavalry.”

“
Jesus, Frank, we’re on in less than 90 minutes.”

“
Just finish the lead I was writing, and I’ll be back in time.”

The address turned out to be less than four blocks from Marvin’s Bar, a gloomy cube of a building, four stories, a three alarmer waiting to happen. He closed the Viper’s door and, as he walked away, inadvertently hit the lock button on the remote twice and heard one brief blast from the horn. “Shit,” he muttered as he glanced quickly away from the building. When he glanced back he found the entrance door propped wide open.

Near the back end of a dark and dirty hallway, pungent with the odor of someone’s excrement, he skirted a large rat skittering in the opposite direction and minding its own business.

Stopping at what he assumed was 11A—one of the metal digits was missing, but it was right across from 10A—he knocked on the door and waited. And waited.

Finally, from inside came Byrd’s voice. “Yeah?“

“
Hey, Randal, it’s Frank DeFauw.”

After a beat Byrd sounded almost amused. “Oh, just a minute.”

With a latch thrown, the door was swung half-way open. Frank found the blade of a large carving knife, swaying slightly, an inch from his nose. Randal Byrd had been drinking and, perhaps as well, indulging in something illegal. His voice was louder than it needed to be.

“
Frank, for a veteran Live at 5 newsman, you’re pretty fuckin’ dense. I thought you’d probably get the idea I don’t want to talk to you.”

Frank again tried the nonchalance. “Well, Randal, I just don’t like it when people hang up on me.”

“
I’ll tell you what. You’re not gone in five seconds here, I’m gonna invite you in and carve my initials on each of your fuckin’ cheeks.”

Frank reflexively moved a foot back from the blade. “Look, Randal, I only want to talk about what you told me at the bar about Judge O’Bryan.”

“
I never told you nothing about a judge. In fact
_,
I never fuckin’ seen you before in my fuckin’ life. You got that, Frank? You either get the fuck outta here now, or you tell me which cheek you want me to start on.”

Byrd moved forward and again brandished the blade near Frank’s nose. “Better yet, maybe I start by slicin’ your fuckin’ nose off. How’d you look on TV without a nose, Frank?”

The sudden glint in Byrd’s dead eyes made Frank back away further.

“
You got the idea now? You come here again, and you leave without your fuckin’ nose.”

Frank nodded and continued backing away.

“
Yeah, I got the idea. Have a nice day.”

“
Randy Byrd is a shitty piece of work.” In Booth Number One at the Black Knight Inn, Sam Dworkin’s constantly conspiratorial rasp had been reduced almost to a whisper so his old friend Frank had to lean close to catch it.

“
He’s an inveterate liar—christ, his story would change every time I’d see him. He had a record as long as my arm, but small stuff mostly, bad checks, car theft, B & E, petty shit.”

He stared at Dworkin. They had met a decade earlier when they served on a panel debating the merits of cameras in the courtroom, on the same side for different but equally self-serving reasons. Their friendship had grown since over their mutual love of our National Pastime, and they’d catch two or three games together each summer at Tiger Stadium.

But he realized now that he didn’t really know Sam Dworkin. He had thought he liked him, knew he was smart and good at what he did, admired his encyclopedic knowledge of baseball, liked the looks of the man’s pretty wife and four kids in wallet photos. But he didn’t really know him.

Finally, he looked away from Dworkin and said, “But if he had some bucks stashed, say from a dope deal, it had to be tempting to milk the guy. Feed him a tale about bribing the judge when the case really went away because of a technicality.”

Dworkin smiled easily. “Naw, the guy’s been through the system too many times. He knows how it works. You can’t pull that kind of shit on somebody like Byrd. Besides, with all the booze and drugs, his brain was fried. You don’t know what he might do.”

“
Then why would he come up with a story like that?”

“
Look, Frank, our clientele is not exactly the salt of the earth. They are scum. They will do or say anything to get what they want. Byrd, as I recall, was pissed at my fee. Here I get him off on a serious charge, and he’s pissin’ and moanin’ about the size of the fee.”

“
With me he was talkin’ about the judge, not you.”

Exasperated, Dworkin slipped a thumb under one of his famed suspenders and snapped it.

“
Frank, the guy’s seen enough gossip columns to know you’re pals with Billy. He’s just fuckin’ with your head.”

Turning his key in Sherie Sloan’s door, he was surprised and annoyed to find the chain lock in place. “Sherie, open the door.”

From inside came a new whiff of sarcasm in the woman’s soft, lilting voice. “Oh, Frank, is that you? How nice.” She closed the door to remove the chain, then opened it. In a long robe, she looked briefly at him, then turned and walked back into the apartment.

He followed. “Who else would have a key to an apartment I pay for?”

In the living room she sat at one end of the couch with a glass of wine on the table in front of her. “You pay for it, Frank, but I may not be here for you much longer.”

He slipped off his suit coat and tossed it on a chair. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“
Simple. You keep acting the way you have lately, and I’m outta here.”

“
The way I have lately?”

“
Frank, I never see you anymore, unless it’s the middle of the night. When’s the last time we had dinner? But like almost every day I read about you cavorting with bimbos all over town.”

He rolled up his shirt sleeves as if for fisticuffs. “‘Cavorting with bimbos.’ That’s a catchy phrase. Sounds like you been talking with that little shit Wil Barnes.”

Sherie stared at him for a second. “I told you long ago, Frank, I knew you couldn’t or wouldn’t leave your wife. I was okay with that. But when I don’t see you, and you’re running around with every cheap trick in town, it’s more than I can bear.”

He made a face and stretched as if his back was hurting. “You got any more wine?”

She looked at him coldly. “In the fridge.”

In the kitchen he moved to the fridge but stopped when he saw magnets holding two recent Wil Barnes columns. He called back to the living room: “So you’re collecting the wit and wisdom of Wil Barnes these days.”

“
I have to keep track of you somehow.”

Opening the fridge, he removed the Chardonnay and found himself a glass. On the counter near the phone’s answering machine, he spotted “Barnes” scrawled on a note pad along with a phone number. He poured himself some wine and back in the living room moved to the opposite end of the couch. “So you
have
talked with Barnes.”

“
What?”

He nodded toward the kitchen. “I saw his name and number. You’ve talked with that piece of shit, knowing damn well he wants to destroy me.”

She took a sip and looked him squarely in the eye. “When I came home from work tonight the machine had a message from him.”

“
So you called him.”

“
I didn’t call him.”

“
What did it say? The message.”

“
It said he wanted to talk to me about you. So obviously he knows about us.”

“
Obviously. If you call, we’re through. You need to know that.”

She held the wine in her lap, leaned back and closed her eyes. “Frank, there’s almost nothing left to this relationship.”

“
I don’t believe that. And I don’t think you do either.”

Those big blue eyes opened, and the woman leaned forward to speak with heat. “Believe it, Frank. I don’t know if I’m gonna talk to him or not. But it would be one way to put an end to this demeaning affair once and for all.”

He stared at her. “Demeaning.”

“
Yes, demeaning.”

Shortly before airtime the newsroom atmosphere was frenetic. At one end of the pit, calmly looking over a script, Frank in his shirt-sleeves stood in front of a camera with a teleprompter. When a young woman with a headset pointed briskly at Frank, he looked up from the script he was holding and gazed with acute interest into the lens.

“
Hello, everybody, this is Frank DeFauw. Coming up on Live News at 5: new information in that tragic car bombing two weeks ago which took the lives of a westside woman and her two children. That and more on Detroit’s sky-rocketing murder rate. See you at 5.”

Frank kept his gaze firmly on the camera lens until the floor director dropped her hand. Then he unclipped the mike from his tie and walked past the pit, asking, “Who’s got some aspirin?”

Fingers flying over his keyboard, Dennis said, “Try Blanche.”

Nearing the back of the busy newsroom, Frank called out, “Blanche, you got some aspirin?”

“
I sure do. Right here in this new handy-dandy dispenser.” She motioned to the corner of her desk and a gumball machine whose globe held hundreds of white tablets. “I’m gonna make me a fortune here.”

Stopping in front of the desk, he reached into his pockets for some change. “What’s it take?”