Broken Monsters (10 page)

There's no
such thing as by the book, Gabi knows. Every case defines itself. But you start with what you know. Work backwards. Fill in the gaps. Daveyton did not arrive home between four and five p.m., when he usually does on a Friday. He left school around three, according to the science teacher who was supervising the hang-out that day, which is what Humboldt Middle School calls their aftercare, confirmed by the footage they've retrieved from the security cameras. The school can't afford to maintain their library, but they have surveillance cameras and metal detectors. Priorities.

Usually, he would walk to the bus stop (public transit: the school does not have its own bus service) with a friend in his class, Carla Fuentes, but she had a dermatologist appointment, and her dad picked her up early. Which means he went missing somewhere in between school and home. It's the worst place of all, that anywhereland.

The parents have been interrogated separately and together, with a lawyer and without, and referred for counseling. They were both at work at the time of their son's disappearance. Lucky to have a double income. Juliet Lafonte works as an administrator at a doctor's office, although her arthritis makes her a slow typist. She has witnesses to her whereabouts all Friday.

Paul Lafonte works dispatch at a printing warehouse. His alibi is golden, complete with a time sheet with his signature on it. His company had already printed a stack of “Missing” brochures, which the parents have been stuffing in mailboxes around the neighborhood. They will have to print new ones. Not “Have you seen this boy?” But “did you?” The finality of past tense.

They canvass the Lafontes' neighbors, Daveyton's teachers, the principal, trying to establish his whereabouts on that day, who he hung out with, if there were any adults who had shown an unusual interest in him.

She gets all the familiar platitudes that fail to sum up a life. He was “a good kid,” he was “well liked,” he “worked hard but he messed around in class sometimes.” His favorite subjects were math and social studies.

“Was there anything unusual about him that I need to know?” Gabi asks the principal.

The woman frowns. “He dwelled too much on the shooting. It made him a celebrity. I didn't like it. Any excuse to show off his scar. He made up all these stories. He said he was a superhero, the bullet was radioactive and it gave him powers, and then he jumped off the bleachers to prove it and broke his arm. Then he wrote an essay about how he got shot because he knew too much. He'd overheard the gang boss planning to whack his mom because they'd been using her as a cover to smuggle drugs in her piano. He saved her life, but they broke her fingers—and that's why she can't play anymore.”

They talk to some of his school friends, with their parents' permission and a counselor present. Gabi asks Carla Fuentes about the route the kids took to the bus stop. Was there anywhere they liked to stop along the way? A detour or shortcut they liked to take? The little girl blinks throughout the interview. “Is he really dead? Really, really?”

The kids have more questions than answers. So do their parents. The rumors are already spreading.

It was a new initiate in the gang that shot him, coming back to finish him off. It was the janitor, who has a prison record for armed robbery from ten years ago, and this is exactly why schools shouldn't hire ex-criminals. And one which might lead somewhere: the father wanted to pay off his gambling debts with the insurance money.

Gabi and Boyd leave Sparkles to mop up the paperwork and compile a list of names to follow up, and go out to walk the route Daveyton would have taken to the bus stop.

The sun is feeble, the sky a washed-out blue. They pass by a used-car dealership and a gas station, an empty lot, the burned-out husk of an old university residence, the scorched roof caving in above the red brick and ivy. A poster in an empty window promises cash for gold.

“Lotta fuckin' places you could grab someone and drag 'em inside,” Boyd observes. “We're going to have to come back here.”

“Have we phoned the bus company yet to check if the driver remembers Daveyton?”

“I put your puppy dog on that.”

“That's unkind, Bob,” Gabi says, but Sparkles does have a waggy-tail eagerness that's tempting to exploit. “Fair amount of traffic,” she checks her watch. “Lunchtime. Wonder what it's like at three p.m. on a Friday.”

“Quieter.”

They reach the bus stop—Plexiglas scratched up with graffiti and stained with rain and dust. The wooden bench is partitioned into four parts with metal railings to prevent anyone from lying down. Initials and swearwords have been crudely carved into the wood. Several boards are missing from the last seat. Cigarette butts litter the ground, smoked down to the filter. Boyd peers down the road, left and right, checking out the rundown apartment building opposite, the parking lot across the way. Gabriella crouches down by the bench.

“Bob.” The urgency in her voice makes him turn. “Here.” She indicates a fine spatter of brown on the glass, low down, butt height if you were sitting. Or head height if you had managed to contort yourself into a position where you could sleep. Or if someone had pulled you off the bench and shoved you on the ground and stuck a nail gun to your head. “He did it right here. Full view of the street.”

“Motherfucker's either got balls of steel or he's dumb as pig shit.”

“Carpe diem. It was opportunistic,” she says, playing it out. “He was driving around looking for the right victim.”

“One that would fit his deer pants. Sizing them up.”

“Spotted little Daveyton waiting for the bus. Maybe circled around for another look. Pulled over. Might have tried to get him in the car first. Offered him a ride.”

“It was vicious cold on Friday,” Boyd agrees.

“Mmm. Smart kid like that wouldn't have gone for it, and our killer couldn't take the risk. No, he parked in front of the bus stop to obscure the view, went right up to him. Maybe didn't even bother with conversation, just shoved him down and nailed him in the head. Loaded him in the car and drove away.”

“I would say that the blood drops over here and here,” Boyd points to the faintest drops on the ground, “would corroborate that theory. Nail straight into the brain—there might not have been that much blood. If he didn't remove it on the scene, it could have kept it sealed in tight.”

“Our sick bastard's also a slick bastard. We need to lock this down. Get statements from the people who live in that apartment building. Get this blood tested and ID'd. Don't radio it in!” she snaps as he reaches for his belt. “Cell phones only.”

Boyd rolls his eyes. “Whatever you say, Versado. This is going to turn into a shit storm however we play it.”

“Two weeks
in Detroit already and you haven't done the Packard Plant?” Jen teases him. “Just what kind of out-of-towner journalist are you?”

Good question,
snipes his troll.

“I spent most of that time getting drunk,” Jonno retorts, which makes it sound like he was out partying, instead of holed up in the studio apartment (easy walking distance to downtown) that he rented from a Web designer on AirVacancy for four weeks. The plan was to get the lay of the land, buy a car, find a more permanent place to live, maybe take a bartending job, meet cool people, and start his brand-new life. His host had diligently left out a pile of city guides and local newspapers on the table, but he couldn't face the Detroit Institute of Arts or hip Corktown, and when he went for a walk, he got as far as the liquor store and scuttled back home.

He needed an adjustment period. He needed to fortify himself. Once he got as far as the French restaurant adjoining the lobby downstairs, where they were showing Fellini movies with subtitles. He drank eight martinis and the cute waitress, who might have been interested in him before he got sloppy drunk, had to help him into the elevator. This is grief. This is loss.

This is rotting in a stranger's apartment feeling sorry for yourself for being a pathetic idiot who sucks at forward planning.

He should have thought it through more. But he was in too much pain to think clearly. He was in free fall from what happened in New York. Until Jen Q.

Jen-Jen-Jen.

His muse, his savior, his Joan of Arc with braids. It was fate, forcing himself to go out on Saturday night.
You're rushing into things. The Amazing Rebound Man.

Now that he's got an in into the city (and okay, wheels), Detroit's a whole other place. Everyone knows Jen Q. She is cool and popular and she opens doors to the parts of the city everyone knows—and then breaks them open to places he didn't imagine.

“So here we go, the biggie,” she says, pulling under the corridor bridge of the Packard Plant: over two miles of broken-down factory.

“The number one Death-of-America pilgrimage destination,” Jonno says. But he's impressed despite himself. The sprawling waste of it. Broken bricks and concrete pillars holding up the sky. Everything is choked with weeds and graffiti. The word “fuck” appears a lot, which seems appropriate.

They drive past a fashion shoot in a gloomy interior full of rubble, a wiry guy holding up a bounce board to better direct the light at a girl with big eighties hair in a bikini top and short-shorts, standing defiantly against the cold among the pillars of a caved-in factory floor, the sky leaking in behind her.

Some old hobos are watching from a doorway opposite.

“Local perverts?” Jonno says.

“Don't be so judgmental. They live here. They collect old junk, clean it up and sell it on eBay. God knows what's going to happen to them if this place ever gets redeveloped.”

“That's an amazing story, can I talk to them? I could write about that.”

“No,” Jen snaps. “Leave them alone. Everyone's done it. You know what's worse than fifteen minutes of fame? The same fifteen minutes again and again, and it doesn't change anything. They're still living in an abandoned building, still scraping by.”

They're all hustlers, Jonno thinks, all still figuring themselves out.

“Hurry,” she says, pushing him into the abandoned theater. They've parked across the road so as not to attract attention. You might call it urban exploration, but it's still trespassing. “Put this on.” She hands him a face mask. “For the asbestos.”

“Great,” he says, sarcastically. But it
is
great. He feels inspired in a way he hasn't for years, and if that means he dies from some horrible lung disease in ten years' time, so be it.

The theater is like a cathedral inside, the same sense of peace and awe.
Or maybe it's just that it's cool and quiet, and your footsteps echo.

He hadn't expected to be so moved by it all. The rows of chairs curved to face a stage that has caved in, the rotted remains of curtains hanging bedraggled on either side. One red velvet chair has been yanked from its row, like a bad tooth, and set up in the center of the stage. You can see the appeal. Haunted by civilizations past. A reminder of mortality. This too shall crumble and fall.

“Want to go up to the balcony?”

Jonno looks, warily, at the flight of stairs under a landslide of rubble and dust. He thinks about how it might give way under him, send him sliding back to where he came from.

“Nah.”

Jen sweeps him on to an early dinner party at a loft apartment owned by two guys who made millions off a website, Text Regrets, where people post messages they wish they hadn't sent. They seem like clever fictions, even though the guys swear they're all real.

“You're just mad you didn't think of it first.” Jen nudges him in the bathroom, handing him her car key to snort a bump of coke off.

Of course he is. And because the more texts he reads, the more he finds it's all there. Not just rude messages about blow jobs accidentally sent to your mom, but pathos and bathos and comedy and the richness of human experience. In a text. What hope does he have? The world is condensing, attention spans narrowing to tiny screens, and there are people who are wittier and smarter, who know how to write for those nanospaces. He wants to sink into despair, but the cocaine won't let him.

They sit down for dinner at a long table, with big dogs galumphing around the kitchen and splashy art pieces on the wall. A young guy with wild dreads who works at the local historic pottery, a lady lawyer, an architect, a Google engineer, and a couple of cute promo girls on a roadshow for a hip sunglasses brand, setting up pop-up stores.

On the other side of the table they're talking about art and Jen's diabetes, after she pulls up her cream sweater and shoots up right there, pinching the flesh at her waist and clicking the insulin pen against it. He loves that she's so don't-give-a-fuck about the procedure, and the questions that rise up around her. He loves the contrast between her dark skin and the pale wool. He wants to reach out and pinch her waist himself, with possessiveness and lust. But he is stuck with promo girl, who's telling him how they hand out free samples to innovators and connectors.

“You're spreading the virus of consumer desire,” Jonno observes. They've reached the point in the evening where they're talking at each other.

“I miss my dog,” the cute brunette says. “We've been on the road for eight weeks now. I want to go back to New York already.”

“I'm from New York,” Jonno says. “Can I get a pair?”

“Oh,” she says. “Sorry, I don't have any with me. Maybe tomorrow?” But her pitying smile says maybe never. She turns to talk to the architect about dogs.

They catch the tail end of an art exhibition, where everything is tired and the same—the same anticonsumer bullshit, Ronald McDonald in jihadi gear and Mickey Mouse in the role of Saturn eating his children. A gumball machine marked “Reality Check” dispenses candy shaped like the red pills in
The Matrix
.

“Cute,” he says. “How did they
ever
come up with that?”

“Are you this jaded about everything?” Jen says, ruffling his hair. “Oh, hang on, I have to say hi to Simon.” She shimmies over to talk to a lithe young man with a lumberjack beard and tattoos on every available surface. Jonno pours some of the gelatin sherbet pills into his hand, trying to act like he's not checking out this Simon guy. He swallows a pill in the hope that someone might have laced it with molly—that would be experiential art—but he suspects that all he's going to get out of it is a red-stained tongue. Maybe this is the thing about getting old—that nothing is new anymore.

“It's all the same,” says the man standing next to him, examining the grotesquery of Mickey Mouse about to gobble up a child with sharp pointy teeth. “Nothing's original.”

“I was thinking the exact same thing,” Jonno says, happy to find a comrade in cynicism, until he sees it's some crusty guy with a shock of white hair in a rumpled brown blazer. Jen is still talking to Simon, her hand on his arm, firing a spike of jealousy down his spine, which he tries to cover with blather. “Like where is the art that's going to change the world? It's undiscovered.” Like the amazing undiscovered novelists of the world, he thinks.

“Maybe it's waiting to be found,” says the white-haired man. His blue eyes are intense, drilling into Jonno.

“Yeah, but it can't wait! You have to
make
the connections, you have to get it in front of the right audience. It's all about the eyeballs. Always the damn eyeballs.”

“Hey, Jonno,” Jen interrupts, “this is Simon. I was telling you about him earlier. The séance?”

Jonno vaguely remembers snippets of a conversation on the other side of the dinner table while he'd been trying to score free shades from promo girl. Something about an artist who killed himself in the caravan he'd customized.

“Yeah, bro. We had beer and naked girls, we did a barbecue in the bathtub—all the things he liked. I was the Ouija board.” He lifts up his shirt to reveal the tattoo of old-fashioned type and the all-seeing eye on his chest. “His spirit didn't show up, but we think he would have appreciated it.”

“Now
that's
original,” Jonno turns to say to his new friend, but the crumpled man has wandered off, and Simon has more coke, even though Jen abstains this time around. So much for the party girl.

He's pretty trashed by the time they end up at an apartment building in the city center at three in the morning, where a cluster of party people are standing shivering in the cold, waiting, for what he isn't sure, but they have to join the line. There is texting. Regrets, maybe. Or instructions, because a man leans out an upstairs window and throws out the keys, attached to a plastic bag so they come parachuting down, like one of those army-men toys.

The girl in front catches the keys and opens the door onto a staircase lined with graffiti that winds up and up, and they all traipse along gamely. It reminds him of Williamsburg in the 2000s, the edgy-as-fuck parties in the warehouse district. Someone has drawn the outline of a door on the wall next to a crazy cartoon cat giving them the finger. “Knock-knock, are we there yet?” Jonno says, rapping his knuckles on the chalk outline.

“Come on,” Jen says, nudging him. “Two more flights.”

The party is weird. A dark room with people milling halfheartedly on the dance floor. Someone in the back sells them two beers for five dollars. Jen takes a turn on the decks and Jonno slinks off to the enclosed balcony among a jungle of potted plants, trying not to feel lonely and old. A skinny Thor-lookalike with long blond hair and a Viking nose offers him a bump off an LP cover and they get talking.

“This is the Detroit I want to write about,” he says, feeling urbane as fuck. “Tattoo séances and nutty street art and text-message millionaires. People don't even know this is happening.”

“Of course we know it's happening, shithead,” Anorexic Thor says. “
You
don't know it's happening.”

But he won't be put off. It feels like this is something, something real and he could be a part of it. The drug has his tongue. “Have you noticed how dim this room is? We're all trying to keep the dark at bay by surrounding ourselves with it. This city,” he says, inspired, “this city is all about the people, who have to burn against the dark. It's the bright against the blight.”

“Or we keep the lights off so we don't alert the cops,” Jen Q says, draping her arms over his shoulders. She kisses the top of his head. “Come on, time for bed. I think you've had enough.”