The Car Bomb (The detroit im dying Trilogy, Book 1) (6 page)

Letty slid into the booth as Frank said, “No problem, man. You know, I’ve been telling the lady here that Marvin’s has the best burgers in town.”

“
They ain’t that good, miss. But if you’re hungry, we can probably take care of you.”

Frank sat across from Letty. “Jackson here is the world’s last honest man.”

Letty took Frank’s hand. “Well, Jackson, you have a charming little place here.”

“
Well, that ain’t true neither, ma’am, but we thank you for sayin’ it.”

Letty laughed, and by now Myra had limped up to the booth.

“
Hello, I’m Myra, and I’ll be your server this evening.”

Frank chuckled. “Hey, Myra. We’ll each have a burger deluxe, and I’ll have a Bud Lite.”

Letty said, “Me too.”

“
You too what?” snarled Myra.

Letty laughed again, this time a lusty peal. “I’ll have a Bud Lite.”

Limping off Myra screamed, “Two Bud Lites!”

Frank said, “I told you, they treat me like royalty in here.”

Jackson had moved around from behind the bar to the booth. “Frank, that guy I run outta here when you was here before?”

“
Yeah?”

“
Name is Byrd. Randal Byrd.”

“
Bird, as in cuckoo?”

“
Yeah,
Byrd with a Y.”

“
Randal Byrd, B-Y-R-D.”

“
Right. He come in again and I carded him. Said he don’t look 21.”

“
How’d he take it?”

Jackson was heading back behind the bar again. “He was pissed. But he wanted a drink more than he didn’t want to be carded.”

With Frank and Jackson talking, a bearded, heavy-set fellow had moved from the back of the bar and was standing now directly in front of Frank. He was wearing a T-shirt that strained to contain his belly. The shirt said, “I Like Tits.”

Frank looked up, read the shirt and said, “Can I help you, pal?”

“
Yeah, Frank, you could retire.”

“
Retire, eh?”

“
Yeah, man, then I wouldn’t have to watch your fuckin’ face on TV.”

Frank glanced at Letty, telling her with a brow lift that he’d been through this a million times. Then he said, “You know, I didn’t catch your name.”

“
Name’s Merle.”

“
Well, Merle, why not turn the dial?”

Merle smirked and swayed, glancing back at his two buddies watching avidly at the pool table. “I don’t have to turn the fuckin’ dial. I don’t never watch your ass anyways.”

“
Then what’s the problem?”

“
The problem? I’ll tell you what the problem is. You, Frank. You’re the fuckin’ problem. You don’t never give just the straight news like people want. You always gotta put your fuckin’ two cents worth in. And that’s about all it’s worth, is two cents.”

“
So you’d like a little more journalistic objectivity.”

“
No, I’d like a lot less Frank on TV.”

“
Well, Merle
_,
but how do you know all this if you never watch me?”

“
See, right there, that’s your problem. You’re a smart ass. I don’t have to watch you. Everybody knows this shit. Like tonight talkin’ about that car bomb like you know all this stuff, like it’s drug-related, and you don’t know shit.”

Frank’s tone remained reasonable and friendly. “So, Merle, you know something about it?”

“
I don’t know nothin’ about it. But I’m not on TV like you, actin’ like I do.”

Behind Merle Frank spotted Randal Byrd walking into the bar. Byrd saw Frank at about the same time, and their eyes locked. After a second Frank called out: “Hey, Randal Byrd, let’s talk.”

Byrd froze for an instant,
glanced at Jackson, then wheeled out of the bar. Quickly on his feet, Frank did a brief dance with Merle, then sprinted for the door.

Crossing the dark street in front of the bar, Byrd ran hard, spinning around a car that nearly hit him as it screeched to a halt. As Frank reached the street, Byrd was disappearing into an alley on the other side. Dodging traffic, Frank followed, but when he finally entered the alley, there was no sign of Byrd.

Back inside the bar, he found Jackson sitting with Letty. Obviously in Frank’s absence the bartender had carefully outlined Merle’s options for him. When Frank passed his table, the man who loved tits barely gave him a glance.

Jackson struggled out of the booth as Frank arrived. “Any luck, Frank?”

“
Naw, must have slithered down some rat hole.”

“
Who was that?” asked Letty without a smile now.

Frank looked up suddenly feeling weary. “Oh, just a little rodent who gave me trouble the last time in here.”

“
Well, you look exhausted. We need to eat our burgers and find a place for you to lie down.” She tilted her head and gave him a wink.

Giving her one back, he nodded. “Yeah, I was up at six this morning, writing.” He slipped his vial of little reds out of his breast pocket, popped one out and swallowed it. “You want a little extra energy?”

She smiled and shook her head. He swallowed some beer and put the pills away, knowing that he’d be quietly boasting in a few seconds. There was clearly no need to with this gal. So was he that insecure, or did he just want an excuse in case his performance later was less than sterling?

“
Up at six! What are you writing?” She was already impressed.

He blew smoke at the dingy ceiling. “Oh, it’s a labor of love, mostly. I’m writing a history of the small Belgian community in this city. Probably about four people outside my family will read it, but I’ve been interviewing folks of my grandfather’s and father’s generations for a couple years now, and I’m telling their tales.”

He brightened as talked about this, as he usually did. “Really, their stories are incredible, the ones who came just after the turn of the century. Like my grandfather who arrived from Antwerp at the age of 16 with a buck and a quarter in his pocket. Unbelievable what they went through and how they made it.”

Letty took his hand in both of hers. “Well, you’ve already got me hooked. I’ll be reader number five.”

On a gorgeous Sunday evening Frank leaned against a wood piling on his dock next to the speedboat and stared at the big orange sun setting over the mirror-like lake. The familiar whine and slap of the screen door at the back of the house called to him, and he turned to find his 19-year-old daughter walking across the large deck. Jennie waved, smiled and moved down the steps to a lawn that sloped gracefully to the lake. She was a pretty blond with a cute figure in her shorts-over-leotard, and she moved with her mother’s sly swing of the hips.

“
Hi, Daddy.”

“
Hello, baby.”

Nestling to him, she kissed him on the cheek. “How’s my favorite dad?”

He puts his arms around her, then leaned back to look into her narrowed blue eyes. “I’m fine, sweetie, how about you?”

“
Fine.”

“
Little hung over this morning? You seemed a tad under the weather.”

“
Oh, maybe just a little. But I ran it off.”

“
Keep ‘em little, and you’ll be fine.”

Jennie frowned and pushed lightly away from him. “God, Daddy, don’t
you
start on me.”

“
Start what?”

“
Oh, Mom’s been on my case like crazy.”

“
About?”

“
About drinking and carousing—just normal stuff.”

Frank gave her a shocked look. “You’re carousing?”

She gave him a small smile. “A little.”

“
Honey, you know your mom. She’s just a worry-wart who loves you to pieces.” He took her hand, and together they walked down the dock. At the end they stood and gazed at the sun’s perfect reflection on the lake.

Always the touchy-feely one in the family, Jennie snuggled up to him again and spoke softly: “What was all the yelling about?”

“
We weren’t yelling. Just our usual domestic banter, with your mother threatening divorce.”

“
She’s doing that again?”

“
She never stopped.”

“
I thought maybe it was because of what day it is.”

“
What day is it?”

“
You know, Daddy. A year to the day since the accident.”

Frank’s arm around her spare, sweet shoulders squeezed her even closer to him. “I know, baby. We just have to put it behind us. Life goes on. Because it has to.”

“
Daddy, you always say that. But a day hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought about Tommy and what happened.”

“
Honey, I hope to Christ you’re not still blaming yourself. You promised me you wouldn’t do that.”

The girl moved away from him to the edge of the dock and stared down at the water just barely moving at the pilings. “Yeah, I know. But how can I not blame myself?”

“
Because it was an accident, baby. If anyone was to blame it was Tommy himself. But it was simply an accident.”

When she spoke again, it was with a thin quiver of her lip. “Okay, so Tommy had too much beer, but so did I. No, he shouldn’t have been hot-dogging, backwards on that ski. But I shouldn’t have been driving so fast. Yes, it was just bloody fate or whatever that the Fisher’s dog was swimming out there, and I veered to avoid him. But if I had been under better control, it just would not have happened.”

Frank moved up to hold his daughter’s shoulders and stop their shiver. “Baby, you’re way too hard on yourself.”

Jennie didn’t answer and stared up at the sun hanging huge above the tree line across the lake. Then her gaze moved down and to the right to the remnants of an ancient dock in the water in front of a home about half-mile away. After a long pause she said, “You know, sometimes I wish they had left that damn piling sticking up out there in front of the Fisher place. Because for me, every time I look out there, I still see it. I know exactly where it was. I see it right now, even though I watched them pull it out with that crane. How long am I going to still see it out there? Probably for the rest of my life. I have dreams about it, weird nightmares, really. It’s gone for a while and then one day it’s back again, all bloody. Once, in one dream, I even took your chain saw out there and started chopping it off at the waterline, and it starting talking to me, screaming at me, telling me it was alive and I was killing it.”

He squeezed her softly and kissed the crown of her head. “I’m so sorry, baby. I had no idea.”

She turned to him, tears on her cheeks. “No, how could you know? I haven’t talked to anybody about it.”

While Jennie tucked herself into her father’s arms, her head on his chest, he held her, and, not trusting his own voice, said nothing. Without a question or a doubt, he had always felt he would give his life for his kids, and yet, with this sweet grieving girl, he’d been deaf, dumb and blind.

At one end of the quiet newsroom, in the lazy pause after lunch and before the afternoon’s editorial meeting, Dennis Clark half-sat on the edge of a desk where Blanche Barowski, the news director’s heavy-set secretary, held up a garish greeting card, homemade with gold script and multicolor ink sketches.

“
Look at this one,” said the perpetually red-faced Blanche, who also handled Frank’s correspondence. “Hand-printed with a long poem called ‘Jesus and Frank.’”

She handed him the card, and he opened it like an accordion.

“
Good Christ! This must have taken weeks.”

Then Dennis read aloud: “‘Jesus and Frank are my two best friends. For the sins of the world they make amends. When the news was bad and our hearts sank, who did we turn to but Jesus and Frank?’”

He laughed with a sad delight. “This is incredible.”

“
You wouldn’t believe the stuff he gets.” Blanche pointed to a large box on the corner of the desk. “Holy cards, novena cards, home remedies. They all have the answer to his backaches and his headaches and every other malady they imagine he has. This is just from the last few days.” She picked up a large wad of letters and drops them into the box.

“
You give it all to him?”

“
All except the hate mail, the really vicious stuff, and he gets a lot of that too.”

“
Well, that’s his secret. You either love him or hate him. Nobody’s neutral. You see the paper today?”

“
No.”

“
Wil Barnes’ column.” Dennis grabbed a section of the paper from a nearby desk.

Blanche rolled her eyes. “Again?”

“
It’s a blind item, but it’s obvious who he’s talking about. Here it is. ‘Strange Sighting Department: Was that who we think it was? Our favorite TV journalist (How’s that for an oxymoron, folks?) tooling through a downtown avenue in his fancy flivver with a drop-dead redhead (not his wife) often dipping from view?’”

“
What’s an oxymoron?”

“
It’s a contradiction in terms. Like TV journalist. Get it?”

“
Got it. That should be worth another fifty irate letters.”

“
So where is our favorite oxymoron?”

“
In with the boss.”

“
Frank, you were in a convertible.” Alice Whitney sat with a cup of tea at one end of a couch. Frank was next to her in an armchair. A handsome woman in her 50s, Alice wore her VP-GM suit with just a hint of cleavage, her fashion reflecting her manner: firm but feminine.

“
So? Lots of people have convertibles.”

“
Not like yours.”

“
Alice, I didn’t know she’d do that.”