Shot In Detroit Read online

  Praise for CONCRETE ANGEL by Patricia Abbott:

  “With cool, compelling prose, CONCRETE ANGEL reveals the menace that lurks beneath a mother’s charming facade. An absorbing novel by an unusually fine writer.”

  —Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award-winning author of CHINA LAKE and THE MEMORY COLLECTOR

  “(An) enthralling, dark debut novel...It’s a potent and at times poignant combination. Those who enjoy suspenseful, atmospheric family drama will find much to love here.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Christine’s mother Eve is sharp, beautiful, charismatic... and a murderous sociopath. Their complicated and heartbreaking relationship is explored in CONCRETE ANGEL -- a riveting depiction of family ties and how they can bind, ensnare, strangle.”

  —Alison Gaylin, USA Today bestselling author

  “CONCRETE ANGEL is debut novelist Patti Abbott’s exquisitely rendered character study of a manipulative mother over two decades. Eve is a woman obsessed – but how will our narrator, Eve’s only daughter, respond as her childhood innocence is taken away? Abbott exhibits a pitch-perfect precision with both language and setting in capturing the tragic world of a mid-century Pennsylvania family.”

  —Naomi Hirahara, Edgar Award winning author of SNAKESKIN SHAMESIN

  “This is a gripping psychological thriller...will draw fans of the late Ruth Rendell as well as Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train.”

  —Booklist

  “A fresh, original voice telling a story that’s probably, in broad outline if not detail, more common than we know. But what detail! From the opening sentence, a grabber.”

  —SJ Rozan, Edgar-winning author (as Sam Cabot) of SKIN OF THE WOLF

  “The characters in Abbott’s debut novel are fully realized.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “CONCRETE ANGEL is a culmination of her very best and is not to be missed.”

  —Criminal Element

  Violet Hart is a photographer whose will to succeed is tested when the opportunity to make it through questionable activity arises. Violet’s previous attempts to leave the downtrodden city of Detroit and strike out in a new place has gone awry. She always returns to cobble out a life for herself in the oddly womblike interiors of Detroit. Nearing forty, she’s keenly aware that the time for artistic recognition is running out. She’s further handicapped by her loner instincts. Roaming the streets of Detroit, her personal and professional failure is a good match for the city’s physical decline.

  Suddenly an opportunity is handed to her: Her current lover, a Detroit mortician, needs a photograph of a body. She takes the picture. It’s an artistic success and she’s energized by the subject matter. She’s discovered an edgy focus for her work and persuades Bill to allow her to take pictures of some of his other “clients,” eventually settling on photographing young, black men.

  Bill is locally famous for dressing his bodies in a flamboyant manner and this heightens the artistry in Violet’s photographs. Although Bill has reservations, he agrees to allow her photography, providing the families of the “departed” agree to it. Most do, surprisingly, and Violet’s new portfolio is launched. Each photograph is stronger than the one before it as she learns how to take pictures of the dead.

  Violet takes her portfolio to a gallery and quickly strikes a deal. She agrees to produce a dozen pictures with the deadline only a few months away. But Violet convinces the gallery owner she can meet the date because dead bodies are commonplace in Detroit. And she has access to the city’s most prominent mortician.

  These demands soon place Violet in the position of having to strain to meet her quota. She haunts Bill’s prep room, looking for suitable subjects. Bill becomes increasingly distressed at acting as a procurer for Violet’s obsession. Her new relationship with a bi-polar outsider artist draws her into a murder investigation and gang activity, raising the radar of the local police.

  As time runs out, how will Violet come up with enough photographs and what will this obsession do to her? And can she succeed as an artist without losing her soul or her life in the process? A riveting novel of psychological suspense, Patricia Abbott continues to cement herself as one of our very best writers of the darkness that lies within the human heart.

  To Josh and Megan

  “The best photographs are often subversive, unreasonable, delirious.”

  Lisette Model

  Midway into my mad flight to Belle Isle in the March predawn chill, a journey I undertook after a distressing evening with Ted Ernst, it occurred to me the park might not be open at six in the morning. I’d jumped into my car not thinking to check the hours. But if my memory was reliable, there was no way to close the park.

  My foot tapped the brake anxiously as I stopped for the umpteenth time, the traffic light swinging jauntily in the river’s breeze, a seagull perched on its top. Planting my foot on the gas pedal a second later, I wondered if Detroit’s population of Canadian geese, abandoned buildings, and rusted cars would soon overtake the number of residents. In New York, they were gassing geese. Perhaps in Detroit it was people instead. Another red light a block later, and I hammered the wheel in frustration.

  Today, I needed the boost that discovering I could still produce a first-rate photo would give me. Why did I feel so comfortable at Belle Isle, a place most suburbanites found threatening, and even depressing, considering their memories of its glory days? But a huge park on the water in a spectacular state of decay could yield good results for a photographer. Ruin porn was the current phrase.

  Parking on an unpaved area inside the park, I hurried through the trees and within seconds spotted a half-naked man on a park bench being serviced by a woman old enough to be on Medicare. She glanced at me smiling, perhaps seeing me as potential back-up. The missing teeth her smile revealed would add an interesting element to both a photo and the act itself. The pair was situated under a street lamp and consequently photographable. Did people on Belle Isle usually act on such desire at dawn? Not even quite dawn? Perhaps they’d been up for hours already and it was mid-afternoon on their cockeyed clock.

  I was considering snapping a picture when the man lifted his grizzled head, spotted me, and wiggled a finger in warning. The light caught the whites of his eyes, his half-smile. Aw, I wouldn’t have done it anyway. If their interest in such activity had not diminished, let ’em at it. I smiled back and moved on, looking for—well, I didn’t know just what—which was precisely the problem. How would I top the scene I’d witnessed? So I snapped away as I walked, stray lights pointing out my path. This hit-or-miss strategy didn’t usually pan out, but what else was there to do?

  I’d barely taken half a dozen pictures when two Detroit cops, attracted by the flashes, approached. Park cops were lenient with activity inside Belle Isle up to a point. They put up with the park’s semi-permanent, homeless residents as long as they behaved themselves. The randy teenagers populating the park on summer nights were also tolerated. Probably kids kept the homeless afloat with gifts of burgers, half-drunk beers, loose change: an environmental niche in action. Certainly the homeless had it better here than the guys hovering by the freeway entrances. Months of cold and the horrible economy made opportunities for successful panhandling scant in Michigan.

  Today it was the more suburban-looking photographer—me—who drew the cops’ attention, and I had no idea why. I lowered my camera, trying to smile, as they approached. Cops made me tense so my smile might’ve been more of a leer if they could see my expression in what was still near-dark.

  One of the cops shone a flashlight, one of those gadgets with the ability to light a small city, in my face, holding it the way the cops on CSI do.

  “Reporter?” the burly, red-haired sergeant asked. His tone
hovered between conversational and investigatory. “One of the papers send you down?”

  I shook my head. “Taking a few pictures of my own.”

  When neither man responded, I added, “I’m a photographer,” wondering if I should dig out my press pass or portfolio since the cops still didn’t look satisfied. The flashlight continued to play across my face—like the lights in an interrogation room.

  “Should we know your name?” the burly guy said, chuckling to himself.

  “No, I’m just poking around. You know. Looking for a good subject.”

  I was babbling. Their noticeable lack of approval was throwing me off. How many fools ended up marking time in police stations through excessive chatter? And my teeth were chattering. It was damp and chilly. Having darted out my door on impulse, I was underdressed in a light jacket.

  “Poking around, huh? At six in the morning and down here for some reason,” the second cop said. He was African-American and his manner was brusque. “It’s barely light, lady. Sure you’re not here to score drugs?” Both cops looked around, alert to this possibility. “Or sell them?” He nodded toward my bag but did not ask me to open it.

  Ignoring his gesture, which could have been right but wasn’t, I said, “I’ve got the necessary lighting in there. To take good pictures, I mean.”

  “Lights? You’ve been snapping away for the last ten minutes.”

  “Proper pictures,” I clarified. Did he really think I was up to something?

  Two blank faces as they continued to see me as a potential dealer or buyer. Trying to distract them, I pointedly glanced at a nearby picnic table where a young woman was sleeping, her head pillowed on one arm, a breast poking provocatively from her half-zipped hoodie. An overturned vodka bottle rested on the bench beside her, another lay on the ground. Shouldn’t they be more interested in her? At the very least, wasn’t she vulnerable to assault given her inebriated state? Hadn’t she probably scored drugs? Where was her dealer?

  “It looks like that woman needs your help, Officers.” Head gesture.

  Neither bothered to follow my gaze. “Bettie’s okay,” the black cop said. “We got her back.”

  They’d seen it a million times and were unimpressed with Bettie and her errant boob. They knew how to protect her. They had her “back.” I was the problem.

  I pushed forward. “Photographers find inspiration in urban settings.” I’d definitely have to work on my vocabulary before venturing down here again. I sounded phony, guilty, snotty, or all three.

  “So it’s art to you, huh?” the redheaded cop interrupted. “The people you snap don’t matter more than apples on a cutting board.”

  This from a guy who allowed Bettie to sleep it off—her breast on the table exactly like a still life object—and up for grabs.

  The cop coughed, scraping the phlegm from his throat and swallowing it back down, a common practice during the nine months of allergy season in Detroit. “But these people here,” he gestured with a sweeping motion and a shrug, “well, you’re not here to take pictures of their fine couture or snazzy cars for HUM magazine. You’re looking for—more.” His lips twisted as he sniffed his displeasure.

  I was getting annoyed at their attempt to provoke me—to make me the villain of their morning stroll, the scenario they were insisting on writing. What if I was hoping for something darker, something that might upset their peace? I did feel sorry for the people in the park. Who didn’t? But they’d been part of the landscape in Detroit for as long as I could remember. For decades before the Canadian geese arrived. Had it ever been any different? You’d have to go back to the fifties to find prosperity and that was long before my birth.

  Anyway, was I much better off in my dreary little apartment in a blue-collar suburb a few miles away? I wasn’t the suburbanite they thought I was. I lived on the fringes of Detroit life, and probably a lot more frugally than the cops.

  My intentions were serious if they’d only try to understand. What I did take “seriously,” as callous as it might seem, was how these people might look on film. How they’d become art in my hands if I was good enough. Occasionally I thought I was. Once in a while, someone actually said it. But the span of time between such periods was lengthening each year—the periods between days when I got that chill from what I produced. When I knew it told a truth.

  “Maybe I can draw attention to what you guys see down here. Raise public awareness.”

  God, I sounded like a public service announcement, but I was growing desperate to win my release. I couldn’t seem to stop the gush of pompous sentiments spilling from my mouth. But I did mean it. Good art was meant to do this. If I were inside the island’s greenhouse or in the aquarium, these dudes would be happy. Probably setting up my lights for me. Popping quarters in the pop machine and sharing an early morning swig of Coke as they watched me work. But out here….

  The black officer looked like he was choking back a laugh. “You’d better be careful,” he said. “People here might not like turning up in your darkroom. This isn’t exactly a pre-theater gala at the Fox Theater. Nobody’s on the red carpet.”

  He turned to his red-haired buddy and got the obligatory laugh. Their mood had lifted a bit as the day’s grayness became tinged with gold. “Don’t get paid to watch the asses of ladies who should be and could be somewhere else, do we? What’s your name anyway?” he said, pulling out a pad.

  “Violet Hart,” I told him. He scribbled it down, flipped the pad shut, and stashed it.

  “Gawkers, I call them—and yes, you,” the black cop continued. “No better than the guy who slows down to watch a fatality hauled off the freeway.” He looked me over again. “Maybe you are here to start trouble, Ms. Hart. What d’ya think, Den? Is she here to make us sweat at six in the morning? Is the pretty lady up to no good?”

  Before his partner could respond, the silver flash of the Renaissance Center, Detroit’s hat tip to the architecture of the early seventies, caught our eyes as the sun began its slow ascent. Only two towers were visible and both looked more like spires of amorphous smoke than objects of steel and glass. When I turned back again, the park had become instantaneously benign, scenic—a site for a photographer seeking such a landscape—a place for joggers and cyclists in bright spandex; city workers in large gloves stabbing at yesterday’s trash; two authentically suburban ladies dressed in olive-colored L.L. Bean wear, binoculars in hand.

  But I couldn’t imagine a moment when a woman in a canvas coat and baggy jeans would show up in my darkroom. Could an artist live right outside Detroit and not be attracted to its gloomy underbelly rather than its predictable suburbs? The possibility of getting striking shots of darker subjects, an opportunity existing only minutes earlier, had disappeared. I’d squandered those sacred moments talking to the cops, explaining what shouldn’t need to be explained.

  Perhaps I’d never been more than a source of early-morning amusement, a person to hassle or harass—a sort of cop’s flirtation.

  I went home to develop the film—the few pictures I’d snapped—but none of the photographs looked like anything special on the contact sheet. And the exposed breast of the woman looked like a rock lying on that picnic table. I turned my eyes away in embarrassment. The overturned bottles looked stagey. You could find better pictures in the free rags. Today’s work joined yesterday’s in the trash.

  I picked up the phone and called Di’s number. “Is he there?” I asked Alberto when he answered. “I need to talk to him.”

  “You need,” he said sarcastically. “Can’t it wait? You know what time he gets home.” I could feel him consulting a clock. “Barely five hours’ sleep.”

  “Did he hire you to monitor his calls?”

  This was the kind of relationship we had. Like Grace and Jack vying for Will’s attention on that old TV show.

  “You like to pretend I’m hired help.” He paused a minute, and when I didn’t reply, sighed again and yelled, “Diogenes! Your ol’ lady’s on the line.” This was a joke,
of course, since it was Alberto who was Di’s ol’ lady.

  When Di got on the line, I told him I was finished. “I’m gonna be taking pictures of bar mitzvahs and sweet sixteens till I’m too old to carry my equipment. I’m no damned good.”

  No response. I was boring him or he’d fallen back to sleep.

  “I earned less than thirty thousand dollars last year. My car’s about to die. My mother hit me up for a loan last week. My mother. There’s little hope I will ever marry, ever put a cent away for retirement, and I am no longer young enough to ignore these things. And I need new equipment for those stupid wedding pictures. But mostly, I am no damned good. And I live in Detroit—a city that makes no promises that any of that will change. Sure a few new restaurants are opening up. So what? 2011 will likely be no better than 2010.”

  He sighed sleepily. “What put the bug up your ass this time?”

  “I can’t bear to tell you.”

  “But you know you will. Start at the beginning.” He yawned. “I need a bedtime story.”

  “My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.”

  Emmet Gowin

  The night before, around eight, an hour I usually devote to a glass of cabernet and a gritty mystery novel, the landline rang. When I heard Ted Ernst recording a message on my ancient machine, I ran for the receiver, nearly tripping over a table leg in my rush. Ted Ernst owned an art gallery where ten or so of my photographs—depending on whether he’d sold any—currently filled one wall. It wasn’t his best wall, the one flooded with light, but still I had a wall. Something I’d found hard to come by.

  “Doing anything?” he asked, not identifying himself. Maybe he assumed I’d seen the caller ID, but probably he thought I’d remember his voice. He was that sort of arrogant prick. “Thought I might drop by since I’m in your neighborhood.” I heard paper rustling. “Hazel Park. Right?”