The Guardian of Detritus

Chapter One

Larry in Accounting

Will waited for the call that would change his life in an office with no door.

Nothing to hold out the sights, sounds, and smells of his coworkers.

Nothing to get in his way if he wanted to leave.

Nothing to prevent senior executives from sticking their heads in and annoying him.

Harkanen, you’re coming to the meeting this morning, right? It starts in ten minutes.

Will looked up to see Larry in Accounting standing in the open doorway, looking like he’d just stepped in dog shit. Larry was the Chief Financial Officer at Technart Innovation Corporation, which made him the CFO at TIC in corporate speak. He made no secret of his deep disdain for Will and his colleagues in Public Relations, being famous for walking by a group of them having lunch together in the cafeteria and

declaring, This must be the overhead table.

I thought the meeting was at eleven o’clock, Larry.

That’s the pre-meeting for Orlando. This is a smaller group meeting to get everyone aligned for the pre-meeting.

You’re having a pre-pre-meeting?

Orlando is important to me. I’m not leaving anything to chance.

I can’t make it; I’m expecting an important phone call.

I sent out a notice on Meetus, didn’t you get it?

I don’t use TIC web apps, they’re too complicated. If you want me to come to a meeting, you have to do it the oldfashioned way: send me an e-mail or call my cell phone.

What’s the matter, Harkanen, afraid to try something new? Let me bottom-line it for you: I need everyone at this meeting with their budget numbers, including PR. You’re the Director of Media Relations; that’s why they gave you this extravagant office. I’ll see you in ten minutes with the PR budget numbers, or I’ll see your boss when the meeting’s over.

Larry disappeared from the doorway, and Will sat staring after him, trying to decide what to do next. He thought of a speechwriting cliché he had used on more than one occasion: the Chinese word for crisis consists of two symbols—danger and opportunity. He knew that wasn’t really accurate, but right now he was desperate enough to hope there was a glimmer of truth in this romanticized lie.

In Monty Python’s Life of Brian terms, he was chewing on life’s gristle.

A month ago his soon-to-be ex-wife had informed him that their marriage was merely comfortable, and that was no longer acceptable. He was told it was time for them to seek fulfillment and happiness—separately. It didn’t take long for him to suspect she had gotten a head start on her search long before she delivered her devastating performance review:

You play everything safe, Will, you’re never spontaneous, you never take chances. You’re so predictable, and so boring, and we are so over.

On the advice of his attorney, he had let slip the dogs of war, or in this case a tired old hound named Murphy. Will smiled at the metaphor, then tried to figure out what movie had brought it to mind. Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar? Sadly, no —it was General Chang in Star Trek VI.

Murphy was hot on the trail last night and had promised to report back this morning.

Will hoped the call came soon; TIC had strict rules about keeping your phone turned off during meetings. He thought about it for a moment but couldn’t decide which was worse: missing the call or attending the meeting. One held the potential to radically change his life; the other was certain to be more of the same meaningless bullshit that continued to fill his days.

He wasn’t sure what scared him more.

It had taken him years to get to where he was—a lifetime, if you counted the false starts before TIC started sucking the life out of him. But still, he was not living the dream.

As a young man he was determined to change the world with his music. That ended in a way that was spectacularly bad, even by the high standards set by rock band cautionary tales. After that he had worked hard as a reporter to save the city he loved. He was branded a liar and thrown in jail for his efforts— a Detroit thank-you.

Will knew from painful experience that things could end quickly and badly if you weren’t careful. And yet being careful was exactly what had led him to his boring job in this boring company.

His thoughts drifted again to Life of Brian: perhaps it was time to give a whistle.

The angry accountant had just presented him with a perfect opportunity to boldly go ahead of schedule. He had ten minutes to get a head start on the banging new lifestyle he told himself he wanted so badly.

Was banging a word a man his age could use without embarrassing himself? Didn’t it mean something dirty? He couldn’t remember and he didn’t care. He was going to use it.

Banging.

Of course, he could always take the call later or listen to a message left on his voicemail. But a banging new life shouldn’t begin with a timid compromise: giving in to a bullying bureaucrat. On the other hand, even if the plan worked and he avoided paying out a massive divorce settlement to his cheating wife, he was still going to need a job and a steady income.

He looked at his watch; seven minutes to decide.

Time for some more movie magic.

It was his favorite game, a mental trick he had taught himself years ago: visualizing a movie that paralleled his current reality. It helped him put things in perspective or, in some cases, ignore an ugly truth. But at the moment it wasn’t working; at the moment the only thing that came to mind was Eric Idle singing and whistling enthusiastically while suffering an excruciatingly painful death.

Five minutes.

He tried to visualize Lauren Bacall asking him the question she asked Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not: You know how to whistle, don’t you? It didn’t help. The only new image that flashed through his mind was a brief montage of car chases and shootouts. He gave up and looked at his watch again.

Three minutes.

He was trying not to look at his watch when a new image started playing in his head. It was some kind of Frank Capra film shown in reverse, where everything started out sunny and bright, then turned dark and desperate: It’s a Horrible Life.

He needed to rewrite his script, and soon.

Maybe just not right now.

Will was reaching into a drawer to get the budget file for the meeting when his phone rang. The ringtone was the song Back in ’72 by Bob Seger, chosen to commemorate the last time he was happy with his path and purpose in life. He answered the phone and heard three words that filled him with hope and horror.

I got them.

Chapter Two

Sucker Punch

Paddy wanted to blast off from the city on a wall of sound but his car wouldn’t cooperate. It ignored his polite requests to play music—a slap in the face to a music freak and audio geek. He thought about his options for a moment, then tried speaking the song titles he wanted to hear in a clear and commanding voice:

Gimme Danger.

Search and Destroy.

Death Trip.

Nothing happened.

This was serious.

He needed the music of the Godfather of Punk to take him away on the drive home, especially after what he’d been through in the last few weeks. Unfortunately he was heading onto the Chrysler Freeway, where he would be surrounded by maniacs racing back to the suburbs as darkness descended on Detroit. At that point any attempt to operate his iPod by hand would be suicide.

It was eyes on the road, hands on the wheel—or else.

Paddy tried to remember back to the thirty seconds he had spent skimming the section about the voice activation system in the owner’s manual of his new car. With his musical background and technical knowledge, he had assumed getting it to talk to him would be easy—one more item to add to the growing list of things he had been wrong about lately.

Buying a new car when he was broke. Thinking he could make it talk to him without bothering to read about how it worked. Trying to cash in on some sordid business from the past that he should have left alone.

Maybe if he spoke the name of the Album or Artist. Raw Power.

Iggy and the Stooges.

The silence that followed was breached by Paddy’s angry shout.

Go screw yourself!

To his amazement, the car responded.

Calling Sue Ursell.

Paddy cursed and ordered it to stop until he heard the familiar voice of his administrative assistant coming through the car’s speaker system from his iPhone.

Wagner and Associates, how can I help you?

Sue, it’s Paddy. My dumbass car called you by accident. Why are you still at work?

I’m leaving in a few minutes. I had to look up some numbers the accountants need to finish our taxes.

The government can wait one more day to pick the bones of our carcass clean. I’m not paying you overtime, that’s for damn sure. Go home.

Yes, sir. By the way, you left those files you were going to take home on your desk. If you want to come back and pick them up, I’ll leave the lights on.

Paddy thought about it for a moment as he headed onto the freeway.

It turns out those won’t be as useful as I thought they would be. I’m just getting onto the freeway. Do me a favor, put them in my top drawer, and lock it.

Will do. Have a nice evening.

Whatever.

After trying several voice commands that did nothing, Paddy found a button on the steering wheel that hung up the phone.

In the silence that followed, he heard a faint thumping sound behind him. As it grew closer and louder, he realized it was some moron playing cranked-up rap music with a booming bass line.

His car began trembling as Greektown Casino and Ford Field flew by on his left. He started cursing, then remembered the voice activation system and stopped. This time his obscenities didn’t generate a random phone call; he assumed they were drowned out by the noise that was filling the car.

He wished he could be cooler about it. Even at his advanced age, he still imagined himself as the young upstart who pissed off old farts with his loud, obnoxious music. He was, after all, Padrig Wagner, aka Paddy Wagon, the bad-boy rebel from the golden age of Detroit rock. But there was no getting around it—he considered the rumbling vibrations he could feel in his chest from fifty feet away to be an invasion of his personal space.

He glanced up at his rearview mirror and spotted the source of his irritation: a shiny black Dodge Magnum with smokedglass windows. With the help of a strong instinct for selfpreservation, he fought off the urge to flip off his fellow music lover. It was never a good idea to give the finger to a stranger in Detroit. Instead he pulled over into the far right lane to let the Magnum pass.

To his surprise it pulled into the right lane behind him and closed the gap between them. Steady, repetitive thumping filled the car, shaking his body and pounding his brain. It was impossible to think, so his instincts took over. He swerved back into the middle lane and stepped on the gas. The driver of the Magnum did the same.

He was being followed.

He swerved into the far left lane and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. He looked in the rearview mirror again to try to figure out who was after him, but he couldn’t see the driver’s face in the growing darkness. What he could see was that the Magnum had followed him into the fast lane and was closing the gap between them once again.

He was being chased.

This was no ordinary case of road rage or rush-hour roulette. Whoever was in the boom box behind him meant to do him harm. He was certain of that, just as he was certain that he had brought it on himself.

Paddy told himself to stay calm and scanned the road ahead of him. He saw a sign for the Ford Freeway and an opening in the traffic to his right. It was time for a Detroit Slide—a highspeed exit from the left lane without the use of a turn signal. He waited until he was almost to the exit, then cut across two lanes onto the ramp heading west.

The Magnum did the same, narrowly missing cars in both lanes.

The ramp made a slow arc to the left, passing the ghostly white ruins of the Fisher Body Plant on the right. The abandoned building, where Cadillacs had once been made, was a Rorschach test of broken windows and graffitied obscenities. Paddy sped past the old plant and a billboard urging drivers to donate their cars to Mother Waddles to help feed the hungry.

The traffic on the Ford Freeway was surprisingly light for rush hour. Paddy found he could maintain a high speed by weaving from lane to lane around cars. But so could the Magnum, which continued following closely behind him. He moved back into the fast lane and saw the exit to the Lodge Freeway on the left. He took it at the last second and found himself sliding to the right, all four tires squealing like pigs being slaughtered.

The Magnum followed, still ticking away like the world’s loudest time bomb.

He was headed south on the Lodge, back toward his office downtown in the Renaissance Center. At this time of day, traffic headed in this direction was almost nonexistent, so Paddy floored it. Motor City Casino zipped past him on the right, and MGM Casino was coming up on his left. He wondered why the cops hadn’t pulled him over yet, then remembered that Detroit cops rarely bothered anyone on the freeways unless there was an accident or a crime.

Going fast in a car was not a crime in the Motor City—or, at least, it was so far down the list of crimes as to not draw attention to itself.

Then he thought, why not get their attention himself?

Call the cops.

I don’t understand.

At least the car was talking to him, despite the noise. The relentless boom, boom, boom was getting closer and louder again, making it hard to think. He had to speak more slowly and clearly, lose the slang.

Call the police.

I don’t understand.

He felt a sudden jolt as the Magnum nudged him from behind. This guy was nuts; he was going to get them both killed. No, Paddy thought, he is just going to get me killed— that’s his job.

He decided it didn’t make sense to call the police; whatever was going to happen would be over in a minute or two, long before they could do anything about it. Cobo Hall was looming straight ahead. He braced himself for the sweeping left turn into the tunnel that went underneath it and spilled out onto Jefferson Avenue.

Once again his tires screamed in protest as he asked too much of them. The car drifted to the right, and Paddy made a split-second decision: instead of heading straight down Jefferson to his office, he would turn left onto Woodward Avenue as soon as he emerged from the tunnel. He moved the car back into the left lane without slowing down and got ready for the hard turn he hoped would lose the Magnum.

He looked ahead for the landmark that would show him where to turn: a traffic island that held a twenty-four-foot-long arm that hung from a four-legged pyramid frame. The statue’s formal name was the Joe Louis Memorial, but everyone in Detroit called it The Fist.

Paddy wasn’t used to coming out of the Cobo Hall tunnel going this fast; there wasn’t much time to think. The traffic lights at Woodward were green, which meant he would be cutting across traffic going in the opposite direction on the far side of the median—a chance he was willing to take at this point. But there was more: some kind of construction on the corner he was hurtling toward; poles with bright lights that cut through the twilight, piles of dirt, yellow sawhorse barricades.

The split-second distraction of this unexpected scene was costly. This time Paddy’s instincts failed him.

He yanked the wheel to the left to make the turn, but it was too much, too soon. A small crowd of people scattered as the car crashed through a barricade, slammed up a dirt pile, and launched itself into the air.

The last thing Paddy saw was an enormous fist heading toward his windshield.

Chapter Three

Motion Pictures

Old Main had started out as a Detroit high school more than a century ago; now it served as offices, classrooms, and revered icon for Wayne State University.

Not a bad second act.

The stately old building’s first floor had a stone exterior that looked like the foundation of a castle; above that yellow bricks cut with arched windows were topped by a slanting, silver-blue roof. A number of pointed spires reached upward from the roof, and a massive clock tower stood at the front of the building.

As he approached it in the vanishing twilight, Will thought Old Main looked like a slightly more sensible version of the castle in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Perhaps he, too, was a special person whose exceptional talents had been overlooked his entire life.

Unfortunately the magic spell of the building’s charm was broken when he sat down in his lawyer’s office to hear the private detective’s report, which began with a simple question.

Do you wanna see naked pictures of your wife doing it with another guy?

Before he answered, Will paused to ask himself a question: was this the worst moment of his life? The monumental failures and traumatic embarrassments of his past had set the bar high. But the only thing that prevented him from declaring this moment the all-time champion was the possibility of worse moments to come.

I paid you to get them, so l suppose I ought to.

The detective handed Will a large manila envelope streaked with dark-red smudges.

Be careful, I got a little barbeque sauce on the envelope.

Will pulled out the photos and shuffled through them. They were grainy black-and-white photos taken with a night-vision camera, but there was no doubt about who was in them and what they were doing.

For a moment Will thought he was going to throw up.

You all right?

His lawyer walked around the desk where they were seated and put a hand on Will’s shoulder. Will stared at him blankly for a moment, then nodded and handed him the photos and the envelope. His lawyer walked back around the desk and put the photos in a drawer before he spoke.

Mr. Murphy is quite insensitive, not to mention fat and sloppy…

Hey, I’m sitting here.

But he is very good at what he does. I know these pictures must make you uncomfortable, but they are going to save you a lot of time and money. I just need your okay and we’ll proceed as we discussed. Do you want me to go over the details of the plan again? If not, do I have your permission to proceed?

Will knew the details of the plan all too well: he had agreed to have Murphy follow his wife and her boyfriend around and take photos that would prove adultery. It was a trump card to be played during the divorce settlement talks that would cut his losses considerably. But now that he had them and was confronted with the ugly but undeniable truth, he wasn’t as sure about taking action as before.

Earlier in the day Will had passed on the chance to begin his new life following his bliss, whatever the hell that was. But that had been a minor test of his resolve, easily dismissed as meaningless. This was the real deal, a decision that was potentially life-changing.

He decided to stall for time.

How did you get these, Murphy? They look like they are inside a hotel room.

It was a motel out in the sticks. I was trying to get shots of them going inside, but I didn’t get there fast enough. Then we got lucky; they opened the curtains in their room. They turned the lights off, but I had my night-vision equipment with me just in case. When they started humping, they didn’t even get under the covers. Who knows, maybe they got turned on by doing it with the curtains open. She was really getting into it, there’s one picture near the end where she—

That’s enough, Murphy. I’m sure this is difficult enough for Mr. Harkanen, he doesn’t need you adding commentary.

He asked, I told him.

Will, we talked about this at length. You agreed to do it. You know what we have to do.

Let me ask you a question first, Baxter. What famous movie does this remind you of?

What?

The three of us, sitting in this office. We look like three of the main characters in a classic film noir, made in the early forties. You know it.

"I know you, Will. You’re procrastinating. I need to let them know we have these photographs right away. We’ll need time to reach a settlement before our court date."

Murphy looked a lot like Sidney Greenstreet, who played the Fat Man in the movie, only a lot more rumpled and stained. Baxter Fineman had the same short stature, finely tailored suits, and refined mannerisms as Peter Lorre. His office in Old Main resembled the worn, poorly lit office of Sam Spade, who was about the same size and build as Will. But the similarities ended there: Will knew he was no Humphrey Bogart.

"The Maltese Falcon. That’s the movie I was thinking of. We kind of look like the guys in The Maltese Falcon."

"None of the main characters in The Maltese Falcon were black."

I know, but you sort of look like a black Peter Lorre.

You’re stalling, and you’re insulting me. That’s great. Let me ask you a question, Will—why did you hire me?

You’re the only lawyer I know—or at least the only lawyer I know that I trust.

I told you when I took this job that I wasn’t a divorce lawyer. I’m a law professor, not a practicing attorney.

You saved my ass when the Detroit Police were after me.

"That was twenty years ago. And that case involved libel law, which I taught and practiced. I don’t teach divorce law."

"What can I say? You’re my friend and I trust you. I assume you’re still passionate about fighting injustice.

Everything else is details and excuses."

How long have we known each other, Will?

"Thirty years, at least. I took your Law of the Press class. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship…"

"Yes, yes, Casablanca, I get it."

Baxter Fineman stood up and began pacing back and forth behind his desk, presumably to address the jury in Will’s mind. He held up his hand and raised a finger for every point he made.

"You’ve known me for decades. You trust me. I’ve gotten you out of serious trouble in the past; more than once, I might add. You hired me despite my strong protests, you agreed to my plan, the plan is working—and now you don’t want to follow my advice."

It was hard to argue with all those fingers, so Will kept stalling.

I haven’t said ‘no.’

"You haven’t said ‘yes’ either. And if you don’t, Jane is going to stomp on your heart and pick your wallet clean at the same time."

Will thought about his options, then thought about the photographs—here’s looking at you, kid, indeed. He was certain they would work, but he also was certain they would hurt and humiliate his wife. A lot of people, including his attorney, would argue that she deserved it. But Will couldn’t ignore their shared history, the two great children they had raised, the good times they had together.

I’m sorry, Baxter. I’m more Rick Blaine than Sam Spade.

What the hell does that mean?

"At the end of The Maltese Falcon, Bogart turns the woman he loves over to the cops to pay for the crime she committed. But in Casablanca he lets the woman he loves

leave with another man because it’s the right thing to do."

Which means?

I’m not going to do it.

His lawyer said nothing at first but just sat there, shaking his head. Finally he spoke.

I was afraid this would happen. You’re making a huge mistake, you know that. You’re letting your emotions influence your decision. You’re a nice guy, you don’t want to hurt anyone, you don’t want to make waves—I get all that. You still have feelings for her, but she doesn’t deserve them.

I’m sorry if I’m screwing up your plan. I thought we’d get a few pictures of them holding hands, maybe kissing in a restaurant.

I know they are unpleasant, but these will be much more useful to us than a picture of them holding hands.

I’m not going to destroy the mother of my children just to save a few bucks in a divorce settlement.

"All right, then. I won’t waste any more of my time trying to talk you into doing something you don’t want to, Will. I ought to know better than that by now. So tell me, what do you want me to do?"

Burn the photos, delete all the images, and settle. Whatever she wants is fine, just end it. I’m tired of this whole mess, I just want to put it behind me.