Brothers, Part One

“This is my brother Abel,” Gwen Martin said. “Abel, this is Tom Jurgen, the man I was telling you about? The detective. And his friend Rachel.”

Abel, a lanky, thin Black man with patchy hair, looked left to right. He looked at Rachel longer than me, but I couldn’t blame him for that. “H-hi. I’m, uh, Abel.”

            We sat at a table outside a bar on Wells Street on a warm summer afternoon. Gwen was nervous about COVID inside the bar—Abel’s health was shit, she told us. 

            She was in her forties, with short curly hair, in a high-necked white blouse and jeans. She had a clear big-sisterly protective attitude toward Abel. “Can you tell them what happened?”

            Abel closed his eyes. “I don’t—we were walking, me and, uh, Charlie. It was night. Outside that drugstore on north Clark, looking for—whatever. We got kicked out . . .” He shook his head and slammed a fist on the table, shaking our drinks. “I don’t remember! I just don’t remember!”

            “Shh, it’s okay.” Gwen stroked his arm. “It’s okay.”

            I nudged Rachel’s foot under the table. She has short red hair, hazelnut eyes, and mild psychic powers. She glared at me, sipped her gin and tonic, then reached out a hand. “May I?”

            Gwen squeezed Abel’s shoulder. He looked at Rachel and nodded. “I’m, uh, Abel.”

            She smiled and placed a hand on his wrist. Abel stared at her, then closed his eyes again. Gwen watched them. I’d told her about Rachel, and unlike a lot of clients, she didn’t ask any skeptical questions about her. 

            We waited. I sipped my beer. After 10 seconds Rachel let go of Abel and leaned back, blinking her eyes. “Okay.”

            “Anything?” I asked.

            She lifted her glass for another swallow. “Tell me about your dreams,” she asked Abel.

            He shuddered and looked away. “It’s dark, and there’s this pit. It’s dark. I’m down on the ground, digging in the dirt. There’s dogs around me, barking. Bells ringing. It’s cold. There’s someone—it’s Charlie. Next to me. Digging. I drop something, and the dogs bark at me. All they do is bark, and the bells keep ringing. Loud. Berking.” He dropped his head. 

            “It’s okay, Abel.” Gwen stroked his arm again. “I’m here. You’re here. We’re going to find Charlie.”

            Two months ago, Abel and Charlie Martin had disappeared. Brothers, they were frequently homeless. Sometimes they slept at Gwen’s house, sometimes in shelters, and the rest of the time.in places Gwen didn’t want to know about. They’d had problems with drugs, and run-ins with the cops. Abel had done rehab twice. Gwen was sure they were both straight and sober now. But when a week went by without any word from them, she got scared.

            “The police didn’t care,” she told me on the phone. “Two Black drug addicts? They took a report, but didn’t do anything about it. I called them every other day for a while, and at least no one hung up on me, but—nothing. I went to church, talked to my friends—our mom’s gone 10 years now—but there wasn’t anything to do. I found some of their friends, the ones I knew about, but . . . nothing.”

            Then, last Thursday, Abel was found wandering around on the Point—Promontory Point, jutting out into Lake Michigan to the east of the University of Chicago campus. He was dazed, talking in rambling sentences that didn’t connect, but he managed to give someone his name. The cops came, and his sister picked him up. 

            But he had no idea where he’d been for two months. Or where his brother Charlie was.

            Abel smiled nervously at his sister and then reached for his glass of lemonade. 

            “This what he was wearing when they found him.” Gwen dropped a plastic shopping bag on the table. “It’s just jeans and a T-shirt, dirty. And this.” She dug inside and dropped a sealed plastic bag in the middle.

            Inside was a stainless steel spoon. I turned it over. Some lettering and a small symbol were printed on the back of the handle. 

            “I don’t know if you can find out anything.” Gwen shrugged. “They said you’re good at stuff like this. If you can find Charlie, or at least what happened to him, you’ll help the family. It’s been tough.” She squeezed Abel’s hand.

            “What was the drugstore?” I asked.

            Abel rubbed his eyes, thinking. “We always—sometimes they have—Golden. Golden Drugs. Sometimes they let us in, sometimes they kick us out, you know?”

            The skinny blond waitress came out to our table with a big smile. “Another round?”

            “I think we’re done.” I handed her my credit card, then looked at Abel. “Let me see what we can do.”

 

Back at our apartment I made fresh coffee. “What do you think?” I asked Rachel.

            She sat down at the kitchen table. “You know I don’t read minds, I just get feelings, vibes? It’s like there’s a gap—something that blew out part of his mind. Trauma? I don’t know.” She blew on her coffee. “I caught some images that I couldn’t see clearly, so I asked him about his dreams. That was sort of a guess.”

            “It worked.” I picked up the bagged spoon. The printing was too small to make out with my bare eyes, so I used my phone to magnify it. Unfortunately, all I saw were the words “Stainless Steel” and an emblem—a stylized seven-pointed star inside a many-sided box. I strained my eyes to make out the shape. An octagon, like a stop sign. “Huh.”

            “Well, I have work to do.” Rachel’s a graphic designer when she’s not helping me. “Leftovers tonight.” It was her turn to make dinner.

            “Fine.” I refilled my coffee and followed her to the office. 

            First I checked the internet for anything about Abel Martin and his brother. I only found a short news story about Abel being found at Promontory Point. He was wandering around, then fell down on his knees and started clawing at the dirt with his fingers, mumbling incoherently, according to a nameless bystander quoted in the article. The piece ended by reporting that the man had been reunited with his family.

            So then I started trying to figure out the emblem on the spoon. “Star” and “octagon” got me a lot of results, but most of them had the wrong kind of star. This one had seven points, so it wasn’t a pentagram, which was good as far as I was concerned. The less weird magic I ran into the better. “Octagon” led me to a lot of images of stop signs and posters for martial-arts movies from the 1980s with Chuck Norris. 

            Then I found something. “Aha!”

            Rachel swung around in her chair. “What is it? Really good porn?”

            The emblem was a logo for a chain of upscale hotels. “Baryar Elite—ever heard of them?”

            She sauntered over to peer at my screen while I pulled up the website. “Looks snazzy. Out of my league. Unless you’re on an expense account.”

            My excitement took a dive as I searched the website. No locations in Chicago. New York, San Francisco, Moscow, Dubai, check—no windy city. Huh. I doublechecked my photo of the emblem. It was definitely the same. 

            So I called my client. “Abel’s sleeping,” Gwen told me. “He liked you. It’s a good sign he remembers you. Short-term isn’t so good since—since he came back.”

            I asked her about the Baryar Elite hotel. “I think I’ve seen commercials for it,” she said. “I don’t know. I travel some for work—” She was in insurance. “No place like that.”

            “Could you ask him when he wakes up? It may not mean anything, but it’s the only lead we’ve got so far.”

            “Sure let me—oh, wait. Hang on a minute. Abel?”

            A moment later she was back. “He just woke up. Abel, this is Tom and his friend Rachel. You remember them?”

            “R-Rachel? Yeah. Hi, Rachel.”

            Of course he’d remember her. Rachel grinned. “Hi, Abel. You okay?”

            “Abel?” I said. “I just want to ask you if you remember anything about a hotel. It’s called Baryar Elite. Does that ring any bells?”

            “Bells.” He was silent for a moment. Then—“Bells! No bells! No bells! Drakon! No bells!” 

            Oops. He’d mentioned bells in his dream. “Sorry, I, uh—”    

“It’s all right, Abel.” Gwen tried to soothe him. “It’s all right. No bells. No bells here. Just breathe. No bells. “I’m sorry, Tom—”

            “Sorry, T-Tom. Rachel.” His voice was suddenly quiet again. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” He started crying.

            “It’s okay, Abel,” Rachel said. O had the phone on speaker. “We’re sorry.”

            “Is that all?” Gwen sounded annoyed. 

            “Yes,” I said. “No, wait. What did Abel say? Drakon?”

            “I don’t—wait a minute. Abel? Abel?”

            After a moment she said, “He’s just sitting there not talking. Rocking back and forth. I don’t want to bother him anymore.” 

            Rachel and I looked at each other and nodded. “Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry. We’ll call again when we know anything.”

            Gwen hung up.

            “Drakon?” I turned to my computer. “That mean anything to you?”

            “Elon Musk’s latest prototype? The latest strain of hydroponic weed? The new guy in the latest Suicide Squad movie?” Rachel rolled her eyes. “I can come up with these all day. Or I can go heat up dinner. Last night’s curry.” She punched my arm. “You choose.”

            “Curry. Mmm.” I rubbed my arm and turned to my keyboard. “How do you think it’s spelled?”

            “J-E-R-K.” She kissed the top of my head. “Fifteen minutes. Salad?”

            “Yes, please.” I started experimenting with spellings. 

 

The next morning I got a call from my favorite cop, Detective Anita Sharpe of the Chicago PD. “Jurgen, what the hell?” Her traditional greeting.

            “Good morning, detective! And thanks for calling me back.”

            “Jurgen, this is not TV and I am not your cop friend who can pull strings for you. We are not friends. I only put up with you for Rachel’s sake. What she sees in you, I don’t know. Anyway, I am busy with actual crime. Why are you bothering me?”

            Sharpe and I worked together on vampire cases, although they haven’t flared up in a long time. I guess even vamps were being careful during the pandemic. “My client spoke to Detective Alvie Harrison about her missing brothers, Abel and Charlie Martin. Abel’s back, but Charlie is still missing. I spoke to Detective Harrison, and his responses were, let’s say less than informative, although very colorful.”

            “Yeah, Alvie’s a real hoot.” Sharpe sighed. “I remember the guy showing up at the Point. Look, all I know—and you didn’t get it from me—is there’s more missing persons in the last couple of months than usual. More runaway kids, more homeless, but they’re hard to track anyway. Sex workers, male and female and whatever. People walking home from work late at night. Mostly west and south side. No ransom notes or witnesses, so there’s not much we can do. What do you think you’ve got?”

            “Nothing,” I admitted. “Just a spoon and some nightmares from the victim. And something called Drakon.”

            “Isn’t that a perfume?”

            “That’s Drakkar.” I’d found it while searching the internet. “Should I get some? Rachel’s not much for cologne, but—”

            “Yeah, you stink no matter what you wear. Tell her hi for me.” Sharpe hung up.

            Rachel came into the office a few minutes later carrying her Wonder Woman coffee mug. “What’s up, Sherlock?”

            “Sharpe says hi. Should I start wearing cologne?”

            “Let’s see.” She leaned down and kissed me. “Nah. Maybe a different mouthwash.” Then she punched my arm and headed over to her desk. 

            I went back to calling people. Aside from Sharpe, I’d been working on a list of Abel and Charlie’s friends from Gwen—those that she knew about, and those who had phones. Most didn’t answer, so I left messages where I could. Those who did answer couldn’t talk, or didn’t want to talk, or couldn’t talk coherently. But I kept at it until I reached the end of the list. Asking questions is what I do.

            I worked on other cases for a few hours. I planned on eating lunch and then driving to the drugstore Abel remembered walking past with his brother. Before heading to the kitchen to make a sandwich, I spent a few minutes in variant spellings of the word “drakon.” Two k’s, three k’s, “draken,” “Dr. Akon,” and anything else I could think of, forward or backward, until words had no meaning no matter what order the letters were in. I was considering getting out Scrabble square, or maybe I Ching sticks, until I gave up, too hungry to think.

            After lunch I drove up to Golden Drugs on north Clark. It had a small parking lot, a bank on one side, a grocery store across the street, and a small office building next door. I checked out the alley, staying cautious—alleys in Chicago creep me out even in full daylight. You never know when a rat’s going to dart out from under a dumpster, or you’re going to step in something disgusting.

            The staff inside the drugstore was polite when I asked questions, although most of them were too busy stocking shelves or ringing up customers to really pay attention to me. They knew Abel and Charlie—or at least some of them recognized their pictures because they didn’t know their names—but nobody specifically remembered the night they’d disappeared.

The manager actually took me in back to check the records, but she didn’t find any mention of an incident. “It happens. We don’t write it all down. I didn’t know anything about them disappearing.” She shook her head. “I noticed I didn’t see them for a while. They were generally pretty nice, except when they were too high to walk straight.”

            I nodded. “Well, thank you for your time. And your staff, too.” I hadn’t really expected to find anything, but clients like it when you’re thorough. So I took a random stab. “By the way, does the word ‘drakon’ mean anything to you? It’s something Abel said.”

            The manager blinked. “Sounds kind of familiar. I don’t know. How do you spell it?”

            “That’s the thing.” I tried a few variations. 

            “Wait!” She hit a key on my computer, then hesitated. “I don’t know—I don’t know you. You can’t tell anyone about this. But I guess it doesn’t mean anything. Not a secret. I guess. Here.”

            She was pointing to the homepage of the Golden Drug Corporation. Then she clicked a link and went to a corporate page, with information on the company—where its HQ was, how to contact, etc. Toward the bottom was a list of officers and owners.

            The CEO was Ronald Drachon.

            Huh. “Ever talk to him?”

            The manager snorted. “It’s not that kind of company.”

            I nodded and gave her a card. “Thanks. I’ll keep your store out of it. If this even means anything.”

            She sighed. “I need this job.” Then she ripped the card up and handed it back to me. “Sorry.”

            “No problem.” I stuffed the remains in my pocket. “Thanks again.”

            

 

Back home I grabbed a Coke and looked up Golden Drug Corporation and Ronald Drachon. It was a privately held company, so there wasn’t much information on its inner workings. It had about 20 stores in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. 

            I tracked down his home address, in a northern suburb. Real estate records showed he’d paid close to $900,000 for his house, so business was obviously good. He was married, two children. No outstanding tax liens. Nothing that suggested he had anything to do with Abel and Charlie’s disappearance. Still . . .

            I took a long, deep, calming breath and called Sharpe again. 

            “Jurgen.” Her voice was low and menacing. “I am in the middle of my final report for the day, and you’re keeping me from getting hammered at the bar. Why do you do this to me?”

            “I just love to hear your voice when you berate me.” At least she’d answered. “Look, you remember that bump in missing persons you mentioned?”

            Sharpe groaned. “I knew that was going to come back to haunt me. What?”

            “Is there any way you can get a list of where the people were last reported seen?”

            A long silence. “I thought I made myself clear this morning about calling me for favors.”

            “And I assumed you were joking.”

            “I should delete you. And not just from my phone.” She sighed. “In fact we do track that kind of information. I can send it to you. Don’t call me again today unless someone is dead or dying. Especially you.” She hung up.

            I got the document a few minutes later. Out of 42 missing persons reports in the last three months, about 22 had a “last seen at/near” notation. I pulled up a map of Golden locations in Chicago to compare. 

            Seventeen missing persons had disappeared within a block of a Golden Drugstore. “Yahtzee!”

            Rachel turned. “You found the golden snitch?”

            “A clue. Maybe.” Now what? Why would Drachon—or somebody else—be kidnapping people off the streets? 

            If the missing people had vanished close to a Walgreens or CVS, it wouldn’t mean much—there were hundreds of them around the city. Golden had less than a dozen. It had to mean something. But what?

            It looked like I was going to have to talk to Ronald Drachon.