Motor City Blue (12 page)

He circled around the front toward the sedan, leaving me there to think. Somewhere in the wreckage of my memory a coin that had been rattling around for a while dropped through a slot and things started clicking. I was too groggy from the blow and from too much all at once to figure out why. I wasn’t any closer to it when I slid beneath the wheel and got moving. It bothered me all the way into River Rouge.

F
OR THREE HUNDRED YEARS,
the broad, flat, sluggish artery men call the Detroit River has brought life to the community that flourishes, more or less, at its base. Before that, like every other waterway in North America, it brought the Indians, Sac and Fox and Miami and Huron and Potawatomi and the mysterious Copper People, who paused not long enough to leave a disfiguring mark on the land they loved, then continued on their predestined way to oblivion. Then came the
coureurs de bois
, the “runners in the woods,” who paddled their birchbark canoes with strong sure hands, leagues ahead of the powerful fur-trading companies in whose territory they were poaching. They left behind their stamp in the depletion of the beaver that once swarmed the grassy banks, but they too moved on. One of them, Etienne Brule, came to explore one time too many and left his brains in an Iroquois camp. Missionaries followed, bringing with them their robes and sacraments and wafers and Bibles and the destruction of the old ways, and the land began to conform to their will. Among these were the Jesuits Dollier and Galinée, who, chancing to pass a stone idol erected by Indians near the mouth of the River Rouge to ensure safe passage across the treacherous waters of Lake Erie, hove to, smashed the pagan abomination to bits, and hurled what was left into the river. In 1701 Antoine Laumet, a well-traveled adventurer with no more scruples than he could carry comfortably in his parfleche, and whose title, Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, was so new it squeaked, stepped ashore where the Civic Center now stands, sank the foundation for the first of many log structures to be erected beneath his supervision, and eventually got a car named after him. If he’d known what he was starting he might have taken advantage of the first favorable wind and set sail for home. Probably not, though, or he might not have died rich.

The river has brought death too. During the siege of Detroit, Pontiac, a great chief and not a bad automobile, turned a successful ambush of British reinforcements into a powerful psychological weapon when he sent logs floating past the fort at irregular intervals with the mutilated corpses of soldiers strapped to them in 1763. Prohibition turned it into a river of beer and blood as rumrunners on their way to and from Windsor shot it out in the names of the Purple Gang and the Licavolis and certain high officials later indicted and sent up for complicity. Every few years someone dredges up another rusted hulk that’s sat on the bottom for half a century, sometimes with a skeleton in it, sometimes not. And there’s no telling how many wops and sheenies are sleeping the long sleep down there wrapped in concrete. In the early summer of 1943, Belle Isle, a spit of land bulging out of the water just this side of the international border and the scene of the massacre of a family of hog-tenders by Pontiac’s warriors during the Battle of Bloody Run, was the origin of one of the worst race riots in modern history, with thirty-four deaths the consequence. Now it’s a park with a grimy fountain named for a notorious reformed gambler, boozer, and womanizer, and Bloody Run hauls sewage and death beneath the pavement to Lake Erie.

An ore carrier wallowing beneath fifteen or twenty tons of iron pellets was crawling through the rust-colored waters at the mouth of the River Rouge on its way to the Ford plant. I watched it through the big picture window on the north side of the truss barn that housed Aphrodite Records on Marion while Barney Zacharias, standing with his back to the window, bored me with his oral history of the rise and decline of the music industry in Detroit.

“Stevie Wonder,” he was saying, oblivious to the manic chords barreling out the open door of the glassed-in recording cubicle to his right, where a stout, bearded white man in a funeral suit sat banging New Orleans boogie-woogie out of a battered upright piano. “He called himself Little Stevie Wonder in those days. He cut a couple of discs in my place on Michigan. Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, the Rationals, SRC, the Ones, the Woolies, Bob Seger, Streisand. That was a riot, Streisand. She didn’t look like nothing coming into the studio, and one of the engineers comes in and says, ‘Hey, babe, she don’t look too cool, but, boy, she’s got a hell of a voice.’ And there she is, and she don’t even give Big D a tumble no more. She did then, though. They all did. What’s Nashville? We turned out more real stars in one month than they have in five years.”

“About Martha Burns,” I put in.

It was no use. Once he got started you had to wait for him to wind down. He was an excitable little guy with a bald head nesting in a fringe of black hair and a body you could pass through a pipe if it weren’t for his forearms. Sticking out of his turned-back cuffs, these were thick, powerful things overgrown with coarse black hair and terminating in large, hard hands that he might have had trouble keeping still if he bothered to try. It’s bigoted to generalize, but I’ve never met an Italian or a Greek who could hold up his end of the conversation if you tied his wrists behind him. His face was round and he had lively eyes the size and color of olives and a five-o’clock shadow that gleamed dully like blue steel beneath his skin.

“It was big money did us in.” He spread his hands to show how big. “A group cuts a disc here, it sells, they get an offer from New York or L.A., and they hop a plane and we never see them again. Which is the stupidest thing in the world, because this is where they got their sound. That don’t come in packages. The riots finished us off. When them windows started busting, the writers lit out, and when they lit out the talent followed them. Then Motown went out to L.A. and died. Those of us that decided to hang on and ride it out got law down our necks and we’re still trying to shake it loose.

“My old man used to tell me about the Old Country, where you would bring the judge a jug of goat’s milk and win any case. To me, if I put a record out, and the jock is instrumental in putting it over, it’s no different from tipping the waitress a buck for doing a good job. But some jocks got hungry. The government looks into it and fines the pants off me so bad I got to sell out and take this dump outside the limits. You’ll see, though. It’ll turn around. Motown’s back now, and pretty soon it’ll be 1965 all over again. Just wait and see.”

He cocked his naked pate toward the recording room, where the pianist had switched to a low, lingering blues. “Hear that? That guy’s a Methodist minister, but by the time he gets done fooling around and puts that stuff on wax and we push it in all the right places he’ll have a brand new calling. He’s just the kind of talent we need to get the whole thing rolling again. Just goes to show you don’t have to be black to play good nigger jazz. What’d you say your name was?”

I gave him my card. He studied it, fingered a corner absently, and consigned it to his shirt pocket. He wore neither jacket nor tie, and his white shirt was dark around the armpits. It wasn’t that hot. The room we occupied was a cavernous hall lit by fluorescent tubes in three long troughs suspended from the ceiling twenty feet above our heads, its dusty cement floor littered with cables and alive with icy drafts that skirled gleefully about our pants legs. The steel door on the north side banged in its casing with each gust off the river.

“Martha Burns,” he reflected, as if I’d just mentioned the name. “I’m not sure I—”

“Beryl Garnet said you offered to record her,” I said.

A sly look came over his features. His expressive face must have been something to see when they had him in court on the payola charge. “She’s marrying money, I bet,” he said. “He’s paying you to look up her past. I bet there’s big dough in it.”

“Wrong twice. Her father’s looking for her and I’m getting my usual fee. Which is probably less than what you’d slip a deejay to turn a bomb into a hit.”

“Hell. The way she carried on I thought she had William Clay Ford on the hook at least.”

“She was here, then. When?”

“What’s it worth?”

“Depends on what you’ve got to sell.”

“I got expenses to meet. Rent. Utilities. It’s gonna be a long winter. I’m gonna burn a lot of gas.”

“Not as much as you’re burning right now, brother.”

“I need some guarantee I’ll get paid for what I give.”

“Sorry.”

He thought about it a minute. The minister had stopped playing in the next room and was scratching something on his sheet music. Zacharias stepped over and pulled shut the soundproof door.

“It was February,” he said. “Early part. She comes in one morning, tells me she’s taking me up on my offer. I said what offer. I didn’t even know her. She says I told her I could make her a star. Hell, that was New Year’s Eve and I was three sheets to the wind. There’s damn few I don’t say that to when I’m off the express. I say, ‘Okay, let’s hear what you got.’ She sits down at the box. She’s got sheet music in her purse. Something from Broadway, I forget what exactly. I expected to get my eardrums warped, but she surprised me. She was good.”

“Star material?”

He shook his head. “Not by ten miles. A good voice I can get by raiding any church choir in town. There are lots of tricks for making a terrific singer sound better, but no amount of backups and echo chambers is gonna put in something that wasn’t there to begin with. Good isn’t good enough.”

“You tell her that?”

He started to go sly on me again. I squashed it early. “It might be worth something.”

“A century?”

“Trot it out. I don’t buy horseflesh I can’t see.”

“You wouldn’t trust Jesus with a used rubber.”

“Jack, you don’t look a bit like him.”

“All right.” He swiped a hand over his scratchy chin, smoothed it up and over the top of his head as if there were something up there to smooth, let it slide down the back of his neck, and left it there. “I told her I could do something with her, but first she’d have to invest a couple of hundred dollars. I needed the money. My landlord’s halitosis was in my collar and the phone company was gonna shut off my service.”

“What made you think she had it to invest?”

“Hell, I saw it. When she hauled out that music the inside of her purse looked like the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant. She had a portrait of Madison in there. You know what he’s on?”

“A thousand-dollar bill.”

“That’s right! Say, what kind of fee do you charge?”

“I read a lot. How much she pour down your little rathole?”

“Watch it, smart mouth! I held up my end. We cut the records, I took out ads, got a jock friend of mine to spin it on the air. I’m not a crook.”

“We had a President who said that. Okay, you bought a tombstone in the neighborhood shopper and sank a fin to play the disc at five A.M. in between farm reports. How bad you burn her?”

“Fifteen hundred.”

I laughed. “How come you’re not mayor?”

“She had plenty to spare.” I’d wounded him. “I got one of her singles here if you don’t believe me. Care to hear it?”

I said sure and followed him into the recording room and across to the door of the engineers’ booth on the other side. The minister didn’t look up from his keyboard as we passed behind him on a wave of ragtime. The booth was deserted. Inside, Zacharias stooped to slide a master disc with a plain label out of a cabinet beneath the gaudy control panel and skimmed it at me. I had to clap it to my chest with both hands to keep it from falling. By the time I had it I was staring into the hole of a .25 automatic in the Greek’s right hand. At that range it might as well have been a Howitzer.

“Cute, huh?” he said around a grin. “I saw it done once in a movie. Only they used an inner tube.”

“I guess you didn’t have one handy.”

“Shut up. I got this baby two years ago after a kid I was training to be an engineer got held up and shot right about where you’re standing. Junkies. He died. They got six dollars off him and some change. Call it River Rouge or Ecorse or Hamtramck or Farmington or Dearborn, it’s all Detroit and it stinks. Now suppose you tell me how much you’re willing to spend to find out what I know. Sight unseen.”

I was holding the record overhead where I’d raised my hands when the gun came out. I let it drop. It didn’t break. They don’t nowadays, though they scratch when you look at them. It hit on its edge and rolled across the floor toward Zacharias. People are like dogs, attracted by movement. His eyes followed the rolling disc and I reached out and snatched hold of the gun.

His forearms were as strong as they looked. He held on and we closed and grappled, four hands fighting for a gun that could be concealed in any one of them. There was a loud, sharp rapping sound and a bullet chipped the concrete between my feet and whizzed off to bury itself in the soundproof wall. The recoil, tiny as it was, was unexpected and it made him loosen his grip momentarily. I twisted it out of his grasp and kneed him in the groin in the same movement. He doubled over gasping.

On the other side of the window the minister was pounding away on the piano. Not a note came through with the microphones turned off. The soundproofing worked as well in reverse. I left Zacharias to wait for the pain to tingle up through his stomach and out while I pocketed the little pistol and stepped over to retrieve the record. Martha Burns’ name was scratched on the label in block Magic Marker capitals. Below it was the title: “Body and Soul.” She had a sense of humor. I found a turntable and spiked it and fiddled around until I found the knob that started it turning. Halfway through the vamp I came across the volume, which damn near brought the booth crashing down around me before I got it dialed down. Then I stood back to watch Barney Zacharias and listen.

She had the kind of voice you find in the better bars, the kind you don’t really hear until you’re three-quarters shellacked and the number you courted the wife by comes up and you poke a dollar into the tip glass and you go home feeling a little sad and wake up the next morning without remembering anything but the drinks and the sadness. It was good enough to hum along with when you weren’t too preoccupied to notice it, but not so good it interrupted the serious drinkers. It was low but not low enough, sultry but shallow. You wouldn’t pay to hear it.