Motor City Burning (36 page)

“How long you been in Oakland?”

“Bout a week.”

Willie decided to come right out with it. “Wes, there's something I need to know.”

“Anything for my baby bro.”

“You remember those three guns from the roof of your building, that night during the riot?”

“Fuck yeah, I remember.”

“You know where they are?”

“Not exactly.”

“What's that mean?”

“Means I sold 'em.”

“To who?”

“Some black Muslim fool name of Yusef.”

“All three of 'em?”

“Yup. Made the sale in a warehouse down by the river. Package deal.”

“When was this?”

“Just before I left D-troit, a month or so ago. Why you axin all these questions?”

“Just curious. Want to make sure those guns don't come back to bite us.”

“Don't worry. They long gone.”

“So what're you doing in Oakland?”

“Just brokered a big shipment a guns to the Panthers. Matter of fact, I'm at Panther headquarters right now. I'm callin on their nickel.”

Willie's stomach did a flip. “You're calling me from
Panther headquarters?”

“Thas right,” Wes said, failing to hear the horror in his brother's voice. “Just took an order for a mess a M-1s from this brother name Geronimo—”

“Get off this line right now!” Willie shouted. “Call me collect from a pay phone!” He slammed down the receiver.

Ten minutes later his phone rang again and Willie told the operator he would accept a collect call. Then he said to his brother, “You got to be the dumbest nigger in the cotton patch. It ever occur to you the phones in Panther headquarters might be tapped?
Je
-sus!”

“Don't worry, my boat leaves in an hour. Once I'm gone they never gonna find me.”

“That's nice for you. How about me?”

“Man, you worry too much. Ain't nothin gonna happen to you.” There was a long staticky silence. Then came the question Willie had been expecting all along. “How you fixed for bread, bro?”

The partial answer was that he was finally building the nest egg that would finance his exit from Detroit, hopefully in the fall; the complete answer was that he wanted no part of the money Wes was about to offer. He'd gotten nigger-rich off gun money once before, and he knew all about the grief that came with it. “I'm fine,” he said.

“You sure? I could wire you a couple hun—”

“Keep it. You're gonna need it worse than I am.”

“Suit yourself. But just as soon as you's able, you run away from
that
town. Ain't nothin there for neither one of us but trouble. You hear me?”

“I hear you. Believe me, I'm working on it. And don't you go anywhere near that Panther house. The F.B.I.'s probably on their way to kick the door down right now.”

Wes, fool that he was, laughed off the warning. After Willie hung up the phone he opened the shades in the living room just as a rusty green Pontiac was pulling away from the curb across the street from his Deuce. Willie realized he'd seen that car before—parked down the block on Pallister, parked outside Octavia's apartment, parked in the visitors' lot at the Public Library. Did Chick Murphy have a private eye on his tail?

As the car pulled away, Willie caught a glimpse of the driver. He had his left elbow out the window and he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It was the white guy from the fish shack, sitting two tables away, drinking beer and pretending to read the newspaper. And, Willie realized with a flash of terror, hearing every word that came out of my big mouth.

23

J
IMMY HAD DROPPED ANCHOR IN A LITTLE COVE JUST UPRIVER
from the Belle Isle Bridge, out of the way of the boat traffic. It was his favorite spot on the river. From here you could see the bridge's graceful arches and its string of lights bouncing off the water. It was how he imagined Europe looked, places like Paris and Prague. It was a steamy night with a fat yellow moon, a good night to be out on the water, catch the breeze. While Jimmy fished a couple of fresh beers out of the cooler, Doyle re-lit his cigar.

“What you call that sauce again?” Jimmy said, handing a beer to Doyle. Earlier that evening Jimmy had nosed his Chris-Craft up the canals that thread through the Jeff-Chalmers neighborhood. He'd tied up at the end of Klenk Street, then walked the two short blocks to Doyle's front door. He could smell the food from half a block away.

“It's called
puttanesca
sauce,” Doyle said. “Comes from the Italian word for whore,
putta
, cause it's so easy to make hookers can whip up a batch between tricks. My mother taught me to make it when I was still in grade school. Like I said, anybody can make it.”

“Might be easy to make, but it damn sure tastes good. And all these years I thought I hated anchovies and capers. And that wine.”

“Yeah, that was nice and chewy. A '54 Barolo.”

“That Spanish shit?”

“No, it's Italian.”

“And that dessert? Tara . . . tara . . .”

“Tiramisu.”

“Man, you got to teach me to cook.”

“Any time, Jimmy, any time. Anybody who can read a recipe can learn how to cook.”

“Yeah, but you got the touch.”

They were quiet for a while, just watching the river and the bridge lights and the moon, Doyle puffing on his cigar. Jimmy could tell Doyle didn't want to talk about food anymore. He wanted to keep talking about what they'd talked about all through dinner—what to do with the stuff he'd learned on Sunday afternoon at Roberta's fish shack in Algonac.

One of the first things Jimmy had taught Doyle was that a good homicide police doesn't have a whole lot of use for motive. “Give me the how, the where, and the when,” Jimmy liked to say, “and nine times out of ten I'll give you the who.”
Why
a person killed another person was usually beside the point. A luxury. Something a competent detective could live without.

But that didn't mean you should run away from a motive if one hopped onto your lap. After he spent that Sunday afternoon eavesdropping on Willie Bledsoe, Doyle went to the records cage and combed through arrest reports from the second day of the riot, Monday, July 24, 1967, and learned that William B. Bledsoe and Walter Mitchell of
Ebony
magazine had been jailed for curfew violation and resisting arrest, then released into the custody of Thomas Henderson after spending twenty-three hours in the rat hole garage at 1300 Beaubien Street. All charges against them were dropped. Through his brother's contacts, Doyle even got confirmation that Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had placed a phone call to the Sheraton Cadillac Hotel to apologize personally to Walter Mitchell and all the readers of
Ebony
magazine. Crafty old Cavanagh, always hip to how his act was playing with the colored crowd. Not that it mattered anymore. The riot had finished Jerry Cavanagh just as sure as it had finished the city of Detroit.

So suddenly they had a nice tidy motive in the murder of Helen Hull, the oldest one in the book: revenge. But instead of making Doyle's life simpler, this had complicated things. All through dinner he'd talked about the questions that were eating at him. Who could blame a young black man—who could blame any man?—for going off the deep end after getting thrown in jail for no reason, beaten, terrorized and humiliated by a pack of vengeful firemen and cops? Jimmy had reminded him that none of it justified the killing of an innocent woman—or anyone else. Frank agreed, but he said he had to ask the questions Willie Bledsoe had surely asked himself after his nightmare in the basement garage came to an end. Who were the true criminals here? And did they really believe that their acts of brutality would not—should not—be answered with equal brutality? Even as he asked himself these questions, though, Doyle said he could hear the answer coming back from Jerry Czapski and Jimmy McCreedy and Walt Kanka and the other ninety percent of the force that was white: “Oh, sure. Cops were the bad guys during the riot. Cops burned down half the city. Cops shot up precinct houses and fire-bombed stores and hauled away as much free shit as they could carry. Tell me all about it.”

Jimmy had said to Doyle at the dinner table, “Ain't just the white guys on the force feel that way. I do too. The thing you gotta realize, Frank, is that this country ain't nothin but a great big motherfuckin tease, especially for the black man. Civil rights—shit—makin it a law don't make it so. What The Man gives with one hand, he takes back with the other. You watch ‘Star Trek,' don't you?”

The question surprised Doyle. “Sometimes,” he said. “Not religiously.”

“But you seen Lieutenant Uhura, the ‘communications director' on Starship Enterprise. See, this is zactly what I'm talkin bout. The Man makes a prime-time TV show bout what the future's gonna look like, he puts an attractive black character on it—then he makes sure she ain't nothin but a glorified switchboard operator.”

Doyle thought Jimmy sounded like Vicki Jones. She was always bitching about the fact that there were plenty of black janitors and secretaries but hardly any black executives at Ford's Glass House, where she worked in data entry. Or else she was bitching about having to wait longer than white people to get help from a clerk in a store. Or, even worse, about having some white customer assume she was a clerk simply because she was black. Doyle thought she was being paranoid and her tirades wore thin—until the day they were shopping in the women's shoe department at Hudson's and an old white lady walked up to Vicki and said, “Miss, do you have these pumps in a seven and a half?”

“So,” Doyle had said to Jimmy at the dinner table, “what The Man gives with one hand, he takes back with the other, . . .”

“Right. But that don't justify nothin.
Nothin
, you hear me? It don't give a man the right to kill or burn or loot. Look, the way I come up I should be in prison right now, or dead. Reason I ain't is cause I made a decision. I decided they's a right way and a wrong way and they ain't no future in the wrong way. So I married a good woman, worked for a livin, paid my taxes, put my girls through college, all that noble shit. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Just like makin
puttanesca
sauce.”

Doyle had smiled at Jimmy's little sermon, but he said he couldn't shake the belief that it was racist cops like Jerry Czapski who fueled the black rage that fueled the fury of the riot . . . and that the riot's fury demanded an equally furious response from the law . . . and that the law's response redoubled the rioters' fury. . . . Round and round and round it went. There were no winners, as Doyle saw it, only losers. Jimmy agreed there was truth in what he was saying, but as they were spooning down the tiramisu, Jimmy had reminded him that assigning blame and meting out justice was somebody else's job. Their job was to find killers. Period.

“You know, it's funny,” Doyle said now, blowing cigar smoke toward the moon. “I've never wanted anything as bad as I want to nail Helen Hull's killer—and now that we're ready to sweat a suspect, I'm not even sure I want to do it anymore.”

“You wanna let the motherfucker walk?”

“Of course not.”

“Don't matter what we want or don't want, Frank. We got a job to do and we gonna do it.”

“I know that, Jimmy. Of course I'll do what I gotta do. It's just that I never imagined this stuff could get so, I don't know, so complicated.”

“Ain't complicated less you make it complicated.”

“But it
is
complicated. Shit, I'm a white man sitting here trying to tell you that a black man might have been justified in killing a white woman, and you're a black man sitting here telling me that this black man—that no man—is ever justified in killing anyone. We're both right and we're both wrong. That's complicated, you ask me.”

“Maybe so, but I still go back to what I said earlier. Do yourself a favor and keep it simple. Our job's to find killers. Let other people worry about all that justice shit.”

They were quiet again. Watching the bridge lights play on the water, Jimmy decided he needed to get the boat out more often. This was even more relaxing than working in the garden.

“There's something else been bothering me,” Doyle said. Jimmy waited. Then he waited some more. Finally Doyle continued, “You remember my second case during the riot, that firefight I stumbled into on my way home, that hick from Tennessee on the roof—”

“Wilson Lee Pryor, sure.”

“There's something I never told you or anyone else. I fired two shots at him on that rooftop.”

“So?”

“So one of the six bullets that hit him was a .38-caliber—from a department-issue gun. Maybe mine.”

“And maybe not. I read that report a hundred times. Look, that man died six ways from Sunday—and rightly so. He refused an order to put down his rifle. A bullet went through the windshield a your Pontiac during the firefight, I recall correctly.”

“That bullet was a nine millimeter, which means it was fired by a Guardsman. Pryor never fired a shot. He was on that roof trying to make sure his building didn't catch on fire.”

“And he was carrying a rifle and he refused to put it down, so people made the reasonable assumption he was a sniper. Case closed. Where you goin with this, Frank?”

“Back to how complicated this is. There's a chance I got away with killing a man, and it's been bothering me ever since.”

“Look, even if you did fire the fatal shot—which is unlikely, I seen you on the pistol range—you'd be justified. You was in a firefight. Your vehicle got hit. You were acting in self-defense—along with a dozen other po-lice and Guardsmen who did zactly what you did. What I'da done. Shit, Frank, you think too much. Like I just said, this stuff ain't complicated less you make it complicated. Do yourself a favor and let it go.”