Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  Working off this information, the feds began tapping phones and wiring cooperating witnesses.

  Paranoia ruled the day. Worried that the feds had bugged their offices, some politicos were taking meetings at the International House of Pancakes or on downtown street corners. One councilwoman was using her granddaughter’s cell phone. Players were going through phone numbers like they were Chiclets.

  Suddenly you couldn’t get a hold of anyone.

  Kilpatrick and Monica Conyers and a dozen other municipal movers and shakers were in the crosshairs of the FBI for accepting bribes in exchange for their support on a billion-dollar sewage contract.

  Details leaked out of the grand jury room about Councilwoman Monica Conyers and her clandestine meetings in fast-food parking lots where she took envelopes stuffed with cash. Apparently Conyers, it seemed, was a big fan of the fish fillet sandwiches on white bread.

  Feeling the heat one muggy morning, Conyers and a group of city council members stood in chambers and prayed for divine intervention. God must have been listening. Lightning struck the building, crippling it for a week.

  While the feds were building a RICO case against Kilpatrick, he was charged by the Wayne County prosecutor with perjury—for lying under oath about fucking his chief of staff, Christine Beatty.

  While lacking meter and polish, the fire and passion in their electronified love sonnets must surely rate with those of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.

  Christine Beatty to Kwame Kilpatrick—“Baby, if I was with you right now, I would sit you down, get on my knees in front of you. I would pull myself up to you and gently suck on your ear lobe and come around kiss you so passionately, then . . .”

  K.K. to C.B.—“PLEASE TELL ME MORE!”

  C.B. to K.K.—“Then I would take off your shirt and kiss you down your neck and suck on your XXX. After that I would take off your pants and lay you down on the bed. Then . . .”

  K.K. to C.B.—“MY SHIT IS SO HARD ALREADY.”

  C.B. to K.K.—“Then I would climb on top of you and start kissing you on the top of your head, move down to your face, then gently move to your stomach and gently lick around your belly button! Then . . .”

  K.K. to C.B.—“DAMN . . . I LOVE THIS!”

  C.B. to K.K.—“Then I would move my way down XXX and gently slide it into my mouth and move it in and out until you feel like you’re inside of me and you’re asking to be in me! Then . . .”

  K.K. to C.B.—“SHIIIT!”

  C.B. to K.K.—“Then just when you’re about to come, I would take it out of my mouth and climb back on top of you and slide it deep inside of me! I would then begin to slowly ride back and forth on top of you. Then . . .”

  K.K. to C.B.—“DAMN CHRIS!”

  C.B. to K.K.—“Then I would pull your chest to mine while you’re still deep inside of me and kiss you so passionately while riding you! I would then ask you to gently grab my ass and you would put your finger in just enough to make beg yo—”

  K.K. to C.B.—“Don’t STOP! PLEASE.”

  K.K. to C.B.—“I’m ABOUT TO COME RIGHT NOW!”

  C.B. to K.K.—“Then I lay on my side and you lay behind me and pull me so close to you and I say ‘I Love You So Much’ and you say ‘I Love You Too’ and kiss my neck so soft. And then we pull up the covers and go to sleep and wake up in an h—”

  K.K. to C.B.—“HELL YEAH! CHRRRRISSS! HOW DO You FEEL?”

  C.B. to K.K.—“First tell me how youuu feel!”

  K.K. to C.B.—“NO NIGGA! You 1ST.”

  All this . . . their salaries, the phones, the cars, the chauffeur, the Kleenex, paid with the taxpayer dime.

  Kilpatrick concocted an interesting legal strategy. I call it the Poltergeist defense.

  Kilpatrick acknowledged that the text messages were made on his city-issued cell phone. But he insisted he didn’t type them. It must have been the Ghost of Christmas Ass who tapped out the randy messages while the phone lay idle in Kilpatrick’s pocket.

  He hired a bevy of million-dollar consultants and lawyers, but it is apparent he heeded little of their advice. Although he was barred from leaving the state as part of his bond, he took a day trip to Windsor, Ontario—forgetting it was in another country.

  Strike one.

  When two sheriff’s deputies went to the mayor’s sister’s house to serve a subpoena, the police encountered Kilpatrick there. Kilpatrick stormed out of the house yelling, “Get the fuck out of here!” and pushing one of the cops, a white man by the name of White, off the porch.

  He then turned to the other cop, a black woman, and shouted, “You, a black woman being with a man with the last name White, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

  Strike two.

  Until then, the governor and attorney general of Michigan had stood on the sidelines, not wanting to confront a black mayor who just might evade the eight felony charges with a rogue O. J. Simpson–type juror.

  But after he pushed the cop, the full weight of the system came down on Kilpatrick. The governor began removal proceedings. The attorney general began criminal proceedings.

  Kilpatrick was hauled into court. The Hip Hop Mayor stood before the judge, choking back tears, his lips quivering.

  “I apologize immensely . . . I am asking your forgiveness . . . I apologize to the citizens as well, but mostly to you.”

  What a pussy. Strike three.

  The judge sent him to jail for the night.

  Shit, I thought, standing there in the courtroom, watching Kilpatrick blubbering. What a big bitch. My sister had done more nights in jail. Hell, even I had.

  Hip Hop my ass.

  Out of moves and out of friends, Kilpatrick took a plea deal—four months in jail, a million dollars restitution and resignation of office.

  * * *

  Kilpatrick appeared on television and gave his resignation speech to the people of the city. He wore a garish tie, something like the old paisley drapes in a seventies bachelor pad. His wife wore a matching dress.

  I watched the speech from a corner seat at Mosaic, the power players’ watering hole in Greektown. The bar was packed and eerily quiet as Kilpatrick spoke. He took credit for a long list of things he never actually accomplished, among them municipal financial stability and the demolition of abandoned buildings.

  You could hear the ice cubes tinkle as the players silently calculated their next moves. In the end, Kilpatrick was only a temporary hiccup. After all, when a king falls, the kingdom still remains.

  The deputy mayor, drinking white liquor, shook his head when Kilpatrick proclaimed in all earnestness, “You done set me up for a comeback.”

  “Awh shiiiiit,” someone said from the corner. It was Adolph Mongo. “Shiiiiit.”

  Good old Mongo. The inebriated uncle at the funeral shouting all the things people wished they could say.

  “Goddamn,” he cackled, his voice box one part Redd Foxx, one part cement mixer.

  “Who told them to put on the matching tie and dress? They look fucking ridiculous. That’s what you get for a million dollars in consultants? The guy fucked it all up. The king is dead!”

  Mongo spied me in the corner, gave me a sober nod and then pretended I wasn’t there. I paid my tab and slipped out the side door.

  GONE TO THE DOGS

  FRANKIE DIDN’T CRY when, as a boy, I hog-tied him with a belt to a tree as the cars drove by on Joy Road. As he hung potato-sack style, a group of teenagers jumped out of their car and beaned him with snowballs.

  Frankie didn’t cry when he was hit by a car, breaking his body forever. Frankie didn’t cry when his daughters were born. Frankie didn’t cry when he got laid off from Ford. Frankie didn’t cry when the FOR SALE signs popped up in his neighborhood like so many horse thistle weeds.

  But he was crying now. />
  I left the newsroom and drove over to see him. He was wearing a knit cap and a sweatshirt, looking for a soft piece of earth in which to bury his massive golden retriever.

  “What the fuck happened?” I asked.

  “It was the dog food,” he heaved.

  “What do you mean it was the dog food?”

  “I looked it up on the Internet. It was the dog food. Poisoned shit from China.”

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve. I looked around his gray neighborhood. Somebody had stolen the aluminum siding off the abandoned house next door.

  This place called Detroit wasn’t interesting to me anymore. It was breaking my heart. It was driving me insane. A whole generation of people relegated to the garbage pile. I hugged my brother.

  “Poison shit from China. How much is a man supposed to fucking take?” my brother sobbed. “They killed my fucking dog.”

  I stood with my hands in my pockets as he dug a hole in the cabbage patch, the only soft spot in the dead of winter. It was directly beneath his neighbor’s window, which didn’t matter so much now that the neighbor’s place was foreclosed and vacant.

  Frankie put stones on top of the dog so the wild animals couldn’t dig him up and cart him away.

  GHOSTS IN THE ATTIC

  “WALT’S DEAD!”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “It’s Nevin.” Mike Nevin. Sergeant Mullet over at Engine 23. He was crying.

  It was one of those lifeless, slate-gray mornings, and I was standing at the upstairs window in my home. I could see the Detroit Zoo water tower from my window. Kwame Kilpatrick’s name had already been removed from it, but I could still make out the ghost of its outline.

  “Hello, Charlie? Walt. He died two hours ago. A fucking house fell in on us this morning. Goddamn it. A little piece-of-shit house. One of them mousetraps. I had him in my arms. Jesus Christ. Anyway, we’re over at the engine house. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  I lingered at the window, staring at the water tower, considering the name. Kilpatrick. What did it matter? One asshole gone, another takes his place and the shit goes on and on.

  I jumped into my pants and kissed my wife. She was still sleeping and I startled her awake.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Walt’s dead,” I told her. “I got to go to the firehouse.”

  “Walt the fireman? Oh my God.”

  I had taken her and our daughter over to Engine 23 on more than one occasion, and we had grown fond of the men there. They were a fraternity of doers, and I admired them for that. I like being around men who accomplish something. It makes me feel a little bit better about being a guy who makes his living typing up clever things other people say.

  “Tell them I’m so sorry,” my wife said. “We’ll pray for them.”

  I drove to the firehouse fast. The roads were empty. No one was on the way to work.

  I had seen Nevin and Walt Harris—the firefighting Baptist preacher—just the day before. I had stopped by the firehouse for lunch. It had been a long time, as I’d been banned from all Detroit firehouses after I wrote my first story about Nevin’s crew criticizing the mayor’s office for its neglect of the department and its firefighters. But rather than accept the chronicle of their complaints and try to improve the situation, the city reprimanded Harris and Nevin and the other men who appeared in my story and hauled them downtown to give statements.

  Everything Harris told me then turned out to be true now, including his death. The culture of lying about Detroit’s problems went from the mayor’s office to the ministers’ pulpits to the no-name bureaucrats in uniform. No one wants to admit they live in an archeological ruin. That’s why a house of firemen complaining about the decay were hauled to HQ.

  Nothing had changed. Their pants and boots still had holes in them, the fire alarm at Engine 23 was still a jerry-rigged alarm clock, they still had to buy their own toilet paper and the city still burned.

  Yes, Walt was right when he talked about people removing their dead from Detroit, just as his prophecy had been right that one of the men from Firehouse 23 was going to die.

  Being a Baptist minister, Big Walt always gave the invocation before chow. And the men, loving Walt more than God Himself, dutifully lowered their eyes. The last prayer of Walt Harris was a good one: “God, look over these good men and return them to their families.”

  Above him, over the firehouse dining table, a teeny-bopper movie played on the television set with cheerleaders in tight sweaters pulling each other’s hair out in the high school cafeteria.

  I laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it, and Harris looked up with an arch of his eye and laughed too. Then he kicked me in the shin under the table.

  “Shut the fuck up, Charlie.”

  I ate the chicken fried steak and went home.

  Eighteen hours later he was dead.

  The street around the firehouse was crowded with fire engines and work trucks. The mourning had begun and, as is particular to the fraternity, it was something of an Irish wake, with distant relatives from all around the region dropping in to give their hangdog condolences. A few rookies were made to stand out in the rain to make sure nobody broke into the trucks or stole the aluminum ladders, which brought a good price at the scrap yard.

  Inside the house, it smelled of cigar smoke and weak coffee and it was mostly silent except that Jimmy Montgomery was screaming, “What a complete fucking waste. For what? For what? Some dump of a fucking house? No. No. No.”

  The commanding officer, Lt. Steve Kirschner, stood in the corner looking on with the pallor of a sickly walleye.

  I had learned about firemen. I had learned about them over the long dark days following the massacre at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I had gone to dozens of their funerals, and I profiled Squad 1 in Brooklyn over the course of a year, a firehouse that had lost half its men that bad morning.

  I learned that when one of them dies, the Irish comes out of the rest of them whether they are Irish or not. A firefighter is Irish by culture even if he is a black man, and there were plenty of them here. The firehouse is one of the few places in Detroit that is integrated at all. The blacks run the department, but its soul will always be Irish. And the Irish don’t handle outsiders very well. Especially reporters. Especially in death. Even if one has been invited to the wake.

  I had learned in New York to stand in the corner and wait to be acknowledged. So I poured a cup of coffee and waited. The men of the house had broken down Walt’s bed and assembled a memorial from his bunker gear before the clock had struck nine. It would stay there as long as the house did, along with the statue of a Dalmatian and the swordfish and the American flag over the busted toilet seat and the portraits of men gone by.

  A raggedy man with patchy facial hair from the neighborhood walked into the death scene, begging change. The rookie gave him a couple of bucks and a cup of coffee and kindly told him to fuck off.

  Nevin watched, a Swisher Sweets cigar burning in his hand.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “This place is making me sad.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Let’s get the fuck out. I’ll take you to the house where Walt died.”

  He gathered up Montgomery and Jeff Hamm, the fireman-nurse who tried to resuscitate Harris on the way to the hospital, and Verlin Williams, who was also pinned down by the collapsed roof.

  Williams was an odd duck, older than many of the men in the department because he had served twenty years in the Marine Corps before moving back home to Detroit. As a boy growing up in the city, Williams would gravitate to the local firehouse, where he scrubbed and washed the engines. It kept him straight and out of trouble, and his life’s dream was to serve in the department.

 
That is, until he got into the department.

  “Now all I want to do is go out West and retire as a cowboy,” he said as we rode over to the house in the fire engine. “Think of that. Spending your days breaking horses in the wide open spaces. Far away from here. Yeah.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him there really weren’t cowboys out West anymore. Let him have his dream. Every sucker’s got to have one.

  I looked out the back window and saw a reporter from the Free Press and his photographer tailing us uninvited.

  We drove past the hulking wreck of the Packard plant, a square mile of dead factory. After a half century of rot, it still stood as a disgraceful reminder of our great past and sordid present. Its founding president was Henry B. Joy—the man who built the first coast-to-coast highway and the man for whom my Joy Road was named.

  Now all that was left of his empire was a ruin that burned at least once a month, usually from the torches of scrappers. A shotgun row of houses stood directly across the street from it. Houses with children growing up inside them.

  We passed more houses with blue tarpaulins for roofs and weedy lots and burnt-out cars and children. Plenty of children. Sweet Jesus, too many children.

  The house where Walt died was no different from the rest of them in this east side swath: an abandoned blue and green bungalow on East Kirby Street. An arson reward poster was tacked to the door and cans of juice and beans were sitting unopened on the dining room table.

  This being Detroit, the men responding to the blaze went into the house to look for people. In this city, crumbling houses are often occupied by drug addicts, the homeless and even families with children struggling to survive.

  This time, there was nobody home.

  As the firemen were snuffing out remnant embers in the attic, someone heard timber snap. And then the roof collapsed.