Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  “Ain’t no flies on Earl,” said the older man, motioning to a beer vendor. He turned to Willie. “Care for a Stroh’s?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “Three,” the man told the vendor. He paid for all of them and passed around waxed-paper cups with foam spilling over their brims.

  “Much obliged,” Willie said.

  “Ain’t no thing.” The man took a long drink of beer. “So where you from, Cuz? You ain’t no Michigan boy. Your manners is too good.”

  “I’m from Alabama. Down around Mobile.”

  “No shit. My homeplace in Lurr-zee-ana, not far from Lafayette.” He let out a yelp when Earl Wilson struck out the leadoff batter.

  “What brings you up here?” Willie asked.

  “Work, same as everybody else. Been at Ford’s the past twenty-two years. Right now I’m a second-shift foreman at the Rouge. Name’s Louis Dumars.” He and Willie locked thumbs, stroked each other’s palms. “And this here’s Clyde Holland—the famous barrister with the even more famous brothers.” The two friends shared a laugh, and Willie locked thumbs with Clyde, brushed the offered palm. His hand was softer than Louis’s.

  “Willie Bledsoe. Pleased to meet you both.”

  After Wilson retired the side in the top of the first and the Red Sox took the field, Willie said to Louis, “So do you always get Wednesdays off at the Rouge?”

  “Fuck no, man. I called in sick—just like half the rank-and-file all over town. You know you shouldn’t never buy no car made on a Monday, right?”

  “No. Why’s that?”

  “Cause—half the guys on the line’s working with a hangover and the other half’s at home sleepin theirs off.”

  Clyde laughed.

  “Same goes for the Tigers’ home opener,” Louis went on. “I pity the fool buys a car made today. Half the bolts is gonna be missin and the other half’s gonna fall off fore the car’s a month old.”

  Clyde roared at this. Then he said, “How bout you, Alabama? How come you so far from home?”

  “Work, same as everybody else.”

  “So what is it you do?”

  “I work in a private club.” Willie was going to leave it at that, but Clyde seemed to be waiting for more. So Willie said, “Bussing tables.”

  “A busboy.” Clyde clucked his tongue, a sound Willie knew well, the sound of the native Detroiter’s scorn for all the poor unhip country hicks who kept pouring in from the South and gobbling up the lowliest jobs simply because they thought they’d arrived in the Promised Land and hadn’t learned the score yet.

  Reggie Smith singled and a rookie named Joe LaHoud walked to start the Boston second. When Rico Petrocelli laced a double that rolled to the wall in left-center, scoring both runners, the mood of the fans turned sour. A greasy-haired white guy, his thick arms protruding from the rolled-up sleeves of a T-shirt, leaned over the front railing of the bleachers and bellowed, “Come on, Horton! Get your fat ass in gear! You coulda cut that thing off!”

  Everyone within earshot guffawed.

  “Damn,” Willie said. “Fans’re tough up here.”

  “Ficklest motherfuckers in the world,” agreed Clyde, draining his beer and crushing the cup with the heel of an oxford. Watching him, Willie remembered the stenciled command on the walls. Clyde, seeming to read his mind, said, “Easier to sweep up after the game if they flat.”

  “Ahh.” One mystery solved.

  Boston added a run in the third, which ignited fresh grumbling about the quality of Earl Wilson’s pitching. He won a brief reprieve by lofting a high fly to left in the bottom of the third, a ball that looked like a routine out until the wind off the river caught it. The crowd erupted when the ball sailed over the fence into the lower-deck seats.

  “Earl my main man!” Clyde shouted, standing to applaud with everyone else as the pitcher trotted around the bases. “Motherfucker can stone play!”

  But in the sixth inning the wheels came off for Earl Wilson. The Red Sox loaded the bases with nobody out. Even way up in the bleachers, some 500 feet from home plate, Willie could taste the doom in the air.

  “Take him out,” Louis pleaded softly when the Tigers’ manager, Mayo Smith, marched out to the mound. The greasy-haired heckler was joined now by a small gang, including one guy who’d stripped off his shirt. He was as pink as a Smithfield ham. Obviously fueled by vast doses of Stroh’s, they began to chant, “Lift the bum! Lift the bum! Lift the bum!”

  But Smith left Wilson in, and the next batter, pesky little Rico Petrocelli, hit a sharp single, scoring one run and sending Earl Wilson to an early shower. As he trudged off the field, boos cascaded down from the stands in physical waves.

  “Shoulda took him out,” Louis said, shaking his head.

  “That shit-ass had no bidness leavin him in,” Clyde agreed. “His arm obviously tired. Any soda cracker could see that—even one named after mayonnaise.”

  By the seventh-inning stretch Boston was ahead 6-1 and fans were beginning to shuffle to the exits. But Louis and Clyde were staying put, and so was Willie. Despite the racial tension, Willie wanted this game, this moment, to last forever, just as he’d wanted Earl Wilson’s lazy home run to stay airborne forever. He realized this was the first time he’d felt truly at ease since arriving in Detroit.

  He was looking at the scoreboard when a roar went up from the crowd. A muscular black player had stepped out of the Tigers’ dugout and started twirling a cluster of bats like they were toothpicks. The hecklers sprang back to life.

  “Hey, Gates! You remember to visit your parole officer this week?”

  “Gates! Looks like you got along pretty good with that prison food!”

  Willie turned to Louis. “What’re those freckle bellies bellering about now?”

  “That’s Gates Brown coming in to pinch-hit. Best in the game, you ax me. Them crackers is giving him shit cause he did a little time. The joint’s where he got the nickname Gates.”

  “What’d he do time for?”

  “Burglary,” Clyde said. “I represented him.”

  “And you didn’t do a very good motherfuckin job!” Louis said, and the two friends laughed and slapped hands.

  Damn, Willie was thinking, the Tigers even had black ex-cons on their roster. His love for this team was growing deeper by the minute.

  Gates Brown yanked the first pitch into the right-field corner and sauntered into second base with a double. Didn’t even break a sweat or get his uniform dirty. That took care of the hecklers. But the mention of prison had reminded Clyde of something.

  “Du, check this out,” he said to Louis. “Got a call this morning from a client a mine, name of Alphonso Johnson. Po-lice woke him out of a dead sleep and hauled him downtown for questioning.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s the amazing thing—for an unsolved murder during the riot. That’s been almost a whole year ago. I didn’t know the D-troit po-lice worked on nothin for a year.”

  “Ain’t a continental thing those fools do that surprises me no more. They get away with murder any day a the week they want to.”

  “So did your client kill somebody?” Willie said.

  Clyde shot him a withering look. “How the hell’m I suppose to know that, Alabama? You think a man kills somebody and goes around braggin on it?”

  “No.”

  “Hell no. I don’t know if he’s guilty and I don’t care. He’s my client. What I’m tryin to tell you is that the po-lice is still workin shit from the riot. That was news to me.”

  It was news to Willie, too. The very worst news he could possibly have heard.

  After the final out of the game, a 7-3 loss for the Tigers, Willie stood and took a last long look at the park, trying to commit it to memory. Then he followed Louis and Clyde and the rest of the hardcore fans down the switchbacks to the street. The two friends made plans to meet for Saturday’s game against the White Sox, and they asked Willie if he was planning to come.

  “Depends on my work schedule,” he
said. They posted the schedules on Thursdays, and there was a chance he would have to work on Saturday afternoon. “If I’ve got the day off I’ll definitely be here.”

  “Here, Alabama,” Clyde said, handing him a business card. The embossed letters, gold on black, said Clyde Holland, Attorney at Law. Then Penobscot Building and a phone number. “A brother never knows when he’s gonna need a lawyer in this man’s town.”

  “Amen,” Louis said.

  “Thanks, Clyde.” Willie slipped the card into his wallet and said his goodbyes.

  There was no sign of life at the hippie house on Plum Street, and his Buick was the only car left in the back yard. Driving up Cass, Willie tuned in WJLB and got the new one by Stevie Wonder, “You Met Your Match.” Great bass line and a nice jump to the beat, Willie thought, another sure hit for a kid who’d been cranking them out for years and wasn’t even out of his teens yet. Just thinking about Little Stevie Wonder made Willie feel old. Then came the signature sign-off of his favorite deejay, Ernie Durham, velvet-tongued “Ernie D,” who delivered his farewell over a drenched blue bed of horns: “I’m rough and I’m tough and I know my stuff . . . and you’re lucky you live in a town where you can hear the Rockin’ Mr. D. before the sun goes down . . . goodbye for now, D-troit, I LOVE ya! Now git yo’selves ready for Martha Jean the Queen!”

  But Willie barely heard it. He couldn’t stop thinking about Clyde’s client getting hauled downtown for questioning in a murder from the riot, a murder that was nearly a year old. Willie realized he’d allowed himself to get lulled into a false sense of security. Just because the riot was ancient history didn’t mean the cops had forgotten about the last few unsolved murders. Far from it.

  He realized the first thing he needed to do was get this Buick off the street. Again. It was the only thing that could possibly be his undoing. So instead of parking in his usual spot—out in the open at the curb near the corner of Pallister and Poe—he guided the Buick up the narrow driveway that ran between his apartment building and the scorched shell next door. He had to move some tires and old paint cans to make room in the garage. Then he pulled the Buick in and covered it with a tarp and closed the garage door.

  He didn’t want to give the cops a thing. And he damn sure didn’t want to find out—from them or anyone else—exactly what had happened on the night he’d spent the past nine months trying to forget. But the world wouldn’t let him forget. It was like a stone in his guts—the killing guilt that lurked there, waiting to pounce if it turned out he had killed a woman in cold blood.

  2

  SATURDAY MORNING NOT QUITE TEN O’CLOCK AND FRANK DOYLE had the Homicide squad room to himself. The place was quiet, flushed with spring sunshine. If he didn’t know better, he might have believed the city of Detroit was at peace with itself.

  When he sat down at his big ugly brown metal desk with the Free Press sports page and a fresh cup of forty-weight from the Bunn-O-Matic, the first thing Doyle noticed was the manila envelope in his IN box. It said INTEROFFICE and CONFIDENTIAL. That sounded promising, but before he could open it his telephone rang. Not even ten o’clock on a Saturday morning and already the calls had started coming. What was he thinking? This was Detroit. The calls never stopped coming.

  Though he’d come in to clear up some paperwork and was, technically, off the clock, Doyle picked up the receiver. You never know. Police work is all about luck and squealers, and maybe this call would bring him luck. The good kind, for a change.

  “Homicide, Doyle.” More than a year on the job and he still got a little jolt every time he heard himself say the words.

  “Frankie, it’s Henry Hull calling from the Harlan House. Sorry to bother you on the weekend like this.”

  “No problem, Mr. Hull. You know I’m always glad to hear from you.” It was true, sort of. Whenever Doyle heard that familiar squawk, his first thought was, The little bug-eyed bastard’s never going to give up, God bless him. Doyle put a smile in his voice and said, “Before we go on, Mr. Hull, I’ve got to tell you something. You’re the last person in the world who still calls me Frankie, and if you don’t knock it off I’m going to drop this investigation.”

  “Hold on one minute, young fella. You drop this investigation and I’m going to report you to Sgt. Schroeder. You and your brother both.”

  “Report us? For what?”

  “Shoplifting. Every day on your way home from school you and Rod stopped by the market. I mighta been behind the meat counter but Helen was behind the cash register and old Hawkeye never missed a trick. Every day, she saw you pinch a Bazooka Joe bubble gum and your brother snagged a Tootsie Roll. Every day—for years.”

  “You knew? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because the Doyles were good people. It doesn’t hurt a boy if he believes he’s slick—so long as he doesn’t take it too far. Which you and your brother didn’t do, obviously.”

  The Hulls’ Greenleaf Market was the unofficial social hub of the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood, the place everyone went for bread and milk, for cigarettes and candy and gossip, to argue politics or talk sports. The Hulls were generous with credit, especially if a customer was visited by hardship, which was a regular occurrence in a city that lived and died with the boom-and-bust cycles of the auto industry. They were also, as Doyle had just learned, lenient with the right kind of shoplifters.

  “Frankie, you’re not gonna believe it,” Henry said, “but I found something we missed!”

  He was right. Doyle didn’t believe it because Henry left no stone unturned. For the past nine months he’d been amassing a small mountain of evidence in a fourth-floor room at the Harlan House Motel on West Grand Boulevard at the John Lodge Freeway, where Henry now lived and where his wife had died on the morning of July 26, 1967, with a single .30-caliber bullet from a sniper’s rifle lodged in her liver.

  Or was the fatal bullet fired by someone other than a sniper?

  A lot of black people in this town—from rabble-rousing Rev. Albert Cleage to Congressman John Conyers to the editors of the Michigan Chronicle to some of the cats way out on the revolutionary fringe—were convinced that the fatal shot was fired not by a sniper (that is, a black man) but by a National Guardsman (that is, a white man). Given the chaos on West Grand Boulevard that night and the Guard’s horrendous performance during the riot, Doyle knew it was not a far-fetched theory. And there had been many times—usually when his boss, Sgt. Harry Schroeder, was pushing him to make that fucking Hull case go down—that he would have been delighted to buy the theory himself. But Doyle didn’t buy theories because they suited his desires or someone else’s political agenda. He bought theories and made arrests based on physical evidence, witnesses, confessions, and, sometimes, luck and squealers. And he knew he was nowhere close to making an arrest in the Hull case. The name stared down at him from the squad room wall, written in red grease pencil on a sheet of clear acetate: VIC #43 HELEN HULL. Just above it was the name of the only other riot victim whose killer was still at large—VIC #42 CARLO SMITH—a firefighter who got shot through the head while he was organizing units outside a burning warehouse on the East Side. The Hull and Smith cases, like all unsolved homicides, grew colder by the day. They were an insult. A torment. A homicide cop’s worst nightmare.

  But there was something that gnawed at Doyle even worse than seeing Helen Hull’s name in blood-red block letters every time he came to work: the two snapshots of Helen Hull he kept on the cork-board partition that separated his desk from Jimmy Robuck’s. Doyle was a sucker for snapshots, especially family snapshots, no doubt because he didn’t have a family of his own other than one workaholic brother, an alcoholic sister-in-law, and their two daughters, who grew more ungodly gorgeous by the day and believed, for some strange reason, that their Uncle Frank had personally hung the moon.

  Of course there were a dozen pictures of the girls, Lizzie and Val, pinned to the corkboard, along with a picture of his brother the day he’d made captain, a picture of his parents on their wed
ding day, a picture the Doyle family in front of the Christmas tree taken during the twilight of the Truman administration.

  All those pictures orbited around the two pictures of Helen Hull. The bigger one, in full color, showed Henry and Helen surrounded by the Doyle brothers and a couple dozen neighborhood kids, everyone roaring full-throat, arms around each other’s shoulders, black kids, white kids, Arab kids, a couple of Hispanic kids, even Henry Wong the Chinese kid, all scabby knees and missing teeth and PF Flyers, one big happy family standing at the top of the center-field bleachers in Tiger Stadium. Doyle loved that picture. Henry and Helen rented a bus every summer and took all the neighborhood kids to a Tigers’ game, even sprang for hot dogs and peanuts and Cokes. It was, without fail, the best day of every summer in a boyhood that now seemed like it was nothing but a long string of cloudless summer days.

  The other picture of Helen Hull was much smaller, black and white. It was a crime-scene photo taken in the fourth-floor hallway of the Harlan House Motel on the night she died. It was a brutal thing, which was why Doyle kept it pinned to the partition. He would not allow himself to forget what had happened to Helen Hull.

  In the photo she was lying on her back on the hallway floor with shards of glass all around her. But it was her expression and her body language that got to Doyle every time he looked at that picture. Her eyes were wide open, like she had just seen something unimaginably horrible, and she was holding up her hands, as though pleading with someone or trying to ward off a blow. There was a dark stain just above the belt of her creamy dress. That’s where the bullet went in and her life-blood poured out. Whoever pulled the trigger was one hell of a shot.

  The scene was starkly lit. The police photographer had to use a flash because the cops had shot out all the lights as soon as they arrived on the fourth floor. The last thing you noticed was the uniform standing off to the side of the frame holding a flashlight and looking down at Helen Hull with an expression that was hard to read. Was it pity? Or was it scorn that anyone could be stupid enough to stand in a brightly lit picture window while a war was being fought down on the street? The uniform was Charlie Dixon, a classmate of Doyle’s from the police academy. One day, when this was all over, Doyle planned to ask Charlie what was on his mind when that flashbulb went off.