Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  “I’m not sure what it’s called.”

  “That’s Van Cliburn playing though, right?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is. You actually like Chopin?”

  “I love him. I heard Van Cliburn play an all-Chopin program last year at Ford Auditorium. I was in pig heaven.”

  “You’re really something, Detective Doyle.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, you’re the first cop I’ve ever met who says ergo and has heard of Chopin. Let alone Van Cliburn.”

  He shrugged. “And you’re the first bartender I’ve ever met who studies Mexican murals and listens to classical music at home on her day off. I can’t stand it when people put each other in boxes.”

  She went into the kitchen to check on the food. Knowing that he’d spent a week in San Francisco eating at fancy restaurants probably wasn’t doing anything for her self-confidence. He watched as she took a deep breath and started putting the food on plates. “You hungry?” she called to him.

  “I’m always hungry.”

  “I hope you like Eggs Benedict.”

  “I liked them the last time I ate them.”

  “When was that?”

  He came across the room and leaned against the bar, watched her pouring Hollandaise sauce over the eggs and ham, then spooning out roasted red potatoes with peppers and onions and garlic on the side. “Let’s see—it was a little over a year ago. At the Detroit Club.”

  “I didn’t know they allowed cops in there.”

  “I didn’t either. But when I got promoted to Homicide last year, the shift commander and my sergeant took me to Sunday brunch there. Brunch!” He laughed softly. “It was their way of baptizing me. On street patrol they do it with Stroh’s and shots of well bourbon. In Homicide, they do it with mimosas and Eggs Benedict.”

  “Well, I’m not making any promises that mine are as good as the Detroit Club’s.”

  They ate at the glass-topped table with chrome legs in the corner of the L-shaped dining nook. Frank ate quickly, eagerly, with deft movements of knife and fork. He didn’t keep switching the fork from his left hand to his right, the way most men in Detroit did. The fork stayed in his left hand, the knife in his right.

  Cecelia was wearing a skirt and espadrilles with open toes, and she’d painted her toenails to match her fingernails, berry red. It was all visible through the glass tabletop, and none of it was lost on Doyle.

  “Everything okay?” she asked, topping off their drinks from the pitcher she’d mixed earlier.

  “Wonderful. You made this Hollandaise from scratch, didn’t you?”

  “First time. Are they as good as the Detroit Club’s?”

  “Way better.”

  “Really?”

  “Swear to God. I wouldn’t lie about something as important as food.”

  She believed him. He surprised her by asking for a second helping of potatoes. It was no great sacrifice—the food was sensational—and besides, his mother had taught him that every woman loves to watch a man devour her cooking. In time he learned that it cut both ways. He loved to watch a woman devour his cooking.

  In the elevator Cecelia told him pink peonies were her favorite flower, then asked where he’d bought the bouquet.

  “I didn’t buy it,” he said.

  “Then how . . . ?”

  “I grew them.”

  “You grew those flowers?”

  “Got a garden behind my house and I built a hot house last year. Now I’ve got flowers and fresh herbs year round.”

  She was revising her earlier opinion that he was a member of that legion of men who try too hard. This man grew flowers—and he listened to Chopin and appreciated good food and had good table manners. He even stuck out an arm to hold the elevator door open for her when they reached the lobby. In two years of marriage Ronnie had never held a door open for her once.

  Cecelia knew more about baseball than Doyle did. Way more. She knew when base runners were supposed to steal. She knew when managers were supposed to change pitchers. She even knew in the bottom of the 12th that it was time for Mayo Smith to send in Gates Brown to pinch hit. Which he did. Which resulted in a sharp single up the middle that scored the winning run from third base. When Doyle praised her knowledge of the game, she shrugged. “Comes with the territory when you’ve got six brothers.”

  Cecelia was so wound up after the game that she insisted they swing by the Lindell AC to decompress. It was packed with fans, roaring and boisterous. The tables were full so they stood at the bar. Doyle spotted Gates Brown and Willie Horton at a corner table, sharing a pitcher of beer with a group of fans. Cecelia pointed out her favorite piece of memorabilia on the walls—the framed jockstrap once worn by Lions linebacker Wayne Walker. When the drinks came she said, “I love coming to the place where Alex Karras got his ass kicked.”

  “You mean where he got busted for betting on games?”

  “No, don’t you remember? He came in here with a bunch of guys from the Lions and picked a fight with that pro wrestler, Dick the Bruiser. Got his clock cleaned, way I heard it.”

  “And people think wrestling’s fake.”

  “Tell that to Alex Karras.”

  They laughed. They’d been laughing all afternoon. Doyle found her easy to be with, and even easier on the eyes. With one espadrille propped on the brass rail, she went unnoticed by no one in the largely male crowd, and she seemed right at home in the loud smoky company of men. She was aware that these men were aware of her, yet she wore the awareness with an easy grace. It was, Doyle thought, the rarest of womanly arts. Probably had something to do with those six brothers.

  When the drinks were gone she offered to buy a second round but Doyle said he had a better idea. “You like jazz?”

  “The only kind of music I don’t like is country. Can’t stand all that weepy hillbilly shit.” She broke into a fair approximation of Mel Tillis’s anthem for all the displaced Southern yokels marooned in the Motor City: “Last night I went to sleep in Dee-troit city . . . By day I make the cars, and by night I’m a-makin the bars . . . I wanna go home, ohhhhhhhh Lord, I wanna go home . . .”

  Doyle said, “I know a place that has jam sessions on Sunday. I saw Charlie Parker there when I was in high school.”

  “I’ve got a paper to finish, remember?”

  “We’ll only stay for one set. I’ll get you home early. Promise.”

  “Well, if you promise. . . .”

  As he guided the Bonneville out Grand River, away from downtown, he asked her if her door was locked.

  “No. Should it be?”

  “Yes. Please lock it.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you’re a fool if you don’t in this town.” Even though it was Sunday. Even though the day was fair and the sun was barely brushing the treetops and he had a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson insurance policy tucked under the driver’s seat.

  “What’s a big mean cop like you scared of, hunh?”

  “I’m not big and I’m not mean and I’m not scared. I’m just being smart. Believe me, there’s a big difference.”

  But she wouldn’t let it go. “I think you’re scared. Well I’m not scared—and I’m not locking my door. Can’t make me.” She folded her arms, stuck her lower lip out in a fake pout.

  Now she was pissing him off. Most of the people he knew who thought they were fireproof had gotten burned; more than a few had gotten dead. The alcohol had helped turn Cecelia’s native confidence into cockiness, but she was too pretty, too noticeable, too ripe a mark to be able to afford the luxury of cockiness in this part of Detroit. It was time to instill a little fear in her, for her own good. He said, “See that stain on the carpet, there by your feet?”

  “Yeah. What is it, motor oil?”

  “No, it’s blood.”

  She moved her feet away from it. “How’d it get there?”

  “Same way that dent got in the dashboard.”

  He gave her the short version of the night he was driving
on this very stretch of Grand River three winters ago, headed to Olympia to meet his brother for a Red Wings game. While he waited at a red light, his unlocked passenger door swung open and a big black girl with a yellow wig and turquoise eye shadow slid onto the front seat beside him. He told her to get out. Hookers had long ago lost their power to rattle him. As he reached to turn down the radio he felt the tip of a knife blade pressing against his throat.

  The light turned green and she told him to take the next left and suddenly they were moving away from the lights of Grand River, into a dark tunnel. As soon as he felt the knife blade leave his neck, he slammed on the brakes and jammed the gearshift into park. Her face made a loud POP! when it hit the dashboard and he grabbed a fistful of yellow wig and kept banging her face against the dash. Blood was pouring from her nose and mouth onto the carpet. She’d dropped the knife. He reached around her and opened the passenger door and shoved her out with his foot. He didn’t bother to wash the blood out of the carpet or fix the dent in the dashboard.

  When he finished telling the story, Cecelia said, “Okay, you win.” She locked her door, then slid across the bench seat, pressed herself against his ribs. His anger vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. He put his arm around her and pulled her close as he made the jog at West Grand Boulevard onto Dexter, then headed north.

  Dexter, like Twelfth, carried a load of memories for Doyle, and as he drove slowly up the street he pointed out the numerous shops with Jewish names on the signs—Dozodin Market, Sussman Printing, Goldman Hardware. It was an illusion, he told her, because when the Jewish merchants gave up, as often as not they sold their businesses to Arabs—A-rabs, in the lingo of the street—Syrians, Palestinians and Chaldeans.

  “What’re Chaldeans?” Cecelia said.

  “Iraqi Catholics. Under the Chaldeans’ code, a slight to any man is a slight to his entire family, and retribution has to be swift and final. Last winter this junkie with a gun held up the new Chaldean owners at Gutman Brothers Variety, a party store over on Linwood. Thought he’d made the perfect score—couple hundred in cash plus a half dozen Hershey bars for good measure, then out the door clean as a whistle. Two nights later, the junkie winds up in the basement of Gutman Brothers handcuffed to a pole with a chained German Shepherd snapping a few inches from his crotch. After a day of that, Johnny and Tommy Yacoub went down and beat the living shit out of the guy and then un-cuffed him and told him to get lost and stay lost. Next time they’d kill him. The Chaldeans’ code says to hell with probable cause, to hell with search warrants, reasonable doubt, Miranda rights and all the rest of it. If you know the guy did it, you make him pay. There’s more than a few cops in this town who think they’re on to something.”

  “But not you.”

  “Let’s put it this way. There’s never been another holdup, or so much as a report of shoplifting at Gutman’s. It’s hard to argue with that kind of results.”

  They pulled up in front of the Drome Lounge at dusk, just as the pink neon martini glass in the front window started sputtering to life. Muffled jazz leaked out of the place, drowsy drinking music. Doyle hurried around and opened Cecelia’s door. She took his hand and, rising to her full height, kissed him on the lips. “Thanks for the tour,” she said.

  “My pleasure.”

  “I do believe you love this sorry old city.”

  “Yeah, I do. I really do.”

  “I promise I’ll never accuse you of being scared again.”

  He shrugged. “Nothing wrong with being scared.”

  They kissed again, longer this time, then walked arm-in-arm past two sharply dressed black guys who were leaning against the club’s side wall. Doyle watched them watching him. He didn’t recognize them. Drug dealers or pimps, he guessed. They rattled him even less than hookers.

  The place was half full, the Benny Anflick Trio on the bandstand. As though on cue, the seductive music they’d heard from the street died and Benny launched into one of his drum solos. When you own the place, you get to bang on your drums as much as you want. The other players, a sax man and a bassist, yawned and checked their watches. Doyle thought of that long-ago night when that bandstand belonged to Charlie Parker, the doomed god. Things had slid at the Drome, just like they’d slid everywhere else in this town.

  Doyle guided Cecelia to the booth near the front door, as far from the bandstand as they could get. The booth was bathed in lovely pink neon from the martini glass, a light that had the power to make the world go away. Cecelia slid onto the bench facing the bandstand and ordered a whiskey sour. Doyle slid in beside her and asked for a Stroh’s. Again he had a splendid view of her thighs. All through the ballgame he’d had to fight off the urge to bend down and plant his lips on the succulent slopes of those thighs. When he looked up he saw Walt Kanka waving from the far end of the bar.

  “Oh shit.” Doyle looked at his hands.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t look now, but that guy sitting at the end of the bar works with me. He’s the last person in the world I want to see right now.”

  “How come?”

  “Because this is my day off and I don’t want to think about work.” The best way to prevent a visit to the table from Walt Kanka was to go right at him. “Wait here,” Doyle said. “I’ll be right back.” He rose and headed for the men’s room.

  The Drome hadn’t lost all of its class, which meant there were still linen hand towels in the gents’ and you still pissed on ice cubes and perfumed pucks of disinfectant in a long porcelain trough. Sure enough, as soon as Doyle started melting ice cubes, the door opened—a burst of Benny banging away at his drums—and Walt Kanka took a stance at the trough. He was wearing his favorite suit, a brown polyester job that looked like it would explode if it got within five feet of a lit match.

  “Who’s the redhead?” he said.

  “She’s a strawberry blonde.”

  “So who is she?”

  “Friend of mine.” Doyle was staring at a phone number on the knotty-pine wall that promised an unforgettable blowjob from Loretta for the unbeatable price of $5.

  “Good-lookin broad,” Walt Kanka said.

  “Thanks, Walt. I’ll be sure to tell her you think so. It’ll mean a lot to her.”

  “How long you two been effin?”

  “Jesus Christ, you married fucks are all alike, you know that?” Doyle zipped his pants and moved to the sink. “We’re on our first date. I took her to the Tigers game. They won in twelve. Anything else you need to know?”

  “Jeez, pardsie, no need to get your neck up. Just an innocent question.”

  But they both knew there was no such thing as an innocent question from a member of the Homicide squad. As one of the squad’s few bachelors, Doyle was a natural target for the sexual speculations of a few dozen middle-aged men with lukewarm marriages, rotting livers, and imaginations both jaded and overheated by years of witnessing every manner of killing ever devised by man. After seeing hundreds of corpses missing limbs, eyeballs and/or genitals, after seeing the handiwork of bullets, knives, blunt objects, fists, fire, battery acid, rope and piano wire, after becoming intimate with the glazed empty stare of the dead, it was hard for a middle-aged man with an overweight wife not to wonder what a good-looking young woman—a living, breathing one—was like in bed. It was only natural, Doyle supposed, but he dried his hands briskly and dropped the towel in the hamper and moved for the door.

  Then Walt Kanka, standing at the sink and studying his gorgeous Slovak face in the mirror, said, “You hear the news?”

  Doyle froze. “What news?”

  “My riot case went down.”

  “No shit. Carlo Smith went down?”

  “Cross my heart.” He whipped out a comb and started working it through the waves of silver hair. “Alphonso Johnson gave it up this afternoon. I’d thrown in the towel, but your buddy Robuck finally wore the little scrote down.”

  “Jimmy called me this morning, said he was heading downtown. How’d he do it?”r />
  “You know how Ro is with the smokes. He started out getting real chummy—I was afraid he was gonna kneel down right there in the yellow room and give Alphonso a knob job. Then he told a few lies—about Alphonso’s fingerprints being on the murder weapon, about a footprint that matched the sneakers Alphonso was wearing at that very moment. Jimmy even said he had a photograph. The usual shit. Then he offered to do Alphonso a once-in-a-lifetime favor if he would just sign the confession.”

  “What’d he offer?”

  “He said it was a brother-to-brother offer, one the big Polack detective didn’t even want to make. You know how the spades are—any white guy’s automatically a Polack if he’s not a Guinea.”

  “Or a Mick.”

  “Right. So anyway, Jimmy said that he and he alone could get Alphonso twenty years on a guilty plea of Man One—but if a first-degree murder charge went to trial, Alphonso be on his own in a world a shit. Said a confession now would look a whole lot better to a judge than all that incriminating evidence would look to a jury, especially those fingerprints and footprints. Christ. I beat on Alphonso for a solid fuckin week and didn’t get anywhere—and Jimmy breaks the jig in four hours flat.”

  “He ask for a lawyer?”

  “Only on the night we picked him up—that smart-mouth high-yellow Clyde Holland. Jimmy kept telling Alphonso he didn’t need a lawyer. Believe it or not, Alphonso believed him.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Doyle said, not because he was surprised by his partner’s interrogation skills or Alphonso Johnson’s colossal stupidity, but because the realization was dawning that VIC #42 was off the squad room wall and he and Jimmy were now the proud owners of the last open murder case from the riot.

  “Yeah,” Walt Kanka said, putting away his comb, “Alphonso signed the confession a few minutes after three. I’ve been celebrating ever since. Gonna get drunk as a monkey.”

  “Congratulations, Walt. That’s . . . great news.”

  “Congratulate Jimmy. He’s the one made it go down. Oh Frank, there’s one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re not going public with this yet. Sarge is convinced Alphonso’s got some more stories to tell. We’re gonna keep working him. Mum’s the word for now.”