Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  “Did you say thirty-caliber?”

  “Is what I said.”

  “Jimmy, this is great!”

  They had both read the Helen Hull autopsy report so many times they could recite it from memory, especially the faint ray of hope the medical examiner held out when she wrote that the fatal bullet was a .30-caliber and there was a possibility of comparison if the gun it was fired from was found.

  “Now for the best part,” Jimmy said. “According to Sid, all three of these types of ammo’s got one thing in common. Care to guess what it is?”

  “Goddammit, Jimmy, you know I don’t know shit about guns.”

  Jimmy’s smile stretched wider. “Sid says all three of these types of ammo’s commonly used by military snipers in Vee-yet-nam.”

  “I’ll be damned. How’d you get up on the roof?”

  “The super let me up there. A brother name of—”

  “Anthony Thompson.”

  Now it was Jimmy’s turn to be impressed. “How you know that?”

  “I went out and talked to the landlord last week, remember? He told me Anthony did some time, he didn’t know what for. I’ll check that out today. The landlord seemed to think he and Anthony are the only ones with keys to the top floor and the roof.”

  “Yes and no. There’s only one key to the top floor in the building. Anthony leaves it on a nail in the mop closet downstairs, says everybody in the building knows about it case they want to get any of they things out of storage. Sort of an honor system. And the doors that let onto the roof have inside dead bolts, no key. So thee-retically anyone in the building can get out on the roof.”

  “Shit.”

  “It gets worse. Our man Anthony claims he spent the entire riot week at his cousin’s crib on Burlingame, behind the Dexter Theater. Says they drank looted Johnnie Walker scotch like it was tap water, played cards, TV’ed it. Paid fifty cents a fifth for that top-shelf booze.”

  “His story check out?”

  “Fraid so. Anthony’s not going to be able to help us beyond what we already got from the roof. So how’d it go with the landlord?”

  “Good question,” Doyle said, yawning into his fist, sipping coffee. “He didn’t give me all that much. Nice enough guy, but he’s about as likely to help us as he is to join the Black Panthers, you catch my drift.”

  “I catch your drift. Man’s all the way boor-zhwa-zee.”

  “Yeah. But when I asked him if any of his tenants had served in Vietnam, I know he lied.”

  “How you know?”

  “Because it was written all over his face. I just know. I got some more good news. After I talked to him, while I was driving back down the Lodge, I remembered a traffic stop Jerry Czapski and I made last spring, my last night in a uniform—an older model car with lots of chrome and red seats, a lot like the one Charlotte Armstrong says she saw the night of the shooting. I looked up the run sheet and—you ready?”

  “Course I’m ready.”

  “The driver’s middle name was Brewer, same as the landlord’s last name, and his driver’s license had a Tuskegee, Alabama address. The landlord told me he grew up in a little town called Andalusia, halfway between Tuskegee and Mobile.”

  “You reckon the landlord and this Buick dude related somehow?”

  “Don’t know for sure, but I intend to find out.”

  “Where this Buick dude stay?”

  “He gave Zap the Algiers Motel as his local address—”

  “You mean the Desert Inn.”

  “Right. I’ll swing by there this afternoon. I don’t expect them to be able to give me anything, but I’ll check it out anyway. Then I’ll swing by the Tenth and have a chat with Czapski. I think I remember stopping a pink car, but I want to double-check it with Zap. At the very least I’ve got some more questions next time I go see the landlord.”

  Jimmy was nodding, taking it all in. “One other thing I forgot to mention. Sides the casings, there was some malt liquor cans on the roof. I got Anthony to padlock the door and told him not to let nobody up there. An evidence team’s on the way over there now to dust the place, take pictures.”

  They could both feel it, the electrical charge that comes when a cold case suddenly gets a pulse. It was the kind of rush they lived for.

  Jimmy got out a legal pad and they made a list of the fresh leads they needed to check out. They knew it was important to become very methodical now. Miss nothing. Play by the book. They knew that all of a sudden they had a chance.

  As Doyle expected, the May 1967 guest log at the Desert Inn, formerly the Algiers Motel, yielded no guest named Bledsoe. Dives like that were why the name Smith was invented.

  Next he checked out Anthony Thompson’s criminal history, which was another disappointment. The super at the Larrow Arms was an undistinguished breed of bad-ass. His sheet contained nothing terribly sexy: a few drunk-and-disorderlies, aggravated assault, soliciting a prostitute, and six months at Jackson for breaking and entering. Not exactly the profile of a revolutionary Doyle was hoping for. Plus the guy had the air-tight Johnnie Walker alibi.

  Doyle’s next stop was his old stomping ground, the Tenth Precinct house on Livernois. He stood in front of the building in a warm, greasy drizzle and studied the modern, state-of-the-art piece of shit that went up during Jerome Cavanagh’s first term as mayor. The walls were made of panels covered with gravel, like vertical slabs of somebody’s driveway. Doyle was on hand the day the mayor cut the ribbon and proclaimed the building a fitting symbol of the city’s progressive spirit, etc., etc., while every cop on the force grumbled that the money wasted on that building should have gone toward pay raises. If there hadn’t been a pay freeze there might not have been an epidemic of “blue flu” on the eve of the riot, nearly a quarter of the police force out “sick” when the city could least afford it. But that was hindsight, and police work had taught Doyle there’s no future in hindsight.

  There were dozens of divots in the gravel facade of the precinct house, reminders that a bunch of drunk brothers had opened fire from the roof of the Earl Scheib shop across Livernois on the fourth day of the riot. Police stations and firefighters under siege by armed civilians. It had been a total breakdown, Doyle thought, a real civil war.

  The staff sergeant behind the long counter today was an alcoholic tub of lard named Jimmy McCreedy, who’d spent the past quarter-century moving from one desk to another within the Detroit Police Department and was nearly ready to reap his pension and devote all of his time and energy to his Hibernian interests. Doyle could still remember standing in front of the J.L. Hudson department store on Woodward in a blizzard when he was ten years old, shivering, watching a pink-faced man in short green pants, a short-sleeved green shirt and a green bowler dance a jig in the middle of the street during the St. Patrick’s Day parade. This leprechaun didn’t even seem to notice that the snow was coming out of Canada in horizontal sheets and the temperature was in the single digits. That was Jimmy McCreedy for you, a man well acquainted with the wondrous power of 90-proof anti-freeze.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” boomed McCreedy’s rich tenor now, a voice that made him a favorite in the handful of Detroit saloons where the singing of Irish ballads was still tolerated. “Come to us now, all the way from thirteen-hundred Beaubien Street in the heart of the Motor City—the fastest rising star in the history of Homicide, it’s Francis Al—”

  “Knock it off, Jimmy. How’s tricks?”

  He lowered his voice. “Fine, lad, just fine.” The story was that when the snipers opened up on this building, Jimmy McCreedy was under the counter before anyone else was even aware they were under fire. “Might I offer you coffee, Frank? Or has our new line of work turned us into a tea drinker?”

  “No thanks, Jimmy, I’m good.” Doyle saw David Denekas, a Vice detective, shuffling through paperwork in the corner. Denekas had let his blond hair grow long, and he was wearing his shoulder holster over a paisley shirt, with bellbottom jeans and a pair of fancy white track shoes. Track
shoes, for chrissakes. The better to chase down deviants? Denekas was one of the stars of Vice’s cleanup squad, a true gung-ho street warrior. The cleanup guys spent the bulk of their time hassling pimps and their prostitutes and the prostitutes’ johns, and they spent the rest of their time hassling homosexuals, who they called “browns.” Despite his blue-collar jockstrap Jesuit upbringing, Doyle had never been able to work up the expected loathing of homosexuals. He believed that what people chose to do in the privacy of their own bedrooms was their own business. Besides, in this town there were bigger battles to fight.

  “Who’s the hippie with the gun?” Doyle said to Jimmy McCreedy. Denekas looked up and flashed Doyle the peace sign, then went back to his paperwork.

  “Nice kicks, Dave,” Doyle said.

  “Thanks,” Denekas said, admiring the shoes. “They’re Adidas.”

  “What the fuck’re Adidas?”

  “Dave DeBusschere wears ’em!” he said, as though a certain brand of sneakers deserved to be bronzed simply because they were worn by the player-coach of the Detroit Pistons, a basketball team that always finished a couple dozen games out of first place and then got bounced out of the playoffs in the first round. “They’re leather,” Denekas added, admiring them some more.

  Doyle still owned the last two pairs of canvas Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star high-tops he’d worn during his senior year at U. of D. High, white for home games, black for away games. Now they were making sneakers out of leather. When the brothers got hip to this, Doyle told himself, a pair of canvas Chucks will be about as prized as Aunt Jemima’s head scarf.

  “Is Zap working today?” Doyle said to Jimmy.

  “He’s in the back doing paperwork. You know how Zap loves his paperwork.”

  “Do I ever.” Doyle went down the long corridor to the last room and found Jerry Czapski sitting at the battered Royal typewriter in the corner, chewing on a pencil and tapping out a report with his thumbs and stubby index fingers. The scary thing about Czapski was that he was more proficient with a typewriter than he was with the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson strapped to his hip. Doyle still thought it was a miracle that Zap nailed that armed robber at Northland with a single shot.

  “You take a speed-typing course?” Doyle said, sliding a chair up to the desk.

  Czapski blinked, then broke into a big toothy smile. Doyle had forgotten how thick his lips were, how thick the flesh on his face was—how meaty the man was. He stuck out his right hand and gave Doyle a crusher handshake. “Hey pardsie, how they hangin?”

  “Fine, Zap. What you working on?”

  “Christ.” He passed a hand over the bristles of his crewcut. “They’re breaking my stones over that thing at Cobo—you know, that fucking Poor People’s March? I got called in on it and I was there when the mounted guys charged the crowd, knocked a few people around. All we were trying to do was get a stalled car out of the way and now the NAACP and all the big niggers like Reverend Cleage are hollering police brutality.”

  “All the fun’s gone, eh Zap?”

  “You said it, brother. So what’s up with you? Nice suit.”

  “Thanks, Zap. Coming from a clothes horse like you, that means a lot. I’ll be sure to tell my tailor.”

  Czapski actually blushed, for even among members of the Detroit police force he was known as an atrocious dresser, partial to the white-belt-with-white-shoes combo known as the full Cleveland. Doyle took the photocopy of the run sheet out of his pocket and set it on top of Czapski’s pile of paperwork.

  “Take a look at this, Zap. Tell me if it rings any bells.”

  Czapski’s lips moved as he read the run sheet. He was frowning, a bad sign. No light bulb blazed inside the thick skull. “Jeez,” he said at last. “We jacked up so many smokes together back in the old days. . . .”

  Yes we did, Doyle thought sadly. “Try to think, Zap. This one was different. Our last night together, we were heading south on Wildemere—you were driving, warm evening, lot of people out—and you said you didn’t like the looks of a young black guy getting into a cherry old Buick with out-of-state plates. You were wondering where he got the money to pay for it. . . .”

  “Ohhhhhh, sure,” Czapski said, like a kid who’d just solved a difficult math problem. “Now I remember. Spade looked a lot younger’n he was. I figured him for a teenager but his license had him somewhere in his mid-twenties, as I recall.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah.” He chuckled. “I remember when he reached for the glove box to get his registration, I gave him a little love tap on the side of his head with my flashlight. Told him not to pull out no gun on me. Just fuckin with him, you know.”

  “Yeah, Zap, I know. You remember what he looked like?”

  “Like I say, young looking. Smooth skin, not too dark. Handsome enough kid. Looked like he coulda been a backup singer at Motown.”

  “You think you could pick him out at a show-up?”

  “I dunno, Frank. It’s been more than a year. And jigs all look alike to me.”

  “But you’d be willing to give it a shot?”

  “Sure, if you asked me to. I can’t make any promises, though.”

  “I understand, Zap.“

  “You want me to come downtown now?”

  “No no, not just yet. I’ll let you know if I need you. One last thing. You happen to remember what color the car was, the exterior?”

  “Yeah, it had a two-tone paintjob—pink in the middle, with a black roof and black beneath that chrome strip that runs along the side of old Buicks. I remember asking the kid was he a pimp since he drove a car the color of pussy. Then I asked him was he a homasexual.”

  “He gave the Algiers as his local address. He say anything about having a roommate?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Thanks, Zap.” As Doyle stood up to leave, a young black uniformed officer walked into the room. Czapski looked up at him. “Jerome! Come over here and meet your predecessor. This is the legendary Frank Doyle. Frank, this is my new partner, Jerome Wright. He was an All-City guard at Cody. Averaged nineteen a game.”

  Jerome Wright gave Doyle a firm handshake, looked him in the eye. “Pleasure to meet you, detective. Heard a lot about you. You were All-City at U. of D., right?”

  “A hundred years ago.”

  Jerome Wright smiled. The kid could have been a movie star. So the department’s much-ballyhooed campaign to hire more black officers was finally paying off, and here was living proof. About time, Doyle thought. When the riot broke out the department was ninety percent white and one hundred percent blue-collar ass-kicker. Even the black cops, guys like Jimmy Robuck, made no apology for their allegiances or their methods. In fact, more than a few black suspects learned the hard way that they were better off taking their chances with polacks like Jerry Czapski and micks like Frank Doyle than with brothers like Jimmy Robuck. But the times demanded change—or the appearance of change—and so the department was beating the bushes for black recruits. Doyle said, “You’re a lucky man, Jerome.”

  “I am, sir? How’s that?”

  “You’re learning your craft at the knee of a true master. They don’t make ’em like Zap anymore.”

  “No sir.”

  Doyle laughed all the way back to downtown. The irony was simply too beautiful: One of the worst racists on the force was now spending his working days trapped in a radio car with a member of the one race he despised above all the others. Let the punishment fit the crime. Doyle believed it was racist cops like Czapski, as much as any other single factor, that explained the fury of last summer’s riot. The brothers were sick and tired of being called “boy” and “honey baby” and worse. They were tired of getting stopped for no reason, getting love taps from police flashlights, getting their justice served up in alley court. And now, as the department scrambled to recruit black officers, Jerry Czapski, of all people, had wound up riding with a black partner.

  The world, Doyle thought, was truly a perfect place.

&n
bsp; While talking to Caldwell Petty, the chief of police in Tuskegee, Alabama, Doyle imagined Rod Steiger sitting at a desk chain-smoking cigarettes and sending gouts of tobacco juice into a Maxwell House coffee can while the blades of a ceiling fan chopped the foggy air. Doyle wondered why so many Southerners had last names for first names. His second case during the riot was a yokel from east Tennessee named Wilson Lee Pryor who rode the Hillbilly Highway straight to a job on the line at Dodge Main and wound up getting shot six times on the roof of the Kentucky-Tennessee Apartments on Alexandrine because a half dozen National Guardsmen and cops, including Detective Frank Doyle, mistook him for a sniper. It turned out Wilson Lee Pryor had gone up on the roof of his building to watch for flying sparks from a nearby fire. But he was carrying a deer rifle for protection and now the poor dumb hick was dead.

  “What can I do ya for, Detective?” came the gravelly voice of Caldwell Petty over the long-distance wire.

  “I’m trying to run down some leads on a murder case,” Doyle said. “You ever have any dealings with a young man named William Brewer Bledsoe?”

  “Sho nuff have. He goes by Willie. This have something to do with that trouble yall had with yo Nigras last summer?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “I figgered as much.”

  “How come?”

  “Cause that boy ain’t nothin but trouble.”

  “How do you mean, trouble?”

  “Well, he come up here to go to school from some little piss-ant town down south a here, Troy or Opp. Can’t rightly remember. Soon as he got here he started raisin sand—sat down at the lunch counter at the Sanitary Cafe, which was segregated at the time. That woulda been about nineteen and fifty-nine, maybe sixty, in there. Then he put some foolish sign on the lawn of the university’s president. Can you imagine that? Some uppity little nigger accusing the president of Tuskegee Institute of being a Uncle Tom!”

  “Amazing. Anything else?”

  “Eventually he run off and joined that Student Nonviolence outfit. Tried to get ill-lit-rit Nigras to register to vote, such foolishness as that. I’m here to tell ya, Detective, we got some of the finest Nigras anywhere in the South right here in Tuskegee, Alabama, yessir. Folks get along here—or they did till uppity niggers like Willie Bledsoe come along.”