Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  In his paneled office, surrounded by all the celebrity golf photos and model cars and autographed baseballs, Chick studied the second-quarter sales figures. He realized one reason sales had fallen off in ’68 was that the riot buyers had dried up. These were the city dwellers, usually black guys, who showed up at the dealership last summer and fall wearing sherbet-colored slacks and pointy alligator loafers, their pockets full of cash from all the fur coats and guns and booze and jewelry they’d looted during the riot and then fenced for a tenth of its value. They came in waves, in battered cars, in taxis, on buses, just poured out Mack through Grosse Pointe, all the way out here to St. Clair Shores because the word was out on the street that Murphy’s made the best price on a Buick. And every last one of them absolutely had to have a new Deuce and a Quarter. Much as Chick hated to see these flashy assholes turn his hometown into a gigantic ashtray, he was a businessman and he knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Sadly, he now realized, all that riot money was gone. The only thing Murphy Buick had to show for it was banner third and fourth quarters in 1967—followed by a sharp drop-off in the first and second quarters of ’68.

  Time to change that. Chick shoved the sales reports into a desk drawer and popped a Certs breath mint. He loved the Certs jingle—Two . . . two . . . two mints in one!—and when he strode out onto the lot he knew instantly it was going to be a good day for selling cars. The sun was out, making the ’68s look a littler newer and the used cars a little less old. It was humid but not too hot, a kiss of breeze coming off Lake St. Clair and stirring the pennants. Lately he’d noticed that more and more of the people wandering around the lot peering into windows were eager to talk about the Tigers. It was the kind of small talk every salesman loves, a superb lubricant. The team’s inspired play was lifting the city’s shaken spirits, bringing people together again and, best of all, making them less reluctant to part with their money.

  Within minutes Chick was pounding on an old black couple from Highland Park, trying to get them to open their eyes and see why the four-door ’65 LeSabre with only 32,000 “original” miles on the odometer was an irresistible deal even though the body had a little rust and there was a hairline crack in the windshield. (Chick didn’t bother to mention the hairline crack in the engine block.) That rust had them worried. Just as Chick was about to throw in a cosmetic paintjob to nail down the deal, his eye caught a flash of black and silver easing onto the lot from 9 Mile. He kept talking, but his eyes stayed on the black car, an immaculate ’54 Buick Century. “If you’re so worried about a little rust,” he told the black couple, “then I’ll paint the car for free. What do you say to that?” They were mulling it over as Willie Bledsoe unfurled himself from the driver’s seat of the black ’54 Century. He was wearing sunglasses, sharp clothes. A man who’d come here to deal.

  As expected, the offer of the “free” paintjob clinched the sale, and Chick sent the old couple off to the finance office to get their pockets hoovered. He’d forgotten all about them by the time he turned on the smile and walked up to Willie Bledsoe with his right hand out.

  “You finally made it!” he cried, pumping Willie’s hand.

  “Yessir. Finally.”

  Chick looked at his car. “Where’d you pick up the hearse?”

  Willie chuckled. “It was a gift, actually. From a friend of my brother’s.”

  It had a cheap paintjob on it, but there were no dents or visible rust, the chrome sparkled like new, and the red-and-black interior was perfect. Cars didn’t hold up this well in Michigan. This one would fetch a pretty dollar. “Looks like you’ve been taking pretty good care of her, Willie,” Chick said.

  “Oh, yes sir. Car spent its whole life in Alabama—till I drove it up here last spring. I kept it in a garage all last winter. Isn’t a speck of rust on it.”

  “How many miles she got on her?”

  “Not even twenty-five thousand—all original.”

  Right, Chick thought, and I was born last Tuesday. His suspicions were confirmed when he walked around behind the car and saw the chrome nameplate of the original dealer bolted to the trunk lid—Tucker Buick, Levittown, Long Island—which meant this was originally a New York car and Willie had already told at least one major lie and therefore it was open season. Chick slid behind the steering wheel. The odometer read 24,767, and he wondered if that meant 124,767 or something else. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he wouldn’t even have to run the car through the Fountain of Youth—the windowless room at the back of the lot where the boys rolled back odometers, changed the oil, gave used cars a cheap paintjob and a fresh set of shoes. The interior had that moldy smell common to old cars, a smell Chick had loved since he was a boy. “Why you want to give up a classic like this, Willie?” he said, climbing out of the car. “She’s a beaut.”

  “Ever since that day my Uncle Bob took me for a ride in the Deuce and a Quarter you sold him, I knew I had to have me one.”

  “So you got your eye on a Deuce?”

  “Yessir. A used convertible, if you’ve got one.”

  “As a matter of fact I just got a ragtop in Friday. It’s a repo, practically fresh off the assembly line. Let’s go have a look.”

  Fifteen minutes later Chick was sitting in the passenger seat of a ’67 Deuce convertible, its top rolled back, its pale blue skin gleaming in the morning sunshine. Willie was driving, his left elbow resting on the driver’s door, his right wrist on top of the steering wheel. He looked right at home.

  They were sailing out Jefferson, the lake glistening like Turtle Waxed sheet metal off to their right as Willie described how Jose Cardenal had tried to outrun Mickey Stanley’s drive to deep center in the ninth inning yesterday but couldn’t catch up with it. Chick pretended to listen as he lit a cigarette. There was something he wanted to get off his chest before they got down to business. When Willie got through with the play-by-play, Chick said, “Listen, Willie, I want to apologize for Saturday night.”

  “Apologize, Mr. Murphy? For what?”

  “For my wife. You saw her. She was drunker’n a boiled owl.”

  “No need to apologize, Mr. Murphy. We all have a little too much now and then.”

  “I swear to Christ, she gets a load on and you can’t even talk to her.” The cigarette tasted terrible and he tossed it toward the lake. “Tell me something. You ever see her flirt with anybody at the club, members or guys on the staff?”

  The answer came back so fast Chick knew he was lying. He almost sounded scared. “Flirt? You mean, like, come on to? I . . . Mr. Murphy, I . . . wouldn’t know a thing about any of that.”

  “Ah, let’s drop it. Sorry I said anything. So tell me, you like the blue color?”

  Chick could tell he was relieved by the change of subject. Willie’s lie, the fear in his voice, his obvious relief—it convinced Chick that there was something to his suspicions about Blythe. He’d heard whispers that Dick Kowalski got run out of the Flint Golf Club for sporting with a member’s wife before he washed up at Oakland Hills. Chick made a note to keep an eye on that Polack weasel.

  Willie said, “The color’s fine.”

  That sounded a little lukewarm, like he was still wrestling with this, the most crucial question in the average car buyer’s mind. Chick said, “The factory calls it ‘Bahama blue’—whatever the fuck that means.”

  “Means driving the car’s supposed to feel like a Caribbean vacation. Which it does. I look at this car and I see a tropical sky on a sunny day.”

  That sounded a lot more promising. “You look like you were born sitting there, Willie. It’s a great fit.”

  “I really like these white seats and red carpet. And I love the way it drives. Practically steers itself.”

  Chick knew then that the car was sold, so he asked Willie if he’d given any more thought to coming to work at the dealership.

  “Tell you the truth, Mr. Murphy, I don’t really know much about cars.”

  “I’ll teach you. The main thing’s how you deal wi
th people. Selling cars to people is all about the people, not the cars.”

  “I might be doing some traveling soon.”

  “Ahh, must be nice.”

  “What must be nice?”

  “To be young and single, not a care in the world.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  Chick noticed he didn’t smile when he said it. They rode in silence for a while. Chick knew what Willie was thinking. He was wondering how much money he would need to cover the difference between the value of his trade-in and the price of this Deuce. To get the ball rolling Chick said, “How much you think your Century’s worth, Willie?”

  “Gee, Mr. Murphy, how much you think—”

  “You ever heard of G.M.A.C.?”

  “G.M.A. what?”

  “It’s how us General Motors dealers finance car sales. You understand how that works, don’t you?”

  “Not really. Like I said, that Buick of mine was a gift. It’s the only car I’ve ever owned, so I don’t really understand fi—”

  “Ah, screw it. I’ll swap you straight up. That sound like a deal?”

  It damn sure did, and by the time Willie brought the Deuce to a stop outside the showroom, the trade was complete. Chick’s largess was explained by two things: his genuine fondness for Willie, and the fact that the ragtop had had its frame bent when it got rear-ended by a gravel truck in Inkster. The boys in the Fountain of Youth worked on it for a solid week, and they were able to fix the bumper and trunk lid good as new, but they said the frame would never be straight. Chick wanted to get the thing off the lot. He figured he could get at least a grand for Willie’s ’54 Century from one of the downriver motorheads who dropped by all the time looking for something to soup up. Maybe even twelve hundred. It would be a loss, but getting rid of that damaged Deuce was worth it.

  “A pleasure doing business with you,” Chick told Willie when he emerged from the sales office with his paperwork in hand. “Drive carefully now—and give some more thought to that job we talked about.”

  “I will. Thanks for everything, Mr. Murphy.” Willie shook the offered hand and guided the Bahama-blue Deuce and a Quarter south toward the city, joining the legion of satisfied customers who’d stayed on the right track to 9 Mile and Mack and didn’t even realize they’d gotten bushwhacked by Chick Murphy’s murderous mood.

  19

  DOYLE AND JIMMY ROBUCK TOOK A RARE TUESDAY AFTERNOON off to watch the Tigers play the Yankees on Bat Day. It was one of the scariest things the detectives had ever seen—51,000 Detroiters buzzed on fire-brewed Stroh’s and armed with giveaway Louisville Sluggers. Miraculously, no one’s brains got bashed in. The Tigers lost that day but then won ten of their next eleven, putting the rest of the American League in their rearview mirror.

  Doyle and Jimmy barely noticed. A heat wave in late June did what heat waves have always done in Detroit—it inspired a burst of violence that sent a dozen citizens to the morgue and sent every homicide detective into maximum overdrive. To make matters worse, as July wore on and the Tigers kept tearing up the American League, there was talk on the street that Armageddon II was going to erupt on the 23rd, the first anniversary of the outbreak of the riot. Word was that some of the Motor City’s better-equipped bad-asses were declaring July 23 open season on anyone with white skin, especially if he or she happened to be employed by the Detroit Police Department.

  Nerves, understandably, were fraying at 1300 Beaubien, and the Helen Hull investigation went back onto the back burner. But then on the eve of Armageddon II, Doyle and Jimmy worked all night to get a signed confession from a shitball named Rayfield Gaudet in the Jeffries Homes shooting during the summer’s first heat wave. It was their last open case. The next morning, after a two-hour nap on the sofa in Sgt. Schroeder’s office, Doyle pulled the Helen Hull file back out. An hour later, as he was reviewing his notes from his conversations with Caldwell Petty and Beulah Bledsoe, his telephone rang.

  “Homicide, Doyle.”

  “Got some great news, Frankie!” came Henry Hull’s familiar squawk.

  “Glad to hear it, Mr. Hull,” Doyle said. He needed to sleep for a week.

  “Did you happen to see the eleven o’clock news last night?”

  “No sir, I was busy.”

  Henry told him what he’d missed. Detroit police, acting on an anonymous tip, had raided a warehouse on Riopelle and seized a small arsenal of rifles, handguns, ammunition, even a few boxes of hand grenades. This was indeed good news. The raid surely had put a large dent in the bad guys’ plans for Armageddon II. A lot of Detroiters, black and white, in and out of uniform, could breathe easier this morning.

  “That’s terrific, Mr. Hull.”

  “Hold on, I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet. While I was watching the news I recognized one of the officers involved in the raid. It was Charlie Dixon.”

  The uniform who was in the crime scene photo the night Helen Hull died. “I thought Charlie was assigned to the Third Precinct,” Doyle said. “What’s he doing raiding a warehouse down on Riopelle?”

  Riopelle dead-ended into the Detroit River a few hundred yards from where Doyle was sitting. It was where bootleggers used to unload their boatloads of Canadian whiskey during Prohibition, and it was nearly four miles south of the Harlan House Motel.

  “I wondered what Charlie was doing on Riopelle myself,” Henry said, “so I picked up the phone and called him first thing this morning. Come to find out he’s been reassigned to the First Precinct. He just happened to be the guy who picked up the phone when the tip came in about the warehouse full of guns. That’s how he got his face on TV.”

  “Go on.”

  “He didn’t have much time to talk, but I did get him to tell me a little about the stuff they seized. And guess what. There were some .30-caliber rifles with scopes on them. He said it’s going to take a while to catalog everything, there’s so much of it. How do you like them apples, Frankie?”

  Doyle liked them just fine, but he didn’t let on. He thanked Henry for the information and promised to be in touch. Then he scribbled a note for Jimmy to call Charlie Dixon and check the seized weapons for a possible match with the bullet that killed Helen Hull.

  Feeling proud of himself—this could be the break they’d been dreaming of, and he was acting like it was just another routine lead—Doyle rode the elevator down to the stinking basement garage. All the prowl cars were signed out, so he climbed into his Bonneville and headed north.

  In the front lobby of the Oakland Hills clubhouse Dick Kowalski greeted Doyle like a long-lost brother. He led the way into his office, pushed a pile of papers off a green leather chair and motioned for Doyle to have a seat. He went to a metal urn in the corner and filled two mugs with molten tar. The guy drinks this swill by the gallon, Doyle thought, just like a cop. Kowalski looked even wearier than before, the sockets of his eyes a little ashier, the slump of his shoulders a bit more pronounced. He swung his wingtips onto the desk. There was a hole in the sole of his right shoe. It looked to Doyle like babysitting rich white people and keeping tabs on their black retainers was a lot of work.

  “So,” Kowalski said, “what can I do for you today? You need to talk to Bob Brewer again?”

  “Actually, I’m looking for his nephew.”

  “Willie? Don’t tell me he’s in trouble.”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “He’s one of the best I’ve got—him and his uncle both. Well-spoken, courteous, always shows up on time and works hard. I don’t even think he plays cards or shoots dice with the other guys.”

  “You said on the phone he’s working tonight?”

  “Yeah.” Kowalski craned his neck to read a schedule taped to the wall behind him. “He’s due in at four to set up for a private party for—oh, shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The party’s being thrown by Chick Murphy, world’s biggest Buick dealer and second biggest blowhard. Word around the clubhouse is he thinks I’m screwing his wi
fe.”

  “Are you?”

  Kowalski laughed. “That old lush? I wouldn’t fuck her with somebody else’s dick.”

  “Why don’t you tell that to this big Buick dealer?”

  “You don’t know Chick Murphy. I’m just keeping my head down. So. Willie’s due in at four, which means he’ll be showing up any minute. He’s always early. Like I say—”

  “He still driving that big old pink-and-black Buick?”

  “I’ll tell you something. Just between you and I, Detective—”

  “Frank.”

  “—between you and I, Frank, I make a point of not knowing what my employees drive or how they got hold of the keys. To be honest with you, I don’t know how busboys and waiters and bartenders can afford to drive some of the cars parked out on our employee lot, and I don’t ask. The less I know, the better. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Sure.” What Doyle understood was that bartenders drive what they steal. “You happen to have a picture of Willie handy?”

  “I should.” Without removing his wingtips from the desk, Kowalski dug in a drawer and produced a job application with a black-and-white photograph stapled to it. Doyle took one look at Willie Bledsoe’s face and immediately thought of Jerry Czapski’s description of the driver of the cherry Buick they’d pulled over at the corner of Wildemere and Tuxedo back in the spring of ’67: smooth skin, not too dark, handsome enough kid. The young man staring at the camera fit the description. Solid jaw, trim Afro, full lips that curled up at the corners in a permanent smile. Doyle couldn’t read that smile. Was it cockiness? Only after studying the picture for a full minute did Doyle notice the most obvious thing of all: the flaw: the scar that ran through the upper lip, near the left corner of the mouth. It was the result of a badly botched sewing job, and he tried to guess what could have caused such a nasty wound. A windshield? A knife? A nightstick? This, he told himself, was a worthy adversary. He said, “Good-looking kid.”