Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  “And smart too,” Kowalski said, checking his watch. “It’s almost three-thirty. He’ll be showing up any minute if you want to talk to him.”

  “No, I think I’d rather just hang around in the parking lot for a while if you don’t mind.”

  “Be my guest. The employees park in the far lot, up by Maple Road.”

  “And one small favor, Dick. Don’t let anyone know I stopped by.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Ten minutes later Doyle was sitting at the wheel of his Pontiac reading the tea leaves of the Tigers’ box score in the Free Press. He looked up as an enormous sky-blue convertible turned off Maple and eased into the employee lot. When Willie Bledsoe climbed out, Doyle put his newspaper down. What the hell happened to the pink-and-black Buick?

  Willie was lean, well over six feet tall, and he was wearing a charcoal-gray sport shirt and light gray slacks, creases like razors, hip but not flashy. His black loafers gleamed. His tortoise-shell sunglasses had little gold screws at the corners. If bartenders drive what they steal, Doyle thought, then maybe busboys drive—and wear—what they steal. Over his shoulder Willie carried a white jacket and a pair of tuxedo pants in a dry-cleaning bag. The man looked as sweet as Marvin Gaye, way too cool to be working for The Man out here in the burbs.

  Doyle watched him glide across the parking lot. He had a fluid walk, smooth and rhythmic. He moved to music only he could hear. Doyle watched him until he disappeared into the service entrance in the clubhouse basement.

  When he was gone, Doyle walked over to the blue convertible and squatted behind the back bumper. The Society of Automotive Engineers serial number on the taillight contained the numeral 67, which meant this Electra 225 was a 1967 model, just a year old. The dealership’s decal was on the trunk lid: Murphy Buick—Stay on the Right Track to 9 Mile and Mack! Chick Murphy, the suspicious car dealer with a wandering lush for a wife.

  Driving east toward St. Clair Shores, Doyle had a warm feeling. If Willie Bledsoe had swapped his ’54 Buick for the blue convertible, it was a sure sign he was trying to get rid of incriminating evidence. Doyle liked having an adversary who took precautions. And he absolutely loved the moment when he first laid eyes on a suspect, when an abstraction became flesh and it was suddenly possible to imagine sitting across the Formica table from another human being in the yellow room, going through the familiar dance, the dance Doyle loved so much because he did it so well.

  Chain-smoking, rattling breath mints across his teeth and talking like a machine gun, Chick Murphy couldn’t seem to get it through his skull that Doyle had not come here to buy a car but to gather information in a criminal investigation. Murphy was on some kind of automatic pilot, like a wind-up doll. Doyle noticed his left pinkie was missing and his knuckles were laced with scar tissue and there were little gaps in his yellow eyebrows. The man had punched and he’d been punched, Doyle thought. No wonder Dick Kowalski was afraid of the guy.

  “Whaddaya say we take her for a quick spin up the lake?” Chick Murphy said, spanking the hood of a yellow Electra 225 with a white vinyl top.

  “Some other time,” Doyle said. “I’d rather have a look at the paperwork on the car Willie Bledsoe traded in.”

  Chick Murphy led the way inside to the finance office. His fingertips drummed the desktop while Doyle went over the papers on the 1954 Buick Century that had been sold last week to a man named Ernest Roquemore from Wyandotte. There was a new state law that required car dealers to list the odometer reading on every used car they offered for sale, and the ’54 Buick’s mileage caught Doyle’s eye. “A fourteen-year-old car with less than twenty-five thousand miles on it? You believe that?”

  “If that’s what’s on the odometer, that’s what I put on the paperwork,” Chick Murphy said. “It’s the law.”

  “The paperwork doesn’t say anything about how he acquired the car.”

  “No, but the title was in his name. That’s all I care about. He did tell me the car was a gift, or somesuch shit.”

  Doyle remembered his conversation with Beulah Bledsoe. Her saying the car was a gift to Willie from some Navy buddy of his brother’s. Still studying the paperwork, he said, “The car was black? Solid black?”

  “Blacker’n the ace of spades. I gave him some shit about driving around in a hearse. It had a cheap paintjob on it.”

  “Did he paint it?”

  “Don’t know. Didn’t ask.”

  “So do you think he turned the odometer back?”

  “I did at first. Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my mechanics did a compression check—and they tell me the mileage is real. I was a little pissed at myself for doubting the kid. I’m convinced he doesn’t have a dishonest bone in his body.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Look, Detective, you learn to size people up pretty fast in this business. I can tell you most people’s life story five minutes after I meet them.”

  “Tell me mine.”

  “I’d say you’re single, played sports, never been to college, and you work too hard, drink a little more than you need to. Probably went to Catholic schools. That suit—you’re obviously a clothes horse. And I’m guessing you’re a skirt chaser.”

  “Not bad.” In fact, he was right on all counts except one. Doyle didn’t have time to chase skirts anymore. He made a mental note to call Cecelia, let her know he was still alive.

  “Look,” Chick Murphy said, “I’m sure about Willie Bledsoe the same way I’m sure that Deuce I showed you is white over yellow with a vinyl top. He’s not the type to turn back an odometer. Or gamble. Or steal. Or screw another guy’s wife.”

  The guy called the car a Deuce. Simply talking about a black man made him talk like a black man. Well, Doyle thought, everyone makes errors of judgment, even street-smart Buick dealers. “So, Mr. Murphy, if you don’t think Bledsoe has it in him to turn back an odometer or screw another guy’s wife, then I guess it’s safe to assume you don’t think he has it in him to commit murder.”

  Chick Murphy actually looked angry. “Murder? Fuck no. What is it with you city cops? You think every black guy’s automatically a murderer?”

  “No, I don’t think any such thing. I’m just running down leads. Doing my job.”

  “I understand, but for whatever it’s worth I really think you’ve got the wrong guy if you think Willie Bledsoe’s involved in some murder. He’s just about the most decent colored guy I ever met.”

  After a secretary photocopied the paperwork for Doyle, he thanked Chick Murphy and left, promising to come back soon to test-drive that yellow-and-white Deuce.

  Doyle took Jefferson back into the city, the scenic route. The smooth silver lake was on his left, salted with sailboats, and off to his right, roosting behind their three-acre lawns, were the palaces of the Motor City’s tycoons. It never ceased to amaze Doyle that you could throw a stone from this stretch of Grosse Pointe and hit Detroit’s rotting East Side—or vice-versa—yet the two places might as well have been in different hemispheres. No wonder every rich suburbanite’s teeth were on edge. If Armageddon II arrives, the black mob will have to travel just a few short blocks before the fun begins.

  Wyandotte was way the hell downriver, so Doyle got on the Fisher Freeway where it started, just west of downtown. He obeyed the speed limit, which meant cars blew past the Bonneville like it was up on cinderblocks. Doyle didn’t mind. He had plenty to think about. He kept seeing Willie Bledsoe gliding across the Oakland Hills parking lot, kept hearing Chick Murphy saying He’s just about the most decent colored guy I ever met, kept hearing Dick Kowalski saying He’s one of the best I’ve got.

  What if they were right? Weren’t all the signs pointing to a Vietnam vet as the shooter? But Doyle reminded himself of another of Jimmy Robuck’s commandments: You work with what you’ve got. And all they had right now was Willie Bledsoe, who might lead them to Wes Bledsoe, who might be the shooter and who, if he was not, might lead them to the shooter. Or n
ot.

  Doyle was rescued from these gloomy thoughts by the sight of Ford’s River Rouge complex looming on his right. The six slender silver stacks were belching smoke at the heavens, and Doyle could see a freighter off-loading iron ore, sending up an orange cloud that drifted off to the south like fallout. It was a blasted world—rusty silos, mountain ranges of coal and slag, spurts of fire, conveyor belts and railroad tracks, all of it coated with ash and bisected by a river as green as a lizard. The sight could not have been any more personal to Doyle—this was the monster that killed his father—and yet it was so vast and so faceless, so inhuman, that it had always been an abstraction to him. It filled him with conflicting emotions he could not begin to untangle—awe, terror, rage and a kind of perverse civic pride. This place was the essence of Detroit, what the city stood for and what it did, and as much as Doyle loathed it he could not deny that he felt humbled and amazed every time he saw it.

  To settle his nerves and his growling stomach, he stopped at a place called Riverside Coney Island in Wyandotte and ordered a tall Vernor’s ginger ale and two Coneys all the way. Doyle was a gourmet but not a food snob, and he understood that there were times when nothing could beat a Detroit Coney. The hot dogs under their piles of chili and chopped onions, the sharp mustard, the bittersweet bite of the Vernor’s—like magic, it brought him back to himself. His earlier doubts were gone. Pursuing the lead on Willie Bledsoe’s old car was the right thing—the only thing—to do.

  Restored, he went looking for the address on Arch Street. At first he thought the place was a junkyard. The tall cyclone fence was topped with razor wire and plastered with signs advising you to KEEP OUT and NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF OWNER. In case those messages didn’t sink in, there was another sign that proclaimed the premises were PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON.

  Doyle saw no evidence of dogs or guns when he pushed through the gate into a cluttered wasteland of cars in various stages of amputation. He assumed they were victims of late-night wrecks and explosions—some were missing doors, others were missing fenders and bumpers and wheels—but then he realized these cars were not wrecks. They were some mad customizer’s raw materials, cars that were being scavenged, chopped and channeled, transformed into things only a man with gasoline in his veins could possibly dream up. Doyle didn’t know a solenoid from a socket wrench, but he’d always admired the way Detroit’s legion of motorheads were forever tearing cars and engines apart, souping them up, then putting them back together and taking them drag racing out on Woodward.

  Doyle was careful not to step in any puddles of motor oil or antifreeze with his new Italian loafers as he approached a man draped over the front fender of a canary-yellow Ford two-seater coupe, something from the Thirties, a moonshiner’s chariot. A transistor radio on the car’s roof was tuned to a country/western station, and a woman with a brassy twang was bemoaning one of life’s eternal verities: “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman . . . giving all your love to just one man . . .”

  The man draped over the Ford’s fender was wearing a T-shirt and Levis. The T-shirt had ridden up and the Levis had ridden down enough to give Doyle a superb view of the top half of his gefilte-fish ass cheeks. Good to be downriver again, back among the butt-crack crowd. Doyle coughed into his fist to announce his presence.

  The man who emerged from under the hood of the Ford had shiny black hair combed straight back and a pair of bushy gun-nut sideburns. His skin, pitted with acne scars, was the color of a sidewalk, and his arms were paved with muddy blue tattoos. Doyle showed him his shield and said he was looking for Ernest Roquemore.

  “You got him,” the man said, smiling. He had gorgeous teeth. He held out his right hand, then looked at it and withdrew it. It was as black and oily as his hair. He started rubbing his hands with a clean red shop rag.

  Doyle said, “I understand you just bought an old Buick from Chick Murphy up in St. Clair Shores.”

  “Sure did. Wanna have a look?”

  Doyle said he did. He followed the guy along a path that zig-zagged through dismantled engine blocks and transmissions and axles. There was a strange tidiness to all this disruption. A freight train was rumbling past the yard’s back fence, loaded with shiny Ford Torinos still wet from the womb at the Rouge. The men entered a garage, a windowless cave lit by fluorescent tube lights.

  And there it was.

  The bumpers and the chrome had been removed and the paint had already been stripped off all the way down to the sheet metal—except on the right front fender, which was black. The engine was gone.

  “You getting ready to paint it?” Doyle said.

  “Candy-apple red, metal-flake. Gonna have flames coming out of the front wheel wells.” He gazed fondly at the car, which looked as naked as a plucked chicken to Doyle but no doubt like a blank canvas to Ernest Roquemore. “Gonna drop the roof four inches,” he went on, “then slip in a Hemi and a Chrysler drive train. Glass packs, Hurst shifter, positraction, the whole nine yards. She’s gonna scream, believe me.”

  Doyle walked close to the fender that still had paint on it. He could see, to his delight, that there was a coat of pink paint between the black outer coat and the sheet metal. “Looks like the guy who owned it before you had it painted.”

  “Yeah, that’s something I don’t get.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, Mr. Murphy told me the guy who traded it in was colored. I never heard tell of a nigger covering up a pink paintjob with a black one. Usually they go the other way.” Ernest Roquemore grinned at his little insight. A greaser who thought he had things figured out. “And I coulda puked when I seen that paintjob.”

  “You mean the color?”

  “No, I mean the paintjob. Looked like he done it himself when he was drunk.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Cause it looked like shit—orange peel, drip marks, holidays, you name it. Didn’t even tape off the chrome right. Typical nigger thing to do, fuck up a cherry ride with a twenty-dollar paintjob. Guess he was trying to tell the world he’s black and he’s proud, or somesuch shit.”

  When Doyle leaned close to the driver’s door, his delight doubled. The seats were pleated red vinyl halfway down, then black fabric shot through with silver glints. He thought of that traffic stop when he’d seen Willie Bledsoe’s long brown arm resting on red vinyl. On this red vinyl. He thought of Charlotte Armstrong seeing a shiny old car with red and black seats pull up beneath her window on the morning of July 26, 1967. This shiny old car.

  There was no doubt in Doyle’s mind that he was looking at the car that transported the gun that fired the bullet that killed Helen Hull. If that gun had been seized in the Riopelle raid . . . Doyle forced himself to snuff the thought and the tingling sensation that came with it. He said, “Interior looks good.”

  “Yeah, I’ll say that much for the nigger. He had the good sense to leave the interior alone. And he babied her. Everything was original—except that fucked-up paintjob.”

  “How many miles it have on it?”

  “That’s the most amazing thing of all. The paperwork said twenty-four thousand and change, so of course I figured the odometer’d been turned back. But when I did a compression check, the engine was like brand new.”

  “Chick Murphy told me the same thing. Anything in the trunk when you bought it?”

  “Just a bumper jack, a spare tire and some oil stains.”

  Gun oil stains, Doyle thought, burping a toxic little cloud of chili and onions. He asked Ernest Roquemore not to touch the car until an evidence team came down to go over it. Roquemore happily complied, said he needed to get that yellow Ford coupe back on the street anyway.

  As Doyle let himself out through the gate, Roquemore was already draped back over the front fender of the yellow Ford. He was cursing. The top halves of his ass cheeks glowed proudly in the summer sun as a different woman’s voice came out of the radio: “My momma socked it to the Harper Valley Pee Tee Ayyyyyyy. . . .”

  Ah, downriver.
>
  There were only three people in the squad room when Doyle got back from Wyandotte. Walt Kanka was in the far corner watching TV, and Jimmy Robuck and Sid Wolff were at Jimmy’s desk playing checkers, which was strictly no-contest. By the time he was old enough to drop out of high school, Jimmy was the undisputed checkers champ of Paradise Valley, the throbbing heart of Detroit’s black East Side, able to whip all the barbershop hangers-on and street-corner hustlers. He was also skilled at carrying bags of money, running numbers, rolling drunks and hot-wiring cars. Eventually he graduated to strong-arm robbery and dope dealing, even ran a short string of girls out of the Gotham Hotel, a promising and diversified career that got cut short by a two-year stretch at Ionia on a weapons charge. Upon his release Jimmy decided that since he was going to carry a gun for the rest of his life he might as well have a badge to go with it, and so he enrolled in the police academy and became a legendary East Side uniform, in touch with the streets like no one else because he’d spent his first twenty years working those streets. He knew every blind pig, chop shop and five-dollar whorehouse, and he forgot nothing—no face, no name, no bad debt or grudge. And he wasn’t afraid to fight. Doyle had never seen anyone beat Jimmy Robuck at checkers or anything else.

  That didn’t appear likely to change soon. Sid Wolff had his chin cupped in both hands. His face sagged like a melting candle. It was obvious he didn’t like what he was seeing on the checkerboard. Then again, Sid Wolff rarely liked what he saw, on a checkerboard or anywhere else.

  Walt Kanka, his feet on a desk, was watching Walter Cronkite on the black-and-white Motorola with aluminum foil wrapped around its rabbit ears. On the screen Doyle could see a wall of helmeted cops wading into a crowd, nightsticks whirling.

  “What’s that, Walt?” Doyle called across the room.

  “Chicago, the Democratic convention,” he said without taking his eyes off the screen. “Would you look at those filthy sonsabitches! They never take baths and they think everybody should be effin each other all the time. Hit ’em harder! That’s it, stomp those long-haired pricks!”