Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  “I stopped the car. A Guardsman walked up and I handed him my license and Walter’s press credentials. He told us to get out the car. Then he told us to put our hands on the hood and spread our feet. A state trooper walked up and said, ‘They’re okay, they’re press,’ but the Guardsman said, ‘I don’t give a fuck who the niggers are.’ He patted us down for weapons, then he jabbed me in the shoulder blades with the butt of his rifle and told us to move. I realized he was pushing us toward two lines of firemen. One of them spit in my face and suddenly they were all spitting, kicking us, punching. I ran with my head down, trying to fend off the blows, trying to reach the station house without falling because I was afraid that if I fell down they’d stomp me to death.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Octavia said. “You had ID and you weren’t doin nothin wrong.”

  Willie smiled. It was working. “We were put in a small detention room,” he went on, “and we could hear the Guardsmen taunting and beating other guys outside, screaming things like ‘Castrate that coon!’ and ‘Beg, nigger, beg!’ Every time a Guardsman walked by the room Walter started yelling about his press credentials, but the men told him to shut up or they’d beat him some more.”

  “You didn’t complain?”

  “No, I knew from experience we were past the point where complaining or pleading would do any good. After a while we were all led outside into a paddy wagon. I noticed my Buick was still parked at the curb where I’d left it. On the way downtown some of the men moaned about their injuries, others bragged about the sniping they’d done, the stores they’d looted. When the paddy wagon finally stopped we were led into a large building. I realized it was the back of police headquarters, the building where Walter had attended the press conference. Inside we were photographed, fingerprinted and told to sign a card that said Curfew Violation. Walter and I both refused. We demanded to make a phone call and see a lawyer but the cop with the camera laughed, and we were led downstairs and turned loose in a huge garage. The floor was greasy and there was a single spigot and a rain drain in the corner—our latrine. I found a dry patch of concrete and fell asleep.”

  “You was able to sleep in a place like that?”

  “I was exhausted and sore. Besides, I’ve seen worse.” Her eyes widened, and he felt another trill of satisfaction. “When I woke up there was sunshine coming through the caged windows. My back and ribs hurt and I had a wicked headache. Walter came out of nowhere and handed me a bologna sandwich and a cup of water. The sandwich tasted like cardboard and it hurt to chew, but I ate the whole thing and drank all the water. A lot more prisoners had arrived while I was asleep, and the heat and the smell were enough to knock you down. Everyone had been beaten. One guy’d been beaten so bad his left eyeball had popped out of its socket and was dangling by a thread on his cheek. Another guy was having convulsions, twitching on that greasy floor, foaming at the mouth.”

  “Where was Walter’s boss the whole time?”

  “I’m coming to that. I started to doze off again. The last thing I heard was a woman with her left eye swollen shut saying, ‘I ain’t looted no store or fired no gun—and the motherfuckers picked me up and done this to me. I tell you one damn thing, though, when I get out this hole The Man is gonna pay.’

  “Walter woke me up. He said they’d called our names. His boss had arrived from D.C.—”

  “Bout damn time.”

  “—and they led us upstairs. This dapper dude with a moustache, made me think of Cab Calloway, he’s talking low with a plainclothes cop. They’re nodding their heads, obviously working something out. When they’re finished, the guy with the moustache introduces himself as Thomas Henderson, the editor of Ebony magazine. He told us to sign the release forms, then he led us out of the building through the front door. The street was much cooler than the garage. God, that air tasted fine! Thomas Henderson had a rental car and he drove us to the Sheraton Cadillac. In Walter’s room I took the longest hottest shower of my life. I couldn’t help but remember all those southern towns where I’d walked out of jails and how good that first hot shower felt, how good that first hamburger tasted. When I got out of the shower, Walter was packing and the phone was ringing. Thomas Henderson answered it. ‘It’s for you,’ he told Walter. ‘Make it quick. We can’t miss that plane.’

  “Walter took the phone. He didn’t say much. When he hung up he said, ‘I can’t believe this shit.’ I asked him who it was. He said it was the mayor of Detroit calling to apologize personally for what had happened to us. We all just looked at each other, not believing anything anymore.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Octavia said again.

  “Then Thomas Henderson drove us back to the firehouse. My Buick was still there, not a scratch on it. Walter’s camera bag was still on the floor, right where he’d left it. I was afraid to drive home alone, afraid of the checkpoints, so Thomas Henderson and Walter agreed to follow me. Soon as we got to my building, they split for the airport. The building next-door to mine had burned while I was in jail. It was still smoking.”

  There was a long silence. When it became apparent he had finished telling his story, Octavia said, “That’s it?”

  “That’s it—my humble experience in a Detroit lock-up.”

  “Wasn’t you mad?”

  “Mad doesn’t begin to get it.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  It hit Willie then that his story had not had the intended effect. It had not put her in her place. She wanted to know how he went about exacting his revenge—for it was a given, in her eyes, that any black man who took such treatment lying down was less than a man. But answering Octavia’s question was something he simply could not do yet, even if he’d wanted to. He was still missing that one crucial piece of information: what happened, exactly, on the roof of the Larrow Arms.

  She couldn’t believe he was finished. “You mean to tell me you didn’t do nothin?”

  “Oh, I did something. But that’s another story for another time.” He grabbed the check and stood up. He could see his brother standing in the doorway of his apartment, all that blood. He could see Detroit burning down below the edge of the roof. He blinked the memories away and stepped to the cash register.

  As they rode back to the city Octavia sang along with the songs Ernie D was playing on the radio, raised her hands above the windshield and let the breeze dance through her fingers. She had already forgotten Willie’s story, and he was glad for that.

  Ernie D was saying, “It’s your ace from inner-space with the swinginest show on the ray-dee-oh. Don’t go way cuz I’ll be right back, Jack, with another stack of shellac for you and doll-face too. . . .”

  Octavia laughed. “You hear that? Man just called me doll-face.”

  The familiar Q&A came out of the radio’s speaker:

  What’s the word?

  Thunnnnnn-der-bird!

  What’s the price?

  Forty-four twice!

  What’s the reason?

  The grapes are in season!

  Who drinks it most?

  Us city folks!

  That’s right, Thunderbird is a delightfully fruity fortified wine. . . .

  Willie snapped off the radio. He wasn’t in the mood for this happy-go-lucky darkie routine. The day had been an emotional roller-coaster ride, beginning with his high spirits at breakfast, rising with the drive out of town, peaking when he told Octavia about starting his book, then plunging after he finished telling her about the riot and heard disappointment instead of awe in her voice. He felt cheap and foolish. He needed to shut up and get back to work. The world was full of people who talked away their books.

  When he pulled up in front of Octavia’s building he left the engine running and turned to say goodbye. Before he could speak she had her arms around his neck and she was kissing him. When their teeth clicked together, she giggled. They kissed for a long time there in the open car under the high sun-washed trees.

  Finally she pulled away and said, “You wanna come in
?”

  “I don’t think so, baby.”

  “You sure?” She cocked her head and smiled. Making it easy for him to reconsider.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I just remembered something and . . . I need to go write it down.”

  She reached for the door handle. Her next words sounded more sad than angry. “I’m beginning to think you and me ain’t never gonna get it together.”

  He had begun to think the same thing. The woman had so much going for her—that body for starters, but also an unfed hunger to know things, to travel, to break out of her small world. He found her hunger attractive, sexy even, and yet he could see that it was unlikely she would ever feed it. There was a gulf between them. He needed to get far away from this place, the only place she had ever known and was ever likely to know. She had a dying daddy to look after, a berth at Motown, a frisky sports car, a nice crib, family and friends all over town—no wonder she was unable to imagine living anywhere but Detroit. But Willie couldn’t allow himself to get tied down here. It would be suicide, spiritual and physical suicide. But instead of saying these things to her now, he said something that was as bland as it was true. “Come on, baby, there’s no way of knowing how things’re gonna play out. This book’s important to me.”

  She got out of the car then and closed the door, gave him a sad smile before she turned to go. Watching her walk up the sidewalk to her apartment building, he thought back to the day they’d first met, when he’d watched her walk to the restroom in the Seven Seas. That day seemed like half a lifetime ago. She waved to him now from her doorway and blew him a kiss before disappearing into the building.

  Willie’s phone was ringing when he opened the door to his apartment. He picked up the receiver and found himself listening to the very loud voice of a very drunk man. “Where you been, bruh?” Wes bellowed. “Been tryin to reach you all damn day long.”

  “I been out. What up?”

  “Just wanted to let you know I’s goin back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Southeast Asia. Gonna take the money and run.”

  “Why you going back there?”

  “Cause it’s gonna take me away from this town. From this whole messed-up country.”

  “Did you re-up?”

  “Fuck no. Gonna open a restaurant over there with an old Navy buddy. In Saigon, or maybe Bangkok.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Oakland.”

  “California? Ma said you were on your way to Denver.”

  ”Got to keep movin, man, keep the pigs guessin.”

  “How long you been in Oakland?”

  “Bout a week.”

  Willie decided to come right out with it. “Wes, there’s something I need to know.”

  “Anything for my baby bro.”

  “You remember those three guns from the roof of your building, that night during the riot?”

  “Fuck yeah, I remember.”

  “You know where they are?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means I sold ’em.”

  “To who?”

  “Some black Muslim fool name of Yusef.”

  “All three of ’em?”

  “Yup. Made the sale in a warehouse down by the river. Package deal.”

  “When was this?”

  “Just before I left D-troit, a month or so ago. Why you axin all these questions?”

  “Just curious. Want to make sure those guns don’t come back to bite us.”

  “Don’t worry. They long gone.”

  “So what’re you doing in Oakland?”

  “Just brokered a big shipment a guns to the Panthers. Matter of fact, I’m at Panther headquarters right now. I’m callin on their nickel.”

  Willie’s stomach did a flip. “You’re calling me from Panther headquarters?”

  “Thas right,” Wes said, failing to hear the horror in his brother’s voice. “Just took an order for a mess a M-1s from this brother name Geronimo—”

  “Get off this line right now!” Willie shouted. “Call me collect from a pay phone!” He slammed down the receiver.

  Ten minutes later his phone rang again and Willie told the operator he would accept a collect call. Then he said to his brother, “You got to be the dumbest nigger in the cotton patch. It ever occur to you the phones in Panther headquarters might be tapped? Je-sus!”

  “Don’t worry, my boat leaves in an hour. Once I’m gone they never gonna find me.”

  “That’s nice for you. How about me?”

  “Man, you worry too much. Ain’t nothin gonna happen to you.” There was a long staticky silence. Then came the question Willie had been expecting all along. “How you fixed for bread, bro?”

  The partial answer was that he was finally building the nest egg that would finance his exit from Detroit, hopefully in the fall; the complete answer was that he wanted no part of the money Wes was about to offer. He’d gotten nigger-rich off gun money once before, and he knew all about the grief that came with it. “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You sure? I could wire you a couple hun—”

  “Keep it. You’re gonna need it worse than I am.”

  “Suit yourself. But just as soon as you’s able, you run away from that town. Ain’t nothin there for neither one of us but trouble. You hear me?”

  “I hear you. Believe me, I’m working on it. And don’t you go anywhere near that Panther house. The F.B.I.’s probably on their way to kick the door down right now.”

  Wes, fool that he was, laughed off the warning. After Willie hung up the phone he opened the shades in the living room just as a rusty green Pontiac was pulling away from the curb across the street from his Deuce. Willie realized he’d seen that car before—parked down the block on Pallister, parked outside Octavia’s apartment, parked in the visitors’ lot at the Public Library. Did Chick Murphy have a private eye on his tail?

  As the car pulled away, Willie caught a glimpse of the driver. He had his left elbow out the window and he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It was the white guy from the fish shack, sitting two tables away, drinking beer and pretending to read the newspaper. And, Willie realized with a flash of terror, hearing every word that came out of my big mouth.

  23

  JIMMY HAD DROPPED ANCHOR IN A LITTLE COVE JUST UPRIVER from the Belle Isle Bridge, out of the way of the boat traffic. It was his favorite spot on the river. From here you could see the bridge’s graceful arches and its string of lights bouncing off the water. It was how he imagined Europe looked, places like Paris and Prague. It was a steamy night with a fat yellow moon, a good night to be out on the water, catch the breeze. While Jimmy fished a couple of fresh beers out of the cooler, Doyle re-lit his cigar.

  “What you call that sauce again?” Jimmy said, handing a beer to Doyle. Earlier that evening Jimmy had nosed his Chris-Craft up the canals that thread through the Jeff-Chalmers neighborhood. He’d tied up at the end of Klenk Street, then walked the two short blocks to Doyle’s front door. He could smell the food from half a block away.

  “It’s called puttanesca sauce,” Doyle said. “Comes from the Italian word for whore, putta, cause it’s so easy to make hookers can whip up a batch between tricks. My mother taught me to make it when I was still in grade school. Like I said, anybody can make it.”

  “Might be easy to make, but it damn sure tastes good. And all these years I thought I hated anchovies and capers. And that wine.”

  “Yeah, that was nice and chewy. A ’54 Barolo.”

  “That Spanish shit?”

  “No, it’s Italian.”

  “And that dessert? Tara . . . tara . . .”

  “Tiramisu.”

  “Man, you got to teach me to cook.”

  “Any time, Jimmy, any time. Anybody who can read a recipe can learn how to cook.”

  “Yeah, but you got the touch.”

  They were quiet for a while, just watching the river and the bridge lights and the moon, Doyle puffing on h
is cigar. Jimmy could tell Doyle didn’t want to talk about food anymore. He wanted to keep talking about what they’d talked about all through dinner—what to do with the stuff he’d learned on Sunday afternoon at Roberta’s fish shack in Algonac.

  One of the first things Jimmy had taught Doyle was that a good homicide police doesn’t have a whole lot of use for motive. “Give me the how, the where, and the when,” Jimmy liked to say, “and nine times out of ten I’ll give you the who.” Why a person killed another person was usually beside the point. A luxury. Something a competent detective could live without.

  But that didn’t mean you should run away from a motive if one hopped onto your lap. After he spent that Sunday afternoon eavesdropping on Willie Bledsoe, Doyle went to the records cage and combed through arrest reports from the second day of the riot, Monday, July 24, 1967, and learned that William B. Bledsoe and Walter Mitchell of Ebony magazine had been jailed for curfew violation and resisting arrest, then released into the custody of Thomas Henderson after spending twenty-three hours in the rat hole garage at 1300 Beaubien Street. All charges against them were dropped. Through his brother’s contacts, Doyle even got confirmation that Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had placed a phone call to the Sheraton Cadillac Hotel to apologize personally to Walter Mitchell and all the readers of Ebony magazine. Crafty old Cavanagh, always hip to how his act was playing with the colored crowd. Not that it mattered anymore. The riot had finished Jerry Cavanagh just as sure as it had finished the city of Detroit.