Detroit City Is the Place to Be (31 page)

At some point, I mentioned how Mayor Bing was talking about downsizing neighborhoods like this one. Mary Howell said, “I wish he would. They trying to get rid of us. But look at it. What’s there for us to stay for? I keep this lawn up.” She nodded at the empty lot next door, neatly mowed, which did not belong to her. “But if they end up building a house on it, who wants to live next door to
this
?” she went on, gesturing at her own place. She said her family had lived in the house for nineteen years. Her sister, one of twelve siblings, worked in real estate and had managed to secure the property for a steal, eventually selling it to Mary Howell and her husband of thirty-three years, Bernard, who used to work at Ford and now did landscaping. Howell herself had been a secretary at the board of education, and later worked as a paraprofessional.

“Now there’s no jobs out here,” she said matter-of-factly, gazing at the empty lot next door where no one would want to live anyway, her hands steepled in her lap. “They say they’re bringing jobs back, but those jobs are way out in Battle Creek, Ypsilanti. How can you get out there?” From inside the house, I heard something beeping steadily every few seconds. It sounded like a fire alarm warning you its battery had run low.

This is a court-reporting cliché but striking enough to note here: when Mary Howell took the witness stand to testify against one son in order to save the other, her face betrayed zero emotion. Her voice was unusually low for a woman’s—husky, too, and unspeakably weary, though the deepness gave her testimony a stony and unwavering quality. It maintained that croaking timbre up close, seeming to almost vibrate out of her chest, like an echo from an underground cave. I thought of that
Our Gang
character with the impossibly deep voice for a child.

Howell approached me during a lull in the courtroom action. I was sitting in the lobby and she walked over and asked when my book was coming out, so she could tell her friends to pick it up.
10
We chatted some. She still had on that blue jacket, but she spoke in a near-whisper. “That house was a drug house,” she said. “My son wasn’t involved in that. He’s had mental health issues since he was one year old.” I said it must have been difficult to testify. She blinked at me impassively and said, “Well, when I heard he might have done it, it wasn’t hard. It was so horrible. I felt for the victims. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

On her porch, Howell elaborated. She said Kevin hadn’t started going to jail until he was eighteen, when he did two years on a drug charge. “Following in the stupid footsteps of his older brother,” she muttered, staring straight ahead. He’d been in and out of mental institutions for his entire life. When he was a little boy, he’d started a fire in Howell’s closet once. Another time, Howell turned her back for an instant while making cornbread and Kevin took the opportunity to stick his head in the oven. She said Kevin had been diagnosed as mildly retarded and schizophrenic.

Looking back, Howell admitted she’d “felt the vibes” on the day of the murder. She knew something was amiss, enough to ask Kevin, once the body parts had been discovered, if he knew anything about what’d happened. “Of course he said no,” Howell said. I asked if Kevin had been upset with her for calling the police. “He know,” she said. “He know he didn’t have no reason to kill the man. He didn’t even
know
him. He still won’t come forward and tell where the man’s head is. I said, ‘If you get life, will you tell where the head is?’ He tells me no, he don’t know where the head is. He said Aaron Coleman was the last one with the head. But he did something so brutal to that man, I had to think, who would be next? Me? One of his sisters?” She sighed. “The way I feel, Kevin took a life. But he still have one. He just on the inside. His family could visit. His family could write. That man he killed, his family can’t. If I’d ignored it, I’d be just as guilty as Kevin.”

Something about Howell’s squat, mother-hen build reminded me of my paternal grandmother. That, and her Coke-bottle glasses—you almost never saw lenses so outrageously thick anymore, magnifying the wearer’s eyes in a way that hinted at some all-seeing oracular power. In the little village where my father’s family came from, so much surname overlap took place that families also retained nicknames. My grandmother’s family nickname had been
Rano
, local dialect for “frog”—
ranocchio
in proper Italian—apparently on account of the family’s propensity for bulging, froggy eyes, so, in my grandmother’s case, it wasn’t just the glasses.

“There’s drugs and crime in every neighborhood,” Howell went on. “That house right there?” She nodded at the lone house on the other side of Grandy, a tidy ranch with white siding. She’d lowered her voice, and I thought she was going to tell me the place was a drug spot. Instead, she said, “
All
the kids graduated and went to college. You can’t blame the neighborhood. It’s up to each individual to achieve.” I asked about her other children, and immediately regretted it. She fell quiet. Finally, she said, “Most of my kids are under mental health—disability. My second oldest daughter has a job. She’s a housekeeper.” Howell paused again, then said her youngest, the princess ballerina, talked about getting a teacher’s certificate, though she didn’t really like the idea of going to college. “She’s still young,” I said. Howell just hoped the girl would finish high school. “None of my kids really did nothing with their life,” she said.

I didn’t think of my paternal grandmother very often. She’d been dead for years, and as a kid I hadn’t known her very well. We used to take family trips to Italy every couple of summers, to visit. We’d stay for a month, living in the upstairs apartment at my grandmother’s house, which she would otherwise rent out to tourists. You had to yank a chain hanging from the ceiling to flush the toilet. It was an old stone building, and the kitchen had the funky smell of a cellar where someone had been curing meat. Every visit, a few days before we were supposed to leave, my grandmother would begin to cry. You could set your watch by it. My father’s sister, my
zia
Rafaela, would slap her mother gently on the shoulder and tell her,
Ma dai, Bianca!
Those glasses, at such moments, would enlarge her sopping irises until you could imagine each of them filling its own drive-in movie screen. I couldn’t get over how much Mary Howell reminded me of Nonna Bianca, and I could easily picture her own eyes redly swelling behind her lenses, just like my grandmother’s, though the whole time we spent together there was never the slightest hint of tears.

*   *   *

On the sidewalk outside the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, a sign listed the various items forbidden in the building, including Alcoholic Beverages, Ammunition, Aerosol, Bingo Markers, Boxcutters, Bullets (Anything Resembling), Curling Irons, Combs (Metal or Rattail), Drug Paraphernalia, Flatware, Noisemakers of Any Kind, and Whistles. When I arrived, there was a long, morning-rush-hour queue to get inside (all court spectators were required to pass through a metal detector) and I felt a sleepy camaraderie among the line waiters, most united in some form of direct or by-proxy opposition to the Man.

The courtroom was on the fourth floor. I found the windowless, climate-controlled space, with its minimalist, midcentury modern decor—blond wood benches, darker ribbed paneling on the walls, a recessed octagonal ceiling—cozily hermetic. Silver-haired Judge Hathaway also seemed of another era, looking as if he should be interviewing Dean Martin on a late-night talk show while chain-smoking on air; even his flat, slightly nasal accent had a faintly Carsonic purr.

Kevin Howell’s mother and sisters lined the bench in front of me. As far as I could determine, Aaron Coleman had no family members in the courtroom the entire week. David Morgan Jr.’s sister and brothers and two grown sons occupied a bench running along the courtroom’s far wall. One brother, a postal worker, stole into the room a couple of hours late every day, still wearing his blue postman’s uniform and cap. Another brother, apparently a motorcycle enthusiast, had a shaved head and a long beard and wore a leather Harley-Davidson jacket, and whenever he walked stiffly by, you could hear the swishing of whatever sort of protective leather chaps he had on underneath his jeans.

Mary Howell’s call to the police had resulted in the questioning of Monique Foster and Jermaine Overman and ultimately the arrest of Mikey and Kevin. Still, on the level of forensic evidence alone, the prosecution’s case remained basically nonexistent. No fingerprints or DNA connecting the young men to the crime had been discovered. David Morgan Jr. had most likely died from a gunshot to the head, but since his head was still missing, there was no official cause of death, and the gun suspected as the murder weapon had disappeared from under a bucket. In fact, the abandoned home where Morgan’s murder allegedly took place had mysteriously burned down forty-eight hours after the body parts were discovered on Hale Street. By the time the police arrived to search for Morgan’s missing head, the condition of the house was deemed too structurally unsound to allow the cadaver dog to enter. The day after Morgan’s torso was found, Coleman’s alleged drug house also burned to the ground.
11

Lacking a solid case, the district attorney had offered Howell a plea bargain, which would have entailed a 27½-year sentence in exchange for an admission of guilt. Howell not only rejected the offer but became so irate when his court-appointed attorney, Wayne Frost, brought up the plea during their first meeting, he refused to speak with Frost again until the morning of their first day in court.

Despite the problematic evidence, the two sides were utterly mismatched. The young, meticulously prepared prosecutor, Raj Prasad, a compact presence with a high, reedy voice, couldn’t wait to lay a series of PowerPoint presentations on the jury. Frost, on the other hand, had a beleaguered air. He read haltingly from a yellow legal pad and did not call any witnesses of his own. Aaron Coleman’s attorney, Brian Gagniuk, an almost comically baby-faced man
12
who nonetheless comported himself with a practiced and lawyerly flamboyance, was probably the most impressive of the bunch, but had a minor role thanks to the lack of any direct evidence against his client.

For the state, the most damning testimony came from Monique Foster—underlined when Prasad played back a jailhouse phone conversation between Howell and Foster. In the recording, Foster has obviously been weeping. “I hope that everything goes as you want it to go,” she says, pausing between words to sniffle.

Howell, belying his rather dim courtroom presence, sounds confident in his reply. “They subpoena you, they can’t force you to testify,” he tells Foster. “You ain’t got to.”

Foster says, “I don’t know, Kevin.”

Before she’s able to continue, a computerized phone-company voice interrupts to say, “
Thank. You. For. Using. Evercom.
”

On the stand, Foster, dressed in high boots, tight black jeans, and a bright pink zippered sweatshirt, became visibly upset during her testimony. Foster admitted she’d only told the police about Howell’s confession out of fear of losing her child. “They said I was looking at conspiracy and could get life,” Foster said. “Honestly, today, I don’t want to be up here. I love this man.” She exhaled deeply, and her voice hitched. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing I put my child’s father behind bars.”

Frost, during his opening argument, anticipated Foster’s testimony and launched directly into an obfuscating Hail Mary pass, insisting to the jury, “The prosecutor wants you to connect dot after dot after dot. This was a guy trying to get back together with his girlfriend! He saw something on the news, and he was trying to act important. This is a different era, ladies and gentlemen. Listen to the music they sing now. He was simply bragging the way they do in rap music now. I’m pretty sure they [rap artists] don’t actually kill police officers just because they sing about it.”

Before closing arguments began, Hathaway considered the case against Coleman, who had not been directly implicated in the killings by anyone except the prosecutor. Monique Foster never claimed Kevin Howell said anything about Coleman’s participation in the murder or dismemberment; Jermaine Overman had simply described Coleman as being present the night they’d entered an abandoned home and seen a dead body; Brian Howell, in his testimony, would only say Coleman had been selling crack.

Prasad endeavored to argue that, regardless who committed the murder, the dismemberment would have required at least two people.

Judge Hathaway frowned. “The dismemberment apparently occurred after the murder,” he murmured. “But I don’t know if that’s a two-man job. I really don’t.”

Prasad chuckled in an unsettling way and said, “When I say it’s a heavy job, judge, I mean it’s a heavy job. That torso alone weighed fifty-eight pounds.”

Gagniuk, Coleman’s attorney, stepped forward and announced, “Last Tuesday, Your Honor, I cut down five trees. It was a two-person job, but I did it myself. I have pictures on my phone to prove it. It was probably not the best idea. But I did it.”

Once this debate exhausted itself, Hathaway dismissed the charges against Coleman, but he continued to express reservations about the overall logic of the prosecution’s case. “It just doesn’t make much sense as a motive,” he said, rubbing his temple as he stared down at his notes. “They wanted to kill a random guy buying drugs from them?”

“The unfortunate analogy,” Prasad countered, “is
The Godfather
.”

“So they killed one of their
own
customers?” Hathaway asked. “It just doesn’t make sense as a way to drive the competition out of the neighborhood. I still don’t quite get the motive, at least as presented.”

Prasad smiled nervously and acknowledged, “It might not be the
best
way to do business.”

“Why wouldn’t they do it to one of the competitors if they really want to reenact
The Godfather
?” Hathaway continued, apparently not quite understanding Prasad’s reference, which clearly had been meant to recall the scene where one of Don Corleone’s enemies, the recalcitrant Hollywood producer Jack Woltz, wakes up, horrified, beside the decapitated head of his beloved prizewinning racehorse.