Low Road (28 page)

Ralph Watts, the brother-in-law to Shirley Sailor—who accompanied Mr. Goines to the dealer's house a few nights before the murders—repeated Ms. Coney's assertion. He didn't specifically place the man they went to visit that evening in any of Mr. Goines's books, but he recalled that the pusher's name was Ronnie. He recognized what he believed may have been a major clue about who committed the homicides when, days after the murders, one of the children began to announce, “Ronnie killed my Shirley! Ronnie killed my Shirley!” Some of the women in the family quickly shut the little one's mouth, and this information was never reported to police, for fear that the child might be put in danger. But whether or not the dealer called Ronnie had seen resemblance of himself in any novel, others agreed with former detective Quinn's suggestion that the crimes were simply drug-related, having nothing to do with what Mr. Goines wrote.

Still, there was another, more unsettling version reported among Sailor family members: that the words of the little girl who turned four years old days after the killings implicated cops who were allegedly there before detectives arrived at the scene. The same daughter who Watts remembered calling Ronnie's name said that uniformed officers—or at least two men dressed like them—shot Mr. Goines while he sat at the typewriter, and turned on Sailor when she screamed. As one Sailor sibling remembers it, the child broke a week of complete silence by telling how murderers then hid her and toddler Donna in the bathroom, explaining, “We don't kill little girls.” The problem with this account is that there's no reference, in any of the documentation I gathered, to Mr. Goines being found at or near a typewriter. It may, however, explain origins of the dramatic rumor his admirers would repeat for decades to come. Moreover, it raises questions about whether an author who occasionally wrote about dirty cops could have died because of it.

In the early part of 2003, I found Walter Williamson occupying the same north Detroit neighborhood where he and his family had lived throughout the years. He had recently left his home in Westland, Michigan, to move in with his mother and care for her before she died. Walter was planning to return to Westland before the year's end. With no telephone number available, Charles Glover and I drove to his address, hoping to talk with him. I was told that he hadn't publicly spoken about Mr. Goines in almost thirty years. Charles suggested we bring along a chess board and a bottle of wine. After looking out onto the porch and seeing Charles, Walter opened the door. He looked nothing like the timid, little man I imagined who had been frightened into silence by his friend's murder. Instead, Walter showed outward signs of the player he had been in his prime. Wearing a bathrobe and hairnet, with a thick and plentiful amount of straightened black tresses netted and bundled upward onto his head, he looked at least ten years younger than the age he claimed, seventy-two. I was surprised at how quickly he appeared to recognize Charles, who credited his uncle and his uncle's companions like Walter with helping to give him a sense of manhood, in spite of their unorthodox and corruptive influence.

The first thing I noticed after shaking Walter's hand and being shown into his living room was a chess set with all of its pieces in position sitting on a green fold-up table. The set I'd brought wouldn't be needed. After at least four decades, Walter was still a passionate chess player. He was expecting a friend to arrive for their regular game any minute. My bottle of wine wouldn't be opened, either. As we all sat down, Walter told us he had stopped drinking and smoking. He was in recovery from treatment for prostate cancer and had only been outside the house three times during the previous two months. He had been through a rough time and was still in the midst of a slow recovery process, he told us. If we wanted to get older, he said, we should pay specific attention to our health now. Was this the sort of talk that retired pimps and Hall of Fame players normally delivered? When his chess opponent arrived, the flashes and flourishes that Charles remembered began.

“I'm glad you came. You know why?” Walter asked the younger man who sat across the board from him. “I ain't kicked nobody's ass today.” We all laughed. That sounded more like player talk to me. Walter had switched his TV set to an audio jazz channel, and in no time we were listening to mellow tunes as cigarette smoke filled the small living room. Charles said it was just like he remembered things when his uncle was alive, except, of course, that Walter wasn't smoking. When Walter's visitor learned that Charles and I were there to do discuss Walter's memories of Mr. Goines, he seemed surprised.

“The author?” he asked in disbelief. The man revealed a subtle reverence that I had recognized in the voices of any number of people I asked about Mr. Goines's books on other occasions. Walter's partner had never accepted the stories he heard about the longtime friendship. “I thought that was just Walt talkin' shit,” he said. Walter had missed his old friend over the years. He and Mr. Goines had been as thick as thieves in the literal sense. Listening to him speak of the many times they shared, it was easy to imagine the writer sitting across from him at the chess board where his visitor sat. Mr. Goines had left behind no interviews that I ever came across. Most likely, he had never received an opportunity to give any formal Q and A. And I found myself wondering, from time to time, just what he might say if he were alive and able to talk to me about his life. Would he have overcome his addiction? Would he have continued writing? Walter's recollections were to be the final contribution I received from those who personally knew Mr. Goines's traits and ways. Yet, not even the people who took the time to talk with me were prepared to say what the man might have become. Walter only knew that his friend had genuine potential. His most pensive moments appeared at the times when he thought about the sudden way in which the author died.

“It was horrible because Donnie had a name,” he said. I knew he hadn't meant to suggest that the death of anyone less known would have been less significant. Mr. Goines's popularity only made the blow of his sudden absence even more devastating. Walter had been excited to see how far his running buddy might go and how much he might achieve.

Talking about Mr. Goines's death took him back to that day just weeks before the murders. There seemed to be no doubt in Walter's mind that he had been in the presence of the men who fired the bullets. All three were uncommonly tall, at least six feet five inches, he thought. They were Caucasians with stringy hair and rotting teeth. They wore jeans, and by Walter's assessment, they were probably addicts like Mr. Goines. The men didn't necessarily give Walter the impression that they were directly affected by the dirty trick Mr. Goines said he had pulled, whatever it was. They seemed like men who came in from out of town to do a job, and who were vicious enough in their motivation to see it through. There was dope involved with their reason for coming to 232 Cortland on that day. Mr. Goines had acknowledged he “put shit on” someone. Walter speculated that Mr. Goines might have been given access to heroin on consignment before he left L.A. and failed to settle his debt. Out of fear, Walter had deliberately remained silent when he got the opportunity to speak to police about what he remembered. He couldn't be certain that the men he thought to be his friend's killers were not still in town. It wasn't until later, he told me, when he described them to a person who was working on another project about Mr. Goines. But Walter wasn't clear on how much time had passed since the killings and when he received this telephone call.

One or two who were less connected to Mr. Goines's personal life, however, thought the drug connection to Mr. Goines's murder was a shaky one. The field trip I thought it was absolutely necessary that I take was to Los Angeles. Although his experiences in the city comprised a relatively small and mostly unpleasant chapter in his own life, aside from Detroit, L.A. was the primary setting for Mr. Goines's novels. It was also the place where I could have a face-to-face interview with Bentley Morriss, the man largely responsible for bringing Donald Goines's books, along with the first biography about his life, to the world's attention. Originally printed the same year of its subject's murder,
Donald Writes No More
was written by Eddie Stone. I didn't miss the coincidence that I was the second person of the same first name to examine Mr. Goines's life. I remember flipping through
Donald Writes No More
once or twice at the bookstore and thinking it was rather flat but forming no real conclusion otherwise. I only questioned how thorough the research could have been, given that there were only weeks between the time of Mr. Goines's and Shirley Sailor's deaths and the publication's date of copyright. (In what I thought a frightening peculiarity, my sister later read to me, from its third or fourth page, the most peculiar disclaimer for a so-called biography that I had ever heard and eventually saw for myself: “Some characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”) On the other hand, while I considered that I was at the disadvantage of working on a book close to three decades later, I waited for some of the personal records I requested for months at a time. In fact, I was finished with all my writing for the manuscript, when, after nearly a year, I still hadn't received the DD 214 Air Force file of Mr. Goines's military history.

I had heard stories about Bentley Morriss and his handling of business related to the Goines estate. A few family members felt that, with all their loved one had contributed—and was still contributing—to the success of Holloway House, they deserved more than the periodic royalty payments they were given. Whether this was true or false, I wanted to get his perspectives and check out the headquarters of the place that now billed itself “World's Largest Publisher of Black Experience Paperback Books,” due, of course in large part, to Mr. Goines's body of work. I first talked with Mr. Morriss on the telephone. He seemed a friendly man with the speaking voice of a radio announcer. In June 2001, he wrote to me and was nice enough to send along a press kit and a copy of
Street Players.
I had heard about one or two film projects that were to be based on Goines books. One had even been pitched on a cable television channel. It aired a commercial for the soundtrack to
Black Gangster,
a movie that would be based on the novel. But it turned out there were seven more books, for which there were movie options, at least one that was reportedly in the postproduction, or final, stages of actual filming. Companies in New York and California had expressed interest in bringing
Never Die Alone, Daddy Cool, Crime Partners, Black Girl Lost, Death List, Kenyatta's Revenge
and
Kenyatta's Last Hit
to the big screen, Morriss informed me.

“Practically all his books have been translated into French,” he also wrote. “His books are sold throughout the globe, and in the past twenty-five years have never been out of print. The hip-hop and rap generation [of] artists have embraced his works, and sales increase each year with a whole new generation of readers.” It was just a little less than a year from the day I received his letter when I got out of bed at 5:00
A.M.
with plans to meet him in the afternoon. Including plenty of layover time, it was a long trip to L.A. From our two or three telephone conversations, I envisioned a stocky, energetic man with white hair that contrasted deeply tanned skin. A prototypical, semiretired, California-beach type is what I expected, but all I was right about was the white hair. After catching a private taxi to Holloway House, I went into the lobby and took the elevator up to its editorial section. I waited with a receptionist until I was called back into his office. Morriss, seated at a large, wood-finish desk, was not outwardly the California-slick businessman at all. If he spent significant time in the sun, his complexion gave no indication. His attire was a simple department-store dress shirt and buttoned casual sweater with slacks.

Following a handshake, I sat in one of the comfortable chairs of his spacious office. I thanked him for taking the time to talk with me and started my micro cassette recorder. Within the first fifteen minutes of the interview, Morriss offered an anecdote. He recalled an encounter at a gathering of a professional organization about ten, maybe fifteen, years ago. A black woman of about sixty approached him at the Holloway House exhibit during the conference.

“We were exhibiting at the American Library Association,” he said, “and these were all people of ‘very high intellectual capability,' and here we are with Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines and the rest of them, and, you know, some hard-rock literature, and a lovely looking lady, small, diminutive,
very
well-dressed came up and said—and we had, also the other series, we had the Mankind books, which are autobiographies of African Americans that have made grade achievement. We have about sixty of those that we've done. And she looked at them and she said, ‘This is lovely, but how can you publish material like
this?'
And I said, ‘Ma'am, have you read Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim?' She says, ‘Absolutely. Every single one of them.' So that kind of gave me an indication, or should give you an indication, that there may be a group or a class within the community that says this is ‘street stuff' but privately appreciates it, nonetheless.”

Morriss and his staff came up with in-house theories about who killed Mr. Goines and Shirley Sailor that resembled the speculation shared by friends and relatives: “We couldn't believe it. We got a call, I think from one of the sisters, who then sent us tearsheets from the
Detroit Free Press.
We called everybody we knew in Detroit. Could they verify it? Did this really happen, and was there any lead as to who did it? But there was no additional information. There were two theories—and they were strictly theories. One, he wrote about the life that he knew. He wrote about the people he knew, people that had crossed his path, and one theory is that if he continued writing about these people, they could be identified. And if they could be identified, they might expose themselves to arrest. The other theory, which doesn't make any sense to me, is that he had built up such a big tag with his supplier that they were angry, but that's ridiculous. I mean you can break his leg or poke an eye out, but you don't kill your source. You know then you're not gonna get paid. He's gone.”