Motor City Burning (14 page)

Doyle slowed the car and blinked at Jimmy, seeming to come back from another world. “That a new suit you're wearing?” Doyle said.

“Yeah, poplin. Picked it up at Brooks Brothers when Flo and I were in New York. The bow tie, too. You like?”

“Very nice. Makes you look positively pro-fuckin-fessorial.”

“Pro-fuckin-fessorial.” Jimmy chuckled. “You really somethin, man.”

“You know you're not suppose to wear white bucks before Memorial Day, don't you?”

“Course I do, but weather this fine, I decided to bend the rules. How bout you? That silk suit don't look cheap.”

“Can't afford to buy cheap clothes. I got an Italian guy out on Livernois making my suits for me now.”

“Bespoke?”

“Got no choice. Nothing off the rack fits me.”

“The shirt too?”

“Oh yeah. You ever seen a shirt in a store with a fifteen-inch neck and thirty-seven-inch sleeves?”

“Not as I recall.”

“That's because they don't make them. I'm telling you, Jimmy, I'm a freak.”

“I dig them cuff links.”

“Thanks, they're opals.” He shot his cuffs, pleased by the compliment. “Got to do my part to keep up our rep as the sharpest dressers on the force.”

“Ain't sayin much. Most a them chumps look like they sport coats made out of car upholstery.”

“Or wallpaper.”

They laughed, not because it was funny but because it was so true. Most of their fellow detectives thought a sport coat was something you put on when you needed to cover the hairy forearms sticking out of your short-sleeved shirt. Not all of Doyle's shirts had French cuffs, but he wouldn't dream of wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a necktie, any more than he would dream of wearing one of those wide cop neckties made out of synthetic shit—the better to keep gravy and soup off your shirt, the better to cover your nose if you had to pop a car trunk on a hot day knowing that the body in there had been marinating at least a week.

Jimmy said, “You really think this Armstrong woman's gonna tell us somethin we don't already know?”

“I got no idea, Jimmy, but we can't afford not to check her out, can we? You heard Sarge. He's got people all the way up to Cavanagh breathing down his neck to make this case go down.”

“You must think she gonna be good, way you been buggin me to ride out here with you.”

They both knew why Doyle wanted Jimmy to ride along. Henry Hull said the woman was black, and the detectives knew that they were more likely to get something out of her if there was another black face—Jimmy Robuck's—in the room. It usually helped to have a black face in the room when a Detroit police interviewed a black witness or interrogated a black suspect, and it always helped when a black defendant went on trial. A black judge on the bench, a black detective on the witness stand, even a couple of black bailiffs could help put a jury at ease, give a boost to the prosecution, convince the jurors that a black defendant actually had a chance of getting justice inside the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice.

Doyle parked at the corner of Pallister and Hamilton, and the partners got out and stood looking up at a yellow brick pile with
Larrow Arms
carved in stone above the front door. They could hear the round-the-clock whoosh of the Lodge Freeway off to their right.

Doyle pushed the button marked
ARMSTRONG
and opened the buzzing foyer door. Jimmy followed him up one flight of stairs. The stairwell smelled like collard greens that had been boiling in fat back for years. The steam had become part of the wallpaper and carpets. While Doyle was no great fan of soul food, he found the smell reassuring, a sign of permanence. And the building was clean, in good repair. The Negro middle class, fighting the good fight.

The woman who opened the door was what Doyle had been led to expect by their phone conversation. She was all the way Southern—a rust-colored wig, flowered dress, gold-rimmed bifocals, her arms as soft as bread dough with brown flesh sagging from her biceps. She was wearing perfume, good, strong, nose-hair-curling perfume. She looked like she was on her way out to church, which was actually a possibility because this was Wednesday and Southern Baptists took Wednesdays almost as seriously as they took Sundays. She had a bosom like a queen-size mattress, and Doyle had a hunch she sang in the church choir and could really belt it out.

“Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, “I'm Detective Doyle and this is Detective Robuck from the Detroit Police Department. We spoke on the phone.” The men showed her their shields.

“Come in, gentlemen, come in,” she said with a slight drawl, like this was a long-awaited social visit and not a homicide investigation. “You gentlemen make yourselves to home while I fix us a cup a tea. Y'all drink tea, don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” they said in unison.

She went into the kitchen but the detectives didn't sit down. They both shuffled around the living room, looking at things, trying to read the woman. The apartment was immaculate, the rug worn but swept so hard and so often it made Doyle's arms ache just to look at it. The hardwood floor glowed. The walls and tabletops were cluttered with framed pictures of babies, old people, teenagers in caps and gowns, football players, an ironworker dancing and grinning on a skyscraper's I-beam, and then the two pictures you knew were coming: the dead saints, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Charlotte Armstrong returned with a silver tea service and motioned for the men to sit in the matching chairs that faced across the coffee table toward the sofa, where she installed herself, regal as a queen. The chairs were wrapped in hard plastic and they crackled when the detectives sat down. There was a plate on the coffee table stacked high with bricks of fresh-baked crumb cake. The men did as they were told and helped themselves. It was delicious, still warm, loaded with brown sugar and cinnamon, and there was a long reverent silence as they ate.

Doyle got things started by asking Charlotte Armstrong if she was feeling better.

“Yes, I'm better today, praise the Lord. Like I tole you on the phone, I been in bed the past two days with a misery in my back.”

“Is that your husband?” Jimmy asked, motioning toward the grinning man on the I-beam.

“Yes, that's my Charles. He passed last Christmas.”

“I'm sorry for your—”

“Rose to treasurer in his ironworker's local, first time a Negro was ever elected an officer. Made good money, too, a hundred and sixty a week plus overtime, enough for me to have my own car. That picture there was taken on the twenty-first floor of the new Pontchartrain Hotel downtown. Heights didn't mean a thing to Charles. Worked forty-one years on high iron, what he did his whole life.”

Jimmy was thinking about how Detroiters love to boast about their wages when Doyle said, “Looks like Charles loved his work.”

It was the perfect thing to say. Charlotte Armstrong beamed at him, and again Jimmy had to marvel at his partner's knack for putting people at ease, getting them to tell him things.

Doyle pointed at two pictures of a young man in a gold frame: one a muddied but grinning football player holding his helmet against his hip, the other a beaming graduate in an indigo cap and gown.

“That your son?” he asked.

“Yes, thas my James. He's the spit and image of his father. The Lord done raised me up a holy son. He's an accountant at Ford's. Yesterday were his birthday.”

“And how old he got to be yesterday?” Jimmy said.

“He done made twenty-six. Spent the whole afternoon in that chair you're sitting in. He do comfort my gray hairs.”

In one smooth move Doyle shifted gears—finished his crumb cake, put down his tea cup, took out a notebook and ballpoint pen. “Now Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, “Mr. Hull tells me that when he came to visit you, you told him about some things you saw last July 26th. Tell us, what exactly did you see that night?”

She put down her tea cup, pinkie extended, and patted her lips with her napkin. She was enjoying herself. Doing her civic duty.

“It must of been after midnight,” she said. “Yes, it was definitely past midnight because Charles and I stayed up to watch the late news about the riot. Then he went on to bed because he had to get up early for a job he was just starting out in Troy at—”

“Yes, it was after midnight. . . .” Doyle could keep people on track without them realizing there was a track.

“I had all the lights off on account of the snipers, naturally, and I was sitting by that window there, looking out across the freeway. It looked like a war over on Grand Boulevard. Tanks and guns going off. Fire trucks and po-lice. Sirens. I probably shouldn't of been so close to the window, but it was a furnace-hot night and there was so much noise weren't no way I could sleep.”

“What did you see next?”

“A car pulled up right down below that window.”

“What kind of car was it?” Doyle had started writing in his notebook.

“Oh goodness, Detective, I don't know much about cars. And the street was dark on account of they shot out all the streetlights. There was a moon, though.”

“Were the car's headlights on?”

“No, but when the car doors opened I could see by the inside lights that it were real pretty. Shiny like. But it weren't no new car. Had lots of chrome like cars use to have.”

“Do you have any idea what kind of car it was? Was it a big car like a Cadillac? Or small like a Mustang? Or—”

“Gracious no. My eyes aren't so good anymore.”

Doyle didn't write that down. He said, “How about the color?”

“Well, the seats were red and black, that much I could see by the inside lights.”

Jimmy said, “You say the car doors opened, Mrs. Armstrong. Two doors, three doors, four?”

She looked at Jimmy. She seemed surprised to see him sitting there.

“Two doors,” she said to Doyle. “And two men got out.”

“Did you recognize them?” he said.

“No, from this angle I couldn't see their faces. And it being so dark—”

“Could you tell if they were black or white?”

“They were both Negroes, of that I'm sure.”

“How can you be sure?”

“They were wearing short-sleeve shirts. One was fat, the other was much taller. And thin.”

“What'd they do next?”

“They opened the trunk and stood there talking for the longest. Sounded like they were arguing. Then the fat man took something out the trunk. Looked like one a them bags soldiers carry. You know, a, a—”

“Duffel bag?”

“That's it, a duffel bag. And then he carried it cross the lawn and into the building. The other man followed him. In the moonlight I could see that the fat man, the one carrying the duffel bag, had a limp. I could still hear them talking—”

“Could you make out what they were saying?”

“No, they were talking too low. I'm sorry.”

“That's fine, Mrs. Armstrong. You're doing just fine. What'd you hear next?”

“I heard the downstairs door open.”

“Is that door always kept locked?”

“Oh yes. They's been a buzzer on the front door since we moved in here five years ago.”

“Can you hear the buzzer from up here?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Did you hear the buzzer before the men opened the door?”

“Come to think of it, no. I didn't.”

“So these men had a key to the front door?” Doyle and Jimmy exchanged a smile.

“Well, yes,” she said, “I suppose so. I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose you're right.”

“So the men came in through the front door.”

“Yes, I heard them come up the first flight of stairs—no voices, just footsteps. They passed our door, then kept on going upstairs. I heard someone knock on a door. For a while after that I didn't hear a thing. I figured they'd gone into an apartment and that was the end of it. I was fixin to go to bed—but then I heard their voices again.”

“Where?”

“Coming from up above.” She pointed at the ceiling. “But I don't think they were inside the building.”

“Why not?”

“Well, they were laughing, talking loud. The way their voices carried, it just sounded like they were outside.”

“On the roof?”

“The fifth floor's kept locked on account of that's where the residents store they spare things. But yes, it sounded like there were two men on the roof, maybe three.”

“Who has a key to the fifth floor?”

“I wouldn't know. We never stored anything up there.”

“Did you hear anything else?”

“Oh yes.” She smoothed the lap of her dress, brushed away a crumb. Doyle and Jimmy were afraid to look at each other. They could hear the roar of the freeway, the ticking of a clock. Finally she said, “I heard gunshots.”

“How many?”

“I counted nine.”

“And then what?”

“Then it stopped. I heard two men talking very loud—arguing again. They might of been drunk. Before long I heard a car coming up the street—it was a po-lice.”

“Yes? And then?”

“Nothing.”

“No footsteps? No voices?”

“Not a thing.”

“No one left the building?”

“Not that I could see or hear.”

“About how much longer did you sit by the window?”

“Not long, maybe fifteen minutes. I saw another po-lice pass by real slow with its lights off, but that was all I saw. Then I went on to bed.”

“Did you report this to the police?”

“I tried, but the lines were always busy. I couldn't get through.”

Frank and Jimmy helped themselves to a second piece of crumb cake while Charlotte Armstrong went into the kitchen to write down her landlord's name, address and phone number on a slip of pink paper.

When they got back to 1300 Beaubien, Doyle started typing up his notes while Jimmy looked over his shoulder, occasionally making a suggestion. Doyle was a much faster typist, used all his fingers and didn't even have to look at the keys.