Motor City Burning (21 page)

They taught typing and American history together in one of the Freedom Schools in McComb, Mississippi. One day they got sent over to Alabama to post voter-registration drive flyers in and around Tuskegee. Such long-distance jobs usually fell to Willie because his Buick was one of the most dependable cars in the Sojourner Motor Fleet. After he and Nancy worked into the early evening posting the flyers, they decided it would be unwise to risk driving the 300 miles back to Mississippi in the dark. The three volunteers who'd disappeared while driving at night near Meridian were still missing. Willie suggested they spend the night in his apartment in Tuskegee, which was doubling as a safe house for Freedom Summer volunteers. There was no one staying there that night, and he offered to sleep on the sofa and let her have the bedroom.

Nancy was on him as soon as the door clicked shut. Willie didn't put up much of a fight, and neither of them did a whole lot of sleeping that night.

And neither of them said a word about it afterwards. In fact, Nancy hardly spoke to him at all the rest of the summer. He realized he'd performed his function and was no longer of any use to her. If he felt anger, it was at himself for allowing himself to be so casually used. She'd flipped the tables and he never saw it coming. But his shame was real: he had taken the bait, he'd fallen into the very trap his mother had warned him about, the one the white man so badly wanted him to fall into. For reasons he never would have been able to imagine in the spring of 1964, he was glad when the volunteers packed up at the end of the summer and went back up north where they belonged. He had survived that bloody summer with nothing worse than a bruised ego and a guilty conscience.

Now, four long years after that night with Nancy Fegenbaum, he had finally overcome his guilt and his shame. He understood that this was a first step, a giant step, on the road to repudiating the world that made him. But even as he congratulated himself for taking this step, he could see that he had also stepped into yet another world of worry. Chick Murphy was not a man to fuck with. He was rich and powerful, he was white, and he had a temper and a gun. The thing that had been so thrilling to Willie just a few hours ago—the danger of being with such a man's wife—now looked like exactly what it was: stone craziness. Thrills, by nature, are fleeting things, but this one had not even survived the night. Willie had a terrifying vision of Blythe Murphy, in a drunken rage, screaming at Chick how much she adored Willie Bledsoe's black cock. . . .

He heard the chugging of a motor coming toward him. It was a member of the Oakland Hills grounds crew driving a cart full of rakes and tools across the golf course. It looked like one of those carts the traffic cops drove in Detroit. The sun was out of the trees now and the sky's blue was giving way to a harsh white glare. The coming day was going to be hot—not Alabama hot, but still hot and gummy. Willie turned back toward the clubhouse, keeping to the trees.

On the long walk back, he forced himself to quit thinking about Nancy Fegenbaum and the Murphys and start thinking about the bigger danger—the detective who'd visited his Uncle Bob. Willie took the visit as a sign. The cops knew a lot more than he thought they knew, and he had done almost nothing to cover his tracks. It was time to quit fucking around.

As soon as he got through the lunch shift today, he would get the Buick out of the garage and drive it to that Earl Scheib shop on Livernois and get a twenty-dollar paintjob. Then, on his next day off, he would drive to Murphy Buick and swap it for whatever the Surf offered. Just get rid of the damn thing.

After that he would have to sit tight and wait for his brother to call from Denver. He told himself that once he got rid of the Buick and found out what had happened to those last three guns, he would be in the clear.

Unless, of course, the cops were somehow able to prove that the unthinkable had happened that night on the roof of the Larrow Arms. That was still the one great unknown piece of this puzzle. That was still the thing that terrified him the most.

14

T
HE DAY AFTER HE TALKED TO
B
OB
B
REWER AND MADE THE
pickup about the traffic stop, Doyle got sent out on a fatal stabbing at the Brewster projects. He didn't want to get distracted from the Helen Hull case—again—but fresh homicides always took precedence over old ones, so he followed Sgt. Harry Schroeder's orders and worked the Brewster case non-stop for a week, until he got a confession after grilling a scared teenager all night in the yellow room. After a few hours of sleep at home, Doyle walked into the squad room shortly before noon and went straight to the Bunn-O-Matic, yawning like an alligator.

“Whatsamatter?” Jimmy Robuck said, making a show of checking his watch. He had his white bucks propped on his desk and a big shit-eating grin on his face. “Couldn't sleep?”

“I was here all night working that Brewster stabbing. Got a confession a little after sunup.”

“Congratulations. Whodunit?”

“Nobody you'd know. Fifteen-year-old kid with no priors named Cliff Robinson. A cousin of Smokey's, believe it or not.”

“I believe it if you say it.”

Doyle sat at his desk, sipping coffee. Jimmy was still beaming. Doyle said, “The fuck're you so happy about?”

“Come have a look.”

Doyle walked over to Jimmy's desk, which was immaculate, as always. Only when he got close did Doyle see that there was something on the desk other than the telephone and the empty In/Out basket.

Nine pieces of shiny metal.

“Looky what I found,” Jimmy said.

Doyle was staring at the pieces of metal like he thought they might jump up and fly out the window. “What is it?”

“Shell casings.” Jimmy pointed to the three on his left. “These bad boys are thirty-aught-six, out of a Remington 700 with a heavy barrel.”

“Where'd they come from?”

“Roof of the Larrow Arms. Same as the three in the middle—seven point six-two millimeter.”

“How do you know all this shit?”

“Cause Sid Wolff told me so.”

“You've already run them through ballistics?”

“Some people been workin while you been sleepin.”

“Fuck you, Jimmy.”

“And last but not least, over here on the right, we got us three thirty-cals out of a Winchester Model 70.”

“Did you say thirty-caliber?”

“Is what I said.”

“Jimmy, this is great!”

They had both read the Helen Hull autopsy report so many times they could recite it from memory, especially the faint ray of hope the medical examiner held out when she wrote that the fatal bullet was a .30-caliber and there was a possibility of comparison if the gun it was fired from was found.

“Now for the best part,” Jimmy said. “According to Sid, all three of these types of ammo's got one thing in common. Care to guess what it is?”

“Goddammit, Jimmy, you know I don't know shit about guns.”

Jimmy's smile stretched wider. “Sid says all three of these types of ammo's commonly used by military snipers in Vee-yet-nam.”

“I'll be damned. How'd you get up on the roof?”

“The super let me up there. A brother name of—”

“Anthony Thompson.”

Now it was Jimmy's turn to be impressed. “How you know that?”

“I went out and talked to the landlord last week, remember? He told me Anthony did some time, he didn't know what for. I'll check that out today. The landlord seemed to think he and Anthony are the only ones with keys to the top floor and the roof.”

“Yes and no. There's only one key to the top floor in the building. Anthony leaves it on a nail in the mop closet downstairs, says everybody in the building knows about it case they want to get any of they things out of storage. Sort of an honor system. And the doors that let onto the roof have inside dead bolts, no key. So thee-retically anyone in the building can get out on the roof.”

“Shit.”

“It gets worse. Our man Anthony claims he spent the entire riot week at his cousin's crib on Burlingame, behind the Dexter Theater. Says they drank looted Johnnie Walker scotch like it was tap water, played cards, TV'ed it. Paid fifty cents a fifth for that top-shelf booze.”

“His story check out?”

“Fraid so. Anthony's not going to be able to help us beyond what we already got from the roof. So how'd it go with the landlord?”

“Good question,” Doyle said, yawning into his fist, sipping coffee. “He didn't give me all that much. Nice enough guy, but he's about as likely to help us as he is to join the Black Panthers, you catch my drift.”

“I catch your drift. Man's all the way boor-zhwa-zee.”

“Yeah. But when I asked him if any of his tenants had served in Vietnam, I know he lied.”

“How you know?”

“Because it was written all over his face. I just know. I got some more good news. After I talked to him, while I was driving back down the Lodge, I remembered a traffic stop Jerry Czapski and I made last spring, my last night in a uniform—an older model car with lots of chrome and red seats, a lot like the one Charlotte Armstrong says she saw the night of the shooting. I looked up the run sheet and—you ready?”

“Course I'm ready.”

“The driver's middle name was Brewer, same as the landlord's last name, and his driver's license had a Tuskegee, Alabama address. The landlord told me he grew up in a little town called Andalusia, halfway between Tuskegee and Mobile.”

“You reckon the landlord and this Buick dude related somehow?”

“Don't know for sure, but I intend to find out.”

“Where this Buick dude stay?”

“He gave Zap the Algiers Motel as his local address—”

“You mean the Desert Inn.”

“Right. I'll swing by there this afternoon. I don't expect them to be able to give me anything, but I'll check it out anyway. Then I'll swing by the Tenth and have a chat with Czapski. I think I remember stopping a pink car, but I want to double-check it with Zap. At the very least I've got some more questions next time I go see the landlord.”

Jimmy was nodding, taking it all in. “One other thing I forgot to mention. Sides the casings, there was some malt liquor cans on the roof. I got Anthony to padlock the door and told him not to let nobody up there. An evidence team's on the way over there now to dust the place, take pictures.”

They could both feel it, the electrical charge that comes when a cold case suddenly gets a pulse. It was the kind of rush they lived for.

Jimmy got out a legal pad and they made a list of the fresh leads they needed to check out. They knew it was important to become very methodical now. Miss nothing. Play by the book. They knew that all of a sudden they had a chance.

As Doyle expected, the May 1967 guest log at the Desert Inn, formerly the Algiers Motel, yielded no guest named Bledsoe. Dives like that were why the name Smith was invented.

Next he checked out Anthony Thompson's criminal history, which was another disappointment. The super at the Larrow Arms was an undistinguished breed of bad-ass. His sheet contained nothing terribly sexy: a few drunk-and-disorderlies, aggravated assault, soliciting a prostitute, and six months at Jackson for breaking and entering. Not exactly the profile of a revolutionary Doyle was hoping for. Plus the guy had the air-tight Johnnie Walker alibi.

Doyle's next stop was his old stomping ground, the Tenth Precinct house on Livernois. He stood in front of the building in a warm, greasy drizzle and studied the modern, state-of-the-art piece of shit that went up during Jerome Cavanagh's first term as mayor. The walls were made of panels covered with gravel, like vertical slabs of somebody's driveway. Doyle was on hand the day the mayor cut the ribbon and proclaimed the building a fitting symbol of the city's progressive spirit, etc., etc., while every cop on the force grumbled that the money wasted on that building should have gone toward pay raises. If there hadn't been a pay freeze there might not have been an epidemic of “blue flu” on the eve of the riot, nearly a quarter of the police force out “sick” when the city could least afford it. But that was hindsight, and police work had taught Doyle there's no future in hindsight.

There were dozens of divots in the gravel facade of the precinct house, reminders that a bunch of drunk brothers had opened fire from the roof of the Earl Scheib shop across Livernois on the fourth day of the riot. Police stations and firefighters under siege by armed civilians. It had been a total breakdown, Doyle thought, a real civil war.

The staff sergeant behind the long counter today was an alcoholic tub of lard named Jimmy McCreedy, who'd spent the past quarter-century moving from one desk to another within the Detroit Police Department and was nearly ready to reap his pension and devote all of his time and energy to his Hibernian interests. Doyle could still remember standing in front of the J.L. Hudson department store on Woodward in a blizzard when he was ten years old, shivering, watching a pink-faced man in short green pants, a short-sleeved green shirt and a green bowler dance a jig in the middle of the street during the St. Patrick's Day parade. This leprechaun didn't even seem to notice that the snow was coming out of Canada in horizontal sheets and the temperature was in the single digits. That was Jimmy McCreedy for you, a man well acquainted with the wondrous power of 90-proof anti-freeze.