Motor City Burning (3 page)

“Ain't a continental thing those fools do that surprises me no more. They get away with murder any day a the week they want to.”

“So did your client kill somebody?” Willie said.

Clyde shot him a withering look. “How the hell'm I suppose to know that, Alabama? You think a man kills somebody and goes around braggin on it?”

“No.”

“Hell no. I don't know if he's guilty and I don't care. He's my client. What I'm tryin to tell you is that the po-lice is still workin shit from the riot. That was news to me.”

It was news to Willie, too. The very worst news he could possibly have heard.

After the final out of the game, a 7-3 loss for the Tigers, Willie stood and took a last long look at the park, trying to commit it to memory. Then he followed Louis and Clyde and the rest of the hardcore fans down the switchbacks to the street. The two friends made plans to meet for Saturday's game against the White Sox, and they asked Willie if he was planning to come.

“Depends on my work schedule,” he said. They posted the schedules on Thursdays, and there was a chance he would have to work on Saturday afternoon. “If I've got the day off I'll definitely be here.”

“Here, Alabama,” Clyde said, handing him a business card. The embossed letters, gold on black, said
Clyde Holland
,
Attorney at Law
. Then
Penobscot Building
and a phone number. “A brother never knows when he's gonna need a lawyer in this man's town.”

“Amen,” Louis said.

“Thanks, Clyde.” Willie slipped the card into his wallet and said his goodbyes.

There was no sign of life at the hippie house on Plum Street, and his Buick was the only car left in the back yard. Driving up Cass, Willie tuned in WJLB and got the new one by Stevie Wonder, “You Met Your Match.” Great bass line and a nice jump to the beat, Willie thought, another sure hit for a kid who'd been cranking them out for years and wasn't even out of his teens yet. Just thinking about Little Stevie Wonder made Willie feel old. Then came the signature sign-off of his favorite deejay, Ernie Durham, velvet-tongued “Ernie D,” who delivered his farewell over a drenched blue bed of horns:
“I'm rough and I'm tough and I know my stuff . . . and you're lucky you live in a town where you can hear the Rockin' Mr. D. before the sun goes down . . . goodbye for now, D-troit, I LOVE ya! Now git yo'selves ready for Martha Jean the Queen!”

But Willie barely heard it. He couldn't stop thinking about Clyde's client getting hauled downtown for questioning in a murder from the riot, a murder that was nearly a year old. Willie realized he'd allowed himself to get lulled into a false sense of security. Just because the riot was ancient history didn't mean the cops had forgotten about the last few unsolved murders. Far from it.

He realized the first thing he needed to do was get this Buick off the street. Again. It was the only thing that could possibly be his undoing. So instead of parking in his usual spot—out in the open at the curb near the corner of Pallister and Poe—he guided the Buick up the narrow driveway that ran between his apartment building and the scorched shell next door. He had to move some tires and old paint cans to make room in the garage. Then he pulled the Buick in and covered it with a tarp and closed the garage door.

He didn't want to give the cops a thing. And he damn sure didn't want to find out—from them or anyone else—exactly what had happened on the night he'd spent the past nine months trying to forget. But the world wouldn't let him forget. It was like a stone in his guts—the killing guilt that lurked there, waiting to pounce if it turned out he had killed a woman in cold blood.

2

S
ATURDAY MORNING NOT QUITE TEN O
'
CLOCK AND
F
RANK
D
OYLE
had the Homicide squad room to himself. The place was quiet, flushed with spring sunshine. If he didn't know better, he might have believed the city of Detroit was at peace with itself.

When he sat down at his big ugly brown metal desk with the
Free Press
sports page and a fresh cup of forty-weight from the Bunn-O-Matic, the first thing Doyle noticed was the manila envelope in his
IN
box. It said
INTEROFFICE
and
CONFIDENTIAL
. That sounded promising, but before he could open it his telephone rang. Not even ten o'clock on a Saturday morning and already the calls had started coming. What was he thinking? This was Detroit. The calls never stopped coming.

Though he'd come in to clear up some paperwork and was, technically, off the clock, Doyle picked up the receiver. You never know. Police work is all about luck and squealers, and maybe this call would bring him luck. The good kind, for a change.

“Homicide, Doyle.” More than a year on the job and he still got a little jolt every time he heard himself say the words.

“Frankie, it's Henry Hull calling from the Harlan House. Sorry to bother you on the weekend like this.”

“No problem, Mr. Hull. You know I'm always glad to hear from you.” It was true, sort of. Whenever Doyle heard that familiar squawk, his first thought was,
The little bug-eyed bastard's never going to give up, God bless him
. Doyle put a smile in his voice and said, “Before we go on, Mr. Hull, I've got to tell you something. You're the last person in the world who still calls me Frankie, and if you don't knock it off I'm going to drop this investigation.”

“Hold on one minute, young fella. You drop this investigation and I'm going to report you to Sgt. Schroeder. You and your brother both.”

“Report us? For what?”

“Shoplifting. Every day on your way home from school you and Rod stopped by the market. I mighta been behind the meat counter but Helen was behind the cash register and old Hawkeye never missed a trick. Every day, she saw you pinch a Bazooka Joe bubble gum and your brother snagged a Tootsie Roll. Every day—for years.”

“You knew? Why didn't you say anything?”

“Because the Doyles were good people. It doesn't hurt a boy if he believes he's slick—so long as he doesn't take it too far. Which you and your brother didn't do, obviously.”

The Hulls' Greenleaf Market was the unofficial social hub of the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood, the place everyone went for bread and milk, for cigarettes and candy and gossip, to argue politics or talk sports. The Hulls were generous with credit, especially if a customer was visited by hardship, which was a regular occurrence in a city that lived and died with the boom-and-bust cycles of the auto industry. They were also, as Doyle had just learned, lenient with the right kind of shoplifters.

“Frankie, you're not gonna believe it,” Henry said, “but I found something we missed!”

He was right. Doyle didn't believe it because Henry left no stone unturned. For the past nine months he'd been amassing a small mountain of evidence in a fourth-floor room at the Harlan House Motel on West Grand Boulevard at the John Lodge Freeway, where Henry now lived and where his wife had died on the morning of July 26, 1967, with a single .30-caliber bullet from a sniper's rifle lodged in her liver.

Or was the fatal bullet fired by someone other than a sniper?

A lot of black people in this town—from rabble-rousing Rev. Albert Cleage to Congressman John Conyers to the editors of the Michigan
Chronicle
to some of the cats way out on the revolutionary fringe—were convinced that the fatal shot was fired not by a sniper (that is, a
black
man) but by a National Guardsman (that is, a
white
man). Given the chaos on West Grand Boulevard that night and the Guard's horrendous performance during the riot, Doyle knew it was not a far-fetched theory. And there had been many times—usually when his boss, Sgt. Harry Schroeder, was pushing him to make that fucking Hull case go down—that he would have been delighted to buy the theory himself. But Doyle didn't buy theories because they suited his desires or someone else's political agenda. He bought theories and made arrests based on physical evidence, witnesses, confessions, and, sometimes, luck and squealers. And he knew he was nowhere close to making an arrest in the Hull case. The name stared down at him from the squad room wall, written in red grease pencil on a sheet of clear acetate:
VIC
#43
HELEN HULL
. Just above it was the name of the only other riot victim whose killer was still at large—
VIC
#42
CARLO SMITH
—a firefighter who got shot through the head while he was organizing units outside a burning warehouse on the East Side. The Hull and Smith cases, like all unsolved homicides, grew colder by the day. They were an insult. A torment. A homicide cop's worst nightmare.

But there was something that gnawed at Doyle even worse than seeing Helen Hull's name in blood-red block letters every time he came to work: the two snapshots of Helen Hull he kept on the cork-board partition that separated his desk from Jimmy Robuck's. Doyle was a sucker for snapshots, especially family snapshots, no doubt because he didn't have a family of his own other than one workaholic brother, an alcoholic sister-in-law, and their two daughters, who grew more ungodly gorgeous by the day and believed, for some strange reason, that their Uncle Frank had personally hung the moon.

Of course there were a dozen pictures of the girls, Lizzie and Val, pinned to the corkboard, along with a picture of his brother the day he'd made captain, a picture of his parents on their wedding day, a picture the Doyle family in front of the Christmas tree taken during the twilight of the Truman administration.

All those pictures orbited around the two pictures of Helen Hull. The bigger one, in full color, showed Henry and Helen surrounded by the Doyle brothers and a couple dozen neighborhood kids, everyone roaring full-throat, arms around each other's shoulders, black kids, white kids, Arab kids, a couple of Hispanic kids, even Henry Wong the Chinese kid, all scabby knees and missing teeth and PF Flyers, one big happy family standing at the top of the center-field bleachers in Tiger Stadium. Doyle loved that picture. Henry and Helen rented a bus every summer and took all the neighborhood kids to a Tigers' game, even sprang for hot dogs and peanuts and Cokes. It was, without fail, the best day of every summer in a boyhood that now seemed like it was nothing but a long string of cloudless summer days.

The other picture of Helen Hull was much smaller, black and white. It was a crime-scene photo taken in the fourth-floor hallway of the Harlan House Motel on the night she died. It was a brutal thing, which was why Doyle kept it pinned to the partition. He would not allow himself to forget what had happened to Helen Hull.

In the photo she was lying on her back on the hallway floor with shards of glass all around her. But it was her expression and her body language that got to Doyle every time he looked at that picture. Her eyes were wide open, like she had just seen something unimaginably horrible, and she was holding up her hands, as though pleading with someone or trying to ward off a blow. There was a dark stain just above the belt of her creamy dress. That's where the bullet went in and her life-blood poured out. Whoever pulled the trigger was one hell of a shot.

The scene was starkly lit. The police photographer had to use a flash because the cops had shot out all the lights as soon as they arrived on the fourth floor. The last thing you noticed was the uniform standing off to the side of the frame holding a flashlight and looking down at Helen Hull with an expression that was hard to read. Was it pity? Or was it scorn that anyone could be stupid enough to stand in a brightly lit picture window while a war was being fought down on the street? The uniform was Charlie Dixon, a classmate of Doyle's from the police academy. One day, when this was all over, Doyle planned to ask Charlie what was on his mind when that flashbulb went off.

“You say we missed something, Mr. Hull?” Doyle said now, sipping coffee and trying to sound excited. He wasn't awake yet.

“Something that was right under our noses the whole time! It's a miracle we missed it!”

His excitement was more contagious than the measles, and Doyle found himself waking up a little. “What is it, Mr. Hull?”

“I can't explain over the phone, Frankie. You gotta come see it with your own eyes. It's unbelievable!”

Doyle woke up a little more. Henry said “unbelievable” only when he had something good. “I'll drop by soon as I clear up some paperwork, Mr. Hull. Give me, oh, a couple hours.”

“No rush. I'll be right here.”

Doyle thanked him for calling and tore open the manila envelope. It contained a pair of tickets to tomorrow afternoon's game between the Tigers and the Chicago White Sox. The tickets were tucked inside a note that read
You don't know where these came from. Enjoy the game. Rod
. Doyle had planned to spend Sunday weeding his vegetable garden, but those weeds weren't going anywhere.

He studied the tickets. They were upper-deck box seats on the first base side, his favorite spot in the park, and the first pitch was at 1:05
P.M.
Perfect. He was enough of a traditionalist to believe that baseball was meant to be played in sunshine, not under the hot white glare of those lamps they'd bolted to the stadium's tarpaper roof. And he knew from careful reading of box scores in the
Free Press
that the fever of Opening Day had already cooled. After drawing more than 40,000 fans for the opener, the team pulled in only about 10,000 the next day. It was still early, of course, but a lot of people were saying that these Tigers had a legitimate chance to win the pennant and atone for losing it to Boston on the last day of the '67 season. That would be nice. This city could sure as hell use a little cheering up.

Doyle was glad his brother hadn't sent tickets for Opening Day. He hated Opening Day, which he called Fair-Weather-Fan Day, and he avoided it for the same reason he stayed home on New Year's Eve, which he called Amateur Night. Noise-makers and stupid hats and champagne expensive enough to make you act like an asshole but cheap enough to give you a head like a dirigible the next morning. All that forced gaiety. The only thing Doyle hated worse than being told when to have a good time was being told he wasn't allowed to have a good time.