Motown (21 page)

“Who’s she?”

“This war with the coloreds isn’t escalating fast enough for somebody. Whoever it is wants it to blow up big enough to wipe out all the small operators. Then when the smoke lifts he’ll stroll in and scoop up the change.”

“What’d he do, smear burnt cork on his face?”

“Muscle’s cheap, and in this town it’s mostly black. If I wanted you to think the coloreds were after you I’d put the hired help in big pimp hats and boost a nigger diesel and do it up brown; get it?”

“Who’s
you?”
DiJesus was interested.

The inspector slid a four-by-six manila envelope from his inside breast pocket and tipped a stiff-backed photograph out onto the desk. It was a front-and-profile mug shot of a Latin face with thick gray hair in waves and sleepy-looking eyelids, an aging Valentino with numbers underneath stenciled white on black. “The picture’s fifteen years out of date,” he said. “I hear he’s porked up lately on linguini and clam sauce. It was taken at the federal correctional facility up in Milan, just before the State Department shipped him off to Sicily.”

He barely looked at it. “Everybody knows Frankie Orr. I thought he’d be dead by now.”

“Frankie made a deal with Old Nick: eternal life in return for the soul of the City of Detroit. He means to make good on the contract. Ever meet him?”

“I never been abroad.”

“How about Puerto Rico?”

No reaction. “Back home, I want to see spicks, I go down to Mexico.”

Canada didn’t pursue that line. If DiJesus was playing it ignorant it wasn’t worth the trouble to confirm and if he really
was
ignorant, Canada didn’t have a teaching certificate. “Frankie wasn’t born behind a desk,” he said. “By the time he was your age he’d committed two murders in front of witnesses, one in New York with a garrote and one here with a knife. Just now it’s in his interest to let you go on breathing. As soon as it isn’t you’ll stop, simple as that. He’s no bigot. He’d ice one of his own as quick as anyone if there’s profit in it.”

“Frankie Orr.” The man in the chair chewed on the name. “It don’t figure.”

“Why not?”

DiJesus stopped there and Canada realized he was leaning forward off the desk. He relaxed.
Because I’m working for his son Patsy,
only DiJesus didn’t say it. Suddenly the inspector had had enough of him. “Get out of here,” he said.

“What about the niggers?” The other man stood.

“They aren’t waiting for you. I just got through saying if they wanted you dead we wouldn’t be talking now. The ones that peppered your car, anyway. I can’t answer for Twelfth Street.”

“What about my car?”

“It’s in the impound. You can pick it up in a couple of days.”

“Why not today?”

“What’s your hurry? You’re getting your interior cleaned for free, courtesy of the mayor. Remember that when you vote in November.”

“Come November I’ll be doing laps in the pool at the Flamingo.” DiJesus left.

Lieutenant Coopersmith was reading the
Free Press
at a desk in the squad room when the inspector came out. “I sure hope the
News
doesn’t go on strike,” he said. “This liberal rag burns my butt. What’d you get out of our boy?”

“Oh, I’m his official biographer. Let me know if you turn anything.” He started past the desk.

“I just got off the phone with the lab. They found a partial thumb on the Caddy’s rearview mirror that doesn’t match the owner’s. I told them to run it over to the FBI. Probably belongs to the last mechanic who serviced the car.”

“Okay, keep me up to speed.”

“You want this squeal? I was going to drop it in Special Investigation’s lap.”

“Yeah, I’ll take it.”

Coopersmith shook his fair head. “Must be awful quiet up there on seven. You need any more open files, just buzz. I’ll send them on up with a forklift.”

Upstairs in the men’s room, Canada took off his coat and shoulder rig, rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands and face, rinsing them first with warm water, then with cold, a ritual he’d observed ten or twelve times a day since his release from the Rabaul stockade. For sixteen months he’d shared a latrine with three other officers, eighteen inches from the filthy pad he slept on. At any given time two of the men had suffered from dysentery, and their aim was unreliable. He’d spent the last twenty-one years trying to scrub off the prison camp.

While he was combing his hair a toilet flushed in one of the stalls and Sergeant Esther came out to wash his hands.

“How’s your daughter?” Canada asked.

“She brought her boyfriend home day before yesterday.” The sergeant shook his hands dry and buttoned his cuffs. “He had on a belt buckle shaped like a cock.”

“He probably just wanted to make a good impression.”

“I’m pretty sure he busted her. If she gets knocked up I’ll give her the boot. Find anything out downstairs?”

“Only that DiJesus is dumber than the average lifetaker.”

“That’s pretty dumb. Think we should haul Springfield in and sweat him a little?”

“Springfield doesn’t know anything.”

“That again.” Esther put on his heavy-duty sportcoat. Everything he wore was either double-stitched or leather-reinforced; an iron ring protected the dial of his wristwatch from blows and scratches, as if his sedentary lifestyle exposed him to anything more hazardous than hemorrhoids. “Why would Frankie put the dump on his own kid’s muscle?”

“Because it’s Patsy’s muscle. He’s not a total washout; some of his younger lieutenants barely remember Frankie and they’d support the Crip in a war with the old man. A war between Patsy and Twelfth Street will clean out the coloreds and kick a hole in Patsy’s set-up big enough for Frankie to step through and rebuild it from the ground up, Frankie’s way.”

“He can’t show himself. The feds would just turn around and send him back home.”

“He’s had fifteen years to figure a way around that. My guess is he’ll fight that old prostitution charge. That means a new trial, which costs money. His rake-off from a citywide policy racket ought to just about cover it.”

“Pretty cold even for Frankie.”

“He and Sal Borneo did the same thing thirty years ago when Joey Machine and Jack Dance were beating the hell out of each other. When it was all over, Dance was dead and Machine was out of capital. Sal’s Unione Siciliana bought into his operation and when they didn’t need him any more they blew him out from under his hat.” Canada put away his comb. “The only thing about these Sicilians that ever changes is their tailors.”

A uniformed officer came in to use a urinal. Canada and the sergeant went out into the squad room. “I hope to Christ you’re wrong,” Esther said. “Frankie’s been gone a long time, he doesn’t know what’s been happening with the niggers. He could light a fire that you and me and the mayor and the whole fucking fire department couldn’t put out.”

“Let the boys in Civil Defense worry about that part. Worry about where Albert Brock fits into all this.”

Later, in his office, the inspector watched a tide of rain blur the window on the other side of the steel mesh, like transparent silk dragged across the glass. His eyes were blurring too and he realized with a little start that he’d been at work since midnight and was halfway through a second shift. That wouldn’t have happened before his marriage went bad, when home was more than just a change of walls. He yawned and reached in his pocket for his keys. His hand closed around a wad of paper. Instinctively he drew it out; he never wrote notes to himself and hated contraband in his suits. It was the napkin he’d gotten from Connie Minor, the retired tabloid reporter. The Cadieux shooting had driven it out of his mind.

He sat down and dialed the number written on the napkin. After two rings a woman’s voice answered.

T
HEY WENT TO SEE
The Greatest Story Ever Told
at the Ramona. Krystal thought it was about Cassius Clay.

Afterward, walking down Gratiot, looking for a cab and not-listening to Krystal talking about her late mother’s efforts to help her find Christ, Quincy stuck his hands in his pockets and breathed the brimstone air of a Detroit evening after a summer storm. The gutters were running and automobile headlights cast elliptical reflections in the puddles on the street. As his brain uncoiled from its long confinement, he considered that John Wayne in the armor and sandals of a Roman centurion still looked like John Wayne.

Gidgy Gidrey’s Excalibur glided up alongside them like the
Queen Mary
on wire wheels. The drug dealer reached across the front seat and cranked down the window on their side. “Man, you tired of living?”

“What’s happenin’?” Quincy leaned on the sill. Gidgy’s dark glasses and darker face looked smoky in the shade of his Panama.

“You ain’t heard?”

“Man, I been in the Holy Land the last three hours. If it ain’t in stereo I ain’t heard nothing.”

“Somebody gone hit DiJesus this morning. I figured it was you.”

“Dead?”

“All’s I know is they shotgunned his car. You just walking around in the open, asking to get took down. Your clothes clean?”

Quincy sometimes had trouble following the train of Gidgy’s conversation. The refrigerated air inside the car was thick with blue smoke, not tobacco. He said his clothes were clean. Krystal spoke up for her tank top and miniskirt. Her lack of underwear spoke up for itself.

“’Kay, hop in. Wipe your feet first.”

They got into the car, Quincy in front next to Gidgy. The seats were suede leather, soft as butter and the same shade of yellow. Gidgy fired a joint off the dashboard lighter, sucked in a lungful, and passed the joint to Quincy. It was better than the stuff he sold; when Quincy handed it to Krystal over the back of the seat, his lips stuck together from the resin. He pried them apart with his tongue. “Who hit DiJesus?” It came out in a wheeze.

“Don’t look at me, blood. I ain’t the gambler in this crowd.” Gidgy accepted the joint from Krystal and wheeled out into traffic. “When Lafayette said it wasn’t you, I figured Sebastian Bright, but he was with Joe Petite’s old lady all day. Offering his condolences, I expect.”

“Where is everybody?”

“My dump. That’s where we’re headed. We didn’t think it was smart to meet at your place.”

“Who’s
we?”

“Besides you and me there’s Sebastian and Lafayette and Beatrice Blackwood and her pet Zulu and them wrasslers. Lafayette called them when he couldn’t get hold of you. You should’ve told him which movie you was going to see. I been to just about every theater in town.”

“What about Mahomet?” Quincy declined another hit. He was getting a contact high from the smoke in the car. It slowed his heartbeat and ordered his thoughts.

Gidgy steered with his wrists while he pinched out the joint and laid it in state in the ashtray. “Out speaking someplace, Lafayette said. Who you think done it if it wasn’t us?”

“What kind of speaking?”

“Ask Lafayette. I ain’t nobody’s answering service. Maybe cops done it.”

“Not with shotguns in broad daylight. See is anything on the radio.”

Gidgy turned it on and ran the dial up and down AM and FM. He got a collage of rock, hillbilly, and classical and a stock market report. He turned it off. “There’s a TV at my dump. We’ll catch the eleven o’clock.”

“Where’d you hear about it?”

“The six o’clock. They didn’t know no more than what I told you.”

Krystal said, in a voice blurred with muggles, “Krystal’s got to pee.”

“Wait till we get to Gidgy’s.”

Gidgy swung into a Shell station and set the brake in front of the rest rooms. “It ain’t your upholstery.”

Krystal came back after a few minutes and they drove the rest of the way to the Morocco Motor Hotel on Euclid, in which Gidgy owned a half interest. The other half belonged to nobody knew who and Gidgy wasn’t saying, although rumor said it was a Detroit policeman whose name was expected to appear sooner or later in one of the little black books still under scrutiny from the Grecian Gardens raid. A white frame two-story building with green shingles and shutters to match, it looked better than its reputation: During one week the previous April, five arrests had been made on the eleven-room premises on charges ranging from prostitution to narcotics violations and the sale of unregistered firearms. The fact that Gidgy had been in Florida that week had seemed to confirm the suspicions about his silent partner’s occupation.

In the garage, the drug dealer paused to cover the ostentatious vehicle with a custom-made tarp with Quincy’s help and the three entered the motel through a covered walkway. Gidgy rapped twice on the door marked manager, paused, and rapped once more. When it opened, Kindu Kinshasha wedged his bulk draped in the inevitable dashiki into the two-foot space. His big broken-knuckled fist was wrapped around a revolver with a large bore.

“Open says me,” Gidgy said.

The ex-fighter identified Quincy and Krystal and opened the door the rest of the way. The office was actually a small living room furnished out of a rummage sale, with a closet-size kitchenette opening off to the right and gauchos poster-painted on black velour on the walls. The room was full of smoke, some of it tobacco, and people.

Lydell seized one of Quincy’s arms in both hands and coughed. He coughed all the time lately, and in those new surroundings Quincy noticed that he’d lost weight. His gray vest hung in pleats and his wrists rattled in his shirtcuffs. A cigarette smoldered in the jade holder between the first two fingers of his right hand. “Man, I thought you was feeding the alley cats by now. Where you
been?
” His eyes lacked focus.

“Anything new?” Quincy glanced at the screen of a color console television set, the most expensive thing in the room. Dr. Richard Kimble was running down a long corridor pursued by cops, without a sound.

“News’ll be on in a little. Man, I thought—”

“What’s this about Mahomet speaking?”

“Wilson McCoy axed him to give a talk at his place on Kercheval. Man—”

“That hotheaded son of a bitch? Why’d you let him go?” McCoy, a former Black Panther, was self-appointed head of the Black Afro-American Congress—BLAC, in the papers—headquartered in a private home on Kercheval that had been raided in the past as a blind pig. McCoy’s temper had threatened to escalate the routine arrests into something else.