Motown (27 page)

He wondered what had been so wrong with working part-time at the Kwik-Pro Garage.

The young Kennedy look-alike approached. “What’s the holdup? I’m covering a Democratic fundraiser live at noon.”

“Can you give me a half hour?”

“I can give you twenty minutes. As it is we’re going to have to make a flying run past the station to drop the stuff off for editing.”

“I’ll check on my people.”

Inside the cool marble walls of the Fisher Building, Rick turned his back on the guards and dialed the office. Enid answered.

“Anything?” he asked.

“I just got off the phone with five of the services,” she said. “Four of them haven’t had radio contact since the last call, but that truck on the Lodge is back on its way. Are we paying traffic tickets?”

“Tell them only if most of our players are here in fifteen minutes.” He hung up.

He went out the Third Street exit, past the arcade of glassed-in shops and the parking lot, where the asphalt pulled at the soles of his shoes and the rows of stationary vehicles appeared to be losing their vertical hold in the heat ribboning up from the pavement. Horns were honking in the street. When he got there the tow trucks were lined up along the curb to the corner of Lothrop and beyond, sealing off traffic behind the Fisher; new red GMCs and old green Dodges and blue Fords with the names and telephone numbers of the services lettered neatly on the doors and rusting Internationals with wired-on license plates and fenders missing. Thirteen in all; the idling of their engines sounding like lions snoring in a pit. Each one had in tow a late-model General Motors car in need of body work:
Corpus delicti,
physical evidence of accidents foreordained the moment they left the plant.

As he walked around to the Grand Boulevard side to tell JFK Junior to get his people ready, Rick caught himself singing under his breath. “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade, with a dee-dee-dee-dum-dum-dum-dee-dee-dum… .”

Enid had a portable Sylvania on her desk with built-in rabbit ears extended almost to the ceiling and she and Pammie and Lee Schenck were gathered in front of it when Rick got back to the office. When he saw the young reporter onscreen he was afraid he’d missed it. Then he recognized the dining room of the Pontchartrain Hotel in the background and realized he was looking at the political fundraiser. A well-known local lobbyist wearing a straw boater with WILLIAMS lettered on the red, white, and blue band had a hand on the reporter’s shoulder and what looked like the start of a three-day drunk.

“Did they show anything yet?”

“Just a teaser.” Enid straightened. She wore a violet silk suit and a floral-print blouse with an open neck that showed cleavage. “It came and went so fast you couldn’t see anything. What
are
we going to see?”

“This for starters.” He unfolded a citation for holding a parade without a permit and laid it on the desk.

“That’s
all?
After all that advice I gave you about going limp when they carried you away?” Lee was disappointed.

“Maybe it’ll come in handy some other time. I was too close to it to tell how it went. I about had a heart attack when the lead truck started coughing and sputtering in the middle of Grand. The gas gauge was laying on empty. But it made it through.”

He looked at Pammie, who was absorbed in a commercial. She hadn’t said ten words to Rick since Friday when she’d run out of the office clutching her poems. She had on shorts and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. No more dresses.

“What did the police say?” Enid asked.

“‘Get these buckets of shit out of here.’ Which I did, at about five miles an hour. It looked—”

Lee said, “Cool it.” Speedy Alka-Seltzer’s beaming face had been replaced by Ven Marshall’s stern one. But the next story was a man-on-the-street interview spot gathering local reaction to Monday’s march by Martin Luther King to the Chicago City Hall, where thousands of Negroes and whites had cheered as he taped a list of demands to the front door in emulation of his namesake, Martin Luther.

“There’s a man,” Lee said.

Rick said, “I wonder if he got a permit.”

And then they were looking at the pasture-wide expanse of Grand Boulevard and the angled verticals of the General Motors Building, before which crawled a phalanx of trucks towing the carcasses of automobiles sacrificed on the altar of speed before safety. The angle of the shot made the procession appear to stretch on forever.

“Corvairs, Chevelles, Impalas, Toronados, Furies, Coupe de Villes,” intoned the young reporter’s voice from off-camera, deeper and more authoritative than it had sounded in person. “The top of the GM line, none of them more than a year old and all of them, according to a spokesman for the Porter Group who asked to remain anonymous, badly damaged in accidents that could have been prevented on the assembly line. Based on statistics gathered by the controversial organization of consumer advocates, each of the fifteen demolished cars in the parade represents sixteen hundred accidents annually.…”

“Where’d you get those figures?” Enid asked.

“Same place he got the other two cars,” Rick said. “Thirteen’s unlucky, so I included the no-shows. These TV people can’t count.”

“… is not known whether General Motors Chairman Fred Donner, who was unavailable for comment, was in his office at the time of the demonstration,” finished the reporter, now onscreen. “In front of GM World Headquarters, this is Robert Wicks, reporting for Channel Four News.”

The anchorman came back on. “Who is Wendell Porter? Tonight at eleven, Channel Four examines the career of this modern-day David locked in a struggle with an industrial Goliath.”

Even Enid cheered.

Lee disappeared into the kitchen and came back a minute later carrying a champagne bottle and four water glasses tucked in the crooks of his arms. “This has been in the fridge since
Hell On Wheels
went bestseller.” He set the glasses down on the desk. “He had to go to Washington and we called off the party. It’s Establishment, but what the hell.”

They cheered again when he freed the cork. It dented the plaster in a corner of the ceiling and landed on the file cabinet. “Only a splash for you, Pammie,” he said, wetting the bottom of the fourth glass. “You’re a minor.”

“Guess I always will be.” Her eyes made brief contact with Rick’s. Then she snatched up the glass.

Lee raised his. “Confusion to the enemy.”

They drank. Rick looked at Enid. “To dinner.”

“You forgot the terms,” she said. “One favorable comment, in the form of a telephone call or a telegram, from someone in authority. That hasn’t happened.”

The telephone rang.

T
HE
L
OCASTE WAS A
converted navy minesweeper, stripped of armaments and painted white with jaunty red trim over the original battlewagon gray, but still martial-looking in its spartan lines and belligerent prow. A stiff breeze—the only one blowing within miles of Detroit on this blazing Wednesday in mid-July—wrinkled the aluminum-colored surface of Lake St. Clair and set smaller craft swaying, but the
locaste
sat like so much pig-iron in its slip while frustrated waves thudded its hull. In this, Canada thought, she was much like her master. The inspector walked out on the pier carrying his jacket over one shoulder and stopped at the foot of the gangplank, wondering if he was supposed to ask permission to come aboard. He had not been on a ship or a boat of any kind since he’d returned from the Philippines. Finally he went up. A large young man in a blue suit blocked his path at the top. He had fair hair and the beginnings of a sunburn on his cheeks and forehead. Canada showed his badge. It had as much effect as the sunburn.

“It’s a cop, Mr. Brock.” The young man raised his voice without turning away.

“He’s expected.”

Canada followed the young man along a new teak deck to the stern, where the president of the American Steelhaulers Association was sitting in a deck chair with his ankles crossed and a glass in his hand. Brock wore a white cotton short-sleeved shirt, pleated khaki shorts, a long-billed fisherman’s cap, and deck shoes on his bare feet. Small shoes, small feet. Canada wondered how a man could spend years double-clutching eighteen-wheel rigs and walking picket lines without pounding his feet as broad and flat as Swiss steak. The shoes were wearing through at the toes, the shorts and cap were dirty, the bill finger-marked and creased down the center, and the shirt was smeared with something that looked like old blood.

“Go find a movie,” he told the young man.

“Sure, Mr. Brock?”

“I get along with cops. Now.”

The young man started back toward the gangplank.

“Something with Dean Jones,” Brock called after him. “He goes to see those old gangster shows in the art houses, thinks he’s Mike Mazurki,” he told Canada, sitting up to shake hands. His grip was a knuckle-buster, the result of union election campaigns rather than truck driving, which he hadn’t done in decades. “Sit down, Inspector. In my work we do everything on our asses.”

Canada moved an empty deck chair into the shade of the aft cabin and sat. The change of angle gave him a view of a man in his middle fifties starting to take on flesh over large biceps and thick hairy thighs and around his waist. He had a healthy-looking tan and his face was handsome in a broad, solid, American working-class kind of way. He looked as if he could still clear a bar with very little help.

“Thanks for the time, Mr. Brock. I know you’re on vacation.”

“Vacation, hell. I’m getting the old girl ready to take some boardroom Hemingways up to Port Huron after salmon. They can’t fish for shit but you’d be surprised what you can do with them once you get them out of their air-conditioned offices and into some real clothes. Neckties just cut off blood to the brain.”

“I didn’t know you fished.” Canada was now sure it was fish blood on Brock’s shirt.

“I grew up in Rouge, you kidding? If I ever tried to dip a worm in that water he’d’ve crawled back up the line and slapped my face. My doctor told me to find a hobby for my gut. Slug of milk? It’s ice-cold.” He indicated a pitcher full of white liquid on the folding table next to his chair. When Canada shook his head, Brock topped off his own glass. “Too young, I guess. My theory is everyone who grew up during Prohibition is fighting ulcers. We thought we had a special obligation to drink as much liquor as possible, and some of that stuff they were passing off as Canadian would eat a hole in a brass bucket. What’s on your mind, Inspector?”

“I work for Jerry Cavanagh.”

The union leader showed his bottom teeth. “Guess I shouldn’t have sent Dan to the movies. You figuring to weight me down and drop me overboard or just leave me here for the gulls?”

“Of course I’m not here to shoot you.”

“Don’t act like it never happened. Well, it must be blackmail, then, because if it was a payoff he’d send a lawyer.”

“What have you got against the mayor? Don’t bring up that business about the city labor contracts; I don’t buy it.”

“I don’t like him.”

“You supported him the first time he ran.”

“I hated Miriani worse. That was then. I can’t stand the mick bastard. Let’s leave it at that.”

“I never thought I’d hear a politician say he wouldn’t support someone just because he didn’t like him.”

“I’m not a politician.”

“How long’s it been since you ran steel?”

“Politicians lie for votes; I never did. I won’t say I never lied. But not to the union. That kind of lie is like atomic fallout. You can duck it for a long time, but it’s still waiting for you when you come out.”

It was an opening, but Canada didn’t step through it. The photograph Susan Niles had given him remained in his wallet. So far Brock had navigated the course of the conversation. Canada changed that by changing the subject. “Are you acquainted with a man named Curtis Dupree?”

“Sounds French.”

He took the mug shot from the inside breast pocket of his coat hanging on the back of the chair and reached it over to Brock, who studied it.

“Well, he’s not French.” He handed it back.

“You don’t know him?”

“Never saw him. What’s he wanted for?”

“He belonged to the Steelhaulers.”

“There are two million Steelhaulers. Do you know every cop in Detroit?”

“We pried this one out of the trunk of his car at Metro Airport last Friday. He had a thirty-eight slug in the back of his head.”

“Then I guess I never will know him. What’s Cavanagh’s interest?”

“We’re pretty sure Dupree was the wheel man in an attempt on the life of one of Patsy Orr’s men last week.”

“I don’t know Patsy. I knew his old man, just to talk to. In the old days you had to know all kinds of people.”

“I think you know him better than that.”

Brock whisked away his milk moustache with a finger and set his glass on the table. “Why don’t we step on the gas? We’ll get there quicker.”

“Frankie Orr wants to start a war between the local mob and the Negro numbers operations citywide. The Negroes would lose and while his son Patsy’s recovering, Frankie plans to nail down the policy racket for himself. He couldn’t very well arrange the contract through his son, and any connected operation he went to would run to the Commission, who would have Frankie hit rather than take the heat from a race war in Detroit. I think he went to his only other local contact who could set up something this big. That’d be you.”

“I don’t owe Frankie Orr anything.”

“You owe him this boat and your office downtown and everything you’ve got on down to your skivvies. Everybody in town knows that except your biographer.”

“Can everybody in town prove it? Can you?”

“I’m not here to prove anything,” Canada said. “Dupree’s partner the triggerman could, if he’s still alive, but I don’t need him. I brought everything I need to stop this war.”

Brock watched him rummaging in his coat. “Thought you weren’t going to shoot me.”

Canada found his wallet, took out the snapshot, and handed it to the union leader.

“The whore,” Brock said after a moment. “She was always taking pictures. You stopped noticing after a while.”