Motown (29 page)

“Somebody shot him to death in his home in nineteen fifty. They never convicted anybody, but the police thought it was one of his old partners who was paroled from Jackson earlier that year. Uncle Hans was a bootlegger,” she said. “He and my father used the money to buy real estate during the Depression.”

“I wondered where the capital came from.”

She adjusted the color on the set during a Chesterfield commercial. “I never knew anything about it until my uncle was killed and reporters started hanging around. He and my father didn’t talk like the Bowery Boys or carry violin cases. Anyway, maybe that’s part of why I use my money and time in support of a good cause like Wendell’s. If my parents weren’t killed in an accident I suppose I’d be working for the March of Dimes.”

They sat through a Vietnam report, an anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, and a gushy announcement that Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow were engaged to be married, before the parade story came on, virtually unchanged from the noon presentation. When it was over, Ven Marshall scowled at the camera and said, “Who is Wendell Porter? A look at the career of the self-described consumer advocate after these messages.” Then a pump jockey in immaculate coveralls and a bow tie offered to put a tiger in their tank.

Enid left the room and came back carrying the percolator, two cups, and containers of cream and sugar on a flat tray. Rick moved some magazines so she could set the tray on the coffee table. Pouring, she said, “We seem to have upstaged the political fundraiser.”

“One drunken politician looks pretty much like all the rest.” He sat back with his cup. Her coffee could float stove bolts.

The report was a three-minute montage of clips, with an objective voice-over, of Wendell Porter fielding hostile questions at a press conference, being interviewed outside a courtroom during one of his many appearances as the defendant in a lawsuit, lecturing on auto safety at Wayne State, and signing copies of
Hell On Wheels
for a long line of customers at the downtown Hudson’s, as well as a glimpse of Caroline, eyes unreadable behind rose-tinted glasses, steering her husband through a gang of reporters in a corridor of the City-County Building, trailing a string of “no comments.” It ended with a shot of the closed door of Fred Donner’s office in the General Motors Building and the information that when the board chairman had finally been located and asked for a statement on Wendell Porter’s parade, he had asked. “Who is Wendell Porter?”

“Yes!” Enid jumped up and flipped off the set. She leaned back against it with her hands on the top. “First thing tomorrow I want you to call the station and ask for a print of that film.”

“Even the last part?”

“Especially the last part. We’ll show it everywhere Wendell appears, including before Congress. A month from now, ‘Who is Wendell Porter’ will be as famous as ‘Let them eat cake.’”

“Are we going to behead Fred Donner?”

“Better than that! We’ll castrate the fucker.” She stopped and raised a hand as if to clap it to her mouth. Rick didn’t know if she’d been embarrassed by the profanity or her choice of
castrate.
Had she detected a reaction to Caroline’s use of the word when they were in her office?

Before he could cover, a telephone rang. She left the room. He poured himself more coffee. Instead of perking him up it had the curious effect of deepening his ouzo buzz. He wondered if it was doing the same for Enid.

She returned. Her eyes were bright. “That was Wendell. He saw the story on Washington television. NBC picked it up. I told him about all the calls. I haven’t heard him this excited since his book went into a fifth printing. He loves my idea of showing the film.”

“Did you remind him whose idea the parade was?”

She hesitated only a second, long enough for him to stand up. They met halfway. Her lips were softer than he’d anticipated, her body harder; she was all supple muscle and nails puncturing his shoulders.

“Right now,” she said when they stopped for oxygen. “You saw the stairs?”

“What’s the hurry? We’ve got all night.”

“If I change my mind we’ll avoid doing something we’ll both regret.”

“Let’s go.”

His memory of her bedroom was cashmere shadows and platinum light and stretched satin where the shadows broke. She smelled of blossoms remembered on the dark side of a hill. On the bed they melded and separated and found the stroke and rode the shadows and the light. It was better than expected, better than shoving the Camaro flat-out down a long straight stretch of smooth road.

“Hello?”

“You motherfucker.”

“Excuse me?”

“You back-stabbing bastard. You piss-poor excuse for an undercover.”

“Oh, hello, Dan. What time is it?”

“I didn’t call you up to give you the time, you son of a bitch, you candy-assed—”

Rick laid the receiver bottomside-up on the nightstand, switched on the lamp, and looked at the alarm clock. Just past four. He’d left Enid’s house at two and had been asleep forty-five minutes. He sat up and picked up the receiver. Dan Sugar had paused for breath.

“What’s on your mind, Dan?”

“I been trying to get you all night. Where were you?”

“My mother lives in Miami Beach. You sure don’t sound like her.”

“Did you know what Porter was planning to pull today—yesterday? Because if you didn’t, what the hell is Donner paying you for?”

“I’m the one who thought it up.”

The silence on the other end ran long enough for Rick to wonder if they’d been cut off. “Dan?”

“You mother-fucker, you back-stabbing bastard, you—”

“You’re stealing your own stuff, Dan. I’m supposed to be working for Porter, in case you forgot. Would you like it better if I sat around in a trenchcoat and dark glasses, taking notes and snapping pictures with a little Jap camera?”

“Nobody said you had to make GM look like shit. Porter was doing that okay before you came along.”

“If I thought it would work as well as it did I might’ve kept it to myself,” Rick admitted. “Anyway I’m in solid with Wendell. He’d trust me with the key to his wife’s chastity belt.” He felt his second twinge that night. It could have been the ouzo. He had a headache like an icicle pressing against an exposed nerve.

“So what do we get for all this trust?”

Rick told him about Porter’s letter to Enid. He could almost hear Sugar rubbing his hands. But his response was guarded.

“Sure she ain’t burned it by now?”

“If she hung on to it long enough for Pammie to get a peek at it, there’s no reason to think she got rid of it since. It probably means a lot to her. And there might be others.”

“Get it. Get them.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Fuck working on it. Steal it.”

“I’m an undercover, not a second-story man.”

“You’re a thief that got caught with his hand in the glove compartment of a fucking T-bird. Get your hooks on the letters and shoot them to me. We got to get our licks in before this parade shit blows up too big to pop.”

“I’ll get them,” Rick said.

“Good.” Sugar breathed. “Sorry about that thief crack, but you need to remember you ain’t working for the cops now. You don’t get title free and clear to no Z-28s for smelling like lime water and lavender.”

Rick said he’d be in touch and pegged the receiver. He sat up for a while afterward, hoping for his headache to get worse. He’d earned it that night.

At least that.

S
ERGEANT
E
STHER WAS EATING
breakfast at his desk, three frosted bearclaws and a half-pint of milk in a cardboard carton. He was using a target silhouette for a placemat.
Dark Shadows
howled and creaked on the TV set atop the file cabinet, without an audience. As Canada approached he chewed rapidly and swallowed.

“Our only lead on Dupree’s partner just blew up,” he told the inspector. “Nobody in town’s seen this buddy of his for a week, but turns out he’s been visiting his sister in Alabama since before the try on DiJesus. Alibi checks out. I’m starting to think Brock went outside the Steelhaulers for his trigger.”

“Forget him. Dary still heading up the Detroit bureau of the FBI?”

“No, he retired in January. Burlingame’s in charge now.”

“Get him on the horn.”

“Something? How’d it go with Brock yesterday?”

“Just get him, okay? I’m pulling the plug on Frankie.”

“I thought you wanted him right where he is.”

“I changed my mind. You ever change your mind?”

Esther lifted his receiver.

In his office, Canada went through the mail on his desk, then went through it again to see what was written on the envelopes. He didn’t open any of them. He sat there for a while looking at nothing. Then he made eye contact with the photograph of the young men in jumpsuits hanging on the wall. He got up and went over and lifted it off its nail and leaned it in a corner on one end, back to front. It left a lighter rectangle on the painted wall.

The intercom buzzed. He flipped the switch. “Get him?”

“Not yet.” The sergeant’s voice crackled out of the speaker. “The commissioner just called. He wants to see you in his office.”

“Now?”

“Yesterday.”

Ray Girardin’s office had windows looking out on Greektown and Beaubien, a quiet room insulated by carpeting and soundproofed panels and blinds that Canada always felt gave its occupant as clear and unobstructed a view of the crime situation in Detroit as the bunker had given Hitler of World War II. He respected the commissioner for his thirty years’ experience as a crime reporter for the Detroit
Times
and had applauded his appointment, but the glare of public office had exposed him as an indifferent administrator and a poor leader; despite an inspired effort to introduce modern methods of law enforcement to a department whose basic structure had remained unchanged since Prohibition, the twelve precincts had deteriorated for want of decisive guidance from 1300 into a feudal state, with each commander operating his fiefdom independent of all the rest.

Girardin was standing in the middle of the office when the inspector entered, and came forward to shake Canada’s hand. He was a slightly built man of sixty-three with thinning gray hair, swollen eyelids, and a face whose bone structure appeared to have disintegrated below the cheekbones, the flesh withering from there down to his oversize collar like a dried stalk. He resembled a cancer-stricken Edward Everett Horton. But his grip was firm.

“How are you, Lew? You don’t look like you’ve been getting enough sleep.”

“I’m fine, Commissioner.” Canada’s response was automatic to a question barely heard. He was looking at the mayor seated behind Girardin’s desk.

“Officially, Jerry’s not here,” the commissioner said. “He’s supposed to be addressing the city council, but it isn’t the first time they’ve been kept waiting. He asked for this meeting because he’s concerned about the racial situation.”

“Racial situation?” Canada didn’t approach the desk. Cavanagh had made no move to rise and offer his hand.

“Twelfth Street.” The mayor looked grim; but then he always did. His round Black Irish face inclining toward jowls, receding dark hair, five o’clock shadow, and gimlet, up-from-under stare lent gravity to his relative youth. This together with his programs to end polarization among Detroit’s black and white population had won him a whopping sixty-nine percent of the vote in his re-election. In Canada’s opinion he had overestimated his political popularity when he decided to challenge former Governor G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams for the Democratic senatorial nomination; but Canada had served on the department through many administrations and had witnessed the ego-distorting qualities of the office at close range.

“We haven’t had any serious problems on Twelfth Street,” Canada said.

“Don’t be deliberately obtuse, Inspector. You know what I mean when I say Twelfth Street. Shall I call it the Black Bottom, or don’t you go back that far?”

He said nothing. Opposition charges of inexperience during Cavanagh’s first campaign had left the mayor resentful toward anyone with a proven track record. It was one reason why he had gone outside the usual political circles and placed a newspaperman in the office of commissioner.

“I don’t need to tell you how much of my reputation rests on my record in race relations,” Cavanagh went on. “After Vietnam, the American people are most concerned about the Negro situation in urban areas. Nobody wants another Watts.”

Girardin walked across the room and sat on the edge of the leather couch, one elbow resting on his knee, the reporter waiting to jump on the sparkling quote. “You wouldn’t have known that the first day I walked in here,” he said, looking at Canada. “Do you know what Gene Reuter said when I asked to see a copy of the department’s riot plan?”

“‘What riot plan?’” Canada had heard about the exchange between Girardin and the superintendent whenever the subject had turned to race.

“Exactly. Manual of procedure for crowd control was written in nineteen forty-two. It included special provisions for the arrest and detention of persons of Japanese descent. The weaponry was even worse: A few shotguns and twenty-year-old canisters of tear gas stored with the motor oil in the municipal garage. I stayed up all night getting that stuff fixed.”

“You’ve done a fine job, Ray.” Cavanagh hadn’t taken his eyes off the inspector. “In the event of a civil disturbance on the order of what took place last year in Los Angeles, this department is reasonably prepared to restore order. However, I prefer that order be maintained and that we prevent any such disturbance from taking place. What’s the name of this person we discussed?” He looked at Girardin.

“Quincy Springfield. Numbers boss, runs a blind pig on Collingwood.”

“Drugs?”

“Not that I know of. Lew?”

“He’s clean there,” Canada said. “The associate too, Lafayette. Gamblers don’t cross that line very often. If you’re worried about Springfield’s beef with the Orr mob, that’s just street stuff. It isn’t racial.”

“Any Panther involvement?” Cavanagh asked.

“Definitely not. He’s not political.”

Girardin said, “That’s not current. What do you know about somebody calls himself Mahomet?”