Motown (33 page)

Man Killed in Puerto Rican Coup Attempt

SAN JUAN (UPI)—A 64-year-old man was slain in the crossfire between bodyguards of Governor Roberto Sanchez Vilella and rebels during an attempt to assassinate the governor on the veranda of the Hotel Pinzón late yesterday afternoon.

A group calling itself the People’s Army for the Liberation of Puerto Rico (PALP) is believed responsible for the assault by four men with revolvers on the governor while he was having tea with friends and associates in the open-air café. Vilella, uninjured, was rushed from the hotel by members of his bodyguard while the others exchanged gunfire with the rebels, all of whom escaped. The victim, whose name is being withheld pending notification of his family, died instantly when bullets struck him in the head and chest …

“I’ll take a wild guess.” Lew Canada leaned forward in his chair and laid the long sheet of newsprint on the desk. “The victim’s name was Francis Xavier Oro. Frankie Orr for short.” The man behind the desk put aside the sheet. “He was traveling under a Brazilian passport in the name of José Antonio Pérez. That’s the name we’re releasing. The story’s just going out over the wires now. It’ll be in the afternoon papers and on the Six O’Clock News.”

“Who fucked up?”

Randall S. Burlingame stuffed an ugly black pipe from a leather pouch with a history. He was tall even when sitting, broad-shouldered, and built, like most of the FBI bureau chiefs Canada had known, along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover; thick through the middle and short in the neck. He had an impressive head of thick red hair graying at the roots and a granite cast to his features from years of Washington infighting.

“Officially, of course, there were no fuck-ups,” he said. “Some nut group tried to take out the head of government and nailed a citizen in the confusion. Just between you and me and Dean Rusk, the State Department bobbled the ball. Standard procedure in a deportation violation is to make a simple arrest using Justice Department personnel; us. But that thing in Santo Domingo last year made State nervous, so they handed it to the San Juan city police with instructions to transfer Orr to federal custody later. The bonehead play was in failing to find out who the collar was having tea with.”

He lit the pipe and got it drawing. “We don’t know who made the first wrong move, Orr’s personal bodyguard or one of Governor Vilella’s men or some green cop. We’re still investigating, not that it will change anything or that anyone will read the report outside of Hoover and a few staple-counters at State. You can bury a lot of corpses in a file drawer.”

“How long do you think this one will stay buried?”

“As long as it counts. Vilella’s happy; he stands to gain a couple of million in federal highway funds if he and his people can keep their mouths shut. That isn’t easy for a Latin, but politicians are the same all over. He’ll clam.”

“What about this People’s Army for the Liberation of Puerto Rico?”

He smiled around the pipestem. “I understand some grunt in media liaison suggested adding the Liberation part just before the release went out. Calling it PAP would have been asking for trouble.”

“So Frankie goes out without even a whimper,” Canada said.

“Oh, in a couple of years some journalist or other will throw his curiosity into gear and track him as far as San Juan, maybe even make the connection between Orr and the poor stiff who stopped lead for
el excelencio.
There’ll be a stink, but nobody really cares how a gangster gets it, especially not in a place like that. Thirty percent of Americans surveyed think Puerto Rico is the capital of Peru.”

Canada stood. “Thanks for calling me, Mr. Burlingame.”

“Call me Red.” He put down his pipe and got up to grip the inspector’s hand. “I’ve got my orders not to share any of this with you, but Hoover doesn’t have to work with the local authorities. I do.”

“Of course, there’s one possibility we haven’t considered.”

“Maybe nobody fucked up after all,” Burlingame supplied. “The Commission has contacts there like everywhere else. Maybe one of those cops got the nod.”

“You have considered it.”

“I got hung up on why. Unless they just didn’t want him in this country, I couldn’t figure out where they stood to gain by dealing Orr out.”

“It wasn’t that,” Canada said. “It’s what they stood to lose if they didn’t.”

Patsy’s idea was to subdivide the city into districts with one man in charge of each, answering only to Patsy, after the fashion of Roman legions and their emperor. From the time he was old enough to understand, Patsy’s father had drilled him in Plutarch and Gibbon and Caesar’s
Conquests,
and it was the one lesson that had penetrated the imagination of a sickly youth terrified by his parent’s energies and reputation and taken hold. But Mike Gallante, with the tact of a born courtier, had gently steered Patsy away from that tentacled structure toward a more flexible system based on corporate industry. Once the merits of the plan were explained to him, the crimelord couldn’t veto it without looking like some kind of dinosaur, but inside he was bitterly disappointed. For most of his adult life he had seen himself as Augustus to his father’s Caesar, needing only an empire of his own to prove himself greater than his predecessor. Now that he had it he would have to settle for Henry Ford II.

They were using the conference room off Patsy’s office. Patsy sat at the end of the long walnut table with a map of Detroit spread before him, marked all over with lines and circles in red ballpoint. Gallante stood over it in his shirtsleeves, making fresh marks and illustrating his theories of organization with sweeping gestures of the hand holding the pen. Patsy only half followed what he was saying. He felt as he had the summer he was nineteen and he sat in on a poker game with members of his father’s troop, older men mostly with spaghetti bellies and salty stains on their underarm holsters. None of the games was familiar to him. Losing the money hadn’t upset him half as much as not knowing why he was losing it.

“We’ll want to hire coloreds for the menial jobs,” Gallante said. “Runners and bag men and collectors. That leaves our people free to administrate and gives the neighborhood coloreds the impression they’re still participating.”

“No colored bag men.” Devlin, seated bearlike in a wallow of his own fat across the corner of the table from Patsy, showed interest for the first time. Despite the air conditioning he had sweated through his polyester sport shirt. Even his necktie was sopping. “Springfield’s courier ran off with fifteen hundred dollars.”

“No colored strongarms either;” Patsy said. “When they forget to pay I want everyone in the neighborhood to know who they owe and who collects.”

“They might not be as eager to play if they suspect the operation’s all white.”

“They can’t stay away. That’s what made the policy business beautiful from the start.”

“Things were different in those days. Coloreds stepped off the sidewalks when they saw a white man coming. Now they’d cut you as soon as look at you.”

Patsy slapped the table hard enough to sting. “No nigger lays a hand on any of my people. They like cutting so much we’ll cut the balls off the first buck that tries it.”

“You’re the boss, Patsy.”

“I am. And Twelfth Street’s going to know it.” Patsy fumbled for the button under the edge of the table. Sweets came in, dry as cut paper in his sack suit and old-fashioned tie. “We’re leaving.” Patsy adjusted his knee braces.

Gallante folded the map. “We’ll ride down with you.”

Sweets helped with the canes and when Patsy was standing went out ahead of them to ring for the elevator. It was an express, a new feature that added five hundred dollars to the monthly rent.

The bullet-shaped accountant heaved himself to his feet and he and Gallante followed Patsy out of the room, hanging back to avoid stepping on his heels. Slowing other people down was the only good thing about his affliction; it reinforced his leadership.

Gallante had overstayed his welcome, Patsy thought. He had hoped the Princeton prick would return to New York after Springfield cut and ran, but the Commission refused to recall him, explaining to Patsy in the infuriatingly pedantic droning way of that East Coast cabal that he needed a good administrator to smooth the transition in the Detroit policy business. He wondered where the Commission had been when his father tore the racket out of Joey Machine’s dead bloody grasp. No smooth transitions there.

The elevator doors opened just as he got to them and he went in ahead of Gallante and Devlin and Sweets, who pressed the button for the ground floor. From the back, the bodyguard’s pointed head looked just like an onion.

Nothing changed, Patsy thought. It was almost as if the war had ended in a draw instead of the victory he knew it was. And nothing ever would change if somebody with balls didn’t take them in his hands and show Gallante’s corporate structure what the Orrs were made of. It struck him then, leaning on the handrail to take the weight off his crippled legs, that he was glad Harry DiJesus hadn’t gone back to Las Vegas after all. Gallante was an easy kill. He thought pleasantly about the words he would use to break the news to his father the next time he called.

The car stopped with a hydraulic sigh and the doors knifed open. Patsy felt a flash of irritation when their exit into the crowded lobby was blocked by three black men waiting to board, one of them a tubercular-looking Dizzy Gillespie type with a black beret and a ratty goatee beard; it was the guard’s responsibility to inform people the elevator was private. He just had time to wonder why the three were wearing heavy raincoats on a blistering August day when the coats flew open like wings and the car filled with noise and stinging heat.

Q
UINCY
S
PRINGFIELD WAS SEEING
things he’d never seen before.

The tired front porch of the house on Kercheval, for instance, was decorated in the upper corners with that old-fashioned gingerbread that looked like spiderwebs. He hadn’t noticed it on his previous visits, yet from its weathered condition and the festooning presence of the imperfect real thing it was obviously not a new feature. But then the last time he’d been there Lydell had accompanied him. He wondered when he would exhaust the store of places to go and think,
The last time I was here …
Lydell had been dead six hours. One moment it seemed like a year, then in the next he would catch himself making a mental note of something to tell Lydell next time he spoke to him, and the realization was like the ground opening under his feet.

“You cheap son of a bitch,” he said. “You always did light out ahead of the bill.”

“What, sugar?” Krystal clung to his arm in her white go-go boots and a silver lamé shift that just covered her pelvis and looked like Reynolds wrap.

“I was just saying I don’t know why we got to be out tonight.”

“You got to get out of your head for a little. I hear Mahomet puts on a show.”

There was a knot of people standing on the porch, looking more garish than usual in their exaggerated Afros and bright nighttime clothes with the sunlight not quite gone. Quincy knew some of them and nodded to them on his way to the door. It was locked. He looked at his watch. A few minutes past eight. “Wilson’s still at his day job,” he told Krystal.

They went back down the steps and wandered up to the corner, where two men and a woman in short-shorts and a halter top were passing around a cigarette. The bright-metal heat of the day was mellowing. Quincy could feel the moisture in the air condensing on his skin. Dusk had been Lydell’s favorite time of day. “You can see the brothers and sisters coming out of the cracks and taking over. The Man done grabbed the daytime for hisself, but he forgot about the night.” Quincy wondered if he’d settle for ordinary cremation. Elrod Brown had given him a demonstration that afternoon and it was just like feeding rubbish to an incinerator.

“Krystal’s thirsty, sugar. You gots a little taste?” She felt inside his breast pocket.

He handed her the hammered silver flask, a gift from Lydell with someone else’s initials engraved on it. It gurgled once and she handed it back. He helped himself before putting it away. So far he’d managed to keep his buzz at the same pleasant level.

A police cruiser coasted past on a grumbling ripple from the crowd, the white officer behind the wheel hanging his big face out the open window and committing features to memory. At the corner he accelerated. One of the men on the corner spat after the car.

When he and Krystal turned around to walk back, the crowd on the porch had swelled to twice its original size and spilled out on the sidewalk and burned-out front yard. Quincy saw Sebastian Bright surrounded by his people. He hadn’t been out alone since Joe Petite’s murder.

A white stretch limousine came around the corner from Pennsylvania, seeming in its exaggerated length to flex in the middle like a snake. As it slid to a stop in front of the house Quincy recognized the plate. It was one of the Fleetwoods he’d rented for Congo’s funeral. A white chauffeur in livery got out and opened the back door on the curb side. The Bongo Brothers alighted first in their dark suits and spread collars and stood glaring at the crowd with their hands open at their sides while Mahomet stepped up onto the curb. The light was fading quickly now and his white suit seemed to glow under the street lamps, which came on just then. Quincy wondered if he’d timed that or if God just naturally smiled on the small man with the straight slick hair and bottomless baritone. The crowd pressed in, but Mighty Joe Young and Anthony Battle had come around from the other side of the car and joined the others in forming a protective seal around Mahomet.

He spotted Quincy then and said something to Mighty Joe Young, who dipped his head with its elaborately beaded coif to listen, then nodded. The group approached Quincy. His hand was seized in both of Mahomet’s.

“I heard about Lafayette.”

“Doc says his heart just went,” Quincy said. “Saved him some pain, I guess.”

“He didn’t care much for me, but I’m sorry just the same.”