Motown (6 page)

“How come?”

Canada showed his white teeth. He spent almost as much time brushing and flossing as he did in the shower. “You mean besides siphoning off the Steelhaulers’ pension fund to keep his
paisano
friends happy?”

“Fuck that. You don’t hear the members complaining.”

“Albert Brock could rape Ladybird Johnson live on Dean Martin and the rank and file would claim she attacked him,” Canada said. “That’s because he’d loan his last dime to a steel employee in trouble if it didn’t get in the way of contract talks. He knows which side his bread’s buttered on and who churned it. And he’s the only man who can keep the wops from robbing the union treasury blind while he’s national president and make them like it.”

“Sounds like a good argument in favor of leaving him where he is.”

“Which is what we’d be doing if he stayed smart and kept his nose out of Detroit politics.”

“I was wondering when we’d get around to the mayor,” Wasylyk said.

“Why’d you think I took you into an interrogation room to discuss this? The walls of my office stop two feet short of the ceiling. That squad room’s a direct pipeline to the Eyewitness News Team.”

“Cavanagh’s got a hard-on about Brock, huh?”

“More like the other way around.” Canada leaned forward and laid a hand on the table. His long, clean-pored face, shaved with a scalpel, reminded Wasylyk of the death-mask of some minor eighteenth-century English general he had seen once in the Detroit Institute of Arts. He wondered what the inspector’s nationality was. “What I say next stays in this room,” Canada said. “Cavanagh’s record squeaks: Second term in office, no garbage strikes, he’s got the race thing pretty much nailed down. No other big-city mayor can claim anything like it except maybe Daley in Chicago. And Daley doesn’t want to be President.”

“Jesus. I didn’t know he had the bug. I knew he was running for senator.”

“He’ll crap out. The party nomination will go to Soapy Williams, who raised the Democratic donkey from a pup in this state. Point is it’s the mayor’s shot at a national profile. Why not President? He’s young, Irish, and Catholic, just like JFK. The voters are always hoping lightning will strike twice. He could stir up some dust at the sixty-eight convention if Johnson doesn’t run. Hell, even if he does. A lot of people who voted for him two years ago are wishing they hadn’t.”

“Bobby Kennedy might have a thing or two to say about it.”

“That prick.”

“So what’s the Presidency got to do with Albert Brock? I know
he
ain’t running.”

“The American Steelhaulers Association is the most powerful labor union in the United States, maybe in the world. Brock controls a third of the blue collar vote in this country. How’s it going to look if the mayor of an industrial town like Detroit can’t claim a boost from a labor leader in his own backyard?”

“What’s Brock got against him?”

“He doesn’t like the way Cavanagh handled the contracts with some city employees. We intercepted a memo he sent to the head of the local last year, urging him to advise his people not to vote for re-election. Of course there were others. Labor support for the mayor dropped twelve percent in November.”

“He still won.”

“He might not have if Brock had brought his opposition out into the open. That memo was meant as a lesson, a little sample of what he could do if Cavanagh doesn’t toe the line. A line he has no intention of toeing for Brock or Princess Grace. Like you said, he’s got the bug. So we have to do something about Brock before he can get up to speed. The senate primary this fall is history. We’re looking two years down the road.”

Wasylyk fished a crushed pack of Pall Malls out of his shirt pocket and lit one off a kitchen match he struck on the table. He dragged in a lungful and tossed the curled match into a corner with the others. “I’m a cop, not a fucking press secretary. I thought you were too. I liked you better when I thought you was a sneak for Internal Affairs.”

“On the books, the unit was formed two years ago separately from I.A.D. to report directly to the mayor on charges of wrongdoing inside the department. ‘Wrongdoing,’ that’s what politicians call crimes in the eighty percent bracket. We do some of that; Cavanagh knew about those Grecian Gardens payoffs before Vice raided the place last January. What we really are is his private staff. That’s another piece of information that doesn’t go out that door when you do. The voters wouldn’t understand why a man in office in a free country would need secret police.”

“I’m one of ’em, I guess. My old man voted for Eugene Debs. So what’s the game plan?”

“Trace this Mafia thing to its source. We know Brock’s office is into Patsy Orr because of the muscle Patsy’s old man Frankie lent Brock twenty years ago when he was running for president of the local. Frankie Orr was a visionary, but he always looked too far ahead. That labor racketeering thing is what got him deported finally. Sal Borneo was supposed to go down for the same thing, but he died. You remember Sal. Frankie married his daughter.”

“Can’t tell the Sicilians from an A-bomb without a score-card. That the Sal our boy Phil was yakking about on the tape?”

“Phil goes back a ways,” Canada said. “Not many of the old gang left. That’s why Frankie’s kid Patsy is in charge.”

“Patsy the Crip. The old man must’ve strained him through a sheet.”

“Talk is Frankie’s still running the show from Messina. Anyway, if we can track one dollar from the Steelhaulers pension fund to Patsy’s pocket, we can send Brock up to Jackson for a year, or at least snarl him in the system long enough to forget about making headaches for the mayor. Hell, the exposure alone would play hell with his support at the grass roots.”

Wasylyk flicked ash at the table. “Tough case to make. Those Mafia boys got more places to launder cash than Liberace’s got teeth.”

“I never said the job was easy. You in?”

“What’s my part?”

“Nothing you haven’t already done enough times to have strong feelings about. Stakeouts, the odd shadow job, some time undercover if it comes to that. It won’t. I got a federal judge might come through with an order for a temporary wiretap when the time comes. When it does you’ll take your turn on the earphones. You know the drill.”

“Doesn’t sound a whole hell of a lot different from what I been doing twenty-nine years. I thought detective work was supposed to be glamorous.”

“That’s the spy game. You’ve been watching
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”
The inspector rose and smoothed the crease on his black suitpants. “Hey, it beats boosting disk brakes.”

“The brakes pay better.”

“Lawyer fees cut into the profits. So you in?”

Wasylyk took one last drag and mashed the butt into an old burn-hole in the table. “I got nothing better to do but sit home and watch
Days of Our Lives.
”

“Swell. Come up to seven. I’ll introduce you to the squad.”

“I’m dead on my feet. What’s it, three o’clock?”

“Almost four. You’ll have to get used to hookers’ hours.
Sub rosa
units work mostly at night.”

“Well, the overtime ought to make up for a patrolman’s salary.”

“What’s overtime?”

“Shit. I should’ve guessed.” Wasylyk stood, bones cracking, and watched Canada gathering up the tape recorder. “How come you can get an order for a tap now and you couldn’t then?”

“We didn’t know then what we know now about this particular judge. Remind me to show you his file sometime.”

“How’d you fill it?”

“Tapped his private line.” Canada held the interrogation room door.

T
HE SEVENTH FLOOR OF
Detroit Police Headquarters at 1300 Beaubien—“1300,” as it was known throughout the department—was made up of barnlike rooms lit through opaque glass panels in the high ceilings and had an acoustical linoleum floor and steel mesh over the windows. The windows, taller than a man, looked to Quincy as if they should contain grim saints carved out of slick marble. It was that kind of building, designed in the 1920s by a white architect who had seen
Intolerance
one too many times. Quincy felt cold and exposed and very black sitting in a vinyl chair in front of the white sergeant’s desk, one of a dozen or more arranged in two rows, most of them unmanned at 4:00 a.m. His hands were icy when he held them to his cheeks. He diagnosed his condition as shock.

He wondered how Lydell was doing. The cops had let Quincy ride with him in the ambulance to Detroit Receiving, where the patient got into an argument with an emergency room orderly who wanted to cut the ring off the injured hand. It was a big gold ingot with a diamond set in the center, which Lydell liked to tell people had been presented to him as a utility infielder with Milwaukee after the 1957 World Series. Quincy, whose father had left Negro ball to go into bootlegging when the Klan broke his hands, had gotten his friend into the crap game where he’d won the ring. Nobody shot the bones like Lydell. But the dispute had convinced him his friend would come out with all the parts he went in with, and Quincy had agreed to ride down to 1300 in a car from the Tactical Mobile Unit.

The fat sergeant had short pale hair tipped with gray and freckles everywhere, even on the backs of his hands. He typed with one finger, pausing between letters to study the keyboard as if he had never seen the old gray Royal before that morning. Something about him made Quincy think of the locker room at the Y; it drove him crazy until he traced it to his nostrils. Man used Ben-Gay like Krystal used perfume.

“That your real name, Springfield?” he asked finally.

“Just in Detroit. Other places I use Harry Belafonte.”

“You watch your mouth, boy. I can ask this same shit down at County with a turnkey’s finger up your black ass.”

“It’s my real name.”

“Know the guys that hit you?”

“All I know is they was white.”

“You said they had their hands and faces covered.”

“Necks too. That’s how come I know they was white. Why’d you wear a turtleneck on a warm night in June unless you didn’t want people knowing you was white?”

“Maybe they didn’t want anyone knowing they were black.”

“On Collingwood? Shit.”

“You watch your mouth, boy. I won’t tell you again.”

Quincy said nothing.

“Anything else you remember?” asked the sergeant.

“One who done all the talking had blue eyes.”

“I’ve seen Negroes with blue eyes. You know Johnny Blue? Don’t say you don’t, ’cause I know he’s been to your place.”

“Johnny’s are pale blue. This one’s was deep and chilly. He was white, all right.”

“I’ll put down you don’t know who the guys were.” Keys whacked paper.

Quincy, who after his father’s death had grown up in a shoebox on Erskine with his mother and shared a bathroom with two other families, thought it was a big room for so few detectives. A thin black man in a white shirt and suitpants with a Smith & Wesson Airweight under his left arm sat reading the
Free Press
city edition two desks down, and two white men with Smitties on their belts were discussing yesterday’s Tigers game at the water cooler by the door. Aside from them, Quincy and the sergeant had the place to themselves. A religious program was playing silently on a portable black-and-white TV atop a file cabinet. The horizontal hold was slipping; the minister’s head showed at the bottom of the screen with his dark-suited torso at the top. Nobody was watching.

The hallway door opened and two men came in. One was as tall as Quincy but leaner and wore an immaculate black suit that was starting to show its age in the knees and elbows. He had a long, slightly angular face and crisp black hair going gray. The other man was shorter and sloppier-looking in a plaid coat, wrinkled slacks, and blue shirt without a tie. He needed a haircut. They stopped to talk to the two cops at the water cooler. The man in the plaid coat shook their hands.

The fat sergeant was snapping his fingers at Quincy. “Stay off the clouds, boy. This ain’t no liquor beef I’m asking you about.”

“Three ‘boys’ is all you get,” Quincy said, and swung at him from his chair.

But he’d been hustled, taken in by the sergeant’s inanimate-looking bulk. The sergeant gave the rickety typewriter stand a shove and the Royal landed in Quincy’s lap. It threw off his aim, and the fat man ducked under the fist, cross-drew the revolver on his belt, and laid the four-inch barrel against Quincy’s right temple in a backhand sweep. The room pirouetted and the ceiling came down on top of him.

For an instant he teetered on the edge of unconsciousness, then pulled back, dizzy and nauseated. He was on his back on the floor, still sitting in the chair, with a paralyzing weight on his chest. It was the typewriter, lying upside-down with the carriage return lever gouging his shoulder. The ceiling rocked itself to a standstill. Six pairs of legs stood around him in a semicircle, tapering up to belt buckles and bellies, mountains with tiny heads carved on their peaks. It was like looking up at Mt. Rushmore through the small end of a telescope.

“What happened?” It was the mountain in black talking. Quincy recognized him now as one of the two men who had entered the room moments ago. He picked out the three detectives and the plaid-coated newcomer and the fat sergeant in his white shirtsleeves, freckled fists balled at his sides. The revolver was clenched in one of them but not pointed at anything.

“Puke took a cut at me.” The sergeant holstered his gun and kicked Quincy hard in the ribs. The pain lanced up to his temple. “You’re busted, jig. Climb out from under that machine before I add stealing office equipment to assaulting an officer.”

“What’s he doing here?” asked the man in the black suit.

“Name’s Springfield. Some guys hit his blind pig on Collingwood this morning. Offed the bouncer and rabbited with what was in the register. He says. His partner’s at Receiving, caught some shotgun spray.”

“What time?”

“About one-thirty. They were getting set to open.”

“That’s Homicide’s squeal. How’d you wind up with it?”

“Coopersmith was dragging his ass off a double shift. I didn’t have anything better on so I took over the paperwork. Nigger killings off Twelfth Street aren’t exactly commissioner’s priority. Come on, Beulah. ’
Ngowa.
I go off duty in four hours.”