Stress (27 page)

“How do you know I’ll send it?”

“You’ll send it. I know a lot harder guys in cement contracting than I ever met dealing guns.”

“Why me? I always thought you had a pretty low opinion of my type.”

“That’s your imagination. Your type is the future of the gun trade.’“

“Where will you go?”

Joe Piper unwound himself from the sofa, set down his glass, and carried the United States Atlas he’d had on the coffee table over to Angell, spreading it open on his lap to the page he had marked with a swizzle stick. He ran his finger down the coast of California and stopped just short of Santa Barbara.

Angell squinted. “What’s at Point Conception?”

“The Pacific Ocean.”

B
Y TURNS THE FERAL
M
ICHIGAN WINTER STALKED AND
slew throughout February, slunk away during the second week of March, then pounced with a primordial howl on St. Patrick’s Day, dumping seventeen inches of snow on Detroit and blowing down power lines in the northern suburbs. In Toledo the lake effect heaped quays of white powder across U.S. 23, sealing off the Northwest Territory as efficiently as dynamiting a bridge. Dozens of hearts burst beneath the strain of digging out. Then came the thaw. The earth, liquefied, collapsed under city streets and expressway ramps, imploding the asphalt into craters that shredded tires, snapped axles, and crumpled suspensions like cheap foil. April stormed. The sky rolled down to the rooftops and sprouted fangs. Tornadoes and lightning gouged furrows through housing tracts in Westland and the factory towns downriver.

During much of this time a disturbance considerably less elemental, but every bit as desperate, had taken place between the United States Department of Justice and the City of Detroit over who would receive custody of Andrew Porterman, a/k/a Wolf. The city attorney argued that while the FBI held jurisdiction in kidnapping cases, the fact that a Detroit police officer was killed during the suspect’s apprehension gave priority to the city; moreover, since no ransom demand had been made at the time of the incident, the taking of Opal Ogden was not precisely a kidnapping at all, but an abduction, which was a civil crime and not federal. The U.S. Attorney General’s office countered that because Porterman was approached by agents and officers while on his way to a public telephone, and because a piece of paper was found on his person bearing the unlisted telephone number of the parents of the girl who had been taken, it stood to reason that a ransom demand was forthcoming. Further, as a three-quarter-blood Ottawa born in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Porterman was a ward of the government, and as such his fate belonged to Washington.

The debate wore into March, while its subject, recovering under heavy guard in a private room at Detroit Receiving Hospital from surgery to remove a .45-caliber bullet from the upper right quadrant of his thorax, remained unaware whether he would spend the rest of his life in the crumbling state facility at Jackson or the relative comfort of the Milan federal house. With no access to television or a newspaper, all he knew was what he overheard police officers and hospital staff discussing outside his door.

In fact, his first indication that any sort of decision had been reached occurred when a male nurse accompanied by half a dozen large men in plainclothes transferred him from his bed to a wheelchair in the meager hours of a sodden morning in late March and pushed him out to the curb, where two Detroit police officers waited to bundle him into the back seat of a city blue-and-white. Within twenty-four hours he had been arraigned in Detroit Recorder’s Court on charges of child abduction and the homicide of a police officer, outfitted with orange coveralls, and assigned a cell in the Wayne County Jail.

As Wolf pieced it together later, the Justice Department had finally bowed to local demands so that it could attend to the far more pressing issue of damage control in the wake of Attorney General John N. Mitchell’s resignation to face charges of obstruction of justice in the Watergate investigation. The Indian, who since his near-fatal injury had become something of a philosopher, supposed there was some solace in the knowledge that he shared his outlaw status with the highest official in the cabinet.

Trial was set for April. Two days after his arraignment, at which he was represented by a public defender, Wolf was visited in his cell by one Theophilus Carver Corbett, a trim young black attorney in a superbly tailored maroon suit who glittered when he moved. The Indian divined early on that this quality had less to do with the man’s personality than his accoutrements, which included a gold collar clip, diamond rings on both hands, a gold Rolex and identification bracelet, and a special hairspray that made his impressive afro twinkle whenever it caught the light. Corbett explained that he was a junior partner in the firm that had represented Wilson McCoy in two criminal cases and that his fee was provided for by the defense fund set up by the National Black Panther Party.

“Answer me one question,” Corbett said. “Then you don’t say another word until after the trail, understand what I’m saying?”

Wolf nodded.

“You do the girl?”

“No!” He tasted bile.

“I don’t just mean did you fuck her. You touch or fondle or say anything to her that could be described in any way as sexual?”

“I bathed her once.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I had to. She was covered with horseshit. The shaman—”

“I know all about that. She’s a prosecution witness. Answer this one, then shut the fuck up. When you was giving her that bath, did you get a hard-on?”

“No. Jesus.”

“Good. Now, seal up that hole and listen to me. They’re going to slap you with two consecutive life terms on account of this here’s political and there’s nothing like current politics for putting folks’ backs up; look at Nixon. But politics go stale faster than pork rinds. Give this thing five years and folks start wondering why they got so hot and bothered over that old thing. That’s when I swing you a new trial, maybe get you off with ten years total. But if they ring in child molestation and it sticks, ain’t no lawyer in this world can spring you any way but feet first on a plank. That don’t never change.”

“I killed a cop.”

“You shot a guy coming at you with a gun. They shot first, from way up on a roof with a scope rifle. You didn’t know if you was being busted or attacked by one of them youth gangs. Did they
say
they was cops?”

“No.”

He nodded his glittery head once. Then his expression changed. “This one’s just because I’m curious. You don’t have to answer, it makes no difference. What were you planning to do with the money once you had it?”

“Buy guns.”

“What for?”

Wolf hesitated. “You know, I don’t remember if we ever got into it. Wilson just wanted guns.”

“That boy’s a handful. I’d sure like to know why he’s worth so much grief.”

Wolf started to answer, then remembered instructions and simply shook his head.

Corbett’s grin illuminated the cell. “You’re a quick study. I do admire that in a client. Now do everything I say and we’ll have you out of denims and back in war paint and feathers before your hair turns so white you won’t be able to raise a whoop.”

“The state calls Sergeant Paul Kubicek.”

The courtroom presided over by Judge Del Rio in the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, a judicial bandshell built of green-and-white Carrara marble with a vaulted ceiling and slightly dished walls, was laid out like a theater. The stage belonged to the judge’s high oak bench and the defense and prosecution tables facing it, behind which spectator seats climbed in graduated rows to just under the balcony. The last, separated from the proceedings below by a gleaming oak rail, was unofficially reserved for off-duty police officers curious to see what new outrages were being committed by the freshman jurist. They called it the “peanut gallery.”

Del Rio was many things to many people. To that special sub-category of embittered minority members convinced there was no justice to be obtained in the white man’s court, the black judge was a hero of his race. To veteran police officers weary of watching their hard-won collars, usually black, released by his order on technicalities, he was a wild-eyed racist who owed his appointment to his affiliation with the local Democratic Party. His apologists referred to his conduct on and off the bench as “unorthodox”; “colorful.” His adversaries, too exasperated to observe the niceties, employed the phrase “criminally corrupt.” In all events he was a Detroit original.

Of which, as it was expressed by one of the participants at his disbarment hearing some years later, that city had more than its share.

Charlie Battle, stopping by in uniform on his way to pickup the deputy mayor’s dry cleaning, took a vacant seat in the front row of the peanut gallery. That row was almost all cops. Some he knew, others he didn’t and drew the obvious conclusion, based on their dress and the way they sat, either slouched on their tailbones with ankles crossed or hunched forward with their arms folded on the railing, that they were plainclothesmen. The one next to him, a STRESS officer Battle had seen a number of times around 1300 and spoken to once or twice in a hallway, sat with his chin resting on his forearms and the thick rubber-fisted grip of a nine millimeter Ruger lolloping from a speed rig under his right arm. Detroit’s downtown courts had to be the only ones in the country where the rule against firearms went so elaborately unenforced. Counting the big S&W on the baliff’s Sam Browne belt, his own department-issue .38, and the pearl-handled job the judge was known to pack under his robes, Battle calculated there was enough iron in the room to sink a small rowboat.

Today Del Rio wore a white silk turtleneck beneath his black robes, which together with his glossily slicked-back hair and gold-rimmed glasses gave him the air of a TV evangelist. He drummed manicured nails on the handle of his gavel and stared at the ceiling while the prosecutor began his questioning of the witness on the stand.

Battle tried to get a good look at the defendant seated at the front table, but from his angle all he could see was the Indian’s broad back in an inexpensive striped suit and his longhair gathered into a ponytail. Once during Kubicek’s testimony, Porterman turned to say something to his flashy-looking attorney, but the lawyer’s big afro got in the way. No matter. Battle had already satisfied himself from the newspaper photographs taken at Porterman’s arraignment that the man who called himself Wolf was the same man Russell Littlejohn’s father had seen climbing the stairs to his son’s room. He’d wondered if the prosecution in its eagerness to close the books on every major local crime that had taken place in the last twelvemonth would try to link the Indian to Russell’s death; but he was hardly surprised when no mention was made of it. The accidental-OD scenario seemed to have satisfied everyone it was necessary to satisfy.

Anyway, Battle knew who’d killed Littlejohn. For his star witness turn as the arresting officer in the Ogden kidnapping, Kubicek had bought a new dark blue suit and gone back to his flattop haircut, which he preferred for its clean look and low maintenance, and to hell with his wife’s notions about contemporary style. Haircut or not, he felt more comfortable than he had in some time as he answered the gray-haired prosecutor’s questions about how he had returned Porterman’s fire after the Indian had gunned down his partner without provocation.
Partner
; the dead man had been on loan to 1300 from the third precinct and Kubicek had never met him before his reinstatement. The guy wore squeaky shoes and read aloud from “The Playboy Advisor,” with special attention to the stuff on blow jobs. Kubicek would probably have put in for a departmental divorce in a day or so.

“Dave was a good man,” he said. “I was proud to serve with him.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. I have no more questions.”

Del Rio propped his chin on his hand. “Mr. Corbett?”

Theophilus Carver Corbett—honest to
Christ
, the names they picked—walked around the defense table and leaned back against it with his arms crossed.

“You say the defendant fired on officer Beddoes without provocation?”

“Shot him down like a dog in the street.”

“Was this before or after a sniper in the employ of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department fired at the defendant with a high-powered rifle from a nearby roof, missing him by inches?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“We have Deputy Kingston’s testimony that he fired the shot. Are you saying you didn’t hear it?”

“It was windy.”

“I see. It was windy. The Detroit ballistics team reported finding evidence that the bullet ricocheted off the steel cover of the pay telephone near where the defendant was standing when you approached him. Surely you heard that.”

“It was a heavy wind,” Kubicek said. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me Shirley.”

Laughter rippled through the spectators, loudest in the balcony. Del Rio, who hated being upstaged, rapped his gavel.

Corbett grinned, appreciating the joke; the fuck. “Did either you or Beddoes identify yourself as a police officer as you were approaching the defendant?”

“Beddoes did.”

“Do you remember what he said?”

Kubicek cleared his throat. “He said, ‘Police! Don’t move!’ Then the Indian shot him.”

“Those were his exact words? ‘Police! Don’t move!’?”

Kubicek said they were.

“Can you explain to this court, Sergeant, how it was you heard the exact words Officer Beddoes used to identify himself as a police officer when you managed to hear
neither
the ear-splitting report of a Remington thirty-thirty rifle fired from the roof of a building twenty feet away
nor
the shrill whine of a high-speed bullet fired by that same rifle bounding off a steel box
ten feet in front of your nose
?”

The defense attorney had started walking toward the witness stand as he began his question, finishing with both hands on the partition in front of Kubicek with his face three inches from the sergeant’s.