Motor City Burning (22 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen!” boomed McCreedy's rich tenor now, a voice that made him a favorite in the handful of Detroit saloons where the singing of Irish ballads was still tolerated. “Come to us now, all the way from thirteen-hundred Beaubien Street in the heart of the Motor City—the fastest rising star in the history of Homicide, it's Francis Al—”

“Knock it off, Jimmy. How's tricks?”

He lowered his voice. “Fine, lad, just fine.” The story was that when the snipers opened up on this building, Jimmy McCreedy was under the counter before anyone else was even aware they were under fire. “Might I offer you coffee, Frank? Or has our new line of work turned us into a tea drinker?”

“No thanks, Jimmy, I'm good.” Doyle saw David Denekas, a Vice detective, shuffling through paperwork in the corner. Denekas had let his blond hair grow long, and he was wearing his shoulder holster over a paisley shirt, with bellbottom jeans and a pair of fancy white track shoes. Track shoes, for chrissakes. The better to chase down deviants? Denekas was one of the stars of Vice's cleanup squad, a true gung-ho street warrior. The cleanup guys spent the bulk of their time hassling pimps and their prostitutes and the prostitutes' johns, and they spent the rest of their time hassling homosexuals, who they called “browns.” Despite his blue-collar jockstrap Jesuit upbringing, Doyle had never been able to work up the expected loathing of homosexuals. He believed that what people chose to do in the privacy of their own bedrooms was their own business. Besides, in this town there were bigger battles to fight.

“Who's the hippie with the gun?” Doyle said to Jimmy McCreedy. Denekas looked up and flashed Doyle the peace sign, then went back to his paperwork.

“Nice kicks, Dave,” Doyle said.

“Thanks,” Denekas said, admiring the shoes. “They're Adidas.”

“What the fuck're Adidas?”

“Dave DeBusschere wears 'em!” he said, as though a certain brand of sneakers deserved to be bronzed simply because they were worn by the player-coach of the Detroit Pistons, a basketball team that always finished a couple dozen games out of first place and then got bounced out of the playoffs in the first round. “They're leather,” Denekas added, admiring them some more.

Doyle still owned the last two pairs of canvas Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star high-tops he'd worn during his senior year at U. of D. High, white for home games, black for away games. Now they were making sneakers out of leather. When the brothers got hip to this, Doyle told himself, a pair of canvas Chucks will be about as prized as Aunt Jemima's head scarf.

“Is Zap working today?” Doyle said to Jimmy.

“He's in the back doing paperwork. You know how Zap loves his paperwork.”

“Do I ever.” Doyle went down the long corridor to the last room and found Jerry Czapski sitting at the battered Royal typewriter in the corner, chewing on a pencil and tapping out a report with his thumbs and stubby index fingers. The scary thing about Czapski was that he was more proficient with a typewriter than he was with the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson strapped to his hip. Doyle still thought it was a miracle that Zap nailed that armed robber at Northland with a single shot.

“You take a speed-typing course?” Doyle said, sliding a chair up to the desk.

Czapski blinked, then broke into a big toothy smile. Doyle had forgotten how thick his lips were, how thick the flesh on his face was—how meaty the man was. He stuck out his right hand and gave Doyle a crusher handshake. “Hey pardsie, how they hangin?”

“Fine, Zap. What you working on?”

“Christ.” He passed a hand over the bristles of his crewcut. “They're breaking my stones over that thing at Cobo—you know, that fucking Poor People's March? I got called in on it and I was there when the mounted guys charged the crowd, knocked a few people around. All we were trying to do was get a stalled car out of the way and now the NAACP and all the big niggers like Reverend Cleage are hollering police brutality.”

“All the fun's gone, eh Zap?”

“You said it, brother. So what's up with you? Nice suit.”

“Thanks, Zap. Coming from a clothes horse like you, that means a lot. I'll be sure to tell my tailor.”

Czapski actually blushed, for even among members of the Detroit police force he was known as an atrocious dresser, partial to the white-belt-with-white-shoes combo known as the full Cleveland. Doyle took the photocopy of the run sheet out of his pocket and set it on top of Czapski's pile of paperwork.

“Take a look at this, Zap. Tell me if it rings any bells.”

Czapski's lips moved as he read the run sheet. He was frowning, a bad sign. No light bulb blazed inside the thick skull. “Jeez,” he said at last. “We jacked up so many smokes together back in the old days. . . .”

Yes we did, Doyle thought sadly. “Try to think, Zap. This one was different. Our last night together, we were heading south on Wildemere—you were driving, warm evening, lot of people out—and you said you didn't like the looks of a young black guy getting into a cherry old Buick with out-of-state plates. You were wondering where he got the money to pay for it. . . .”

“Ohhhhhh, sure,” Czapski said, like a kid who'd just solved a difficult math problem. “Now I remember. Spade looked a lot younger'n he was. I figured him for a teenager but his license had him somewhere in his mid-twenties, as I recall.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I remember when he reached for the glove box to get his registration, I gave him a little love tap on the side of his head with my flashlight. Told him not to pull out no gun on me. Just fuckin with him, you know.”

“Yeah, Zap, I know. You remember what he looked like?”

“Like I say, young looking. Smooth skin, not too dark. Handsome enough kid. Looked like he coulda been a backup singer at Motown.”

“You think you could pick him out at a show-up?”

“I dunno, Frank. It's been more than a year. And jigs all look alike to me.”

“But you'd be willing to give it a shot?”

“Sure, if you asked me to. I can't make any promises, though.”

“I understand, Zap.“

“You want me to come downtown now?”

“No no, not just yet. I'll let you know if I need you. One last thing. You happen to remember what color the car was, the exterior?”

“Yeah, it had a two-tone paintjob—pink in the middle, with a black roof and black beneath that chrome strip that runs along the side of old Buicks. I remember asking the kid was he a pimp since he drove a car the color of pussy. Then I asked him was he a homasexual.”

“He gave the Algiers as his local address. He say anything about having a roommate?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Thanks, Zap.” As Doyle stood up to leave, a young black uniformed officer walked into the room. Czapski looked up at him. “Jerome! Come over here and meet your predecessor. This is the legendary Frank Doyle. Frank, this is my new partner, Jerome Wright. He was an All-City guard at Cody. Averaged nineteen a game.”

Jerome Wright gave Doyle a firm handshake, looked him in the eye. “Pleasure to meet you, detective. Heard a lot about you. You were All-City at U. of D., right?”

“A hundred years ago.”

Jerome Wright smiled. The kid could have been a movie star. So the department's much-ballyhooed campaign to hire more black officers was finally paying off, and here was living proof. About time, Doyle thought. When the riot broke out the department was ninety percent white and one hundred percent blue-collar ass-kicker. Even the black cops, guys like Jimmy Robuck, made no apology for their allegiances or their methods. In fact, more than a few black suspects learned the hard way that they were better off taking their chances with polacks like Jerry Czapski and micks like Frank Doyle than with brothers like Jimmy Robuck. But the times demanded change—or the appearance of change—and so the department was beating the bushes for black recruits. Doyle said, “You're a lucky man, Jerome.”

“I am, sir? How's that?”

“You're learning your craft at the knee of a true master. They don't make 'em like Zap anymore.”

“No sir.”

Doyle laughed all the way back to downtown. The irony was simply too beautiful: One of the worst racists on the force was now spending his working days trapped in a radio car with a member of the one race he despised above all the others. Let the punishment fit the crime. Doyle believed it was racist cops like Czapski, as much as any other single factor, that explained the fury of last summer's riot. The brothers were sick and tired of being called “boy” and “honey baby” and worse. They were tired of getting stopped for no reason, getting love taps from police flashlights, getting their justice served up in alley court. And now, as the department scrambled to recruit black officers, Jerry Czapski, of all people, had wound up riding with a black partner.

The world, Doyle thought, was truly a perfect place.

While talking to Caldwell Petty, the chief of police in Tuskegee, Alabama, Doyle imagined Rod Steiger sitting at a desk chain-smoking cigarettes and sending gouts of tobacco juice into a Maxwell House coffee can while the blades of a ceiling fan chopped the foggy air. Doyle wondered why so many Southerners had last names for first names. His second case during the riot was a yokel from east Tennessee named Wilson Lee Pryor who rode the Hillbilly Highway straight to a job on the line at Dodge Main and wound up getting shot six times on the roof of the Kentucky-Tennessee Apartments on Alexandrine because a half dozen National Guardsmen and cops, including Detective Frank Doyle, mistook him for a sniper. It turned out Wilson Lee Pryor had gone up on the roof of his building to watch for flying sparks from a nearby fire. But he was carrying a deer rifle for protection and now the poor dumb hick was dead.

“What can I do ya for, Detective?” came the gravelly voice of Caldwell Petty over the long-distance wire.

“I'm trying to run down some leads on a murder case,” Doyle said. “You ever have any dealings with a young man named William Brewer Bledsoe?”

“Sho nuff have. He goes by Willie. This have something to do with that trouble yall had with yo Nigras last summer?”

“Looks that way.”

“I figgered as much.”

“How come?”

“Cause that boy ain't nothin but trouble.”

“How do you mean, trouble?”

“Well, he come up here to go to school from some little piss-ant town down south a here, Troy or Opp. Can't rightly remember. Soon as he got here he started raisin sand—sat down at the lunch counter at the Sanitary Cafe, which was segregated at the time. That woulda been about nineteen and fifty-nine, maybe sixty, in there. Then he put some foolish sign on the lawn of the university's president. Can you imagine that? Some uppity little nigger accusing the president of Tuskegee Institute of being a Uncle Tom!”

“Amazing. Anything else?”

“Eventually he run off and joined that Student Nonviolence outfit. Tried to get ill-lit-rit Nigras to register to vote, such foolishness as that. I'm here to tell ya, Detective, we got some of the finest Nigras anywhere in the South right here in Tuskegee, Alabama, yessir. Folks get along here—or they did till uppity niggers like Willie Bledsoe come along.”

“He ever get into any serious trouble?”

“Not here. I heard tell he was on that bus got fire-bombed outside Anniston. Too bad they didn't cook his ass. Happiest day of my life was when him and that worthless brother a his packed up and left for D-troit. They had a big send-off party night before they left.”

“He has a brother?”

“Better believe it. Ornery sumbitch, name of Wes. He was with the Navy in Vee-yet-nam and something musta happened to him over there. That boy ain't right.”

Doyle was scribbling in his notebook, trying to keep up. Again he said, “How do you mean?”

“Well, he just ain't right. Lazy as the day is long. Just pure-T worthless. All he ever done round here, so far's I can tell, was watch TV, drink beer and shoot guns.”

“Guns?”

“Yeah. Way I heard it, him and his brother used to go out into the woods for a little target practice.”

“What kind of guns they have?”

“Beats me.”

“Any idea how many? Or where they got them?”

“Nosir.”

“Weren't you curious?”

“Nosir. Most folks round here's got guns.”

“Do you know where Wes is now?”

“Can't say as I do. All I know is that I haven't seen his black face in this town in over a year—and that suits me just fine. Wes Bledsoe's the kind that'll explode on you. Believe me, I seen it happen more'n once.”

“How about Willie?”

“Ain't seen him neither. He could still be in D-troit for all I know. The folks at Tuskegee Institute—that's the Nigra college here in town—they could probably help you find his homeplace. Like I say, it's one a them little piss-ant towns down south somewheres.”