Motor City Burning (7 page)

Driving through his old precinct never failed to depress Doyle. He'd spent three of his seven years in uniform patrolling this neighborhood and he'd grown fond of it. It had never been plush but it was always solid, working-class, and there were still many blocks where people owned their homes, trimmed their hedges and lawns, went to church, belonged to the block association, the U.A.W., the N.A.A.C.P. But they were being nibbled away. Since the riot, whites and many better-off blacks hadn't been able to get out fast enough.

Now he was passing the shoe repair shop where the first person died during the riot. That case was Doyle's baptism by fire. The shop was empty now but the red neon shoe was still in the window, unlit, as dead as Krikor Messerlian himself. He was the Armenian immigrant who ran the place, a sweet shriveled old goat who always offered Doyle strong coffee and strong opinions whenever he stopped by to chat. When the neighborhood started to burn last July, Krikor stayed in his shop around the clock, armed only with a fireplace poker and the immigrant's determination not to back down, not to cede his little patch of the American dream.

When a gang of black kids gathered outside and threatened him through the locked door, Messerlian cursed them and told them to get off his property. Their response was to kick down the door and beat him to death. The police dispatcher used the word “mob,” and when Doyle arrived at the scene Krikor Messerlian was lying inside the shop in a sticky pond of blood alongside a fireplace poker. His face was gone.

Doyle did what Jimmy Robuck had taught him to do at a murder scene: He followed his gut. He told the two uniforms to secure the building and not touch anything while he went knocking on doors in search of a witness because his gut told him they would never have anything on this one without an eyewit. As he turned to go, one of the uniforms, a black rookie, nodded toward a big stucco house across the street and suggested he might want to talk to an elderly lady in a blue dress who lived on the ground floor.

Doyle always did his own door-to-doors because he didn't trust uniforms with something so important and he'd discovered in his first week on the job that he could get people to tell him things. Mamas, widows, ex-husbands, eyewitnesses, sometimes even the killers themselves—they seemed to want to tell him things. Jimmy Robuck said it was a homicide cop's greatest gift.

Doyle knocked on a dozen doors before he got to the lady in the stucco house across the street. Her name was Clara Waters and she told Doyle she was on her front porch watering her geraniums when the boys kicked down the door and started beating the old man. She knew the boy who took the pipe, or whatever it was, and used it to smash Mr. Messerlian's face. She even told Doyle where the boy stayed—“corner apartment in that little two-story brick across from Roosevelt Field.”

The kid was eating a bag of Frito's and watching “I Love Lucy” when Doyle and Jimmy knocked on his door. He had fresh blood on his sneakers and his fingerprints matched those on the fireplace poker next to Krikor Messerlian's body. They had the kid locked up, his confession signed and the paperwork on its way upstairs before the Medical Examiner started dismantling Krikor Messerlian's corpse in the white-tiled autopsy room in the basement.

Yes, this job was all about luck and squealers—and getting people to tell you things.

When Doyle reached Clairmount now he pulled the Plymouth to the curb and shut off the engine. To his right was the building where it had all started. The print shop on the ground floor was still vacant. He wondered if the blind pig upstairs, the United Community League for Civic Action—or was it the United Civic League for Community Action?—was back in business, serving illegal after-hours booze. It wouldn't have surprised him. Very little surprised him anymore.

The street looked shabby, sadder than ever. People called it “Sin Street” or simply “The Strip,” and during the riot one poet at the
Free Press
had described this stretch of Twelfth Street as “an ugly neon scar running up the center of a Negro slum.” Doyle didn't think it was ugly. He thought it was alive. It contained the usual gallery of pawn shops and furniture stores, record shops, soul food restaurants and discount liquor stores, a religious artifacts shop that offered statues of the Virgin Mary, money-drawing oil, skin-whitening ointments. The street was always buzzing. Now he could see the fading words
SOUL BROTHER
and
NEGRO OWNED
and
AFRO ALL THE WAY
spray-painted on certain windows and walls, the black owners' way of pleading with arsonists and looters to pass them by. Zuroff Furniture Co., once one of the busiest enterprises on the street, was boarded up, a
FOR RENT
sign out front. It was hard to blame old Abe Zuroff for packing it in. The Jewish merchants had gotten hit especially hard during the riot, and Doyle had often wondered why. Was it simple bad luck, a case of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or was it something darker, something tribal, a settling of scores for slights, real or imagined, that blacks had been feeling for years in every inner-city in America, Detroit included? Doyle had given up on believing he would ever know the answers to such questions.

Across the street from Zuroff's there was a storefront church, its name painted crudely around a big red cross:
Truth and Light Free Will Deliverance Tabernacle
. A junkie was nodding in the doorway. Thank God for churches and junkies, Doyle thought, imagine the hell we'd have to pay without them to take some of the edge off. Two men were sprawled on the hood of a Cadillac in front of the church, passing a quart bottle of Colt .45 malt liquor—a completely unique experience, if you believed the popular ad campaign, which Doyle did not. An enormous radio on the roof of the Caddy was blasting Smokey Robinson:
“If you feel like giving me a lifetime of de-vo-o-tion, I second that emotion. . . .”
Ten-dollar flatback hookers sashayed back and forth across the street, brazenly waving down cars. Doyle easily knew half of them by name.

He'd seen enough. He started the Plymouth and eased down Twelfth Street. The brothers and sisters on the sidewalks all stopped what they were doing and gave the unmarked their very best Motor City hate stares. There was heat in those stares. Doyle turned left at Grand Boulevard, ending his little trip down Memory Lane and turning his thoughts to what Henry Hull could possibly have for him on this fine spring morning.

As always, the door to Room 450 was ajar and Henry Hull was sitting alone on the sofa. Henry's skull was as smooth and white as an onion. He was barely sixty years old but looked eighty, the flesh on his face sagging. His eyes, once so bright, were now lifeless and dull, the light gone out of them. Doyle knew the man well enough to know that his sorrow went even deeper than his personal losses, for Henry Hull, like most native Detroiters, was immensely proud of his hometown, of its swagger, its work ethic, its dirty fingernails and thick wrists, its ability to accommodate a crazy quilt of races and ethnic groups, shoulder to shoulder. Sure, there had always been tension—labor organizers were regularly beaten during the Depression, and thirty-four people died in a vicious race riot that started on Belle Isle in 1943—but in Henry Hull's eyes such flare-ups were inevitable in such a big rough city, and they were the exception, not the rule. Detroit had always been a city that worked, in both senses of the word. Now, for the first time in Henry Hull's life, there were disturbing signs that it had stumbled so badly it might never pick itself up.

“Knock, knock,” Doyle said, pushing the door open.

“Come in, Frankie,” Henry said, rising from the sofa. “I just brewed a fresh pot. You want a cup?”

“Silly question.”

There was nowhere to set their mugs on the coffee table because it was buried under drifts of paperwork—the autopsy, Doyle's typed report of the crime scene, newspaper accounts of the killing and the ongoing investigation. Pinned to the room's walls were blown-up maps of the blocks surrounding the motel, and Henry's endless lists of addresses and phone numbers and names, all the far-fetched leads that had failed to locate Helen Hull's killer and, in Doyle's opinion, probably never would. He'd learned that the twelve hours after a homicide are the most crucial for a detective and that a case that stays open for a month is likely to stay open forever. That meant the Helen Hull case had been open nine times forever.

“Let me see, let me see, it's right here somewhere,” Henry said, digging frantically in the pile of papers. His doggedness and the futility of his quest filled Doyle with admiration and sadness. Sometimes he found himself wishing the old guy would simply give it up, pack his belongings, check out of the motel, and get on with his life. But Doyle knew that was out of the question, and deep down he was glad it was. He'd vowed to find Helen Hull's killer the day he stood at the corner of Jefferson and Piper looking at the burned-out shell that had been the Greenleaf Market. Henry had just come back from identifying his wife's body at the morgue. Watching him spray-paint the words
THANKS FOR WHAT YOU
'
VE DONE
on the market's charred walls, Doyle broke down and wept.

“Here it is!” Henry cried, unearthing a photocopied map. “I don't know how we could've missed it.” He had drawn a dotted line in red ink from the motel to a street corner behind Henry Ford Hospital on the far side of the Lodge Freeway.

Henry stood up and grabbed his binoculars. “Come on, Frankie,” he said, starting for the door, “I've got something to show you. Let's walk through what happened again.”

For the thousandth time, Doyle thought, following him out the door.

“Okay,” Henry said, turning right in the hallway, Doyle on his heels. “Helen can't sleep because of all the noise down on the street, so she walks out into the hall. She passes Lisa Perot's room and sees that the door's open and the lights are on.” Henry jerked a thumb at the door to Room 433. “Helen walks all the way to the window.”

They had reached the picture window at the north end of the hallway. Henry pulled the string that opened the curtain, and they were looking down at West Grand Boulevard. Doyle hated revisiting this spot, for it was written in the homicide bible that while it's possible to murder a man only once, it's possible to murder a murder scene a thousand and one times. And this one had been slaughtered.

In the early hours of last July 26, the area around the Harlan House was a war zone. All streetlights had been shot out. Sniper fire aimed at Henry Ford Hospital was so heavy that the staff had to blacken the windows in the emergency rooms so they wouldn't die while trying to save the dying. Tanks roamed on West Grand Boulevard, pouring rounds from .50-caliber machine guns at anything that moved. They were answered with tracer fire from the rooftops. National Guardsmen, poorly trained and terrified, were also shooting at anything that moved, including other Guardsmen and police. The night was thunder and chaos.

It was Helen Hull's second night at the motel. She'd checked in when the riot started spreading to the East Side, while Henry stayed behind in their apartment above the shuttered market with a loaded deer rifle. Police cruised the Jeff-Chalmers neighborhood with bullhorns, urging residents and shopkeepers to stay away from windows and doorways, reminding them about the dusk-to-dawn curfew. A National Guard unit had bivouacked in Ford Park down by the river because there were rumors that black militants were going to mount an invasion by boat from Canada, then blow up Detroit's water works. The city was jazzed with such rumors.

“Okay,” Henry said now to Doyle, “so Helen calls to Lisa Perot to come look at the tank down on the street. The globe light behind her is on.”

Which made her a beautifully silhouetted target. Within seconds, two bullets crashed through the window. One missed her, and one ripped into her chest, penetrating her heart and glancing downward before coming to rest in her liver. Then, according to the interviews Doyle conducted after the shooting, one of the most bizarre incidents of that bizarre week took place. A man named J.R. Glover of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was hastily packing his bags in Room 401. When he heard the crash, he crawled out into the hallway and saw Helen Hull lying on her back. Suddenly a man with a rifle charged into Glover's open room and began firing out the window. National Guardsmen peppered the room with dozens of rounds, but the man, miraculously, was not hit.

Then the police arrived. They stormed into Glover's room and disarmed the man with the rifle and hustled him away. Someone smashed or shot out the globe light in the hallway. And someone in the hallway fired at least one bullet out through the window where the fatal bullet had entered.

By the time Doyle and Jimmy Robuck showed up, the crime scene was a disaster. Helen Hull had been taken by ambulance to Ford Hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. It was impossible to examine the scene in the dark, and it was too dangerous to use flashlights for more than a few minutes. After noting the location of the three bullet holes in the window, the detectives and the rest of the police left the scene.