Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  I called 911. A woman answered. I explained it slowly to her.

  “Where is this building?” she asked. I pulled up an online map on the photo editor’s computer. A crowd of News reporters and photographers was gathering around the photo of the frozen man’s feet.

  “You think it’s a story by itself?” I asked one of the paper’s more imaginative editors.

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “It’s an important story.”

  Twenty minutes passed, then 911 called the newsroom. This time it was a man. “Where’s this building?”

  I explained it again.

  He said he’d send a crew out.

  Gary Miles, the deputy managing editor of the News, told me to hold off writing a story until the body was extricated by the authorities. Maybe we would learn his cause of death and such. So Ortiz and I drove back to the warehouse and waited until sundown. We saw no squad car, no fire truck. We drove home and had a warm supper.

  Ortiz and I went back to the warehouse the next morning to check on the frozen man and collect details for the story we would write. Incredibly, he was still there. Now the man became his own story. Two feet in ice, and nobody cared.

  A colony of homeless men frequently used the warehouse to keep warm until the nearby shelter along Michigan Avenue opened for the evening and gave out sleeping spaces on the floor by lottery. One of the men, a bundle of bones and whiskers, was lying under filthy blankets not twenty feet from the shaft.

  “You know that guy in the shaft?” I asked him.

  “I don’t recognize him for his shoes,” he said.

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “No, I figured someone else did,” he said. “There’s lots of people coming through here with cameras and cell phones.”

  “He’s been down there since last month at least,” said his shack-mate, who had walked up with some scrap wood to feed the fire in an oil drum.

  “I thought it was a dummy myself.”

  Besides, he said, he’d rather live next to a corpse than play the musical chairs game back at the shelter.

  Then he asked: “You got a couple bucks?”

  * * *

  Ortiz took some more photos, this time lighting the scene with a strobe. We drove back to the office and called 911 twice more. Once they hung up. The second time, they answered and took directions. And then they called me back again. This time, I offered to show them where the dead man was.

  Ortiz and I drove back out. The firefighters were standing at the wrong building, across the vacant lot. We pointed them toward the elevator shaft across the street.

  After a few minutes, one of them emerged. “My God, every time I say I think I’ve seen it all, I see something like this,” said the captain. The firefighters began to extract him with chainsaws.

  A police sergeant arrived and called me to his car to make some notes. His city-owned Chevy was smashed on the right front quarter panel. The odometer read 100,000 miles. The floorboards were rotting away, and the sergeant’s thin shoes were sitting in a pool of cold water where the gas pedal was. We made small talk. I asked him how business was. “I’ve got job security, let’s put it that way,” he said, deadpan.

  “Nobody says shit,” the sergeant said about murder witnesses. “Now we got to be nice to them. Yeah, like that works. It’s a culture of silence and death in this city.”

  He explained to me how he was trying to get one of his homicide cases reclassified as a suicide, since it may have been possible that a bedridden invalid had plugged himself in the face with a shotgun. “If you look at the blood splatter just right, it is possible,” he said hopefully.

  “That’s one way to close a case,” I said, wishing him luck.

  The television trucks began to show up, having heard the goings-on over the police scanner. A tall British cameraman could only laugh at the attention the frozen man was now getting. “The people actually alive in this city can’t get an ambulance to show up and Mr. Freeze down there has half the fire department helping him. That’s the power of the press, mate.”

  True. The average response time in Detroit for an emergency call to the police is a half hour, give or take; it’s little better with ambulances.

  * * *

  It was nearing midnight when the frozen man was finally extracted. He was set on the loading dock to await the meat wagon, the coroner’s van.

  When it arrived, who should get out but my old pal Mike Thomas, the rapping body collector. I had profiled Thomas a few years earlier for the Times—one of those “losers” I wrote about—and he was fired under orders from city hall, since he made the city look bad.

  I wrote that he was one of the few people in Detroit who was working. Thomas earned $14 a human corpse and claimed on his tax forms that he had made $14,000—not including the $9 he got paid to collect dead animals that had been mistaken for human beings, which happened more often than one would think.

  The difference between a dead dog and a dead man is $5, exactly the amount Henry Ford used to pay for a day’s work.

  “Hey, Mike!” I yelled. “I thought I got you fired.”

  “You can’t get rid of me, son. I’m like a cock-a-roach.”

  He appeared to be doing well. He said he had recently moved out of the ghetto, married the mother of his child and cut some new songs. He invited me to his upcoming show, then drove away with the corpse.

  * * *

  The story of the frozen man hit the streets the next morning, the photograph of his feet above the fold and stretching five columns wide. The headline read: FROZEN IN INDIFFERENCE. It was a bold decision by Jon Wolman, the editor and publisher. A dead man with your cornflakes is not the journalistic standard.

  The lede read: “This city has not always been a gentle place, but a series of events over the past few, frigid days causes one to wonder how cold the collective heart has grown.”

  The story was not the only thing that hit the streets that morning. A middle-level manager who had been laid off from General Motors dove out of his downtown high-rise apartment just as a bailiff knocked at the door to evict him.

  Also that morning, four thousand winter caps were distributed to the poor by Matty Moroun, the billionaire trucking magnate who owned the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit to Canada. As it happened, Moroun also owned the rotting warehouse in which the frozen man was found.

  Moroun—Detroit’s biggest owner of dilapidated buildings—was giving out the free hats in a public relations move—a sort of “Matty Cares” campaign.

  The idea was cooked up by Adolph Mongo, whom Moroun had hired as his Detroit strategist. The free hats and the dead man were pure coincidence, Mongo told me.

  I later asked Moroun why he didn’t just tear the old book repository down. A gesture like that would do more to soften his image in the newspapers as Detroit’s billionaire slumlord than distributing a trailerful of hats. To which he replied: “I’m in the catbird seat here.”

  Moroun was so rich and the town so broken, no one was going to make him fix shit as long as he had money for lawyers. And he knew it.

  The timing of Moroun’s hat giveaway stunt was as unfortunate as the selection of hats themselves. They were not your run-of-the-mill knitwear; they were, in fact, ski masks. The type gunmen use to stick up liquor stores.

  * * *

  The picture of the frozen man made its way around the world by way of the Internet, with commentators wondering what in the world was happening in Detroit.

  Bailouts, credit-default swaps, international trade blocs. These things were too amorphous, too complex to get your mind around. But a human being left in a crumbling elevator shaft. Everyone could understand that. Had it reached the point of anarchy? a reporter from Barcelona asked me by telephone.

  Funny things happen when you run out of money, I tol
d her.

  Police officials spent the day trying to explain why it took two days and five phone calls to extricate the man. Some black people complained on the radio talk shows that the News—and by extension, I—was racist because it never would have published the picture of a dead white girl from a posh white suburb.

  The small, white “art community” in Detroit complained that I was focusing on the negative in a city with so much good. What about all the galleries and museums and music? they complained in a flurry of e-mails and blogs. What about the good things?

  It was a fair point. There are plenty of good people in Detroit. Tens of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. There are lawyers and doctors and auto executives with nice homes and good jobs and community elders trying to make things better, teachers who spend their own money on the classroom, people who mow lawns out of respect for the dead neighbor, parents who raise their children, ministers who help with funeral expenses.

  But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it.

  What galleries and museums have to do with a dead man is beyond me. Writing about shit like that in the city we were living in seemed equal to writing about the surf conditions while reporting in the Gaza Strip.

  The town turned on me. As if I had committed the outrage of throwing the man down the shaft. The Free Press asked why I didn’t wait around for the police myself that first night, intimating that I was a sensationalist; that I twisted the facts and sat on a body for a good story.

  I got an anonymous phone message from someone claiming to be one of the hockey players. He offered to beat my ass. He said the Showtime network wanted to film the hockey players and their basement scene until I had ruined it with the dead man story. The caller didn’t leave a name with his message. A spokesman from Showtime told me he had never heard of urban explorers.

  Most odd, I received an e-mail from a man who had also been at the hockey game and claimed he was the first to see the body that morning. He wrote that he took exception to my characterization that his was a cold heart because he stepped around a dead man.

  “This discovery presented a moral dilemma to me,” he wrote. “Yes, this was a dead human being. However, he had clearly been there for at least 3 months, knowing that the basement had frozen by November. And, as you stated, this building houses many homeless men through the winter. While others may say who-gives-a-shit about the homeless people finding shelter in this warehouse, I wondered if the police would essentially kick all of them out. Maybe one of them would freeze to death?”

  He was half right about the homeless people. They were evicted once the police were notified. But no homeless man froze to death as a consequence. They simply moved over to the next abandoned building, an old hotel.

  FIRE WOMAN

  THE WHOLE FROZEN-MAN episode was dredging up memories I’d tried to bury for a decade. The death of somebody else society considered worthless: my sister.

  Nicole died after a night of partying in a bar frequented by prostitutes and heavies called the Flame, located in Brightmoor, on Detroit’s west side.

  My sister, among her many endeavors in life, was a streetwalker. I wish I could say it wasn’t true—but it is. So there you go.

  According to the police report, she had climbed into a van with a strange man. He was loaded on liquor and Lord knows what. He was doing eighty miles per hour down a residential street. The street dead-ended at a vacant lot, and beyond the lot was a garage.

  My sister was a wild one. And if I remember her right, she probably decided that if she was going to die it wasn’t going to be sitting passively in a van while it smashed into a brick wall. She jumped out, straight into a tree.

  The van came to a stop, entering the garage through the back. The man inside survived.

  At her funeral, the Outlaws motorcycle gang sat in the back of the church, red-eyed, snuffling into their leathers. They had purchased a big horseshoe of roses, the same kind they place around the neck of the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Her name, spelled out in gold lettering, was pinned to it.

  NICOLE.

  The wake was held in my mother’s yard. It was ridiculous. There were bikers and women with the ten-mile stare and proper Catholics and three grown men who wept as they confided to me separately how much they loved my sister and how they were planning to marry her.

  I introduced the triplets to one another and watched as they hugged and cried over their shared loss. No hard feelings.

  God, I loved my sister. What a hellcat. A fire woman who lived red hot until the flame burned out. Three paramours. A biker gang. A rap sheet and a whole clan weeping over her. I’m proud to have been her brother.

  NICOLE.

  My mother, predictably, was shattered with guilt and loss. A few weeks after the funeral she asked Frankie and me to take her to Brightmoor so she could lay some flowers at the spot where Nicky died. Then maybe go to the Flame Bar, retrace Nicky’s last steps, as though they might offer some sort of explanation as to where it all went wrong.

  So we went to the tree in the vacant lot. My mother put her palm upon it and wept. She collected a dry leaf and put it in the pocket of her raccoon coat. Then we went to the Flame.

  The place was typical Detroit: cinder block, cheap paneling, a jukebox and a handful of wretches with faces of mud. We sat at the end of the bar, near the door. The mud faces looked at us hard. Lynyrd Skynyrd was playing.

  I got a whiskey, my brother got a Southern Comfort and my mother ordered an Amaretto and coffee, except they didn’t have coffee here. Or Amaretto. She adjusted her raccoon coat with dignity and smiled.

  “Jack Daniel’s then. Do you have that? Okay, Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Thank you.”

  A working girl, gauging by the makeup and cheap spaghetti-strap dress she was wearing in the fangs of winter, approached my mother.

  “Do I know you?” barked the hooker, standing with her legs wide apart, her hands on her hips, like there was going to be a fight. My brother stiffened and looked at me with a stony eye. I kept an eye on the leathernecks at the far end of the bar.

  My mother looked at the woman with a warm sadness.

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “Are you lost?”

  “No, sweetheart. My daughter used to come here. I wanted to see what it was like.”

  “Who’s your daughter?”

  “Her name was Nicole.”

  “Oh,” the girl said, lowering her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you,” my mother said and sipped her whiskey. “Did you know her?”

  “Yes,” the girl said, and then went back to the corner and whispered conspiratorially to her people.

  We didn’t pay for the drinks.

  * * *

  I’ve been most everywhere on the planet: war zones, deserts, the Arctic Circle, campaign buses, opium dens, even Albuquerque, but I’ve never returned to that section of Detroit called Brightmoor. I was afraid of it and would drive miles to avoid it. The memories are too hard.

  My mother dealt with the pain a different way. Despite her staunch Catholic beliefs, my mother had my sister cremated. Unable to let Nicky go, not knowing what to do, not wanting to scatter her to the wind, my mother kept her ashes in an urn in her closet, waiting for inspiration. And then the inspiration came.

  As I pulled up to the old house on Joy Road, I found my youngest brother, Billy, sitting on a rock in the front yard, crying. He steadied his head in the fold of his elbow, which rested on the stump of an old maple. The tree had died a long time ago from disease.

  Traffic out front was unusually light for a workday. When I was a kid, there was always a traffic jam in the late afternoon, around quitting time. But
what did I know? I hadn’t been home in years.

  My brother Frankie told me the Ford plant up the street was down to a single shift.

  “Ain’t shit left here,” he said, frowning at Billy through a menthol.

  Billy shuddered, caught a big breath and whimpered again. He was always tender as a boy. When a hatchling fell out of the fir tree near the front door, Billy brought the thing into the house to nurse it. The bird died overnight, and early the next morning I watched from the upstairs window as he gave the thing a private funeral, replete with tears and a cross.

  Now he was carrying on like an old Greek widow. I wanted to kick him in the ribs and tell him to shut the fuck up. He was upsetting the children. Instead, I took the cheap bottle of liquor lying at his knees and poured it in the bushes.

  “Stop it,” I told him. “She’s dead.”

  My mother sat on the porch, pale and thin, a cigarette burning between her knuckles. Her husband was pacing back and forth shouting, “Goddamn it!”

  My stepfather—my second stepfather—was old enough to be my grandfather, and he came late in his life to our family. He was from a different time, from that mythological generation of people who worked hard and fought a good war and paid their debts and had respect for the rules. His was a generation that knew nothing about drugs or divorce or moral dissolution. At least that’s what he said. He never had any children of his own, but then he married into six—if you count my niece, Ashley, Nicole’s daughter, whom he raised since the time she was practically an infant.

  And now Ashley was lying in a casket in the funeral parlor next door to our house on Joy Road, dead of a heroin overdose. She died in her other grandparents’ basement near the interstate while her father slept nearby.

  I looked at the ravaged face of my stepfather and thought to myself that he had finally been baptized in the fires of pain. He was suffering the ultimate feeling of belonging to a family—at least our family.

  Stupid kid, she would have grown out of it. Ugly me. Why did I not open my home for her? Had I been away from Joy Road so long that I’d forgotten who I was? The rules and expectations of family? If a brother lies, the other brothers lie to protect him. If a niece calls, her uncle takes her in.