I cruised through Detroit trying to get lost in the sunshine and the radio. Then I spotted a tumultuous cloud of black smoke and drove for it like it was the lodestar.
The smoke came from a tumbledown ghetto neighborhood where a white vinyl house was burning savagely, kicking up the acrid plume. A horde of neighborhood people were blocking the street so the firefighters couldn’t gain entrance with their trucks. The engine driver was leaning on his horn, which reminded me of the wailing cries of animals at a slaughterhouse. I thought of my little wind chime.
A mini-riot was about to erupt, with the firemen screaming at a man who had blocked the street with his van. I jumped out of my car and ran toward the crowd.
“What’s going on?” I asked a heavyset woman with her hair in a cloth, showing her my press card.
“That be a crack house,” she said. “We been calling the police every day, but nobody does nothing. That house be wild and we got children living here. So somebody lit the house on fire and nobody on this block wants it put out.”
I told this to the battalion chief, who finally managed to negotiate his rigs through the crowd without incident.
“I can’t say I blame them,” he said. “Sometimes people gotta do for themselves.”
* * *
Strange things had been happening in the fire department. One of the men who worked alongside Walt Harris on the morning of his death was sent to work at Ladder Co. 14, also on the east side of the city.
The guy took the death of Harris especially hard. He had turned to the Bible and was studying to become an ordained minister.
He was reading by lamplight on an early Tuesday morning just after midnight and attempted to create a little mood by lighting some incense and dousing the harsh light of a floor lamp by placing a towel over it.
Then the ladder company received a call for a fire at an abandoned apartment complex.
The sleepy-eyed firefighter jumped into his bunker gear, forgetting to take the towel off the lamp.
It seems that nobody in the crumbling neighborhood saw the flames cascading from the firehouse or cared enough to call it in, even though fire was leaping out high above the window frames. In fact, the fire was discovered by the firefighters themselves as they returned from their call.
Laughably, they could not put out the blaze because they had no engine to pump water from the fire hydrant. As it happens, the city decommissioned the engine at the firehouse in a cost-cutting measure.
* * *
Inspectors came to talk. I eavesdropped on the whole conversation because another guy had called me with a cell phone in his pocket. The Bible-reading firefighter was scared. As much as he probably wanted to leave Detroit, he needed this job.
“Man, I’m telling you, I didn’t have nothing to do with it,” he shrieked.
Crestfallen, he disappeared for the better part of a day, which launched a manhunt of firefighters concerned that he would take his own life.
In the end, the investigation ruled it an electrical fire and not another word was spoken about it.
* * *
Unbelievably, the same thing—nothing—was being done with the investigation into Walt Harris’s death. It was a murder because it happened during an arson—someone had torched the house with a can of gasoline.
In New York or Los Angeles, there would have been an elite homicide squad investigating the death of a man in uniform. But here in Detroit, no manhunt had been launched. No task force assembled. The Harris case had been given over to a single overworked homicide detective, and so it sat on the back burner growing stale.
People in uniform will tell you that no one life is more important than another. The lives of a white cop, a black fireman, a minister and a drug addict all have equal value. But the presumption is that if a person in uniform is killed with impunity, if such a killer is allowed to run free, then no regular citizen is safe. So for the sake of civil order, when a person in uniform is murdered, heads must get knocked, doors must be kicked in and every available cop is put to the task.
In Harris’s case, the sole detective’s name was Tony Wright. I knew him well. He had been the partner of Mike Carlisle, and I had tailed the two of them a few years earlier when they were hunting down a serial killer. Wright was a good cop, overworked and waiting to retire. I called him from home.
“Tony, what the fuck is going on with Walt’s case?”
“It’s just me,” Wright said. “I’m frustrated. I’d like to solve this case. But I’ve picked up two more cases since this one. Then I’ve got to be in court tomorrow. It just goes on and on and on.”
I called James Tate, the police department mouthpiece. Poor schmuck. He had to make the department’s shit smell decent. He had to tap-dance around the Kilpatrick scandal. He accomplished this by never giving a straight answer.
“We’ve got a few leads on this case,” Tate said, “but if people aren’t talking, they aren’t talking.”
“James, you’ve only got one guy working this case,” I said.
“You’ve got to remember that we’ve got three hundred twenty-five other homicide cases out there.”
“But this is a guy in uniform.”
“It is what it is,” Tate said. “I’m just the talking head here.”
The situation had grown so ridiculous that the firefighters themselves were going door to door trying to develop leads. But the only thing a fireman is going to accomplish by stepping into the middle of a murder investigation is to fuck it up.
So I wrote the story: HERO GOES FORGOTTEN.
Almost immediately, my boss, Miles, got a call from a deputy chief of police and a junior officer from the homicide squad. They were not pleased with the piece and complained that Wright had not said those things to me. They said I had made them up out of thin air.
Miles said he would have to hear it directly from Wright.
As it happened, Wright was in the room with his commanding officers. They put him up to the speaker phone.
I made a mistake by putting Wright’s name in the paper. His balls were in a sling and I placed them there. I imagined him bookended by the brass, scowling, like he was the suspect of an interrogation. You’d think a grown man would know better. I couldn’t blame the detective for whatever he was about to say.
“Go on, Wright, tell him,” the deputy chief growled.
“I know Charlie,” Wright told my boss. “He’s a good dude. I talked to him the other night and I know he was meaning to do the right thing. I’ll leave it at that.”
Wright could have thrown me under the bus. He didn’t because that’s how real men behave. Now because he acted like a man, he’d probably be walking the beat in some hellhole on the far northwest side.
There are still a lot of good people in this city trying to hold it together with gum and bailing wire. And I believe Wright wanted me to get done what he could not. Newspapers and journalism still mattered to the community in some way. The work could be important for those without a voice. It could help. That’s what Wright was saying by saying almost nothing at all.
* * *
In the meantime, Harris’s partner Mike Nevin was promoted to lieutenant and transferred from Squad 3 to Engine Co. 38, a firehouse located on the tinder-trap east side.
He and his men were out checking fire hydrants on a spring morning when one of the deckies—fire department speak for grunts—found a screen door torn off its hinges at an abandoned house. The deckie threw the door on the back of the rig and the engine drove off, with Nevin in command. It seemed like no big deal. The copper piping in the old house had been scavenged, the meter box, the electrical wiring, even the garage door. Inside the garage was a pile of trash and human excrement. Who would miss the screen door?
Their firehouse didn’t have a screen door and the flies were getting in. Det
roit firefighters have been repairing their firehouses like this for decades. Toilets, doors, lumber, bricks. The city never cared. No one ever complained. And it was cheaper than paying for upkeep.
This time, however, a neighbor caught Nevin and his crew on tape. The neighbor sent the tape to a local news station. The news station put its crack reporter on the job. Within days, Nevin and his men were fired for “looting” the city.
Nevin was beside himself. Maybe he should have told the deckie to leave the door be. Maybe he shouldn’t have revealed to investigators that Walt Harris’s alarm didn’t trigger when the roof collapsed on him. Maybe he shouldn’t have called the city leadership an abject and complete failure in my newspaper column. Maybe he shouldn’t have told Rep. Sander Levin to kiss his balls. There was a lot Nevin probably shouldn’t have done. The brass hated him, and the brass had his balls now.
The irony is, Nevin used to have a little screen door business. He knew the thing wasn’t worth twenty bucks.
I went to Nevin’s disciplinary hearing, a meeting open by law to the public. I waited in the foyer of fire headquarters downtown, making notes in my book. There was a glass case containing the photographs of the department’s fifteen ranking executives—all were black and all appointed. The department in total is about half black and half white, and an all-black command staff would be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit in most other cities. But this is metropolitan Detroit. Race is a way of life.
A man in uniform approached me. I recognized him from the glass case: Second Deputy Commissioner James W. Mack Jr.
“May I ask what you are doing here?”
“I’m a reporter covering Lieutenant Nevin’s disciplinary hearing.”
“I know who you are and I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said, taking me by the elbow and leading me to the elevators. He smiled like a lizard.
I wrote his name in my tablet.
It was quiet in the elevator. He watched the lighted numbers change. I watched him watch the lighted numbers change. I never took my eyes off him. I was staring directly at the man. Mayors come and go, but it is the footmen who tie the knots and divide the bag. The longtime little men. Bureaucrats. Cockroaches.
The elevator reached the ground floor.
“Here you are.”
“Sir,” I said, “the only reason you have Nevin up there on charges is because he spoke to me and he told the truth. So I promise you one thing. I’m going to go through all the paperwork, all the contracts, and I’m going to find it.”
“What do you suppose you’ll find?” he asked with a face.
“The money,” I said. “I’m going to find out who ruined this department. I’m going to find those screen doors.”
“Good luck with that, sir, and have a nice day.”
* * *
I stepped outside into the doom and the gloom of the Michigan spring and watched steam hiss from the sewer caps. All of downtown Detroit is powered and heated by steam produced from a massive waste incinerator located on the edge of a neighborhood. The whole goddamned downtown running on garbage. A whole neighborhood full of kids choking on the smoke of burning diapers and car batteries.
I stood under the granite cornices of the fire headquarters where a covey of pigeons was huddled against the rain. I roasted up a Winston and thought about things.
It was funny to me at first: the corruption and incompetence and selfishness. But now I was looking at it in a different way: the leadership was ruining people. Or worse, killing them.
Kilpatrick had been taken out. So too had Monica Conyers. But he was only the head of the snake. And she was a dipshit. I couldn’t laugh at it anymore. I was part of it, related to it, stuck in it. I was home and I wasn’t leaving. I couldn’t.
I decided I was going to keep that promise. I was going to find out who was responsible for the outrage of murderers walking free while the city burned night after night. I was going to become a real reporter. Someone had to answer for this shit. The dignified burial of Johnnie Dollar and the demolition of Harris’s death house gave me confidence. The people of Greater Detroit deserved better than to be robbed by their leaders and forgotten by their neighbors.
I threw my cigarette butt into the sewer grate. I looked up into the rain. That’s when a bird shit on my face.
THE FIFTH
DRINKING WAS THE only thing that would make Detroit go away. My life was populated with dead men and liars and desperate people who would call me at all hours of the evening, and the only door of escape I could find was at the bottom of a bottle.
One evening my wife and I dropped our daughter off at her grandmother’s and we got good and loaded on red wine. Then the phone rang. It was a cop buddy of mine with another piece of nasty news. Three men dead on a lawn and nobody had bothered to call the authorities for four hours.
Entranced, I ignored my wife. A mistake. When I hung up the phone, she was eating a piece of cold pizza.
“I’m getting sick of this.”
Apparently she was fed up with the stories of murder victims lit on fire in abandoned houses and women who found their boyfriends hanging dead from a pair of pantyhose while dressed in their lingerie.
“Fucking deal with it,” I said. “It’s putting pizza in your fat mouth.”
“Fuck you,” she hissed.
“Fuck me?” I jumped out of my chair, took her by the wrist and smeared the pizza in her face. She slapped me.
“I’m calling 911, you fucking asshole.”
“Go ahead. I’m going to bed.”
I was upstairs sleeping, nude except for a pair of striped underpants—my own—when the cop knocked on our door.
“Charlie,” my wife yelled. “The police are here.”
She had called 911 and then, like a spoiled sorority girl, hung up the phone. Apparently no one informed my wife that the cops come anyway in the suburbs. I poured myself down the stairs in nothing but those electric striped underpants. I was surprised to see the cop—not on the porch but standing in my living room, the blue lights from his cruiser lighting up the neighborhood.
He had tricked my wife into letting him in.
“Yes, Officer?”
He was a short, stout guy with a round, slightly oily face like a ham hock sealed in plastic.
“Put some clothes on,” he ordered.
I tried some drunken legalese. “Is there justifiable reason why you have entered my domicile, Officer? Do you have reason to believe there is imminent danger here? Have I made a furtive motion?”
He shined a light on my wife. “She has blood on her face.”
I don’t know where the bitterness comes from, but when provoked, I spew like a warm can of beer. It causes problems.
“It’s pizza sauce,” I sneered. “Taste it.”
“Put your hands in front of you,” ordered Officer Ham.
I did as he said. He slapped handcuffs on me.
“Go upstairs and get him some clothes,” he told my wife.
“Do no such thing,” I ordered her.
“You don’t want clothes?” he said with an arch of the eyebrow.
“Officer, I wish to invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent so as not to incriminate myself.”
“Just put some fucking clothes on.”
“Officer, I wish to invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent so as not to incriminate myself.”
“Suit yourself.”
The cop led me by my shoulder across the lawn into the back of the squad car. I could see a neighbor peering out the window at the spectacle of the wife-beating redneck with the feral alley cat and church-bell wind chime being led to the pokey, barefoot and in striped blue underpants.
I woke up in the morning in a jail cell, shivering in my striped underpants. There was no one else in th
e cell except a cockroach tending to a half-eaten egg sandwich lying near the stainless-steel toilet.
I felt bad, hollow. A middle-aged fuckup crumbling under the bulk of a dying city. It had infected my private life, which was no longer separate from my public one. People took photos and said shitty things about me that were mostly true, but the annoying thing was they were only guessing. And now I probably had two court dates: one with the criminal judge, one with the divorce judge. I thought about my little girl and wondered what I had done bringing her back to this shit hole.
I tried to place a collect call to Frankie on the jailhouse telephone. It was one of the few numbers I had committed to memory. But the jailhouse phone was malfunctioning, the wires crossed or something. I could hear the woman’s conversation in the next cell.
“Tell him when I see him again I’m gonna put a knife in his neck,” the woman was telling her son. “Tell that motherfucker I’ll finish the job, soon’s I get outta here.”
I laughed. It was like a bucket of fresh water for my spirit. No matter how bad I had it, I wasn’t that crazy bitch in the next cell plotting to finish her boyfriend off with picnic cutlery or the sharp end of a No. 2 pencil.
“Hey,” I shouted, knocking on the one-way glass above the wooden bunk. “I want my phone call.”
“Stop beating on the glass, asshole,” came the response through the intercom. “They know you’re here.”
“I want some shoes,” I shouted back. “I’m cold.”
“There’s a pair outside the door, asshole.”
“I want a Koran,” I shouted one more time. “It’s my constitutional right. I want a Koran.”
“Put a cork in it, asshole,” said the voice in the box. He may not have had an extensive vocabulary, but he was consistent if nothing else. I suppose that’s what you want in your peace officers.
And he was right. I was acting like an asshole because deep inside that chasm I could hear my own echo: You are an asshole.
The cell door opened about twenty minutes later and there sitting near the threshold was a stack of clothes and a pair of sneakers. “Put those on,” said the sergeant. He was different from the guy who’d arrested me.
Detroit: An American Autopsy Page 13
