There was only one willing witness. His friend Anthony Alls. And Alls put the finger squarely on Woolfolk and Cooley and a third man named Eiland Johnson.
A few weeks later Alls was leaving his job at a Detroit barbershop. He walked around the corner and opened the hood of his ’88 Bronco. This was the usual routine for Alls. The power-steering pump leaked like a sandbag, and before he would start the motor, he would fill the reservoir with fluid. He was meaning to take it in to the mechanic to get it fixed.
While Alls was stooped over the quarter panel, someone approached from behind and unloaded six shots into his back. Alls was spun around by the force of the barrage and took a seventh in the chest. He stumbled backward and collapsed on the sidewalk. Then he died.
Instead of the mechanic, Alls went to the morgue. The killer calmly walked around the corner and disappeared.
“He’d been subpoenaed to appear in court just five hours before he was murdered,” Martel said, spearing his chili fries with a plastic fork. So much for the meat-only diet, I was thinking.
“For whatever reason, they provided no protection for him,” he said.
Nobody got a look at Alls’s killer.
Two days later, police arrested a man breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s house. The man, not wanting to do another stretch in prison, said he had information on Alls’s murder. The man said he did paid hits himself and had information on a handful of other murders as well. He wanted to be an informant. And this was all on police videotape.
“Do you know Alls was scheduled to go into the police academy?” Martel asked me.
“No shit?” I said, writing the detail down on a napkin.
“No shit,” he said, slurping his Diet Pepsi. “He was basically a cop.”
But before Martel could put the informant to work—get him wired and get him back on the streets—a junior prosecutor turned the hit man’s taped interrogation over to the judge and the defense lawyers.
Without a living, breathing witness, the prosecutor was trying to show that Alls was killed to keep him quiet. This, he hoped, would convince the judge to allow the dead man’s statement as evidence in court.
Martel said he pleaded with the prosecutor to stall for a few more weeks while he used the hit man to gather information on the murders by wiring him up.
He even begged the prosecutor to call in sick to court.
The prosecutor refused.
“I told that asshole to give me thirty days and we can get all them fuckers,” Martel said, scanning the joint for eavesdroppers. We were the only ones in there except the fry cook and the girl at the register. They were watching TV. I noticed Martel had dribbled chili on his tie.
“The prick refused. Flat-out refused. Said he wasn’t going to break the rules of the court. So he gets to be a Boy Scout and we’re going to get some very bad men back on the street. Motherfucker.”
He picked up the check. When a cop picks up a check, you know he’s serious.
“You want me to have him call you?”
“Who?”
“The hit man, my informant. He’s scared for his life because his name is now out on the street.”
“Call me? Yeah, sure. Give him my cell number, I guess.”
Suddenly I was in the middle of a gangster picture and I didn’t have the script.
BIG MARTHA
AS FOR LITTLE Martha Barnett, I tracked the end of her story to a linen closet on the city’s west side, where her grandmother kept her remains, too poor to bury the ashes.
“All the pain that man caused,” the grandmother, a decent, churchgoing woman also named Martha Barnett, told me at her dining room table about Woolfolk. “Why? Why was he still allowed to walk ’round?”
Big Martha’s house held the choking, musty smell of fear so common in Detroit. Fear to open the door or the windows. Fear that someone might decide to break in and take the TV—or a life.
Inside the linen closet near the bathroom, above the rolls of toilet paper and a bag of dirty laundry, Barnett kept the ashes of Little Martha in a brass urn in a plastic bag.
Big Martha, seventy-three, paid her rent with a Social Security check and lived with her infirm daughter Sharon—Little Martha’s mother.
Dressed in checked pajama bottoms at four in the afternoon, Sharon shuffled in and out of the bedroom where her daughter used to sleep, listening to a radio, occasionally going to the stove to light her cigarette. The first time she emerged from the bedroom and held her head over the flame, she caught her wig on fire but patted it out without panic and shambled back to the bedroom.
The second time she emerged, she lit the cigarette without incident, and before going back into the bedroom she turned to me and said with a vacant stare: “I should have stayed in school. Oh well, it’s never too late, right? I could always go back to trade school. Learn a little skill or something.”
Sharon must have been frozen in that bedroom for twenty years. What trades? It was all gone, honey. All gone, including your daughter.
“That’s a real good idea,” I lied.
Pacified, Sharon shuffled back to her radio.
Martha sat at a kitchen table covered with a peeling plastic cloth, a painting of the Last Supper hanging on the wall behind her and next to that a glass menagerie filled with owls and eagles and a photo of the Obama family, which was striking to me since there were no photographs of her own kin.
“I wished I might be able to leave this big city here,” Big Martha said in a thick Mississippi accent. Like many religious women raised in the South, she believed God reveals His divine plan to her through dreams.
“I been having a dream of that fishing hole in the country outside Greenville, Mississippi. That’s where I come from. I believe the Almighty is calling me away from here, Mr. Charlie. He got something else left for me. He want me to go home.”
“Please don’t call me Mr. Charlie,” I said.
“Okay then, Charlie. I been wishing I never come up here. Trapped in the ghetto like this. People running wild. My grandbaby dead. Me too poor to bury her.”
Big Martha retrieved the urn, set it on the table. The polishing machine had scarred the facing.
Big Martha began crying. All the pain that little girl got caught up in. All the pain Woolfolk caused. All the pain we all carry around. She cried until Sharon came out to light another cigarette.
“I know my grandbaby’s in a better place,” Big Martha said. “Absent from the body. Present with the Lord,” she said, quoting the New Testament.
I thought about my sister, Nicky. I would go around the part of town where she died rather than drive through it. I avoided it not out of fear, but sadness. I couldn’t face it. It was my own linen closet. I guess that’s why dogs don’t put their snouts in the fire. Too much pain. I hadn’t even visited the grave where she and her daughter lay.
Big Martha talked about Little Martha’s funeral.
“So many people was there, so many young people. I didn’t know all those young people loved her so much. Well, in the middle of the funeral, during the songs, the funeral director stopped the music right there in the middle of the service, and he brought me in the back room and was asking how I was gonna pay for it. I didn’t rightly know. I should have passed the hat right there. Everybody would have given, praise God. But I didn’t pass the hat. So I had her cremated. I had to borrow and beg just to do that. Even her father chipped in. They charged me seven thousand dollars for the casket and everything.”
“What happened to the casket?” I asked.
“They told me they burned it too.”
“That’s a lot of money for nothing.”
“I know, but people like me’s sorta dumb in death, honey. We ain’t got much on this earth. You want to send your people out proper. The news channels they says they was gonna help
me, but they never did. Never helped a thing. Not that I expected them to. They took all of the pictures I had of my baby and they never brought ’em back. Said they was gonna help, and all they did was call my little lamb a prostitute and things like that on the news. It hurt something terrible, the way it all happened.”
She cried a little more. Seeing a half-filled ashtray, I lit a cigarette and waited out the tears.
“Well, can’t nobody hurt her no more,” Big Martha said, composing herself. “She’s with Jesus Christ. Better place. We all going to that place, that’s a birthday none of us is going to miss.”
Barnett came to Detroit in 1977 by way of Chicago. Her son, Clarence Jr., was murdered in 1979 when he was thrown from a second-story window in the Cass Corridor. He’s buried in Belleville, way out by the airport; she knows not where.
Her husband, Clarence, died of lung cancer in 1994 and is buried at the Sacred Heart Cemetery, part of the old Polish church located in what is now a rough east side neighborhood. The priest there lives in the rectory, behind an iron door.
Clarence’s grave is unacknowledged. Barnett said she paid for a stone when Clarence died, but the salesman ran off with the $300. As it happened, the stone salesman cheated a lot of poor people before he died.
She ran through her finances: “HUD wants to move me out of this house, put me on the east side with the criminals and hooligans. They want to sell this house and fix it up. I only pay sixty-one dollars a month. Where am I gonna get the extra money? I keep applying for Section 8, and they keep denying me ’cause I’m old, I guess—and I’m gonna die if they just ignore me and I suppose I won’t have no headstone neither.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to do something for this woman. She was my forebear in some way, my auntie, trapped and scared and bunking with a zombie. I offered to find her the money to bury Little Martha.
“That’d be a beautiful thing, Mr. Charlie.”
“Please, just Charlie.”
“Okay then, Charlie. But you know something, Charlie? I’d much rather have a car,” Martha said hopefully. “I mean, to get around, you know? Maybe a van. Can you help me with a van? White people got nice cars for sale in they yards. I’m sure you know a lot of white people with a van.”
Sharon walked by and lit a half-smoked menthol on the stove again. Then she silently went back to her radio. She forgot to shut off the flame.
KISS THE BABIES
I WAS IN my underwear, shaving cream on my face, a razor in my hand. I was getting dressed for my aunt’s funeral.
That’s when a man called me. He spoke fast and he spoke as though he had matriculated at the University of Jailhouse Law School.
“So-and-So told me to give you a call,” he said without introducing himself, without so much as a good morning.
“Who’s So-and-So?” I asked the voice, confused. “Who is this?”
“Our mutual friend on that barbershop job,” the voice said. “He told me you might want to talk.”
I quickly put it together. It was the hit man caught on an interrogation tape saying he would be willing to wear a wire to send the Black Mafia to prison.
Understanding now, I set down the razor and picked up a pen. The hit man whined that he had been aggrieved, that the assistant prosecutor broke all notions of protocol when he turned the interrogation tape over to the defense attorneys working for the very people he was snitching on.
“Me and my family’s dead, know what I’m saying? I mean, the first witness got killed,” he shouted. “The prosecutor’s desperate for a case, but they can’t even use that tape. I could have been lying. It’s hearsay. If they subpoena me, I ain’t saying shit. I’m taking the Fifth. Who’s gonna protect me? I’m fucking dead. I ain’t going out without a gun battle. I promise. There’s gonna be a war.”
“I didn’t know there were rules in the murder business,” I said to him.
“Gangsters dying, that’s part of the game. But innocent people? No.”
He was worried that the “Family” now knew his identity and was going to kill his children, him and his dog.
A dollop of shaving cream dripped to the floor. I wiped it out with a toe.
The hit man said he was going to hurt the prosecutor if his own children got hurt.
“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“What do you think I should do?” he asked me.
“Get out of Dodge,” I said lamely. Like I said, I’ve never been in a gangster picture. I was grasping for dialogue here.
“That ain’t gonna work, they’ll find me,” he said. “There’s gonna be a war.”
“Then I’m talking to a dead man,” I said.
“You probably right.”
“Call So-and-So,” I said. “But just calm down and don’t do anything stupid. I gotta go to a funeral. I’ll call you later. Just don’t go killing anybody.”
“Aw, man, I’m fucked.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“If anything happens to my family,” the hit man warned me again, “that fucking prosecutor, he can kiss the babies.”
I hung up the phone and went back to the bathroom to finish shaving. I’d have to call the prosecutor, I figured. If I wasn’t legally obligated to do so, I suppose I was morally. Even if the guy was a fucking tool.
GRANDMA
MY WIFE AND I loaded up the baby in the SUV and drove to my aunt’s funeral in a rural corner of Oakland County, where the land rolls like a ship on the swells. A boat, a house, a lake, a foreclosure sign.
“Jesus, it’s Whitey McWhiteville out here,” my wife said distractedly, noticing a white-faced lawn jockey. My woman is a white girl who grew up in Detroit—not the suburbs—which makes her a special kind of white person.
“Have some respect,” I barked at her. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the idea of the funeral. My people don’t handle them very well. There is usually a drunk screaming from an upstairs window, like a stewed sailor on night watch. Sometimes it is a fistfight. One time, a cousin threw a beer bottle at his brother’s casket as it was lowered down the hole, screaming that his brother could keep the dime deposit.
I turned up the radio. Manfred Mann was singing, the blackest-sounding white band there probably is. Blue, black and white, can’t we get anything right? An appropriated sound, of course, but righteous enough in its own way.
The funeral for my aunt was weird in the fact that it wasn’t weird. It was normal. It was white. It started on time. Everyone wore a tie and jacket. Aunt Marilyn, my father’s sister, had raised the ultimate American family. A husband of forty-nine years, seven children, twenty-two grandchildren or something like that. No divorce. No death by misadventure. Catholic to the point of evangelical. Her progeny lining up single file to each place a rose in a vase. It was simply odd in its normalcy, its clean-scrubbed sweetness. Who were these people? Where was their bitterness? Their bite? Their whiskers? They couldn’t possibly belong to me.
And then a brassy woman stepped out of a dark corner.
“Hi, Charlie?”
“Yes?” I had never seen her before.
“I’m your long-lost Aunt Debbie.”
I stood there blankly. She was a well-put-together blonde in a black dress, with red lipstick. A smoker, I thought, by the sound of her voice.
“Your father’s half sister?” she offered helpfully. “Your grandmother, she was my mother. Betty? I’m your father’s half sister.”
“Her name was Betty?”
“Yes, your father’s mother. We had the same mother. Betty.”
“Betty what?”
“Well, first Betty Lancour. And then Betty LeDuff when she married your father’s dad. And then Betty Zink when she married my dad. She died when she was thirty-five years old. Alone.”
“Those are a lot of names.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah, they are.”
“How did she die?”
“A heart attack, I think.”
“Oh.”
“How is your father?”
“I haven’t talked to him in a decade,” I told my new Aunt Debbie. “Not since my sister’s funeral. She was thirty-five too.”
“Oh, wow,” Aunt Debbie said with an eyebrow.
Like a gossip with a secret, Aunt Debbie wasted little time telling me her son’s girlfriend just had her feet amputated because of a virus and that the muffler just fell off her car, making it difficult to fulfill her job, which was to shuttle around the Amish back in Pennsylvania.
This was more like my family. I liked her.
Grandma Betty died alone. Who was she? And who was Grandpa, for that matter? It occurred to me, especially now that I was back in Detroit, that for a man who had spent his entire professional life crisscrossing the planet asking others the most pointed and personal questions, I didn’t really know much about my family. Or myself. A boat without an anchor, bobbing across the shores of Whitey McWhiteville.
I eventually found Grandma Betty in the municipal archives.
* * *
The radio dispatcher sent scout car no. 10-1 to see about a dead woman, according to the police report. It was 3:35 in the afternoon on March 8, 1956. It was cold outside. Patrolman Mitchell Adamek found a youngish woman lying dead in the back bedroom of Apartment 207 at 2665 Gladstone, on the west side of Detroit, near the Sacred Heart Seminary. She was dressed in a slip, nothing more. There were no visible signs of violence to her body. Adamek contacted the homicide squad anyway.
On the dressing table was a bottle of Anacin tablets, a bottle of Bufferin tablets, a bottle of nose drops and a bottle of codeine cold remedy in liquid form. In the corner stood John W. Migan, a narrow-shouldered dentist who, at the age of thirty-four, was still living with his mother. He told Adamek that he had been dating the woman for the better part of three years and that he had last seen her about two A.M., when he dropped her off after an evening of spirited partying.
Detroit: An American Autopsy Page 17
