The company had rented out an off-site dance studio and placed five silver Cadillacs on the open dance floor. Cloth-covered tables lined the entrance, and smartly dressed waiters brought lunch to reporters as they looked over the vehicles.
Back in Detroit, something was brewing. GM announced it would be holding a press conference at 4:30 P.M. But the news leaked early.
As the reporters in L.A. sipped ice tea and nibbled on rubbery salmon, a GM beat writer held up his BlackBerry: “Fritz Henderson, GM CEO, resigns.”
Henderson was the GM insider who took over as CEO after Rick Wagoner was forced out by Obama. Now Henderson was being forced out and replaced by Edward Whitacre, the administration’s handpicked chairman of the GM board, who would take on both jobs.
The reporter with the BlackBerry looked over at one of Cadillac’s global marketing men and asked, “Do you have any reaction to Fritz Henderson’s resignation?”
“What?” The marketing man choked, freezing in his chair.
The reporter repeated the question, holding out his BlackBerry. “Fritz just resigned.”
“Holy shit,” gulped the marketing man.
And then the dance studio became the set of a bad movie. All around, reporters were clicking away at their smart phones. GM executives and others were scurrying back and forth, murmuring and mumbling and stumbling.
As reporters ran to the door to fetch their cars from the valet, another public relations man from Cadillac was standing near the entrance, cursing.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Why the fuck would Fritz Henderson do this today, the day before the L.A. show? All of those stories everyone was going to write about the CTS Coupe are gone, they’re walking out the door right now.”
He was right. Even the Detroit News wasn’t going to mention the new Caddy. The Henderson firing was huge news. Seemed like little had changed in the executive offices back in Detroit. They still hadn’t gotten their shit together.
Meanwhile, the Cadillac executives in Los Angeles gathered in a single office to take a conference call from Detroit. They were obviously being told what had transpired in the Renaissance Center. The only problem was that the office was glass, and the remaining reporters just stood outside of it and watched the hand-wringing. You could see the shock in their slumped shoulders and exasperated expressions.
Who the fuck was running the country?
Later that night, well past deadline, reporters were drinking in the hotel bar, trying to clear their heads for the morning go-around before going to bed.
A GM executive was there, easily ten drinks into the evening, judging by the smell of gin and olives on his breath.
“The new board of directors are fucking crazy,” he slurred. “Every time they meet, someone gets fired. Every thirty days, we’re scared shitless because they don’t have any idea how a car company works.”
He went on, telling how the board kept asking executives to produce a hybrid—something that can’t be done in thirty days—and about other unattainable, if not impossible, demands from Washington.
The executive’s voice cracked with desperation and alcohol, the burden of the day’s failure weighing heavy on him.
“Worse yet, Fritz resigns today. Why would you let him quit the day before four of your most important vehicles are set to debut? The Buick Regal, the Chevy Cruze, the Cadillac CTS Coupe and the Chevy Volt? Are they trying to ruin us?”
Here was a man who loved GM, loved it more than any reporter ever could, and he was watching the company as he knew it disintegrate before his eyes. He believed that there was a conspiracy to undermine all of the GM execs.
The Fritz Henderson “resignation” didn’t surprise many people; he was a lame duck at best, but the timing couldn’t have been worse, and everybody already knew that what the executive was saying was true. Detroit may be a hidebound and inept culture allergic to change, but so too is Washington. Auto insiders sitting at the bar stirring their olives wondered how long this arranged marriage could last. No one in Detroit was going to care about the L.A. Auto Show. Not the editors, not the readers and not anyone else in the world. It was a colossal clusterfuck.
The next morning, as reporters entered the Los Angeles Convention Center, there was a sign announcing that Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman, would be giving the keynote address during the breakfast instead of Henderson, who was the originally scheduled speaker.
Lutz’s name was written on white tape and placed over Henderson’s on the signboard pointing to the room where the speech would be given.
But like a bad painting, you could still read Henderson’s name underneath.
FEAR NO EVIL
THE VOICE OF the old woman was threadbare and sad.
“I need a few hundred dollars,” Big Martha asked me meekly. “I’m haunted by that closet. Every time I walk by it now, I get so sad. It don’t seem right that Little Martha should spend a second Christmas up in there. It ain’t really for Martha I’m asking. She’s gone on. Murder always stays murder forever, I suppose. I’m asking the favor for myself.”
I felt that I had unleashed some terrible emotions that Big Martha had stuffed away deep in a pantry when I had come knocking a few weeks earlier, and I felt obligated to fix things. I wanted to make things right for her. For Christmas. I made some calls.
When I explained the situation to the manager of the Sacred Heart Cemetery, he promised to provide a plot for Little Martha on top of her grandfather for $450. A stonecutter said he would supply a simple marble marker with the names of both Martha Anne and her grandfather, Clarence, for $199.
I didn’t have the heart to tell Big Martha that a Polish man was buried beneath Clarence in what is called a double plot. But I put the detail in a small newspaper story that got picked up by Angelo Henderson, a former newspaperman who found better fortune in the pulpit of talk radio.
Detroit is full of good people who know what pain is, and they sent more than $3,000 by mail, some in tens, some in fifties, the extra money going to a soup kitchen of Big Martha’s choice. One man even gave Big Martha the money for the car she needed. If there is any hope for Detroit it is the thousands of good people like this, afraid but not wanting to be afraid anymore.
* * *
It was cold and overcast in the morning, the snow falling like a shower of needles. I picked up Big Martha in the News car. Whirrr. Whirrr. Whirrr.
She clutched the urn containing Little Martha to her bosom. Little Martha’s mother, Sharon, was too busy with her demons and cigarettes to leave the musty little house.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with them people,” was all Big Martha said about her family—none were coming to the graveyard. She was silent the rest of the way to the funeral.
When we arrived, the cemetery manager was waiting with a shovel, the stonecutter with the headstone. The manager then turned over a little dirt on top of the grave that Big Martha’s husband shared with the unknown Pole who lay below him.
We buried Little Martha’s ashes. Big Martha forgot her Bible, so I read Psalm 23 from an iPhone, but Big Martha cried anyway, shivering in her thin shoes.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
She hugged the stonecutter and I drove her home.
We got lost in her neighborhood, since Big Martha doesn’t get around much except to walk to church or the bus stop.
“You know something, Mr. Charlie?”
“Charlie.”
“You know something, Charlie? I knew you was coming. I knew it because before you did, I put my last forty dollars in the collection plate and prayed. Now the Lord says, ‘Giveth and ye shall receive tenfold.’”
“And the preacher shall receiveth a new Cadillac,” I said.
She laughed. “You right about that.”
&nb
sp; “Now don’t go giving him your new-car money, Martha. That’s for your car, not the reverend’s.”
“My Lord,” she said, studying the boulevard. “Look at all these churches. How can there be so many churches? Who goes to ’em all?”
“I’ve wondered that myself.”
“We ought to do it like white people,” Martha said. “Just have two or three different kinds of churches. All these churches we black folks have don’t seem to be accomplishing much.”
Finding her street, I pulled up to the little HUD house that the city in its wisdom would soon be taking away from her.
“Merry Christmas, Martha.”
“Thank you, Charlie. Thank you. May the Lord shine on you.”
MURDER ALWAYS STAYS MURDER FOREVER
WE HAD GOTTEN one innocent lamb a proper and decent burial. Now I had to make sure we didn’t have to bury a jackass.
I remembered the conversation I had with the hit man while standing in my underwear. He had threatened to wipe out a prosecutor for making his identity as a snitch known to the dope crew he ran with.
I called the assistant prosecutor and told him about the hit man’s threats. I didn’t call because I liked him. I thought the prosecutor was a weasel. A tight-assed bureaucrat who was more concerned with closing a case than getting justice.
In the end I didn’t call him out of any moral or journalistic obligation. I figured it was probably illegal not to tell a prosecutor that someone was looking to ice him.
So I called.
“Tell me exactly what he said about me. Did he threaten to kill me?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” I said, starting to regret the call. “Not exactly. It was implied, maybe.”
“Did he or didn’t he?” the prosecutor said in a pinched-nose tone.
“Why are you asking?”
“Because we’ll have to pick him up.”
“On what grounds?” I asked.
“For threatening a prosecutor.”
“Wait a minute!” I screamed. “I’m calling you as a gentleman. You’re going to arrest a killer on the grounds that I told you he was upset with you? What’s to stop him from coming after me?”
The prosecutor, who had been known to wear a bulletproof vest beneath his Oxford shirt while in court, squealed, “I’m not going to get shot by [the informant]!
“Hold on a moment,” he fumbled. “I want you to tell that to my supervisor. Tell it exactly as you told it to me to my supervisor.”
“I can’t tell you any more,” I said. “You do what you got to do.”
I hung up the phone.
That weekend, I moved my family out of the house.
* * *
If a suburban prosecutor and a suburban reporter fear for their lives, imagine what it’s like to live in the rough Detroit neighborhoods.
Sumayah Tauheed closed the barbershop where Alexander and Alls worked two days after Alls was assassinated. She thought she was next.
Tauheed agreed to meet me at the shop, about a quarter mile from the Detroit Police Central Precinct.
When I arrived, she insisted that the door be padlocked from the inside.
“Is that really necessary?” I asked. “It’s broad daylight.”
“Trust me,” she said. Then the forty-seven-year-old grandmother lifted her purse. She had a .38 strapped to her waistline.
“I just got it,” she said. “At least I got a fifty-fifty chance.”
It was the first Monday of the month: Social Security check day.
At the very moment Tauheed was showing me her piece—outside the door, just feet from where Alls was murdered—an old man was being bludgeoned across the face. Two young men had tailed him from a check-cashing joint. They savaged him and robbed him of $500. They broke his two front teeth.
We fumbled with the padlock trying to get out to help, but by the time we got the door open, the muggers were long gone down the street. There was nothing but a bloody old man and an abandoned mattress.
The ambulance arrived. Eventually, the police came too.
“It’s despicable,” said a white cop with Roy Orbison glasses. “Watch your ass around here.”
Tauheed and I watched him drive off.
“The police don’t run the streets,” she said. “The gangs run the streets.”
* * *
There’s not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That’s why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things. My news story about the hit man and Little Martha and the trail of bodies following Deandre Woolfolk hit the streets the morning of the preliminary trial—a hearing to determine if there was enough evidence to bind the defendants Woolfolk, Johnson and Cooley over for the nightclub beating death.
And of course there wasn’t enough evidence. The only witness had been murdered. But everyone involved that morning had read the story of Alls, the wannabe cop, getting rubbed out because he had the guts to stand up and testify as a witness to a beating death.
They read about Little Martha. They read her last words: “What’s happening?” They read about her spending eternity in a linen closet.
They read about Woolfolk being kicked free from jail even though he admitted to chipping in on the girl’s murder.
They read about the hit man, his protestations and his threats to kill the prosecutor.
They read about the frustrated cop who’d filled me in on this whole steaming shit pile.
They read about the bodies.
I sat in the jury box and smiled as the lawyers and the weak-kneed prosecutor bitterly complained that the case had been leaked to the media.
The attorney for Woolfolk—the killer of Little Martha—pointed at me in the jury box, complaining that I had poisoned his client’s ability to get a fair hearing.
“I didn’t say anything to the reporter,” the prosecutor said with a shrug.
Then Sgt. Mike Martel was called to the stand. Woolfolk’s attorney adjusted his plaid suit coat. It hung on him as though it were trying to crawl away.
The guy fancied himself a regional Johnnie Cochran. And he may have dressed like Cochran, but he possessed none of Cochran’s cunning. He addressed Sergeant Martel, who was sworn in and sitting in the witness chair.
“The judge told you in this case not to release information with respect to tapes and identification of parties; you did that anyhow, didn’t you, sir?”
Martel sat up in the witness box and rubbed his knuckles. “I wasn’t advised by this court to do or not do anything,” he said.
“Did you give the [hit man] the news reporter’s number?”
The lawyer looked over at me. I gave a little wave. He turned back to Martel, who did not acknowledge me.
“I discussed it with the witness.”
“Were you the person that showed the news reporter the tape, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Were you the person who felt confident that by showing the news reporter the tape that you would be furthering justice?”
“It had nothing to do with justice,” Martel said.
“Basically, you were mad at the prosecutor and therefore you were going to get out information you wanted to get out to the public?”
“It had to do with exposing conduct.”
“Are you talking about the judge now or the prosecutor?”
“The prosecutor.”
“Oh!” shouted the lawyer, theatrically peeling his glasses from his face. “You wanted to go after the prosecutor! Is that it?”
“I didn’t go after anybody,” Martel said coolly.
“You vilified the prosecutor because h
e didn’t follow your suggestion as to how he ran the case! I have nothing further.”
He sat down. His jacket shoulders stayed up, and Martel left the courtroom with his broad chin high.
Later that afternoon, Martel called me: “How did I do?”
“Unbelievable,” I said. “You got a set on you.” I had never seen a cop admit that he’d leaked sensitive information to a reporter. Especially in court.
“I’m not going to lie,” he answered.
* * *
The judge was a cautious one. And the preliminary trial dragged on for weeks. During that time I was supplied by the police a videotape of a strip-club shoot-up. It showed Eiland Johnson—one of the codefendants—walking into the club dressed in shorts and a tank top and opening up with a semiautomatic pistol before running out. I was struck by one hero in the lower right frame of the videotape, a big guy who shielded himself by grabbing a stripper and throwing her toward the gunman. I began my newspaper story this way:
DETROIT—According to police accounts, not only does Eiland Johnson not know how to behave at a nightclub, he doesn’t know how to dress for one either.
As I sat in the gallery waiting for court to begin, a young black woman leaned into me. She wore a long black wig, long purple nails and a set of outrageous eyelashes that looked like fans made of plucked chicken feathers. Her breasts were spilling out of her blouse. Her lips were full and ravenous and moist and it looked as though she could suck the snout of a hog clean with those things. She was a girlfriend of Woolfolk’s and kept tilting her tits so he could get a nice long look. He licked his lips as though he were staring into a plate of stuffed chops. The fact that he was facing life in prison did not register. This seemed more like an early morning field trip.
“’Scuse me,” his woman whispered to me. “Are you that man who wrote the story that Eiland don’t know how to dress?”
Detroit: An American Autopsy Page 20
