Lone Wolf #11: Detroit Massacre

by Barry, Mike

  And then it all went away from him.

  II

  They didn’t know what to do with Wulff, not yet, not by far, but they had a better idea with Smith. They could bring Lieutenant Smith in and formally charge him with conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to drug-peddle, obstruction of justice in the investigation of the peddling—oh, they had Smith on a hell of a lot of things, not the least of which was what Wulff had done to him in the precinct; and on the first day that Smith could stagger out of the hospital bed on his own, go down the hall under custody and take a leak, they brought him down to Centre Street and arraigned him. Those three charges would do for now; there was even heavier stuff which they could have laid on him, stuff like consorting with elements of the drug network, indeed functioning on their payroll, and actually planning if not in fact pulling the trigger on Marie Calabrese, but that would have been too heavy even under the circumstances, it would have opened up a lot of questions as to Smith’s supervision and contacts on the narco squad which the NYPD did not want to get into at this time. Everybody knew the narco squad stunk; it was in the process of being phased out of existence as quickly and quietly as possible; every day a new story broke about this or that member having taken graft or having been busted for actual possession—why give the press even more mileage than they had already? No, they would try to keep it in the family to the extent that they would pin everything that they could on Smith which was strictly his own and which could be tried without getting into the men he had worked with, the institution that had supported all of them.

  And that gave them something to do with Wulff. If they didn’t quite know what to do with him on his own hook, they could make him a material witness against Smith. If anybody was a witness against Smith it would be Wulff all right, and they must have congratulated themselves downtown the night that they had finally, about midnight, come up with that ploy; they could justify continuing to hold Wulff because of the material-witness aspect and the fact that he was being gunned for by about five thousand people, any one of whom would have gladly taken him out of the case and the chance of testifying against Smith. Oh, it was a smooth enough maneuver, and it would enable them to get their first good look at Wulff in a more public situation. So the guard told Wulff, the night before, about Centre Street, that Wulff would be taken out of the cell the next morning, and what they had planned for him; and Wulff, as he had been doing ever since he had hit confinement, merely nodded and said nothing. His face showed great acuity, his eyes intelligence, his mind clearly registered everything that was being said, but he did not talk.

  It was an object of some debate in the cell block and up to higher levels of the PD whether Wulff’s mind had really gone, whether that last incident in the precinct station with Smith and everything that had led up to it had actually destroyed his emotional balance and rendered him insane. There were very few who thought so, judging from Wullf’s previous record and from what he had been able to accomplish on the road, on his own, in just a couple of months. “That son-of-a-bitch is biding his time,” the captain downstairs had told one of his guards quietly, “and when he’s through with that, he’ll make his move.” And the guard was inclined to believe it; all of them were. Still Wulff was not saying a word. Whatever was going on inside remained very private, even when they told him that the man who had killed his girl was going to be arraigned in open court in Wulff’s presence. If there was any pleasure or apprehension in this, it would not show. They didn’t bother telling him about the material-witness stuff. That, they figured, would only lead to complications.

  On the morning of the arraignment, Williams came to Wulff’s cell with a guard, got keyed inside, waited until the guard went away mumbling, and said, “I got something that I think will interest you.”

  Wulff said nothing. He sat with his arms folded, looking at and past Williams at the little spokes of light that bounced and glinted off the bars. He felt very comfortable with his ex-partner—there was no tension at all—but then again, he had nothing to say. Not at all personal; Williams would have been the first man he would have spoken to if anything had been on his mind.

  Williams rubbed his palms together, sat on the bunk casually, and leaned toward Wulff. “I still maintain my contacts,” he said. “I got a call from Detroit. Some guy called me. There was a murder at the Fleetwood plant. Some guy got a two-ton beam dropped on him while he was on the line, an assembly man. It was an unfortunate accident; the plant got closed down for half an hour while they took out the remains.”

  Wulff said nothing, but in a different way. There was a little activity behind his eyes, a shading of light which might have been response. Williams said, “He was impaled against a car. When they took the car out—which they had to do, because it was the only way to get the body—they found that there were two hundred pounds of shit, wrapped up, in the framework, stuffed into one of the joints. They must have been running the stuff through.”

  Wulff shook his head very slowly and then went back to staring. Williams said, “The way that my informant pieced this thing together, the guy who got killed, a guy named Hooper, must have seen this stuff in the frame. There was some connection between it and the way the beam fell on his head. Someone must have fucked up very bad,” Williams said. “Someone must have made a drop when he wasn’t supposed to, or maybe someone got awfully mad at someone else and set this up for discovery. Anyway, my informant thinks that this guy Hooper was murdered because of what he saw. Not that it makes any difference,” he said after a pause. “Everything’s in custody right now, the shit and the frame and the remains. They’re trying to piece something together out of this, but they’re not going to get very far, I don’t think. For one thing, they don’t want to get very far, you see.”

  Wulff stood and walked to the edge of the cell, then turned and came back slowly. Six-feet-four, about a hundred and eighty now, he looked no worse to Williams than he had back in Los Angeles a couple of months ago, at the peak of his crusade. Maybe a little bit ragged, but just as competent. He looked as if he could have torn the cellblock down if he wanted to. “So what does that mean?” Wulff said. “What does that mean to me?”

  It was the first thing he had said in a very long time, but Williams had the cop’s impassivity; he showed no reaction. “Something stinks in that plant,” he said. “If they’re using cars for stash, something stinks very bad. If they’re going to kill a guy who sees it, that’s got to be even worse. My informant thinks that hell is going to break loose.”

  “It’s not my doing,” Wulff said, “it’s not my war. I’m through with it. I’m resigning.”

  “Just going to sit in the cell, eh?” Williams said. “You got the guy who got your girl, so that’s the end of it. What do you care about the racket or the people it’s killing? All you got into it for was to get the people who got your girl, and now that you’ve found him, now that you did, and it’s only one son-of-a-bitch, you’re finished. It wasn’t a crusade, it was just revenge.”

  There was a very long pause. Wulff leaned against the wall looking at Williams in a strange, intense way, and it occurred to Williams that, yes, he had pushed it very far, he had better not push it one inch farther, this man could kill him. Even at this time, in this condition, he could kill him. “You know that’s not true,” Wulff said slowly. “You know that’s not true at all.”

  “But you said you’re going to stop.”

  “That’s different,” Wulff said. “Can’t you see that? It’s too much. It’s too much already. The price is too high. I can’t take the death.”

  “They can,” Williams said. “They can take the death. There is no end to it for them. They’ll do everything, kill everyone they have to in order to keep their line straight. They’ve proved that. So now that you’re out, they have a clear path again.”

  “What do you want?” Wulff said harshly and walked toward Williams, put his hands on the man’s shoulders, applied pressure. Williams, held in the grasp, did not move.
“What do you want of me? Isn’t it enough? Doesn’t there come a time when you’re at a stop, when you can say that there’s an end to it? I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore; I did everything that I could, I set them back ten years.”

  “Not ten months,” Williams said softly. “Not ten months, if you stop, if you leave it go now.”

  “What do you want?” Wulff said, still holding his position. “What do you want of me? So there’s hell in Detroit, so they’re funneling the shit through the assembly lines. That figures, that would be the next step. Still, what’s the difference? What do you want of me? Where do I come into this? They’re going to arraign this guy, this bastard here this morning; I’m supposed to be present to give testimony. Do you understand, I’m going to be in court, nailing this son-of-a-bitch. The lawyers were in here to see me; that’s what they want me to do. What does that have to do with Detroit? I’ve got an arraignment to make.”

  Wulff’s hands still on him, Williams said, “That’s what I mean.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to be in open court today. Things can get a little confused in open court. Things can get a little fouled up, people can lose track of other people.”

  Wulff’s hands fell away. “I think I hear what you’re saying,” he said, “but I don’t believe it.”

  “Do you want Detroit?” Williams said.

  “No. I don’t want anything.”

  “You’re lying. I can tell you’re lying. You want it bad. You want to go back on the road again. You needed a little rest, but not anymore. The road’s all you’ve been thinking of now for weeks.”

  “No,” Wulff said shaking his head, but it was not a denial. “No, you can’t—”

  “I’m still living in the same place,” Williams said, “the same fucking place, me and my wife and my kid, and I can’t go nowhere anymore. But you can see me. You can see me, and you’ll hear whatever you need to know.”

  “See you when?”

  “Who knows?” Williams said, and stood, went to the door of the cell, knocked for the guard. “Who can say? It’s a long life. It’s a strange life. It’s filled with strangenesses. None of us knows what may happen to us in the long run, or even in the next moment.”

  And then the guard came and opened the door and took Williams out of there.

  And left Wulff standing in place, hearing the voices inside him again.

  III

  “Bastard,” said Hamilton, and hit the man Standing in front of him in the face again. “Stupid bastard. Stupid son-of-a-bitch. I didn’t ask you to kill him. Who asked you to kill him? Who needed this?” His voice broke, and he lunged to his feet, hit the man fully in the stomach.

  The man, restrained in the grip of two others, doubled over, retched at Hamilton’s feet as Hamilton looked at him with revulsion. Little rivulets of sweat ran down the man’s face and pooled into a little space on the floor. Hamilton looked at him, looked past him, seemed to take himself out of the room for a moment, peering into abstraction; but then, as always, he was back again, and so was the man There was no escaping; eternally you had to come back behind the walls of self and look at the sons-of-bitches who were out to destroy you. “Why?” he said to the man calmly, almost patiently, a slight lisp intruding into his voice, as it always did at times of tension. “What made you feel, you shit, that you had to do this?”

  The man was named Shields; he was fat and short and in his forties and a foreman at the plant. Hamilton knew little about him, had known nothing until a day ago, when news of the situation had come through to him. Now in the man’s terror he could see more than he had ever wanted to know. “I thought there was no choice,” Shields said desperately. “There was a mistake, something got through on the line, it was riding in the frame—”

  “I don’t want to know anything about that,” Hamilton said. “I don’t want any excuses or explanations. I want to know why this man was killed.”

  “He wasn’t killed,” Shields said weakly. “It wasn’t that; we just—”

  Hamilton stepped forward and hit the man in the mouth again. There was a pulpy sound, and then his hand bore the faint marks of Shield’s teeth and blood. “You fool,” he said, “you stupid fool. You deserve to die for this.”

  The men holding Shields looked at Hamilton hopefully, and one of them made a gesture in his clothing. Abruptly Hamilton felt the disgust rising within him, the dark revulsion, and he could not deal with this any longer. He could not handle it. Not in this fashion. If there was murder in this room and Hamilton guessed that there was, it would have to be on his own terms, it would have to be the kind of murder that he could shape and understand, because only in that way, Hamilton thought, could death itself be controlled. “Get out of here,” he said to the two men. “Go on, just get out of here.”

  They looked at him with puzzlement. Nominally they were foremen; in truth they were nothing but fools. If they had had to sustain themselves on the line, they would have been burned to death in an industrial accident years ago. That was one virtue of crime, Hamilton thought bitterly, it gave new hope to the unemployable. “Fuck out,” he said. “Get the fuck out.”

  They let Shields go, wriggling, turned, went to the door. Looking at them, two tough-looking men in their late thirties, Shields did not see so much simple muscle as a reflection of himself, of some inward necessity. He did not want to think of that. It was nothing to pursue. “Fuck out,” he said again. They went away, the door hanging like an open mouth, twitching slightly in the breezes of the hallway.

  “Close the door,” Hamilton said to Shields, who was standing in a graceless posture rubbing his hands up and down his arms, seemingly not sure that he had been released. “Shut the door,” he said again. “I want to talk to you. Don’t think about making any moves down the corridors,” Hamilton said casually, and made a motion toward the desk. “There’s enough armament in there to make that a very poor idea, and even if I missed, you wouldn’t get very far. You wouldn’t get very far at all.”

  “All right,” Shields said. “I understand that. I got a wife and kids. I wouldn’t do anything.” He moved away, closed the door with an exaggerated gesture of compliance, and came back to the place where he had been standing, as if it had been assigned to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry about this. It was—”

  “Listen,” Hamilton said quietly. “Now, just listen to me. I’m a little pissed off about this, nothing serious, you understand, but serious enough. If you’re fucking up an operation there, that’s your business. I’m not too concerned with fuckups, only with results. If some stash got into a frame on the line, that’s the kind of thing that can happen, you can get screwed up anywhere along the way in an operation like that, and I can understand that too. But to knock off a man because he happens to come across it—”

  “It wasn’t that way,” Shields said a little too eagerly, “it wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I wouldn’t have wanted it that way. It was just that they got a little excited—”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Some guys,” Shields said vaguely, “just some guys, nothing that I had anything to do with. They got a little overexcited, they thought that maybe his seeing something made more of it than it was. I didn’t know anything about it until later; I was on a break then—”