Low Road

by Eddie B. Allen, Jr.

  My effort to gain information about the Goines and Sailor murders was the most challenging facet of all my research. Even though it’s one of the first elements in writing the story that I began pursuing, after almost two years I found that my work had generated the least tangible of any results where the double homicide is concerned. My file folders are not nearly as thick with documents and data as I had once imagined they would be. In the corner of my desk, opposite the computer, I’ve got census papers, letters from the FBI, court records, prison papers, personal letters, and all sorts of other pieces to the puzzle that was Mr. Goines’s life. Yet, I managed to get my hands on only a few pages of official documentation pertaining to the killings. Nonetheless, with all the difficulties Highland Park police have to handle, I can completely sympathize with the idea that any person calling around for information about a thirty-year-old, unsolved crime might be regarded as a nuisance. But I think I owe more to Mr. Goines and his family than to record everything I learned about his life, and then simply say that he was murdered.

  I was thankful to be directed to Sergeant William McClain. He helped supervise a skeleton crew backed by the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office and, later, by the Michigan State Police. If I began to irritate him with my questions, at least he didn’t say so. Working from 6:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M., Sergeant McClain had a little more time to spend talking with me on the phone than those on the day shift. But, like an idiot, I didn’t realize until something like three months after I picked up the autopsy reports that the names of two detectives who were assigned to the homicides were included with the information I requested. Billy Quinn and Paul Lee were listed as the police investigators. I called Sergeant McClain one evening and reminded him of the last time he talked with me. “He sounds like a cop,” I remember thinking. Like there couldn’t be much he hadn’t seen in his years of working metro Detroit. Cigarette smoke may have given his voice some of its husky gristle and distinction. McClain was one of few men still working who were on the force when the murders took place, though he didn’t specifically recall it. In his way, patient and polite, he thought aloud about the last he had heard of Lee and Quinn. Lee was a mystery, he said. McClain had gotten no word from him nor received knowledge of his whereabouts in years and years. Quinn, on the other hand, was living in the Tampa area when he and the sergeant last had contact. A good while back, McClain had even visited with his former colleague in Florida, where they went fishing. He remembered that Quinn had gone into a sort of semiretirement, starting a glass-installation business that he operated while enjoying the sunshine far away from Michigan winters. But now I’d have to find him.

  The whole thing was beginning to feel like a John Grisham novel, as if I’d become a character in one of those story lines about some determined amateur sleuth who has to rely on the kindness and cooperation of others he meets, in order to get information. Even if I could locate Billy Quinn, there was the matter of what he’d have to say, or whether he’d be willing to speak with me at all. And how much would he remember? As a news reporter, I had probably spent a little more time around police officers than the average person, but I just couldn’t speculate on it. Weeks later, I checked my computer’s e-mail and read a telephone number. A professional contact, who had already contributed generously to my research, called in a favor to someone who ran a check of Tampa and its surrounding areas. The search revealed more than fifty William Quinns, but only one Billy. Along with the name, he shared with me a birth date not quite two years after that of Mr. Goines. “I would think that might be about right, as 30 yrs ago he would be around 34 or so—about the age of an active-duty detective, I would think,” my helpful acquaintance wrote. Soon, I would know if this was our man.

  In a few days, I called and reached Quinn’s wife. She screened me, explaining that she and her husband hadn’t been in Detroit for twenty-five years. I told her why I was calling, and she confirmed that Quinn had been a Highland Park cop. I called him at his latest place of employment, and he agreed to speak with me the following week. He didn’t immediately recall the case, but he thought it sounded like a “double” he investigated, in which the victims had their hearts cut out. This was an ex-cop alright. After sending a fax version of the investigator’s report that had his name signed to it, I called him back. He did remember the case. He and Paul Lee had been on call during the morning when the murders were reported. It was a time when cops had plenty of work to keep them busy in the few neighborhoods that made up Highland Park. He remembered thinking that the Goines and Sailor killings were a result of drug involvement.

  “We figured it was kind of dope-related,” he said. “We had quite a bit of that back then. Our precinct was only about four square miles and we were getting like sixty homicides a year.” About twenty-five of those murders—more than a third—Quinn said, were connected with drugs. Cortland, which extended directly west from near the front of Highland Park’s municipal complex, was no rougher than any of the other surrounding streets, though it was apparently a place where residents preferred to mind their own business. All of the people living at the address of the incident were interviewed, but Quinn suspected they were afraid to speak up. There was no indication of silencers on the two .38s left at the scene. Which means that, even having heard no less than ten gunshots inside the house, if anyone at 232 Cortland knew, they weren’t sharing it. Quinn recalled no signs of forced entry at the apartment. The killer or killers—he wasn’t willing to guess at the number—were people known or recognized by the victims, he told me. The dazed children had already been removed from the house by the time Quinn and Detective Lee arrived.

  “The children weren’t able to give any information whatsoever,” Quinn recalled. Police were left with no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence, and found no fingerprints on the weapons. And by the condition in which he found their bodies, Quinn estimated that Mr. Goines and Shirley Sailor had been dead for at least ten hours, leaving time for the suspects to put hundreds or thousands of miles between themselves and the crime, depending upon their mode of travel. Ultimately, Highland Park cops would find little to investigate beyond the initial police report to which Quinn signed his name. Without ever identifying a single suspect to question and without making a single arrest, the case that was one of only three double murders he would be assigned was placed in the inactive file.

  “Right now, you would have to have almost a confession from whoever did it,” Quinn told me before we ended our call. But Ciccone had disagreed, telling me: “Crimes have been solved with less evidence than this.”

  Highland Park, in 2003, is a vastly different place than it was, not quite thirty years earlier in 1974. The McGregor Library, where I wanted to do research, is closed to the public. The tiny city hall building that faces Woodward Avenue functions with few staff members. Hours of business are not the nine-to-five time frame that one might expect. Show up on the wrong day or at the wrong time, and you may not even gain entrance through the glass doors. What’s left of the Highland Park Police Department operates out of a cramped police mini station near the center of a strip mall less than half a mile away. The Farmer Jack supermarket and the Ashley Stewart clothing store draw more activity and attention since the number of officers on the force has been drastically reduced, to the point where the handful of remaining cops are limited in the calls to which they can respond. Even the mayor has faded into relative obscurity, affected by various stresses and with his authority limited by the state powers enforced with his support. Highland Park is a city in decline. Millions of dollars in debt are largely to blame. There has been talk, in the past year or longer, of making the city a part of Detroit’s municipal domain. Also discussed was the possibility of a complete takeover by the Michigan government.

  Cortland Avenue might be viewed as one example of the need for such an intervention. The short stretch that begins at Woodward and runs through to Second Avenue is not terribly different from other sections of the city, or from many in neighboring Det
roit, but this makes for sad commentary. It’s only by the comparison to worse blocks that this stretch of Cortland is able to emerge as less depressing in appearance. There is a row of outwardly well-kept and decent houses, which look as if they’ve probably been occupied for a long while. After all, this isn’t the sort of neighborhood that beckons new residents. A little farther down there is the sudden manifestation of empty lots. Another set of houses that appears on the opposite side is a striking contradiction. Abandoned and literally crumbling, they have the look of easy access for vagrancy or other illegal occupancy. On the opposite side of the street are two schools within short distance of one another. Cortland Elementary is the smaller of them and the closest to the spot that I’m seeking. There is extremely short, winter-bleached grass near the street, but it grows tall and thick deeper into the lot, which has obviously not been tended. There is no more 232 Cortland. The building where Mr. Goines and Shirley Sailor were murdered is gone without a trace. A passerby might not even be aware that there used to be a residence in the barren location. Any memory of Mr. Goines is imperceptible.

  A 1987 Detroit News article included the frequently used head-shot of the author, tight-lipped and expressionless, above the caption “Donald Goines: He lived, wrote and, at age 35, died by the streets.” Along with the incorrect age at death that it listed, the feature included at least three or four other mischaracterizations, such as an improper count of fourteen books that “still sell,” when the total of Mr. Goines’s titles was sixteen, and its offhanded labeling of Black Bottom as “a ghetto in Detroit.” Significant, however, were a few of the quotes. Pete Locke, identified as an executive editor with Holloway House, told the News: “Each generation is reading him. We still get fan letters each month from kids who don’t realize he’s dead.” Myrtle Goines, then seventy-seven, was reported to have contradicted the most commonly held beliefs about the events that led to her son’s writing career. Mrs. Goines appeared to tell the paper that he began Dopefiend way back in 1965, before Holloway House published Iceberg Slim’s first book, which would have made it improbable that he could have been Mr. Goines’s inspiration. Possibly, his mother had just lost some of her recollection, because she was quoted in a way that suggested Mr. Goines got into pimping after he started to write during a jail sentence. “When he got out I told him to keep writing,” she was quoted as saying. “I told him he could make some money one day. But he wanted to make it fast.” Most intriguing was Joan Coney’s quote about her brother. While she and her sister seemed much less certain about who they felt killed Mr. Goines at the times when I interviewed them, the News article read: “Goines captured the life of the ghetto so vividly it cost him his life, says his sister, Joan Coney, 38. ‘The characters in his book resembled those in real life,’ she says, ‘so they killed him.’”

  Ralph Watts, the brother-in-law to Shirley Sailor—who accompanied Mr. Goines to the dealer’s house a few nights before the murders—repeated Ms. Coney’s assertion. He didn’t specifically place the man they went to visit that evening in any of Mr. Goines’s books, but he recalled that the pusher’s name was Ronnie. He recognized what he believed may have been a major clue about who committed the homicides when, days after the murders, one of the children began to announce, “Ronnie killed my Shirley! Ronnie killed my Shirley!” Some of the women in the family quickly shut the little one’s mouth, and this information was never reported to police, for fear that the child might be put in danger. But whether or not the dealer called Ronnie had seen resemblance of himself in any novel, others agreed with former detective Quinn’s suggestion that the crimes were simply drug-related, having nothing to do with what Mr. Goines wrote.

  Still, there was another, more unsettling version reported among Sailor family members: that the words of the little girl who turned four years old days after the killings implicated cops who were allegedly there before detectives arrived at the scene. The same daughter who Watts remembered calling Ronnie’s name said that uniformed officers—or at least two men dressed like them—shot Mr. Goines while he sat at the typewriter, and turned on Sailor when she screamed. As one Sailor sibling remembers it, the child broke a week of complete silence by telling how murderers then hid her and toddler Donna in the bathroom, explaining, “We don’t kill little girls.” The problem with this account is that there’s no reference, in any of the documentation I gathered, to Mr. Goines being found at or near a typewriter. It may, however, explain origins of the dramatic rumor his admirers would repeat for decades to come. Moreover, it raises questions about whether an author who occasionally wrote about dirty cops could have died because of it.

  In the early part of 2003, I found Walter Williamson occupying the same north Detroit neighborhood where he and his family had lived throughout the years. He had recently left his home in Westland, Michigan, to move in with his mother and care for her before she died. Walter was planning to return to Westland before the year’s end. With no telephone number available, Charles Glover and I drove to his address, hoping to talk with him. I was told that he hadn’t publicly spoken about Mr. Goines in almost thirty years. Charles suggested we bring along a chess board and a bottle of wine. After looking out onto the porch and seeing Charles, Walter opened the door. He looked nothing like the timid, little man I imagined who had been frightened into silence by his friend’s murder. Instead, Walter showed outward signs of the player he had been in his prime. Wearing a bathrobe and hairnet, with a thick and plentiful amount of straightened black tresses netted and bundled upward onto his head, he looked at least ten years younger than the age he claimed, seventy-two. I was surprised at how quickly he appeared to recognize Charles, who credited his uncle and his uncle’s companions like Walter with helping to give him a sense of manhood, in spite of their unorthodox and corruptive influence.

  The first thing I noticed after shaking Walter’s hand and being shown into his living room was a chess set with all of its pieces in position sitting on a green fold-up table. The set I’d brought wouldn’t be needed. After at least four decades, Walter was still a passionate chess player. He was expecting a friend to arrive for their regular game any minute. My bottle of wine wouldn’t be opened, either. As we all sat down, Walter told us he had stopped drinking and smoking. He was in recovery from treatment for prostate cancer and had only been outside the house three times during the previous two months. He had been through a rough time and was still in the midst of a slow recovery process, he told us. If we wanted to get older, he said, we should pay specific attention to our health now. Was this the sort of talk that retired pimps and Hall of Fame players normally delivered? When his chess opponent arrived, the flashes and flourishes that Charles remembered began.

  “I’m glad you came. You know why?” Walter asked the younger man who sat across the board from him. “I ain’t kicked nobody’s ass today.” We all laughed. That sounded more like player talk to me. Walter had switched his TV set to an audio jazz channel, and in no time we were listening to mellow tunes as cigarette smoke filled the small living room. Charles said it was just like he remembered things when his uncle was alive, except, of course, that Walter wasn’t smoking. When Walter’s visitor learned that Charles and I were there to do discuss Walter’s memories of Mr. Goines, he seemed surprised.

  “The author?” he asked in disbelief. The man revealed a subtle reverence that I had recognized in the voices of any number of people I asked about Mr. Goines’s books on other occasions. Walter’s partner had never accepted the stories he heard about the longtime friendship. “I thought that was just Walt talkin’ shit,” he said. Walter had missed his old friend over the years. He and Mr. Goines had been as thick as thieves in the literal sense. Listening to him speak of the many times they shared, it was easy to imagine the writer sitting across from him at the chess board where his visitor sat. Mr. Goines had left behind no interviews that I ever came across. Most likely, he had never received an opportunity to give any formal Q and A. And I found myself wondering, from t
ime to time, just what he might say if he were alive and able to talk to me about his life. Would he have overcome his addiction? Would he have continued writing? Walter’s recollections were to be the final contribution I received from those who personally knew Mr. Goines’s traits and ways. Yet, not even the people who took the time to talk with me were prepared to say what the man might have become. Walter only knew that his friend had genuine potential. His most pensive moments appeared at the times when he thought about the sudden way in which the author died.

  “It was horrible because Donnie had a name,” he said. I knew he hadn’t meant to suggest that the death of anyone less known would have been less significant. Mr. Goines’s popularity only made the blow of his sudden absence even more devastating. Walter had been excited to see how far his running buddy might go and how much he might achieve.