Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  Then a better idea came to him. Maybe he should do exactly what his uncle was suggesting—paint the Buick and trade it in for a used Deuce and a Quarter. Then he could forget the cops and point his new car away from Detroit and just let it take him away from all this bad air and worse history.

  But first he would have to get some money together. Again he thought of all the bread he and his brother had made selling those guns when they first hit town, and again he cursed himself for pissing away every last dime of it. He’d lost track of all the stories he’d told himself to justify his behavior. He told himself his brother had leaned on him to make the run from Alabama to Detroit—though Willie was secretly glad for an excuse to get away from the ghosts of the South. He told himself he needed a change of air if he was ever going to get back to work on his book—but the words hadn’t come in Detroit any more than they’d come in Alabama. He told himself the world owed him a little fun—and so he gave himself over to pleasure for the first time in his life. He had money to burn, and he burned it. Saw Edwin Starr at the Twenty Grand, Etta James at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, Freddie Hubbard at the Drome, went all the way out to a VFW hall in Mt. Clemens to hear Bobby Blue Bland. After the bars closed at three o’clock he might hit a blind pig for a nightcap or load up on barbecued pigs’ feet at the Log Cabin. Everywhere he went he was the life of the party, always a roll in his pocket and a girl on his arm, everyone’s stick buddy.

  It was the very sort of behavior that made his parents and Uncle Bob see red. They even had an expression for it—“nigger rich”—and it was the most scathing put-down they could utter about a member of their own race. Their scorn applied to all forms of wasteful behavior, the tendency to squander not only money but health, opportunity, good luck, anything acquired through hard work or simple fate. Squandering invariably led to need, and a needy man had an instinctive urge to seek a scapegoat. Willie’s parents and his uncle would not abide this yearning for a scapegoat because they believed that all people achieve their own failures as well as their own successes, and the only way to attain true dignity is to accept responsibility for those failures and successes without complaint or false pride. As much as Willie hated to admit it, he knew they were right. This fix he was in was his own damn fault. He’d finally come to understand that the world doesn’t owe a thing to any man.

  Uncle Bob was saying something about Chick Murphy.

  “I’m sorry,” Willie said. “What was that?”

  “I said Chick Murphy made me a nice price on this car. He beat Krajenke by almost five hundred bucks.”

  “Chick Murphy sold you this car?”

  “Yeah, you met him?”

  “He was at the wedding reception I worked this afternoon. Man drinks like a fish.”

  “Well, he might be a boozer but he’s the biggest Buick dealer in Michigan and he damn sure did right by me on this deal. You oughta talk to him. I’m sure he’d take your old Buick in trade.”

  It was such a beautiful idea that Willie couldn’t get it out of his head. He was in a daze all through the dinner shift that night, unable to stop working and reworking the angles. If he got a cheap paintjob on his ’54 Buick and unloaded it on a dealer with a huge lot, the car would as good as disappear. Once it was resold, the cops would never be able to trace it back to him. And once he got behind the wheel of his own Deuce and a Quarter, all his problems would be solved.

  He told himself these things so many times that by the time he fell asleep on his bunk in the Quarters, well past midnight, he had actually come to believe they were true.

  4

  AS SOON AS DOYLE OPENED THE DOOR TO THE BASEMENT GARAGE, the smell hit him. It was a layered, physical thing, the smell of ammonia and lye and disinfectant and their failure to conquer the far more powerful smells of human shit and piss and sweat and rage that had stewed in that garage since last July, when it was pressed into service as an impromptu holding tank for hundreds of people who’d been arrested on charges of curfew violation and looting and arson and were waiting their turn to stand before an over-worked, short-fused Recorder’s Court judge and learn that their bail was up there in fantasy land, in the neighborhood of ten grand. Doyle guessed the stench would linger in this garage forever.

  He climbed into a Plymouth and headed north on Woodward. It amused him that these cars were considered “unmarked.” With their cheap hubcaps, long radio antennas and identical chocolate paintjobs, they might as well have had bull’s-eyes on the doors. Couldn’t the brass at least spring for a few different shades of paint, maybe a Chevy or a Ford every once in a while just to keep the bad guys guessing?

  He took Woodward instead of the Lodge Freeway because he preferred surface streets. For one thing, you were less likely to get a brick dropped through your windshield by some prankster who’d cut a hole in the cage on an overpass. For another, you were more likely to pick up on new strains of street life.

  As he passed the Fox Theatre he saw that another Motown Revue was coming. His eye caught a few names on the marquee—Martha & the Vandellas, the Miracles, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. “The Sound of Young America” sounded like fun, but he knew it wasn’t available to him. He was much closer to his thirties than his teens, and he wasn’t about to pretend he didn’t know it. Besides, he preferred jazz.

  When he crossed over the Ford Freeway, the atmosphere changed. It wasn’t anything on the street; it was something in his stomach, a sudden tightness. Instead of turning left on Grand Boulevard and going straight to the Harlan House, he kept heading north, guided by the tightness in his stomach. He knew where it came from: It came from the neon sign and his need to see it. And suddenly there it was up ahead, on the left side of the street, waiting to remind him of so many bad things. The palm tree with its green neon fronds, unlit at this time of day, topped the familiar metal rectangle. What he saw next came as too much of a shock to be a relief.

  They’d changed the name.

  What had once been the Algiers Motel was now the Desert Inn. They’d changed the name but they hadn’t bothered to take down the sign and get rid of that fucking neon palm tree. The place was a blot on the entire police force, on the city itself.

  Doyle slowed the Plymouth as he passed. There were a few black guys drinking out of paper bags in the parking lot beyond the swimming pool, out by the annex building. That was the killing floor. That was where cops killed unarmed civilians in cold blood. He was so mesmerized he almost missed “her”—the six-foot Negro with the copper wig and the hot pink mini-skirt and high heels who was hip-swiveling along the sidewalk in front of the motel, dangling a big white purse and checking each car as it passed. Christ, Doyle thought, now they’ve got trannies doing the hooking up here—in broad daylight.

  He turned left onto Boston, a boulevard of fading but still-grand mansions. The grandest of them all was off to his right, a three-story palace roosting on a green carpet that was being groomed by black men riding a fleet of little tractors. Country living right here in the heart of the Motor City. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown records, had paid a million for the place last year, and the understanding around town was that he’d done so to squelch rumors that the company was planning to move to L.A. But Doyle had his doubts, and he wasn’t alone. A million bucks was beer money to a guy like Berry Gordy. Besides, why shouldn’t a thriving record company join the exodus? Did it have an obligation to hang on just because it happened to be owned by a black man? Did Ford Motor Company have a similar obligation just because old Henry made his pots of money here? Nobody squawked when he took his show out to snow-white Dearborn.

  After crossing over the Lodge Freeway, Doyle turned left onto Twelfth Street, where it had all started. The gutted buildings still looked warm to the touch, like the fires had stopped burning nine hours and not nine months ago. Very few of them had been torn down yet, as though someone—insurance companies? the white power structure?—had left them standing as perverse monuments to the madness that had swept this city. Those that had been
torn down had usually been replaced by nothing at all, just pebbly, weed-choked lots that glittered more brightly every day with smashed wine and liquor bottles. Ragweed Acres, Doyle called these vistas. Businesses along Twelfth that were untouched or only brushed by the flames had usually been modified—windows filled in with bullet-proof bricks or cinderblocks, a hideous but necessary architectural trend known locally as “Riot Renaissance.”

  Driving through his old precinct never failed to depress Doyle. He’d spent three of his seven years in uniform patrolling this neighborhood and he’d grown fond of it. It had never been plush but it was always solid, working-class, and there were still many blocks where people owned their homes, trimmed their hedges and lawns, went to church, belonged to the block association, the U.A.W., the N.A.A.C.P. But they were being nibbled away. Since the riot, whites and many better-off blacks hadn’t been able to get out fast enough.

  Now he was passing the shoe repair shop where the first person died during the riot. That case was Doyle’s baptism by fire. The shop was empty now but the red neon shoe was still in the window, unlit, as dead as Krikor Messerlian himself. He was the Armenian immigrant who ran the place, a sweet shriveled old goat who always offered Doyle strong coffee and strong opinions whenever he stopped by to chat. When the neighborhood started to burn last July, Krikor stayed in his shop around the clock, armed only with a fireplace poker and the immigrant’s determination not to back down, not to cede his little patch of the American dream.

  When a gang of black kids gathered outside and threatened him through the locked door, Messerlian cursed them and told them to get off his property. Their response was to kick down the door and beat him to death. The police dispatcher used the word “mob,” and when Doyle arrived at the scene Krikor Messerlian was lying inside the shop in a sticky pond of blood alongside a fireplace poker. His face was gone.

  Doyle did what Jimmy Robuck had taught him to do at a murder scene: He followed his gut. He told the two uniforms to secure the building and not touch anything while he went knocking on doors in search of a witness because his gut told him they would never have anything on this one without an eyewit. As he turned to go, one of the uniforms, a black rookie, nodded toward a big stucco house across the street and suggested he might want to talk to an elderly lady in a blue dress who lived on the ground floor.

  Doyle always did his own door-to-doors because he didn’t trust uniforms with something so important and he’d discovered in his first week on the job that he could get people to tell him things. Mamas, widows, ex-husbands, eyewitnesses, sometimes even the killers themselves—they seemed to want to tell him things. Jimmy Robuck said it was a homicide cop’s greatest gift.

  Doyle knocked on a dozen doors before he got to the lady in the stucco house across the street. Her name was Clara Waters and she told Doyle she was on her front porch watering her geraniums when the boys kicked down the door and started beating the old man. She knew the boy who took the pipe, or whatever it was, and used it to smash Mr. Messerlian’s face. She even told Doyle where the boy stayed—“corner apartment in that little two-story brick across from Roosevelt Field.”

  The kid was eating a bag of Frito’s and watching “I Love Lucy” when Doyle and Jimmy knocked on his door. He had fresh blood on his sneakers and his fingerprints matched those on the fireplace poker next to Krikor Messerlian’s body. They had the kid locked up, his confession signed and the paperwork on its way upstairs before the Medical Examiner started dismantling Krikor Messerlian’s corpse in the white-tiled autopsy room in the basement.

  Yes, this job was all about luck and squealers—and getting people to tell you things.

  When Doyle reached Clairmount now he pulled the Plymouth to the curb and shut off the engine. To his right was the building where it had all started. The print shop on the ground floor was still vacant. He wondered if the blind pig upstairs, the United Community League for Civic Action—or was it the United Civic League for Community Action?—was back in business, serving illegal after-hours booze. It wouldn’t have surprised him. Very little surprised him anymore.

  The street looked shabby, sadder than ever. People called it “Sin Street” or simply “The Strip,” and during the riot one poet at the Free Press had described this stretch of Twelfth Street as “an ugly neon scar running up the center of a Negro slum.” Doyle didn’t think it was ugly. He thought it was alive. It contained the usual gallery of pawn shops and furniture stores, record shops, soul food restaurants and discount liquor stores, a religious artifacts shop that offered statues of the Virgin Mary, money-drawing oil, skin-whitening ointments. The street was always buzzing. Now he could see the fading words SOUL BROTHER and NEGRO OWNED and AFRO ALL THE WAY spray-painted on certain windows and walls, the black owners’ way of pleading with arsonists and looters to pass them by. Zuroff Furniture Co., once one of the busiest enterprises on the street, was boarded up, a FOR RENT sign out front. It was hard to blame old Abe Zuroff for packing it in. The Jewish merchants had gotten hit especially hard during the riot, and Doyle had often wondered why. Was it simple bad luck, a case of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or was it something darker, something tribal, a settling of scores for slights, real or imagined, that blacks had been feeling for years in every inner-city in America, Detroit included? Doyle had given up on believing he would ever know the answers to such questions.

  Across the street from Zuroff’s there was a storefront church, its name painted crudely around a big red cross: Truth and Light Free Will Deliverance Tabernacle. A junkie was nodding in the doorway. Thank God for churches and junkies, Doyle thought, imagine the hell we’d have to pay without them to take some of the edge off. Two men were sprawled on the hood of a Cadillac in front of the church, passing a quart bottle of Colt .45 malt liquor—a completely unique experience, if you believed the popular ad campaign, which Doyle did not. An enormous radio on the roof of the Caddy was blasting Smokey Robinson: “If you feel like giving me a lifetime of de-vo-o-tion, I second that emotion. . . .” Ten-dollar flatback hookers sashayed back and forth across the street, brazenly waving down cars. Doyle easily knew half of them by name.

  He’d seen enough. He started the Plymouth and eased down Twelfth Street. The brothers and sisters on the sidewalks all stopped what they were doing and gave the unmarked their very best Motor City hate stares. There was heat in those stares. Doyle turned left at Grand Boulevard, ending his little trip down Memory Lane and turning his thoughts to what Henry Hull could possibly have for him on this fine spring morning.

  As always, the door to Room 450 was ajar and Henry Hull was sitting alone on the sofa. Henry’s skull was as smooth and white as an onion. He was barely sixty years old but looked eighty, the flesh on his face sagging. His eyes, once so bright, were now lifeless and dull, the light gone out of them. Doyle knew the man well enough to know that his sorrow went even deeper than his personal losses, for Henry Hull, like most native Detroiters, was immensely proud of his hometown, of its swagger, its work ethic, its dirty fingernails and thick wrists, its ability to accommodate a crazy quilt of races and ethnic groups, shoulder to shoulder. Sure, there had always been tension—labor organizers were regularly beaten during the Depression, and thirty-four people died in a vicious race riot that started on Belle Isle in 1943—but in Henry Hull’s eyes such flare-ups were inevitable in such a big rough city, and they were the exception, not the rule. Detroit had always been a city that worked, in both senses of the word. Now, for the first time in Henry Hull’s life, there were disturbing signs that it had stumbled so badly it might never pick itself up.

  “Knock, knock,” Doyle said, pushing the door open.

  “Come in, Frankie,” Henry said, rising from the sofa. “I just brewed a fresh pot. You want a cup?”

  “Silly question.”

  There was nowhere to set their mugs on the coffee table because it was buried under drifts of paperwork—the autopsy, Doyle’s typed report of the crime scene, newspaper accounts of
the killing and the ongoing investigation. Pinned to the room’s walls were blown-up maps of the blocks surrounding the motel, and Henry’s endless lists of addresses and phone numbers and names, all the far-fetched leads that had failed to locate Helen Hull’s killer and, in Doyle’s opinion, probably never would. He’d learned that the twelve hours after a homicide are the most crucial for a detective and that a case that stays open for a month is likely to stay open forever. That meant the Helen Hull case had been open nine times forever.

  “Let me see, let me see, it’s right here somewhere,” Henry said, digging frantically in the pile of papers. His doggedness and the futility of his quest filled Doyle with admiration and sadness. Sometimes he found himself wishing the old guy would simply give it up, pack his belongings, check out of the motel, and get on with his life. But Doyle knew that was out of the question, and deep down he was glad it was. He’d vowed to find Helen Hull’s killer the day he stood at the corner of Jefferson and Piper looking at the burned-out shell that had been the Greenleaf Market. Henry had just come back from identifying his wife’s body at the morgue. Watching him spray-paint the words THANKS FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE on the market’s charred walls, Doyle broke down and wept.

  “Here it is!” Henry cried, unearthing a photocopied map. “I don’t know how we could’ve missed it.” He had drawn a dotted line in red ink from the motel to a street corner behind Henry Ford Hospital on the far side of the Lodge Freeway.

  Henry stood up and grabbed his binoculars. “Come on, Frankie,” he said, starting for the door, “I’ve got something to show you. Let’s walk through what happened again.”

  For the thousandth time, Doyle thought, following him out the door.

  “Okay,” Henry said, turning right in the hallway, Doyle on his heels. “Helen can’t sleep because of all the noise down on the street, so she walks out into the hall. She passes Lisa Perot’s room and sees that the door’s open and the lights are on.” Henry jerked a thumb at the door to Room 433. “Helen walks all the way to the window.”