by Bill Morris
They had reached the picture window at the north end of the hallway. Henry pulled the string that opened the curtain, and they were looking down at West Grand Boulevard. Doyle hated revisiting this spot, for it was written in the homicide bible that while it’s possible to murder a man only once, it’s possible to murder a murder scene a thousand and one times. And this one had been slaughtered.
In the early hours of last July 26, the area around the Harlan House was a war zone. All streetlights had been shot out. Sniper fire aimed at Henry Ford Hospital was so heavy that the staff had to blacken the windows in the emergency rooms so they wouldn’t die while trying to save the dying. Tanks roamed on West Grand Boulevard, pouring rounds from .50-caliber machine guns at anything that moved. They were answered with tracer fire from the rooftops. National Guardsmen, poorly trained and terrified, were also shooting at anything that moved, including other Guardsmen and police. The night was thunder and chaos.
It was Helen Hull’s second night at the motel. She’d checked in when the riot started spreading to the East Side, while Henry stayed behind in their apartment above the shuttered market with a loaded deer rifle. Police cruised the Jeff-Chalmers neighborhood with bullhorns, urging residents and shopkeepers to stay away from windows and doorways, reminding them about the dusk-to-dawn curfew. A National Guard unit had bivouacked in Ford Park down by the river because there were rumors that black militants were going to mount an invasion by boat from Canada, then blow up Detroit’s water works. The city was jazzed with such rumors.
“Okay,” Henry said now to Doyle, “so Helen calls to Lisa Perot to come look at the tank down on the street. The globe light behind her is on.”
Which made her a beautifully silhouetted target. Within seconds, two bullets crashed through the window. One missed her, and one ripped into her chest, penetrating her heart and glancing downward before coming to rest in her liver. Then, according to the interviews Doyle conducted after the shooting, one of the most bizarre incidents of that bizarre week took place. A man named J.R. Glover of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was hastily packing his bags in Room 401. When he heard the crash, he crawled out into the hallway and saw Helen Hull lying on her back. Suddenly a man with a rifle charged into Glover’s open room and began firing out the window. National Guardsmen peppered the room with dozens of rounds, but the man, miraculously, was not hit.
Then the police arrived. They stormed into Glover’s room and disarmed the man with the rifle and hustled him away. Someone smashed or shot out the globe light in the hallway. And someone in the hallway fired at least one bullet out through the window where the fatal bullet had entered.
By the time Doyle and Jimmy Robuck showed up, the crime scene was a disaster. Helen Hull had been taken by ambulance to Ford Hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. It was impossible to examine the scene in the dark, and it was too dangerous to use flashlights for more than a few minutes. After noting the location of the three bullet holes in the window, the detectives and the rest of the police left the scene.
When Doyle returned in the morning, the plate-glass window had already been replaced and the blood-soaked carpet had been torn up and thrown away. Even the police who’d been on the scene after the shooting gave him conflicting accounts. The only good news was that the Medical Examiner had dug a fragment of a .30-caliber bullet out of Helen Hull’s liver. If a weapon was found, there was a chance of matching slug with gun. A slim chance, to be sure, but it was better than nothing.
So every time Doyle revisited this end of the fourth-floor hallway, he despaired. It was a terrible crime scene. A difficult investigation had been made virtually impossible by circumstances beyond his control.
Now Henry raised the binoculars to his eyes and gazed through them to his left, toward the freeway. “There! Just past the right edge of the hospital, one block to the north. Yellow brick building. Five stories tall.”
Doyle took the binoculars. A moment later he said, “What is it?”
“It’s an apartment building called the Larrow Arms. You see that rooftop?”
“I see it, all right. It’s . . . it’s perfect. Mr. Hull, it’s perfect! How in the—how could we have possibly missed it?”
Though it would have taken a superb shot to score a direct hit from that distance and that angle, it was not out of the question.
“It’s perfect!” Doyle said again, still peering through the binoculars.
“It gets better,” Henry said. “I went over there yesterday and started knocking on doors. And a lady who lives on the second floor on the east side of the building—the side facing the Lodge—says she saw some things on the morning of July 26th that I think you’ll find very interesting. She said she’d be willing to talk to you and Jimmy.”
“Who is she?”
“A widow lady’s lived there for years.”
“She black?”
“Yeah, but decent. A real lady.” He reached in his pocket and handed Doyle a scrap of paper. It read: Charlotte Armstrong. Larrow Arms, apartment 2-E. TY5-7930.
Cecelia was tending bar that afternoon at the Riverboat, as Doyle had hoped, and she had a bottle of Stroh’s and a frosted glass on the bar before he was settled on a stool. She knew he hated beer mugs. He’d told her they made him feel like he was wielding a weapon, which was the last thing he wanted to feel when he was off the clock. He’d also told her, proudly, that he’d never taken his service .38 out of its holster while on duty.
It was a nice story and it played well with the ladies. Only trouble was, it wasn’t true.
When she went off to fill an order at the service bar, Doyle turned and looked out the Riverboat’s picture window just as the Bob-Lo boat came chugging past the big Canadian Club sign on the far shore. That was something he’d always loved about Detroit: You were so far north you actually looked south toward Canada, toward that scintillating little eyesore known as Windsor, Ontario.
Windsor—Vicki Jones’s hometown. Three weekends ago he’d gotten home at four in the morning after finishing up a double shooting at the Driftwood Lounge and discovered that Vicki had needed all of fifteen words to kiss him off. They were stuck to his refrigerator door: I can’t spend the rest of my life waiting for you to get off work. Not even a Sorry or Good luck or It was fun.
Fair enough, though there was no denying he would miss Vicki’s skull-popping blowjobs and those rare Sundays when he got to stay home and play jazz records for her and cook lavish Italian meals that lasted, over bottles of good Valpolicella, late into the night. Vicki loved his record collection even more than she loved his cooking. Her tastes in music ran toward Aretha, the Supremes, and Gladys Knight, but he opened her ears to new worlds, to Duke Ellington and Lester Young, to Miles and Monk and Bird. She even learned to like Chopin and Debussy. Doyle would also miss those nights they went out dancing at places like the Twenty Grand, at black clubs where the whole room lifted off together, at after-hours bars and private parties where he wouldn’t have dared take a white girl. He was accepted—he was tolerated—in those places because he was with Vicki. Because Vicki was a fox with a big laugh who could dance—anything from a slow grind to a waltz to the funky chicken—like nobody else in the house.
Now Cecelia brought him a second Stroh’s, touched the back of his hand and said, “There you go, hon.” She was wearing a loose blue silk blouse and a tight black skirt instead of pants. It was the first time he’d seen her legs, and they were marvels. There was something else different about her look, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
By the time his second beer and the Bob-Lo boat were gone, he’d figured it out. It was her hair. There was a hint of strawberry coloring in it, less brassy than the blonde she’d been before. It still tumbled to her shoulders and it still shimmered, but now there was fire in it. It suited her milky skin and green eyes. She was standing in front of Doyle, fixing two 7-and-7’s for a well-dressed black couple at the far end of the bar. “You sure are quiet,” she said.
“Yeah, had a strange day.”
“Strange good or strange bad?” She was squirting 7-Up into the highball glasses from a gun attached to a metal hose, another modern “improvement,” like night baseball and push-button telephones, that Doyle instinctively distrusted. What was wrong with opening a bottle of pop and pouring it in a glass?
“Actually, it was strange good, believe it or not.”
He admired her legs some more as she took the drinks to the black couple. She came right back with a fresh beer and a fresh glass. “Why shouldn’t I believe your day was strange good? Don’t cops have good days once in a while like everybody else?”
“Sure they do. Every once in a long while.” He laughed. “I love what you’ve done with your hair.”
“You’re the first person to notice. You really like it?” While she studied herself uncertainly in the mirror behind the bar he snuck another look at her legs. He felt like a dog, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“I like it,” he said. “A lot.”
“Thanks. It’s my natural color, but I still can’t decide if I like it or hate it.”
“Well, I like it.” He took a sip of beer. “Say, I was wondering . . . you a baseball fan by any chance?”
She turned back toward him. “No, I’m a Tigers fan. There’s a big difference. I love the Tigers. I’ve loved them since I was a little girl. If you’re asking me to a game, the answer’s yes.”
That wasn’t terribly complicated. You spend hours screwing up the courage to ask a woman a question, then come to find out she’s been light years ahead of you the whole time. It had always been like that for Doyle. He supposed it had something to do with his Catholic upbringing. The Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns and the Jesuits didn’t exactly pass along a wealth of tips on romance and courting. Father Monaghan, the priest who had the unenviable task of explaining the birds and the bees to a roomful of hormone-stoked, zit-faced jerkoffs at U. of D. High School, referred to the fuzz that was magically sprouting around their genitals as poo-bic hair.
“I’ve got a couple of nice box seats for tomorrow’s game,” Doyle said. “First pitch is at five past one.”
“And I’ve got tomorrow off. I’ve got a paper due Monday, but I guess I’ll just have to finish it after the game. My father taught me never to pass up a ticket to a Tigers game.”
“A paper?”
“Yeah, on how the Cubists influenced Mexican mural painters.”
“You’re still in school?”
“Grad school—at Wayne State. I’m working toward a master’s in art history so I can get a minimum-wage job as an assistant curator at the Institute of Arts. Then I’ll work my way up from there.” She waved at the liquor bottles and the beer taps. “This is just paying my tuition and rent. I tried to make it as an artist, but . . .”
“But what?”
“But nothing. I went to New York and studied at Pratt. I wanted to paint cityscapes and portraits—not soup cans. I couldn’t get a gallery to show my work, so I came home and went back to school. And I love it.”
This was a pleasant surprise. Detroit had never had much use for the arts or artistic types. Artists in this city didn’t wear paint-spattered jeans or suffer gorgeously in grimy lofts. They wore smocks over their business suits—they were almost always men—and they worked in vast, well lit studios at places like the G.M. Tech Center, dreaming and sketching and building life-size clay models of next year’s Tempest or Corvette. They did some glorious work, to Doyle’s way of thinking, but there wasn’t an Abstract Expressionist or Pop artist among them. As for the women in Detroit, most of them carried themselves as though their greatest ambition in life was to become a professional bowler. Doyle was about to tell Cecelia how much he loved to hate the Diego Rivera murals at the Institute of Arts when she said, “How bout I fix us a late breakfast at my place before the game? Say, eleven-thirty?”
“Sounds good.”
She drew him a map on a cocktail napkin. She lived in one of those new twin high-rise apartment buildings on East Lafayette, not far from here, twenty-story slabs of glass and concrete. He’d always assumed they were put there for the benefit of swinging singles, dope dealers and the mistresses of rich auto executives. So bartending art students were allowed to live there too. He tucked the napkin in his pocket and promised to show up at her door at eleven-thirty sharp.
On his way across the parking lot he considered swinging by the Larrow Arms, but his stomach was empty and he’d gotten a surprising buzz off the three beers. He didn’t want to do something stupid that might ruin the day’s good luck. So he headed east on Jefferson toward the big rickety frame house where he grew up, where he still lived, and where he expected to die. The house was pale green and in bad need of a coat of paint and a new roof, but since he couldn’t afford to pay someone to do the work and couldn’t afford to take time off to do it himself, the house was going to stay pale green and it was going to continue to leak. He lived alone there with the ghosts of his dead parents. His mother’s spirit resided mainly in the kitchen and in the vegetable garden out back, the places where she’d passed her love of cooking and gardening down to him. The old man could usually be found on the front porch, where Doyle had installed some ratty furniture from the parlor. He liked to sit out there at night and smoke a cigar and tell his father about his day. He would have plenty for the old man tonight.
So Mrs. Charlotte Armstrong could wait. Doyle wanted to be at the top of his game when he sat down and asked her what she saw and heard the night Helen Hull died.
5
THERE WAS A LATE LUNCH RUSH IN THE MEN’S GRILL AT OAKLAND Hills Country Club that Sunday afternoon when members came pouring in off the golf course to watch the climax of the Masters golf tournament on television. Willie was the only busboy working the room, and his Uncle Bob and Edgar Hudson were the only waiters. Hudson, as always, was useless. He stood around kibitzing on gin rummy games and laughing way too hard at the members’ jokes, slapping a napkin on his thigh, skinning ’em back for all he was worth. Once in a while he’d saunter over to the bar to get an order of drinks from Chi Chi.
Willie didn’t mind having to hustle, especially with his uncle. It made the clock move and it put money in his pocket. He was sure Uncle Bob was the only waiter on the staff who gave busboys the full ten percent of his tips they were entitled to. Besides, Willie had no interest in kibitzing on gin rummy games or watching golf on television. The only black people on the TV screen were the ones carrying the golf bags and raking the sand traps.
All afternoon Willie kept one eye on the door where the men came in off the golf course. Finally, a little after four o’clock, Chick Murphy walked in with a transistor radio pressed to his right ear. He sat down and kicked off his golf spikes and ordered a Michelob from Hudson. He was looking at the television set but Willie could tell he was paying closer attention to what was on the radio. When he saw Willie, he waved him over.
“Yes, Mr. Murphy?”
“Just picked up the Tigers’ game. Bottom of the twelfth, tied 5-5. McAuliffe’s on third and Gates is coming in to pinch hit.” The other men at the table, pink with sunburn and dressed in sherbet-colored clothes, ignored him.
“Gates Brown?” Willie whispered, moving closer.
“Yup. Ball one.”
“How many outs?”
Chick Murphy held up two of the three fingers on his left hand. Willie could hear the fuzzy roar of the Tiger Stadium crowd, and he wondered if Louis and Clyde were in the bleachers. One of the men said to Chick Murphy, “Turn that shit down, would you please? Goalby’s getting ready to putt on eighteen.”
“He can’t hear this, numbnuts,” Chick Murphy said. “Ball two.”
No sound came out of the television set, and the room was as quiet as a tomb. Willie tried to imagine a game where all the spectators had to be utterly silent and still. He thought of those gyms in Alabama where he’d played basketball, raucous cauldrons of sweat and noise, cheering and chanting, the fans dancing
to saxophones, bongo drums, tambourines, syncopated clapping. On the TV screen now a lantern-jawed guy leaned over a putt for a long time, then drilled it into the hole. There were sighs of relief, palms slapping tables, a few soft whistles.
“Swing and a miss,” Chick Murphy said. “Two balls and a strike.” Willie was the only person listening to him. “Here’s the pitch . . . he hit it up the middle . . . it’s going . . . it’s a single! McAuliffe scores from third! Ballgame!”
Chick Murphy sprang from his chair and wrapped an arm around Willie’s shoulder, gave him a crusher squeeze. One of the men cocked an eyebrow and said, “You don’t knock it off, Murphy, I’m gonna tell the wife.”
Willie went back to work. Later a cry went up from the crowd when the announcer reported that the Masters had not ended in a tie, as everyone believed. A guy named Roberto De Vicenzo had signed his scorecard with a 66 instead of the 65 he shot, and the rules required him to accept the higher score. It cost him a tie. There were hoots of disbelief throughout the room, and Willie watched as Bob Goalby slipped into a green sport coat, grinning like a hyena. Win a major golf tournament and you get an ugly jacket.
“Say, Billy . . .” Chick Murphy, in plaid pants and stocking feet, was on his way to the locker room. There were bright-green grass shavings stuck to his lemon-yellow socks.
“It’s Willie, sir. Willie Bledsoe.”
“Right. Sorry. Your Uncle Bob tells me you might be in the market for a new car. Here.” He handed Willie a business card. “Give me a call—or just drop by the lot. I’m always there.”
“Thanks, Mr. Murphy.”
As the men filed into the locker room, Willie studied Chick Murphy’s business card. Stay on the right track to 9 Mile and Mack!—for the best Buick buys in Michigan! He knew, he just knew he was holding his one-way ticket out of purgatory.
