by Bill Morris
When the score reached 7-0 in the seventh inning, fans began moving for the exits. But once again Louis and Clyde and Willie stayed put, bound together by the unspoken understanding that even watching a mop-up job here in this beautiful green room surpassed anything that awaited them down on the streets of Detroit.
Clyde bought one last round of beers, then turned to Willie. “You still workin that busboy job?”
“Fraid so.”
“Where’s it at?”
“Oakland Hills Country Club. Way out in honky land.”
“No shit. One a my best clients is a member there. Man name of Chick Murphy.”
“The Buick dealer?”
“Thas right. Man’s a prince. Traded with him for a new Deuce and a Quarter just last week.”
“You’re Chick Murphy’s lawyer?”
“Not his personal lawyer. He calls me whenever one a his nigger mechanics gets liquored up and does something stupid. I make a nice chunk a change off them fools.”
Every day, it seemed, the big city got a little smaller. And Chick Murphy seemed to have satisfied customers all over this shrinking town.
The second game ended 7-0, and the day’s sweep left the Tigers two games ahead of second-place Cleveland. It was a glorious day to be a Detroit Tigers fan. Willie was feeling so good he accepted Clyde’s offer of a ride home in his new Deuce and a Quarter. It was fire-engine red with a white convertible top and white seats, AM-FM radio, power windows, much flashier than Uncle Bob’s Deuce, and it beat the hell out of the DSR. Willie didn’t want the party to end just yet, so he asked Clyde to drop him off at the Chit Chat Lounge.
The place was packed, as it always was when the Tigers were in town. Aziz was sitting on a barstool drinking a Vernor’s ginger ale because he was a Muslim and he never drank alcohol. Next to him sat Erkie, who was drinking a shot of Old Overholt and a Stroh’s chaser because that was all he ever drank. Willie made his way through the mob toward them.
Though his bar-hopping days were past, Willie stopped by the Chit Chat from time to time because the walls were covered with Tigers memorabilia, and Izzy Gould, the three-day Jew who owned the place, always unplugged the jukebox and tuned the radio to WJR on game days. The jukebox was an old Seeburg full of great records, everything from Sarah Vaughan to Clarence Carter to Bo Diddley. To top it off, the Chit Chat was on Euclid just a few blocks from Willie’s apartment, which meant he could crawl home if he had a few too many.
When he reached the bar he saw that Erkie had a Viceroy cigarette stuck in the gap where his second tooth on the lower right side used to be. His head was shrouded in so much smoke that at first Willie thought he was on fire. Normally Erkie was in high spirits when the Tigers won, but now he looked glum.
“Why the long face, Erk?” Willie said, sliding onto the empty stool next to him. Izzy Gould put a bottle of Stroh’s in front of Willie and rapped the bar twice with a knuckle, his way of letting regulars know the first one was free.
“That fuckin Kaline!” Erkie moaned without removing the cigarette. It bobbed when he talked. Willie realized he was blotto, which was no surprise. Erkie spent every waking hour on that barstool, directly beneath the Hamm’s beer sign, waiting for someone to buy him a drink. The Hamm’s sign had a waterfall made of tinfoil that actually appeared to tumble over rocks, especially after you’d had a few.
“What’s your beef with Kaline? He hit a two-run homer in the second game.”
“Sonofabitch—it was the 307th of his career. Broke Hank Greenberg’s club record.”
Just then Izzy set a shot of brown liquor in front of Willie, a fresh shot of Old Overholt in front of Erkie and a shot of Vernor’s ginger ale in front of Aziz. Izzy didn’t want teetotalers to feel left out.
“This round’s on the house!” Izzy shouted. “To Hammerin’ Hank!”
“To Hammerin’ Hank!” everyone shouted back, flipping their shot glasses.
Now Willie understood Erkie’s long face. Erkie had forgotten more about the Tigers than most men would ever know. Willie had always been a sucker for old-timers, and whenever he bumped into Erkie he gladly bought him shots of Old Overholt just to keep him talking. Erkie’s two favorite Tigers of all time were the “G-Men”—Charlie Gehringer, the Mechanical Man, at second base and the great Hank Greenberg at first.
Aziz said, “Finish telling the sad story about Ty Cobb after his retirement, Mr. Erk.” Aziz was a sucker for old-timers, too.
“Where was I?” Erkie said, his cigarette bobbing. “Oh yeah. After he retired, this woulda been along about in the Thirties, Cobb used to go big-game hunting out West with that famous writer, you know, what’s his name, the bullfight guy?”
Aziz gave him a blank look.
Willie said, “Ernest Hemingway?”
“Thas right, Hemmenway. Later on, in the Fifties, Cobb played golf with President Eisenhower hisself. But he passed a few years back, not a friend in this round world. In the end, all that fame and all that Co-Cola stock didn’t do him a lick a good.” He drained his beer. “You know, it’s funny. I knowed the man was a red-ass first time I laid eyes on him at Halloran’s, where I use to wash dishes. Man was what they called a nigger-breaker during slave times. But much as he hated us, I still felt sorry for the way he died. Ain’t nobody deserves to die all alone like that.”
The old man reminded Willie of his father, Reverend Otis, who was forever preaching to his sons that racism was a sickness and it was their Christian duty to love the racist just as they should love a victim of polio or cancer. Willie tried to do his Christian duty, though in the end he failed. His brother didn’t even bother to try.
As Erkie launched into another Tigers story, Willie turned to watch the sports wrap-up on the TV bolted to the ceiling in the corner. They replayed Kaline’s historic home run and even flashed a picture of Hank Greenberg.
Willie ended up closing the place down with a skinny white hooker from West Virginia named Ginger and Tommy Slenski, a DSR bus driver who had worked that afternoon and was still wearing his uniform. Everyone called him Ralph because he looked like Jackie Gleason on “The Honeymooners.” He was telling Ginger a disjointed story about a mob setting his bus on fire during the riot, but the long day of drinking had finally caught up with Willie and he had trouble following Ralph’s story.
As he weaved back to his apartment, Willie considered how rich the day had been. How many days do you learn new things about H. Rap Brown, Ernest Hemingway, Ty Cobb, Dwight Eisenhower, Hank Greenberg and Ralph Ellison? As rich as the list was, he had the nagging feeling he was forgetting something. When he got home and turned on the late news, he remembered what it was.
A Channel 2 reporter, a sharp-looking black lady with a big Afro and a red silk scarf, was interviewing two detectives in front of 1300 Beaubien Street—a fat, silver-haired white guy and a dapper black dude. They were explaining that Alphonso Johnson, a paroled felon, had confessed to the murder of Detroit fireman Carlo Smith, who was shot by a sniper during last summer’s riot.
Then there was a picture on the screen of a white woman identified as Helen Hull, a lumpy old doughball with harlequin glasses, her gray hair pulled back into a bun. The reporter was saying that the Detroit grocer, shot dead while looking out a window in the Harlan House Motel, was now the victim of the last unsolved homicide from the riot. She signed off with: “Police say their investigation into her death is continuing. This is Sylvia King reporting live from Detroit police headquarters for WJBK.”
Willie snapped off the TV and swallowed four aspirin and took a long hot shower. But when he lay down in bed the ceiling started spinning and he spent an hour waiting for it to stop. The whole time a question ate at him: What had become of those last three guns from the trunkload he and Wes had brought up to the city a year ago? There was only one person who knew the answer. In the morning Willie would make a long-distance phone call he dreaded.
As he lay there in the dark, he kept seeing the two detectives, the white one with the silver
hair and the black one with the crisp suit, and he kept seeing the doughy dead white woman named Helen Hull. The sight of her made the stone of guilt in his gut bigger and harder and colder than ever. The tree outside his window shivered in the breeze. A siren howled. He could feel the big city getting smaller, closing in.
PART TWO
TINDERBOX
8
DOYLE WAS GUNNING THE PLYMOUTH OUT THE LODGE FREEWAY, weaving through traffic, honking the horn, gripping the steering wheel like he was trying to break the thing in two. Jimmy Robuck, not one to get nervous in the passenger seat of a car or anywhere else, said, “You might want to ease off that gas pedal, Frank. The lady ain’t goin nowhere.”
Doyle slowed the car and blinked at Jimmy, seeming to come back from another world. “That a new suit you’re wearing?” Doyle said.
“Yeah, poplin. Picked it up at Brooks Brothers when Flo and I were in New York. The bow tie, too. You like?”
“Very nice. Makes you look positively pro-fuckin-fessorial.”
“Pro-fuckin-fessorial.” Jimmy chuckled. “You really somethin, man.”
“You know you’re not suppose to wear white bucks before Memorial Day, don’t you?”
“Course I do, but weather this fine, I decided to bend the rules. How bout you? That silk suit don’t look cheap.”
“Can’t afford to buy cheap clothes. I got an Italian guy out on Livernois making my suits for me now.”
“Bespoke?”
“Got no choice. Nothing off the rack fits me.”
“The shirt too?”
“Oh yeah. You ever seen a shirt in a store with a fifteen-inch neck and thirty-seven-inch sleeves?”
“Not as I recall.”
“That’s because they don’t make them. I’m telling you, Jimmy, I’m a freak.”
“I dig them cuff links.”
“Thanks, they’re opals.” He shot his cuffs, pleased by the compliment. “Got to do my part to keep up our rep as the sharpest dressers on the force.”
“Ain’t sayin much. Most a them chumps look like they sport coats made out of car upholstery.”
“Or wallpaper.”
They laughed, not because it was funny but because it was so true. Most of their fellow detectives thought a sport coat was something you put on when you needed to cover the hairy forearms sticking out of your short-sleeved shirt. Not all of Doyle’s shirts had French cuffs, but he wouldn’t dream of wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a necktie, any more than he would dream of wearing one of those wide cop neckties made out of synthetic shit—the better to keep gravy and soup off your shirt, the better to cover your nose if you had to pop a car trunk on a hot day knowing that the body in there had been marinating at least a week.
Jimmy said, “You really think this Armstrong woman’s gonna tell us somethin we don’t already know?”
“I got no idea, Jimmy, but we can’t afford not to check her out, can we? You heard Sarge. He’s got people all the way up to Cavanagh breathing down his neck to make this case go down.”
“You must think she gonna be good, way you been buggin me to ride out here with you.”
They both knew why Doyle wanted Jimmy to ride along. Henry Hull said the woman was black, and the detectives knew that they were more likely to get something out of her if there was another black face—Jimmy Robuck’s—in the room. It usually helped to have a black face in the room when a Detroit police interviewed a black witness or interrogated a black suspect, and it always helped when a black defendant went on trial. A black judge on the bench, a black detective on the witness stand, even a couple of black bailiffs could help put a jury at ease, give a boost to the prosecution, convince the jurors that a black defendant actually had a chance of getting justice inside the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice.
Doyle parked at the corner of Pallister and Hamilton, and the partners got out and stood looking up at a yellow brick pile with Larrow Arms carved in stone above the front door. They could hear the round-the-clock whoosh of the Lodge Freeway off to their right.
Doyle pushed the button marked ARMSTRONG and opened the buzzing foyer door. Jimmy followed him up one flight of stairs. The stairwell smelled like collard greens that had been boiling in fat back for years. The steam had become part of the wallpaper and carpets. While Doyle was no great fan of soul food, he found the smell reassuring, a sign of permanence. And the building was clean, in good repair. The Negro middle class, fighting the good fight.
The woman who opened the door was what Doyle had been led to expect by their phone conversation. She was all the way Southern—a rust-colored wig, flowered dress, gold-rimmed bifocals, her arms as soft as bread dough with brown flesh sagging from her biceps. She was wearing perfume, good, strong, nose-hair-curling perfume. She looked like she was on her way out to church, which was actually a possibility because this was Wednesday and Southern Baptists took Wednesdays almost as seriously as they took Sundays. She had a bosom like a queen-size mattress, and Doyle had a hunch she sang in the church choir and could really belt it out.
“Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, “I’m Detective Doyle and this is Detective Robuck from the Detroit Police Department. We spoke on the phone.” The men showed her their shields.
“Come in, gentlemen, come in,” she said with a slight drawl, like this was a long-awaited social visit and not a homicide investigation. “You gentlemen make yourselves to home while I fix us a cup a tea. Y’all drink tea, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison.
She went into the kitchen but the detectives didn’t sit down. They both shuffled around the living room, looking at things, trying to read the woman. The apartment was immaculate, the rug worn but swept so hard and so often it made Doyle’s arms ache just to look at it. The hardwood floor glowed. The walls and tabletops were cluttered with framed pictures of babies, old people, teenagers in caps and gowns, football players, an ironworker dancing and grinning on a skyscraper’s I-beam, and then the two pictures you knew were coming: the dead saints, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Charlotte Armstrong returned with a silver tea service and motioned for the men to sit in the matching chairs that faced across the coffee table toward the sofa, where she installed herself, regal as a queen. The chairs were wrapped in hard plastic and they crackled when the detectives sat down. There was a plate on the coffee table stacked high with bricks of fresh-baked crumb cake. The men did as they were told and helped themselves. It was delicious, still warm, loaded with brown sugar and cinnamon, and there was a long reverent silence as they ate.
Doyle got things started by asking Charlotte Armstrong if she was feeling better.
“Yes, I’m better today, praise the Lord. Like I tole you on the phone, I been in bed the past two days with a misery in my back.”
“Is that your husband?” Jimmy asked, motioning toward the grinning man on the I-beam.
“Yes, that’s my Charles. He passed last Christmas.”
“I’m sorry for your—”
“Rose to treasurer in his ironworker’s local, first time a Negro was ever elected an officer. Made good money, too, a hundred and sixty a week plus overtime, enough for me to have my own car. That picture there was taken on the twenty-first floor of the new Pontchartrain Hotel downtown. Heights didn’t mean a thing to Charles. Worked forty-one years on high iron, what he did his whole life.”
Jimmy was thinking about how Detroiters love to boast about their wages when Doyle said, “Looks like Charles loved his work.”
It was the perfect thing to say. Charlotte Armstrong beamed at him, and again Jimmy had to marvel at his partner’s knack for putting people at ease, getting them to tell him things.
Doyle pointed at two pictures of a young man in a gold frame: one a muddied but grinning football player holding his helmet against his hip, the other a beaming graduate in an indigo cap and gown.
“That your son?” he asked.
“Yes, thas my James. He’s the spit and image of his fathe
r. The Lord done raised me up a holy son. He’s an accountant at Ford’s. Yesterday were his birthday.”
“And how old he got to be yesterday?” Jimmy said.
“He done made twenty-six. Spent the whole afternoon in that chair you’re sitting in. He do comfort my gray hairs.”
In one smooth move Doyle shifted gears—finished his crumb cake, put down his tea cup, took out a notebook and ballpoint pen. “Now Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, “Mr. Hull tells me that when he came to visit you, you told him about some things you saw last July 26th. Tell us, what exactly did you see that night?”
She put down her tea cup, pinkie extended, and patted her lips with her napkin. She was enjoying herself. Doing her civic duty.
“It must of been after midnight,” she said. “Yes, it was definitely past midnight because Charles and I stayed up to watch the late news about the riot. Then he went on to bed because he had to get up early for a job he was just starting out in Troy at—”
“Yes, it was after midnight. . . .” Doyle could keep people on track without them realizing there was a track.
“I had all the lights off on account of the snipers, naturally, and I was sitting by that window there, looking out across the freeway. It looked like a war over on Grand Boulevard. Tanks and guns going off. Fire trucks and po-lice. Sirens. I probably shouldn’t of been so close to the window, but it was a furnace-hot night and there was so much noise weren’t no way I could sleep.”
“What did you see next?”
