Motor City Burning

by Bill Morris

  “Nothing, Uncle Bob.”

  “Don’t lie to me, boy. Since when you know what color hair Detroit cops has got?”

  “Since I saw one on the TV news the other night. Something about a murder during the riot. I thought maybe it was the same guy came out to talk to you.”

  There was a long silence, both of them trying to figure where this was going. Bob said, “Since you so curious, Cuz, he wanted to know if any of my tenants drives an older model car with a red-and-black interior and lots of chrome.” Bob let that sink in good and deep before he went on. “He wanted a list of my tenants from last July.”

  “All your tenants? I mean, he know how many buildings you own?”

  “He knows exactly how many buildings I own. He knows all kindsa shit. He just wanted to know about my tenants in the Larrow Arms. And he wanted to know who has a key to the roof.”

  “The roof? Why?”

  “Cause he already talked to a widow lady lives alone on the second floor name of Mizz Armstrong. She told him she saw a shiny older-model car pull up under her window early in the morning last July 26th. That was during the riot. She saw two men get out—two black men, one fat, one tall and thin—then saw them come inside the building. Then she heard voices and nine gunshots coming from the roof. The cop didn’t say so, but I’m guessing somebody died right about then, otherwise he wouldn’t be asking so many questions. You hearing all this, Cuz?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you drive Wesley home one night after curfew during the riot?”

  “I guess . . . maybe . . . yeah, I did. Once.”

  “You got rocks in that nappy head a yours?”

  “He was in trouble, Bob. He’d been beat up. Bad.”

  “Now here’s the strange part. The last thing the cop asked me was whether any of my tenants in that building ever served in Vietnam.”

  This time the silence was so long and so deep that they could hear water rushing through pipes, could hear the building groan.

  Finally Willie said, “So what you tell him, Uncle Bob?”

  “Same thing I’d tell any cop—as little as possible.”

  “You didn’t tell him bout my Buick?”

  “No.”

  “Or bout Wes living at the Larrow?”

  “No.”

  “Or bout him serving in Vietnam?”

  “Hell no. But something tells me I haven’t seen the last of that po-lice.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cause he’s smart. He does his homework. And I could tell from his questions that he knows a lot more’n he’s letting on. Now you listen to me, William Bledsoe. The more I think about this, the less I like it. If there’s something you need to tell me—something I need to know—you better do it now. Fore that motherfucker comes back.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, Uncle Bob. Honest. . . .”

  “Suit yourself, but I’m going to tell you right now I don’t like all these ‘coincidences.’ The car. Vietnam. Someone on the roof right after you and Wesley drove up—”

  “That’s all they are’s coincidences.”

  “You be doing us both a big favor you tell me what you need to tell me right now so I know how to handle that cop. You know you can trust me, boy. I’m family. Now tell me if you and Wesley were up on—”

  There was a roaring snort from the bottom bunk, then the voice of Edgar Hudson, thick with sleep: “Yallshuttafuckup.”

  Bob checked his watch. “I got to go. You think this over, Willie. And you think hard.”

  “There’s nothing to think about, Uncle Bob.”

  “Don’t feed me no more a your shit. I’m working the dinner shift tonight. We’ll talk when I get back here this afternoon.”

  “I may be gone already. I’m working the lunch shift, then I’m off till Thursday.”

  “Then I’ll call you at home. We going to talk.”

  13

  AFTER BOB LEFT, Willie couldn’t sleep. His mind was jumping all over the place—from what his uncle had said about the detective, to Bobby Kennedy, to Blythe Murphy, back to the detective, back to Blythe Murphy. Sleep was out of the question, so he decided to go for a walk on the golf course, this time for real.

  The grass was soaked from dew and the silvery jets of water shooting out of sprinklers. Willie left his shoes and socks under a bush and started walking across the miles of perfect grass. The sun hadn’t come out of the trees yet, and the grass was squishy and cold on his bare feet.

  As he walked, dodging the jets of water, he kept smelling his hands, smelling Blythe Murphy’s perfume, their mingled sweat and sex. Her hair was brittle to the touch, unnatural, not quite human, but for that very reason even more mysterious and thrilling. Already the whole experience was beginning to seem like a dream, surreal now that it was over. But it was not a dream and it was not over and he knew it never would be.

  He had spent his whole life being told that black people had to be above reproach, had to answer to a higher standard and be much better than white people if they ever hoped to be treated as an equal. Willie saw this in his Uncle Bob, the way he dressed and spoke and conducted himself. He saw it in his mother, her impossible standards, the way she insisted that her sons work harder, play harder, study harder and fight harder than other children, black and white, because she knew that nothing would ever be given to them and they would have to scrap like hell if they hoped to get a fraction of what they deserved. While the world urged Willie and his brother to make peace with mediocrity, their mother insisted that they aspire to excellence. Willie loved her for that.

  Of course white women were off-limits. It was unthinkable that Beulah Bledsoe’s boys could even want a white woman, for this was the very trap the white man wanted the black man to fall into, this was the final confirmation of the disdain that propped up the white man’s shaky sense of superiority. To fall into the trap, Ma BeBe said, was to justify that disdain. Worse, it was to admit to a loathing of your own blackness. And that was the one thing she simply would not abide.

  She used to tell her sons stories about working as a domestic for rich white people during her college years in Atlanta. Her employers were forever leaving cash and jewelry lying around the house. She understood why. They were baiting her. Tempting her. Testing her. Hoping she would steal so their stereotypes and their sense of superiority would remain intact. Ma BeBe took great delight in disappointing them.

  And now Willie had done the very worst thing a black man could do. Yet as he walked across that rolling carpet of cold grass, he could sense something strange beginning to happen. He felt like a snake shedding its skin. He felt himself sloughing off the shame he’d been programmed to feel, and as it fell away he felt anger rising in his throat. He realized he was tired of being told what he was supposed to feel. How he was supposed to dress and act. Who he was supposed to follow. Who he was allowed to fuck. What had he fought for all those years? Why had he gotten his skull cracked, his lip split, his flesh burned? Why had he bled? So he would be free to live under a different set of rules?

  But even as he tasted this anger, he understood it was a luxury he could not afford. He was a black man living in America. It was like living in a room without windows or doors, a room where the air is stale and unchanging. He knew there was no place in that room for an angry black man. Look what happened to Malcolm X. Better to keep your head down, go along, get by. When he was still in short pants he’d understood that the best a black person in the Deep South could hope for was a job teaching or preaching, maybe something with the railroad or the post office. His own parents were living proof of this fact. And now here he was up North, walking on a patch of pampered grass that existed for the white man’s pleasure and the black man’s continuing pain, working a menial job for The Man and despising himself for it, worrying himself sick about the police. Here he was, smelling the sex of a white woman on his skin—and, for the first time in his life, refusing to deny that he’d enjoyed his transgression. This refusal felt like the b
eginning of something immense. It felt like the beginning of a rebirth.

  As he continued walking, he began to see that he was in an impossible predicament: His anger may have been a luxury he could not afford, yet it alone could set him free. His anger, more than anything in his Alabama box, more than anything he was likely to find in old newspapers and notebooks and photographs, was the key to writing his memoir. It was the key to everything.

  He could see that there was a word for what he had to do if he ever hoped to be free. He had to repudiate the world that made him—his parents’ world, the world of the movement, the world of the black striver—and then he had to learn to live by his own rules. That was the only path to true freedom.

  He thought of the scene awaiting him back in the Quarters—the dice and the playing cards, the empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts of men who’d done what they had to do to make it through another night. As Willie had known for years, and as the author of Black Like Me discovered during his travels in the Deep South, those men understood that they had no options. They had to dull their senses with whatever was available and they had to laugh, had to laugh as hard as they knew how because if they ever stopped laughing they would start sobbing, and once they started sobbing they would be as good as dead. That would be the end of them, admitting how close they lived to despair. But at least those snoring men had never bought into the illusion that Willie once bought into and that his parents and his Uncle Bob still bought into—that education or religion or a change of scenery or political activism or the right president could possibly change the way their lives were destined to play out. There wasn’t a romantic or an idealist among those sleeping men. Much as he loathed Hudson and Wiggins, Willie had to admit he admired their toughness and their fatalism. They reminded him of his Aunt Nezzie, the toughest and most fatalistic—the bravest—person he’d ever known. She knew for a fact that there would never be anything new under the sun, and that suited her just fine. She wouldn’t dream of registering to vote or going to church, of admitting that some politician or some preacher or some new law might be her salvation. She had no desire to be saved. She was content to live by her own lights. Yes, Aunt Nezzie was the bravest person Willie had ever known.

  Again he smelled his hands and thought of the lie he’d just told Blythe Murphy out on the parking lot. She was not his first white woman. Nancy Fegenbaum was his first white woman, his dark secret and, until this night, the source of a scalding shame.

  Nancy Fegenbaum was a sophomore at Vassar, a stunning Jewish girl from Westchester County outside New York City, one of the volunteers who came south in droves from the best northern colleges for the Freedom Summer of 1964. Like most Snick veterans, Willie viewed these new arrivals as a bunch of anarchists, dopers and floaters. He dismissed the occasional Negro among them as nothing more than a freedom-high nigger.

  But Nancy was different. She truly believed they could change the world. She truly believed the races could, and should, live in harmony. She did menial jobs without complaint, and she didn’t make fun of southern accents or boss people around the way so many of the northern students did. She was also a knockout with olive skin who wore her hair in long, thick henna-colored ringlets and believed a brassiere was an unnecessary encumbrance in the Mississippi heat. Willie couldn’t take his eyes off her, and every time she caught him staring she gave him an asking look, followed by a smile. Never in his life had he gazed so brazenly at a white woman, and he found it both terrifying and thrilling. Thrilling because it was terrifying. Terrifying because it could get him killed.

  They taught typing and American history together in one of the Freedom Schools in McComb, Mississippi. One day they got sent over to Alabama to post voter-registration drive flyers in and around Tuskegee. Such long-distance jobs usually fell to Willie because his Buick was one of the most dependable cars in the Sojourner Motor Fleet. After he and Nancy worked into the early evening posting the flyers, they decided it would be unwise to risk driving the 300 miles back to Mississippi in the dark. The three volunteers who’d disappeared while driving at night near Meridian were still missing. Willie suggested they spend the night in his apartment in Tuskegee, which was doubling as a safe house for Freedom Summer volunteers. There was no one staying there that night, and he offered to sleep on the sofa and let her have the bedroom.

  Nancy was on him as soon as the door clicked shut. Willie didn’t put up much of a fight, and neither of them did a whole lot of sleeping that night.

  And neither of them said a word about it afterwards. In fact, Nancy hardly spoke to him at all the rest of the summer. He realized he’d performed his function and was no longer of any use to her. If he felt anger, it was at himself for allowing himself to be so casually used. She’d flipped the tables and he never saw it coming. But his shame was real: he had taken the bait, he’d fallen into the very trap his mother had warned him about, the one the white man so badly wanted him to fall into. For reasons he never would have been able to imagine in the spring of 1964, he was glad when the volunteers packed up at the end of the summer and went back up north where they belonged. He had survived that bloody summer with nothing worse than a bruised ego and a guilty conscience.

  Now, four long years after that night with Nancy Fegenbaum, he had finally overcome his guilt and his shame. He understood that this was a first step, a giant step, on the road to repudiating the world that made him. But even as he congratulated himself for taking this step, he could see that he had also stepped into yet another world of worry. Chick Murphy was not a man to fuck with. He was rich and powerful, he was white, and he had a temper and a gun. The thing that had been so thrilling to Willie just a few hours ago—the danger of being with such a man’s wife—now looked like exactly what it was: stone craziness. Thrills, by nature, are fleeting things, but this one had not even survived the night. Willie had a terrifying vision of Blythe Murphy, in a drunken rage, screaming at Chick how much she adored Willie Bledsoe’s black cock. . . .

  He heard the chugging of a motor coming toward him. It was a member of the Oakland Hills grounds crew driving a cart full of rakes and tools across the golf course. It looked like one of those carts the traffic cops drove in Detroit. The sun was out of the trees now and the sky’s blue was giving way to a harsh white glare. The coming day was going to be hot—not Alabama hot, but still hot and gummy. Willie turned back toward the clubhouse, keeping to the trees.

  On the long walk back, he forced himself to quit thinking about Nancy Fegenbaum and the Murphys and start thinking about the bigger danger—the detective who’d visited his Uncle Bob. Willie took the visit as a sign. The cops knew a lot more than he thought they knew, and he had done almost nothing to cover his tracks. It was time to quit fucking around.

  As soon as he got through the lunch shift today, he would get the Buick out of the garage and drive it to that Earl Scheib shop on Livernois and get a twenty-dollar paintjob. Then, on his next day off, he would drive to Murphy Buick and swap it for whatever the Surf offered. Just get rid of the damn thing.

  After that he would have to sit tight and wait for his brother to call from Denver. He told himself that once he got rid of the Buick and found out what had happened to those last three guns, he would be in the clear.

  Unless, of course, the cops were somehow able to prove that the unthinkable had happened that night on the roof of the Larrow Arms. That was still the one great unknown piece of this puzzle. That was still the thing that terrified him the most.

  14

  THE DAY AFTER HE TALKED TO BOB BREWER AND MADE THE pickup about the traffic stop, Doyle got sent out on a fatal stabbing at the Brewster projects. He didn’t want to get distracted from the Helen Hull case—again—but fresh homicides always took precedence over old ones, so he followed Sgt. Harry Schroeder’s orders and worked the Brewster case non-stop for a week, until he got a confession after grilling a scared teenager all night in the yellow room. After a few hours of sleep at home, Doyle walked into the squad
room shortly before noon and went straight to the Bunn-O-Matic, yawning like an alligator.

  “Whatsamatter?” Jimmy Robuck said, making a show of checking his watch. He had his white bucks propped on his desk and a big shit-eating grin on his face. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “I was here all night working that Brewster stabbing. Got a confession a little after sunup.”

  “Congratulations. Whodunit?”

  “Nobody you’d know. Fifteen-year-old kid with no priors named Cliff Robinson. A cousin of Smokey’s, believe it or not.”

  “I believe it if you say it.”

  Doyle sat at his desk, sipping coffee. Jimmy was still beaming. Doyle said, “The fuck’re you so happy about?”

  “Come have a look.”

  Doyle walked over to Jimmy’s desk, which was immaculate, as always. Only when he got close did Doyle see that there was something on the desk other than the telephone and the empty In/Out basket.

  Nine pieces of shiny metal.

  “Looky what I found,” Jimmy said.

  Doyle was staring at the pieces of metal like he thought they might jump up and fly out the window. “What is it?”

  “Shell casings.” Jimmy pointed to the three on his left. “These bad boys are thirty-aught-six, out of a Remington 700 with a heavy barrel.”

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “Roof of the Larrow Arms. Same as the three in the middle—seven point six-two millimeter.”

  “How do you know all this shit?”

  “Cause Sid Wolff told me so.”

  “You’ve already run them through ballistics?”

  “Some people been workin while you been sleepin.”

  “Fuck you, Jimmy.”

  “And last but not least, over here on the right, we got us three thirty-cals out of a Winchester Model 70.”