Arthur Hailey - Wheels

Soon after, she heard Adam climb the stairs.

He came in, yawning, with a, "God, I'm tired," then undressed sleepily, climbed into bed, and was almost instantly asleep.

Erica lay silently beside him, sleep for herself far away. After a while she imagined that she was once more walking, out of doors, the softness of the rain upon her face.

The day after Adam and Erica Trenton failed to bridge the growing gap between them, after Brett DeLosanto renewed his faith in the Orion yet pondered his artistic destiny, after Barbara Zaleski viewed frustrations through the benthos of martinis, and after Matt Zaleski, her plant-boss father, survived another pressure-cooker work day, a minor event occurred in the inner city of Detroit, unconnected with any of those five, yet whose effect, over months ahead, would involve and motivate them all.

Time: 8:30 p.m. Place: Downtown, Third Avenue near Brainard. An empty police cruiser parked beside the curb.

"Get your black ass against the wall," the white cop commanded. Holding a flashlight in one hand, a gun in the other, he ran the flashlight's beam down and up Rollie Knight, who blinked as the light reached his eyes and stayed there.

"Now turn around. Hands above your head. Move! You goddamn jailbird."

As Rollie Knight turned, the white cop told his Negro partner, "Frisk the bastard."

The young, shabbily dressed black man whom the policeman had stopped, had been ambling aimlessly on Third when the cruiser pulled alongside and its occupants jumped out, guns drawn. Now he protested, "Wadd' I do?", then giggled as the second policeman's hands moved up his legs, then around his body. "Hey man, oh man, that tickles!"

"Shaddup!" the white cop said. He was an old-timer on the force, with hard eyes and a big belly, the last from years of riding in patrol cars.

He had survived this beat a long time and never relaxed while on it.

The black policeman, who was several years younger and newer, dropped his hands. "He's okay." Moving back, he inquired softly, "What difference does the color of his ass make?"

The white cop looked startled. In their haste since moving from the cruiser he had forgotten that tonight his usual partner, also white, was off sick, with a black officer substituting.

"Hell!" he said hastily. "Don't get ideas. Even if you are his color, you don't rate down with that crumb."

The black cop said drily, "Thanks." He considered saying more, but didn't. Instead, he told the man against the wall, "You can put your hands down. Turn around."

As the instruction was obeyed, the white cop rasped, "Where you been the last half hour, Knight?" He knew Rollie Knight by name, not only from seeing him around here frequently, but from a police record which included two jail convictions, for one of which the officer had made the arrest himself.

"Where I bin?" The young black man had recovered from his initial shock.

Though his cheeks were hollowed, and he appeared underfed and frail, there was nothing weak about his eyes, which mirrored hatred. "I bin layin' a white piece o' ass. Don't know her name, except she says her old man's a fat white pig who can't get it up. Comes here when she needs it from a man."

The white cop took a step forward, the blood vessels in his face swelling red. His intention was to smash the muzzle of his gun across the contemptuous, taunting face. Afterward, he could claim that Knight struck him first and his own action was in self-defense. His partner would back up the story, in the same way that they always corroborated each other, except - he remembered abruptly - tonight his partner was one of them who might just be ornery enough to make trouble later. So the policeman checked himself, knowing there would be another time and place, as this smart-ass nigger would find out.

The black cop growled at Rollie Knight, "Don't push your luck. Tell us where you were. ."

The young Negro spat on the sidewalk. A cop was an enemy, whatever his color, and a black one was worse because he was a lackey of the Man. But he answered, "In there," motioning to a basement bar across the street.

"How long?"

"An hour. Maybe two. Maybe three." Rollie Knight shrugged. "Who keeps score?"

The black cop asked his partner, "Should I check it out?"

"No, be a waste time. They'd say he'd been there. They're all damn liars."

The black officer pointed out, "To get here in this time from West Grand and Second he'd have needed wings, anyway."

The call had come in minutes earlier on the prowl car radio. An armed robbery near the Fisher Building, eighteen blocks away. It had just happened. Two suspects had fled in a late model sedan.

Seconds later, the patrolling duo had seen Rollie Knight walking alone on Third Avenue. Though the likelihood of a single pedestrian, here, being involved with the uptown robbery was remote, when the white cop had recognized Knight, he shouted to halt the car, then jumped out, leaving his partner no choice but to follow. The black officer knew why they had acted. The robbery call provided an excuse to "stop and frisk," and the other officer enjoyed stopping people and bullying them when he knew he could get away with it, though it was coincidental, of course, that those he picked on were invariably black.

There was a relationship, the black officer believed, between his companion's viciousness and brutality - which were well-known around the force - and fear, which rode him while on duty in the ghetto. Fear had its own stink, and the black policeman had smelled it strongly from the white officer beside him the moment the robbery call came in, and when they had jumped from the car, and even now. Fear could, and did, make a mean man meaner still. When he possessed authority as well, he could become a savage.

Not that fear was out of place in these surroundings. In fact, for a Detroit policeman not to know fear would betray a lack of knowledge, an absence of imagination. In the inner city, with a crime rate probably the nation's highest, police were targets - always of hate, often of bricks and knives and bullets. Where survival depended on alertness, a degree of fear was rational; so were suspicion, caution, swiftness when danger showed, or seemed to. It was like being in a war where police were on the firing line. And as in any war, the niceties of human behavior - politeness, psychology, tolerance, kindness - got brushed aside as nonessential, so that the war intensified while antagonisms - often with cause on both sides - perpetuated themselves and multiplied.

Yet a few policemen, as the black cop knew, learned to live with fear while remaining decent human beings, too. These were ones who understood the nature of the times, the mood of black people, their frustrations, the long history of injustice behind them. This kind of policeman - whether white or black - helped relieve the war a little, though it was hard to know how much because they were not in a majority.

To make moderates a majority, and to raise standards of the Detroit force generally, were declared aims of a recently appointed police chief. But between the chief and his objectives was the physical presence of a contingent of officers, numerically strong, who through fear or rooted prejudice were frankly racist like the white cop here and now.

"Where you working, crumb?" he demanded of Rollie Knight.

"I'm like you. I ain't workin', just passin' time."

The policeman's face bulged again with anger. If he had not been there, the black cop knew, his partner would have smashed his fist into the frail young black face leering at him.

The black cop told Rollie Knight, "Beat it! You flap your mouth too much."

Back in the prowl car the other policeman fumed, "So help me, I'll nail that bastard."