Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

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.”

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.