Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

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.