Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

“Oh shit.” Doyle looked at his hands.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t look now, but that guy sitting at the end of the bar works with me. He’s the last person in the world I want to see right now.”

“How come?”

“Because this is my day off and I don’t want to think about work.” The best way to prevent a visit to the table from Walt Kanka was to go right at him. “Wait here,” Doyle said. “I’ll be right back.” He rose and headed for the men’s room.

The Drome hadn’t lost all of its class, which meant there were still linen hand towels in the gents’ and you still pissed on ice cubes and perfumed pucks of disinfectant in a long porcelain trough. Sure enough, as soon as Doyle started melting ice cubes, the door opened — a burst of Benny banging away at his drums — and Walt Kanka took a stance at the trough. He was wearing his favorite suit, a brown polyester job that looked like it would explode if it got within five feet of a lit match.

“Who’s the redhead?” he said.

“She’s a strawberry blonde.”

“So who is she?”

“Friend of mine.” Doyle was staring at a phone number on the knotty-pine wall that promised an unforgettable blowjob from Loretta for the unbeatable price of $5.

“Good-lookin broad,” Walt Kanka said.

“Thanks, Walt. I’ll be sure to tell her you think so. It’ll mean a lot to her.”

“How long you two been effin?”

“Jesus Christ, you married fucks are all alike, you know that?” Doyle zipped his pants and moved to the sink. “We’re on our first date. I took her to the Tigers game. They won in twelve. Anything else you need to know?”

“Jeez, pardsie, no need to get your neck up. Just an innocent question.”

But they both knew there was no such thing as an innocent question from a member of the Homicide squad. As one of the squad’s few bachelors, Doyle was a natural target for the sexual speculations of a few dozen middle-aged men with lukewarm marriages, rotting livers, and imaginations both jaded and overheated by years of witnessing every manner of killing ever devised by man. After seeing hundreds of corpses missing limbs, eyeballs and/or genitals, after seeing the handiwork of bullets, knives, blunt objects, fists, fire, battery acid, rope and piano wire, after becoming intimate with the glazed empty stare of the dead, it was hard for a middle-aged man with an overweight wife not to wonder what a good-looking young woman — a living, breathing one — was like in bed. It was only natural, Doyle supposed, but he dried his hands briskly and dropped the towel in the hamper and moved for the door.

Then Walt Kanka, standing at the sink and studying his gorgeous Slovak face in the mirror, said, “You hear the news?”

Doyle froze. “What news?”

“My riot case went down.”

“No shit. Carlo Smith went down?”

“Cross my heart.” He whipped out a comb and started working it through the waves of silver hair. “Alphonso Johnson gave it up this afternoon. I’d thrown in the towel, but your buddy Robuck finally wore the little scrote down.”

“Jimmy called me this morning, said he was heading downtown. How’d he do it?”

“You know how Ro is with the smokes. He started out getting real chummy — I was afraid he was gonna kneel down right there in the yellow room and give Alphonso a knob job. Then he told a few lies — about Alphonso’s fingerprints being on the murder weapon, about a footprint that matched the sneakers Alphonso was wearing at that very moment. Jimmy even said he had a photograph. The usual shit. Then he offered to do Alphonso a once-in-a-lifetime favor if he would just sign the confession.”

“What’d he offer?”

“He said it was a brother-to-brother offer, one the big Polack detective didn’t even want to make. You know how the spades are — any white guy’s automatically a Polack if he’s not a Guinea.”

“Or a Mick.”

“Right. So anyway, Jimmy said that he and he alone could get Alphonso twenty years on a guilty plea of Man One — but if a first-degree murder charge went to trial, Alphonso be on his own in a world a shit. Said a confession now would look a whole lot better to a judge than all that incriminating evidence would look to a jury, especially those fingerprints and footprints. Christ. I beat on Alphonso for a solid fuckin week and didn’t get anywhere — and Jimmy breaks the jig in four hours flat.”

“He ask for a lawyer?”

“Only on the night we picked him up — that smart-mouth high-yellow Clyde Holland. Jimmy kept telling Alphonso he didn’t need a lawyer. Believe it or not, Alphonso believed him.”

“I’ll be damned,” Doyle said, not because he was surprised by his partner’s interrogation skills or Alphonso Johnson’s colossal stupidity, but because the realization was dawning that VIC #42 was off the squad room wall and he and Jimmy were now the proud owners of the last open murder case from the riot.

“Yeah,” Walt Kanka said, putting away his comb, “Alphonso signed the confession a few minutes after three. I’ve been celebrating ever since. Gonna get drunk as a monkey.”

“Congratulations, Walt. That’s. . great news.”

“Congratulate Jimmy. He’s the one made it go down. Oh Frank, there’s one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re not going public with this yet. Sarge is convinced Alphonso’s got some more stories to tell. We’re gonna keep working him. Mum’s the word for now.”

“Sure thing.”

When Doyle got back to the booth Cecelia said, “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. You look like your dog just died. What’d he say to you?”

“Just shop talk. Let’s drop it. Work’ll be there when I show up tomorrow. Finish telling me the story about how your parents met.”

Walt Kanka sent a round of drinks to the table and Doyle tried to pay attention as Cecelia resumed a familiar Detroit tale, one she’d started telling back at the ballpark, about her mother’s parents coming from Czechoslovakia and settling in Hamtramck, her mother working as a key punch operator and meeting Tommy Cronin, an Irishman from the West Side, a salesman with friends all over town and money to burn. .

But Doyle only caught scraps of the story. Walt Kanka had broken the spell with his bad good news. When the band took a break, Benny Anflick came over to the booth to squeeze Doyle’s shoulder and offer his trademark greeting, “How ya doin, babe?”

Babe. When Benny finally drifted away, Doyle put a $10 bill under his empty glass and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

It was dark now, and though the two black guys were gone and the night was starry and soft, Cecelia locked her door without having to be reminded. They didn’t say much during the drive back to her place. When Doyle pulled into the parking lot on East Lafayette, she invited him up for a nightcap.

“Thanks,” he said, “but I’d better be getting home.”

“Relax. I’m not asking you to spend the night. I’ve still got a paper to finish writing, in case you forgot.”

Seen from the twentieth floor at night, Detroit was astonishingly beautiful, diamond spokes radiating through skewed grids, an orderly world where no harm could possibly come to any man. A freighter with the blue Ford oval on its smokestack was gliding downriver, riding low in the water, its belly swollen with iron ore taken on in Duluth, Minnesota. The ore would be off-loaded at the Rouge, where Doyle’s father worked for thirty-five years, and where he died.

Cecelia poured a snifter of Drambuie for Doyle and a cup of coffee for herself and they sat by the window, admiring the river and the lights. They drank in silence, holding hands, both of them happy that the day’s earlier ease had returned. After a long while she said, “So you still don’t want to talk about what your buddy had to say back at the club?”