Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

“Where are you now?”

“Oakland.”

“California? Ma said you were on your way to Denver.”

”Got to keep movin, man, keep the pigs guessin.”

“How long you been in Oakland?”

“Bout a week.”

Willie decided to come right out with it. “Wes, there’s something I need to know.”

“Anything for my baby bro.”

“You remember those three guns from the roof of your building, that night during the riot?”

“Fuck yeah, I remember.”

“You know where they are?”

“Not exactly.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means I sold ’em.”

“To who?”

“Some black Muslim fool name of Yusef.”

“All three of ’em?”

“Yup. Made the sale in a warehouse down by the river. Package deal.”

“When was this?”

“Just before I left D-troit, a month or so ago. Why you axin all these questions?”

“Just curious. Want to make sure those guns don’t come back to bite us.”

“Don’t worry. They long gone.”

“So what’re you doing in Oakland?”

“Just brokered a big shipment a guns to the Panthers. Matter of fact, I’m at Panther headquarters right now. I’m callin on their nickel.”

Willie’s stomach did a flip. “You’re calling me from Panther headquarters?”

“Thas right,” Wes said, failing to hear the horror in his brother’s voice. “Just took an order for a mess a M-1s from this brother name Geronimo—”

“Get off this line right now!” Willie shouted. “Call me collect from a pay phone!” He slammed down the receiver.

Ten minutes later his phone rang again and Willie told the operator he would accept a collect call. Then he said to his brother, “You got to be the dumbest nigger in the cotton patch. It ever occur to you the phones in Panther headquarters might be tapped? Je -sus!”

“Don’t worry, my boat leaves in an hour. Once I’m gone they never gonna find me.”

“That’s nice for you. How about me?”

“Man, you worry too much. Ain’t nothin gonna happen to you.” There was a long staticky silence. Then came the question Willie had been expecting all along. “How you fixed for bread, bro?”

The partial answer was that he was finally building the nest egg that would finance his exit from Detroit, hopefully in the fall; the complete answer was that he wanted no part of the money Wes was about to offer. He’d gotten nigger-rich off gun money once before, and he knew all about the grief that came with it. “I’m fine,” he said.

“You sure? I could wire you a couple hun—”

“Keep it. You’re gonna need it worse than I am.”

“Suit yourself. But just as soon as you’s able, you run away from that town. Ain’t nothin there for neither one of us but trouble. You hear me?”

“I hear you. Believe me, I’m working on it. And don’t you go anywhere near that Panther house. The F.B.I.’s probably on their way to kick the door down right now.”

Wes, fool that he was, laughed off the warning. After Willie hung up the phone he opened the shades in the living room just as a rusty green Pontiac was pulling away from the curb across the street from his Deuce. Willie realized he’d seen that car before — parked down the block on Pallister, parked outside Octavia’s apartment, parked in the visitors’ lot at the Public Library. Did Chick Murphy have a private eye on his tail?

As the car pulled away, Willie caught a glimpse of the driver. He had his left elbow out the window and he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It was the white guy from the fish shack, sitting two tables away, drinking beer and pretending to read the newspaper. And, Willie realized with a flash of terror, hearing every word that came out of my big mouth.

JIMMY HAD DROPPED ANCHOR IN A LITTLE COVE JUST UPRIVER from the Belle Isle Bridge, out of the way of the boat traffic. It was his favorite spot on the river. From here you could see the bridge’s graceful arches and its string of lights bouncing off the water. It was how he imagined Europe looked, places like Paris and Prague. It was a steamy night with a fat yellow moon, a good night to be out on the water, catch the breeze. While Jimmy fished a couple of fresh beers out of the cooler, Doyle re-lit his cigar.

“What you call that sauce again?” Jimmy said, handing a beer to Doyle. Earlier that evening Jimmy had nosed his Chris-Craft up the canals that thread through the Jeff-Chalmers neighborhood. He’d tied up at the end of Klenk Street, then walked the two short blocks to Doyle’s front door. He could smell the food from half a block away.

“It’s called puttanesca sauce,” Doyle said. “Comes from the Italian word for whore, putta , cause it’s so easy to make hookers can whip up a batch between tricks. My mother taught me to make it when I was still in grade school. Like I said, anybody can make it.”

“Might be easy to make, but it damn sure tastes good. And all these years I thought I hated anchovies and capers. And that wine.”

“Yeah, that was nice and chewy. A ’54 Barolo.”

“That Spanish shit?”

“No, it’s Italian.”

“And that dessert? Tara. . tara. .”

“Tiramisu.”

“Man, you got to teach me to cook.”

“Any time, Jimmy, any time. Anybody who can read a recipe can learn how to cook.”

“Yeah, but you got the touch.”

They were quiet for a while, just watching the river and the bridge lights and the moon, Doyle puffing on his cigar. Jimmy could tell Doyle didn’t want to talk about food anymore. He wanted to keep talking about what they’d talked about all through dinner — what to do with the stuff he’d learned on Sunday afternoon at Roberta’s fish shack in Algonac.

One of the first things Jimmy had taught Doyle was that a good homicide police doesn’t have a whole lot of use for motive. “Give me the how, the where, and the when,” Jimmy liked to say, “and nine times out of ten I’ll give you the who.” Why a person killed another person was usually beside the point. A luxury. Something a competent detective could live without.

But that didn’t mean you should run away from a motive if one hopped onto your lap. After he spent that Sunday afternoon eavesdropping on Willie Bledsoe, Doyle went to the records cage and combed through arrest reports from the second day of the riot, Monday, July 24, 1967, and learned that William B. Bledsoe and Walter Mitchell of Ebony magazine had been jailed for curfew violation and resisting arrest, then released into the custody of Thomas Henderson after spending twenty-three hours in the rat hole garage at 1300 Beaubien Street. All charges against them were dropped. Through his brother’s contacts, Doyle even got confirmation that Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had placed a phone call to the Sheraton Cadillac Hotel to apologize personally to Walter Mitchell and all the readers of Ebony magazine. Crafty old Cavanagh, always hip to how his act was playing with the colored crowd. Not that it mattered anymore. The riot had finished Jerry Cavanagh just as sure as it had finished the city of Detroit.

So suddenly they had a nice tidy motive in the murder of Helen Hull, the oldest one in the book: revenge. But instead of making Doyle’s life simpler, this had complicated things. All through dinner he’d talked about the questions that were eating at him. Who could blame a young black man — who could blame any man? — for going off the deep end after getting thrown in jail for no reason, beaten, terrorized and humiliated by a pack of vengeful firemen and cops? Jimmy had reminded him that none of it justified the killing of an innocent woman — or anyone else. Frank agreed, but he said he had to ask the questions Willie Bledsoe had surely asked himself after his nightmare in the basement garage came to an end. Who were the true criminals here? And did they really believe that their acts of brutality would not — should not — be answered with equal brutality? Even as he asked himself these questions, though, Doyle said he could hear the answer coming back from Jerry Czapski and Jimmy McCreedy and Walt Kanka and the other ninety percent of the force that was white: “Oh, sure. Cops were the bad guys during the riot. Cops burned down half the city. Cops shot up precinct houses and fire-bombed stores and hauled away as much free shit as they could carry. Tell me all about it.”