Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

Jimmy had said to Doyle at the dinner table, “Ain’t just the white guys on the force feel that way. I do too. The thing you gotta realize, Frank, is that this country ain’t nothin but a great big motherfuckin tease, especially for the black man. Civil rights — shit — makin it a law don’t make it so. What The Man gives with one hand, he takes back with the other. You watch ‘Star Trek,’ don’t you?”

The question surprised Doyle. “Sometimes,” he said. “Not religiously.”

“But you seen Lieutenant Uhura, the ‘communications director’ on Starship Enterprise. See, this is zactly what I’m talkin bout. The Man makes a prime-time TV show bout what the future’s gonna look like, he puts an attractive black character on it — then he makes sure she ain’t nothin but a glorified switchboard operator.”

Doyle thought Jimmy sounded like Vicki Jones. She was always bitching about the fact that there were plenty of black janitors and secretaries but hardly any black executives at Ford’s Glass House, where she worked in data entry. Or else she was bitching about having to wait longer than white people to get help from a clerk in a store. Or, even worse, about having some white customer assume she was a clerk simply because she was black. Doyle thought she was being paranoid and her tirades wore thin — until the day they were shopping in the women’s shoe department at Hudson’s and an old white lady walked up to Vicki and said, “Miss, do you have these pumps in a seven and a half?”

“So,” Doyle had said to Jimmy at the dinner table, “what The Man gives with one hand, he takes back with the other, . ”

“Right. But that don’t justify nothin. Nothin , you hear me? It don’t give a man the right to kill or burn or loot. Look, the way I come up I should be in prison right now, or dead. Reason I ain’t is cause I made a decision. I decided they’s a right way and a wrong way and they ain’t no future in the wrong way. So I married a good woman, worked for a livin, paid my taxes, put my girls through college, all that noble shit. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Just like makin puttanesca sauce.”

Doyle had smiled at Jimmy’s little sermon, but he said he couldn’t shake the belief that it was racist cops like Jerry Czapski who fueled the black rage that fueled the fury of the riot. . and that the riot’s fury demanded an equally furious response from the law. . and that the law’s response redoubled the rioters’ fury. . Round and round and round it went. There were no winners, as Doyle saw it, only losers. Jimmy agreed there was truth in what he was saying, but as they were spooning down the tiramisu, Jimmy had reminded him that assigning blame and meting out justice was somebody else’s job. Their job was to find killers. Period.

“You know, it’s funny,” Doyle said now, blowing cigar smoke toward the moon. “I’ve never wanted anything as bad as I want to nail Helen Hull’s killer — and now that we’re ready to sweat a suspect, I’m not even sure I want to do it anymore.”

“You wanna let the motherfucker walk?”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t matter what we want or don’t want, Frank. We got a job to do and we gonna do it.”

“I know that, Jimmy. Of course I’ll do what I gotta do. It’s just that I never imagined this stuff could get so, I don’t know, so complicated.”

“Ain’t complicated less you make it complicated.”

“But it is complicated. Shit, I’m a white man sitting here trying to tell you that a black man might have been justified in killing a white woman, and you’re a black man sitting here telling me that this black man — that no man — is ever justified in killing anyone. We’re both right and we’re both wrong. That’s complicated, you ask me.”

“Maybe so, but I still go back to what I said earlier. Do yourself a favor and keep it simple. Our job’s to find killers. Let other people worry about all that justice shit.”

They were quiet again. Watching the bridge lights play on the water, Jimmy decided he needed to get the boat out more often. This was even more relaxing than working in the garden.

“There’s something else been bothering me,” Doyle said. Jimmy waited. Then he waited some more. Finally Doyle continued, “You remember my second case during the riot, that firefight I stumbled into on my way home, that hick from Tennessee on the roof—”

“Wilson Lee Pryor, sure.”

“There’s something I never told you or anyone else. I fired two shots at him on that rooftop.”

“So?”

“So one of the six bullets that hit him was a.38-caliber — from a department-issue gun. Maybe mine.”

“And maybe not. I read that report a hundred times. Look, that man died six ways from Sunday — and rightly so. He refused an order to put down his rifle. A bullet went through the windshield a your Pontiac during the firefight, I recall correctly.”

“That bullet was a nine millimeter, which means it was fired by a Guardsman. Pryor never fired a shot. He was on that roof trying to make sure his building didn’t catch on fire.”

“And he was carrying a rifle and he refused to put it down, so people made the reasonable assumption he was a sniper. Case closed. Where you goin with this, Frank?”

“Back to how complicated this is. There’s a chance I got away with killing a man, and it’s been bothering me ever since.”

“Look, even if you did fire the fatal shot — which is unlikely, I seen you on the pistol range — you’d be justified. You was in a firefight. Your vehicle got hit. You were acting in self-defense — along with a dozen other po-lice and Guardsmen who did zactly what you did. What I’da done. Shit, Frank, you think too much. Like I just said, this stuff ain’t complicated less you make it complicated. Do yourself a favor and let it go.”

Jimmy got a beer out of the cooler and drank half of it in silence. Then he said, “Since we gettin all confessional tonight, I got somethin I ain’t never tole you or nobody else.” Now it was Doyle who waited while Jimmy finished his beer and went back to the cooler. “You want one?”

“I’m good,” Doyle said.

Jimmy sat back down. “I got into the ponies at Hazel Park big-time back in the day. Lost so much money I couldn’t make the car payments, the mortgage payments. We was in danger of losin the house.”

“The house in Conant Gardens?”

“No, this was back on Brush, when I was still in a uniform. I was so desperate — I’m almost shamed to admit it — I stole some dope out the evidence room and sold it to a street dealer I knew. I never even tole Flo. Almost got busted too — and it scared me so damn bad I been clean as a whistle ever since. There. I ain’t proud of it, but now you know. You ain’t the only cop in this town with a secret.”

Doyle finished his beer and his cigar without saying a word. When he flipped his cigar butt into the river— pssssssst! — Jimmy said, “So. When you want to snag Bledsoe?”

“The sooner the better, I guess.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Might as well. We should probably run everything by Sarge one more time.”

“Definitely. You want me to come with you to pick him up?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

“Gimme a rough time.”

“Well, he’s working the lunch shift at Oakland Hills tomorrow, so he’ll probably show up at home around five and chain himself to his typewriter for the rest of the day. Let’s say five-thirty?”

“Sounds good. What’s he doin on the typewriter?”

“Writing a book about his time in the civil rights movement.”

“I might like to read that. Too bad he gonna have to finish writin it in prison.”