Bill Morris - Motor City Burning

“The file will stay open till the case is solved, Mr. Hull.” It would stay open and it would turn cold and eventually it would slip into the deep freeze. “We never stop working open cases.”

Doyle wondered if it was possible that the old bird was feeling the same thing he’d felt when he watched Willie Bledsoe walk out the front door of 1300, a free man. He wondered if it was possible that Henry was feeling a skewed sense of relief now too. No, Doyle told himself, I know more than Henry knows, and he lost his wife. No way Henry was feeling relief.

Yet Henry was willing to let it go. His wife didn’t deserve to die, but Henry, like Doyle, seemed to believe that Willie Bledsoe didn’t deserve many of the things he’d been through, things no white man in America would ever have to endure. Something had to give. Somebody was always having to pay for the things that went on, for the things that had been going on in this country for hundreds of years. If the cycle of vengeance was ever going to stop, it had to stop somewhere. Why not here? If Henry wasn’t exactly relieved, Doyle told himself, maybe he agreed that some sick form of justice had prevailed. Somebody had to be the first one to step off the merry-go-round.

“I said let it go,” Henry repeated. He waved at the boxes. “If I can get on with my life, then you can get on with yours. It’s time for me and you — and this whole city — to move on.”

“You coming back to the old neighborhood?”

“Afraid I can’t. There’s nothing for me there but memories, mostly bad ones, and I’ve still got a few good years left in me.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“My kid brother’s got a place in the U.P., not far from Marquette. He says he needs someone to go fishing with him. His wife passed away last summer too.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“How about you? What’s next for you?”

“Let’s see. I’m cooking dinner tonight for Jimmy and Flo and a gorgeous strawberry blonde. In the morning Jimmy and I’ll go out looking for new killers.”

“Is it serious?”

“Killers are always serious, Mr. Hull.”

“No, I mean the strawberry blonde.”

“Yeah, I think it’s safe to say we’re falling in love.”

This perked Henry up. “Tell me about her.”

“Well, she’s gorgeous and she’s sexy and she knows a lot about art and she loved the lamb chops I cooked for her last—”

“Shit!”

Bob Gibson had struck out his fourteenth Tiger batter.

“I’m sorry, Frankie. You were saying about the lamb chops.”

“She likes my cooking almost as much as Jimmy does. I’m making chicken cacciatore for everyone tonight.”

“You say she knows a lot about art?”

“She’s getting her master’s in art history at Wayne State. She’s writing her thesis on the way the Nazis looted art during the War.”

“Sounds like an interesting gal.”

“She is, she really is. And smart as hell.”

“You remember me telling you I was in Patton’s Third Army during the war?”

“Yeah, I remember that picture of you in your uniform, the one behind the cash register at the market. Right next to the picture of you shaking hands with President Truman.”

“Well, my unit was the one that found the salt mine full of stolen art near Altaussee, Austria. Hitler was going to put the stuff in his museum in Linz after the war. There were hundreds of pieces.”

Doyle had forgotten that about Henry Hull, the way he was always surprising you with his stories. It was what made the Greenleaf Market such a lively place. This city was going to miss him.

“So what’s your girl’s name?” Henry said.

“Cecelia Cronin.”

“She from Detroit?”

“Hamtramck. But yeah, she’s been here all her life except for a short spell in New York. She’s going to move in with me to see, you know, how we work together.”

“Sounds pretty damn serious.”

“Yeah. . ” Like any inveterate bachelor, Doyle was anxious about having Cecelia move into his big empty house. Surely her presence would cut down on his front porch chats with his father. And he knew that those buckets of rainwater in the master bedroom would seem romantic to her for only so long. He told himself that this might actually be a good thing, might force him to get off his ass and replace that sieve of a roof before the house fell down. Doyle was much less anxious about their travel plans. “We’re hoping to go to Italy together in the spring. My mother made me promise I’d go see the Uffizi and the Sistine Chapel before I died.”

“You should go. Go while you can.” Henry glanced at the naked walls. “You never know when it’s going to get yanked away from you.”

They sat there on the sofa like father and son and watched the rest of the game. It wasn’t pretty. Bob Gibson broke Sandy Koufax’s World Series record by striking out seventeen Detroit batters, and the Cardinals embarrassed the Tigers, 4–0.

When the game was over, Doyle asked Henry what he was planning to do with all the boxes, all the evidence and tips and dead-end leads he’d amassed so painstakingly over the past fifteen months.

“The guys on the motel staff are gonna toss it in the dumpster out back for me.”

“I was wondering, Mr. Hull. . I’ve got my brother’s pickup truck parked out back — had to pick up some topsoil yesterday — and I was wondering if you’d let me take this stuff with me.”

“Take it where?”

“Back to my house. For some strange reason I cleaned out my old bedroom last week. It’s the only room upstairs that doesn’t have any leaks in the roof. I’d like to spread everything out in there as a way of, you know, keeping the case warm.”

“I dunno, Frankie. Like I said, maybe it’s time to let it go.”

“I can’t do that, Mr. Hull.”

Henry sighed. He sounded older than he’d ever sounded, like a man who was finished with life. “Be my guest then, Frankie. Do what you gotta do.”

When the post-game show ended, Henry called the front desk and a bellhop came up to fetch his two suitcases. He was taking a cab to City Airport, then a plane to Duluth, Minnesota, where his brother was meeting him. He wrote down his brother’s address and phone number in Marquette and made Doyle promise he would keep in touch. They hugged then, and Doyle stood in the doorway and watched him walk, one last time, down the hallway where his wife died.

When the elevator door closed behind him, Doyle got a porter to help him load the boxes into his brother’s pickup. There would be time to smoke a cigar on the front porch before he had to start sautéing the vegetables and the chicken. He wanted to tell his father about the latest developments. The old man would be surprised and saddened that Henry Hull had packed it in. But Doyle had a hunch — he hoped — that his father would be proud that he’d brought all the evidence home and planned to keep the candle burning for Vic #43.

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE THE WORLD SERIES OPENED, Willie broke the news to Octavia that he would be leaving Detroit for good as soon as the Series ended. His friend Walter Mitchell had a spare room waiting for him in D.C., a quiet room with a view of Rock Creek Park, and Willie was determined to finish writing his memoir there.

Willie broke this news while he and Octavia were lying in her big four-poster bed, sticky and spent from their most frenzied lovemaking yet. He had dreaded this moment, but he thought she took the news pretty well, almost calmly, almost like she’d been expecting it. “Oh Willie, we so different,” she said, sounding relieved to finally be able to admit that this was something they could never hope to overcome.