Detroit: An American Autopsy (17 page)

T
WENTY
B
UCKS

I
T WAS LATE FALL,
nearly a year since Harris’s death. Outside the courthouse window, leaves were falling from the trees, whipping in the streets.

Inside the courtroom, Darian Dove sat in the witness chair with his chin buried in his chest and mumbled the events of November 15. They began with a can of gasoline and ended when a roof collapsed on Walt Harris.

At the defendant’s table, Mario Willis sat impassively in a jail-green jumpsuit as Dove recounted how Willis had hired him to burn up the house “a little bit” for an insurance job.

Dove, a worn-at-the-heel handyman, had cut a plea deal. He got a hamburger and seventeen years in prison in exchange for his testimony against his boss Willis.

Willis, whose gold-framed spectacles nicely set off the green prison attire, presented himself to the court as a business sharp and man of God who orbited in the same universe as Mayor Kilpatrick. He maintained his innocence.

Not according to the handyman. According to him, Willis had picked him up around 2:30
A.M
. and they stopped at a Gratiot Avenue service station to buy gasoline.

“He paid,” Dove mumbled. “I didn’t have no money.”

From there, they drove to Kirby Street, where Willis waited in his vehicle while Dove went to set fire to the house.

“He called me on my cell phone,” Dove said, so quietly that the judge told him to speak up. “He called me on my cell phone. He said: ‘What’s taking so long?’”

Dove set the fire, then he tried to put it out with his shirt because the boss didn’t want the whole thing burned down in case he wanted to burn it again a couple months later. It was an insurance job, Dove said. He’d set a fire at the same house a few years before, whereupon Willis had collected $20,000. He never made repairs to the house and the city never required him to do so.

But the handyman couldn’t get the flames under control this time by waving a shirt at it. A piece of timber broke loose from the ceiling and struck him on the head, knocking him down.

After collecting his senses, he ran out to the boss’s vehicle and they drove to a gas station where Dove called 911 from a pay phone to report the fire.

Harris’s widow sat impassively in the gallery, leaning into the shoulder of firefighter Jimmy Montgomery while Nevin draped a broad hand across her shoulder.

“He said he was going to buy me a new truck when he got the money,” Dove continued, mumbling into his wiry beard. “He never bought me nothing, though. He gave me twenty bucks is all.”

“How much?” the prosecutor asked.

“Twenty bucks,” he repeated.

The courtroom gasped.

C
HEAPER
T
HAN A
M
OVIE

A
RSONISTS DO THEIR
best work at night. As do murderers. And so it stands to reason that homicide dicks should work the graveyard shift. But it’s a bad thing to give your number to these types of cops, because they like to ruin your sleep. One evening, homicide detective Sgt. Mike Martel called me while I was curled up on the couch. He said he had a scene I might be interested in. I slid my trousers on and drove to the southwest side.

There was a doctor or something who had his Mercedes-Benz ruined by his brains splattered all over the leather interior.

“Look at it,” the detective said, shining his flashlight on the dead man. He was slumped over the wheel almost like he was leaning to change the radio station. From the passenger side you could see his teeth. All of his teeth. Half his face was gone. Glass stuck to his golf shirt. His shoes were in need of a competent polish.

“Did you bring a camera?” the detective asked.

“No.”

“Too bad. Good picture.” He pulled off the rubber gloves from his large, nail-bitten hands. He slipped them into his suit pocket. It was hot but he still wore a hat. A porkpie with a feather in it. It looked ridiculous but that’s a Detroit murder thing. The homicide cops wear hats. Still, his hat didn’t fit and I never knew Martel to wear one. He must have borrowed it. He was clowning me on the crime set. Murder does that to a man’s mind if he stares into it long enough.

“Shouldn’t try painting the town red in this part of town,” he lectured the corpse, pantomiming pity for the dead man in the expensive car who didn’t really deserve any. “It’s usually your own blood that gets used for paint.”

He turned to me. “You hungry?”

* * *

We sat in a local diner, a rundown joint with walls the color of an old man’s teeth. I watched the detective tear into a chili dog. He weighed 350 pounds and was trying that meat-only diet.

“The whole shit is corrupt from top to bottom,” he said through his mustache and a mouthful of dog. “Cops to judges. The fucking radios in the cars don’t even work. Why you think so many guys are leaving the department?”

And then he launched into the craziest story of true-life murder I’d ever been told.

“You should look into this one, it’s totally fucked.”

In January 2008, a teenage street tough named Deandre Woolfolk made plans to avenge a failed hit on his boss, Darnell Cooley, a reputed drug dealer who was lying in a hospital in a coma.

Woolfolk tried to enlist the help of a neighborhood mope named Perry to be the getaway driver.

Perry declined, insisting he had to work that night. But Perry never went to work. Perry didn’t even have a job. Instead, Perry went to the intersection of Fenkell and Wyoming, where he had been told the hit would take place, to watch. Before Perry arrived, however, the thirty-four-year-old picked up his sixteen-year-old brother and three teenage girls, including fifteen-year-old Martha Barnett.

It was two
A.M
. on a school night. They went shopping for Slurpees and snack cakes.

“It was cheaper than a movie,” the detective said, launching into his second dog. That’s the same thing Nevin told me about arson, I thought.
Cheaper than a movie.

In any event, that evening’s entertainment didn’t turn out to be as cheap as he figured. Perry either forgot or did not know that the intended target of the hit drove a black Jeep—just like his.

And when Woolfolk and his hit squad came careening around the corner, they did not stop at the Jeep to inquire. One opened up with an AK-47. Woolfolk, sitting in the front passenger seat, raised a 9 mm pistol, pointed and pulled the trigger.

“What’s going on?” little Martha screamed.

When the smoke cleared, little Martha Barnett was dead with a gunshot wound to the head.

Woolfolk got away for a couple months, until he was swept up in a dope raid on the city’s west side. He was arrested among a cache of weapons and narcotics.

Two days after his arrest, Woolfolk was interrogated by Sergeant Martel. During that taped interrogation, he was read his Miranda rights. And on that tape he admitted that he was in the car when the girl was murdered and that he had indeed tried to shoot but that his gun jammed.

“How can I be responsible for a gun I didn’t fire?” he asked.

The driver and the shooter with the AK-47 were convicted of first-degree murder, but Woolfolk’s lawyer—who was married to a judge—argued that his client had repeatedly asked to speak with a lawyer before he confessed but was denied one by detectives.

The judge believed him and threw out his confession on the grounds that Woolfolk probably had asked for a lawyer since he knew the legal system so well.

With little other evidence, the prosecutor was forced to drop the charges.

Woolfolk walked.

Fast forward six months. Robert Alexander had gone to Arturo’s Jazz Club in Southfield, a suburb of Detroit, to celebrate his thirty-third birthday. He went with a group of guys from the barbershop and their girlfriends. Among them was his best friend, Anthony Alls.

Also there was Woolfolk, along with kingpin Darnell Cooley, who had gotten over his coma and was feeling better.

The evening began as a good one. Champagne was flowing, the music was sweet. Then someone from Woolfolk’s table spoiled the evening by fondling one of the women at Alexander’s table. Alexander, a large man weighing more than 250 pounds, went over to straighten it out.

When police arrived, they found Alexander lying amid upset tables, a broken bottle and his own blood. He was faceup, unconscious and gasping for air. Then he died.

There was only one willing witness. His friend Anthony Alls. And Alls put the finger squarely on Woolfolk and Cooley and a third man named Eiland Johnson.

A few weeks later Alls was leaving his job at a Detroit barbershop. He walked around the corner and opened the hood of his ’88 Bronco. This was the usual routine for Alls. The power-steering pump leaked like a sandbag, and before he would start the motor, he would fill the reservoir with fluid. He was meaning to take it in to the mechanic to get it fixed.

While Alls was stooped over the quarter panel, someone approached from behind and unloaded six shots into his back. Alls was spun around by the force of the barrage and took a seventh in the chest. He stumbled backward and collapsed on the sidewalk. Then he died.

Instead of the mechanic, Alls went to the morgue. The killer calmly walked around the corner and disappeared.

“He’d been subpoenaed to appear in court just five hours before he was murdered,” Martel said, spearing his chili fries with a plastic fork. So much for the meat-only diet, I was thinking.

“For whatever reason, they provided no protection for him,” he said.

Nobody got a look at Alls’s killer.

Two days later, police arrested a man breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s house. The man, not wanting to do another stretch in prison, said he had information on Alls’s murder. The man said he did paid hits himself and had information on a handful of other murders as well. He wanted to be an informant. And this was all on police videotape.

“Do you know Alls was scheduled to go into the police academy?” Martel asked me.

“No shit?” I said, writing the detail down on a napkin.

“No shit,” he said, slurping his Diet Pepsi. “He was basically a cop.”

But before Martel could put the informant to work—get him wired and get him back on the streets—a junior prosecutor turned the hit man’s taped interrogation over to the judge and the defense lawyers.

Without a living, breathing witness, the prosecutor was trying to show that Alls was killed to keep him quiet. This, he hoped, would convince the judge to allow the dead man’s statement as evidence in court.

Martel said he pleaded with the prosecutor to stall for a few more weeks while he used the hit man to gather information on the murders by wiring him up.

He even begged the prosecutor to call in sick to court.

The prosecutor refused.

“I told that asshole to give me thirty days and we can get all them fuckers,” Martel said, scanning the joint for eavesdroppers. We were the only ones in there except the fry cook and the girl at the register. They were watching TV. I noticed Martel had dribbled chili on his tie.

“The prick refused. Flat-out refused. Said he wasn’t going to break the rules of the court. So he gets to be a Boy Scout and we’re going to get some very bad men back on the street. Motherfucker.”

He picked up the check. When a cop picks up a check, you know he’s serious.

“You want me to have him call you?”

“Who?”

“The hit man, my informant. He’s scared for his life because his name is now out on the street.”

“Call me? Yeah, sure. Give him my cell number, I guess.”

Suddenly I was in the middle of a gangster picture and I didn’t have the script.

B
IG
M
ARTHA

A
S FOR
L
ITTLE
Martha Barnett, I tracked the end of her story to a linen closet on the city’s west side, where her grandmother kept her remains, too poor to bury the ashes.

“All the pain that man caused,” the grandmother, a decent, churchgoing woman also named Martha Barnett, told me at her dining room table about Woolfolk. “Why? Why was he still allowed to walk ’round?”

Big Martha’s house held the choking, musty smell of fear so common in Detroit. Fear to open the door or the windows. Fear that someone might decide to break in and take the TV—or a life.

Inside the linen closet near the bathroom, above the rolls of toilet paper and a bag of dirty laundry, Barnett kept the ashes of Little Martha in a brass urn in a plastic bag.

Big Martha, seventy-three, paid her rent with a Social Security check and lived with her infirm daughter Sharon—Little Martha’s mother.

Dressed in checked pajama bottoms at four in the afternoon, Sharon shuffled in and out of the bedroom where her daughter used to sleep, listening to a radio, occasionally going to the stove to light her cigarette. The first time she emerged from the bedroom and held her head over the flame, she caught her wig on fire but patted it out without panic and shambled back to the bedroom.

The second time she emerged, she lit the cigarette without incident, and before going back into the bedroom she turned to me and said with a vacant stare: “I should have stayed in school. Oh well, it’s never too late, right? I could always go back to trade school. Learn a little skill or something.”

Sharon must have been frozen in that bedroom for twenty years. What trades? It was all gone, honey. All gone, including your daughter.

“That’s a real good idea,” I lied.

Pacified, Sharon shuffled back to her radio.

Martha sat at a kitchen table covered with a peeling plastic cloth, a painting of the Last Supper hanging on the wall behind her and next to that a glass menagerie filled with owls and eagles and a photo of the Obama family, which was striking to me since there were no photographs of her own kin.

“I wished I might be able to leave this big city here,” Big Martha said in a thick Mississippi accent. Like many religious women raised in the South, she believed God reveals His divine plan to her through dreams.

“I been having a dream of that fishing hole in the country outside Greenville, Mississippi. That’s where I come from. I believe the Almighty is calling me away from here, Mr. Charlie. He got something else left for me. He want me to go home.”

“Please don’t call me Mr. Charlie,” I said.

“Okay then, Charlie. I been wishing I never come up here. Trapped in the ghetto like this. People running wild. My grandbaby dead. Me too poor to bury her.”

Big Martha retrieved the urn, set it on the table. The polishing machine had scarred the facing.

Big Martha began crying. All the pain that little girl got caught up in. All the pain Woolfolk caused. All the pain we all carry around. She cried until Sharon came out to light another cigarette.

“I know my grandbaby’s in a better place,” Big Martha said. “Absent from the body. Present with the Lord,” she said, quoting the New Testament.

I thought about my sister, Nicky. I would go around the part of town where she died rather than drive through it. I avoided it not out of fear, but sadness. I couldn’t face it. It was my own linen closet. I guess that’s why dogs don’t put their snouts in the fire. Too much pain. I hadn’t even visited the grave where she and her daughter lay.

Big Martha talked about Little Martha’s funeral.

“So many people was there, so many young people. I didn’t know all those young people loved her so much. Well, in the middle of the funeral, during the songs, the funeral director stopped the music right there in the middle of the service, and he brought me in the back room and was asking how I was gonna pay for it. I didn’t rightly know. I should have passed the hat right there. Everybody would have given, praise God. But I didn’t pass the hat. So I had her cremated. I had to borrow and beg just to do that. Even her father chipped in. They charged me seven thousand dollars for the casket and everything.”

“What happened to the casket?” I asked.

“They told me they burned it too.”

“That’s a lot of money for nothing.”

“I know, but people like me’s sorta dumb in death, honey. We ain’t got much on this earth. You want to send your people out proper. The news channels they says they was gonna help me, but they never did. Never helped a thing. Not that I expected them to. They took all of the pictures I had of my baby and they never brought ’em back. Said they was gonna help, and all they did was call my little lamb a prostitute and things like that on the news. It hurt something terrible, the way it all happened.”

She cried a little more. Seeing a half-filled ashtray, I lit a cigarette and waited out the tears.

“Well, can’t nobody hurt her no more,” Big Martha said, composing herself. “She’s with Jesus Christ. Better place. We all going to that place, that’s a birthday none of us is going to miss.”

Barnett came to Detroit in 1977 by way of Chicago. Her son, Clarence Jr., was murdered in 1979 when he was thrown from a second-story window in the Cass Corridor. He’s buried in Belleville, way out by the airport; she knows not where.

Her husband, Clarence, died of lung cancer in 1994 and is buried at the Sacred Heart Cemetery, part of the old Polish church located in what is now a rough east side neighborhood. The priest there lives in the rectory, behind an iron door.

Clarence’s grave is unacknowledged. Barnett said she paid for a stone when Clarence died, but the salesman ran off with the $300. As it happened, the stone salesman cheated a lot of poor people before he died.

She ran through her finances: “HUD wants to move me out of this house, put me on the east side with the criminals and hooligans. They want to sell this house and fix it up. I only pay sixty-one dollars a month. Where am I gonna get the extra money? I keep applying for Section 8, and they keep denying me ’cause I’m old, I guess—and I’m gonna die if they just ignore me and I suppose I won’t have no headstone neither.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to do something for this woman. She was my forebear in some way, my auntie, trapped and scared and bunking with a zombie. I offered to find her the money to bury Little Martha.

“That’d be a beautiful thing, Mr. Charlie.”

“Please, just Charlie.”

“Okay then, Charlie. But you know something, Charlie? I’d much rather have a car,” Martha said hopefully. “I mean, to get around, you know? Maybe a van. Can you help me with a van? White people got nice cars for sale in they yards. I’m sure you know a lot of white people with a van.”

Sharon walked by and lit a half-smoked menthol on the stove again. Then she silently went back to her radio. She forgot to shut off the flame.