Detroit: An American Autopsy (3 page)

T
HIS
A
IN’T
H
OLLYWOOD

M
IKE
C
ARLISLE WAS
considered one of the finest homicide detectives in a place perpetually battling for the title of Murder Capital USA.

He solved well over half his cases in a city with more than eleven thousand unsolved homicides dating back to 1960. Carlisle prided himself on earning his money, even though generally nobody gives a shit about dead prostitutes and dope dealers.

I’d met him a few years earlier while I was in Detroit on assignment for the
Times
. He appealed to me right away: his perpetual cigarette and his cotton-field vocabulary, his workingman suits and the white mustache. He looked and thought like a murder dick should, it seemed to me. He kept an odd collection of photographs in his top desk drawer. A mix of wedding pictures, vacation shots and crime-scene snaps of naked hookers laid out starfish style.

Carlisle answered the phone.

“How’s it going, Mike?” I said.

“How’s it going? This department is a fucked-up shit hole, Charlie. Nine months to retirement and I’m outta here.”

“Nothing’s changed, huh?”

“Not a goddamned thing.”

I asked if he knew anything about this Strawberry Greene case.

“Yeah, I know something about it,” he said. “They’ve reopened her investigation since numb-nuts got caught texting with his cock, and I’m the asshole whose desk it landed on. It’s three binders thick.”

“You got that case? No shit?”

“No shit. What are you doing back in town?”

I explained it. He laughed. “That’s the dumbest decision I’ve heard in quite some while. Welcome home, I guess.”

“Don’t rub it in,” I said, staring at the coffee stain at my feet.

I asked if I could see the files.

* * *

He brought them the next morning to a diner on Woodward, the main thoroughfare from the city out to the suburbs. We met just north of the city limits, where I had recently bought a house. The fact was, I couldn’t afford to live in the ghetto. I loved Detroit, but now that I had a daughter, I wasn’t going to live there. Not with the corruption and high taxes and lack of ambulances. So I cast my lot about a mile outside the city proper.

Carlisle sat in a corner, near the front, in a cloud of smoke. You could still smoke in the restaurants in Michigan. He was drinking black coffee.

We made small talk and then ordered. He got oatmeal. Fucking oatmeal and cigarettes. How precious.

“This case ain’t shit,” Carlisle whispered, looking at the whelp of a waiter who was trying to steal in on the conversation. “It’s a dope beef gone wrong. A working girl caught in the middle.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, but on the other hand, you’re fucking with some bad people here. From the mayor on down. This whole town is just a worm-infested shit pile, Charlie. I mean, there are good people, but they get lost in the incompetence. It’s a dead city. And anybody says any different doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.”

He was smoking like wet wool. “You know, I took this job because I thought I could make a difference. Because I really thought I could be some help.” He pushed the files toward me. “Here, you’ve got forty minutes.”

I began scribbling in my notebook.

He was silent for a few minutes before launching into a monologue about his grandson’s new Easter suit. I played along for as long as I could, absently nodding my head while trying to decipher the police reports.

“Mike,” I finally said, looking up from the case file. “I’ve got forty fucking minutes here. Please.”

Carlisle stuffed a cigarette in it.

* * *

The murder of Tamara “Strawberry” Greene had become the stuff of Detroit legend, a whodunit of sex and politics and power. The most incredible plot was a simple one: she is said to have danced at a party at the mayor’s mansion and was executed on the orders of Kilpatrick because she knew the names and proclivities of the powerful attendees.

She died in a hail of bullets in a drive-by shooting nearly a year later, the story went: slumped over her steering wheel, her eyeglasses broken, the car still in drive, creeping down the street. Her boyfriend—a dope dealer—survived.

* * *

It was just another murder in a city with too many of them, until the original homicide detective filed a lawsuit after being removed from the case. He claimed that it was Detroit police officers who killed her at the behest of city hall.

But nothing in the case files suggested anything like that. She was not shot eighteen times in a drive-by as that detective claimed; she was struck three times.

The medical examiner’s report revealed she died with two black eyes—giving credence to statements given by another stripper that Strawberry was beaten at a party two weeks before her death—the object of affection between two feuding dope dealers.

Then there was the recollection of a drug kingpin doing time in federal prison. Being a kingpin, all dope-related hits on the city’s east side had to be cleared through him. So a few weeks after Strawberry’s murder, one of the dope dealers came to explain that he was actually trying to shoot her boyfriend.

“Old girl just got in the way,” the dope dealer told the kingpin, according to the reports.

* * *

Looking at the case file was like looking at the high school yearbook of my sister, Nicole. A beautiful woman tied up in an ugly life. Strawberry oozed sex. And she used it. She teased dangerous men, manipulated them and stole from them. And in the end she paid with her life. A Good Time Girl Who Met a Bad End in the Streets of Detroit.

Strawberry.

Nicole.

A simple book. Made in Detroit.

“How many girls like this die in the city?” I said, looking up at Carlisle.

“Too many,” he said, through a cloud of smoke.

“My sister died like this,” I told him. “In Detroit.”

“Oh, man. I’m sorry.”

“She wasn’t garbage, you know?”

“She was somebody’s daughter,” he said sympathetically.

“Yeah, nobody cared at all. Except one cop. A guy named Snarski. I’ll never forget his name. Snarski. He understood that everybody’s somebody to someone. He got the guy.”

“I’ll never forget his name either,” Carlisle said. “He’s the guy who trained me.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

That was Detroit. Smallest big town in the world, 140 square miles and five inches deep.

* * *

Combing through Carlisle’s notes, there was absolutely nothing I could see that placed Strawberry at the mansion, which is not to say there wasn’t a party. But nothing suggested a cop killed her beyond the first detective’s spectacular leap of logic that it had to have been a cop who murdered her since she was killed with a .40 caliber pistol, the same caliber weapon issued to Detroit police.

It was a theory that launched a thousand bar-stool conspiracies. And Detroit loves a good conspiracy. Strawberry’s murder had become the city’s grassy knoll.

I said good-bye to Carlisle and went back to the newsroom. I called that first investigator and confronted him with the facts.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and he sounded creaky and unstable, as though he’d been beaten silly with a feather pillow. He couldn’t explain the factual discrepancies but offered me this: “To be perfectly honest, it’s like an octopus’s tentacles that spread all over. In Detroit, once you see it, once you connect the dots, it’s obvious.”

The only thing obvious to me was the people of Detroit had been duped by a loon. The mayor was a liar and a cheater, but he wasn’t a murderer—at least not in the case of Strawberry it seemed to me.

I was convinced that I had the answer to the mystery of the murdered stripper. And it had nothing to do with the mayor. And that’s the way I wrote it.

The story ran on the front page of the
News
. I came into the office at nine. The place was empty except for a receptionist. The light on my phone was blinking, letting me know I had a message. Maybe several. Maybe a dozen, I figured.

I threw my coat on a vacant desk next to mine, got myself a cup of coffee and sat down with a notepad to listen to them all.

There was only one. A single two-word assessment of my worldview.

“Nigger lover.”

J
OY
R
OAD

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG
.
I didn’t recognize the number on the screen. I picked it up.

It was my niece, Ashley.

“Hi, Uncle Char,” she said in a gooey voice. She was stoned, I could tell. Her baby-girl tone gave it away. So did the slurring. She called me Uncle Shar.

Fuck, I said to myself.

“Hey girl,” I said to her. “What’s going on?”

“You know how it is with me,” she said pathetically. “Not much.”

“Yours is a common problem.”

“Yeah, that’s true, but it’s worse when you’re a fuckup like me.”

This was the place where she expected me to provide her the opening; the place where I was to ask with real sympathy and concern: “What’s wrong?”

Then, according to the script, she would bombard me with her self-pity. That would give way to her self-loathing, which would end with her hitting me.

I didn’t bite. I let the effort strangle in silence.

“I haven’t been to your new house yet,” she said finally, her voice crackling honeycomb. “I haven’t even talked to you. You’ve been home a month now.”

“Yeah, well . . . Sorry about that. Unpacking boxes and trying to get some stories in the newspaper. I don’t have much time for anything else, I guess.”

“How about if I come over and help you? I could watch the baby.”

I ran it through my mind: If I let her over, she would stay for a week. She would watch TV, smoke all my cigarettes. Eventually, sick of looking at her and the kid howling with a diaper full of shit, I would bawl her out, giving her the pat lecture about making something of her life.

Then she would make off with my car and my liquor cabinet.

Life in Detroit had gotten tough.

Everyone was broke and if they weren’t out of work, they were half out of work. One of my brothers pulled his tooth out with a pair of pliers because he had no dental insurance and was too proud to ask for the loan.

And then there was my niece. I loved her—I loved her hard—but I didn’t trust her. Everybody in America has young people like that.

“We’ll work out a day and then you can come over.”

“You’ll have to pick me up. My boyfriend totaled my car.” She laughed. “He was wasted. What a loser.”

Her casual, spiritless laughter worried me. Just like her mother.

* * *

My sister, my three brothers and I grew up on Joy Road, the dividing line between Livonia and Westland—two working-class suburbs about three miles west of the Detroit city limits. Our house was an equal distance from the shopping mall and the Ford plant, somewhere between the Jeffries Freeway and the dead Rouge River.

The north side of Livonia—on the other side of the freeway—was well-to-do and WASPy. Our side was populated by working-class Italians, Scots-Irish, Arabs, a few blacks and a sprinkling of Vietnamese. The sort of place where people drive American cars, not German.

It was not a ghetto by any means. Those are just the gradations of middle-class America unknown and unseen by a kid growing in its belly. Ours was a good home. A mother who wrapped her arms around us at night. Dinner on the table at six. We were taught the difference between the salad and dinner forks. We had a wall of books and some good friends. The schools, funded by the taxes from the auto plant, were some of the very best public schools in the state of Michigan. That’s why my mother and stepfather chose to move here from Gary, Indiana.

But Joy Road wasn’t always so joyful. Sometimes, even with all the love and the best intentions in the world, things get balled up. What happened in the 1970s and early ’80s had never happened before in American life. Drugs were a scourge. You couldn’t sit on the school bus without a mullet-topped greaser trying to push a bag of PCP on you. And this was seventh grade.

Divorce was another thing. Men like my stepfather were packing their bags, walking out the door and never looking back. The kids were left to fend for themselves as Mom—God bless the old girl—went off to earn the bread. Suddenly, the six o’clock dinners with Cronkite stopped.

As a consequence, I knew a lot of children who caved in to the greaser on the school bus. My siblings were among them. So were the other kids who hung around our house and ditched school while our mother was working in the flower shop on Detroit’s east side. I remember a runaway named Doc who lived in his car outside our house, sleeping on Joy Road and waiting for crumbs from our table—and there were always crumbs at my mother’s table. My sister’s friend Carrie came to live with us for a while. It was fine with her mother, one less mouth to feed. It was fine with my mother too. And it was fine with me. She was gorgeous. And then one day, she simply evaporated. Gone. I wouldn’t see her for decades. Not until my sister’s funeral.

Nobody bothered to get educated. My sister and brothers and Carrie and Doc and too many others dropped out of high school, yet nobody went to work in the automobile plants. You suspected the work was too hard and the union made the work too hard to get. Two of our neighbors’ fathers worked at the leviathan Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn, on the western city limits of Detroit. It must have been terrible in there. They both killed themselves with a rope. Who knows?

Still, we had all gotten a taste of it, summer jobs sweeping the floor or working the press. It was horrible. The yellow lights, the stink of grease and oil and acid. The unblinking time clock. You walked in the door and the first thing you’re trying to figure out is how to get out. If you don’t know that about factory work, you don’t know anything.

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day’s labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright—our grandfather in the white socks—is the thing that ruined us.

But even so, a high school dropout could count on the factory or the tool-and-die shops or the gas stations if he needed them. The assembly line would live forever, we thought. But like Doc sleeping out on Joy—named after Henry Joy, the president of the now-defunct Packard Motors—we thought we could live off the crumbs. Instead of working, we figured we could be hustlers and salesmen and gamblers and partiers. Work was for suckers. If anybody had told us such a thing existed, we probably would have tried to become New York bankers and stockbrokers. And I have no doubt we would have been good at it too.

Work versus The Hustle. That was the internal conflict on Joy Road, USA. My mother gave us the work ethic. My stepfather taught us that the best dollar was an easy dollar.

Predictably, the marriage didn’t hold up. How could it, with the wife grinding out an honest living while the mackdaddy husband cavorted around in a green Lincoln Continental with a loaded .22 in the glove box, playing poker until all hours of the morning?

I loved the man and I hated him. He read voraciously and he gave me an affection for books. Without that, who can tell? But he also bred in me an antipathy to authority. He possessed a volcanic temper. The marriage ended when I was about fourteen, after he opened my head with a large oak spool my mother used as a candle holder. I ran and hid in the weeds on the other side of the street, blood dried on my face, looking at the house on Joy Road, hating the place. Hating it so bad I wanted to go away forever. I remember sitting there in that weedy lot thinking if I ever made $50,000 I’d be a rich man. I’d be a rich man and I could take my mother and brothers and sister away and we’d never have to come back here again.

But my sister, she ran away young. First at fourteen and permanently by seventeen. While she turned to the streets, I turned toward the classroom and the sporting field and my friends. I owed my mother that much.

Our mother, an elegant woman, militantly loyal and rabidly Catholic, worked hard in her flower shop on the city’s east side—she wore herself down to such a nub. But she was still there at the sporting events, standing on the thirty-yard line in her raccoon coat teaching a young angry man the meaning of family.

When her children got lost, she went looking for them.

My brother Jimmy got lost in the blizzard of the eighties crack cocaine epidemic. He was sixteen and working and living in a crack den in Brightmoor—a notoriously rough section in northwestern Detroit. His boss was a black dude named Death Cat, the son of a successful dry cleaner. Jimmy’s job was to branch out the business to the white suburban clientele, where the real money was.

My mother got wind of where he was working and drove over there. She knocked on the side door of the crack house. It was early evening and business was at full pace. She stood at the door shouting that she wanted her boy returned and if she didn’t get him, she was going to call the cops.

“Yo, get that crazy bitch outta here,” Death Cat ordered my brother.

My brother came to the door.

“Ma, what are you doing here?” he said, stepping out.

“Jimmy, your sister’s lost out here somewhere and I’m not going to lose you both.”

“Ma, are you fucking crazy? These guys’ll kill you.”

“Jimmy,” she said with streaming eyes. “I work too damn hard to lose you kids to this city. I want you home with me now.”

Wild-eyed crack heads continued to file in and out, with this little Rockwell scene playing out near the screen door.

“Okay, okay, Ma. Just go. I’ll call you in a day or two,” my brother remembered saying.

A week later, someone made the call for him, when rival drug boys strafed his Buick with semiautomatic gunfire. One bullet entered into the windshield at chest level and by the divinity of physics ricocheted downward and lodged in the dashboard.

That’s when Jimmy, thankfully, came home.

Nicole didn’t, except occasionally to steal furniture or clean herself up. And that was always a curious thing. No matter what outrage she committed, my sister was always welcomed in my mother’s home on Joy Road. It was her daughter’s home too, and always would be. That’s what love is.

When she was clean, my sister’s career consisted mostly of serving men eggs and bacon. And when she was sober, Nicky was one of the most magnetic women you could find. Handsomely built with an oval face, she had no trouble finding wholesome company.

But my sister could never make it stick. In 1986, she became a mother. Incapable of nursing both a child and a drug habit, she abandoned her daughter, Ashley, to my mother and my mother’s new husband before the baby could even crawl.

My mother had had high hopes for her. We all did. Despite the fact that Nicole’s demons had dragged her away from her baby girl, Ashley was lucky. She wasn’t going to grow up around strange men and whiskers and dope and booze. She was going to grow up in a loving home and learn those old-generational values of self-respect and bootstrap accomplishment. She was going to appreciate art and go to college and date nice boys. With her, all the mistakes of the past generations would be mended.

But things have a way of not turning out like they’re supposed to. Ashley, as much as any of us, was a spawn of Joy Road.

* * *

“So yeah, I’m staying at Grandma’s,” Ashley went on. “If you can come and get me, I’ll meet you there.”

I was home. But I couldn’t bring myself to accept the responsibility of it.

“Gimme a couple days,” I lied. “I’ll come get you then.”

“Okay,” she said. She sounded genuinely happy. “I love you, Uncle Shar.”

“I love you too, sweet pea.”

I never did call back. I feel cheap about it because I’ll never be able to fix the fact that I failed her. I locked her out. I broke the rule of Family.