Devil's Night (8 page)

That night at eleven, Francisco's task force regrouped. Before going out, they sat around a television set and heard a news report about two Detroit police officers who had been accused of raping a woman. This was greeted by hoots of disbelief. “There's enough women chasing cops, they don't have to rape anybody,” one officer said, and the others voiced their agreement.

Woodward Avenue was twitching with weekend nightlife when the cops headed out. Once again I rode with Robinson. “The man that shot Jackie's daughter is going to get some justice tonight,” he said, his good spirits restored.

I mentioned to Robinson that it seemed strange that a murderer would simply go home and continue with business as usual, but he told me that it happens all the time. “These punks think that they're
above the law, just like Richard M. Nixon,” he said. “Nobody will tell anything, that's what they think. We dealing here with the Richard M. Nixon of northwest Detroit.”

Despite Robinson's prediction, Jacqueline Wilson's killer did not get any justice that night; he still wasn't home. A dozen disgruntled cops, weekend plans shot to hell, drove back to the station to get into civilian clothes. Robinson, adrenaline pumping, decided to cruise for a while. Within minutes, we heard a radio report of gunfire outside a motel. When we arrived, a crowd of people were hanging around the parking lot, but there was no sign of any shooting.

“Just hookers,” said Robinson, disappointed. “I would venture to say that if someone was chasing someone with a gun, these people wouldn't be out here sunning themselves at midnight.” He nodded to several of the women as he drove slowly through the lot; Highland Park is a small town, and the police and street people know one another. “Just a bunch of little Richard Nixons,” Robinson grumbled as he headed in.

The Highland Park police never caught up with their suspect. They didn't have to—he caught up with them. A couple of weeks after the abortive raids, he walked in off the street. Although the police had what they considered an ironclad case, he was released on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond—five thousand in cash.

On the day that the suspected killer was released on bond, I went to see Jacqueline Wilson's mother, Frieda. She was living in a flophouse motel, across the street from the store where her daughter was killed. The first thing she said to me was that she was glad her husband, Jackie, wasn't alive to hear about the murder.

“Happy Jackie Wilson,” Frantic Ernie Durham, the rhyming disc jockey, used to call him, but it was a misnomer. Wilson had the best voice and the worst luck in Detroit show business. Berry Gordy wrote some of his first hits—“Reet Petite” and “Lonely Teardrops”—but Wilson never rode the Motown bandwagon. He was locked, instead, into a recording contract with Brunswick Records, which had no idea of what to do with his remarkable gifts. Wilson
could have been bigger than Marvin Gaye or Smokey Robinson; instead, he wound up entangled in grotesque musical arrangements full of florid strings and peppy white background singers. He recorded songs that Eddie Fisher would have rejected, including a never-to-be-forgotten rendition of “My Yiddishe Mama.”

As a stage performer, Jackie Wilson was in a class with James Brown, far grittier than the choreographed and coiffured teenagers at Motown. His sweet-and-sour good looks and prizefighter grace inspired frenzy in his audiences, and passion in women. One, a fan, shot and almost killed him. Another, a neighborhood girl named Frieda, married him.

Frieda and Jackie met when he was nine and she was ten. They wed as teenagers, in 1951. Together they had four children, Jacqueline, Sandy, Anthony and Jackie Jr., and they lost others—Frieda was pregnant fifteen times.

“Jackie believed in keeping me barefoot and pregnant,” she said. “And not just me. I don't know how many other children he had. Women always liked Jack, even churchwomen. And he wasn't the kind of man to say no.”

In 1965, Frieda and Jackie Wilson were divorced. Ten years later, during an oldies show in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the singer collapsed onstage from a heart attack. He lingered on in a coma for years, his money tied up in legal tangles, until he finally died in 1984.

But even before his stroke, the streets of Detroit began to claim Jackie Wilson's children. Jackie Jr. was shot and killed at the age of sixteen in circumstances that his mother did not want to discuss. Sandy died, of “unknown causes,” at twenty-three. And, in the summer of 1988, Jacqueline Wilson was gunned down.

The music community was shocked by the news, and saddened; many remembered Jacqueline as a little girl, backstage at her father's shows. Berry Gordy sent money to bury her. The Four Tops dispatched a telegram. And Frieda Wilson, a prematurely old woman in a red ski cap, tattered overcoat and torn plastic shoes, went back
to her rented room at the sleazy motel across the street from the party store and cried for days.

Once, when the money was good, Frieda Wilson lived like a celebrity. She had a big home and a fancy car. Her children were educated at exclusive Catholic academies, and she traveled in Detroit's show business circles. In those days, she was an envied woman. But no one envies her anymore. Three of her children are dead, and she shares a room with a dying old man in a wheelchair, whom she nurses. There is only one window in the room, boarded up because of the gunfire of drug dealers in the parking lot. Frieda cooks on a Bunsen burner and cleans her dishes in the bathroom sink.

“The income tax people took my house,” she said, sitting on an unmade bed. “And Jack's estate is still all tied up, because of all these women and children he had.” Frieda Wilson picked up a picture of her dead daughter and stared at it. “When Jackie Jr. was killed, Jack couldn't even come to the funeral. He just locked himself up in his room and wouldn't come out. He wanted to see pictures of his son in the casket. He was very, very close with his kids; he was a family person. And now look what's happened.…”

Frieda Wilson has been battered by circumstances and she knows it. At times she seems confused and helpless. But occasionally she summons the strength to pull herself together, and you catch a glimpse of her as an articulate, ambitious young woman who dreamed the Detroit show business dream, a dream so powerful that it could, for a moment, dispel the gloom of the present.

“You know, Jack's songs are starting to sell again in England,” she said. A few months before, “Reet Petite,” written by a man who has been as lucky as Jackie Wilson was unlucky, hit the charts in Great Britain, and a generation of young kids there were thrilled by the great singer's voice. “Maybe they'll be some money from that,” she said wistfully. If there is, it's safe to say that Berry Gordy will get his share. Frieda will get hers—maybe.

“And you know, the people from
Entertainment Tonight
were here,” she said. “They visited Jack's grave. After he died, we reburied
him next to his mother. I told you, he was a family person. And we're negotiating with ABC about a miniseries.…”

Loud laughter from the pimps and dealers in the parking lot wafted through the open door. Frieda looked once more at her daughter's picture. “Maybe something good will come of all this,” she said, and then she began to cry again.

Jacqueline Wilson was murdered because she got caught in the cross fire of an unsuccessful drug transaction. Much of the violent crime in Detroit is drug related, and there is little the cops can do about it. Crack is sold openly; police say that there is simply no way to arrest everyone. The main thrust of enforcement is to keep the supply to a minimum. No one believes that it can be dried up altogether.

From time to time, the cops stage raids on known crack houses, which are nothing more than apartments or homes from which drugs are sold. Locating them is as easy as finding stockbrokers on Wall Street, but busting them can be dangerous—most pushers are armed and ready to fight.

Not long after the search for Jacqueline Wilson's killer, Jim Francisco gathered his troops for a raid on a crack pad. Robinson was off that night, but half a dozen others were there, including Caldwell, the massive, bearded black undercover cop. The raiding party also had one woman, a thin redhead with a southern twang. Francisco took the wheel of the van, and the raiders climbed in the back. They were in good spirits that night, buoyed by the prospect of action, and as the van turned onto Woodward Avenue, they began to sing—“Roll 'em, roll 'em, roll 'em,” to the tune of the theme song from
Rawhide
. They sounded like a high school football team on the way to a big game.

The singing stopped when we pulled up in front of a seedy apartment building on a side street. Without a word the cops jumped out of the van and raced into the building. Caldwell carried a battering ram, and the policewoman held a shotgun in both hands. A couple of people stepped aside to let them pass as they ran up the two
flights, stopped in front of a door, hollered “Police, open up!” and, without waiting for a response, bashed in the door and flooded into the apartment.

Inside they found a very frightened black woman of twenty, dressed in a flimsy nightie and holding an infant. They were alone. One of the cops looked in a nightstand drawer and found several packages of cocaine.

“That's my boyfriend's,” the woman said, crying. “He's not here. I don't know where he stay. We don't even get along that good—he's just the baby's father, that's all.” The policewoman sat on the bed and talked gently to her while the others continued their search. Under the bed they found a police scanner, a pager and a loaded carbine. “I don't know nothin' about all that stuff,” the young mother protested. “It belongs to my boyfriend. I ain't mixed up in nothin'.…”

The small apartment was neat and clean. A high school equivalency diploma hung on a wall, next to a shelf of stuffed animals. Record albums were stacked near an expensive stereo. The cops, respectful of neatness, searched gently, replacing things as they went along.

The baby, dressed in pink-and-white pajamas, began to cry. “He had a shot today, that's why he don't feel good,” his mother explained.

“Yeah,” said the policewoman empathetically. “Those shots make me feverish, too.” She gently undid the baby's diaper, looking for hidden drugs.

The police stacked the carbine and the cocaine on a counter, next to a box of Oh So Nice Baby Wipes, and began to make a list of the seized material. By this time the young woman had calmed down and was watching the search without apparent emotion. Her composure irked the policewoman. “If we bust you again, we'll take your baby and get it a good home,” she threatened. “Not no crack house.” The mother nodded, but said nothing. Now that she knew
she was not going to be arrested, she was simply waiting for the police to complete their business and leave.

As they carried out the search, I could hear people scurrying through the halls. The building is a maze of crack houses, and many of the tenants were quietly leaving with their inventory. Francisco, who had no warrant for any other apartment, seemed unconcerned. This wasn't his first visit to the building, and it wouldn't be his last.

The task force gathered up the drugs and weapons, put them in bags, and trooped down the stairs. Francisco, pistol in hand, potbelly drooping over his jeans, Crimson Tide baseball cap set back on his head, swaggered down the hallway, just to make sure the neighbors knew who had been there. In the stairwell he met a tall, thin black man with a heavily bandaged hand and the look of someone caught in the act.

“Excuse me sir,” said Francisco, his mouth working on a large wad of gum. “I can't help but notice that you have been wounded.” The man nodded in guarded affirmation. Francisco waited. “I got shot,” the man finally said.

“May I ask you a personal question?” said Francisco in an intimate tone. “Was the shooting by any chance, ah, drug related?”

“Naw, man, it was a family situation,” said the thin man.

“I'm glad to hear that, sir. It's a pleasure to meet a family man in a place like this,” said Francisco of Morality, and walked down the stairs, pistol in hand, whistling the theme song to
Rawhide
.

It was around this time that I decided to move into the city. I had been living in West Bloomfield, commuting every day across the Eight Mile border, then retreating behind it every night. But this was an inconvenient arrangement and, more to the point, I found myself increasingly comfortable in Detroit.

The time I spent on the city streets, my evenings with the cops or hanging around the Tailwind and various other neighborhood spots, had convinced me that Detroit's reputation as a violent city was well deserved. It was possible, I knew, to get caught in cross fire, like
Jacqueline Wilson, or stabbed or mugged. But strangely, I didn't feel any real sense of personal danger, certainly nothing that justified the dire warnings of my suburban friends. Years in the Middle East had given me good antennae for hostility, and the truth is, I didn't feel any. When I went into a bar or a club where there were no other whites, which was pretty often, I got some wondering looks. If I was taking notes, people sometimes clammed up. But that was all.

My decision to move into the city was made easier by the fact that, during the course of interviewing people, I had become friendly with a number of black Detroiters. They rarely admonished me for living in the suburbs—to them it seemed natural—but the time I spent with them made Detroit seem a less alien place.

Many of my new acquaintances had little experience with books and authors; most of the younger ones had known very few whites. But they surprised me with their willingness to speak openly about their lives and their city. Clearly they enjoyed the chance to educate an interested foreigner. “I know you've never eaten any of this,” a woman would say, handing me a plate of collard greens. “I know you've never heard anything like this,” a man would tell me, putting on a Little Milton tape. Any evidence that I understood black culture was greeted with good-natured surprise. Once, at a party, I astonished a room full of people by dancing without breaking an ankle.