Motown (14 page)

Now, staring at the group photograph on the wall of his office, Canada was struck by the thought that he had lost sight of that Japanese officer. Albert Brock, his Jap bastard of the moment, had been in the public eye so long he had fooled himself into thinking he knew the labor leader. In fact he was hardly better informed than the guy on the loading dock who came home every night and had supper and read his newspaper and fell asleep in front of Huntley and Brinkley.

He pulled his personal file on Brock from the deep drawer of his desk—in this frame of mind, a disappointing collection of transcripts from tapes, affidavits signed by people who knew even less about its subject than Canada, photographs and newspaper clippings going back to 1938, when Brock was elected president of the Detroit Steelhaulers local—and read it all again from start to finish. It left him unenlightened.

Lieutenant Boyle, Canada’s second whip on the mayor’s squad, was under suspension pending an investigation into why his name had appeared on the infamous “Christmas list” seized in the raid on the gambling operation at the Grecian Gardens. With the imminent early retirement of District Inspector Peter R. Soncrant, who had also been mentioned, that brought the number of high-level vacancies in the department to eight since the probe began. Boyle, like Sergeant Esther, had been a gift from Police Commissioner Girardin and just the sort of choice one might expect from a former newspaperman who had only learned of the squad’s existence three months after it was formed. The sergeant at least had worked out, and Canada placed him in charge when he left.

The Doubleday Book Shop was on the ground floor of the Penobscot Building on Griswold, a graduated limestone pile the inspector detested, if only because Patsy Orr directed his father’s criminal empire from his office on the forty-third floor; which reminded him that Ma Bell was still dragging her feet on that list of long-distance calls placed to the booth across the street. At least it was Saturday, and unless Patsy was a workaholic—not a common complaint among mafiosi—Canada was spared the sensation that Patsy was standing on top of his head.

He found the book he was looking for in the Local Interest section between a Detroit restaurant guide and Wendell Porter’s
Hell On Wheels.
A thick volume with a white pictorial cover showing Albert Brock standing alone on a speaker’s platform with laced fingers held high over his head in a victory salute, its blurbs promised a personal look at the labor chief’s life even if its title,
BROCK! The Steel Behind the Steelhaulers,
was unencouraging from a muckraking point of view. Canada had been wondering about the book ever since he had discovered it excerpted in last month’s issue of
True.
He bought it and took it back to the office.

“Anything yet from the phone company?” he asked Esther, who was filling a paper cone with water from the cooler. The sergeant took in more liquids than any man Canada had ever known, and sweated out two quarts for every pint.

He shook his head and drank. “They only move fast when they tot up my wife’s bill.”

“See if you can light a fire under them.”

“Taking up reading, Inspector?”

He showed Esther the cover.

“We could write a book of our own by this time,” the sergeant said.

“Make a damn short read if we did.”

But the book wasn’t much better than the file. Brock had been brought up in Ecorse, not the most honest two square miles in North America, the son of the owner of a small cartage firm that in twenty years managed to increase its fleet from one horse-drawn wagon to three secondhand Mack trucks, one of which was always parked over the grease pit in the garage. He had driven for a time for his father, then when the company went bankrupt, bought a rig on time and hired out as an independent. The 1929 stock market crash ended that. Later he hauled steel for the Ford River Rouge plant, which earned him a draft deferment after Pearl Harbor when the company switched its emphasis from automobiles to Liberty ships and B-17 Flying Fortresses at Willow Run. His involvement in the labor movement, beginning in the Depression when he took his lumps from strikebreakers, came to a head in 1938 when, running from the lowly position of shop steward, he was elected president of Local 406 of the American Steelhaulers Association in an upset victory over the two-term incumbent. It was a short hop from there to the national presidency, which at last count he had held for sixteen years and four terms. In that time he had established locals in forty-eight cities and expanded the union’s scope beyond truck drivers and dock laborers to include police officers, clerical workers, and migrant farmers. All this was public knowledge.

What wasn’t widely known, and what this most laudatory of authorized biographies had missed completely, was the union’s mob connections. It had been muscle provided by Frankie Orr rather than any personal popularity on Brock’s part that had catapulted him from blue-collar obscurity to the front office in Detroit, the hub of the organization. The methods were as old as the blackjack and fully as effective: a threat in this shop steward’s ear, a few dozen extra ballots in that box, a gentle reminder in the counting rooms that certain bookmakers were waiting to collect on busted sure things and longshots that came up short at the finish. It made no difference that four years later Brock’s sweeping reforms in the local had carried him into a legitimate landslide victory at the national level; a deal was a deal. The pension fund was made to order for laundering money skimmed off the tables in Frankie’s casinos in Vegas, and for two and a half decades now the washing machines had been running non-stop at Steelhaulers.

Leafing through the book, reading the testimonials of statesmen and sanitation workers, housewives and holy men—one thing about Brock, he never forgot his apprenticeship among the rank and file—Canada got the impression that most of the material had been handed to the author by Brock himself, or at least by his people. There was, however, one new piece of information, and if for no other reason than that it was a fresh straw to snatch at in a sodden stack, the inspector decided to follow it up.

The biographer’s name was Clinton Baedecker. There was a photograph of him on the back panel of the jacket—a rawboned, deeply tanned man in his late thirties, roughhousing with his two small towheaded daughters on someone’s lawn—and a brief note that said the author made his home in Detroit. Canada pulled down the city directory and slid his reading glasses down the
B
’s, but Baedecker’s name didn’t appear there. Nor was he listed in any of the suburban directories. He called Information and was told the number was unlisted.

“My name is Canada,” he said. “I’m an inspector with the Detroit Police Department. I need that number. This is a police emergency.”

“I’m sorry, Inspector. You have to file a request in writing.”

He depressed the plunger, got the 1300 switchboard, and asked for Stationary Traffic. He introduced himself all over again for the bored-sounding female clerk who answered.

“Baedecker, Clinton.” He spelled both names. “He must have drawn a parking ticket sometime during the past two years. I’m after a telephone number.”

“We wouldn’t have that even if a ticket was issued.”

“An address would do.”

“You’d have to call the Secretary of State’s office. It’s not our job to match license numbers to addresses and telephones. You might try the Traffic Court Bureau.”

He got a male clerk there, who kept him waiting five minutes while he went through the records. “A Clinton Baedecker appeared before the magistrate to oppose a ticket for careless driving on October fourth, nineteen sixty-five. Officer who issued the ticket didn’t appear and the case was dismissed.”

“Did he give a telephone number?”

“Yes.” He read it.

Baedecker answered on the third ring. He had a light voice for such a rugged-looking man. When Canada introduced himself he laughed shortly. “Word sure gets around. Who told you I’m researching a book about the Detroit police?”

“Nobody. I’m reading your book on Albert Brock and have a question.”

“Is this police business?”

“Yes.”

A match scratched on Baedecker’s end. “Go ahead, Inspector.”

“In Chapter Three you mentioned Brock’s involvement in a strike at an automobile plant in nineteen thirty-one. I wasn’t aware he ever worked for an auto company.”

“It was after the bank repossessed his first truck and before he went to work hauling steel. The plant was in Dearborn, where they made hood latches for Chrysler.”

“What were the circumstances of the strike?”

“A pregnant female worker was fired for fainting on the job. Brock and the others shut down their machines and refused to let anybody in or out. The Dearborn police showed up with professional strikebreakers. There was a brawl, but nobody was seriously hurt. Chrysler fired the strikers and replaced them. That wasn’t too difficult with a Depression on.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a strike.”

“I only mentioned it because it was Brock’s first exposure to the labor movement and because it predated the strike at the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company by five years. Most histories identify that as the beginning of the movement locally.”

“What was your source?”

Baedecker exhaled; blowing smoke. “How’s the Grecian Gardens investigation coming along?”

“The commissioner’s planning on calling a press conference next week. I’ll get you an invitation.”

“Well, it’s a start. I came across the story when I was going through some old newspapers at the library. It wasn’t in the
Times, News,
or
Free Press.
The
Banner
used it for filler. Dearborn police quell communist riot, the headline ran.”

“I never heard of the
Banner.
”

“You wouldn’t. It went out with the rest of the tabloids when times got hard. Brock had referred to the plant in passing during one of our early interviews. He was too busy to see me, so I got what details there are from one of his old cronies. I understand the reporter who covered the story is still living. Connie Minor is the name.”

“A woman?”

“No, he had a column in the paper with a picture.”

“Where can I reach him?”

“Search me. I didn’t try. Like you said, it wasn’t much of a strike.” Baedecker blew out again. “How’s chances of my getting a look at that Christmas list?”

Canada said he’d see what he could do, thanked him, and hung up. So far the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on the constitutionality of lying to a writer.

E
LROD
B
ROWN WAS BUILT
like Chilly Willy and dressed like a black caricature of a white undertaker. His black suit and gray cotton gloves with matching spats came straight out of the mortician’s catalogue. (Lydell swore the silver rims of his eyeglasses had come from his customers’ fillings.) He spoke with a pronounced lisp, and his infrequent laughter, intended to be obsequious, was uncomfortably close to a giggle. Following Brown through the big display room behind the main parlor, listening to the relative merits of options and standard equipment, box springs, and aerodynamic engineering, Quincy felt as if he were shopping for a new car instead of just a box to put Congo in and cover up with dirt.

The fat man stopped and slapped the curved lid of a casket the color and general shape of a Luden’s cough drop. “This is the top of the Eternity line,” he said. “Solid bronze. Guaranteed not to collapse or leak for a thousand years.”

Lydell said, “Who we see if it falls apart in nine hunnert and ninety-nine?”

“Pop the hood,” Quincy said. “Let’s see what she’s got.”

Brown lifted the lid. Lydell said mm
-mm!
and stroked the white satin lining. “This is nicer than my apartment.”

“Marcus Garvey was laid to rest in a casket just like this one.” The mortician giggled.

Quincy asked how much.

“Six thousand dollars. Now, that’s the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. I can let you have it—”

“Ain’t you got nothing more expensive?”

Brown lowered the lid. His hand shook a little. “This is the Jeroboam. The Nebuchadnezzar is the same model with fourteen-karat gold fittings and an Italian silk lining. Eighty-five fifty.”

“We’ll take it. How much does that come to with the flowers and the white hearse and limos?”

“Don’t forget the choir,” Lydell said.

Brown scribbled some figures in a leather-bound notebook. “Eleven thousand five hundred. A fifteen percent deposit is customary.”

“Pay the man, Lydell.”

He took a roll of bills out of his pocket. “Hundreds okay?”

“Body’s at the Wayne County Morgue,” Quincy said. “Vernon Kress is the name. You pick up?”

“Pick up? Oh, sure.” The mortician watched the bills piling up on his outstretched palms. “When do you want to hold the services?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is Independence Day.”

“It is for Congo.”

“That isn’t much time. They have to ship the casket from Lansing, and, er, I understand the remains are not in the best repair. They may require extensive reconstruction.”

“For eleven and a half grand you can let bids,” Quincy said. “C’mon, Lydell. We’re late for church.”

Quincy drove the Sting Ray. Lydell no longer wore a sling, but the pain pills the doctors had prescribed for him at Receiving made him too giddy for Quincy’s taste as a passenger, especially since he washed them down with rye. It was a blistering, tar-smelling Sunday morning and the top was down. The radio in a pink-and-black DeSoto cruising along next to them carried details of John Kennedy, Jr.’s recovery from first-and second-degree burns suffered when he fell into a bed of hot coals during a trip to Hawaii with his mother. A plastic surgeon who had treated the late President’s five-year-old son in the Honolulu home of Henry J. Kaiser reported that reconstructive surgery would not be necessary.

“Poor little fucker,” Lydell said. “Gots his lily-white butt blistered at a luau, and here you and me’s worried about someone blowing our heads off. Makes you ashamed.”

“His old man got
his
blowed off, don’t forget. You never heard John-John piss and moan. He saluted at the funeral.” Quincy nicked a red light at Fourteenth and flipped the bird at a trucker who leaned on his air horn.