Motown (17 page)

“You don’t fight, you already lost it.”

Sebastian laid a pudgy hand on Quincy’s wrist. His smile was set in concrete. “You throw a good wake, and I’m sorry about your boy. But you go stirring up shit with the Man, somebody gonna take you out. Maybe one of us.”

Quincy said, “Old Patsy cranks the organ, you just shake that tin cup, huh?”

The gold tooth disappeared. “I was running policy slips for Machine before you sat on your first pot. I seen that stairwell he got shot up in with his bodyguard right after they drug out the bodies. Looked like somebody went and dumped a tub of guts down the steps. Patsy’s old man Frankie done that, or had it done, which is the same thing. So when Patsy says, ‘Nigger, git,’ I dips my head and says, ‘Yes, suh,’ and shuffles on out de do’. I got this far playing the percentages. You want to lay it all down on a longshot, you just go right ahead. I’ll throw dirt down your hole.”

The wake had been going two hours when four new guests entered, single file because the doorway was barely wide enough for one. They stood just inside, two Negroes in their middle years and two in their twenties, looking around. Their loud sportcoats and open-necked shirts, strained at the shoulders and too short in the arms, stood out against all that funeral black like Easter eggs in an alley. Quincy went over to them.

“You’re Springfield?” The speaker, built along Quincy’s lines but longer in the arms, simian, took his hand in a knuckle-demolishing grip. His graying hair, strung through beads that rattled when he moved his head, hung to his shoulders, thrusting the Neanderthal bone structure of his face into frightening relief. He made Quincy feel fey. “They mentioned you on the Six O’Clock News. That’s some send-off you gave Vernon.”

“You relatives?” There was a certain similarity of build.

“No. Hell, no. We wrestled with him. You seen me on Channel Nine maybe, right after Mitch Miller.”

“I work nights.”

“I’m Mighty Joe Young, the Gorilla from Manila. These here is my son and my nephew, they’re the Bongo Brothers, Boone and Bosco. They bend crowbars and shit over each other’s heads to warm up the crowd.”

“Bet it works.” Having just reclaimed his hand from Mighty Joe Young’s, Quincy merely nodded at the two younger men, who looked enough alike to be twins, second carbons of their father and uncle with less spectacular facial framework and tightly curled hair cut close to their scalps.

“And this is Anthony Battle.”

Quincy looked at the last man, a Joe Young contemporary with an advanced forehead and hostile eyes in a medium-dark face without expression. “Just Anthony Battle? What’s your gimmick?”

“I wrestle.”

“Anthony should of been world heavyweight champion.

He’s the only man to take a cocoa-butt from Bobo Brazil and laugh at him.”

“What happened?”

“It was during a press conference,” Battle said.

“Oh.”

Mighty Joe Young explained. “The World Wrestling Guild owns all the contracts. The championship belt looks best on Bobo, so they bought the reporters to keep the story out of print.”

Lydell had joined them. “Think you can get me a date with Amazonia the Python Queen?”

“She’s married,” Mighty Joe Young said. “To the Guild treasurer.”

Quincy said, “Sorry you couldn’t make the funeral.”

“I read about this Congo getting killed, but I didn’t know it was Vernon till tonight when I seen the procession on TV. Old Cape Horn had a headlock on every one of us at one time or another. We come to pay our respects.”

“Vernon’s friends are welcome. What you all drinking?”

“It’s not us and the Sicilians. It’s the white man kicking us back down to the bottom.”

Mahomet’s deep voice, raised at the bar, flattened the murmuring in the room. Heads turned. The singer was standing in front of Joe Petite, looking almost straight up at the former basketball center towering over him by nearly two feet.

“You think we push liquor after hours and sell numbers because we want to?” he went on. “We do it because the white man has kept us out of everything legal. Now, just when we’re starting to build ourselves up in the last place that’s open, he’s saying coloreds need not apply. He killed one of us like he was stepping on a bug, or did you forget you’re here swilling and stuffing your face because of him? You’d be standing in his blood right now if I didn’t clean it up day before yesterday.”

There was a little silence before the tall man set his glass down on the bar and turned to go; it was an eerie vacuum in that room filled with people, and Quincy thought of the tingling moment that had followed “Freedom Road” in church. Petite paused when he reached Quincy.

“It was a real fine day, brother, but your help needs a muzzle.” He left.

The crowd started to thin out after that. Sebastian Bright shook Quincy’s hand, showed his gold tooth, and went out without a word. Beatrice Blackwood kissed Quincy on the cheek, said, “It was lovely, dear. Stop in any time for a body shampoo and a massage, no charge”, and left with Kindu Kinshasha. On his way out, Gidgy told Quincy he was expecting a shipment of Mexican that he’d cut him a deal on if he was interested.

Mahomet came over. His face was tragic. “Sorry, boss.”

“It was a good speech, man. Martin ought to know about you.”

“Twelve thou, with the booze and eats. ‘It was a real fine day, brother.’ Shiiit.” Lydell subsided into a coughing fit. Quincy pounded him until he stopped.

Mighty Joe Young held out a card between two fingers the size of frankfurters. “This is my agent’s number. He’ll know where to reach me anytime you want me.” The others followed him out.

“We can always have him put a half nelson on Patsy,” said Lydell, gasping for breath.

When the last guest had departed, Quincy sent Lydell and Mahomet home and scraped Krystal out of the corner where she sat spraddle-legged on the floor with her glass in her purple lap. Hours later in the apartment, still half-asleep and smelling of junipers, she found him in the dark and made him hard and climbed aboard. The telephone rang.

“Quincy, this is Sebastian Bright.”

“Yeah, Sebastian.” He put a hand on Krystal’s back, interrupting her rhythm.

“I got the people if you can get the guns.”

He sat up, dislodging her. The luminous dial on the alarm clock read 3:10. “What happened to playing the percentages?”

“Fuck the percentages. They hit Joe Petite’s place tonight behind the barbershop. Joe was dead a long time before he got to the floor.”

“I
T’S FUNNY HOW THE
second-and third-rate speaks all hung on to become restaurants and such while all the best ones got torn down or turned into laundromats. I interviewed Chaplin here when he was in town researching
Modern Times,
and the service isn’t any better now than it was then. How’d you track me down?”

His companion’s racing-changes between subjects made Canada struggle to catch up. He swallowed a mouthful of corned beef and rye and chased it with beer from a thick mug. “I called the Detroit Press Club. They told me you spend a lot of time here.”

Here
was a busy restaurant in the warehouse district, a cave of a place cut into the side of a soot-stained brick building that was new when Detroit was the stove-making capital of the world, before Henry Ford saw his first piston. The walls were plastered with black-and-white pictures of federals with axes staving in kegs and cases of bottles, and the tables all had shelves under the leaves for stashing the evidence whenever the cop on the beat strolled past a window—a pretty conceit, as if the cop wouldn’t stop in to wet his own whistle. On a stage the size of a speaker’s platform, a girl in a turtleneck sweater and jeans with straight blonde hair to her waist sat on a high stool strumming a guitar and warbling a song about the Civil War. Consistency of theme was apparently not a priority.

“I keep up my membership, God knows why. I haven’t been near a typewriter in twenty years.”

Connie Minor, baptized Constantine, was a round little man with fine white hair brushed back over pink scalp and bright, intelligent eyes in a red face that made him appear jovial; an impression that faded within five minutes of meeting him. He tasted his chowder, recoiled, and poured ice water from his glass into the bowl. He wasn’t drinking. A coin-size medallion on a silver chain around his neck announced for the benefit of paramedics that he was diabetic.

“Before looking you up I read some of your columns in old issues of the
Banner
at the library,” Canada said. “They hold up better than anything else in the paper. Why’d you quit journalism?”

“I quit it the way Batista quit Cuba. While I was busy getting in tight with the Purple Gang and that crowd, the news business was developing a social conscience. I never did. I thought it was tough enough getting along as an individual without having to drag the whole human race with you. Still do, which is why Cronkite never calls. Oh, I bumped along for a while, did some vacation columns for the
News
and
Times
and a couple of radio scripts for
The Lone Ranger
when I really got desperate. I even wrote a book. I don’t imagine you read it. It was about Jack Dance.”

The Brock book was the first one the inspector had found time to read in years. “Was he as kill-drunk as they say?”

“Jack? He played cops and robbers his whole life. He thought everyone got up and brushed the dirt off after the shooting was over and went home.”

“What do you do now?”

“Sell power lawn mowers. Want one?”

“I don’t have a lawn.”

“That’s what everyone says. I sure do stink.”

Canada drank some beer. “Can we talk about Albert Brock?”

“You bought the soup.”

“Do you know Clinton Baedecker? He wrote a book about him.”

“I read it. It’s a joke. No, we haven’t met.” He blew on a spoonful.

“What’s wrong with it?”

He returned the spoon to the bowl. “Cold. I shouldn’t have added the water.”

“I meant the book.”

“I know.” He pushed the bowl away. “There are two million Steelhaulers in this country. A million and a half of them would carry Brock on their shoulders to the Cape of Good Hope and back if he asked them to. The rest are too young to remember what the union was like before he took over and cleaned house. A million of them easy would buy a book about Brock if it was properly respectful.
Dr. Zhivago
didn’t sell a million copies. Baedecker isn’t in the business to go broke.”

“Are you saying the book is a whitewash?”

“Come on, Inspector. You read it.”

“I read it as a cop. I’m asking your opinion as a journalist. Or as someone who sells power mowers.”

“There isn’t a thing in it you couldn’t get out of press releases from Brock’s office. Son of a poor trucker makes good through pluck and luck; that’s not a biography, it’s an episode of
Leave it to Beaver.
The first Greek laborer who refused to add another brick to the Parthenon until he got a second handful of grain hired someone with a broken nose to protect him from the broken noses the contractor hired to change his mind. To hear Baedecker tell it, you’d think Brock never shook a hand that ever held a blackjack.”

“He didn’t have any broken noses to back him up at that plant in Dearborn.”

Minor’s smile almost managed jovial. “You
did
read the book. The
Reader’s Digest
cut out that part.”

“Baedecker told me the strike didn’t amount to much.”

“Not if you don’t count several broken heads, courtesy of Sal Borneo and the Dearborn police. I was there. Were you ever hit by a leather sap?”

Rabaul sprang forward, clearer than memory. “No. Not by a sap.”

“It’s not much more fun to look at. Borneo’s thugs went through those auto workers like salt through a hired girl. Jack Dance was one of them.”

“What about Brock?”

“He fought his way clear. I caught up with him in a blind pig around the corner and interviewed him there.”

“I read your piece.”

“Not my piece. My editor spiked the piece I wrote and ran four inches about a commie uprising. If I ever had a chance to cultivate Brock as a source I lost it that day. I had a feeling about him, too. It sounds like hindsight now, but if you were to ask me at the time which one of the people I saw that day would still be talked about thirty-five years later—Well, hell. I picked Seabiscuit too and didn’t put any money down.” He sipped at his water.

“Borneo was boss of the local Mafia then?”

“They called it the Unione Siciliana in those days. Maybe they still do. But yeah. Joey Machine pretty much had to cooperate with Sal, and even Jack Dance listened to him now and again when Jack wasn’t chipping away at the Machine mob, which was pretty near all the time. Those were wild days. A bunch of us prided ourselves on knowing who was fighting who and who was neutral from one week to the next. These days, gang-watching is about as exciting as matching socks.”

“You’d be surprised.” Canada sat back, playing with his mug. “When did Borneo switch his support from management to labor?”

“Just before the press did. That’d be about the time Harry Bennett opened fire on strikers with machine guns at the Ford plant. The Mafia always was sensitive to public opinion; also the smell of money. There was getting to be a lot of it in the union kitties. Anyway, Borneo wasn’t making many decisions by then. He was under federal indictment for interstate labor racketeering and had suffered his first stroke. Someone else was calling the shots.”

“Frankie Orr.”

Minor looked away, at the girl, who was now singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Frankie married Borneo’s daughter. I don’t know why he bothered. The old man knew what he was doing when he brought him in from New York.”

“You met him?”

“Just once.” He returned his gaze to Canada. “I was sitting as close to him as I am to you when he slit a man’s throat with the same knife he used to cut his steak.”

The inspector said nothing.

“It was in a private dining room at the old Griswold House. I don’t remember the man’s name. He was just some flunky who’d got on the wrong side of Frankie’s wallet. I remember he was eating rack of lamb, because it was floating in blood before he finished thrashing around. I haven’t been able to look at a plate of mutton since. Yeah, I met Frankie.” He drained his water glass and swallowed.