Motown (23 page)

Detroit Police Department. Most of the people in the pictures were unknown to him. In one, Hattie Long, in a low-cut gown with silver clips at the shoulders, sat at the back of a horseshoe-shaped booth with her hands resting on the arms of a skinny young man in a tweed jacket and crooked bow tie and an even younger roughneck wearing a two-hundred-dollar suit and the broadest grin Canada had ever seen. His curly hair needed trimming. Canada commented on the picture.

“The one on the left is Connie,” Susan Niles said. “The big one is Jack Dance.”

He looked closer at the roughneck, at the expression and posture of a youth well aware of his good looks. Nothing in his appearance suggested that he was the man the press had dubbed Jack the Ripper after bullets from his gun cut down a teenage girl by accident during a gangland assassination attempt on Sylvester Street. “He looks like the captain of a college football squad.”

“Aunt Harriett said he received more fan mail during his murder trial than Valentino.”

He turned over a few more leaves, questioning and commenting as he went. He didn’t know what he was looking for and the blind woman was no help. She seemed to be waiting.

By the time he found what she was waiting for he had seen so many lost faces he almost went past it. Two men were seated at a Formica-topped table with schooners in front of them and a forest of tall-necked beer bottles standing between. They appeared to have just noticed the presence of the camera and were turning in that direction when the picture was taken. The man on the left, dressed in a forty-dollar suit and the characteristic white socks of the last working-class generation, was Albert Brock; twenty-five years younger perhaps, dark-haired and powerfully built rather than stocky, but Canada had been staring at his likeness too much lately not to recognize him. The other man, older and dressed more expensively but constructed along similar lines, looked vaguely familiar. He had dark thinning hair cut short and a five o’clock shadow. Recognition nudged gently at the inspector’s memory.

Susan Niles interpreted the long silence. “You found it.”

“Harry Bennett. That’s Harry Bennett. When was this taken?”

“Connie asked the same question the first time I showed it to him. It’s dated on the back.”

He dismounted the photograph from its corners and turned it over. The notation, written in blurred pencil, read “Roseville 5/28/37.” He read it aloud.

“Aunt Harriet was operating a beergarden in Roseville then. How’s your UAW history?”

He ran a silent check of his knowledge of the United Auto Workers and caught himself shaking his head. “Not as good as yours, I bet.”

“On May twenty-seventh, nineteen thirty-seven, Walter Reuther, Richard Frankensteen, and other union officials gathered in front of the Ford plant in Dearborn to hand out leaflets. A gang of thugs hired by Harry Bennett beat them up and threw Reuther down the steps of the Miller Road overpass. The Battle of the Overpass, it was called.”

“That much I know. I didn’t know the date.”

“Not many do. You also might not know that a number of other unions went out on strike in sympathy as a result of the action. One of them was the Steelhaulers.”

It was as if a door in his brain had been opened to a room full of light. The blind woman sensed it; nodded.

“Brock was a shop steward for the Steelhaulers in nineteen thirty-seven,” she went on. “The question is, what was he doing having a beer—several beers—with the man responsible for the overpass fight when every other union man in town was burning Bennett in effigy?”

“We could ask Bennett.” But the answer was no less rhetorical than the question. Henry Ford’s strongarm chief, long since forced into retirement by the old man’s grandson, was an aging recluse, decomposing bitterly inside a ring of his own security men in a castle he had built for himself in Ann Arbor, turrets and all. Canada fingered the snapshot. “Who took it?”

“Aunt Harriett. She was a shutterbug after Repeal. I think she knew about the cancer early and wanted to leave some kind of record behind. She used to say the marks a prostitute makes generally burn away with the first cigarette. I was her favorite family member, so she left it to me.”

“If it can be proved Brock made some kind of secret deal with Bennett, the union will dump him in the next election. It wouldn’t matter how long ago it happened; the majority of the rank-and-file are old enough to remember Bennett and hate his guts. I wish there were some way to verify the date.”

“There’s a newspaper in the frame. Is the date visible?”

It was folded lengthwise on the table by Bennett’s elbow. The partial masthead identified the paper as the
News.
Part of a headline said something about Spain. Bennett’s left hand rested on the corner where the date would appear. “No,” he said. “But if this headline is about the Spanish Civil War, that would narrow it down to thirty-seven. We could blow it up, match the issue to the one on microfilm in the library or at the
News.
Bennett would probably be carrying around that day’s newspaper, but it wouldn’t matter if it were a week old. He certainly wouldn’t have it
before
the twenty-seventh, when keeping company with him wouldn’t be so incriminating. Can I borrow this?”

“You can keep it. I have no more use for anything in the book.” The blue eyes, entirely ornamental, were shadowless.

He placed the picture carefully in his billfold, closed and returned the scrapbook to the table, brushed the dust from his trousers, and used his handkerchief to wipe his hands. With nothing more to do, he stood. Her face followed him up. “Personal question,” he said.

“Why.”

“Yes. I don’t think you care about Albert Brock one way or the other. You’re not arbitrarily malicious.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I was a cop before I became an inspector. When you lose that you’re through.” He waited.

“That scrapbook is Hattie Long’s life,” she said. “As long as it just sits there she’s dead, really dead. This way—well, whatever the result, it’s like she’s still out there somewhere. Of course you’ll let me know what happens.”

He promised he would, and took her hand when she started to rise. She squeezed her thanks and let go. Her fingers were strong and calloused lightly at the tips. “What do you do, Miss Niles?”

“I teach Braille at Cranbrook.” She smiled, suddenly and dazzlingly. “Aunt Harriett might approve. I think.”

“I’ll bring back the picture.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to.”

“All right.”

She walked him to the door. He put on his hat and opened it. “You see plenty for someone without sight.”

“I’m blind,” she said. “Not stupid. Good night, Inspector.”

G
ERALD
W. L
ILLEY—
M
AHOMET
to his new Twelfth Street friends—walked the five miles from Kercheval to Collingwood. Wilson McCoy had offered him a lift, but he’d said no. It was a nice night after the rain and he wanted the extra time to come down from his high.

Not from drugs. He had given those up in all forms when he read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X;
impressed with the ethic of the Black Muslims but with no clear idea of how to join formally, he had jettisoned his Christian and family names and adopted a variant spelling of Mohammed. The change was easy because both his parents were dead and his siblings scattered, and he had no friends. The degree from Wayne State University, for which he had washed dishes and bused tables for six years, had cut him off from others of his race. He’d thought of enrolling in divinity school after graduation, but when a distant cousin was lynched in Georgia because he resembled another Negro overheard shouting drunken obscenities at a white woman on the street, he decided that God had abandoned his people. Rising tuition costs and a discouraging academic record in his senior year ended subsequent plans for a career in teaching.

A stint at singing, involving a six-record contract based on an audition at Motown, went the same way when Berry Gordy laid an arm across Mahomet’s shoulders and said, “Man, you can diagram a sentence, but you ain’t got
soul.
” The records weren’t released.

He let his life slide after that. When jobs he applied for, and for which his education qualified him, went to white men who had barely finished high school, he came to wish that he had never opened the books; they merely promised worlds that were closed to him. About the time he read Malcolm X’s book he learned of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a Negro seamstress who had stood trial in Alabama ten years before for refusing to sit in the back of a bus. Rosa Parks had given up her back seat for one beside Malcolm in Mahomet’s esteem. Although he had lost his faith, he had continued to sing in Baptist choirs as an outlet for his voice and training. But his bitterness at sermons preaching brotherhood and mercy—things plainly denied everyone in the congregation—had begun to boil over in the form of impromptu speeches needled with invective and blasphemy. He was asked to leave. Deprived of that forum, he had carried his anger to restaurants, private clubs, and nightspots where Negroes were tolerated only in the livery of service. Inevitably, he was ejected. Just as inevitably, he had returned, to be beaten and arrested for creating a disturbance. It was a slow, passive form of suicide that would eventually have fulfilled its purpose had not blind luck—he resisted God yet—flung him into a cell opposite Quincy Springfield’s.

When, the day after their brief first acquaintance, a turnkey opened his cell door and told him that Springfield had bailed him out, he’d experienced a lightning revelation of the sort that he had only read of in eighteenth-century British novels:
Only your own will look out for you.
Nothing he had learned since joining Springfield’s loyal little group had changed that impression. Certainly not Krystal, who had formed the habit early of sharing with Mahomet the cash that Springfield gave her in hopes she might spend some of it in shops that wouldn’t dress her like a Twelfth Street whore.

He had invested some of that money in the suit he was wearing, white linen with a pinched waist and flared trousers, woven so tight it felt like cool silk against his hot skin. Walking along with the jacket flung over his shoulder, he admired his reflection in store windows. The contrast between white vest and pink shirtsleeves and tie made a bold statement that matched the defiance of his verbal message. The fag tailor had tried to sell him a Panama, but he’d refused; hats left ugly ledges in his painstakingly relaxed and brilliantined hair, like laminated porcupine quills. The suit, along with the high-heeled black patent-leather boots he always insisted on regardless of the condition of his finances, added inches to his stature.

The talk had gone well. Wilson McCoy, a firebrand barely out of his teens whom Mahomet distrusted instinctively, had been enthusiastic about the reception and asked him to come back Saturday night when he could promise more than fifteen listeners. Mahomet had said he’d get back to him. Even then he knew he’d accept. He had found his calling.

He scarcely remembered the words he’d used. They were but fuel to get him around from behind the long table that served as a bar after hours while the fifteen in their folding chairs listened at first with skepticism, then swelling anticipation and finally, as he bore down on them, with the rhythmic, junglelike grunts of acquiescence he’d heard so often from congregations in the thrall of the Reverend Otis R. R. Idaho those Sundays when the fever was truly upon him. The words didn’t matter in the end, only the fire and the spirit. He had struck Soul, and the vein was deep, deep. Sex was never as draining nor as satisfying; although he had to admit that most of the sex he had experienced was part of a monetary transaction, and its passion therefore suspect. Women had wanted him, for his looks and his hair and his voice, but
that
kind of transaction called for a sacrifice after the fact. Once sated, Mahomet’s appetites turned in new directions.

Yes, it was a changing fate that had ushered Quincy Springfield into the life of Gerald W. Lilley, Jr.

A pair of headlights on high beam swung around the corner, blinding him momentarily and shrinking his vitals; the thing with the Sicilians was always a dash of cold water in the face of his good fortune. Despite his fistfights with the Man in all his many incarnations, Mahomet was not physically brave. He felt a warm release when the vehicle, a sport model of some kind on a short wheelbase, sped past. Then its tires shrieked and it reversed directions in a shower of flaming rubber. The door on the driver’s side sprang open. Someone bounded out and seized him by the shoulders.

“Jesus, we been looking for you all over the West Side! You just shufflin’ along, gots all the time in the world.”

The wasted features staring down at him were Lydell Lafayette’s.

“What happened?”

“Quincy got busted is what. Looking for you. The war’s on. We gots to get down to the police department and post bond. How much cash you carrying?”

He pried himself free and picked his jacket up off the sidewalk. He found six dollars in a side pocket. Lydell coughed disgustedly.

“I got about a hunnert. We’ll go up to the place and get what’s in the box.
Shake
it, brother! That nightside’s hell on niggers.” He was climbing under the wheel.

Mahomet got into the passenger’s side carefully. He’d wet himself when Lydell grabbed him.

The name on the watch desk at 1300 was O’Pronteagh, but the sergeant’s accent was flat Midwestern and he had the patrician features of a Roman senator, all high cheekbones and eagle’s beak and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair on a tall tan forehead. Despite the airlessness of the big room with a single fan humming in a distant corner, his collar was buttoned and his necktie snugged up under an Adam’s apple as big as an eightball.

“Your boy’s being booked downstairs,” he said. “Carrying a concealed weapon. You can visit him in the morning at County.”

Lydell said, “We’re here to post bond.”

“Sorry.”

Lydell took the roll from his pocket and thumped it down on the counter. “They’s a thousand here. That ought to cover it three times and change.”