Motown (30 page)

“Springfield’s errand boy. We’ve had him here a couple of times. Assault, disturbing the peace. Nickel-and-dime pops.”

“This incident last Tuesday at the front desk, was that nickel and dime?” The commissioner’s tone was unreadable.

“Somebody overreacted. As soon as I heard about it I had everyone released.”

“Did you order Sergeant O’Pronteagh to return an unlicensed firearm to Springfield?”

That son of a bitch O’Pronteagh had made an end run. Now he knew where this was going. “I thought it advisable that we treat the thing as a non-incident.”

“You’re not on trial.” Girardin sounded exactly like a judge. “We’re just collecting facts. You should have reported to me, but we’ll talk about that later. You should know that this Mahomet character has been spending quite a lot of time lately at the headquarters of the Black Afro-American Congress on Kercheval. It’s a blind pig operated by Wilson McCoy. We’ve quite a file on McCoy,” he told Cavanagh. “He was formerly connected with the Black Panthers and we think this BLAC group is a politically sanitized Panther front.”

“It’s news to me. About Mahomet, I mean.” Canada wondered where the commissioner got his information. Was there another secret squad buried somewhere on the force that answered only to Girardin? Mentally he upgraded the department’s epoch from feudal to Borgian.

“In the light of this revelation,” the mayor said, “would you care to re-think your position on whether Springfield’s fight with Patsy Orr is racially motivated?”

“It’s a dangerous assumption, based on the fact that a man works at one blind pig and socializes at another. Your honor.”

“Jerry. We’re in the team locker room now.” The mood lifted slightly. Cavanagh stood and came around the desk and leaned back against it with his arms crossed. Canada admired the way the mayor’s gray flannel jacket didn’t gap or buckle. “Ray tells me you blame outside agitation for the shooting on Cadieux last week. What’s your evidence?”

The inspector was prepared for that question. If he mentioned Albert Brock’s involvement, Cavanagh would jump all over it, maybe even go public to discredit Brock. Fresh politicians didn’t understand the importance of deals. “The car was a neon sign,” Canada said. “Why steal an old Cadillac unless you want to leave the impression Negroes were involved? Also it’s plain they weren’t out to kill this trigger DiJesus or they wouldn’t have missed with two loads of double-O buck. It’s what we call a Boston tea party.”

“Why?”

“Blame it on Indians,” said Girardin, who knew the language. “Who do you suspect?”

“Frankie Orr.”

Cavanagh made a noise of disgust and circled the desk. “He’s been in Sicily since Thuman.”

“He’s back.”

Girardin rose. “Here?”

“Puerto Rico. A place called the Hotel Pinzón. He’s been there at least a month.”

“How long have you known?”

“A little over a week.”

“You’re an independent son of a bitch, aren’t you, Inspector?” The mayor was back to titles. “You’re supposed to report directly to me.”

“Your honor, at the time we found out I didn’t know if it came under the squad’s jurisdiction.”

“You knew about Orr’s connection with the Steelhaulers and Albert Brock.”

“Sir, with respect, I know the men in my squad and I don’t know the people in your office. If it leaked out that Orr was on U.S. soil he might spook and run home and we’d be back to square one. I was planning to report as soon as we knew what he was up to.”

“So now you know. Or think you do.”

“Any way you shake it up it comes down the same: Frankie’s the only one who stands to gain from a policy war.”

Cavanagh stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed down on Greektown. The Grecian Gardens was visible from the window, the first cloud on his administration’s horizon; some of the columnists had begun to hint at a connection to his office. When he turned back, first names were restored. “None of this is evidence, Lew.”

“Evidence is for convictions, your honor. Jerry. I’m saying it doesn’t feel like what it looks like.” It sounded lame. It always did when he discussed gut reactions with people who weren’t cops.

“Unfortunately, the people of Detroit don’t share that feeling,” Cavanagh said. “I can’t afford to. If you’re right, and Orr is stirring up a hornet’s nest for his own ends, the situation remains the same. Ray?”

The commissioner went behind the desk and sat down. He lifted a typewritten sheet off the blotter and held it out. “I think you’ll recognize some of these addresses, Inspector.”

The first one on the list belonged to the Morocco Motor Hotel on Euclid. He knew most of the rest, and as he took them in he knew a mounting horror unlike anything he’d felt since the jump that had placed him in enemy hands in 1944; the sensation, like a cold fist clenching his entrails, of a tragic mistake in the making. “Blind pigs and dope houses,” he said.

Girardin said, “I’m placing Motor Traffic and the Tactical Mobile Unit at your disposal, but don’t call in the commandos unless you need uniformed backup, and for God’s sake don’t order Mounted without notifying me first. The last thing we want to do is look like Cossacks. I want a staggered pattern of raids, Saturday nights mostly between four p.m. and midnight when manpower is at the maximum, but not
every
Saturday night, so they’ll be kept guessing. Now, that’s not after hours, so there will be no liquor law violations except in cases where there’s no permit to sell. Concentrate on known felons. I don’t care if the arrests don’t hold up, but don’t take anyone in unless he’s in possession of dope or a concealed weapon. These aren’t rousts. And I don’t want the switchboard jammed with complaints about unnecessary force or racial epithets on the part of the arresting officers. Two of those against the same officer is an automatic suspension. Oh, and if you do require backup, ask for black officers. That goes without saying.”

“They’ll riot.”

The commissioner shook his head. “I’ve studied procedure in the Watts disturbance inside out, and most of the tactical errors had to do with misguided attempts to mollify the rioters, such as withdrawing from the scene once the trouble started in hopes the anger would burn itself out. Go in fast, avoid physical contact as much as possible, and get out with your prisoners before the reaction sets in. Make it look routine.”

“We’ll continue the sweep through August,” Cavanagh said. “The strategy is to keep the agitators from settling down and gaining a following through the hot weeks, which is when these things boil over. The Michigan winter is our strongest ally.”

“You don’t understand these people, Mayor. They’ve been dealt off the bottom for a long time and they’re just waking up to the fact that they’re no longer a minority, not on Kercheval and along Twelfth. They don’t need a tent meeting to get up a good mad. Riots aren’t planned.”

“Our sources say different.” Girardin folded his hands on the blotter. “Wilson McCoy and this golden-throated fellow Mahomet have been exhorting anyone who will listen to secure weapons and go to war with whitey. They aren’t singling out the Sicilians.”

“What sources?”

“The usual. Paid informants, addicts busted for possession trying to deal their way out of custody before withdrawal. You know the animal.”

“I know they’re unreliable. They’ll say anything you want to hear for the price of a lid. You have to know how to interrogate them if you’re going to get anything worth using.”

“I think there are others who are as qualified as you,” the commissioner said stiffly. “I’m giving you this detail because of your experience and because you’ve been in on the situation from Day One. You can turn it down, but I can’t think of anyone better equipped to handle the O’Pronteaghs in the ranks.”

Suddenly Canada wanted out of that cotton-wrapped room. It was beginning to remind him of the nursing home where his Uncle Herman sat day after day with only his clear blue eyes moving in the withered skull; a place where dead men waited for the waiting to end.

He folded the sheet of paper and put it in his inside breast pocket. “When do you want me to start?”

“This coming Saturday, unless you need more time. You’re the driver.” Girardin grasped his hand. “Thanks, Lew. My first editor at the
Times
told me a great editor was one who could claim he had one reporter he could count on. That goes for police chiefs and cops. I’m a great police chief.”

Cavanagh gave him the single-pump politician’s handshake. “Good luck.” Humming, he turned back to the window. Canada was out of the room before he recognized the tune as the mayor’s favorite, “The Quest,” from
The Man of LaMancha:
“To dream the impossible dream …” Rumor said he planned to use it in his presidential campaign.

On his way from the elevator to the seventh floor squad room, the inspector stopped at the vending machine in the hall and invested thirty-five cents in a pack of Camels. From April 1961 to last week, when he had watched them bag up Curtis Dupree’s decomposing remains at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, he hadn’t smoked so much as one cigarette. Since then he had gone through a carton.

O
F
W
ILSON
M
CCOY,
Q
UINCY
Springfield had said, “Wilson ain’t pissed because he’s black. He’s pissed because he’s an asshole and everybody knows it.” Lydell Lafayette had added that on five minutes’ acquaintance he was ready to practice discrimination against McCoy “with a fry-pan upside his head.” Now they were seated with him at the card table in the little utility room off the basement where McCoy sold drinks from 2:00 a.m. until dawn.

The block, bounded by Kercheval and Pennsylvania, was crowded with single-and two-family houses separated by strips of brown grass scarcely wide enough for a man to walk on without brushing against a wall on either side. The boards were parched and paintless and in the daytime old people sat on the sagging porches looking as bleached and gray as the horsehair sofas and overstuffed chairs that had grown too shabby for even the dark cramped living rooms and been exiled.

The house belonged to McCoy’s mother, a nearly deaf woman of sixty-five who slept each night through believing her son worked nights waxing the floors at Felician Academy High School, a job he’d been fired from nine months earlier after an electric typewriter and a hundred dollars in staples and stationery disappeared from the office during his shift. At twenty he was the last of eleven children still living at home, a slat-thin, unlikely-looking Black Panther alumnus with a sunken chest, a straggly Fu Manchu moustache and chin whiskers, and an enormous Afro with a black beret clinging to one side at all times like moss on a boulder. Tonight he was wearing a dirty pinstripe vest over no shirt and bell-bottom jeans that looked as if they’d been urinated on by the Pistons bench. Quincy suspected the Panthers had turned him out for reasons of hygiene.

“You sure this is accurate?” McCoy dropped ash from his cigarette on the sheet of ruled notepaper in front of him and tried to brush it off. His hand was oily with sweat and he left a muddy smear on the diagram. The room had no ventilation.

“I drew it myself. Been there a hundred times.” Quincy used his finger for a pointer. “This here’s the express. It stops only two places, the ground floor and forty-three.”

“Looks too easy.”

“Well, there’s security, and people going in and out all the time.”

“Fuck the people. We need to know how many guards.”

“Easy to get. What kind of guns you need? We got a connection.”

“Full auto.”

“Noisy.”

“What we want,” McCoy said. “Louder the noise, less pain-in-the-ass heroes we got to deal out. Plus we might not have time to play Annie Oakley. Spray and run.”

“I don’t want no bystanders hit.”

“No big deal, blood. That time of day downtown, all’s we hit is white meat.”

“Hey, I ain’t mounting no crusade for the fucking race. I’m just trying to stay alive.”

“Okay, man. Everything’s cool.” Backpedaling. Quincy seemed to be the only man, black or white, whom McCoy feared to cross.

Lydell coughed; or maybe it was a laugh. The cough had become such a constant that Quincy never noticed it unless a third party expressed annoyance. The loss of weight was now unmistakable, and lately Lydell had complained of a sore back. He had taken to carrying a handsome walnut stick with a gold knob to help him get up and down. But he refused to see a doctor. The man who had escalated a few bar-splinters in his hand and wrist to the level of a Purple Heart now dismissed obvious serious illness as simple exhaustion. And he was smoking more than ever.

McCoy showed no irritation at the persistent coughing. He was the most perfectly self-absorbed individual Quincy had ever met. Quincy had heard somewhere that McCoy had been allowed to sleep in the same bed with his parents until age fifteen, at which time his sixty-two-year-old father had left home to move in with a waitress and part-time prostitute who lived down the street. After that, according to the rumor, Wilson had gone on sleeping with his mother. A few months later the father and his mistress were found shot to death in the bedroom of their apartment. The motive was officially recorded as robbery, but the police couldn’t explain why the thief would have reloaded his revolver twice and emptied it three times into the couple on the bed. Wilson and his mother were questioned, but the murder weapon never turned up and the case remained open, as did so many others in neighborhoods like Kercheval.

“How many men you going to use?” Quincy asked.

“How many you want? We can go in with a dozen and cover all the exits.”

“Too flashy. Cops might not spend too much taxes looking for whoever offed a bunch of thugs, but if we rub their noses in it they dog us into the ground.”

“We can do it with three. Somebody got to cover your innocent lily-butt bystanders.”

Their conversation was wrapped in the whooshing and thudding of the old gas water heater in the corner and a clatter of voices and music from the basement-turned-saloon outside, where a radio played straight Motown for the drinkers and dancers. When the noise swelled suddenly, McCoy leaned back in his chair and opened the door.