Stress (21 page)

He wondered why he felt disappointed.

A long time later—just twenty minutes by his heavy-duty wristwatch, but clocks had a way of moving slowly in those rooms—Battle returned alone, closing the door behind him. Another tip-off that he didn’t know what he was doing; did he think the sergeant would take that to mean no one was listening in?

Well, play the part. “About fucking time,” Kubicek said, squashing out the butt in an old burn-hole on the scarred wooden table. “You through showing your mammy and pap around the office?”

“That’s raw even for you.” Battle leaned back against the door, folding his arms. “But I shouldn’t be surprised. You killed Junius Harrison because he happened to be black at an all-white party in Grosse Pointe.”

“Know that for a fact, do you?”

“There’s nothing to link him to Kindu Nampula and Leroy Potts, nada. Nampula and Potts were heavyweights. Harrison’s record squeaked except for a penny pop for selling joints. Just on the off chance he made some kind of contact with Nampula when they were both in Jackson, I checked with Records there. Since about two weeks into his orientation, Harrison worked as a file clerk and errand boy for the deputy warden; slept in the bedroom the deputy didn’t use because he had a house and family in Albion. Both the warden and the deputy warden provided references when he was released. Those references helped land him his job in the legal firm that sent him to the Ogden party that night with a message for one of the Ogdens’ guests. Harrison never mingled with the general population all the time he was behind bars. If he saw Nampula at all it was in passing. Not much opportunity to forge a criminal partnership there.”

“Harrison’s old man beat his old lady. He didn’t grow up no Ricky Nelson.”

Battle stared. “Who told you that?”

“I’m a cop. Lessons cost extra.”

“Never mind. I can guess. Okay, he had a bad childhood. You didn’t know that when you shot him. All you saw was the color of his skin.”

Kubicek shook a cigarette out of the pack and tapped it against the back of his hand. “I’m out on the streets, pal. I don’t see a whole hell of a lot of Swedes running away from smashed plate-glass windows with color TVs under their arms.”

“What if one’s a TV repairman running to catch a bus?”

“Shit.” Chuckling, he lit up. “Say Harrison had a legit reason to be there. Even the Grosse Pointe cops said there had to be someone inside.”

“Inside men know the layout. New Year’s Eve was his first visit.”

“Anybody can get hold of a floor plan. They needed a layoff man to watch their backs.”

Battle counted a beat. “What if I told you the Grosse Pointe police have the inside man in custody?”

Kubicek extinguished his match by pressing it between thumb and forefinger. The stinging burn established calm. “What if I told you Nixon wore Pat’s panties to the Kremlin? Buddy, you stink at this.”

“Inside woman, actually. Cops up there found men’s clothes and Kindu Nampula’s fingerprints all over the apartment of a server who worked for the company that catered the party. She’d worked the house once before, last Easter. The public defender’s cutting a deal: No jail time if she testifies.”

“Stupid fuckers, them Pointers. Heist guys don’t tell their cunts shit.”

“But if she plugs the hole, where’s that leave Junius Harrison?”

“Back-up, like I said. Most messenger boys don’t pack a piece, even in Detroit.”

“Harrison never saw that thirty-two. You dropped it next to his corpse. It was a throwaway piece you carried around just in case you shot an unarmed man.”

“Prove it.”‘

Battle straightened, walked around the table. Kubicek blew an elaborately unconcerned plume of smoke and flicked ashes at the overflowing tray. Gently, the black officer took the sergeant’s wrist and turned up the knuckles. Kubicek snatched his hand away.

“That’s a bad scrape,” Battle said. “Were you in some kind of fight?”

“Banged it on a doorjamb putting on my coat. Keep your fucking mitts off me, by the way. I didn’t come here to hold hands with no”—he took a drag—“rookie.”

“Sure you didn’t bang it on Russell Littlejohn’s hard head?”

For a bad second he thought he was going to choke on a lungful of smoke. He felt his face grow red. But he let out a shallow hack and cleared his throat and the moment passed. “Who the fuck’s that?”

“You probably heard the name and forgot it. Just another OD they pulled out of a culvert out in the neighborhoods. The ME said he’d been roughed around some shortly before death. Life’s never easy for an addict, I guess. Especially not the last part.”

“Don’t bleed all over the floor, son. Maintenance don’t like it.”

“Bad break for you,” Battle said, “if you’re telling the truth. Littlejohn was the pilot of the speedboat that was supposed to carry away Potts and Nampula and the plunder from the Ogden place. If anyone knew whether Harrison was in with them, it would’ve been him.

“He had pork in his stomach, and rice. After his Bronco turned up on Chicago, I beat a little leather near there and wound up at Greenleaf’s on Linwood. A waitress there who knew him slightly thought she saw him come in around six
P.M
. the evening before his body was found. Assuming that’s where he ate—Greenleaf’s famous for its hamhocks and rice, did you know that?—he stopped digesting somewhere between seven and nine. Would you happen to know where you were about then, Paul? Can I call you Paul?”

“You can call me Sergeant Kubicek. And you got to tell me what night it was before I can tell you where I was. That is, if I even want to.”

“You’re right. I didn’t really think you’d trip over one as old as that. Just boxing the compass. Like when I bothered to read you your rights before I took you in for questioning. I want to make sure nothing gets overlooked when I pull you down.” He was leaning over the sergeant’s shoulder, close enough to smell his aftershave.

Kubicek spat a grain of tobacco off his lower lip. “For what, wasting some junkie puke accomplice to armed robbery? Make it stick, Sambo. That didn’t look like no positive ID from the coon in the hall. Littlejohn’s old man, right? As much as any of you knows who’s whose old man.”

“I’ll make it stick. If Littlejohn could’ve told us Harrison was in with Nampula and Potts, he could’ve told us he wasn’t. And if he wasn’t, he didn’t pull a gun on you any more than you scraped your knuckles shadowboxing in your bedroom. So you took out Littlejohn. If I
don’t
make that stick, I’ll make Harrison stick. I’d rather it be the junkie puke: That’s Murder One. But I’ll settle for the messenger boy. It’ll get you out of the department anyway, and put one more nail in STRESS’S coffin.”

“
That’s
your wagon, ain’t it? Just like a nigger. Burn down the whole fucking barn to clean out the rats.”

“I’m glad you see it. It’s not every rat knows what he is.”

“You ain’t no cop. You don’t know what being a cop means.”

Battle blinked. He unfolded to his full height. “That’s rich. Coming from someone who’s no better than Leroy Potts or Kindu Atticus Nampula Geary. Hell, you’re worse. They never pretended to be anything but the punks they were.”

Kubicek stood suddenly. His chair skidded back and clattered over. Facing Battle, he was shorter by several inches but broader and, despite his apron of beef fat and doughnuts, harder. “Unless the oath changed since I came through, it don’t say nothing about putting your black skin ahead of the shield. Why’n’t you just quit and join up with Quincy fucking Springfield?”

“Probably because that would leave the department in the hands of guys like you.”

The door opened and Walter Stilwell came in, brows arched to the roots of his carroty hair. Battle and Kubicek turned to look at him.

“Chance meeting?” Stilwell asked.

“Shit.” The STRESS sergeant pushed out past Aaron Bookfinger standing in the doorway.

Stilwell put his hands in the pockets of his plaid polyester slacks, eyeing Battle with his tongue bulging his right cheek. “You’re just a team all by yourself, aren’t you? I guess me and Aaron missed a memo.”

Battle’s jaws ached from clenching. Willing them to relax, he took a deep breath and looked from Stilwell to Bookfinger and back.

“Which one of you told Kubicek about Harrison’s father?” he asked.

O
, THE LIFE OF A PUBLIC ENEMY.

Every evening at sundown—with certain minor variations in detail—Wilson McCoy put on his good brown leather hip-length coat, bent to tuck his mottled jeans into the tops of his freshly oiled stovepipe boots, plucked lint off the short springy nap of his black beret, and cocked it at a precise angle over his left ear, monitoring the operation in the shaft of clouded mirror over the basin in the little toilet where he’d performed all his ablutions for three years. Finally he ran his pocket pick through his stringy Ho Chi Minh goatee and headed for the stairs, whistling “Thank You Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin” through the gap in his front teeth and picking up swagger as he went.

Once on the street, he turned his collar up Elvis-style against the Arctic blast and started north to Edison with his hands in his coat pockets. There he exhaled the stale brown air of the empty blind pig where he lived and sucked in the midnight-blue oxygen of the street, heady as cold ether. Quite apart from the fact that it was the one time of day when he felt safe going out, McCoy liked that hour the best. It was the only time when you could actually see the complexion of the town changing from white to black, when the fat honkies in striped suits threw their briefcases into their cars for the drive home to the suburbs and the brothers and sisters changed from coveralls and baggy bellbottoms to sunset colors and skirts so short you could use them for napkins; and in the past he had, boy, he had. He told people that making the Most Wanted list was the best way he knew to get women. Just plant that old suggestion in their heads that a team of FBIs might bust through the door any second, he said, and they came to a screaming climax in about eight point four seconds.

In truth, though, women entered his world rarely, didn’t stay long, and left unsatisfied and disgruntled. It was a tiny planet, to begin with: ten blocks square, bounded by Edison to the north, Woodrow Wilson to the west, Hazelwood to the south, and good old Twelfth Street to the east, the one he was walking on now, in better days the Black Broadway of Detroit, now a windswept desert of dirty snow, skittering Want Ad sections, charred timbers, and the echo of angry voices, five and a half years old now and losing shape, sounding more arid more like the hollow keening of monotonous despair. When a woman did penetrate its orbit, she did so for money, and if the name Wilson McCoy meant anything to her at all it meant getting paid up front, a John who was shot full of federal holes being notoriously difficult to bill. Then right in the middle, just when he was starting to have a good time, he would wonder if she was some kind of undercover operative, a dusky Mata Hari dispatched to divert his attention until he was helpless with orgasm and unable to struggle against an invading horde armed with grease guns and handcuffs. Then he would become flaccid, and when the bitch failed to get him back up she would yank on her panties and flounce out to spread the word on the street that the great Wilson McCoy was a limp wad. The risk to his reputation was too great, and so he had told Wolf to cool it on the sporting ladies for a while. A while having been ten months and some days as of this last week of January 1973.

The old man who sold papers in front of the burned-out bakery on Edison solemnly handed a copy of that day’s
Chronicle
to McCoy, who never paid; in 1969 the old man’s daughter, a sophomore at Wayne State University, had been walking past a safe house on Cass on her way to school when a bullet shattered her spine. The slug was eventually traced to a .30-30 issued to a Detroit police officer backing up an FBI raid on the Black Panther hideout, which at the time had been unoccupied for several weeks. The last McCoy had heard, the girl was in a state-owned nursing home in Monroe or somesuch place, getting spoon-fed Malt-O-Meal and watching
Days of Our Lives
during the hours when she would have been studying for her master’s.

Paper tucked beneath his arm, he walked east to the corner of Woodrow Wilson, where he slapped five with a couple of brothers he knew by their nicknames only from the rib place on Hazelwood. One of them had a transistor radio, over which McCoy learned that the Pistons were taking a beating from the Lakers in the second quarter.

Which what else was new.

“Hey, man, turn on the news.”

Obediently the brother with the radio, a long drink of water with a Wilt Chamberlain Vandyke who looked as if he must have played a little round ball in his time, thumbed the wheel over to CKLW, the Windsor station, just in time to hear Grant Hudson announce that two “punks” had been taken away in a “meat wagon” from the scene of the botched robbery of a drug operation on Sherman earlier that evening. McCoy, who liked the stentorian-voiced news reader’s snide copy even if he wasn’t a brother, didn’t recognize the name of either of the robbers-turned-victims. When the headlines gave way to a traffic report with no mention of McCoy, he concluded that an FBI blackout was in force. They were planning some kind of maneuver. He made a mental note to put Wolf to work on it. For an Indian he was plenty good at sniffing out the scuttlebutt on the street. McCoy himself was piss-poor; pushed too hard, tipped his hand. Didn’t matter what kind of hero you were in that situation, when people found out you wanted something, really wanted it, they stood on it like it was the only thing holding them up.

He took his leave of the pair and started down Wilson, wondering if one or both of them were reporting to the feds. He’d learned at lot about people since his late teens, when he’d first put on the black beret to get himself out of his mother’s house. In those days things had seemed pretty clear: black to black, white to white, and no overlap. That was before one of his closest friends had turned state’s evidence to indict him and a half-dozen others in return for immunity, and before a white attorney in a five-hundred-dollar suit had sprung him clear of a homicide charge when the only question among those who followed the case was whether McCoy would go to Jackson or Marquette for his life stretch. Wising up was the shits.