Stress (28 page)

He met Corbett’s gaze. “The wind died down for a second.”

For the first time since he was shot, Wolf was enjoying himself. He enjoyed watching the big man in the box squirm, enjoyed watching Corbett work. He’d heard the attorney was dangerously unpredictable, a borderline nutcase. It was the kind of insanity that should have been embraced by defense lawyers everywhere.

Now Corbett turned his back on Kubicek and headed back toward the table, winking at Wolf. “How long have you been a police officer, Sergeant?”

“Eighteen years last November.”

“In that time I imagine you’ve had your share of close calls?”

“That’s why they pay me.”

“Don’t be modest. Would you say you’ve been called upon to use your training and reflexes a number of times in your own defense?”

“A time or two.”

“And if you were standing all alone on a dark windy street corner late at night, and a man you never saw before came up to you suddenly with a gun in his hand, how would you react?”

As he spoke, the attorney brought his right hand across his abdomen inside the left flap of his maroon suitcoat. Something caught the light as he turned around.

Questioned later, Kubicek would say he went for a piece when he spotted the gun, but that was just for the record. He’d known it was there before he saw it, was coming up from his seat with his hand around the checked grip of the.45 while Corbett was still turning, his body between Kubicek and the weapon. And then there it was, just where he knew it would be, right at the end of the attorney’s out-stretched arm with its empty black eye staring right at him.

The .45 was up as well, although not as high, and it bucked twice against his ribs.

By then guns were going off all over the place.

Like every other cop in the front row of the balcony, Battle was up and moving at the sight of Corbett’s pistol; but unlike all the others, he was moving toward the stairs leading down to the main floor of the courtroom. A dozen or more speed holsters, spring clips, leather grannies, and drop-releases squeaked, rattled, sproinged, and skidded their burdens into swift-moving hands and then the air exploded and Battle, moving away from it, thought,
Jesus. Marble walls. Holy Jesus.

Chaos awaited him at the bottom of the stairs. At first he could see nothing for the gangle of arms, legs, and desperate faces swarming toward the exit. The bailiff, taller than most of the spectators by a head, stood in their midst, gesticulating with his gun to keep them herded in the right direction. As the bodies began to thin out, Battle saw Kubicek standing in the witness box and the Indian, rising, behind the defense table with his back still to Battle. There was no sign of the judge. Battle pointed his own revolver at the ceiling, steadied it by crooking that elbow into the palm of his other hand, and started that way.

Wolf saw when the first of Kubicek’s bullets struck Theophilus Carver Corbett. The attorney’s narrow shoulders hunched, his raised arm bent at the elbow, and the little .25 automatic, the square one that looked like a novelty cigarette lighter, wilted in his hand, swiveling upside-down on the pivot of his finger inside the trigger guard. He continued to crumple in on himself as the second bullet entered his body. In another moment there was nothing standing between Paul Kubicek and the Indian. Their eyes met. The bleakness in the sergeant’s remained. And Wolf knew.

Buzzing bits of metal struck the marble behind the judge’s bench, crackling on impact and adding puffs of white dust to the blue swirls hazing the air. Kubicek was aware of this, but separate from it, as if he were thinking with two heads. With Corbett down, the cop-killer stood before him, one hand gripping the oak table that was no defense at all, the other stretched out in front of him palm-first, no expression on his face, as if he expected to catch the bullet in mid-air. The arrogant shit.

All the time in the world now. The sergeant raised his arm to the level of his shoulder, sighted down it, just like on the range, and pumped a slug square into the middle of the impassive Indian face.

Silence, sudden and loud.

Andrew Porterman, Wolf, the defendant; it didn’t matter what you called him now, what was left of him lay half under the defense table with the upper half sprawled on the seat of the chair he’d been sitting in up until sixty seconds ago, one arm bent over the back.

The STRESS sergeant stood motionless, the big automatic still extended in front of him. Time lay on the air.

Sounds then, desperate pants and scrabbling. Kubicek turned his head. On the floor behind the bench, Judge Del Rio was crawling on his knees and elbows toward the door to his chambers, black-gowned buttocks pointed at the ceiling.

The sergeant lowered the .45, brought it around.

“
Guess who, cocksucker!
”

The force of the words blasted Kubicek back around. Straddling the center aisle between the spectator seats, Charlie Battle, his .38 clamped between both fists, stared at him with his eyes white all around the irises.

Kubicek raised his vision higher, to the twelve black muzzles trained on him from the balcony.

He laid the pistol on the railing of the witness box and clasped his hands behind his head.

T
HE SHOOT-OUT IN
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UDGE
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EL
R
IO’S COURTROOM WAS
investigated, recorded, and consigned eventually to local legend, where it joined such storied events as the Collingwood Massacre and the death of Harry Houdini. A postscript, unknown to all but a handful of insiders, involved the discovery of a number of jagged depressions in the marble wall behind the judge’s bench, describing a broken line twelve to eighteen inches above the floor, and corresponding precisely with Del Rio’s retreat on all fours to the sanctity of his chambers. Since all the bullets fired in the incident were police rounds, the conclusion was that one or more of the officers in the balcony had selected the judge for his target; but the only action taken in regard to this intelligence was an order from the commander of the Detective Division requiring all personnel present on that day to report to the firing range for target practice. And time resumed its flight.

May, siren that she was, broke sunny and seductive over the industrial and residential sprawl of metropolitan Detroit. Windows opened against the seal of the long winter, short sleeves came out of storage, and colds spread like mildew.

The worst, after the March mudslides and tempests of April, was to come.

June brought the dead hammer heat associated in southern regions with July and early August. By mid-month the mercury reached ninety, with humidity to match. Storefront windows glared like white steel in the sunlight. Parking meters squirmed behind ribbons of heat twisting up from the pavement. At five o’clock the city’s major arteries clogged with stalled vehicles like dead flies in a fixture, while anger grew like a stench.

Two motorists shot each other on Michigan Avenue over a broken taillight. They died twelve hours apart.

In a blind pig downtown, a man refused to put his shoes back on for another man who complained about the smell. He was shot to death for his stubbornness.

A husband on Mt. Elliott Street threatened his wife with a pistol when she protested his gambling. She scooped up a shotgun and blew him nearly in half.

In a similar neighborhood on the northwest side, another man shot his live-in girlfriend to death when she declined to share her welfare check with him.

A tenant in a residential hotel on East Jefferson shot his landlord in lieu of paying rent. The landlord was dead on arrival at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

This sudden seasonal upsurge in the violent-crime statistics of a city already notorious for its homicides attracted the attention of all three national television networks. Camera crews arrived and uncoiled cables in places that were barely acquainted with electricity. This renewed interest inspired United Artists to move up the world premiere of
Murder City
(formerly titled
Detroit P.D.
). The feature film opened the July 4th weekend at the Fox Theater on Woodward, once a grand motion-picture palace, more recently reduced to all night showings of third-rate black exploitation flicks and quasi-respectable stag films. It shared a double bill with
Deep Throat.

There were no searchlights or stretch limos in evidence opening night. Neither Mayor Gribbs nor Police Commissioner Nichols attended the event, despite their cameo appearances onscreen. The presence of the Detroit Police Department, however, was unmistakeable, particularly when a brawl broke out in the lobby after the first showing and a fully equipped riot squad waded into the mob with helmets and batons. Peace was restored, but when a similar disturbance took place following the eleven-thirty show, a deputy commissioner ordered the theater closed, “with regret.” When it reopened a week later,
Buck and the Preacher
topped the bill, supported by
Fritz the Cat.
That night a fistfight over the missing prize from a box of Cracker Jacks was quickly broken up by the ushers.

Wilson McCoy spent this entire period on the second floor of his condemned building on Twelfth Street. When news reached him that Wolf was in custody, he scrubbed the glutinous cosmoline jacket from a short-barreled Winchester pump twelve-gauge shotgun with its stock cut down to the pistol grip, cleaned the big shiny .44 magnum, loaded them, and kept both within reach at all times. Word that Wolf had been gunned down in broad daylight in a downtown courtroom had him carrying the Winchester with him to the toilet. He was certain now the FBI would mount a full-scale assault on the safe house, and to hell with the civil disturbance that would inevitably follow.

He lived on the canned goods he’d been stockpiling since the day he moved in. At night, writhing on his cot through the thick gummy weeks of June and early July with no electricity to operate a fan, he sweated pure sardine oil and Dole pineapple juice. When in all that time no attempt was made to breach his plywood-reinforced citadel, he made a decision. He thrust the revolver into the waistband of his army camouflage pants, covering the butt with his olive-drab sleeveless undershirt, and Went Out, leaving the shotgun behind. His little back-up .22 made a reassuring weight in his right boot.

The heat was brutal. He crossed to the shady side of Twelfth, where the shadows cast by the burned broken buildings lay like a damp towel across his shoulders; but the unaccustomed exertion of walking brought the sweat streaming down his face in moments. On Edison he turned east into the hammering sun, accepted his complimentary
Chronicle
from the glum old man in front of the bakery, skimmed through its pages for his name, failed to find it—confirming his faith that the FBI was stonewalling the media in its fever to spit him on its grill—and threw it into the ashcan at Woodrow Wilson. There the taller of the two brothers he knew from Tino’s, the one with the Wilt the Stilt goatee, was slumped in the shade of a graffiti-splattered iron bench left over from the days when the DSR bus still stopped there, but McCoy walked past without speaking. The feds had honeycombed his old neighborhood with informants; you never knew who you could count on from one day to the next.

Rounding the corner onto Hazelwood he slowed his pace, out of breath now, his clothing soaked through, the accelerated aging cycle of the wanted felon catching up with him at twenty-five. But the tension was lifting. Three-quarters of the way around his fiefdom and no attempt had been made to take him. The magic was still holding. The jackals, sated for the time being with their fresh carrion, were reluctant still to approach the lion in his lair.

His spirits were high when he reached Tino’s and took his usual seat in the corner. The wind from the ceiling fan cooled his skin and pushed the sharp-sweet odors of garlic, tomatoes, and hot grease all around. His half-dozen fellow patrons, all but one or two of whom were strangers, recognized him and began to whisper. He felt like Billy Dee Williams.

The owner’s big slab face showed no expression at all, although McCoy knew he was glad to see him. Of all the celebrities who had dined there in the past—Aretha, Stevie, Berry Gordy, the Brown Bomber—he was the only one who still came around. The last firefly.

“The Redd Foxx is good today,” Tino informed him, gesturing over his shoulder with a long-handled cooking fork. “I got six of the biggest fattest porkers you ever seen hanging in the cold room.”

McCoy tucked his red-and-white-checked napkin inside the scoop neck of his undershirt. “Gimme the Wilson McCoy, double order. Bring out three or four thick slices of that garlic bread while I’m waiting, and a big bowl of barbecue sauce. And a bottle of Ripple.”

“Hungry man.”

“No shit. I been eating out of cans so long I piss aluminum.”

The appetizers came, hot and steaming. The garlic made him belch and the jalapeño peppers in the sauce started him sweating all over again; but everything was delicious.

His appetite found its second wind just in time to devour the meatball sandwich that bore his name. He used the last of the bread to swamp the last trace of sauce from the bowl. Then he washed it all down with Ripple. The cheap wine shot straight to his head, filling it with great plans—plans he knew he’d have to scale down in order to fit them inside his little ten-block universe. It was a tight space, full of the same tired faces, any one of which might be hiding a scheme to take him down. But what the hell, it beat prison.

T
HE SHOOT-OUT IN
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UDGE
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IO’S COURTROOM IS A
part of Detroit lore; but outrageous as it was, it occupied center ring only briefly in the circus that was the period.

Between 1967—the year of the riots—and 1974, the number of homicides committed within the city limits of Detroit increased eightfold, climbing to 801 in 1974, a rate of 44.5 murders per 100,000 citizens.

In January 1971, a police crackdown squad, STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), was implemented to bring down the number of violent crimes taking place in the streets of the city.