MOTOR CITY BLUE Read online

  Out of sheer boredom I consulted the listing and struck paydirt. Bogart was on Channel 50’s Eight O’Clock Movie. The Barefoot Contessa, not one of his best. But what the hell, it was Bogart. I had an hour and a half to kill before it came on. I settled into my only easy chair for a systematic and intelligent reading of the Free Press, starting with “Beetle Bailey.”

  The telephone hollered just as Rossano Brazzi stepped out of the bushes with Ava Gardner’s corpse in his arms. I gave it its head until the credits flashed on the screen, by which time it was winding up for its seventh ring.

  “Amos Walker?” A nothing voice, not young, not old. But definitely male. I confirmed his suspicion.

  “Ben Morningstar wishes to speak with you.”

  My grip didn’t crack the receiver; that would be an exaggeration. But it came close. Ben Morningstar wasn’t someone you spoke with on the telephone. He was a name in Newsweek, a photograph taken at a funeral by a G-man with a telephoto lens across the street, a pair of nervous hands fiddling with a package of Lucky Strikes in a Congressional hearing room on television in the early fifties. He was Anthony Quinn in a thinly veiled role that had never hit the theaters because the lawyers had it all tied up. He was the brass ring for every government prosecutor with his eye on the Attorney General’s office. To Hymie “the Lip” Lipschitz, a smalltime bootlegger and numbers book forgotten except in an old Warner Brothers whitewash they keep bringing back on the late show, he was eighty pounds of cement and a lungful of Detroit River. After a couple of seconds, disguised as an hour, I found voice enough to say, “I’m listening.”

  “Mr. Morningstar doesn’t use the telephone,” explained the voice. “We’ll send a car for you.”

  “From Phoenix?” That’s were Newsweek had him living these days.

  “From Grosse Pointe. Look for it in about an hour.”

  “No good. I’m out early. He can reach me at the office tomorrow afternoon.” Tomorrow morning Gibson went out to collect his unemployment check, and while he wasn’t dull enough to go on that errand without his canes, there was no telling what he might do in a hurry.

  “We’ll send a car.” The line clicked and buzzed.

  I stood there listening to the dial tone until the recording cut in to tell me to hang up. I cradled the instrument before the automatic warning system could start bleating. That’s one more thing technology has taken from us lately, the right to leave the telephone off the hook. My only consolation was that this was one time I hadn’t gotten myself into whatever it was I was in. So far as I knew.

  At five minutes to eleven the doorbell clanged. For crosstown it was good time, but not spectacular. The 1967 riots having dealt a crippling blow to whatever nightlife the city had left, streets generally shut down around ten-thirty on a weeknight. From then until two, when the blind pigs started doing business, you could score a direct hit with a mortar shell on Cobo Hall from the upper end of Woodward without fear of striking anything in between.

  When I opened the door I half expected a pair of plug-uglies poured into loud suits tailored to make room for their shoulder rigs, noses folded to the side and at least one cauliflower ear between them. I was disappointed to find a tall young black man standing on the stoop, the kind you see in the United Negro College Fund ads, all earnest and serious-looking in a blue Hughes & Hatcher under a light gray topcoat and black-rimmed glasses. If I’d wanted to see that I’d have gone down to Wayne State.

  “Mr. Walker?” A bold voice, with just a hint of Alabama around the r’s, once removed. It wasn’t the voice I’d heard on the telephone. He had prominent teeth that flashed white and straight against his coffee-colored skin when he spoke. With the glasses, he reminded me of Little Stevie Wonder, another Detroit product.

  “Where’s your friend?” I asked him.

  “Friend?”

  “Don’t you usually travel in pairs?” I struggled into my coat and screwed on my hat, smoothing the brim between thumb and forefinger.

  He killed a moment studying that from both sides. Then his expression cleared and he smiled, blinding me with his eighty-eights. “You’ve been watching too many old movies. I’m too dark for George Raft and too skinny for Barton MacLane.” He stood aside while I came out and closed the door behind me, locking it.

  “A black man who knows old movies,” I said, shaking my head as we made our way down the walk toward the street. I turned up my coat collar. The storm had blown over. The sky was as clear as Lake Michigan used to be and the cold was straight from outer space. Breathing it was like snorting ground glass. “I didn’t know you partook.”

  “We don’t spend all our time sticking up liquor stores and raping white women.” The way he said it brought the temperature down another notch. Suddenly he sensed that I was kidding. The grin flashed. “I try to avoid Stepin Fetchit.”

  I laughed. “I had to know who I was dealing with.”

  “Did I pass?”

  “Poor choice of words.”

  He gave that one all the mirth it deserved, and opened the passenger door of a yellow Pinto for me. There went another illusion. Next he’d be telling me they’d traded in their tommy guns on Daisy air rifles.

  As a driver he was no great shakes, but at least he knew who has the right of way at stop streets–a dying art–and had the presence of mind to fry the eyeballs of a couple of jokers who refused to dim their lights as they approached from the other direction. After a dozen blocks I asked him how long he’d driven cabs.

  His grin reflected the lights of an oncoming semi an instant before they reached the rest of his face. “How’d you know that?”

  “You know the shortcut from Hamtramck to Grosse Pointe, but I’d bet my next retainer you’re not from this part of town. The rest was guesswork.”

  “Sherlock Holmes, yet!” He let the tires slue their way through a slick spot without a qualm.

  “It works one time out of six.”

  “I’m beginning to think the boss didn’t make such a bad choice after all.”

  “Choice for what?”

  He changed the subject. “A white man who wears a felt hat,” he mused, eyes on the street ahead. “I didn’t know you partook.”

  “Ninety percent of human body heat escapes through the head and feet,” I said. “Want to see my socks?”

  He chuckled but didn’t say anything. The lines were drawn. I didn’t ask him about his mission and he kept his nose out of my wardrobe. That left the weather, which was obvious. We made the rest of the trip in silence.

  Whoever said all men are created equal must have had his eye on a home in Grosse Pointe. In this democracy, any boy can hope to grow up and live in the riverfront suburb, provided his credit ratingis A-1 and he’s prepared to mortgage himself to the eyes. Something over a hundred years ago, a healthy chunk of the area to the west was under the control of Billy Boushaw, boss of the First Precinct of the First Ward, whose old saloon and sailors’ flophouse stood at the northwest corner of Beaubien and Atwater streets, but that’s a slice of history they don’t serve in the local schools. Now it’s rich town, and the best-patroled square mile in the city. On maps it usually appears in green.

  The house was a letdown. It didn’t have more than forty rooms and the Austrian cavalry would have had to settle for column of sixes to get through the front door. An eight-foot stone wall surrounded five acres of yard over which kliegs mounted in trees near the house slung hot yellow light, which must have raised hell with the grass in summer. Here was where we crossed the line from public image into private necessity.

  The man who appeared on the other side of the steel picket gate as we pulled up to it had collar-length blond hair bare to the elements and crisp Teutonic features, the kind that look the same year after year until they finally fall apart overnight. He hadn’t anything to worry about for a while. He was young and tan and healthy and wore a navy blue peacoat over a white turtleneck shirt. I satisfied myself that he wasn’t the one I’d spoken with on the telephone either
, when my companion climbed out to speak with him and he answered with a German accent straight out of Stalag 17. Ben Morningstar was an equal opportunity employer.

  After a moment of conversation, during which he turned to squint at me through the windshield, the kraut nodded and unlocked the gate. He had it open by the time the black returned to the car and we drove through. A hairpin drive of freshly scraped asphalt swung past a skimpily modern front porch and broadened for the turnaround in front of an attached garage you wouldn’t call skimpy unless the Pontiac Silverdome had spoiled you. We parked in front of the porch and got out.

  The door was opened by a man in a red and black checked shirt fastened at the neck with a stringtie and a Hopi totem of turquoise and silver. He was about my height, which made him less than six-four and more than five-ten, and wore a broad smile that went all the way up to his eyes, brilliants mounted in a setting of deep crow’s-feet. Naturally lean, he had developed a slight paunch in recent years that he tried to keep cinched in with a belt with a rodeo buckle around Levi’s so new they rustled when he moved. His face was full of tiny cracks and creases and burned by a kind of sun Michigan never saw. He looked fifty. He might have been forty or sixty. He had a full head of crisp black hair that swept down in a natural break over his right eyebrow. It was a big head, much too big for the rest of him except for his hands, one of which enveloped mine in a grip like a third rail.

  “You’d be Amos Walker,” he observed, straining the smile a notch farther as he stepped aside to admit us. His drawl was pure El Paso.

  “And you’d be Paul Cooke.” I pried my hand loose and kneaded the bones back into place.

  The twinkle in his eyes deadened. “We met?”

  “You’re famous. Ever since ‘Sixty Minutes’ aired that exposé last year about your hotel in Tucson. What did they call it? ‘Little Caesar’s Palace.’ ”

  The grin was gone. He said something that was as much Detroit as it was wide open spaces, then, “You’ll hear more of it before I’m through. Do you know I had to close down after that ran? No more convention business. Guests were scared they’d be machine-gunned in their beds. Nothing bad ever happened in that place, not in the six years I owned it. Okay, one rape, eighteen months ago, and they threw that suit out of court. Turned out she was a hooker. Those New York bastards are going to learn something about the penalties for libel.”

  “Slander.”

  “Huh?”

  I said it again. “In print it’s libel, spoken it’s slander. Common mistake. TV newscasters make it all the time.”

  His face now was a desert. Nothing like a smile had ever grown there or ever would. He glanced at the black man, who took a step in my direction. I read his intent behind the glasses.

  “I’m heeled,” I said. “On my belt, a thirty-eight, left side.” I unbuttoned my coat one-handed and spread my arms.

  Without taking his eyes off mine, the younger man reached under my jacket, groped around, and drew the blue steel Smith & Wesson from the snap-on holster inside the waistband of my pants. He handed it to Cooke, who accepted it by the butt between thumb and forefinger and watched as the other lifted my wallet and went on to pat all my pockets and run an expert hand around the inside of my thighs down to my ankles. Then he rose and, almost as an afterthought, removed my hat and subjected it to the same thorough analysis. By the time he was finished he knew how much change I was carrying without having seen it. Finally he stepped back with a nod and turned the wallet over to the Texan. Cooke opened it, glanced at the photostat license and the buzzer I had obtained from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department during my process-serving days and never given back, and returned it to the other, who handed it back to me. My faith in the conventions was restored.

  “Not smart,” said Cooke, still holding the revolver as if it were a dead rat. There were a few in his occupation who had no taste for iron. They paid others to carry it for them.

  “I don’t usually play in this yard,” I replied.

  There was nothing for him in that, so he let it float. “You’ll get it back later,” he snarled, thrusting the gun toward the black, who grasped it less gingerly and dropped it into his topcoat pocket. Then Stevie Wonder and the Midnight Cowboy ushered me without further preamble across a quietly carpeted foyer and into the Presence.

  3

  THEY GOT THE BODYGUARD from central casting. On the short side, with bowed arms and a chest you couldn’t measure with an umpire’s chain, he was doinga fair imitation of Gibraltar in the space between the two sliding library doors as we approached. His black suit was painted on and he wore his striped necktie in a knot you couldn’t undo with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. He had no neck, or maybe he did have and someone had accidentally chopped off his head and pasted a brown, gray-streaked wig on the stump and penciled on features to make it do for a substitute. Certainly they could have been penciled on, flat and lifeless as they looked, with bladderlike scar tissue over the eyes and a crescent of dead white skin on each cheek. Either he had Roderick Usher’s ears or he had been watching through the crack between the doors, because we were still coming when he slid them open noiselessly on rollers and struck an Arabian Nights pose with one refinement, his thumb hooked in his lapel near where something spoiled the line of his suit beneath his left arm. I’d have laughed at him in the theater. Not here.

  “It’s all right, Merle,” Cooke told him. “This is the guy.”

  Merle looked doubtful. “He carrying?”

  Bingo. Smooth and moderately pitched, his voice was in such contrast to his bouncer build that I’d ruled him out as the man on the telephone before he’d opened his mouth. I was wrong. What’s more, seeing him and hearing him at the same time, I suddenly knew who he was.

  “Not now. Wiley frisked him.”

  “Check his socks?”

  Cooke nodded, and favored me with a wry look. “He always asks that,” he explained. “Ever since someone slipped past him two years ago with a baby Remington in his argyles.”

  I remembered the incident. Two bullets from a .32, one in the ribcage, the second describing a path beneath the scalp from a point just above the right temple around the skull to the nape of the neck. Morningstar was released from the hospital two weeks later, straight into a nest of popping flashbulbs. His assailant was scooped up from the floor of the victim’s living room by a couple of morgue attendants the afternoon of the shooting. There was the usual political circus afterward, the usual Grand Jury investigation, the usual congressional re-elections the following year to show for it. The unwanted publicity forced Morningstar into retirement, so they said, leaving a vacuum for all of two minutes until someone with a lyrical Mediterranean name stepped in to fill it.

  “Aren’t you Merle Donophan?” I asked the bodyguard.

  He lamped me with ceramic eyes. “What if I am?”

  “You were a Detroit Red Wing three years ago. I caught your act a couple of times at Olympia.”

  “Yeah?” Out the side of his mouth now. He was stepping into character. “The last one, too?”

  “I didn’t see it. I heard about it. A fight. You let some guy on the Maple Leafs have it with your stick.”

  “He hit me first. Only difference was I used two hands and he only used one. So how come they gave me the boot and not him?”

  “You aren’t still sitting in a sanitarium watching the wallpaper.”

  “Christ’s sake, Merle, let them in and close that fucking door. Draft’s worse than a bullet.”

  If you’ve never heard a man speaking with the aid of a mechanical voice box, I can’t describe it for you. A Dempsey dumpster or an automatic garbage disposal unit that’s suddenly found itself capable of human speech doesn’t cut it. Alvino Rey came close when he used to make his electronic guitar talk on the old “King Family Show.” That was what came to my mind when the monotonic complaint broke in from across the room.

  The place had all the warmth and security of a dentist’s waiting room. The only light
came from one of those copper Christmas tree floor lamps with funnel-shaped metal shades drooping from it like leaves on a rubber plant. Like those in most rental homes, mansions notwithstanding, the room had no personality at all. That had to be provided by the figure slouched in the green Lazy Boy next to the lamp.

  Whether Benjamin Morningstar, no middle name, was pushing eighty or dragging it behind him was something nobody knew, not even Ben himself. The record of his first arrest in 1917 had 1900 marked in the box labeled “Date of Birth,” but that was likely the educated guess of an overworked cop. A couple of years this way or that hardly mattered now in any case.

  He was wearing a mustard-colored baggy sweater with a shawl collar over what was probably an expensive white shirt, limp for lack of starch and too big for his wasted frame. Equally as loose, his trousers were charcoal gray with a pearl stripe and cuffs two-thirds the length of his perforated brown shoes. A stout cane with a rubber tip was hooked around the chair’s right arm. One hand lay twitching within its reach in his lap, a pale, spotted thing that reminded me of old blue cheese encountered unexpectedly in a wad of foil in the refrigerator. The other was raised to his face, where it clutched a flesh-colored cup of perforated plastic around his nose and mouth.

  His eyes were huge wet plums that shimmered behind thick corrective lenses as they watched us come in. Farther up, hair as black and gleaming as a new galosh grew straight back from his forehead with a single, startlingly white gash of a part following the path of a bullet long forgotten by everyone outside this room. Not a gray hair in sight. It made the rest of him look that much more worn out, like a shabby old chair with a crisp new doily pinned to its crown.

  When we were all inside and the doors were closed he lowered the filter, and then I saw his eagle’s beak with the skin stretched taut and shiny across its bridge and the strings of loose flesh suspended beneath his chin over the scars from his throat operation and the downward turn of his wide, arid mouth. For a moment a bloom of life showed in a thin red line around his muzzle where the cup had been pressed, but it quickly fled.