Motown Read online

  “You got kids, Inspector?”

  “Not in my worst nightmare.”

  “I got three, and the only time they grow out of anything is when they grow into something worse.”

  Canada made no response and the pair settled into a mulch of silence. They had been watching the alley for an hour and a half. Two stray dogs had entered it an hour apart, sniffed around the base of the two painted trash cans standing by the fire door, then moved on. In between them an emaciated Negro in a streaked World War II army coat whom Esther vaguely recognized from some time or other in the squad room at 1300 had stumbled in, taken something from one of the cans the dogs had snubbed, and stumbled out after a minute wiping his hands on his coat. There had been no other activity. The alley ran behind an auto parts store on Gratiot.

  The sergeant’s Ben-Gay burned Canada’s nostrils. The inspector had a sensitive nose, made more so by his personal cleanliness. His nails were always pinkish white and his black hair, barely splintered with silver at forty-nine, glistened, although he used nothing on it but hard water and Lifebuoy soap, a lot of Lifebuoy soap. His dark inexpensive suits and white shirts were never anything less than immaculate. “You could eat off the son of a bitch,” he had overheard his wife complaining to her sister on the telephone shortly before she walked out on him. She’d told him then that if she wanted to live in a bandbox she’d have married a haberdasher, and advised him to see a psychiatrist. He didn’t need to see a psychiatrist. He knew why he was the way he was.

  “This snitch of yours reliable?” asked the sergeant.

  “How reliable is a snitch?”

  Esther didn’t answer. “Nineteen years I been a cop, I never saw a tip come to anything but crap. Tips don’t compare with good police work.”

  “You know the drill. We run ’em out.”

  “What I don’t know is what an inspector’s doing on a nickel stakeout like this. Day I make lieutenant I put my feet up on my desk and don’t take them off till the department buys me dinner.”

  “That’s the day LBJ makes Eartha Kitt ambassador to South Vietnam.”

  “I still think we’re—”

  Canada touched Esther’s knee.

  A late-model Pontiac had coasted to a stop in the alley just under the edge of the light from the lamp on the corner. The door on the passenger’s side caught the light on its markings when it opened. DETROIT POLICE.

  The sergeant said shit.

  The door on the other side came open almost simultaneously and the officer who had been driving moved to the back of the car. That end was in darkness, but the flatulent creak of a trunk hinge in need of oil reached the men in the unmarked Fury. A moment later the officer came back into the light carrying a chrome-plated pinch bar.

  The sergeant said shit again.

  Both officers were at the fire door now. Canada thought he knew which was which. Their faces were out of focus at that distance and they were built similarly, but he knew there was a fifteen-year difference in their ages, and older officers always carried themselves the same way; a legacy of the automobile industry’s inability to design a seat that didn’t ruin a man’s back after years of eight hours’ daily contact. The man with the wrecking tool—it would be Wasylyk, a year or two behind Canada at the Academy—slid it between the lock hasp and the jamb and tore the screws out of the wooden frame after two tries. He tugged the door open by its handle. He handed the pinch bar to his partner, accepted a black rubber police flashlight in return, and went inside. The other officer leaned his shoulders against the door and crossed his ankles. He flipped the pinch bar end over end twice and slid it into the loop on his belt designed for his baton.

  “Cool as a can of Schlitz,” Esther said. “I wrote that little fucker Drachler up for a commendation two years ago.”

  Canada said, “He probably earned it.”

  “When do we go in?”

  “Not yet.”

  After a few minutes the younger officer stirred from the door and Wasylyk pushed it open from inside, stooping to prop it in place with a box the size of a beer case. He went back inside and came out carrying another box, which Drachler took from him and carried back toward the rear of the patrol car. By the time he returned empty-handed, Wasylyk had another box for him.

  Canada handed Sergeant Esther a pair of binoculars. “Can you make it out?”

  “Disk brakes. I’d have picked radios.”

  “They don’t stock them. I checked.”

  “Let’s take ’em down.”

  “Hold your bladder. Let me know when they unprop the door.” The inspector slumped down and tilted his narrow-brimmed hat onto the bridge of his nose.

  “They got more horsepower than us. If they get out of that alley—”

  “Don’t let them.”

  Esther watched for a few more minutes. “There goes the door.”

  Canada sat up and pushed back his hat. He’d actually been asleep. “Well, don’t wait for Christmas.”

  The sergeant dumped the binoculars and hit the ignition. The Fury’s motor gunned, its rear tires kicked up divots of grass laced with condoms and broken beer bottles, and they shot across Gratiot behind a Sinclair oil tanker with a brontosaurus painted on its side. Esther jerked on the lights just as they entered the alley. The high beams washed the blue-and-white and the brick wall on either side in blinding platinum. Quick-frozen in the glare, the two uniformed officers stood white-eyed, holding on to both ends of a box of disk brakes.

  The crunch of the Fury’s tires as Esther braked ended that. The box hit the pavement with a crash and Drachler and Wasylyk scrambled for the doors of the marked Pontiac. Canada piled out of his side an instant ahead of Esther and locked both arms across the top of the open door with his blunt-barreled Chief’s Special clenched in both hands.

  “Guess who, motherfuckers!” he shouted.

  The sergeant had assumed the same stance with his own revolver trained across the top of the door on the driver’s side. “Police! Hold it right there!”

  No imagination.

  Halfway across the front of the patrol car, Drachler faltered, then stopped and threw his hands straight up. “Jesus, don’t shoot me!”

  Canada lost interest in him then. He was watching Wasylyk’s face behind the patrol car’s windshield. A pouchy face, grayish in the light—probably in any light—looking years older than Canada’s. It sagged before the inspector’s eyes like a tent collapsing. Slowly an arm came out through the open door with the departmental Smith & Wesson dangling by its butt from between thumb and forefinger. The hand kept going up and laid the gun on the roof of the car. Wasylyk started to get out.

  “Now the throwaway,” Canada said.

  In a moment a nickelplated Browning .25 automatic with black sidegrips had joined the revolver on the roof. Wasylyk came out with his hands over his head and the two plainclothesmen left cover. Sergeant Esther flung Drachler facedown across the hood of the patrol car, handcuffed him, and relieved him of his sidearm and the pinch bar on his belt.

  “I’ll call it in,” Esther said, panting a little.

  “Not yet.” Canada, who had not cuffed the older officer, put away the Chief’s Special and told him to lower his hands. When he obeyed, Canada touched his arm and they moved away from the car.

  “Piss-poor, Ed,” Canada said. “Break in someplace and loot it, then call it in as a B-and-E. I’d have thought thirty years with the department would teach you something more original.”

  “Twenty-nine,” corrected Wasylyk. “Feels like fifty.” His voice, coarse and thick with phlegm, sounded like a flooded carburetor.

  “I pulled your jacket. You’ve got commendations up the ass. I’ve got to ask why this.”

  “You know what the job pays.”

  “Screw that. A street cop can pull down a thousand a week just by knowing what doorways to stay out of. A couple of hundred in parts? Don’t insult me.”

  “Let’s just get to the booking. I got the same rights as any asshole ju
nkie and one of them’s to keep my mouth shut.”

  “If I wanted to book you, you’d be on your way downtown by now. Answer the question, shithead.”

  Wasylyk looked down the alley. There were white whiskers in the creases of his cheeks. “They passed me over for detective again. My wife and I were counting on that promotion for a decent pension when I retired next year. Then she went and died.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “I don’t mean bullshit she died. I mean bullshit you don’t care any more. You just got too lazy to do the job by the numbers.”

  No response.

  “What would it take to light a fire under your lazy butt?” Canada asked.

  Tobacco teeth showed in Wasylyk’s sneer. “You recruiting me to spook for Internal Affairs?”

  “I’m not with Internal Affairs.”

  “The hell you’re not. Everyone knows you run it.”

  “Some college punk with a slide rule runs it. I work for the mayor.”

  “Ain’t that a coincidence. So do I.”

  “I mean directly.”

  The officer looked at him for the first time. “Cavanagh?”

  “When no one’s around I get to call him Jerry.”

  “The hell you do.”

  “You’re too good a cop to hand over to those pricks in I.A.D. They’d just bust your ass and send me out for more.” Canada gave one of Wasylyk’s blue collar-ends a flip. “It’s a chance to get out of the bag.”

  “Detective’s pension?”

  “Don’t be greedy.”

  Wasylyk glanced toward Drachler, still cuffed with Esther standing behind him. “What about the kid?”

  “I’ll get him put on Stationary Traffic. He can’t steal anything there but fire hydrants. I don’t need him.”

  “Okay by me. We just turn out together. We ain’t exchanged vows.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  The officer showed his teeth. “If I don’t like it, can I come back here and take the fall for the brakes?”

  Chapter 3

  JED CLAMPETT SMOKED WINSTONS. Granny was reluctant, but he talked her into poking the filter end into the bowl of her corncob pipe and she agreed with him that it tasted good, like a cigarette should.

  That was the impression Quincy Springfield got anyway, with the sound turned off on the thirteen-inch set in the corner and the black-and-white images clomping around silently in burlap and gingham and those big scuffed-leather honky shoes that TV people associated with Southern wardrobe. Quincy had been to Alabama once and folks down there wore baseball caps and flannel shirts buttoned to the neck and stiff blue jeans and tenny-grippers, just like in some places in Detroit. Negroes too. But then the only Negro on TV wore a white coat and ironed Jack Benny’s pants, so what did TV people know?

  The commercial ended and the show came on, with the same two people conversing over a big smoking kettle that the old lady was stirring next to a swimming pool with statues of naked white people scattered around it. Nobody was lighting up now. Quincy lost interest and turned his attention to the man seated in front of him behind the glass-topped desk.

  The man’s name was Devlin, but Quincy was sure he was Jewish. He had the nose, a broad soft face with a hooking chin, and combed his dark hair across his scalp in a way that reminded Quincy of Mr. Rappaport, a pawnbroker he had liked twenty years ago because he always paid a fair price, or did anyway until somebody from outside the neighborhood let out his intestines with a Barlow knife when he didn’t open the cash register fast enough. But Quincy had no affection for Devlin. The man wore highly inflammable suits with loud patterns and ties you could mop your face with and still have enough dry material left over to wipe your hands. People with money who didn’t spend any of it on their appearance wore their contempt for their fellow human beings like a six-hundred-dollar suit. Quincy himself favored colored shirts—it was lavender today—jackets with natural shoulders, peg-top pants, and ostrich half-boots that zipped up inside the ankles. He never wore a hat. Hats were for pimps.

  At six-three and 220 pounds, Quincy was a hard fit, which was why tailors received much of his income. The skin of his face was blue-black, almost plum-colored, and stretched tight over thick bones with chiseled edges. His prognathous jaw, which resembled the underslung bucket of a steam shovel, frightened the people he wanted to frighten, but when he smiled—not often—it receded, transforming his features. There was gray in his modest Afro. He was thirty-five.

  Devlin removed the last packet from the satchel, stripped off the rubber band, and counted, his meaty thumb separating the bills with scalpel precision. He could have done it much faster, but he obviously enjoyed making Quincy wait. In so far as it was possible for a man like Devlin to enjoy anything. Any other courier would have been dismissed upon delivery, to be recalled later if there was a discrepancy in the count; and in fact the delivery itself would have been handled by a bag man, not by a boss like Quincy. But since the day three months ago that one of his couriers had pocketed fifteen hundred dollars, nothing would do but that Quincy carry the cash himself, one of many humiliations he had had to endure because he was Bass Springfield’s son. It made no difference that Quincy had apprehended the greedy bag man and made him curl his fingers around a doorjamb while Quincy kicked the door shut. If the man had eight broken fingers, his boss had suffered as much in loss of esteem.

  When he finished counting, Devlin grasped the arms of his chair, reddened from his hairline to his collar, and stood up. He went out through the door behind the desk without excusing himself.

  On the television screen, a blonde in a slippery gown was hanging all over a man who was shaving the way no sane man would ever shave if there were a blade in his razor. Quincy ignored it and looked instead at the view from the forty-third floor of the Penobscot Building. The river glinted in scallops of reflected sunlight between the block buildings of the warehouse district and Windsor on the other side. Quincy had never been to Canada, three minutes away across the Ambassador Bridge or through the tunnel. Despite the similarity of the Windsor skyline to Detroit’s, he pictured the country as a land of moose and snowy mountains and honkies in tight uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats who rode horses and sang to each other in deep fruity voices. He’d seen that in a movie his mother had taken him to see when he was five years old and the images were now more real than many of the other events of his childhood.

  Devlin returned and lowered himself derrick-fashion into his chair. His body was bullet-shaped and like his face gave no indication that there were bones beneath. “Patsy wants to talk to you.”

  The door behind the desk led into a corner office twice as deep as the one Quincy had just left. The adjoining windows would have presented the same view of Canada and another of downtown Detroit if they weren’t cloaked in blinds and drapes of some heavy green material with gold threads that glittered. There was a moss-green Brussels carpet wall-to-wall—Quincy had made a study of such fine things—and brushed aluminum panels on the walls that made the room look like something seen in a clouded mirror. Neither of its two occupants got up when the visitor entered.

  “Your receipts are off six percent this week,” Patsy said.

  He was looking at Quincy with both hands resting flat on top of an absolutely bare desk with a deep gloss that reflected the perforated ceiling and its recessed circles of light; a small man with delicate bones who always seemed to be shrinking inside his beautifully tailored suits, his neck overcome by a high collar and the big knot of a silver tie. His black hair, waving back intricately from a straight line across his forehead, was his best feature, but it looked artificial. He had large, glistening, mahogany-colored eyes almost entirely without whites, a nothing nose, and the thickest pair of lips that Quincy had ever seen on a white man, very red against a complexion that ranged from saffron to orange depending upon the intensity of his emotions. Although Quincy knew that the man was several months younger than he, there was something abo
ut him that always made Quincy think of an old man in a room in a hospital, waiting.

  “Did you Hear me? I said your receipts are off six percent this week.”

  Quincy unbuttoned his jacket. Rooms that contained Patsy Orr were always uncomfortably warm. “That’s because five-twenty-seven came up,” he said. “Five plus two equals lucky seven. Every brother with a rabbit’s foot in his pocket plays it. Lydell and me was up till two this morning paying out.”

  “They were off four percent last week and eight percent the week before that.”

  “Hard times. It’s like the market, only opposite. Next time the Supreme Court hands down a desegregation decision, you watch them numbers climb, Patsy.”

  “Mr. Orr,” someone corrected.

  The someone, reading a paperback book in a tan stuffed leather armchair by the door, was called Sweets, and he was the only white man who unnerved Quincy as much as Patsy Orr. He was bullet-shaped like Devlin, but stretched out, a .44 long as opposed to a squat magnum round, with a head that came to a perfect point. It was the point that bothered Quincy; he found it impossible not to stare. The condition must have been congenital, as he could think of no mishap that would plane a man’s head on all four sides. Colorless hair grew straight down from the point and curled on Sweets’s forehead, which sloped without a crease to glass-blue eyes and a brief Irish nose and a long upper lip split in the middle like a cat’s. His suit was monk’s-brown and sack-shaped—a dead giveaway that he was carrying—and he wore one of those short diamond-shaped ties Quincy hadn’t seen since the forties, red and blue in vertical halves with a musical clef embroidered on it, red on the blue background, blue on the red. Quincy craned his neck a little to see the paperback’s cover. The Warren Commission Report.

  “Times must be especially hard in your neighborhood,” Orr said. “Nobody else’s receipts are off by as much as yours.”

  “Hey, what else is new? Hastings Street ain’t Grosse fucking Pointe.”