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  “He’ll crap out. The party nomination will go to Soapy Williams, who raised the Democratic donkey from a pup in this state. Point is it’s the mayor’s shot at a national profile. Why not President? He’s young, Irish, and Catholic, just like JFK. The voters are always hoping lightning will strike twice. He could stir up some dust at the sixty-eight convention if Johnson doesn’t run. Hell, even if he does. A lot of people who voted for him two years ago are wishing they hadn’t.”

  “Bobby Kennedy might have a thing or two to say about it.”

  “That prick.”

  “So what’s the Presidency got to do with Albert Brock? I know he ain’t running.”

  “The American Steelhaulers Association is the most powerful labor union in the United States, maybe in the world. Brock controls a third of the blue collar vote in this country. How’s it going to look if the mayor of an industrial town like Detroit can’t claim a boost from a labor leader in his own backyard?”

  “What’s Brock got against him?”

  “He doesn’t like the way Cavanagh handled the contracts with some city employees. We intercepted a memo he sent to the head of the local last year, urging him to advise his people not to vote for re-election. Of course there were others. Labor support for the mayor dropped twelve percent in November.”

  “He still won.”

  “He might not have if Brock had brought his opposition out into the open. That memo was meant as a lesson, a little sample of what he could do if Cavanagh doesn’t toe the line. A line he has no intention of toeing for Brock or Princess Grace. Like you said, he’s got the bug. So we have to do something about Brock before he can get up to speed. The senate primary this fall is history. We’re looking two years down the road.”

  Wasylyk fished a crushed pack of Pall Malls out of his shirt pocket and lit one off a kitchen match he struck on the table. He dragged in a lungful and tossed the curled match into a corner with the others. “I’m a cop, not a fucking press secretary. I thought you were too. I liked you better when I thought you was a sneak for Internal Affairs.”

  “On the books, the unit was formed two years ago separately from I.A.D. to report directly to the mayor on charges of wrongdoing inside the department. ‘Wrongdoing,’ that’s what politicians call crimes in the eighty percent bracket. We do some of that; Cavanagh knew about those Grecian Gardens payoffs before Vice raided the place last January. What we really are is his private staff. That’s another piece of information that doesn’t go out that door when you do. The voters wouldn’t understand why a man in office in a free country would need secret police.”

  “I’m one of ’em, I guess. My old man voted for Eugene Debs. So what’s the game plan?”

  “Trace this Mafia thing to its source. We know Brock’s office is into Patsy Orr because of the muscle Patsy’s old man Frankie lent Brock twenty years ago when he was running for president of the local. Frankie Orr was a visionary, but he always looked too far ahead. That labor racketeering thing is what got him deported finally. Sal Borneo was supposed to go down for the same thing, but he died. You remember Sal. Frankie married his daughter.”

  “Can’t tell the Sicilians from an A-bomb without a score-card. That the Sal our boy Phil was yakking about on the tape?”

  “Phil goes back a ways,” Canada said. “Not many of the old gang left. That’s why Frankie’s kid Patsy is in charge.”

  “Patsy the Crip. The old man must’ve strained him through a sheet.”

  “Talk is Frankie’s still running the show from Messina. Anyway, if we can track one dollar from the Steelhaulers pension fund to Patsy’s pocket, we can send Brock up to Jackson for a year, or at least snarl him in the system long enough to forget about making headaches for the mayor. Hell, the exposure alone would play hell with his support at the grass roots.”

  Wasylyk flicked ash at the table. “Tough case to make. Those Mafia boys got more places to launder cash than Liberace’s got teeth.”

  “I never said the job was easy. You in?”

  “What’s my part?”

  “Nothing you haven’t already done enough times to have strong feelings about. Stakeouts, the odd shadow job, some time undercover if it comes to that. It won’t. I got a federal judge might come through with an order for a temporary wiretap when the time comes. When it does you’ll take your turn on the earphones. You know the drill.”

  “Doesn’t sound a whole hell of a lot different from what I been doing twenty-nine years. I thought detective work was supposed to be glamorous.”

  “That’s the spy game. You’ve been watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” The inspector rose and smoothed the crease on his black suitpants. “Hey, it beats boosting disk brakes.”

  “The brakes pay better.”

  “Lawyer fees cut into the profits. So you in?”

  Wasylyk took one last drag and mashed the butt into an old burn-hole in the table. “I got nothing better to do but sit home and watch Days of Our Lives.”

  “Swell. Come up to seven. I’ll introduce you to the squad.”

  “I’m dead on my feet. What’s it, three o’clock?”

  “Almost four. You’ll have to get used to hookers’ hours. Sub rosa units work mostly at night.”

  “Well, the overtime ought to make up for a patrolman’s salary.”

  “What’s overtime?”

  “Shit. I should’ve guessed.” Wasylyk stood, bones cracking, and watched Canada gathering up the tape recorder. “How come you can get an order for a tap now and you couldn’t then?”

  “We didn’t know then what we know now about this particular judge. Remind me to show you his file sometime.”

  “How’d you fill it?”

  “Tapped his private line.” Canada held the interrogation room door.

  Chapter 7

  THE SEVENTH FLOOR OF Detroit Police Headquarters at 1300 Beaubien—“1300,” as it was known throughout the department—was made up of barnlike rooms lit through opaque glass panels in the high ceilings and had an acoustical linoleum floor and steel mesh over the windows. The windows, taller than a man, looked to Quincy as if they should contain grim saints carved out of slick marble. It was that kind of building, designed in the 1920s by a white architect who had seen Intolerance one too many times. Quincy felt cold and exposed and very black sitting in a vinyl chair in front of the white sergeant’s desk, one of a dozen or more arranged in two rows, most of them unmanned at 4:00 a.m. His hands were icy when he held them to his cheeks. He diagnosed his condition as shock.

  He wondered how Lydell was doing. The cops had let Quincy ride with him in the ambulance to Detroit Receiving, where the patient got into an argument with an emergency room orderly who wanted to cut the ring off the injured hand. It was a big gold ingot with a diamond set in the center, which Lydell liked to tell people had been presented to him as a utility infielder with Milwaukee after the 1957 World Series. Quincy, whose father had left Negro ball to go into bootlegging when the Klan broke his hands, had gotten his friend into the crap game where he’d won the ring. Nobody shot the bones like Lydell. But the dispute had convinced him his friend would come out with all the parts he went in with, and Quincy had agreed to ride down to 1300 in a car from the Tactical Mobile Unit.

  The fat sergeant had short pale hair tipped with gray and freckles everywhere, even on the backs of his hands. He typed with one finger, pausing between letters to study the keyboard as if he had never seen the old gray Royal before that morning. Something about him made Quincy think of the locker room at the Y; it drove him crazy until he traced it to his nostrils. Man used Ben-Gay like Krystal used perfume.

  “That your real name, Springfield?” he asked finally.

  “Just in Detroit. Other places I use Harry Belafonte.”

  “You watch your mouth, boy. I can ask this same shit down at County with a turnkey’s finger up your black ass.”

  “It’s my real name.”

  “Know the guys that hit you?”

  “All I know is they was white.”

  “You said they had their hands and faces covered.”

  “Necks too. That’s how come I know they was white. Why’d you wear a turtleneck on a warm night in June unless you didn’t want people knowing you was white?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want anyone knowing they were black.”

  “On Collingwood? Shit.”

  “You watch your mouth, boy. I won’t tell you again.”

  Quincy said nothing.

  “Anything else you remember?” asked the sergeant.

  “One who done all the talking had blue eyes.”

  “I’ve seen Negroes with blue eyes. You know Johnny Blue? Don’t say you don’t, ’cause I know he’s been to your place.”

  “Johnny’s are pale blue. This one’s was deep and chilly. He was white, all right.”

  “I’ll put down you don’t know who the guys were.” Keys whacked paper.

  Quincy, who after his father’s death had grown up in a shoebox on Erskine with his mother and shared a bathroom with two other families, thought it was a big room for so few detectives. A thin black man in a white shirt and suitpants with a Smith & Wesson Airweight under his left arm sat reading the Free Press city edition two desks down, and two white men with Smitties on their belts were discussing yesterday’s Tigers game at the water cooler by the door. Aside from them, Quincy and the sergeant had the place to themselves. A religious program was playing silently on a portable black-and-white TV atop a file cabinet. The horizontal hold was slipping; the minister’s head showed at the bottom of the screen with his dark-suited torso at the top. Nobody was watching.

  The hallway door opened and two men came in. One was as tall as Quincy but leaner and wore an immaculate black suit that was starting to show its age in the knees and elbows. He had a long, slightly angular face and crisp black hair going gray. The other man was shorter and sloppier-looking in a plaid coat, wrinkled slacks, and blue shirt without a tie. He needed a haircut. They stopped to talk to the two cops at the water cooler. The man in the plaid coat shook their hands.

  The fat sergeant was snapping his fingers at Quincy. “Stay off the clouds, boy. This ain’t no liquor beef I’m asking you about.”

  “Three ‘boys’ is all you get,” Quincy said, and swung at him from his chair.

  But he’d been hustled, taken in by the sergeant’s inanimate-looking bulk. The sergeant gave the rickety typewriter stand a shove and the Royal landed in Quincy’s lap. It threw off his aim, and the fat man ducked under the fist, cross-drew the revolver on his belt, and laid the four-inch barrel against Quincy’s right temple in a backhand sweep. The room pirouetted and the ceiling came down on top of him.

  For an instant he teetered on the edge of unconsciousness, then pulled back, dizzy and nauseated. He was on his back on the floor, still sitting in the chair, with a paralyzing weight on his chest. It was the typewriter, lying upside-down with the carriage return lever gouging his shoulder. The ceiling rocked itself to a standstill. Six pairs of legs stood around him in a semicircle, tapering up to belt buckles and bellies, mountains with tiny heads carved on their peaks. It was like looking up at Mt. Rushmore through the small end of a telescope.

  “What happened?” It was the mountain in black talking. Quincy recognized him now as one of the two men who had entered the room moments ago. He picked out the three detectives and the plaid-coated newcomer and the fat sergeant in his white shirtsleeves, freckled fists balled at his sides. The revolver was clenched in one of them but not pointed at anything.

  “Puke took a cut at me.” The sergeant holstered his gun and kicked Quincy hard in the ribs. The pain lanced up to his temple. “You’re busted, jig. Climb out from under that machine before I add stealing office equipment to assaulting an officer.”

  “What’s he doing here?” asked the man in the black suit.

  “Name’s Springfield. Some guys hit his blind pig on Collingwood this morning. Offed the bouncer and rabbited with what was in the register. He says. His partner’s at Receiving, caught some shotgun spray.”

  “What time?”

  “About one-thirty. They were getting set to open.”

  “That’s Homicide’s squeal. How’d you wind up with it?”

  “Coopersmith was dragging his ass off a double shift. I didn’t have anything better on so I took over the paperwork. Nigger killings off Twelfth Street aren’t exactly commissioner’s priority. Come on, Beulah. ’Ngowa. I go off duty in four hours.”

  Quincy had managed to heave the Royal over onto its rubber feet. Now he got his knees under him and jacked himself up using the fallen chair as a lever. The room did a slow Twist. His head was going bloing-bloing.

  The angular-faced man in the black suit studied him. The upper third of the man’s head seemed to be resting on the single black lintel of his eyebrows. He looked clean for a cop. “Did he hit you?” he asked the sergeant.

  “I talked him out of it.”

  The man in the plaid coat was amused. “You should talk to Castro.”

  “Tank him for disorderly.”

  “He took a cut at me, Inspector.”

  “Next time let him connect.”

  Quincy said, “Give me my call first. I got to call the hospital.”

  “Sergeant Esther didn’t hit you that hard.”

  “Not me. Lydell.”

  “Lydell?”

  The sergeant said, “That’s the partner. I don’t know where their mammies get those names.”

  “You’ll get your call when you make up your mind to quit bullshitting,” the inspector told Quincy. “Nobody robs a pig before it opens. Not for what’s in the till.”

  The Wayne County Jail was clean as lock-ups went, no bugs and they lent him a broom once a day to sweep the cell and cleanser to scrub the little sink and toilet. The blue coveralls were as comfortable as pajamas. He had no cellmate. It was a quiet place to stretch out on the shallow mattress and listen to the pulpy mass heal over his right ear, the traumatized skin crackling as it dried and shrank. The throbbing had receded to a warm buzz. He would miss it when it was gone.

  He stopped thinking about the injury after two sheriff’s men dragged a Negro in coveralls into the cell kitty-corner from his and dumped him on the cot. The man’s eyes were swollen shut and his lips were puffed. He lay motionless on his ruined face after they slammed the cell door and didn’t stir hours later when they came with supper. Quincy wondered if he was dead and how long they’d let him stink before they hauled out the carcass.

  The next morning, Quincy’s second at County, he woke up and looked across at a pair of cinnamon-colored hands dangling between the bars of the man’s cell. Quincy got up and leaned his face against his own cell door. The man’s face had broken out in yellow blistery streaks and the blood on his split lip had dried to a black thread, but Quincy could see something glittering in the slits of his eyes. He was short and slender, with straight glossy black hair that would have reminded Quincy of Johnny Mathis if the man’s face didn’t make him think of Quasimodo.

  The man was saying something now. He had to try a second time to make it come out like words. “Got a cigarette, brother?”

  “Don’t use ’em,” Quincy said.

  “That’s okay. I’m too pooped to puff anyway.”

  “Whitey do your face?”

  “I ran into a door. It was marked POLICE. I couldn’t see on account of the flashing red light.” He started to smile and winced. Fresh blood glittered on his chin.

  Despite the distortion, the man’s voice had a roundness and depth that suggested practice. Quincy wondered if he was some kind of preacher. “What’d you do, brother?”

  “Broke a window.”

  “Liquor store?”

  “Restaurant.”

  “How come?”

  “They wouldn’t serve me, so I threw a chair through the front window. Waiters did this.” He gestured toward his face.

  “Had a date, huh.”

  “No, it was just me.”

  “Brother, you’re crazy.”

  “I heard that before.”

  “What’d they hang on you?”

  “Assault and battery of five waiters. I didn’t hear the other charges; they were beating on me with sticks at the time. What’d you do?”

  “Slugged me a cop.”

  “Yeah? Who for?”

  Quincy felt himself grinning. “I hear you.”

  They were silent for a moment.

  “When do they feed you here?” the man asked.

  “You missed supper. Breakfast’s coming.”

  “How do you know? You got a watch?”

  “No, I can hear the trays.”

  Silence again.

  “You a preacher?” Quincy asked.

  “I’m a singer.”

  “No shit, where? Church?”

  “Used to. Guess I will again. I cut twelve sides for Berry Gordy, but he didn’t renew my contract. He said my English was too good.”

  “Whyn’t you do something about it?”.

  “Tried. Can’t. I’ve got a BA from Wayne State and I can’t shake it.”

  “So you bust windows in restaurants.”

  The other man turned his better eye Quincy’s way. “Where’d you study psychology?”

  “Twelfth Street.”

  A big deputy came down the hall and stopped in front of Quincy’s cell. He wasn’t carrying a tray. “Springfield?”

  “Where’d he go if I ain’t him?”

  The deputy unlocked the door and opened it. “You get your phone call now.”

  In the corridor between the cells, Quincy asked the man with the swollen face what he called himself.

  “Mahomet.”

  Chapter 8

  THERE WAS NO TELEPHONE.

  The room the deputy took him to and left him in was twice the size of Quincy’s cell, with two laminated tables surrounded by vinyl chairs and three machines against the wall selling coffee, sandwiches, and cigarettes. Copies of Argosy, True, and last week’s Life littered the tables. The inspector from yesterday stood by the cigarette machine. He had on the same black suit without even a rumor of lint and a red tie on a white shirt. He placed a quarter against the slot in the machine. “What brand?”