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Motown Page 6


  “Don’t smoke,” Quincy said.

  The inspector made a noise in the back of his throat and pocketed the coin. “Me too. Have a seat.”

  “Cop said I was getting my phone call.”

  “I can save you a dime. They kicked your friend Lafayette out of Receiving yesterday. All he had were splinters in his wrist and hand, from where the shotgun blast hit the bar. Thirty minutes in and out. He’ll be writing down numbers left-handed for a day or so, but he’s fine.”

  “You could be lying.”

  “It’s a fair bet. I lie a little every day. You can call and find out for yourself after you leave here.” He waved a hand. “This is the guards’ lounge, like it?”

  “Beats where I been.”

  “You ought to try a bamboo stockade on Rabaul.”

  “Where’s that, downriver?”

  “It was in New Guinea. Still is, probably. I don’t plan to go back and check. Battery acid?” The inspector slotted a dime into the coffee machine.

  “Yeah, okay.” In the cells it was milk; Quincy had decided the county didn’t want its inmates staying awake. He slid out a chair and sat down. The slippery seat felt good. He’d memorized all the slats in his cot.

  He wondered about Rabaul.

  The other man bought coffee for himself too and carried the waxed cups over to the table and set them down. Before sitting he unbuttoned his coat and tugged up the knees of his trousers. Quincy could count his pores, man was that clean. He made Quincy, who hadn’t shaved since day before yesterday, feel even grubbier.

  “My name’s Canada. I apologize for Sergeant Esther. The department dumped him on me six weeks ago and I don’t like him any better than you do. But he does his job.”

  “Done one on me.”

  “You were begging for it. I’m talking about that racist shit. This department’s in enough trouble without it.”

  “That’s what I heard.” In January, a gambling raid on the Grecian Gardens restaurant a block from 1300 had turned up a “Christmas list” of recorded payoffs to high-ranking police officials to ignore gambling in the Greektown area. A number of the officials named had since announced early retirement.

  “Scandals come and go like buses,” Canada said. “The population of Detroit is better than forty percent black. If we don’t improve relations with the Negro community we could have another Watts on our hands. I told Esther if he mouths off like that again I’ll get his fat butt suspended.”

  “Don’t make no difference to me. Man’s got enough trouble getting by on his own without worrying about everybody else that’s his color. Do I get to make my call or what?”

  “You really don’t believe me. About your partner being okay.”

  “I believe you. Now I don’t got to think about Lydell. I can use a lawyer.”

  “I’d have thought he’d show up with one himself before this,” Canada said. “Friend like that.”

  “Lydell looks out for himself.”

  “Who looks out for Quincy?”

  A deputy with a Wyatt Earp moustache entered the room, bought a pack of Kools, and left. Quincy sipped coffee; battery acid was a fair description. “You got a wife, Inspector?”

  “I did for a while.”

  “She call you Inspector or what?”

  “She called me Lew when she wasn’t throwing things at me. It’s my first name. That’s what you wanted to know, right?”

  “Okay. I thought as long as you knew mine.”

  Canada rotated his cup between his palms. So far he hadn’t drunk from it. “I did some homework on you while you were in the tank. Your old man used to leg liquor from Ontario back in the dry time. The Machine mob killed him.”

  “Strung him up by his wrists in the Ferry Warehouse and barbecued him with blowtorches, my ma said. I never knew him.”

  “He ran with Jack Dance. Jack the Ripper, the papers called him. I was just a kid when they gunned him and two of his boys in an apartment on Collingwood. Just down the street from your place now.”

  “That so?”

  “It can’t be easy working with the Italians, knowing they killed your father.”

  He’d been wondering how they were going to come around to it. “Like I said, I didn’t know him. And I don’t work with no Italians. Me and Lydell sell drinks after hours. What you going to do, throw me in jail for it?”

  “Settle down. You’ve got a lot of anger in you, you know it? Can’t be the jail time; you’ve got two priors for liquor violations, so this is old stuff to you.” Canada drank from his cup finally. “Someone knocked over a policy operation on Clairmount an hour before your joint was hit. Same M.O., three guys in ski masks with shotguns. Nobody was killed there, so it didn’t come across the police blotter. You numbers people aren’t much for hollering cop.”

  Quincy said nothing.

  “The street talk is someone’s crunching down on the West Side: Policy, dope, fencing. Especially policy, which means whoever it is is targeting the Negro rackets. Only thing around with that kind of muscle is the Mafia. Getting on with Patsy, are you?”

  “Patsy who?”

  Canada sat back. “I’m not Vice. I don’t give a shit about numbers and who’s selling who a snort after the bars close. I’m just trying to avoid a war. Is Patsy Orr turning up the heat or what?”

  “Arrest the three guys. War’s over then.”

  “Assuming they’re not all out in Vegas by now, what good’s that? He’ll just hire three more. Next time maybe they’ll get smart and take you out instead of your bouncer.”

  “What you want, Canada? You got your street skinny. You don’t need me.”

  The inspector slid a copy of True out of the clutter of magazines on the table and laid it in front of Quincy. The cover was a color photograph of a square-built man standing on an asphalt lot with his back to a row of gleaming diesel tractor-trailers parked facing the camera, Macks and Whites and Kenworths with square grilles and shiny stacks. The man, in his fifties, had on a navy blue suit and patent-leather shoes and stood with his elbows turned out slightly and his hands hovering in front of his thighs in an unconscious weightlifter’s stance. His hair was short and spiky, dark on top and graying on the sides so that his temples looked shaved, and there was about his scowling face and thick frame—not going to fat so much as retreating before it slowly, fighting it at every step—that echoed the bottled thunder of the towering rigs at his back. The legend on the cover read:

  BROCK!

  The Steel Behind the Steelhaulers

  EXCERPT FROM A SENSATIONAL NEW BOOK

  “Ever see him?” Canada asked.

  “On TV, sure. He invented unions.”

  “I mean in person. Maybe you saw him in Patsy’s office a time or two.”

  “I never been.”

  “The express elevator to Patsy’s floor only makes one stop. I’ve had a man watching the elevator for two months. Your description shows up on the list six times. I can haul him down here for a positive ID.”

  “Bullshit.” But he’d hesitated, and had seen the other man flick his tongue at the flutter of doubt and wobble it around.

  “Okay, it’s not an express. Point is you’d have to have been to the Penobscot Building to know it. Anyway, Brock’s too sharp to pay a call on a paisan.” Canada took a crumpled envelope out of the side pocket of his coat and laid it on top of Brock’s face.

  “What’s that, breakfast?” Quincy didn’t touch it.

  “Wallet, change, keys. Make sure everything’s there and give me back the receipt. You can change into your street clothes in Admissions. I never filed charges.”

  Quincy looked inside the envelope and dumped out its contents. He counted the bills in the wallet, groped for and handed over the twist of paper he’d gotten for his valuables, and put everything in his jumpsuit pockets. He rose. Canada wasn’t watching. “Aren’t you going to ask why I put you in lock-up?”

  “My ma taught me never to ask the Man for nothing.” He started for the door.

  “How’s your side?”

  Quincy slowed. “Which side?”

  “The one they took thirty-two stitches in at Receiving last spring. You walked into a blade at the Chit Chat Lounge?”

  “Hurts when it rains.” He hovered inside the door.

  “You’ve got balls, Quincy. It’s one thing to spit over the brink when you don’t know what it’s like to have your blood filling your shoes, something else when you do. Once is lucky. Twice doesn’t happen. Not in Motown.”

  Quincy returned to the table. “You got family, Inspector?”

  “One uncle in a nursing home in Stockbridge.”

  “Nice place?”

  “It’s okay. The doors to the rooms are painted different colors so the patients won’t get lost.”

  “My ma caught clap from her customers. When she couldn’t feed herself no more the Welfare folks stuck her in Ypsi State. Up there they keep them doped so they’re less trouble and tie them to their beds so they don’t fall out. She strangled herself with the ties, they said. They wasn’t sure just how.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I dream about it sometimes. Dying like that.”

  “I get you.”

  Quincy made another try at leaving, then went back.

  “You got a brother locked up for trashing a restaurant,” he said. “Calls himself Mahomet?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, what’s bail on a thing like that?”

  “Up to the judge.” Canada filled his mouth with coffee and held it for a moment, then swallowed. “If nobody files for personal injury, say five hundred.”

  “I’m short fifty. I’ll be back with the rest.”

  “He a friend of yours?”

  “I just like to hear him talk.”

  “Lucky for him those three guys didn’t take your wallet.”

  “Guess they was in a hurry after they blowed down Congo.”

  “Speaking of Kress, who’s going to claim the body? Doesn’t look like he had any relatives.”

  “I’ll send Lydell. He hired him.” Quincy was leaving now.

  “While you’re at it, tell him the police in Toledo want to talk to him about some bad checks he passed down there a couple of years back.”

  In Admissions they’d hung his silk shirt and sharkskin jacket on wire hangers in a cabinet with a lot of other clothes that had never been hung anywhere before. Quincy would’ve told the deputies to burn them and worn the jumpsuit home if it didn’t mean being seen in his neighborhood in county blue. He changed, caught a cab to Wilson, and went up to the apartment for a shower and fresh threads. Krystal was still asleep at 9:00 a.m., spreadeagled buck naked on her back on top of the covers with her hair in her face and snoring like an Evinrude. He could never look at her pointy little tits and visible ribs without feeling like a child molester. He thought he’d give her a couple of hundred when she woke up and send her packing.

  Scoured and shaved, he put on an emerald shirt with gold cufflinks and a pair of brown pinstripe pants and used the telephone in the living room to call Lydell. He had to shout the name several times before the old woman who answered told him to hang on a minute. Lydell lived rent-free in a house on Palmer with the old woman, who was deaf as a brick; Quincy had once made the mistake of asking him what he did to earn his bed and board.

  “Put it this way,” he’d answered. “I’d jerk off in my hand and throw it in there if it means clean sheets and plenty of hot water.”

  After five minutes during which Quincy listened to distant house-sounds and a television recipe for creamed chicken, Lydell came on the line. The telephone was a wall unit in a narrow hallway. “Quincy, my man. You out?”

  “I just found out you left Receiving,” Quincy said. “What you been doing to cut me loose?”

  “I was working on it, man. I can’t go in no police station. I got troubles that direction.”

  “Fuck that. Ain’t no Detroit cop going to wet his pants over what goes on in no Toledo.”

  “Toledo? Shit, I done forgot about Toledo.” He spoke quickly. “So you go over the wall or what?”

  “Tell you later. What’s happening at the place?”

  “Ain’t nothing happening. Police stuck one of them yellow seals on the door. What’s left of it.”

  “They padlock it?”

  “Ain’t nothing to padlock. You seen what them three done to it. Ain’t you going to ask me about my hand?”

  “I heard you got some splinters.”

  “Splinters, that’s what they said? Shiiit. Damn near blowed it clean off. Man, I hates shotguns. They got no sense of fine judgment.”

  “Think it was Sicilians?”

  “Who else?”

  “I didn’t ask you for no questions,” Quincy spat. “We got to be sure.”

  “We can always ask ’em.”

  “Who, Patsy?”

  “We can start with this guinea he’s sending, whatsizname, Gallante. He called while you was in the can. Wants to meet us tomorrow at the Civic League.” A grin crept into Lydell’s voice. “Sounds like he knew when the cops was going to kick you before the cops did.”

  Chapter 9

  FOUR BARRELS MADE ALL the difference.

  Bob Hertler’s GTO, hobbled by a carburetor designed for a family car, had been like a mountain cat stuck with iron shoes. Now, sailing east on Jefferson along the river, playing the pedal to catch all the lights green, Rick felt the Z-28 filling its lungs with clean damp air, Pure premium-leaded hammering in its veins. The pavement skinned underneath like Teflon.

  It had taken thirty minutes for the paint crew at the Chevrolet assembly plant in Westland to spray silver over the original yellow, heat-dry and buff it; another ten to put the two thick black racing stripes on the long hood. The bucket seats were upholstered in black Naugahyde, and Rick himself had replaced the lambswool steering wheel cover with perforated leather. The leather smell joined the air off the river and made Rick think of new shoes and fresh-cut grass and the last day of school. For once he felt as young as he looked. He flipped the radio on and punched up WKNR. The Beach Boys were just finishing “Little Deuce Coupe.” He laughed. The announcer came on and identified the frequency: 1300. It reminded Rick of police headquarters and he sobered.

  He fished the fold of notepaper out of the pocket of his one good dress shirt and checked the number. He had a 10:30 a.m. appointment with a Miss Kohler at an address on Whittier, base of operations for the Porter Group, or Wendell’s Wonders, as a sardonic press had dubbed the organization of headline-rakers, Chicken Littles, and general pains in the butt of the American automotive industry. Rick knew the Miss Kohlers of this world, rodentlike creatures in University of Michigan sweatshirts with granny glasses and pencils in their hair. Unpaid volunteers were like professional virgins, standing sentry over treasures of questionable value.

  The place wasn’t what he’d expected. Porter’s television image, tousled hair and unpressed Ivy League suits, bespoke an office and anteroom in a building with a wheezy elevator or a converted warehouse overlooking a broken streetlamp. Either the image or the address was wrong. Set back from the street with a sign on the lawn bearing only the letters PG, the house was a Colonial of turn-of-the-century vintage, painted rose and white, with gables and shutters and flower boxes under the windows. A huge eucalyptus, shipped in by some long-dead lumber baron or stove manufacturer, overhung the roof. The place had all the fussed-over detail of an infirm child’s dollhouse. Rick took the composition driveway to a little square lot behind the house and parked between a late-model Mercedes and a VW Beetle with mismatched fenders. He figured the VW belonged to Miss Kohler.

  A three-by-five card wedged into a corner of the window in the front door urged him in ballpoint pen to please enter. When he closed the door behind him a little brass bell looped over the doorknob jangled.

  “One minute,” said a woman’s voice from the back.

  The entryway, ten feet by twelve with a staircase leading to the second story, was painted bright yellow, the shade he had just banished from the Camaro, and contained a potted fern, three-drawer file cabinet with a five-volume set of engineering manuals standing on top of it, and a small desk holding up a splash of nasturtiums in a ceramic vase, a low sleek Smith-Corona electric with a powder-blue shell, and a black telephone with a banana-shaped caddy attached to the receiver. The plastic nameplate on one corner read ENID KOHLER. Rick considered the first name and added ten years to his image of Miss Kohler.

  The telephone rang and a tall brunette in a red knitted dress cinched with a wide black belt clicked in on high heels through an open door in back, laid a sheaf of blank forms on the desk, unscrewed a diamond from her left earlobe, and picked up the receiver. She was in her late twenties and had the long straight black hair and high coloring of a gypsy. “This is Miss Kohler,” she told the person on the other end.

  The Mercedes. Not the VW.

  “No, Mr. Porter is in Washington. We don’t expect him back until tomorrow afternoon.”

  Rick studied her hands. No ring.

  “May I help you?”

  She’d hung up and was looking at him. She had brown eyes.

  “Rick Amery,” he said. “I’m a little early.”

  She took inventory. He’d dressed carefully for his role as a volunteer: blue suit and brown wingtips, freshly polished. His lapels and black knitted tie were a little narrow for the current fashion, but that was all right; dorky lobbyists didn’t go broke on Carnaby Street. He couldn’t tell if she approved.

  “Fill out this application, please.” She handed him a form and a Bic pen and pointed to a kidney-shaped school desk in the corner.

  He used his real name but put his age down as thirty. When he came to Reason for applying for this position, he hesitated, then wrote, Hoping for a career in politics. He’d decided he couldn’t sustain the altruist dodge he’d been tinkering with all morning. Out of the corner of his eye he watched Enid Kohler screw her earring back on, roll a sheet into the typewriter, turn it on, and begin tapping. She was competent, but no keyboard whiz. He was sure she’d never seen the inside of a secretarial school.