MOTOR CITY BLUE Read online

  The guy in the back seat, whom I glimpsed while shifting around to sit the way I was designed, was older, about fifty, with crisp gray hair cut severely without sideburns. His face, naturally lean but beginning to go slack in the standard places, was all planes and sharp angles, like something blocked out by a sculptor before placing the finishing touches on a statue. He was bareheaded and wore a tawny car coat with a black fur collar. He didn’t pay any attention to me at all, but kept his flinty eyes on the scenery rolling past the window. His wide, lipless mouth was tugged downward into a wooden-Indian scowl that looked as if it might be terminal.

  We were doing twenty-five down a street I recognized, one of the better residential sections along the river. All the houses looked alike and their snow-clad lawns sloped at the same angle down to the sidewalk. Only the colors of the Cordobas and Sevilles parked in the asphalt driveways changed.

  “Stop here,” I said, through a throat thick with phlegm. “Going somewhere?” The driver’s tone was casual enough. The threat was there without his having to be obvious.

  “Not as long as you’ve got my car.”

  “General?” He shot a glance back over his shoulder. The General didn’t say anything, but he must have nodded because the car swung in toward the curb and glided to a stop.

  I got out, breathed some cold fresh air, stooped, and rolled up the square plastic mat containing the remains of my lunch. I hiked back to where someone had left his garbage out for pickup and thrust the roll inside a plastic trash can.

  I had an egg on the back of my head you could have served to a Boy Scout troop. But you wouldn’t have wanted to, because it was sticky with blood. A white-hot bolt of pure pain shot clear down to my toes when I touched it. The ache that came back afterward was blinding. As the car slid into motion I closed my eyes and slouched down to rest my neck on the back of the seat.

  “Cigarette?” The man behind the wheel nudged me. I opened my eyes and stared for a moment at the package of Lucky Strikes beneath my nose as if it were a picture of his kids. I patted my shirt pocket, found that my Winstons were still there, got one out, and shook my head. Something rattled inside. He withdrew the pack.

  “The trouble with Luckies is they never came back from the war.” I couldn’t find my matches. He finished lighting one of his own and tossed his lighter toward me. I caught it and looked at it. It was a silver and pigskin job with the initials J. V. engraved on one side. I lit up and tossed it back.

  “Jim Vespers,” he introduced himself. “Colonel Vespers, if you want to be formal about it. The gentleman sitting behind you is General Spain.” He scooped something out of a pocket and flipped it open in front of my eyes. It was a leather folder with gold corners and something behind a celluloid window.

  “Which one am I supposed to read?”

  He laughed, a short, ordinary laugh, and put it away. “I forgot. You’re probably seeing double about now. The General and I represent Army Intelligence.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  He laughed again. He enjoyed a good joke as much as the next guy. They were regular fellows, these quiet men with guns who went around tapping people’s telephones and following them from place to place. He caught me eyeing the glove compartment.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” Without taking his eyes from the road he held out my Smith & Wesson in its snap holster. “Go ahead, take it. It’s not loaded anymore.”

  I accepted it, took a minute to establish that fact, and snapped it onto my belt.

  “You’ve a permit to carry that, I hope,” he said.

  “You ought to know. You went through my wallet.”

  He let that one slide. “That was a stupid trick you pulled back there. How come?”

  “Force of habit. I can’t seem to stop myself from going for iron whenever somebody comes running up on me waving a pistol.”

  We drove for a while in silence. We weren’t going anywhere in particular, just swinging in a wide circle back to where we’d started. Vespers pulled into the filling station at Fort and First and told the kid attendant to top off the tank.

  “This one’s on the taxpayers, Walker,” he explained as the pump clanged.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s worth a fractured skull anytime.”

  “Where’s the film?”

  I looked at him through the smoke of the cigarette I wasn’t supposed to have going now that the pump was working. Nobody enforces the rules anymore. I reached over and crushed it out in the ashtray. Vespers made no effort to ditch his.

  “What film?” I said. Someone had to.

  He changed the subject. They teach them to do that in Washington. “We ran down your record after Alderdyce told us you were the one clued him in on Francis Kramer. Pretty impressive. Six years’ military service, a tour in Vietnam and Cambodia, a DSC for saving your platoon at Hue, three years in the MPs stateside. How’d you end up in this greasy line of work?”

  “Where’d you learn to tap a telephone?”

  He smiled. That amused him. He took a last drag on his butt and killed it beside mine. “So you found it. I told the General you would. We also tossed your office and your house, but you wouldn’t know that.”

  “I knew about the office. I haven’t been home.”

  “You did? How?” He seemed genuinely interested. I’d stumbled on a chink in his defenses and he was waiting with mortar and a trowel.

  “You left it neater than you found it. What’s on the film?”

  “We waited quite a while for you to show up. What’ve you been doing?”

  “Working.”

  “Working on what?”

  I stared out the window. “Did you know this is a historic site? This was the first drive-in gas station in the world. It’s been operating since 1901. The roots of the automobile era go down deep in this town.”

  “What the hell has that got to do with anything?” He was miffed. That was the word for it. His type never gets howling mad. It would draw too much attention.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  That bought me a few seconds of confused silence. Then the fellow in the back seat spoke up. “Tell him, Colonel.” His voice was General Patton filtered through George C. Scott.

  The kid in greasy coveralls and a two-tone high school jacket appeared at the driver’s window and quoted an astronomical figure, which Vespers paid without glancing at the pump. People like him put kids like that through college. Back on the road: “Have you ever heard of something called the Black Legion?”

  “A Warner Brothers flick. Bogart made it in ’37.”

  He nodded, as if that was what he’d been getting at. “I’ve seen it. That’s basically what I’m talking about.”

  “Where does Ann Sheridan come in?”

  “Cut the comedy, Walker. The Legion was a northern branch of the Ku Klux Klan that kept its headquarters in Detroit during the thirties. It boasted a membership of two hundred thousand, but it was a few hundred bully boys at the center that caused most of the trouble. Mainly they were a bunch of frustrated WASPs who blamed blacks and foreigners for their inability to get anywhere in the world. What they should have done was blame their mothers for giving birth to a herd of narrow-minded malcontents who had neither the brains nor the stamina to rise above their station without resorting to violence. Midnight rides in white robes and peaked hoods, lynchings, cold-blooded executions in lonely fields in the wee hours–that was their style. It’s estimated that between 1931 and 1936 they were responsible for at least fifty killings in the area. There’s no telling how many more might have died if the police and the public hadn’t banded together in ’36 to put most of the leaders behind bars. After that, publicity and unmasking laws sent them scrambling for the tall timber.”

  “Does this history lesson take long?”

  “Jesus, but you’re impatient for a cop, even a private one. The Black Legion’s been staging a come-back over the past two years. Someone down south is financing a Klan franchise up here. We kn
ow who it is, but we can’t prove it, and even if we did what could we do about it? It’s perfectly legal.”

  “So why worry?”

  “Don’t be naïve. It’s our job to see it stays that way. Detroit was chosen for tradition’s sake, but since the GOP’s announcement that it would hold its next convention here the whole movement’s gained real impetus. Word has it that one of the candidates for the Republican nomination is marked for assassination and that the Legion’s behind the plan. The system can stand it, but all hell’s bound to bust loose for a while, and chaos is what these quasi-revolutionary groups thrive on. There’s no telling what they’ll do for an encore. We’ve all learned something from the troubles in Ireland and the Middle East.”

  “Sounds nutty.”

  “Read the papers, Walker. Watch television. The world’s gone nutty.”

  “How does Army Intelligence figure in? Why not the FBI or the Secret Service?”

  “The army’s got as much stake in seeing this thing put to rest as anybody. The Legion’s infiltrated our ranks. I’m not just talking about the guys you see on furlough at the local whorehouse, privates or sergeants or even second lieutenants. I’m talking pentagon. Care to see your country defended by rank after rank of ridgerunners in sheets and pillowcases, carrying flaming crosses? Stick around.”

  I started to hum “Marching through Georgia.” It hurt my head. I stopped.

  “Okay,” he said, “so maybe I’m being melodramatic. That doesn’t throw any sand over a sticky situation. We had a man among the local nightriders. He’s dead.”

  “Francis Kramer made Army Intelligence? You really ought to change your name. Too many jokes come to mind.”

  “He wasn’t one of our regulars. He knew some people in the group and he was familiar with most kinds of photographic apparatus. We got him out of the reserves, where he was a major, taught him how to avoid tripping over his own feet, armed him with a movie camera, wound him up, and turned him loose. For six months he furnished us with reports and some interesting footage, then missed an appointment with a field agent and cropped up nine hours later with a hole in his head an army physician couldn’t miss. No film. No camera. We threw wraps over the case and tossed his apartment. We found the camera, but the only film kicking around was unexposed. He had something or he wouldn’t have made the appointment. Question is, what was it and who has it?”

  “Which is why I’m sitting here holding my brains in while you run up miles on my automobile.”

  “We’d attract too much attention sitting where we were. As for the state of your health, I’m sorry about that but you begged for it. You were the only lead left. As far as we know you were the last one to see Major Kramer alive–except for his murderers–and by your own testimony at police headquarters he was your company commander in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, you’re a private dick, a profession that has not been known for an astonishing lack of blackmailers and ripoff artists. Look at it from this side and see how it plays. You run into an old war buddy who may already be in fear of his life because of some incriminating evidence in his possession. He gives you some song and dance and places the evidence in your care. He gets dealt out; you realize what you’ve got is dynamite and sock it away for future use. What could be more natural?”

  “Except that you didn’t find anything.”

  “Yet.”

  I laughed dryly. That hurt too. Not much didn’t. “You didn’t even turn a key to a safety deposit box. If you looked up my background you know I don’t own a summer house in Grosse Pointe. Where else could I have ditched it?”

  “You tell us, Walker. Look, I didn’t say you were the only possible suspect, just the only one we had. That play you pulled back there makes me wonder if we’ve even got you. That isn’t the kind of thing someone with something to hide would do. Someone who isn’t wrapped too tight, yes, but not someone with something to hide. So we’re back to square one. Less than that. We’re out a deep cover agent we couldn’t afford to lose. What’s the case you’re working?”

  “Missing person. Nothing to do with Kramer.”

  “Who’s the person?”

  “It’s either Judge Crater or Jimmy Hoffa. I keep forgetting.”

  “All right, smart guy.”

  We were back on Harrison. The green Merc was parked in front of a ranch-style home on a low hill as if it belonged there. Vespers coasted up beside it took the Cutlass out of gear and got out, tipping the driver’s bucket forward for General Spain to climb out of the back. I’d almost forgotten he was there. Colonel Average Guy stooped to peer in at me through the open door.

  “You roll out first,” he said. “I don’t want this hot rod in heap’s clothing behind me again. Oh, and a word of warning. Just in case I’m wrong, and you have got something to hide, stand clear of a pair of blond hicks who call themselves the Darling brothers. They dusted Kramer because they found out he’d been spying on them. You they’d do just for practice.”

  He circled around the front toward the sedan, leaving me there to think. Somewhere in the wreckage of my memory a coin that had been rattling around for a while dropped through a slot and things started clicking. I was too groggy from the blow and from too much all at once to figure out why. I wasn’t any closer to it when I slid beneath the wheel and got moving. It bothered me all the way into River Rouge.

  12

  FOR THREE HUNDRED YEARS, the broad, flat, sluggish artery men call the Detroit River has brought life to the community that flourishes, more or less, at its base. Before that, like every other waterway in North America, it brought the Indians, Sac and Fox and Miami and Huron and Potawatomi and the mysterious Copper People, who paused not long enough to leave a disfiguring mark on the land they loved, then continued on their predestined way to oblivion. Then came the coureurs de bois, the “runners in the woods,” who paddled their birchbark canoes with strong sure hands, leagues ahead of the powerful fur-trading companies in whose territory they were poaching. They left behind their stamp in the depletion of the beaver that once swarmed the grassy banks, but they too moved on. One of them, Etienne Brulé, came to explore one time too many and left his brains in an Iroquois camp. Missionaries followed, bringing with them their robes and sacraments and wafers and Bibles and the destruction of the old ways, and the land began to conform to their will. Among these were the Jesuits Dollier and Galinée, who, chancing to pass a stone idol erected by Indians near the mouth of the River Rouge to ensure safe passage across the treacherous waters of Lake Erie, hove to, smashed the pagan abomination to bits, and hurled what was left into the river. In 1701 Antoine Laumet, a well-traveled adventurer with no more scruples than he could carry comfortably in his parfleche, and whose title, Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, was so new it squeaked, stepped ashore where the Civic Center now stands, sank the foundation for the first of many log structures to be erected beneath his supervision, and eventually got a car named after him. If he’d known what he was starting he might have taken advantage of the first favorable wind and set sail for home. Probably not, though, or he might not have died rich.

  The river has brought death too. During the siege of Detroit, Pontiac, a great chief and not a bad automobile, turned a successful ambush of British reinforcements into a powerful psychological weapon when he sent logs floating past the fort at irregular intervals with the mutilated corpses of soldiers strapped to them in 1763. Prohibition turned it into a river of beer and blood as rumrunners on their way to and from Windsor shot it out in the names of the Purple Gang and the Licavolis and certain high officials later indicted and sent up for complicity. Every few years someone dredges up another rusted hulk that’s sat on the bottom for half a century, sometimes with a skeleton in it, sometimes not. And there’s no telling how many wops and sheenies are sleeping the long sleep down there wrapped in concrete. In the early summer of 1943, Belle Isle, a spit of land bulging out of the water just this side of the international border and the scene of the massacre of a family of hog-tender
s by Pontiac’s warriors during the Battle of Bloody Run, was the origin of one of the worst race riots in modern history, with thirty-four deaths the consequence. Now it’s a park with a grimy fountain named for a notorious reformed gambler, boozer, and womanizer, and Bloody Run hauls sewage and death beneath the pavement to Lake Erie.

  An ore carrier wallowing beneath fifteen or twenty tons of iron pellets was crawling through the rust-colored waters at the mouth of the River Rouge on its way to the Ford plant. I watched it through the big picture window on the north side of the truss barn that housed Aphrodite Records on Marion while Barney Zacharias, standing with his back to the window, bored me with his oral history of the rise and decline of the music industry in Detroit.

  “Stevie Wonder,” he was saying, oblivious to the manic chords barreling out the open door of the glassed-in recording cubicle to his right, where a stout, bearded white man in a funeral suit sat banging New Orleans boogie-woogie out of a battered upright piano. “He called himself Little Stevie Wonder in those days. He cut a couple of discs in my place on Michigan. Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, the Rationals, SRC, the Ones, the Woolies, Bob Seger, Streisand. That was a riot, Streisand. She didn’t look like nothing coming into the studio, and one of the engineers comes in and says, ‘Hey, babe, she don’t look too cool, but, boy, she’s got a hell of a voice.’ And there she is, and she don’t even give Big D a tumble no more. She did then, though. They all did. What’s Nashville? We turned out more real stars in one month than they have in five years.”

  “About Martha Burns,” I put in.

  It was no use. Once he got started you had to wait for him to wind down. He was an excitable little guy with a bald head nesting in a fringe of black hair and a body you could pass through a pipe if it weren’t for his forearms. Sticking out of his turned-back cuffs, these were thick, powerful things overgrown with coarse black hair and terminating in large, hard hands that he might have had trouble keeping still if he bothered to try. It’s bigoted to generalize, but I’ve never met an Italian or a Greek who could hold up his end of the conversation if you tied his wrists behind him. His face was round and he had lively eyes the size and color of olives and a five-o’clock shadow that gleamed dully like blue steel beneath his skin.