Motor City Burning

PART ONE

OPENING DAY

1

UNCLE BOB WASN’T LYING. Can’t miss it, he’d said of the hippie house on Plum Street where it would be safe for Willie to park his baby, his immaculate classic Buick. And there it was now, right side, halfway down the block, painted up like a bad acid trip—orange walls, purple trim, some of the windows missing and others cracked and milky, the front door covered by an American flag with a peace symbol on the blue field where the fifty stars were supposed to be. A kid with stringy blond hair halfway down his back was waving cars onto the back yard. Music poured from an upstairs window, jangling electric guitars and a woman wailing, Go ask Alice when she’s ten feet taaaaaaaaall. . . .

The driveway was pocked and cracked so Willie took it slow. He had the Sonomatic radio tuned to the pre-game show on WJR—Uncle Bob told him he absolutely must not miss it—and a guy with a folksy southern drawl was reciting some kind of poem:

For, lo, the winter is past,

The rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth,

The time of the singing birds is come

And the voice of the turtle is heard on the land . . .

Voice of the turtle? Man, that cracker must’ve been smoking something good, Willie thought as he switched off the radio, parked and locked the car.

He paid two dollars to a chubby girl wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tight sweater, no shoes, no brassiere. She flashed him a smile and the peace sign and said, That’s a pretty far-out car you got there. What is it?

It’s a ’54 Buick Century.

Wow, looks brand new. I love that trippy pink-and-black paintjob.

Thanks. So do I.

Looks like something Elvis would drive. She noticed the license plate. You really from Alabama?

Yes, ma’am.

Ma’am! She laughed so hard her breasts jiggled under the nubby sweater. It was the sort of thing he would not have dared to notice back home—until the day he did dare to notice, and then proceeded to learn the high price of noticing. The girl said, You don’t gotta call me ma’am. My name’s Sunshine.

And I’m Willie. He shook the offered hand. Her fingernails were painted turquoise and they were gnawed down to the quicks. Weren’t her feet cold?

How come you’re way up north here, Willie?

That’s a long story . . . He caught himself before he called her ma’am again. Got some family up here. Thought I might find a better job.

So did you?

Not really. He managed a chuckle. It was a reflex. He knew how important it was not to let white people see his pain, not to even let them suspect that he might be in pain.

Um, Willie . . . ? She touched his arm and looked into his eyes. He noticed for the first time that her eyes were glassy and pink. Must be nice, smoking reefer before noon. Listen, I’m . . . we’re . . . everyone here in the house, we’re, like, all real sorry about what happened to Dr. King.

He stiffened. You’re very kind to say so, Sunshine, but there’s no need to be sorry.

There’s not? She looked confused. How come?

Cause you didn’t kill him.

"Of course not, but. . . ."

Sides, there’s a lot of us brothers think the man was a sell-out.

"Dr. King? A sell-out?" Satisfied when Sunshine’s jaw dropped—he loved to fuck with white people, especially the ones who believed their hearts were full of good intentions—he turned and left without another word.

The neighborhood was shabby—glass glittering on the sidewalks, houses in need of paint, black bruises on the street where cars had leaked their vital fluids. In the shadows between houses there were still gray slag heaps of unmelted snow. In April. Surviving his first Detroit winter was not something Willie was going to forget anytime soon. One day he was sitting in buttery sunshine in Palmer Park reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, watching swans glide across the pond, marveling at the palette of the trees, the bloody reds, the juicy oranges, the richest colors he’d ever seen. The next morning he awoke to a blizzard, the first of his life, a storm that had come howling down out of Canada in the night and dumped a foot of snow on the city.

This neighborhood, the shabbiness of it, reminded Willie of something he picked up from a Chicago brother named Clifford Jenks who’d shared a cell with him at Parchman Farm in Mississippi back in ’61, during Snick’s jail, no bail phase. Unlike the other Freedom Riders, Clifford and Willie weren’t big on singing or Scripture. They spent most of that long night talking about sports and girls. They were still wet from the hosing they’d been given, shivering from the chill breath of the fans the guards had trained on them.

What Clifford said was: Must be some kinda unwritten law that all stadiums is in shitty neighborhoods. Look at my hometown. Comiskey Park’s on the South Side, in a black ghetto. Look at Yankee Stadium, South Bronx, a Puerto Rican ghetto. And look at D-troit. Tiger Stadium, in a white ghetto—which is the worst kind a ghetto they is. Clifford Jenks was something, a man who could make you laugh inside a cage in Parchman Farm.

As Willie joined the river of fans flowing toward the ballpark, he felt the familiar tingling. He’d always loved crowds, their anonymity, their electricity, their animal warmth. This mostly white crowd was in high spirits, like they hadn’t heard the news about Martin Luther King—or didn’t care. For the past week there’d been riots in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and dozens of cities in between, but Detroit had remained almost eerily quiet. Just one death, two cops wounded, a few student walkouts and assembly line shutdowns. Nothing like last summer, when a routine police raid on an illegal after-hours liquor house set the city off, a week of burning and looting and shooting that Willie and a lot of other people had spent the past nine months trying to forget.

And now, just after Willie’s riot nightmares had finally stopped, Martin Luther King Jr. gets himself killed by a white man in Memphis. At least, everyone said it was a white man did it. Almost a week after the shooting they still hadn’t found the gunman, and Willie was convinced they never would. He didn’t think he was being cynical, just realistic. When it was announced that the funeral would be held in Atlanta on April 9, President Johnson, that lame white duck, decreed that the opening day of baseball season would be postponed from the 8th to the 10th, and he ordered all flags flown at half-mast. The Academy Awards show was also postponed by two days. Willie greeted these tokens with a shrug.

Though he had given up on King years ago, the details about the assassination fascinated him. For days he devoured newspapers and magazines and lived in front of his television set. He learned that the embalmers had to spend long hours working on King’s corpse because the whole right side of his face was shot away, the jaw barely dangling. They had to rebuild the face with plaster. In Atlanta the coffin was placed on a crude farm wagon that was pulled through the throngs of mourners by two Georgia mules. This attempt to dress the patrician King in the trappings of the common man struck Willie as calculated and deeply dishonest, downright shameful. But hardly surprising. That, after all, was what mythmakers did. Given some of the things he’d heard King say, Willie even believed the man had pursued martyrdom.

Willie devoured such news not because he was shocked or even particularly dismayed by the killing, but because all the images of King had reawakened something in him. Hard as he’d tried to forget what happened during the riot, now he felt a need to remember something that happened long before the riot. Something he thought he’d buried forever. Something he would need to remember—and confront—if he ever hoped to escape from the purgatory he was living in.

All he had to go on was two little words: de Lawd.

His memory, clouded by the poisons he’d ingested during the past year, could tell him only that he first heard those words somewhere in Alabama and that they were uttered by a girl with a voice as soft as satin. He could still hear her voice but could no longer picture her face or remember her name. He had forgotten so much. The one other thing he knew about the girl’s words was that they were dripping with acid and they were directed at King. Hearing a sister deride King as de Lawd had made the floor fall out of Willie’s world, like a trap door had opened beneath him. Everything in his carefully constructed life fell through that trap door—all his beliefs, his ideals, his idols, his faith that the world could be made to change and that he could play some small part in changing it—everything started falling that day. And on the day after King’s funeral, years after he heard those two killing little words, Willie could see with fresh eyes that he was still falling and he wanted to stop.

Watching those ridiculous Georgia mules pull King’s coffin through the wailing mob in Atlanta, Willie understood that if he could recapture the moment when he first heard those two words—if he could relive that moment—he might be able to reassemble the life that fell through that trap door. Then he might be able to tell the story of that life. For the first time in years, thanks to Martin Luther King’s murder, that was what he wanted to do.

He was jolted from his reverie by the shriek of a traffic cop’s whistle. This edition of Detroit’s finest, an Irishman with a cranberry nose, was holding up traffic with a big white-gloved paw so pedestrians could cross Trumbull. Even now, the sight of a Detroit cop sent a hot flash of terror through Willie. He hunched his shoulders and kept his eyes down as he hurried across the street.

When he made it safely to the other side he exhaled, then looked up and saw the great sooty iceberg of Tiger Stadium looming in front of him. It was lovely. Then came the smell of a charcoal fire warming bags of peanuts, tended by a whiskery old man in a hooded sweatshirt. Roasted peanuts here! he barked, bouncing from foot to foot to keep warm. Gitcher hot peanuts! The man was wearing gloves with the fingertips cut away, just like the gloves people wore to pick cotton back home.

As Willie waited in line at the ticket window, new smells came to him—wind-borne ash and cinders from the city’s smokestacks, a vaguely briny smell off the river, diesel exhaust from idling buses. And then, after he paid fifty cents for a bleacher seat and began ascending the switchbacks that carried fans from the street to the upper deck, he realized he was climbing into a symphony of smells, a single complex aroma that had been composing itself since the first baseball game was played fifty-six Aprils ago in this, America’s oldest big-league ballpark. It was equal parts mustard, sweat, stale beer, urine, popcorn, wet wool, vomit, perfume, cigar smoke and boiled pork. It was that musty smell iron gives off after it has stood in one place through fifty-six scorching summers and fifty-six Arctic winters and an unknowable number of sleet storms and baseball games and football games, half-time pageants and fistfights and pennant drives, after it has absorbed the shuffling of millions of pairs of feet, heard the guttural animal roar of cheers and boos and taunts, after it has housed the whole range of human emotions, from ecstasy to scorn to despair, that touch the lives of people who live in a sports-mad city like Detroit.

He was winded when he reached the upper deck. Pausing to catch his breath, he told himself winter was over and he needed to get back out on the basketball court. He noticed something on the concession stand menus called Red Hots, and the cryptic words CRUSH ALL CUPS stenciled on the walls at regular intervals. He had entered a house of mysteries and secret codes. The bleachers were reached by long catwalks suspended by cables from riveted iron girders. Looking down gave him a mild sense of vertigo, so he lifted his eyes to the rectangle of blue sky before him. He saw seagulls. And then he stepped into the sunshine.

Arrayed before him was the most beautiful room he’d ever seen. It was painted green, this irregular open-air room, its upper-deck seats sheltered by a tarpaper roof, the field a luxuriously cross-hatched emerald carpet. The infield dirt was tinged with something black. Coal dust? The bases glowed like sugar cubes.

He climbed toward the big black scoreboard at the top of the bleachers, toward the huge A.C. spark plug shooting through a ring of fire. From up there he could see the spires of downtown, but he turned his back on the skyline and studied this lovely open-air room. The longer he gazed out at the park, the smaller it seemed to become. It was hard to believe the place could hold upwards of 50,000 people. It was so . . . so intimate.

The American flag on the roof behind home plate was at half-mast, as he’d expected, and the pennants of the American League teams rimming the roof were all crisply horizontal from the river wind that cleared the roof on the first base side and galloped across the outfield. He was glad he’d worn a sweater under his nylon windbreaker. He wondered how it was humanly possible to watch the Lions play football in this place in the middle of December.

By the time a fat man in a tuxedo stood behind home plate and sang the National Anthem, the bleachers were nearly full. It was not going to be a sellout, but it was a fine surly crowd. After a minute of itchy silence for Martin Luther King, everyone stood and roared as the Tigers were introduced and sprinted out to their positions. The loudest cheers were for Al Kaline, the veteran right fielder, and Willie Horton, a home-grown hero, a powerful black slugger who tipped his cap as he jogged to his position in left.

A black pitcher named Earl Wilson strode to the mound and began warming up. Of course Willie knew there were black pitchers in the major leagues. He’d listened to St. Louis Cardinals games on KMOX radio since he was a boy, and he would never forget the seventh game of the 1964 World Series. He had just returned to his apartment in Tuskegee to write about the fires he’d walked through during that so-called Freedom Summer, and the Series came as a welcome distraction. A bunch of his old college buddies crowded into his apartment for the seventh game because he had the best radio reception and the coldest beer in town and because Bob Gibson, the intimidating black pitcher, was starting the game for the Cardinals. Surely Gibson understood that there were brothers crowded around radios like this all over the country, hanging on his every pitch, hoping he could put down the vaunted Yankees, the whitest of dynasties, and lay to rest the myth that black people were lazy, that they weren’t as mentally tough as whites, that they couldn’t be trusted with jobs as momentous as pitching the deciding game of the World Series. Gibson pitched brilliantly, then gave up two runs in a tense ninth inning before getting the Yankees’ dangerous second baseman, Bobby Richardson, to pop up, sealing the Cardinals’ victory.

Sitting in the Tiger Stadium bleachers now, watching Earl Wilson throw his last warm-up pitches, Willie remembered feeling a flood of elation and relief when Bob Gibson got that last out. So he was aware that there were black pitchers—black stars at every position—in the major leagues. But knowing this and seeing it with his own eyes for the first time were two very different things.

Just before Earl Wilson threw the first pitch of the 1968 season, two brothers came up the aisle and sat on the bench in front of Willie. One was middle-aged, very dark-skinned, almost blue, what Willie called African black. White hair boiled out from under the upturned brim of his Panama hat. He was sucking on a toothpick. He nodded to Willie, who felt an instant kinship with this man, his deep blackness, his warm-weather hat, his silent gesture of greeting. Without thinking, Willie let slip a southernism: Hey now.

A’ight—and y’sef? the man said.

Fine, thanks. Got Earl Wilson on the mound.

I seen that, said the other man, who was younger, fairer, tea-colored. He wore a tan trench coat with epaulets over a brown pin-striped suit, his yellow necktie loose, his shirt collar unbuttoned. His brown oxfords were laced tight, deeply creased but polished to a high shine. They looked elegant and businesslike and comfortable, three things that rarely went together. He looked like one of those rich oats you see in Esquire magazine, a successful businessman who could afford to duck out of the office in the middle of the day to catch a ballgame or drop in on his girlfriend.

Ain’t no flies on Earl, said the older man, motioning to a beer vendor. He turned to Willie. Care for a Stroh’s?

Um, sure.

Three, the man told the vendor. He paid for all of them and passed around waxed-paper cups with foam spilling over their brims.

Much obliged, Willie said.

Ain’t no thing. The man took a long drink of beer. So where you from, Cuz? You ain’t no Michigan boy. Your manners is too good.

I’m from Alabama. Down around Mobile.

No shit. My homeplace in Lurr-zee-ana, not far from Lafayette. He let out a yelp when Earl Wilson struck out the leadoff batter.

What brings you up here? Willie asked.

Work, same as everybody else. Been at Ford’s the past twenty-two years. Right now I’m a second-shift foreman at the Rouge. Name’s Louis Dumars. He and Willie locked thumbs, stroked each other’s palms. And this here’s Clyde Holland—the famous barrister with the even more famous brothers. The two friends shared a laugh, and Willie locked thumbs with Clyde, brushed the offered palm. His hand was softer than Louis’s.

Willie Bledsoe. Pleased to meet you both.

After Wilson retired the side in the top of the first and the Red Sox took the field, Willie said to Louis, So do you always get Wednesdays off at the Rouge?

Fuck no, man. I called in sick—just like half the rank-and-file all over town. You know you shouldn’t never buy no car made on a Monday, right?

No. Why’s that?

Cause—half the guys on the line’s working with a hangover and the other half’s at home sleepin theirs off.

Clyde laughed.

Same goes for the Tigers’ home opener, Louis went on. I pity the fool buys a car made today. Half the bolts is gonna be missin and the other half’s gonna fall off fore the car’s a month old.

Clyde roared at this. Then he said, How bout you, Alabama? How come you so far from home?

Work, same as everybody else.

So what is it you do?

I work in a private club. Willie was going to leave it at that, but Clyde seemed to be waiting for more. So Willie said, Bussing tables.

A busboy. Clyde clucked his tongue, a sound Willie knew well, the sound of the native Detroiter’s scorn for all the poor unhip country hicks who kept pouring in from the South and gobbling up the lowliest jobs simply because they thought they’d arrived in the Promised Land and hadn’t learned the score yet.

Reggie Smith singled and a rookie named Joe LaHoud walked to start the Boston second. When Rico Petrocelli laced a double that rolled to the wall in left-center, scoring both runners, the mood of the fans turned sour. A greasy-haired white guy, his thick arms protruding from the rolled-up sleeves of a T-shirt, leaned over the front railing of the bleachers and bellowed, Come on, Horton! Get your fat ass in gear! You coulda cut that thing off!

Everyone within earshot guffawed.

Damn, Willie said. Fans’re tough up here.

Ficklest motherfuckers in the world, agreed Clyde, draining his beer and crushing the cup with the heel of an oxford. Watching him, Willie remembered the stenciled command on the walls. Clyde, seeming to read his mind, said, Easier to sweep up after the game if they flat.

Ahh. One mystery solved.

Boston added a run in the third, which ignited fresh grumbling about the quality of Earl Wilson’s pitching. He won a brief reprieve by lofting a high fly to left in the bottom of the third, a ball that looked like a routine out until the wind off the river caught it. The crowd erupted when the ball sailed over the fence into the lower-deck seats.

Earl my main man! Clyde shouted, standing to applaud with everyone else as the pitcher trotted around the bases. "Motherfucker can stone play!"

But in the sixth inning the wheels came off for Earl Wilson. The Red Sox loaded the bases with nobody out. Even way up in the bleachers, some 500 feet from home plate, Willie could taste the doom in the air.

Take him out, Louis pleaded softly when the Tigers’ manager, Mayo Smith, marched out to the mound. The greasy-haired heckler was joined now by a small gang, including one guy who’d stripped off his shirt. He was as pink as a Smithfield ham. Obviously fueled by vast doses of Stroh’s, they began to chant, Lift the bum! Lift the bum! Lift the bum!

But Smith left Wilson in, and the next batter, pesky little Rico Petrocelli, hit a sharp single, scoring one run and sending Earl Wilson to an early shower. As he trudged off the field, boos cascaded down from the stands in physical waves.

Shoulda took him out, Louis said, shaking his head.

That shit-ass had no bidness leavin him in, Clyde agreed. "His arm obviously tired. Any soda cracker could see that—even one named after mayonnaise."

By the seventh-inning stretch Boston was ahead 6-1 and fans were beginning to shuffle to the exits. But Louis and Clyde were staying put, and so was Willie. Despite the racial tension, Willie wanted this game, this moment, to last forever, just as he’d wanted Earl Wilson’s lazy home run to stay airborne forever. He realized this was the first time he’d felt truly at ease since arriving in Detroit.

He was looking at the scoreboard when a roar went up from the crowd. A muscular black player had stepped out of the Tigers’ dugout and started twirling a cluster of bats like they were toothpicks. The hecklers sprang back to life.

Hey, Gates! You remember to visit your parole officer this week?

Gates! Looks like you got along pretty good with that prison food!

Willie turned to Louis. What’re those freckle bellies bellering about now?

That’s Gates Brown coming in to pinch-hit. Best in the game, you ax me. Them crackers is giving him shit cause he did a little time. The joint’s where he got the nickname Gates.

What’d he do time for?

Burglary, Clyde said. I represented him.

And you didn’t do a very good motherfuckin job! Louis said, and the two friends laughed and slapped hands.

Damn, Willie was thinking, the Tigers even had black ex-cons on their roster. His love for this team was growing deeper by the minute.

Gates Brown yanked the first pitch into the right-field corner and sauntered into second base with a double. Didn’t even break a sweat or get his uniform dirty. That took care of the hecklers. But the mention of prison had reminded Clyde of something.

Du, check this out, he said to Louis. Got a call this morning from a client a mine, name of Alphonso Johnson. Po-lice woke him out of a dead sleep and hauled him downtown for questioning.

What for?

That’s the amazing thing—for an unsolved murder during the riot. That’s been almost a whole year ago. I didn’t know the D-troit po-lice worked on nothin for a year.

Ain’t a continental thing those fools do that surprises me no more. They get away with murder any day a the week they want to.

So did your client kill somebody? Willie said.

Clyde shot him a withering look. How the hell’m I suppose to know that, Alabama? You think a man kills somebody and goes around braggin on it?

No.

Hell no. I don’t know if he’s guilty and I don’t care. He’s my client. What I’m tryin to tell you is that the po-lice is still workin shit from the riot. That was news to me.

It was news to Willie, too. The very worst news he could possibly have heard.

After the final out of the game, a 7-3 loss for the Tigers, Willie stood and took a last long look at the park, trying to commit it to memory. Then he followed Louis and Clyde and the rest of the hardcore fans down the switchbacks to the street. The two friends made plans to meet for Saturday’s game against the White Sox, and they asked Willie if he was planning to come.

Depends on my work schedule, he said. They posted the schedules on Thursdays, and there was a chance he would have to work on Saturday afternoon. If I’ve got the day off I’ll definitely be here.

Here, Alabama, Clyde said, handing him a business card. The embossed letters, gold on black, said Clyde Holland, Attorney at Law. Then Penobscot Building and a phone number. A brother never knows when he’s gonna need a lawyer in this man’s town.

Amen, Louis said.

Thanks, Clyde. Willie slipped the card into his wallet and said his goodbyes.

There was no sign of life at the hippie house on Plum Street, and his Buick was the only car left in the back yard. Driving up Cass, Willie tuned in WJLB and got the new one by Stevie Wonder, You Met Your Match. Great bass line and a nice jump to the beat, Willie thought, another sure hit for a kid who’d been cranking them out for years and wasn’t even out of his teens yet. Just thinking about Little Stevie Wonder made Willie feel old. Then came the signature sign-off of his favorite deejay, Ernie Durham, velvet-tongued Ernie D, who delivered his farewell over a drenched blue bed of horns: I’m rough and I’m tough and I know my stuff . . . and you’re lucky you live in a town where you can hear the Rockin’ Mr. D. before the sun goes down . . . goodbye for now, D-troit, I LOVE ya! Now git yo’selves ready for Martha Jean the Queen!

But Willie barely heard it. He couldn’t stop thinking about Clyde’s client getting hauled downtown for questioning in a murder from the riot, a murder that was nearly a year old. Willie realized he’d allowed himself to get lulled into a false sense of security. Just because the riot was ancient history didn’t mean the cops had forgotten about the last few unsolved murders. Far from it.

He realized the first thing he needed to do was get this Buick off the street. Again. It was the only thing that could possibly be his undoing. So instead of parking in his usual spot—out in the open at the curb near the corner of Pallister and Poe—he guided the Buick up the narrow driveway that ran between his apartment building and the scorched shell next door. He had to move some tires and old paint cans to make room in the garage. Then he pulled the Buick in and covered it with a tarp and closed the garage door.

He didn’t want to give the cops a thing. And he damn sure didn’t want to find out—from them or anyone else—exactly what had happened on the night he’d spent the past nine months trying to forget. But the world wouldn’t let him forget. It was like a stone in his guts—the killing guilt that lurked there, waiting to pounce if it turned out he had killed a woman in cold blood.

2

SATURDAY MORNING NOT QUITE TEN O’CLOCK AND FRANK DOYLE had the Homicide squad room to himself. The place was quiet, flushed with spring sunshine. If he didn’t know better, he might have believed the city of Detroit was at peace with itself.

When he sat down at his big ugly brown metal desk with the Free Press sports page and a fresh cup of forty-weight from the Bunn-O-Matic, the first thing Doyle noticed was the manila envelope in his IN box. It said INTEROFFICE and CONFIDENTIAL. That sounded promising, but before he could open it his telephone rang. Not even ten o’clock on a Saturday morning and already the calls had started coming. What was he thinking? This was Detroit. The calls never stopped coming.

Though he’d come in to clear up some paperwork and was, technically, off the clock, Doyle picked up the receiver. You never know. Police work is all about luck and squealers, and maybe this call would bring him luck. The good kind, for a change.

Homicide, Doyle. More than a