Motor City Blue (2 page)

“Better than that. I can give you his name.”

“Damned thoughtful of him to introduce himself.” There was an edge to his tone.

“The guy was my company commander in Nam. That’s why I was following him. Captain Francis Kramer, age forty, give or take a year, five-ten, five-eleven, a hundred and ninety pounds, blond hair, gray eyes—you getting all this?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.””

I described the abductors and the car they were driving, finishing with the license plate number. “Look,” I said, “if you won’t trace it for me you can at least put it through regular channels. I’m not after any favors.”

“How many saw this besides you?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody?” Disbelief coupled with anger. “On Woodward at five-thirty in the afternoon? Who the hell are you trying to kid? The last time that happened was during the riots.”

“I didn’t say there was nobody else there. They just didn’t see it.”

“And you did.”

“I was looking for it. I’m telling you, these guys were pros.”

“I’ll give it to the boys in General Service.”

“Why can’t you handle it?”

“I’m Homicide. I’ve got my hands full with the Freeman Shanks killing. Don’t worry, I’ll ask them to take special care with this one, seeing as how you and Kramer were friends. I wouldn’t do it if our fathers hadn’t been partners. I don’t hate you yet, Walker, but give me time.”

I let that slide. “We weren’t friends. I just don’t like to see people snatched on public streets in broad daylight. It makes me wonder who’s next.”

“Stay available. General Service will want to talk to you.”

“I’ve an answering service and a beeper, if the batteries are still good,” I assured him. “Any leads in the Shanks thing?”

“Several hundred. Which is why I’ll be a member in good standing of the Detroit Yacht Club before it’s solved. Unless you know something about that too?” It was sarcasm, but backed with desperation. The investigation into the August shooting of the popular black labor leader was in its third month and both the
News
and the
Free Press
were screaming for action or certain officials’ scalps.

“Who killed Jimmy Hoffa?” I said.

“Go to hell, Walker.” The line went dead.

C
OME AND VISIT ME
sometime in my little shack just west of Hamtramck, but don’t bring too many Poles with you; the neighborhood is predominantly Ukrainian and ancient antagonisms die hard. It’s a one-story frame dwelling, built during the great European famine in the 1920s, when refugees came here in droves, and boasts a bath, a bedroom, a combined living room and dining area big enough for one or the other but not both, and a full kitchen, currently an endangered species. It’s not the lobby of the Detroit Plaza, but it’s still more space than one person needs. Maybe when we know each other better I’ll tell you about the person who used to share it with me. In any case, it will suit me until the taxes eat me alive.

I got home just in time to catch the meat of the six o’clock news on Channel 4, the part that comes after the first commercial when the sweetness and light they like to lead off with these days is over. There was nothing about Francis Kramer. Channels 2 and 7 had just as much to say on the subject, but then unlike 4 they generally line up the hard stuff for their first pitch and I might have missed it. I’d bought the evening editions of the
News
and
Free Press
, but I didn’t expect to find him there. They had hit the street about the time he was taking that jab in the liver.

Dinner was with Mrs. Paul, or maybe it was Birdseye; once the label’s off they all defrost the same. Not that I can’t cook, but every now and then it’s nice to see that somewhere someone’s following a set pattern. Peas in one place, meat in another, little round potatoes all lined up like lead soldiers in neat rows. I broke them up with one deft stab of my fork.

My digestive juices were massing for the kill when I returned to the television set. The Canadian station carried hockey and I watched a couple of minutes of that, but they staged one fight too many and I switched it off. If I wanted to see human nature at its worst I’d go back to the news. I’m talking about the fans, not the players.

I considered putting a 78 on the J. C. Penney stereo but veteoed it. My collection of jazz and early rock had been a source of some pride before the divorce settlement left me with just a bunch of records. I could do without the depression playing one would bring on.

Out of sheer boredom I consulted the listing and struck paydirt. Bogart was on Channel 50’s Eight O’Clock Movie.
The Barefoot Contessa
, not one of his best. But what the hell, it was Bogart. I had an hour and a half to kill before it came on. I settled into my only easy chair for a systematic and intelligent reading of the
Free Press
, starting with “Beetle Bailey.”

The telephone hollered just as Rossano Brazzi stepped out of the bushes with Ava Gardner’s corpse in his arms. I gave it its head until the credits flashed on the screen, by which time it was winding up for its seventh ring.

“Amos Walker?” A nothing voice, not young, not old. But definitely male. I confirmed his suspicion.

“Ben Morningstar wishes to speak with you.”

My grip didn’t crack the receiver; that would be an exaggeration. But it came close. Ben Morningstar wasn’t someone you spoke with on the telephone. He was a name in
Newsweek
, a photograph taken at a funeral by a G-man with a telephoto lens across the street, a pair of nervous hands fiddling with a package of Lucky Strikes in a Congressional hearing room on television in the early fifties. He was Anthony Quinn in a thinly veiled role that had never hit the theaters because the lawyers had it all tied up. He was the brass ring for every government prosecutor with his eye on the Attorney General’s office. To Hymie “the Lip” Lipschitz, a smalltime bootlegger and numbers book forgotten except in an old Warner Brothers whitewash they keep bringing back on the late show, he was eighty pounds of cement and a lungful of Detroit River. After a couple of seconds, disguised as an hour, I found voice enough to say, “I’m listening.”

“Mr. Morningstar doesn’t use the telephone,” explained the voice. “We’ll send a car for you.”

“From Phoenix?” That’s were
Newsweek
had him living these days.

“From Grosse Pointe. Look for it in about an hour.”

“No good. I’m out early. He can reach me at the office tomorrow afternoon.” Tomorrow morning Gibson went out to collect his unemployment check, and while he wasn’t dull enough to go on that errand without his canes, there was no telling what he might do in a hurry.

“We’ll send a car.” The line clicked and buzzed.

I stood there listening to the dial tone until the recording cut in to tell me to hang up. I cradled the instrument before the automatic warning system could start bleating. That’s one more thing technology has taken from us lately, the right to leave the telephone off the hook. My only consolation was that this was one time I hadn’t gotten myself into whatever it was I was in. So far as I knew.

At five minutes to eleven the doorbell clanged. For crosstown it was good time, but not spectacular. The 1967 riots having dealt a crippling blow to whatever nightlife the city had left, streets generally shut down around ten-thirty on a weeknight. From then until two, when the blind pigs started doing business, you could score a direct hit with a mortar shell on Cobo Hall from the upper end of Woodward without fear of striking anything in between.

When I opened the door I half expected a pair of plug-uglies poured into loud suits tailored to make room for their shoulder rigs, noses folded to the side and at least one cauliflower ear between them. I was disappointed to find a tall young black man standing on the stoop, the kind you see in the United Negro College Fund ads, all earnest and serious-looking in a blue Hughes & Hatcher under a light gray topcoat and black-rimmed glasses. If I’d wanted to see that I’d have gone down to Wayne State.

“Mr. Walker?” A bold voice, with just a hint of Alabama around the r’s, once removed. It wasn’t the voice I’d heard on the telephone. He had prominent teeth that flashed white and straight against his coffee-colored skin when he spoke. With the glasses, he reminded me of Little Stevie Wonder, another Detroit product.

“Where’s your friend?” I asked him.

“Friend?”

“Don’t you usually travel in pairs?” I struggled into my coat and screwed on my hat, smoothing the brim between thumb and forefinger.

He killed a moment studying that from both sides. Then his expression cleared and he smiled, blinding me with his eighty-eights. “You’ve been watching too many old movies. I’m too dark for George Raft and too skinny for Barton MacLane.” He stood aside while I came out and closed the door behind me, locking it.

“A black man who knows old movies,” I said, shaking my head as we made our way down the walk toward the street. I turned up my coat collar. The storm had blown over. The sky was as clear as Lake Michigan used to be and the cold was straight from outer space. Breathing it was like snorting ground glass. “I didn’t know you partook.”

“We don’t spend all our time sticking up liquor stores and raping white women.” The way he said it brought the temperature down another notch. Suddenly he sensed that I was kidding. The grin flashed. “I try to avoid Stepin Fetchit.”

I laughed. “I had to know who I was dealing with.”

“Did I pass?”

“Poor choice of words.”

He gave that one all the mirth it deserved, and opened the passenger door of a yellow Pinto for me. There went another illusion. Next he’d be telling me they’d traded in their tommy guns on Daisy air rifles.

As a driver he was no great shakes, but at least he knew who has the right of way at stop streets—a dying art—and had the presence of mind to fry the eyeballs of a couple of jokers who refused to dim their lights as they approached from the other direction. After a dozen blocks I asked him how long he’d driven cabs.

His grin reflected the lights of an oncoming semi an instant before they reached the rest of his face. “How’d you know that?”

“You know the shortcut from Hamtramck to Grosse Pointe, but I’d bet my next retainer you’re not from this part of town. The rest was guesswork.”

“Sherlock Holmes, yet!” He let the tires slue their way through a slick spot without a qualm.

“It works one time out of six.”

“I’m beginning to think the boss didn’t make such a bad choice after all.”

“Choice for what?”

He changed the subject. “A white man who wears a felt hat,” he mused, eyes on the street ahead. “I didn’t know
you
partook.”

“Ninety percent of human body heat escapes through the head and feet,” I said. “Want to see my socks?”

He chuckled but didn’t say anything. The lines were drawn. I didn’t ask him about his mission and he kept his nose out of my wardrobe. That left the weather, which was obvious. We made the rest of the trip in silence.

Whoever said all men are created equal must have had his eye on a home in Grosse Pointe. In this democracy, any boy can hope to grow up and live in the riverfront suburb, provided his credit rating is A-l and he’s prepared to mortgage himself to the eyes. Something over a hundred years ago, a healthy chunk of the area to the west was under the control of Billy Boushaw, boss of the First Precinct of the First Ward, whose old saloon and sailors’ flophouse stood at the northwest corner of Beaubien and Atwater streets, but that’s a slice of history they don’t serve in the local schools. Now it’s rich town, and the best-patroled square mile in the city. On maps it usually appears in green.

The house was a letdown. It didn’t have more than forty rooms and the Austrian cavalry would have had to settle for column of sixes to get through the front door. An eight-foot stone wall surrounded five acres of yard over which kliegs mounted in trees near the house slung hot yellow light, which must have raised hell with the grass in summer. Here was where we crossed the line from public image into private necessity.

The man who appeared on the other side of the steel picket gate as we pulled up to it had collar-length blond hair bare to the elements and crisp Teutonic features, the kind that look the same year after year until they finally fall apart overnight. He hadn’t anything to worry about for a while. He was young and tan and healthy and wore a navy blue peacoat over a white turtleneck shirt. I satisfied myself that he wasn’t the one I’d spoken with on the telephone either, when my companion climbed out to speak with him and he answered with a German accent straight out of
Stalag 17
. Ben Morningstar was an equal opportunity employer.

After a moment of conversation, during which he turned to squint at me through the windshield, the kraut nodded and unlocked the gate. He had it open by the time the black returned to the car and we drove through. A hairpin drive of freshly scraped asphalt swung past a skimpily modern front porch and broadened for the turnaround in front of an attached garage you wouldn’t call skimpy unless the Pontiac Silverdome had spoiled you. We parked in front of the porch and got out.

The door was opened by a man in a red and black checked shirt fastened at the neck with a string tie and a Hopi totem of turquoise and silver. He was about my height, which made him less than six-four and more than five-ten, and wore a broad smile that went all the way up to his eyes, brilliants mounted in a setting of deep crow’s-feet. Naturally lean, he had developed a slight paunch in recent years that he tried to keep cinched in with a belt with a rodeo buckle around Levi’s so new they rustled when he moved. His face was full of tiny cracks and creases and burned by a kind of sun Michigan never saw. He looked fifty. He might have been forty or sixty. He had a full head of crisp black hair that swept down in a natural break over his right eyebrow. It was a big head, much too big for the rest of him except for his hands, one of which enveloped mine in a grip like a third rail.

“You’d be Amos Walker,” he observed, straining the smile a notch farther as he stepped aside to admit us. His drawl was pure El Paso.