Motown (22 page)

“I look like his mama? Anyways, that was before we got word. Who done it, you think?”

“Since when’s Mahomet make speeches?”

“Oh, that shit he fed Joe Petite at Congo’s wake got around. Gidgy says he can get us all the guns we need.”

“Handguns with a history, all name brands, hunnert apiece. Three hunnert you don’t want them traced. Automatic weapons a thousand a pop.” Gidgy took off his Panama and hung it up, exposing a head of carroty hair that compromised the solemn dark wood-sculpture of his face; hence the hat. “I got a dude in Chicago’s been after me for months to trade him coke for guns. I tell him, ‘What I want with guns? I get along with everybody.’ ‘You never know,’ he says.”

“
White
dude?” Sebastian Bright had joined them. Quincy might not have recognized him except for his shiny bald head. The gold-toothed grin that had won him his name was nowhere in evidence. He and Joe Petite had been tight.

Gidgy spread his hands. “Color don’t figure. Man likes to throw snort parties, impress his friends with his big-deal connections. Who cares what color he is if his guns shoot?”

“Means he’s white. Maybe his guns don’t shoot. Maybe they blow up in our face.”

“This ain’t no race war.”

“It ain’t Ethiopians we’re fighting.”

“We ain’t fighting nobody,” Quincy said. “Not yet. We don’t even know for sure what happened. Dude like DiJesus has got more enemies than brains. Maybe one of his own done him.”

“Or maybe it was one of us.”

They turned in a body toward Beatrice Blackwood, perched on the couch with her ankles crossed and a glass of amber liquid in her hand. She was wearing a white blouse with a lace yoke and a full black skirt. She cropped her hair close to the scalp, accentuating the Egyptian cast of her Jamaican features.

“Anybody can buy a shotgun,” she went on. “He wouldn’t even have to tell anyone about it.”

“Not much percentage in a one-man war,” Quincy said.

She sipped her drink. “Maybe he didn’t think it would stay just one man.”

“You saying somebody done it just to start the ball?” Quincy was looking at Sebastian.

After a long moment the gold tooth broke cover. Sebastian shook his head. “I got no stomach for that. Never did.”

“Don’t take no stomach to hire help.” Gidgy had taken a seat next to Beatrice on the couch and poured a quarter-teaspoon of white powder out of an envelope onto the scratched glass top of the coffee table. From an inside breast pocket he produced a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl handle and proceeded to divide and sub-divide the powder into a series of thin lines.

Sebastian said, “It weren’t me.”

“’Course not.” Lydell coughed. “Everybody knows Sebastian never spends his own money on nothing. I heard a lady bought him that tooth.”

“One
sweet
lady. She went and married a repo man.” The bald man was sanguine.

Beatrice said, “Sebastian wasn’t the one that invited us to the wake.”

“I was to go after DiJesus I’d of done it after he hit my place,” Quincy said. “I only knew Joe to talk to. I sure wouldn’t of killed for him.”

“There’s the news.” Lydell turned up the volume on the set. At that moment James Brown started wailing “I Feel Good” in the room next door. Gidgy hammered on the wall with his fist until someone turned down the music. On the TV screen, a GI in combat fatigues winked as he walked past the camera carrying an M-16 with a flower stuck in the muzzle.

Gidgy used a silver straw to ingest a line of powder into his left nostril. He sat back and let an uncharacteristic grin blossom over the lower half of his face, displaying the yellowest teeth Quincy had ever seen. “Don’t nobody else want a toot?” he asked.

Beatrice shushed him. The flower-carrying soldier had given way to a tight shot of a jagged hole in the rear window of a parked automobile. The camera prowled the length of the car, lingering on a spray of oval holes in the sheet metal on the driver’s side. “… at the intersection of Cadieux and Mack Avenue,” thundered the voiceover. “The driver, identified as Harold DiJesus, thirty-one, a resident of Nevada, reportedly emerged unscathed and was released from custody after questioning. Police declined to speculate on the motive for the attack, but did not rule out the possibility that drugs were involved. In a related story, Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin today announced the adoption of a plan to protect citizens and private property in the event of a civil disturbance …”

Lydell turned off the set just as Girardin’s basset-hound visage appeared. “If they get the guy they better not count on a confession,” he said. “Ain’t nobody going to admit he missed twice’t at that range with a fucking splattergun.”

Quincy found a bottle of Vernor’s in the kitchenette and poured it into his sour stomach. “Least we know who’s going to be coming at us.” He belched.

“Won’t be DiJesus,” said Sebastian. “Cops’ll be on him like flies on a pig’s asshole. For a while anyways.”

Krystal leaned over Beatrice. “I just love your blouse.”

The telephone rang. Lydell picked it up. “That’s probably Mahomet. I sent them wrestlers to fetch him back here.”

“We still don’t know who did it.” Beatrice ignored Krystal.

“That don’t matter no more.” Gidgy was coming down. “We want them guns or not?”

Lydell hung up the receiver. “Shiiit. That was Mighty Joe Young.” Quincy gave him a stupid look. “The wrestler, you know. The meeting was over when they got there. They missed Mahomet.”

Quincy said, “He’ll head for our place. DiJesus might have somebody there. You bring the Sting Ray?”

“It’s parked out back.” A fit of coughing bent him double.

“Throw me the keys. You can’t even walk.”

“I can shoot.” Wheezing, Lydell handed Quincy the ring. “I got my Bulldog.”

Krystal rose. She had Gidgy’s straw in her hand. “I’ll go too.”

“It only seats two.” Quincy watched as she dropped back down and raised the straw. “Go easy on that shit. I don’t want to scrape you off the ceiling when we get back.”

He drove the Corvette flat-out. The moisture in the air beaded up on the windshield and made crooked tracks toward the frame.

Lydell held his hat and looked back. “You just busted a red.”

Quincy said nothing. He down-shifted for a curve, then banged the stick back up into fourth. The engine harrumphed and whined. Traffic was sparse.

“Man, I hope you drives like this for me when my time comes.”

“Everybody I hang around with needs to be took care of,” Quincy said. “I should start a mission.”

“That’s what you been running right along, brother. You just serves liquor instead of soup and sells numbers instead of Bingo. You the Saint fucking Francis of Twelfth Street.”

Collingwood was quiet at that hour. A light burned behind the window of the Jiffee Coin Laundromat & Custom Laundry to discourage burglars, illuminating starkly the rows of washers and dryers inside, like white marble slabs in a mortuary. Only two cars were parked in the block. One, a stove-in Ford Fairlane with two flat tires and a square of clear plastic taped over a missing window, had been there for three weeks and sported a police tow sticker on the windshield. The other, snugged against the curb across from the laundromat, was a new black Plymouth Fury. Someone was seated behind the wheel.

“Don’t look till we get past.” Quincy kept his eyes on the street ahead.

At the corner, Lydell lit a cigarette. His hand shook. “All’s I know is he’s white.”

“We’ll go around the block, see can we spot Mahomet.”

“Maybe he went up already.”

“Maybe. I don’t see no lights.”

They turned down Twelfth, doubled back on Calvert, and parked on Fourteenth near the corner. From there they could see the Fury. A couple with their arms around each other walked past them swinging white cardboard cartons bound with string, trailing the sweet-sharp aroma of ribs in barbecue sauce.

“Think Mahomet’s up there?”

“One way to find out.” Quincy opened his door. “Give me your piece.”

“What you fixing to do with it?”

“That ain’t up to me.” He held out his hand. Lydell laid the Bulldog in it. It felt cool and heavy. Quincy got out and put it in the side pocket of his linen jacket, leaving his hand on it. He leaned his hip against the door until the latch caught. “If anything moves, blow the horn.”

“Okay if I wets my pants first?” Lydell’s grin flickered and went away.

Quincy tried to walk normally, but the weight of the revolver threw off his rhythm. He turned the corner onto Collingwood opposite the parked car and tried not to look in that direction, tried not to look like he was trying not to look; so of course he looked. From that angle the interior was full of shadows. He kept walking toward the door that led upstairs to the blind pig. His footsteps clapped back at him as if he were walking down an empty corridor. He thought of Dr. Kimble. He turned to grasp the door handle.

The Sting Ray’s horn honked.

He heard the creak of the car door opening, a new set of footsteps shuffling on asphalt. He drew the Bulldog out of his pocket and turned toward the street. A man was standing in the middle with his feet spread and a gun extended in both hands.

“Police!” shouted the man. “Drop it!”

T
HE ADDRESS
C
ANADA HAD
written in his notebook belonged to a new brick ranchstyle in Allen Park, one of those architectural one-sided coins with fretwork and built-in flower pots in front and a back as plain as a Dixie cup. The flagstone path that ran past the picture window had been claimed by an overgrown juniper hedge. With an oath, Canada surrendered his shoeshine to the grass, still wet from the day’s rain. Evening shadows made black shag of the lawn.

The doorbell brought a small woman in her middle thirties to the screen. He took off his hat. “Miss Niles?”

“Yes. Are you Inspector—?”

“Canada. Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

Her short laugh was husky and entirely mysterious. She reached up and unhooked the screen door and he pulled it open and stepped inside.

Susan Niles had on a simple knitted dress—taupe, if he remembered the name of the color correctly from his married days—cinched at the waist with a pleated belt. In low-heeled slippers she was almost a foot shorter than her visitor. Her hair was ash blond, nape-length and swept to the side in an almost careless fashion that he liked, and her chin came to a point; the only fault he noted on short acquaintance. She turned away without offering to take his hat.

“We’ll talk in the living room. Can I get you anything?”

“Thanks, I just had supper.”

She stepped down carefully into a sunken room containing a lot of heavy furniture that appeared to be suspended a few inches above the pile carpet until he got close enough to see the thin steel legs. The walls were bare, but painted in soft colors that lessened the effect of no pictures, and where a television set would have stood in most households was a stereo in a walnut cabinet and a rack filled with LPs. Although the lights were on, she reached out and felt the wall switch. Canada knew then that the blue eyes were sightless.

“How is Connie?” She touched the arm of a plaid sofa and sat down.

He trusted his weight to a tulip chair and laid his hat in his lap. It occurred to him that he could just as well have put it back on. “He ought to get out of the lawn mower business. He hates it.”

“He needs the money. And he won’t go back to newspapers.”

“Did he tell you I’d call?”

She nodded. After a little silence she said, “I’m not Connie’s mistress, if that’s what you’re thinking. He knew my Aunt Harriett.”

“He said something about almost marrying your aunt.” He wondered where this was going.

“Long was her last name.”

He nodded, then remembered the uselessness of gestures and said, politely, “Oh?”

She smiled in his direction. “There’s a scrapbook on the table by your chair. I hope it isn’t too dusty. I got it out after you called. I memorized everything in it long before the glaucoma.”

He’d noticed it when he sat down, an old-fashioned ledger-size volume with thick boards bound in raveled green fabric. He transferred it to his lap and lifted the cover carefully to avoid smearing his hands. A brittle brown clipping from the old Detroit
Times
was pasted to the first page. The picture, taken with a flash and rubbed and faded with years, was of a woman in a cloche hat with circular penciled eyebrows, beestung lips, and Susan Niles’s pointed chin. MADAM TESTIFIES IN M’DONALD CASE, read the block headline. It was dated October 2, 1939.

He looked up. “You’re Hattie Long’s niece?”

“I thought you might recognize the name, being a policeman. Just about no one else would. She died when I was thirteen.”

“Some of the older officers were still talking about her when I joined the department. She ran a blind pig back when blind pigs were blind pigs. The Rooster.”

“The Cock,” she corrected. “The newspapers cleaned it up in print. It was named after the stuffed rooster in the window of whatever building she happened to be using between raids. You forgot to add that the blind pig was also a whorehouse.”

“I seem to recall that it was more than that.”

“It was where every politician and policeman above the rank of sergeant went to get paid off in town. When that came out during the grand jury a lot of vacancies opened at City Hall.”

“Thirteen Hundred too,” he said. “That’s how I got into the training program.”

“Until the day she died, Aunt Harriett thought I thought she was a stenographer. Young ladies didn’t read newspapers then. It’s funny how naive the truly jaded can be. All that time I was keeping that scrapbook. She was my father’s sister; if my mother ever found out I visited Aunt Harriett in her apartment—well, she didn’t. When Hattie died, I inherited a cigar box full of photographs. They’re all in the book.”

He turned pages. More clippings from the grand jury investigation into events surrounding the suicide of Janet McDonald, the jilted mistress of a corrupt police official, sprinkled among black-and-white snapshots with serrated edges of mixed groups seated around bar tables and smiling in front of automobiles with running boards and bullet-shaped headlights and picnicking on a younger, cleaner Belle Isle. The articles told him, if he didn’t know already, that the Grecian Gardens affair was nothing new in the history of the