Motown (26 page)

“It’s a valuable skill, particularly when there are no women around. I picked it up in fifty-seven when Genovese and Costello were at war. It was self-defense; you can only eat so many sardine-and-mustard sandwiches. Your boy’s invited too.” He began setting the table.

“Sweets stays at his post. You know how many
capos
have been shot over dinner?”

“That only happens in restaurants. Governor Romney should have the security system I put in here.”

“I don’t know why we couldn’t meet at the office.”

“My father worked two jobs, seven days a week. My sister and I never got to see him. When I bring my wife and kids here from New York, that’s one mistake I’m not going to make. I’m establishing the habit of staying away from offices on Saturdays.” He filled two stemmed glasses from a bottle of burgundy and lifted one.
“Salute.”

Patsy didn’t touch his. “Wine screws up my digestion.”

Gallante shrugged, drank, set down the glass, and used serving tongs to heap both plates from the colander. He turned off the burner under the smaller pot and ladled clam sauce from it over the linguini. Removing the apron, he took his place at the table and scooped pasta into his mouth. “Perfect,” he said. “Directions say eight to ten minutes, but that’s at least two minutes too long. What are you doing about DiJesus?”

Patsy poked at his linguini. Spiced sauces were almost as bad as wine for his system. “What’s to do about him? He’s doing a good job.”

“Just as long as he doesn’t take it into his head to hit the coloreds ahead of schedule. Some of these hitters are pretty independent.”

“They tried to hit him. I guess he’s got a right to hit back.”

“He shouldn’t have gone after Joe Petite. Was that your idea?”

“The niggers needed another lesson. They were spitting in our face with that funeral.” He wasn’t about to inform Gallante that the Petite killing had come as a surprise.

“If you hold off long enough, I’ll hand you Twelfth Street without firing a shot. All DiJesus is doing is stirring them up, giving them a reason to fight.”

“We’ll rip them up if they do.”

“Why rip anyone up if we don’t have to?”

Patsy pointed his fork at Gallante. There’s no
we
about it. You’re just the East Coast help. You’re only here because the Commission outvoted me.”

“I don’t like it any more than you, but they gave me a job to do. I studied at Princeton. I’m front man for the organization’s legitimate interests on the Atlantic Seaboard; you think I asked to come here and count pennies in niggertown? If they wanted a war they’d have sent some Apache from Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Don’t throw the Commission in my face. My father helped build the Commission.”

“Your father’s methods went out with Joey Machine. That’s why the government sent him back to Sicily.”

Patsy said nothing. So far only he knew that Frankie Orr was on American soil.

Gallante had a few more forkfuls and topped off his glass from the bottle. A thick gold wedding band winked on his ring finger. Patsy despised men who wore them. “It would be different if this were between Italians, or Italians against Jews,” Gallante said. “The blacks are headline news. Just yesterday a jury in Georgia convicted a Klansman for civil rights violations in the murder of a Washington educator. A couple of years ago that would’ve been a simple homicide beef and no one would have heard about it outside Georgia. The feds are cracking down. That’s good news for us, because it means Uncle Sam’s only interested in the boys in sheets and dunce caps. If we mix in this race thing, though, he’ll turn his gun on us.”

“I’m not going to sit by and hand everything over to the coloreds, government or no.”

“They’re not trying to take anything over. They’re just trying to hold on to what they’ve got. And right now the country’s on their side.”

“Whores and pushers, the bunch of them.”

“That’s the kind of fine distinction that gets overlooked in the current climate,” Gallante said. “My advice is to call off DiJesus. Send him back to Vegas. Let me deal with Springfield and I’ll give you Twelfth Street for Christmas.”

“The motherfuckers opened up on him with shotguns. My man. They’ll be coming after me next.”

“I doubt it. They made their pass and it came up craps. They’ll draw their horns in now. I know Springfield. He won’t fight a war he can’t win. If we dictate terms now—peacefully and with tact—he’ll accept them. But you have to give me time.”

“What time is it?”

He blinked and checked his watch. “A little after one.”

“I’ve got an appointment with my physical therapist at two.” Patsy reached for his canes and rapped on the window. Outside, Sweets turned around, looked, and started toward the front door. By the time he joined the others in the kitchen, Patsy had secured his leg braces and was standing with the aid of the canes. “Tonight’s the money night,” he told Gallante. “Tell Springfield and his people we’re taking ninety-five percent from now on. Tell them to pass the word to the rest.”

“I can’t do that!”

“My father taught me never to tell a man to do something twice. He said that’s why God made undertakers.”

“Why ninety-five? Why not a hundred percent?”

“Lincoln freed the slaves.” He clanked toward the door. Sweets stepped past him to hold it.

“What if they decide to send you ninety-five percent of me instead?” Gallante asked.

“Take DiJesus with you.”

When they were through the door, Patsy remembered his manners and sent Sweets back to thank Gallante for lunch.

Canada showed the uniform at the barricade his badge and ID and joined the group gathered by the parked Studebaker with its trunk lid standing. A passenger jet shrilled overhead, dragging its shadow across the long-term parking lot; one of the new 747s. Flies swam in the stench from the car trunk.

“Shut it, for chrissake,” Canada said.

One of the uniforms slammed the lid. Everyone was smoking, including Sergeant Esther, who didn’t have the habit. He coughed a lot and his face was red. Canada, who had given up cigarettes five years ago, bummed one off the uniform holding the pack and lit it off Esther’s. The smoke helped kill the stink. He watched two morgue attendants in gas masks preparing to lift a stretcher on the ground containing an oblong in a black zipper bag. “Is it him?”

Without warning, the sergeant bent down and unzipped the bag twelve inches, uncovering a face bloated like bread dough, the blurred features of which vaguely resembled the mug shot of Curtis Dupree; also half the Negro population of Detroit and a manitee Canada had seen once in a picture in the
National Geographic.
Stench rolled out like smoke from a broiler. One of the uniforms turned away and threw up on the asphalt.

Canada, his lungs filled with smoke, motioned for Esther to close the bag. He nodded to the attendants and they lifted the corpse and carried it to the coroner’s wagon parked in the middle of the aisle.

“It’s him okay.” The sergeant walked with Canada toward fresher air. “We’ll need a positive ID from his wife, but Dupree’s name is on the registration in the glove compartment. Airport cops figure it’s been parked here three days. In this heat they don’t take long to turn.”

“That would make it the day after the try on DiJesus. What about his partner?”

“Holding down the bottom of Lake St. Clair, maybe, if he didn’t get smart and blow town.” He threw away his cigarette. “Springfield’s had a couple of days to get over Wednesday night. I think we ought to pull him in and sweat him.”

“He wouldn’t know anything.”

“Just because Dupree paid his union dues doesn’t mean he was Brock’s man. If you took all the blacks out of the Steelhaulers you wouldn’t have enough men left to get up a bowling league. He wasn’t any stranger in the numbers parlors around town.”

“That’s a real coincidence, that is. A Negro who plays numbers.” Disgusted to find that he was still smoking, Canada dropped the butt and crushed it out. The heat rising from the pavement billowed the cuffs of his trousers. Esther was sweating heavily. “Find out who Dupree hung out with,” the inspector said. “I want the partner.”

“We’ll need a medium.”

“Maybe not. Maybe he skipped town like you said. If so he left a trail.”

“If we’re going to take over all of Coopersmith’s cases. I hope he remembers us come Christmas.”

“Christmas, that’s the other side of the elections. Another country.”

They had reached Canada’s car. “Anything else?”

“Put the whole squad on the partner.” Canada opened the driver’s door; the handle was white-hot. “Meanwhile I think I’ll go pay a visit on the Steel Behind the Steelhaulers.”

Gallante unfolded himself from the passenger’s seat of the Cobra, a tall, square-jawed, thick-necked man in blue gabardine who looked like a retired athlete gone into a successful business. Harry DiJesus, wearing tight Wranglers and a white see-through shirt that showed off his pecs, joined him on the sidewalk. The short-barreled .32 he carried when he wasn’t doing heavy work made a clear outline in his right hip pocket. He narrowed his eyes speculatively at the holes in the Cobra’s sheet metal. A garage connected with the Orr organization had managed to replace the rear window the day after the shooting but was waiting on a new trunk lid and door from Shelby before completing the repairs.

“Should’ve brought Max and Georgie along,” he said.

“No, I know these people. They won’t give us as much trouble if it’s just two. If they think we’re afraid to come here alone there’s no telling how they’ll react.”

“Devlin’s safe at home, I bet.”

“Devlin pushes pencils.”

They climbed the narrow rubber-runnered staircase next to the laundromat. No light showed under the door to the blind pig. Gallante’s knock went unanswered. He inspected the luminous dial of his watch. 1:36. “They should be in there setting up.” He tried the knob. It turned and the door opened.

DiJesus put a hand in front of Gallante and tugged out the .32. He went in ahead.

The room, like any other in a city at night, wasn’t entirely dark. Light from windows in other buildings made swollen shadows in the quiet bar and gleamed fuzzily off the rows of bottles on the back shelves. DiJesus closed the door behind him noiselessly, leaving Gallante out on the landing, and moved away from it along the wall before hitting the light switch. An uninhabited room glared at him under the ceiling bulbs.

Staying close to the walls, he took five minutes working his way behind the bar and into the pool room, where the fixture suspended over the table bounced and swayed after he jerked its chain, splashing light up this wall and that. He was alone with the cues and secondhand music drifting from Twelfth Street. The hot stagnant air told him the windows had been shut for hours. A mirror inside the open door of the single bathroom reflected a sink and toilet as old as the building; otherwise it, too, was unoccupied.

He went back and admitted Gallante, who went straight to the bar and leaned over it to lift the White Owl cigar box from the shelf underneath. It was empty. He let it fall.

“Cleared out.” DiJesus returned the revolver to his hip pocket. “I guess they spooked when they missed me.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

The killer blew into a glass, sniffed at a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and poured himself two inches. “The coloreds got no guts for gun stuff. Blades are more their speed.”

“I didn’t figure Springfield for your average colored.”

“So you want to go into the saloon business?” DiJesus drained the glass.

“That’s up to Patsy.”

“Sebastian Bright and the rest’ll fall into line now. Springfield was their leader.”

“I guess.”

“It’s too bad. I wanted a shot at him bad.”

“Go back to Vegas.”

He helped himself to another inch. “Too hot there this time of year. I think I’ll hang around for a little.”

“Don’t start anything.” Gallante was looking at him. A window was at his back with the lights of Detroit scattered across it like dirty sequins.

“I get paid for finishing things, not starting ’em.” He finished his second drink.

The two men came out of the door next to the laundromat and got into the Cobra. The engine growled to life and the car took off with a gasp of rubber. It was barely out of sight when Lydell fired up his Zippo, punching a hole in the shadow of the doorway he shared with Quincy. Quincy stepped out onto the sidewalk. The lights were still on in the second-story windows across the street.

Lydell blew smoke with a sigh. “Think they bought it?”

“Who knows how them people think?”

“I do. They all carry on like Rome never fell. They bought it all right. Ain’t no way they could ever think it would go any different.” He coughed and spat. The spittle hit the warm concrete with a crack. “Question is, what do we do now?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“For now.”

“That’s the trouble with doing nothing,” Lydell said. “You never know when you’re through.”

T
HE REPORTER SENT BY
Channel 4, a former J. L. Hudson’s menswear salesman in his twenties who wore his hair and dressed like JFK, complained that he had landed the parade beat; Rick overheard him telling one of the technicians that he had covered a Negro funeral procession on the Fourth. The cameraman, a white-haired Wallace Beery type in a Hawaiian shirt and baggy-kneed slacks, groused that the sun was too bright and the shadows too sharp. The sound engineer, nineteen and covered with acne, snarled that he’d been rushed out of the station with only two reels of tape. They were the bitchiest crew Rick had ever encountered. He paced the sidewalk in the shade of the Fisher Building, ignored by the TV people, checking his watch every few seconds and ducking into the building periodically to call the office from a pay telephone. The security guards had begun to take notice of the young man in jeans and a gray work shirt with the tail out and the sleeves rolled above the elbows.

So far it was a disaster. One truck had vapor-locked on the Lodge Freeway, creating a backup from Howard Street to the Edsel Ford interchange, two others had been stopped by the police for minor traffic infractions and detained because their work orders were incomplete—discount towing services, Rick was learning, didn’t save enough to offset the hassles—and most of the rest were late. He’d hoped to line them up on Third and bring them
en masse
around the corner and down Grand Boulevard between the erect finger of the Fisher and the accordion construction of the General Motors Building, but the scant four tow trucks he had waiting there, with their crushed and wrinkled burdens suspended by their rear axles from chains, suggested nothing more out of the ordinary than a bad accident. He’d arranged for fifteen, down from the original fifty because of the logistical problems involved. He’d already broken up two fistfights among the drivers, who had been waiting more than an hour in the ninety-degree heat. Now a couple of them were arguing spiritedly about whether Chester Goode or Festus Haggen was the better sidekick for Marshal Dillon on
Gunsmoke.
Rick had thought the jig was up twenty minutes into the vigil when a police cruiser pulled up behind the last truck and two officers got out, but the older of the partners remembered Rick from his Plainclothes Division days and agreed, no questions asked, to hold off any more inquiries pending the outcome. So far he had proven as good as his word, Rick’s first break that day. But it couldn’t last, and anyway if they didn’t get rolling soon they would miss the Twelve O’clock News and the event would lose a third of its impact.