Motown (35 page)

A few minutes later the landlady from downstairs tapped at his door and asked him apologetically to use the ventilator fan when he cooked.

S
MOKE POURED IN A
black column from the upholstery of an abandoned car someone had set fire to at the curb. The gasoline tank, like its tires and wheels and most of the engine, had been cannibalized weeks ago and none of the officers busy cordoning off that section of Kercheval was paying it any attention. Only Quincy was watching it when Krystal found him. On the other end of the block, glass broke with a long shivery tinkle. Most of the action had moved up the street.

“You okay, sugar? I heard shooting before but the police wouldn’t let me through.”

“You should of went home.”

“You got the keys. Besides, you know Krystal don’t like to sleep alone.” She slid an arm inside one of his. “You sound funny. You coming down with a cold?”

He touched the back of a hand to his nostrils and looked at it in the firelight. The bleeding had stopped. “I’m okay.”

“Radio says rain.”

It was still playing. He could hear it in a Doppler effect from the Corvette parked several blocks down, Barry McGuire singing about the eve of destruction.

“Mahomet’s dead.”

“Somebody told me.”

“I never did understand the crazy son of a bitch.”

“Wasn’t your fault, sugar. It was that white suit.”

“Man ought to be able to wear what he wants without getting shot.”

“Wasn’t nothing you could do.”

“I could of left him in jail.”

Sirens swooped and fell. Somebody said something unintelligible into a bullhorn. Krystal squeezed Quincy’s arm. “Riot’s over, Quincy. Let’s go home.”

He let her steer him toward the car. Then he stopped, turned back, and fished something out of his pants pocket that caught the firelight in a red glint. Lydell had given it to him to hold when he went to the hospital because it didn’t fit any more and he was afraid some intern might steal it. Quincy held up the ring, read the engraving: WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS 1957. He threw it through the broken windshield into the burning car.

“The whole town next time, Lydell.”

A few minutes later he helped Krystal into the Corvette and they drove back toward Twelfth Street.

T
HE SO-CALLED
“K
ERCHEVAL
incident” of August 9–10, 1966—sometimes referred to as a “miniriot” but downgraded by the media from a full-scale civil disturbance at the request of Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Department—began Tuesday at 8:25 p.m. when a routine arrest in front of a private residence aroused the wrath of bystanders, and ended twenty-four hours later when a cloudburst drenched the spirits of even the most stubborn protesters. Mother Nature’s intrusion was the last in a long line of fortunate coincidences—including the hour the trouble started, when the police force was at maximum strength, and the presence in the area of two squads of the Motor Traffic Bureau and both the first and second sections of the Tactical Mobile Unit—that enabled the police to restore order with a minimum of conflict.

The event has been called a dress rehearsal for the devastating riots that took place in the area of Twelfth Street during the week of July 23–29, 1967. A Sunday morning raid on a blind pig operated by the United Civil League for Community Action went wrong when customers attempted to prevent the police from leaving with their prisoners. Throughout the next seven days, the police engaged in running firefights with citizens on a street of flames. When local authorities proved incapable of containing the arsons, violence, and looting, Governor George Romney dispatched reinforcements from the Michigan National Guard and eventually requested emergency aid from President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who ordered tanks and paratroopers from the United States armed services into the area. When the insurrection had at last been put down, eighty million dollars in property had been destroyed and forty-three lives had been lost.

Mayor Cavanagh’s hopes for national office died soon after the riots. Defeated by former Governor G. Mennen Williams for the Democratic senatorial nomination, he announced his decision in June 1969 not to run for a third term as mayor. His death some years later received minimal attention in the national press. Similarly, George Romney’s dependency upon federal troops to quell a civil disturbance has been cited for his abysmal showing in the 1968 race for the Republican nomination for President. Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin requested retirement in October 1967, explaining, “You’ve got to bleed some in a job like this, but, by God, I’ve been gushing.”

In 1973, the year the Arab oil embargo and the resulting energy crisis ended the brief reign of the gas-guzzling “muscle cars,” Detroit elected its first black mayor. Despite numerous federal and local investigations of alleged misconduct in his administration, Coleman A. Young remains in office as of this writing, the longest-serving mayor in Detroit’s history. Under his leadership the municipal government and its police agency have come to reflect the city’s predominately black population to a degree that would have been unthinkable in 1966.

Today, the biggest problem facing Detroit is not race but drugs, America’s most enduring legacy of the 1960s. The fight for supremacy in the numbers racket has been supplanted by drive-by shootings and crack-house massacres over millions of dollars in controlled and illegal substances. There have been other changes as well. The music of choice is Rap. Video arcades outnumber neighborhood movie houses, and those automobiles not manufactured in Japan are built with foreign steel and assembled in countries other than the United States. By law, they are all equipped with seat belts and other features designed exclusively for the safety of the people who ride in them.

And Twelfth Street is now known as Rosa Parks Boulevard.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.