Motown, page 26
“She says she’ll be off her butt to cook you kidneys when you get out. She says they’re your favorite. I didn’t know that.”
“I ain’t getting out.”
“Want me to open them blinds? View from up here’s better than what you had on three.”
“You bring the cigs?”
“Now, what you want with them? They’re what put you in here.”
Lydell grunted in disgust, rummaged in the drawer of the table, and fell back. “C’mon. They only put me to sleep so’s they can sneak in and take ’em away.”
“Ain’t you dying fast enough?”
“Dogs. The boy went and said the word.”
Quincy took the pack of Kents out of his shirt pocket, opened it, and gave him one. “I never knew you to just up and roll over.” He held the match.
The smoke came out in a sigh. Lydell put his head back against the window. “I seen about a thousand numbers come up. I figure mine’s past due.”
“Doc says it’s operable.”
“He tell you what they got to take out?”
“Well, there’s always craps.”
Lydell grinned, puffed, and plucked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. He frowned. “Some son of a bitch stole the jade holder my daddy give me.”
“You won it off Joe Petite on three straight throws.”
“My daddy’d of give me one like it if he didn’t run off. Hear from Wilson?”
“Too early.”
“I see on TV the cops hit Beatrice Blackwood’s place.”
“She made bail. No big thing.”
“Three raids in two weeks. I figure the cops know. That Wilson’s all mouth and no balls.”
“If that was the case he’d be in jail all the time.”
“Maybe that’s how he stays out.”
“They ain’t arrested me,” Quincy said. “No reason. For just about the first time since I can remember I ain’t doing nothing against the law.”
“How’s it feel?”
“Not as bad as I thought.”
“I hear once you get used to it you don’t never want to go back.”
“That’s cornholing.”
“I never done that either.”
Quincy stuck his hands in his pockets. “I’m thinking maybe I been wasting my time with numbers. I’m thinking maybe Mahomet’s on to something with this civil rights thing.”
“Forget that racket. The money’s for shit and the cops bust sticks on your head.”
“I ain’t thinking of making money at it,” Quincy said. “Didn’t you feel nothing at all when the police was slapping you and Mahomet around?”
“I felt a cop’s arm across’t my throat and my arm getting busted.”
“I don’t know, Lydell. You and me we always laughed at Wilson McCoy and that bunch, marching and throwing bricks and getting the shit beat out of them for no money. Maybe they been right all along. Not about what they been doing, but why they done it. Maybe change is coming.”
“Take a hot bath and forget about it.”
“No, really. I been studying on it a lot lately.”
“Don’t turn Christer on me, Quincy. You’re all I got.” Lydell held out the cigarette. “You better put that out now and find me a nurse. I ain’t feeling too good.”
Quincy got one from the station, a small dark woman of about thirty with a nice shape, and waited in the corridor while she went in. A white man in his fifties shuffled past in paper slippers and a checked robe, using his i.v. stand as a walking stick. He had a little hole in the white gauze wrapped around his throat, and from time to time he inserted the filter end of a burning cigarette in the hole. Smoke blew out.
Quincy felt heat between his fingers, looked down, and saw he was still holding Lydell’s Kent. He dropped it quickly and mashed it underfoot.
He felt conspicuous. He was wearing his chalkstripe double-breasted over peach silk. Suddenly he was convinced he looked like a pimp. He wanted to go home and change clothes, but he hadn’t a gray suit or a white shirt to his name.
The nurse came out. She had large chocolate-brown eyes. “Someone’s been smoking in there.”
“Sorry.”
“You’d better finish your visit. That sedative will take effect in a few minutes.”
“Thanks. You Shannon?”
She put a hand on her hip. “Now, what’s that boy been saying about me?”
“He’d rather be kicked by you than kissed by Diana Ross.”
“One of you lights up in that room again he’ll get his wish. You, too. I’ve carried around bigger men than you.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“I already did.” She touched his arm, then walked away down the hall.
Lydell was lying flat with the TV off. From the doorway, Quincy noticed for the first time that his friend was going bald in front. He hadn’t seen him often without his hat. Quincy approached the bed. “I see what you mean about that Shannon. A man could get took care of by worse.”
“You ought to see what I get at night.”
“Cuter than Shannon?”
“Like Moms Mabley.”
“Want me to bring you anything next time?”
“Pack of Rents.”
Quincy rested his hands on the bedrail where other hands had worn the white enamel down to bare metal. “You got any ideas at all about why you and me are friends?”
“You used to wail the shit out of the big kids when I couldn’t talk my way clear.”
“That’s why I’m your friend. How come you’re mine?”
“‘Cause you’re too big, and you’re uglier than you are big. I bet Krystal puts a bag over her head too just in case yours comes off.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
Lydell closed his eyes. Quincy was about to leave when they opened again and turned his way. “What’s that you said once’t about a Viking funeral?”
“I don’t recall it.”
“Sure you do.”
“It was in Beau Geste,” Quincy said. “When Gary Cooper and his brothers was kids in the movie they thought that was the best way to go out, burning in a boat cast adrift on the water. That’s what his brothers done to him in the end when he got killed. It didn’t mean nothing. I was just talking to hear myself.”
“Think you can fix up something like it for me?”
“In twenty or thirty years, when it’s time.”
A hand too bony to support Lydell’s World Series ring closed on one of Quincy’s. “No shit, Quincy. This here’s Lydell. We went in together on our first whore.”
“Man, she was ugly.”
“First whores is supposed to be. I ain’t much for water. A fire’ll do. Make it kind of big, huh?”
Quincy laid his other hand on top of Lydell’s. “I’ll burn down the town.”
“Shiiit.” Lydell grinned and went to sleep.
Chapter 37
THE LITTLE MAN BEHIND the counter was getting to be a rarity in Greektown, an immigrant who didn’t go home to the suburbs after dark. His scalp glittered in the fluorescent light through curly hair gone the pink of his skin and the weight of his moustache seemed to be pulling his flesh away from the bone. His eyes, one of them cataracted, looked a question that through the years he had pared down to no words at all.
“Ouzo,” Rick said.
The Greek glanced at the clock at the end of the counter—two minutes to 2:00 a.m., closing time—seemed to shrug, and bagged a plain bottle off the shelf behind the cash register. He made his only comment as he was handing Rick his change. “Drink a hole in a clear morning.”
Rick drove home, poured two inches of the clear spirits into a tumbler, and added water, watching the liquid cloud up. That part always fascinated him. The first sip tasted like licorice. By the fifth the taste was no longer noticeable.
In high school, when the Model A died finally, he had worked nights pumping gas until he’d saved $150, enough to buy a 1939 white Oldsmobile coupe off a widow in the next block who hadn’t had it out of the garage since her husband died. For weeks he’d haunted every junkyard within reasonable driving distance of his parents’ home, picking up a carburetor here, a set of plugs there, and when he was finished with the Olds he had what he still liked to think of as the first genuine hot rod in Detroit. He’d have framed his first speeding ticket—ninety-two in a twenty-five—if he hadn’t had to send it in with his payment. It had cost him the price of a new set of tires and the use of the car for one whole summer when his father found out.
Sitting there drinking he could smell the Olds’s mohair interior.
He hadn’t had a drink alone since leaving the police department. Not that he had any such problems, but he had seen good officers under hack for some chickenshit complaint drink themselves right out of society, and he hadn’t been about to give those maggots at I.A.D. the satisfaction. He topped off his glass from the bottle.
With his first paycheck from the city he had made a down payment on a 1957 Chevy, red and white with tail fins till hell wouldn’t have them and a speedometer that topped out at 120, although he had found out on the John Lodge that it would do better. Within six months the car was repossessed for missed payments. It was the memory of that, being dropped off at home by his partner at the end of a double shift to find the Chevy gone and a note from the finance company, that had changed his view of department regulations prohibiting the acceptance of gratuities.
He could read the shelf clock that had come with the apartment without turning on a light. Outside the window the night sky was beginning to peel away from a pale horizon.
In between there had been a Buick sedan, black, with a profile like the tortoise leaning forward at the starting line and three silver holes on each side of the hood and an exhaust that sounded like a twin inboard. He had wrapped that one around a telephone pole in rural Oakland County, total wreck and ten days at Receiving with his jaw wired shut and one leg in a cast. A salvage yard had given him forty dollars for what was left of the car, just about what Rick had paid for anesthesia.
Cars were his life, the little bratty fast ones and the big chesty loud ones, the high-strung foreign jobs that spent most of their time on hydraulic lifts and the Norman Rockwell workhorses that idled their way up vertical hills and kept on going miles after their crankcases squeaked dry and all the water had boiled out of their radiators. He would rather spend Sunday under a greasy chassis with particles of rust falling into his eyes than a week in a whorehouse, and what did he have to show for it, this lifelong love affair with the internal combustion engine? A leg that still throbbed every time it rained and a furnished apartment with a bum shower. And a stack of letters just now catching the light on the writing desk by the window.
He poured another two inches, without water. The letters interested him more than the chemical reaction now.
Man Killed in Puerto Rican Coup Attempt
SAN JUAN (UPI)—A 64-year-old man was slain in the crossfire between bodyguards of Governor Roberto Sanchez Vilella and rebels during an attempt to assassinate the governor on the veranda of the Hotel Pinzón late yesterday afternoon.
A group calling itself the People’s Army for the Liberation of Puerto Rico (PALP) is believed responsible for the assault by four men with revolvers on the governor while he was having tea with friends and associates in the open-air café. Vilella, uninjured, was rushed from the hotel by members of his bodyguard while the others exchanged gunfire with the rebels, all of whom escaped. The victim, whose name is being withheld pending notification of his family, died instantly when bullets struck him in the head and chest …
“I’ll take a wild guess.” Lew Canada leaned forward in his chair and laid the long sheet of newsprint on the desk. “The victim’s name was Francis Xavier Oro. Frankie Orr for short.” The man behind the desk put aside the sheet. “He was traveling under a Brazilian passport in the name of José Antonio Pérez. That’s the name we’re releasing. The story’s just going out over the wires now. It’ll be in the afternoon papers and on the Six O’Clock News.”
“Who fucked up?”
Randall S. Burlingame stuffed an ugly black pipe from a leather pouch with a history. He was tall even when sitting, broad-shouldered, and built, like most of the FBI bureau chiefs Canada had known, along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover; thick through the middle and short in the neck. He had an impressive head of thick red hair graying at the roots and a granite cast to his features from years of Washington infighting.
“Officially, of course, there were no fuck-ups,” he said. “Some nut group tried to take out the head of government and nailed a citizen in the confusion. Just between you and me and Dean Rusk, the State Department bobbled the ball. Standard procedure in a deportation violation is to make a simple arrest using Justice Department personnel; us. But that thing in Santo Domingo last year made State nervous, so they handed it to the San Juan city police with instructions to transfer Orr to federal custody later. The bonehead play was in failing to find out who the collar was having tea with.”
He lit the pipe and got it drawing. “We don’t know who made the first wrong move, Orr’s personal bodyguard or one of Governor Vilella’s men or some green cop. We’re still investigating, not that it will change anything or that anyone will read the report outside of Hoover and a few staple-counters at State. You can bury a lot of corpses in a file drawer.”
“How long do you think this one will stay buried?”
“As long as it counts. Vilella’s happy; he stands to gain a couple of million in federal highway funds if he and his people can keep their mouths shut. That isn’t easy for a Latin, but politicians are the same all over. He’ll clam.”
“What about this People’s Army for the Liberation of Puerto Rico?”
He smiled around the pipestem. “I understand some grunt in media liaison suggested adding the Liberation part just before the release went out. Calling it PAP would have been asking for trouble.”
“So Frankie goes out without even a whimper,” Canada said.
“Oh, in a couple of years some journalist or other will throw his curiosity into gear and track him as far as San Juan, maybe even make the connection between Orr and the poor stiff who stopped lead for el excelencio. There’ll be a stink, but nobody really cares how a gangster gets it, especially not in a place like that. Thirty percent of Americans surveyed think Puerto Rico is the capital of Peru.”
Canada stood. “Thanks for calling me, Mr. Burlingame.”
“Call me Red.” He put down his pipe and got up to grip the inspector’s hand. “I’ve got my orders not to share any of this with you, but Hoover doesn’t have to work with the local authorities. I do.”
“Of course, there’s one possibility we haven’t considered.”
“Maybe nobody fucked up after all,” Burlingame supplied. “The Commission has contacts there like everywhere else. Maybe one of those cops got the nod.”
“You have considered it.”
“I got hung up on why. Unless they just didn’t want him in this country, I couldn’t figure out where they stood to gain by dealing Orr out.”
“It wasn’t that,” Canada said. “It’s what they stood to lose if they didn’t.”
Patsy’s idea was to subdivide the city into districts with one man in charge of each, answering only to Patsy, after the fashion of Roman legions and their emperor. From the time he was old enough to understand, Patsy’s father had drilled him in Plutarch and Gibbon and Caesar’s Conquests, and it was the one lesson that had penetrated the imagination of a sickly youth terrified by his parent’s energies and reputation and taken hold. But Mike Gallante, with the tact of a born courtier, had gently steered Patsy away from that tentacled structure toward a more flexible system based on corporate industry. Once the merits of the plan were explained to him, the crimelord couldn’t veto it without looking like some kind of dinosaur, but inside he was bitterly disappointed. For most of his adult life he had seen himself as Augustus to his father’s Caesar, needing only an empire of his own to prove himself greater than his predecessor. Now that he had it he would have to settle for Henry Ford II.
They were using the conference room off Patsy’s office. Patsy sat at the end of the long walnut table with a map of Detroit spread before him, marked all over with lines and circles in red ballpoint. Gallante stood over it in his shirtsleeves, making fresh marks and illustrating his theories of organization with sweeping gestures of the hand holding the pen. Patsy only half followed what he was saying. He felt as he had the summer he was nineteen and he sat in on a poker game with members of his father’s troop, older men mostly with spaghetti bellies and salty stains on their underarm holsters. None of the games was familiar to him. Losing the money hadn’t upset him half as much as not knowing why he was losing it.
“We’ll want to hire coloreds for the menial jobs,” Gallante said. “Runners and bag men and collectors. That leaves our people free to administrate and gives the neighborhood coloreds the impression they’re still participating.”
“No colored bag men.” Devlin, seated bearlike in a wallow of his own fat across the corner of the table from Patsy, showed interest for the first time. Despite the air conditioning he had sweated through his polyester sport shirt. Even his necktie was sopping. “Springfield’s courier ran off with fifteen hundred dollars.”
“No colored strongarms either;” Patsy said. “When they forget to pay I want everyone in the neighborhood to know who they owe and who collects.”
“They might not be as eager to play if they suspect the operation’s all white.”
“They can’t stay away. That’s what made the policy business beautiful from the start.”
“Things were different in those days. Coloreds stepped off the sidewalks when they saw a white man coming. Now they’d cut you as soon as look at you.”
Patsy slapped the table hard enough to sting. “No nigger lays a hand on any of my people. They like cutting so much we’ll cut the balls off the first buck that tries it.”
“You’re the boss, Patsy.”
“I am. And Twelfth Street’s going to know it.” Patsy fumbled for the button under the edge of the table. Sweets came in, dry as cut paper in his sack suit and old-fashioned tie. “We’re leaving.” Patsy adjusted his knee braces.
