Read Online Devil's Night by Ze'ev Chafets - Free Book Online

lanes of traffic and there were a dozen cops in riot gear milling around, pedestrians and cars passed without more than a glance. “It’s a pretty common sight down here,” explained a huge black cop named Caldwell.
    The raid itself was an anticlimax: There was no car parked in front of the suspect’s house. Francisco decided to try again later that night. On the way to the station Robinson was in a foul mood—the new hour was certain to screw up his weekend—and he grumbled about the false alarm on Woodward Avenue. “Some people think all blacks look alike,” he said. “Please. The guy we want has close-cropped hair. That guy on the street had long hair. Now,
we
can’t grow hair overnight. I mean, please.”
    There was nothing personal in Robinson’s remark, though. I recognized the tone from my army days, the sound of a man who just felt like bitching. In Detroit today, tough white cops like Jim Francisco could not survive if they were even suspected of racism.
    That night at eleven, Francisco’s task force regrouped. Before going out, they sat around a television set and heard a news report about two Detroit police officers who had been accused of raping a woman. This was greeted by hoots of disbelief. “There’s enough women chasing cops, they don’t have to rape anybody,” one officer said, and the others voiced their agreement.
    Woodward Avenue was twitching with weekend nightlife when the cops headed out. Once again I rode with Robinson. “The man that shot Jackie’s daughter is going to get some justice tonight,” he said, his good spirits restored.
    I mentioned to Robinson that it seemed strange that a murderer would simply go home and continue with business as usual, but he told me that it happens all the time. “These punks think that they’reabove the law, just like Richard M. Nixon,” he said. “Nobody will tell anything, that’s what they think. We dealing here with the Richard M. Nixon of northwest Detroit.”
    Despite Robinson’s prediction, Jacqueline Wilson’s killer did not get any justice that night; he still wasn’t home. A dozen disgruntled cops, weekend plans shot to hell, drove back to the station to get into civilian clothes. Robinson, adrenaline pumping, decided to cruise for a while. Within minutes, we heard a radio report of gunfire outside a motel. When we arrived, a crowd of people were hanging around the parking lot, but there was no sign of any shooting.
    â€œJust hookers,” said Robinson, disappointed. “I would venture to say that if someone was chasing someone with a gun, these people wouldn’t be out here sunning themselves at midnight.” He nodded to several of the women as he drove slowly through the lot; Highland Park is a small town, and the police and street people know one another. “Just a bunch of little Richard Nixons,” Robinson grumbled as he headed in.
    The Highland Park police never caught up with their suspect. They didn’t have to—he caught up with them. A couple of weeks after the abortive raids, he walked in off the street. Although the police had what they considered an ironclad case, he was released on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond—five thousand in cash.
    On the day that the suspected killer was released on bond, I went to see Jacqueline Wilson’s mother, Frieda. She was living in a flophouse motel, across the street from the store where her daughter was killed. The first thing she said to me was that she was glad her husband, Jackie, wasn’t alive to hear about the murder.
    â€œHappy Jackie Wilson,” Frantic Ernie Durham, the rhyming disc jockey, used to call him, but it was a misnomer. Wilson had the best voice and the worst luck in Detroit show business. Berry Gordy wrote some of his first hits—“Reet Petite” and “Lonely Teardrops”—but Wilson never rode the Motown bandwagon. He