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

as lucky as Jackie Wilson was unlucky, hit the charts in Great Britain, and a generation of young kids there were thrilled by the great singer’s voice. “Maybe they’ll be some money from that,” she said wistfully. If there is, it’s safe to say that Berry Gordy will get his share. Frieda will get hers—maybe.
    â€œAnd you know, the people from
Entertainment Tonight
were here,” she said. “They visited Jack’s grave. After he died, we reburiedhim next to his mother. I told you, he was a family person. And we’re negotiating with ABC about a miniseries.…”
    Loud laughter from the pimps and dealers in the parking lot wafted through the open door. Frieda looked once more at her daughter’s picture. “Maybe something good will come of all this,” she said, and then she began to cry again.
    Jacqueline Wilson was murdered because she got caught in the cross fire of an unsuccessful drug transaction. Much of the violent crime in Detroit is drug related, and there is little the cops can do about it. Crack is sold openly; police say that there is simply no way to arrest everyone. The main thrust of enforcement is to keep the supply to a minimum. No one believes that it can be dried up altogether.
    From time to time, the cops stage raids on known crack houses, which are nothing more than apartments or homes from which drugs are sold. Locating them is as easy as finding stockbrokers on Wall Street, but busting them can be dangerous—most pushers are armed and ready to fight.
    Not long after the search for Jacqueline Wilson’s killer, Jim Francisco gathered his troops for a raid on a crack pad. Robinson was off that night, but half a dozen others were there, including Caldwell, the massive, bearded black undercover cop. The raiding party also had one woman, a thin redhead with a southern twang. Francisco took the wheel of the van, and the raiders climbed in the back. They were in good spirits that night, buoyed by the prospect of action, and as the van turned onto Woodward Avenue, they began to sing—“Roll ’em, roll ’em, roll ’em,” to the tune of the theme song from
Rawhide
. They sounded like a high school football team on the way to a big game.
    The singing stopped when we pulled up in front of a seedy apartment building on a side street. Without a word the cops jumped out of the van and raced into the building. Caldwell carried a battering ram, and the policewoman held a shotgun in both hands. A couple of people stepped aside to let them pass as they ran up the twoflights, stopped in front of a door, hollered “Police, open up!” and, without waiting for a response, bashed in the door and flooded into the apartment.
    Inside they found a very frightened black woman of twenty, dressed in a flimsy nightie and holding an infant. They were alone. One of the cops looked in a nightstand drawer and found several packages of cocaine.
    â€œThat’s my boyfriend’s,” the woman said, crying. “He’s not here. I don’t know where he stay. We don’t even get along that good—he’s just the baby’s father, that’s all.” The policewoman sat on the bed and talked gently to her while the others continued their search. Under the bed they found a police scanner, a pager and a loaded carbine. “I don’t know nothin’ about all that stuff,” the young mother protested. “It belongs to my boyfriend. I ain’t mixed up in nothin’.…”
    The small apartment was neat and clean. A high school equivalency diploma hung on a wall, next to a shelf of stuffed animals. Record albums were stacked near an expensive stereo. The cops, respectful of neatness, searched gently, replacing things as they went along.
    The baby, dressed in pink-and-white pajamas, began to cry. “He had a shot today, that’s why he don’t feel good,” his mother