Read Online Motor City Burning by Bill Morris - Free Book Online

seemed to want to tell him things. Jimmy Robuck said it was a homicide cop’s greatest gift.
    Doyle knocked on a dozen doors before he got to the lady in the stucco house across the street. Her name was Clara Waters and she told Doyle she was on her front porch watering her geraniums when the boys kicked down the door and started beating the old man. She knew the boy who took the pipe, or whatever it was, and used it to smash Mr. Messerlian’s face. She even told Doyle where the boy stayed—“corner apartment in that little two-story brick across from Roosevelt Field.”
    The kid was eating a bag of Frito’s and watching “I Love Lucy” when Doyle and Jimmy knocked on his door. He had fresh blood on his sneakers and his fingerprints matched those on the fireplace poker next to Krikor Messerlian’s body. They had the kid locked up, his confession signed and the paperwork on its way upstairs before the Medical Examiner started dismantling Krikor Messerlian’s corpse in the white-tiled autopsy room in the basement.
    Yes, this job was all about luck and squealers—and getting people to tell you things.
    When Doyle reached Clairmount now he pulled the Plymouth to the curb and shut off the engine. To his right was the building where it had all started. The print shop on the ground floor was still vacant. He wondered if the blind pig upstairs, the United Community League for Civic Action—or was it the United Civic League for Community Action?—was back in business, serving illegal after-hours booze. It wouldn’t have surprised him. Very little surprised him anymore.
    The street looked shabby, sadder than ever. People called it “Sin Street” or simply “The Strip,” and during the riot one poet at the Free Press had described this stretch of Twelfth Street as “an ugly neon scar running up the center of a Negro slum.” Doyle didn’t think it was ugly. He thought it was alive. It contained the usual gallery of pawn shops and furniture stores, record shops, soul food restaurants and discount liquor stores, a religious artifacts shop that offered statues of the Virgin Mary, money-drawing oil, skin-whitening ointments. The street was always buzzing. Now he could see the fading words SOUL BROTHER and NEGRO OWNED and AFRO ALL THE WAY spray-painted on certain windows and walls, the black owners’ way of pleading with arsonists and looters to pass them by. Zuroff Furniture Co., once one of the busiest enterprises on the street, was boarded up, a FOR RENT sign out front. It was hard to blame old Abe Zuroff for packing it in. The Jewish merchants had gotten hit especially hard during the riot, and Doyle had often wondered why. Was it simple bad luck, a case of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or was it something darker, something tribal, a settling of scores for slights, real or imagined, that blacks had been feeling for years in every inner-city in America, Detroit included? Doyle had given up on believing he would ever know the answers to such questions.
    Across the street from Zuroff’s there was a storefront church, its name painted crudely around a big red cross: Truth and Light Free Will Deliverance Tabernacle . A junkie was nodding in the doorway. Thank God for churches and junkies, Doyle thought, imagine the hell we’d have to pay without them to take some of the edge off. Two men were sprawled on the hood of a Cadillac in front of the church, passing a quart bottle of Colt .45 malt liquor—a completely unique experience, if you believed the popular ad campaign, which Doyle did not. An enormous radio on the roof of the Caddy was blasting Smokey Robinson: “If you feel like giving me a lifetime of de-vo-o-tion, I second that emotion. . . .” Ten-dollar flatback hookers sashayed back and forth across the street, brazenly waving down cars. Doyle easily knew half of them by name.
    He’d seen enough. He started