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

can’t sleep because of all the noise down on the street, so she walks out into the hall. She passes Lisa Perot’s room and sees that the door’s open and the lights are on.” Henry jerked a thumb at the door to Room 433. “Helen walks all the way to the window.”
    They had reached the picture window at the north end of the hallway. Henry pulled the string that opened the curtain, and they were looking down at West Grand Boulevard. Doyle hated revisiting this spot, for it was written in the homicide bible that while it’s possible to murder a man only once, it’s possible to murder a murder scene a thousand and one times. And this one had been slaughtered.
    In the early hours of last July 26, the area around the Harlan House was a war zone. All streetlights had been shot out. Sniper fire aimed at Henry Ford Hospital was so heavy that the staff had to blacken the windows in the emergency rooms so they wouldn’t die while trying to save the dying. Tanks roamed on West Grand Boulevard, pouring rounds from .50-caliber machine guns at anything that moved. They were answered with tracer fire from the rooftops. National Guardsmen, poorly trained and terrified, were also shooting at anything that moved, including other Guardsmen and police. The night was thunder and chaos.
    It was Helen Hull’s second night at the motel. She’d checked in when the riot started spreading to the East Side, while Henry stayed behind in their apartment above the shuttered market with a loaded deer rifle. Police cruised the Jeff-Chalmers neighborhood with bullhorns, urging residents and shopkeepers to stay away from windows and doorways, reminding them about the dusk-to-dawn curfew. A National Guard unit had bivouacked in Ford Park down by the river because there were rumors that black militants were going to mount an invasion by boat from Canada, then blow up Detroit’s water works. The city was jazzed with such rumors.
    â€œOkay,” Henry said now to Doyle, “so Helen calls to Lisa Perot to come look at the tank down on the street. The globe light behind her is on.”
    Which made her a beautifully silhouetted target. Within seconds, two bullets crashed through the window. One missed her, and one ripped into her chest, penetrating her heart and glancing downward before coming to rest in her liver. Then, according to the interviews Doyle conducted after the shooting, one of the most bizarre incidents of that bizarre week took place. A man named J.R. Glover of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was hastily packing his bags in Room 401. When he heard the crash, he crawled out into the hallway and saw Helen Hull lying on her back. Suddenly a man with a rifle charged into Glover’s open room and began firing out the window. National Guardsmen peppered the room with dozens of rounds, but the man, miraculously, was not hit.
    Then the police arrived. They stormed into Glover’s room and disarmed the man with the rifle and hustled him away. Someone smashed or shot out the globe light in the hallway. And someone in the hallway fired at least one bullet out through the window where the fatal bullet had entered.
    By the time Doyle and Jimmy Robuck showed up, the crime scene was a disaster. Helen Hull had been taken by ambulance to Ford Hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival. It was impossible to examine the scene in the dark, and it was too dangerous to use flashlights for more than a few minutes. After noting the location of the three bullet holes in the window, the detectives and the rest of the police left the scene.
    When Doyle returned in the morning, the plate-glass window had already been replaced and the blood-soaked carpet had been torn up and thrown away. Even the police who’d been on the scene after the shooting gave him conflicting accounts. The only good news was that the Medical Examiner had dug a fragment of a .30-caliber bullet out of Helen Hull’s liver. If a weapon