Read Online Motown by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page A

suspended.”
    “Don’t make no difference to me. Man’s got enough trouble getting by on his own without worrying about everybody else that’s his color. Do I get to make my call or what?”
    “You really don’t believe me. About your partner being okay.”
    “I believe you. Now I don’t got to think about Lydell. I can use a lawyer.”
    “I’d have thought he’d show up with one himself before this,” Canada said. “Friend like that.”
    “Lydell looks out for himself.”
    “Who looks out for Quincy?”
    A deputy with a Wyatt Earp moustache entered the room, bought a pack of Kools, and left. Quincy sipped coffee; battery acid was a fair description. “You got a wife, Inspector?”
    “I did for a while.”
    “She call you Inspector or what?”
    “She called me Lew when she wasn’t throwing things at me. It’s my first name. That’s what you wanted to know, right?”
    “Okay. I thought as long as you knew mine.”
    Canada rotated his cup between his palms. So far he hadn’t drunk from it. “I did some homework on you while you were in the tank. Your old man used to leg liquor from Ontario back in the dry time. The Machine mob killed him.”
    “Strung him up by his wrists in the Ferry Warehouse and barbecued him with blowtorches, my ma said. I never knew him.”
    “He ran with Jack Dance. Jack the Ripper, the papers called him. I was just a kid when they gunned him and two of his boys in an apartment on Collingwood. Just down the street from your place now.”
    “That so?”
    “It can’t be easy working with the Italians, knowing they killed your father.”
    He’d been wondering how they were going to come around to it. “Like I said, I didn’t know him. And I don’t work with no Italians. Me and Lydell sell drinks after hours. What you going to do, throw me in jail for it?”
    “Settle down. You’ve got a lot of anger in you, you know it? Can’t be the jail time; you’ve got two priors for liquor violations, so this is old stuff to you.” Canada drank from his cup finally. “Someone knocked over a policy operation on Clairmount an hour before your joint was hit. Same M.O., three guys in ski masks with shotguns. Nobody was killed there, so it didn’t come across the police blotter. You numbers people aren’t much for hollering cop.”
    Quincy said nothing.
    “The street talk is someone’s crunching down on the West Side: Policy, dope, fencing. Especially policy, which means whoever it is is targeting the Negro rackets. Only thing around with that kind of muscle is the Mafia. Getting on with Patsy, are you?”
    “Patsy who?”
    Canada sat back. “I’m not Vice. I don’t give a shit about numbers and who’s selling who a snort after the bars close. I’m just trying to avoid a war. Is Patsy Orr turning up the heat or what?”
    “Arrest the three guys. War’s over then.”
    “Assuming they’re not all out in Vegas by now, what good’s that? He’ll just hire three more. Next time maybe they’ll get smart and take you out instead of your bouncer.”
    “What you want, Canada? You got your street skinny. You don’t need me.”
    The inspector slid a copy of True out of the clutter of magazines on the table and laid it in front of Quincy. The cover was a color photograph of a square-built man standing on an asphalt lot with his back to a row of gleaming diesel tractor-trailers parked facing the camera, Macks and Whites and Kenworths with square grilles and shiny stacks. The man, in his fifties, had on a navy blue suit and patent-leather shoes and stood with his elbows turned out slightly and his hands hovering in front of his thighs in an unconscious weightlifter’s stance. His hair was short and spiky, dark on top and graying on the sides so that his temples looked shaved, and there was about his scowling face and thick frame—not going to fat so much as retreating before it slowly, fighting it at every step—that echoed the bottled thunder of the towering rigs at his back.