Motor City Burning Read Online Free Page A

missed!”
    He was right. Doyle didn’t believe it because Henry left no stone unturned. For the past nine months he’d been amassing a small mountain of evidence in a fourth-floor room at the Harlan House Motel on West Grand Boulevard at the John Lodge Freeway, where Henry now lived and where his wife had died on the morning of July 26, 1967, with a single .30-caliber bullet from a sniper’s rifle lodged in her liver.
    Or was the fatal bullet fired by someone other than a sniper?
    A lot of black people in this town—from rabble-rousing Rev. Albert Cleage to Congressman John Conyers to the editors of the Michigan Chronicle to some of the cats way out on the revolutionary fringe—were convinced that the fatal shot was fired not by a sniper (that is, a black man) but by a National Guardsman (that is, a white man). Given the chaos on West Grand Boulevard that night and the Guard’s horrendous performance during the riot, Doyle knew it was not a far-fetched theory. And there had been many times—usually when his boss, Sgt. Harry Schroeder, was pushing him to make that fucking Hull case go down—that he would have been delighted to buy the theory himself. But Doyle didn’t buy theories because they suited his desires or someone else’s political agenda. He bought theories and made arrests based on physical evidence, witnesses, confessions, and, sometimes, luck and squealers. And he knew he was nowhere close to making an arrest in the Hull case. The name stared down at him from the squad room wall, written in red grease pencil on a sheet of clear acetate: VIC #43 HELEN HULL . Just above it was the name of the only other riot victim whose killer was still at large— VIC #42 CARLO SMITH —a firefighter who got shot through the head while he was organizing units outside a burning warehouse on the East Side. The Hull and Smith cases, like all unsolved homicides, grew colder by the day. They were an insult. A torment. A homicide cop’s worst nightmare.
    But there was something that gnawed at Doyle even worse than seeing Helen Hull’s name in blood-red block letters every time he came to work: the two snapshots of Helen Hull he kept on the cork-board partition that separated his desk from Jimmy Robuck’s. Doyle was a sucker for snapshots, especially family snapshots, no doubt because he didn’t have a family of his own other than one workaholic brother, an alcoholic sister-in-law, and their two daughters, who grew more ungodly gorgeous by the day and believed, for some strange reason, that their Uncle Frank had personally hung the moon.
    Of course there were a dozen pictures of the girls, Lizzie and Val, pinned to the corkboard, along with a picture of his brother the day he’d made captain, a picture of his parents on their wedding day, a picture the Doyle family in front of the Christmas tree taken during the twilight of the Truman administration.
    All those pictures orbited around the two pictures of Helen Hull. The bigger one, in full color, showed Henry and Helen surrounded by the Doyle brothers and a couple dozen neighborhood kids, everyone roaring full-throat, arms around each other’s shoulders, black kids, white kids, Arab kids, a couple of Hispanic kids, even Henry Wong the Chinese kid, all scabby knees and missing teeth and PF Flyers, one big happy family standing at the top of the center-field bleachers in Tiger Stadium. Doyle loved that picture. Henry and Helen rented a bus every summer and took all the neighborhood kids to a Tigers’ game, even sprang for hot dogs and peanuts and Cokes. It was, without fail, the best day of every summer in a boyhood that now seemed like it was nothing but a long string of cloudless summer days.
    The other picture of Helen Hull was much smaller, black and white. It was a crime-scene photo taken in the fourth-floor hallway of the Harlan House Motel on the night she died. It was a brutal thing, which was why Doyle