Detroit Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2007 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Detroit map by Sohrab Habibion

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-39-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007926098

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  “Panic” by Joyce Carol Oates appeared in an earlier version in Michigan Quarterly Review, 1993.

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Brooklyn Noir 3, edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey) , edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  For Angie and Cinda

  The editors would like to thank Robert Teicher, M.L. Liebler, and Christopher Leland, whose generous assistance helped make this book a reality.

  Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.

  —Marvin Gaye

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Introduction

  * * *

  PART I: ANIMAL FARM

  * * *

  LOREN D. ESTLEMANRivertown

  Kill the Cat

  P.J. PARRISH Brush Park

  Pride

  JOYCE CAROL OATESChrysler Freeway

  Panic

  NISI SHAWL Belle Isle

  Little Horses

  * * *

  PART II: FACTORY OF ONE

  * * *

  CRAIG HOLDEN Hamtramck

  Red Quarters

  CRAIG BERNIER Rouge Foundry

  Migration

  DESIREE COOPER Palmer Woods

  Night Coming

  * * *

  PART III: SILENCE OF THE CITY

  * * *

  MELISSA PREDDY Grandmont-Rosedale

  The Coffee Break

  E. J. OLSEN Grand Circus Park

  Snow Angel

  JOE BOLAND Downtown

  The Night Watchman Is Asleep

  MEGAN ABBOTT Alter Road

  Our Eyes Couldn’t Stop Opening

  DORENE O’BRIEN Corktown

  Honesty above All Else

  * * *

  PART IV: EDGE OF THE PAST

  * * *

  LOLITA HERNANDEZ East Grand Boulevard

  Over the Belle Isle Boundary

  PETER MARKUS Delray

  The Dead Man’s Boat

  ROGER K. JOHNSON New Center

  Hey Love

  MICHAEL ZADOORIANWoodward Avenue

  The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  REFLECTIONS FROM THE DARK SIDE

  Detroit.

  The name comes from “les étroits ” (the narrows), for the river straits that flow between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. The city was founded as French wilderness outpost Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit in 1701 by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Memorialized in true Detroit fashion, his coat of arms was used as the logo of the Cadillac automobile. The past as viewed through the lens of the auto industry.

  Despite the twentieth-century dominance by manufacturing, Detroit has been many things in its 300-year history. A young settlement in the face of an often hostile western wilderness, it was a frontier town where settlers fought for valuable property along the waterway, the only reliable connection with the cities to the east.

  It was a city in dispute. In 1760, during the French-Indian War, the British took control of the region. In 1796, a treaty brought Detroit into the United States. During the War of 1812, Detroit was again captured by the British, and in 1813 it was retaken by the Americans, this time permanently.

  Detroit was a Gilded Age boom town. By the late nineteenth century, the city had become a prosperous transportation hub, bolstered by the rise of shipping, shipbuilding, and manufacturing. During this period, Detroit was known as the Paris of the West for its beautiful architecture. In 1896, Henry Ford built his first automobile in a workshop on Mack Avenue, and the city became the birthplace of a transportation revolution which would change the face of Detroit, and America, forever.

  It was a bootlegger’s town, where the Purple Gang and their competitors might drive a car filled with Canadian alcohol across the frozen surface of the Detroit River. A prohibition city, where the forbidden liquor flowed so freely that there were those who believed some of the city’s more enterprising gangsters had laid, beneath the dark waters of the river, a pipe that stretched all the way across from Canada to furnish Detroiters with bootleg whiskey on tap.

  It was the Motor City, Sugartown, the City of Basements, where a working man or woman from anywhere could find a steady job and the promise of the middle-class American Dream. But the dream always had a dark side.

  Factory shifts were long and often dangerous. In 1935, the United Auto Workers was founded, and the union went on to fight a bitter, often bloody battle with General Motors and the notoriously brutal strikebreakers from the Ford Service Department.

  During World War II, Detroit was the Arsenal of Democracy, and the auto plants retooled to manufacture munitions, planes, and tanks. Wartime also gave Detroiters a preview of the social strife to come when racial tensions, primarily among black and white migrant workers from the South, exploded into a full-scale riot in 1943.

  By the ’ 60s, Detroit had become Motown, the city with a pulsing beat where melodies that enchanted the world were born and endured. But this decade also saw the beginning of a long economic decline, and the city was often cited as a symbol of urban blight and “white flight” to the relatively homogenous suburbs across Eight Mile Road. In 1967, racial tensions again boiled over, and 12th Street erupted into riots that spread throughout the city. The rioting lasted five days and kill
ed forty-three people. More than two thousand buildings were destroyed, and the city has never recovered from the exodus of fleeing residents and businesses.

  In the economically depressed landscape of the 1970s, it finally became Murder City, where the dreams of industry and the working man collapsed into urban decay, crime, drugs, and desperation, where many would say it languishes to this day. The capital of the rust belt.

  Detroit is an old and wounded city, broken into wildly diverse splinters, but it is not dead, for it is possessed of a unique vitality rooted in its complex history and in its hardy people.

  Detroit is noir, shadowed and striving, grim and powerful. It is impossible to truly know the city and not respect it. This collection of stories is a rich reflection of Detroit’s dark side, offering a variety of perspectives on both the city and noir style.

  Here you will find noir in many forms, embodied by many characters. From a driven detective with a mystery to solve to a working man just trying to make it through another day, from a bemused outsider seeking a thrill to one so deeply inside the city as to see no outside at all. Urban professionals, night watchmen, tarot card readers, waitresses, caretakers, and criminals, all bound together by the city and by a dark dilemma that looms just ahead.

  A moment awaits each of them, a moment of truth or violence or epiphany or change. A noir moment.

  This is Detroit Noir.

  E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Detroit, Michigan

  August 2007

  PART I

  ANIMAL FARM

  KILL THE CAT

  BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  Rivertown

  It was right at dark, one of those evenings when you saw it as a black diagonal against the light, like the title sequence of the old soap opera The Edge of Night. The river smelled like iron, and the People Mover—Coleman Young’s electric train set—chugged along several stories above the street, empty as usual, shuttling around and around in its endless circle as in one of those post-apocalyptic sciencefiction stories about a depopulated world, still going about its automated business decades after doomsday, jungle vines crawling up the sides of vacant glass buildings. Detroit had a start on the last, in weedy empty lots where pheasants roosted among the rats and cartridge casings. I was thirty seconds from downtown and might have been driving through Aztec ruins.

  The address I’d scribbled in my notebook belonged to a barely renovated pile in the shrinking warehouse district, one of the last places where the city still shows its muscle: miles of railroad track and a handful of gaunt brick buildings where steering gears and coils of steel once paused for breath on their way to becoming automobiles. In a year or two it’ll be gone. City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce are busy gentrifying it into riverfront condominiums. This address was poised square in the middle, the edge of the edge of night.

  I was working on a teenage runaway. Mark Childs had slid through a crack in the über–upper class of Grosse Pointe, getting the boot from the University of Michigan three weeks into his first semester and then falling in with low company, in this case three boys studying at Wayne State University. I’d gotten the last from a kid who hung doors at Chrysler in order to attend classes in library science at WSU. Childs had taken his place when he’d opted out of sharing rent so he could sleep in his parents’ house and save money for cigarettes and tuition.

  Where the new roomie found cash to keep up his end, I didn’t know and never did, although the family suspected an indulgent aunt. Childs was seventeen, a young high school graduate coming into a trust fund when he turned eighteen in two months. The family didn’t like that, thought if they got him back under the parental roof they could teach him some responsibility in sixty days so he wouldn’t blow it all on Internet poker or the Democrats. I hadn’t said anything to that. When work comes your way you don’t get into a debate situation with the client.

  A simple job: Confirm the kid’s location and notify the parents so they could call the cops and tell them to take a mixed-up boy off the streets and deliver him to their door.

  I parked on gravel off Riopelle and walked down to the river to finish a cigarette, stepping carefully over chunks of brick and Jell-O pudding tops. The lights of Windsor, Ontario made waffle-patterned reflections on the surface where the Detroit River squeezes between countries. The spot where I stood hadn’t changed since Prohibition, when rum boats docked there and men who weren’t dressed for the work offloaded the cargo into seven-passenger touring cars with a man standing sentry holding a tommy gun. It was late August and already the air felt like October. We were in for one of those winters that shut up the global-warming people for a while.

  The place I wanted stood fifty yards away, with all the character sandblasted off the brick and yellow solar panels replacing the multiple-paned windows. The concrete loading dock was intact, but above it someone had substituted a faux–wrought iron carriage lamp for the original bare bulb. It was an amateur facelift, done on the cheap by a landlord who’d seen too many local renaissances fizzle out to put any faith in the current one.

  The big bay doors were chained and padlocked, but decks had been built around the corner with steps zigzagging up four stories and doors cut into each level for the tenants, with small windows added to let in light and accommodate the occasional window-unit air conditioner. The only lights burned on the ground floor. The kid at Chrysler had said none of the other apartments was ready for occupancy.

  When no one answered I tried the knob. It turned freely.

  There might have been nothing in that; college housing is always getting burgled because the students are careless about locking up. The boxy window unit that stuck out of the nearest window was pumping full out. I didn’t like that. The damp air off the river was too cool to bother running up the utility bill. I went back to my car and transferred the Chief’s Special from its special compartment to my pocket.

  Still no answer. I opened the door as quietly as I could, just wide enough to step inside around the edge with my hand on the revolver. It was like walking into a refrigerator truck.

  The first one lay on a blown-out sofa near the wheezing air conditioner. He was in his underwear, lying on his side facing the back of the sofa, as if he’d been caught sleeping. I found the next one on his back in an open doorway connecting to a hallway and had to step over him to inspect the rest of the apartment. I had the gun out now.

  Number three was twisted like a rag on the floor halfway down the short hallway. I eased open the door to a small bathroom, dirty but unoccupied, found an untidy bedroom with no one in it, checked out a narrow closet with sports equipment piled on the floor, and finished the inventory in another bedroom at the back. This one, more cautious than the others, sprawled on the bed with his legs hanging over the footboard, arms splayed. When I stepped in for a closer look, my toe bumped into something that rolled: an aluminum baseball bat. He’d dropped it when he fell backward. He was naked, the others nearly so. No one wears pajamas anymore.

  I put away my weapon. There was nobody left to shoot.

  I noticed the smell then, faint but bitter, mixed with the slaughterhouse stink. They’d all been blasted at point-blank range by a heavy-caliber shotgun.

  Checking for pulses would have been redundant. I went back to the first corpse. The back of his head was a mass of pulp; stray pellets had torn fresh holes in the upholstery, but he’d taken most of the charge. The others had been struck in the chest or abdomen. Mr. Sofa was the only white victim. Mark Childs was white.

  I wished it was that easy, but I had a report to make. Setting my jaws tight, I grasped his bare shoulder to pull his face into view. The skin was cold and the body turned all as one piece, stiff as a plaster cast. Death alters features, but he looked enough like his picture to give him a name. The birthmark on his upper lip settled the question.

  The front room was as big as the rest of the apartment. The sofa was part of a rummage-sale set facing a home theater from a box, with a kitchen at the
other end. Disposable food cartons littered a folding card table with four mismatched folding chairs around it, but plastic forks and smeared paper napkins suggested more nomadic dining habits. My breath made gray jets. I thought about turning down the air conditioner but didn’t. Whoever had touched the controls last wasn’t present.

  The place didn’t seem to be wired for a telephone. I found a cell on the sticky kitchen counter and called police headquarters. I bypassed 911 and asked for Lieutenant Mary Ann Thaler.

  “Why felony homicide?” she asked. “Why not plain homicide?”

  “It looked like a drug thing,” I said.

  “It still looks like it.”

  “So I called you to avoid a handoff.”

  “I appreciate it. I’ve been on duty thirteen hours now.”

  She sat across from me at the folding table, dangling a tea bag on a string in a big cardboard cup with a Powerpuff Girl printed on it. Now that she no longer wore glasses the tiredness showed, but she was still the best-looking thing I’d seen all day, and mine had started as early as hers. Her skin was fair, she had her light brown hair tied in a ponytail with a yellow silk scarf, and a fitted jacket and pleated slacks didn’t distract the admiring male gaze from the rest. Her SIG Sauer would be on the left side of her belt, the gold shield on the right. Her brown eyes were as big as wheel covers.

  The place buzzed with assorted professionals. A happy Asian medical examiner hummed show tunes and probed at wounds with the nightmare tackle from his tin box. Young people of both sexes measured spatter patterns and bumped into a big black radio-car cop who kept grunting and moving out of their way and into someone else’s. Every light was on and a couple of arcs had been brought in for a better look.

  Finally the air conditioner stopped. A fingerprint tech had lifted latents off the controls with a gizmo that took pictures like a camera phone.

  “That should wrap this,” Thaler said. “The heat wave broke night before last; the tenants had no reason to crank up the cold. Whoever did wanted to keep them from getting ripe long enough to split and set up an alibi. I figure these boys have been dead since early this morning or they wouldn’t have been undressed for bed.”