An excerpt from US Guys

DETROIT 

“Remorse for what? You people have done everything in the world to me. Doesn't that give me equal right?”  -- Charles Manson

     Two homicide detectives sat in a Chinese joint on the north side of Eight Mile Road on the east side of town. It was bright outside, cold light poured through the plate window. The view outside was cheap architecture, depressing and non-descript. As homicide cops most always do, they talked murder. Their conversation went something like this:

    “There was this time over in the 6^th when an Arab made his wife get down on her knees in the front yard,” the white detective said. He pronounced it Ay-rab. “She was cheating on him. He made her beg for her life before he cut her head off with a machete. He tossed her naked body in a dumpster.

   “She had a great set of tits,” he said matter of fact, almost as an afterthought. The waitress came by and poured him more tea. He paused, wiped his lips and smiled. She walked away. He continued: “Those tits were so fantastic that every guy in the precinct stopped by to look at ‘em. You hardly even noticed the brain stem poking out. Her head was stuffed in a sack.”

    “Those Ay-rabs don’t take no shit like that man,” the black detective added. “A cheating wife, I mean. They’re old school those Ay-rabs.”

     “Very true. Anyhow, she had a great set of tits. You couldn’t help but look at ‘em. Nice big balloons. I’ll never forget those.”

      Tits. You can’t help but stare at them, whether they’re attached to a headless corpse or they appear in your run of the mill crime scene photograph. Tits cause more murder than money. Tits cause passion. Passion leads to sex and sex is death. Nobody knows that more than a good homicide dick.

     The men finished their lunch and drove back to headquarters to fill out paper work. A lead on a caper they were investigating had run its string. Dead end. Even dead ends needed to be documented or you didn’t get paid in the Dead Squad. At precisely 4 p.m., the black detective put on his trench coat and went to see a man about a dog.

    “Night Mike,” he said.

    “Night Tony.”

     The white detective, Mike Carlisle, took a dirty ashtray from a metal drawer, lighted himself a cigarette and opened a window. It was late October and Detroit was getting cold. Carlisle smoked like a tailpipe. He was tall, around the 6-foot range, well built, somewhere between 45 and 55 years old with a square ruddy face, blue eyes. He preferred his suits like his coffee -- black. He was a hardboiled character with a humor and vocabulary that matched his suits – dark. He carried a pistol under his arm and a badge on his belt, #4339. He put on a fresh pot of coffee.

    The Detroit homicide bureau was a terrible place to work. The motto: aspire to retire. The office was filthy from neglect. The shades, there were none, save for a piece of brown paper covering one of the windows. The floors hadn’t been mopped since Prohibition; electric cords hung from the drop ceiling and led to nowhere. The mug shot computer did not work and was collecting dust in the corner. In another corner, crime scene evidence sat in a shopping cart near the entrance in brown envelopes marked biohazard. Sometimes the packages sat for days and leaked while waiting to be taken to the crime lab. Murders were still logged into an accountant’s ledger by hand and many times there was no toilet paper in the bathrooms. How did you expect a cop to get off his ass when there was no toilet paper to wipe it?

    And when Carlisle spread out a photo collage of the most grisly murders he has had the good fortune to work, you started to understand that murder had leached into the most personal recesses of his life.

       Take for instance the snapshots of the hookers, all black, who had been beaten with a blunt object, had their clothes torn off and then their corpses raped. The scene was always the same: some filthy back lot or abandoned house, which are everywhere in Detroit. This one lay on a soiled mattress, a smear of blood showing she was dragged to her final resting place, a used condom at her side. She had been bludgeoned on the left side of her head, revealing that the killer was right handed. What was disturbing was that she was displayed in a spread eagle, like a DaVinci drawing, her chin and toes pointing upward. More disturbing still was the angle at which the crime scene photographer had taken the photos. That is, straight up her crotch, as if the photographer couldn’t help himself, as if the killer or killers knew what lurked in the heart of every man. Crotch. Crotch and tits. The murderer mocked:

     See them maggots and the blood. You like that pig? No difference between you and me.  Shine your light tight up in there pig…

    Carlisle excused himself as there were some family photos mixed in with the pictures of insanity. A fishing trip; his son in his naval uniform; Carlisle as a kid playing in a rock ‘n roll band; Carlisle hugging his wife.

    “Don’t know how those got in there,” he said with a shrug.

    There were other photos of other women with their heads smashed in, spread eagle in some forgotten corner of this dying city. The DNA matched on all of them. A serial murderer from ‘02, who hadn’t killed since ’03 as far as any one knew. The killer just disappeared. Vanished. Took a poof pill.

    This case in particular distracted Carlisle. He was considered to be among the best homicide detectives in a city known as the Murder Capital of America. He used to work the Cold Case Squad, but that was disbanded earlier in the year because of budgetary problems. Not that the squad didn’t have enough work to do. There are, detectives say, 10,000 unsolved murders dating back to 1960 in the Motor City. So far, since he returned to the homicide desk earlier in the year, Carlisle was a perfect 11 and 0 in closing-out murder cases. He prided himself on a good job, that he earned his money, like he was contributing something to society even though nobody gives a shit about dead whores.

    Detroit was once a beautiful city, known as the Paris of the Midwest with its wide boulevards and elm trees and Tudor-style mansions and working class bungalows. Money was everywhere, even for an uneducated man thanks to the factory jobs at Ford and Chrysler and General Motors. Detroit was the end point of the great migration of poor blacks and whites from the South and European immigrants flooding in from the east. Then the bottom fell out. It was a perfect storm. There were devastating riots in 1967. The whites left in droves and they took their money with them. Then came the oil shocks of the early 70’s and then better-made cars from over seas and Detroit began to collapse. Factories closed or moved to the suburbs or to the South and finally to Mexico. The city was buried in a blizzard of crack cocaine. Then blacks began to leave. What was left in Detroit was a dark, desperate center.

    Today, Detroit is the most violent of America’s biggest cities when adding up rapes, burglaries assaults and killings. Detroit officially recorded 385 murders in 2004, though detectives say murder cases came closer 500. They suspect someone upstairs of cooking the books, reclassifying some murders as justified, for “publicity reasons,” detectives other than Carlisle told me.

    The car jobs dried up and as a consequence the city was broke. To balance the budget the current mayor Kwame Kilpatrick ordered the layoffs of 150 cops even though Detroit is one of the few cities in America where murder is on the rise. There is about one cop for every 300 residents of the city, while the mayor at one point had a security staff of 27. These are hard times for Detroit. Hard times mean murder, Carlisle said. Unemployment leads to poverty, poverty leads to drugs, drugs lead to misplaced passion and passion leads to murder.

     At the time of this writing, Detroit had a 15 percent unemployment rate. It was the poorest city in America, where one third of the people – and half the children -- lived in poverty. It is the blackest big city in America, where nearly nine in 10 citizens is of African descent and nine in 10 shootings (more 1,500 last year) are of blacks. Detroit is broken. If you get in a car wreck in Detroit, detectives said with all seriousness, citizens will call for an ambulance, but not before they lift your wallet and belt and shoes. It has been said that Detroit was the first Third World city in a First World country.

    Some people die because they’re stupid. Consider the killing of “Quick,” an east side drug dealer and hustler. He was shot in the face by his woman “Unique” because Quick cut off her dope.

    “You shot me in the eye, bitch, go get my glasses,” he told her before getting a ride to the hospital.

    They didn’t rush. On the way, Quick wanted Burger King because hospital food, he knew, was terrible. He took a piss in the bushes then walked himself into the emergency room. He was pronounced dead a half hour later. Moral of the story: fast food is bad for your health.

    In Detroit, they don’t get even. They get odd. Take for instance the case of a desperate man so angry at his life’s circumstances that he bickered with the landlord’s wife, who lived below him, just for something to do. One day he snapped and hung himself by the neck out his window, stark raving naked. He had done it perfectly. That is, when the landlord’s wife went to open the morning blinds, she got an eyeball view of his swollen and quite dead scrotum.

     “Fuck you bitch,” his suicide note read.

     The narratives are endless:

     “I had a guy stab his woman to death with a fork,” Carlisle told me. “His reason was that she served him chicken instead of pork chops. ‘Hey man,’ he says, ‘I don’t play that shit. I’m the man of the house.’

    “Dumb fuck, only thing getting to Jackson State Penitentiary before you, I tell him, is the headlights on the bus taking you there.”  

    He laid out more photos. A quadruple homicide from ’85 – a shooting, a stabbing, and strangulation, the trifecta all in one. Five people. Mommy, daddy, uncle and the two children. The uncle was bound and killed on the toilet. Daddy in bed. Mommy in bed with her legs spread open. One child in his bunk bed. The girl on the floor, looking very peaceful, asleep almost, except for the blood. Carlisle has a suspect wandering around in Ohio, but he’s been waiting six months for the samples to come back from the crime lab.

    It’s easy to grow cynical. Cops are people after all. They know other cops are assholes, that prosecutors are assholes; the mayor’s an asshole. Judges are assholes too. They don’t want their children making a career in the department. They don’t want the kid divorcing his wife or collecting morbid photographs or spending long evenings in the bars staring at the bottom of whiskey glasses or having to sneer through broken cheek bones. Carlisle didn’t drink as a habit.

   “More people are murdered around Christmas time in Detroit,” Carlisle said of one photograph, the tree shining in the window, someone dead underneath. “I think it’s to avoid buying Christmas gifts.” Carlisle had gone hard.

    He emptied the ashtray, turned off the coffee pot, closed the window. He drove home to the east side, past the corner in his own neighborhood where a kid was gunned down two weeks before. The teddy bears and candles were still there. Carlisle was the last white man in the neighborhood. He opened the door to his little house and there you see the whole thing, all 900 square feet of it. The sort of box that if you tripped coming in the front door, you found yourself falling out the back. He took off his gun and placed it on top of the refrigerator. Changed out of his work clothes, washed his hands and removed the foil from a plate that his wife had set on the stove. The phone rang. It was the mother of a guy who shot himself in the head. She got some information, she told him. He told her to come downtown in the morning.