CHAPTER SEVEN

IT WAS 1984, a long hot summer in Detroit. Cocaine was still king that summer, the good old-fashioned powder, long lines of it all over the city. Crack was just a rumor. I had been on the police force about eight years, and was just about ready to take the detective’s exam. My partner, Franklin, was new on the job. He was an ex–football player, an offensive lineman. He played at the University of Michigan and made second-team All Big Ten his senior year. The Lions drafted him, but he blew out his knee the first week of training camp. He went back and finished up his degree, and a couple years after that he joined the force. They stuck him with me, figuring an ex–football player and an ex–baseball player would get along together. They were wrong.

“This is what a baseball player does,” he said one evening in our squad car. The argument had been going on all day. “He stands around in a field. Once in a while, a ball might get hit to him. And if it’s not hit right at him, he might have to move sideways a little bit. I’ll give you that. Occasionally, the man has to move sideways.”

I just shook my head. We were on our way to the hospital. One of the emergency room doctors had called in a disturbance, and we were the closest car.

“Now after he’s done standing in the field,” Franklin went on, “he comes back into the dugout to rest. I mean, it’s hard work standing out there like that, right? So he’s gotta come into the shade and sit down on a bench. All right, so he’s sitting in that dugout for a while, having a drink, and then what do you know, it’s time for him to get up and go to bat! So now he’s gotta get up and go stand in a little box they painted in the dirt and swing this big stick, right? Now again, I’ll admit to you, swinging a big stick is a lot of work. I mean, if he fouls a couple balls off, he ends up swinging that stick something like five or six times!”

“Keep talking, Franklin,” I said. “Just keep digging that hole.”

“And then, get this, Alex. Say he hits that ball, what’s he gotta do then? He’s gotta run all the way down to first base. What is that, like ninety feet?”

“Ninety feet, yes. Very good.”

“Ninety feet the man has to run! And if he wants to try to stretch that into a double, that’s a hundred and eighty feet!”

“A football player with math skills,” I said. “What a bonus.”

“Where you going, anyway?” he asked.

“Receiving Hospital,” I said. “This is the best way.” I was going south down Brush Street, deep into the heart of downtown Detroit. The heat from the day was still lingering there on the streets, long after the sun had gone down.

“Best way if you don’t want to get there in a hurry,” he said. “You should have swung over to St. Antoine Street, go right down by the Hall of Justice.”

“Nah, this is faster,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I grew up in this city, friend. What do you know?”

“See, we’re here already,” I said. I pulled around to the back of the building near the emergency room entrance.

“We would have been here and gone by now if you’d listen to me.”

“The day I listen to you is the day I retire,” I said. We walked into the place, expecting the usual chaos. But everything seemed quiet. There was a woman in the waiting room, holding an icebag against her cheek. Across from her a man sat doubled over, hugging himself and gently rocking. A nurse was looking through a stack of files at the reception desk. She looked up at us and did a double take. Either I was just too damned good-looking or Franklin was just too damned big.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Franklin said. “We’re police officers.”

“In case you’ve never seen the uniform before,” I said. “Don’t mind my partner. He’s an ex—football player.”

She didn’t seem too amused by either one of us. “You want Dr. Myers,” she said. “Take a seat.”

We sat down in the waiting room and watched the woman shift the icebag around on her cheek. Somebody had given her quite a shiner.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “Are you all right?”

The woman looked at us. “Do I look all right?”

“No, ma’am, I guess you don’t. Is there anything I can do?”

The woman shook her head.

“Did your husband do this to you?”

She shook her head again.

“Because if he did—”

“Just leave me alone, all right?”

“Ma’am, I’m just saying—”

“I don’t want to hear what you’re saying, all right? I don’t want to hear it.”

I put my hands up in surrender and settled into my seat. We sat there for a long time. From outside we could hear the sounds of the city, a dog barking, a siren wailing in the distance. Detroit was always at its worst in the summer, but tonight it was really simmering. The heat was even worse than usual. And the bus strike was still on. There wasn’t even a Tiger game to watch because of the All-Star break. I didn’t see how the emergency room could be so empty. I kept waiting for those big double doors to burst open with fresh casualties.

“So tell me, Franklin,” I said. “Have you ever tried to hit a fastball?”

Franklin just looked at me.

“Have you ever had somebody throw a baseball ninetyfive miles an hour right at your head?”

“Keep trying, Alex.”

“I’m serious, Franklin. I’m trying to enlighten you here. You obviously have no appreciation for other sports. I suppose I can understand that, though. I mean, basically, what did you do when you were playing football? You were an offensive tackle, right? So let’s see. You crouched down and you put one hand on the ground. And then when the quarterback said ‘hut!’ you stood up and hit the guy in front of you. Am I right? Oh no wait, it was more involved than that, wasn’t it. Sometimes the quarterback would say ‘hut-hut!’ and you had to be smart enough not to stand up and hit your guy until the second ‘hut.’”

Before he could say anything, Dr. Myers came into the waiting room. “I’m sorry, Officers,” he said. “Please come this way.” When we stood up I slipped the woman with the icebag a piece of paper. It had my name and Franklin’s name on it, and the phone number for our precinct. I didn’t expect her to call, but I figured that was about all we could do for her that night.

The doctor led us out of the waiting room into a small lounge behind the reception area. He was a thin black man, with a meticulous doctor’s air about him. There was a slight Caribbean lilt in his voice. After we turned down the coffee and doughnuts, he finally told us why he had called the police.

“There’s a man who’s been coming in here,” he said. “Pretty regularly. Although you never really know when he’s going to be here. He’ll come in every night for a few nights running, then he’ll disappear for a few days. Then he’ll show up again. He’s obviously very disturbed, probably paranoid schizophrenic, although I couldn’t say that for sure. I certainly don’t have the time to try to talk to him.”

“What does he do when he’s here?” I asked.

“Mostly he just sort of … this is going to sound strange. Mostly he hides.”

“He hides?”

“We used to have this big plant out in the waiting area. You know, like a palm tree? He always used to stand behind it. Eventually, we had to take the plant away. He was scaring the patients.”

“You have security guards here, don’t you?”

“We have some,” he said. “Not nearly enough. Whenever we called them, as soon as they showed up, he’d be gone. It’s like he had a sixth sense about it.”

“When’s the last time he was here?”

“He was here earlier tonight,” he said. “He had a doctor’s coat on this time. I think he must have stolen it from our linen closet. He was walking around the examination rooms, pretending to be a doctor. One of the nurses stopped him, and he just said something like, ‘Just act natural, nurse. I’m undercover.’”

I looked at Franklin and shook my head. “Great.”

“We’re accustomed to having some pretty odd people around here,” he said. “It comes with the territory. But this man is becoming very disruptive.”

“Do you have any idea what his name is? Or where he lives?”

“We don’t know his name. But I think we know where he lives now. As soon as the nurse called security, he disappeared again. But the guard saw him on the street and followed him. There’s an apartment building about eight or nine blocks up, on the corner of Columbia and Woodward, right before the freeway. He saw the man go in, but he didn’t see which apartment he went into.”

I wrote the address on my pad. “What does this man look like?” I asked. “How will we know it’s him?”

“Oh, you’ll know,” he said. “In that neighborhood, he’ll be the only white man in that building, I’m sure. And if that’s not enough, all you have to do is look for the wig.”

“The wig? What kind of wig?”

“The man wears a blond wig,” he said. “One of those big blond wigs that come out to here.” He held his hands a foot away from his head.

“Big blond wig,” I said as I wrote it on my pad. “Anything else?”

“He’s a crazy white man and he’s wearing a big blond wig,” he said. He sounded tired. “What else do you need?”

 

WE FOUND THE apartment building on the corner of Columbia and Woodward. With all the work they had been doing in the downtown area, you didn’t have to go too far to see the “real” Detroit, the Detroit where Franklin and I spent most of our time either handling domestic disputes or responding to reports of gunfire. The building had looked nice in its better days, you could tell, but those days were long gone.

“How we gonna do this?” Franklin asked.

“How do you think?” I said. “We knock on doors.”

“I was afraid of that.”

We started on the first floor, Franklin taking one side of the hallway and me the other. If anyone answered our knocks at all, it was usually a woman’s frightened face peering out at us, a child or two or three behind her. On the second floor, one woman was finally willing to help us. “That white boy, you mean? One with the wig? He’s up on the top floor somewhere. Craziest man I ever seen.”

We thanked her and went right up to the top floor. “She saved us a lot of doorknocking,” I said. “We should do something for her.”

“Nothing we can do,” Franklin said. A place like this always hit him a little harder than it did me. Detroit was his home. I only worked there.

The first door we knocked on, we found our man. He opened the door just a crack and looked out at us. The blond hair stood several inches over his head.

“Police officers, sir,” I said. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”

He looked at me and then at Franklin, and then back and forth again a few times without saying anything.

“Can we come in?” I said.

“Why?” he said. His voice was dead flat.

“So we can talk to you,” I said.

“Why do you want to talk to me?”

“Just open the door, please.”

“Does he have to come in?” The man nodded toward Franklin.

“This is my partner,” I said. “His name is Franklin. My name is McKnight. Can I ask you your name?”

“Ha!” he said. “Nice try.”

“Sir, open the door, please,” Franklin said. The man jumped at the sound of his voice.

“What do you want?” he said. “Why are you here?”

“We’ve just been to the hospital,” I said. “They tell us you’ve been harassing people there. Now, can we please come in for a moment and talk about it?”

He slowly opened the door. I took stock of him as I stepped into the apartment. Five foot nine, maybe, a little overweight. He had blue jeans on, old but clean, tennis shoes, and a sweatshirt. No glasses, no facial hair. He would have looked almost normal if he didn’t have that damned wig on. “Harassing?” he said. “They said I was harassing people? Is that what they said?”

The apartment was small. One table with three chairs, a couch that probably folded out into a bed. A kitchenette and a small bathroom. A single lamp burned in the corner, giving a stingy glow to the rest of the room. No light came from the window. We weren’t even sure he had a window, because all four walls were completely covered with aluminum foil.

We just stood there and looked at the place. Finally, Franklin said, “Who did your decorating, the tin man?”

The guy looked at Franklin, pure hatred in his eyes. A little bell went off in the back of my mind. I knew something was wrong, but at the time I just assumed the guy was a simple-minded bigot. I didn’t think about what else could be going on inside his head.

“There’s a good reason for the aluminum foil,” he said.

“Yeah, I heard about this once,” Franklin said. “It’s to keep the radio waves out, right?”

The man shook his head. “Radio waves? You think aluminum foil keeps out radio waves? This is for microwaves.”

“Microwaves,” Franklin said. “Of course.”

“You said your name was McKnight?” he said to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Would it be possible perhaps to have this …” He looked Franklin up and down. “ … this individual step outside. I’d be happy to talk to you alone.”

“No, that would not be possible,” I said. I knew that Franklin had a long fuse, but I was starting to get a little worried. If our roles had been reversed, I would have already been fighting the urge to bend the guy’s arms behind his back and cuff him.

“I don’t get it,” the guy said. He started to rock back and forth from one foot to the other. “The two of you. Are you really partners? Do you work together every day?”

“All day long,” Franklin said. “Sometimes we even drink from the same drinking fountain.”

“This is very interesting,” he said. “This could be valuable information.”

“All right, sir,” I said. “I’m going to sit down.” I took one of the three chairs and sat down at the table. “My partner is going to sit down, too.” Franklin kept looking at the man, then finally sat down next to me. “Please, sir, have a seat.”

The man sat down.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“My last name is Rose,” he said. “That’s all I’m going to tell you.”

“No first name?”

“First names are personal names,” he said. “If you know somebody’s first name, you have power over him. I’ll never make that mistake again.”

Franklin folded his arms and looked at the ceiling.

“I understand you’ve been spending time at the emergency room at Memorial.”

“Is that what they told you?”

“Yes, that’s what they told me.”

“I may have stopped by there. Once or twice.”

“They say you’ve been there quite often.”

“And you believe them,” he said.

“Never mind them,” I said. “Have you been there?”

“I suppose I must have,” he said. “If that’s what they told you.”

“Mr. Rose, you’re not making this very easy.”

“Do you two really spend all day together?”

“Oh, good Lord,” Franklin said. I could tell he had heard enough. “What the hell is wrong with you, anyway? You’re down there at the hospital scaring people all day long, acting like a lunatic. I mean, if you’re crazy, be crazy. That’s fine. Go see a shrink. If you’re doing drugs, get in a program. Do something for yourself. Or just sit up here in your tinfoil room, I don’t care. Just don’t be bothering people at the hospital, all right? They have enough problems down there without you hiding behind the plants. And what’s the deal with that wig, anyway? You look like that rock singer. What’s his name, Alex? The guy with the hair.”

“Peter Frampton?” I said.

“No, the other guy. From Led Zeppelin.”

“Robert Plant?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy,” Franklin said. “He looks just like him.”

“I think he looks more like Peter Frampton,” I said.

“Are you two about done here?” he said.

“No, I’m afraid not, Mr. Rose,” I said. “You see, we need to tell you something very important. And you need to listen to us. All right? You need to stop going to that hospital. Okay? You can’t go there anymore.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” he said.

“Why is that not possible?”

“I’m doing important work there,” he said. “I can’t stop now. Do you play billiards?”

“Mr. Rose …”

“You know what the eight ball does, don’t you? It divides the rest of the balls into the high and the low. The high frequency and the low frequency. The eight ball is black. Black for division and separation and death. The absence of light.”

“Mr. Rose …”

“The cue ball is white. All light, all colors, it’s all part of white. White is life and movement. None of the other balls can move until the cue ball moves.”

“Mr. Rose,” I said, “do you think maybe you should be talking to somebody? Is there a doctor taking care of you? Is there any medication you should be taking?”

“This is a trick, isn’t it?” he said. “You’re in disguise.”

“Mr. Rose …”

“Very clever,” he said. “I have to hand it to you. You’re getting smarter all the time. You bring a big one to distract me.” He shot a glance at Franklin and then locked his eyes back on me. “And you just slip right in here like you’re one of us. You even sound like one of us. Very convincing.”

Franklin and I looked at each other and nodded. This one was taking a little ride to the station, then maybe later to a nice padded cell somewhere.

“It’s not going to work,” he said. “You picked the wrong man this time.”

The gun came out before either of us could react, before we could even think of reacting. He moved with such insect quickness, I swear he was pointing it at us before we even heard the tape tearing underneath the table.

It was an Uzi. In a few years, Uzis would become a cliché, but in 1984, they were still a novelty. Every coke soldier wanted one. They showed us an Uzi at roll call once. The gun was made in Israel. It shot 950 rounds per minute, little nine-millimeter pistol bullets, with full metal jackets. And it didn’t sound any louder than a sewing machine.

“Mr. Rose,” I said slowly, “put the weapon down.” Both of my hands were on the table. Franklins arms were still folded. I didn’t know which one of us could reach his holster first. Or if we’d even have the chance.

“Tell me who sent you,” he said.

We both looked at the Uzi. I’m sure Franklin was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Although he had even more to lose than I did. He had two daughters, three and five years old. You want to see your family again. You don’t want to die in a crazy man’s apartment just because he thinks you’re his secret enemy.

“Mr. Rose,” I said. I tried to breathe. “We’ll tell you whatever you want. I promise you. Just put the weapon down, please.”

“I found this, you know,” he said.

He looked down at the gun for a split second. A cold shiver ran up my back. It wasn’t enough time to go for my gun. I needed him to look away for just an instant longer. Just give me a chance. If you’re really crazy, do something crazy. Go into a trance or something.

“I found this in an alley,” he said. “After one of your friends killed somebody. He didn’t see me there, but I was watching. He threw it into a Dumpster. Very sloppy.”

“Mr. Rose,” Franklin said. His voice was almost a whisper. “Please …”

“Don’t talk to me,” he said. He pointed the gun at Franklin’s chest. “I don’t want to hear anything from you.”

Franklin swallowed.

“Now you,” he said, looking back at me. “Tell me how you did it. How did you turn white?”

“I’ll tell you after you put the gun down,” I said. “Just put it right there on the table.” Right hand down, unsnap the revolver, bring it back up. How long will it take? Should I just do it?

He shook his head. “Well, this is quite a situation,” he said. “Now I won’t know what color you are. I was afraid this might happen.”

Hand down, unsnap, raise and fire. Reach, rip, boom. I rehearsed the motion in my mind, hoping maybe I could shave off a fraction of a second. Hand down, unsnap, raise, and fire. Reach, rip, boom.

“You know, I’ve learned a lot at the hospital, doing my undercover work. At first, I didn’t want the assignment, but I was told that the chosen one needed me to be there on the front lines. I was told that the chosen one needed to know how the enemy killed people. What the latest techniques were. So we could develop the right defense.”

Franklin sat motionless beside me. I can’t do this. If I move, he’ll shoot me. I won’t even get close to my gun. He has to look away. Please look away, just for a second.

“You know what really gets to me?” he said. “You’re trying so hard to find the best way to kill people, you’re even killing each other. Is that just for practice?”

Silence. I looked into his eyes. It was like looking down a mine shaft and seeing all the way down to hell.

“You have no respect for life, do you?” he said. “The chosen one says that if something has no respect for life, then killing that something is not really killing. Especially if you use the same technique that they use. That’s the key.”

Silence. How could I have taken one look at those eyes and not known? I should have cuffed him the minute I walked in.

“So I’m not really going to kill you.”

“Mr. Rose …” I said.

“I’m going to remove you. That’s what the chosen one calls it. He calls it removing.”

“Mr. Rose …”

He moved the Uzi a few inches closer to us. “And do you know what the latest technique is?” he said.

Go for his gun? Knock it sideways? I looked at his hand. Is it tensed? Will he shoot if I make a move for it?

“Of course you know,” he said. “You all do. It happens almost every day. I’ve seen it in the hospital. I heard the doctors talk about it.”

You’re going to have to make a move. You’re going to have to risk it.

“‘Here comes another zip,’ they say. ‘How many zip’s is that this week? Five already?’”

“Mr. Rose …” I said. One more try to talk him out of it. Then I move.

“It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” he said. “Zip!”

I knew what a zip was. Franklin did, too. We had seen a lot of them that summer. The coke dealers would zip a guy if he moved in on his turf, or if he didn’t pay him soon enough, or if he just looked at him the wrong way. You take an Uzi and you give the guy a quick burst right down the middle of his body. Twenty, maybe thirty rounds from his head right down to his pecker. That’s a zip.

Move. Move now. Go for his gun. Now. Now!

I didn’t move.

He shot Franklin. Right down the front of him. The Uzi spat out the bullets with a sound like a cat purring. I went for my revolver. I felt the bullets hit me in the right shoulder. I didn’t know how many. I felt them all at once, like when a rising fastball glances off your mitt and catches you in the shoulder. I heard the sound of my gun going off, the man named Rose screaming.

I was on the floor, next to Franklin. He was still alive. Just for a moment. I saw his eyes looking at me and then he wasn’t there anymore. I tried to reach for my radio. There was blood on my hands, on my face, in my eyes. Blood everywhere.

I said something into the radio. I don’t remember what. I lay there on the floor and looked at the ceiling. There was a hole there. I didn’t get him. When the bullets hit me I shot straight up into the ceiling. Why did he scream? Did the sound scare him? Did he run away? How many times did he shoot me? How long until I die?

And why didn’t he put aluminum foil on the ceiling? All four walls, but not the ceiling? I looked over at Franklin again. I kept looking at him until everything went black.

 

“GODDAMN IT, MCKNIGHT,” Maven said. “Why didn’t you go for your weapon when he first drew on you?” He had been listening to me in silence as I told him the story. He was driving the squad car. I was sitting in the passenger seat. My voice had been the only sound in the car, all the way from Paradise to the Soo. We were almost at the police station. The sun had just started to turn the eastern sky from black to ruddy gray.

I went through a whole list of things to say to him. Places he could stick it. Things he could do to himself. Finally, I just said, “I don’t know why.”

He shook his head. We passed by an old warehouse building. Half of the windows were broken. Under the cheap light of a street lamp a cat sat licking its paws, oblivious to our passing. “So you’re telling me,” he said, “this guy has found you how many years later?”

“Fourteen years,” I said.

“All the cops you got in Detroit, you never caught the guy?”

“Well, Chief,” I said. “You see, that’s the part I haven’t told you yet.”

“What part?”

“We did catch the guy. About six months later.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They caught him hanging around another hospital across town. I had just left the force, but I came back in to identify him. I testified at his trial.”

“Let me guess,” he said. “Not guilty by reason of insanity.”

“No,” I said. “His defender gave that a good try, but it didn’t wash. Not for a cop-killer. Rose got life for Franklin, plus twelve years tacked on for me. No parole.”

“So you’re telling me that this Rose guy …”

“Is in prison,” I said. I looked out the window. “Or at least, I thought he was.”