QUINCY SPRINGFIELD WAS SEEING things he’d never seen before.
The tired front porch of the house on Kercheval, for instance, was decorated in the upper corners with that old-fashioned gingerbread that looked like spiderwebs. He hadn’t noticed it on his previous visits, yet from its weathered condition and the festooning presence of the imperfect real thing it was obviously not a new feature. But then the last time he’d been there Lydell had accompanied him. He wondered when he would exhaust the store of places to go and think, The last time I was here … Lydell had been dead six hours. One moment it seemed like a year, then in the next he would catch himself making a mental note of something to tell Lydell next time he spoke to him, and the realization was like the ground opening under his feet.
“You cheap son of a bitch,” he said. “You always did light out ahead of the bill.”
“What, sugar?” Krystal clung to his arm in her white go-go boots and a silver lamé shift that just covered her pelvis and looked like Reynolds wrap.
“I was just saying I don’t know why we got to be out tonight.”
“You got to get out of your head for a little. I hear Mahomet puts on a show.”
There was a knot of people standing on the porch, looking more garish than usual in their exaggerated Afros and bright nighttime clothes with the sunlight not quite gone. Quincy knew some of them and nodded to them on his way to the door. It was locked. He looked at his watch. A few minutes past eight. “Wilson’s still at his day job,” he told Krystal.
They went back down the steps and wandered up to the corner, where two men and a woman in short-shorts and a halter top were passing around a cigarette. The bright-metal heat of the day was mellowing. Quincy could feel the moisture in the air condensing on his skin. Dusk had been Lydell’s favorite time of day. “You can see the brothers and sisters coming out of the cracks and taking over. The Man done grabbed the daytime for hisself, but he forgot about the night.” Quincy wondered if he’d settle for ordinary cremation. Elrod Brown had given him a demonstration that afternoon and it was just like feeding rubbish to an incinerator.
“Krystal’s thirsty, sugar. You gots a little taste?” She felt inside his breast pocket.
He handed her the hammered silver flask, a gift from Lydell with someone else’s initials engraved on it. It gurgled once and she handed it back. He helped himself before putting it away. So far he’d managed to keep his buzz at the same pleasant level.
A police cruiser coasted past on a grumbling ripple from the crowd, the white officer behind the wheel hanging his big face out the open window and committing features to memory. At the corner he accelerated. One of the men on the corner spat after the car.
When he and Krystal turned around to walk back, the crowd on the porch had swelled to twice its original size and spilled out on the sidewalk and burned-out front yard. Quincy saw Sebastian Bright surrounded by his people. He hadn’t been out alone since Joe Petite’s murder.
A white stretch limousine came around the corner from Pennsylvania, seeming in its exaggerated length to flex in the middle like a snake. As it slid to a stop in front of the house Quincy recognized the plate. It was one of the Fleetwoods he’d rented for Congo’s funeral. A white chauffeur in livery got out and opened the back door on the curb side. The Bongo Brothers alighted first in their dark suits and spread collars and stood glaring at the crowd with their hands open at their sides while Mahomet stepped up onto the curb. The light was fading quickly now and his white suit seemed to glow under the street lamps, which came on just then. Quincy wondered if he’d timed that or if God just naturally smiled on the small man with the straight slick hair and bottomless baritone. The crowd pressed in, but Mighty Joe Young and Anthony Battle had come around from the other side of the car and joined the others in forming a protective seal around Mahomet.
He spotted Quincy then and said something to Mighty Joe Young, who dipped his head with its elaborately beaded coif to listen, then nodded. The group approached Quincy. His hand was seized in both of Mahomet’s.
“I heard about Lafayette.”
“Doc says his heart just went,” Quincy said. “Saved him some pain, I guess.”
“He didn’t care much for me, but I’m sorry just the same.”
“Lydell was tough to get on with.”
“Remember me, Mr. Big Stuff? I bought you your first ice cream suit.”
Mahomet let go of Quincy’s hand and embraced Krystal. They were the same height. He left one arm around her waist. “Staying to hear me talk?”
“Well, the line was too long at the Poitier picture.”
“I’ll try to make up for it.”
Wilson McCoy, in his dusty coveralls from his job at the brick factory, made his way through the crowd, jingling his keys. For once he wasn’t wearing his beret. “Fucking bus was late,” he told Mahomet. “Let’s go in.” He turned to mount the porch without acknowledging Quincy’s presence. By agreement, they hadn’t had direct contact since before the shooting at the Penobscot Building.
Police had counted 147 holes in the elevator car. Pasquale Oro and Michael Nicholas Gallante were pronounced dead at the scene and Herschel Schmerer, alias Sean Devlin, died in the ambulance on the way to Detroit Receiving. Ovid “Sweets” Sito, the bodyguard, lived for two hours with bullets in his brain, chest, and stomach, then expired without having regained consciousness. Being sought were three Negroes in their early twenties and a security guard named Paul Arnet, who had disappeared from his post earlier that afternoon and was still missing from home. Quincy had thought McCoy an idiot to go on operating his blind pig and conducting BLAC meetings, but since the artists’ renditions that had appeared in the papers and on TV of the killer in the beret didn’t remotely resemble him, maybe he was wise to go on as if nothing had happened. Quincy himself had been questioned and released when a waitress at the Butcher’s Inn on Winder confirmed that he’d been eating there when the incident took place.
The crowd outside thinned as people entered the house. Just as Quincy and Krystal turned away from the street a blue car blatted past and he looked, his body tensing, just in time to see a taillight flick around the corner. He made himself relax. Everywhere he looked lately he was seeing blue Cobras.
McCoy, having unlocked the front door for his guests, was standing on the porch talking with Sebastian Bright. They both turned when Quincy and Krystal started up the steps, but they weren’t looking at them.
“Wilson McCoy?”
The man who had called out, tall and white in a neat black suit and narrow-brimmed hat, climbed past Quincy accompanied by two Detroit police officers in uniform, both white, and another white plainclothesman, shorter and wider than Sebastian Bright, wearing a wrinkled jacket and double-knit pants and a hat with a five-inch brim like they didn’t sell any more in stores. Quincy recognized Inspector Canada and the fat sergeant with a woman’s name, what was it, Ethel or Edith. Esther.
“This a private party.” McCoy started to go inside. One of the uniformed officers grasped his arm.
“You’re wanted for questioning in a quadruple homicide,” Canada said. “Let’s go downtown.”
“Whitey’s going to kill me!” shouted McCoy.
One of Sebastian Bright’s men tried to seize Canada’s arms from behind. The inspector elbowed him in the throat, cross-drew a short-barreled Chief’s Special, and aimed it at the man’s face. “Back down off the porch. Everybody off the porch,” he barked. “This is police business.”
“White motherfuckers!” Krystal lunged, her long-nailed fingers hooked like claws. Quincy caught her around the waist and dragged her, kicking and twisting, off the porch.
The crowd was surging back outdoors now, becoming vocal. The fat sergeant stood on the top step with his revolver out to cover the others’ backs. The uniforms had handcuffs on McCoy, who kept saying, “Don’t let them do this to me! You going to let them do this to me?”
A bottle sailed past the inspector’s head and exploded against a porch post, showering glass and whiskey everywhere. “Radio for backup,” Canada said. The sergeant retreated down the steps, backing and turning, and slipped around the corner of the house. Quincy had wondered where they’d parked the car.
There were people all over now. The porch boards groaned under their weight and they were standing in the yard and on the sidewalk and in the middle of the street, blocking the officers’ way out. Many of them had come out of the other houses in the block.
“This is where it starts!” McCoy shouted. One of the uniforms slammed the prisoner’s head against the wall of the house and he quieted down.
“Fucking pig!” Krystal’s heels raked Quincy’s shins. He cursed and held on. Sirens thrilled in the distance.
Mahomet’s white suit appeared on the porch. He had his hands raised and his mouth was moving, but Quincy couldn’t hear what he was saying.
The sirens were getting louder. They sounded like they were coming from all over the city, answering one another like wolves. Quincy transferred his grip to Krystal’s wrist and pulled her a block and a half down Kercheval to where the Sting Ray was parked. He threw her across the seat and slammed the door. “Stay in there till I get back or you can pedal your ass from now on.”
“Where you going?”
“Back to get Mahomet.”
Blue-and-whites from Motor Traffic and the Tactical Mobile Unit were entering the block from both ends. More bottles had been smashed, their fragments twinkling in the red and blue of the strobes. One of the officers who had handcuffed Wilson McCoy pushed down his head and shoved him into the backseat of a cruiser. Other uniforms in riot helmets moved through the crowd with sticks and bayoneted rifles—bayonets, for chrissake—quartering it and isolating the hotspots. Quincy knew a flash of dread when he couldn’t see Mahomet on the porch. Then he spotted him at ground level, a whitecap bobbing in a sea of bright shirts and halter tops, still talking with his arms raised.
Something struck Quincy hard between the shoulder blades. He stumbled and grabbed at the fender of a parked car for support. His legs were kicked out from under him and his hair was grabbed from behind and his face slammed into the hood. He felt his nose give. A hand frisked him from neck to ankles, his wrists were jerked behind his back and clamped together.
“Let him go.”
Snuffling blood, Quincy turned his cheek to the warm hood. Inspector Canada was standing on the other side of the car. He’d lost his hat and his crisp black hair was in his eyes.
“Inspector—” The voice behind Quincy was muffled.
“He didn’t do anything. Take off the cuffs.”
His wrists were freed. He straightened up, leaned a hip against the fender. The officer who had cuffed him had on a white helmet with a tinted Plexiglas shield that hid his face. Only the hands sticking out of his blue shirtcuffs told Quincy the man was black. “Sorry, Inspector. I thought—”
“Get back with the others.” Canada came around to Quincy’s side of the car and gave him his handkerchief. “Is it broken?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” He blew into it and mopped the blood from his upper lip. The front of his face was growing numb, a sure sign.
“McCoy did it, didn’t he?”
He tipped back his head and pinched his nostrils shut with the hand holding the handkerchief. “Did what?”
“You know damn well what. He shouldn’t have worn the beret. Did you pay him, or is this one of those brotherhood things?”
“I just want to get Mahomet out of here. He gets beat up on a lot.”
“That officer wasn’t so far off. We’ll just have to come back and do it all over again when McCoy talks.”
Quincy lowered his head. “He won’t talk.”
“About what?”
“About nothing. This ain’t no cops and robbers, Mr. Police Man. This here’s war. You’re the enemy.”
“It didn’t have to come to this. You had your chance to stop it when we talked back in June.”
“It was already started.” He held out the handkerchief. “Thanks.”
“Keep it. It’s bloody.”
“Nigger bastard!”
Quincy turned toward the new voice just as the gun fired. He felt a hot wind on his cheek. Harry DiJesus, his face demonic in the light of the strobes, was standing in the middle of Kercheval with his feet spread and an automatic clamped between both outstretched palms. Canada’s revolver was out and he returned fire. There was a moment of darkness while the beacons rotated away from each other, then when their beams crossed again the spot where DiJesus had been standing was vacant. “Get down!” Canada crouched behind the fender on his side. His head swiveled slowly from left to right. Bodies ran back and forth through the pulsating lights.
Four shots rattled, too close together for a revolver. The sound came from behind Quincy. He wheeled. Mahomet was standing in an opening created by the four wrestlers who never left his side, his arms still raised above his head. Four red spots the size of half-dollars had spoiled his white vest; Quincy thought crazily of strawberries and cream. Mahomet, looking around, spotted Quincy and he started to smile. Then his knees bent and his head tipped forward and the rest of him followed.
DiJesus was crouched six feet away with his back to Quincy, still holding the pistol in target stance. He turned, his eyes darting, and the light when it struck them came back glowing green as from an animal’s. Canada fired twice. The first bullet was high and struck DiJesus in the throat, neatly parting the gold chain around his neck. It glittered as it slithered down inside his T-shirt. The second entered his chest on the left side. He fell.
There was a lull in the shouting and running. Quincy walked past DiJesus’ body without stopping to look at it and stood over Mahomet. Mighty Joe Young was kneeling with Mahomet’s head in his lap. The eyes were already growing soft and glistening.
“What was he saying?”
One of the Bongos looked up, startled. Quincy repeated the question.
“Same thing, over and over,” said Anthony Battle. “‘Be calm, brothers and sisters. This is the test.’ “