After the crap game broke up in Lee’s room, Carl and Lee wandered out to the pool in the main part of the motel, and Auburey and Sortor lay around A-5 watching television.
Papa’s Delicate Condition, starring Jackie Gleason and Glynis Johns, with a song in it, “Call Me Irresponsible,” which had won an Academy Award, had begun at nine, and the serial “I Spy” had come on later on another channel, and then all channels showed news of the turmoil outside in the city’s streets; after that, Lives of the Bengal Lancers and the “Tonight Show” came on—all frequently interrupted by commercials and news bulletins.
This room of Lee’s was at the back of the annex; a pair of French doors opened from it onto a wooden back porch with steps down to the motel parking lot. Two double beds stood on wall-to-wall carpeting. The television set was in a corner of the room, against the outer wall and to the left of the French doors, and a refrigerator-stove stood across from it, near a connecting door to room A-2, through which one had to go to get to the front hallway of the annex and to the stairs to the upper floors. The rooms were smartly furnished and clean; they must have given the young men, whose homes were crowded and cluttered, a sense of luxury—of living almost within the commercials they kept seeing on the tube.
Carl and Lee brought the two hungry white girls, Juli and Karen, into the room. Sortor turned the television set off, and one by one the boys turned on transistor radios. “They had about three radio sets going at the same time,” Juli testified. She said she had known Carl casually before this but got to know Lee for the first time that night, and she and Karen now also met “two fellows that I didn’t know”—Auburey and Sortor.
Lee had a cache of foodstuffs. “We bought them at the store,” Sortor told me. “They was in there before the riot broke out, you know; we had kept a icebox full of food.” Mr. Gill told me that when he went to the motel after the shootings to get Carl’s clothes, “I saw Lee had quite a bit of food, canned food and hot dogs and things.”
Lee and the girls cooked some hot dogs. The meal took about twenty minutes.
Carl, whose room was upstairs, “had a record player,” Juli testified, “and asked us if we wanted to listen to some records.” The girls decided they would like to do that, and they went with Carl and Lee up to A-14.
Sortor cooked some more hot dogs for Auburey and himself. He burned them, he testified, and opened the French doors onto the back porch to let out the smoke. At some point he turned the television set back on—loudly enough so that he and Auburey did not hear what happened upstairs in Carl’s room a few minutes later.
When the two couples reached A-14, they found Michael there; the girls knew him. Carl started up some music on his record player.
“We were sitting around listening to records,” Juli testified in the conspiracy hearing. “Everyone, everybody was just sitting around talking and listening to records. And,” she added, “that’s all.”
Attorney Lippitt, cross-examining her, asked: “That’s all?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Come on, your memory is better than that, isn’t it?”
Juli made no response to that question.
They listened to music, she said, “approximately ten minutes, fifteen.” Then, according to the synopsis of a statement Karen made to the police, “Carl Cooper pulled a pistol out from under the bed. Cooper and Forsythe were playing with it. They had blanks in it and Cooper shot it twice.”
“During this time,” Juli told the police, “Carl Cooper fired a gold-and-silver blank pistol toward Lee Forsythe; Lee ran out as though frightened.” “He shot it once,” Juli testified later, “. . . toward the door . . . Lee Forsythe was standing quite close. . . . He didn’t fire at Forsythe; he fired at the direction that he was in. He wasn’t intentionally meaning to shoot Lee.”
Juli described the pistol as “a pellet gun or something, just looked like a plastic gun to me. . . . Silver or gold, one or the other. . . . a toy, a blank pistol or something. . . . It wasn’t a real gun.”
“Could it,” Prosecutor Weiswasser asked her, “fire a fatal shot, as far as you could see?”
“No.”
Michael Clark, who had spent time in prison for carrying a concealed weapon, could not be expected to wish it known, even during hearings weeks later, that a weapon might have been in in his possession, or even in his room, on the evening of the incident. Like all his friends, he was cynical to the soles of his feet about the judicial process; an oath in court meant nothing to him except as a factor in a larger danger. Fear of jail made most of the boys crafty; Michael was either less intimidated or less subtle than they, for he was blatant in his disregard for truth and even consistency in his testimony. His lies, which grew bolder, more disdainful, and more ironic with the passage of time, as well as the more cautious evasions and untruths of the other boys, confused even Prosecutor Weiswasser, who was supposed to be on their side; to them, he was just a prosecutor, a familiar enemy, and they were suspicious of his help.
“Clark stated,” according to the detectives’ synopsis of their interview with him, “he overheard Sortor tell a police officer that Clark had the pistol. When Clark was questioned, he denied having a pistol because three days previous, he had given the pistol to his brother-in-law.”
By the time of the murder hearing, a fortnight after this interview, the three days had grown into a week. In the conspiracy hearing, later still, Michael testified, “Look, I say that my brother-in-law had a pistol over there in the Motel about three weeks before all this happened, and he came and got it about three weeks before it happened. . . . It was a starter pistol.” Michael did not want it thought that he had even touched the pistol three weeks before the night of the killings.
“And he left it with you, didn’t he?” Attorney Kohl asked him.
“No, he didn’t leave it with me.”
“Who did he leave it with?”
“I didn’t know anything about the thing until I found it up under the pillow.”
“Until you found it what?”
“It was up under the pillow.”
“What pillow, sir?”
“The pillow on my bed.”
“The pillow on your bed?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I recognized it. I recognized the gun. I knew whose it was.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I didn’t; Carl took . . . the pistol from under my pillow . . . and he hid it.”
Michael would not admit that a starter pistol had been shot, as the girls said it had, in the annex on the night of the killings.
“Now,” Attorney Kohl asked him, “is there anything else that took place, as you sit here under oath; let me rephrase that question: Was there any shooting in that motel that night?”
“Not to my knowledge, no.”
Sortor and Lee also denied under oath that there had been any starter pistol there that night.
“Before the police or military personnel started firing,” Weiswasser asked, “had there been any shots from within, from inside the Algiers Manor?”
“No.”
“Or annex?”
“No, no shots in there.”
And later Weiswasser asked, “Did you see anyone in that motel that night with a gun of any kind in his hand outside of police officers?”
“No,” Sortor said, “I didn’t.”
“Did you at any time see any person,” the prosecutor asked Lee, “at any time while you were in the Motel that night other than a police officer or soldier or a trooper with a gun?”
“Nope.”
And later: “And up in that room on that night Carl Cooper shot the blank pistol, didn’t he?”
“Not while I was there, no. . . . I saw a blank cap pistol earlier that day,” Lee said. “I didn’t see any gun that night.”
During the first stages of my relationship with these young witnesses, when they must still have thought of me as a detective-like person, they kept putting me on; and they denied to me, too, the presence or firing of the starter pistol.
“They said there was a starter gun they had there,” Lee said to me one day, “and in court they said that it was fired at me. Earlier that day my little brother had come over, and he had a little Green Hornet gun, but he took that with him. It sounded just like a cap gun, but it looked real.”
And Sortor said to me on another day, “Wasn’t no starter pistol. I don’t want to shit you or anything, but there wasn’t no starter pistol in there.”
Late one morning several weeks later, I was sitting in the back room of Sortor’s home with him and with a friend of his, whose right hand was wrapped in bandages, at a table covered with laundry, and Sortor was drinking wine, and a record player was going full blast in the front room, and we talked awhile about Auburey. Then I asked Sortor what had tripped off the episode at the Algiers that night.
He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “I know but I ain’t telling.”
Perhaps it was that I did not press him, or perhaps it was simply that much time had passed since the night when he had lost his two friends and the danger seemed somewhat remote at last, or perhaps it was the wine—whatever it was that made him decide that silence no longer mattered, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said, “Them girls didn’t even know what happened down there. Me and Auburey was downstairs, eating, sitting there, and we were looking at TV. See, Carl was somebody who always had to be having fun. He come running downstairs, him and Michael, just trying to scare us, you know. They was mocking the polices that come in there in the morning to search us down, you know, hollering at us to put our hands up, and scaring us. He shot it twice. Michael said, ‘Look out!’ you know. They was only two blanks in the gun. Lee stayed upstairs. See, me and Auburey didn’t know it was a starter gun at first, and we was scared at first, you know. They was laughing at us. Shot one straight out and one at the floor, you know.”
It is quite possible that Sortor was putting me on again this time, all the way, but I do not think he was. I do believe he left something out of an essentially true story: something about one of those who may have been shooting craps, and was wearing a yellow shirt, and who may not have gone home when the others went.
Sortor pushed his hat forward on his head, as he finished the account, and looked at me as if to say, “That’s it.” But then he gave his friend a flicker of a look of wisdom and shared secret amusement. I could not begrudge their sharing and asked no more, as I supposed there was a good reason—perhaps loyalty—for the distortion of the record, if there had been one.
As they had watched television in A-5, Sortor and Auburey—and perhaps a lingering friend in a yellow shirt—had not heard Carl fire the starter pistol at Lee upstairs. Something Sortor mumbled to me once, then quickly corrected, led me to think that Carl might have chased him or Auburey or their friend right out onto the back porch, or that Carl (or perhaps another; perhaps the friend in the yellow shirt had also handled the gun) might have made some kind of demonstration out there on the back porch.
Synopsis of Statement taken from Willie Harris, 36/M/N, 47 W. Euclid:
“Willie Harris states that on Tuesday night, July 25, 1967, does not know what time, he heard a shot fired in the rear of his home. Harris investigated and observed a Negro man standing on the lower left rear porch of the Algiers Manor Motel, and saw the man fire a shot in the direction of Woodward and Euclid; it appeared that the man had a revolver.
“Harris stated that after the second shot, he observed a man who looked like a private guard fire a shot at the Manor Motel. Harris heard several shots after this. He described the Negro man as wearing a yellow shirt and dark trousers.”
Were the shots of a blank pistol the sound of “snipers” that had caused Warrant Officer Thomas to call high command and tell them that he and his men were being fired upon; that caused the alarm that brought the police that killed the boys—“Army under heavy fire,” two cops had quoted their dispatcher as saying? I have not been able to find any other plausible explanation. Not one of the scores of witnesses has ever said, in court or to me or to anyone else I have been able to trace, that he saw real snipers at or near the Algiers that night.
What greater—or more bitter—irony could there be than that the three boys at the Algiers may have been executed as snipers because one of them, satirizing the uniformed men who had made them all laugh in the midst of their fear during the search that morning, had been playing with a pistol designed to start foot races, from which it was not even possible to shoot bullets?
Except, of course, that as it turned out the boys were not executed as snipers at all. They were executed for being thought to be pimps, for being considered punks, for making out with white girls, for being in some vague way killers of a white cop named Jerry Olshove, for running riot—for being, after all and all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time.