City Primeval

7

TECHNICALLY, SQUAD SEVEN of the Detroit Police Homicide Section specialized in the investigation of “homicides committed during the commission of a felony,” most often an armed robbery, a rape, sometimes a breaking and entering, as opposed to barroom shootings and Saturday night mom and pop murders that were emotionally stimulated and not considered who-done-its.

The squad’s home was in Room 527 of Police Headquarters, a colorless, high-ceilinged office roughly twenty-four-by-twenty that contained an assortment of ageless metal desks and wooden tables butted together, file cabinets, seven telephones, a Norelco coffeemaker, a GE battery-charge box for PREP radios, a locked cabinet where squad members sometimes stored their handguns, two banks of flickering fluorescent lights, a wall display of 263 mug shots of accused murderers, a coatrack next to the door and a sign that read:

Do something-

either lead, follow

or get the hell

out of the way!

A very old poster, peeling from the column that stood in the middle of the squadroom and left over from another time, stated: I will give up my gun when they pry my cold fingers from around it.

It was 2:30 in the afternoon when Raymond Cruz returned to the squadroom. The investigations into the deaths of Alvin Guy and the young woman found in Palmer Park were less than thirteen hours old.

Raymond hung up the suitcoat he’d been wearing for the past twenty-four hours, crossed to the unofficial lieutenant’s desk in the corner-the desk facing out to the squadroom, beneath the room’s only window and the air-conditioning unit that didn’t work-and listened.

Norb Bryl’s desk faced the lieutenant’s. Bryl was on the phone-taking notes and saying, “… keyhole defectment, bullet found in anterior cranial fossa…”-talking to someone at the Wayne County morgue.

Hunter, also on the phone, had a young black guy sitting at his desk who was the suspect/witness in the Palmer Park murder. They sat almost knee to knee, the young black guy slouched low, wearing a white T-shirt and a plaid golf hat with a narrow brim that he fooled with as he waited for Hunter, who was waiting for someone to come back on the line. No one else was in the squadroom.

Still waiting, Hunter said to the young black guy, “Twenty-five years old and all you got are some traffic tickets? You must’ve been in the army a while.”

Raymond watched the young black guy give a slow shrug without saying anything.

Hunter said, “Let’s see your hair.”

The young black guy raised his hat above his head and held it there.

“We’ll call it nappy,” Hunter said and made a notation on the DPD Interrogation Record lying on his desk.

“It’s Afro,” the young black guy said.

Hunter said, “An Afro? It’s a shitty looking Afro. We’ll call it a nappy ‘fro.” He straightened then and said into the phone, “Yeah?… Darrold Woods?… Okay, give me what you got.” Hunter nodded and said yeah, uh-huh, as he made notes on a yellow legal pad. When he finished, Hunter picked up a Constitutional Rights Certificate of Notification form and said to the young black guy, “How come you signed this Donald Woods? You lied to me, Darrold”-sounding a little hurt-“try to tell me you’re cherry and they got a sheet on you, man. First thing, I’m gonna erase this zero cause it’s a bunch of shit.”

Darrold Woods was saying, “Two larceny from a person reduced from larceny not armed and a little bitty assault thing…”

And Hunter was saying, “Little bitty … little bitty fucking tire iron you used on the guy…”

Bryl put his hand over the phone and said to Raymond, “Cause of death multiple gunshots… two slugs, one with copper jacket recovered intact within the spinal canal, the other one in his head…”

Raymond said, “Judge Guy?”

Bryl nodded and said into the phone, “Okay, how many holes in the girl, Adele Simpson?… You sure?… Can’t find any more, uh?” He put his hand over the phone and said to Raymond, “It’s looking good. Maureen’s already taken the slugs over to the lab.”

Hunter was saying to the young black guy, “How well did you know Adele Simpson?”

“I never seen her before right then.”

“You took her purse-what else?”

“What purse you talking about?”

“Darrold, you had Adele Simpson’s credit cards on you.”

“I found ’em.”

Hunter said, “You gonna start shucking me again, Darrold? We’re talking about murder, man, not a little half-assed assault. You understand me, mandatory life…”

Raymond got up from his desk. He walked over to the young black guy in the plaid golf hat and touched him on the shoulder.

“Let me ask you something, okay?”

The young black guy didn’t answer, but looked up at the lieutenant.

“The woman’s lying there dead-is that right?”

“What I been trying to tell him.”

“What did you burn her with?”

The young black guy didn’t answer.

“Shit,” Hunter said, “let’s put him upstairs.”

“I just touch her a little,” the young black guy said then, “see if she’s alive.”

Hunter said, “What’d you touch her with, your dick?”

“No, man, nothing like that.”

“They’re doing an autopsy on her,” Hunter said. “Now they find any semen in her and it matches your blood type-then we got to ask you, Darrold, you rape her before or after you shot her?”

“I didn’t shoot her. You find a gun on me? Shit no.”

“Where’d you touch her?” Raymond asked.

After a moment the young black guy said, “Like around her legs.”

“Just touched her a little?”

“Yeah, just, you know, a little bit.”

“You touch her with a cigarette?” Raymond asked.

“Yeah, I believe was a cigarette.”

“Lit cigarette?”

“Yeah, was smoked down though, you know, like a butt.”

“Why’d you touch her with a cigarette?”

“I told you,” the young black guy said, “see if she’s alive, tha’s all.”

Raymond went over to the coffeemaker, picked up the glass pitcher and walked out.

Maureen Downey, coming along the hall, raised a file folder she was carrying. She looked eager, pleased.

Raymond waited for her.

“Pathologist reports,” Maureen said.

“How about the lab?”

“They’re still comparing, but as far as they’re concerned the slugs’re identical.”

“What kind of gun?”

“They got frags from the woman and two good ones from Guy, the casing intact…”

“Norb told me.”

“Nine-millimeter or a .38. You know what they’re leaning toward and looking into now?” Maureen was beaming.

“Walther P .38,” Raymond said.

Maureen’s grin dissolved. “How’d you know?”

“November, seventy-eight,” Raymond said, “the shooting in the drug house on St. Mary’s-”

Maureen’s eyes came alive again.

“Remember? Two slugs were taken out of the woodwork, from a P .38.”

“My God,” Maureen said. “You don’t suppose-”

“I sure do,” Raymond said. “Go on back to the lab, get ’em to do a comparison, the slugs out of the wall with the slugs from Judge Guy and Adele Simpson.”

“It sounds too good to be true,” Maureen said.

“If they compare,” Raymond said and continued down the hall and around the corner to the sink in the janitor’s closet where he rinsed out the glass percolator and filled it with fresh water-aware of the good feeling, the rush of excitement he would have to contain, the feeling telling him-without any doubt or pauses or maybes-that all the slugs would compare. He saw Clement Mansell in a green-red-and-yellow Hawaiian sportshirt standing before the judge’s bench. He saw Clement Mansell turn and walk out of the courtroom, grinning at everybody.