Devil's Night by Ze'ev Chafets Page A

Eight Mile Road. But whatever it was called, people talked about it constantly; there was an aura of glamour surrounding it that all the disapproving social commentators on
Nightline
couldn’t dispel.
    The drug dealers I met in Detroit were anything but glamorous. One of them, a young white man in a Detroit Tigers warm-up jacket and a blank expression associated with drug-fried brains, was introduced to me by Aboud. “You want to know about drugs, he’ll tell you all about drugs,” said Aboud. “The man is an expert, the hard way.”
    â€œThat’s right, the hard way,” agreed the young man, who told me with a look of cunning invention that his name was John Doe.
    â€œI was born right here on this street,” he said in black-inflected English. “When I got eighteen I began to deal drugs, cocaine. Opportunity knocked. I used it, too, I ain’t gonna lie, but mostly I was just selling it.
    â€œOne day, last year, I was ridin’ around in my father’s Tempo and someone came up and shot it thirty-four times. I ducked. I didn’t gethit; it’s amazing. The insurance company said, ‘What are you,
Miami Vice
?’ That’s when I decided to quit.”
    At the high point of his career, as a teenage pusher, Mr. Doe worked as a salesman in a local crack house that cleared three thousand dollars a day. His cut was a salary of seven hundred dollars a week—good money for a near-illiterate kid, although the hours were arduous.
    â€œI worked between five and seven days straight,” he said. “Twenty-four hours a day. People would come to the door with their spoon and their money. I’d take the money, fill up the spoon and pass it back.
    â€œI sold on the street, too,” he continued. “See, the police didn’t expect a white dude to be sellin’. But I got out. I didn’t dig the pressure, y’know? Today I make a hundred and fifty dollars a week as a busboy. But the guy I was working for, he killed a guy who was like his brother. It’s a bad business.”
    John Doe was shot at thirty-four times and survived. Jacqueline Wilson was shot only once, and didn’t. She was killed coming out of a grocery store on Woodward Avenue, where she had gone to buy cigarettes. Two rival drug gangs happened to be staging a shoot-out in front of the store, and she got caught in the cross fire.
    Normally this kind of murder doesn’t arouse much interest in Highland Park, a 2.2-square-mile urban enclave surrounded by Detroit. Highland Park is the headquarters for the Chrysler Corporation, and two generations ago it was a model of urban progress, with the country’s first freeway and one of its first junior colleges. Academics, mid-level auto executives and businesspeople lived in large, comfortable brick homes and shopped in smart shops along Woodward Avenue, which bisects the tiny town.
    Today, Highland Park is a smaller, meaner version of Detroit. Hookers and drug dealers ply their trade on its main streets, and homicide is more common there than anyplace else in the United States. But Jacqueline Wilson’s murder was not a common killing. She was the daughter of the late singer Jackie Wilson, and her deathreceived extensive local and even national publicity. The mayor wanted action, the chief of public safety demanded action, and the case wound up on the desk of Jim Francisco.
    Francisco took their calls seated, feet on the desk, in his dingy office in the Highland Park police station annex. A powerfully built man dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and a Crimson Tide baseball cap, he answered each call with “Francisco, Morality,” in the slight southern drawl of Detroit’s working-class whites. He chomped a wad of gum vigorously as he listened, occasionally making polite responses to a superior’s questions. From time to time, he ran his massive hand over the pistol in the shoulder holster he wore.
    Each conversation