Motor City Burning by Bill Morris Page B

Motor City. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown records, had paid a million for the place last year, and the understanding around town was that he’d done so to squelch rumors that the company was planning to move to L.A. But Doyle had his doubts, and he wasn’t alone. A million bucks was beer money to a guy like Berry Gordy. Besides, why shouldn’t a thriving record company join the exodus? Did it have an obligation to hang on just because it happened to be owned by a black man? Did Ford Motor Company have a similar obligation just because old Henry made his pots of money here? Nobody squawked when he took his show out to snow-white Dearborn.
    After crossing over the Lodge Freeway, Doyle turned left onto Twelfth Street, where it had all started. The gutted buildings still looked warm to the touch, like the fires had stopped burning nine hours and not nine months ago. Very few of them had been torn down yet, as though someone—insurance companies? the white power structure?—had left them standing as perverse monuments to the madness that had swept this city. Those that had been torn down had usually been replaced by nothing at all, just pebbly, weed-choked lots that glittered more brightly every day with smashed wine and liquor bottles. Ragweed Acres, Doyle called these vistas. Businesses along Twelfth that were untouched or only brushed by the flames had usually been modified—windows filled in with bullet-proof bricks or cinderblocks, a hideous but necessary architectural trend known locally as “Riot Renaissance.”
    Driving through his old precinct never failed to depress Doyle. He’d spent three of his seven years in uniform patrolling this neighborhood and he’d grown fond of it. It had never been plush but it was always solid, working-class, and there were still many blocks where people owned their homes, trimmed their hedges and lawns, went to church, belonged to the block association, the U.A.W., the N.A.A.C.P. But they were being nibbled away. Since the riot, whites and many better-off blacks hadn’t been able to get out fast enough.
    Now he was passing the shoe repair shop where the first person died during the riot. That case was Doyle’s baptism by fire. The shop was empty now but the red neon shoe was still in the window, unlit, as dead as Krikor Messerlian himself. He was the Armenian immigrant who ran the place, a sweet shriveled old goat who always offered Doyle strong coffee and strong opinions whenever he stopped by to chat. When the neighborhood started to burn last July, Krikor stayed in his shop around the clock, armed only with a fireplace poker and the immigrant’s determination not to back down, not to cede his little patch of the American dream.
    When a gang of black kids gathered outside and threatened him through the locked door, Messerlian cursed them and told them to get off his property. Their response was to kick down the door and beat him to death. The police dispatcher used the word “mob,” and when Doyle arrived at the scene Krikor Messerlian was lying inside the shop in a sticky pond of blood alongside a fireplace poker. His face was gone.
    Doyle did what Jimmy Robuck had taught him to do at a murder scene: He followed his gut. He told the two uniforms to secure the building and not touch anything while he went knocking on doors in search of a witness because his gut told him they would never have anything on this one without an eyewit. As he turned to go, one of the uniforms, a black rookie, nodded toward a big stucco house across the street and suggested he might want to talk to an elderly lady in a blue dress who lived on the ground floor.
    Doyle always did his own door-to-doors because he didn’t trust uniforms with something so important and he’d discovered in his first week on the job that he could get people to tell him things. Mamas, widows, ex-husbands, eyewitnesses, sometimes even the killers themselves—they