Motown by Loren D. Estleman

detective work was supposed to be glamorous.”
    “That’s the spy game. You’ve been watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” The inspector rose and smoothed the crease on his black suitpants. “Hey, it beats boosting disk brakes.”
    “The brakes pay better.”
    “Lawyer fees cut into the profits. So you in?”
    Wasylyk took one last drag and mashed the butt into an old burn-hole in the table. “I got nothing better to do but sit home and watch Days of Our Lives. ”
    “Swell. Come up to seven. I’ll introduce you to the squad.”
    “I’m dead on my feet. What’s it, three o’clock?”
    “Almost four. You’ll have to get used to hookers’ hours. Sub rosa units work mostly at night.”
    “Well, the overtime ought to make up for a patrolman’s salary.”
    “What’s overtime?”
    “Shit. I should’ve guessed.” Wasylyk stood, bones cracking, and watched Canada gathering up the tape recorder. “How come you can get an order for a tap now and you couldn’t then?”
    “We didn’t know then what we know now about this particular judge. Remind me to show you his file sometime.”
    “How’d you fill it?”
    “Tapped his private line.” Canada held the interrogation room door.

Chapter 7
    T HE SEVENTH FLOOR OF Detroit Police Headquarters at 1300 Beaubien—“1300,” as it was known throughout the department—was made up of barnlike rooms lit through opaque glass panels in the high ceilings and had an acoustical linoleum floor and steel mesh over the windows. The windows, taller than a man, looked to Quincy as if they should contain grim saints carved out of slick marble. It was that kind of building, designed in the 1920s by a white architect who had seen Intolerance one too many times. Quincy felt cold and exposed and very black sitting in a vinyl chair in front of the white sergeant’s desk, one of a dozen or more arranged in two rows, most of them unmanned at 4:00 a.m. His hands were icy when he held them to his cheeks. He diagnosed his condition as shock.
    He wondered how Lydell was doing. The cops had let Quincy ride with him in the ambulance to Detroit Receiving, where the patient got into an argument with an emergency room orderly who wanted to cut the ring off the injured hand. It was a big gold ingot with a diamond set in the center, which Lydell liked to tell people had been presented to him as a utility infielder with Milwaukee after the 1957 World Series. Quincy, whose father had left Negro ball to go into bootlegging when the Klan broke his hands, had gotten his friend into the crap game where he’d won the ring. Nobody shot the bones like Lydell. But the dispute had convinced him his friend would come out with all the parts he went in with, and Quincy had agreed to ride down to 1300 in a car from the Tactical Mobile Unit.
    The fat sergeant had short pale hair tipped with gray and freckles everywhere, even on the backs of his hands. He typed with one finger, pausing between letters to study the keyboard as if he had never seen the old gray Royal before that morning. Something about him made Quincy think of the locker room at the Y; it drove him crazy until he traced it to his nostrils. Man used Ben-Gay like Krystal used perfume.
    “That your real name, Springfield?” he asked finally.
    “Just in Detroit. Other places I use Harry Belafonte.”
    “You watch your mouth, boy. I can ask this same shit down at County with a turnkey’s finger up your black ass.”
    “It’s my real name.”
    “Know the guys that hit you?”
    “All I know is they was white.”
    “You said they had their hands and faces covered.”
    “Necks too. That’s how come I know they was white. Why’d you wear a turtleneck on a warm night in June unless you didn’t want people knowing you was white?”
    “Maybe they didn’t want anyone knowing they were black.”
    “On Collingwood? Shit.”
    “You watch your mouth, boy. I won’t tell you again.”
    Quincy said nothing.
    “Anything else you remember?” asked