Bruce Jenner was sitting on the passenger’s side of the Cutlass, sweating but breathing about as heavily as a somnambulist. I gave him the rest of what I’d promised him and watched his narrow back loping away. When I was a kid, no black would have dared to be seen running near police headquarters. Times change both ways.
6
S QUARE ONE FOUND ME reading the late edition of the News between bites of roast beef sliced not too thin in a little supper place across from what used to be the Kern block on Woodward. The headwaitress was built like Cass Elliott, with arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and kept up a running patter of good-natured insults with the regulars as she went around freshening everyone’s coffee without being asked. The music was subdued, and though the lights were low you could see what was on your plate without having to set fire to a napkin. They ought to declare those places national treasures while there are still a few left. For all I knew this was the last one.
There were no fresh details on the courtroom raid beyond those released that morning, but that didn’t keep the reporters from padding the front section with speculation. Alonzo Smith had been seen crossing the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor in a yellow van with California plates, sucking a Coke at a service station on Chalmers, bagging groceries in a market down by the river. An Ohio woman swore it was he who snatched her purse while she was waiting for a bus in Toledo. On the strength of the bridge story, the Governor of California was calling for an investigation to learn if the fugitive had indeed spent time in that state. It wasn’t even an election year.
As if the cops didn’t have enough screwy leads to follow, the Detroit Police Officers Association was offering five thousand dollars for information leading to Smith’s arrest and conviction. Next to that item was a piece about a professional bounty hunter from Oklahoma named Munnis “Bum” Bassett, a six-foot-five former bail bondsman with more magnum-powered weaponry than it was safe to shake a stick at, who vowed, so help me, “to bring that critter in alive—or dead.” How he planned to collect on a corpse was something he either didn’t want to go into or the reporter didn’t think was worth asking.
That raised my spirits. A cowboy in town was just what the doctor ordered to keep the boys with badges off this peeper’s back. I was a criminological genius next to Bum, who came out of the interview sounding slightly to the right of Caligula.
The inside pages carried background on Smith’s outlaw girlfriend, which interested me more. She was a twenty-year-old white woman named Laura Gaye, a native New Yorker and a born-again Christian who had come out to enroll in pre-med at the University of Michigan, then left after six months for a job at the Ford River Rouge plant. Until the blowup at Mt. Hazel Cemetery, she had been living for some time with Smith in a commune frequented by drug peddlers, black revolutionaries, and hippies still coming down from the sixties on McDougall. She had a widowed father in New York who couldn’t be reached for comment. A picture lifted from her high school yearbook showed a pretty, serious-looking girl with bangs on her forehead, a far cry from the frizzy-headed scarecrow described by witnesses to the incident at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. Hitler’s baby picture was cute, too.
It seemed like a good enough place to start. I circled the McDougall address in pencil, left a buck for the waitress with the ready pot and Rickles’ best routines, and paid at the cash register wondering if I had enough time to buy a bulletproof vest before penetrating the inner city at night.
It was eight-thirty and still light out, although the sun was below the skyline, sucking red and purple streamers down with it. West of the city you could read a newspaper by natural light until ten, one of the advantages—if you could call it that—of living on
6
S QUARE ONE FOUND ME reading the late edition of the News between bites of roast beef sliced not too thin in a little supper place across from what used to be the Kern block on Woodward. The headwaitress was built like Cass Elliott, with arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and kept up a running patter of good-natured insults with the regulars as she went around freshening everyone’s coffee without being asked. The music was subdued, and though the lights were low you could see what was on your plate without having to set fire to a napkin. They ought to declare those places national treasures while there are still a few left. For all I knew this was the last one.
There were no fresh details on the courtroom raid beyond those released that morning, but that didn’t keep the reporters from padding the front section with speculation. Alonzo Smith had been seen crossing the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor in a yellow van with California plates, sucking a Coke at a service station on Chalmers, bagging groceries in a market down by the river. An Ohio woman swore it was he who snatched her purse while she was waiting for a bus in Toledo. On the strength of the bridge story, the Governor of California was calling for an investigation to learn if the fugitive had indeed spent time in that state. It wasn’t even an election year.
As if the cops didn’t have enough screwy leads to follow, the Detroit Police Officers Association was offering five thousand dollars for information leading to Smith’s arrest and conviction. Next to that item was a piece about a professional bounty hunter from Oklahoma named Munnis “Bum” Bassett, a six-foot-five former bail bondsman with more magnum-powered weaponry than it was safe to shake a stick at, who vowed, so help me, “to bring that critter in alive—or dead.” How he planned to collect on a corpse was something he either didn’t want to go into or the reporter didn’t think was worth asking.
That raised my spirits. A cowboy in town was just what the doctor ordered to keep the boys with badges off this peeper’s back. I was a criminological genius next to Bum, who came out of the interview sounding slightly to the right of Caligula.
The inside pages carried background on Smith’s outlaw girlfriend, which interested me more. She was a twenty-year-old white woman named Laura Gaye, a native New Yorker and a born-again Christian who had come out to enroll in pre-med at the University of Michigan, then left after six months for a job at the Ford River Rouge plant. Until the blowup at Mt. Hazel Cemetery, she had been living for some time with Smith in a commune frequented by drug peddlers, black revolutionaries, and hippies still coming down from the sixties on McDougall. She had a widowed father in New York who couldn’t be reached for comment. A picture lifted from her high school yearbook showed a pretty, serious-looking girl with bangs on her forehead, a far cry from the frizzy-headed scarecrow described by witnesses to the incident at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. Hitler’s baby picture was cute, too.
It seemed like a good enough place to start. I circled the McDougall address in pencil, left a buck for the waitress with the ready pot and Rickles’ best routines, and paid at the cash register wondering if I had enough time to buy a bulletproof vest before penetrating the inner city at night.
It was eight-thirty and still light out, although the sun was below the skyline, sucking red and purple streamers down with it. West of the city you could read a newspaper by natural light until ten, one of the advantages—if you could call it that—of living on
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