Motor City Burning Read Online Free PDF Page A

woman, one who would be interested in what took place on the field. He couldn’t stand going to the ballpark with someone who didn’t care about the game, who was just there to show off the new wardrobe or blow off a little steam. Let the Grosse Pointe swells sit down behind the dugout looking like a million bucks, and let the brothers and the longhairs and the rivet-heads from Hamtramck sit out there in the bleachers and take their shirts off and get rowdy and loud. Doyle went to ballparks to watch ballgames.
    The choice was obvious. Cecelia, the bartender at the Riverboat out on East Jefferson, had started calling him “Hon” and touching the back of his hand when he dropped in on his way home to drink a few beers and admire the view. Not the river view out the window, the view across the bar. He could watch her for hours, the way her brassy hair flashed in the dim light, the way her hips swiveled as she marched back and forth behind the long U-shaped bar. She would probably have tomorrow off. Just as he made up his mind to swing by the Riverboat after visiting Henry Hull, his phone rang again.
    â€œHomicide, Doyle.”
    â€œFrancis Albert Doyle—shame on you, me boy, for working on your day of rest,” came the falsely sugared brogue of his brother, who was the only person in the world who still called him Francis. Rod knew Frank hated it, but that’s how it works between brothers. One is forever the big brother and one is forever the kid brother and the former never stops reminding the latter of this unchanging fact of life. Doyle was pushing thirty, which meant he was still too young to enjoy it but way too old to fight it.
    Doyle knew his brother wasn’t calling to chastise him for breaking union regs. He was calling to make sure the Tigers’ tickets had arrived safely and that the gift had been registered in the debit column of their brotherly ledger. Rod had been like this since they were shoplifting Bazooka Joe and Tootsie Rolls, but his native skill at calibrating favors and debts had acquired a razor sharpness two years ago when he made captain. He got the promotion after leading the Vice raid on the Grecian Gardens restaurant, where he personally discovered four little black books that recorded a series of bribes paid to uniformed police officers for ignoring liquor and gambling violations. Twenty-one cops were indicted, a bit of overdue house-cleaning that did not go unnoticed by the man whose image it burnished most, Jerome P. Cavanagh, Detroit’s liberal Democratic mayor who, back in 1966, still fancied himself destined for the U.S. Senate at the very least, maybe a Cabinet post, possibly even the White House itself. And why not? The sky hadn’t fallen yet in 1966. In the eyes of the national press back then, Cavanagh was still “The Dynamo in Detroit,” the man who’d funneled millions of War on Poverty dollars to his city, which boasted the nation’s largest NAACP chapter, low unemployment and high wages, the only city in America with two black Congressmen and a thriving auto industry and a home-grown, black-owned record company called Motown that cranked out the finger-popping hits as fast as the factories cranked out the gas-guzzling cars.
    Rod Doyle saw to it that he not only got a captain’s chair for his role in the Grecian Gardens case, but that his kid brother stopped patrolling the gritty streets of the Tenth Precinct and started breathing the relatively rarefied air of the fifth-floor Homicide bullpen at 1300 Beaubien Street. Thanks to his brother, Frank even got to skip the detective’s standard apprenticeship in Vice, Burglary and Violent Crimes, and he got teamed with Rod’s old partner, the Homicide squad’s leathery legend, Jimmy Robuck.
    Doyle thanked his brother for the Tigers’ tickets. Then, since he wasn’t supposed to ask, he asked, “So where’d they come from?”
    â€œBelieve it or not, I