Motor City Burning by Bill Morris

Author:Bill Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus

While talking to Caldwell Petty, the chief of police in Tuskegee, Alabama, Doyle imagined Rod Steiger sitting at a desk chain-smoking cigarettes and sending gouts of tobacco juice into a Maxwell House coffee can while the blades of a ceiling fan chopped the foggy air. Doyle wondered why so many Southerners had last names for first names. His second case during the riot was a yokel from east Tennessee named Wilson Lee Pryor who rode the Hillbilly Highway straight to a job on the line at Dodge Main and wound up getting shot six times on the roof of the Kentucky-Tennessee Apartments on Alexandrine because a half dozen National Guardsmen and cops, including Detective Frank Doyle, mistook him for a sniper. It turned out Wilson Lee Pryor had gone up on the roof of his building to watch for flying sparks from a nearby fire. But he was carrying a deer rifle for protection and now the poor dumb hick was dead.

“What can I do ya for, Detective?” came the gravelly voice of Caldwell Petty over the long-distance wire.

“I’m trying to run down some leads on a murder case,” Doyle said. “You ever have any dealings with a young man named William Brewer Bledsoe?”

“Sho nuff have. He goes by Willie. This have something to do with that trouble yall had with yo Nigras last summer?”

“Looks that way.”

“I figgered as much.”

“How come?”

“Cause that boy ain’t nothin but trouble.”

“How do you mean, trouble?”

“Well, he come up here to go to school from some little piss-ant town down south a here, Troy or Opp. Can’t rightly remember. Soon as he got here he started raisin sand—sat down at the lunch counter at the Sanitary Cafe, which was segregated at the time. That woulda been about nineteen and fifty-nine, maybe sixty, in there. Then he put some foolish sign on the lawn of the university’s president. Can you imagine that? Some uppity little nigger accusing the president of Tuskegee Institute of being a Uncle Tom!”

“Amazing. Anything else?”

“Eventually he run off and joined that Student Nonviolence outfit. Tried to get ill-lit-rit Nigras to register to vote, such foolishness as that. I’m here to tell ya, Detective, we got some of the finest Nigras anywhere in the South right here in Tuskegee, Alabama, yessir. Folks get along here—or they did till uppity niggers like Willie Bledsoe come along.”

“He ever get into any serious trouble?”

“Not here. I heard tell he was on that bus got fire-bombed outside Anniston. Too bad they didn’t cook his ass. Happiest day of my life was when him and that worthless brother a his packed up and left for D-troit. They had a big send-off party night before they left.”

“He has a brother?”

“Better believe it. Ornery sumbitch, name of Wes. He was with the Navy in Vee-yet-nam and something musta happened to him over there. That boy ain’t right.”

Doyle was scribbling in his notebook, trying to keep up. Again he said, “How do you mean?”

“Well, he just ain’t right. Lazy as the day is long.

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