Wheels

From the back seat, Big Rufe grunted. "We ain't clear o'nuthin'yet."

Rollie, in front with Daddy-o and trying to stem the bleeding of his hand with an oily rag, knew that it was true.

Despite his fall, Big Rufe had managed to get one set of chained cash bags over the fence with him. Leroy Colfax had the other. In the back seat they hacked at the bags with knives, then poured the contents - all silver coins - into several paper sacks. On the freeway, before reaching the city, Colfax and Big Rufe threw the original cash bags out.

In the inner city they parked the car on a dead-end street, then separated. Before they did, Big Rufe warned, "Remember, all we gotta do is act like there ain't nuthun' different. We play this cool, ain't nobody gonna prove we was there tonight. So tomorrow, everybody shows their faces just like always, same as any other day." He glared at the other three.

"Somebody don't, that's when the pigs start lookin' our way."

Leroy Colfax said softly, "Might be smarter to run."

"You run," Big Rufe snarled, "I swear I'll find 'n kill you, the way you did that honky, the way you got us all in this . . ."

Colfax said hastily, "Aint gonna run. Just thinkin' is all."

"Don't think! You showed already you aint got brains."

Colfax was silent.

Though he had not spoken, Rollie wished he could run. But to where? There was nowhere; no escape, whichever way you turned. He had a sense of his own life seeping out, the way blood was still seeping from his injured hand. Then he remembered: The chain of happenings leading to tonight had begun a year ago, when the white cop baited him, and the black cop gave a card with a hiring hall address. Rollie's mistake, he recognized, had been to go there. Or had it? If what had overtaken him had not happened in this way, there would have been some other.

"Now listen good.." Big Rufe had said, "we all in this together, we stick together. If nobody of us four blabs, we gonna be okay."

Perhaps the others believed. Rollie hadn't.

They parted then, each taking one of the paper sacks of coins which Big Rufe and Colfax had divided in the back seat of the car. Big Rufe's was bulkier than the others.

Choosing his route cagily, conscious of the implications of the paper sack of coins if he should be stopped by a police patrol, Rollie reached the apartment house on Blaine near 12th.

May Lou wasn't in; she had probably gone to a movie. Rollie bathed the gash in his hand, then bound it roughly with a towel.

After that he counted the money in the paper sack, dividing the coins into piles. It totaled $30.75 - less than a day's pay at the assembly plant.

If Rollie Knight had had the erudition or philosophy, he might have debated, within himself, the nature of risks which human beings take for trifling amounts such as $30.75, and their degrees of losing. There had been earlier risks which frightened him - the risk of refusing to be swept along into deeper involvement with plant crime, and the risk of backing out tonight, which he could have taken, but didn't, when Big Rufe thrust the gun into his hand.

These risks had been real, not just imagined. A savage beating, accompanied by broken limbs, could have been ordered for Rollie by Big Rufe as easily as groceries are ordered from a store. Both men knew it; and that way Rollie would have been a loser too.

But in the end the losing could have been less than the total disaster - life imprisonment for murder - which threatened now.

In essence the risks which Rollie chose to take, and not to take, were those which - in degree - face all men in a free society. But some, within the same society, are born with cruelly limited choices, belying the hoary bromide that "all men are created equal."

Rollie, and tens of thousands like him, hedged in from birth by poverty, inequality, scant opportunity, and with the sketchiest of education providing poor preparation for such choices as occur, are losers from the beginning. Their degree of losing remains the only thing to be determined.

Thus, the tragedy of Rollie Knight was twofold: The darker side of the earth that he was born to, and society's failure to equip him mentally to break away.

But thinking none of this, knowing only bleak despair and fear of what would come tomorrow, Rollie thrust the $30.75 in silver beneath his bed, and slept. He did not awaken later when May Lou came in.

In the morning, May Lou dressed Rollie's hand with a makeshift bandage, her eyes asking questions which he did not answer. Then Rollie went to work.

At the plant, plenty of talk was circulating about the murder - robbery of the night before, and there had been reports on radio, TV, and in the morning newspaper. Local interest in Rollie's area of Assembly centered on the bludgeoning of Frank Parkland, who was in the hospital, though reportedly with mild concussion only. "Just proves all foremen are thickheaded," a humorist pronounced at break time. There was immediate laughter. No one seemed distressed by the robbery, or greatly concerned about the murdered man, who was otherwise unknown.

Another report said one of the plant managers had had a stroke, brought on by the whole affair plus overwork. However, the last was clearly an exaggeration since everyone knew a manager's job was a soft touch.

Apart from the talk, no other activity concerning the robbery-murder was visible from the assembly line. Nor, as far as Rollie could see, or hear through scuttlebutt, was anyone on the day shift questioned.

No rumors, either, tied any names to the crime.

Despite Big Rufe's warning to the other three, he alone failed to show up at the plant that day. Daddy-o conveyed the news to Rollie at midmorning that Big Rufe's leg was so swollen he could not walk, and had reported sick, putting out a story of having been drunk the night before and falling down stairs at home.

Daddy-o was shaky and nervous, but had recovered some of his confidence by early afternoon, when he paid a second call to Rollie's work station, obviously wanting to gab.

Rollie had snarled at him, low-voiced, "For Cri-sakes quit hangin' round me. And keep that stinkin' mouth shut!" If anyone blabbed, causing word to spread, Rollie feared most of all it would be Daddy-o.

Nothing more that was notable occurred that day. Or on the one after.

Or through an entire week following that.

As each day passed, while Rollie's anxiety remained, his relief increased a little. He knew, however, there was still plenty of time for the worst to happen. Also he realized: while the sheer numbers of lesser unsolved crimes caused police investigations to ease or end, murder was in a different league. The police, Rollie reasoned, would not give up quickly.

As it happened, he was partly right and partly wrong.

The timing of the original robbery had been shrewd. It was the timing also which caused police investigation to center on the plant night shift, even though detectives were unsure that the men they sought were company employees at all. Plenty of auto plant crimes were committed by outsiders, using fake or stolen employee identification badges to get in.

All the police had to work with was a statement by the surviving vending machine collector that four men were involved. All had been masked and armed; he believed all four were black; he had only the vaguest impressions of their physical size. The surviving collector had not seen the face of the briefly unmasked robber, as had his companion who was knifed.

Frank Parkland, who was struck down instantly on entering the janitor's closet, had observed nothing.

No weapons had been discovered, no fingerprints found. The slashed cash bags were eventually recovered near a freeway, but provided no clue, apart from suggesting that whoever discarded them was headed for the inner city.

A team of four detectives assigned to the case began methodical sifting through names and employment dockets of some three thousand night shift employees. Among these was a sizable segment with criminal records. All such individuals were questioned, without result. This took time. Also, part way through the investigation the number of detectives was reduced from four to two and even the remaining pair had other duties to contend with.

The possibility that the wanted men might be part of the day shift, and had remained in the plant to stage the robbery, was not overlooked. It was simply one of several possibilities which the police had neither time nor manpower to cope with all at once.

What investigators really hoped for was a break in the case through an informer, which was the way many serious crimes, in greater Detroit as elsewhere, were solved. But no information came. Either the perpetrators were the only ones who knew the names involved, or others were remaining strangely silent.

The police were aware that the vending concessions at the plant were Mafia-financed and run; they knew, too, that the dead man had Mafia connections. They suspected, but had no means of proving, that both factors were related to the silence.

After three and a half weeks, because of a need to assign detectives to newer cases, while the plant murder-robbery case was not closed, police activity slackened off.

The same was not true elsewhere.

The Mafia, generally, does not look kindly on any interference with its people. And when interference is from other criminals, repercussions are stern, and of a nature to be a warning against repetition.

From the instant that the man with the Indian features died from the knife wound inflicted by Leroy Colfax, Colfax and his three accomplices were marked for execution.

Doubly assuring this was that they were pawns in the Mafia-Black Mafia war.

When details of the murder-robbery were known, the Detroit Mafia family worked quietly and effectively. It had channels of communication which the police did not.