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.
First, feelers were put out for information. When none resulted, a reward was quietly offered: a thousand dollars.
For that much, in the inner city, a man might sell his mother.
Rollie Knight heard of the Mafia involvement and reward one week and two days after the debacle at the plant. It was at night and he was in a dingy Third Avenue bar, drinking beer. The beer, and the fact that whatever official investigation was going on had not, come close to him so far, had relaxed a little of the terror he had lived with for the past nine days.
But the news, conveyed by his companion at the bar - a downtown numbers runner known simply as Mule - increased Rollie's terror tenfold and turned the beer he had drunk into bile, so that he was hard pressed not to vomit there and then. He managed not to.
'Hey!' Mule said, after he conveyed the news of the Mafia-proffered reward. 'Ain't you in that plant, man?'
With an effort, Rollie nodded.
Mule urged, 'You find out who them guys was, I pass the word, we split the dough, okay?'
'I'll listen around,' Rollie promised.
Soon after, he left the bar, his latest beer untouched.
Rollie knew where to find Big Rufe. Entering the rooms where the big man lived, he found himself looking into the muzzle of a gun - the same one, presumably, used nine days before. When he saw who it was, Big Rufe lowered the gun and thrust it in his trousers waistband.
He told Rollie, 'Them crummy wops come, they ain't gonna find no pushover.'
Beyond his readiness, Big Rufe seemed strangely indifferent - probably, Rollie realized later, because he had known of the Mafia danger in the first place, and accepted it.
There was nothing to be gained by staying, or discussion. Rollie left.
From that moment, Rollie's days and nights were filled with a new, more omnipresent dread. He knew that nothing he could do would counter it; he could only wait. For the time being he continued working, since regular work - too late, it seemed - had become a habit.
Though Rollie never knew the details, it was Big Rufe who betrayed them all.
He foolishly paid several small gambling debts entirely with silver coins. The fact was noticed, and later
