Whiskey River (15 page)

“Dive in, Connie,” he said. “There’s room enough in here to play croquet.”

I sank into the seat. The inside smelled like new leather and oiled wood. The door closed with a discreet snick. Bass Springfield, sitting in back in his cap and old suit-coat, grunted when I said hello.

“What happened to the LaSalle?” I asked.

“I figure I’ll drive it this winter when the streets get slushy.” Jack pried a hole in the traffic with his left front fender and wedged the rest of the car in after it. A horn blew. “Speedometer goes up to a hundred and sixteen, but I ain’t tested it yet. Best I did so far is ninety-eight.”

“The brewery must be doing well.”

“We start shipping next week. I’m just on my way home from there now. Thanks for letting me pick you up. I’m on a short leash these days.”

“Thanks for agreeing to talk to me. How you doing with that explosives beef?”

“Next month’s the hearing. Nate says I’ll get off with a fine.”

“Nate?”

“Nathan Rabinowitz. Vivian’s lawyer fixed me up with him. He’s slicker’n snot on a doorknob, they say.”

I’d heard of him. He’d served as president of the Detroit Public Lighting Commission and had run for Recorder’s Court judge twice without success, but his reputation was as the mouthpiece who had won acquittal for six Purple Gang members accused of the shotgun murder of Michael P. “Mike Freak” Faryniak, boss of the eleventh ward and a known supporter of the Machine-Dardanello association, in 1926. Since then Rabinowitz had not lacked for clients among the local underworld.

I said, “That was lucky, Andy and Lon clearing out just before the bombing.”

“Yeah, wasn’t it.” Jack tapped the horn button when the driver ahead didn’t react to the green light. Four notes crooned from under the long hood in descending order. The offending car started forward.

“Who’s your informant in the Machine set-up?”

He laughed. He had a pleasing tenor—people who had heard it said he’d have given a mick singer a run for his money—and his mirth was contagious. “I like you, Connie. You got chutzpah. There’s some things I don’t even tell Bass, and if a nigger can’t keep a secret from a white man, who can?”

Springfield, watching the scenery crawl past, said nothing. In Jack’s vocabulary, “nigger” was an endearment. Springfield must have been aware of that, because when the big Negro was arrested for murder later and a bull called him a nigger, he almost beat the bull to death with his knees and elbows and had to be clubbed down by three other officers.

“How’s life on the lake?” I asked.

“Damper’n frogs’ drawers. The Lugers rust if I don’t clean ’em every day.”

“I meant how’s married life.”

“Everybody ought to be married. You take the drop yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Who you waiting for, that Glenda Farrell dame?”

The whole country was talking about
Little Caesar,
a corker of a movie about a hood named Rico who rises out of and falls back into the gutter with the help of a smooth chum who throws him over for a nightclub dancer. Douglas Fairbanks’s kid played the smoothie and Glenda Farrell played the dancer. There was a line in it that made audiences laugh across the continent. Says Rico, wounded in an attempt on his life: “Tell ’em the cops couldn’t get me any other way, so they hired somebody to kill me.” No one laughed in Detroit.

“How was the Atlantic Ocean?”

“Just like Lake Erie, except nobody was shooting at me, ha.”

“I hear you came back early.”

He didn’t change expressions. “Where’d you hear it?”

“Who’s your man in Machine’s camp?”

“Ha. I get it.”

We hit Jefferson and turned east. The traffic was lighter there and he accelerated, cutting in and out to avoid slow-moving vehicles. The engine burbled. The sunlight died orange on the scalloped surface of Lake St. Clair.

“Someone saw you,” I said.

“Hard not to get seen in a Doozy.”

“I mean at the LaSalle Hotel. The night Jerry Buckley bought the farm.”

He laughed and looked up at Springfield in the rear-view mirror. “You see why I like this guy?”

“You admit it?” I pressed.

“Bass, I’m gonna let you out.”

“Okay.”

Jack pulled over and Springfield got out onto a grassy strip between the pavement and the beach. “Pick you up in a little,” Jack said. As we rolled away the big man started walking east along the shoulder, throwing a shadow as long as the Duesenberg.

“Who’s asking,” Jack wanted to know, “you or the
Banner?”

“This one’s off the books. If it turns into a story later I’ll let you know. Either way this conversation never happened.”

He took off the boater and laid it on the seat between us bottomside up. The red silk lining was soaked. It was the heat that made him sweat; for a guy with plenty of nerve, Jack had no nerves at all.

“Hattie told you I was at her place. Only two people knew I was in town, and you didn’t talk to the other one. I didn’t even tell Bass or Andy or Lon. Nobody saw me at the LaSalle, because I wasn’t there. Not on foot.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Buckley was an asshole. He wasn’t like you, Connie. He talked about anything he heard or thought he heard, on or off the books. He didn’t know half what he said he did. Sometimes that’s worse than knowing more than you should. What the hell, it was a quick three grand, and I could use the friend. I took the job.”

It was starting already. My legs had gone dead. “Who’s the friend?”

“Pete Rosenstein. He dumped fifteen G’s on the anti-recall campaign. He had his boys out all day election day stuffing the boxes. He said the commissioner promised him the East Side if the recall fell through. The bulls’d bust up Joey’s joints and leave his alone.”

“But the recall didn’t fall through.”

“Didn’t mean Bowles couldn’t be re-elected. It was too late to rub out Buckley; a thing like that could’ve put the recall over the top if it wasn’t already. Doing it
after,
in case Bowles lost, would take Buckley off his neck and give the whole schmeer time to blow off before the next election. Pete looks ahead. You got to give the son of a bitch that.” We were gliding past the stately homes of Grosse Pointe now, where the Duesenberg was no more out of place than a diamond in a platinum setting. The acres of lawn in their wrought-iron cages were billiard-green, each equipped with its own black iron jockey.

“I thought you were enemies.”

“Joey’s enemy enough. Anyway, somebody’s got to buy my beer.”

“You said you weren’t at the hotel that night.”

“Not on foot’s what I said. I was supposed to be there before Buckley finished his whatchacallit, broadcast, but I got hung up. I borrowed a car from Pete on account of I couldn’t get to my LaSalle without letting too many people know I was in town. I was looking for a place to park when these three mugs came out putting heaters away under their coats. I knew then someone beat me to it, and I hauled my freight out of there.”

“Rosenstein double-crossed you?”

“That’s what I thought at first.”

I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “Did you get a look at their faces?”

“There’s a light in front of the hotel. Two of them I didn’t know from Steamboat Willie. Well, maybe I’d hire out of town too, for a job like that. I knew the third one, though. He was at my wedding reception.”

I’m Greek, and I wouldn’t wish a journalist’s life on a Turk. There are questions whose answers you know you’ll wish you’d never been told, but you have to ask them anyway.

“So who was it?”

“That bird Frankie Orr. You know, the guinea Sal Borneo sent.”

“I remember him. How sure are you it was him?”

“I seen him as clear as I see you.”

“I thought Borneo was a peacemaker.”

“Sal didn’t get where he is shaking no tambourines. He’s got as much stake in keeping the town open as Pete. More.” He grinned. “It’s kind of funny when you think about it, both of them hiring triggers to do the same guy on the same night. Old Jerry was dead twice and he never knew it.”

“It’s like Shakespeare.”

“Now you sound like Tom. He was always one for reading that shit, even when we was kids. I guess that’s okay for guys like him and you, but in my business I got to keep my head clean. I better go back and pick up Bass while I can still see him.” He swung into a driveway with a grilled gate and turned around.

“Glad you come along,” Springfield said when we had collected him and resumed our eastward journey. “I was scared I’d end up standing on some white man’s lawn with a iron ring in my hand.”

It was the first and last joke I ever heard him tell.

“We got a German cook,” Jack told me. “She makes strudel like my mama never could. If you clean your plate good enough, she might give you some.”

“I didn’t mean to invite myself to dinner.”

“Vivian’s used to unexpected guests. We put up Lon and Andy when the place on Howard went up. Bass, he’s got his own place and a woman, but she’s working tonight.”

St. Clair Shores was a brand new community, founded and built by rumrunners with families who didn’t want their children gunned down on the streets of Detroit. The houses were large but not ostentatious, with lawns bare of shrubbery to deny cover to intruders and docks behind the houses with power boats moored to them for quick escape across the lake. The Dance home, described by Andrea St. Charles as a “charming cottage,” had twelve rooms and an eight-foot stone wall enclosing the yard. A dog barked when we pulled into the driveway.

“Down, Devil!” Jack commanded, as we entered through the side door. The dog, a sixty-pound black-and-tan rottweiler, took its huge paws off Jack’s shoulders and sat on its haunches, growling. Its square black head was as big as an oven.

Dinner was pot roast and boiled potatoes, with blueberry pie instead of the promised strudel, but just as welcome. The cook served. She was a small, dark-haired woman in her forties with rodentlike features and quick, jerky movements, not at all the large blonde dough-faced Hun I’d expected. Vivian, looking older than twenty-four in a starched white high-necked blouse with her hair pinned up, had greeted me coolly before we sat down. I got the impression she’d disapproved of my account of the wedding reception, with its inventory of the notorious characters present. But she was a good hostess and saw that my plate was well stocked and my glass kept full of a red bordeaux her father had put down before Prohibition.

“Bass isn’t joining us?” I asked. He’d disappeared soon after we came into the house.

Jack said, “He likes to eat in the kitchen. I keep telling him Lincoln freed him, but he don’t hardly believe it.”

Jack’s business never entered the conversation, which ranged broadly. Vivian warmed a little when I mentioned that I’d once interviewed Eddie Foy; he had entertained at a party at her parents’ estate in Southampton in 1920. She knew a great deal about the theater. Her ambition to become an actress had ended when she married Woodbine. Jack broke his silence of several minutes to declare that the only actor who wasn’t queer was Edward G. Robinson.

All through dinner I’d had a question on my mind, another one of those I’d regret having answered. When Vivian went upstairs and Jack and I retired to a walnut-paneled living room with tufted leather furniture, I asked him another one entirely. “Does Vivian know why you left Atlantic City?”

“She don’t ask me about my business.” He turned on a tabletop radio and dialed through the squawks and squeals until he found Paul Whiteman. Music was all he ever listened to on the box. Springfield was standing on the grass outside the window with his back to us, smoking a cigarette. It was then that I realized he was performing as Jack’s bodyguard.

I spotted
The Pious Heart
for the first time, hanging all alone on the wall opposite the dining room door. The cow-eyed girl kneeling beneath the crucifix wore her dark blonde hair in sausage curls tied with one of those big bows I hadn’t seen since the war. Her clasped hands weren’t fully developed, the fingers short and pudgy, and there was a babyish fullness to her cheeks that depending on your philosophy or how the day had treated you would make you want to tickle her under the chin or tear off her cotton underpants and take the devout look off her face. Jack told me then how he had bought the painting in a Houston Street gallery in Manhattan over Vivian’s protests and of the artist’s suicide in 1921. Cloying and simplistic, it clashed with everything I knew or thought I knew about its owner, but I didn’t try for the obvious. Liking Jack involved a protocol all its own.

“Vivian doesn’t strike me as the meek kind,” I said, sitting down. “I mean about asking why you interrupted the honeymoon.”

“I told her I had a problem with the brewery.”

I asked it. “Why go to Hattie’s if you didn’t want anyone to know you were in town?”

He actually blushed. Nobody ever believes me when I say it, but Jack was shy about those things. “Guy gets horny when he’s supposed to be on his honeymoon, Connie. You’ll find out. I guess I forgot to tell Hattie to keep it a secret. Then when someone else did Buckley I didn’t think it was worth telling her.”

“What about the girl?”

“Which girl?”

“The girl you were with. Nobody goes to Hattie’s to listen to her corny records.”

He looked puzzled. “I was with Hattie.”

I had just lit a Chesterfield. I paused, then snapped shut the lighter.

“Don’t tell Vivian,” he said.

J
AMES
A
LOYSIUS
D
OLAN, A/K/A
Jimmy Dolan, Big Jim, Diamond Jim, Boss Dolan, and the Irish Pope, lived forgotten in a forgotten place once known as Corktown, an area of undefined boundaries on the near West Side where, in an era of paper collars and pomade, Detroit had drawn the majority of its bricklayers, ditch-diggers, motormen, prizefighters, policemen, and petty politicians with names like Brennan, Sullivan, Rooney, O’Brien, and Flaherty. The house was a narrow brick saltbox with green trim on Porter, two blocks from Most Holy Trinity Church. In election years past, city councilmen in carnations and day-laborers in overalls had lined up on that street waiting for an audience with the master of the house, which now looked somewhat priggish in that declining neighborhood.