Jitterbug (19 page)

Although the sleek look of the concealed headlights and the predatory appearance of the DeSotos grille—elaborately chromed to resemble the denticles of a grinning shark—appealed to the two sides of his nature, his reasons for selecting the dynamics were practical. From the outside the cars were indistinguishable from one another. With the fore and aft vehicles filled with bodyguards and his own sandwiched between, three drivers hired off the General Motors proving grounds could in the event of pursuit play a high-speed shell game, confusing the chasers as to which car contained the prime target. Since accepting delivery, he reckoned that he had dodged two subpoenas, lost an incalculable number of federal agents assigned to his surveillance, and foiled one assassination attempt. Had he adhered to the poky armor-plated locomotives of Prohibition, he would already be dead or in custody.

Seeing his father’s personal bodyguard push himself away from the fender of the middle car and move to open the door to the backseat, Patsy placed his crutch tips on the sidewalk. Frankie’s hand, still wiry from his days with the garrote, squeezed his shoulder with a punishing grip.

“Not yet,
imbecile.
”

The DeSoto’s motor trembled alive and backed into idle. His father let go.

“How many times I got to say it? Hitler didn’t corner the market on bombs. You want some nigger streetsweep to come out and unstring your guts from a lightpole? Get inna car, what you waiting for now?” He gave him a shove.

Patsy liked the feel of the glove-leather upholstery. Frankie had offset the expense by ordering Bedford cloth for the other cars. The smell was smoky gray, like the color of the interior. Since the age of consciousness, the younger Orr had connected odors with colors. The fumes of the stinging ointment his private nurse massaged into the withered muscles of his legs were fiery orange, the aroma of pasta and clam sauce in the kitchen soft saffron. When he was small his mother’s smell was pink, like a flannel blanket. More recently it was the copper hue of bourbon. The combination of his father’s expensive cologne and his personal scent smelled blue-white, like dry ice.

So cold it burned.

The boy never told anyone he smelled in colors. He was afraid if it got back to Frankie it would confirm his suspicion, already almost a conviction, that his son was without worth. Patsy had always felt that his father had accepted him only on approval, and that the moment he showed himself unequal to the effort he would be turned out—into what, he didn’t know, but the thought that it might be even less tenable than life with Frankie Orr filled him with dread. He lived afraid.

They drove through the light wartime traffic with the windows rolled down just far enough to let in air but not bullets, past shops with recruiting posters in the windows and female pedestrians in suits with pinched waists and hats fashioned after overseas caps, heading places carrying briefcases and portable typewriters, past men loitering in doorways and on streetcorners, demonstrably with no place to go; older men mostly, in the wide-brimmed fedoras and sack suits of the previous decade. Detroit had become a city almost entirely devoid of young men. Those who remained, and who had not been judged to hold essential jobs, were by definition substandard, damaged in the chute. The place had the feel of a rummage sale the day after, where the goods still to be seen had been picked over and rejected, awaiting removal to the dump. Outside the smoke and racket of the plants, the Arsenal of Democracy was a dustbin.

The motorcade slid into the curb in front of Carl’s Chop House, but no one got out. Frankie produced a gold-and-enamel combination cigarette case and lighter, tapped a Fatima against the case, and lit it. A chain-smoker, he had customized the DeSoto so that there was an ashtray within arm’s reach from every angle. Patsy quickly found the atmosphere oppressive, but was unwilling to crank the window down farther for fear of another diatribe. In a little while a broad-shouldered man in a badly fitting suit standing in front of the restaurant opened the front door and leaned in. Then he swung the door wide and Albert Brock came out, walking briskly. Patsy recognized the short, square-built union organizer from earlier meetings with his father and from his picture in the newspapers. He wore sturdy suits made of some stiff material that Frankie would never have allowed in his presence during fittings, wing-tip shoes with thick rippled soles, and white socks. Very quickly he jerked open the door on Patsy’s side and got in. He reacted to the boy’s presence belatedly. “Does he have to be here?”

“I’m showing him how things work. You got a boy, ain’t you?”

“He’s away at school. He’s not going to push rigs and he’s never going to see a set of brass knuckles.” Brock spoke slowly, in stark contrast to his actions. He seemed to be experimenting with good grammar. Patsy noticed his manicured nails and calloused palms.

“See, that’s the difference between me and you, Al. I ain’t ashamed of my work.”

“I’m not either I bounced bricks off the skulls of scab drivers so my boy wouldn’t have to.”

“That was ten years ago. You wear a tie now, got yourself a big office with wood paneling, a fuckable secretary. I hear you’re buying a boat.”

“Am I supposed to be surprised you know that? You’ve got people in every bank in southeastern Michigan.”

“I’m just congratulating you on how good you’re doing. When I met you you were working two jobs to pay for your own rig, popping bennies like Crackerjacks. You fell asleep anyway, rolled a peddle truck on 23, and got laid up for six months with a busted leg. Did your boss pay your bills?”

“You know damn well he fired me.”

“You lost six months’ wages and any chance at going into business as an independent. You’d still be in hock for the hospital bill if you didn’t run for presidency of the union local and win. Who delivered the vote, Al?”

“
I
delivered the vote, cocksucker! I made speeches in the rain, got my brains beat out by city cops working private security, signed up members standing in snow up to my ass with double pneumonia. I got out of bed six weeks early to do it. My left leg’s still a half inch shorter than my right. I didn’t see you.”

“Let’s not fight,” Frankie said. “Okay, Barney.”

The driver tapped his horn. The car in front skinned away from the curb and the motorcade moved out into traffic.

“Where we going?” asked Brock.

“Relax, Al. If I wanted you in the river you’d be floating. It’s almost lunchtime; you want a lot of hungry people looking at a big shot like you sitting in a car with a wanted character like me?”

“For a man on the lam you sure like to stick out. Purple cars, for chrissake.”

“Midnight maroon, the dealer said. Anyway I ain’t on the lam. I’m out on a writ while my lawyers work out this phony Mann Act rap with the Justice Department. I never ran a whore in my life.”

“I guess those cockshops on Michigan and Cass run themselves.” Brock unbuttoned his suitcoat and sat back. He was developing a roll around his middle. “What is it you want, Frank? The pension fund’s off-limits, I told you that. That was never part of the deal.”

“Well, let that rest. I’ve got four hundred thousand tires sitting in a warehouse in Akron. The markets here. I need trucks.”

“You’re rich. Call Mack.”

“Every time I make a call, J. Edgar Hoover picks up. If I wanted them tires in federal custody, I’d sell ’em to Cordell Hull. I need log entries and bills of lading that’ll stand up to a traffic stop. Most of all I need drivers with balls the size of coconuts.”

“Lots of luck. The last shipment of those pulled out for England.”

“If I trusted luck I’d be rotting in Sacred Heart Cemetery in a ten-grand bronze coffin. I put my faith in my friends.” He reached across Patsy and slapped Brock’s knee.

“How much you figure to net?”

“Million and a half. I got people to take care of. That’s three hundred grand to you.”

“Not me. The strike fund. Minus a grand apiece to the drivers. You may have helped put me in, but it’s the boys behind the wheels of the rigs that keep me there.”

“That’s what I like about you, Al. You’re loyal. Where can I drop you?”

“At the first light. I’ll catch a cab.”

“I ain’t seen but two this whole trip. There’s a war on, you know?”

“There’s always a war on, Frank.”

It was a busy day.

Their next stop was the Grecian Gardens in Greektown, where they ate lunch in a private room. A police inspector in a uniform crusted all over with gold joined them for baklava and coffee, talked about the war and the Detroit Tigers the whole time, and left with a warm handshake, during which a wad of bills changed hands. Patsy’s presence was never acknowledged.

From there they drove out of the city into the wilds of Oakland County to inspect a new line of slot machines in the back room of a roadhouse Frankie owned on Square Lake Road. The place smelled, woodsy—deep green to Patsy—full of knotty pine with leafy branches scratching at the windows. The man who ran the roadhouse, small and natty, with greased-back hair and a clip-on bow tie, looked grave. He took them into his office and showed Frankie a stack of 78 rpm records in brown paper sleeves resting in a wooden crate stuffed with straw. Frankie’s brow darkened as he read the labels.

They drove fast back to Detroit and braked with a crunch of gravel in front of a crumbling brick building off Jefferson. The place was vast and echoing inside, stinking of fish and the dry musk of rats, and stacked with crates and barrels to the rafters. They were accompanied by Tino, Frankie’s personal bodyguard, his beautiful mouth in a jaw like a concrete pier, who carried the records in his huge hands as gently as a housemaid bringing china to a formal table.

One by one, Frankie showed the records to a squirrel-faced man in a flannel shirt and dungarees while the man’s complexion went from sunburned brown to watery gray. The roadhouse was headquarters for the entire Midwestern juke route, an Orr enterprise since 1937. As Patsy understood the situation, the squirrel-faced man had stuck Frankie’s manager with a load of Guy Lombardo tunes when the demand was for Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby, and the Andrews Sisters. The man stammered an explanation—something about the USO having priority—but by then Frankie had begun dashing the records one by one across the top of the man’s head. Patsy didn’t think it hurt much, but the employees of the warehouse had gathered to watch, and the spectacle of the squirrel-faced man’s humiliation tied the boy’s stomach into knots. It was a relief when they left the man sitting on the concrete floor in a litter of brittle black plastic to go back to the office.

The New Deal Recovery Corporation—Frankie had moved with characteristic speed to register the trademark before the dust settled on FDR’s special economic congressional session in 1933—operated out of a corner suite on the twenty-first floor of the David Stott Building overlooking Capitol Park. His name appeared nowhere on the lease or in the papers filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Even the door to his private office, oiled hickory with a bulletproof steel core, remained blank, Frankie had ordered an electronic lock installed so that no one entered or left unless a buzzer was activated beneath the edge of his desk, a copy of Mussolini’s in Rome. Frankie, who hated the dictator for the brutal measures he had taken against the Mafia in Sicily, had nonetheless appropriated some of his more effective psychological tricks. These included knocking down two walls to create a long, nerve-shattering walk from the door to the desk for those visitors he preferred to put ill at ease. Frankie liked to sit with his back to a dazzling west window, against which his features remained a purple blur while he took the measure of the newcomer illuminated in the glare.

Today, still charged up from the scene in the warehouse, he strode across the pile carpet, threw himself into his studded leather swivel, and placed a call to his liquor distributor in Canada, an associate since Prohibition. He seemed oblivious to the presence of his son, who trailed him in on his crutches and sat in an unobtrusive corner. A professional decorator had done the room in ruthless Modern, hanging abstract prints on brushed-aluminum walls and dotting the floor plan sparsely with glass-topped tables and uncomfortable chairs made of chromium and black leather. It reminded Patsy of every waiting room in every brand-new hospital he had sat in while his parents conferred with a specialist in the private office about their son’s case.

Frankie was winding up his call when the intercom buzzed.

He hung up, flipped a switch on the varnished wooden box on the desk, and listened to his secretary inform him in her flawless West End accent that three men were there to see him from the Detroit Police Department. Patsy assumed they had come to collect a bribe and let his mind wander. It came back abruptly when his father snapped off the switch and uttered a vile Sicilian oath, something Patsy had never heard him do when they were in the same room, although he had overheard similar sentiments through the occasional wall. Frankie sat back for a moment, one hand covering his chin, the other drumming the desk top. Then he activated the buzzer.

The two plainclothes detectives who entered the room first made a mockery of the hike to the desk, loping across it in three seconds and taking up a position at an angle to the window that forced Frankie to swivel a quarter turn to face them. This put the bright sunlight as much into his eyes as theirs. He got up, drew the cord that closed the drapes, and remained standing with his hands resting on the back of the chair. The visitors were two of the largest men Patsy had ever seen. He was especially unnerved by the one whose eyes stood out from his head like rubber door bumpers, and by his nervous energy; even when he was standing still, his hands continued to open and close at his sides and his entire body seemed to vibrate, like a big engine threatening to shake itself apart if it weren’t put to work soon. His companion, older, quieter, with thick mats of black hair on the backs of his hands, represented something altogether more solid and rooted. When he stopped moving it was as if he’d been bolted to the spot for years.