Whiskey River (16 page)

Dolan was an anachronism, a walking monument to a less sophisticated period in the history of American political corruption. From 1912 to 1926, although he himself never held any office higher than street railway commissioner, no government project was undertaken in the city and not so much as a screwdriver was sold to a municipal employee without his knowledge and approval. That approval carried a price, which varied widely depending upon whether you were contracting to excavate a sewer or requesting permission to operate a bawdyhouse on East Grand River. He elected mayors, controlled the press so far as that bratty enterprise can ever be controlled, and arranged for the discreet disposal of those whose loyalty could not be obtained for money or fear. On the shiny side, he loaned vast sums without hesitation to ordinary citizens in trouble in return for their support at the polls and punished severely the grasping landlord and the arrogant city hack who forgot that his Tower of Babel was built on grass roots. At the peak of his popularity and fame, he could have been governor merely by agreeing to accept his party’s nomination.

Then, in the autumn of the fourteenth year of his reign, after dining in his home with an associate, Dolan escorted his guest to a waiting cab just as four men stepped out of the doorway of the house next door carrying sawed-off shotguns. One of them held the driver at bay while his companions pumped between twelve and fifteen loads of double-ought buck into the two victims. Then the four climbed into a gray sedan that stopped in the middle of the block to pick them up and were whisked away.

The guest, Michael P. Faryniak—“Mike Freak” to his friends and constituents in the eleventh ward—died instantly when his head was blasted nearly off his shoulders. Dolan had been partially shielded by the open taxi door, but pellets had shattered his jaw and entered his chest, left arm, and abdomen. Doctors at St. Mary’s Hospital, where he was taken after his wife called for an ambulance, didn’t give him much of a chance to recover. He fooled them, but it was six weeks before he could stand up without help and two months before they unwired his jaw. Meanwhile, six men associated with the Purple Gang, two of whom were thought to have waited in the sedan while the others mounted the assault, were arrested and charged, although it was never established whether Dolan or Faryniak, who was friendly with Joey Machine and Phil Dardanello, was the actual target. A jury acquitted the six when both Dolan and the cab driver refused to identify them in court. Shortly afterward the Irish Pope, who had done a lot of thinking during his long recuperation, announced his retirement from politics. The supplicants stopped coming to Porter Street.

I was greeted at the door by a short stout woman of sixty or so, with gold-rimmed glasses attached to a gold chain around her neck and beautiful white hair combed in waves. She was wearing a print dress and brown leather walking shoes with thick soles. When I introduced myself she smiled with counterfeit teeth and said, with a brogue, that she was Charlotte Dolan. “Jimmy’s downstairs in the shop. He said to show you right in to the study.”

She hung up my gray felt hat, which I had broken out only that morning in honor of another Labor Day gone past, and led me down an immaculate hall lined with tasteful paintings of the saints into a small room containing a big desk. On the way I heard a child laugh somewhere deep in the house. I accepted Mrs. Dolan’s offer of a cup of tea and she shut me in.

It was a man’s room, done in leather and dark wood with no windows and a skin of dust on everything, in contrast to what I had seen of the rest of the house; Dolan belonged to a class and generation that didn’t brook female invasions with feather dusters. It smelled of bootblack and tobacco. An oil portrait of the man himself, not too well executed, with his thumbs inside his vest pockets, leaned out from the wall behind the desk. On the one adjacent, a large crucifix carved from a single block of wood hung dwarfed by the nakedness of the wall around it. Rows of framed photographs with dust hammocked in the corners dangled crookedly from floor to ceiling on the facing wall. Many of them were autographed: John L. Sullivan, Henry Ford, James J. Corbett, Thomas Edison, Jim Jeffries, Father Coughlin, Jack Dempsey, Jess Willard, Bob Fitzsimmons, many others, some of whom I recognized, some I didn’t. Most of them were Irish, many of them were prizefighters, and Jimmy Dolan was in all the pictures, pumping mitts and beaming like an overgrown leprechaun in his king-size three-piece suit with a Knights of Columbus pin on the lapel.

I heard heavy footsteps outside the door, and then it was opened by a large old man in a gray shawl-collared cardigan over a plaid shirt buttoned to the neck and old pinstriped suitpants sagging in the crotch, pushed down by a belly the size of a beer wagon. He had a huge red face, lemon-colored hair parted in the middle and smeared into curled wings on both sides of his brow, and white muttonchops. His feet were enormous in brown wingtips and he brought with him a woodshop scent of sawdust and varnish. His voice when he addressed me was a deep burr, the brogue very faint.

“Mr. Minor,” he said, wrapping his great paw twice around my hand. “I’ve heard your name, but I don’t read you. I am loyal to the good Democratic
Free Press,
don’t you see.”

“That’s all right. Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Dolan.”

“Jimmy, if you please. Mr. Dolan was my father, the teamster. Tee-hee.”

It was a girlish giggle for such a big man. I extricated my hand diplomatically. “I like your study. It’s like something out of
Babbitt.”

“It’s a place to be. I don’t spend much time in it anymore. These days I make furniture.”

He moved behind the desk and sat down. This was an impressive piece of furniture in itself, as big as a dinner table, supporting a blotter stained many times over with “J. A. Dolan” in backward script with a turn-of-the-century flourish, an upright telephone with the black enamel worn down to dull metal where his big hand had gripped it, and a pipe rack, from which he selected a clay in the late stages of disintegration. I noticed, as he stuffed the bowl with black shag from a humidor with an Indian’s head carved on the lid, that he held the pipe in his left hand, then leaned forward to take the stem between his teeth while he struck a match and ignited the tobacco with his right. Then when he got rid of the match he sat back and used his right hand to hold the pipe. It was obvious that he had never regained full use of his wounded left arm. Despite that, he appeared not to have Jensen’s difficulty with keeping his tobacco burning. A smell like hot tar filled the room.

“You said on the phone you needed something,” he said.

I remained standing. His was the only chair in the room. “Yes, sir. I need a line on a man named Frankie Orr. He works for Sal Borneo.”

“Why?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

He sucked on his pipe and said nothing. His eyes were glass-blue and not as warm as the red face and large soft frame made him seem. I backed off a notch.

“I got a tip he may be involved in a homicide. I’d use my contacts on the police force, but I don’t want it to get out I’m interested. Not yet.”

“Orr, you say?”

“It’s probably not his real name. They’re always shortening them.”

“What is it you’re thinking I can do? Most of the people I knew went out when Bowles came in.”

“I heard you keep your hand in.”

“You heard that, did you?”

“Yes, sir. The talk is Bowles would never have been recalled if you’d given him your support.”

“That’s the talk, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked at it, and put it back. “And what if it’s true? I don’t remember the
Ban
n
er
ever doing a kindness for me and mine. I don’t think it existed when I retired.”

“Maybe it can do one for you now.”

Someone tapped on the study door. Dolan said come in and his wife entered carrying a Dresden tea set on a tray. She set it down on a corner of the desk and put her hands on her hips. “Jimmy, why doesn’t your guest have a chair?”

“He didn’t ask for one.”

She made a noise I have forever afterward regarded as wifelike, left the room, and returned with a straight kitchen chair, which I accepted. She asked me what I took in my tea and poured us each a cup. Without missing a beat she plucked the pipe from Dolan’s mouth and carried it out with her, drawing the door shut. Her visit had diminished him a little.

“The damned doctors are determined to have me celebrate my hundredth birthday,” he snarled. “Don’t let the bastards sink their hooks into you whatever you do.”

The brogue was more pronounced when he became agitated. I assured him I wouldn’t and sipped from my cup. The tea was strong enough to float a car ferry.

He said, “I like this man Murphy.”

“Which Murphy?” The new subject threw me.

“Frank Murphy, the Recorder’s Court judge. The man’s for jobs and against gangsters. They’ve had their run these past dozen years. Mothers won’t let their children walk to school for fear they’ll be trapped in the crossfire. What’s your paper’s position on Murphy for mayor?”

“I don’t think we have one. The election’s too far off.”

“Well, I like him.”

This was the new Dolan talking, the Dolan who had survived a gangland ambush at the cost of his career and part of the use of one arm. The old Dolan had done more than a little to create the climate he’d just described. Musing on that, I was a moment realizing he’d stated his terms.

“You’ve overestimated my influence, Mr. Dolan—Jimmy. I don’t dictate policy at the
Banner.”

“Indeed. I’ve done some research on you since you called Saturday. Nearly a million people read your column. Who else on the staff can claim that?”

“It’s available to that many. I doubt that many read it. Anyway, Howard Wolfman is his own man. If I told him who to endorse in the election he’d send me packing.”

“To one of the other two hundred newspapers that subscribe to your wisdom.”

“It wouldn’t matter to him. I can’t do it.”

“You can write about Murphy.”

I kept coming back to the same thing; first in Joey Machine’s office, now here. “I don’t endorse candidates.”

“Never?”

“No reflection on you, Jimmy, but when you work for newspapers as long as I have you come into close contact with a lot of politicians. Too close to too many to ever want to support one. Besides, I have a national readership to think about now. Who’s running for office in Detroit doesn’t interest everyone.”

“But a local murder does.”

I shrugged over my cup. “I write for them. I don’t try to explain them.”

“What
do
you have to offer, Mr. Minor?”

“The name of the man who tried to have you killed four years ago.”

“Tee-hee. I know that already. Pete Rosenstein. He was after Mike Freak.”

“It wasn’t Rosenstein. That’s what the man wanted you to think; it’s why he hired Purples to do it. And it wasn’t Mike Freak he wanted. Mike was just there. You were the target.”

“How is it you know this?”

“I had the first interview with Rosenstein after Joey Machine released him to the Purple Gang for ransom back in twenty-seven. He told me who ordered the shooters. Some of the scribes were saying Pete faked his own kidnapping to avoid arrest for the Freak killing. He wanted to set me straight.”

“And you believed him.”

“No reason not to. The shooters had been acquitted. If he sent them, they had nothing to gain by tipping the squeal on him. The bulls had no case.”

“Why didn’t you write about it?”

“It was off the record. He didn’t want a reputation as a stool pigeon. He just wanted one scribe to believe him and not stir up rumors.” I gave myself a tea transfusion. “It doesn’t have to make sense. He’d just spent a week and a half in Machine’s custody, and Joey isn’t a gracious host. You don’t think logically in a situation like that.”

The room grew quiet. Dolan set his cup and saucer on the blotter, opened the file drawer of the desk, and lifted out a half-full quart bottle of White Mountain Irish Whiskey, from which he drew the cork and poured a jiggerful into each of our cups. The label said it had been bottled in 1909. He stood the bottle on the blotter and raised his cup.

“You’ve a Greek head, Mr. Minor. Are you of that race?”

“My father was.”

“Then you are as well. The Jews say it’s the mother passes it down, but then they’ve not had a country these three thousand years. To Premier Venizelos?”

“I don’t keep up with the politics in Greece. But I like Irish.” I lifted my cup and drank. The liquor gave the tea an amber flavor.

We drained our cups in silence. When I set mine down, he said: “Would you give me ten minutes, lad? The parlor is across the hall.”

I got up. He had the receiver off the hook when I closed the door behind me.

The parlor was clean and comfortably shabby, with a worn horsehair sofa and chairs, and violets on the wallpaper. There was a crucifix, smaller than the one in the study, family pictures on the little fireplace mantel, a Philco radio, and a small bookcase containing a handsome leatherbound set of the works of St. Thomas More, arranged incongruously next to three bound volumes of
Boy’s Life.
A window looked out on a sheltered porch where Charlotte Dolan was buckling a fair-haired boy of six or seven into a yellow slicker; it had started to rain. The boy had to be a grandchild. Most of the pictures on the mantel were of young men and women in caps and gowns and wedding livery and military uniforms, callow versions of the Porter Street Dolans. Outside, the raindrops made big fat circles when they struck the window.

After twelve minutes or so I went back across the hall and laid my knuckles on the door. I was invited in.

Dolan, holding the telephone in both hands, lifted an elbow to gesture toward the straight chair. I sat down.

“Chester, you always pitch them in,” he told the mouthpiece. “How’s that godchild of mine, by the way?” The brogue now was as thick as potatoes and cabbage.

The conversation, his end of it anyway, continued along those lines for two more minutes. Then he hung up and folded his big hands on the stained blotter. His eyes had flaked off a glacier. Once again his voice had lost its lilt.