Whiskey River (24 page)

As I said, I wasn’t missed. The guest list at the reception included Henry and Clara Ford, who sent their regrets along with a goldware table setting for twelve in a hand-carved rosewood box. Several judges and a state senator attended among the yeggs in their wing collars and the retired professional hostesses in sable and mink.

The cake, wheeled out on a special dolly by a sissy chef in a white hat, was six feet tall with angels and bluebirds and a perfect likeness of the bride and groom on top, carved in ivory by an eighty-year-old artisan imported from Palermo for the occasion. Although no cameras were allowed inside the church or at the Griswold afterward, the
Banner
ran a blow-up from a shot taken from across the street of the bride’s father, in top hat and cummerbund, scowling at the federal men noting down the license plate numbers of the Cadillacs, Lincolns, LaSalles, and Packards parked at the curb in front of St. Boniface.

It’s all there in poor Andrea’s column, or most of it, gone the color and texture of last year’s leaves, as dead as Andrea herself. At the time it was apparent to everyone but her, caught up in her ruffles and pâté, that more than a couple had been wedded that Saturday, and that many happy returns were anticipated from the teeming area that lay between Woodward Avenue and the Detroit River.

They had forgotten about Jack Dance, however. People had a habit of doing that, always to their regret.

T
HE
W
AYNE
C
OUNTY BUILDING,
occupying the block bounded by Randolph, Congress, Brush, and Fort streets, was finished in 1902 at a cost of $1,600,000, a lot of money at that time although not as much as it was in 1931. It’s sandstone over granite, a tower with a brass cupola and spire on a horizontal fretwork of Renaissance windows, baroque balconies, bronze quadrigae that are somehow supposed to be carrying Progress in their chariots, and Ionian columns among a thousand other fussy little details, like government itself. The courtroom where Jack Dance’s trial took place was faced with translucent white marble from Roman quarries with swirls of English vein, Alps green, Verona blue, Sienna orange, red and yellow Numidian, and domestic gray. The benches were curly birch and sycamore, hand-rubbed to a deep umber gloss, and the judge’s bench, which really wasn’t a bench at all like the benches in the gallery but a tall counter, was chocolate mahogany with beveled panels and a reproduction of that same chariot-and-four design embossed on a bronze seal the size of a bicycle wheel on the wall behind it, flanked by the Stars and Stripes and the state flag on their American eagle staffs. The air had no smell at all. The atmosphere was antiseptic, like an operating room in a hospital; a place where men and women in gowns and surgical masks extracted justice with forceps in absolute sterility. Sitting there sequestered from the granite, tarry smell of the city, the angry horns in the street and the cries of the newsboys on the sidewalk, you got some idea of how juries arrived at the decisions they made. Justice thrives in a vacuum.

Jack, seated at the defense table beside Nathan Rabinowitz rummaging inside his briefcase, was dressed for the occasion in navy worsted with a quiet sheen and a domino necktie, the black and white halves joined at right angles like squares on a checkerboard. He’d had a haircut, a question mark of shaved skin showing pink around each ear and his curly forelock pomaded and combed back neatly, although as the first day wore on it would loosen and fall into its accustomed place on his forehead. At his elbow sat Bass Springfield in a white shirt and black necktie and his old suitcoat, cleaned and pressed with the cuffs turned. Finding a new one in his size had evidently proven too tall an order even for the great criminal attorney. I’d never had a good look at the big Negro without a hat or his worn cloth cap, and now I stared at the back of his head with its close curls turning gray like steel wool. I wondered about his age for the first time.

Vivian occupied a space behind Jack in a gray tailored dress and pillbox hat with a veil, protection against the photographers who prowled the room before the judge’s arrival, aiming their dropfront cameras with salad-bowl flashguns attached at whoever caught their eye. I drew the end of a bench three rows back, reserved for the press, marked off with a white ribbon like a church pew set aside for the family of the bride. For the rest of the spectators it was first come, first served, and some of them had been lined up outside the building since before dawn.

The jurors, looking privileged in their box seats, were all male. You could tell the manual laborers from the office workers by the way they ran a finger under their collars every two minutes and re-settled the knots of their neckties below their Adam’s apples. It had taken nearly a week and the entire stock of challenges allowed both attorneys to select a jury of twelve and two alternates who had not read or heard enough about the killing of Mary Margaret Connor to have formed an opinion about the case weeks before.

Judge Steelbarger, his face looking a little less congested this morning, entered, sat down, and threw the trial into gear. Assistant County Prosecutor E. Wharton Clay, a wiry, overwound watchspring of a man who wore rimless spectacles and parted his thin hair in the middle, and defense attorney Rabinowitz, mildly Yiddish with his reading glasses folded in his hand, never on his nose, presented opening remarks. Jack appeared attentive when Clay called him a “swaggering killer” and again when Rabinowitz explained that the county’s case was based on hearsay and innuendo, but he was sitting with one arm over the back of his chair and his profile turned toward me and I saw his right nostril distend slightly as he swallowed a yawn. When he wasn’t up and moving, even his own fate couldn’t hold his interest. Springfield kept his broken hands in his lap and stared down at the table the whole time.

Wharton called his first witness, an assistant medical examiner I didn’t know named Werner Kersten, who testified that he’d removed a nine-millimeter slug from the dead girl’s cerebellum—specifically, the isthmus rhombencephalon—where it had lodged after entering through her right eye at an angle consistent with the trajectory of a bullet fired from the window of a passing vehicle. The prosecutor spent a good deal of time establishing the angle and none at all on the bullet’s caliber. According to my contact in Detroit Ballistics, attempts to match the firing pins of Jack’s Lugers to indentations in the ends of ejected shells found at the scene had been inconclusive—they almost always were—and there was no similarity at all between the striations on the slug that had killed Mary Connor and the rifling of the Lugers. It had not occurred to me that Jack would have the calculation to surrender a pair of weapons different from the ones he had used on Sylvester Street, or more likely replace the barrels. That smacked of advice from Lon Camarillo, the experienced Uniohe killer; in which case he had passed it on sometime before the shooting, as he had been in Canada when it took place and in jail from the time he came back until Jack turned himself in. Whatever the details, the guns were not introduced in evidence.

Rabinowitz didn’t cross-examine the pathologist, who was excused to make room for a Mrs. Castellano, three hundred pounds of Sylvester Street housewife in a polka-dot dress with hennaed hair in a page boy cut not unlike the dead girl’s, which didn’t remind anybody of Colleen Moore in
Lilac Time.
She had been cooking breakfast for her husband when she heard the shots—“Crackle, crackle, just like bacon fryin”—and looked out the kitchen window in time to see a car speeding down the street. “Blue and yellow it was, big, with wire wheels. One of them fancy-schmancy Doozenburgers.”

When Clay finished questioning her, Rabinowitz drew a paper from the stack he had removed from his briefcase, walked up to the witness stand, and held it up in front of her. It was an automobile advertisement torn from a magazine.

She nodded, jiggling her chins. “Yeah, that’s it.”

The lawyer turned and showed the advertisement to the jury. Then he handed it to the court clerk, who passed it up to the judge. “Let the record show that the witness has identified a nineteen twenty-six Studebaker as the car involved in the shooting.”

After lunch Clay tried to repair the damage by calling upon two other witnesses who had seen the car roaring away from the scene. Rabinowitz established during cross-examination that neither had managed to get the license number and seemed satisfied. Court adjourned for the day.

Joey Machine, Dom Polacki, and Aaron Stahl were not on the list of those subpoenaed to testify. All three had sworn in their statements to the police that they had seen neither the car nor the shooter. On the second day the county’s star witness, an unemployed hod-carrier named James Liam, took the stand. He was a lean Irishman burned reddish-brown from years of lugging bricks and mortar up steep ladders in the urban sun, with sandy-looking skin and a long face with a thick lower lip that hung down exposing amber teeth. His grizzled hair had been cut at home and his neck and wrists stuck a long way out of his collar and cuffs. He had been standing on the corner, he said, when the Duesenberg drew abreast of the three men walking along the street and the man on the passenger’s side fired at them, missing and hitting the girl, who was running past the trio headed in the opposite direction. Liam said he had recognized the man with the gun from his picture in the newspapers.

“Do you see that man in the courtroom?” Clay asked.

Liam pointed a black-nailed finger at Jack.

“Your witness, counselor.” The assistant prosecutor had short legs for his body and a banty strut.

Nathan Rabinowitz, who had been polishing the half-lenses of his reading glasses with a handkerchief, put them down and folded his hands. He didn’t get up.

“Your name is James Liam?”

The witness nodded, then said yes when the judge told him to speak.

“Then who is Liam Dougherty?”

The witness hesitated. A restlessness rippled through the gallery, like leaves stirring. “Who?”

Rabinowitz ran a finger down the sheet in front of him. “Liam Sullivan, Tom Liam, Timothy Liam, Harold Liam O’Farrell; do you know any of these names, Mr. Liam?”

Clay objected. Judge Steelbarger overruled the objection.

“In fact, Mr. Liam, they’re all names you’ve used in the past, are they not? And every one of these names is accompanied by at least one felony arrest in the Detroit metropolitan area, isn’t that right?”

“I ain’t been convicted but twice,” Liam said.

Steelbarger gaveled back the groundswell. The lawyer consulted his sheet. As far as I could tell he didn’t need reading glasses or any other kind. “Grand Theft Auto, two arrests. Three arrests breaking and entering, one conviction. Another conviction, violation of the Volstead Act. Drunk and disorderly, lewd and lascivious conduct—uh-oh, what’s this one for perjury?”

“They dropped that.”

“Because the man you testified against was convicted on other evidence; otherwise it might have been a different story. Is it possible, Mr. Liam—I’ll call you Mr. Liam to avoid delaying these proceedings by reciting all your aliases—that you testified in that trial in return for a promise by the Detroit police not to prosecute you for auto theft the second time? That if you refused and were found guilty, it would have been your third offense and you might have received a sentence of twelve to fifteen years in prison?”

“That ain’t—”

“And is it not correct that the most recent complaint against you, for breaking and entering, is still pending and that the police offered to drop the charge if you agreed to testify against my client today? In fact, aren’t you what is called a professional witness, someone who will swear to anything under oath in return for proper compensation?”

All of this came over and through the objections of the assistant prosecutor and gavel-banging by the judge to avoid a riot in the gallery. When order returned, Steelbarger sustained Clay’s last objection on the grounds of badgering the witness and directed the defense counsel to ask his questions one at a time.

“Thank you, Your Honor. I’m finished with Mr. Whatsizname.” Rabinowitz slid his glasses into a stiff leather case and returned to his papers.

Clay appeared unruffled—a sign, based on the theatricality of his opening remarks on the first day, that he had been ruffled thoroughly. His next witness, a motorist who had passed the Duesenberg going the other way in the next block shortly before the shooting, had picked Bass Springfield out of a line-up as its driver, but appeared uncertain about his identification when the defense attorney established that the man couldn’t tell Bill Bojangles Robinson from Al Jolson in blackface. With a show of determination, the assistant prosecutor presented a member of the truck convoy hijacked by Lon Camarillo and others of the Dance gang back in June, to establish the existence of the long-standing enmity between Jack and Joey Machine that had led to the attempt on Joey’s life the day the Connor girl was killed. He was a gum-chewing youth in a sharkskin suit and fawn-colored spats with a carnation in his buttonhole.

The cross-examination was brief and gentle. “Mr.—Salerno, is it?”

“Yeah, and I ain’t got no ali-asses.”

The gallery laughed. Steelbarger banged.

“Mr. Salerno, in your expert opinion, was this a well-planned assault?”

“Well, it worked.”

“Not just something they made up as they went along? A complex maneuver worked out to the last detail beforehand?”

“Yeah, sure. It must of been.”

“Thank you. No more questions.”

The witness was allowed to step down. Clay rose to announce that the prosecution was resting its case. Judge Steelbarger, his face redder now than it had been at the beginning, glanced at the clock and adjourned until the following morning.

I was the first witness for the defense on the third day of testimony. The clerk, a tired-looking man with a neck too big for his collar, swore me in on a Bible with its pebbled cover worn smooth where other hands had touched it and I sat down. Immediately, perspectives changed. From the witness stand the room looked bigger and more crowded and I wanted to shake the eyes off my lapels. It was like looking out from inside a bright mirror.