Whiskey River (3 page)

“Just marking my place. Where’s the cold stuff?” he asked Hattie.

She led the way to a door at the end of the hall and unlocked it. Up there the splintering and crashing below sounded remote, like a simulated sports broadcast on WXYZ. I wondered where Hattie’s girls had gone. Their communications system was better than Detroit Bell’s.

The room was a shoebox with a bed on a painted iron frame and a window looking out on a Pierce-Arrow sign. The dead man tangled in the sheets wore only a pair of boxer shorts gone gray from many washings. He lay half on his back with his scrawny legs twisted around each other and one hand clenching the mattress, yellow batting bulging out between the fingers. His eyes were half open and glittering, and all his teeth were exposed in a rictus wide enough to show they were false. He was bald with a white fringe. Someone had opened the window to vent the stench from his voided bowels, but the air was thick with it just the same.

“Strychnine,” declared Kozlowski, chewing hard on his cigar. “It always makes them grin like Fairbanks. Anybody else?”

“Just him,” Hattie said.

“Who was with him?”

“Lorraine. You need her?”

“Don’t know yet.” An empty glass and a bottle of Hiram Walker’s stood on the nightstand. He lifted each and sniffed at it, then ran a finger down the inside of the glass and touched it to his tongue. He saw my expression and fashioned a rictus of his own.

“My grandmama used to dose my papa with strychnine when he went off his feed,” he said. “Gives you an appetite if it don’t croak you first. Also it’s bitter as a drain crystal. This guy must of had tin tastebuds.”

Hattie said, “The Indian spit his out.”

“One lucky redskin.”

The dead man’s clothes, consisting of a black wool suit, a white shirt, and a knitted black tie, were draped neatly over the back of a wooden chair. Kozlowski found nothing in the coat and went through the pants. He drew out a battered brown leather billfold and opened it.

“ ‘Abel S. Turner, Justice of the Peace.’ Looks like he found some.” He glanced at the pictures in the other celluloid windows, then thumbed through the bills in the money compartment and put them in his pocket. Finally he returned the billfold to the pants and dropped them on the seat of the chair. “What was Oklahoma drinking?”

“Hiram’s. I opened a fresh case tonight.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“It was part of last week’s shipment.”

“The Roost?”

“Riopelle.”

“Who handled it?”

“Couple of Joey’s boys made the delivery. I knew them both. I don’t know who was on the boat.”

It was the kind of conversation I could never have written up in a way readers of the
Times
would have understood: a sworn officer of the law asking an East Side madam about her illegal liquor operation, the madam answering, and nobody getting arrested. If you want the real reason why the lid stayed on as long as it did, it was because nobody wanted to look like he’d just found out about it. Remember, it took a fresh kid to tell the emperor his ass was hanging out.

“Get rid of it and everything else that came that day,” Kozlowski told Hattie. “Pour it down the sewer.”

“Don’t you want it for evidence?” I asked.

He looked at me with all three eyes. “Who am I talking to, you or your sheet?”

“Just me. I like my fingers the way they are.”

“Evidence ain’t worth shit if you don’t make an arrest. For all I know the stuff was poisoned before it left Canada. You ever try talking to a Mountie?”

“If I did I’d remember.”

“Well, for starters they wear Sam Browne belts with their pajamas.”

Hattie said, “You know it was poisoned on this side.”

He relit his stogie, which had gone out. I welcomed the reek of nickel tobacco in that room. “How’s Joey getting on with the Sicilians?” he asked her.

“Okay. You know the Sicilians.”

“That makes it the Jews. We’ll do a sweep, stick ’em under the light. They’ll get a tan and we’ll kick them. It’ll be like election time.”

“Why bother?”

“It’s no bother. I like to hear them kikes squeal when I shove my stick into their bellies.”

“This is a homicide beef,” I said. “Who called the Prohibition Squad?”

“On nights like this there ain’t much difference.”

Homicide never did get the Turner killing. It went into the jacket unsolved. The various police divisions in those days were like feudal fiefdoms, and unless it was a case nobody wanted—a nigger killing in the Black Bottom, say, or a little girl raped with a Coke bottle in the warehouse district—it went to whoever got there first. Pulling the file on an old case required a scavenger hunt throughout the Criminal Investigation Division.

“What about the Indian?” Hattie asked.

“I logged a raid. I need a body besides just personnel and the j.p. here.”

“Take Connie. It wouldn’t be the first time he ate on the county.”

“I did my charity work tonight,” I reminded her. “Besides, I’ve got four hours left in my shift.”

She glared up at the lieutenant. “What did I buy downstairs? They rescinded the tipover order three years ago. You need a warrant.”

“We was told there was lives in danger here. I could of called the county wagon, put bracelets on the clientele, get their names printed in the papers. How many you think would come back, with twenty thousand blind pigs in this city?”

A shot slammed below. The noises of destruction stopped.

Kozlowski said shit. “That bug Wagner. Last time he put a slug clear through a keg and hit my best man.” He drew a stubby black revolver from his belt holster and hit the hallway running. We followed him.

It was hard to see at first on the ground floor. When the two-legged termites had finished with the fixtures and furniture they had started on the walls, and a cloud of yellow plaster filled the room. As it settled I saw John Danzig standing in the center of a circle of bulls. They had their guns out in the firing-range stance, pointing at his head. He looked like the hub of a spoked wheel. Sergeant Wagner lay on his back at the kid’s feet with his knees drawn up, rocking from side to side and clasping the bottom half of his face with both hands. One of them held a revolver. Blood was sliding out between his fingers.

Tom Danzig stood outside the circle with his arms hanging loose. Jerry the Lobo slid a hand into Tom’s pocket and was pushed away.

The lieutenant threw down his cigar. It extinguished itself immediately in the tide of beer washing back and forth across the floor. “What.”

“This puke took a swing at Wagner.” The speaker was a fat plainclothesman much softer than Kozlowski, in spectacles and a straw boater out of season.

“Looks like he connected. Who shot?”

“Wagner.”

“Son of a bitch was waving it in my face.” The kid had both fists clenched but looked peaceful otherwise. A lock of his dark curly hair had fallen over one eye. I think he was enjoying himself.

Kozlowski nudged Wagner roughly with his foot. “What’d you hit?”

“My nofe if bufted,” Wagner said through his hands.

“It went into the ceiling,” one of the uniforms said. “His piece went off when the kid poked him.”

Kozlowski booted Wagner in the ribs hard. The sergeant whinnied, spraying blood. “You bastard, I was up there.”

Fatso said, “The puke was acting smart, Lieutenant.”

Kozlowski gnawed a cheek.

“Clear a space,” he said. “Get away from him, for chrissake. He ain’t Leopold and Loeb.”

The bulls backed off, lowering their weapons. Kozlowski holstered his revolver, then put a hand inside the right slash pocket of his raincoat and drew it out as a fist. He took two steps and stood in front of the kid, who had half an inch on him. The brim of the lieutenant’s hat was almost touching the kid’s forehead. He slid his knuckles up and down the raincoat’s lapel restlessly. “What’s your name?”

“John Danzig.”

“You a kike?”

“What?”

“A hebe. A yid. A sheeny. A goddamn pork-avoiding Christ-killer.”

“What if I am?”

They were the same words he’d said to me, but the lieutenant wasn’t having any. I didn’t see his fist leave his lapel. The crack was as sharp and as loud as the pistol shot earlier. The kid staggered back into one of the bulls standing behind him, who shoved him away. He fell down on one knee, got up, and fell again, pitching forward from the toes. That was the end of it. I’d lost enough money on the fights to know they don’t get up again once they go down on their face.

His brother didn’t move then or later. He was the thinker as I said.

Lieutenant Kozlowski flipped the little sap he’d had hidden in his fist and returned it to his pocket. Then he unhooked a small key from the chain attached to his belt. “Run upstairs and cut loose the Indian, son,” he said, handing it to me. “We got our body.”

He was instructing someone to call it in from the box on the corner when I ascended out of earshot.

I didn’t see Jack Dance again for two years. He was using his new name then and it was hard to believe he’d ever been off his feet.

W
HERE TO START.

Wide-Open Detroit was just yesterday, but so much has happened between then and now that it all seems like a half-pleasant dream that needs analyzing.

We had a jump on the rest of the country in the bootlegging department for two simple reasons: 1. Ontario, Canada, which was also dry but permitted the manufacture of liquor for export, was only three minutes away across the Detroit River; 2. Michigan went dry a full year before the Volstead Act prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages kicked in across the United States. By the time New York and Chicago got into the business, Detroit had rumrunning down to a science.

Not that there were many white coats involved. Although the practical Poles were mixing the stuff in their bathtubs in Hamtramck and selling it in Mason jars out of their car trunks on Joseph Campau, the main traffic was on the river. There the fastest boats in maritime history ran Coast Guard blockades to deliver crates of whiskey and barrels of beer to Cadillacs and Lincolns waiting on the docks in Ecorse—Robbers’ Roost, the locals had christened that stretch along Jefferson Avenue—and at the foot of Riopelle Street in Detroit proper. The demand always exceeded the supply, and the supply was greater than in the days when it was legal. Everyone, it seemed, was in the liquor business. You could stand before an anonymous apartment house on Michigan Avenue or Gratiot and guess how many windows belonged to blind pigs, just like the suckers who lined up in front of J. L. Hudson’s downtown to estimate how many marbles resided in the big jar in the display window and win a new Packard. Some experts said there were twenty thousand illegal drinking establishments in the city. Others said it was more like twenty-five thousand. There could have been a million. They didn’t register at the Wayne County courthouse.

The city was growing fit to be tied, only you had to catch it first. America was on wheels and Detroit supplied the motors. Art deco buildings sprang up downtown like gothic toadstools; from 1923 to 1928 you couldn’t walk a straight path across the Grand Circle in the heart of the business district without tripping over a hundred sawhorses. It was a red-bandanna town with white-collar dreams, and when a Sunday driver who wore coveralls during the week put-putted past the great pink-and-white marble mansions on Lake Shore Drive, instead of shaking his fist, he thought of the day when he’d occupy one just like them. Hadn’t Henry Ford begun as a machinist’s apprentice?

That placid certainty, that today was better than yesterday and tomorrow would be better still, stumbled in 1927, when Ford discontinued the Model T. That decision ended the beetle-black little chug-chug’s twenty-four-year reign, forced production cutbacks at the factory in Dearborn, and led to the layoff of thousands of foreigners, hillbillies, and coloreds, who had come swarming in like grease-stained bees toward the promise of five dollars a day and a company-owned home. It went down for the count on October 29, 1929—although most of us west of the New York Stock Exchange wouldn’t get the message until the ripples from Black Tuesday reached us across Lake Erie a year later. Even then nobody thought things would get as bad as Lewis machine guns mounted atop the Rouge plant for the purpose of mowing down striking laborers.

Detroit was a night town then, trading overalls and work shoes for seersucker and black patent leather when the sun went down somewhere beyond Inkster. Dancing the Charleston and Detroit’s own Black Bottom at the Arcadia Ballroom on Woodward, checking out Gloria Swanson and John Gilbert at the Oriole Terrace on East Grand, lapping up real nigger jazz, down and dirty, on Hastings Street, and drinking—always drinking, from hip flasks and coffee mugs, crystal flutes and clay pots, silver cups and the hollow handles of trick umbrellas. You could pass the pint around at Navin Field while watching Ty Cobb hit and Dutch Leonard pitch, or you could put on the dog and sip champagne at the Polar Bear Cafe in Ecorse and hear Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke hotting up the band to cover the noise of Piejacki’s Navy unloading Ontario’s finest on the dock below the dining room. There, and all along the riverfront they called Michigan’s Barbary Coast, broken noses lined up with highbrows and the hard-eyed young killers who ran with the Purple Gang rubbed shoulders with the sheiks who greased their hair down like Ramon Novarro and the hennaed shebas who tried to look like Theda Bara in pearls and fringe, not to forget the occasional city councilman. In 1929 a scribe at the New York
Times
wrote an article estimating the annual profits of Detroit’s three top industries as follows: Automobiles, $2,000,000; Chemicals, $90,000,000; Liquor, $215,000,000. Blind Blake sang it, and others joined in:

When I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come” around When I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come around ‘Cause I don’t want her now, Lord, I’m Detroit bound.

There were casualties, of course. The business belonged to the survivors. In 1926 alone, three hundred and twenty-six Detroiters died from bullets, bomb blasts, and that faithful Sicilian export, the garrote, compared to less than half that number in 1917, when you could drink a beer in a public place without risking arrest. Little or no attempt was made to investigate these killings, most of which involved gangsters and the odd citizen who violated the unwritten law against waltzing into the crossfire. Oh, the dicks came around and made their chalk lines and smoked their cigars and had their pictures taken pointing at bulletholes, but the atrocities might have taken place in Turkey for all the attention they got after a new one came along to shove them off the front page. I was present at a press conference in Mayor Charles Bowles’s office when he commented, “Perhaps it’s just as well to let this scum kill each other off.” The bulls were happy to agree, and the papers ran the murder count like box scores.