Whiskey River (32 page)

M
ACHINE
:     I didn’t catch his name. He was someone I met in a blind pig a long time ago.

C
HOUSER
:     Do you expect this court to believe you risked a fine of fifty thousand dollars and a lengthy prison sentence on the word of someone you spoke to in a saloon?

M
ACHINE
:     What, you never gave nobody free legal advice?

C
HOUSER
:     Will Your Honor please instruct the defendant to answer the question prosecution has put to him?

M
ACHINE
:     Keep your shirt on, counselor. Yes, the man was introduced to me as a capable attorney and I felt he had no reason to lie under those circumstances. When I found out about this action I consulted my own attorneys and when they told me I owed the taxes I naturally wanted to make good, Joey Machine don’t welsh. When I offered to pay the forty-six thousand they said I owed, the government turned me down.

On July 2, six weeks and two days after the trial began, the defense rested and Judge Wilson Abernathy adjourned court until after the Independence Day break. The prosecution spent all of July 7 on its summation, recapping the dramatic figures and driving home the point that when a major abuser of the tax system failed to do his duty, his burden was placed on the shoulders of every taxpaying citizen; appealing to the jurors’ pocketbooks, if not their sense of justice. Cranston, speaking a fraction of that time the following day, chose the same tack, explaining that if the government had accepted the defendant’s offer to settle his debt, it would be richer by the sum of $46,000 plus the cost of a lengthy trial and that it was in the jury’s power to prevent similar raids on its wallets in the future by returning a verdict of not guilty. They were both convincing arguments based on a strong premise with a dollar sign in front of it, and I speculated in my column how different the lawyers’ strategies might have been had the trial taken place two years earlier, when the stock market was cresting the wave and Detroit rang with the “mighty din” of pneumatic hammers, not the “sad sibilant shuffling” of cardboard soles on concrete in front of the Department of Public Welfare.

The jury deliberated for thirteen hours that day and seven hours the next. At four
P.M.
they filed back into the courtroom, their expressions as unreadable as a first date’s. The foreman, a well-known local funeral director in blue serge and a cinerary black toupee, rose and read the verdict from a sheet of government stationery.

“Of the charge of evasion of federal income taxes for the year nineteen twenty-four, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.

“Of the charge of evasion of federal income taxes for the year nineteen twenty-five, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.

“Of the charge of evasion of federal income taxes for the year nineteen twenty-six, we the jury find the defendant not guilty….”

By the third “not guilty,” the groundswell had started, and the declaration that the defendant was innocent of willful nonpayment of taxes for the years 1927, 1928, 1929, and 1930 was lost in the jabbering and hooting and cracking of palms on backs and of the judge’s gavel. Joey, beaming like a new citizen, shook Orville Cranston’s hand, gripping the attorney’s wrist with his left like the President. The picture made the front page of the
Banner,
with the text of Joey’s surprisingly eloquent off-the-cuff justice-is-served remarks, delivered in the lobby of the Federal Building after adjournment, appearing on Page Two opposite another boxed item containing the U.S. prosecutor’s grim prophecy about a hostage America, and a Jensen cartoon between showing a senile Uncle Sam chucking a thug in a baby bonnet and five o’clock shadow under the chin. A wire story from Chicago, where Al Capone was preparing to face charges of tax evasion, reported that United States Attorney George E. Q. Johnson was troubled by the decision in Detroit. Outrage got a real workout in the press that week. Meanwhile Joey’s blind pigs on the East Side ran out of booze satisfying the thirsts of customers who packed the joints celebrating the verdict or hoping to catch a glimpse of the former defendant toasting the system. They were disappointed. He was back in the Acme Garage with the three accountants he had hired to replace the phenomenal Presto, toting up six weeks’ worth of losses and brainstorming plans to recoup.

As soon as my column was finished for the trial extra, I went to the County Building and dragged Mouse out from between pillars.

“You win,” I said. “Twenty for you, twenty for your friend. Who’s the juror he saw Cranston getting into the elevator with?”

“Scram, Connie. I’m meeting a guy.”

“Yeah, me. You ran out from under a double sawbuck in the Green Lantern, Mouse. That’s not like you.”

“My friend made a mistake. It was two other guys.”

All the county courts had just let out. I realized I was shaking a midget by his lapels in a crowd. I let go. He adjusted his clothes, the suit with Felix the Cat on the label. “If the jury bought Joey’s sob story, it’s the draw,” I said. “It happens. If Joey bought the jury, it’s news. How much?”

“C’mon, Connie. Nobody fixes the feds.”

“In nineteen twenty, Arnold Rothstein bribed the Coast Guard on Long Island to help him unload twenty thousand cases of Scotch smuggled from Europe. Everybody fixes everybody, Mouse.”

“My friend made a mistake, what can I tell you? Seen my card?”

I took it from his hand. It was engraved in shiny black ink on heavy gray stock and read:

DANIEL MOSKOVITCH ARRANGEMENTS

There was a telephone number in the lower right-hand corner.

“When did you get a phone?”

“It’s in a booth in the Federal Building. See you there sometime, Connie.” And with a broken-field maneuver Knute Rockne would have appreciated, he ducked around me and took off at a rattling clip down the marble hall, holding down his hat.

So Mouse had found his lever.

I gave it the college try. I tracked Orville Cranston to his base of operations in the Book-Cadillac Hotel, Jack Dance’s old stamping ground, but the desk clerk said he’d checked out. Information gave me the number of his firm in Washington, D.C., and I left a dozen messages with a receptionist who sounded like Old Virginny, but he never returned the calls. With the help of the city directory and a Michigan Bell employee who sometimes sold me unlisted numbers, I established contact with four of the jurors. Two hung up on me when they guessed what I was after, I took a secretary to dinner who put on her glasses to read the menu and squinted at me the rest of the time and finally admitted she’d changed her verdict at the last minute so she could be home in time to hear “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” and I was talking on the telephone to the fourth party on my list and not making any progress, when a twenty-four-year-old lawyer with a firm that specialized in class action suits walked into the office and snapped open an injunction under my nose ordering me to cease harassing his twelve clients. Since the
Banner
and the Continental News Syndicate were included in the order and subject to the same penalties for refusal to comply, Howard Wolfman invited me into his office and asked me in his mild albino way to find something else to write about.

While all this was happening, Joey Machine, having whipped the United States Government, had turned his attention to winning back the East Side. Within ten days of his acquittal, two stores in the Black Bottom with policy rooms in back were firebombed, a barbershop that specialized in hair-straighteners and the book on the Windsor racetracks was invaded and its clientele clubbed bloody with pistol barrels and baseball bats, and two men walked into the bedroom of a palatial apartment over a rib joint on Harper and fired seventeen bullets into a colored numbers boss named Big Nabob and his companion, a blonde who had formerly taught home economics at the Merrill-Palmer Institute. He died instantly, she expired at Detroit Receiving Hospital an hour later without regaining consciousness.

Big Nabob, born John Thomas, had enjoyed a loud reputation for a Negro underworld figure, renowned for his wide-brimmed white felt hats, gold front tooth, and the rose and pink and lavender silk suits with which he draped his six-foot-six-inch, four-hundred-pound frame, as well as for his custom cream-colored Cadillac with stone marten seats and solid gold fittings. He had gotten his start as a bouncer in a pool hall on Hastings, served a two-year bit in Jackson for manslaughter after belly-walloping a belligerent Negro customer through a plate-glass window and down two stories to his death, then became a policy collector. From that position he furnished statements of earnings and other useful information to Joey Machine, who had just begun to take an interest in numbers. As a reward for meritorious service, Big Nabob was given the management of the lucrative Hastings Street franchise by Joey after the Machine mob muscled in along with a junior partnership in the policy business for the entire Black Bottom for continuing to protect the interests of the Mechanic, as the owner of the Acme Garage was known to the Negro population. The gold tooth and custom Cadillac followed, and wherever Big Nabob went he was surrounded by colored bodyguards nearly as large as he.

Joey’s trouble with the government changed things. The rumor in the Bottom ran that the Mechanic was going to prison; war threatened among the dispossessed black policy bosses for the territory that had been snatched from them when the whites moved in. Another rumor had Big Nabob meeting with representatives of Frankie Orr to request the support of the Unione Siciliana in maintaining his hold on Hastings. The giant Negro was seen dining in his back booth in the rib place with three Mediterranean-looking men, among them Leo Campania, the Unione torpedo whose corpse was later dumped like a bundle of newspapers on the doorstep of the Griswold House. And now Big Nabob himself was riding in the backseat of the bus to Paradise, his bodyguards having made themselves as scarce as five big men in striped suits and sunburst ties can get.

Detroit hadn’t heard the last of him, however. Three days later, while police were still half-heartedly questioning witnesses and suspects in the homicide, Big Nabob’s funeral procession rolled east on Monroe from the Second Baptist Church to Gratiot and south on Mt. Elliott to the cemetery, led by a white Packard hearse containing the king-size casket, bronze with platinum handles under a mound of red and white roses, with the Cadillac behind it carrying his widow Esther and three hulking brothers—his former collectors—trailing a string of Lincolns, LaSalles, and sixteen-cylinder Auburns that held up traffic for nineteen blocks. The graveside ceremony, performed by the Reverend Otis R. R. Idaho, pastor of Second Baptist and a flamboyant figure in his own right in robes of yellow and purple satin, invoked Christ’s mercy for the soul of the departed while placing an order for hellfire on the heads of his slayers and included rollicking renditions of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow,” led by a white-robed female choir and accompanied by a Dixieland band in derbies and frogged coats. Rumors that the Black Legion planned to disrupt the proceedings proved false, but Big Nabob’s brothers carried sawed-off shotguns to the graveside, in case they didn’t. If the obsequies didn’t cost quite as much as the Dardanello send-off of 1925, it outdid that Catholic service in flash and volume. Even the police, normally quick to put down anything that looked like a show of force among the Negro netherworld, maintained its distance.

It was news, and although the dead man’s color kept it on an inside page, the
Banner
sent a reporter. I turned down the assignment. I had already attended one funeral more than Í cared to, when Bass Springfield was buried at the end of June.

The movies prefer rain when someone is put under, black umbrellas and sodden flowers. In life, funerals are saddest under bright sunshine, when everywhere you look you’re reminded of the day the dead missed. Of the seventeen people who attended the graveside service, one was the minister, an assistant of Reverend Idaho’s, one was the funeral director, six were professional pallbearers, and two were gravediggers. The mourners included Celestine Brown, her baby, Vivian Dance, Tom Danzig, and me. Jack wasn’t there because two other men were, parked in a gunmetal Cord on Mt. Elliott across from the cemetery; it was the same car that had followed me from the Guardian Building the night I delivered Joey Machine’s fifty thousand dollars to Springfield’s apartment until I lost it at Grand Circus Park.

Celestine, wearing a plain black dress and hat without a veil, held the baby wrapped in a blanket on her lap in a folding chair and looked straight at the minister as he read from St. John:

“ ‘A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.’ ”

I had brought Celestine there. As we turned away from the casket, eight hundred dollars’ worth of simple black oak, paid for by Jack along with the rest of the funeral, Vivian asked if she and Tom could take her back to Crystal Street. I looked at Celestine, who nodded. They started toward the LaSalle with the baby. Tom and I followed more slowly. He was wearing a tan felt fedora and blue serge double-breasted. His face had aged, pulled tight to the bone; his sandy hair had begun to glitter at the temples. He couldn’t have been more than thirty.

“How many does this make?” he asked as we walked.

“Killings? I’d have to check. City Hall isn’t providing a tally this year.”

“Now he’s killing his own.”

“Jack didn’t do this,” I said.

“Didn’t he?”

“Springfield knew his chances. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t Jack’s slave.”

“We’re all his slaves. What are you?”

“A journalist.”

“Bullshit. You’re Jack’s satellite, just like the rest of us. We think we’re going our own way when all we’re doing is turning in his orbit. You dropped everything to deliver that ransom.”

“I got a story out of it.”

“You’d still have done it if Joey hadn’t let you write about it at all. You justify your part in all this because you think you’re a nonparticipating observer, when the truth is you’d do anything Jack asked you to.”