Whiskey River (9 page)

With him in the room was a pale attendant in his twenties wearing short sleeves and a rubber apron like his superior, a female police stenographer with an unmade face and her hair in a bun and long slim calves crossed on a straight wooden chair, and Lieutenant Valery Kozlowski.

Kozlowski was taller, fatter, and harder than I remembered. He had on a squashed fedora and his trademark rubber raincoat—a badge of the barrel-smashing Prohibition Squad—over a three-piece suit with creases in all the wrong places and a tie with a bullfighter painted on it. He was chomping a stogie as usual but the stogie wasn’t lit, in deference to the inflammable formaldehyde fumes swimming around the room. His mud-colored eyes flicked from the corpse’s cavity to my face and back to the corpse without recognition. Well, we hadn’t seen each other since the Turner poisoning.

“Read that back,” Anderson told the stenographer. He withdrew his forearms, caked with blood, from the cavity and wiped his hands on a gory rag.

She paged back through the pad. “ ‘Body of a well-developed white male, aged twenty to twenty-five—’ ”

“Not that far back. Read what. I just dictated.”

She paged forward. “ ‘In the stomach, approximately a quart and a half of a pale liquid, the color and consistency of the gravy they serve biscuits in at the Star Diner in Flatrock.’ ”

“Better change that to ‘a pale, watery liquid’ and leave out the rest. Ryan’s delicate,” he added, winking at me. “Hello, Connie. Long time no see.”

“Sooner or later we all come back to the morgue,” I said. “Good morning, Lieutenant.” I introduced myself all over again.

Kozlowski took the stogie out of his mouth, said, “Sure,” and put it back. He never looked up from the corpse.

There was no need to ask if it was the stiff from Rivard. Someone who didn’t know much about sewing had stitched the bloodless lips together with coarse black thread, making a jagged cross-hatch with the frayed ends dangling. The dead man was thin and gray-white, his dark hair matted. Two nights earlier it had been black and glossy, its owner flush from the cold and manic. He was one of the sniggering youths I’d interviewed among Jack Dance’s crew in Leamington. His name was somewhere in my notebook.

“This a Prohibition beef?” I asked Kozlowski.

He worked the cigar to the other side of his mouth. “The guy that reported the Chevy stolen has a sheet for selling Hamtramck hootch in front of St. Stanislaus. When a beat cop spotted it we took the squeal. We think, maybe we got lucky. Maybe some puke had a joyride and never knew there was booze in back. That ain’t the way it worked out. Know him?”

I said, “No. Shot?”

Anderson gestured to the pale attendant, who handed him a white enamel basin from an instrument stand on his side of the table. The medical examiner used a forceps to pick up a snarled bit of lead with copper fragments stuck to it.

“Copper-jacketed, either a thirty-eight or one of those foreign calibers. We don’t have all the fragments yet, so it might be larger. That’s for Ballistics. Read that part,” he told the stenographer.

She took a moment to find it. “ ‘Bullet entered the left upper quadrant of the thorax, describing a thirty-degree oblique trajectory downward and to the right, shattering the fifth rib and fragmenting. The largest fragment ricocheted downward and to the rear sixty degrees, piercing the upper intestine at least twice before coming to rest between the tenth and eleventh dorsal vertebrae. Other fragments—’ ”

“He gets the idea,” Anderson said. “There’s another hole in the back of his neck with powder-burns. We’ll have that slug when we get to the brain. That’d be the
coup de grâce,
delivered after the first shot put him down. A layman’s opinion; I’m not a dick.”

“Right,” said Kozlowski.

“Why sew his mouth shut?” I asked.

“Maybe he used it once too often. That was a fresh touch. Usually they just shoot them in the mouth, or if they have time and they’re Sicilian, lop off the poor bastard’s penis and testicles and shove them down his throat. I like this guy’s style. Tray.” Returning the forceps and slug to the basin, he handed it back to the attendant, who set it down and held up a square tray with instruments arranged on it. Anderson snipped the thread in two places with a long pair of scissors, then used tweezers to tug the thread out of the holes. The dead man’s lips remained tightly compressed. Freeing his hands, Anderson grasped the chin and forced the jaw open. “What do you know?” he said. “It gets better.” It sounds screwy, but I knew what it would be, or at least what it would mean. Kozlowski didn’t, of course, and it surprised him enough to make him take the stogie from between his teeth and forget to replace it.

After feeling around inside the dead man’s mouth, Anderson withdrew an unused cartridge, shiny brass with a copper nose, of the type designed for use with the nine-millimeter Luger.

“C
OME KIND OF SIGNATURE
, I expect.” Anderson held the cartridge up to the light. “Know anyone who owns a Luger, Lieutenant?”

“Shit, half the population of Michigan’s German and the other half come back from the war with souvenirs. Who don’t?” He remembered his cigar and pegged it into his favorite corner. “Anyway, if the sheeny turns out Purple, who done it won’t matter. If it was up to the chief, the city’d pay him a bounty.”

“What makes him a sheeny?” I asked.

He pointed. “They didn’t shoot the end of his dick off. It was that way already.”

I didn’t pursue the point. In Lieutenant Kozlowski’s simple world, the inhabitants were divided into two camps: Those who had been circumcised and those who hadn’t.

He buttoned his raincoat. “When you finish digging that slug out of his noggin, run it over to Ballistics. We’ll blow some taxpayers’ money and pretend that Luger ain’t on the bottom of the river by now. Then when we don’t get noplace, we’ll hand it to Homicide. No sense jamming up the files at Prohibition with another open case.”

After Kozlowski went out, I asked Anderson if I could have the cartridge.

“Collecting souvenirs?” he asked.

“Sort of. You need it for evidence?”

“A bullet isn’t evidence until it’s fired.” He gave it to me.

I put it in my ticket pocket, gave him the high sign, and left on the trot. I wanted to ask Kozlowski a question, but a pair of raised voices at the door at the end of the hall broke my concentration.

“Nobody in without a badge or a pass,” the deputy at the door was saying.

“I keep telling you I haven’t been issued a pass yet. I just started the job. Here’s my press card.”

“That ain’t a police pass. Nobody in without a badge or a pass.”

Kozlowski joined them. “Pipe down. You want to wake up the stiffs and fuck up all the paperwork?”

“Man don’t have a pass, Lieutenant.”

The civilian swung his attention to Kozlowski. “Tom Danzig, the
Times.
We met once. Is someone afraid I’ll smuggle out a kidney in my pocket?”

“You think that don’t happen?” The lieutenant struck a match on the doorframe, scratching the varnish, and lit his stogie. “Where was it we met?”

“You wouldn’t remember. It was two years ago and I was working somewhere else.”

I’d recognized him before he used his name. He hadn’t changed as much as his brother. His jawline had hardened, making him appear more lean than slight, but his hair was the same sandy shade at the temples under a soft brown felt snapbrim and he was still fair where Jack was dark. He wore a tan double-breasted under a light topcoat, inconspicuously tailored, and the kind of necktie that didn’t exist in Kozlowski’s world, wine-colored silk that glistened softly under the harsh institutional light. If he was dressing like that on the sixty a week the
Times
had paid me, he wasn’t eating or paying rent. I thought about the thousand dollars Joey Machine had thrown at me, along with the promise to repeat the performance the first day of every month if I wrote what he wanted.

“Don’t ever tell a bull he don’t remember,” Kozlowski said. “It ain’t every day somebody gets himself poisoned on my shift.”

That was impressive, and I could see Tom knew it. The lieutenant had seen thousands of faces in two years and poisoning or not, the raid on Hattie’s had been just one more obligatory tipover in a career awash in them. Just because a bull’s bent doesn’t mean he isn’t a good detective. I watched Tom learn that, saw him file it away. That was the basic difference between the brothers. You could see Tom think, while everything Jack did came straight out of left field, as if some shadowy Muse had whispered a course of action into his ear just before he took it.

I saw something else too. I saw Kozlowski noting Tom’s clothes, putting them together with his announcement that he worked for the
Times,
and, although he hid it well enough from anyone who wasn’t looking for it, saw him relax. For all his professed amorality, a man who’s been bought is always at a disadvantage with others until he sniffs a kindred soul. In less than a minute the pair had stamped and pigeonholed each other, and only I saw it. The deputy was too busy yawning.

“How’s your brother?” asked the lieutenant. “Still running with the wops?”

“We don’t stay in touch. Right now I’m investigating a murder.”

“No kidding. So am I. If the chief don’t trust you enough to give you a pass, why should we?”

“It’s not a matter of trust. Can I help it if the killers in this town are more efficient than the bureaucracy?”

Kozlowski pointed over Tom’s shoulder with the butt of his cigar. “That’s your curtain line, bub. Take your bow.”

I put in an oar. “He’s the police reporter at the
Times
okay. I helped clear him for the job.”

Tom hadn’t taken notice of me before. Now he looked, made the connection. I had handed the letter of introduction directly to Joey, who had arranged things from there.

Kozlowski was looking at me too. My clothes didn’t satisfy him the way Tom’s had. “I didn’t know the
Times
and the
Banner
was on speaking terms.”

“You can call his editor if you want.”

He sighed. “Let him by, Pike. He ain’t Sacco and Vanzetti.”

The deputy shrugged. I would see that shrug in many different places as the decade wore on: Representing, in the long hangover after the ten-year binge of the twenties, a contentment just to keep one’s job.

The lieutenant left. I lingered. I’d forgotten what I was going to ask him anyway.

“Thanks,” said Tom. “I could have talked my way in, but you saved me some time.”

He couldn’t talk his way onto a public street without help; I’d been doing some pigeonholing of my own. But I said nothing. After a moment he shook my hand and headed toward the dissecting room. No mention of the letter. He knew I’d been compensated.

I patted my ticket pocket. Well, it was as good a way as any. I called after him. He stopped and turned. Fishing out the unfired cartridge, I walked down the hall and extended it. He took it automatically. “What’s this?”

“Give it to your brother next time you see him. Tell him he owes me.”

He wasn’t a full-fledged scribe yet. I left before he could ask any more questions.

I’m not clear even now on why I didn’t volunteer the dead man’s name, or speak up when Anderson made his discovery inside the silenced mouth. The stitched lips said as plain as anything that the man on the table had leaked information on the Canada run to someone in Pete Rosenstein’s camp, and the stashed cartridge, compatible with Jack Dance’s trademark Lugers, was as arrogant a boast as a killer could make, even if I was the only one who made the connection; Jack always assumed he and his works were better known than they were. True, I didn’t owe anything to the bulls. When an entire legal system pledges its services to a small band of thugs and pirates, the duties of citizenship are suspended. But I never thought of my silence in terms of sticking it to the authorities. I’m not a rebel. It’s tempting to think, because of what I said to Tom, that I was investing in a source of good copy, but that doesn’t answer everything. Maybe I just liked Jack. In those days it was becoming increasingly hard to accept the simplest explanation as the truth, but sometimes it was. Winter went, as winters will, even in Michigan. The investigation into the murder of Lewis Welker—for so the young man with the sealed lips had been identified when the bulls matched his fingerprints to a set on file at the Juvenile Detention Home—stayed alive on the front page of the
Banner
for a week, helped a little by Swayles when he shook off the mumps, then guttered out as the campaign to recall Mayor Bowles got too hot for the second leaders. (It wouldn’t have lasted even that long but for the needlework.) Ballistics failed to find a match either in its files or those of the Justice Department for the striatums on the nine-millimeter bullet taken from Welker’s brain, after which the case went to Homicide, who pulled in every known member of the Purple Gang, the Little Jewish Navy, the Unione Siciliana, and the Machine mob—all except the gang chiefs, who were always out of town during a sweep. The bulls posed with them for newspaper photographers in their hats and coats at the Wayne County Jail and then cut them loose. I still have a group shot taken by Fred Ogilvie for the
Banner,
with Jack Dance at one end turning to say something with a smile to the man at his right, and every time I come across it the faces look younger. Hatless and dressed in varsity sweaters, they’d have passed muster in a high school yearbook, not a Dillinger in the bunch. If Repeal and the Depression have done nothing else, they’ve taken crime away from the kids and given it back to seasoned professionals.

I didn’t do a column on Welker. I had brass then, but not
that
much brass. Instead I wrote a series on evangelists that didn’t tell anyone anything he didn’t already know or suspect and snared me no bonuses or nominations and only one letter, a scorcher from the chairman of the local chapter of the National Committee to Draft Billy Sunday for President.

As the spring floods receded, recall fever, inflamed by the
News,
the
Free Press,
and the
Banner,
and by Jerry Buckley on radio, mounted. In May, while Bowles was attending the Kentucky Derby, the
News
published a photograph of a bookie recording bets on the same race. This was not in itself newsworthy. What made it so was the fact that the photographer had been standing at a window in Bowles’s office when he pushed the button. Inspired, Police Commissioner Harold H. Emmons took advantage of the mayor’s absence to crack down on such handbook operations with a series of raids citywide. When Bowles returned, he fired Emmons. That action put the petition drive over the top, and the recall election was scheduled for July 22. If successful, it would make Detroit the first major city to recall its mayor. The eyes of the nation, to swipe a phrase from the newsreels, were on the Motor City.