Dead Lock (16 page)

“Hello, Miss Brennan. Looking for a story?”

I greeted Corporal Roy Cummins with a smile. “Just checking on preparations for tomorrow, corporal,” I said. “Good to see you’re back.”

Corporal Cummins returned the smile. “The colonel took one look at the evidence and chased me out of his office. Told me to get my tail back to work.”

“So you’re free and clear.”

“Not exactly. There’s a hearing coming up a week from this Wednesday. But my captain says it’s just a formality as long as I ‘keep my nose clean;’ which I definitely plan to do.”

I pointed to the ancient-looking anti-aircraft gun he was manning. “Are you sure that thing’s powerful enough to bring down a Nazi dive bomber?”

He put a hand on the weapon. “Old Betsy may not be the latest government issue, but she’ll do just fine.”

He introduced me to the soldier with him, a Private Johnson. “He feeds Betsy here,” Cummins said, pointing to a clip of ammunition beside the carriage. “And I fire.”

The barrel of the weapon, a slender two inches in diameter, couldn’t have been more than eight feet in length. It was mounted on a small carriage that had two large spoke wheels in front, two smaller ones in the back. It was a far cry from the anti-aircraft artillery I had seen in photographs from England.

“It looks like a holdover from the last war,” I said.

Cummins smiled sheepishly. “More like the Second Boer War,” he said. “The Boers used guns like this against the British. The Brits were impressed and adopted the design for themselves. This one was made by Vickers. The Army bought them from the British before this war started.”

I looked at the gun skeptically. “Will it bring down a plane?”

“Don’t worry, she’ll do just fine,” Cummins said. Then he spoke as if he were reciting from an Army manual: “She fires a one-pound shell accurately up to 3,000 feet vertically, 5,000 feet horizontally. Twenty-five shells at a clip.”

“It shoots horizontally?”

“Dive bombers can come at you almost at ground level,” he said. “This baby’s ready for them at any altitude.”

“How do you fire it?”

“The button is here,” Cummins said, pointing to the handle of the weapon. “Go ahead, grab the handle and push the button in.” He saw my hesitancy. “Hey, don’t worry. Nothing happens until Johnson here feeds her the ammo.”

Tentatively I wrapped my hand around the handle and placed a finger on the button.

KA-BOOOM!

I must have jumped three feet in the air, and when I came down both men were laughing uncontrollably. It took me a moment to realize why.

Darkness had fallen and as I looked skyward I could see that the evening’s fireworks display had just begun.

68

Monday, July 5

I spent the morning writing articles for Wednesday’s special
Morning News
section covering the history of the Soo Locks. Concentration was a real problem, though. My thoughts kept flashing to what I might find during my trip to Negaunee tomorrow.

The Canadian and American forces had just about given up their search for a German base in northern Canada. If the Krauts were going to launch an air attack from the north, there had to be evidence of some kind of airfield. But the military had combed the area as far north as Hudson Bay and east to the Atlantic without finding so much as a child’s glider.

Mid-day we received rumor of a town meeting called for that evening in the banquet room above Blades Larue’s restaurant. According to the local businessmen who had called the meeting, the purpose of the gathering was to make sure the town was prepared for the onslaught of people expected for the lock dedication just eleven days away. But G.P. guessed the real reason for the meeting ran deeper.

“The merchants are scared to death that people will stay away in droves if they get a whiff that there might be an attack on the locks,” he said. “They’ve been threatening to organize a boycott of the News if we run a story that even hints that there might be some sort of danger at the dedication.

“Roland Swenson’s been calling me all day with threats that Fred Westendorf, Tom Barbas or some other shopkeeper is going to cancel their advertising in the News if I don’t back down. Personally, I think he’s more worried than they are.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked. As if I didn’t know.

“Why, we’re going to the meeting,” G.P. announced.

We were going to stick our heads in the lion’s mouth.

69

The sleek black Studebaker coupe slid past the shops on Ashman Street. The driver, James “Jimmy Shoes” Pecora, kept his focus on the woman on the sidewalk up ahead.

Jimmy Shoes thought she was classy, the way she walked. Real confident, like she knew exactly where she was going. Sharp dresser, too. Jimmy liked that. He earned his nickname from the expensive clothes he wore. You couldn’t find clothes like that in a hick town like this. He had stopped at a few shops earlier, just to look around. You could buy a good pair of shoes in those shops for less than five bucks. Jimmy’s cost five times that.

Yeah, the woman up ahead had to be her. He’d followed her from the time she left the
News
office. Joe Zerilli’s boys had suspected she’d be in Sault Ste. Marie working for her uncle at the
Soo Morning News
. She fit the description they’d given him: five foot six, light brown hair, everything arranged precisely the way you’d want it.

She stopped now, and turned around. She looked at the Studebaker, then past it, down the street. A moment later she turned back and continued walking. Did she suspect he was tailing her? Probably not; but just to be sure he gunned the engine and drove past her, taking a right at the next corner onto Portage Street.

Jimmy Shoes felt certain the woman had to be Kate Brennan. He had found her, and for now that had to be enough. He had been driving all day for three days since leaving Cleveland. He was tired, and when you were tired you made mistakes.

He checked the address again on the paper in his pocket. One of Zerilli’s capos, Danny Palazzolo, had pulled some strings to get him a place to stay. Danny told him that Sault Ste. Marie was packed with soldiers and civilians, but he had arranged for Jimmy to bunk in a rental cabin owned by his uncle.

Joe Zerilli, head of the “Partnership” as the Detroit mob called itself, had ordered a hit on the Brennan woman. Her series of
Times
articles had been honing in too close on the ration stamp counterfeiting that was netting the mob eleven million dollars every year. Rather than have one of his own soldiers carry out the mission, Zerilli had called his old friend, Alfred “Big Al” Polizzi, boss of the Cleveland mob. “I want the best button you have,” he told Al. Polizzi said that would be Jimmy Shoes, and four days later Jimmy was here in Sault Ste. Marie.

Jimmy was twenty-nine. Most men his age were in the service, somewhere overseas. Had he been better educated, Jimmy would have termed it “ironic” that his criminal record had disqualified him, the best button in the Midwest, from killing Krauts overseas. There was nothing too serious on his rap sheet; maybe a couple armed robberies when he was a kid. He’d never come close to being convicted for the nearly two-dozen murders he’d pulled off since he became a made man.

Jimmy considered himself someone to be reckoned with, and he was. He had made his first mark at seventeen, killing a storeowner during one of his many armed robberies. The man pleaded for his life and Jimmy Shoes had said, “Okay, if you come to me on your knees and kiss my ring.” As the man kissed his ring, he put a bullet through his head. They couldn’t pin anything on him because there were no witnesses.

More killings followed, each more violent than the one that preceded it. They added up to twenty-three in all; soon the total would be twenty-four.

But now it was time for some rest.

70

Just before seven o’clock, G.P., Jack Crawford and I entered Blades’ Tavern, walked past the bar and climbed the stairs. As we neared the top we could hear a rumble of voices. The meeting had attracted a crowd.

To our right, a well-stocked bar ran almost the 30-foot width of the far end of the room. There was an elevated platform against the wall to our left, with a polished wood dance floor directly in front of it. In between were tables, with chairs arranged around each one. The walls were knotty pine, like the tavern below, and the floor was brown tile.

A few of the windows were open, but the room still smelled of cigarette smoke and Spic ’n Span.

Scotty Banyon sat alone at one of the tables just off the dance floor and waved to us as we entered. We joined him, the men shaking hands and Scotty giving my hand a discrete squeeze as he motioned to the chair next to him. As we sat down a man who looked to be in his mid-forties stood and walked to the platform with a slight limp. He had dark hair and wore a navy blue suit with a light blue tie. I recognized him from photographs as Mayor Roland Swenson. The crowd quieted as he began to speak.

Swenson waded through a short preamble, thanking the crowd for coming, then threw the meeting open for comments from the floor.

Fred Westendorf, a tall, sandy-haired man in a light brown business suit that matched his hair stood at a table three from where we sat. He owned one of the two hardware stores in the Soo. “Tonight’s meeting is supposed to be a planning session for the dedication ceremony,” he began. “But I’d guess the reason most of us are here is the rumor that the Germans are planning an attack during the dedication ceremony.”

It had taken all of 60 seconds for the real purpose of the meeting to surface. There was a murmur of agreement from many in the crowd.

Westendorf continued. “I for one don’t buy it. I don’t believe the Germans have planes capable of crossing the Atlantic, let alone flying here.”

“It’s been sixteen years since Lindberg made it across the Atlantic,” called another man. “What makes you think the Krauts haven’t developed planes that can fly that far?”

“Wait a minute,” said a man at the table next to us. “They may not have to. I’ve heard talk that the Germans could be assembling small dive bombers piece by piece up in Canada.”

“I’ve heard that both the Canadian Air Force and our Army Air Force have been searching without finding a thing,” said Jim Danbert, owner of one of the Soo’s many gift shops. “But, even if they did try an attack, the locks are well guarded. Why, our boys would blow them out of the sky.”

G.P. cleared his throat as he stood, all eyes turning to him. “I think I know where this conversation is headed,” he said. “I’ve heard some of you are against the Soo Morning News mentioning any word of a German threat.”

There was another murmur from the crowd. G.P. held up a hand for silence.

“Some say we’ll have two thousand people or more attending the dedication,” he said. “Every one of them is at risk if the rumor turns out to be true.”

“Now see here, G.P.,” another shop owner, Rich Fabbiano, called out. “How do we know how true these rumors are? What if we scare people off, lose all the revenue they would have spent, and nothing happens?”

“I don’t think we can take that chance.” The speaker was Abe Lieberman, the local haberdasher. “I think we need to at least tell people what we know.”

“Easy for you to say, Abe,” said Fabbiano. “You don’t risk much if the visitors leave. They’re probably not buying suits and sport coats while they’re here.”

“I have as much at stake as you do, Rich,” Lieberman said. “When visitors spend money here, it affects our town’s whole economy. Folks like you have more money to spend on the clothes my store stocks.”

“My drug store is already doing a swell business from people here for the dedication,” said Jerry Dixon. “You publish some kind of b.s. about an attack, those people are going to leave.” He looked around the room. “Sorry ladies,” he said. Besides me, there were four other women present, owners of businesses around town.

“It’s summer and ice cream sales are booming,” said another man I didn’t recognize. “Most of my buyers are from out of town.”

“What do you think, Blades?” asked Westendorf. Blades’ viewpoint would carry weight with quite a few of his fellow businessmen.

“Aw, hell,” he said. “The more scared people are the more they drink. I’m in favor of letting them know there’s at least a chance of an attack.”

G.P. was still standing. “What if there is an attack and we’ve said nothing to warn people about it?” he asked. “The lives of men, women and even children are in our hands. If we fail to warn them about a danger, their deaths will be on our consciences.”

The heated argument continued, with others jumping in on either side. G.P. seemed to have the final word when he announced that he alone determined the editorial content of the
Soo Morning News.
It seemed to quiet the crowd somewhat when he agreed to wait a few days before sounding an alarm. In the meantime, the source of an attack might be discovered and dealt with.

“Anyone else got something to say?” Swenson asked the crowd.

“Yeah,” boomed Blades Larue. “The bar’s open.”

71

Blades’ offer to buy the first round of drinks had a lot of takers. At least thirty of the fifty or so who had attended the meeting bellied up to the bar.

I was wary at first that the heat of the earlier discussions might turn into an ugly situation once people started drinking, but that wasn’t the case. There were differences of opinion, alright, but most of them concerned whether a Squirrel Tail Streamer was more likely to catch rainbows than a Burlap Wiggler. Or which had the better brookie fishing between the Fox and Two Hearted Rivers.

Since I didn’t know a fly rod from a bait bucket, most of the conversations were lost on me. I was glad when Scotty came over to the bar where I was standing nursing a Pfeiffer’s Beer and smoking a Chesterfield.