Motor City Shakedown (13 page)

I returned home and ate lunch. It was only one o'clock. I decided to go to work, whether my father wanted me there or not. I dressed and headed down to the streetcar stop. Curious if the newsboy had made good on his promise, I looked for the foulmouthed whelp.

Sure enough, he stood on the corner with his white bag slung over his shoulder, holding up a
Detroit Herald
and bawling out, “Shoot-out in Little Italy! Two dead!”

I stopped and stared at him with my mouth hanging open. I flashed back to the boy who had taken the blackmail money from me a year and a half earlier.

“Man says you got a envelope for him. Says I'm s'posed to get it.”

I glanced around. “Where is this man?”

“Says that's none a your business.” He dug through his thick black hair and scratched the top of his head.

I squatted down, holding tightly to the envelope in my pocket. “You tell him I need my package before he gets this envelope.”

The urchin was still grinning. “Says you'd say that. Money first or no clothes. Says the coppers wants 'em.”

I was sure it was him—heavy-lidded eyes, recessed chin, a thatch of black hair. The blood must have obscured his appearance when I'd seen him before. I stood off to the side and studied him carefully.

No. This boy looked the same age, and the better part of two years had passed. A younger brother, perhaps? This was worth investigating. I sauntered up to him and handed him a nickel for a paper. “You got the corner, huh?”

He handed me a paper and three cents change. “Yeah. So?”

“So nothing. Good for you. What happened to the other kid?”

The barest trace of a smile crossed his lips. “He ain't a problem no more.”

“What's your name?”

“What's it to ya?”

I grinned at him. “You're a friendly one, aren't you?”

“Lemme alone.” He turned away and called out, “Coppers nab fifteen illegals! Read it here! Getcher paper!”

I figured he must like me—he hadn't called me a name. I took a few steps away and thought. It would be worth my while to find out something about this kid. If his brother had taken the blackmail money, he might be able to lead me to Vito Adamo. My father didn't want to see me today anyway. I crossed the street and sat in the window of a café, nursing a cup of coffee and watching the boy.

Every time a streetcar rattled up to the stop, a herd of people tried to cram themselves on board. Most were turned away, the trolleys already packed to their roofs. A few cars didn't even stop. The waiting customers shouted and cursed, but the motormen stayed on the throttle. It was a daily occurrence all over Detroit, and unless the city finally broke through the Detroit United Railway trust, the situation would just keep getting worse. More and more immigrants flooded into town every day, yet the streetcar company—which had a stranglehold on the business in the city—refused to add more trolleys to meet the demand. Nor would they lower the price from a nickel a ride to an amount the average person could afford. It only made good business sense to solve the problem of too few cars, but the DUR had drawn a line in the sand, and they weren't going to budge.

I was going to have to get myself an automobile. First chance I got, I'd talk to Edsel about buying a Model T. I certainly couldn't afford a Detroit Electric.

I sat back, picked up the newspaper, and looked for the story about the shoot-out. The headline read:
GUN BATTLE IN LITTLE ITALY—TWO DEAD
. The dead men were unidentified, but this had the Adamos and Gianollas written all over it. I read and watched the newsboy. On page eight, I found a short article headlined,
SUSPECTS GONE TO GROUND, POLICE SAY
. Vito Adamo and a man named Filipo Busolato, who were wanted for the shotgun murder of Carlo Callego, had disappeared. The police speculated they'd fled to Canada. But Adamo didn't strike me as the kind of man who would run from anything. He was probably somewhere in Detroit. I just had to find him.

I pushed the paper aside and went back to watching the boy.

It was nearly three o'clock when he finally exhausted his supply of newspapers and began walking south on Woodward. I threw a dime on the table and followed him from across the street. He dodged and weaved through the crowds on the sidewalk. With all the wagons, carriages, trucks, automobiles, and bicycles hurtling down both sides of the road, I lost sight of him a few times, but I managed to shadow him to Winder Street. There he crossed the road and headed east. He threaded through the business district to the Bishop Ungraded School, a three-story redbrick building that served two distinct purposes. Half the building was a regular school for kindergarten through eighth-grade students. The other half served as a trade school for delinquents. I was fairly certain on which side this boy belonged.

He cut around back to the school yard and hopped the short picket fence. I followed him at a distance and stopped just outside the yard behind a tree at the edge of the building. He had joined a group of perhaps ten boys who stood or knelt by the rear entrance. They looked to range in age from ten to fourteen or fifteen. The blackmail boy would be right in the middle.

They all looked poor—tufts of hair standing out from their heads, wool trousers held up by suspenders, cotton shirts shiny from wear, scuffed and dirty lace-up shoes, a few with heels flapping behind them. One of the kneeling boys flung something against the wall with a sidearm delivery—dice. The boys shouted, some excitedly, others in despair. The kneeling boy gathered up the dice, while others picked up or threw down coins.

Two boys stood, facing each other. I tried to get a look at them but couldn't see either clearly. They were talking, and their voices rose, though I was too far away to hear what they were saying. One of them dropped the other with a straight right to the chin. When the kid fell, the first one followed up with a kick to the side of his head. The rest of the boys laughed and pulled him away. He turned, and in that moment I saw him clearly.

It was the blackmail boy.

*   *   *

Everyone went back to their craps game. The boy who'd been beaten picked himself up from the ground, brushed off his trousers, and tentatively rejoined the game—at the opposite side of the semicircle from the blackmail boy. About fifteen minutes later, a man called out from the other side of the school yard and began walking over to the boys. He wore a black suit and derby, and his face looked dark—Italian? He was well over a hundred yards from me, too far away to make out features. The clothing was no help, since 90 percent of the men in town wore the same things.

One of the boys, a thin lad in a black derby, met him halfway down the wall and handed over a fistful of change. The man counted the money, said something, and shoved the boy, who spread his hands in front of him.
That's all,
the gesture said. The man grabbed his collar and gave him a shake before pushing him away and heading back toward the side of the building. He flipped something over his shoulder. The sun sparkled off it—one of the coins. The boy picked it up out of the dirt and stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the man's back. Finally sticking the coin in his pocket, the boy returned to the rest of the gang, and they all left together, cutting across the school yard and hopping the fence in the back. I followed at a distance.

The blackmail boy seemed to be second in the pecking order. The boy in the black derby, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, looked like he could be another of the newsboy's brothers. They all hooted and laughed, and pushed one another around as they turned down Saint Antoine. I followed them from a block behind, staying to the other side of the street and using whatever cover I could. We were in the Russian ghetto now, actually only a few blocks from Paradise Valley. The business's signs were in Hebrew or Cyrillic lettering, and only a few feet separated the four- and five-story tenement buildings, built of crumbling brownstone and brick. Clotheslines hung diagonally across the alleys, weaving a spider's web trapping hundreds of pairs of dull brown and gray trousers, and a greater number of white shirts and underwear. Men sat on stoops, passing the time.

The boys suddenly split up and raced to the steps where the men sat. Each of them pulled the hat from a man's head and tore down the street. I broke into a run to stay with them. The men ran after them, shouting,
“Mamzers!” “Trombeniks!”
and other words I presumed to be even worse. A second later, the boys threw the hats into the air and bolted down an alley behind Gratiot.

The men retrieved their hats, dusted them off, and shouted a few more halfhearted curses at the boys before heading back to their perches. “
Feh!
Like the butcher says,” one of the men said to me. “Those boys are rotten, purple—like spoiled meat.”

I slowed and then stopped across the street from the alley. A few rickety wooden privies stood at the side of the alleyway, and dozens of garbage cans and their contents were strewn across the dirt. The boys were gone.

I hesitated. These boys were clearly capable of doing damage. They would be on the alert for the men whose hats they'd stolen. To go down that alley was a big risk. I had a gun, but I wasn't going to shoot a child. No. I'd wait. I knew where to find the blackmail boy now.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The next morning, I took a streetcar to the factory to speak with my father. Wilkinson directed me to the carriage building. It was the largest in the complex, three stories with almost a quarter million square feet of floor space. My father was in the body department that took up most of the first floor. I was surprised to see it half-empty, with dozens of Detroit Electric coupé and brougham bodies strewn in among the carriages and coaches. He and William P. MacFarlane, the general manager of the factory, stood off to the side, deep in discussion, while electric sanders buzzed and saws ripped. They both wore dark gray suits with waistcoats and ties. The workmen around them wore their ties tucked into their trousers. Their jackets were hung on pegs on the exterior walls of the building, away from the sawdust.

A pair of men rolled the shiny maroon body of one of the “clear vision” brougham models—rounded glass at the corners gave the driver nearly 360-degree visibility—out from paint finishing to the overhead door at the shipping dock. They parked it behind a dozen other automobile bodies of various models in maroon, brewster green, or blue, all sitting on the wheeled dollies that carried our vehicles, motorized or otherwise, from department to department.

Mr. MacFarlane saw me first. He was a bony Scotsman with huge drooping mustaches, now more gray than red. “Will, why, hello!” He held out his right hand before he remembered, and then awkwardly patted my arm. “It's great to see you. Congratulations on the, ah … Are you coming back?”

I looked at my father. “I hope to.”

My father held my gaze. “How are you feeling today?”

“Good.” I had to sell him. “Wonderful, in fact.”

“Well…” My father turned to Mr. MacFarlane. “What would you think of Will looking into this for us?”

“Don't see why not.” MacFarlane leaned in close to me and said in a serious tone, “You're not an imbecile, are ye, lad?” His grin gave him away.

“Depends on whom you ask,” I said. “What do you think, Father?”

His head tilted a bit to the side, and he studied me with mock seriousness. “Imbecile?” He thought for a moment and shook his head. “No.” He thought some more. “Moron, perhaps.” Another pause. “Idiot.” He began nodding. “Yes, that's it, idiot.”

I bowed. “Much thanks to my trusted supporters.”

They laughed. My father put his arm around me and steered me away from the noise. The three of us walked out onto the macadam, which was radiating heat from the sunshine. It had warmed into the mid-seventies and was an absolutely beautiful day. We stopped on the test track near one of the small hills.

“Let's talk turkey,” my father said. “We're leading the electric market, but we're heading for serious trouble.”

“Trouble?” I said. “Why?”

“Well, it doesn't take a genius to see that the carriage, wagon, and coach business is going to all but disappear over the next ten years.”

Mr. MacFarlane stuck his hands into his back pockets. He never looked at home in a suit. “After growing every year for more than a decade, our horse-drawn business was down twenty-three percent last year and is going to be off double that this year. And I need not remind you that's a bigger part of our business than automobiles. The market is a disaster.”

I shook my head. “But automobile business is making up for it, right?”

“That was the plan,” my father said. “But our production isn't growing fast enough, and our costs are stratospheric. Gasoline automobiles are dropping in price every day, and their growth is off the charts. Worse, Kettering's self-starter has those cars taking away a significant amount of our customers. Turns out the noise and smoke are much less a factor than easy starting when it comes to ladies driving automobiles. We've made no progress whatever in getting men to accept our ‘sedate' vehicles.” He glanced away and folded his arms across his chest before looking back at me. “We're stuck. Our automobile business is showing solid growth, but our overall volume is falling off the table. Because of that we're paying more for materials, but the squeeze from the other automobile manufacturers keeps us from raising prices.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“Help us improve our efficiency.”

“So you're thinking of Taylorism?”

He sighed. “I'd go with voodooism right now if I thought it would work. Virtually all of our manufacturing employees are craftsmen. We're paying them as much as six dollars a day when the market for unskilled labor is a quarter of that. If we could get more work out of the craftsmen we need, and turn over some of the tasks to unskilled laborers, we could significantly raise our margins.”