Whiskey River (12 page)

“I’m twenty-four. He’s twenty. It’s not what you think.”

“What do I think?”

“What I’d think, if I weren’t me and Jack weren’t Jack: That he’s after my money. He proposed to me the night we met. I turned him down, of course. The point is he didn’t know then who I was or how much I was worth. All he knew about me was my first name.”

“He might have known all that going in.”

“He might have, but he didn’t. I’m a lot less naive than I was in 1922; I can smell a chiseler a mile off. Even when I told him who I was it didn’t mean anything to him. There are still a few Americans who have never read a tabloid, Mr. Minor.” She raised the cup to her lips, watching me.

“I was just fishing, Miss Deering. I know Jack. He’d swipe a nickel from a street peddler but he wouldn’t marry Garbo to get his hands on a million dollars. He’d rather grab it running.”

“I agree, except for the part about stealing from a peddler. He has ideas. He doesn’t plan to spend his life as a common hoodlum.”

“Is that why you’re marrying him?”

She met my gaze. “I’m marrying him because it’s right. His isn’t the first proposal I’ve had since Gus. The right man had to ask.”

That’s the thing with smart women, and Vivian was no dummy. When they manage to do something boneheaded it’s usually over a pair of pants. Well, I sat through Jack’s trial for the Sylvester Street killing later and heard more than a few women sigh when he sat down at the defense table. He was big and good-looking like Red Grange, and when he swung open that barn-door grin you could smell female heat all over the gallery. I guess if a slippery politico like Jimmy Walker could trip himself up over a sweet young thing like Betty Compton, women had the same privilege. That’s what the suffragettes had been squawking about. I asked her if they’d set a date.

“The second Saturday in June. He called today. The reception will be at the Chesterfield Inn.”

“He asked me not to announce it. I won’t use any of this until after the ceremony, but I had to promise someone a scoop to get your address. Would it be all right if we ran an announcement that night? Chances are you’ll be starting your honeymoon by then.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Where are you going, by the way?”

She smiled for the first time. “Atlantic City. Jack’s never been there.”

It was the logical choice. The local rackets had many friends in Jersey, where the New York bosses went to gamble and visit the whorehouses and trade their soiled bills for fresh Detroit green. Atlantic City would represent the exotic end of the universe to Jack Dance and his crowd, many of whom had never been farther from home than Ontario. There he could show off his elegant bride and impress potential backers with the ideas that made Vivian so proud.

The rest of the questions had to do with her life before and after Woodbine. Not much there, unless you were Andrea St. Charles: Born in Buffalo to a minor railroad baron and his society wife, raised in Southampton, educated in finishing schools, introduced to the auto magnate at a party on Long Island when she was sixteen, married to him six weeks later in Detroit with her parents’ consent. The next three months were as well known to readers as Buster Brown’s adventures in the funnies. After Woodbine’s suicide and the reading of the will, his adolescent widow had gone back home to Southampton to live with her parents for a time, but the scribes followed her there and camped out on the patio, so she toured Europe for a year, took the waters, met Mussolini, and saw a bullfight or two before coming back to defend Woodbine’s will from the first of many legal attempts on the part of his children to have it set aside. The press had covered the opening round perfunctorily, but probate was too Byzantine for short declarative headlines and it moved on to fresh scandals. Since then, with the exception of visits to Southampton and family, she had been living in town.

I drank a second cup of coffee, thanked her for the interview, offered congratulations, and left. Sitting on the story until after the wedding wasn’t likely to raise my blood pressure. The bride-to-be was no moll, and shorn of Daddy and his feather dusters she was flatter copy than the Anti-Saloon League’s candidate for President in 1932. Quality folk made poor press. It was one of the reasons I stayed around Detroit.

The event took place on schedule. Because Vivian was a Catholic who had nettled the Church with a noisy public petition for divorce and Jack hadn’t been to Synagogue since he was ten, the couple was united in a brief ceremony in the County Building by a justice of the peace. What the nuptials lacked in pomp the reception at the Chesterfield made up for in volume, with a fourteen-piece dance band blasting out the latest from Chicago and New Orleans for what had to be the largest gathering of area characters this side of the last Prohibition sweep, cutting up the floor in monkey suits with janes in beads and satin who hadn’t been off their backs for that many hours in succession since Coolidge. Jack looked as fit as Dempsey in white tie and tails, and Vivian, wearing green sequins and a diamond choker, stole the show from the wedding cake, which was as tall as Howard Wolfman and came courtesy of Sal Borneo. Borneo himself couldn’t be there but sent someone in his place: a smooth dark Italian in his late twenties named Frankie Orr, who spent the evening nursing the same drink and memorizing faces. Also absent was Joey Machine, but a package with a card signed by him stood taller than all the other gifts on the table. Jack made a show of ducking when it was opened. It turned out to be a cut-glass vase for long-stemmed roses, imported from England.

“A dame must of picked it out,” said Andy Kramm, who wasn’t feeling much pain by then. “Joey wouldn’t know crystal from his dago ass.”

Jack was less ebullient. In his circle you never knew what was meant by a gift involving flowers.

Tom Danzig attended, looking more polished than his brother in evening clothes with a redhead on his arm, one of these hollow-cheeked ascetic types in a white gown who looked as if she read T. S. Eliot without being forced to. Tom shook my hand, said something with a reined-in smile that was lost in the “Black Bottom Stomp,” and moved on.

Lon didn’t drink and left early. Andy said he didn’t like crowds or music. “Old Spooky didn’t come back from France with all his checkers,” he explained. I found out then that Lon was known as the Spook when he pulled the trigger for Borneo, not entirely because of his appearance. Alcohol was an aphrodisiac to Andy’s natural love of gossip.

I was stag. I had asked Hattie to come with me, but the Elks were in town and she was busy directing traffic at her joint in River Rouge, where she’d been for a record six months. I introduced myself to another loner, a thin, trampled-looking old man with curly white hair and spectacles as thick as coasters. He wasn’t much bigger than Andy and had on a black suit with dust in the creases. “You know my boy John?” he asked.

It took me a moment to realize he meant Jack. “You’re Mr. Danzig?” He looked like the watch repairman he was. Jack and Tom must have gotten their size from their mother’s family. We tried talking, but the music was loud and he indicated that his hearing was no better than his vision. We separated. When I looked for him later after the set was finished I learned he’d gone home.

At dusk Mrs. Dance threw her bouquet into the arms of a Charlotte Street professional, who squealed as if she were sixteen and unbroken, and the bride and groom left for the train station in Jack’s new LaSalle. Truce or no truce, no chances were taken. They were escorted in two Buicks, front and rear, driven by kids from Jack’s gang with Andy Kramm and Bass Springfield riding shotgun. It was the first I’d seen of Springfield that day. Negroes weren’t allowed in the Chesterfield unless they wore aprons or carried musical instruments.

The reception was still going when the
Banner
hit the pavement. The lead item in Andrea St. Charles’s “Lives of a Saint” column read:

Motor City freebooter Handsome Jack Dance and Vivian “Dearie” Deering (and we
all
remember Daddy Woodbine, don’t we, darlings?) joined destinies today in a civil ceremony downtown. It’s not known yet whether the gay couple plans to raise Hades or a family.

Jack brought a Kodak to Atlantic City, and the Dances took each other’s picture posing on the boardwalk and in front of the Ferris wheels and clowning in their swimsuits on the beach. A snapshot Vivian took of Jack, natty in seersucker and a Panama hat, squaring off with a rifle to knock down a tin duck, appeared in the
Free Press
the day after Sylvester Street; a reporter copped it from an album in the living room of the Dance home in St. Clair Shores while his partner kept Vivian busy in the front hall when Jack was in hiding. Because of the gun it’s the one they use most often when his name comes up, just ahead of the picture that originally appeared on the
Banner’s
front page with my wedding story, of the couple slicing the cake with a big knife, on account of that Ripper tag the
News
hung on him. But I’m getting ahead of myself again, and I swore I wouldn’t.

They took a day out to visit New York City, where they watched the Empire State Building crawling up its steel skeleton and caught Gertrude Lawrence and Leslie Howard in
Candlelight
on Broadway and Jack bought a painting in a gallery. Done in dark oils and framed in cheap amber Bakelite like crystallized honey, it showed a blonde girl praying in profile beneath a crucifix on a mustard wall, hands clasped under her slightly retiring chin. The typewritten card that contained its price identified it as
The Pious Heart,
by Arthur Rayburn Couzzens. It was a flagrantly Christian painting for so flagrant an agnostic Jew as Jack, executed unremarkably by an artist the world had forgotten long before he ended his life by drinking a glass of turpentine in 1921—the year, the curator reported, that
The Pious Heart
had entered the gallery—but it went wherever Jack went from then on. I would come to look for it the first time I visited him in a new place. He never explained why he liked it and I never asked him; it was that kind of picture, the girl’s corn-fed face so vapid in its rapture it made you turn away in embarrassment, as from those likenesses of Jesus whose eyes open and shut depending on where you’re standing. Vivian had tried to talk him out of buying it, which goes to show you how little she knew about her new husband. That anonymous girl prayed in more interesting places than Elmer Gantry.

While Jack was away, the truce fell apart. Joey was considering Borneo’s suggestion that he cede a small portion of his holdings on the East Side to Jack in return for a cut of the profits from the new brewery, when someone hijacked a convoy of ten-ton trucks hauling beer from a brewery Joey did business with in Cleveland. The scout car for the convoy drove around a tree that had fallen across a country road ten miles from the Michigan border, and as the lead truck tried to do the same, a biplane that had been buzzing and farting around the sky a thousand feet up without attracting much attention suddenly went into a steep dive and the man in the rear seat slung a tommy gun over the side of the cockpit and tattooed a line of holes across the truck’s radiator. A couple of hand grenades followed, one exploding under the scout car’s rear axle and dumping the car over sideways. By the time the gunners scrambled out and returned fire, the aeroplane had climbed out of range. Then a small army led by a big Negro charged down a slope from a cluster of trees, firing machine guns and high-powered rifles. One of the men from the car was killed and two more wounded. The one remaining dropped his shotgun and threw up his hands. He was forced to lie down on the ground with his hands behind his head. Then the drivers were pulled from the trucks and told to join him while others took their places at the wheel. From start to finish the raid took twenty minutes.

There was no mystery involved. The pilot of the plane could only have been one person, and I had a pretty good idea who the airborne gunner was. The big Negro clinched it. As soon as word reached Detroit I headed straight for the house on Howard, which, although Jack had moved out, had become the unofficial headquarters of the Dance mob.

Bass Springfield opened the door four inches, enough to show me his .45. When I convinced him I was alone he let me inside. Immediately my hand was seized by a manic Andy Kramm, who pumped it as if we hadn’t seen each other in years and I had brought a bottle. As a matter of fact I had, but it was no orphan there. His face was flushed and his eyes were brighter than ever.

“Connie, Connie! Come in and take a load off.”

“Where’s Lon?”

“He’s at the blockhouse. You hear about it?”

“Jesus Christ,” Springfield muttered.

“You mean the hijack?”

“Hijack, hell! It was a major fucking offensive with air support. Sit down.”

I took a seat at the card table this time and transferred the flat pint from my hip pocket to the table. I had wondered a little about the paradox of bringing booze to a bootlegger, but as it happened, he had just run dry. Jack’s rule against drinking on the job had kept the stock low.

Within twenty minutes and half the bottle, I had a full account of the raid for publication minus names, including the name of my source. Springfield tried for a while to stand on Andy’s tongue, but coloreds didn’t tell whites what to do in that company or any other and he gave up. Off the record, I asked Andy if Jack was aware of what happened. His toothpaste grin was lopsided. “Hell, who you think planned it?”

“What’s he got against peace?”

“Same thing he had against working for Joey, I guess. Not enough noise.”

The evening my exclusive “interview with an insider” ran with the first public details of the Ohio hijacking, I accepted an invitation over the telephone to have lunch at the Detroit Club the next day with Lloyd Bundle, director of the regional bureau of the Continental News Syndicate. I had abalone for the first time in my life in a wood-paneled dining room that looked and smelled like the inside of a humidor. Bundle, chubby and pink-featured with a head of hair the color and thickness of lemon sherbet, might have passed for a Dutch Master in a Rembrandt get-up, but he had on a banker’s blue suit instead and a Masonic ring on his left pinky. Over the baked Alaska he offered me syndication in two hundred newspapers and $8,500 annually plus ten percent of each new subscription, on top of my salary at the
Banner.