Whiskey River (18 page)

“It’s a he?”

“In journalism we always use he unless we’re being specific.”

“Why didn’t this witness go to the police?”

“You’re new here,” I said. “Maybe you don’t know our little town. We don’t run to the bulls with anything as insignificant as murder.”

“No town’s that rotten.”

“It isn’t worth arguing about.”

“Who’s your witness?”

“You know better than that, Mr. Orr.”

It happened faster than I could follow it, so I’m guessing. Frankie transferred his napkin to the table beside his plate. In almost the same motion, he picked up his steak knife and swept it backhanded across the top of Mr. Norman’s collar. The ease and grace of what should have been an awkward maneuver distracted my thoughts from what happened next, leaving me with impressions only. It struck me that Frankie was double-jointed or a magician with stage experience. A bright orange arterial spurt arced past my head and thumped the door four feet behind me. The slash opened like a mouth without teeth, dyeing Mr. Norman’s shirt, jacket, and tie deep scarlet. The blood covered his rack of lamb like thick marinade, welled over the edge of the plate, and fanned out across the tablecloth, making the white linen transparent as it advanced toward the corners. I stood, tipping my chair over. Mr. Norman tried to stand too, both hands reaching for his throat. Then he slid sideways and out of sight, although not out of earshot. His grunts had a yearning toward articulation. The knife had evidently torn through his voice box.

The doors rattled. Frankie laid the glistening steak knife on the table, covered it with his napkin—a grislily comical gesture in view of the fact that the place looked like a butcher’s back room—and walked around the table, pausing to kick the grunting, thrashing man hard in the ribs. “When you get to hell, chiseler, tell them Sal gets what’s his.”

He slid back the bolt and pulled the doors apart four inches. A set of features appeared in the opening. “Any problems?”

“Oh, yeah, it looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Frankie, irritated. “Everybody gone?”

“Yeah.”

“Give them ten minutes to make sure nobody forgot his hat. Then grab Leo and come back and scrape up this sack of shit. He ought to be through kicking by then.”

He turned toward me. For once I wasn’t paralyzed. I was aware that I’d wet my pants.

“When you Greeks were writing poetry and buggering each other all over the Parthenon, we were out conquering the world,” he said. “Some things don’t change. Forget about Buckley or I’ll feed you your fucking balls. Tell your witness the same thing. Tell him tonight.” He threw the doors open wide.

Walking carefully in my soaked trousers, I went out. In a few days the smell of Mr. Norman’s blood left my nostrils. In a few months I even forgot all about Jerry Buckley. After nine years, though, I still can’t drive by the spot where the Griswold House stood without embarrassing myself physically.

W
E HEARD THE PLANE
before we saw it, a nasal whine that stopped and started in impertinent little surges, like an electric mixer with a loose plug. Then it grew out of a tiny smudge in an absolutely clear sky, widening and assuming detail as it approached, until we could see the box kite wings and the cigar-shaped fuselage and light shining through the wires and struts, the leather-helmeted head behind the windscreen. It passed over within a hundred feet, close enough to show the khaki patches on its olive-drab fabric and the way the wings bowed and flexed like a gull’s. Then it turned its nose into the wind in a long climbing loop and headed in.

Belonging as it did to the air, the machine seemed reluctant to land. The carriage touched down twice, bounded back up, and struck with a bone-shattering bang, the wheels lurching over uneven ground until the tailskid dug in and scratched up a brown cloud that scudded over and settled in a fine layer on our shoes. The aeroplane swung into a slow turn and rolled to a stop. The motor sputtered and died. The propeller feathered, reversed, and drifted around in a half-dozen lazy circles before standing still. Quiet fell with a thud.

Jack and I stood by Jack’s LaSalle in a field near St. Clair Shores. It was a blustery Monday morning in September, too windy for shirtsleeves, too warm for a topcoat, with the death-stench in the air that was fall in Southeastern Michigan. In half an hour Jack was due to meet Joey Machine on the Belle Isle Bridge.

Andy Kramm climbed down from the observer’s seat behind the wings, using the bottom wing as a step. Lon Camarillo bounded out of the cockpit straight to the ground and came our way behind Andy, unbuckling his helmet. The former ace was wearing his leather aviator’s jacket and puttees, with an ivory silk scarf wound around his neck and tucked inside his collar. Andy had on his cloth cap and mackinaw. He blew on his hands.

“Jesus, it’s cold up there,” he said. “My balls shriveled up no bigger’n cantaloupes. Anybody got a bottle?”

I gave him my flask. Lon joined us, carrying his helmet and goggles. The lower half of his face was dark with smoke and oil. The white outline left by the goggles accentuated his skull-like features. “When do I get a new bus?” he demanded. “The only time that old Jenny’s done better than sixty since the Big Show was when they brought it up on the truck.”

Jack said, “When we can afford a better aeroplane, we won’t need no aeroplane. What’d you see?”

“Ask Andy. I was too busy trying to keep us in the air.”

“That’s good hootch.” Andy returned my flask. “Looks copacetic. Seen Joey’s Chevy on the island and Joey standing on the bridge. No other cars or people close enough to do us a bother.”

“Sure it was him?”

“Had on that cheap coat and that hat he wears, the one like Hoover’s.”

“Homburg,” I said.

“That’s the one. Say, you all right? You look like you could stand a pull yourself.”

“I had a shock.”

Jack said, “I don’t like the coat.”

“It’s cold on the water,” said Andy. “Anyway, Joey hires the hard stuff. He don’t do it himself.”

“Bass is in the Doozy.” Jack flipped his head toward the dirt road that ran past the field, where the big car was parked. “You ride in back. Give us three or four blocks’ start.”

“My chopper there?”

“You’ll have to load it. I never did figure out how to wind up that fucking drum.”

“Joey said one car,” I said.

“I stopped taking orders from Joey a while back.” He was looking at me. “You sure you can do this? ’Cause if you can’t, I won’t. He can stand there till his dick rots and falls off.”

“I’m jake.”

“You better be. I don’t trust guys that get sick or have to go take a dump just before the shooting starts.”

“Lewis Welker,” I reminded him.

“What about him?”

“Your memory’s not that short.”

He nodded.

I had checked with the hospitals and the morgue, but nobody answering Mr. Norman’s description had showed up at any of them, and no complaint had been filed with the police department about a mess at the Griswold House. Frankie Orr’s clean-up crew was worth whatever he paid them. I had called in sick at the
Banner
two days in succession. I had lost weight. Every time I thought of food I saw Mr. Norman’s rack of lamb drenched biblically in blood. Actually, I was feeling a little better that morning, although Howard Wolfman and even Jensen the cartoon editor had remarked on my appearance. I’d told them I’d been fasting.

“I thought you were Greek Orthodox,” Jensen had said, lighting his pipe.

Lon brought me back to the field. “I’ll get the bird back in the hangar. It’s throwing oil like a bitch.”

Andy started for the Duesenberg and Jack and I returned to the LaSalle. He took his matched Lugers out of the glove compartment, the converted one sporting an extra long clip that extended three inches below the hollow handle, checked their loads, and put one in each side pocket of his suitcoat. I didn’t say anything about the ban on weapons. He ground the motor into life, swung the car around, and bumped down the rutted path that led to the road.

On the way down Jefferson he turned on the radio. He never listened to the entertainment programs that were beginning to flood the dial, just dance music. Despite the name he took, I had never seen him dance with anyone, or tap his foot when a fast tune was playing, or heard him hum during a quiet moment. For all I knew he was tone deaf. He preferred things happening, and when they weren’t he tried to create the illusion, and so the more frenetic the music the better he liked it. Jazz was a favorite, but he made no distinction between the corny trumpets and party whistles of Paul Whiteman and the smoky strains of Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club Orchestra. I always thought it was a shame he didn’t live to hear jitterbug. If he had, he might have had a better shot at dying of old age, but I doubt it. Whenever I think of him, there’s a hot number playing in the background.

Nearing the Belle Isle Bridge, he pulled off onto the gravel apron, cut the motor, and coasted to a stop, blocking the end of the bridge. The Duesenberg glided over two blocks back and parked. Jack set the LaSalle’s brake, cut the ignition. His window was open and I heard the water, the edged waves where the Detroit River broadened into Lake St. Clair slapping the seawall.

“Look at the son of a bitch,” Jack said. “Thinks he’s for Christ’s sake Napoleon.”

I noticed him then, leaning with his back to the railing halfway out to the island, a figure in a long black coat too heavy for the season although it was windy out there, the gusts molding the coat to the backs of his legs and pushing the hem out in front of him so that he looked like the letter
J
, his pale gray homburg held in place by his hand on the crown. The wind was kicking up little whitecaps on the water like paper sailboats.

“He looks on the square,” I said.

“He’ll be on the square when a priest shakes his stick in his face. Even then they’ll have to screw him into the ground.”

“What he said makes sense. This war isn’t making anybody rich. Who was it said you could spit in Joey’s face and steal his wife and he’d just laugh at you, but if you get in the way of a buck he’ll rip your heart out?”

“Phil Dardanello. Just before Joey blew him to hell.” He took out the Lugers again, checked the loads again, put them back in his pockets. Then he grabbed his door handle. “Anybody comes, get out and throw up the hood. Pretend you got engine trouble.” He opened the door, put a foot on the running board. I laid a hand on his arm. I had never touched him before except to shake hands.

“Are you on the square?” I asked.

He showed me his teeth. “Hell, Connie, I never know what I’m going to do till I do it.”

He left the door open, giving me an unobstructed view of the proceedings through a square frame, as if I were the only spectator in a movie house. I felt alone right away. Anyplace that Jack had been seemed twice as empty after he went. Out over the water, gulls swung like pendulums on the updrafts, their wings making lowercase
m
’s. That was the second letter that had occurred to me in a few minutes. I missed my typewriter. Hattie was right. I couldn’t marry her until the
Banner
granted me a divorce.

Jack made his way out along the bridge, a tall, broad-shouldered young man—barely a man, just turned twenty-one—in blue gabardine and saddle shoes and a pearl fedora set at an arrogant angle, one hand touching the railing from time to time because in that wind it would seem to a landlubber that the bridge was swaying, although it was solid enough for truck traffic. He was alone out there with the creaking of the gulls and the loud raspberry of a speedboat heeling around the angle of the island. There were always speedboats.

I’m not sure which came first, Jack’s slowing step or the movement of the man in the black coat and homburg, still fifty or sixty feet away from him. Maybe the two things were simultaneous, Jack getting close enough to see that it wasn’t Joey Machine standing there, that Joey wasn’t within a mile of that spot on that day, just as the coat came open and something that looked like a two-foot length of iron pipe swung up from underneath. There was something familiar about the movement, a wicked grace that reminded me of the private dining room at the Griswold House and a backhand sweep that severed Mr. Norman’s jugular even as Mr. Norman was cutting the meat on his plate. And I knew who the man was in Joey’s clothing.

Jack was fast for his size. I can still see him turning into the classic shooter’s stance, sideways to his opponent and offering the narrowest possible target as his right hand came out of his pocket with a Luger in it and his arm straightened at shoulder level. Dirty gray smoke billowed from the end of the sawed-off and slid sideways in front of the wind. I saw Jack lurch without losing his footing. I couldn’t see his gun because his body was in the way, but in the next instant I heard the round blooey of the shotgun and, just behind it, three rapid pops that had to belong to the smaller automatic, but not the one converted to full auto; Jack had gone with his best hand and single-fire for accuracy.

I didn’t hear the next few reports. They were lost under the whine of the speedboat on the water, approaching the bridge now with its throttle wide open. As it neared the place where the two men stood it slowed down, the noise tailing off to a burble directly under the bridge. At that moment the man in the black coat went over the railing.

His hat and shotgun flew as he plunged feet first through air, arms rotating. Something else came loose on the way down, black and shield-shaped with dangling straps, falling slower than the man, planing on the air currents like an autumn leaf until, just after the man hit the water, it sliced the top off a series of waves, pulling a plume of white spray. Then it tipped up and stood tombstone fashion for a long moment before sliding under. It was a bulletproof vest, forty pounds of nickel steel with a black fabric covering. I had tried one on that disastrous day on the police range when I almost wiped out the force with a runaway Thompson and had decided I wasn’t big enough to be a cop.

In the water, the man wriggled out of the overcoat, whose tails had spread like oil on the surface, and swam toward the bobbing boat, pulling himself along with an inexpert Australian crawl, head held up out of the water. Little white spurts erupted around him. I heard the pops and looked up at Jack supporting himself on the railing of the bridge with one hand and firing at the swimming man. The shots stopped just as the man reached the boat and was helped aboard by someone inside; Jack had emptied the magazine. Leaning awkwardly on his elbow on the railing, he switched weapons. I heard the burp of the doctored Luger, but by that time the boat was moving again, its bow lifting as the engine wound up. Long before it disappeared around the end of the island it had drawn out of range. Jack pushed himself away from the railing, still firing, and fell to his knees.