Whiskey River (25 page)

Rabinowitz had changed too. He was neither the soft-spoken rabbi of Jack’s arraignment nor the cagy officer of the court I had played intellectual tag with at the House of All Nations. The glasses remained in their case as he came out from behind the defense table holding something that looked like a newspaper clipping pasted to a sheet of looseleaf note paper. His step was light, he seemed years younger and every bit as aggressive as the assistant prosecutor tried to appear.

“You’ve been a member of the press how long now, Mr. Minor?”

“Ten years this April.”

“Your column appears in how many newspapers?”

“At last count, two hundred and fifteen.”

“You’ve come far in ten years. Success like yours must require a talent for observation and a deep regard for the facts.”

Clay rose. “Your Honor, is there a point to this or is counsel for the defense recruiting for the tabloids?”

“I’m merely attempting to establish Mr. Minor’s qualifications as a witness before this court.”

“Objection overruled. Proceed.”

I said, “I’ve got a good eye and I don’t write fiction, if that’s what you mean.”

“In that case I would like to read for the record a column you wrote that appeared in the
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on Sunday, November thirtieth of last year.” He held up the sheet. I saw my picture with the ridiculous pipe.

There was another objection and a whispered conference at the bench involving the judge and both attorneys. The upshot was that Rabinowitz received permission to read aloud a portion of the column I had filed in the special Sylvester Street edition, a reflective piece based on Jack’s actions in the Belle Isle Bridge ambush about his behavior under fire. Recited in a flat monotone in that sterile room it sounded gushing. I couldn’t look at Jack, but I knew he was wearing, that barn-door grin. After a minute I realized the lawyer had stopped reading and was addressing me.

“… still of that opinion, Mr. Minor?”

I straightened in the hard chair. “Which opinion is that?”

The gallery tittered. Rabinowitz smiled tolerantly and returned to the clipping. “ ‘In the heat of events, Jack Dance is equal parts Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and every matador who ever passed a veronica: Graceful, gimlet-eyed, and as nerveless as a well-placed bullet.’ Still true?”

“I never write what I don’t believe.”

“Then you don’t think my client would become rattled in his excitement and forget his marksmanship?”

I saw where he was headed. So did the assistant prosecutor, who interrupted with an objection about speculation.

“Your Honor,” said Rabinowitz, “Mr. Minor is by his own testimony a trained observer. That’s what I’ve spent these past five minutes establishing before this court. If he’s not in a position to speculate, who is?”

Steelbarger overruled the objection, but warned defense counsel to proceed with caution.

“Shall I repeat the question, Mr. Minor?”

I said, “It wouldn’t be like Jack Dance to screw up because he was scared or in a hurry.”

The room sighed. But he wasn’t through.

“I now remind the jury of comments made in this court yesterday by Nicholas Salerno, a witness for the prosecution, during cross-examination of his account of the hijacking of Joey Machine’s beer shipment by members of Jack Dance’s gang.” He appealed to the court recorder, who took a minute to find it in yesterday’s transcript. Finally she read:

“ ‘Rabinowitz. Mr. Salerno, in your expert opinion, was this a well-planned assault? Salerno. Well, it worked. Rabinowitz. Not just something they made up as they went along? A complex maneuver worked out to the last detail beforehand? Salerno. Yeah, sure. It must have been.’ ”

He thanked her. “Gentlemen of the jury, I leave it to you to decide whether this Napoleonic strategist, this bullfighting sharpshooter, is the same man who missed three stationary targets not one, but sixteen times, from a distance of less than twelve feet.”

E. Wharton Clay let the buzzing die down before he approached me with his hands in his pockets. The light was hitting his glasses at an angle that let me see my face in both lenses.

“Do you fire guns often, Mr. Minor?” He spoke quietly, although not as quietly as his opponent did when he wanted people to hang on his words.

“I fired one once, on the police range,” I said. “I wasn’t good.”

“Not in the service?”

“They rejected me. My blood was too sweet for them. They said I was a borderline diabetic.”

“Do you attend shooting matches?”

“No.”

He tugged at an earlobe. “I’m puzzled. From where do you derive your knowledge of marksmanship?”

“Common sense. I figure a man who hits what he’s aiming at is a better shot than one who aims and misses.”

“I see. How many bullfights have you attended?”

“None.”

“So in other words you have no way of knowing just what kind of a shot the defendant is, or how cool he is when pressured. You just wrote what your readers wanted to read so more of them would buy papers.”

Rabinowitz objected without rising. “Is counsel for the prosecution delivering his summation at this time?”

“Sustained. Phrase it as a question, counselor.”

“I withdraw the comment,” said Wharton, resuming his seat. “I have nothing more for this witness.”

I stepped down in a daze. If he had ever asked, did Jack Dance tell you, late at night in the big empty city room of the
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with only the lamp on the night desk burning, that he had shot the Connor girl, it would all have been over. I learned something about justice then, about how it can walk right by the truth and never know it because of the blindfold.

Vivian Dance, who had been sitting behind her husband in a smart blue suit and veil during my testimony, didn’t come back after lunch. Jack kept glancing back toward the double doors. As soon as the afternoon session started, Nathan Rabinowitz stood and called for a directed acquittal. I had covered a couple of trials and it was nothing new. Every defense attorney fired that shot and none of them seemed surprised or disappointed when it was rejected. But Steelbarger fooled everyone, including the man who had made the motion: He granted it. Jack and Springfield were free.

None of the reporters in attendance waited to hear the judge finish chewing out the assistant prosecutor for burdening an already groaning docket and wasting taxpayers’ money on a trial for which the county was inadequately prepared. I beat the
News
guy to the only unoccupied telephone booth in the lobby, but I didn’t call the
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I dialed Jack’s number in St. Clair Shores to get Vivian’s reaction. Jack’s brother Tom answered.

T
HE WINDOW IN MY
shared office was closed, but I could read the newsboy’s lips as he chased pedestrians down the sidewalk on their way to their cars and home. It was on the front page of the
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he was waving: RIPPER FREED! The thick sans-serif letters as black as a mafioso’s moustache against the otherwise virginal page, the words stacked one on top of the other and filling the space from just below the masthead to the bottom. This time the kid who had carved the letters got credit under Graphics on the Page Two flag, but no more money than the dime an hour he earned sorting
p
’s and
d’
s into their slots in the typecases and cleaning up, despite having had to provide the FREED in a hurry; he had finished carving GUILTY only a few days earlier. It was a dramatic Page One by any standard, and I don’t suppose many of those who saw it dwelled very long, if at all, on the headline’s interior fallacy: If he’d been freed, then he was no longer the Ripper. In any case, the distinction is still ignored, and Jack’s has joined the long list of parenthetical names that appear in chronicles of the dry time: Al (Scarface) Capone, Fred (Killer) Burke, Charley (Lucky) Luciano, Jack (The Ripper) Dance. Time and legend are tougher than the courts.

My column had consisted of an analysis of E. Wharton Clay’s and Nathan Rabinowitz’s vastly different courtroom styles, with a passing reference to my special viewpoint from the witness stand. Howard had been surprised and disappointed that I didn’t make it more personal—
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REPORTER GIVES EVIDENCE was to have been the headline when the acquittal changed everything—but I said that Chuck Kobler, the
Banner’s
court reporter, had covered my testimony thoroughly in his story, as did every other scribe in town. In fact it irritated me to be everyone else’s beat and I wasn’t about to be my own as well.

Standing there at the window, I knew that a woman was on her way through the city room and that it wasn’t Andrea. No one was so crass as to whistle—that’s for the movies, like the cigar-chomping editor who says, “Why, you,” just before he slugs someone—but the chairs stopped squeaking as they never would if the mayor walked in wearing his inaugural top hat and red silk ribbon, and I was aware of a general lifting of the atmosphere, as in a stuffy elevator when a messenger boards carrying a bouquet of flowers.

Vivian tapped the open office door with the back of a gloved hand. She had on a turban with a small feather in it and a fur jacket over a pale yellow silk blouse and a forest-green broadcloth skirt that caught her legs several inches below the knees. I had been mourning the passing of the short flapper skirt before then, but the length accentuated her long slender calves. She was wearing fur half-boots.

I turned from the window. “I thought you’d be out celebrating with Jack.”

“I hate parties. I have ever since Southampton. Besides, I’d just slow him down.” She took in the office, Jensen’s empty desk. “Are you busy?”

“I almost never am.”

“I want to talk.”

I went over and took my hat and coat off the peg. They’d been covering a cartoon Jensen had bought last fall and tacked up, showing ex-Mayor Bowles and ex-Commissioner Wilcox trapped inside a bottle with three X’s on the label and a cork jammed into the neck. Already their faces were getting hard to place. “There’s a joint down the street.”

“I don’t feel like going to a joint. Can we just walk?”

It was a warm evening for late February but damp, with a light fog rolling in from the river. We walked in that direction. The beams of the car headlamps in the street seemed to bend in the mist at right angles, like searchlights trained on the surface of a lake. Walking beside me clutching the collar of her coat, Vivian lifted her face to the moisture. Her profile was her best feature, the high forehead and long straight Mediterranean nose and clean chin.

“I wanted to explain about Tom,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“No one has to do anything for you. That’s how you work, isn’t it?”

I said nothing.

“That sounded wrong,” she said. “I didn’t like you at first, what you do. It was hard to think of reporters as human after what happened when I was divorcing Gus. Jack told me you did him a favor once. He didn’t say what it was.”

“It gave me an in.”

“I don’t think that’s why you did it. You like him, don’t you?”

“I don’t understand him.”

“That has something to do with it. I like him too. So does Tom, although he doesn’t approve of him.” She paused. “We haven’t done anything, Tom and I haven’t.”

“When did he start coming to your house?”

“After Sylvester Street, when Jack was in hiding. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t being bothered by police and reporters. He’s a solid man. Jack’s exciting, but he isn’t solid.”

“They both used to work for Joey Machine.”

“Tom told me. He said that’s over.”

“It’s over when Joey says so. He doesn’t acknowledge bad investments. You should know that if you’re thinking of leaving Jack for Tom because Tom’s solid.”

“I’m not thinking anything like that. I don’t know what I’m thinking.”

We crossed Jefferson with the light and walked along the river, a trough of milky fog with the Windsor skyline crumbling away to stacks of lighted windows on the other side. Dusk was sliding in in long connecting shadows.

“What do you think he’d do?” she asked.

“Kill you both,” I said. “Or one of you. Or he won’t. He wouldn’t know himself until he did it, or didn’t. You ought to know that by now.”

“He really didn’t mean to hurt that little girl. She ran into it.”

“He told you about it?”

“I asked him. It’s funny, being what he is and doing what he’s done, but Jack doesn’t understand death. Tom told me that when their mother died, their father wouldn’t tell them what happened or where she went. I think Jack’s still waiting for her to come back. Down deep he thinks they’ll all come back when they get tired of hiding. That’s why killing doesn’t mean anything to him.”

“Maybe he’s right.”

An icy wind skated the water and roughened our cheeks. We turned our backs to it and started back. “He won’t keep on missing, will he?” she asked.

“Who, Jack?”

“Joey Machine.”

I let a bull pass us in his long double-breasted uniform coat doing stunts with his nightstick.

“There’s a bookie named Arny D’Agostino,” I said. “Ex-bookie now; his brother takes care of him. A couple of years back some guys took him out of the smoke shop where he ran his book and strung him up by his wrists from a pipe in the basement of the Healy Building. They roughed him around a little, nothing new. Then they took a strip of gauze and one of the guys who had gonorrhea dripped onto it and they pasted it over Arny’s eyes and left him up for three days. By the time they cut him down he was blind for life. Joey figured he’d stolen about thirty thousand dollars from him over a period of eleven months.”

After a while she said, “And they’re trying to get him for unpaid taxes.”

“This is his business, his and Sal Borneo’s and Pete Rosenstein’s and the rest. They all took the same chances and they’re not in business to make it easy for the next guy up.”
When you get to hell, chiseler, tell them Sal gets what’s his.

She shuddered and took my arm with an embarrassed little laugh. “I think I’m ready to go to that joint now.”

It was a loud little place that had been there since before the ink had dried on the Eighteenth Amendment, full of smoke and the smell of hot grease from the grill behind the bar. We waited ten minutes for a booth to open up and had gin fizzes under a caricature of George M. Cohan bearing his signature. You went there to watch people, to remind yourself you weren’t living on some burned-out asteroid in a dead solar system.