Whiskey River (26 page)

We had a drink apiece. During a lull in the din I said, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

She looked very young in the light of a candle guttering in an orange glass on the table. “I never knew a reporter to ask permission.”

“This one’s for me. I asked it once before, but we didn’t know each other then, and that was for publication.”

“What do I see in Jack?”

“Don’t tell me again he has ideas,” I said. “We’re in a depression. Ideas are cheaper than apples.”

“I run with winners.”

“One courtroom upset doesn’t make him a winner.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I married Gus Woodbine because my father wanted me to and because he looked like he had it all. Only he was destroyed by someone who had more. They said I drove him to suicide, but it wasn’t me. The Woodbine was his dream. More than that, it was a good automobile, maybe the best. When Ford and Chrysler and his own friends at General Motors squashed it, he never recovered. Big business made him a loser. So I moved up to big business.”

“Jack Dance is big business?”

“None bigger. Obviously you don’t know how much the alcohol business took in last year. Nobody does, because bootleggers don’t file taxes. It isn’t the money, though; it’s who’s on top. You know that game, scissors cut paper, rock breaks scissors, paper wraps around rock?” She made the accompanying gestures: two fingers, fist, flat hand. “I play that game with my husbands.”

“There doesn’t seem to be much percentage in it, for the risk.”

“Now you’re beginning to understand.”

I shook my head. “That’s Jack’s game, not yours.”

“Don’t let this Southampton accent fool you. As gamblers go I make Jack look like Mary Pickford.”

“So if Gus was scissors and Jack’s the rock—” I paused. “Well, Tom does work on a paper.”

She sobered. “Don’t try to be clever, Connie. Not on your feet.”

That ended the evening. A few minutes later I put her in a cab out front. I hung on to the door. “I won’t say anything.”

“I know. It gives you an in.” She leaned forward from the shadows in the backseat and pressed her lips to mine for a second. Hers were cool. Then she sat back and looked out the window until the cab drew out of sight, a girl from Southampton in furs and a turban in a place where they blinded you and cut your throat with a steak knife and blew you to pieces and threw you in the river and shot you in the eye because you were late coming home from church. She’d be just fine.

Frankie Orr’s wedding came after that, and then Joey Machine’s trial in the Federal Building in a wood-paneled courtroom with the United States seal behind the bench with its hypocritical eagle clutching an olive branch in one set of talons and a fistful of arrows in the other. Nathan Rabinowitz wasn’t present, having represented Joey only at his arraignment while his attorney of record, a tax lawyer named Cranston, like The Shadow, freed himself from a similar case in Washington involving a United States Congressman. A totally bald man with a handlebar moustache, who looked like a circus barker, he wore a bow tie and suspenders that showed when he hooked his thumbs behind them while addressing the court. The trial made front pages its first week—pictures of Joey and Cranston leaning their heads together at the defense table like lovers, Joey patting back a yawn while an accountant for the Bureau of Internal Revenue reeled off an interminable list of figures from his notebook, the gangster getting out of his famous Chevy while Dom Polacki held the door for him in front of the Federal Building—but without a body count or such ornaments as lunkhead bulls perspiring on the stand and platinum blonde witnesses with fox stoles and red, red lipstick, the story lost momentum in a hurry. The remaining two months of depositions, objections, motions, and private meetings in chambers were pushed to the inside pages by more photogenic, if less far-reaching, daily dramas. Photostats of pages from ledgers don’t move as fast on the stands as shots of tramps’ corpses found cut in two on the tracks by Union Station.

Not that the tabloids were reduced to such dregs. Frankie Orr, having bailed out of the East Side for the time being after Leo Campania’s passing, had assumed the pinball machine concession from Dearborn to Woodward Avenue beginning in March. His skull-busters pushed the nickel games, which repaid a penny a point above a chosen score, into blind pigs, whorehouses, and legitimate establishments until their cartoony sproings, whirrs, buzzes, and flashing lights became a familiar part of the local landscape. Detective Chief Kozlowski parlayed the anti-gambling sentiment at City Hall into a series of raids, smashing the machines to sputtering, snapping bits and confiscating the coins they vomited out. Unione lawyers then dug up a friendly Recorder’s Court judge who slapped a ninety-day restraining order enjoining the police from approaching to within forty feet of the machines, but the next day a Sergeant Swoboda, an alumnus of Kozlowski’s old Hamtramck neighborhood, led a plainclothes team into a dance hall on West Grand and they blasted away with revolvers and shotguns at four machines bearing labels clearly identifying them as the property of Orr’s Motor City Game Owners’ Association. Despite an argument that the shots were fired from a distance of forty-one feet, Swoboda was suspended for a month without pay and the judge who had issued the injunction fined Kozlowski five hundred dollars for contempt of court. Meanwhile city attorneys went to appellate and got the injunction reversed. It was a new kind of gang war, conducted entirely in the marble halls of justice where the crack of gavels rang like gunshots.

Lieutenant Hermann Gabriel of the Prohibition Squad, taking advantage of the confusion, tipped over fourteen blind pigs during the month of May. Fred Ogilvie, who with Ernie Swayles was invited along on one of the raids, snapped a picture for the front page of the grim-faced crew in fedoras and rubber raincoats seated under the tarpaulin of the confiscated beer truck they used for cover, armed with short-handled axes and black Thompsons and pump shotguns cut back to the slides.

With all that going on, none of the city papers caught a fire in Oakland County that destroyed a barn and its contents, chief among them a JN-4 “Jenny” biplane that had seen service behind American lines during the war. Sheriff’s investigators, combing through the ashes, found the remains of a simple incendiary device involving a can of high-test gasoline and a blasting cap, much like the bomb that had gutted the rented house on Howard Street in Detroit the previous June. The destruction of Jack Dance’s one-craft air corps came over the wires as a simple arson and was treated as filler by the Detroit papers that used it at all, the
Banner
among them. It was another message from Joey, subtler than the Campania murder, but an indication that the hundreds of hours in court hadn’t slowed him down. Even he wasn’t savage enough to order a killing while his case was being tried by an unsequestered jury, but a match job in another county could pass unnoticed by all but those for whom it was intended.

It was a waste of gasoline, however, and with the price having gone up to twelve cents per gallon; because late in May, when the complainant in
The People of the United States of America v. Giuseppe Garibaldi Maccino
had rested and the defendant was preparing to take the stand on his own behalf, Jack hit him hard, and at the very core of his kingdom on the river.

Nowhere in the world may the trend of the new industrial cycle be perceived more clearly than in Detroit. In this sense it is the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow.

—Matthew Josephson,

“Detroit: City of Tomorrow,”

Outlook,
February 1929

Don’t shoot—I’m not a bootlegger.

—Detroit automobile window
sticker, c. 1930

“Y
OU SHOULD’VE SEEN IT.
”

And as Jack told me about it later in the little apartment on Crystal Street, I did. Not because of any talent he had for description, but because his enthusiasm acted as a kind of conductor to his own mind’s eye, like an electric arc. I saw the sawdust-strewn dock at the foot of Riopelle Street in the area the press called Smugglers’ Alley; the big black Franklin backed up to the edge of the dock where men in cloth caps and rollneck sweaters loaded wooden crates into the trunk and backseat carefully, to avoid breaking any of the bottles packed in wood straw; the scout car, a gray Chrysler sedan parked crosswise of the Franklin with the four armed men inside, two in front, two in back; and blocking the mouth of the alley, long enough from radiator cap to rear bumper to close Jefferson itself, the Buick Standard Eight, black on tan with a coffin-shaped hood, ironically christened the Empire Saloon Car, its driver standing with one foot on the running board and his Thompson’s snout resting on the toe of his other wingtip on the ground. This was what Jack saw through the thick window of a deserted warehouse on the opposite corner from atop a stack of empty packing crates. I smelled the dry rat droppings in the huge room, the dank air from the river. The moon, high and small and broken in half as if someone had tried to pry it out of the sky, shone straight down and made patches of shadow under the figures on the dock.

“The lookout, that’s the glamor job,” Jack said. “He’s got to smile at the folks who wander in, ask them to keep moving, he can’t be a lug. I used to do it for Joey. You dress up for it.

“That’s the weak part, see; the good-looking ones that can talk, they ain’t always hard enough. This night it was Nick Salerno. You remember him from the trial. A cream-puff. Hard on the outside but all soft and gooey when you break the crust.”

After a little while a Model A coupe passed the alley without stopping on Atwater and blew its horn. That was Jack’s signal. Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo had found no Machine reinforcements in the immediate area. Jack jumped down from the crates, left the warehouse, and rejoined Bass Springfield sitting behind the wheel of the flatbed Dodge half-ton truck they had stolen from the same parking lot where they got the Model A. But he didn’t get into the cab. Six empty wooden barrels stood on the flatbed, arranged in a horseshoe. Jack climbed inside it, Springfield started the motor with a ka
-pow
followed by a clatter of lifters, stripped the gears, and cranked the horizontal steering wheel around corners and down narrow back streets with the headlamps off until they came out on Jefferson, where he tugged them on. At Riopelle he swung toward the river, ignoring stop signs, and stood on the brakes convincingly in the last block to avoid piling into the big Buick.

“Shee-
it
!” he whined.

Nick Salerno, who had leaped up onto the Buick’s running board to save his knees, hopped down cradling his submachine gun and approached the driver. He had on a light tan topcoat with a dark silk lining and a brown derby tilted like Edward G. Robinson’s in
Little Caesar.
“Mister, you better be blind drunk.”

“I’s sorry, boss. Man tole me delibber thisyer
ce-
ment to one-one-two-six Dubois. This it?”

Here Jack interrupted his own narrative. “Dubois, that’s how he said it, like noise and toys. He laid on that plantation nigger shit with a trowel. But Nick, he lapped it up.”

The discovery that he’d called a colored man mister, snide as he’d said it, turned Salerno nasty. “Four blocks down, buck. Take off the fucking hat when a white man’s talking to you.”

Springfield removed his cap. Balancing the gun along his right forearm, the lookout slid a black rubber flashlight out of his slash pocket and shone it into the driver’s face. Whether he recognized the Negro from court was never determined. He was still looking at him when Jack, who had alighted from the flatbed on the other side, circled behind him and put a serious dent in the derby with the butt of his Luger.

It was a new pistol, acquired to replace the pair he’d surrendered to me, which as unlicensed firearms, the law had refused to return to him after his acquittal. Salerno grunted and sagged into Jack’s arms, dropping the Thompson across his buckled knees and from there to the pavement without setting it off or making a racket. Moving quickly, Jack dragged him a few feet away, stripped him of his topcoat, shrugged into it, threw his own hat onto the flatbed, poked the dent out of the derby, and cocked it over one eye. The coat was tight in the shoulders and the hat was too big, but he made it stay in place by tucking one ear inside the crown and picked up the tommy gun. Springfield, meanwhile, had stepped down from the cab to cover Salerno with his .45. He needn’t have bothered. The gum-chewing young gangster who had helped Nathan Rabinowitz destroy the case against Jack Dance died several hours later of a fractured skull without regaining consciousness.

The man in the front seat on the passenger’s side of the gray Chrysler hailed Jack as he approached in Salerno’s coat and hat carrying Salerno’s submachine gun. “Nick, if it’s bulls, tell ’em to call Joey tomorrow. This one’s paid for already.”

Jack’s answer was to draw back the Thompson’s breech and slam a shell into the chamber.

There was a moment, a vacuum in time, during which the men in the car interpreted this action. Then the Chrysler rocked on its springs. Holsters squeaked, shotguns rattled. Meanwhile Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo, who had parked the Model A on Orleans and cut back to Riopelle on foot between dark empty warehouses, stepped out onto the dock. Andy had his Thompson and he and Jack flanked the Chrysler with the choppers braced against their hips while Lon threw down on the men near the Franklin with his Browning Automatic Rifle. The loaders stood there holding crates of whiskey with their weapons in their pockets.

Jack ordered the gunmen out of the Chrysler. “Touch the clouds, gents. Just like in
Cimarron.”

As they obeyed, big men all in fedoras and coats too bulky for spring, Jack greeted them. “ ‘Evening, Jim. Fat, looks like you put on a couple-three pounds. Cheer up, Ricky, you still got that redhead at home?” He sniffed the air. “This’s got to be Stink, unless one of you boys shit his pants.”