Whiskey River (36 page)

The
Banner,
like its fellow Detroit tabloids the
Daily
and the
Mirror,
did not survive Prohibition. It folded at the end of 1933 after a period during which it became a grotesque parody of itself at its lurid peak, as when it offered cash prizes to readers for locating missing parts of a corpse some psychotic had deposited in trunks throughout the city, treating it like a contest. As circulation fell off, I entertained the fantasy that my position as a syndicated columnist would prevent me from going down with it; hadn’t I placed first in the 1931 Continental News Syndicate’s Excellence in Journalism competition with my five-part series on the Black Bottom? The framed certificate was on the wall next to my desk, I had made a down payment on a new Marmon roadster with the $150 check. But I had failed to take note of the trend when editors began canceling my column, until by the end of my three-year contract with CNS it was appearing in less than a hundred newspapers, with the number going down weekly. Lloyd Bundle bought me lunch at the Statler and informed me that as of August 1, I was free to begin negotiations with other parties. “Very sorry, Minor, but it seems you’re associated in the public mind with bootleggers and hijackings and midnight massacres, all that rat-a-tat stuff, and nobody’s interested anymore, not even Hollywood. Musicals, that’s what they’re making now. You might consider moving out there, I hear they need writers. Your stuff would sound great in Dick Powell’s mouth.” I thanked him for the advice and didn’t hit him even once.

On New Year’s Eve, 1933, I attended a party in the
Banner
offices to celebrate a fresh deck, Repeal, and the short loud life of a newspaper whose final issue had hit the streets six hours before. Nearing midnight, Howard Wolfman invited me into his office, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and filled two glasses. “I bought this just today,” he said, setting down the bottle. “My first illegal act, if you don’t count libel.” He looked buttoned-down as always in his thick sparkling eyeglasses and snug necktie and navy cashmere jacket despite the heat of a malfunctioning radiator; in the city room the female file clerks, inhibitions seriously damaged, had already begun taking off sweaters and shoes and stockings, with more to follow. The scene was being replayed in offices and private homes and restaurants across the city, across the country. The Big Thirst was being slaked after thirteen years, fourteen in Detroit.

I picked up my glass. “I don’t think we’ll be raided tonight.”

“I hope not. I’d have to get out an extra, and I can’t pay for the ink.” He raised his. “To anything. To truth in journalism, honesty in government, and—what?”

“Absent friends.”

“They’re all absent.” We clicked glasses and drank. It was the first and only time I ever saw him imbibe. Readers and detractors of the
Banner
alike would have been surprised by the neat quiet man behind the splashy headlines, the grainy pictures of corpses in puddles with their eyes blown out.

“What are you going to do?” I asked him.

“A fellow I cubbed with on the Chicago
Daily Journal
is getting up a picture magazine in San Francisco. He wants me to edit it. I’m not sure just how one goes about editing pictures, but I’m broke enough to give it a try.”

“He wouldn’t by any chance be looking for writers?”

“No one wants writers anymore, Connie. They want photographers and cartoonists. Jensen signed a contract with the
Saturday Evening Post
last week.”

“I hope they throw in a year’s supply of matches.”

“Do you need money? I can get an advance from my friend in San Francisco and arrange a loan.”

“Thanks. I’ve got an interview Tuesday morning with Roberts and Gorman.”

“Ad copy?”

“People will always need to sell things.”

“We can’t all be tabloid writers.” He took one more sip and poured the rest of his glass into a potted plant. “I never did understand what people see in this stuff. It wasn’t worth a revolution.”

“Everything’s worth a revolution,” I said. “Even revolution.”

“See, that’s what was wrong with your stuff. You always had to educate people.” He stuck out his white hand. “Take care, Connie.”

I took it. “Good luck in Frisco.”

“I won’t need it. It isn’t a real town, like Detroit.”

I never saw Howard again. I never saw the magazine either. It folded after one issue.

There isn’t much left to tell about Jack Dance, the dry time in Detroit, and me. I heard Hattie Long got out of the life after Joey was killed and bought into a legitimate beer garden in Royal Oak; but I said that. I haven’t seen her since the night she came to tell me about Jack’s insane plan to kidnap Joey Machine right out of the Acme Garage.

That last conversation with Andy Kramm I mentioned took place in the visitor’s room at the Wayne County Jail. A boyish-looking thirty-three in denims, with his fair hair combed forward over a thinning widow’s peak, his bright blue eyes and thousand-candlepower grin—the one mannerism, I always thought, that Jack borrowed from anyone—he chain-smoked Chesterfields he bummed from me but seemed resigned to his year-and-a-half sentence, if not to the penny-ante nature of the crime of which he’d been convicted, the armed robbery of a service station in Romulus.

“Fifteen bucks and change, that’s all there was in the till,” he said. “Not even a buck a month for how long I’ll be away. That’s as many bullets as them bums fired in that room at the Collingwood.”

“Why’d you stick it up?”

“Tapped out. There’s no money in legging no more, now that they’re fixed to make it legal.”

“I never thought I’d see the day when a bootlegger would be standing in a breadline.”

“You won’t, neither. We’re crooks, not tramps. Nor Communists,” he added quickly. “I’d like to see this bum Stalin try to muscle in on the East Side. There’d be caviar shit all down Mt. Elliott.” But his own mention of the Collingwood affair had started him thinking in another direction. “I didn’t see you at Jack’s funeral last year.”

“Would’ve been spooky if you did. I wasn’t there.”

“Too bad. It was okay. They kept out the pukes and the press, it was private. First time I had on a yarmulke since my cousin Ray’s bar mitzvah. I bet I know why you didn’t show up.”

I told him my reasons.

“That ain’t it,” he said. “Not all of it. I bet it was because Tom was there.”

“Tom’s doing okay. I hear they’re going to make him assistant city editor at the
Times.”
I was changing the subject.

“He’s marrying Vivian, did you hear that?”

“I heard. The town’s not that big.”

“The bulk thought it was Scalia tipped Joey where they was hid out; Scalia didn’t move fast enough to stay out of the way or Joey double-crossed him, took him out too for turning on Joey in the first place. If he turned on him he’d turn on Jack, that’s the way the bulls seen it.”

“Kozlowski said he finally sold himself out.”

“Kozlowski always was full of shit. They was all full of shit. I know who tipped Joey, and it wasn’t Scalia. You do too, I guess.”

I said nothing for a moment. The way the police had it figured, Barberra and the others had been using the Orlando Hotel for a jumping-off point until the word came down to hit the Collingwood, only to be interrupted when Inspector Fraley ordered them off the premises, delaying the event twenty-four hours; but I had seen the killers leaving the Acme Garage that night and knew that they had been using the hotel while they scouted the neighborhood, probably on some smoky tip that Jack Dance or one of the others had been seen in that area. They didn’t have the specific location until the night of the killing, a location provided by the man I had glimpsed sitting in the fishbowl garage office with Joey Machine. I knew, all right, but I wasn’t sure how Andy knew. I asked him. “Who did Jack use to pick up and deliver the ransom for Frankie Orr’s baby?”

“His brother, who else you think? Tom fucking Danzig. He brought the fifty grand to the apartment in the Collingwood. He was the only one who knew where Jack was besides Lon and Scalia, because Jack told him. And he was the one who called Joey and told him where he could send his shooters.”

“He didn’t call,” I said. “He went in person. I saw him at the garage that night.”

“It explains a lot,” Andy said after a moment.

“Yeah, like how the
Times
beat every other paper in town to the street with the story on the massacre. They had the headline all set to go while it was still happening. All they needed was the details.”

“The son of a bitch.”

“The son of a bitch,” I agreed.
We’ll all do handstands to earn a pat on the head from Jack,
he had told me as we were leaving Bass Springfield’s grave.
We will for as long as he lives.
That’s how he’d justify it. I wondered if he thought it covered scooping the rest of Detroit while he was at it on the hottest story of the year, his brother’s murder.

I’ve already reported the rest of what Andy Kramm told me during that visit. From there he was taken to Jackson, where he was released in February 1934 after serving his full term. In April of that year he was reported among the bandits who escaped from the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin with John Dillinger when federal agents opened fire on the building. One month later, exiting a bank in Greencastle, Indiana with two companions and a sack containing eleven thousand dollars in stolen bills and securities, Andy walked into a wall of shotgun, rifle, and pistol fire from a posse made up of local police officers and storekeepers. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk.

For me, like Jack and Springfield and Lon and Joey and Kozlowski and Gabriel and Frankie Orr and Hattie and Vivian and Howard and all the rest of them, all that fading cartoon cast, he’s alive somewhere, waving brightly to someone as he did to me while the guard turned him back toward his cell. I stood there smiling faintly back and fingering the object in my pocket, the thing I was never without, worn smoother than any emery wheel could get it and probably too small now to fit snugly in the chamber of any pistol, my rosary, the essential lie of my life, the thing that had sent the stool pigeon Lewis Welker to Purgatory with the taste of brass on his tongue and his killer unpunished. I still have the cartridge, and unless it falls through a hole in my pocket someday or winds up at the cleaners or is just plain misplaced, someone will take it off my body too. It is my own personal exclusive portable drip-dry wash-and-wear no-assembly-required Mark of the Beast.

That’s the story, end of column, thirty; and if you think it’s been too long in the telling then I’ve made a bum job of it, because it should seem no more than a brazen moment in time. To feel what we felt, those of us who were there, you had to have been there too, and to have been like us, when the river that glittered on the border between the United States and Canada seemed to match the honey glow of the liquid gold that flowed across it when we were all too young and stupid and full of piss and rotgut to believe for one second that it would ever stop flowing.

Jack had a phrase that covered it:

You should’ve seen it.

The third day: September 27, 1939

For a moment after he finished, the courtroom hung in time, suspended by the humming of the fan and the little exhalations the shorthand machine made as the recorder palpated the keys. The special prosecutor, looking less like Old Man Prohibition now and more like a young lawyer insulated by marble and mahogany from the street outside, stirred himself from behind his table.

“You’ve revealed an appalling number of unreported crimes,” he said. “Were you afraid of reprisals if you told what you knew?”

“Only if they involved clamming up whenever I entered a room, or not letting me into the room at all. I had to work in this town.”

“I don’t agree that your rights under the First Amendment regarding a free press include withholding evidence in a murder. Even if I did, I’d have to ask what stopped you from going to the authorities after you left newspapers, when keeping silent was no longer a professional consideration.”

“I didn’t leave newspapers, counselor; newspapers left me. When Prohibition ended I became a relic, like slave bracelets and F. Scott Fitzgerald. A few years ago, Steele Gilmore at the
News
offered me a Sunday column, one of those old-fart retrospectives: ‘On this day in nineteen twenty-five, Clara Bow was appearing in person at the Oriole Terrace, prime rib was eleven cents a pound, and Fat Freddie Gunsberg was discovered floating facedown under a dock in Wyandotte.’ I turned him down. I may just be selling toothbrushes and toilet paper now, but at least they’re
new
toothbrushes and toilet paper.”

“Answer the question, please,” said the judge, twitching his eyebrow-feelers.

“What was the point? Jack was dead, Joey was about to be, and Frankie Orr was beyond reach even if I had a corroborating witness to the Norman murder, which I didn’t. There was nothing to be gained.”

“If that’s the way you feel why are you talking now?”

“You’re not a journalist. I’m not sure I can explain it so you’ll understand.”

“Please try.”

He leaned forward, folding his hands between his knees and staring at the floor, where curls of varnish had collected at the base of the railing.

“When you know something that nobody else knows, it belongs to you. It’s all yours. When you tell it to someone, you take him in as a partner and lose half of it. When he tells somebody, you and he each lose half of the half, and so on, until everybody has a piece and you’ve got nothing. Then you start to forget.”

“From what you’ve told this grand jury I’d say it’s better forgotten,” said the special prosecutor. “That will be all for now, Mr. Minor. Please remain available in case it becomes necessary to recall you for further testimony. You should also be aware that a transcript of these proceedings will be handed over to the local authorities after the grand jury has adjourned. It will be up to them whether to pursue criminal indictments against you for withholding evidence and accessory after the fact of murder. You’re excused.”