Whiskey River
By Loren D. Estleman
To my father, Leauvett Estleman,
who told the stories
W
ITH NOTABLE EXCEPTIONS
—the killing of Jerry Buckley, the Collingwood Massacre, the recall of Mayor Charles Bowles and succeeding election of Frank Murphy, the McDonald murder-suicide, and the 1939 Ferguson-O’Hara grand jury investigation of the Detroit Police Department, as well as other incidents and people referred to but not seen—the characters and events depicted herein are fictional. There was no Jack Dance, no Joey Machine, no Sal Borneo, or Frankie Orr; saddest of all, there was no Connie Minor. But people like them existed in the city, and the situation in Detroit during the years 1919-1939 was as reported. All other characters and events except those suggested by figures and incidents in places other than Detroit are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is coincidental.
It is simply not possible to tell the truth about the past. My grandmother has become an angel; she couldn’t possibly have been.
—E
DWARD
G. R
OBINSON
PART ONE 1928-1930 The Black Bottom
PART TWO May-November 1930 Bloody ’30
PART THREE November 1930-May 1931 Indians
PART FOUR May 1931-August 1932 The Collingwood Massacre
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
The first day: September 25, 1939
The special prosecutor reminded him of Old Man Prohibition in the old cartoons, only younger: tall and gangling, longish black hair plastered back with water, a razor-slash of mouth in a narrow face with a lantern jaw and eyes set too close together. Only the stovepipe hat was missing. Trouble was he could never tell Old Man Prohibition from John Barleycorn as the cartoonists drew them. Maybe nobody could, and that was the source of the trouble.
He swore on the Bible, that anomalous ceremony wherein Church and State were wedded in perpetuity, and sat down in the box, experiencing anew that radical change of perceptions, as if he were looking down the wrong end of a telescope; and although there was no gallery, just the judge (one-man grand jury, to put the fine point on it, but a sworn judge notwithstanding and seated behind the high bench) and a paunchy old granite-eyed bailiff with a big revolver behind his hipbone and a young court recorder with a brush cut and freckles on the backs of his hands, he felt like a germ on a microscope slide.
The judge had white hair with black sidewalls and wild hairs in his heavy eyebrows that swayed like feelers in the breeze from the electric fan on the railing.
“Please state your full name and occupation,” said the special prosecutor.
“Connie Minor.” He corrected himself: “Constantine Alexander Minor. I’m an advertising copywriter.”
“You’re a former journalist, is that correct?”
“Yes, I worked for the
Times
and the
Banner
and wrote a column for the Continental News Syndicate.”
“Do you know why you received a subpoena to testify before this grand jury?”
“You’re investigating allegations of misconduct in the police department. I assume you think I know something about the subject, but I don’t.”
“We’re also looking into crimes perpetrated by certain well-known underworld figures in Detroit, some of whom have been mentioned several times in the course of these proceedings. I believe you’re familiar with Salvatore Bornea, alias Sal Borneo, and Francis Xavier Oro, alias Frankie Orr?”
“Slightly. I met them both once.”
“Your name was given to us by Miss Celestine Brown, Negro, who testified here last week. Do you know her?”
“I met her on two occasions.”
“You knew her late Negro companion, Bass Springfield?”
“I did.”
“You’re aware of the circumstances of his death?”
“I am.”
“You were acquainted with Springfield’s associates, Charles Austin Camarillo, Andrew V. Kramm, and John Danzig, alias Jack Dance?”
They sounded like nothing more than people’s names in the relentless prosecutorial mouth. It was a warm day for late September and the fan, oscillating to right and left like a reptile’s head, looped cool air over the back of his neck once every forty seconds, drying the sweat that formed there in the intervals between.
“I knew all of them.”
“You’re aware of the circumstances of the deaths of Dance and Camarillo?”
“I was present when they were killed.”
“Indeed? That isn’t what you told the police. We have the report.”
“There’s a great deal I didn’t tell the police.”
“Why not?”
“You’ve been investigating them for five weeks. You should know the answer to that question.”
“I see nothing to joke about, Mr. Minor. Official corruption is serious business.”
“Also a high-paying one.”
“Are you prepared to share your knowledge with the grand jury?”
“All of it?”
“Unless you have Fifth Amendment reasons for not doing so.”
He glanced at the young recorder. “If I used them I’d sound like a thug.”
“All citizens are protected by the Bill of Rights, Mr. Minor, not just thugs.”
“You say that and I believe you, but what I see is a headline saying ‘Minor Takes Fifth.’ It would wash me up as a newspaperman in this town. I don’t want to write ad copy forever.”
“Our concern is truth. It should be yours as well. Now, are you or are you not refusing to share your knowledge at this time of crimes committed in Detroit during your career as a journalist under your Fifth Amendment rights guaranteeing you protection from self-incrimination?”
The motion of the special prosecutor’s lips, or rather the edges of his mouth since he appeared to have no lips, fascinated him. It reminded him of the up-and-down chopping of the cutters that separated the long printed sheets into pages as they came off the presses.
“No, I guess not.”
“Then tell us about your relationship with Jack Dance.”
“The whole relationship?”
“If you would. As a matter of fact, I insist.”
“I hope you brought your lunch, counselor.”
1928-1930
The Black Bottom
We have the biggest of nearly everything: the tallest building, the biggest electric sign, the longest bridge, the most money …
—
Detroit City Directory,
1925-26 edition
The “blind pig” conditions are worse in every way than in any other town visited, and the liquor sold is of a ruinous quality.
—Ernest W. Mandeville,
“Detroit Sets a Bad Example,”
Outlook,
April 1925
I
SAW
J
ACK DANCE
the first time in Hattie Long’s place on Vernor the night the bulls tipped it over. I guess he was going by John Danzig at the time.
Hattie hadn’t been renting the place long. I remember my hack and I drove up and down the East Side for almost an hour looking for the stuffed rooster in the window. The rooster went everywhere Hattie went and it was how you could tell where she was set up on any particular night. For all the bulls cared most of the time, she could have advertised in the
Free Press,
but Hattie always had a keener sense of the proprieties than any of the auto-money hags in Grosse Pointe. Last I heard she was running a beer garden in Royal Oak or somewhere. I heard she lost her looks.
The rooster this time was in a window on the ground floor of a house with an undertaker’s sign out front. She sublet it to the digger during the day and stored the liquor in coffins in back. The joke that made the rounds ran that you could get a bier in the daytime and a beer at night.
I sent the hack on his way and went in through the front. Although the side door was customary in those places, this one was five feet wide and meant for carrying out the stiffs, and not many cared to use it. We were superstitious in those days.
Hattie had about an hour between the time the mortuary closed and she opened for the night, but you’d have thought she had a week. The burgundy velvet curtain that separated the entry way from the slumber room had been pushed back, tables and chairs set in place, and a cherrywood bar with a brass footrail erected on the platform where in all probability a corpse had lain in state that afternoon. In place of the stand where visitors signed in stood two antique slot machines weighing two hundred pounds apiece. The bartender, whose name was Johnston, had on a white apron and a red bow tie on a shirt with garters. He parted his hair in the middle and waxed his handlebars like in pre-Prohibition days, but there wasn’t anything affected about it because he’d been mixing drinks for forty years; his favorite boast was that he had once served a pink gin to Bat Masterson. Nobody ever called him on it, not with a faded sepia photograph of a young Johnston sparring with Jim Jeffries tacked to the wall behind the bar. The place smelled of needle beer and Lifebuoy soap from the cribs on the second floor and “Ramona” was playing on a wind-up Victrola by the big door. Hattie hated jazz.
This kid—I guessed he was twenty, but it turned out later he was barely eighteen—was leaning on the bar with his back to me, watching something. I noticed him because of his size and because the pants of the brown suit he had on were swinging a good three inches shy of his big wingtips. He was built like a lug and if I hadn’t seen his face a minute later I’d have thought he was older still.
“How’s the boy, Johnnie?” I asked Johnston, clearing a space for my elbows next to the kid. The bars were always crowded in places where there was no one to wait tables, with two full glasses in front of each beer drinker in case the kegs ran out.
“What’ll it be?” Johnston wasn’t much for the small talk.
I skidded a half-dollar across the bar and told him the usual. He poured two fingers of Old Log Cabin into a tumbler half full of Vernor’s—Vernor’s on Vernor, that’s how I remember where the blind pig was.
The kid had turned around and looked at me when I said “Johnnie”—they were still calling him John then as I said—and that’s when I found out he was a kid. He had some baby fat, and curly black hair that needed cutting. It would still need cutting years later when he had a Duesenberg and a tailor to make sure his cuffs came to his shoes. That night he looked like one of the big Polish line workers from Hamtramck that got tired of buying their boilermakers from a parked car in front of Dodge Main and came downtown. They were all youngsters.
He lost interest in me when he figured out I wasn’t addressing him and returned his attention to the other end of the bar, where a shrimp in a cloth cap and a green tweed suit too heavy for the weather stood fishing in his pants pockets. He came up with a quarter and put it on the bar. Johnston filled a schooner with beer from the keg and set it down directly on top of the quarter. The shrimp put a hand on his cap, tipped down the beer in one easy installment, belched dramatically, set down the empty schooner, and put the coin back in his pocket. Then he went out past the velvet curtain. He was weaving a little.