Whiskey River (10 page)

Although neither the press nor even the demagogic Buckley would say it without evidence, it was clear to a blind deaf-mute that Bowles and his ring were in the pay of the men in sharp suits who smelled faintly of sour mash. When a Detroiter was in a hurry of an evening, he learned to detour around Riopelle and East Jefferson to avoid being delayed by a polite young man with a submachine gun while a cargo of liquor was being offloaded. “Where are the cops?” ran a close second to “Wanna buy a duck?” as the joke question of the decade. The terms “Vice Squad” and “Criminal Investigation Division” became double-entendres.

Thus unhampered by the watchdogs of justice, the gangs had little to look out for but one another, which kept them busy enough that year. They shot it out on the river and in the streets, in apartments and from the running boards of Cadillacs and LaSalles. As the days rat-tat-tatted by, the Battle of Lake Erie—Connie Minor’s battle, copyrighted and on file at the Library of Congress—became just one skirmish in an escalating war. Lewis Welker became part of a statistic that threatened to top the all-time high of 1926.

It’s hard for a newspaper not to look good in that kind of climate, but the
Times
suffered. The distant Hearst’s support of Prohibition was untenable, and a poorly planned series of articles about the policy racket’s promise to make any poor Negro a Cinderella rang tinnily amid the clamor to rid the city of gambling and every other vice not served in glasses. Joey Machine’s hand-picked boy Tom Danzig had a hand in that, but the decision to print the material was made higher up. I began to suspect that Joey’s pockets ran deeper than I’d guessed. He’d limp ten blocks on a blister to save two bits on a new pair of shoes, but when it came to improving his business he could be as generous as Schweitzer.

It was still black out one balmy morning in May when the telephone rang in my apartment. I came awake with my head doubled under my arm stork fashion. The bell rang seven times before I got the kinks out of my neck and found any feeling in the arm below the elbow. I tipped the candlestick off the nightstand and caught the receiver.

“Connie?”

“I’m not sure.” I turned on the lamp, looked at the alarm clock. “Jesus.”

“Wrong. I’m the guy that owes you a favor.”

I didn’t need any more waking up after that. In time I’d learn that Jack never identified himself over the telephone. He’d heard that the feds had tapped into Capone’s line and not being electronically gifted had come to the conclusion that they could eavesdrop on anyone’s conversation anywhere simply by flipping a switch. It was the only thing he was ever cautious about.

“What’s the deal?” I sat up.

“You know the Black Bottom?”

“I hope you didn’t wake me up to ask me out dancing.”

“Not the dance, shithead, the place. You know Crystal Street? Runs next to Hastings.”

“I’ve been there.”

“Bass Springfield’s got a room there. He ain’t got a phone. I need to get a message to him.”

“So go see him.”

“If I could do that, you think I’d call you? The war’s on, Al. Andy and Lon and me are squirreled in here.” He gave me an address on Howard. “The Purples got Baldy Hannion tonight. Gunned him in his car in the middle of Woodward.”

That took a moment to sink in. Something had gone wrong with the natural order when an Oklahoma train robber was shot to death at the wheel of an automobile in downtown Detroit.

“When?”

“Hey, I’m not talking to your sheet.”

“Sorry. What’s the message?”

“That’s it Tell Bass what happened. Tell him to get his ass down here and cover it on the way. That son of a bitch Rosenstein’s got a hard-on for the whole outfit.” “Why me? I’m not one of the boys.”

“You answered your own question, chum. Pete’s gorillas ain’t looking to put one in you. You’re the only one outside I can trust.”

“What makes you think you can trust me?”

“Lew Welker.”

I fumbled for my Chesterfields in the drawer of the nightstand. “Do you always repay a favor by asking for another favor?”

“He’s got a woman there, Nadine or Francine, one of them nigger names. Bass might want to send her on vacation.”

“I’ll tell him.” I got the address on Crystal and then the connection broke.

I’d been to the neighborhood many times, but never after two in the morning, which represented an unspoken curfew for whites in the Bottom. After that, if you were the wrong color and you were caught on the street, you stood a good chance of being bumped off a practically empty sidewalk and, if you still didn’t take the hint, the bulls might find you after daylight sitting in a weedy lot with your guts in your lap. I cranked up the Ford and prayed the moon would stay hidden.

The house was a two-story saltbox, whitewashed clapboard with the wood wearing through under the streetlamp out front, but the windows were clean and the strip of grass between the foundation and the sidewalk had been cut recently. Things are changing now, but in those days, residents of the most rundown neighborhoods kept them neat, even the alleys. I left the motor running and climbed the stoop. There was a movement in the shadows and a lanky Negro I hadn’t noticed in a cloth cap and a baggy suitcoat stopped leaning against a lightpole on the corner and passed under the streetlamp out of sight.

I rapped on the screen door. After a moment an old colored woman came to the screen without turning on a light inside. She had on a hairnet and a faded housecoat with gnawed elbows. Her face was a length of carved dark wood.

“Bass Springfield,” I said.

Her eyes took the slow tour. “You
po
lice?”

“No, just a friend.”

A long silence let me know what she thought of that. Finally she reached up and unhooked the screen door.

When I stepped inside she turned on a lamp. The parlor had a square of rug, threadbare but clean, two sofas with mismatched floral covers, and a crystal set on a painted pine table.

“Upstairs,” she said.

I climbed the stairs. In the dark hallway I knocked on a door with light showing under it. Bessie Smith was singing on a phonograph inside. The light went out, but the music continued.

“Bass?” I said. “This is Connie Minor from the
Banner.
We met last January.”

“What you want?” It was a young woman’s voice.

“Jack Dance sent me. I’ve got a message for Bass.”

“He ain’t here. You can give it to me.”

“It’s personal.”

“How I know you’re who you says you are?”

I stooped and slid my press card—not the police pass—under the door. I hoped she was a better reader than Springfield. After a moment the card poked back out. I retrieved it.

“He at the Red Door,” said the voice.

I knew where that was. I thanked her and left. There was no sign of the old woman in the parlor.

Three young colored men were gathered around the Ford with the hood folded up on one side and the motor still running. One of them was the man who had been holding up the lightpole before. I hesitated a beat, then walked between two of them and secured the hood. They smelled of sour whiskey and old lavender. The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight out.

The men stepped back when I nudged the car forward. The Red Door was just two blocks away but I wasn’t going to walk them. The trio followed on foot down the center of the street.

Puddles stood on Hastings from a recent rain, reflecting green and purple from the neon lit saloons that lined the block on both sides; the street had been outlaw too long to observe the usual blind-pig proprieties. I parked in front of a brownstone at the end of the block. Stepping down, I saw an Auburn two-seater on the other side of the street with two men inside. Their features were in shadow, but the boat-tailed Speedster was worth noticing in that neighborhood at four in the morning, especially when it faced the wrong way. As I entered the brownstone, the glass in the door reflected the three Negroes walking around the corner onto Hastings.

Two flights up I knocked on a door painted red and told the black face behind the go-to-hell panel I was there to see Bass Springfield. The panel slid shut. I listened to a muted cornet on the other side. The door opened.

They had gutted two apartments, set up a bar and a platform at one end, and brought in tables and chairs from any where at all. Three colored couples shared a sofa and a brown cigarette near the door. The air was smeared with smoke, tobacco and marijuana. The cornetist on the platform was growling his way through “Potato Head Blues” with help from a banjo and bass fiddle.

Springfield sat flat-footed at the bar on a stool that would have left anyone else’s feet dangling, with his crippled hands wrapped around a white china mug. Every eye in the place saw me put an elbow on the bar. The bartender, fat and bald in a pink shirt with garters, kept one hand out of sight under the taps.

“I remembers you,” Springfield said when I spoke. He had a soft cap pulled down to his eyes and was watching his image in a mirror advertising Listerine’s Halitosis Cure behind the bar.

“Jack sent me,” I said. “They got Hannion.”

He drained the mug two-handed. I smelled raw alcohol. “Celestine tell you where to find me?”

“Is that her name? You ought to send her away. Three men followed me from your house.” I described them.

“I told them to watch the place.”

“You knew about Hannion?”

“I expected Mr. Andy. He takes more chances. But I knowed it be one of us. Mr. Jack and them at the place on Howard?”

“He said to join them and watch your ass. By the way, there’s an Auburn parked across the street. Those friends of yours too?”

“No. They followed me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Make ’em wait.” He pushed his mug toward the bartender,

“They’ll be there when you come out.”

He said nothing. The musicians finished playing. In the silence between sets I heard a long tinkle of glass in the distance. I turned from the bar. Springfield grasped my arm. His grip was weak, but I hesitated. “My car’s parked outside.”

“It ain’t your car.”

More glass broke. I remembered the three Negroes. “They’ll get shot.”

“That’s covered.”

“You mean they’re armed?”

Everyone in the room laughed. The bartender took his hand from under the bar and filled Springfield’s mug from a bottle.

“What will they do to them?” I asked.

“Just rough ’em around some. They be walking home.”

“That won’t make Rosenstein any happier.”

“They ain’t from Rosenstein.”

I tried to read his profile. “Jack said—”

“Mr. Jack always was full of horseshit,” he said. “He knows they ain’t Purples. Them boys works for Joey Machine.”

I think the Prohibition laws can be successfully enforced against commercial operations. We propose to make these our objective and not to dissipate our energies in other fields…. We will exert a steady, unrelenting pressure against the outlaw liquor traffic until it is driven from the land, or our last drop of energy expended.

—Amos W. W. Woodcock,

Prohibition Administrator

Some of the wets talk as though they had several drinks and some of the drys talk as though they needed them.

—
The Detroit Free Press

B
Y
J
ULY 1930—THAT TERRIBLE,
blood-and-shit-splattered July in the City of Detroit—Jack Dance no longer had to pretend he was notorious. His name flew around the exclusive Detroit Club and opened the doors of blind pigs from Outer Drive to Cadillac Square, and his unruly curls and screw-you grin were as famous as Father Coughlin’s voice of doom.

In May, while Jack was holed up in a rented house on Howard Street with Bass Springfield and little Andy Kramm and Austin Camarillo, the former air ace whose wasted features gave him an unlucky resemblance to the Phantom of the Opera, I “braved hails of lead” (my words, from the
Banner)
to interview the rebel chief in a room filled with pistols and rifles and enough hand grenades to open a hole in the Siegfried line. His name appeared in print for the first time and he coined a statement that’s become part of the language. “We didn’t start this fight,” I quoted him, “but we’re sure as shooting going to finish it.”

The column contained three lies. The hails of lead presented no obstacle because there weren’t any, the interview having taken place during one of the frequent lulls that occur in a protracted gang war; Jack said “sure as hell,” not “sure as shooting”; and there was no fight until he started it. For some time Jack and his little band had been embezzling liquor from the Machine stock and selling it to neighborhood dealers who couldn’t afford Joey’s prices. In many cases the shipments never made it to the warehouse, one or two carloads having been diverted to a blockhouse Jack had arranged for the purpose with a caretaker at historic Fort Wayne. Off the record, the young gangster was astonishingly candid about the details. For the first time I understood Andy Kramm’s slip in Leamington when he had referred to Joey’s liquor as Jack’s.

Joey, who knew every nickel he had ever earned or stolen by serial number and date and where it had gone, was not long in discovering the leak and who was responsible. He had sent Dom Polacki, his hulking bodyguard, around to Jack’s room at the Book-Cadillac Hotel with a friendly warning to return the spoils by way of breaking Jack’s kneecaps. But Jack was ready for him, and twenty-four hours later a private messenger service delivered Dom’s oversize hat to the Acme Garage, along with a note demanding a thousand dollars for his safe return.

The word around was that Sal Borneo, in the interest of public relations, had restrained Joey from sending a convoy of gunners down Michigan Avenue where the hotel stood, and chipped in half the ransom from Unione Siciliana funds as a gesture of good faith. The money was left in a telephone booth in the Union Depot on Fort Street and Dom reported to the garage that afternoon, bareheaded but unharmed. Joey was quiet for a week. Then, as Baldy Hannion, a known Dance associate, was driving up Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main stem, to spend the night with his wife, a gunmetal-gray Pontiac sedan drew abreast of his Plymouth coupe and a man in the backseat poked a sawed-off shotgun through the open window and blew off the top of Hannion’s head. His car sideswiped a Model T truck, spun completely around, bucked up over the sidewalk, and came to rest against the base of the marble steps leading up to the Detroit Public Library.