Whiskey River (13 page)

I did some quick mental arithmetic. All told, not counting bonuses and subscription royalties, it came to $16,300. Governor Green made $15,000, not counting graft. If you placed any stock in people’s names, Bundle was well placed.

“What about the
Banner?”
I asked.

“Wolfman gets a cut. We take care of home plate. You won’t even have to change offices.”

“That’s not a point in your favor.”

He chuckled. He knew he could afford to. I pretended to think it over. In the kitchen someone had the radio tuned to WMBC, and whenever the door swung open Jerry Buckley’s slightly brassy voice came put gloating over his listener poll, which was running three to two in favor of recalling Mayor Bowles. Buckley said; which had a way of becoming truth once he said it. Between him and Father Coughlin it was even money which man had the firmer grip on his audience’s testicles.

“Mr. Bundle, you’ve bought yourself a columnist.”

He wiped ice cream off his chins and grasped my outstretched hand. “Any ideas on the subject of your first column?”

A waiter flapped through the swinging door, letting out a little more Buckley.

“One or two,” I said.

T
HREE SAINTED ADJECTIVES BECAME
decanonized early in the thirties. Within a short span of years, we learned to measure a politician’s crookedness by the number of times “Honest” appeared in front of his name; “rich,” except when applied to certain foods and fabrics, became a term of proletarian contempt; and “crusading,” most exalted of all, lost its power to uplift, coming to signify demagoguery and arrogance. But in July 1930, Gerald E. Buckley wore the first and third with Borgian pride and defined the second.

In looks and personality, he was an unlikely spellbinder. Despite a somewhat heavy-lipped, slope-browed resemblance to a trout, he had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and his harsh voice and overly aggressive delivery at the microphone, instead of having the opposite effect, drew listeners to the Mutual network the way the
Banner’s
shrill headlines created mobs at newsstands. From his tiny studio on the mezzanine of the LaSalle Hotel at Adelaide and Woodward—Buckley’s answer to Father Coughlin’s electronic pulpit in the Shrine of the Little Flower—he exerted a derisive, brow-beating, tent-revival influence over numbers that would impress a senator.

For months, since before Bowles’s now-infamous “Let ’em die” speech, Buckley had been beating the drum for recall. The big, amiable mayor with the thinning black hair and horn-rimmed glasses had, he said, created a climate in which crime was encouraged to prosper. When the police bothered to arrest a suspect in a gangland slaying and bring him to court, the judge or jury almost invariably freed him for his service to society. This, said Buckley, amounted to a mandate to go forth and commit more murders. By July the statistics were firmly on his side. Violent deaths averaged one per day. Detroit was marked up like a butcher’s chart, each portion bearing the stamp of a different marauding band: the Machines, the Rosensteins, the Oakland Sugar House Gang, and the rivergoing Little Jewish Navy, with the Purple Gang claiming free range throughout the city and the communities downriver, forming and breaking alliances with the amoral license of post-Christian Vandals and hiring out their guns as far west as Chicago, where every little kid knew they had supplied the shooters for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In spite of numerous attempts by Sal Borneo’s fraternal Unione Siciliana to maintain some semblance of peace through the assignment of sovereign duchies, splinter wars flared up sporadically along ethnic lines as old as Exodus, made more deadly by the prospect of financial reward and the presence of modern weaponry. It was Dodge City with choppers and V-8 Fords. All this Buckley laid at Charles Bowles’s wide-open door.

Late on the night of the 22nd, the lights of every newspaper and radio station in the city were burning as results trickled in from the polling places, where a record number of voters had turned out to decide whether Detroit should be the first large American city to give its mayor his walking papers. The trickle became a torrent, and by midnight it was all over, including the shouting: The public had voted by a majority of 30,000 to dump Bowles.

The
Banner
beat out every other election extra in the city by minutes. Two front pages—”SO LONG, CHARLIE” and “ELECTION FRAUD!”—the former illustrated with a four-column blow-up pulled from the morgue of Bowles waving to reporters as he boarded the train on his way to the Kentucky Derby, had been prepared days earlier; and in less, than ten minutes, with Ernie Swayles barking the numbers ward by ward into his ear through a receiver held by a copy boy, Walter DiVirgilio on the rewrite desk clattered out a twenty-inch story. Another boy tore each sheet out of the machine as it was finished and ran it down to typesetting. When the last one vanished, Walter lit up a cigar to celebrate, and by the time he had it half smoked the newsies were crying it in the street. Howard was there, the only man on the premises not in his shirtsleeves that sticky summer night, and shook everyone’s hand at least once. The festive air was fouled only a little by the fact that while Walter was typing, Buckley was reading the final tally over the air on the radio in Howard’s office. I don’t think any of us caught the significance then. Did the dinosaurs observe the furry little mammals darting between their legs and think of anything but how to make a meal of them?

I was there just for the ride. My column, a lightweight thing comparing the recall system to the old Roman custom of hacking to pieces those leaders who had overstayed their welcome, was being reprinted from the regular evening edition. I stayed at my desk, out of the way, with a cup of coffee laced with bourbon, noodling around with my first piece for syndication. I had discarded my first opening as pompous and stilted:

On paper, Jerry Buckley’s broadcasts read like a page of notes from a high school civics lecture—broken, half-formed, puerile. What makes them sound like the Sermon on the Mount? When time stills the voice and the red-hot topics are fossils, will future generations read the transcripts and condemn us for gullible half-wits?

It was past two A.M. and I had taken an entirely different tack without liking it any better when Ernie Swayles leaned in through the office door. The knot of his tie was down around his knees, he had sweated through his tan poplin jacket, and his nose, potato-shaped and cocked off-center, registered a blood-alcohol level in the mauve range. I could smell the junipers on his breath from where I was sitting.

“Hell of a fine job, Ern.”

“You hear?”

I misunderstood him. “Yeah, I’m here.” He was drunker than I’d thought.

“Who told you?”

“I was standing by Walter’s desk when you called him.”

I still wasn’t getting it. He looked more confused than I was. “I ain’t talked to Walter since I dictated my story. My phone was ringing when I got in just now. What’d
you
hear?”

“Let’s start over. What happened?”

“Buckley’s dead. They gunned him in the lobby of the LaSalle.”

“Who did?”

“The bulls don’t know yet. That’s who called me. I’m on my way down. Want to come?”

“No, I’ll wait.” The truth was I couldn’t leave my chair. Ever since that night on the ice I had reacted to shock with paralysis. Courage is the first casualty of experience.

He shrugged and left. When I could move, I upended my much-kicked steel wastebasket and bent down from my chair to sort through the crumpled sheets until I found that original opening. You never know what you can use.

The story Swayles came back with, and that kept the linotypists and pressmen on duty for several hours more while the front page was redone and another extra was put together, had something for everyone, including a mysterious dame.

After finishing his broadcast, Jerry Buckley had shut down his microphone in the LaSalle and descended the stairs from the mezzanine to the lobby, where he bought a copy of the
Times
election extra and sat down in one of the overstuffed leather chairs to read it. He had told someone at the studio that a woman had called him and asked him to meet her there. No name was mentioned. Since it was nothing unusual for him to make a late-night date, no one thought anything about it. Then, at 1:55
A.M
. Wednesday, July 23rd, three men dressed as businessmen entered the lobby. One hung back by the street door while his companions walked up to where Buckley was sitting and shot him eleven times in the head, chest, and stomach. He stood up, then fell forward. The three then walked out the way they had come. Buckley was dead when his face hit the floor.

Typically, Howard Wolfman had an idea for the front page of the extra-extra that exceeded the
Banner’s
abilities, and an immediate solution. Discovering that there was no headline type in the cases large enough for his purposes, he grabbed a young printer’s devil who carved duck decoys in his spare time and put him to work with a knife and a block of soft pine. Then he used the telephone to get Jensen out of bed and commissioned a cartoon for the front page.

There was a little delay as Howard paced the halls waiting for Swayles to come back and write the story, Walter DiVirgilio having left to make the rounds of the blind pigs after finishing the election piece. Then the gears went back into motion. Just before dawn the first bundle hit the stands. The black legend DEAD! covered half the front page in letters eight inches high—a little crooked because the young woodcarver hadn’t had time to make a neat job—with a recent smiling head shot of Buckley on the lower half next to Jensen’s cartoon. This was an angry thing showing a broken-nosed silhouette in cap and turtleneck leering down with gun smoking at a corpse sprawled at its feet. On the other side of the corpse, also looking down, stood a female figure in a head-scarf and dress with a blank face bearing a large question mark and a skeletal hand clutching its throat. There had been some grumbling about this choice of illustrations for Page One while a fresh shot taken and developed by Fred Ogilvie of Buckley’s body itself, crumpled on the floor of the LaSalle lobby, went inside, but Howard argued that every other paper in town had had a photographer there as well and would be sure to run the same gory picture up front.

His instincts proved right. It was an old-fashioned front page, reminiscent of the war, and as such it stood apart from all the others on the rack. Readers were more interested in the mysterious woman whose call had lured Buckley to his death than in staring at yet another picture of cold meat, and the
Banner
sold out quickly. I never worked for a publisher who understood his readership better than Howard Wolfman. He’d have been a bigger tycoon than Hearst if the tabloid business hadn’t suddenly gone bust a few years later.

The bulls had plenty of leads in the Buckley slaying, if they dared pursue them. Ex-Mayor Bowles might have hired it done, either as a parting shot or to remove the radio commentator as an obstacle to his re-election, for which he was automatically a candidate unless he withdrew his name from the ballot. Buckley had threatened repeatedly to expose the quiet men behind the Machines and Borneos who arranged deals with the city’s political structure, and they might have had him killed to ensure his silence. Other, darker suspicions involved the victim’s own alleged ties to the underworld and the possibility that he had double-crossed someone by supporting the recall. Then there were the romantics who suggested that the mystery woman was a scorned lover who had put him on the spot for revenge.

The investigation concentrated on the trigger men. Once again the streets were emptied of tramps, grifters, known gang members, and suspicious-looking strangers, and once again most of them were released because none of the witnesses had gotten a good enough look at the men in the lobby to pick them out of a line-up. The rest were held for carrying blackjacks or pistols without permits or whatever else the bulls could dig up or plant on them to gain time to work them over with lamp cords and rubber hoses in the basement of 1300 Beaubien. Police Commissioner Wilcox, sensitive to pressure from the newspapers and radio, not to mention the scrutiny of whoever might succeed Bowles, pushed for convictions in these lesser crimes when no confessions to the Buckley murder were forthcoming, as evidence of the new hard line. It didn’t work; when Frank L. Murphy was elected mayor on a liberal reform ticket, Wilcox was one of the first of the old regime to go.

The heat kept up. Aided by reinforcements from Homicide and Vice, Lieutenant Valery Kozlowski and the Prohibition Squad tipped over several hundred blind pigs and whorehouses in a two-week binge, destroying the fixtures and inventory and arresting everybody who looked as if he belonged in the mug file. One of these raids, on a house on Charlotte Street, turned into a gun battle when three U.S. Treasury agents who were enjoying a night off thought the place was being robbed and opened fire on the plainclothes detectives. Kozlowski killed one and was suspended from duty pending an investigation. Until he was reinstated, he was a
cause célèbre
among reporters who a few weeks earlier would have rolled over on a source to see him brought up on charges, crippled wife or no.

Despite the push, nobody was ever arrested for the murder in the LaSalle Hotel. The mystery woman was never identified and a spokesman for the police department announced that they had abandoned that search. Buckley received short play as a martyr, then went down under a mudslide of speculation, encouraged by the scandalmongering public journals, that the radio celebrity was nothing more than a blackmailer who had tried to shake down the wrong party. After all this time I still don’t know if he deserved that. Certainly there was no evidence to support it, other than a messy death at an inconvenient hour. As I said, remaining a hero had become twice as tough since the rise of the two-penny press.

Bowles’s ouster, and the area-wide crackdown after the killing (following the lead of their neighbor upriver, the police in River Rouge had closed down Hattie Long’s place, among others, ending her seven-month run of good luck and even confiscating her stuffed rooster) made it obvious that Detroit’s wide-open days had come to an end. Getting a job became more important than having a drink, and although the liquor racket continued to prosper, as it will in times good and bad, people stopped buying papers to read about the latest death in the gutter and turned directly to the Help Wanted ads. Unemployment went up, hemlines came down. In a few years a new kind of crime, daylight bank robbery, would capture the consciousness of a nation facing foreclosure, interring the bootlegger forever in a tomb of yellowed newsprint and empty bottles.