Whiskey River (14 page)

But in the summer of 1930 Detroit was still thirsty. On the last day of July, Andrea St. Charles reported:

Having returned from six weeks of newly wedded bliss in Atlantic City, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Dance wish to announce that they are At Home in their charming new cottage in St. Clair Shores—to everyone but you, Joey M.

W
HAT’S THE GOOD WORD,
Professor,” said Howard, “and is it in Greek or Latin today?”

I had just handed him tomorrow’s column, the second part of an interview with Ty Cobb, the first in depth since the former Tiger’s retirement from baseball two years ago. The first part had just gone on sale. The mean-tempered son of a bitch had started the session in his hotel room by throwing a beer bottle at me. The bump on my forehead was still tender.

“I don’t get you,” I said.

Howard leaned back in his chair in his triangular office overlooking Michigan and Woodward. It was a sweltering day in late August and he had his heavy silk jacket on and every window closed. It struck me then that he didn’t sweat. “ ‘Tyrus Raymond Cobb, who can barely read and write his own name, is a horsehide autodidact,’ ” he read from my column. “Define autodidact.”

“Self-taught.”

“At least you weren’t bluffing. Why not just say self-taught? People are going to think he abuses himself with a fielder’s glove.”

“That’s an adjective. I needed a noun. I don’t think our readers are that stupid.”

“I’ll bet you my box at Navin Field not one in ten of them knows what ‘autodidact’ means. When a man comes home from the line at Ford’s with the
Banner
under his arm, he wants to relax with it. He doesn’t want to have to get up and hunt for the dictionary.”

“This isn’t just about my choice of words, is it?”

He swiveled right and left, white hands folded across his spare middle. “Last month when you were writing about the recall, you quoted from Gibbon. Edward, not Floyd. When Buckley got it you wrote ten inches on the ephemeral nature of oratory that would snare you a Ph.D. from Princeton. I got a letter from a woman in Royal Oak asking if this fellow Demosthenes was free to address her Tuesday afternoon tea social. And let’s not forget that little lesson in Napoleonic tactics you gave us last January. I’m thinking of adding a poetry page and letting the newsboys go. A sheet this cerebral shouldn’t be shouted in the street.”

Lloyd Bundle had loved the Buckley thinkpiece, my first column for CNS; but I didn’t mention it. When a property goes into syndication, the newspaper of origin loses much of its authority over the content. Howard wouldn’t appreciate being reminded of the fact.

I said, “I got the idea from you. The day you hired me you said that phony picture in the Bowles press-conference issue would be remembered when Buckley was dead and his words were forgotten. When he was killed I thought maybe you knew something.”

“It was just an example. And I didn’t bring in the Greeks.”

“I’ll watch it.”

He swiveled left and right. “How’s your head?”

“Okay, if I hang my hat on my right ear.” I touched the lump.

“The darn cracker laid out my photographer when I was with the
Plain Dealer.
It cost Hughie Jennings five hundred dollars to avoid a lawsuit. Nice to know the old boy still has his arm.” He laid my column on top of his OUTGOING basket. “It won’t kill them to learn a new word just this once. Are you free for a drink?”

“I’ve got a date.”

“Hattie Long?”

I paused. “Who follows me, that little red-headed sneak from composition?”

“I was at the Oriole Terrace with my wife when you walked in with her one night back in April. We ran a spread on local bordellos in the first issue, when she was set up on Randolph. That’s how I recognized her.”

“Any objections?”

“Not as long as you don’t leave any crabs on the toilet seat down the hall.”

“You need a vacation, Howard. You’re starting to talk like the
Banner.”

He smiled his measured smile. “Who do you think taught it to talk?”

The city was enjoying a quiet spell after the carnage of July. The Tigers were sliding out of the pennant race with a win-loss record of half and half for the season, and it looked as if it would be St. Louis and Philadelphia in the Series. Bowles was serving as mayor pro-tem until an election could be got up. It was summer in Detroit, and weekends the city reconvened on Belle Isle in the middle of the Detroit River to picnic, play softball, and watch the Prohibition Navy chasing rumrunners. The runners, long on capital and unhampered by bureaucracy, had the best boats and the most powerful engines—the fastest craft afloat anywhere in the world—and were almost never caught. When they were, nine times out of ten they dumped their cargo overboard with floats and bags of salt attached, then when the salt dissolved and the floats carried the crates to the surface, they came back under cover of darkness to reap the harvest. The less showy spurned boats entirely and hauled the stuff across the floor of the lake with winches concealed in service stations.

Early in the month, a green Nash sedan had cruised past the rented house on Howard Street and a man wearing overalls and a cloth cap had thrown an incendiary bomb through a window, blowing out the rest of the windows and unrolling orange streamers of name out through the empty frames. A box of hand grenades stored inside exploded all at once and tore off the roof. Five engine companies spent the next several hours pouring water over the blaze and ducking small-arms fire as boxes of ammunition went up like strings of firecrackers. Casualties included a woman next door who had suffered a concussion when the grenade blast hurled her off her feet, and a milkhorse blown to bits while waiting for its master to finish his break in a blind pig in the basement of a house across the street. Neighbors told police they had seen the occupants of the demolished house throwing suitcases into a car early that morning. The owner was located and questioned about his tenants, but said he knew nothing about them beyond the fact that he was paid in cash the first day of every month by a big, good-looking, curly-haired young man who dressed like Rod La Rocque. The owner spoke only Polish and read a Polish-language newspaper. Shown a picture of Jack Dance, he nodded and said that was the man. Jack was arrested in St. Clair Shores for keeping dangerous explosives in a residential section and released the next day on $2,500 bail. But the explosion was the only big noise that month. The
Banner
suggested that Joey Machine peruse its classified ads and buy a second-hand aeroplane “if he expects to keep up with the Dances.”

Over a sunset dinner at the Book-Cadillac—Jack’s home until the trouble with Joey—I raised my Zippo to light the cigarette in Hattie’s amber holder. She ignored it and struck a match. She was sitting with her back to a bright west window, but she was starting to show her age just the same, in hairline cracks around the eyes. I preferred the cracks to the black glop some women used to cover them. I had a few myself, courtesy of my thirty-sixth birthday.

I said, “You haven’t seen the new apartment. I moved out of the place on John R.”

“I’m getting a cold.”

“Sorry to hear it. You know, I never actually met anyone with a summer cold before. My mother always said they were the worst.”

I was babbling. I had spent most of the previous night parked in my Ford off East Jefferson on a tip that two Detroit police officers were making nightly withdrawals from a liquor warehouse there. The bulls never showed, and Fred Ogilvie, who had sat up with me with a camera in his lap, had called in sick that morning. I’d reported to work on two hours’ sleep and was still running on ethyl ten hours later.

Hattie flicked ash into a glass tray and said nothing.

“New place open yet?” I asked.

“I haven’t decided if it will. Joey and I lost a bundle in Rouge. They smashed the slot machines.”

“Speaking of Bundles, Lloyd paid me today.” I produced a roll from my pocket. “How much do you need to walk around on?”

She looked at the bills. “Changing professions?”

“Humor me. I’ve never been in a position to make a loan before.”

“I can get all I need from Joey. Put it away before you get rolled.”

“In here?”

“It’s still Detroit, isn’t it?”

I pocketed the roll. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. You’re who you are and there’s no good trying to make you someone else. I don’t know why I worry about it.”

“Sorry about the slots.”

“To hell with the slots and the rooster too. I was getting sick of schlepping them all over the East Side. I’m talking about you and me. Mostly you.”

“What’d I do, forget a birthday?”

“Where were you last night?”

“Working. Did we have a date?”

“Where were you night before last?”

“Same thing. I had an interview up in Warren.”

“What about all day today?”

Now I had a line on where this was going. “All right, I work a lot. I’m worth what they pay me. As I recall, you and I never made any deals about how much time we’d spend together. This is the first time we’ve been out in almost a month. I didn’t even know where you were until last week.”

“That’s the way I wanted it.”

“Oh.” I sat back.

“Then when you tracked me down I thought, what the hell, we might as well talk. I’m thirty-nine, Connie. A thirty-nine-year-old whore and I’m running around with a newshawk who wears the same shirt three days without changing because he’s never home.”

“I changed today. If I thought my wardrobe meant so much to you—”

“Shit.” She plucked the cigarette out of its holder and stabbed it out. “For a guy who makes his living from his powers of observation, you’re as dull as a handle. You don’t even know when a girl’s proposing to you.”

I felt the old paralysis. As I sorted through my vocabulary, the glitter in her eyes dimmed slowly, like the incandescence in a lightbulb after the power goes out. Finally she dropped the cigarette holder into her purse and snapped it shut.

“Yeah. Well, like the man said, if you don’t ask. Can you give me a lift across town? I’m staying with one of the girls.”

“I didn’t say no,” I said. “It isn’t like you asked me out to the track.”

“I can see how tough it is for you not to jump up and down.”

“It’s not a bad life. What makes you think I want to change it?”

“You don’t have to. I’ll catch a cab out front.” She stood.

“Sit down, for Christ’s sake. Since when don’t we talk?”

She sat. The light hadn’t gone out entirely. “You’re a middle-aged man, Connie. You want to wind up banging a typewriter in a corner booth at seventy because if you retire you’ll have nobody to stay home with?”

“And bang?” I grinned.

She lifted her lip like Gloria Swanson. “Honey, if you’re still banging ’em at seventy, I’ll still be getting banged at seventy-three. Hattie’s learned some things staring at ceilings.”

“Don’t talk about yourself in the third person. You remind me of Andrea.”

“She’s seen some ceilings, I bet.”

The waiter came with our bill and left with our dishes. “A lot’s happened to me this year,” I said. “Give me some time to sort it all out.”

“I can give you a week. That’s as long as I can expect Joey to wait to hear if I decide to reopen.”

“I guess you won’t starve.”

“Starving’s for suckers.”

I put money on top of the bill. “Is this why you didn’t go with me to Jack’s reception?”

“I really did have the Elks convention. But I was pretty sore at you then. I was still stewing over that crack you made about being drunk enough to propose to me. I couldn’t trust myself among all that wedded bliss. Not that those two belong in a storybook,” she added. “Jack showed up at my place later.”

“I thought they went straight to the station.”

“No, I mean after the honeymoon.”

“Your place was closed by then.”

“It was July nineteenth. I know because it was the last Saturday before the bulls tipped me over.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“I’ve known him as long as you have, remember? I ribbed him, asked if the little woman was waiting in the car. Why’s it so important?”

We were standing now. The waiter reappeared and helped her on with her shawl, diaphanous violet silk embroidered with swastikas for good luck. I sometimes wonder what she did with it after Schickelgruber took over in Germany.

“Maybe it
isn’t
important,” I said when the car was brought around. “But Jack didn’t come back officially until the thirty-first. Nine days after Jerry Buckley was killed.” I tipped the attendant a quarter and we got in.

I
HAD MOVED THE
stuff that counted out of the old apartment, sold the rest, and furnished a larger flat—I preferred to call this one a flat—on the sixth floor of a building with an elevator on Park. The change was dramatic. I had a bathroom all to myself, a good view of the trees and shrubbery that gave the street its name, and a Westinghouse refrigerator in the kitchen; no more balancing-act carrying; a trayful of water from the icebox to the sink. But all I could think of when I was there was what a shame it was I hardly ever saw it.

On the Friday evening preceding the Labor Day weekend, I stood on the sidewalk in front of the building watching the traffic thicken. The cars were all packed with trunks and kids and red-and-yellow beach balls. It was a big time of year in Detroit, bigger than Christmas. Labor Day, arriving in the old-gold part of summer, was a reminder that the days of swimsuits and seersucker had numbers. Before long it would be overcoats and galoshes and the seven-month nightmare of winter on the Great Lakes. Everyone you saw at the wheel of a northbound car had that fixed grimace of someone determined to have a wonderful time even if it wiped out the family.

I had been standing there five minutes when a dream car, midnight blue with ivory side-panels and wire wheels, separated itself from the near lane and glided over to the curb. It was a Duesenberg, the J Club sedan, as long as a baseball diamond and loaded with horsepower. Jack Dance leaned over from the driver’s seat and opened the door on my side. He was wearing a white linen suit with a straw boater tipped over his left eye.