Whiskey River (19 page)

I had not moved since the first shot. Now the musical horn of the Duesenberg climbed my spine and I turned and saw Bass Springfield’s face working behind the windshield, a hood’s length away from the back of the LaSalle. He was gesturing wildly out his open window. I slid across the seat, pins and needles pricking my legs and feet as feeling returned below the belt, and stomped on the starter. It growled several times before I realized I hadn’t switched on the ignition. I did that and the engine caught. I stalled it twice trying to work the clutch, but on the third try I hit a happy combination of gears and gas and drove the car away from the bridge. The Duesenberg’s bumper clipped the LaSalle’s taillight as it swung onto the planks. I got out and followed on foot, crunching over the broken tinted glass.

Springfield and Andy Kramm were both out of the car when I reached it, Andy clinging uselessly to his beloved machine gun. Jack was sitting on the planks with one leg doubled under him, trying to ram a fresh clip into one of the Lugers and missing. The entire left side of his suitcoat including the sleeve was slick with blood. It had slid out under the cuff and stained his hand and gun so that you couldn’t tell where the flesh left off and the metal began. “Cocksucking wop,” he was saying. “Too yellow to do his own double-cross.”

“Mr. Jack, we gots to get you to a doctor.” Springfield was trying to circle his arms under Jack’s and smearing himself all over.

“It was Frankie Orr.”

Jack didn’t hear me. He was still trying to reload the Luger. “Wop cocksucker.”

Andy said, “Get him in back. We’ll use Teague. He don’t report bullet wounds.”

I told Jack again it was Frankie Orr. I don’t know why it was so important at that moment. There was blood all over, although not as much as Mr. Norman had shed. Jack stopped playing with the pistol.

“How do you know?”

The question distracted Andy. He straightened, watching me. He was still holding the Thompson. Its black muzzle was broad, a single flaring nostril. “Jack said you’re the one set up the meet.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know, but you know it was Orr.”

I couldn’t think of a way to say it.

“Lay off that,” Jack said. “He’s gutty. He ain’t stupid.” Springfield had his arms around him now and was dragging him backwards in the direction of the Duesenberg. Jack’s heels made smeary lines in the blood on the planks. “Drive the LaSalle back, Connie. Tell Vivian I won’t be home. Don’t say I got shot.”

She guessed anyway, when I brought the car back without him. She was on her way out somewhere in a white lambswool belted topcoat and a cloche hat with a clamshell purse in her hand. I said someone would be in touch. She didn’t say a lot, and what she did say I don’t remember. I don’t think it was, “Jack has ideas.”

It was a near thing. I was told later that the edge of the pattern had ground up Jack’s left upper arm as he turned, and pellets had lodged close to the heart. Too close anyway for Dunstan Teague, a former emergency room specialist at Detroit Receiving who had lost his license to practice medicine when he was caught removing drugs from a locked cabinet without authorization; he merely flushed out and stitched up those wounds and gave the patient a tetanus shot after plucking the lead out of the arm. Jack carried the remaining pellets to the grave. He had lost a deal of blood and burned up with fever, but it broke, and after ten days on a cot in Teague’s spare room he returned home twenty pounds lighter with his arm in a sling and a dashing new white streak in his curly hair where it tumbled over his forehead. He gained back the weight and found the use of his arm, but he never lost the streak. It gave him a branded look, like a man I had read about in a rival tabloid who was struck by lightning and bore the mark of the bolt in a dead white line from the crown of his head to the ball of one foot for the rest of his days.

Something else had changed, too. The go-to-hell spirit was still there and always would be, but he didn’t seem to enjoy himself as much. At times, when the world was turning around him, he would sit absentmindedly rubbing the spot where the pellets had entered his chest, and the expression on his face would put me in mind of his more thoughtful brother.

When I visited him in St. Clair Shores the first time after his return, I was stopped and frisked in the front hall by a pair of young men I had never seen before. Vivian rescued me, explaining that they were reinforcements hired by Andy. They had Purple all over them. Jack greeted me in the parlor, looking more relaxed than I had ever seen him in slacks and an open-necked shirt. He kept taking his arm out of the sling to light cigarettes and twirl the knob on the radio, looking for the bouncy music he liked. I told him how I knew the man with the shotgun was Frankie Orr. It was the first and only time I mentioned the incident at the Griswold House to anyone.

“Clyde Norman.” He rubbed his chest. “He carried the bag for Borneo in the Bottom when I was delivering there for Joey. I knew back then he was dipping.”

“I wonder why Orr hooked up with Joey.”

“Frankie’s a whore. I guessed that the first time I seen him.”

“Maybe it’s not just him. Maybe Borneo’s with Joey now. It makes sense when you think about it. That play at the bridge was too complicated for Joey.”

“I thought he was a fucking ghost till I seen the metal shining through the holes I put in that vest. I tried for his head then but I guess I missed.”

“He looked pretty healthy swimming away. What do you think, is it Machine and Borneo?”

“It don’t matter. Joey’s dead. He’ll fall down when he gets the message.”

In spite of what he said, the streets were quiet for a long time after the bridge fight. Meanwhile there was an election and Frank L. Murphy stepped into the mayor’s office handily. The Belle Isle incident notwithstanding, it was an indication of how much progress the problem of economic depression had made beyond the problem of lawlessness that he was voted in on his promise to create more jobs. There were more people in bread lines than in blind pigs.

Jack’s brother Tom was starting to get bylines in the
Times.
He wrote about everything but the policy racket, and it was evident that Joey Machine had abandoned his public relations strategy. I saw Tom at press conferences. He was getting better at asking questions, but I couldn’t shake the conviction that he wasn’t cut out for journalism. He was no plunger.

When I finally got around to calling Hattie again, a strange woman answered and told me she’d changed addresses. The woman didn’t know where she was living now.

October leaves fell, November gales swept them into the gutters. On the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving—a big weekend for the numbers, when everyone bet on 620 in honor of the year the Pilgrims landed—Joey Machine, accompanied by his bodyguard, Dom Polacki, and his bookkeeper, a grave fat man known as “Presto” DiPesto, but whose birth name was Aaron Stahl, left a house on Sylvester Street where it was rumored the accounts were kept on every vice game on the East Side and started walking toward a coffee shop on the corner. A dark blue Duesenberg with ivory side-panels drew abreast of them and a young man with dark curly hair streaked white in front cranked down the back window on the curb side and fired at them sixteen times with a machine pistol. He missed all three of them but killed a fourteen-year-old girl on her way home from early Mass.

Is this city and this State to be ruled by the assassin or by the forces of organized government?

—
The Detroit Times

There is more law in the end of a nightstick than in any court in the land.

—old Detroit policeman’s saying

T
HE MURDER OF MARY
Margaret Connor made the front page of every evening edition in the city and went out over the wires to both coasts. For days afterward, anyone who wasn’t aware that she was an honor student at St. Benedictine, took piano lessons Thursday afternoons, wanted to be a nurse, and looked a little like Freddie Bartholomew with her page boy cut and parochial collar and dark solemn eyes, didn’t read newspapers. If she had ever sat in a mud puddle in her Communion dress or kicked the milkman in the shin or stuck her tongue out at Sister’s back or otherwise behaved as a normal healthy little girl, her teachers and her parents’ neighbors didn’t report it. Death’s like that.

Based on eyewitness descriptions of the man in the Duesenberg, and of the car itself, there was little doubt concerning the identity of her killer. Joey Machine, who observed few laws but his own and often violated those, broke the old mob rule of silence when, pausing to address reporters waiting for him on the steps of Detroit Police Headquarters, where he had gone to make his statement, he said: “That kike’s bugs. If the bulls don’t put him down, somebody else will.” He had on a new homburg and overcoat and a square of sticking-plaster on his right cheek where some of the skin had been scraped off when Dom Polacki body-checked him into a row of trash cans to take him out of the line of fire. A white and shaken DiPesto had made no public comment at all. A CPA who had never before been shot at and didn’t own a gun, he had stood frozen in the middle of the sidewalk while the bullets sped around him. He left Joey’s employ soon after and showed up later under his real name as a candidate for Roosevelt’s Brain Trust until his past caught up with him and he was forced to withdraw his application.

A search of Jack’s house by Detroit police and Wayne County sheriff’s deputies turned only Vivian Dance, who said she hadn’t seen Jack since Saturday night. She was brought in for further questioning—meaning she would be stripped by matrons and deloused to teach her a little humility and to demonstrate some results for the press—but Nathan Rabinowitz, Jack’s lawyer, was waiting at headquarters with a writ of habeas corpus when they got there and she left with him. It would be years before an internal investigation revealed Rabinowitz’s paid source of information in the department, by which time the lawyer had retired to a brick mansion on Mackinac Island.

The day after the shooting, the Duesenberg was found parked on East Larned a stone’s throw from the spanking new Windsor Tunnel. This sparked wide speculation that the fugitive had fled to Canada until a U.S. Customs official blandly pointed out that a man walking through a vehicular tunnel would have drawn some attention. Nevertheless Jack Dance was seen riding a streetcar in Windsor. Others reported him ordering bacon and eggs in a diner on Kercheval, reading a newspaper at a bus stop in Monroe near the Ohio border, and wandering around the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. When a service station on Fort Street was reported robbed by a man answering Jack’s description Monday night, bulls flooded the place, but the attendant who called the police turned out to have a record of burglary convictions under another name and was arrested without fanfare.

In the midst of all this, Mayor Murphy announced a reshuffling in the police department. These things always start out nobly on paper, a major housecleaning and ventilation, but prove disappointing in practice. Commissioner Wilcox was out, replaced by a murky committee until a permanent substitute could be named. Casting about for a chief of detectives, the mayor’s eye lit upon the impressive arrest record—including the first rap for John Danzig—of one Valery Kozlowski, lieutenant in charge of the Prohibition Squad. Thus the plainclothes division acquired a new leader, a large hard fat man with tiny feet, a stogie squashed between his molars, and an eleven-thousand-dollar annual mortgage on his horse ranch outside Kalamazoo that he presumably paid out of his forty-dollar-a-week salary as a civil servant. In turn—mainly from default, the position being a notorious dead end except when reform fever was in the air—the Prohibition unit went to a former sergeant named Hermann Gabriel.

Gabriel, a dish-chested tubercular with a long yellow face and ears that turned out under a Panama hat he wore in all seasons, should have been retired on a medical disability years earlier, but because the job he’d held for five years—investigating Negro murders in the Black Bottom—was an even more thankless one than enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, personnel regulations concerning health and fitness and danger to the community had been waived. The glitch was that, through a chain of circumstances no one could have planned or predicted, for the first time in the squad’s twelve-year history it had come under the supervision of a reasonably honest man. Gabriel had been broken down from motor patrolman to bunion duty back in 1920 for arresting the driver of a beer truck after the truck went through a stop sign on Jefferson. Although he had not repeated the mistake and had managed by doing his job and closing his eyes to the indiscretions of his superiors to be promoted to detective sergeant, he lived within the means dictated by his station and kept no flashy blondes or secret bank accounts, or at least none that could be traced; and they tried, once they learned what he was about. He would be heard from.

A special
Banner
Sunday edition on the Connor slaying was in the chase when Howard Wolfman entered the print shop pounding his palm with a rolled-up copy of the
News
and ordered the front page taken out and re-made. The new layout featured a six-column blow-up of Jack Dance holding the cake knife at his wedding reception under the eighteen-point head JACK THE RIPPER! Chet Mooney, covering the story for the
News,
had tossed off the moniker in his lead and Howard, who kept up on the competition the way a brilliant surgeon studies medical journals, had decided it was too good to waste on the broadsheet press. Ernie Swayles’s account, written while the bulls were still counting the bullet holes, was as blaring as the new headline, but factual to the ground, a highwire act he pulled off as neatly drunk as he did sober. Six years later an equally balanced piece on Father Coughlin and the Francis Townsend presidential campaign had him primed to take over
Collier’s
Midwest bureau when his liver got him first.

As the paper’s resident expert on Jack Dance, I filed a noncommittal sidebar column on his marksmanship and cool nerve under pressure. Had I known where it would lead, I might have chosen another tack.