Whiskey River (20 page)

In command of the manhunt, Chief of Detectives Kozlowski fell back on the old Prohibition Squad formula and pulled in every thug and grifter not on speaking terms with an attorney in hopes of shaking loose the whereabouts of the killer and his associates. Lon Camarillo, making a run across the river at the time of the shooting and thus unaware of the excitement, landed his reconditioned JN-4 with a load of Old Log Cabin in front of the barn he used for a hangar in Oakland County and was arrested as soon as he stepped down. Andy Kramm, driving Jack’s LaSalle, tried to ram a sheriff’s blockade on Grand River west of Outer Drive, lost heart at the sight of the waiting Thompsons and shotguns, and surrendered. Both men received the Beaubien Basement Treatment but swore through bloody and swollen lips they didn’t know where Jack was. Despite sound alibis they were charged with accessory to murder and jailed. Ironically, a square-jawed shot of a younger, less cadaverous Charles Austin Camarillo in dress uniform with Army Air Corps wings on his chest appeared in the newspapers next to an old front-and-profile mug of Andy Kramm from an early arrest for gambling.

The dragnet now concentrated on the gang’s leader and Bass Springfield, who police believed had manned the wheel during the attempt on Joey Machine. Celestine Brown, 26, a colored file clerk employed by the Ford Motor Company, was arrested for questioning, and because no lawyer appeared with a writ, underwent stripping and spraying for cooties at the Detroit House of Correction. She admitted that she lived with Springfield but claimed ignorance of his current locality. She was booked for unlawful cohabitation. Tom Danzig presented himself at headquarters to state in the presence of the detective chief and a police stenographer that he hadn’t seen or spoken to his brother in weeks. He was questioned hard, but without rubber truncheons, and allowed to leave once he’d signed his statement. Even a Turk like Kozlowski knew better than to turn a member of the press on the spit. As for me, when Tom’s story got out, I believed him, if no one else did. I’d known distant cousins who were closer than these two sons of a Jewish watch repairman.

Meanwhile, Hermann Gabriel wasn’t letting any dust settle on his new lieutenant’s bars. On the Wednesday after Sylvester Street, he piloted a flying wedge of unmarked police vehicles led by a Mack truck through the steel-reinforced doors of a warehouse on Orleans and coughed lung-tissue into a borrowed handkerchief while his men handcuffed Ernst Adolf Scherwein, an eighty-year-old brewmeister late of Heidelberg, Germany, and nine of his assistants. Then they set to work staving in kegs and barrels and a wooden vat as big as Grand Circus Park with axes and sleeve bars and stood back to watch the green beer gush out, its fumes making the fixtures wobble and weave like an iron fire escape on a hot day.

The raid on Jack Dance’s operation was the first on a local brewery since 1919. A blind pig was nothing. It could be tipped over, gutted and punched full of holes at midnight, and then re-open the next evening. Making beer required a huge investment, much of which went to officials whose business it then became to hold their noses against the stink of fermenting hops and find interest elsewhere when the trucks trundled out with their cargo. Gabriel was no ex-Commissioner Emmons, grandstanding in the morning and seeking new employment in the afternoon. He knew that in the climate surrounding the violent death of a fourteen-year-old girl, no bent ward-heeler was about to draw attention to himself by complaining. It was as brilliant a payback for a ten-year-old demotion as the city had ever seen.

Every police-sanctioned scribe for miles around attended the press conference in Gabriel’s office the morning after the raid. There, amid the chewing gum-and-tobacco mulch that only a parade of apathetic bulls could bring to a building barely seven years old, we jammed like lemmings into the glassed-in room with its institutional green desk and kicked-in file cabinets and interoffice correspondence going brown and curling on the corkboard while the lieutenant read from a prepared statement. In between sentences he hawked and expectorated into a succession of paper tissues which he plucked from a box on the desk, used, scrutinized, wadded, and tossed into a steel wastebasket. They were the first I’d ever seen; I was fascinated by how quickly they filled it to overflowing. His narrow grim jaundiced face brought back memories of Calvin Coolidge, and he had puffy eyes and chestnut-colored hair slicked back with Vaseline that showed a ridge where his Panama settled when he went outdoors. The statement ran: “After weeks of surveillance upon the warehouse building on Orleans Street, and upon obtaining a warrant as required by law …” I could have written it myself without leaving the office.

When it was finished, Gabriel fielded a handful of the dozens of questions, then got up from behind the desk and towed the reporters out into the squad room, where he turned them over to officers who would escort them to the property room and let the shutterbugs take pictures of the weapons confiscated in the raid. It was a staple, that shot of slab-faced detectives standing behind a table displaying handguns of various makes and calibers and boxes of ammunition and the inevitable Thompson, in this case recruited most likely from the department’s own arsenal because simple brewers seldom armed themselves so fiercely. I was still in the office when the lieutenant returned. He raised his eyebrows, but went around and took his seat without pausing. “Minor, isn’t it?” He had a thin, Georgia Cracker kind of voice, aged years beyond his late thirties.

I nodded. “What’s shutting down Dance’s brewery got to do with the Connor shooting?”

“It was in the statement. It’s half of a two-pronged assault. While Chief Kozlowski’s anti-racketeering task force concentrates on hunting Dance down, the Prohibition Squad will continue to carry out raids on his places of business. Did you see that picture
Dracula?”

“I missed it.”

“The book’s better. Everybody’s after this bum Count Dracula who bites women in the neck and sucks out their blood. He’s got to stretch out in one of these coffins full of dirt from his backyard by sunup or he’ll croak, so they find them and smash them up and scatter the dirt so he’ll have to come out in the open. Jack Dance is no different. Staying underground takes dough. Cut off his sources of income and you flush him out.”

“He doesn’t have any other source except his wife,” I said. “The brewery was it.”

“So maybe it won’t take so long.”

“You wouldn’t be taking advantage of the situation to dump over as many places as you can before the neckties upstairs cut you off at the ankles.”

He chuckled. It turned into a coughing jag and he spat into a tissue and inspected it before flipping it onto the pile. “Great invention. You wouldn’t believe my old laundry bill. If you want to write that I’m the only square man in a bad town, I won’t stop you. It’s better than making some kind of Robin Hood out of that crum Dance. That’s part of how we got in this fix.”

“Save it for the newsreels. I think you’re just getting yours for all those footbaths you took when they stuck you back on the beat for doing your job. Would you care to comment on that?”

“It’s a crock of shit. You can quote me.”

“If it weren’t for that crum Dance you wouldn’t be behind that desk.”.

“I wasn’t unhappy in the Bottom,” he said. “One time this big buck, twelve hours out of the joint, came looking for his girl in a whorehouse on Hastings. Someone decided to make a fight and five niggers got stabbed to death, six with the girl. If you didn’t hang onto something when you walked through later you could slip and fall on your ass in the blood. The boyfriend wasn’t cut into so many pieces they couldn’t be sewed back on, so we booked him and he got ninety-nine in Jackson. The fight got three lines next to the shipping reports. This puke gangster hits some little whitebread brat with a stray bullet and he’s Public Enemy Number One on every front page in town.”

“What’s your point?”

“When the hand’s poker you don’t play pinochle. When it was Hastings nobody gave a shit, so we cut one out of the herd and fed him to the system. When it’s Sylvester we do it with brass bands and bright lights.”

“Dance had just the brewery. If you hit more places you’ll be raiding the competition. Machine and Borneo, the Purples.”

He shrugged. “After the shooting’s over, who’s going to go back and sort it all out? Meanwhile we do some good.”

“And incidentally get the rest of them sore enough at Dance for bringing heat to do your job for you.”

“Bowles was on the right track about letting the rats thin out their own ranks,” he said. “He just didn’t know how to use it.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

When I was at the door, he snatched a fresh tissue out of the box and folded it. “This conversation is off the record, by the way. If you use it I’ll have you banned from the building.”

The hunt continued through December. Blind pigs were turned inside out and doors in hotels and private houses were kicked in all over the city, but finally even the police grew tired of saying they were “following promising leads,” and the papers began to sneer all over again at official incompetence the way they had under Mayor Bowles. The
Banner
ran a Jensen cartoon showing a bunch of fat-assed Keystone Kops tripping over their own flat feet and pointing guns at one another, “Doing the Jack Dance.” One of them was labeled “Chief Kozlowski.” Things got busy again after a group calling itself Citizens for a Safe Detroit, made up mostly of the wives of Ford and General Motors board members, offered a reward of $5,000 for information leading to the arrest of Mary Margaret Connor’s killer, but only because the crackpots had had some time to rest since the initial flurry; one old woman in Corktown turned in her seventy-five-year-old landlord. Christmas came and went. It was generally believed that Jack had left the city.

About eleven o’clock Monday night, December the 29th, when Howard and Jensen had gone home to bed and I was wrestling with a column about life in the Black Bottom, my telephone rang. Getting my own line had been one of the perks of syndication.

“Minor, the
Banner.”

“Connie, this is Hattie.”

I took my foot off the Remington. “How are you, Hattie?”

“I tried your apartment first. Are you alone?”

“Just me and the guy on the night desk.”

“Can you get rid of him?”

“I guess.”

“Do it, okay? And hang around.”

“How long?” She’d hung up.

George Capstone, the night editor, had a new pregnant wife at home. He didn’t argue when I told him I’d watch the desk. Forty-five minutes later I was sitting alone in the city room, the pool of light from the desk lamp the only illumination on that floor, when Bass Springfield came forward out of the shadows.

He moved with an unreal silence for his size, as if the darkness in the open door to the hallway had grown deep enough to have mass and animation. He was wearing his old cloth cap and the raccoon coat he had worn the night I met him. It gave him no small resemblance to a grizzly, or a mythical man-beast from my father’s books on the old legends, with his lower features showing in the light shining up through the green glass shade. The light glistened on the big automatic in his right hand, the one with the trigger guard filed off to make room for his misshapen finger. He stood there without speaking for a hundred years. Then his head turned and I saw the angle of his jaw. It needed shaving.

“Clear, boss.”

Jack made a lot more noise coming in. His camel’s hair coat was open, swishing, and his rapid footsteps on the linoleum floor mocked his preference for automatic fire. Despite the display of nervous energy, he looked tired. The green light trapped under the brim of his hat found lines and hollows I’d never seen in his young face, a day’s growth of whiskers. His smile was a self-conscious imitation of the broad grin I knew.

Before I could say anything, his hands came out of his coat pockets with the Lugers in them. I felt my limbs go dead. Then he laid both pistols on the desk.

“I’m bushed, Connie,” he said. “Call the bulls and tell them to make a bed for me at County.”

J
ACK
D
ANCE SURRENDERS TO
BANNER
COLUMNIST

Too long.

JACK DANCE SURRENDERS TO
BANNER

Too passive.

BANNER
CAPTURES JACK THE RIPPER

Run it.

(Picture on the front page of Chief Kozlowski, Jack Dance, and Connie Minor, the columnist looking small and slight next to the two big men as posed by Fred Ogilvie.)

Inside:

Minor’s Majors

BY
C
ONNIE
M
INOR

A furtive and exhausted Jack Dance, hunted by the police in two countries for the murder last month of St. Benedictine honor student Mary Margaret Connor, walked into the
Banner
office early this morning and gave himself up to this writer, asking him to intercede with the police in his arrest.

Asked why he didn’t surrender himself to the police directly, Dance, who refused to disclose where he had been hiding, said, “The papers stab you in the back. They don’t shoot you in the head.”

In fact he told me, off the record, that Hattie had put him up in a second-story room of her new place on Monroe east of Greektown, four blocks from police headquarters, almost in the epicenter of the largest manhunt since Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb raped and killed the Frank boy. “No Man’s Land, Connie. Safest place to piss on the sidewalk in town is right in front of Thirteen Hundred. The bulls look right at you, they don’t see you because you can’t be there.”

“Accommodating of Hattie,” I said, “considering she doesn’t like to take chances with her business.”

“Oh, she’s the goods.”

I let it go. It didn’t mean anything anymore anyway. I was conscious of Springfield hovering behind me, the raccoon coat smelling of mothballs. “What happened on Sylvester?”

“Off the books?”

I nodded.

Jack bummed a Chesterfield and let me light it. He was straddling a chair backwards facing the desk with his arms folded on top of the backrest. “I had a clear shot. Bass took me close enough to bounce a baseball off the guinea son of a bitch’s schmuck. Then that big Polack of his seen me and knocked him down like a fucking tenpin. I guess I should’ve used single-fire and took my time, but I had the full auto in my hand already. Then that girl ran right into it. I bet her old man promised her the strop if she was late, fast as she was running. I stopped and we got out of there, but she was down by then.” He took a drag, coughed, and put the cigarette out in an old burn-hole on the desk. “Never did get the hang of these things. I don’t know how I could’ve not hit nobody else. You should’ve seen that fatty—whatsizname, Pesto?”