Whiskey River (28 page)

“That’s what the call was about. I guess he trusts you. Use one of my people he might get his kike head blown out from under his hat. That’s how he thinks, that bughouse killer, that murderer of Catholic schoolgirls.”

I stood. “Excuse me, Mr. Machine, but the hell with this. I’m not a messenger.”

The telephone on the desk rang, loud in the echoing emptiness of the garage.

“Answer it, it’s for you.” Joey looked at the clock on the wall, an electric one with a glowing face advertising Fisk tires. “He’s ten minutes late. Just like a yid, too cheap to buy a fucking watch.”

After two more rings I sat down and lifted the cup off the hook, leaning forward with my elbows planted on the desk. “Hello?”

“Connie?” He sounded out of breath, as he always did when the fever was on him.

“Why me, Jack?”

“I thought you could use the break. I been reading your column.”

A dream come true: I had a gangster for a critic. Aloud I said, “Christ, Jack, fifty thousand bucks. If everybody in town who would hit me over the head and run off with it stood in line to do it, you know how long the line would be?”

“As long as you don’t tell nobody, you got no better chance of getting hit on the head for carrying fifty grand than fifty cents.” I heard riotous music on his end. “It had to be you, Connie, like the song. I’d ask Tom, but it’s like I don’t know him; he’s
Times
now, he don’t hang out with no racket boys.”

Mention of his brother made me think of Vivian. I asked him if she knew where he was.

“I called her today. I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t talk long in case Joey had one of his pet bulls put a trace on the line. You going to help me out, Connie?”

“I’m thinking. Where are you?”

“There’s a booth in the lobby of the Guardian Building. I’ll call you there in ten minutes.”

“It’ll be closed.”

“I know the guard, he’s expecting you. Tell him you’re from me. Listen, if you don’t answer the phone, I’ll know you’re not interested.” The line clicked and buzzed.

Joey watched me hang up. I told him about the telephone booth. The Guardian was right down the street at 500.

“So you going to do it?”

“Who else gets the story?”

When he tried to appear sardonic he looked just like a kewpie. “You kidding? Soon as you leave I’ll call Winchell, tell him all about how I got shook down like some snotnose kid in the street.”

I rose and hefted the suitcase. It didn’t seem heavy enough for what it contained. Money never does, physically.

He turned down his cuffs and buttoned them. Something had been consummated, a commitment had been made.

“I’ll call,” I said.

He put a hand on the hand holding the suitcase. The little eyes crowding the big nose were murky. “A scribe could live the rest of his life in Mexico on dough like this,” he said. “That wouldn’t take as long as he’d think.”

“I’ll call,” I repeated.

He withdrew the hand.

Walking down Griswold carrying the case, drawing a straight line through the circles of light under the streetlamps, I thought, the President doesn’t walk around with fifty thousand dollars. Babe Ruth doesn’t. It wasn’t a cozy thought. It filled the black doorways, the right-angled shadows between buildings with thugs—frightening ones, like in the cartoons Jensen bought and sometimes drew for the
Banner,
barrel-chested lower primates in cloth caps and striped pullovers and little black masks, carrying blackjacks.

Nothing like that materialized, although I had a bad moment when an eight-cylinder Packard swept around the corner from Congress, dousing me in blinding light and convincing me that bullets would follow. It grumbled past, and for the five hundredth time I decided I’d make a lousy gangster.

The night man at the Guardian Building was in his fifties, the visor of his uniform cap making shadows in the folds of his face; he had a belly and a revolver with a big cedar handle on his hip. He opened the door the rest of the way when I mentioned Jack and I walked past him and down a corridor lit by white light, my footsteps snapping back at me from the bright Pewabic tiles. Everything—sights, sounds, odors—has sharper edges at night. I could smell the industrial wax the janitors used, like stale gun oil.

There were three booths, framed in yellow oak with their doors folded back and built-in short benches inside upholstered like bus seats in black grainy leather. I stood facing them with the suitcase in my hand like a hunky just off the boat, aware that I was being watched by the guard. When the ringing started it took me a second to react—waiting does that—and another second to locate its source, in the third booth on my right. I took the case in with me and closed the door before answering.

“I knew you’d stick,” Jack said. “You got it?”

“I got it.”

“No shit, how’s it feel?”

“Like a suitcase full of snakes. Where do you want it?”

“Anybody follow you?”

“Not here. I told Joey where I was going.”

“They’ll be waiting when you come out.” The pause on his end was full of thought and frantic music. “Okay, we’ll have to get fancy. You got your car?”

“It’s parked around the corner.”

“I’m at Bass’s place, you remember where it is?” I said I did. “Okay, take this route.”

I didn’t write it down. I wasn’t likely to forget it.

When the guard let me out I saw the car, a long low Cord, parked halfway down the block on the other side with its lamps off. The end of a cigarette glowed in the darkness of the front seat, a tiny red eye. I didn’t look directly at the car, but turned and walked up the street the way I had come. Behind me I heard gears meshing, tires crunching slowly on asphalt. At Congress I turned the corner. I didn’t see the car again until it appeared in my rearview mirror when I pulled away from the curb. Its lamps were on now. The suitcase lay beside me on the seat, a shabby thing worth ten times more than the Viking V-8 it was riding in.

I took Congress to Woodward and turned north. Headlamps turned behind me a block back. We drove at a stately pace up the main stem, as broad as a pasture and gunbarrel-straight, dividing the city straight up the middle like the part in Valentino’s hair. It was almost empty at that hour. It gave you the feeling you could drive to the North Pole and back all in one night and never see another soul. Fort, Lafayette, Michigan, State, the cross streets bending in toward the center of the web: Grand Circus Park. The half-circle of grass looked black at night.

I wrenched the wheel hard to the left. The Viking bucked up over the curb, front axle first, then rear, a double jolt that snapped my teeth together, prepared though I was, and pitched the suitcase onto the floor under the dashboard. The wheels plowed twin furrows through the grass, mushed down. For a panicky moment I thought I was stuck. Then I bumped over again, again, and came down on Bagley. I gripped the gearshift knob, round and black like an eight-ball, shoved it forward, accelerated, then yanked it straight back into third while squashing the pedal to the firewall. The gears bawled, the throttle made a noise like a phlegmy old man clearing his throat, the tires spun, caught. The steering wheel jerked my arms straight. The Cord’s headlamps flashed in the mirror at a Krazy Kat angle, then dropped out of the corner.

At Grand River I turned northwest, then took Adams east and wound my way toward the Black Bottom and Crystal Street. There was no sign of the Cord behind me. Either I’d lost it or the driver had killed his lamps.

T
HE SCREEN DOOR HAD
new patches to go with the old ones, and new rents that needed patches. The old colored woman who answered my knock was wearing the same tattered housecoat of more than a year before but no hairnet this time, and as thin as her hair was, with startling pink scalp showing through it in streaks, I wondered that she had ever needed one in the first place. She looked at my white man’s clothes, hat and necktie with no funeral in the neighborhood or Baptist meeting to justify them, the suitcase, heard what I had to say, and unhooked the screen door. She was a sunken post in a changing tide, that old woman in her house that needed whitewashing; she would look as she did and live as she had regardless of who was mayor and who had killed whom for whatever reason and whether liquor was banned or legal, not out of any conscious sense of determination or pride but because this was where she had landed, this was the condition of the deck. The furniture was the same, the odd floral covers on the sofas faded one step closer to plain white, but clean. Only the worn rug was missing, having evidently grown too thin to contribute and therefore banished. Even the homemade radio set on the painted table, the room’s one sad nod toward luxury and leisure, was in the same unfinished state; a loose crystal I had noticed on my first visit lay in the identical spot.

Music was playing behind the door in the dark upstairs hallway, Jack’s kind, hot horns and jungle drums. I knocked.

“Yeah?” This was a new male voice, which threw me, there in that place that defied evolution. Eager young barracudas of Jack’s stamp had drifted in and out of his association in the past, but since Sylvester Street, it had strictly been the three with whom he’d started minus Baldy Hannion. There was no brewery now to give him a foundation, no collateral of a physical nature to make his standard worth following. Hunches are for the old and established. The young need a sure thing.

“Connie Minor.”

The door opened six inches and a boy of nineteen or twenty inserted himself into the rectangle. He was shorter than Jack but nearly as broad, and much softer. He had a ring of fat above his belt under a white shirt with the collar spread, a round face and thick red hair and gray eyes with a watery sheen and a harelip. The gun in his hand was a .38 revolver, the snubnosed kind bulls carried. I had never seen him before.

“Let him in, for Christ’s sake, does he look like a torpedo?” Jack, wearing pinstriped trousers and a shoulder holster over a BVD undershirt, shoved him aside and grabbed my free hand. “Get in Connie, how the hell are you, you’re letting the flies out.”

I let him pull me inside. It was a railroad flat, a series of rooms lined up all in a row so that you had to pass through all of them to get to the back. We were in the kitchen. It had a shade drawn over its only window and bulging yellow plaster on the walls and newspapers taped over the places where there was obviously no plaster at all. The linoleum on the floor was dirt-colored. There were a cot with rumpled bedding on it in a corner, an old Michigan Stove Company woodburner with a warming oven overhead and yellow calcined grease on the black iron and nickel, a cast-iron sink, an icebox dripping into a pan, and an oilcloth-covered table where Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo sat playing dominoes until I came in with the suitcase, when they got up and came over. In the next room, visible through the open door, a portable phonograph with a daisy-petal horn stood on a chest of drawers playing King Oliver. The place stank pungently of old meals and urine, the way they all did, the way they all still do in that neighborhood. That’s how civilization smells under the toothpaste and powder.

“Open it up.” Andy was staring at the suitcase.

“That ain’t no way to treat a guest.” Jack took the suitcase from me, lightening me by more than just pounds, and sat me down at the table. “They followed you, right?”

“I lost them at the park like you figured.”

“Joey’s chewing their asses out right now, I bet.”

Someone knocked at the door: Bang-bang, pause, bang. Jack set down the suitcase and opened it with the Luger in his hand and the soft young man, who had stepped out when I came in, entered. “No sign of anybody outside.” The harelip didn’t seem to get in the way of his speech.

“Connie, this here’s Vern Scalia. Vern’s the reason you’re here.”

We exchanged nods. He stuck his revolver inside his belt. It had several thick rubber bands wound around the grip to keep it from slipping down.

“Vern’s the one told us about the shipment. He used to work for Joey. Joey don’t know yet he don’t no more.”

“Just what we need in this outfit,” said Andy, building a skyscraper out of dominoes. “Another wop.”

Lon gave him his death’s-head stare.

I said, “Shipment?”

“You should’ve seen it.” That’s when Jack told me about the hijacking.

Bass Springfield came in on the end of the story from one of the rooms in back. He was wearing a blue work shirt and overalls and carrying a Negro baby wrapped in a towel with the name of a hotel stenciled on it. I’d heard a baby crying the moment I’d entered the house, but I’d assumed it was in another apartment. He was feeding it milk from a beer bottle with a nipple on it. His deformed hand held the bottle like a claw.

Jack saw me staring, laughed. “Bet you never guessed Bass was a daddy. We didn’t neither till we got here. Celestine tied into him for bringing us, didn’t she, Bass?”

“She’s asleep,” he said, in response to nothing.

“Little Quincy’s gonna be a slugger,” Jack went on. “You got to see the shoulders on this kid. Knock that ball clean into the white side of town.”

“He ain’t.” Springfield jiggled the child in his arms. “He gonna be mayor, wear a tall hat.” It was a tone of voice I’d never heard him use, as close to real laughter as I ever heard him come. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the little dusky face since he’d entered.

“That ain’t no ambition. If I had a kid I’d want him to be the one
pays
the mayor. Clear that table, boys. It’s Christmas.”

Andy and Lon swept the dominoes into a deal box and Jack hoisted the case up onto the table and opened it. For a time they all stared at the neat stacks inside, Springfield dividing his attention for the first time. Then Jack started picking up the banded sheafs and checking the bills, pushing them back rapidly with his fingers like a bank teller. He dug down, selecting stacks at random, destroying the symmetry inside the suitcase. While he was doing that, a pretty, short-haired colored girl came in wearing a plaid bathrobe and man’s shoes on her feet and took the baby from Springfield; it had begun to cry again. Without paying attention to any of us she set down the bottle, opened her robe, and popped a brown nipple into the child’s mouth, jiggling and humming something tuneless, turning away from the table and the fifty thousand dollars in cash she had not looked at once. That’s what I remember when I think of Celestine Brown, whom I never heard speak a word: a young woman who made maybe twelve hundred a year working at Ford’s, breast-feeding her baby in the presence of a fortune she didn’t acknowledge. The boy would be about eight now.