Whiskey River (30 page)

“Fuck the sweep,” Gabriel was saying, his thin Cracker voice irritated, wobbling in the rafters. “Let’s just call Philly and have them grab him when he steps off the train. Isn’t that where he goes every time he caps someone, to visit relatives? The guinea’s a good family boy. They see a lot of him.”

The pork smell grew stronger as I approached, and long before they noticed me I knew what the dangling thing was, who it was, and my stomach did a slow turn.

Kozlowski spotted me. “Normally when we find ’em swinging, the first thing we do is cut them down,” he said without greeting, “see can we revive them. We didn’t need no medical examiner to tell us we didn’t have to bother this time, did we, Doc?”

“No, he’s been dead at least twelve hours. Hello, Connie.” The examiner, who had climbed a six-foot stepladder to examine the corpse while it was still suspended, was Paul Anderson, the man who had found the unfired Luger cartridge in Lewis Welker’s mouth. He was wearing a corduroy sportcoat with elbow patches, like a U of D professor’s, and a blue polka-dot necktie that ran out of material above his sternum after the long trip around his linebacker neck. “You can take him down now.”

His wrists had been wired to a steel beam that ran the length of the ceiling, after which a blowtorch had burned big oval holes through his clothes and suppurating blue scars on the flesh beneath. Somewhere along the way, either from pain or fear when it was happening—I couldn’t believe fear, not of him, not even then—or after the shock finished him, his sphincter and bladder had released, and under the odor of scorched cloth and roasted meat lay the stench of a public toilet. He was wearing his old cap and shabby suitcoat, the one Nathan Rabinowitz had had repaired for his day in court with Jack Dance. His expression wasn’t pained, but stoic, as it had always been, as it would always be now, until the worms got him.

Bass Springfield, the best left fielder the Biloxi Bullets had ever had. He had hit safely in thirty-eight consecutive games, his son was going to be mayor someday. In the two years I’d known him he had said maybe twenty words to me total.

While the police photographer, a swarthy slob with filthy nails and a soup stain on his hat, took pictures of the room, a morgue attendant I bribed regularly to steal autopsy reports went up the ladder with bolt cutters while his partner got to stand with his arms around Springfield’s hips to catch him when the wires parted. There were several plainclothes detectives standing around, some of them wearing the rubber raincoats and galoshes of the Prohibition Squad, holding useless axes and looking like guests at the wrong party. If Gabriel had brought a raincoat, he had taken it off, but his ubiquitous Panama was wrapped in cellophane. Kozlowski had on a new-looking Palm Beach suit and his old fedora and tiny wingtips. The suit had already begun to conform to his sloppy configuration.

“We got an anonymous call there was a still up here,” said Gabriel, I assumed to me, although he was watching the attendants. “Nobody here knew anything, I have it on their authority. Nobody had any business on this floor today. Maybe. My six-year-old nephew goes blind the same way every time his dog shits on my sister’s carpet. Anyway, we had to get a forklift to move the stacks of crates so we could get to Springfield. They put them there last night to block the windows, keep the torch flame from showing outside.”

Kozlowski thrust a blowtorch at me, unlit. I flinched anyway. “Go ahead, take it,” he said. “It’s been dusted.”

I took it in both hands, the first time I’d ever held one. It was heavier than expected and shaped like a watering can with a jet and a screw valve on top. Cool to the touch. I smelled kerosene.

Kozlowski said, “They left it behind, as who wouldn’t, get stopped on the street carrying a torch, ha, with a barbecued stiff upstairs. Smell the handle.”

I hesitated, then lifted it, sniffed. I handed it back.

“That stink don’t wipe off as easy as prints,” he said. “You’d think the son of a bitch would wash his hands once in a while.”

Gabriel produced a wad of tissues from a pocket and coughed into it. He made a business of folding and returning it to his pocket, for once without inspecting the results. “I saw that column you wrote a couple of weeks back, about Dance kidnapping Stink. The chief thought maybe you left something out.”

The last strand of wire let go with a noise like a guitar string snapping. The attendant on the floor woofed and almost sat down under the corpse’s sudden weight. Its arms remained stretched over its head, its knees didn’t bend. If its toes weren’t pointed downward the attendant could have stood it on the floor like a statue. Kozlowski laughed.

“You boys’re going to have to bust him in two to get him in the drawer,” he said.

Anderson said, “Not till I’m through with him. Postmortem contusions are hard enough to subtract from the rest without broken bones.”

“We know
what
killed him, Doc. All’s we need is
when,
exactly.”

“Tell me when he had supper and I’ll tell you when he died.”

I said, “They were holding Barberra in Springfield’s apartment. Springfield’s wife and baby were there. I don’t have to tell you why I didn’t write about that.” I watched the attendants roll the corpse like a log into the rubber bag they’d unzipped and spread on the floor on top of the canvas stretcher. It was as if Springfield’s stiff crippled hands had spread throughout his body.

“They probably blindfolded Stink when they brought him there and when they took him out,” Gabriel said. “They didn’t have to bother. Stink’s got ears and a nose and he can add up to twenty-one if he takes his shoes and socks and pants off. We sent a car for the woman. Maybe she saw something.”

“Are you arresting Machine?”

“We’ll talk to him.” Kozlowski relit his stogie. As often as they smoldered out, I figured he got them at the same place Jensen bought his pipe tobacco. “My guess is he was holed up with his lawyer all last night, or out whoring around in front of fifty witnesses. Sure you didn’t see nothing else that night?”

“A new Cord followed me for a while downtown. I lost it at the park.”

“Could you identify it?”

“I wouldn’t mistake it for a Studebaker in court.”

Kozlowski laughed his snorting laugh. “Yeah, ain’t them sheeny legals something. Okay, Minor. If you hear from your pal Dance, tell him we want to talk to him. We called his wife, she ain’t seen him since yesterday. Maybe he’s in the river.”

Anderson and the morgue attendants took the body in its rubber cocoon down in the freight elevator in back. The kid in the main elevator looked at me a second time when I got in. “You all right, mister? You look a little green.”

“Touch of influenza.”

“That’s tough. You see the nigger? I bet it was the Klan, them Black Legionnaires.”

“Shut up, you little bastard.”

“Hey, fuck you.”

Jensen was out of the office. I called Jack’s house in St. Clair Shores. Vivian answered.

“Did the bulls tell you what happened?” I asked without saying hello.

“No, they just wanted to know where Jack was. Do you want to talk to him?”

“He’s there?”

“It’s Connie,” she said, away from the phone.

“Connie, what’s up?”

“Jesus Christ, Jack, Joey’s looking for you. What are you doing at home?”

“I just stopped in to show Vivian I’m still kicking. What do the bulls want? I’m clean since May.”

There is a compulsion to tell about death. It’s still unique after all this time. I told him about Springfield. I didn’t leave anything out. There was a long silence on his end, and for once no music. Then something banged in my ear and I thought someone had been shot. More banging then. He was hammering the receiver against something, a wall or something. I shouted his name several times. A copy boy stuck his head inside the door curiously, then withdrew it. After a couple of minutes Jack’s voice came back on. There was a humming on the line now, the words were broken up by static. I figured the tin cup must be smashed almost flat. “I’m here, Connie.”

“You better get under somewhere,” I said. “The others too. Joey and Barberra are on the prod.”

“They better be. They better come with cannons and a fucking tank.” He thanked me for calling. We said good-bye.

I didn’t write about Springfield’s death. I let the others have that beat. Howard ran something from the well and when it appeared I was already pixilated. Somehow—I’d been to several places first and I don’t know now where it was or how I found it, she was moving every couple of weeks now to stay ahead of Gabriel—I landed at Hattie Long’s. I remember how she looked, the expression on her face when she saw me, its heart shape and astonished drawn-on eyebrows and beestung lips, I even remember what she was wearing, a silver lamé shift with a scoop neck and a chain around her waist, sandals with glittery heels, but I don’t remember what was said, or if anything was. I woke up with two girls, still drunk, one or both of whom I had seen someone mounting from behind, cowboy fashion, someone who looked a lot like the guy whose picture ran every day in the
Banner
on top of his column sucking a cold pipe. “That’s how Greeks fuck, honey,” said the other one, the one watching. The guy slapped her, just like a gangster, just like James Cagney. I had a sprained wrist the next day and Hattie charged me twenty dollars extra for dental work. The girl had a loose tooth. Johnston, Hattie’s bartender-bouncer-ex-prizefighter, backed the claim. “See if I come back to this dump,” I said, paying. I was still drunk. It took me an hour to find my car, by which time I was sober and mean. I rear-ended a Polish welder from Dodge Main on Joseph Campau and took a swing at him. Two bulls, one of them a mounted patrolman with spurs on his boots who smelled like Tom Mix’s horse Tony, pulled him off me. I was booked as a disorderly person. Howard Wolfman bailed me two hours later.

Professional detachment, that’s my middle name.

T
HE DEATH OF BASS
Springfield meant war, after a fashion, and after its fashion nothing happened for a while. Joey Machine himself was under federal surveillance during his tax trial and beyond Jack’s reach unless Jack was screwy enough to knock him down in front of the most reliable witnesses this side of the Entente Cordiale. He wasn’t that screwy and he did nothing. The news business became downright dismal. When an eleven-month-old Inkster girl was rescued from a drain tile on Michigan Avenue where she had managed to get stuck for a couple of hours, the
Banner
gave the story front-page play for a week in spite of the fact that she was a Negress. The Black Legion, a particularly rabid local outlet of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote letters. Howard was desperate enough for copy to print two of them.

Aside from prostitution, journalism is the only work I know that’s hardest when business is on the bum. I used up my store of ideas a week into the Great Calm and wound up dead in the water. One morning, when twenty minutes of staring failed to produce a column from the wall opposite my desk, I went motoring. I sought, if not a murder, at least a couple of tangled fenders and a fistfight, or some other demonstration of human nature of the sort that kept Will Rogers’s typewriter smoking. Anything to prevent an L-shaped hole from appearing under my picture on Page Three.

On that morning, angels walked the land. Drivers indicated the correct turns a third of a block up the street. Pedestrians used the crosswalks on the green. Motorists stopped politely to let other motorists pull out of parking spaces, signaling early their intention to stop. The specter that haunts the reporter’s nights is the fear that the entire human race will decide in a body to start over fresh and broadcast the spirit of the Good Samaritan from Barbary to Burma. I could write a column about a day when nothing happened, but what if it happened again tomorrow? Other writers stocked their wells: Not me. The work is a dead enough lift on an immediate deadline without borrowing others.

I was nursing a fantasy about plowing through a group of nuns and reporting the event—nothing but nuns would do, and I’m not half-sure I wasn’t lucky no nuns appeared just then, to say nothing of the nuns’ luck—when I turned off Seven Mile onto Littlefield and passed a gray frame house with a wooden sign swinging from the porch roof. WATCHES SOLD AND REPAIRED. Antique letters with looping serifs.
J.Danzig, Prop.

Come clean, Connie. I was going to lie and say I went looking for the secret of Jack Dance’s past the day I visited his father in his shop; but when you fudge on the small things you gnaw a little off the foundation under the big things. I stumbled onto it, pure and simple.

I parked down the street and walked back. It was a Jewish neighborhood on the crawl northward, lined with bakeries and pushcarts and shapeless old women walking with their beautiful black-eyed daughters and old men sweating in their stiff collars and black wool suits. An orange cat that must have gone twenty pounds watched me from its hollow in a split and bloated cushion on the porch swing as I mounted the steps.

Whatever the condition of the old man’s eyes may have been, there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He was holding the screen door open for me when I came over the last step, smiling his trampled-looking smile and blinking behind his nearly opaque lenses. He wasn’t wearing a coat, but his dusty black vest was buttoned up all the way, with a knitted fob hanging out of the watch pocket like a tongue. His curly white hair made his shirt look yellow, and his bow tie, slightly off plumb and red everywhere but the pale ovals where he placed his thumbs, seemed to have bled all the color from his face. The thick old-fashioned wedding band on the hand holding the door had slipped an eighth of an inch around, showing the end of a wad of white tape inside. He was thin with the emaciation of some progressive disease. His wrists reminded me of stemware and as I went in past him I caught a sweetish sickroom smell of medicine and decay. I stood on a rubber mat just inside the door and took off my hat. He let the spring pull the door shut.

“Is it a watch you want?” His teeth barely touched his lip on the
w
’s, softening the
v
sound of his Yiddish pronunciation. He had worked long and hard to rid himself of the accent and he had come as close to success as he ever would.