Whiskey River (33 page)

“What about you?”

“I’m a satellite too. I said that.”

We had reached the LaSalle. My Viking was parked behind it, its new front fenders and radiator gleaming a little brighter than the rest of the car; the accident with the Dodge Main worker had set me back two hundred dollars. Tom opened the doors on the passenger’s side of the LaSalle for the women. After shutting them in he said, “Sometimes he doesn’t even
have
to ask. Like what you did for him when he killed Lew Welker.”

“You know about that?”

“I was there when he killed him. I’m the one who suggested he put that cartridge in Lew’s mouth and sew his lips shut, as a message. Remember, we were both still working for Joey then.”

He looked for my reaction. His eyes were like Jack’s and yet not, darker and less open, as if the things Jack did that had no effect on him were reflected in his brother’s eyes: Pictures in the attic to Jack’s Dorian Gray. “See, we’ll all do handstands to earn a pat on the head from Jack. We will for as long as he lives.”

The moment went, as they will. When it did we shook hands and got into our cars. The gray Cord remained at the curb a few seconds after the cars pulled away, as if in indecision, then moved out behind the LaSalle.

O
NE NIGHT LAST WEEK
my telephone rang at eleven o’clock and I awoke convinced it was Jack, dead these eight years. It turned out to be a drunk looking for someone named Angie and the conversation was over in fifteen seconds, but I sat up and smoked and listened to the radio for half an hour before I was ready to go back to sleep. I can count on one thumb the occasions when a call that had anything to do with Jack Dance came in any other time than between 11:00
P.M
. and 2:00
A.M
. They were his optimum hours, during which his considerable energy glowed brightest, as if he were one of those tropical flowering plants that bloom by moonlight, closing their petals at the first rays of the sun, although Jack never closed his until the end. He rarely apologized for the hour even though it always meant getting up and dressing and going out to do something illegal for him in some unlikely place; the implication was that I was somehow at fault for not being ready to go and waiting for his summons. This was the Jack Dance egocentric theory of the universe and its laws were inviolate.

As it happened, I was awake, and dressed after a fashion, when he called me the last time. It was a sweaty night toward the end of August, too hot to sleep, too thick to get up and do anything, and I was lying in the dark, the thought of the heat of the sixty-watt bulb in the lamp on the nightstand unbearable, in my pants and undershirt and bare feet, handling a Chesterfield between thumb and forefinger like Peter Lorre, to keep it from getting too greasy to burn and trying not to touch flesh to flesh. The jangling of the bell was a welcome interruption and a cool sound, like chimes stirred by a breeze you could neither hear nor feel. The metal of the earpiece and standard felt cool for a few seconds.

“Hot enough for you, Connie?”

“That’s beneath you, Jack.”

“You ought to take a drive, crank down the windows and move some air.”

“As for instance where?”

“The Griswold House.”

That cooled me off. “Nix,” I said. “Count me out.”

“You ain’t heard what I got.”

“Doesn’t matter. We had this conversation, remember? Just before Springfield got it. Besides, I don’t go near the Griswold. The Griswold isn’t in my world anymore.”

“You mean on account of what happened to Clyde Norman there? Hell, that wasn’t nothing. Did I ever tell you what Joey did to Arny D’Agostino?”

“It’s too hot to swap stories. Get somebody else.”

“I don’t trust nobody else.”

“Call your brother.”

“This don’t involve Joey. It’s something on the side. Case dough. That fifty grand had wings, it’s gone. Now I got to buy—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

Long pause. Music. Glen Gray. The Casa Loma Stomp. Okay, Connie. I won’t bother you again.”

The next day a messenger came to the
Banner
and landed me a package wrapped in brown paper the size of a pack of cigarettes. Jensen, stuck for an idea at his drawing board, watched me undo the string and pluck a brass-jacketed pistol cartridge out of a box stuffed with cotton. “Advice from a fan?” he asked.

“More like a mortgage-burning.” I looked at it for a while and put it in a pocket.

It was Andy Kramm, a year later when he was in the Wayne County Jail awaiting transportation to Jackson to begin an eighteen-month sentence for armed robbery, who told me about Jack’s big thing, the one I’d turned down.

“I’d do anything for dough, that’s what everybody thinks,” Andy said. “That’s how come the jury was only out forty-five minutes on this piece of shit. But I didn’t want the best part of that one. I took a vacation, went up to Seney to do a little fishing. Didn’t catch nothing unless you count saving my own life, which I do. I guess you could say I quit. Jack said no sweat and got Vern Scalia. That’s how come it was the harelip and not me in that apartment later with Jack and Lon. You remember that kid Frankie Orr had with Sal Borneo’s daughter, what did they name him, Pasquale?”

“Sure.” The baby had been born in August after a five-month pregnancy and weighed less than two pounds. I’d consumed larger steaks.

“They had him in an incubator at St. Mary’s with about a fifty-fifty chance to live, a hunnert to one against without the incubator. Funny, ain’t it, the way they give odds at hospitals? I bet the East Side book was hot on that one. Anyway, Jack’s idea was to call up Frankie and remind him how someone could accidentally kick out the plug on one of them incubators. A new father’d pay fifty grand for information like that, he figured.”

“That’s dirty even for Jack.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I’d believe anything of Jack.”

“You knew him better than most, then. Let me ask you something. Why do you figure we liked that guy so much?”

“You tell me.”

“It was something Jack told me himself. When he and Vivian was honeymooning in Atlantic City, they bought tickets on a ride called the Hammer. It was shaped like that, with the handle attached to this forty-foot tower and they strapped you inside the head part, then twirled it up and around, faster and faster each time. Jack said you could feel your face flatten out as you swung up to the top, then hung there a second, then tipped forward and down, wham! like somebody swinging a hammer. He said it scared the shit out of you, you couldn’t wait till it was over, but after it was over you wanted to go again. How’d you feel when you found out he was dead?”

“First I was relieved. Then I was sorry.”

“Me too. I been thinking on it a lot lately, and I think that’s what Jack was doing, taking that ride for us over and over, scaring the shit out of us but making us want him to take it again so we didn’t have to. We was glad it was over, but that didn’t last.”

It didn’t satisfy me at first. Two summers later, when Dillinger was haring across the Midwest, knocking down banks and hick police department arsenals and getting more press than FDR, I decided there was some truth in Andy’s theory. But by then Andy was dead too.

“Why’d he hold up Frankie?” I asked. “What happened to the fifty thousand Joey paid him for Barberra?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He just said it was gone.”

“Jack gave every penny of it to Vivian. She was the one paid Rabinowitz to spring him from that Connor rap. He never took nothing from her he didn’t pay back, you can say that much about Jack. He killed little girls and threatened little babies but he wasn’t no pimp.”

“Did Frankie pay?”

“Let me tell you something about having kids. This comes from somebody that never had one so you’re talking to an expert. They cut your balls off. I know that don’t make sense, you got to have balls to make a kid. But after you make one you might as well hang them over his crib to play with for all the good they do you. If you snatched the old Frankie, the Conductor, the guy that iced Vinnie Cool on the train in New York, if you snatched him and stuck a knife in his belly and offered to let out three yards of gut if he didn’t give you ten bucks, he’d spit in your face, and if you went ahead and did it, he’d use the gut to strangle you with. But this wasn’t the Conductor Jack was dealing with, it was Papa Orr, whose kid Pasquale was his ticket to the twenty-first century. Did he pay? You bet he paid, and with a Unione guard ringed three deep around the incubator. That’s why them Sicilians never kill family. They don’t want to set a precedent.”

“Would Jack have pulled the plug?”

“Search me. Search him too. That’s why I never played cards with Jack. He wouldn’t know if he was bluffing.”

“How much of this is guesswork and how much do you know? I mean about Frankie paying the ransom.”

“You was in that apartment, you saw what was there. You know why he needed the money?”

“I know,” I said.

It was Hattie who told me, that night in September, almost three weeks after my last telephone conversation with Jack. She was waiting for me in the lobby of the Parker Block, in a light summer dress and a patch of a hat pinned to the side of her head and one of those mysteries of engineering, a pair of shoes held on by only a strap across the back of the heel; the first time in years I’d seen her in street clothes. She had asked the doorman to call up for me.

“Why didn’t you come up?” I asked.

“Sure. ‘Fallen Dove Visits
Banner.
’ Your boss did me up good the last time I had anything to do with this rag. I got closed down for three weeks.”

“Before my time. Listen, I’m sorry about that thing in your place that night. I had a shock.”

“We’re there to be made love to and kicked around. But you have to pay for the privilege.” She was minding her language in the doorman’s presence.

“Who’s watching the store?” It was past dark out. Hours after the evening edition hit the streets, I’d been upstairs tinkering with the column I’d started months earlier, about the Black Bottom. The new version started with a comparison between the funerals of John “Big Nabob” Thomas and Bass Springfield.

“Johnston is. I’m not here to be social, Connie. Where can we talk?”

I led her back into the elevator and closed the cage. The building was almost deserted at that hour. Her makeup looked blotchy in the light of the yellow overhead bulb. It would have looked blotchy anyway. I wondered if she was sick.

“Jack’s going to get himself killed,” she said.

“Do you know what a chase is?” I asked.

“What?”

“I don’t mean two guys running after each other. It’s a kind of frame you screw together to lock the type in place when you’re going to print something. We’ve had one ready to go for months, a headline. It’s upstairs, I can show it to you. It says ‘Jack Dance Dead.’ All we need is the details.”

“I mean he’s going to get himself killed tonight. He and Lon Camarillo and that harelip are going to hit the Acme Garage.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“What’s it matter who told me? Men always think they can talk in front of whores, like we’re priests or doctors or something and won’t pass it on. It isn’t true.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Stop him. He’ll listen to you. You’re the most levelheaded guy he knows. He told me that once.”

“I’m not sure we’re still speaking to each other.”

I don’t know why I was doing that to Hattie. No, that’s a lie, I did too. In that way I was worse than Jack, who as bad as he got never did anything out of malice. Levelheaded guy, my ass. I was all jacked up—Jacked up, yeah—because a whore I thought I knew had slept with someone I liked, just because of that, like some kid. She knew it, too. A sheet of contempt came down behind her made-up face. She slipped a hand between my thighs.

“Please, Connie.”

I took her wrist and shoved it back at her. I tasted bile, as if I’d just caught a whiff of myself. “What makes you think he’ll be killed?”

“Because if I know, Joey knows. I’ll tell you who told me. It was that harelip Vern Scalia. He’s got a fat mouth for a kid. They’ve got a police car and uniforms and they’re going to go in like it’s a raid, like Capone’s boys did in Chicago. Only they’re not going to kill Joey, they’re going to take him and ransom him back to his mob just like Stink Barberra. Jack told Scalia it’s better that way, make him look like a sap in front of the whole town. Worse than killing him. Connie, it’s nuts. It must be all over the East Side by now.”

“Take it easy. Where is Jack?”

“The Collingwood Apartments. It’s at Collingwood and Twelfth. I don’t know what room. Scalia didn’t say.”

“When did he say they’re doing it?”

“I don’t know. Any time now. Connie, the apartments are too far. Can you head them off at the garage?”

“What with, my press card?”

“Call the bulls. If he sees them, he’ll back off.”

“Joey’s expecting them to come dressed like bulls. I cover bloodbaths, I don’t start them. I’ll swing by the garage, see if there’s any activity. If it doesn’t look like they’re expecting the Kaiser I’ll call the bulls.”

“Thanks, Connie.” She kissed me. Not exactly like an aunt, but not like someone who’d proposed to me either, a thousand years ago.

“If I get anywhere, you know it’s just a stay of execution,” I said. “Can you see Jack as an old man? Hell, can you see him thirty?”

“It’s just the knowing. I wish Scalia hadn’t said anything. I wish I hadn’t heard him. Hurry, Connie.” She pulled open the cage.

“Go back to your place. Jack can add. If he sees you, he might do something wild even for him.”

We’d had some rain. The streets were shiny and reflected the buildings with their lighted windows to an incredible depth, so that the Viking seemed to be cruising along ten stories in the air. Approaching Griswold from Congress, I killed my lamps in the last block, glided over to the curb, switched off the ignition, and coasted to a stop so the brake lights wouldn’t come on. I could see part of the garage from there, the big sliding doors and yellow ACME flaking off the bricks above them. It seemed quiet. I didn’t know how a gang stronghold under siege looked.