Whiskey River (34 page)

After a minute or so I got out and walked around the corner, my hat on the back of my head and my hands in plain sight, but I hoped swinging naturally; I was trying hard to look the exact opposite of what I imagined a street soldier looked like on his way to do something nasty. Sometime later when I was telling the story to Doug Keenan in the House of All Nations, he asked me to demonstrate. When I did, turning around at the end of the aisle to the men’s room and walking back, he shook his head and bought me a drink and said if I ever walked into the
Free Press
Building looking like that, the security guard would have plugged me on sight.

Nobody plugged me that night, and I went on to the next corner where there was a telephone booth and dropped in a nickel and dialed the number of the police department. From there I had a full view of the front of the garage when the big door opened, pushed by a man in a hat and unseasonable topcoat. The long gray Cord rolled out and stopped, blocking the sidewalk, while the man slid the door back the other way on its track and got in on the passenger’s side in front. Then the car turned right and headed north on Griswold with a gargle of exhaust.

I saw a lot in that thirty seconds. When the garage was open I saw Joey at the desk in the glassed-in office he was using while his headquarters upstairs was being bulletproofed, and the man who was sitting in there with him; and when the car door opened and the overhead domelight winked on I saw the driver’s face under the curled brim of his hat, his pouchy eyes and the exploded veins in his cheeks and the sagging mouth, and because senses have memories I smelled garlic. There were two more men seated in back.

“Police.”

I hung up. A Checker cab came up the street with its light on just as I left the booth and I hailed it. The two-minute walk to my car would have cost me five blocks.

“Collingwood and Twelfth,” I told the driver, climbing in. “Show me what this thing will do.”

A
LL THE WAY UP
Twelfth I thought,
so Joey doesn’t know.
Because if he had the word Jack Dance was coming, he wouldn’t be sending the troops away from him, taking the chance the two carloads of shooters would pass each other on the street and leave him open in the garage. Because the cheap son of a bitch wouldn’t spend the gas if he knew all he had to do was wait and they would come to him. A whore knew, but Joey didn’t. There was some significant higher meaning in that, something cosmic, but whatever it might have been was shunted aside by another thought, more basic:
You stupid shit, why didn’t you talk to the police when you had them on the phone?

Another easy one. For the same reason a friend I once had, forced to use the fire escape in just his shorts when his apartment caught fire, remembered he’d left his wallet in his pants and climbed back up and found the pants on the floor under the smoke and took his wallet out of the pocket and then tossed the pants back into the flames. When you’re running on instinct there is no room in your head for more than one thought at a time.

The apartment building was typical of Northwest Detroit, neat, placid-looking, and built of brick and wrought iron. When pictures of it appeared in the papers the next day it would look sinister with all those arrows and dotted lines and a big black Maltese cross on the window of the room where it happened, but when I first saw it, it was just another building on a quiet street scores of blocks and a world away from Smugglers’ Alley, Robbers’ Roost, and the unsavory things that happened there. The Cord was nowhere in sight. Well, the hurry for them wouldn’t be on the way
there.
I paid the driver and went inside.

In the small neat foyer, lit by an overhead fixture, I felt the icy wave that usually preceded paralysis. I didn’t want to be in the building when the others came. The cab had passed a telephone booth two blocks back; if I could find out the number of the apartment I could go back and call the manager’s office and be put through. There was a bank of brass mailboxes in the wall to the right of the door. I skimmed the nameplates. The name I wanted, which would be fictitious, would have been added recently, written on a piece of paper and taped in place. Jack would do that even though he wouldn’t be getting mail, to avoid making the neighbors suspicious.

I don’t remember what the name was. I had just come to it when I heard the first shot. When it’s a shot, you always know it from a backfire or a heavy book dropped on a bare floor; it fills your head and rings afterward. There were two, spaced a half-second apart and very loud inside the walls, then a short silence, then a cluster of them,
bammity-bam-bam,
then another pause, then one more, final, isolated in a deliberate void like the slam of a door.

I forgot about being paralyzed and started up the stairs. The light was out over the stairwell. I had just time to think that lights don’t stay out in nice buildings, that someone must have loosened the bulb deliberately, when suddenly I was no longer alone. He thundered down straight at me, filling the well with thumping footsteps and rustling clothes. Something struck my left shoulder hard, an open hand, and I spun, half-voluntarily, back-first to the wall, eyes shut tight.
This is it,
I thought.
Your last second.
Then he brushed past, breathing hoarsely and smelling of mothballs and adrenaline-sweat and something else, something burned, and down to the bottom of the stairs and around to the back of the building. A door slammed for real. More slams outside that could have been mistaken for gunshots any other time, then a motor roared and gears farted and tires chirped. The engine sound faded as it changed pitch to second and third. Then silence, bottomless and profound.

The tenants were starting to gather in the upstairs hallway, blinking, tying robes. A door stood open halfway down, leaking out light and blue fog. When I got to it, the stench of charred sulphur and cordite parched my nostrils, a hundred times stronger than it had smelled coming off the man on the stairs. The air was hazy.

It was an unfinished room, smelling of paint, with newspapers spread on the floor and a five-gallon bucket trailing threads of medium blue down its sides into a congealed puddle at its base, half-covering a picture of the
Graf Zeppelin.
The furniture was draped in sheets. Lon Camarillo sprawled across a covered overstuffed chair with a blue hole in the center of his forehead and his chin pointed at the ceiling. Both his hands twitched in his lap. Vern Scalia lay half on his stomach on the floor just inside the door, the back of his white shirt pierced in three places and caked; exit wounds, the coroner declared later. His right arm was extended within a foot of Lon’s Browning Automatic Rifle leaning in the corner by the door, which was as close as he had gotten when someone whose shoeprint showed clearly in the blood on Scalia’s shirt planted a foot between his shoulderblades and fired point-blank at the back of his head. Of the two, Lon being the experienced killer, trained in France by the army and at home by the Mafia, only the harelip had gone out fighting.

Jack wasn’t there.

There was an angry patch of blood on one of the newspapers on the floor an equal distance from Scalia and Lon, whose hands had stopped twitching. I stepped into the room for a closer look. I saw a partial palmprint. From it a trail of spatters led crookedly to a door on the far side of the room, smeared in two places where the bleeder had fallen, then pushed himself back up. I went that way, laid my hand on the door. It opened to my touch. A long way off I heard sirens and the first police gonger.

The room was dark. I groped for the wall switch, pressed it. It was a small bedroom with twin beds, unmade, separated by a wooden nightstand, its only window directly above the stand. I saw my reflection in it. The light was coming from a lamp that had occupied the stand until it had been knocked over onto one of the beds, its shade tipped so that the bulb was shining directly into my eyes. The trail led between the beds.

I moved out of instinct. I know I didn’t have time to put it together. As the Ballistics crew worked it out later, the bullet missed my head by two inches, splintering the doorframe and burying itself in the plaster wall on the other side of the room I had just left. I don’t even remember hearing the shot, although my ears rang most of the next day. I banged my elbow throwing myself sideways to the floor, and that bothered me more and longer.

“That you, Stink?”

He sounded raw. The bed on the right was between us. I couldn’t see him.

“Jack, it’s me, Connie.”

Nothing. The sirens were still many blocks away. I could hear the alarm clock ticking on the nightstand.

After a long time—probably no more than two minutes—I dragged myself toward the bed. “Connie Minor, Jack. Remember?”

When more time had passed I got my knees under me and peered over the mattress. He was down between the beds out of sight. I heard something else now besides the clock and the sirens: A sawing, as of breath dragging in and out and bubbling slightly on the intake.

I stood up.

He lay on his side almost under the other bed. He was wearing his vest and shirtsleeves and what I thought was a dark red tie until the light caught it as he inhaled and I saw blood bubbling out of a hole in his chest. His right arm was stretched out with his Luger at the end of it. It was cocked and pointing at my groin.

“Jack, it’s Connie.”

He didn’t hear me. I saw his grin, saw his finger whiten on the trigger. Then it relaxed. “Connie?”

“Lie still, Jack. Help’s coming.”

“Connie?” he said.

“Yeah, Jack.”

“Shit, Connie.”

“Yeah, Jack.”

He let his hand fall with the pistol in it. I knelt beside him and got a hand under his head. He’d been hit in the stomach too, and once in each leg. He started to say something a couple of minutes later, then coughed up a cup of blood. He didn’t try again and by the time the first of the uniforms came into the apartment he had died.

The room seemed larger without him in it. I lowered his head to the floor and got up. On the wall opposite the beds, where the light would strike it when the sun came up in the morning, hung the painting of the girl praying beneath the crucifix.

Something was different. I didn’t think the change would be that sudden, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. The apartment was quiet, there was no music. Later when the bulls drew the sheet off a cabinet radio in the living room they found that a bullet had smashed a tube. Up to then it had been tuned to Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge on NBC. The loud music had drowned out the killers’ approach.

They found other things as well. In addition to Lon Camarillo’s B.A.R. and Jack’s Luger, the arsenal in the apartment included a Thompson submachine gun believed to have been Andy Kramm’s with two extra fifty-round magazines, fully loaded; Bass Springfield’s heavy Colt automatic pistol without a trigger guard; two Smith &Wesson revolvers; and a sawed-off Remington pump shotgun, all cleaned and loaded and lined up on the counter in the little kitchen off the living room. The shotgun’s discarded barrels and a hacksaw turned up in a trash can behind the building, wrapped in newspaper. The search also uncovered three unissued Detroit police uniforms hanging in a closet and, in the drawer of the nightstand, a pink slip made out to a J. Danzig for a 1930 Oldsmobile touring car like the ones the police used. The car itself was eventually discovered, complete with a new black-and-white paint job and a growler on the running board, in a garage on Woodrow Wilson that had gone out of business in March.

I had just come out of the bedroom when the uniforms entered with guns drawn. I let them throw me up against the wall and pat me down. When Chief Kozlowski showed up, they had heard enough from the neighbors to turn their backs on me. The chief’s Palm Beach suit had continued to conform to his frame in the three months since I’d seen him and had grown as wrinkled and discolored as his hat. He looked at me sitting on the sheet-covered sofa and scratched the mole between his eyes. “How come whenever a stiff turns up, you’re there too?”

“Jack called me tonight and invited me over for an interview. This is what I found.”

“Horseshit. Your timing ain’t that good. Try again.”

“Okay, a dame told me. You can take me to the basement at Thirteen Hundred and the only name you’ll get out of me is mine. You can sell her to the papers as the Mystery Woman.”

“Quit fucking me over, Minor. I like the interview story better.”

“Looky here, Chief.” A swarthy plainclothesman I remembered from the Ferry warehouse had been poking around inside the paint bucket with the stir stick and lifted it out with a .32 revolver dangling from its trigger guard on the end, blue paint dripping in threads off the barrel.

“Smart. These sonsabitches don’t take chances getting nailed with the tools. Keep fishing.” He reached down, grabbed a handful of Vern Scalia’s fair hair, and lifted up his face. “Hello, Harelip. Finally sold yourself out, did you?” He hung on for a moment as if waiting for an answer, then let the face drop and stepped over the body to examine Lon. “Nice shot. He’s looking a little healthier these days.”

“In there’s the rest of it.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder.

Kozlowski went into the bedroom and came out a few minutes later. “Shit. What’re we going to do for fun around here now?”

“That’s just what Jack said.”

“What’d he say?”

“Shit.”

“He say anything else?”

“He took a shot at me and asked me if I was Stink.”

“Deathbed statement,” he told the other plainclothesman, who nodded and went on with his task. He had fished a second gun out of the bucket and laid it on one of the newspapers next to the first. Kozlowski looked back at me. “Neighbors said one of ’em ran the wrong way, down the front stairs. See him?”

“Not his face.”

“Big man?”

“They’re all big.”

“Not by my ruler. Smell him, maybe?”

“It wasn’t Barberra.”

More detectives had arrived. One of them opened the closet and whistled at the three uniforms hanging inside. Kozlowski, who had gone into the kitchen to check out the guns, came out and looked in the closet.