Whiskey River (37 page)

“I told you you wouldn’t understand,” he said.

The air in the hallway smelled different, which is to say it
had
smell; the static institutional odors of waxed linoleum and people waiting on benches. He didn’t recognize the other witnesses waiting to be called, but he felt he should have, even if they never raised their eyes except to see who had come out. Well, he’d changed too. At forty-five he was as old as Howard Wolfman had been at the time of the
Banner
wake, older than Joey Machine lived to be. The only suit whose pants he hadn’t outgrown was the one he was wearing, the gray worsted he’d bought for meeting advertising clients. He’d been skinny in the old days, a jackrabbit among rhinos. Funny how you could be lean when times were fat and fat when times were lean.
You need exercise, Connie,
Jack would say.
Get your hat, we’ll hop across the river.

The reporters were on him then, a couple of vaguely familiar faces in the crowd but mostly youngsters, hotshots with their press cards in their hatbands like Pat O’Brien in
The Front Page,
some of whom had probably read his column with a flashlight under the covers, the
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being a parental exile from respectable homes; reading about midnight runs across the ice and gilded flappers in shimmy skirts and young sheiks in tight chinchilla coats and gray fedoras, Fatimas smoking between their lips. “Connie
Minor?
I read him when I was that high to a sock garter. He must be a hundred years old.”

“What’d you tell ’em, Connie?”

“They ask you who killed Joey Machine?”

“Turn this way, Connie.”

“You tell ’em what you did with Jack the Ripper’s Lugers?”

“Who’s your tailor, Connie? You look like shit.”

No comment, you sons of bitches. Read about it tomorrow. Hear them in the
News
cafeteria later: “… so then he says, ‘Now that I’m a white man I can’t stand you niggers.’ That’s Minor. Bastard’s got the shortest memory this side of Neville Chamberlain.”

He almost passed her in the crowd, thin woman, not a sob sister, red-dyed hair in marcels under a cloche hat that emphasized the lines in her face, the skin shrunken to the bone. Harsh makeup, raccoon eyes with big eyebrows that looked as if she traced them on around Mason lids. “Hattie?”

She took his arm, a talon’s grip, and they walked around the wainscoted corner. That section of hallway was deserted, paved with toilets and supply closets. Her calves were okay below the below-the-knee skirt; they’d been the least bit thick before and now they were just right. She let go of him, making a reluctant production of it, turned to face him. “You put on some,” she said. “It suits you. You always were kind of puny.”

“Lanky,” he corrected. “Like Bobby Jones. Are you testifying?”

“Next week. I heard they were cutting you loose today.”

“Same old Hattie. The prosecutor didn’t know that this morning.”

“Don’t say ‘same old’ to a hag. They tell me you sell soap.”

It was like being told he masturbated. He got away from it. “You’re still tending bar, I heard. Out in Royal Oak.”

“Roseville. I married my partner. He’s a good man. Dumb as a cork.”

“The best kind, I’m told. Hell,” he said. “How are you, Hattie?”

“I’ve got cancer. Three doctors told me it’s terminal. Three kings wins the hand.”

He said hell again. She smiled and took his hand. Hers was cold, as if it had spread that far. He missed the beestung lips when she smiled. “I should’ve been repealed with Prohibition anyway,” she said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever get. You’re the one I’m worried about. I always did, you know. When I found out you went out on the ice with Jack I wanted to go out after you and drag you back.”

“I never knew.”

“You weren’t supposed to. When you threw me over later I went after everything in pants. I wanted to catch a disease and die right then. It’s kind of too bad I didn’t. I bet it’s one way no one else has tried.”

“I didn’t throw you over. You threw me.”

She let go of his hand and slapped it. “You didn’t call.”

“I tried.”

“When it was too late. You don’t put off calling a girl to propose marriage. How did you think that made me feel?”

“I thought maybe you were too busy sleeping with Jack to feel anything but Jack. He told me all about lying low at your place so nobody knew he was in town to kill Jerry Buckley.”

She got angry then for real. “That’s why you didn’t call? I was a whore, nitwit. You broke dates to be a newspaperman. I had a career too. Maybe not the most respectable one in town, but I was good at it. It’s what I did.”

“He paid you?”

“You think I was in love with him?”

“Most women were.”

“Yeah, and they’d have been damn disappointed, because he was one rotten lay. He did everything on the gallop, Connie. Everything.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“There’s a scoop.”

“Hattie, I blew it.”

“We both did.” After a pause, she smiled again. “You look good, Connie. I had to see you. Not many of the old gang left.”

“There’s none of them left.”

She kissed him. Her lips were cold, but not as cold as her hands. And then she left, her heels echoing off the linoleum and marble.

The bar where he kept his office in Hamtramck was almost empty at that time of day. He held up a palm to Oscar polishing the tables, in greeting and to tell him he wasn’t drinking, and started toward the corner booth and his portable Underwood permanently parked there.

“Second, Connie,” Oscar said. “Letter came for you.”

He waited while the bartender, a thickset twenty-two-year-old with bouncer’s biceps, the owner’s nephew, stretched across the bar and rummaged on the shelf below. The plate-glass window looked out on part of the Dodge Main plant across Joseph Campau.

“They used to sell it out of their trunks right out there in front,” he said. “The big Polacks would come out between shifts and drink it standing up.”

“That’s what Uncle John says.” Oscar extended the envelope. “It’s a letter, not a package this time.”

He hefted it, glanced at the New York return address, ran his thumb under the flap.

Dear Mr. Minor:

Thank you for the look at your proposal, which I’m returning to you under separate cover.

I have no doubt that your experiences as a reporter would make a compelling book. Unfortunately, the market at present is saturated with Prohibition stories.

I wish you good luck in placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

(signed) Burton Weems

Senior Editor

He shook his head. Oscar’s bright face clouded. “Sorry, Connie.”

“Nothing I’m not used to. On second thought, I’ll have a whiskey sour.”

In the booth he read the letter again, then crumpled it one-handed and bonged it into the wastebasket beside the table. He took the cartridge out of his pocket, glanced at it, and stood it up on the table beside the typewriter. Then he skimmed the top sheet off the typewritten stack next to the wall and without reading it selected the sharpest of the pencils standing erasers-down in a chipped dusty schooner, licked the tip, and marked an X across the entire page. From another stack he drew a fresh sheet and cranked it into the Underwood. For a moment he sat there, hands hovering over the keys. Then he began typing.

I saw Jack Dance the first time in Hattie Long’s place on Vernor the night the bulls tipped it over.…

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.