Whiskey River (8 page)

“Now!”

Kramm had cleared the breech. Now he braced his foot against the hump in the floor over the driveshaft and stuck his entire torso through his window. I heard the clattering reports, the clinking of the spent shells striking the Hudson’s roof. He fired two long bursts and pulled himself back inside.

“What the hell, everybody dies.” Jack turned again. A spray of ice crystals coming off the tire chains caught the moonlight in an iridescent gusher.

I saw then what was happening. In his attempts to outmaneuver the lighter Hudson, the driver of the lumbering Packard had forgotten where he was. The armor-plated car’s front tires, unchained, had locked and the car had slewed over the edge of a dark patch over a shoal. As we powered past within a hundred feet, drawing machine-gun fire which at that range was haphazard at best, Andy Kramm thrust himself half out of the Hudson again and hammered at the thin ice under the Packard.

At first there was no effect. The bullets vanished into darkness as if poured down a hole. Then a pattern of fine cracks starred the dark patch, etched white on black, spreading outward.

“Shit!”

Kramm fell back into the seat, the Thompson across his lap with its breech locked open. It was a bad time to run out of ammunition.

But bullets were still hitting the ice. As we sped away from the Packard, having veered too close to its gun for comfort, I watched the battered black Lincoln following our original path with Lon Camarillo standing on the running board, bracing himself with an arm hooked around the window post and pumping away with what looked like a Browning Automatic Rifle at the center of the network of cracks. His face in the moonlight with the buttstock against his cheek looked like the Grim Reaper’s. At the wheel of the Lincoln, his bald head shining, sat Hannion, the train robber from Oklahoma.

“Son-of-a-bitch cowboys,” growled Kramm.

The former aviator and his partner weren’t the only ones who had caught on. The driver of the Packard was spinning his wheels in a white blur now, frantic to back away onto a better footing. His engine whined, but the car only subsided into a drunken tilt, spoiling the aim of the gunner in back and thrusting its armored prow farther out over the shoal.

A wheel broke through and the car stumbled, then went down on both knees as the ice collapsed under the other front wheel. White floes stood up in shards and slid under the black water. The Packard teetered, rear wheels turning in empty air, a scaled-down
Titanic
suspended on a cloud of exhaust.

We didn’t stay for the rest. Jack threw on the headlamps and started in a long loop toward the Michigan shore. With their lead car foundering, the others in the hostile party had lost interest in the fight and sought to spread out to avoid a chain reaction. Bumpers and fenders tangled as more than one driver chose the same route. Friendly headlamps came on behind us.

“They’ll try again in town,” Kramm said.

“No, Pete’s got a deal in Monroe.” Jack’s voice was pitched high, but not from fear. “How we doing, any fresh dead? Connie?”

“I’m okay.” Actually I was. I had thought I’d wet myself in the excitement, then discovered that a bullet had pierced the crate at my elbow, smashing a bottle and drenching the seat in Old Log Cabin. “They’d go to all that trouble just for liquor?”

“This is a million-dollar load. He’s got payments to make on that rolling hunk of boilerplate. Besides, he never did forgive Joey for kidnapping him that time. It made him look common.”

“Wonder how the others come out.” Of all of us, Bass Springfield seemed the least transported.

Jack said, “They know where to go when we get separated.”

Kramm chuckled. “You see that lardbutt Packard go
down?
I never seen nothing like it, not even in Russia.”

“Good thing Lon come along,” said Springfield.

“I softened it up for him.”

Jack wasn’t listening. His eyes in the rearview mirror were bleak. “When I find out who stooled I’m fucking gonna pick his bones.”

Minor’s Majors

BY
C
ONNIE
M
INOR

B
ONAPARTE AT
A
USTERLITZ HAD
nothing on a local lieutenant of bootleggers, hardly more than a boy, who last night on the battlefield of icebound Lake Erie routed an army of hijackers with a few bursts from a submachine gun.

Historians tell us Napoleon destroyed the Russian Army in Prussia by directing his cannon at a chain of frozen lakes over which the enemy sought retreat, plunging horses and men into the icy waters and claiming victory. Although it’s a fair bet this gang tactician has never read Von Clausewitz (or even Hans and Fritz) and knows nothing of the Napoleonic Wars …

And like that. It creaks a little now, but it read better when it was fresh. Well enough anyway to be picked up by the wires and land me my first Pulitzer nomination. I think I’d have had a shot at it, too, had not the deadline been months away; by which time, for reasons I’m about to set forth, the notion of gangsters as modern Robin Hoods was as dead as Franz Ferdinand.

The night the
Banner
with my Battle of Lake Erie column hit the streets, I celebrated. With a bonus practically in my pocket I started high, watching the Grosse Pointe suckers and getting suckered myself at roulette in the Aniwa Club on Van Dyke, then did Blossom Heath and floated from there to Doc Brady’s and the Arcadia Ballroom, where Don Redman was blowing saxophone with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. At one point it occurred to me that some of the liquor I was drinking had probably come over in the load I had helped escort. Somewhere, although I don’t recall stopping at her place, I collected Hattie Long, who had on a gold lamé shift under an ermine coat and one of those metal headpieces stuccoed with jewels like Marie Dressier wore in the movies, only on Hattie it looked less like the coronation of the Queen of the Dykes. I remember putting the arm on her for fifty when my pockets turned inside out over the blackjack table at the Green Lantern in Ecorse. My luck improved after that, but all told I figure that twenty I hadn’t gotten yet cost me two weeks’ pay.

Once—Jean Goldkette was directing the band, so it must have been in the dining room off the Graystone Ballroom—a liveried waiter brought a green bottle with gold foil on the neck to our table. When he pointed out the gentleman who had sent it, I looked at Jack Dance in black tie and black satin lapels raising a glass of beer to me at a table in the corner. The woman he was with was no flapper. She was wearing black velvet off the shoulders and pearls, and her hair was long and blonde in an old-fashioned sort of way, no curling irons or peroxide. She had a long straight nose like a Greek statue and when she turned my way her eyes went past me as if I were a fern growing there. Hattie told me later I waved back at Jack with an idiot grin, “like you were separated at birth and he saved your life and you were partners in a gold mine in Alaska or something.” Women exaggerate.

The next morning, standing in the same clothes I had put on the morning before, I watched Hattie drawing on her eyebrows at the little French Empire vanity a Hupmobile vice president had given her when he went back to his wife. The bedroom of her apartment on Livernois was fussily decorated in a high school cheerleader’s idea of Bourbon splendor, ruffled polka-dot bedspreads and flouncy curtains and gold fleurs-de-lis on pale blue wallpaper.

“Did I propose to you last night?” I asked.

“Not me.” She did something with a brush that made her chin look less pointed. “It was the hatcheck girl at the Addison. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”

“I don’t remember going to the Addison.”

“If you can’t hold your liquor, don’t pick it up.”

“So when are the nuptials?”

“She was already married to the bouncer.” She exchanged the brush for a lipstick.

“I was wondering why my nose was so tender. I must’ve been drinking gin. Gin always makes me propose to hatcheck girls.”

“All the more reason to take the pledge. Hatcheck girls always marry bouncers.”

“If I were a sensible drunk I’d propose to you.”

She painted on the beestung lips. “Don’t joke about it.”

In the streetcar later I said, “Whoops.”

I’d been in the office ten minutes when Howard Wolfman woke me up by crumpling a twenty-dollar bill under my nose. He looked country-squirish in Harris tweeds and a red silk necktie that brought out the pink in his eyes behind the gold-rimmed cheaters.

“I got an angry call at home last night from an Agent McPeek with the Prohibition Navy,” he said when I snatched the bill.

I couldn’t read him. My eyes were still woolly from the night before and I didn’t want to move my head too quickly for fear my brains would spring out like watchworks. I could read the twenty, though. I uncrossed my ankles on the desk, crossed them the other way, and stretched the bill in both hands. “What did the floating Keystone Kops want?”

“He said the Navy patrols that part of Erie with Model T’s on skis and no battle like you described took place night before last or any other.”

“The river was open that night. They were probably busy sinking some auto muckety’s yacht off Belle Isle on the theory it belonged to Joey Machine. That’s all they’re good for, unless you want to run them in the funnies next to Happy Hooligan.”

“Until that call came in I wasn’t going to pay you a bonus. That Bonaparte stuff is a little heavy for readers of the
Banner.
You want to watch that.”

“Columnists’ disease. Every now and then I get the urge to prove I read a book.”

“Fight it. This isn’t the
Literary Digest.
What’s in the hopper?” He inclined his white head toward the Remington on its slanty stand.

I cranked up the sheet. “ ‘Now is the time for all good men to jump over the lazy dog.’ I’m stuck.”

“Is it serious?”

“Critical. Happens every day about this time.”

He hesitated a stroke. “Swayles is out today.”

“Another binge so soon after the last one?” Swayles was the
Banner’s
police reporter. They didn’t stay sober for long on that beat.

“No, he’s really sick. Mumps. Can you run this down? I know it’s not your department anymore, but it might turn into something.” He handed me a sheet torn off a pad.

I recognized the telephone number. “Who’s in the morgue?”

“That’s the question. Two hours ago the police pried him out of the trunk of a stolen Chevy parked on Rivard.”

“What makes him different from all the other John Does punched full of holes we run in the police blotter column?”

“Somebody took a needle and thread to this one and stitched his lips shut. It might not be anything. Maybe we can make it something.”

“Is he white?”

When he screwed up his face like that he looked just like a rabbit. “If he weren’t, they wouldn’t have bothered to call it in.”

“I don’t know, I was counting on going home and catching a couple of hours’ sleep. The column’s not due till four.”

“I was going to ask. You look worse than Swayles. Big night?”

“Chalk it up to research.” I checked my watch. “Anderson should be on duty. I’ll stop by the morgue on my way home.”

Wolfman left and I got up to get my hat and coat from the rack by Jensen’s desk.

“Need me?” Jensen relit his pipe for the eleventh time that morning.

I shook my head. Wolfman, who wouldn’t blink at running a picture of a child cut in two by a streetcar, was strangely reticent about photographing corpses on slabs, and always had the cartoon editor do a sketch when he wanted to give readers an opportunity to identify a John Doe. Meanwhile the scribes at the
Times
kept a collar and tie in a file drawer at the morgue to put on the cadavers, and the boys in the darkroom airbrushed eyeballs onto their closed lids to make them look more lively.

Fred Ogilvie stopped me in the hallway to show me proofs of head shots for my column. A short pudge with thinning black hair and a strawberry mark on the lower half of his face, Ogilvie had been hired off the
Free Press
at twice his former salary to take over the
Banner’s
photography department. I was in a hurry, so I picked one of me chewing a pipe I’d borrowed from Jensen’s desk—a mistake, as it turned out, because when the column went into syndication later, admirers started sending me tobacco and pipes. When I smoked at all I smoked Chesterfields.

Fred said, “I kind of like the one with the hat.”

“So does Winchell. Use this one, starting tonight. I’m sick of getting mail addressed to ‘Miss Minor.’”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We were having a January thaw. The sidewalks were slushy and a wind was blowing up from Ohio that ought to have smelled of cherry blossoms. I walked the four blocks to the Coroner’s Court Building at Brush and East Lafayette. The balmy air woke up several brain cells I’d given up for dead, and by the time I got there I was feeling a good deal better than most people when they enter the morgue.

It’s a corner construction like the Parker Block where the
Banner
lived, built in 1925 to replace the old facility in the northwest corner of the County Building. It contains a private office for each of the two coroners, general offices, two courtrooms with chambers, a mortuary viewing room, a dissecting room, rooms for freezing, X-ray, and sterilizing, a wash room, and cold storage for one hundred and eighty-six bodies. The planners must have had an inkling of what Prohibition would continue to bring.

I showed a county employee in uniform my police pass and he let me into the dissecting room, where Paul Anderson had both gloved hands up to his elbows inside a naked male corpse dressed open on the steel table. The place smelled of fresh meat and ammonia and brine from the cooling system. Anderson was a big Swedish-born former linebacker with a curl of blonde hair on his pink scalp, meaty jowls, and forearms like Popeye; not at all the type you’d expect to see mucking around in a dead person’s insides. He was first assistant medical examiner under W. D. Ryan, and liked his work. I never met a forensic pathologist who didn’t. It isn’t an occupation you drift into.