Dead Lock

by B. David Warner

  I took a pull from the Chesterfield I held in my hand. I’d quit smoking a couple of years after college, but started again after Ron was killed.

  “I can’t leave now, Wells,” I said. “I’m days from cracking this counterfeiting ring wide open.”

  Okay, so I exaggerated. I’d been writing a series of front-page stories covering a ring of gasoline ration stamp counterfeiters. With the war on gasoline was sold practically a teaspoon at a time and stamps were gold. I hadn’t busted the ring yet, but I felt close.

  Mayburn knew that convincing me to leave town would be a tough sell. He took another drag and ran a thick hand through thinning black hair. “I know you’re hot on their trail, Kate. Problem is: so do they.”

  “Look, Miss Brennan...” Inspector McKinley stepped up for a turn at bat. At an even six feet, he stood a few inches taller than me, and sported a full head of snowy white hair. “There are more Valvanos out there. You may not be lucky next time.”

  “Lucky, huh?” My eyes burned with a combination of anger and cigarette smoke. “You think it was luck that I kicked that bastard in the crotch when he surprised me inside my house? That I ducked to give your sniper a clear shot at his head? Why, if it weren’t for me your cops would still be standing around in front of my house picking their noses.”

  The Inspector shot a look at Mayburn, who simply shrugged his shoulders. My attitude didn’t surprise the man who’d been my editor for nearly three years.

  The Inspector leaned forward, hands tightly gripping the wooden back of a chair, eyes squinting at me across the table. “I don’t deny your bravery last night, Miss Brennan. But next time there might not be a chance to be brave. Their hired killer might just shoot from across the street, or come up behind you. You don’t have eyes in the back of your head, do you?”

  I stared him down. Realizing I wasn’t going to budge, the Inspector went on. “Why don’t you just tell us what you know and let us handle this?”

  Mayburn winced, anticipating my response.

  “My information,” I said through tightly pursed lips, “is from sources who won’t talk to you. I got it because they trusted me. Trusted I wouldn’t turn them in or turn their names over to you. I’m not selling them out because some punk held a gun to my head. And I’m sure as hell not running away.”

  The Inspector threw his hands in the air, looking toward Mayburn. “You reason with her. I’m done. And I won’t spend one damned cent of taxpayer money guarding a woman who’s too stubborn, or too stupid to stay out of harm’s way. She walks out of here, she’ll be in the morgue in two days.”

  He had finally worn Wells down. “Kate, I’m taking you off the assignment.”

  I turned, ready to give him both barrels, but he held up a hand. “Temporarily,” he said. “Your life is more important than any newspaper story. Go away for a few weeks; hide out somewhere. Give the Inspector time to work on the information you’ve published so far...and anything else you can give him without divulging your sources.”

  “And after that?”

  “You come back. We see what the situation is and we talk about continuing the series.”

  I looked back and forth from Mayburn to Inspector McKinley. “What happens if the police get lucky? What if they crack the ring while I’m out of town?”

  McKinley started to open his mouth, but Wells spoke first. “Inspector McKinley, if your people make arrests based on information Miss Brennan gives you, will you guarantee her first access to your arresting officers and any facts they can provide?”

  McKinley’s face still glowed red. “I won’t guarantee any such thing.”

  Wells decided on a detour. “Inspector, how long has this ring been counterfeiting gasoline stamps?”

  McKinley cleared his throat. “They’ve been active for nine months. . . more or less.”

  “And outside of the information published in Miss Brennan’s stories in the Detroit Times, are you any closer to proving who’s behind this counterfeiting than you were nine months ago?”

  The Police Inspector did a slow burn as Wells went on. “If Miss Brennan helps you crack a case you’ve been working on for that long, doesn’t she deserve some consideration?”

  The Inspector let out a deep breath. “All right, all right. But she’d better give us some damn good information, or it’s no deal.”

  I held the Inspector’s eye for a long moment before speaking. “You’ll get great information, Inspector. Just make damn sure your people don’t screw it up.”

  6

  It’s hard as hell to say you’re wrong when you know you’re right. But I swallowed hard and bowed to Wells Mayburn’s request that I leave Detroit.

  I could have stayed in spite of Wells, tracking down the leaders of the counterfeiting ring and blowing the lid off with a series of articles unmasking the bastards. I’d like to have seen Wells refuse to publish them. Why, they would have beaten the hell out of the war news on page one; that is unless we had another Midway -- or God help us -- another Pearl Harbor.

  Much as I hated to admit it, a little time off might do me some good. I had been working the counterfeiting story for a solid nine months, trailing bad rationing stamps from the gasoline stations that accepted them to the printers who turned them out. I even got a few printing operations shut down. But the really bad guys, the ringleaders, just moved on to another press.

  Maybe I’d gotten stale; I’d certainly gotten careless. Forgetting to lock the door had let that punk Valvano sneak into my house. It turned out to be a close call, closer than I wanted to admit to Mayburn or McKinley.

  Picking a location for my self-imposed “time out” presented no problem. My bank account wouldn’t support me for long but my uncle could. G. P. Brennan owned the Soo Morning News in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the town people simply called the “Soo”. I’d spent my senior year of high school in the Soo and G.P. had promised me a job if I ever decided to move back. But I always felt too attracted to Detroit to return to Sault Ste. Marie for more than a week or two each summer. I’d miss the noisy factories and the quiet afternoons on Belle Isle. I’d miss Hamtramck and its Polish restaurants with their pirogues and kielbasa. I’d miss the nightlife of Greektown; and Black Bottom, the center of Detroit’s Negro community, with its special blend of soul food and hot jazz. As much as anything, I’d miss those marvelous Sunday mornings pouring through fresh fruits and vegetables at Eastern Market after church.

  But the time had come to leave, at least for now. After the meeting in Wells’ office I went home, loaded a couple of suitcases and my German Shepherd Mick into my thirty-seven Ford and hit the road.

  7

  Thanks to President Roosevelt’s thirty-five mile-per-hour speed limit, it took two days just to get to the northern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. (I admit I had the speedometer close to fifty-five or sixty between towns.)

  Fortunately, Wells had come up with some extra gasoline ration stamps from the Times’ supply.

  Mick and I spent our second night on the road just below the Straits of Mackinac. I rented a small cabin, one of a group huddled together with a tiny lake out back and a patch of gravel they called a parking lot in front. The bed felt comfortable though and the shower steamed good and hot in the morning.

  Shortly after eight a.m., I stood on a pier at the tip of the Michigan mitten, peering out four miles across the Straits to the Upper Peninsula, waiting for the car ferry to come and transport me, Mick and my Ford to the far side. I had left my car parked in the middle of a grid of a hundred or so others, poised and waiting to drive onto the deck of the ferry.

  A strong wind blew from the north, slapping cold against my face and raising white caps on the water in front of me. Waves lapped against the foundation of the pier and billowing white clouds slipped across a bright blue sky, their dark shadows racing over the waves. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with air so clean you’d swear it came straight from the breath of God Herself.

  The car ferry h
ad just left St. Ignace on the far shore and appeared as a white dot out on the water, so I had plenty of time for a phone call to my uncle. I headed for the big gray terminal. I found the public telephone on the wall and pumped in twenty cents after giving the operator the number of the Soo Morning News. I made the call station-to-station; my uncle would be at his desk in spite of the early hour. He hadn’t missed a day of work since my Aunt Susan died twelve years ago.

  As I listened to the phone ring at the other end of the line, snapshots of my uncle developed inside my head. Standing an inch or so taller than me, he had flashing blue eyes, a thin straight nose and much more hair than most men in their mid-sixties. It was pure white and combed straight back. He looked younger than his age, due to good genes and an active lifestyle that included plenty of trout fishing and ten-hour days at the paper.

  Those mental photographs wound further back in time and I pictured him holding me up to pick apples from the tree in his backyard, and standing behind me at his old gas stove as we popped popcorn.

  In another mental image he sat at a desk, editing a story I had written the year I worked at the Morning News. It was the year I had moved – unexpectedly I might add - to Sault Ste. Marie for my senior year in high school.

  I had grown up in Detroit and as a young girl I led a life most young boys dream of. I literally grew up with the Detroit Tigers.

  My father was sports editor and columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Maybe you’ve heard of him: Harold “Buck” Brennan? During home stands at Navin Field our house served as a second home for the likes of Harry Heilmann, Topper Rigney and even the legendary Georgia Peach, Ty Cobb.

  As you might imagine, my house was also very popular with the kids in school. Boys would just “happen” to drop by whenever they saw a strange car in the driveway on the chance it might belong to a Detroit Tiger.

  When the team went on the road, Dad went with them, logging more rail miles than Casey Jones. That became a sore point between him and his second wife Rose until she threatened to leave him and move back to Denver, where her parents lived.

  Dad refused to take her seriously until one day at the start of the Tigers’ swing to the east coast, Rose put me on a train to Sault Ste. Marie and took one herself, west to Colorado.

  Just after filing for divorce.

  She had called my uncle, of course, to make sure I had a place to stay in the Soo. G.P. was familiar with the strains a newspaper career could put on a marriage, his own having survived nearly forty years before my Aunt Susan passed away.

  After my senior year of high school, I accepted a journalism scholarship to Columbia University. Dad would visit whenever the Tigers played the Yankees, but sadly he died during my junior year of college. That left me an orphan; my real mother had been killed in a car accident when I was barely three years old.

  A voice on the phone jarred me back to the present.

  8

  “Soo Morning News.” The woman sounded very business-like.

  “G. P. Brennan, please.”

  “One moment.”

  Another wait. I watched two small boys play catch on the far side of the huge waiting room. They dressed alike in red shorts, white shirts and blue caps, a reflection of the patriotism that had swept the country after that shocking December day nearly two years ago. I couldn’t help hoping this damn war would be over before they and other kids like them would be called to serve in some foxhole on the other side of the world. The soldiers doing the fighting and dying now had tossed baseballs just a few years ago.

  “Brennan.”

  “G. P., it’s Kate.” I had called him G. P. instead of “Uncle George” since childhood. “G. P.” was his nickname, and much easier for a three-year-old to say.

  “Kate! It’s grand to hear from you. Say, you sound like you’re next door.” His voice sounded full of the warmth I remembered so well.

  “I am, practically. I’m in Mackinaw City.”

  “Mackinaw? Why, what in blazes are you doing there?”

  “Coming to visit you.”

  There came a pause at the other end, then, “Oh?” Strange. My beloved Uncle George didn’t sound overjoyed to hear I had come to see him.

  “What’s wrong, G. P.? You always said I had a job with your paper anytime I wanted it.”

  Another pause. “It’s not the job, Kate; it’s finding you a place to stay.”

  “How about where I always stay...the upper flat in your house?”

  “Why, it’s rented out. Jack Crawford, my new managing editor, is living there until his house is built.”

  “I’ll find a room somewhere in town.”

  “Impossible. There are no rooms. The War Department has stationed seven thousand troops here to guard the locks. Soldiers are everywhere. Fort Brady can’t house them all and people are renting out their basements and garages.”

  I felt as though one of those huge rolling white caps out in the Straits had knocked me over. I knew the strategic importance of the Soo Locks, but I hadn’t counted on this.

  The iron ore from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Minnesota’s Mesabi Range was critically vital to the Allied war plants. Every lake freighter carrying ore to the steel mills in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania passed through one of four locks in the St. Marys River. If anything happened to those locks, every factory in America making tanks, munitions or anything else vital to the war effort, would shut down.

  “Kate...” G. P.’s voice came from somewhere in the distance. “Kate, are you there?”

  “I’m here. G. P.”

  “Take my advice and turn around for home. The Soo is no place for you right now.”

  “Neither is Detroit, I’m afraid.” Blow by blow I recounted my latest experience. I started with the articles on the gas ration stamp counterfeiters and the punk holding the gun to my head in the doorway of my home, and ended with Wells Mayburn’s polite request to get the hell out of town.

  “So you see, G. P.,” I concluded, “I don’t have much choice.”

  This time the pause stretched so long I thought the line had gone dead. A deep sigh from G.P. finally broke the silence. “Oh, all right. Come ahead. I’ll find something for you.”

  As I hung the phone back on the hook and walked to my car I saw the ferry approaching the pier. The wind blew stronger now and the clouds had turned black. But they weren’t the only darkness on the horizon. All the way across the strait I couldn’t help thinking that a lack of space wasn’t the real reason my uncle didn’t want me in Sault Sainte Marie.

  9

  Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan lies at the source of the St. Marys River, where waters from Lake Superior flow through Whitefish Bay and then into the River on their journey to the lower Great Lakes. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the American Soo’s sister city, is just across the water. People traveling from one town to the other use a car ferry to negotiate the river.

  There, between the two towns, the water level of the St. Marys drops 21 feet, creating a once insurmountable barrier for shipping. The first lock, built in the middle of the nineteenth century changed all that.

  Hours after driving off the ferry, I crested a hill on Highway 2 and started down into the St. Marys River Basin and Sault Ste. Marie. Founded by French missionaries in 1668, the “Soo” is Michigan’s oldest city, and the country’s third oldest town west of the Appalachian Mountains.

  The sun had poked out again and the scene below reminded me of Detroit’s annual J. L. Hudson Thanksgiving Day Parade. There were a myriad of giant gray balloons floating a thousand feet or so above the town. The closer I got, the larger the balloons became. Like those in the Detroit department store’s holiday parade, they were some thirty feet long; but instead of bright fairy tale figures, they appeared drab in color and oval in form, like dirigibles.

  We drove into town, car windows down, Mick with his head stuck out in the wind, taking in the sights.

  On a day when the stifling heat forces you to drive with the windows down, it’s
hard to imagine these streets bordered on either side by snow drifts ten feet high. But U.P. weather is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Each November Mr. Hyde comes riding in over Whitefish Bay on dark, black-bottomed clouds that drop flakes of snow the size of quarters. The quarters pile up on streets and sidewalks and make travel by foot or automobile not only difficult, but treacherous. There’s so much snow that there is no place to put it and merchants pay men with carts to haul it away and dump piles of white slush beyond the city limits.

  But today it was difficult to fathom anyone making a living hauling snow.

  I drove down Ashmun Street and through Sault Ste. Marie, barely noticing the shops, restaurants and taverns. My focus remained on the balloons ahead. I had to lean forward and look straight up to see them at the very top of my windshield.

  As her car slid through town, Kate Brennan couldn’t have noticed Claus Krueger as she passed where he stood on the sidewalk outside Cowan’s Department Store. He, too, found the giant balloons interesting, but for a far different reason.

  Born in Germany, Claus Krueger had admired the United States even as a young boy. Shortly after he began to talk in his native tongue, his father had coached him in speaking Americanized English. The family planned to move to America and his father wanted him to fit in immediately. But his father’s death when Claus was twelve changed those plans. That was 1924, and like many Germans, young Claus was drawn to the charismatic personality of the man known as Adolph Hitler. Hitler had been sentenced to five years in the Landsberg Prison earlier in the year, but was pardoned and released after serving only nine months.