Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  Tom Danzig attended, looking more polished than his brother in evening clothes with a redhead on his arm, one of these hollow-cheeked ascetic types in a white gown who looked as if she read T. S. Eliot without being forced to. Tom shook my hand, said something with a reined-in smile that was lost in the “Black Bottom Stomp,” and moved on.

  Lon didn’t drink and left early. Andy said he didn’t like crowds or music. “Old Spooky didn’t come back from France with all his checkers,” he explained. I found out then that Lon was known as the Spook when he pulled the trigger for Borneo, not entirely because of his appearance. Alcohol was an aphrodisiac to Andy’s natural love of gossip.

  I was stag. I had asked Hattie to come with me, but the Elks were in town and she was busy directing traffic at her joint in River Rouge, where she’d been for a record six months. I introduced myself to another loner, a thin, trampled-looking old man with curly white hair and spectacles as thick as coasters. He wasn’t much bigger than Andy and had on a black suit with dust in the creases. “You know my boy John?” he asked.

  It took me a moment to realize he meant Jack. “You’re Mr. Danzig?” He looked like the watch repairman he was. Jack and Tom must have gotten their size from their mother’s family. We tried talking, but the music was loud and he indicated that his hearing was no better than his vision. We separated. When I looked for him later after the set was finished I learned he’d gone home.

  At dusk Mrs. Dance threw her bouquet into the arms of a Charlotte Street professional, who squealed as if she were sixteen and unbroken, and the bride and groom left for the train station in Jack’s new LaSalle. Truce or no truce, no chances were taken. They were escorted in two Buicks, front and rear, driven by kids from Jack’s gang with Andy Kramm and Bass Springfield riding shotgun. It was the first I’d seen of Springfield that day. Negroes weren’t allowed in the Chesterfield unless they wore aprons or carried musical instruments.

  The reception was still going when the Banner hit the pavement. The lead item in Andrea St. Charles’s “Lives of a Saint” column read:

  Motor City freebooter Handsome Jack Dance and Vivian “Dearie” Deering (and we all remember Daddy Woodbine, don’t we, darlings?) joined destinies today in a civil ceremony downtown. It’s not known yet whether the gay couple plans to raise Hades or a family.

  Jack brought a Kodak to Atlantic City, and the Dances took each other’s picture posing on the boardwalk and in front of the Ferris wheels and clowning in their swimsuits on the beach. A snapshot Vivian took of Jack, natty in seersucker and a Panama hat, squaring off with a rifle to knock down a tin duck, appeared in the Free Press the day after Sylvester Street; a reporter copped it from an album in the living room of the Dance home in St. Clair Shores while his partner kept Vivian busy in the front hall when Jack was in hiding. Because of the gun it’s the one they use most often when his name comes up, just ahead of the picture that originally appeared on the Banner’s front page with my wedding story, of the couple slicing the cake with a big knife, on account of that Ripper tag the News hung on him. But I’m getting ahead of myself again, and I swore I wouldn’t.

  They took a day out to visit New York City, where they watched the Empire State Building crawling up its steel skeleton and caught Gertrude Lawrence and Leslie Howard in Candlelight on Broadway and Jack bought a painting in a gallery. Done in dark oils and framed in cheap amber Bakelite like crystallized honey, it showed a blonde girl praying in profile beneath a crucifix on a mustard wall, hands clasped under her slightly retiring chin. The typewritten card that contained its price identified it as The Pious Heart, by Arthur Rayburn Couzzens. It was a flagrantly Christian painting for so flagrant an agnostic Jew as Jack, executed unremarkably by an artist the world had forgotten long before he ended his life by drinking a glass of turpentine in 1921—the year, the curator reported, that The Pious Heart had entered the gallery—but it went wherever Jack went from then on. I would come to look for it the first time I visited him in a new place. He never explained why he liked it and I never asked him; it was that kind of picture, the girl’s corn-fed face so vapid in its rapture it made you turn away in embarrassment, as from those likenesses of Jesus whose eyes open and shut depending on where you’re standing. Vivian had tried to talk him out of buying it, which goes to show you how little she knew about her new husband. That anonymous girl prayed in more interesting places than Elmer Gantry.

  While Jack was away, the truce fell apart. Joey was considering Borneo’s suggestion that he cede a small portion of his holdings on the East Side to Jack in return for a cut of the profits from the new brewery, when someone hijacked a convoy of ten-ton trucks hauling beer from a brewery Joey did business with in Cleveland. The scout car for the convoy drove around a tree that had fallen across a country road ten miles from the Michigan border, and as the lead truck tried to do the same, a biplane that had been buzzing and farting around the sky a thousand feet up without attracting much attention suddenly went into a steep dive and the man in the rear seat slung a tommy gun over the side of the cockpit and tattooed a line of holes across the truck’s radiator. A couple of hand grenades followed, one exploding under the scout car’s rear axle and dumping the car over sideways. By the time the gunners scrambled out and returned fire, the aeroplane had climbed out of range. Then a small army led by a big Negro charged down a slope from a cluster of trees, firing machine guns and high-powered rifles. One of the men from the car was killed and two more wounded. The one remaining dropped his shotgun and threw up his hands. He was forced to lie down on the ground with his hands behind his head. Then the drivers were pulled from the trucks and told to join him while others took their places at the wheel. From start to finish the raid took twenty minutes.

  There was no mystery involved. The pilot of the plane could only have been one person, and I had a pretty good idea who the airborne gunner was. The big Negro clinched it. As soon as word reached Detroit I headed straight for the house on Howard, which, although Jack had moved out, had become the unofficial headquarters of the Dance mob.

  Bass Springfield opened the door four inches, enough to show me his .45. When I convinced him I was alone he let me inside. Immediately my hand was seized by a manic Andy Kramm, who pumped it as if we hadn’t seen each other in years and I had brought a bottle. As a matter of fact I had, but it was no orphan there. His face was flushed and his eyes were brighter than ever.

  “Connie, Connie! Come in and take a load off.”

  “Where’s Lon?”

  “He’s at the blockhouse. You hear about it?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Springfield muttered.

  “You mean the hijack?”

  “Hijack, hell! It was a major fucking offensive with air support. Sit down.”

  I took a seat at the card table this time and transferred the flat pint from my hip pocket to the table. I had wondered a little about the paradox of bringing booze to a bootlegger, but as it happened, he had just run dry. Jack’s rule against drinking on the job had kept the stock low.

  Within twenty minutes and half the bottle, I had a full account of the raid for publication minus names, including the name of my source. Springfield tried for a while to stand on Andy’s tongue, but coloreds didn’t tell whites what to do in that company or any other and he gave up. Off the record, I asked Andy if Jack was aware of what happened. His toothpaste grin was lopsided. “Hell, who you think planned it?”

  “What’s he got against peace?”

  “Same thing he had against working for Joey, I guess. Not enough noise.”

  The evening my exclusive “interview with an insider” ran with the first public details of the Ohio hijacking, I accepted an invitation over the telephone to have lunch at the Detroit Club the next day with Lloyd Bundle, director of the regional bureau of the Continental News Syndicate. I had abalone for the first time in my life in a wood-paneled dining room that looked and smelled like the inside of a humidor. Bundle, chubby and pink-featured with a head of hair the color and t
hickness of lemon sherbet, might have passed for a Dutch Master in a Rembrandt get-up, but he had on a banker’s blue suit instead and a Masonic ring on his left pinky. Over the baked Alaska he offered me syndication in two hundred newspapers and $8,500 annually plus ten percent of each new subscription, on top of my salary at the Banner.

  I did some quick mental arithmetic. All told, not counting bonuses and subscription royalties, it came to $16,300. Governor Green made $15,000, not counting graft. If you placed any stock in people’s names, Bundle was well placed.

  “What about the Banner?” I asked.

  “Wolfman gets a cut. We take care of home plate. You won’t even have to change offices.”

  “That’s not a point in your favor.”

  He chuckled. He knew he could afford to. I pretended to think it over. In the kitchen someone had the radio tuned to WMBC, and whenever the door swung open Jerry Buckley’s slightly brassy voice came put gloating over his listener poll, which was running three to two in favor of recalling Mayor Bowles. Buckley said; which had a way of becoming truth once he said it. Between him and Father Coughlin it was even money which man had the firmer grip on his audience’s testicles.

  “Mr. Bundle, you’ve bought yourself a columnist.”

  He wiped ice cream off his chins and grasped my outstretched hand. “Any ideas on the subject of your first column?”

  A waiter flapped through the swinging door, letting out a little more Buckley.

  “One or two,” I said.

  Chapter Eleven

  THREE SAINTED ADJECTIVES BECAME decanonized early in the thirties. Within a short span of years, we learned to measure a politician’s crookedness by the number of times “Honest” appeared in front of his name; “rich,” except when applied to certain foods and fabrics, became a term of proletarian contempt; and “crusading,” most exalted of all, lost its power to uplift, coming to signify demagoguery and arrogance. But in July 1930, Gerald E. Buckley wore the first and third with Borgian pride and defined the second.

  In looks and personality, he was an unlikely spellbinder. Despite a somewhat heavy-lipped, slope-browed resemblance to a trout, he had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and his harsh voice and overly aggressive delivery at the microphone, instead of having the opposite effect, drew listeners to the Mutual network the way the Banner’s shrill headlines created mobs at newsstands. From his tiny studio on the mezzanine of the LaSalle Hotel at Adelaide and Woodward—Buckley’s answer to Father Coughlin’s electronic pulpit in the Shrine of the Little Flower—he exerted a derisive, brow-beating, tent-revival influence over numbers that would impress a senator.

  For months, since before Bowles’s now-infamous “Let ’em die” speech, Buckley had been beating the drum for recall. The big, amiable mayor with the thinning black hair and horn-rimmed glasses had, he said, created a climate in which crime was encouraged to prosper. When the police bothered to arrest a suspect in a gangland slaying and bring him to court, the judge or jury almost invariably freed him for his service to society. This, said Buckley, amounted to a mandate to go forth and commit more murders. By July the statistics were firmly on his side. Violent deaths averaged one per day. Detroit was marked up like a butcher’s chart, each portion bearing the stamp of a different marauding band: the Machines, the Rosensteins, the Oakland Sugar House Gang, and the rivergoing Little Jewish Navy, with the Purple Gang claiming free range throughout the city and the communities downriver, forming and breaking alliances with the amoral license of post-Christian Vandals and hiring out their guns as far west as Chicago, where every little kid knew they had supplied the shooters for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In spite of numerous attempts by Sal Borneo’s fraternal Unione Siciliana to maintain some semblance of peace through the assignment of sovereign duchies, splinter wars flared up sporadically along ethnic lines as old as Exodus, made more deadly by the prospect of financial reward and the presence of modern weaponry. It was Dodge City with choppers and V-8 Fords. All this Buckley laid at Charles Bowles’s wide-open door.

  Late on the night of the 22nd, the lights of every newspaper and radio station in the city were burning as results trickled in from the polling places, where a record number of voters had turned out to decide whether Detroit should be the first large American city to give its mayor his walking papers. The trickle became a torrent, and by midnight it was all over, including the shouting: The public had voted by a majority of 30,000 to dump Bowles.

  The Banner beat out every other election extra in the city by minutes. Two front pages—”SO LONG, CHARLIE” and “ELECTION FRAUD!”—the former illustrated with a four-column blow-up pulled from the morgue of Bowles waving to reporters as he boarded the train on his way to the Kentucky Derby, had been prepared days earlier; and in less, than ten minutes, with Ernie Swayles barking the numbers ward by ward into his ear through a receiver held by a copy boy, Walter DiVirgilio on the rewrite desk clattered out a twenty-inch story. Another boy tore each sheet out of the machine as it was finished and ran it down to typesetting. When the last one vanished, Walter lit up a cigar to celebrate, and by the time he had it half smoked the newsies were crying it in the street. Howard was there, the only man on the premises not in his shirtsleeves that sticky summer night, and shook everyone’s hand at least once. The festive air was fouled only a little by the fact that while Walter was typing, Buckley was reading the final tally over the air on the radio in Howard’s office. I don’t think any of us caught the significance then. Did the dinosaurs observe the furry little mammals darting between their legs and think of anything but how to make a meal of them?

  I was there just for the ride. My column, a lightweight thing comparing the recall system to the old Roman custom of hacking to pieces those leaders who had overstayed their welcome, was being reprinted from the regular evening edition. I stayed at my desk, out of the way, with a cup of coffee laced with bourbon, noodling around with my first piece for syndication. I had discarded my first opening as pompous and stilted:

  On paper, Jerry Buckley’s broadcasts read like a page of notes from a high school civics lecture—broken, half-formed, puerile. What makes them sound like the Sermon on the Mount? When time stills the voice and the red-hot topics are fossils, will future generations read the transcripts and condemn us for gullible half-wits?

  It was past two A.M. and I had taken an entirely different tack without liking it any better when Ernie Swayles leaned in through the office door. The knot of his tie was down around his knees, he had sweated through his tan poplin jacket, and his nose, potato-shaped and cocked off-center, registered a blood-alcohol level in the mauve range. I could smell the junipers on his breath from where I was sitting.

  “Hell of a fine job, Ern.”

  “You hear?”

  I misunderstood him. “Yeah, I’m here.” He was drunker than I’d thought.

  “Who told you?”

  “I was standing by Walter’s desk when you called him.”

  I still wasn’t getting it. He looked more confused than I was. “I ain’t talked to Walter since I dictated my story. My phone was ringing when I got in just now. What’d you hear?”

  “Let’s start over. What happened?”

  “Buckley’s dead. They gunned him in the lobby of the LaSalle.”

  “Who did?”

  “The bulls don’t know yet. That’s who called me. I’m on my way down. Want to come?”

  “No, I’ll wait.” The truth was I couldn’t leave my chair. Ever since that night on the ice I had reacted to shock with paralysis. Courage is the first casualty of experience.

  He shrugged and left. When I could move, I upended my much-kicked steel wastebasket and bent down from my chair to sort through the crumpled sheets until I found that original opening. You never know what you can use.

  The story Swayles came back with, and that kept the linotypists and pressmen on duty for several hours more while the front page was redone and another extra was put together, had something for everyone, includ
ing a mysterious dame.

  After finishing his broadcast, Jerry Buckley had shut down his microphone in the LaSalle and descended the stairs from the mezzanine to the lobby, where he bought a copy of the Times election extra and sat down in one of the overstuffed leather chairs to read it. He had told someone at the studio that a woman had called him and asked him to meet her there. No name was mentioned. Since it was nothing unusual for him to make a late-night date, no one thought anything about it. Then, at 1:55 A.M. Wednesday, July 23rd, three men dressed as businessmen entered the lobby. One hung back by the street door while his companions walked up to where Buckley was sitting and shot him eleven times in the head, chest, and stomach. He stood up, then fell forward. The three then walked out the way they had come. Buckley was dead when his face hit the floor.

  Typically, Howard Wolfman had an idea for the front page of the extra-extra that exceeded the Banner’s abilities, and an immediate solution. Discovering that there was no headline type in the cases large enough for his purposes, he grabbed a young printer’s devil who carved duck decoys in his spare time and put him to work with a knife and a block of soft pine. Then he used the telephone to get Jensen out of bed and commissioned a cartoon for the front page.

  There was a little delay as Howard paced the halls waiting for Swayles to come back and write the story, Walter DiVirgilio having left to make the rounds of the blind pigs after finishing the election piece. Then the gears went back into motion. Just before dawn the first bundle hit the stands. The black legend DEAD! covered half the front page in letters eight inches high—a little crooked because the young woodcarver hadn’t had time to make a neat job—with a recent smiling head shot of Buckley on the lower half next to Jensen’s cartoon. This was an angry thing showing a broken-nosed silhouette in cap and turtleneck leering down with gun smoking at a corpse sprawled at its feet. On the other side of the corpse, also looking down, stood a female figure in a head-scarf and dress with a blank face bearing a large question mark and a skeletal hand clutching its throat. There had been some grumbling about this choice of illustrations for Page One while a fresh shot taken and developed by Fred Ogilvie of Buckley’s body itself, crumpled on the floor of the LaSalle lobby, went inside, but Howard argued that every other paper in town had had a photographer there as well and would be sure to run the same gory picture up front.