Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  I don’t think the Banner’s competition ever forgave me that moment under the light. The News and Free Press reported merely that Jack had been apprehended in an office in the Parker block. The Times said that the police made the arrest on a tip by “an employee in the building.” Howard made up for it by trumpeting my role in the drama for the next week, and got it into every story about Jack thereafter; and there were many of them from the time the doors closed on him at the Wayne County Jail until the judge delivered the verdict at his trial. Even now, on those rare occasions when my old colleagues find reason to mention me, they append “the reporter to whom Jack (The Ripper) Dance surrendered” to my name, effectively sealing me away in Jack’s coffin. Now that Jack himself is part of regional history and his times a smoky dream of childhood, the old jealousies are suspended. To be made peace with is unassailable proof that one is finished.

  Jack never said what happened to him after Kozlowski and a gang of very large bulls in crumpled fedoras and cheap coats took him away, but I heard that Bass Springfield, who sent a sergeant to Detroit Receiving with a broken nose and eleven cracked ribs for calling him a nigger, was beaten to the concrete floor in the basement of police headquarters and stripped and tied naked to a chair under a bare bulb and worked over with those eighteen-inch lengths of hard black rubber that are so much more effective than hoses and electric cords and leave all their bruises under the skin. Working in shifts, the bulls laid the truncheons along his ribs and belly and poked at his testicles with the ends and flicked hot cigar ashes into his lap for twelve hours and never asked a question. When he soiled himself and the stink got too bad they sluiced him down with buckets of ice water and waited until he came to and started in again. Then when he passed out and couldn’t be revived they untied him and dragged him down to Holding and dumped him, still naked, into the cage. A three-page typewritten confession of his part in the Connor killing, with an X on the bottom said to be his mark, was offered into evidence at the trial. That, he said later, was the first time he’d seen it.

  The morning after the arrest, Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo were released. They’d been held for four weeks without arraignment or counsel.

  I saw Nathan Rabinowitz for the first time at Jack’s arraignment. He was short and pudgy in a gray wool double-breasted with a white handkerchief arranged in three points in the breast pocket, a bullet-headed man in his fifties who shaved his temples and combed his graying hair sideways across his scalp. The exact opposite of the braying mob mouthpiece of fable, he spoke quietly with a light Yiddish accent, so that you had to strain to hear him even inside the white Italian marble walls of Recorder’s Court. Jack, standing beside him in front of the bench, was dressed conservatively for his taste in charcoal wool and a tiger-striped necktie. He kept his hands folded in front of him and said nothing. Judge Thomas A. Steelbarger, neckless in his pleated black taffeta gown, with coarse red features and thick black hair that started just above his eyebrows and went straight back, showing the marks of the comb, listened to Rabinowitz’s motion for low bail—“My client is a well-known figure locally, a native of Detroit, with a wife and home in St. Clair Shores”—and Assistant County Prosecutor E. Wharton Clay’s strident demand that the defendant be held without bail—“a community menace, a gangster, a crazed child-killer”—then set bail at thirty thousand dollars and cracked his gavel. Bass Springfield, also represented by Rabinowitz, received a fifteen-thousand-dollar judgment. Vivian, who attended the proceedings in a hat and veil and something tailored, arranged both amounts with a bailbondsman and the two were set free. The Banner that evening led off with a shot of Jack, old grin in place, firmly shaking Rabinowitz’s hand. The attorney’s smile was shy.

  A funny thing happened in the courtroom when bail was set. The amount, which might as well have been thirty million for as close as the average Detroiter could ever hope to come to it in that first year of the Great Depression, was little more than walking-around money for the crowd Jack ran with those days, who tipped doormen with fifty-dollar bills and drove cars that cost more than houses and booked forty tables at an exclusive nightclub just to have privacy for a party of eight. Everyone had to know that the figure was as good as a pass out the front door. Yet they cheered. The store clerks and window washers and typists and bank tellers and firemen’s wives and tailors and insurance underwriters who squeezed onto the mahogany benches and stood at the back of the room and jammed the big double doorway, who a month earlier had been calling for the hide of this maniac, this runaway Jew, this killer of Catholic schoolgirls, celebrated his freedom. It had to do with human nature, with a solid month of watching the guardians of justice turning over every manhole cover in the city and arresting whatever crawled out blinking into the sunlight, of being force-fed Mary Margaret Connor’s academic record and piano virtuosity and angelic nature, of shaking their heads over their chipped coffee mugs in their drab kitchens at a handsome young man, sought in every corner of the land, who stepped out of darkness into a downtown building five minutes from police headquarters and laid down his guns, asking to be arrested and tried. It had to do with the limits of human patience, of disdain for the pious moralizing of a system which like a perpetual-motion machine generated only enough energy to keep its many parts moving, forget effectiveness. It had to do with Robin Hood and Jesse James and a society that called for individual sacrifice on Tuesday and taxed it on Friday. It had nothing to do with the death of a little girl. It didn’t even have anything to do with Jack Dance. It was the bellow of the primitive from the depths of the caverns beneath his civilization.

  Joey Machine, interviewed over the telephone at his home in Rochester by Doug Keenan of the Free Press, put it more succinctly. “This whole town’s as bugs as that crazy kike.”

  The trial was scheduled for February. Meanwhile the old year played itself out the usual way, with horns and confetti, the gaiety even more forced than usual because it’s supposed to be based on the belief that better things are coming. The automobile industry was faltering—everyone was patching up the old jalopy and making do—and lines of muffled men and women without jobs blocked the sidewalk in front of the Department of Public Welfare from before dawn to well past dark. The murder tally for 1930 topped out at 192, a four-year high. At those times you blew the horn extra loud to cover the sighs and doubled up on the confetti so you couldn’t see the tears.

  After half a dozen calls to his storefront office on Michigan, I got Nathan Rabinowitz to agree to meet me at the House of All Nations. The reputation of the place had been bad since the days when anarchists were all we thought we had to worry about, but it was convenient to both of us and I liked the way it smelled when the souvlaka and the boiled cabbage came together. Also I had a warm feeling for the establishment where Howard Wolfman had rescued me from the Times.

  In a corner booth we had club sodas, as if the beat bull seated at the bar with his cap at his elbow wasn’t blowing the foam off a tall cold one, and the attorney set fire to a cigar that didn’t smell as if it came from the same hemisphere as the four-for-a-quarter stogies smoked by Chief Kozlowski. His three-piece suit, a little less conservative than his courtroom double-breasted, was blue with a faint orange windowpane check and the three symmetrical handkerchief points in his breast pocket looked like massed torpedoes. His eyes were light brown with gold flecks and warm-looking for a man of his reserve. I asked him what strategy he planned to use in the Dance case. The warm eyes crinkled, he shook out the match, and dropped it on the battered table; there were no ashtrays and damn few other heavy blunt instruments at the House of All Nations.

  “Do you follow football?” he asked.

  “I used to when I wrote sports. I’m a horsehide man by choice.”

  “They’re not the same. Baseball is a soldier’s game. Football is for generals. Would a football coach tell a reporter his Sunday game plan on Saturday?”

  “Off the record, then. I’m broadening my base here. I haven’t covered many trials.”
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  “Jack says you can be trusted, but I’m not Jack. Fortunately for him.”

  I knew what he was thinking. “You can talk about him in front of me. I like him, but I wouldn’t let him carry my wallet. With Jack, there’s no link between thought and deed. They’re the same thing. And he doesn’t regret afterwards.”

  “We see him similarly,” he said. I noticed there was almost no trace of an accent now. It was a courtroom tool, like the quiet suits and the soft speech that made you lean forward as if everything he had to say was manna from heaven. “I’ll just say the state has no case. Nobody can place Jack on Sylvester Street at the time the Connor girl was killed.”

  “There were several eyewitnesses.”

  “Witnesses are not necessarily eyewitnesses.”

  “He was seen and recognized. So was the car. The police have his guns.”

  He rotated his cigar, pulled on it. I had the impression that line of questioning had been overruled; he had, after all, tried twice to be made a judge. I moved my freight to safe port.

  “Because of cases like the Faryniak killing and this one, you have a reputation as a mouthpiece for gangsters. Do you think it’s a fair description?”

  He flicked ashes on top of the curled match. “I’m a criminal lawyer. My clients are people who have been accused of crimes. Gangsterism is the most visible crime in Detroit. If I practiced in Calcutta, where it’s a capital offense to eat beef, I imagine I’d have a reputation as a mouthpiece for hamburger hounds. As long as you’re good at what you do, it doesn’t matter what you’re called. Do you think tabloid scribbling is a fair description of what you do?”

  “I’m not on the stand, Mr. Rabinowitz. So you’re planning to stick with the not-guilty plea you entered at the arraignment?”

  “As I said, the state has no case.” He drained his glass and put a hand inside his coat.

  “My treat,” I said. “I’m grateful for your time.”

  “I wasn’t reaching for my wallet.” He withdrew a long fold of thick paper showing Gothic boldface over finer print and thrust it at me in a single practiced motion. I had my hand on it before I realized it.

  “What’s this?”

  “A subpoena to testify for the defense in Jack Dance’s trial. You’ve been served, Mr. Minor.” He rose and took his hat and coat off the peg.

  Chapter Nineteen

  DANNY MOSKOVITCH, BETTER KNOWN as Mouse because of his habit of scurrying out from between pillars at the County Building to tug at the sleeves of judges and county officials, was a sharp-featured midget in a boy’s-size Sears Roebuck suit turned up at the cuffs and a bulky overcoat that he always seemed to be trying to run out of as he scampered along holding on to his porkpie hat with one hand. Depending upon your ethnic or political persuasion, he was either a noodge or a chooch or a professional lobbyist, and if he ever paused long enough to tote up the score he’d probably have found that he’d done more good for his clients than an army of lawyers. It was Mouse, catching his breath for a rare moment between buttonholes, who explained the troubles of the time for me in words I never forgot.

  “Start with the Indians,” he said. “Well, the limeys was a bitch before them, but they was easier to get along with at least until that tea thing. It took us almost three hunnert years, but we finally rounded up the bastards and stuck them away on reservations. Then it was the Kaiser. We done him pretty good, us and the limeys and the frogs. After the Kaiser it was anarchists, and after anarchists it was gangsters. Now it’s commies. Next it’ll be niggers. Point is, we should of never got rid of the Indians, ’cause all we been doing ever since is fighting them under different names.”

  In 1931, with talk of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment in the wind and the bootlegger off the front pages and stuck away on the entertainment reservation—Underworld, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy—the Indian in Detroit had taken a new shape, a thickset one with its collar turned up and its hat pulled down, bludgeoning order out of chaos with brass knuckles and a blackjack in factory parking lots and on docks where ore carriers dropped anchor to unload thousands of tons of iron pellets at the Rouge plant. Strikebreaking was an unfamiliar new term to Detroiters, but as the months passed and the economic situation began to look less like a depression and more like a black bottomless pit, it would fall on their ears with the dull thud of a phrase heard so often it had lost its power to create emotion.

  The people who keep track of such things point to December 10, 1936 as the beginning, when a woman working on the line at the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company faked a faint and Walter Reuther climbed on a box and delivered an oration in favor of the United Automobile Workers union. For me it started much earlier, in the middle of January 1931, three weeks before Jack Dance’s trial and almost a year to the day since the night I had accompanied the Machine mob on the Canada run across the ice of Lake Erie. About midmorning, an anonymous call came in to the Banner reporting trouble on Wyoming Street in Dearborn. Ernie Swayles was out, so Howard dropped it in my lap.

  You could drive down Wyoming every day on your way to and from work for years and never notice the little plant where a few hundred employees made hood latches for the DeSoto straight-eight Chrysler; it was a dumpy square block building set back from the street with only its address visible from the curb. As we pieced it together later, the trouble had started months before when the company began nickel-and-diming workers for replacing lost and broken tools and paying insurance premiums, deducting the amounts from paychecks so that in some extreme cases employees had gone home with less than a dollar for fifty hours’ work. Workers were hired at one salary and paid another much lower, and when they complained, the brass told them nobody was forcing them to work there and if they cared to quit there were thousands of others willing to take their place. There had been a number of slowdowns and one walkout that fizzled when the majority failed to join the rebels, who were then barred from the plant.

  On this particular morning, after a pregnant woman was fired because she could no longer stand at her drill press for ten hours, some thirty of her fellow employees shut down their machines and refused to go back to work or leave the premises until the woman was reinstated. The plant brass, who had been anticipating a demonstration of the kind, had then called in strikebreakers to drag them out. A brawl had ensued, other workers joining in, and boiled out into the lot. That was when someone, possibly a striking employee, although more likely one of the timid ones who didn’t take part, had called the Banner.

  When I got there with Fred Ogilvie, the Dearborn police were filling the first of three panel trucks parked in front of the plant with men and women in handcuffs. A crowd of what looked like several hundred people fumed and bubbled on the slushy strip between the block building and the sidewalk, although when things calmed down and a tally could be made it would come out to less than fifty, not counting officers in uniform who moved among them wielding riot clubs equipped with perpendicular handgrips like those on submachine guns for ramming the ends into guts and kidneys, and big men in coats and hats who could have been detectives but weren’t. As I alighted from my Viking V-8 on the edge of the crowd, one of the latter standing not ten feet from me swung his fist and sunlight glinted on brass just before he connected with a hatless man in shirtsleeves and overalls, whose head spun on his neck with a splat just before he dropped into a junkpile of unrelated limbs. Fred took a picture across the roof of the car, eternalizing the thug, faceless in the middle of his follow-through, and the stricken man falling, his arms out like a diver arching backwards off the high board. It was a Pulitzer shot, if only it had appeared.

  He used his flash. There was a suspended moment after the burst, like the vacuum that follows a gunshot in a quiet room; then the man with the brass knuckles turned our way, blinking. I saw his flat nose, the black inverted U of his mouth like a trout’s, the pink insides of the pouches under his tiny eyes, the burst purple capillaries in his cheeks that said he hadn’t been observing Prohibition any more closely
than the rest of us. Then he came straight at me, the easy mark, the one without an automobile between him and a new place to plant his brassbound fist. I clawed behind me for the handle of the driver’s door. It wasn’t where I needed it to be. I missed, and then he was on top of me, his ham hand cocked back and glinting. I smelled garlic.

  “Stink!”

  He halted his swing. He had thrown so much weight into it that stopping propelled the rest of him forward almost into my arms before his big thick-soled Oxfords dug into the slush and asphalt with a crunch like tires braking in gravel. He whirled halfway around, his fist still cocked. The man who had shouted was shouldering his way through the crowd, grasping an occasional body in two hands and shoving it aside. I could tell it was Jack before I ever got a clear look at him, by his gait and the way he went through rather than around the obstacles in his path. A blackjack swung from a strap around his wrist, its bulbous leaded head dangling like a phallus.

  “He’s jake,” he told the man with the knuckles. “Can’t you tell he ain’t no striker?”

  “One of ’em taken my pitcher.” The words wheezed out as through a broken steampipe.

  “Next time smile. C’mon, Connie.” Jack closed a hand around my upper arm. He had a blue welt under his right eye that grew deeper as I looked at it.

  “Where we going?”

  “There’s a place around the corner.”

  Fred was still standing on the running board on the other side of the car with his camera resting on the roof. I tossed my keys at him. He trapped them against his chest with both hands. “Get that picture back to the office. Tell Howard I’ll call in my story.”