It was a workingman’s pig, the walls hung with rusty pictures of prizefighters and lit by a smoky shaft of sunlight canting in through the front window, the kind of place where all the bartender had to do all day long was walk up and down the bar filling the shot glasses from a bottle on one pass and scooping the beer mugs under the taps on the next. We were the only customers until two men Jack’s size in coats and hats came in and sat down at a table near the door. They might as well have been wearing their shields.
“Right on time,” Jack said, turning back to our table. The blackjack in his pocket made his coat hang crooked. “I ain’t lonely these days.”
The bartender, fat and beetle-browed with a faded “Remember the Maine” tattoo on his thick right wrist, set beers in front of us. Jack paid, then handed him another dollar. “Ask the gents by the door what they’re drinking.”
When he left us I said, “I thought you were keeping close to the ground until the trial.”
“The work’s legit. The Dearborn cops pay us to nail the lid on the Communists. I need the dough. Nate don’t work on IOU’s and I’m through putting the arm on Vivian. I ain’t no pimp.”
“They didn’t look like Communists.”
He grinned, lopsidedly because it hurt his eye. “What’s one look like?”
“They have scruffy beards and slouch hats and carry big round black bombs with burning fuses. Those were just factory stiffs you were beating on.”
“Thanks for the thanks. You know who that was I pulled off you? Stink Barberra.”
“Whoever named him knew what he was doing. He must’ve had a whole head of garlic for breakfast.”
“Far as I know he never eats it.”
“I couldn’t mistake that smell.”
“It wasn’t his breath you smelled it on,” he said. “It was his fingers. He rubs the stuff on his bullets.”
“What’s it do?”
“It’s supposed to give you blood poisoning in case the bullets don’t kill you. Personally I don’t believe it. It’s just something you do when you ain’t sure how good a shot you are. Someone put a round through Stink’s windpipe in twenty-five and that’s how he lost his voice. Maybe they didn’t use garlic.”
“What’s a professional killer doing breaking heads for the bulls?”
“Same thing I am, making dough to eat. How you think they live from one job to the next? When Stink works, I mean works, he works for Joey. The rest of the time he sits around rubbing garlic on his bullets and hitting himself with an ugly stick.”
“You’re working with someone who works for Joey Machine?”
“The town ain’t that big, Connie. Anyway, if he’s working, he ain’t working; get it?”
“Really like walking the edge, don’t you?”
“Beats reading the wallpaper at Hattie’s all to hell.” He turned and raised his mug to the bulls by the door. One of them lifted his right back. The other ignored him. They’d surprised me by accepting the beers. I don’t know why I should have been surprised. I counted it a good sign that I still could be, living there as long as I had.
I was starting to think of something to say to get loose from Jack—a new experience, rider to the hounds that I was, but I was there to cover a disturbance at the plant, not to discuss career opportunities in labor racketeering or whether garlic is any more deadly on a bullet than on someone else’s breath—when my story walked into the blind pig. Stumbled in, rather, in the person of a square-built young man with short dark hair in disorder on his forehead and one strap of his overalls broken and hanging down. The loose flap of the bib reminded me somehow of a man’s scalp I had seen dangling in front of his face at the scene of an accident I had covered my first year out of sports. That man had scalped himself bucking back through the hole he had punched through a windshield with his head when the Plymouth coupe he was riding in had struck a lamppost. There was less blood in the present case, a crust under the young man’s nose and a spray that had dried on his shirt, but something about that broken strap and the way he came in spoke of a disaster hardly less devastating. His shirt was torn and his eyes had a disoriented cast. Even aside from the way he was dressed, I’d have known he had been involved in the brawl—no, the rout—around the corner.
He held up inside the door, made himself slow down. I saw him hesitate when he spotted the men seated at the table nearby; then when they returned their attention to their beers after a brief curious glance his way, he walked up to the bar and ordered whiskey. Suddenly we were all in a western movie.
“What happened, Al?” The bartender filled an ounce glass and collected his four bits.
Al gulped the top half of his drink, coughed. He was younger than his thick build made him seem, not much older than Jack. “The fuckers murdered us.”
“Which fuckers, Al?”
“The fucking goons, which fuckers you think?”
The bartender paused in the midst of screwing the top back on the bottle. “You ain’t hot, are you, Al?”
Either it was the bartender’s glance in our direction, the first of four strangers who had just come into his place where he knew most of the clientele because they worked at the plant, or the nervous way he kept repeating the young man’s name. Whichever it was, Al caught it and turned to look at us sitting at a table by the wall in a place not noticeable from the door. I could feel his fear and hostility like a shadow across my face. He was standing with his back to the bar now and his hands on it. The movie was The Virginian.
Meeting his gaze but talking to Jack, I said, “I’m working. See you later, okay?”
Jack was looking too. “You better bring your chair. I don’t think you can take him barehanded.”
“If you leave, maybe I won’t have to. He just saw you beating on his friends.”
“I think he’s the one hit me.”
“I don’t think so. He’s still alive.”
Jack laughed. “Be seeing you, kiddo. I hope your head knows what your ass is up to.”
He left. The two plainclothesmen took one last gulp of their beers and went out behind him. None of this was lost on the young man in overalls, who stood up straight as I approached him. He was shorter than I’d thought, although not short, and everything about him was square except his face, which was round like a boy’s and wore a pouty expression he probably thought was defiant.
“Nothing in here, men.” The bartender laid an ancient bulldog pistol on the bar with the blueing worn down to bare metal in places and a wad of duct tape wound around the grip.
I had my wallet out with the press card showing. “Connie Minor. I’m with the Banner.”
“I see your picture,” the young man said, relaxing not at all. “You write about gangsters.”
“Not all the time. I’d like to talk to you about what went on at the plant.”
“Why, didn’t your friend tell you? He was there.”
“I’m paid to get all sides. I want to get yours.”
“How do I know you’re not spying for the plant?”
I smiled then. “What am I going to tell them, you’re on strike?”
He appeared to take that in. He wasn’t as dumb or as ignorant as he wanted me to think he was. I have some education myself, and it’s easier to fake than not having any. In the end he proved to be more tired than he was suspicious. He picked up his drink and we went back to the table. I got the bartender’s eye and made a circular motion with my index finger. He broke out a fresh mug and shot glass.
The young man’s name was Albert Brock. He was an auto worker—ex-auto worker now, he reflected—by default, having had to give up employment as an independent steelhauler when the bank repossessed his rig. He was twenty-four and a native of Ecorse, a little town downriver from Rouge owned down to the doorknobs by the Purple Gang, so he was no stranger to rotten barrels. He had a good speaking voice and a controlled kind of anger that might have brought him a career in politics if he hadn’t lived his whole life downwind of the local political s
ituation. It was inevitable, working where he did, that he’d be chosen as a spokesman for unionization. In that very bar he had taken part in the kind of after-work discussions conducted in low voices that can so easily come to nothing unless converted into action by an event like the woman’s firing that morning. Brock and a handful of others, some of whom, if captured, would almost certainly be singled out for special treatment—the boot in the stomach, the nightstick applied to the kidneys—had managed to escape after the strike deteriorated into a melee. The problem, he saw now clearly, was that they had acted too fast, in the first heat of their anger, without a proper plan. That wouldn’t happen again.
“How are you going to lead any more strikes if you’re out of work?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’m new at this like everyone else. But I’ll learn.”
I called the story in to Walter DiVirgilio on the rewrite desk. Howard Wolfman gave it four inches on page 16 without Fred’s picture or the interview with Albert Brock. The facts weren’t changed, exactly, just turned ass-backward with details acquired from a last-minute telephone call to the plant brass, like a sports story with the correct score, but with the teams switched. The headline read DEARBORN POLICE QUELL COMMUNIST RIOT. I understand Brock still has a clipping, tacked to a bulletin board in his office at the American Steelhaulers local. He was elected to head it last year, and he’s no friend of the Detroit press.
Chapter Twenty
BY THE BEGINNING OF February, with Jack Dance’s trial two weeks off, Joey Machine had other things on his mind. Shortly after the Connor killing in November, agents of the United States Treasury Department had invaded the house on Sylvester Street armed with sledgehammers and a warrant, punched through a plaster wall, and seized a stack of ledgers containing transactions relating to the East Side operation. They then began to construct a case, digit by digit, zero by zero, decimal point by decimal point, against Joey Machine; not for murder or extortion or bribery or gambling or violation of the Volstead Act, but because he hadn’t paid his taxes for the years 1924 through 1930. Encouraged by similar proceedings involving Al Capone in Chicago, the agents paid a call on Joey at the Acme Garage and informed him he was under arrest for income tax evasion.
But there would be no jail for Joey. Not then, anyway. The federal men, explaining neatly that Mr. Machine had too many enemies in the Wayne County Jail while managing to imply that the turnkeys there might accidentally leave him alone in the booking room with the door open if he was of a mind to use it, which if you thought that you didn’t know Joey, put him up at the Statler pending arraignment. I was among the scribes waiting in the hotel lobby on his morning in court when the accused came off the elevator towing four men whose pressed raincoats and hats all worn at the same conservative angle made him look like a hunky dressed up for a funeral. His bargain-basement coat and homburg, new since Frankie Orr had lost the originals off the Belle Isle Bridge, already showed wear, and his short brown-and-yellow necktie flapped outside his vest, an untidy flag for that fleet made up for the most part of the sartorially bureaucratic faithful. In the rear, towering over everyone in a black wool topcoat and size twelve fedora, lumbered Dom Polacki, and Nathan Rabinowitz walked beside Joey in a soft hat and herringbone tweeds carrying a maroon leather briefcase.
Some reporters expressed surprise in print that Rabinowitz should represent both Joey Machine and Jack Dance in their respective travails, mortal enemies that they were. Those reporters were new to the underworld scene. In those days attorneys glided in and out among opposing camps like Homer’s meddlesome gods, invisible when they had to be, vocal when required, and crucial to the outcome, in which their own stake, at most, was minimal. The role seemed dangerous but wasn’t. Of all the mob rubouts of my personal knowledge and all those I had ever heard about in Detroit and other places, all the slain hoodlums, stool pigeons, bulls, bookkeepers, molls, reporters, radio commentators, clergymen, aldermen, doormen, wheel men, bag men, juice men, trigger men, men of distinction, tramps, sharps, sawbones, cookers, bookies, runners, waiters, hotel clerks, nurses, housewives, children, and other innocent bystanders—Christ, even one optometrist, that schlemiel Schwimmer who wandered into the Chicago garage massacre—of all of them buried in gangland state and family plots and potter’s fields or holding down the bottoms of great bodies of water, I knew of not one lawyer in private practice who had lost his life. It was as if their briefcases deflected bullets, their framed diplomas composed in Latin and printed in German Gothic cast a halo over their heads that defied the shiv and the garrote. They were like those insects the scientists said would inherit the earth after the great global holocaust they’d been predicting since Genesis. It was depressing to think of a world populated only by cockroaches and their attorneys.
“How are you pleading, Mr. Machine?”
“What’s jail food like at the Statler?”
“Who’s minding the store?”
“Where are your handcuffs?”
“Why don’t they just convene court in your suite?”
“When’s the victory party?”
He wasn’t as smooth with the press as some of his fellow public enemies. It would never occur to him to single out one or two reporters he recognized and call them by their first names like the President did, establishing a friendly atmosphere and sending them away to write that Mr. Machine appeared calm and confident, that bullshit, and he hadn’t learned the art of throwing a glib line over his shoulder like a hunk of meat for the pack to claw one another over while he made his escape. Instead he stopped and considered for the better part of a minute. The federal men fidgeted. I think they really believed, these Washington policemen who pounded their beats with slide rules and adding machines, that his gang was going to barrel through the revolving doors any minute and try to bust him loose like Billy the Kid, but they were too well-mannered to lift him by his armpits and charge the exit. God knew what a Detroit bull would make of them.
“They say I owe three and a half million in tax,” Joey said finally. “I don’t see it, but I offered to pay them anyway. They turned me down. They’d rather blow half a million on a trial they can’t win. I ask you, is that any way to run a government in a depression?”
They liked it. Pencils scratched. “You gonna make ’em give you back your books, Joey?”
“How many times did the big guy order room service?”
“Who pays for the room, Uncle Sam or the policy suckers?”
I asked, “What do you hear from Frankie Orr?” His head swung around, and just before our eyes met I saw another Joey Machine. Not the buffoon who couldn’t keep his tie inside his vest or the harried businessman who bellyached about the fucking kikes who wanted to put holes in him, but the slum-bred little Italian stove fitter who blew up Phil Dardanello, kidnapped Pete Rosenstein out from under the murderous gaze of his own Purple Gang, and threw Harry Fleischman and Frank Kornblum into the Detroit River with heavy six-volt batteries tied around their necks because they’d spiked his best brand with strychnine; the president, chief comptroller, and chairman of the board of the most ruthlessly efficient criminal enterprise between Capone’s South Side and Luciano’s Harlem and the sole executive survivor of every beer war that had taken place in the nation’s fourth largest city since 1919. It was the face he had made when, as his late dismembered partner had once put it, somebody tried to steal a goddamn dime from Joey.
Which was what somebody was doing, a lot of dimes. Anyone with his ear to the ground was aware that while Joey had been involved with planning his defense against the income tax beef, leaving the nuts and bolts of his rumrunning, saloon, and gambling operation to subordinates, someone else had been cutting himself in on the numbers racket in the Black Bottom and the handbook on the East Side. Two of Joey’s collectors—gray men in green eyeshades who recorded the bets on little squares of rice paper suitable for swallowing in the event of a raid, changed the greasy coins into stacks of bills, and carried them in leather satchels to the Acme G
arage—had vanished along with their satchels, and a third had announced his retirement, all within the ten days since the feds had gone public with their intention to indict Joey. The figures were still infinitesimal, but the East Side book was falling off. The rumbling in the pipes said the Conductor had set up shop in Machine territory, and if you knew how Frankie Orr had killed Vincenzo Cugglio aboard the New York elevated railway, you didn’t have to ask who the Conductor was. The only question was whether he was acting independently of Sal Borneo or the Unione was behind the invasion.
All this paraded across Joey’s doughlike face as his gaze swept the assembled reporters, looking for the one who had asked him about Frankie. It settled on me and his expression returned to normal. I don’t know if he placed me. More than a year had passed since the interview in the blue monoxide air of his office over the garage, and except for one telephone conversation and a brief impromptu press conference among a yapping crowd of scribes and bulls on the steps of 1300 after the Sylvester Street shooting, we had had no personal contact in the time between. In the depths of his legal and business dilemma I was just a newshound who had asked an impertinent question.
“Never heard of him,” he said, and resumed walking.
The men from the Justice Department, caught napping, lunged to close ranks around him and the party swept out of the lobby and into an Oldsmobile ragtop sedan parked in the loading zone in front of the hotel. We were left on the sidewalk watching it glide down the street escorted by a Detroit black-and-white fore and aft.
“Say one thing for you,” said Chet Mooney, the News’s police reporter and a horse’s ass of the first water in spats and a pearl stickpin, “you know how to break up the ball before it gets old.”
I told him where to stick his pin.
The arraignment took five minutes. Joey pleaded not guilty, the judge set bail at fifty thousand, Rabinowitz paid the court clerk, and Joey walked out of the Federal Building a free man with a May 18 trial date. Nobody cheered when the bail was announced; if Jack Dance was Robin Hood, Joey Machine was Sir Guy.
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