Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  Not that the tabloids were reduced to such dregs. Frankie Orr, having bailed out of the East Side for the time being after Leo Campania’s passing, had assumed the pinball machine concession from Dearborn to Woodward Avenue beginning in March. His skull-busters pushed the nickel games, which repaid a penny a point above a chosen score, into blind pigs, whorehouses, and legitimate establishments until their cartoony sproings, whirrs, buzzes, and flashing lights became a familiar part of the local landscape. Detective Chief Kozlowski parlayed the anti-gambling sentiment at City Hall into a series of raids, smashing the machines to sputtering, snapping bits and confiscating the coins they vomited out. Unione lawyers then dug up a friendly Recorder’s Court judge who slapped a ninety-day restraining order enjoining the police from approaching to within forty feet of the machines, but the next day a Sergeant Swoboda, an alumnus of Kozlowski’s old Hamtramck neighborhood, led a plainclothes team into a dance hall on West Grand and they blasted away with revolvers and shotguns at four machines bearing labels clearly identifying them as the property of Orr’s Motor City Game Owners’ Association. Despite an argument that the shots were fired from a distance of forty-one feet, Swoboda was suspended for a month without pay and the judge who had issued the injunction fined Kozlowski five hundred dollars for contempt of court. Meanwhile city attorneys went to appellate and got the injunction reversed. It was a new kind of gang war, conducted entirely in the marble halls of justice where the crack of gavels rang like gunshots.

  Lieutenant Hermann Gabriel of the Prohibition Squad, taking advantage of the confusion, tipped over fourteen blind pigs during the month of May. Fred Ogilvie, who with Ernie Swayles was invited along on one of the raids, snapped a picture for the front page of the grim-faced crew in fedoras and rubber raincoats seated under the tarpaulin of the confiscated beer truck they used for cover, armed with short-handled axes and black Thompsons and pump shotguns cut back to the slides.

  With all that going on, none of the city papers caught a fire in Oakland County that destroyed a barn and its contents, chief among them a JN-4 “Jenny” biplane that had seen service behind American lines during the war. Sheriff’s investigators, combing through the ashes, found the remains of a simple incendiary device involving a can of high-test gasoline and a blasting cap, much like the bomb that had gutted the rented house on Howard Street in Detroit the previous June. The destruction of Jack Dance’s one-craft air corps came over the wires as a simple arson and was treated as filler by the Detroit papers that used it at all, the Banner among them. It was another message from Joey, subtler than the Campania murder, but an indication that the hundreds of hours in court hadn’t slowed him down. Even he wasn’t savage enough to order a killing while his case was being tried by an unsequestered jury, but a match job in another county could pass unnoticed by all but those for whom it was intended.

  It was a waste of gasoline, however, and with the price having gone up to twelve cents per gallon; because late in May, when the complainant in The People of the United States of America v. Giuseppe Garibaldi Maccino had rested and the defendant was preparing to take the stand on his own behalf, Jack hit him hard, and at the very core of his kingdom on the river.

  PART FOUR

  May 1931-August 1932

  The Collingwood Massacre

  Nowhere in the world may the trend of the new industrial cycle be perceived more clearly than in Detroit. In this sense it is the most modern city in the world, the city of tomorrow.

  —Matthew Josephson,

  “Detroit: City of Tomorrow,”

  Outlook, February 1929

  Don’t shoot—I’m not a bootlegger.

  —Detroit automobile window

  sticker, c. 1930

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “YOU SHOULD’VE SEEN IT.”

  And as Jack told me about it later in the little apartment on Crystal Street, I did. Not because of any talent he had for description, but because his enthusiasm acted as a kind of conductor to his own mind’s eye, like an electric arc. I saw the sawdust-strewn dock at the foot of Riopelle Street in the area the press called Smugglers’ Alley; the big black Franklin backed up to the edge of the dock where men in cloth caps and rollneck sweaters loaded wooden crates into the trunk and backseat carefully, to avoid breaking any of the bottles packed in wood straw; the scout car, a gray Chrysler sedan parked crosswise of the Franklin with the four armed men inside, two in front, two in back; and blocking the mouth of the alley, long enough from radiator cap to rear bumper to close Jefferson itself, the Buick Standard Eight, black on tan with a coffin-shaped hood, ironically christened the Empire Saloon Car, its driver standing with one foot on the running board and his Thompson’s snout resting on the toe of his other wingtip on the ground. This was what Jack saw through the thick window of a deserted warehouse on the opposite corner from atop a stack of empty packing crates. I smelled the dry rat droppings in the huge room, the dank air from the river. The moon, high and small and broken in half as if someone had tried to pry it out of the sky, shone straight down and made patches of shadow under the figures on the dock.

  “The lookout, that’s the glamor job,” Jack said. “He’s got to smile at the folks who wander in, ask them to keep moving, he can’t be a lug. I used to do it for Joey. You dress up for it.

  “That’s the weak part, see; the good-looking ones that can talk, they ain’t always hard enough. This night it was Nick Salerno. You remember him from the trial. A cream-puff. Hard on the outside but all soft and gooey when you break the crust.”

  After a little while a Model A coupe passed the alley without stopping on Atwater and blew its horn. That was Jack’s signal. Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo had found no Machine reinforcements in the immediate area. Jack jumped down from the crates, left the warehouse, and rejoined Bass Springfield sitting behind the wheel of the flatbed Dodge half-ton truck they had stolen from the same parking lot where they got the Model A. But he didn’t get into the cab. Six empty wooden barrels stood on the flatbed, arranged in a horseshoe. Jack climbed inside it, Springfield started the motor with a ka-pow followed by a clatter of lifters, stripped the gears, and cranked the horizontal steering wheel around corners and down narrow back streets with the headlamps off until they came out on Jefferson, where he tugged them on. At Riopelle he swung toward the river, ignoring stop signs, and stood on the brakes convincingly in the last block to avoid piling into the big Buick.

  “Shee-it!” he whined.

  Nick Salerno, who had leaped up onto the Buick’s running board to save his knees, hopped down cradling his submachine gun and approached the driver. He had on a light tan topcoat with a dark silk lining and a brown derby tilted like Edward G. Robinson’s in Little Caesar. “Mister, you better be blind drunk.”

  “I’s sorry, boss. Man tole me delibber thisyer ce-ment to one-one-two-six Dubois. This it?”

  Here Jack interrupted his own narrative. “Dubois, that’s how he said it, like noise and toys. He laid on that plantation nigger shit with a trowel. But Nick, he lapped it up.”

  The discovery that he’d called a colored man mister, snide as he’d said it, turned Salerno nasty. “Four blocks down, buck. Take off the fucking hat when a white man’s talking to you.”

  Springfield removed his cap. Balancing the gun along his right forearm, the lookout slid a black rubber flashlight out of his slash pocket and shone it into the driver’s face. Whether he recognized the Negro from court was never determined. He was still looking at him when Jack, who had alighted from the flatbed on the other side, circled behind him and put a serious dent in the derby with the butt of his Luger.

  It was a new pistol, acquired to replace the pair he’d surrendered to me, which as unlicensed firearms, the law had refused to return to him after his acquittal. Salerno grunted and sagged into Jack’s arms, dropping the Thompson across his buckled knees and from there to the pavement without setting it off or making a racket. Moving quickly, Jack dragged him a few feet away, stripped him of his topc
oat, shrugged into it, threw his own hat onto the flatbed, poked the dent out of the derby, and cocked it over one eye. The coat was tight in the shoulders and the hat was too big, but he made it stay in place by tucking one ear inside the crown and picked up the tommy gun. Springfield, meanwhile, had stepped down from the cab to cover Salerno with his .45. He needn’t have bothered. The gum-chewing young gangster who had helped Nathan Rabinowitz destroy the case against Jack Dance died several hours later of a fractured skull without regaining consciousness.

  The man in the front seat on the passenger’s side of the gray Chrysler hailed Jack as he approached in Salerno’s coat and hat carrying Salerno’s submachine gun. “Nick, if it’s bulls, tell ’em to call Joey tomorrow. This one’s paid for already.”

  Jack’s answer was to draw back the Thompson’s breech and slam a shell into the chamber.

  There was a moment, a vacuum in time, during which the men in the car interpreted this action. Then the Chrysler rocked on its springs. Holsters squeaked, shotguns rattled. Meanwhile Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo, who had parked the Model A on Orleans and cut back to Riopelle on foot between dark empty warehouses, stepped out onto the dock. Andy had his Thompson and he and Jack flanked the Chrysler with the choppers braced against their hips while Lon threw down on the men near the Franklin with his Browning Automatic Rifle. The loaders stood there holding crates of whiskey with their weapons in their pockets.

  Jack ordered the gunmen out of the Chrysler. “Touch the clouds, gents. Just like in Cimarron.”

  As they obeyed, big men all in fedoras and coats too bulky for spring, Jack greeted them. “ ‘Evening, Jim. Fat, looks like you put on a couple-three pounds. Cheer up, Ricky, you still got that redhead at home?” He sniffed the air. “This’s got to be Stink, unless one of you boys shit his pants.”

  The fourth man out of the car, as big as Jack, with his hat jammed down on top of his ears and his mouth open for purposes of breathing, was Stink Barberra. Shadows pooled inside the pouches under his eyes.

  “Drop the hardware now. One at a time, so the dock don’t fall down.”

  The shotguns had been left in the car. They bent and laid their pistols and revolvers gently at their feet. Barberra took longer because he had a handgun in each of his side pockets and another in a shoulder rig under the coat.

  “Don’t forget that little two-shot in your hat, Stink,” Jack said.

  He removed his hat with both hands, exposing his white bald head and the black fringe that stopped where the hat began, his tiny eyes, and took out a nickel-plated Colt derringer, and put it on the ground next to the others.

  “Now get down on all fours and crawl under the car.”

  They hesitated, Barberra longer than the others, then did as directed, getting sawdust and grease on their camel’s hair and alpaca.

  Bass Springfield joined them holding his .45. Jack asked him if he’d left Nick untied.

  “He ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Okay, get rid of these heaters, the ones in the car too. Throw ’em in the drink.”

  While Springfield was doing that, the weapons splashing substantially, Jack told the men with the crates to finish loading the Franklin. When their hands were free he had them toss their guns off the dock. There were two more crates in the speedboat by the piles. Lon covered two of the three loaders from the edge while they went down the rope ladder. When the cargo was in place Jack had Springfield move the Buick out of the way and told the three men in sweaters and caps to lie down on their stomachs. They complied. Andy and Lon got into the Franklin.

  “Jerk them wires,” Jack shouted as Springfield stepped down from the Buick. He himself flung up the Chrysler’s hood on one side, tore loose the spark plug wires, and threw them after the guns. Lon started the Franklin. Jack took a step in that direction, then turned back, raising the Thompson. “Slither out from under there, Stink.”

  “Mr. Jack,” Springfield said. After disabling the Buick he had gone back for Jack’s hat and stopped in the alley now with it in one hand and his pistol in the other, down at his side.

  “Get in the car with Lon and Andy. Roll down all the windows. Stink’s coming along.”

  “What for?”

  Barberra was standing by the Chrysler now with his arms spread slightly and the front of his coat streaked with filth. “You little shit,” he wheezed.

  Jack fired a chattering burst over his shoulder. A round struck sparks off the Chrysler’s roof and whistled off into the night. One of the men under the car yelled.

  “Next one goes in your ear,” Jack said. “Shake a leg.”

  Barberra walked ahead of him and climbed into the backseat of the Franklin. There wasn’t room in back for three large men and the whiskey and the submachine gun, so Jack heaved it. It arced out past the dock, turned two somersaults, struck the water, and bobbed once, kicking up its buttstock, before sliding straight down. Jack made Barberra transfer a crate from the seat to his own lap and he and Springfield squeezed in on both sides. The garlic smell was oppressive with the doors shut. Springfield hadn’t had time to open both windows in back, so Jack cranked down his. He threw out the derby and put on his snapbrim. Then he placed the Luger cocked against Barberra’s temple. “Don’t hit no bumps, Lon. I ain’t sure how much pull this trigger takes.”

  Lon slipped the clutch. “What do we want with him?”

  “Joey depends on Stink,” Jack said. “Without Stink we’d still have Baldy Hannion and the place on Howard and an aeroplane. Frankie-boy, he’d still be mucking around in Joey’s policy business in the Bottom if it wasn’t for Stink. What do you think a shooter like Stink is worth to Joey?”

  Andy said, “Five thousand. That’s five times what we got for Dom.”

  “I’m thinking fifty.”

  “Grand?”

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Lon said.

  “He won’t pay it,” said Springfield.

  “Then we’ll send him fingers till he does. Stink’s got ten.”

  Barberra sat with his big-knuckled hands curled around the edges of the crate in his lap and said nothing.

  “Look at this here,” Andy said.

  At the stop sign on Guoin, a cross street, two uniformed police officers sat in a black-and-white Oldsmobile touring car with mounted spotlights and a gonger on the left side. The car pulled out behind the Franklin and followed it for two blocks, then turned east on Woodbridge. Jack lowered the Luger a couple of inches.

  “Fat wasn’t fooling when he said they were taken care of,” Lon said. “I bet they heard that chopper, too.”

  Jack shook his head sadly. “I thought they was going to clean up this town.”

  “Lucky it wasn’t that bird, Gabriel,” said Andy.

  “That lunger, forget him. It’s the bulls that won’t stay bought you got to watch out for, like Kozlowski.” But Jack was distracted. “You know the thing about cops? They can go anywhere, do anything. Nobody stops them, asks where they’re going or what they’re up to. Not even other cops.”

  “Bulls got it made in this town,” Andy agreed.

  “It ain’t just this town. It’s because they’re bulls. They could walk into the ladies’ toilet, who’s gonna stop them? It’s like they’re invisible.”

  “You got a wife. Why would you want to walk into a ladies’ toilet?” Andy was puzzled.

  “I don’t. It’s just something I thought of.”

  Having a hostage complicated matters. They’d planned to stash the whiskey in the disused blockhouse at Fort Wayne like always, but a prisoner needed feeding and guards. After they had driven around aimlessly for half an hour arguing, Jack suggested they drop off the cargo as planned and take Barberra from there to Bass Springfield’s apartment on Crystal Street.

  “Celestine’s there,” Springfield said.

  Jack wanted to know if she could cook.

  “Beans and fatback.”

  “Stink ain’t particular. Are you, Stink?” Jack dug an elbow into his ribs. He’d put away
the pistol finally.

  Stink said, “You little shit.”

  “Pick up the needle, Stink. That record’s busted.”

  “What’s wrong with St. Clair Shores?” Springfield asked.

  “I got neighbors.”

  “Who, Johnny the Rock and the Fleischer brothers?”

  “We got an agreement: No mob stuff in the neighborhood. One more in yours won’t be noticed. Pull in here, Lon.” He pointed at a little parking lot next to a corner market with a sign in the window that said OPEN 24 HOURS in English and Polish. They were in Hamtramck.

  “What for?”

  “Didn’t the air corps teach you no manners? You don’t invite yourself over to somebody’s house without bringing something.”

  Jack and Andy got out to shop while Springfield and Lon watched the hostage. They came back ten minutes later with a box of groceries, which Jack put on top of the whiskey crate on Barberra’s lap, “Polack behind the counter wanted to know if we was throwing a party,” he said when they were back on the road. “Tell ’em what you said, Andy.”

  “ ‘Sons of Italy.’ ”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “THANKS FOR COMING, MINOR. Can Dom get you anything?” I hesitated, then said no thanks. I wasn’t used to good host’s manners from Joey Machine. He shook my hand inside the greasy little office behind glass on the ground floor of the garage without rising from the ancient desk chair and waved me into the only other seat in the room, straight hickory with a rung missing. The desk, gray steel, was shoved against the brick wall and a wooden mail case stood on it with its pigeonholes stuffed full of papers. A bulb with a funnel shade hung by a cord from the ceiling, its light pooling through the glass onto the concrete floor outside the office and a row of automobiles in various stages of dismemberment. It was late, the garage was closed. The air smelted of stale exhaust.