Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  Joey was in vest and shirtsleeves with the vest unbuttoned, no necktie, and his cuffs turned back on his hairy wrists. He’d been working; an old-fashioned black adding machine with a big handle stood on the desk, surrounded by curls of tape like empty cocoons whose larvae had left a residue of anonymous figures in martial rows. At midnight it was a fevered kind of clutter, as if he had to work all night to manufacture the evidence that the lawyers for the Bureau of Internal Revenue presented against him during the day. The trial, in its second month now, had taken its toll. His face looked even pastier than usual, he had blue-green smudges under his eyes like thumbprints, and he was smoking a lot. The index and middle fingers of his right hand, between which a Lucky Strike rested, were stained black, a Vesuvius of gnawed butts had erupted over the sides of a cheap tin ashtray on a pile of yellow bills of lading. Big Dom stood outside facing the glass, the reflected light from the bulb accentuating the gorilla cast of his lower features. Insofar as his battered and bitten face was capable of expression, he looked worried.

  “Sorry about the dump,” Joey said. “I’m having some work done upstairs. Steel plates in the walls, iron mesh over the windows, couple of other improvements I can’t talk about. Costing me a fucking fortune. I don’t know why the feds are breathing hot air down my ass. I’m building my own little Leavenworth right here.”

  “Concerned?”

  “About who, the feds? No. Hell, no. Taxes, what kind of yellow shit is that to pull? They want to stop me selling beer, why don’t they walk up and arrest me for that like men instead of pulling this chickenshit? It’s the kikes I’m concerned about, that wild-ass Dance and all his tribe. You know why they call them Purples?”

  “I heard it was because they got their start during the cleaners and dyers’ war.”

  “No, it was because one of the first people them pukes robbed, hit him over the head and lifted his wallet—his fucking wallet, for Christ’s sake, with maybe two dollars in it and change—he was a butcher, and he told the bulls they was all purple like rotten meat. That’s the first true thing that was ever said about them and it still holds. It ain’t enough them Washington nancies hung this tax thing around my neck, that asshole Borneo and his pup

  Frankie Orr, the Pinball Prince, think they can muscle in on me while I’m in fucking court eight hours a day; no, I got to have this crazy Jew gunning for me so I’m stuck in this hole for the next three months while they turn my office into fucking Fort Knox. Now he pulls this.”

  He lit a fresh Lucky, forgetting the one he’d parked half-smoked and smoldering on top of the pile of butts. “What I could do is send some boys up to St. Clair Shores and snatch that society dame he’s hitched to, teach him two can play this kidnap game. But I ain’t like that, I don’t touch family. I’m not a Hun. I don’t kill little girls.”

  “Who’d he kidnap?”

  When Joey Machine called you in the middle of the night, admitted he remembered you, and asked you to come see him, you went without asking why. I figured if he was sore enough at me for whatever reason to give me the river treatment, he’d have sent two guys for me. I’d thought maybe he needed another favor, which meant he had something to trade. I hadn’t had a beat in weeks. The column was as bleak as a Wall Street report.

  “Fella works for me named George Barberra. You wouldn’t know him. Snatched him in the middle of a delivery.”

  “They took Stink alive?”

  “Oh, you heard of him. Four ayem this morning, shit, yesterday morning, my phone rings in Rochester, it’s the kike himself, he says, ‘Rise and shine, Joey, I got your boy Stink.’ Then he hangs up. Christ, my wife’s in the fucking bed next to me. I don’t sleep the rest of the night. Five ayem there’s a knock on my door, car takes off out front and leaves rubber all down the block. There’s a package on the stoop with a pink ribbon tied around it. It’s too small for a bomb, so I open it and there’s Stink’s knucks. I know they’re his brass knuckles because there’s friction tape wound around the part you hold like he uses to protect his hand, they’ve both been busted before. On the inside of the wrapping there’s a note: ‘Call you at the garage. Love, Jack.’ Love, for Christ’s sake. What’s he, a nancy? So when I’m not in court getting a blister on my ass sitting on that hard seat, I’m here waiting for the fucking phone to ring. Weil, tonight it rang.”

  I waited. Something momentous was about to happen. It was in the air, like the monoxide that filled the garage. He stooped and slid a leather suitcase out of the kneehole of the desk. It wasn’t even a new suitcase; the straps were cracked and the corners were scuffed and shaggy. He laid it down on the concrete floor gently, reverently, and opened it, unbuckled the straps that held the clothes-press in place and flipped it back. Thirty Benjamin Franklins smiled up at me, each on top of a stack as high as the suitcase was deep.

  “Fifty grand,” he said. “A five and four zeroes. That’s the price, and don’t think I didn’t have to send my best collector to ten different places to get it.”

  “Barberra’s worth that much to you?” My tongue felt like leather. People who say money makes your mouth water have never seen five hundred one-hundred-dollar bills all in one place.

  “More, only don’t tell the kike. Accountants? I can stand outside any business school you name and buy ten Prestos for half that. Collectors? Drivers? Legs? They stand outside waiting to work for me. A shooter like George, that does who you tell him to do when you tell him to do it and nobody else, and draws his pay without holding you up for more than you agreed on—well, you come up with a figure, I’ll pay it if I can raise it. Understand, I’m not telling you any of this, you didn’t hear it, if you say you did, I’ll deny it. I think a man should know why he’s carrying someone else’s money, assuming his risks. I’m not Sal Borneo, treat you like a junkwagon nag, slap on the blinders and smack you on the ass in heavy traffic.”

  He covered up the money, closed the suitcase and latched all the latches and buckled all the buckles. Then he stood it back up with its handle on top. He must have done it. I was watching him, and when my brains came back, that was the suitcase’s condition.

  “I’m carrying it?”

  “That’s what the call was about. I guess he trusts you. Use one of my people he might get his kike head blown out from under his hat. That’s how he thinks, that bughouse killer, that murderer of Catholic schoolgirls.”

  I stood. “Excuse me, Mr. Machine, but the hell with this. I’m not a messenger.”

  The telephone on the desk rang, loud in the echoing emptiness of the garage.

  “Answer it, it’s for you.” Joey looked at the clock on the wall, an electric one with a glowing face advertising Fisk tires. “He’s ten minutes late. Just like a yid, too cheap to buy a fucking watch.”

  After two more rings I sat down and lifted the cup off the hook, leaning forward with my elbows planted on the desk. “Hello?”

  “Connie?” He sounded out of breath, as he always did when the fever was on him.

  “Why me, Jack?”

  “I thought you could use the break. I been reading your column.”

  A dream come true: I had a gangster for a critic. Aloud I said, “Christ, Jack, fifty thousand bucks. If everybody in town who would hit me over the head and run off with it stood in line to do it, you know how long the line would be?”

  “As long as you don’t tell nobody, you got no better chance of getting hit on the head for carrying fifty grand than fifty cents.” I heard riotous music on his end. “It had to be you, Connie, like the song. I’d ask Tom, but it’s like I don’t know him; he’s Times now, he don’t hang out with no racket boys.”

  Mention of his brother made me think of Vivian. I asked him if she knew where he was.

  “I called her today. I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t talk long in case Joey had one of his pet bulls put a trace on the line. You going to help me out, Connie?”

  “I’m thinking. Where are you?”

  “There’s a booth in the lobby of the Gua
rdian Building. I’ll call you there in ten minutes.”

  “It’ll be closed.”

  “I know the guard, he’s expecting you. Tell him you’re from me. Listen, if you don’t answer the phone, I’ll know you’re not interested.” The line clicked and buzzed.

  Joey watched me hang up. I told him about the telephone booth. The Guardian was right down the street at 500.

  “So you going to do it?”

  “Who else gets the story?”

  When he tried to appear sardonic he looked just like a kewpie. “You kidding? Soon as you leave I’ll call Winchell, tell him all about how I got shook down like some snotnose kid in the street.”

  I rose and hefted the suitcase. It didn’t seem heavy enough for what it contained. Money never does, physically.

  He turned down his cuffs and buttoned them. Something had been consummated, a commitment had been made.

  “I’ll call,” I said.

  He put a hand on the hand holding the suitcase. The little eyes crowding the big nose were murky. “A scribe could live the rest of his life in Mexico on dough like this,” he said. “That wouldn’t take as long as he’d think.”

  “I’ll call,” I repeated.

  He withdrew the hand.

  Walking down Griswold carrying the case, drawing a straight line through the circles of light under the streetlamps, I thought, the President doesn’t walk around with fifty thousand dollars. Babe Ruth doesn’t. It wasn’t a cozy thought. It filled the black doorways, the right-angled shadows between buildings with thugs—frightening ones, like in the cartoons Jensen bought and sometimes drew for the Banner, barrel-chested lower primates in cloth caps and striped pullovers and little black masks, carrying blackjacks.

  Nothing like that materialized, although I had a bad moment when an eight-cylinder Packard swept around the corner from Congress, dousing me in blinding light and convincing me that bullets would follow. It grumbled past, and for the five hundredth time I decided I’d make a lousy gangster.

  The night man at the Guardian Building was in his fifties, the visor of his uniform cap making shadows in the folds of his face; he had a belly and a revolver with a big cedar handle on his hip. He opened the door the rest of the way when I mentioned Jack and I walked past him and down a corridor lit by white light, my footsteps snapping back at me from the bright Pewabic tiles. Everything—sights, sounds, odors—has sharper edges at night. I could smell the industrial wax the janitors used, like stale gun oil.

  There were three booths, framed in yellow oak with their doors folded back and built-in short benches inside upholstered like bus seats in black grainy leather. I stood facing them with the suitcase in my hand like a hunky just off the boat, aware that I was being watched by the guard. When the ringing started it took me a second to react—waiting does that—and another second to locate its source, in the third booth on my right. I took the case in with me and closed the door before answering.

  “I knew you’d stick,” Jack said. “You got it?”

  “I got it.”

  “No shit, how’s it feel?”

  “Like a suitcase full of snakes. Where do you want it?”

  “Anybody follow you?”

  “Not here. I told Joey where I was going.”

  “They’ll be waiting when you come out.” The pause on his end was full of thought and frantic music. “Okay, we’ll have to get fancy. You got your car?”

  “It’s parked around the corner.”

  “I’m at Bass’s place, you remember where it is?” I said I did. “Okay, take this route.”

  I didn’t write it down. I wasn’t likely to forget it.

  When the guard let me out I saw the car, a long low Cord, parked halfway down the block on the other side with its lamps off. The end of a cigarette glowed in the darkness of the front seat, a tiny red eye. I didn’t look directly at the car, but turned and walked up the street the way I had come. Behind me I heard gears meshing, tires crunching slowly on asphalt. At Congress I turned the corner. I didn’t see the car again until it appeared in my rearview mirror when I pulled away from the curb. Its lamps were on now. The suitcase lay beside me on the seat, a shabby thing worth ten times more than the Viking V-8 it was riding in.

  I took Congress to Woodward and turned north. Headlamps turned behind me a block back. We drove at a stately pace up the main stem, as broad as a pasture and gunbarrel-straight, dividing the city straight up the middle like the part in Valentino’s hair. It was almost empty at that hour. It gave you the feeling you could drive to the North Pole and back all in one night and never see another soul. Fort, Lafayette, Michigan, State, the cross streets bending in toward the center of the web: Grand Circus Park. The half-circle of grass looked black at night.

  I wrenched the wheel hard to the left. The Viking bucked up over the curb, front axle first, then rear, a double jolt that snapped my teeth together, prepared though I was, and pitched the suitcase onto the floor under the dashboard. The wheels plowed twin furrows through the grass, mushed down. For a panicky moment I thought I was stuck. Then I bumped over again, again, and came down on Bagley. I gripped the gearshift knob, round and black like an eight-ball, shoved it forward, accelerated, then yanked it straight back into third while squashing the pedal to the firewall. The gears bawled, the throttle made a noise like a phlegmy old man clearing his throat, the tires spun, caught. The steering wheel jerked my arms straight. The Cord’s headlamps flashed in the mirror at a Krazy Kat angle, then dropped out of the corner.

  At Grand River I turned northwest, then took Adams east and wound my way toward the Black Bottom and Crystal Street. There was no sign of the Cord behind me. Either I’d lost it or the driver had killed his lamps.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE SCREEN DOOR HAD new patches to go with the old ones, and new rents that needed patches. The old colored woman who answered my knock was wearing the same tattered housecoat of more than a year before but no hairnet this time, and as thin as her hair was, with startling pink scalp showing through it in streaks, I wondered that she had ever needed one in the first place. She looked at my white man’s clothes, hat and necktie with no funeral in the neighborhood or Baptist meeting to justify them, the suitcase, heard what I had to say, and unhooked the screen door. She was a sunken post in a changing tide, that old woman in her house that needed whitewashing; she would look as she did and live as she had regardless of who was mayor and who had killed whom for whatever reason and whether liquor was banned or legal, not out of any conscious sense of determination or pride but because this was where she had landed, this was the condition of the deck. The furniture was the same, the odd floral covers on the sofas faded one step closer to plain white, but clean. Only the worn rug was missing, having evidently grown too thin to contribute and therefore banished. Even the homemade radio set on the painted table, the room’s one sad nod toward luxury and leisure, was in the same unfinished state; a loose crystal I had noticed on my first visit lay in the identical spot.

  Music was playing behind the door in the dark upstairs hallway, Jack’s kind, hot horns and jungle drums. I knocked.

  “Yeah?” This was a new male voice, which threw me, there in that place that defied evolution. Eager young barracudas of Jack’s stamp had drifted in and out of his association in the past, but since Sylvester Street, it had strictly been the three with whom he’d started minus Baldy Hannion. There was no brewery now to give him a foundation, no collateral of a physical nature to make his standard worth following. Hunches are for the old and established. The young need a sure thing.

  “Connie Minor.”

  The door opened six inches and a boy of nineteen or twenty inserted himself into the rectangle. He was shorter than Jack but nearly as broad, and much softer. He had a ring of fat above his belt under a white shirt with the collar spread, a round face and thick red hair and gray eyes with a watery sheen and a harelip. The gun in his hand was a .38 revolver, the snubnosed kind bulls carried. I had never seen him before
.

  “Let him in, for Christ’s sake, does he look like a torpedo?” Jack, wearing pinstriped trousers and a shoulder holster over a BVD undershirt, shoved him aside and grabbed my free hand. “Get in Connie, how the hell are you, you’re letting the flies out.”

  I let him pull me inside. It was a railroad flat, a series of rooms lined up all in a row so that you had to pass through all of them to get to the back. We were in the kitchen. It had a shade drawn over its only window and bulging yellow plaster on the walls and newspapers taped over the places where there was obviously no plaster at all. The linoleum on the floor was dirt-colored. There were a cot with rumpled bedding on it in a corner, an old Michigan Stove Company woodburner with a warming oven overhead and yellow calcined grease on the black iron and nickel, a cast-iron sink, an icebox dripping into a pan, and an oilcloth-covered table where Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo sat playing dominoes until I came in with the suitcase, when they got up and came over. In the next room, visible through the open door, a portable phonograph with a daisy-petal horn stood on a chest of drawers playing King Oliver. The place stank pungently of old meals and urine, the way they all did, the way they all still do in that neighborhood. That’s how civilization smells under the toothpaste and powder.

  “Open it up.” Andy was staring at the suitcase.

  “That ain’t no way to treat a guest.” Jack took the suitcase from me, lightening me by more than just pounds, and sat me down at the table. “They followed you, right?”

  “I lost them at the park like you figured.”

  “Joey’s chewing their asses out right now, I bet.”

  Someone knocked at the door: Bang-bang, pause, bang. Jack set down the suitcase and opened it with the Luger in his hand and the soft young man, who had stepped out when I came in, entered. “No sign of anybody outside.” The harelip didn’t seem to get in the way of his speech.

  “Connie, this here’s Vern Scalia. Vern’s the reason you’re here.”