No graduation shot of Jack. I would have been surprised to see one. If any were taken, it would have been about the time I met him at Hattie’s place on Vernor. I couldn’t picture a photographer getting him into the gown and mortarboard even if he’d earned them.
In his carefully de-ethnicized tones, the old man recounted family history. His father had been a watchmaker with a five-syllable surname in Danzig. After his parents were killed in a pogrom, relatives pooled their money and sent Jerome to America. An exhausted civil servant at Ellis Island, unable to spell his name or misunderstanding his English, had rechristened him after his home city, and it was as Jerome Danzig that he became a citizen in 1910, by which time he had married and come to Detroit with his pregnant wife and small son Tom. Anna Danzig never fully recovered from her second pregnancy and died when John was two.
I knew then, with a sickly sinking sensation, why I’d put off coming there so long. It was all so suffocatingly ordinary, and nothing in it explained Jack Dance.
Danzig turned pages as he spoke. At one point, more to interrupt his drone than to feed my curiosity, I asked him to go back one. It was a picture of the boys in trunks and swimtops on a beach. John, two inches shorter than his towheaded brother and chubby, was resting his hand on the shoulder of a girl of twelve or thirteen with a big bow in her dark blonde hair, wearing one of the ridiculous puff-sleeved swimming dresses that were hardly ever worn anymore outside of Mack Sennett comedies. She was squinting into the sun behind the photographer, distorting her features, but she looked familiar. Something nudged me and I looked out the window. I asked Danzig who she was.
“That’s Emily, the boys’ cousin. That was taken on Belle Isle, summer of nineteen twenty-four. John spent a lot of time with her then. He was going to marry her when he turned sixteen, but I told him he couldn’t. She was Mrs. Danzig’s niece and his first cousin. It was the law.”
“Was it serious?”
“No. Well, I caught him throwing his suitcase out of his window one night; he was going to meet her and take the train to Toledo and get married there. I took away the suitcase and locked him in. Emily went to Muskegon and married a man in the cement business. She had a girl last year.”
“Eloping sounds serious.”
“They were children. He said if he couldn’t marry Emily he wouldn’t marry anyone. You were at his wedding.”
I let it go then, reluctantly. I’d had a headline—JACK THE RIPPER’S FIRST LOVE—but it evaporated. Burnt-out passion never sold a newspaper. The story told me something, however. If I was any judge of proportions, the chunky kid in the photograph could have broken his diminutive father in two without putting down his suitcase. Yet he’d meekly allowed the old man to lock him in his room. Whatever had swept him off the path of church and community, it hadn’t been permissiveness.
“You said John had a room?”
“He shared with Tom. I changed nothing. In case one of them wants to stay. So far …” He shrugged.
“Could I see it?”
“Wait, there are more pictures.”
So I sat through the rest of the album. Tom’s first bylined article for the Times, Jack and Vivian cutting their wedding cake, photographed at a different angle from the similar shot that had run in the Banner, Andrea St. Charles’s account of the reception. A lot of strangers in long skirts and mail-order suits, identified as Aunt Inez and Uncle Ignatz, or names to that effect. A blurred clipping from the legals of the old Evening News announcing a list of new citizens, with Jerome Danzig underlined in faded brown ink. Anna’s obituary, sparsely worded; each “beloved” would have cost extra. There was no chronology to the order in which the items appeared, as if they had been pasted on whatever page happened to present itself when the book was opened. Unusual for a watchmaker. Or perhaps not. He was the first watchmaker I had ever spent any time with.
At last he put the book, down and I followed him up a narrow enclosed staircase without a runner or paint on the plaster walls to the second story. A small metal cylinder of the type that usually contained a mezuzah was attached to the hallway wall at the top. It was the only religious artifact I saw on the premises. In most Jewish households it was nailed to the front doorframe for luck. Maybe Danzig thought he needed more luck upstairs.
At first glance, the room told me more about the parent than it did about the sons. It didn’t look like a place where boys had lived. There were no pictures of Babe Ruth or Red Grange on the walk, no litter of baseballs and pocket knives and movie theater ticket stubs on the bureaus; just a Spartan neatness about the two single beds and steelpoint engravings hung in plain wood frames of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and Lord Cornwallis’s surrender and George Washington’s farewell to his troops. I knew without looking that no copies of the Police Gazette lay hidden under the mattress Danzig had pointed out to me as John’s. The future bootlegger would have found a better way to smuggle his impure thoughts past his father. For all the old man’s air of shriveled depletion, unless he had lied about not changing anything in the room, his authority had reached from the barren storefront on the ground floor to his sons’ most private corner. Inside those quiet walls I saw emerge a family tyrant on the European order.
The nightstand on Tom’s side of the room had two shelves containing schoolbooks. There were books on the small table on John’s side, too, but these were of the Tom Swift variety and probably hadn’t been opened in many years. A picture in a standing frame on John’s bureau was turned toward a corner. I had to step between the bed and the bureau to look at it.
It was another shot of John in his middle teens with his cousin Emily. Both were fully dressed, he in a suit that might have been the same one he was wearing when I met him, she in a dark sailor dress with white piping. She had the big bow in her hair and was looking up at John, who was grinning at the camera and hugging her tightly with one arm.
I knew then why she’d seemed familiar. I had seen that rapt, upward-tilted profile, dripping with devotion, in every place Jack Dance had lived since his honeymoon. The artist might have used Emily as his model had he not died when she was still a little girl. From the hair bow to the slightly plump cheeks to her worshipful expression, she was the girl in The Pious Heart.
A married man couldn’t carry around a picture of a strange girl without raising too many questions, but a painting that reminded him of her could pass as just another of his many idiosyncracies. And he would go on breaking laws as long as he continued to remember the law that had taken away the girl he had chosen.
I thanked Danzig for the tour through things past and left. I found something else to write about that day, and the next and the next. The Banner wasn’t right for Jack’s story. Neither was any other paper, and I haven’t told it to anyone before this.
I never went back for my watch, either. Six months later Jerome Danzig was dead, and for all I know, they buried it with him. At that, he outlived Jack by three months.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
MEANWHILE THE MACHINE TAX evasion trial ground on and on. Joey’s gross earnings for the seven-year period covered by the indictment, however much of their impression was lost by the dry adding-machine tone in which the government’s accountants read the figures into the record, were staggering: Liquor, $224,000,000; gambling, $175,000,000; prostitution, $53,000,000; protection, a paltry $14,000,000, but coming up fast in the stretch. Henry Ford, running a poor second to such enterprise, had no comment for the reporters who reached him, but was said to have remarked in private that even the Jews could learn a thing or two from that man Machine. But they were just meaningless strings of zeroes to Detroiters who had to scratch to come up with two pennies to read them. Public interest in the proceedings didn’t pick up until the defendant took the stand on his own behalf. The Banner, thanks to court reporter Chuck Kobler’s business-school shorthand, maintained a faithful transcript, a portion of which I provide here, from United States Prosecutor Melvin I. Chouser’s cross-examination:
CHOUSER
: You admit that you willfully refused to pay any income tax for the years 1924 to 1930 inclusive?
MACHINE: Not willfully, no. It was a mistake.
CHOUSER: You forgot to file a return seven years in a row?
MACHINE: No sir. I was told I didn’t have to.
CHOUSER: Told by whom?
MACHINE: A lawyer I talked to once. He said I didn’t have to pay taxes on illegal earnings under my Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
CHOUSER: When did you find out this advice was incorrect?
MACHINE: When I was arrested four months ago.
CHOUSER: Who is the attorney who told you you didn’t have to pay taxes on illegal earnings?
MACHINE: I didn’t catch his name. He was someone I met in a blind pig a long time ago.
CHOUSER: Do you expect this court to believe you risked a fine of fifty thousand dollars and a lengthy prison sentence on the word of someone you spoke to in a saloon?
MACHINE: What, you never gave nobody free legal advice?
CHOUSER: Will Your Honor please instruct the defendant to answer the question prosecution has put to him?
MACHINE: Keep your shirt on, counselor. Yes, the man was introduced to me as a capable attorney and I felt he had no reason to lie under those circumstances. When I found out about this action I consulted my own attorneys and when they told me I owed the taxes I naturally wanted to make good, Joey Machine don’t welsh. When I offered to pay the forty-six thousand they said I owed, the government turned me down.
On July 2, six weeks and two days after the trial began, the defense rested and Judge Wilson Abernathy adjourned court until after the Independence Day break. The prosecution spent all of July 7 on its summation, recapping the dramatic figures and driving home the point that when a major abuser of the tax system failed to do his duty, his burden was placed on the shoulders of every taxpaying citizen; appealing to the jurors’ pocketbooks, if not their sense of justice. Cranston, speaking a fraction of that time the following day, chose the same tack, explaining that if the government had accepted the defendant’s offer to settle his debt, it would be richer by the sum of $46,000 plus the cost of a lengthy trial and that it was in the jury’s power to prevent similar raids on its wallets in the future by returning a verdict of not guilty. They were both convincing arguments based on a strong premise with a dollar sign in front of it, and I speculated in my column how different the lawyers’ strategies might have been had the trial taken place two years earlier, when the stock market was cresting the wave and Detroit rang with the “mighty din” of pneumatic hammers, not the “sad sibilant shuffling” of cardboard soles on concrete in front of the Department of Public Welfare.
The jury deliberated for thirteen hours that day and seven hours the next. At four P.M. they filed back into the courtroom, their expressions as unreadable as a first date’s. The foreman, a well-known local funeral director in blue serge and a cinerary black toupee, rose and read the verdict from a sheet of government stationery.
“Of the charge of evasion of federal income taxes for the year nineteen twenty-four, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.
“Of the charge of evasion of federal income taxes for the year nineteen twenty-five, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.
“Of the charge of evasion of federal income taxes for the year nineteen twenty-six, we the jury find the defendant not guilty….”
By the third “not guilty,” the groundswell had started, and the declaration that the defendant was innocent of willful nonpayment of taxes for the years 1927, 1928, 1929, and 1930 was lost in the jabbering and hooting and cracking of palms on backs and of the judge’s gavel. Joey, beaming like a new citizen, shook Orville Cranston’s hand, gripping the attorney’s wrist with his left like the President. The picture made the front page of the Banner, with the text of Joey’s surprisingly eloquent off-the-cuff justice-is-served remarks, delivered in the lobby of the Federal Building after adjournment, appearing on Page Two opposite another boxed item containing the U.S. prosecutor’s grim prophecy about a hostage America, and a Jensen cartoon between showing a senile Uncle Sam chucking a thug in a baby bonnet and five o’clock shadow under the chin. A wire story from Chicago, where Al Capone was preparing to face charges of tax evasion, reported that United States Attorney George E. Q. Johnson was troubled by the decision in Detroit. Outrage got a real workout in the press that week. Meanwhile Joey’s blind pigs on the East Side ran out of booze satisfying the thirsts of customers who packed the joints celebrating the verdict or hoping to catch a glimpse of the former defendant toasting the system. They were disappointed. He was back in the Acme Garage with the three accountants he had hired to replace the phenomenal Presto, toting up six weeks’ worth of losses and brainstorming plans to recoup.
As soon as my column was finished for the trial extra, I went to the County Building and dragged Mouse out from between pillars.
“You win,” I said. “Twenty for you, twenty for your friend. Who’s the juror he saw Cranston getting into the elevator with?”
“Scram, Connie. I’m meeting a guy.”
“Yeah, me. You ran out from under a double sawbuck in the Green Lantern, Mouse. That’s not like you.”
“My friend made a mistake. It was two other guys.”
All the county courts had just let out. I realized I was shaking a midget by his lapels in a crowd. I let go. He adjusted his clothes, the suit with Felix the Cat on the label. “If the jury bought Joey’s sob story, it’s the draw,” I said. “It happens. If Joey bought the jury, it’s news. How much?”
“C’mon, Connie. Nobody fixes the feds.”
“In nineteen twenty, Arnold Rothstein bribed the Coast Guard on Long Island to help him unload twenty thousand cases of Scotch smuggled from Europe. Everybody fixes everybody, Mouse.”
“My friend made a mistake, what can I tell you? Seen my card?”
I took it from his hand. It was engraved in shiny black ink on heavy gray stock and read:
DANIEL MOSKOVITCH ARRANGEMENTS
There was a telephone number in the lower right-hand corner.
“When did you get a phone?”
“It’s in a booth in the Federal Building. See you there sometime, Connie.” And with a broken-field maneuver Knute Rockne would have appreciated, he ducked around me and took off at a rattling clip down the marble hall, holding down his hat.
So Mouse had found his lever.
I gave it the college try. I tracked Orville Cranston to his base of operations in the Book-Cadillac Hotel, Jack Dance’s old stamping ground, but the desk clerk said he’d checked out. Information gave me the number of his firm in Washington, D.C., and I left a dozen messages with a receptionist who sounded like Old Virginny, but he never returned the calls. With the help of the city directory and a Michigan Bell employee who sometimes sold me unlisted numbers, I established contact with four of the jurors. Two hung up on me when they guessed what I was after, I took a secretary to dinner who put on her glasses to read the menu and squinted at me the rest of the time and finally admitted she’d changed her verdict at the last minute so she could be home in time to hear “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” and I was talking on the telephone to the fourth party on my list and not making any progress, when a twenty-four-year-old lawyer with a firm that specialized in class action suits walked into the office and snapped open an injunction under my nose ordering me to cease harassing his twelve clients. Since the Banner and the Continental News Syndicate were included in the order and subject to the same penalties for refusal to comply, Howard Wolfman invited me into his office and asked me in his mild albino way to find something else to write about.
While all this was happening, Joey Machine, having whipped the United States Government, had turned his attention to winning back the East Side. Within ten days of his acquittal, two stores in the Black Bottom with policy rooms in back were firebombed, a barbershop that specialized in hair-straighteners and the book on the Windsor racetracks was invade
d and its clientele clubbed bloody with pistol barrels and baseball bats, and two men walked into the bedroom of a palatial apartment over a rib joint on Harper and fired seventeen bullets into a colored numbers boss named Big Nabob and his companion, a blonde who had formerly taught home economics at the Merrill-Palmer Institute. He died instantly, she expired at Detroit Receiving Hospital an hour later without regaining consciousness.
Big Nabob, born John Thomas, had enjoyed a loud reputation for a Negro underworld figure, renowned for his wide-brimmed white felt hats, gold front tooth, and the rose and pink and lavender silk suits with which he draped his six-foot-six-inch, four-hundred-pound frame, as well as for his custom cream-colored Cadillac with stone marten seats and solid gold fittings. He had gotten his start as a bouncer in a pool hall on Hastings, served a two-year bit in Jackson for manslaughter after belly-walloping a belligerent Negro customer through a plate-glass window and down two stories to his death, then became a policy collector. From that position he furnished statements of earnings and other useful information to Joey Machine, who had just begun to take an interest in numbers. As a reward for meritorious service, Big Nabob was given the management of the lucrative Hastings Street franchise by Joey after the Machine mob muscled in along with a junior partnership in the policy business for the entire Black Bottom for continuing to protect the interests of the Mechanic, as the owner of the Acme Garage was known to the Negro population. The gold tooth and custom Cadillac followed, and wherever Big Nabob went he was surrounded by colored bodyguards nearly as large as he.
Joey’s trouble with the government changed things. The rumor in the Bottom ran that the Mechanic was going to prison; war threatened among the dispossessed black policy bosses for the territory that had been snatched from them when the whites moved in. Another rumor had Big Nabob meeting with representatives of Frankie Orr to request the support of the Unione Siciliana in maintaining his hold on Hastings. The giant Negro was seen dining in his back booth in the rib place with three Mediterranean-looking men, among them Leo Campania, the Unione torpedo whose corpse was later dumped like a bundle of newspapers on the doorstep of the Griswold House. And now Big Nabob himself was riding in the backseat of the bus to Paradise, his bodyguards having made themselves as scarce as five big men in striped suits and sunburst ties can get.
Whiskey River Page 25
