Hunting a Detroit Tiger

by Troy Soos

  I needed something else to occupy me for a while. It was still too early to get the morning newspapers, and I wasn’t eager to venture out into the cold anyway. The copy of Main Street on the table briefly tempted me, but I figured if Landfors liked the book, it probably wasn’t very good.

  With the gray light of early dawn still too dim for reading, I clicked on the lamp next to my chair and settled for rereading the papers of the last few days. While on my third cup of coffee, I came across one of the stories about Treasury agents accusing the Detroit police of being on the payroll of bootleggers. I read it thoroughly, then flipped through the rest of the papers to study every article on the feud between the federal and local enforcement agencies. I started rocking in the chair, excited that I thought I had the answer to McGuire’s puzzling behavior.

  The screeching of the rocker woke Landfors, who promptly contributed a foghorn yawn to the din. He reached for his spectacles; once they were securely hooked over his ears, he peered around bleary-eyed. Disappointment that his dreams were over showed on his face.

  I stood and stretched. “How’d it go last night?”

  His answer was drowned out by an explosion behind me. I spun to see my window disintegrate in a spray of glass shards. The booming report of a gunshot echoed up from the street below. “Get down!” I yelled at Landfors as I hit the floor.

  Lying facedown, I heard the squeal of a car speeding away and the tinkle of broken glass raining on the hardwood floor. After a few long seconds, the only sound was of heavy breathing—and I wasn’t sure if it was mine or Landfors’s. It took a moment more until I noticed the hot prickly sensation running from my shoulder blade to my lower back. The irritation quickly blazed into a searing fire of pain.

  I asked Landfors, “You okay?”

  “What on earth was that?”

  “My guess is somebody put a bullet through the window. And Karl . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I think it’s in my back.”

  Landfors carefully lifted my sweater and undershirt. I obeyed his instructions and lay as still as I could on my belly. Since he’d served in the Ambulance Corps, I trusted his judgment and took his word that the best thing to do for a possible back injury was to remain immobile.

  “My, but that’s ugly,” he said.

  “It’s bad?”

  “No, just ugly. It doesn’t look like a bullet wound. Too small.”

  “Glass?” I hoped it might be merely a fragment from the broken window.

  “Don’t think so. But it’s right at the base of your spine. We better call a doctor.”

  I thought of Dr. Wirtenberg, with his filthy instruments and rough manner. “Let’s not,” I said. “You told me you pulled a lot of shrapnel out of kids during the war. Think you can handle this?”

  “I can try. There’s hardly any blood, so whatever’s in there probably isn’t very deep.”

  “Shoulder stings like hell, too, Karl. Can you take a look at it?”

  Landfors slowly pulled the sweater and shirt over my head. “You have one more wound next to the shoulder blade. Let me work on that one first before I go digging around your spine.” He went to the bathroom. “You don’t have much in the way of medical supplies,” he called to me. “All you have is some kind of grease.”

  “Liniment,” I yelled back. “Whatever you do, don’t put any of that on me.” It was a mixture of Vaseline and Tabasco that a trainer had once given me for stiff muscles. It was not the thing to put on an open cut.

  Landfors took tweezers from his travel kit and heated the tip with a match. It probably made for a more sterile instrument than anything Dr. Wirtenberg had.

  Just before he began on the shoulder, I realized there was one sound I hadn’t heard: a police siren. “How come there’s no cops?” I said. “This is Detroit, not Chicago. How often are there shootings around here? Somebody should have called the cops.”

  He paused to walk over to the window. “The street’s empty,” he reported. “Most people are still sleeping. And anyone who did hear the shot might have thought it was a car backfiring.”

  Landfors then went to work on the shoulder wound. He stretched my skin with one hand, while the other manipulated the tweezers. It felt like my flesh was on fire. “Got it!” he said after a couple minutes of digging. He showed me a bloody BB held in the tip of the instrument. “Buckshot. You’re lucky it wasn’t close-range. With the distance, and having to go through the window, the damage isn’t much. The heavy sweater helped, too, I’m sure.”

  “Would this count as being thrown from the train?” I said.

  “You think it was the IWW?”

  “Don’t you remember how Whitey Boggs greeted us at Fraternity Hall?”

  “They usually don’t kill people.” Landfors moved down to my lower back and started probing for the pellet embedded there.

  The pain was intense. Partly to take my mind off what Landfors was doing to me, I thought over my assumption about the Wobblies. Who else could it be? I was sure it hadn’t been one of my teammates: besides the fact that there was hardly a ballplayer alive who’d be up this early in the morning, they just hadn’t seemed that angry at me. Buckshot . . . a shotgun. Only last night, Connie Siever had mentioned having one. But she hadn’t even appeared upset about her father’s death—why would she go gunning for me? No, I decided, my initial hunch was most likely the correct one. Actually, Landfors and I were probably both right: it was the Wobblies who shot at me but not with murderous intent.

  Through gritted teeth, I said, “This wasn’t an attempt to kill me, I don’t think. Like you said, it wasn’t likely to do much damage. If they wanted to kill me, why not wait till I stepped outside? Firing a shotgun into a second-floor window is probably more of a scare tactic.”

  Landfors dug a little more firmly into my flesh. “Then I would say that this very well could count as being thrown from the train.” It felt like he was trying to drill a hole through me; I wished I’d thought to ask him for something to bite on. “Darn,” he said. “This one’s deeper than the other.” The tweezers hit a nerve that caused my leg to twitch like a sleeping dog’s.

  As he worked, my thoughts traveled back to November 8, 1918, the day after my twenty-seventh birthday. I’d been haunted by the events of that day ever since, and they had colored my reaction to Emmett Siever’s murder more than I could explain to anyone else. But I decided to give it a try. “Something I never told you about when I was in France,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That stuff in the papers about me being a ‘war hero,’ and the things they claimed I did over there, it’s all a load of crap.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Landfors said calmly,“anyone who fought is a hero.”

  “No, no—you don’t understand.” I took a breath. “Here’s what happened, what really happened. It was November, I was with the 131st Infantry, in France, and we were attacking the Germans at St. Hilaire. Hell, I didn’t know anything about being a soldier. The army rushed me through basic training in less than half the usual time, then they assigned me to the 131st, a National Guard regiment. You know why? Because it was from Chicago, and the Cubs’ management wanted me with a Chicago outfit—they thought it would make for good publicity.”

  “I wondered how you ended up in a Guard unit, without ever having been in the Guard,” Landfors said.

  “That’s how. Anyway, it all happened November 8, early in the morning. It was freezing; I remember thinking it was so cold they should have given both sides off that day. Of course, they didn’t. My squad was scouting what was left of some village. We split up, combing the area, going through abandoned farmhouses and bombed-out buildings.

  “I turned the corner around a barn and there was a German soldier taking a leak against the wall. A boy in a German uniform, I should say, because he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. However old he was, he saw me and swung his rifle off his shoulder. Mine was at the ready, but I froze. Wasn’t
till he got off a shot that I took aim at him. My fingers were numb from the cold; I could hardly feel the trigger.

  “Finally, I fired. He returned it. I fired again. I swear we weren’t more than ninety feet apart, and we couldn’t hit each other. I kept trying to aim better and all I could think was that the kid looked as scared as I felt.” My voice caught as I continued, “Then I got him. Found out later, it was my last round.”

  “Consider yourself lucky.”

  “You know what the first thing I did was?”

  “No, what?”

  “Tried to see if I could help him, revive him somehow. He was dead, got him in the chest same as Siever was. Just some kid, taking his morning piss, and I killed him. That was my ‘heroic’ war deed.”

  Landfors said, “I was there three years, and not much happened the way they say in the recruiting posters or Liberty Bond speeches. Now stay completely still; I almost have this one.” A few seconds later, he succeeded in digging the pellet out and stood up. “You have any bandages?”

  That was one medical supply I did have, for spike wounds. I told him where to find them, and he returned with the gauze and tape.

  As he bandaged the wounds, I went on, “Some lieutenant made up the story that I’d single-handedly wiped out a machine gun nest. Turned out our mission was a flop, so he decided to make up something that would give the unit a little glory. By the time I got back to the States, and the season opened, the Cubs were using me as a poster boy for baseball’s patriotism.

  “They used me, Karl. From the regiment I was assigned to, to the stories they made up. It was an awful thing, killing that kid. Not something I’m proud of, and I hated the way they twisted things. I tried telling the truth, but nobody wanted to hear it, so I gave up.

  “This thing with Emmett Siever is the same. They want to say I killed him, and they want to use me. I’m not giving up this time. I didn’t do it, and I’m gonna find out who did no matter what it takes.”

  “I can understand you feeling that way,” Landfors said. “Put your shirt back on.”

  I’d finished dressing when there was an urgent hammering on the door. It was my landlady, who’d just discovered the glass on the sidewalk and the broken window.

  I let her in and tried to calm her down. She wasn’t satisfied until I agreed to pay for a new window and not let anyone shoot at me again. I wished I knew how to comply with that second demand.

  Landfors then volunteered to clean the mess and board up the window while I paid a visit to the Trumbull Avenue station house to report the shooting.

  Landfors and I met for lunch at Kelsey’s. I took care to sit forward from the backrest. The wounds were tender but not excruciating.

  “How did it go with the police?” he asked.

  Sergeant Phelan had again been the officer on duty, and turned out to be no more helpful this time than he had when I’d first met him. “I was told that a broken window isn’t much of a reason to investigate anything.” The morning shooting hadn’t been my only reason for speaking to him, however. Phelan did prove himself helpful—though unwittingly so— when I’d asked him about the feud between the Treasury Department and the Detroit police.

  Landfors nibbled at his food.

  I thanked him again for patching me up.

  He said, “I’ve been thinking: you might be best off dropping this. True, you have the Wobblies angry at you because they think you killed Siever, but if you go digging into it, you’ll have somebody else coming after you: the man who really murdered him. As long as Siever’s death is credited to you, he’s off the hook. But if he finds out you’re looking into things . . .”

  “He’ll want to stop me to keep himself in the clear. I thought about that, Karl. I don’t see that dropping this now would make me any safer. Even if I did, the killer would never know for sure that I wasn’t going to bring it up again in the future, so he still might want to kill me, too. No, I’m not giving up.”

  “I didn’t think so,” said Landfors.

  Changing the subject, I said, “You haven’t told me about how it went last night.”

  He smiled broadly, and a pixilated look came into his eyes. After giving me an almost verbatim retelling of his speech to Constance Siever and her friends, he recounted with relish every word of the adoring praise they’d heaped on him. As he spoke, his demeanor became increasingly distracted, and he repeated his favorite lines often enough that I had the sense of listening to a Victrola with its needle stuck in a groove. It made me wonder—just a little—if people ever tired of hearing me tell about the time I hit a home run off Big Ed Walsh in Fenway Park.

  I patiently let him talk on through a dessert of apple pie.

  Back in my apartment, I asked a question that shook him partway out of his reverie. “Could you set up a meeting with Leo Hyman?”

  “Well, I suppose so. For when?”

  “Tonight, if possible. We’re leaving for a series against the Browns on Sunday.”

  Landfors flushed and stammered, “I, uh, I have a date for tonight. I can break it, though, if you want me to go with you.”

  I didn’t need to ask who the unfortunate lady was. “No need. I can talk to Hyman by myself.”

  He relaxed slightly when I passed up the opportunity to prod him about his date. “Very well,” he said as he went to the phone. After he got Leo Hyman on the line and told him what I wanted, Landfors relayed to me, “Tonight’s no good for him. Is tomorrow all right?”

  “Sure.” I remembered that the IWW hall was probably under surveillance. “Not at Fraternity Hall, though. I don’t want to be seen.”

  Landfors nodded and said into the mouthpiece, “Yes, tomorrow night is fine. And the meeting has to be invisible, Leo.” After another brief exchange with Hyman, he hung up. “He’ll call back to let us know where and when.”

  “Thanks, Karl. By the way, what’s the problem between you and Hyman? Connie Siever said something about how you and him should make up. Did you two have a fight?”

  Landfors returned to the sofa. “We’ve had some differences of opinion.” He pushed up his glasses and crossed one leg over the other. “Regarding tactics.”

  “Tactics?”

  He hesitated. “You won’t repeat this, right?”

  I agreed that I wouldn’t.

  “Leo Hyman advocates sabotage as a political tactic.”

  There’d been endless stories about German sabotage during the war. “You mean like blowing up factories and sinking ships?”

  “No, no. Nothing that drastic. Hyman goes for a more subtle approach. He’s a clever man—used to be an engineer. As a matter of fact, he’s quite capable of designing all sorts of complicated devices if he wanted to, but he generally tries to find the simplest way of doing damage. Hyman was the one who discovered that if you put mustard seed in cement mix, the seeds will grow and crumble the concrete. And it was his idea to have assembly workers at Ford put dead rats behind the door panels.”

  “Dead rats?”

  “Yes, the cars are shipped before the rats decompose. Then the dealers are stuck with smelly cars that no one will buy, or the customer returns it. Either way, it’s a problem for Ford.”

  I imagined some poor fellow spending a thousand dollars for a new automobile, taking his family out for a drive, and the smell of decomposing rat ruining the outing. I generally didn’t take sides with the combatants in a conflict; I identified with those caught in the middle. “And you don’t agree with that approach,” I said.

  “No. Innocent people get hurt. Imagine a foundation giving way and a building collapsing because of the mustard seed.” Landfors shuddered. “Those kinds of tactics only hurt our cause. People have to be won over by words and ideas, not threats. But Leo Hyman feels sabotage is the only real power the workers have, so they have to use it.”

  I was glad Landfors and I were on the same side on this point. “So . . . where are you and Connie going tonight?”

  He blushed. “Dinner. And a show.”

/>   “Well, be careful. She might be a witch.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She was wearing a pin of a black cat.” I smiled to show I was only teasing.

  “Oh that.” His expression grew a little grimmer. “Well, she sides with Leo Hyman in the tactics debate. A black cat is the sign of sabotage. So is a wooden shoe, by the way. That’s where the word came from—a ‘sabot’ is a wooden shoe. When French farmworkers had a grievance they would throw their wooden shoes into the machinery to jam it. Hence ‘sabotage.’”

  “Seems to bother you more about Hyman than it does about Connie.”

  His lips made a thin smile. “I don’t expect the subject will come up.”

  We avoided political discussion for the rest of the afternoon. As evening approached, Landfors fell into a state of almost total confusion, flushed for no reason, took a long bath, and primped endlessly. I wondered when he’d last had a date.

  He asked me to lend him a tie with color in it instead of his usual black. I offered him a new suit that I hadn’t yet worn myself—a double-breasted, chalk-striped, navy blue worsted with alpaca lining; it had set me back nearly $50. Landfors declined, saying he didn’t want her to think he was dressing up for the occasion. He was right: the goal on a first date is to look good, but give the impression that it’s your natural appearance—if you’re obviously dressing up, the girl might wonder what you really look like.

  After Landfors rejected every tie I offered until I reached plain navy blue, I helped him with the knot and ushered him out the door. No matter how he’s dressed, I thought, a radical in love is not a pretty sight.

  I picked up Main Street and settled in for the night, lying facedown on the sofa to ease the pain in my back. I was through the first fifty pages when the cuckoo emerged from the clock and issued eight groans. He seemed to be taunting me with the fact that it was eight o’clock on a Friday night, Karl Landfors was out on a date, and I was home reading a book.