by Troy Soos
While I was casting a suspicious glance at a peanut vendor, two large men in old work clothes caught me by surprise, stepping out from behind a parked ice wagon. I was fairly certain that I’d seen them before in Fraternity Hall.
One of them said, “Gonna take you for a little ride,” and gestured at a black hardtop Dodge moving slowly along the curb.
The other man had an overcoat draped over his forearm; he pulled back the coat just enough to reveal the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun.
The rear door of the Dodge opened and the first man started to push me toward it. My effort to resist was brief, lasting only until I heard the sound of a hammer being cocked. One of the first rules of staying alive is don’t argue with a loaded gun. The second rule is assume that any gun pointed at you is loaded.
I was hustled into the backseat, where Whitey Boggs was waiting. “Your time is up,” he said. The other two men hopped in, one in the front and one in the back, and the driver hit the gas to send us speeding south.
“Where we going?” I asked. My situation didn’t look promising: there were four of them, and I was wedged between a man pressing a shotgun against my ribs and Boggs, who I was sure had his razor.
“To administer a little justice for Emmett Siever,” Boggs answered.
I turned to the man on my right. “Mind pointing that thing to the side? I don’t want to die just from hitting a bump.”
The gunman said to the driver, “Try not to hit any bumps, Pete. Don’t want a mess back here.” The barrel remained where it was.
Whitey Boggs said nothing more. I started to wish that he’d put a blindfold on me. Either wherever they were taking me wasn’t a secret, or I wouldn’t be alive to identify it anyway.
After a right turn onto Jefferson, we crossed the railroad tracks. I silently cursed the driver for taking them so hard—the car bounced and lurched when he hit the rails. We proceeded about half a mile on a dirt road, until we were near the Wabash Freight Depot. The driver pulled up to a small, run-down brick building that looked like it had once been a warehouse.
“Last stop,” said Boggs.
The driver killed the engine, and I was led out of the car. I spotted a slow-moving freight car rolling along the tracks. The idea of bolting for the train was tempting, but I knew I couldn’t outrun buckshot.
The four men ushered me into the abandoned warehouse. It contained a few crates and barrels and a great deal of dirt. The walls shook and the floor rumbled from activity in the freight yard.
I was starting to feel numb, frozen. I wanted to fight, or to flee. But every option seemed more likely to hasten my death than prevent it.
“Okay,” said Boggs. He fluffed out his clothes. “Got some good news for you. We’re not going to kill you.”
I took that as very good news indeed. “Then why’d you bring me here?”
He smiled. I wanted more than anything at that moment to punch him in the nose, never mind the consequences. Before temptation could get the better of my judgment, one of the men grabbed my arms and pinned them behind my back. “That’s the bad news,” Boggs said. “We are going to hurt you.”
The man who’d held the shotgun put it on top of one of the boxes and picked up a short-handled sledgehammer from the floor.
Boggs went on, “We’re gonna show you what it’s like to be out of work for a while. Maybe then you’ll appreciate what a union can do for you.” He turned to the man with the hammer. “Your choice, Marty. Hands or legs?”
“Hands,” was the reply. “They’re easier.”
Boggs nodded and turned back to me. “But first—” He pulled the straight razor from his pocket and flicked it open. “It’s my turn.” He nodded to the men behind me. The grip around my arms tightened as I tried to squirm out of it. One of the men pulled my tie to the side and tore open my shirt.
Boggs smiled. Then his hand flashed toward me and a searing pain ripped the center of my chest. I tried to back away and got nowhere. His hand came at me again. Another biting cut, and again the awful sound of tearing flesh. I braced myself to show nothing when the third slash came. The blade of the razor was now streaked with red, but I refused to look down to see what it had done to me.
The glee started to fade from Boggs’s expression; I don’t think I was giving him a satisfactory reaction. He lashed out twice more and was preparing for another, when a screech of tires outside gave him pause. “Go see who it is,” he said.
Marty exchanged the sledge for his shotgun, went to the door, and peered out. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just Leo.”
Leo Hyman waddled through the door a moment later. His face was red and his whiskers quivered like they had static in them. “I heard you boys were coming here. Bunch of goddamned, thick-skulled hotheads is what you are. Let him go.”
“But Leo—” Boggs said.
“Shut up and do what I say!”
My arms were freed. As they swung forward, the skin of my chest stung anew from the movement. I was no longer forcing myself not to look down, I just didn’t want to.
Boggs pulled a handkerchief from his jacket and carefully wiped my blood off his razor. “He had it coming, Leo. You know what he did to Emmett.”
Hyman walked over to me. “He didn’t do anything to Emmett.” He pulled the handkerchief from Boggs’s hand and pressed it on my chest. “Doesn’t look deep,” he said to me. “Just messy.” Turning to Boggs, he said, “Do you have to use that goddamned razor, Whitey? That thing is more bloody, and does less good, than anything else.”
Boggs slipped the weapon back in his pocket. “I like it.”
“Okay,” Hyman said. “No real harm done here. All of you beat it. And listen: everything’s on ice for a while. Mind your manners till I say otherwise.”
The four men skulked out of the warehouse, leaving Hyman and me alone. He continued to dab at my chest until the handkerchief was dripping blood. I thought his diagnosis of “no real harm done” might have been premature. I took out my own handkerchief, and finally looked to see what Boggs had done. From my upside-down perspective, the cuts read MI. To somebody looking at me, it would be IW.
“Least I got here before he did the next ‘W,’” said Hyman. “You’d think it was his own monogram, the way he goes carving them letters on people.”
“Thanks for stopping him.”
He dismissed my gratitude and examined the cuts again. “Doubt if you need stitches. But I know a doctor if you want him to check it.”
I looked again. The cuts were each only an inch or two long. “No,” I said, “I’ve done worse than this shaving.”
“Thatta boy,” Hyman chuckled. He picked up my tie. “I’ll take you home.”
During the drive to my apartment, neither of us spoke. I sat with my arms folded across my chest, as if that would contain the flow of blood.
When he pulled up to the curb, Hyman said,“You’ll be safe for a while. From us, anyway.”
“You told them I didn’t do it,” I said. “What do you know about what happened that night?”
He shook his head. “Not enough—yet. Now go on in and clean yourself up.”
Clutching my hat over my shirt, I sprinted up the stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In the locker room before the Memorial Day doubleheader, took a fair amount of ribbing about the thin, dark scabs on my chest. Harry Heilmann advised me to stay away from “wild dames,” Donie Bush suggested that I grow some hair to cover them up, and Bobby Veach said I should know better than to try to give a cat a bath. I thought maybe I should be grateful to Boggs for what he’d done—this was the most my teammates had said to me all season.
The only “wild dame” I knew still wasn’t aware of what had happened. I’d told Margie only that I’d gotten into a “bit of a scuffle.” Partly, I was embarrassed by having been on the losing end of it.
Our trainer taped gauze over the wounds and told me to avoid moving too much or I might break them open. Since I was slated to play sho
rtstop, there was no way I could do as he advised—onty first basemen can play baseball without moving.
Sure enough, the bloodied bandages had to be replaced between games, and then again after the second half of the double header.
With fresh bandages and clean clothes on, I left Navin Field and walked to the Empire Theatre. Stan Zaluski had mentioned he’d be working at the theater all weekend.
Judging by the density of the pipe smoke in the projectionist’s booth, he must have been in there literally all weekend, puffing away round the clock. He’d appeared somewhat surprised at my unannounced appearance, but didn’t hesitate to let me in.
Once I was settled on a stack of film cans, I asked Zaluski, “You hear about what happened yesterday?”
“Yep. You all right?”
“I been spiked worse than that. What I’m wondering is: will there be more of that coming? Hyman told Boggs and the others to ‘mind their manners’ and ‘everything’s on ice for a while.’ Will they listen to him?”
“That’s the way he put it?”
“Yes.”
Zaluski nodded. “They’ll leave you alone. ‘Mind your manners’ means don’t get involved in anything you wouldn’t want the cops to know about. It’s a phrase we use when there might be an infiltrator. Sometimes the cops or the government plant somebody in the organization to stir up trouble—agents provocateurs, they’re called. The agent incites other people to do something that they end up getting arrested for. ‘Everything’s on ice’ means nobody will make a move on you until Leo says otherwise.”
“You think there is one of them provocateurs?” I couldn’t make the word sound foreign the way Zaluski did.
“Doubt it. Leo probably just wanted to make sure they’d back off.”
Hyman and Boggs had mentioned something about plants when we’d spoken in the Rouge shack. “You have a lot of trouble with spies in the IWW?” I asked.
“Not anymore.” He pulled the pipe from his mouth. “We found a couple of ways to discourage that sort of thing. For one thing, we test anybody who seems too nosy or a little too eager for trouble. And then of course there’s the penalty.”
“Death,” I said.
“That’s it. Marvelous deterrent.”
I pondered that while Zaluski performed a reel change on the projector. After he completed it, I asked, “How can you tell which side somebody is really on?”
“It’s not easy. You know, I’d swear there are some people who could be on one side of an issue just as easy as on the other. They get involved in a cause more to feel like they belong to something than because they believe or understand the philosophy. Sometimes those are the ones who become the worst fanatics.”
“If it’s so hard, how do you go about testing them?”
“Oh, give them some information and see if it gets passed on. Something like that. Can’t really tell a person’s belief, but we can check for behavior.”
Provocateurs. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before. “What about Whitey Boggs?” I asked. “Seems he’s always inciting the others—against me, anyway.”
“What about him?”
“Could he be a government plant? Why is the guy who’s in charge of the Relief Committee so violent?”
Zaluski chuckled. “I think it’s because of someone else who’s on that committee. Whitey’s trying to make a good impression on Norma. I wish he’d realize that feeding people is more impressive than beating them up.”
“Oh.”
“Besides when an infiltrator joins, he usually wants to get on a committee where he can learn secrets. Boggs joined the Relief Committee right from the start. And he’s been tested—and he passed.”
“Was Emmett Siever tested?”
“Hmm. I don’t rightly know. I expect his daughter vouching for him was enough.”
“Why would she vouch for him? Based on what? He abandoned her when she was a baby. What did he ever do to show she should trust him?” I was getting angry at Siever for some reason.
Zaluski asked, “Would you want to be judged based on what you did when you were young?”
“It should be included in the judging, yes. I may not be proud of everything I’ve done, but I’ll take whatever comes because of it.”
“Well, I think the slate should be wiped clean after a while. But then, my way of thinking might be a little different. I spent four years in Jackson paying for what I did when I was young.”
“Jackson?”
“State prison.”
Hyman had mentioned that Ford hired ex-convicts. He hadn’t told me that Stan Zaluski was one of them. “What did you do?” I asked.
“I paid my debt. The slate is clean. End of story.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t going to push him if he didn’t want to say. “Back to Siever and his daughter ...”
Zaluski sucked at his pipe. “I don’t know how Emmett and Connie got back together. That’s between them. I do know he tried to make up for his past. He left her well provided for.”
“How did she—”
“If you want to know about Connie Siever, you’ll have to ask her. I ain’t gonna speak out of turn about a lady.”
“All right.”
I dropped the questioning. To repay him for his time, I took over at the projector for an hour or so while Stan Zaluski went out for dinner.
It wasn’t until he’d returned and I left the theater that I thought to ask: where did Emmett Siever get the money to leave his daughter “well provided for”?
The new month began with a new problem. Not brand-new, but not one that I expected to have to face again, either.
Tuesday morning, Calvin Garrett phoned before I was half-awake. “I’m in Detroit,” he said. “Thought you might like to get together.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because you can use a friend, somebody who’ll watch your back.”
I didn’t want Garrett as a friend; I only wanted him to be truthful about what he knew. “Will you tell the police—and the papers—that I didn’t have anything to do with Emmett Siever’s murder?”
“No. Afraid I can’t do that.”
“Then what good is it having you watch my back?”
Garrett snorted. “I hear you got carved up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play dumb with me! You do not want to get on my bad side.” He paused, and sounded more controlled again when he went on. “It’s time for you to decide which side you’re on. To make the choice clearer for you, I’ll point out that our side doesn’t cut anybody with razors.”
I wished for my own sake that he hadn’t called so early in the morning, because I was too grumpy to be diplomatic. “You just push ’em out windows,” I said.
“Don’t sass me! Salsedo was a suicide, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Right, just like I killed Emmett Siever in self-defense.” Mickey, I warned myself, you’re going to get yourself in trouble.
“Okay,” Garrett said. “Let’s start over. No sense going into things that can’t be changed. The present situation is that the IWW sees you as their enemy, and that means they’re going to come after you. You want me for an enemy, too, or you want to cooperate? You help me out, and I’ll give you some protection.”
“What kind of ‘cooperate’?” I wasn’t at all interested, but curious as to where he was heading.
“That’s more like it. The business I mentioned last time we talked. I want to know if baseball is going to be taken over by Reds.”
I was tempted to say that, no, I didn’t think Cincinnati was going to win the World Series again. What I did say was, “You sound like Hub Donner.”
“Who?”
“Now who’s playing dumb? You’re in Detroit, trying to crack down on unions, and you don’t know a union buster like Donner?”
I listened to Garrett’s ragged breathing. Abruptly, he said, “I’ll be in touch,” and hung up.
; I had no doubts that Garrett and Donner must have known each other. I considered it while I treated myself to a full breakfast in Kelsey’s Cafe. Then I thought of a way to do something about Hub Donner.
Back in my apartment, I phoned Karl Landfors and asked him if he still knew any reporters from his newspaper days.
Wednesday morning, I visited the Detroit News building and met with an editor named Malcolm Bingay. Landfors had made a few calls for me and arranged for me to give my first newspaper interview. Bingay was a baseball fan, a former sportswriter, and an influential newsman. He was easy to speak to, and except for one minor detail, I told him the exact truth.
Hub Donner and the team owners weren’t going to like what I had to say, but if the article came out as I hoped, there might be fewer people after my hide. My teammates would learn where I really stood on the players’ union, and Donner would be out of the picture. Then I could focus my efforts entirely on solving Emmett Siever’s murder and clearing myself with the Wobblies.
Wednesday night, I was with Margie again, in her hotel room, in her bed. I’d filled her in on my encounter with Whitey Boggs and his friends.
She traced the IW on my chest with her fingertip. “Doesn’t look bad,” she said. “It’ll leave a scar, though.”
I still had hope that some hair might eventually grow over it. Could it still come in after age twenty-eight, I wondered.
“What you need,” Margie said, “is a girlfriend with the initials ‘I.W.’ Do you know anyone named Irma Worthington?”
“No.”
“Ingrid Westinghouse?”
I smiled. “No.”
She began tickling me. “Iris Wolechesky?”
“No! I give!” Margie always won.
She laughed at her quick victory. “Oh! Sit up a second.” I did so and she examined the top of my head, parting the hair to check my scalp. “Here it is!” She ran a finger over an old scar. “Do you remember when you got this?”
