Border City Blues 3-Book Bundle

by Michael Januska

  “He said we can run with it — but only to the end of the week like we all agreed.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Gorski, sensing something else was in the air.

  “Nothing. Jack’s just got a lot on his mind right now, you know, what with getting back in business and all.”

  “Anything we should know about?” said Lapointe.

  “No, not now,” said Shorty. “Let’s stay focused on our game. I have to make a call.” He got up from his chair, went up to the bar, and asked for the phone. The boys looked at each other but didn’t say anything.

  Before the end of the hour, Shorty was sitting across from Olive McTavish in a booth at Lanspeary’s Drugstore. She was one of the elevator operators across the street at the Prince Edward Hotel. The rest of the gang was sitting tight in Shorty’s Studebaker parked around the corner on Pelissier, mumbling into their coat collars.

  Olive was about to start her shift; Shorty bought her a milkshake for lunch. He asked the soda jerk to put an extra egg in it for her.

  “Good?”

  “Tasty.”

  “Great.” Shorty got right to the point. “Now, me and the boys want upstairs.”

  She was gently working the ’shake with the long spoon. “Where upstairs?”

  “You know where upstairs. Is it occupied?”

  “It’s off-season.”

  “Yeah, I heard all the beaches were closed. You’re going to let us in the back door so the house dick doesn’t see us, and then you’re going to take us up the service elevator.”

  She held the spoon halfway between the tall cup and her thin, painted lips. “You wanna short-sheet the beds?”

  “You’re awful cute today, aren’t you, Olive?”

  Shorty and Olive had a bit of a history. They'd gone to school together at Cameron Street Public. They were sweethearts for a while, but when Olive got a job and started taking long walks with a bellboy named Gerry, Shorty’s nose got out of joint. The fact of the matter was Olive didn’t want the complications that went along with being the girlfriend of an entry-level gangster. She wanted a simpler life. Shorty insisted he could give her that. Olive told him to take a good, long look in the mirror and be careful not to burn himself on that torch he was carrying. She was silent as she shovelled the last dregs of the thick ’shake into her mouth.

  Where does she put it? wondered Shorty. She came up to his chin and looked she weighed about as much as a bag of grapes.

  “All right. What’s it worth to you?”

  “Five,” she said.

  “A fin? For that I can get the concierge to give me a guided tour of the hotel and a hot meal at the end. All I want is a peek inside the suite.”

  “I could lose my job if I get caught, Shorty.”

  He looked at the pyramid of soda glasses behind the counter and wondered if he could knock them all down with one saltshaker. He sighed and reached for his wallet.

  “I feel like I’m displaying a horrible precedent.”

  She smiled.

  “And what’s this going to buy you if you get caught?”

  “It’ll let me drink my sorrows away.”

  Shorty was glad the others weren’t here to witness this. He told her he would bring the boys through the alley behind the hotel, just off Park Street, in ten minutes.

  “There’s a door to the left of the loading dock. I’ll be there,” she looked at her watch, “in fifteen.”

  Right on time, she let the boys in, and when they started with the stomping of the boots inside the door she told them to shush. “Be quiet and wait here.” It was the loudest whisper they had ever heard.

  Mud put out his cigarette and Lapointe pulled out his flask. Olive reappeared presently and waved them down a short, ugly, cinder-block hallway to the service elevator. She locked the car so that it travelled non-stop to the eleventh floor. When it halted she opened the scissor-gate slowly. It was dead quiet; the only thing running was the red carpet to the window at the end of the hall. The gang followed the tiny elevator operator to the door of the deluxe suite that back in the day had served as Richard Davies’s second home.

  It suddenly occurred to Shorty how crazy it was to think there might be anything belonging to Davies left in the suite, or even the smallest clue to the whereabouts of his fortune. After law enforcement from all levels of government and of varying degrees of corruption had turned the place inside out, there’d surely be nothing to work on. Not only that, but by the time the hotel finished putting the place back together again there was a long list of reservations from tourists and honeymooners wanting to stay in the rooms formerly occupied by the infamous Richard Davies. In other words, the suite had seen a variety of traffic. But Shorty had to start somewhere.

  They examined every lock in the place, in desks, closet doors, armoires, even the gramophone case. They looked for strong boxes, trunks, grips, wall safes, and loose floorboards. Whenever there was a break in the action, they discussed the Guard and whether or not they could trust Olive. Paranoia became the hardest currency. They found nothing and came to no conclusions.

  “Don’t you think someone would have found it by now?” said Mud.

  “Maybe they just didn’t look in the right place,” said Thom.

  “Or maybe whoever found it absconded to South America,” said Mud. “What now?” He continued kicking the ball back into Shorty’s end.

  “Yeah, what now?” said Lapointe.

  Shorty stiffened. What was it Three Fingers said after he found Jigsaw’s body? Always the last place you look. He turned away from the window on the Avenue to find Three Fingers staring at him. The Indian was always doing that and it always threw him off. What Shorty didn’t know was that the Huron believed answers were found in people’s faces, regardless of whether they knew it, and not in hotel rooms or in spoken words that might as well have been written in blowing sand or melting snow. He saw something in Shorty’s face. The others came back from taking one last look around the place and gathered around their leader.

  “Maybe we should take the key to a locksmith and hear what he has to say,” said Thom.

  “No, not yet,” said Shorty. “Let’s try the house.”

  Shorty led them back down the service elevator and this time straight through the front lobby. Sure, they were turning a few heads but Shorty didn’t care. The five bucks he gave Olive burned him. So did the boys’ attitude up in the suite. He paused at the cigar shop and asked the tobacconist for a box of White Owls. The tobacconist pulled the box out of the humidor and set it down on the counter. Shorty opened his jacket to his waistcoat, exposing the butt of the revolver he had in his holster, and then picked up the box and pushed his way out and through the revolving doors onto the Avenue. He didn’t even smoke. He just wanted to walk away with something. The gang followed without saying a word.

  It was treacherous along Riverside Drive. Frozen ruts kept stealing the wheel away from Shorty while parts of the road exposed to sun were smooth as glass. Just yesterday, one of the city’s leading barristers and his wife were driving along this very same stretch when, in an effort to avoid an oncoming vehicle that had veered into their lane, the barrister hastily applied the brakes, causing the car to skid and topple down a thirty-five-foot embankment, landing on its side on the frozen Detroit River. The barrister had to kick a hole through the ragtop so that he could drag himself and his fainting wife to safety. Now that’s someone I’d like to have in my corner, thought Shorty.

  When they reached the house, he pulled up Esdras, the nearest side street, and parked a few doors up from the Drive. The boys climbed out of the Studebaker and traipsed through the snow toward the entrance. It was set back, nearer the water’s edge. The first thing they noticed was the fresh tire tracks in the driveway.

  “Cops?” said Shorty.

  “No,” said Three Fingers.

  “What interest would they have in this place any more?” said Mud.

  Shorty pulled his coat lapels tighter around his n
eck. “C’mon.”

  The snow had drifted against the hedge along the driveway. Three Fingers leaned into Shorty and said, “Look — footprints where the tire tracks stop.”

  Gorski noticed too. “That’s a big pair of boots.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Lapointe.

  As they made their way carefully up the tiled stairs, Gorski picked up where he had left off and told Irish Thom and Lapointe how Davies had been running a smuggling operation from this house, and not just liquor either but guns and munitions too. Davies, he said, was arming strikebreakers on the other side of the border, trying to stop the spread of socialism in every blue-collar town between Detroit and Chicago. What Gorski didn’t know, what didn’t make it into the papers, was that Davies was also fanning the flames of racial unrest. He sold the whole thing as a package deal. He had been a man on a mission.

  The front door was open a crack with icy snow wedged in the gap. Davies had been renting the property from a businessman in Detroit. This businessman never stood up to claim the property after the incident. Clearly he wanted to distance himself from the whole affair. He probably wrote it off. As with the hotel suite, the police and the Mounties had taken turns scouring the residence. No one on the street had heard whether or not they had turned up anything of interest. There was a fallen section of ceiling behind the door. Thom carefully forced it open.

  The place was a disaster area: bloodstained walls, broken windows, crumbling plaster, and cold and snow blowing in from every crevice. Shorty started having flashbacks to that fateful night. Memories he thought were lost and forgotten were resurfacing, just like Jigsaw.

  “You okay?” asked Mud.

  “Yeah, sure.” Shorty started to think more about the police. If the police had found anything pointing to Davies’s working capital, someone in the department would have spilled. How long could someone keep money like that a secret? On the other hand, a dirty cop might have kept it to himself. But if he did, why would he have stuck around? While Jack was recovering from his wound, Shorty and the boys kept had close tabs on all the Border City Blues. No one had voluntarily left the force in the last several months, and no one had been discharged. The Mounties were a different story, however: an unknown variable.

  Being the only ones who had ever set foot in the place before, Shorty and Mud split the group.

  “There’s two or three rooms down the hall as well as the way to the cellar. The kitchen and the dining room overlook the river.”

  They started poking around. More fresh footprints, damp with snow; handprints on dusty, overturned furniture; and recently exposed wall frame where sections of plaster had been pried off. It was bad enough that no one knew exactly what they were looking for, but to be sifting through a mess like this made the venture that much more challenging. Three Fingers examined the fresh hand and footprints.

  “The Guard was here,” he said.

  A few heads popped around corners.

  “Recently?” asked Shorty.

  “Not sure,” said the Huron, “but they have been here.”

  “Someone was here, but what tells you it was the Guard?” asked Mud.

  “They probably know about the key,” said Gorski.

  “How’s that possible?” said Shorty.

  “They were always one step ahead of everyone else,” said Gorski. “They have this sixth sense. They anticipate, they see, they know.”

  He sure could tell a story.

  “Weren’t they also supposed to have gone through this place last summer?” said Shorty, sounding more and more like a believer.

  “But when they failed to turn up the money,” said Gorski, “they probably figured all they had to do was wait until a certain snake lifted his head out of the grass.”

  “Who’s the snake?” asked Thom.

  “Charlie Baxter,” said Shorty. He needed to sit down. He righted one of the chairs.

  “And who would that be?” asked Lapointe.

  “The guy who shot Jack,” said Shorty. “Davies’s bodyguard and the only one from his inner circle still unaccounted for.”

  “Some bodyguard he turned out to be,” said Lapointe.

  “Baxter was on a riverboat cruise with his sweetie — Davies’s girlfriend — when Davies got killed.” Shorty pointed at the big brown stain on the wall. “Right over there.” It was his turn to tell the story. “There’s plenty of speculation about what happened to Charlie Baxter after he shot Jack. Did he mean for his boss to get shot so that he could steal his fortune and run off with his girl? And did he try to kill Jack in order to prevent him from getting to the fortune before he did? No one ever believed Baxter tried to gun down Jack just to avenge his boss’s death. There obviously wasn’t that kind of loyalty there. There had to be more to Charlie Baxter.”

  “And where’s the girl?” asked Lapointe.

  “Ever heard of Pearl Shipley?” said Shorty.

  “Hasn’t she been in some pictures?” said Thom.

  “Small ones,” said Mud.

  Lapointe’s eyes got big and Thom started breathing heavy.

  “You’re steaming up the windows,” said Lapointe.

  Lapointe slapped Thom’s shoulder and Shorty leaned back, folded his arms together, and continued. “Anyway, accounts are sketchy. Piecing it together, it sounds like Baxter had been following Jack all morning, and at the Michigan Central train station pulled a gun on Jack while Jack was sitting in his car. With his boxer’s reflexes, Jack shouldered open the unlatched door, throwing off Charlie’s aim. Jack took the bullet between his chest and his shoulder. The strange thing is, it was the exact place his brother took a bullet in a street fight.”

  “Where’s Baxter now?” asked Thom.

  “No one knows,” said Shorty. “It sounds like he used the chaos at the train station to disappear. And the cops were so distracted by the events from the previous night, they kind of forgot about him. Maybe it would have been different had it been a homicide.”

  The boys who hadn’t heard the story before were listening intently, not minding the wind blowing through the crumbling house. Mud lit a cigarette and quietly poked through the rubble. Three Fingers was busy watching the river from the sunroom at the back of the house.

  “Jack was well-liked and respected by all, even his enemies. Whether they knew it or not, he was the glue holding the city together — or at least the city that we live in. Depending who you ask, you’ll hear that either the Guard got Charlie, that he went over to the States, or that he went back up north to the lumber camp that Davies recruited him from.”

  There was a pause, and then Thom asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. “Do you think the Guard knows we have the key?”

  “Again,” said Mud, “how would they know?”

  “If they did, they’d be all over us by now,” said Gorski.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for us to make our next move,” said Lapointe. “Maybe they’re just waiting for us to lead them to Davies’s fortune.”

  “They’re watching us right now,” said Three Fingers as he re-entered the room. He didn’t talk much, but when he did he had everyone’s undivided attention. The gang held their maybes and stood very quiet and very still for a moment, looking around the place and listening. Nothing but the wind off the river, whistling through the holes and cracks in the house.

  “Whatever you might believe,” said Shorty, “I don’t think this is a good place for us to be right now.”

  “But we came here to have a look around,” said Thom.

  “Look at this place,” said Shorty, turning slowly around the room with his arms outstretched. “But don’t look too hard because you’re liable to knock it down.”

  “It’s been picked clean,” said Mud

  “By the vultures,” said Three Fingers.

  They were quiet again, feeling the cold, the emptiness, and the dark, bottomless pit of this sorry address on Riverside Drive.

  “This house drinks from us,” said Three Fing
ers.

  Shorty had heard enough. “We should split up,” he said.

  “But we gotta watch each other’s backs,” said Gorski.

  Shorty pocketed the key. “Okay,” he said, “you can start with mine.” He knew the Guard had been here. He had felt their presence before. Hell, he had even seen them. But he wasn’t going to get into that with the boys. He had never told anyone what he saw, not even McCloskey. Part of him didn’t believe it. The other part just hoped he would never have to experience them again.

  — Chapter 4 —

  BULLETS, RYE, AND REMEDIAL GYMNASTICS

  Afternoon

  “Maybe you should just sit down.”

  McCloskey was pacing about the room. He was in one of his moods again. “Not right now,” he said and then he sat down. He was in Clara Fields’s apartment, in her reading chair.

  “Do you want to —?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “All right.”

  And then he started talking. “I still don’t remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “You know.”

  “Sorry,” she said. She sat back on the chesterfield with her ashtray in her lap and a lit the cigarette she cradled between her fingers. She gave him time to put his thoughts together. This was becoming a ritual of theirs, quite different from their past rituals.

  “There’s the war, but it’s not like I’m trying to remember that … it surfaces occasionally … this is different … last summer —”

  “You know what happened last summer,” she said.

  “I know what people told me, people who were there. But there’s still that gap, those lost hours. I just feel like something important is missing, some place, or someone.”

  McCloskey’s memory had been returning gradually, progressing backwards, from when he was convalescing, to arriving at the hospital, to being at the train station, seeing Charlie Baxter’s face and the gun in his hand, to the gunshot, and then the memories stopped and his mind was blank, and then his memories picked up again at the night before, in the storm and the gunfight at the house on Riverside Drive.