Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  Wide-Open Detroit was just yesterday, but so much has happened between then and now that it all seems like a half-pleasant dream that needs analyzing.

  We had a jump on the rest of the country in the bootlegging department for two simple reasons: 1. Ontario, Canada, which was also dry but permitted the manufacture of liquor for export, was only three minutes away across the Detroit River; 2. Michigan went dry a full year before the Volstead Act prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages kicked in across the United States. By the time New York and Chicago got into the business, Detroit had rumrunning down to a science.

  Not that there were many white coats involved. Although the practical Poles were mixing the stuff in their bathtubs in Hamtramck and selling it in Mason jars out of their car trunks on Joseph Campau, the main traffic was on the river. There the fastest boats in maritime history ran Coast Guard blockades to deliver crates of whiskey and barrels of beer to Cadillacs and Lincolns waiting on the docks in Ecorse—Robbers’ Roost, the locals had christened that stretch along Jefferson Avenue—and at the foot of Riopelle Street in Detroit proper. The demand always exceeded the supply, and the supply was greater than in the days when it was legal. Everyone, it seemed, was in the liquor business. You could stand before an anonymous apartment house on Michigan Avenue or Gratiot and guess how many windows belonged to blind pigs, just like the suckers who lined up in front of J. L. Hudson’s downtown to estimate how many marbles resided in the big jar in the display window and win a new Packard. Some experts said there were twenty thousand illegal drinking establishments in the city. Others said it was more like twenty-five thousand. There could have been a million. They didn’t register at the Wayne County courthouse.

  The city was growing fit to be tied, only you had to catch it first. America was on wheels and Detroit supplied the motors. Art deco buildings sprang up downtown like gothic toadstools; from 1923 to 1928 you couldn’t walk a straight path across the Grand Circle in the heart of the business district without tripping over a hundred sawhorses. It was a red-bandanna town with white-collar dreams, and when a Sunday driver who wore coveralls during the week put-putted past the great pink-and-white marble mansions on Lake Shore Drive, instead of shaking his fist, he thought of the day when he’d occupy one just like them. Hadn’t Henry Ford begun as a machinist’s apprentice?

  That placid certainty, that today was better than yesterday and tomorrow would be better still, stumbled in 1927, when Ford discontinued the Model T. That decision ended the beetle-black little chug-chug’s twenty-four-year reign, forced production cutbacks at the factory in Dearborn, and led to the layoff of thousands of foreigners, hillbillies, and coloreds, who had come swarming in like grease-stained bees toward the promise of five dollars a day and a company-owned home. It went down for the count on October 29, 1929—although most of us west of the New York Stock Exchange wouldn’t get the message until the ripples from Black Tuesday reached us across Lake Erie a year later. Even then nobody thought things would get as bad as Lewis machine guns mounted atop the Rouge plant for the purpose of mowing down striking laborers.

  Detroit was a night town then, trading overalls and work shoes for seersucker and black patent leather when the sun went down somewhere beyond Inkster. Dancing the Charleston and Detroit’s own Black Bottom at the Arcadia Ballroom on Woodward, checking out Gloria Swanson and John Gilbert at the Oriole Terrace on East Grand, lapping up real nigger jazz, down and dirty, on Hastings Street, and drinking—always drinking, from hip flasks and coffee mugs, crystal flutes and clay pots, silver cups and the hollow handles of trick umbrellas. You could pass the pint around at Navin Field while watching Ty Cobb hit and Dutch Leonard pitch, or you could put on the dog and sip champagne at the Polar Bear Cafe in Ecorse and hear Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke hotting up the band to cover the noise of Piejacki’s Navy unloading Ontario’s finest on the dock below the dining room. There, and all along the riverfront they called Michigan’s Barbary Coast, broken noses lined up with highbrows and the hard-eyed young killers who ran with the Purple Gang rubbed shoulders with the sheiks who greased their hair down like Ramon Novarro and the hennaed shebas who tried to look like Theda Bara in pearls and fringe, not to forget the occasional city councilman. In 1929 a scribe at the New York Times wrote an article estimating the annual profits of Detroit’s three top industries as follows: Automobiles, $2,000,000; Chemicals, $90,000,000; Liquor, $215,000,000. Blind Blake sang it, and others joined in:

  When I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come” around When I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come around ‘Cause I don’t want her now, Lord, I’m Detroit bound.

  There were casualties, of course. The business belonged to the survivors. In 1926 alone, three hundred and twenty-six Detroiters died from bullets, bomb blasts, and that faithful Sicilian export, the garrote, compared to less than half that number in 1917, when you could drink a beer in a public place without risking arrest. Little or no attempt was made to investigate these killings, most of which involved gangsters and the odd citizen who violated the unwritten law against waltzing into the crossfire. Oh, the dicks came around and made their chalk lines and smoked their cigars and had their pictures taken pointing at bulletholes, but the atrocities might have taken place in Turkey for all the attention they got after a new one came along to shove them off the front page. I was present at a press conference in Mayor Charles Bowles’s office when he commented, “Perhaps it’s just as well to let this scum kill each other off.” The bulls were happy to agree, and the papers ran the murder count like box scores.

  By then my days at the Times were numbered. The trouble with working for innovators like Mr. W. R. Hearst is they got all that innovating out of their systems early, after which the ideas they came up with when they were bold enough to pop monocles and crack corset stays assume the more depressing qualities of poured concrete. In Mr. Hearst’s case they were as old as his feud with the late Joseph Pulitzer and the war they had invented with Spain in 1898. Worse, he was a teetotaler. It did little for my journalistic pride to beat the News’s goddamn auto-giro to the scene of some riverfront bloodbath only to see my account sandwiched between a gushing review of Marion Davies’s latest costume epic and an editorial in favor of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. After three years at the same stand the soles of my feet were starting to crawl.

  I was neglecting the free lunch at the House of All Nations for the butcher job a night editor had done on a piece of mine when a compact towhead in a neat gray double-breasted hung his overcoat and hat on the hook next to mine. It was January 1930, the room was overheated, and I could feel the cold wafting off the navy cashmere. He was smiling down at me when I glanced up from the newspaper.

  “Connie Minor, isn’t it?”

  I looked quickly at his hands. He wasn’t holding any papers, so I said it was Connie Minor all right.

  “I’m Howard Wolfman.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” he said simply. “They told me at the Times you’d be here. Is it all right if I sit down?”

  I flicked a hand toward the seat facing mine. It wasn’t the trick name that threw me; I’d heard of Howard Wolfman. If I’d been expecting him I would have been looking for sweaty armpits, a beer gut, and gin on his breath. Someday maybe I’ll learn not to write the story until I’ve met its subject. The man who sat down opposite me in the booth was a natty little albino with thin white hair combed down on his forehead and pink eyes like a rabbit’s behind gold-rimmed glasses. I folded the newspaper and laid it aside.

  “The Times told you where to find me?”

  “I didn’t exactly tell them who I was.” He inclined his head toward the paper. “Good story on the Windsor Tunnel.”

  “It was before they got to it.”

  He caught the bartender’s eye and made a circle with his forefinger. Two fresh beers were brought. Wolfman turned down the lunch. “Are you familiar with the Banner?”

  “The sta
nds are always out.”

  He turned, slid a rolled newspaper from the pocket of his dangling overcoat, and spread it out on the table facing me.

  It was half the size of the broadsheet Times and printed on coarse gray pulp; I could feel the ends of the fibers when I turned the pages. The masthead, a simple block with no Old English flourishes, read The Detroit Banner. A grainy shot of two men lying on their faces on a splotched sidewalk filled the midget front page under the screamer:

  BOWLES: “LET THEM DIE!”

  Inside was an account of the mayor’s press conference explaining his policy of noninvolvement concerning gang killings, side by side with a story about two unidentified men gunned down last night on the East Side.

  “Nice,” I said. “Only he didn’t say, ‘Let them die.’ I was there.”

  “It made a better headline. What do you think of the picture?”

  “It’s okay. I didn’t know any were taken.”

  “There weren’t. My photo editor dressed two linotypists in hats and overcoats and had them lie down. What looks like blood is really just an oilstain.”

  “That’s unethical,” I said automatically.

  He waggled a hand. “We wouldn’t have done it if we’d been able to get a picture of the real thing. The timing was too good to let go. And we didn’t actually say the picture is of the two men who were killed.”

  “I guess it sells papers.” I was trying to imagine the Times’s photo editor showing that kind of initiative.

  “Better than that. There’s talk of a recall. The Banner can claim most of the credit.”

  “Jerry Buckley might not agree. He’s been on Bowles’s ass for weeks on WMBC.”

  “Radio’s for housewives. People believe what they see in print.” He tapped the newspaper. “This picture will be remembered long after Buckley’s dead and his words are gone in the ether. Father Coughlin doesn’t have that kind of power. Neither does Herbert Hoover.”

  Six months later, I remembered what he said about Buckley, and wondered if he’d had some kind of line.

  “It’s a good-looking paper,” I said. “The writing could be better.”

  “It could be a lot better. That’s why I’m here.”

  I sucked the foam off my beer. I knew what was coming next.

  “How’s Hearst to work for?” he asked.

  “He signs the checks every other Friday.”

  “I mean from a journalist’s standpoint. Are you happy at the Times?”

  “Are you offering me a job, Mr. Wolfman?”

  “Howard. I’ve got the newest equipment and the best photographers in the Midwest. I need good copy. I’ve read your stuff. What’s Hearst paying you?”

  “Seventy-five a week.”

  He smiled, blinking behind the spectacles. “Nearer sixty. I’ll give you a hundred and fifty, plus a twenty-dollar bonus every time you scoop the rest of the city.”

  My hand was starting to shake. I clamped it around the handle of my mug. “I cover police and city government. And I get a byline.”

  “I already have a police reporter and a city government reporter. I’m offering you a column.”

  I let go of the mug and took his hand. “When do I start?”

  “How soon can you clean out your desk?”

  That’s how I came to work for the tabloids. They’re tamer now, and so much a part of the landscape that it’s difficult to imagine the impact they made when they were new. Splattered with lurid photos (many of them dramatically doctored) and black headlines, they broke out in cities from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico as suddenly as gang wars and swooped down on domestic murders, state executions, sex scandals, and anything else sufficiently scarlet to clear a newsstand in minutes. Little bullets of voyeuristic pleasure, they were portable enough to be read easily in cabs and streetcars and cheap enough, at two or three cents a pop, to be left behind. They obeyed few laws beyond supply and demand and sold in the millions. When a New York tabloid smuggled a photographer into Ruth Snyder’s electrocution chamber and ran a picture of her snapped just as the switch was thrown—RUTH FRIES, the headline explained—the legitimate press lowered its flags in mourning, while scrambling behind the scenes to start tabloids of its own. The Fourth Estate would never be the same, and no one who moved around in the public eye would ever again be totally secure in his private life. The tabloids would force subtlety upon the corrupt and threaten heroes with extinction.

  My new employer inhabited the fifth floor of the Parker Block, a Victorian wedge triangulated by Woodward, Michigan, and Gratiot avenues, with a cast-iron front housing Siegel’s Department Store on the ground floor, dripping with cornices and scrollwork—a dotty old aunt of a building, and a strange home for a brat like the Banner. The office I shared with the cartoon editor was eleven feet square with an arched window looking out on Gratiot and the J. L. Hudson building across the street. The cartoon editor, whose name was Jensen, a woodsy-looking number with craggy features and a pipe he couldn’t keep burning to pay the rent, never cracked a smile when I was around to see it and gave no indication when I told a joke that he understood English, but the cartoons he bought were the funniest I’ve ever seen. You figure it out.

  I’ve forgotten the subject of the first column I wrote once I’d gotten past the novelty of a Remington typewriter with an entire working alphabet and no keys that stuck. I’m not alone, because it garnered no letters to the editor and Howard didn’t stop by the office to congratulate me, something he made a point of doing later whenever I scored. The second was an obituary.

  Two nights earlier, a driver named Little Augie Bustamente had plunged through the ice on Lake Erie at the wheel of a Stutz Blackhawk loaded to the roof with crates of Old Log Cabin. The car, part of a convoy, had driven too near the center of the lake where the current ran through. Little Augie was nobody’s loss, being a known wife-abuser and convicted rapist, but the whiskey and particularly the car, which was a good ten years newer and several hundred dollars more valuable than the rusty flivvers the Machine mob usually sent out on the ice, would be missed. Rumor said Joey Machine had given it to his mistress for Christmas and that it had been pressed into service without his knowledge when a Model T touring car caught cold at the last minute. I believed the second part, but not the first. Joey was too cheap to keep a woman, let alone give one a bucket that cost twice as much as the Chevy he drove every day without benefit of chauffeur. In any case, I flatter myself that my piece was the first eulogy ever written for an automobile. It drew letters for a week and H. L. Mencken bought the rights to reprint it nationally. The morning after it appeared in the Banner I found a check for twenty dollars bearing Howard Wolfman’s signature on my desk.

  I was pondering whether to spend the twenty on a new suit or a battery for my Ford—the stock market was definitely out—when the telephone rang. It was on Jensen’s desk; seniority. He took the receiver off the gallows, listened, and extended it to me without a word. I slung a ham onto the cartoon-cluttered desk and took it. “Minor.”

  “Connie Minor?” The voice in the tin cup was deep and slow, like a Victrola winding down. It sounded congested.

  “There’s only one I know of,” I said.

  “I thought you was a dame.”

  I made a mental note to have my picture taken for the top of the column. “Sorry to disappoint you, kiddo. What’s your beef?”

  “No beef.” The owner of the voice cleared his throat with a gurgle. I guessed the condition was chronic. “If you got an hour this afternoon I want to talk to you about that story you wrote last night. My name’s Joey Machine.”

  I took the time and place down on a cartoon. I don’t remember if Jensen complained.

  Chapter Four

  “YOU KNOW MY REAL name ain’t Machine,” said Machine. “It’s Maccino, Giuseppe Garibaldi Maccino. If I had it to do over I wouldn’t make the change. Every damn scribe this side of the ocean can spell Joey Machine, and look at the mess it’s got me in.”


  I looked politely, but the only mess he appeared to be in at present had to do with introducing a triple-decker meatball-and-liverwurst sandwich into a strictly single-decker mouth. He was eating a late lunch at a cheap yellow pine desk gouged all over and stained with the residue of other lunches past. The office was twice the size of mine and contained half the furniture, a big echoey room with windows in two adjacent walls and bare floorboards that buzzed whenever someone gunned a motor directly below. The Acme Garage on Griswold was Joey Machine’s flagship. He and a partner, since deceased, had bought it in 1919 out of their salaries as fitters for the Michigan Stove Company, a small inheritance belonging to Joey’s wife, and the income from a still the partners operated on Belle Isle. Everything else had come later, including the liquor concession for the entire East Side and a graveyard at the bottom of Lake St. Clair for those who lacked Joey’s vision. Anyone could get a lube and an oil change in the garage, but chiefly the place served as the payoff point for every bull and city official on the Machine roll, or so the press suspected. Those parties serviced their private automobiles there with a regularity that defied any other explanation.

  The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago the previous winter taught Joey the importance of defending a garage against armed siege. He had had the old wooden bay doors replaced with steel panels, installed bar locks on the back and side entrances, and rigged a warning buzzer that would sound in his office the moment someone tried to enter the building by force. A signal from his window to a lookout stationed on a neighboring roof, it was said, would bring a dozen men with machine guns to the scene in minutes.

  I jumped at a noise from his desk, but it was just the telephone. He put the sandwich down with a sigh and barked his name—or rather his streamlined nom de guerre—into the mouthpiece. “Who’s that? Yeah, what about him?” He listened, chewing. “What the fuck’s he mean, it’s got a bitter taste? Did I ask him for a fucking review? Remind him we got a contract. No, I don’t care how you do it.”