Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The Biloxi Bullets,” I said, looking at him. “I thought you looked familiar. You played left field.”

  “Sometimes center.” The big man sounded a little less hostile. He had succeeded in applying the safety and returned the pistol to his pocket. “Not many white folks follow black ball.”

  “I broke in as a sportswriter. My first assignment was the Negro leagues. You were working on some kind of record when you dropped out.”

  “Hit safely in thirty-eight consecutive games,” said Kramm. “Then the Klan got him.”

  Springfield nodded. “Tied me to a cottonwood and let fly at my hands with a table leg till I couldn’t grip a bat no more.” He looked at them, then put them in his pockets.

  “Baseball’s loss is our gain. Them Purples keep their distance when Bass is around.” Kramm put a hand on my back. “Jack’s in the lead car.”

  “Jack?”

  “Jack Dance. He’s barking the show. I’ll introduce you.”

  Kramm and I started that way with Springfield following, providing a windbreak. The lead car was a six-year-old Hudson Model S four-door with its motor running, black over bottle green and shaped like a bus, with a plank mounted up front in place of a bumper. The front door on the passenger’s side was open and the boy I had known as John Danzig sat on the seat at an angle, with one foot on the running board, pouring steaming liquid out of a thermos jug into a tin cup. He looked up, saw me, and grinned.

  “Hey, Connie! Move any slot machines lately?”

  If he hadn’t mentioned the slots I might never have placed him. As it was it took me a minute to make the connection. He had lost the baby fat and looked big and hard in a black camel’s hair topcoat over a brown pinstriped suit. He had a pearl-gray snapbrim on the back of his curly head and matching spats on tan wingtips that were better suited to the lobby of the Fisher Building than a windswept downtown street in late January. Then and later, always, he was overdressed for the occasion. He had worn his last twenty-dollar suit.

  “You know each other?” Kramm was puzzled and, it seemed to me, annoyed. He’d been robbed of his introduction.

  “We was in the moving business together. How the hell are you, Connie?” He stood the thermos on the floor of the sedan and shook my hand. His was manicured, and as free of calluses as I remembered. My memory was working fine now.

  “Freezing my balls off,” I said. “Who’s this Jack Dance?”

  “Joey’s idea. You know them wops, can’t say a name that don’t sound like that crap they eat. Hang a lip over this. It’ll warm your belly.” He held out the tin cup.

  I accepted it, taking off my gloves first so I could feel the heat on my palms, and offered him the flask. He shook his head.

  “Never touch it. Thins the blood. Go ahead, drink up.”

  I put away the flask and took a sip.

  “This isn’t coffee.”

  “Didn’t say it was. Chicken broth’s better.”

  It tasted better than whiskey anyway. The fumes thawed out my sinuses. He watched me drain the cup.

  “Joey says you’re here to make us famous.”

  “I promised him I wouldn’t use names.”

  “You can use mine. The bulls don’t scare me.”

  “Not even Kozlowski?” He was still a lieutenant, still in charge of the Prohibition Squad. The department wasn’t about to promote him and go begging for someone to take his place. Most bulls preferred a leper’s sheet to the rubber raincoat.

  “He worked me over with a lamp cord for a little, but nobody liked that bug Wagner. I heard he died of a bad needle.”

  “I hadn’t.”

  “No?” His smile flared briefly, leaving behind a light phosphorescence, like a flashbulb. “Anyway, Joey sent down bail and gave me a job. Tom too.”

  “Where is your brother?”

  “Waiting for your letter of introduction. He’s all ready to start working for the Times.”

  “He’s the one?” I remembered how carefully he had weighed the risks before agreeing to help Hattie with her slot machine problem. A poet, John—excuse me, Jack—had called him.

  “Says he can’t write no novels without getting experience first. I said he could have all he wanted if he stayed here, but he said that wasn’t the kind he needed. He wasn’t a lot of good anyway. He thinks too much. Thinks all the time.” He worked his fingers into a pair of doeskin gloves. “That was some night at Hattie’s. You remember that funny little guy, they cut a piece off of his brain?”

  “Jerry the Lobo.”

  “That’s him. Guy like that, he’s better dead.”

  I knew then. It wasn’t what he said exactly, or the way he said it. It was that he even brought up Jerry the Lobo. The newsroom oddsmakers at the time, when they thought about Jerry at all, had decided that he had wandered into a boxcar and was cadging his beers in Pensacola or someplace, thinking he was still in Detroit. I had never entered the discussion. Thinking about Jerry the Lobo made me sad.

  “What’s the radio say, Lon?”

  Jack directed this at a skull-faced man in a greasy slouch hat and brown leather aviator’s jacket, who had just come out of the garage.

  “Overcast and flurries.” He kept walking in the direction of the last car in line.

  “Good.” Jack smiled at me. “No place to hide on the lake when the moon’s out.”

  “Who’s Lon?”

  “Oh, we just call him that on account of he looks like Lon Chaney in that picture, the one about the opera. His name’s Camarillo.”

  That name I knew. He had shot down eight German planes with Eddie Rickenbacker’s squadron during the war and had a medal pinned on his chest by Woodrow Wilson. That was the last good thing I had heard about him. “I thought he worked for Sal Borneo.”

  “He did. Now he don’t.”

  “He’s a killer. They’re the only ones that can just up and quit like that.”

  “Mercy-go-run,” Andy Kramm said. “Jack, you never told me I was keeping company with criminal trash.”

  Big Bass chuckled—a low, chilling sound, like wind whistling through holes in a steel drum.

  “No-man’s-land out there on the ice, Connie. You just joined the war.” Jack took back the tin cup and corked the thermos. “Let’s roll, kids.”

  I rode in back with Andy Kramm, who rested his feet on a long black metal toolbox on the floor. Jack drove and Bass sat on the passenger’s side in front, blocking my half of the view through the windshield. The tire chains clanked and light from the streetlamps fluttered inside the car. Behind us the headlamps of the other cars were strung out like mourners in a funeral procession.

  We took Woodward down to Jefferson and turned left. “Lake Erie’s the other way,” I said.

  Jack turned his head to grin at Bass. “We don’t go out on the ice, Connie; we come back on it. There’s no law against driving to Canada.”

  “Oh.”

  We crossed on the Ambassador Bridge. The Windsor Tunnel, which some Detroiters had already rechristened the Funnel for its potential as a conduit for alcohol, was still under construction. The river beneath our feet glistened like black oil.

  The guard in the Customs booth had silver hair and rimless glasses under a fur cap. He looked over our ID’s. “Reason for your visit?”

  Jack said, “Pleasure.”

  He handed back the cards. “Enjoy your stay.”

  We drove on. Nobody else in the party was detained. Customs officials weren’t dumber then than they are now, or any less honest. When eight cars of a uniform size and vintage crossed the border with chains on their tires, the man in the rimless glasses had to suspect their true purpose, along with the probable presence of a number of unlicensed weapons. Bootleggers brought money into Canada. Where they went with what they bought was strictly between them and their own country.

  The distillery Joey Machine did business with was in Leamington, conveniently located near the point where a convoy loaded with contraband might push off for the trek acr
oss Lake Erie’s frozen surface. On our way through the provincial village of Windsor I remembered why I was there and asked Andy Kramm how he had come to hook up with the Machine organization.

  “I was a gunner with the Polar Bears. When I got home the war was over a year and there wasn’t no work for a veteran. I guess that’s how Lon wound up here too.”

  “What are the Polar Bears?”

  “We stood behind to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia, but that war didn’t go so good and they sent us home finally. I missed all the parades.”

  “You’ve been with Machine since 1919?”

  “No, I bummed around some: Drove a truck for the Greeks, run with the Little Jewish Navy, shot craps for Lefty Clark in Ecorse till my luck went west. Joey hired me off the floor the night Lefty canned me.”

  “As a croupier?”

  “No. Hell, no. I never got back my luck for that. He wanted a gunner.”

  In Leamington, Jack pried the Hudson down a narrow brick-paved alley into a rutted lot and parked it at the end of a loading dock lit by a bare overhead bulb. The other cars arranged themselves around the dock, a ragtag cohort of Essexes, Lincolns, and Studebakers with missing fenders and rocker panels rusted through. Their exhaust pipes smoked thickly in the subzero air.

  We got out. The wind off the lake had razors in it. Jack vaulted onto the dock, pounded on a door next to the closed bay, and went inside when it opened, tipping a brief L of yellow light from inside. The rest of us stood around with our hands in our pockets, stamping life into feet numbed by the inadequacy of old car heaters.

  The lake was a great empty black hole spreading east to the blank sky and west to a lonely scattering of lights that was the city of Monroe, twenty miles south of Detroit. I felt the emptiness in the pit of my stomach. The cars seemed small and fragile compared to that bleak distance. I couldn’t help thinking of Little Augie Bustamente, feeding the fish on the floor of the lake.

  “Colder’n a witch’s tit, all right,” said Andy Kramm next to me. “I wouldn’t turn down a pull on that flask of yours. Jack’s chicken soup just makes me piss.”

  I got it out and handed it to him. I watched him tip it up. “Is it true he doesn’t drink?”

  “Nothing like the Creature to warm up the tubes. You buy good liquor.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and returned the flask. “Oh, he don’t say no to a beer when he’s thirsty. He ain’t the only leg to steer away from harder stuff. Jack says it’s what separates him from the suckers on the other end, but I say if it gets out he won’t touch his own liquor, it won’t be good for business.”

  “You mean Joey’s liquor.”

  “Sure. Ain’t that what I said?” He moved off, smiling.

  Chapter Six

  A CHAIN RATTLED AND the bay doors swung outward on parched hinges, pushed by Jack and a solid-looking fat man in an earflapped hunting cap and streaked overalls. The inside of the building was a cavern lit by a row of ceiling bulbs, stacked to the rafters with stenciled wooden crates and charred barrels and smelling heavily of sawdust and sour mash. It was a warm stink, like the interior of a stable, and took the edge off the bitter wind. I hadn’t seen that much beer and whiskey stored in one place since the early days of Prohibition when the bulls were still gleefully smashing up the distilleries in the warehouse district for newsreel photographers. I could not conceive of its value on the 1930 market.

  I had to scramble out of the way while the men in Jack’s party, unbidden, formed three lines and began loading crates bucket-brigade fashion into the trunks and tonneaus of the cars parked at the dock. Jack, the hard fat man, and Bass Springfield brought out the crates and handed them down one by one to the first men in line, who followed suit. The cars filled with miraculous speed.

  Nonparticipation is the reporter’s hallmark, even when the event involves a perfectly legal transaction under Canadian law. In this case the efficiency of the system would only have suffered had I tried to take a hand. I had toured the River Rouge plant with Henry Ford and monitored the Detroit Police Department’s twelve-week officer training course, and neither operation had worked more smoothly or with less waste. I stood out of the base path and conducted spot interviews.

  Most of the loaders were in their twenties and younger, boys from poor neighborhoods whose heroes drove sixteen-cylinder Auburns and wore alpaca coats with tailored pockets for their revolvers. As they worked they leered at one another as if the common labor in which they were engaged—again, no laws had yet been broken—were somehow naughtier and less prosaic than stacking cartons in a market; as if they shared a practical and unprintably dirty joke. Asking them questions was not rewarding, unless sniggering and winking could be called good copy.

  The oldest, a tall bareheaded bald man in his late forties named Hannion, was different. He had come to Detroit at the invitation of relatives after his release from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester, where he had served nineteen years for the robbery of the Kansas, Texas, and Missouri Railroad in 1905. He had a road-gang complexion, sun-cracked and windburned, and a short cigarette smoldering in a groove in his lip that didn’t move when he spoke, a characteristic of men accustomed to conversing in an environment where silence is enforced.

  “You were a desperado?” I had grown up on a steady diet of Tom Mix and William S. Hart.

  “Not as desperate as the ones that spent so much time chasing me.” His rigid lips flattened his Southwestern drawl further. “There was quiet times.”

  “Quiet as this?”

  He accepted a crate and passed it on. “Work like this here’s the reason I went on the scout in the first place.”

  “So why are you doing it?”

  “Trains run too fast these days.”

  Austin Camarillo—Lon to his fellow bootleggers—proved a disappointing interview. Stationed at the end of the line, the skull-faced former aviator socked crates into the back of a battered black Lincoln hard enough to rattle the bottles inside, wouldn’t discuss his experiences in the war, and responded to questions about his current activities with monosyllabic snarls. So much for what Winchell wrote about the easy sociability of hired killers. I got a rise out of him just once, when I asked him how he came to know Joey Machine.

  There was a lull while another stack was being carried from the depths of the warehouse. Camarillo fished papers and makings out of his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette with a careless ease I would sooner have associated with Hannion, the Oklahoma bandit. He speared it between his meatless lips, struck a match on the seat of his pants, and paused with the flame shimmying an inch from the end of the cigarette.

  “Influenza,” he said, and lit the tobacco.

  “Sorry?”

  He blew smoke through his nostrils and shook out the match. “I came down with the influenza November ninth, nineteen-eighteen. We were short on planes, so somebody else flew my bus. Coming back from patrol the squadron ran into heavy Archie. Archie, that’s anti-aircraft fire. A piece hit the fuel tank and my plane went up like a Catherine wheel with somebody else inside. Two days later I was strong enough to fly, but in the meantime the Kaiser signed the Armistice and I shipped home.”

  “So?”

  “So if it wasn’t for the influenza I wouldn’t have come to know Joey.”

  The line started moving again and he went back to work. I thanked him and walked away.

  Bass Springfield had been spelled early on the loading dock by Andy Kramm, who although he was half the colored man’s size had two functional hands and worked just as fast. Springfield rested his bulk on an upended barrel with his mangled fingers spread on his knees. I wandered over there and leaned my elbows on the dock.

  “Miss baseball a lot?”

  “What you think?” He was watching the operation.

  “Is this the only work you could get?”

  He nodded. “I ain’t any too good at it neither.”

  I asked him, after having asked Kramm, Hannion, and Camarillo, what I had come to think o
f as The Question.

  “I don’t know Mr. Machine nohow,” he said. “I was hired by Mr. Jack.”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “You should’ve seen it.” Jack Dance came over to the edge of the dock, brushing sawdust off the front of his coat. “I was meeting a train at the station on Brush when I hear this banging coming from a freight on the siding, a real racket. The train’s late, so I stroll over there and take a peek inside this boxcar where the noise is coming from. I see this big nigger walloping a white man’s head against the side of the car. This other white man’s laying on his face on the floor and you just got to figure he had the same.

  “Well, it wasn’t none of my business, except I’m a white man too, so I show the nigger the piece. He lets go and the guy just kind of slides into a pile on the floor. It was like his bones turned to piss.”

  “They was Pinkertons,” contributed Springfield. “Come to put me off the train. They tried to grab my hands.”

  “I can see right off here’s a nigger I can use if I don’t have to shoot him, so I had him come down out of the car. I got him to tell me his name, which I don’t know from Lenin’s, not being a fan of colored ball like Andy there, and I asked him if he wanted a job. He didn’t say no. Joey’s train’s coming in now, all the way from Atlantic City; I ain’t worked for him so long I figure I can trot Bass up to the platform and ask can I keep him. I gave him a hundred to get cleaned up and buy some duds without nothing living in them but him and told him to come see me at the Book-Cadillac. I figure I bought him for the C-note if he don’t show up, but he does, all decked out in yellow from hat to heels.” He shook his head. “You should’ve seen it.”

  You should’ve seen it. I would come to recognize that as Jack’s favorite phrase, a recurring declaration of his faith in the wonder of the world. I visited his grave recently in Hebrew Memorial Park and was disappointed to learn that no one had thought to inscribe it on his stone.

  “What happened to the Pinkertons?” I asked.

  Jack moved a shoulder. “I didn’t read about them in the paper so I guess they must’ve come around finally. Either that or some hoboes stripped their carcasses and dumped them off along the rails somewhere between here and wherever that freight was headed.” He raised his voice. “That’s the load. Let’s leave some room for passengers.”