Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  I was greeted at the door by a short stout woman of sixty or so, with gold-rimmed glasses attached to a gold chain around her neck and beautiful white hair combed in waves. She was wearing a print dress and brown leather walking shoes with thick soles. When I introduced myself she smiled with counterfeit teeth and said, with a brogue, that she was Charlotte Dolan. “Jimmy’s downstairs in the shop. He said to show you right in to the study.”

  She hung up my gray felt hat, which I had broken out only that morning in honor of another Labor Day gone past, and led me down an immaculate hall lined with tasteful paintings of the saints into a small room containing a big desk. On the way I heard a child laugh somewhere deep in the house. I accepted Mrs. Dolan’s offer of a cup of tea and she shut me in.

  It was a man’s room, done in leather and dark wood with no windows and a skin of dust on everything, in contrast to what I had seen of the rest of the house; Dolan belonged to a class and generation that didn’t brook female invasions with feather dusters. It smelled of bootblack and tobacco. An oil portrait of the man himself, not too well executed, with his thumbs inside his vest pockets, leaned out from the wall behind the desk. On the one adjacent, a large crucifix carved from a single block of wood hung dwarfed by the nakedness of the wall around it. Rows of framed photographs with dust hammocked in the corners dangled crookedly from floor to ceiling on the facing wall. Many of them were autographed: John L. Sullivan, Henry Ford, James J. Corbett, Thomas Edison, Jim Jeffries, Father Coughlin, Jack Dempsey, Jess Willard, Bob Fitzsimmons, many others, some of whom I recognized, some I didn’t. Most of them were Irish, many of them were prizefighters, and Jimmy Dolan was in all the pictures, pumping mitts and beaming like an overgrown leprechaun in his king-size three-piece suit with a Knights of Columbus pin on the lapel.

  I heard heavy footsteps outside the door, and then it was opened by a large old man in a gray shawl-collared cardigan over a plaid shirt buttoned to the neck and old pinstriped suitpants sagging in the crotch, pushed down by a belly the size of a beer wagon. He had a huge red face, lemon-colored hair parted in the middle and smeared into curled wings on both sides of his brow, and white muttonchops. His feet were enormous in brown wingtips and he brought with him a woodshop scent of sawdust and varnish. His voice when he addressed me was a deep burr, the brogue very faint.

  “Mr. Minor,” he said, wrapping his great paw twice around my hand. “I’ve heard your name, but I don’t read you. I am loyal to the good Democratic Free Press, don’t you see.”

  “That’s all right. Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Dolan.”

  “Jimmy, if you please. Mr. Dolan was my father, the teamster. Tee-hee.”

  It was a girlish giggle for such a big man. I extricated my hand diplomatically. “I like your study. It’s like something out of Babbitt.”

  “It’s a place to be. I don’t spend much time in it anymore. These days I make furniture.”

  He moved behind the desk and sat down. This was an impressive piece of furniture in itself, as big as a dinner table, supporting a blotter stained many times over with “J. A. Dolan” in backward script with a turn-of-the-century flourish, an upright telephone with the black enamel worn down to dull metal where his big hand had gripped it, and a pipe rack, from which he selected a clay in the late stages of disintegration. I noticed, as he stuffed the bowl with black shag from a humidor with an Indian’s head carved on the lid, that he held the pipe in his left hand, then leaned forward to take the stem between his teeth while he struck a match and ignited the tobacco with his right. Then when he got rid of the match he sat back and used his right hand to hold the pipe. It was obvious that he had never regained full use of his wounded left arm. Despite that, he appeared not to have Jensen’s difficulty with keeping his tobacco burning. A smell like hot tar filled the room.

  “You said on the phone you needed something,” he said.

  I remained standing. His was the only chair in the room. “Yes, sir. I need a line on a man named Frankie Orr. He works for Sal Borneo.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  He sucked on his pipe and said nothing. His eyes were glass-blue and not as warm as the red face and large soft frame made him seem. I backed off a notch.

  “I got a tip he may be involved in a homicide. I’d use my contacts on the police force, but I don’t want it to get out I’m interested. Not yet.”

  “Orr, you say?”

  “It’s probably not his real name. They’re always shortening them.”

  “What is it you’re thinking I can do? Most of the people I knew went out when Bowles came in.”

  “I heard you keep your hand in.”

  “You heard that, did you?”

  “Yes, sir. The talk is Bowles would never have been recalled if you’d given him your support.”

  “That’s the talk, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked at it, and put it back. “And what if it’s true? I don’t remember the Banner ever doing a kindness for me and mine. I don’t think it existed when I retired.”

  “Maybe it can do one for you now.”

  Someone tapped on the study door. Dolan said come in and his wife entered carrying a Dresden tea set on a tray. She set it down on a corner of the desk and put her hands on her hips. “Jimmy, why doesn’t your guest have a chair?”

  “He didn’t ask for one.”

  She made a noise I have forever afterward regarded as wifelike, left the room, and returned with a straight kitchen chair, which I accepted. She asked me what I took in my tea and poured us each a cup. Without missing a beat she plucked the pipe from Dolan’s mouth and carried it out with her, drawing the door shut. Her visit had diminished him a little.

  “The damned doctors are determined to have me celebrate my hundredth birthday,” he snarled. “Don’t let the bastards sink their hooks into you whatever you do.”

  The brogue was more pronounced when he became agitated. I assured him I wouldn’t and sipped from my cup. The tea was strong enough to float a car ferry.

  He said, “I like this man Murphy.”

  “Which Murphy?” The new subject threw me.

  “Frank Murphy, the Recorder’s Court judge. The man’s for jobs and against gangsters. They’ve had their run these past dozen years. Mothers won’t let their children walk to school for fear they’ll be trapped in the crossfire. What’s your paper’s position on Murphy for mayor?”

  “I don’t think we have one. The election’s too far off.”

  “Well, I like him.”

  This was the new Dolan talking, the Dolan who had survived a gangland ambush at the cost of his career and part of the use of one arm. The old Dolan had done more than a little to create the climate he’d just described. Musing on that, I was a moment realizing he’d stated his terms.

  “You’ve overestimated my influence, Mr. Dolan—Jimmy. I don’t dictate policy at the Banner.”

  “Indeed. I’ve done some research on you since you called Saturday. Nearly a million people read your column. Who else on the staff can claim that?”

  “It’s available to that many. I doubt that many read it. Anyway, Howard Wolfman is his own man. If I told him who to endorse in the election he’d send me packing.”

  “To one of the other two hundred newspapers that subscribe to your wisdom.”

  “It wouldn’t matter to him. I can’t do it.”

  “You can write about Murphy.”

  I kept coming back to the same thing; first in Joey Machine’s office, now here. “I don’t endorse candidates.”

  “Never?”

  “No reflection on you, Jimmy, but when you work for newspapers as long as I have you come into close contact with a lot of politicians. Too close to too many to ever want to support one. Besides, I have a national readership to think about now. Who’s running for office in Detroit doesn’t interest everyone.”

  “But a local murder does.”

&nbs
p; I shrugged over my cup. “I write for them. I don’t try to explain them.”

  “What do you have to offer, Mr. Minor?”

  “The name of the man who tried to have you killed four years ago.”

  “Tee-hee. I know that already. Pete Rosenstein. He was after Mike Freak.”

  “It wasn’t Rosenstein. That’s what the man wanted you to think; it’s why he hired Purples to do it. And it wasn’t Mike Freak he wanted. Mike was just there. You were the target.”

  “How is it you know this?”

  “I had the first interview with Rosenstein after Joey Machine released him to the Purple Gang for ransom back in twenty-seven. He told me who ordered the shooters. Some of the scribes were saying Pete faked his own kidnapping to avoid arrest for the Freak killing. He wanted to set me straight.”

  “And you believed him.”

  “No reason not to. The shooters had been acquitted. If he sent them, they had nothing to gain by tipping the squeal on him. The bulls had no case.”

  “Why didn’t you write about it?”

  “It was off the record. He didn’t want a reputation as a stool pigeon. He just wanted one scribe to believe him and not stir up rumors.” I gave myself a tea transfusion. “It doesn’t have to make sense. He’d just spent a week and a half in Machine’s custody, and Joey isn’t a gracious host. You don’t think logically in a situation like that.”

  The room grew quiet. Dolan set his cup and saucer on the blotter, opened the file drawer of the desk, and lifted out a half-full quart bottle of White Mountain Irish Whiskey, from which he drew the cork and poured a jiggerful into each of our cups. The label said it had been bottled in 1909. He stood the bottle on the blotter and raised his cup.

  “You’ve a Greek head, Mr. Minor. Are you of that race?”

  “My father was.”

  “Then you are as well. The Jews say it’s the mother passes it down, but then they’ve not had a country these three thousand years. To Premier Venizelos?”

  “I don’t keep up with the politics in Greece. But I like Irish.” I lifted my cup and drank. The liquor gave the tea an amber flavor.

  We drained our cups in silence. When I set mine down, he said: “Would you give me ten minutes, lad? The parlor is across the hall.”

  I got up. He had the receiver off the hook when I closed the door behind me.

  The parlor was clean and comfortably shabby, with a worn horsehair sofa and chairs, and violets on the wallpaper. There was a crucifix, smaller than the one in the study, family pictures on the little fireplace mantel, a Philco radio, and a small bookcase containing a handsome leatherbound set of the works of St. Thomas More, arranged incongruously next to three bound volumes of Boy’s Life. A window looked out on a sheltered porch where Charlotte Dolan was buckling a fair-haired boy of six or seven into a yellow slicker; it had started to rain. The boy had to be a grandchild. Most of the pictures on the mantel were of young men and women in caps and gowns and wedding livery and military uniforms, callow versions of the Porter Street Dolans. Outside, the raindrops made big fat circles when they struck the window.

  After twelve minutes or so I went back across the hall and laid my knuckles on the door. I was invited in.

  Dolan, holding the telephone in both hands, lifted an elbow to gesture toward the straight chair. I sat down.

  “Chester, you always pitch them in,” he told the mouthpiece. “How’s that godchild of mine, by the way?” The brogue now was as thick as potatoes and cabbage.

  The conversation, his end of it anyway, continued along those lines for two more minutes. Then he hung up and folded his big hands on the stained blotter. His eyes had flaked off a glacier. Once again his voice had lost its lilt.

  “Francis Xavier Oro. Born Messina, Sicily, nineteen-oh-two. His parents took him with them to New York when he was eleven months old. In nineteen-eighteen he did a jot in the Elmira reformatory for setting fire to a coal wagon. In nineteen twenty-two he was convicted of violation of the Volstead Act and possession of an unlicensed firearm and served six months in Sing Sing. Three arrests for assault, in nineteen twenty-four, twenty-five, and twenty-seven, no convictions. In nineteen twenty-eight he stood trial for the murder of a man named Vincenzo ‘Vinnie Cool’ Cugglio. The jury was hung and the state elected not to try him again. He appears to have behaved himself these two years, although he was a known associate—I take that to mean bodyguard—of Lucky Luciano’s before coming here. You know Luciano?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Nor I. Apparently the thieving dagos set some store by him. How Orr came to be with Sal Borneo I can’t guess. Perhaps it’s like an exchange program. If so, I wonder who this Luciano got. In any case, Mr. Orr now resides at the Griswold House. Suite six-oh-one.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Only this. Orr is a cold customer. Eyewitnesses to the murder of Vinnie Cool, whose memories failed them when the case came to trial, said in their statements to the police that Frankie tracked Vinnie through three crowded cars on the Third Avenue elevated railway and garroted him standing up in full view of a dozen passengers. Then he stood in front of the door until the train reached its next stop and stepped off. He passed two transit policemen coming in and never broke into a run.”

  I finished writing. “That’s a lot of information in a few minutes.”

  “My source keeps records on all the new faces in town.”

  The White Mountain bottle remained on the desk. Significantly, he heeled the cork back in and sat back. It was my turn.

  I said, “I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  “I know I won’t be disappointed. Who wanted me dead?”

  “Mike Freak.”

  “Ah.” The exclamation meant nothing. I went on.

  “They jumped the gun. So to speak. They weren’t supposed to come out of that doorway until Mike’s cab left with him in it.”

  His gaze slid involuntarily toward the crucifix in its lonely place on the bare wall. “Jesus, Son of Mary. The Slavic son of a bitch.”

  “I knew you’d be disappointed,” I said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THAT NIGHT I CALLED HATTIE. “I can’t make it tonight,” I said. “I’m working on something.”

  “I didn’t know we had a date tonight,” she said.

  “Well, you gave me a week. It’s a week today.”

  “You can say all I have to hear over the phone.”

  I was sitting by the window of my place on Park. I hadn’t turned on a light. The window was open and the brimstone smell of rain on asphalt drifted in with the mist. I watched the last bus heading toward Woodward, its pistons drumrolling as it accelerated away from the stop. “Come on,” I said. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

  There was a pause. Then, “I’m with Joey tomorrow. We’re going to talk about the new place.”

  “I thought you hadn’t decided you were going to reopen.”

  “I just did. I’ll see you, Connie.” The connection broke.

  I was still holding the receiver when the operator came on and asked me what number I wanted.

  I became alert. “The Griswold House, please.”

  “Griswold House.”

  This was a male voice with a Franklin Pangborn accent. Its owner would have a pencil moustache.

  “Let me speak to Frankie Orr,” I said.

  “We have no one registered by that name.”

  “Mr. Oro, then.”

  “There is no Mr. Oro here either.”

  “Have it your way. Tell him Connie Minor wants to talk to him about Mr. Buckley.”

  I left my number and hung up. Five seconds later the telephone rang.

  “That was fast,” I said, answering.

  “Minor?”

  I recognized the phlegmy baritone. It wasn’t Orr’s.

  “Yes, Mr. Machine.”

  “I tried to get you at the paper. They gave me this number. I need to get in touch with your friend Dance.”

  “He’s not
a friend. Anyway, I think he’s listed.”

  “I want you to do it. He won’t trust it coming from me. This thing, this war thing between us, it’s shit for the birds. We got to talk.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Last spring Sal said something about a trade. Ten of my joints on the East Side for twenty percent of Dance’s brewery. I didn’t like it then. I’m losing good men now and I like that less. Tell the Jew if he’s interested, we’ll talk turkey.”

  The plan was a simple one. The two men would meet in the middle of the Belle Isle Bridge. Two cars, no weapons. Each could have one companion. The meeting would take place on a weekday when they weren’t likely to be interrupted. Joey would be standing alone in the middle of the bridge with his car parked on the island end; he would be visible from East Jefferson. Jack would leave his car and companion on the Jefferson end and meet Joey on foot in the middle. If Jack liked, he could send Lon Camarillo over in the aeroplane first to make sure everything was jake.

  I wrote it all down. “I’ll tell him.”

  “Think he’ll go for it?”

  “I don’t second-guess people like Jack, Mr. Machine. Who else gets the story?”

  “Just you.”

  “Last time peace came up Jack’s brother got it.”

  “That was Sal’s idea. The greasy fuck’s got nothing to do with this one.”

  “I’ll talk to Jack.”

  “Call me. I’m at the garage.”

  I spoke to the German cook first, who put Vivian on. “He’s not here,” she said.

  “Is there a telephone in the brewery?”

  “What brewery?”

  Less than three months married and she was already acting like a moll. “Okay, have him call me at my apartment. He’s got the number. It’s important.”

  The telephone rang while I was listening to a ballgame. I turned off the radio and unhooked the receiver. “Jack?”

  “This is Frankie Orr. Let me talk to Minor.”

  It was the first time I’d heard him speak. His voice was a sliding whisper. Whatever it owed to Little Italy had been repaid. I switched on a lamp. “This is Minor.”