“The bulk thought it was Scalia tipped Joey where they was hid out; Scalia didn’t move fast enough to stay out of the way or Joey double-crossed him, took him out too for turning on Joey in the first place. If he turned on him he’d turn on Jack, that’s the way the bulls seen it.”
“Kozlowski said he finally sold himself out.”
“Kozlowski always was full of shit. They was all full of shit. I know who tipped Joey, and it wasn’t Scalia. You do too, I guess.”
I said nothing for a moment. The way the police had it figured, Barberra and the others had been using the Orlando Hotel for a jumping-off point until the word came down to hit the Collingwood, only to be interrupted when Inspector Fraley ordered them off the premises, delaying the event twenty-four hours; but I had seen the killers leaving the Acme Garage that night and knew that they had been using the hotel while they scouted the neighborhood, probably on some smoky tip that Jack Dance or one of the others had been seen in that area. They didn’t have the specific location until the night of the killing, a location provided by the man I had glimpsed sitting in the fishbowl garage office with Joey Machine. I knew, all right, but I wasn’t sure how Andy knew. I asked him. “Who did Jack use to pick up and deliver the ransom for Frankie Orr’s baby?”
“His brother, who else you think? Tom fucking Danzig. He brought the fifty grand to the apartment in the Collingwood. He was the only one who knew where Jack was besides Lon and Scalia, because Jack told him. And he was the one who called Joey and told him where he could send his shooters.”
“He didn’t call,” I said. “He went in person. I saw him at the garage that night.”
“It explains a lot,” Andy said after a moment.
“Yeah, like how the Times beat every other paper in town to the street with the story on the massacre. They had the headline all set to go while it was still happening. All they needed was the details.”
“The son of a bitch.”
“The son of a bitch,” I agreed. We’ll all do handstands to earn a pat on the head from Jack, he had told me as we were leaving Bass Springfield’s grave. We will for as long as he lives. That’s how he’d justify it. I wondered if he thought it covered scooping the rest of Detroit while he was at it on the hottest story of the year, his brother’s murder.
I’ve already reported the rest of what Andy Kramm told me during that visit. From there he was taken to Jackson, where he was released in February 1934 after serving his full term. In April of that year he was reported among the bandits who escaped from the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin with John Dillinger when federal agents opened fire on the building. One month later, exiting a bank in Greencastle, Indiana with two companions and a sack containing eleven thousand dollars in stolen bills and securities, Andy walked into a wall of shotgun, rifle, and pistol fire from a posse made up of local police officers and storekeepers. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk.
For me, like Jack and Springfield and Lon and Joey and Kozlowski and Gabriel and Frankie Orr and Hattie and Vivian and Howard and all the rest of them, all that fading cartoon cast, he’s alive somewhere, waving brightly to someone as he did to me while the guard turned him back toward his cell. I stood there smiling faintly back and fingering the object in my pocket, the thing I was never without, worn smoother than any emery wheel could get it and probably too small now to fit snugly in the chamber of any pistol, my rosary, the essential lie of my life, the thing that had sent the stool pigeon Lewis Welker to Purgatory with the taste of brass on his tongue and his killer unpunished. I still have the cartridge, and unless it falls through a hole in my pocket someday or winds up at the cleaners or is just plain misplaced, someone will take it off my body too. It is my own personal exclusive portable drip-dry wash-and-wear no-assembly-required Mark of the Beast.
That’s the story, end of column, thirty; and if you think it’s been too long in the telling then I’ve made a bum job of it, because it should seem no more than a brazen moment in time. To feel what we felt, those of us who were there, you had to have been there too, and to have been like us, when the river that glittered on the border between the United States and Canada seemed to match the honey glow of the liquid gold that flowed across it when we were all too young and stupid and full of piss and rotgut to believe for one second that it would ever stop flowing.
Jack had a phrase that covered it:
You should’ve seen it.
The third day: September 27, 1939
For a moment after he finished, the courtroom hung in time, suspended by the humming of the fan and the little exhalations the shorthand machine made as the recorder palpated the keys. The special prosecutor, looking less like Old Man Prohibition now and more like a young lawyer insulated by marble and mahogany from the street outside, stirred himself from behind his table.
“You’ve revealed an appalling number of unreported crimes,” he said. “Were you afraid of reprisals if you told what you knew?”
“Only if they involved clamming up whenever I entered a room, or not letting me into the room at all. I had to work in this town.”
“I don’t agree that your rights under the First Amendment regarding a free press include withholding evidence in a murder. Even if I did, I’d have to ask what stopped you from going to the authorities after you left newspapers, when keeping silent was no longer a professional consideration.”
“I didn’t leave newspapers, counselor; newspapers left me. When Prohibition ended I became a relic, like slave bracelets and F. Scott Fitzgerald. A few years ago, Steele Gilmore at the News offered me a Sunday column, one of those old-fart retrospectives: ‘On this day in nineteen twenty-five, Clara Bow was appearing in person at the Oriole Terrace, prime rib was eleven cents a pound, and Fat Freddie Gunsberg was discovered floating facedown under a dock in Wyandotte.’ I turned him down. I may just be selling toothbrushes and toilet paper now, but at least they’re new toothbrushes and toilet paper.”
“Answer the question, please,” said the judge, twitching his eyebrow-feelers.
“What was the point? Jack was dead, Joey was about to be, and Frankie Orr was beyond reach even if I had a corroborating witness to the Norman murder, which I didn’t. There was nothing to be gained.”
“If that’s the way you feel why are you talking now?”
“You’re not a journalist. I’m not sure I can explain it so you’ll understand.”
“Please try.”
He leaned forward, folding his hands between his knees and staring at the floor, where curls of varnish had collected at the base of the railing.
“When you know something that nobody else knows, it belongs to you. It’s all yours. When you tell it to someone, you take him in as a partner and lose half of it. When he tells somebody, you and he each lose half of the half, and so on, until everybody has a piece and you’ve got nothing. Then you start to forget.”
“From what you’ve told this grand jury I’d say it’s better forgotten,” said the special prosecutor. “That will be all for now, Mr. Minor. Please remain available in case it becomes necessary to recall you for further testimony. You should also be aware that a transcript of these proceedings will be handed over to the local authorities after the grand jury has adjourned. It will be up to them whether to pursue criminal indictments against you for withholding evidence and accessory after the fact of murder. You’re excused.”
“I told you you wouldn’t understand,” he said.
The air in the hallway smelled different, which is to say it had smell; the static institutional odors of waxed linoleum and people waiting on benches. He didn’t recognize the other witnesses waiting to be called, but he felt he should have, even if they never raised their eyes except to see who had come out. Well, he’d changed too. At forty-five he was as old as Howard Wolfman had been at the time of the Banner wake, older than Joey Machine lived to be. The only suit whose pants he hadn’t outgrown was the one he was wearing, the gray worsted he’d bought for meeting advertising cl
ients. He’d been skinny in the old days, a jackrabbit among rhinos. Funny how you could be lean when times were fat and fat when times were lean. You need exercise, Connie, Jack would say. Get your hat, we’ll hop across the river.
The reporters were on him then, a couple of vaguely familiar faces in the crowd but mostly youngsters, hotshots with their press cards in their hatbands like Pat O’Brien in The Front Page, some of whom had probably read his column with a flashlight under the covers, the Banner being a parental exile from respectable homes; reading about midnight runs across the ice and gilded flappers in shimmy skirts and young sheiks in tight chinchilla coats and gray fedoras, Fatimas smoking between their lips. “Connie Minor? I read him when I was that high to a sock garter. He must be a hundred years old.”
“What’d you tell ’em, Connie?”
“They ask you who killed Joey Machine?”
“Turn this way, Connie.”
“You tell ’em what you did with Jack the Ripper’s Lugers?”
“Who’s your tailor, Connie? You look like shit.”
No comment, you sons of bitches. Read about it tomorrow. Hear them in the News cafeteria later: “… so then he says, ‘Now that I’m a white man I can’t stand you niggers.’ That’s Minor. Bastard’s got the shortest memory this side of Neville Chamberlain.”
He almost passed her in the crowd, thin woman, not a sob sister, red-dyed hair in marcels under a cloche hat that emphasized the lines in her face, the skin shrunken to the bone. Harsh makeup, raccoon eyes with big eyebrows that looked as if she traced them on around Mason lids. “Hattie?”
She took his arm, a talon’s grip, and they walked around the wainscoted corner. That section of hallway was deserted, paved with toilets and supply closets. Her calves were okay below the below-the-knee skirt; they’d been the least bit thick before and now they were just right. She let go of him, making a reluctant production of it, turned to face him. “You put on some,” she said. “It suits you. You always were kind of puny.”
“Lanky,” he corrected. “Like Bobby Jones. Are you testifying?”
“Next week. I heard they were cutting you loose today.”
“Same old Hattie. The prosecutor didn’t know that this morning.”
“Don’t say ‘same old’ to a hag. They tell me you sell soap.”
It was like being told he masturbated. He got away from it. “You’re still tending bar, I heard. Out in Royal Oak.”
“Roseville. I married my partner. He’s a good man. Dumb as a cork.”
“The best kind, I’m told. Hell,” he said. “How are you, Hattie?”
“I’ve got cancer. Three doctors told me it’s terminal. Three kings wins the hand.”
He said hell again. She smiled and took his hand. Hers was cold, as if it had spread that far. He missed the beestung lips when she smiled. “I should’ve been repealed with Prohibition anyway,” she said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever get. You’re the one I’m worried about. I always did, you know. When I found out you went out on the ice with Jack I wanted to go out after you and drag you back.”
“I never knew.”
“You weren’t supposed to. When you threw me over later I went after everything in pants. I wanted to catch a disease and die right then. It’s kind of too bad I didn’t. I bet it’s one way no one else has tried.”
“I didn’t throw you over. You threw me.”
She let go of his hand and slapped it. “You didn’t call.”
“I tried.”
“When it was too late. You don’t put off calling a girl to propose marriage. How did you think that made me feel?”
“I thought maybe you were too busy sleeping with Jack to feel anything but Jack. He told me all about lying low at your place so nobody knew he was in town to kill Jerry Buckley.”
She got angry then for real. “That’s why you didn’t call? I was a whore, nitwit. You broke dates to be a newspaperman. I had a career too. Maybe not the most respectable one in town, but I was good at it. It’s what I did.”
“He paid you?”
“You think I was in love with him?”
“Most women were.”
“Yeah, and they’d have been damn disappointed, because he was one rotten lay. He did everything on the gallop, Connie. Everything.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“There’s a scoop.”
“Hattie, I blew it.”
“We both did.” After a pause, she smiled again. “You look good, Connie. I had to see you. Not many of the old gang left.”
“There’s none of them left.”
She kissed him. Her lips were cold, but not as cold as her hands. And then she left, her heels echoing off the linoleum and marble.
The bar where he kept his office in Hamtramck was almost empty at that time of day. He held up a palm to Oscar polishing the tables, in greeting and to tell him he wasn’t drinking, and started toward the corner booth and his portable Underwood permanently parked there.
“Second, Connie,” Oscar said. “Letter came for you.”
He waited while the bartender, a thickset twenty-two-year-old with bouncer’s biceps, the owner’s nephew, stretched across the bar and rummaged on the shelf below. The plate-glass window looked out on part of the Dodge Main plant across Joseph Campau.
“They used to sell it out of their trunks right out there in front,” he said. “The big Polacks would come out between shifts and drink it standing up.”
“That’s what Uncle John says.” Oscar extended the envelope. “It’s a letter, not a package this time.”
He hefted it, glanced at the New York return address, ran his thumb under the flap.
Dear Mr. Minor:
Thank you for the look at your proposal, which I’m returning to you under separate cover.
I have no doubt that your experiences as a reporter would make a compelling book. Unfortunately, the market at present is saturated with Prohibition stories.
I wish you good luck in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
(signed) Burton Weems
Senior Editor
He shook his head. Oscar’s bright face clouded. “Sorry, Connie.”
“Nothing I’m not used to. On second thought, I’ll have a whiskey sour.”
In the booth he read the letter again, then crumpled it one-handed and bonged it into the wastebasket beside the table. He took the cartridge out of his pocket, glanced at it, and stood it up on the table beside the typewriter. Then he skimmed the top sheet off the typewritten stack next to the wall and without reading it selected the sharpest of the pencils standing erasers-down in a chipped dusty schooner, licked the tip, and marked an X across the entire page. From another stack he drew a fresh sheet and cranked it into the Underwood. For a moment he sat there, hands hovering over the keys. Then he began typing.
I saw Jack Dance the first time in Hattie Long’s place on Vernor the night the bulls tipped it over.…
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more
novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estleman with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
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