“Who?”
I leaned in closer to him. “The Gianollas.”
He looked around before whispering, “The Black Hand this time? Anderson, you play in the wrong side of the sandbox.”
“So you know them?”
“Heard of ’em.”
“Can you find them?”
Holding the top of the chair with both hands, he bounced back and forth. He hit the chair of the man behind him, who did nothing more than squeeze himself closer to his table. “If they’re in the city, I can find ’em. Gonna be expensive, though.”
“How expensive?”
“Fifty bucks—half now, half when I find them.”
“That’s a little steep, don’t you think, Abe?”
“That’s what it costs. Take it or leave it.” His bright blue eyes glinted at me from under his heavy lids.
“I’ll pay it if you also arrange a meeting for me with Vito Adamo.”
“You’re just spoilin’ for a fight, ain’t ya?”
“No. I just need to talk with these guys. I think the Adamos will want to meet, but I doubt the Gianollas will, so I just need to know where they’ll be at a particular time.”
“Extra twenty bucks for Adamo,” Abe said.
I nodded.
“Awright. I’ll even throw in a little information for free.”
“What’s that?”
He held out his hand. “Thirty-five up front.”
He may not have had a lot of education, but his math skills were fine. I eyed him for a moment before pulling my wallet from my coat and handing over the money.
He tucked it into his pocket. “What you wanted me to look into before?”
“Moretti’s killer?” I said.
He nodded. “Heard it was a pro.”
“Pro?”
“Assassin.” He seemed to relish saying the word. “Expensive one.”
“Did you get a name or description?”
“Nah. People don’t talk much about these guys.”
“Who paid?”
Abe shrugged. “Don’ know.” He stood and walked around the side of the table. “I’ll call when I find them guys.”
“No, that won’t work. Tell you what. Why don’t you leave a message for me at the Cosmopolitan Hotel—Rivard and Wilkins.”
He cocked his head and gave me a puzzled grin. “Little ratty for the likes of you, ain’t it?”
I shrugged. “Just convenient. Now, how do I get hold of you?”
Pointing toward the kitchen door, he said, “If you’re gonna be slummin’ down here, leave a message with Markovitz.”
I looked him in the eyes. “What if you don’t find the Gianollas? What about my money?”
He laughed. “That ain’t what you should be worryin’ about. You should worry about what you’re gonna do when I do find ’em.”
* * *
When we returned to the Cosmopolitan, we stopped in the lobby to use the pay phone. I dropped a nickel into the coin slot and the metal clamp over the receiver sprang open. Detective Riordan answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
“It’s Will,” I said, my hand cupped over the bell of the telephone.
“Good. You’re all right?”
“Yes.”
“Elizabeth too?”
“Yes.” My hand throbbed. I tried not to think about it.
“I talked to your father. You and Elizabeth need to get out of town, right—”
“Forget it. You can’t do this by yourself. You’ve never even seen these people.”
“Will.” He sounded like he was trying to hold his temper. “Elizabeth doesn’t belong in this.”
“Would you like to try talking her out of it?”
He grunted. “No. Your father said she wouldn’t listen. But you have to keep her safe.”
I glanced back at Elizabeth. From behind, her small stature made her look like a boy playing grown-up in a suit and hat. “I will,” I said.
“I had warrants sworn out for Pinsky and Sam Gianolla,” Riordan said. “You gave the testimony, by the way. I’m sure I botched your signature, but it was good enough to get the ball rolling.”
“Good.”
“You two stay out of sight while I figure this out.”
“I’m not making any promises. I want the Gianollas.”
“Let me find them. You are in so far over your head you can’t see the surface.”
I thought about my dream. “I’m used to it.”
He sighed. “All right. Call me tomorrow night.”
“Sure.”
“Is there a number I can get you?”
“I’m not sure where we’ll be.” I didn’t want to tell him where we were, in case he thought he ought to lock us up for our own good.
“Okay. But, Will?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
“You too.” I hung up the telephone and turned to Elizabeth. “It’s early yet. Would you like to take a walk?”
“Sure,” she said.
My hand had begun to really hurt. I excused myself to urinate, though what I did instead was duck into the bathroom for a sip of morphine. I wasn’t sure I’d gotten enough, so I finished the bottle. We walked outside, and I looked up at the cerulean sky. Sunset was near. I filled her in on my conversation with Detective Riordan while we wandered down to Jefferson and along the riverbank.
The delicious fuzziness began to envelop me. We sat on a bench overlooking the river and just looked out at the water. As more of the morphine worked its way into my bloodstream, my mind began to soar, over the river, into the sky. My eyes closed.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I opened my eyes and was surprised to see a young man sitting next to me. He wore a dark fedora and a black duster. Oh, shit, the little voice in the back of my mind said. That’s Elizabeth. I took too much. The voice that so often hounded me was afraid, but it was barely a whisper in the roar of the freight train running through my head.
“Well…” My tongue felt too large for my mouth. I thought about that.
“Are you all right?”
I sat up straighter, tried to look alert. “Oh, yeah, just … thinking.”
“About what?”
“You know. This af-afternoon.” My tongue kept getting in the way.
“Are you on drugs?”
“No.” I tried to summon some indignation, but it was all I could do to speak intelligibly. “Of course not. I’m just … in shock.” I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. “Aren’t you?”
She looked at me a bit longer before turning back to the river. “If you say so.”
The next time I turned my head to say something to her, she was gone.
* * *
I was lying fully clothed in my bed at the Cosmopolitan when a knock on the door awakened me.
“Will?” Elizabeth called quietly.
“Mmph.” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Just a minute.” Remembering the night before, I felt a moment of sheer terror. She knows. “I’m not decent. Give me a few minutes.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll wait in the lobby.”
She walked off down the hallway, and I lay back with my hands over my eyes. Elizabeth knew I’d been taking drugs. I was going to lose her again. I pushed myself up in the bed, my back against the wall, and looked out the window to see a light rain falling. It was frightening how easily I’d fallen again into the morphine habit. It was natural, almost instinctive, at this point. But I was done. I had to be.
I pulled up the bedclothes and rooted around in the hole I’d cut in the mattress. Nothing. I dug deeper. Still no bottles. I struggled to remember returning to the room last night. Had I thrown them away then, or had someone found the bottles and stolen them? I sat on the edge of the bed and thought. It didn’t matter. They were gone. Now I could get on with it.
Trying to ignore the throbbing in my hand, I put on my immigrant clothing. Even with the rain, the morning was hot and humid, so I left
my duster in the room when I headed out. An old woman now sat behind the desk in the lobby, assembling corsages of silk flowers—no doubt how she paid the bills left unpaid by her hotel wages. She looked up at me when I passed, and I saw she was toothless, her mouth sunken in on itself.
I smiled at her and tipped my derby. “Good morning.”
She didn’t reply, just bent once again over her materials, her jaw working back and forth as she sucked on her lower lip while fitting a needle into tiny stems.
I continued on to Elizabeth, who stood by the door. “Good morning, sir.”
She turned and appraised me. “You sound a bit better than you did last night.”
“Yes, I—I don’t know what was wrong with me. Maybe yesterday hit me harder than I thought.”
Her eyes gave me nothing. “Okay.”
I looked away. “How about some breakfast?”
She nodded and ducked out into the rain. I followed her to a little restaurant across the street from the Eastern Market. While we ate, I glanced at her, trying to see her as a man. She would have been maybe sixteen, a short, slight young man, perhaps an artist or a teacher. No, she was too damn pretty for that. I gave up. “What should we do today?”
She swallowed the scrambled eggs in her mouth and said, “You should check with Mr. Wilkinson to see if your father has been in touch.”
“Right. What else?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were the criminal mastermind.”
I thought about it. “Do you want to look around Little Italy? See if we can scare up the Gianollas?”
“Makes as much sense as anything else,” she said. “Until we hear from Abe I don’t know what we can do.”
After we ate, I called my father’s office from the Cosmopolitan’s lobby and got Mr. Wilkinson on the phone. “This is Will. Have you heard from my father?”
“Yes. He sent a telegram.” He was quiet for a moment while papers rustled. “‘Tell Will to get out of Detroit, stop. We are on our way to safe place, stop.’ Does that make any sense to you?”
“Yes. Excellent.” I thanked him and hung up.
We spent most of the day waiting at the hotel for word from Abe Bernstein, and the rest slogging around Little Italy in the rain, ostensibly to look for Gianollas, but in reality doing nothing but killing time. The rain had finally stopped when we returned to the hotel for good just after eight o’clock.
The little fat man was back on duty. He opened his eyes long enough to say, “Message,” and pushed a folded piece of paper across the counter to me. I picked it up and read it.
Tawked to both. Mich Coal Co docks 2 AM Bring my 35 AB
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A tingling sensation spread through my body. Tonight we’d meet with Abe and presumably at least one of the gangs. If it was both, we could end this. The Adamos wouldn’t bypass an opportunity to kill the Gianolla brothers, regardless of who was providing the intelligence. I tucked the paper into my pocket and nodded toward the stairs. We hurried up to Elizabeth’s room, and I handed her the message.
She glanced at it and looked up at me. “Can we trust him? Who’s to say they don’t just kill us?”
“Abe likes my money. I don’t think he’d sell us out. Assuming he’s arranged for both gangs to be there, this could be our chance to rid ourselves of the Gianollas once and for all. Can you … that is, are you sure you can do this?”
“I’ll be fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”
I didn’t meet her eyes. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not taking anything, are you?”
I didn’t have to think too long to know what she was talking about. “No.” I met her eyes again.
She studied me for a long moment before turning away. “All right. I’m going to get some rest. Should we phone Detective Riordan first?”
“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow to talk with him. It’s possible our problem will be solved tonight, and he won’t need to get involved at all. And he certainly doesn’t need to know what we’re doing tonight.”
She looked doubtful but finally nodded. “Okay. I’ll come get you at midnight. We should get there early.”
“Good. We’ll pick up my car at the garage.”
She smiled and reached over, squeezing my good hand. “We can do this.”
Trying to look confident, I nodded and squeezed back. “I’ll see you in a bit.” I returned to my room and sat on the edge of the bed, checking the load on my pistol and shotgun. I was ready, but I was afraid. Even if the Adamos helped us, this would be a dangerous mission. The Gianollas would be armed to the teeth and ready for trouble. We would be facing one of the most dangerous gangs in Detroit. I was putting Elizabeth squarely in the crosshairs.
Still. Killing Sam Gianolla after what he did to Joe … I was game to try it. I’d see if Elizabeth was.
She knocked on my door a few minutes later. Her fedora was pulled low over her forehead, and her black duster hung nearly to the floor. Even though she made a very small man, tonight she looked like a tough.
I slung on my duster and fit the shotgun into the lower inside pocket. Without a word, we descended the stairs and walked out of the hotel into the dark, heading toward Woodward. Clouds obscured the moon and stars. Few people were on the street. The area was quiet, little noise other than distant automobile motors, the faint sound of a crowd, a piano player banging out ragtime.
I stopped Elizabeth a block away from the Detroit Electric garage. “Wait here while I get the car.”
She nodded. I hurried to the garage and knocked on the door underneath the red metal archway. Perhaps half a minute later, Ben Carr’s elfin face appeared at the bottom of the window in the door, looking up at me. I hadn’t seen him for how long—two years? It didn’t seem possible. But I imagined that, after I nearly got him sent to prison, he avoided me as much as my guilt made me avoid him. To his credit, his expression remained neutral when he saw me.
He unlocked and opened the door. “Mr. Anderson?” His tone was wary.
“Just picking up my car, Ben.”
“Sure.” He didn’t meet my eyes.
“Could you get the door for me?”
“Sure.” He walked toward the overhead door, and I grabbed my key from the board. I scanned the room, looking for my Torpedo among the automobiles arrayed against the walls. It wasn’t hard to find, being the only ugly car among the hundred or so shiny Detroit Electrics. While I started it, Ben raised the door. He gave me a halfhearted wave as I drove past him, turning up Woodward toward Elizabeth.
Before she got in, she slipped one arm out of her duster and slid the strap of the Marlin rifle off her shoulder. She placed the gun in the backseat and climbed in. We drove in silence down to Jefferson and west, past Zug Island and its massive foundry. The blast furnace threw a hellish white light over the shoreline. After we crossed the River Rouge Bridge, I took a left on Pleasant Street, and we headed down toward the docks. I switched off the Torpedo and let it glide to a stop two blocks over and three blocks back from the coal yard. When my motor shut down, a low rumble became apparent—the foundry. Once we were out near the water, the noise from the blast furnace would obscure small sounds. We’d have to be very alert.
Elizabeth pulled the .32 from the pocket of her duster and popped out the magazine. “Have you checked your weapons?” Her voice was higher than normal, tight.
“Elizabeth, you don’t have to do this. Here.” I pulled the car key from the ignition and handed it to her. “Go back to the hotel. I’ll see you there.”
She was quiet.
“I won’t think any less of you.”
“No.” Turning to me, she said, “I have to. I have to do this.”
“Please. Go back.”
“No.” This time she sounded certain. “Do me a favor, though. Check your ammo.”
She popped the magazine out of her pistol and looked at it. I dug into my pocket, feeling bullets and shotgun shells … and something else. My hand froze in place.
Two little bottles. I must have hidden them there last night while under the spell of the opiate. When I had a chance, I’d dump them. I pulled my hand from my pocket, stepped out of the car, and reached back for my shotgun. Elizabeth grabbed her rifle and hid it under her coat again. “Let’s go.”
“All right. But if anything goes wrong tonight, let’s meet at the car as quickly as possible.”
She nodded.
I climbed out. Flood lamps on the corners of a few buildings provided the only illumination. Staying in the shadows of the redbrick warehouses lining the road, we walked down to the coal yard. The street dead-ended at the Michigan Coal Company’s office, a squat cement-block building with a few flood lamps around it. Jutting out from both sides was an eight-foot-tall wooden fence topped with barbed wire, dozens of coal pyramids backlit behind it.
We stopped in front of the building. “Why don’t you go down that way,” I whispered, pointing to my left. “See if there’s a way in. I’ll look on this side. We’ll meet back here.”
“Okay.”
“Be careful. They could have somebody here already.”
She nodded. We separated, and I hurried around the perimeter of the fence. It ran down into the river and out perhaps fifty feet into what I assumed would be deep water. But if we couldn’t get in any other way, we could swim it. I returned to the front of the building. Elizabeth appeared a few seconds later. “It looked to me like we could swim around the fence,” I whispered. “Anything else on your side?”
“No.”
“Let’s go back to the warehouse and wait for Abe.”
We walked across the street and sat on the warehouse’s stoop, hidden in the shadows. I listened to the faint rumble from Zug Island, remembering my journey through the snow with Elizabeth’s father’s body and my fall into the icy water.
My memories, it seemed, were virtually all of bad things—tragedies, lost love, foolish blunders, missed opportunities. Surely good things had happened to me once upon a time. But I couldn’t think of any without the pull of their resolution. My father believed I would be the man to carry on the family business, building it to even greater heights. I rewarded him with drunkenness, open disregard, and dereliction of duty. Elizabeth gave me her heart. I rewarded her with my stupidity and brutality, and her love for me resulted in the ruination of her life. And it indirectly caused the death of both her father and my best friend.
Motor City Shakedown Page 25