The Bootlegger

by Clive Cussler

  At Michigan Central Station, Bell’s detectives found no evidence of her arriving recently on any of the extra-fare limited trains like The Detroiter or The Wolverine that a wealthy woman would ride. On the other hand, thought Bell, she was uncommonly wealthy. He went personally to the private sidings. New York Central Railroad detectives, always eager to help a Van Dorn executive in hopes of future employment, had no memory of Fern Hawley arriving by private car from New York.

  “What about New Haven?”

  A rail dick recalled that a car from Connecticut had parked for several days on a private siding. “Left yesterday at noon.”

  Only hours after the machine-gun attack on Rosenthal.

  “Where did it go?”

  They questioned dispatchers. The private car had been coupled to a New York Central passenger train bound for Cincinnati that connected with the Southern Railway’s “Royal Palm” to Jacksonville, Florida.

  With an idea forming of where she was headed, Bell asked, “What line does the Southern connect to in Jacksonville?”

  “Florida East Coast Railway.”

  Isaac Bell slipped him a double sawbuck and his card. “If you need something from the Van Dorns, drop me a line.”

  The tall detective returned to the main passenger terminal and found a coin telephone to call James Dashwood at Fort Van Dorn.

  “She’s gone to Miami! I’m booking you a through ticket on the Royal Palm. Get down to Florida and find out what she’s up to.”

  “Is Zolner with her?”

  “He can’t leave Detroit until he’s installed his replacement for Rosenthal and they finish that tunnel.”

  “Do you think Zolner sent her away to keep her out of danger?”

  “Possibly. Or she could be fed up with him and gone south early for the winter. Except I’ve got a very strong feeling that Fern Hawley’s gone on ahead to lay the groundwork for his next move.”

  Dashwood played the devil’s advocate as Bell had taught him to. “Based on what?”

  “Based on Pauline’s report that the Comintern sent a shipload of grain alcohol to The Bahamas. Nassau is only a hundred eighty miles from Miami, Bimini’s even closer, and Florida is a booze funnel into the entire South. He’ll have New York in the East, Detroit in the Midwest, and Florida in the South.

  “At that point, he can paste a new label on millions of bottles—‘Genuine Old Cominterm, America’s Favorite.’”

  • • •

  ISAAC BELL PACED IMPATIENTLY.

  “Whisky haulers have heard about a booze tunnel under the Detroit River. Strong-arm men have heard about this tunnel. The cops have heard about this tunnel. Crooks have heard about this tunnel. Gangsters have heard about this tunnel. Wouldn’t you think that Detroit newspapermen have not only heard about this tunnel but would also have some inkling of where it is?”

  “It’s a big story,” Scudder Smith agreed. He was toying with his hat and looked like a man who was reconsidering not drinking.

  “You’re picking up bar tabs for every reporter in town,” Bell reminded him. “One of them must be writing the big story.”

  “No editor would run it. It would get the reporter shot—which wouldn’t trouble most editors excessively—but it could get the editor himself shot, too, and that possibility would trouble him.”

  Isaac Bell did not smile.

  “Funny enough,” said Scudder. “You know who’s really looking for the tunnel?”

  “Volstead officers,” said Bell. “The payoffs would make them rich men.”

  “Or dead.”

  Bell said, “Go back to the pressrooms, go back to the blind pigs where newspapermen hang out. There must be some cub reporter out there scrambling for a scoop that would make his name.”

  • • •

  SCUDDER SMITH came back much sooner than Bell had expected.

  “Now what?”

  Scudder grinned ear to ear. “I have redeemed myself.”

  “Did you find a reporter who found the tunnel?”

  “No. But I found several reporters who know who might have shot Sam Rosenthal.”

  “Might have?”

  “I don’t know who actually pulled the trigger, but I definitely know who replaced him. Abe Weintraub, like we guessed. Admiral Abe.”

  “I thought he disappeared. I thought he was dead.”

  “So did I. So did they. But then I caught a rumor that the admiral was seen gumming his supper at the Hotel Wolverine.”

  “‘Gumming’?”

  “Apparently someone—an amazingly formidable someone—knocked Abe’s teeth out. I checked. I found a Wolverine waiter who said he ate sweetbreads. Sweetbreads and champagne. Sweetbreads are expensive. A meal you eat when you’re celebrating. As if you became the new Purples’ boss.”

  “And easy to chew,” said Bell. “Any idea who knocked his teeth out?”

  “Everyone agrees that whoever did it must be dead by now.”

  “Was he dining alone?”

  “That’s the best part. I showed the waiter Prince André’s photograph. He thought Prince André might be the guy Abe was eating sweetbreads with.”

  Bell thought that this was too much to hope for. The most that Bill Lynch and Harold Harding had conceded, when shown the out-of-focus photograph, was a dubious “maybe” that it was the bootlegger who had commissioned Black Bird.

  He asked, “Why was the waiter so talkative?”

  “He needed money to leave Detroit.”

  “Why?”

  “I persuaded him, after I suggested that Abe might be the new boss of the Purples, that any association with Admiral Abe could be dangerous for his health. Including—or especially—witnessing who he eats sweetbreads with. Rightly or wrongly, the waiter decided to start over a thousand miles away. I—or, strictly speaking, Mr. Van Dorn—provided the means.”

  “But it’s not impossible that the waiter told you what he thought you wanted to hear,” said Bell.

  “May I suggest,” said Scudder, “that we have a field office full of valuable men to follow up on this?”

  • • •

  JAMES DASHWOOD telegraphed on the private wire that he had traced Fern Hawley’s railcar to a Palm Beach, Florida, siding that served an oceanfront estate seventy miles north of Miami. Neither the car nor the estate was owned by her.

  PALACE CAR RENTED.

  ESTATE RENTED.

  FERN FLOWN.

  There was nothing innately suspicious about renting cars and estates. She could, indeed, be setting up early for the winter in Florida, where more and more of the rich headed when the weather got cold. Typically, though, society people of Fern’s means were building elaborate homes in Palm Beach and Miami. She could be testing the waters. But for what? Winter holidays or Marat Zolner’s empire?

  The answer came in a contrite wire from Dashwood.

  MISSED BLACK BIRD FLATCAR YESTERDAY MIAMI.

  • • •

  “COUPLE OF PROHIBITION DICKS asking to see you, Isaac,” said Texas Walt.

  Bell looked up from the sandwiches he was sharing at the kitchen chopping block with Leon Randolph, the Texas Walt’s Roadhouse cook whom he knew from the days Leon had cooked on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe’s Overland Limited.

  “How did they know to find me here?”

  “I wondered, too. I persuaded them to leave their artillery with the hatcheck.”

  The bar was empty at this hour but for a bartender who was polishing a sawed-off shotgun.

  Bell’s stern features darkened with such anger when he recognized the Volstead agents that Texas Walt’s hands would have strayed toward his Colts if the bartender didn’t already have them covered.

  “We got to talk, Mr. Bell.”

  Tom Clayton and Ed Ellis, the former Protective Services house detectives Bell had fired from the Hotel Gotham, looked prosperous. Their cheeks were pink from the barbershop, their hair slick. They wore signet rings on their fingers and remained somewhat handsome, despite imperfectly hea
led broken noses.

  “We’ve already bribed your superiors,” Bell answered coldly.

  “We know,” Ed Ellis said. “Bureau chief told us Texas Walt’s is hands-off.”

  “It should be for what it cost us. Did you inform your chief that we’re Van Dorns?”

  “No!” cried Clayton.

  “We wouldn’t squeal on you!” said Ellis.

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t want to gum up your case.”

  “Mighty big of you,” Bell said, more than a little puzzled.

  “Can we talk in private?” asked Clayton.

  “How’d you happen to land in Detroit?”

  Clayton ducked his head.

  Ellis rubbed his nose. “We knew we weren’t welcome in New York anymore.”

  Clayton immediately said, “Hey, no hard feelings, Mr. Bell. We got what we deserved.”

  “We just thank God they didn’t kill that little kid.”

  “Detroit,” said Bell. “I asked how did you two end up in Detroit?”

  “We figured the Detroit Prohibition Bureau had to be a gold mine, with all the booze coming from Canada.”

  “Came out to wangle jobs,” said Clayton, and Ellis explained matter-of-factly, “Government doesn’t pay much, but the salary’s only a start, if you know what we mean.”

  “You mean graft,” said Bell. “Hush money, payoffs, protection.”

  “We ain’t lying to you.”

  But their story didn’t add up. Congress had organized the Prohibition Bureau to be exempt from Civil Service regulations. As a result, its system of hiring agents was completely corrupt, and the bureau was hobbled by cronyism, nepotism, and patronage.

  “How did you manage Volstead jobs? Nobody gets in the bureau without some bigwig pulling wires.”

  “We know a bigwig,” said Ellis.

  Clayton explained. “A Michigan politician staying at the Gotham was getting in a jam with his missus over a manicure girl.”

  “We fixed it for him—arranged for a onetime gift—and he was mighty grateful. ‘If you boys ever need anything in Detroit, look me up.’”

  “We looked him up.”

  “Presto!” said Ellis and patted his badge.

  Isaac Bell turned to Walt Hatfield. “I can handle them.”

  The bartender put away his shotgun.

  Bell took Clayton and Ellis to the cellar where he had interrogated Tony. “It better be good, boys. I’m in no mood to play.” Which was putting it mildly. Harry Warren was dead, and Marat Zolner was getting stronger every day.

  Clayton and Ellis exchanged significant looks. They nudged each other. Then they chorused, “We heard you’re looking for a tunnel.”

  28

  “WE CAN HELP YOU.”

  “Where did you hear we’re looking for it?” asked Bell.

  “Everybody knows the Van Dorns have a new office down by the tracks,” said Clayton.

  “Hoods and cops wonder what you’re up to,” said Ellis.

  “They heard you’re asking about the tunnel.”

  “It sort of happens,” said Ellis. “Word gets around.”

  “Questions raise questions,” Bell snapped. “Go on!”

  “Our bosses at the bureau caught wind of the tunnel, too. They’re hunting night and day. They reckon it’ll be worth a fortune in protection.”

  “And they’re worried you’ll get there first,” said Ellis.

  Clayton said, “Me and Ed knew they wouldn’t share it with us—they hog the big payoffs—so me and him did a little snooping on our own. Thinking maybe we’d get there first. We heard the tunnel guys drowned a bunch of Eye-talians working on it. They weren’t hoods, just some bricklayers and stonemasons.”

  “Murdered ’em because they knew where it was,” said Ellis.

  “It didn’t seem right.”

  “Making us think that maybe getting rich off Prohibition isn’t completely right either,” said Ellis.

  Bell stared hard at them, wanting to believe that they had stumbled onto valuable information but not clear about their motives. They gazed back, wide-eyed and guileless, and Bell recalled, with growing excitement, that a prison chaplain once told him that he was often surprised by the particular event that shunted a sinner to a righteous path.

  “Do you know where the tunnel is?” he asked.

  “Pretty fair idea,” said Clayton.

  “Downriver,” said Ellis. “It starts on Fighting Island.”

  “Comes up under a boathouse in Ecorse.”

  This sounded pretty good, thought Bell. Fighting Island was logical—a large, empty mid-river island on the Canada side of the international boundary. Ecorse on the United States side was a lawless, wide-open town next door to Detroit with elected officials and cops in the bootleggers’ pockets.

  “Do you know where the boathouse is?”

  “Got some good hunches,” said Ellis.

  Bell said, “There are two hundred boathouses on the Ecorse waterfront and dozens of slips.”

  “Gotta be near the creek,” said Clayton, narrowing the location considerably.

  “Where’d your hunches come from?”

  “Heard our boss talking.”

  “Any theories who dug it?”

  “The boss thought Polacks started digging it. Polacks from Poletown. Started in Ecorse. Then Eye-talians pushed ’em out. Then there was talk of Russians.”

  “Russians?” asked Bell, keeping his own information to himself. “Where did Russians come from?”

  “Could be talk, but there’s thousands of foreigners in Detroit.”

  “Where does your boss stand on this?”

  Clayton’s answer suggested a second motive for their conversion: a healthy desire to seek shelter in Fort Van Dorn. “He died yesterday, killed crossing Michigan Avenue.”

  “Hit-and-run. Could have been a Ford. Could have been a Dodge.”

  Isaac Bell extended his hand. “Welcome back, boys. You’re reinstated. On probation, providing you keep your noses clean.”

  “Oh, we will, Mr. Bell.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Bell.”

  “Should we quit our government jobs?”

  “Stay at them. I’d like nothing better than a couple of good men inside the Prohibition Bureau.”

  • • •

  NEITHER ABE WEINTRAUB, who was only five and a half feet tall, nor Marat Zolner could stand erect in the Ecorse end of the Comintern’s tunnel under the Detroit River. The short, newly dug connecting section was wet, dimly lit, and had a very low ceiling. Water seeped through cracks in the bricks and sandbags and accumulated in a trench between the rails on which rolled eight-foot flatcars stacked with whisky cases.

  Pumps on Fighting Island, two thousand feet away, emptied the trench when it filled. The pumps, a dynamo for the lights, and the flatcars were housed in a ferry terminal under construction on the island. There was no ferry, no plans for one, but there were various city of La Salle building permits for the terminal, and the fiction provided a ruse for the machinery.

  The main tunnel, discovered by Polish gangsters who then dug the Ecorse connector, was a partially built railroad bore. It was much bigger, better lit, and comparatively dry, a high-crowned cast-iron tube that had been sealed shut and abandoned decades ago when Ecorse was a tiny village and Fighting Island, then as now, consisted of fifteen hundred acres of deserted swampy lowland. The curving ceiling was so high that it felt more like a room than a passage.

  Zolner had feared, at first, that the low, cramped, hundred-foot connector between the abandoned tunnel and the Ecorse boathouse shaft would be a choke point. But then he had seen an unusual opportunity offered by the big railroad section—a secret, secure under-river warehouse where he could stash cases by the carload. It already contained a huge stockpile of liquor worth millions, and they were packing in more every day. The amount that he chose to funnel through the choke point would control the American liquor market, raising and lowering the price by adjusting supply.
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  Only yesterday, when he caught wind that the River Gang had successfully landed ten thousand cases of a whisky labeled “Canadian Club” in Detroit, Zolner had immediately released ten thousand cases from the tunnel. Before the River Gang could sell theirs, Abe Weintraub’s distributors hit the streets with the same whisky at half the price. Bankruptcy would loom over a legitimate business. In the hooch trade it meant gunplay. The Purples won the shoot-outs with a Thomas .45 loaned by the Comintern.

  Next week, carefully planned hijackings—scheduled to coincide with Volstead raids conducted by bribed agents—would squeeze supply. Zolner would sell more whisky from the tunnel at double the price. Pure capitalism, he joked to Weintraub. Worse than Karl Marx had ever dreamed.

  He allowed no one but his own trusted agents near the Detroit side of the tunnel now that it was finished and the last workers executed. The sole exception to the ban was Admiral Abe. Not even Weintraub’s bodyguards were allowed near. By now, of course, Weintraub trusted him, even loved him, for the belief had sunk into his savage, one-track brain that Marat Zolner was not only making him rich and powerful but needed him to fend off the other gangs and protect the tunnel.

  • • •

  “EXCELLENT TOWN to hide a hooch tunnel.”

  Ecorse also looked to Isaac Bell like a fine place to lam it from the cops.

  He was piloting his long green Phaeton through the clogged streets of the cabaret section known as the Half Mile of Hell. No one would notice strangers and newcomers, not with thousands flooding in nightly to drink and careen about. Thousands from Detroit and the suburbs got drunk in the ramshackle cabarets, played roulette, blackjack, and craps in gambling parlors, and celebrated in the dance halls and brothels that had sprung to life with Prohibition.

  Booze was plentiful and cheap. Steel mills and chemical plants had grown to supply the booming motor factories, and the customers had money to burn. Those who arrived sober quickly remedied their condition and thronged the streets all night. It was a good town to be a gangster and not a bad town for private detectives searching for a tunnel.

  If the fancy Cadillac, the pistol bulge in his suit coat, and the Borsalino dragged over his eyes left any doubt Isaac Bell was a bootlegger, the sight of his bodyguards erased it. Scar-faced Ed Tobin rode shotgun, broken-nosed Clayton and Ellis glowered in the backseat. In the unlikely event they were recognized as Prohibition agents, they would not be the first bureau officials to accept freelance employment from a bootlegger who needed protection while prospecting for new opportunities or stalking rivals.