Whiskey River Read online

  “You still need muscle,” I said. “I haven’t lifted anything heavier than a paragraph since I left the loading dock. What’s wrong with Johnston?”

  “He’s got a hernia older than I am.”

  “This is your lucky night. That big kid at the bar’s looking for work.”

  She glanced that way. The kid was glaring at Jerry the Lobo, who had just come back from the toilet and was playing the gag with the quarter again.

  “Can we trust him?”

  “Honey, you can’t trust me. I came here looking for a story. One poisoned j.p. in a whorehouse could get me my own column.”

  “How you going to write it with ten broken fingers?”

  I watched her. Hattie never smiled. If she ever told a joke no one knew it. “Even Joey Machine wouldn’t touch a member of the press.”

  “How long you know Joey?” she said. “What’s the kid’s name?”

  “John something. He’s a sheeny.”

  “Well, he don’t look like a Purple. Let’s go talk to him.”

  That was how Jack Dance got in with the Machine mob, although he didn’t know it at the time. Joey Machine had a part interest in most of the better blind pigs and hook shops on the East Side and owned Hattie Long’s establishment outright. The kid listened to as much of the tale as Hattie told and said he’d be glad to help. He was smart enough not to impose conditions. All his life Jack Dance was a creature of instinct and it never let him down until the last.

  “My brother can help,” he said, and added: “He’s a poet.”

  I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, but we accompanied the kid to a table where a sandy-haired sheik in his twenties was talking with one of Hattie’s girls over a bottle of gin with a Canadian label and a Dearborn ancestry. His suit was a better fit than his brother’s but it was strictly Hudson’s basement just the same. There was no family resemblance that I could see. He was built along slighter lines and his complexion was fair. I wondered if they were just close friends who considered themselves related, like the coloreds; but the kid introduced him as Tom Danzig.

  “Your brother says you’re a poet,” Hattie said.

  He played with his glass and never drank from it all the time we were there. The two had that in common at least. “I’m trying to be a writer. John thinks everyone who writes is a poet.”

  Hattie said, “All we need is a strong back. I don’t care if you can rhyme.”

  He was slower to volunteer than his brother. On that short acquaintance I could see he was the thinker of the team, measuring everything against the consequences and what it meant to him. I don’t know why that irritated me. With all the things Jack did later and everything he became I always liked him, and I never liked Tom. But then I gave up trying to figure myself out years ago.

  Finally he agreed to lend a hand. Hattie told Johnston, who left the bar and trundled the big White truck they used for a moving van around to the side door, and with Hattie directing us to look out for the handles and gimcrackery the three of us carried out the slot machines. We got the truck doors closed just as the sirens came within hearing. Whoever had poisoned the whiskey had given the stuff time to take effect before placing his anonymous call to the bulls. It turned out to be just time enough for us. The Danzig brothers and I were sharing a table and a bottle inside with Hattie tending bar when Lieutenant Valery Kozlowski showed up with the walking sputum from the Detroit Prohibition Squad.

  Chapter Two

  A COUPLE OF YEARS ago Chet Mooney, who held down the police beat at the News, wrote a book about the dry time in Detroit in which he claimed that Dusty Steinhauser had once offered a $1000 reward for the assassination of Valery Kozlowski. I asked Dusty about it in the tailor shop he ran after Repeal broke up his Little Jewish Navy. I couldn’t use the one-word answer he gave me in the paper, but I did run his explanation: “If I had the grand to spare I’d of gave it to Kozlowski and then I wouldn’t of had to offer no reward.” Chet Mooney always was full of banana oil. The book, which carried a foreword by J. Edgar Hoover, sold out quickly.

  I never minded Kozlowski. He was six feet and two hundred sixty pounds of hard fat in a fedora and a rubber raincoat, an ambulatory sneer with a cold stogie pegged into a corner of his mouth—just the kind of arrogant bull we liked to rag in the columns, only we didn’t much in his case. It was an open secret in the newspaper community that the lieutenant was supporting a wife bedridden by polio, which gave him a better reason than most to rake off what he could. We didn’t like him, but we under stood him; and I at least was sorry when that psychotic bitch Janet McDonald took him down from beyond the grave.

  There wasn’t much original about the way he came into Hattie’s that night. A uniform gnawed through the heavy door with a fire axe and Kozlowski stepped inside, kicking aside a splintered panel with one of his ridiculous Size Sixes; he always looked about to fall off his tiny feet. The uniforms attacked the fixtures with axes and wrecking tools while he embroidered a graceful path through the scattering patrons up to the bar. A crowbar struck the center of the table the Danzigs and I were seated around and it fell apart in two halves. We got up.

  “Where’s Johnston?” Kozlowski asked Hattie.

  “He’s down with the influenza.” She brought up the Dutch Masters box Johnston had been making change from all night and shoved it across the bar. Kozlowski pocketed the bills without counting them and left the coins. “Get the Victrola,” he shouted over the noise. A moment later an axe split the turntable and Helen Morgan stopped singing with a shriek.

  “I hear you’re selling liquor with a boot in it tonight,” Kozlowski said.

  “We only sell the best.”

  “How many dead?”

  “I don’t run the funeral parlor,” Hattie said. “Come back in the morning.”

  This went on for a little. The lieutenant had three plainclothesmen with him, two of whom were staving in the kegs behind the bar and letting the beer gush out in a yellow stream. Hattie let it foam around her shoes. The third detective, a sergeant named Wagner, stood watching the destruction with his hands in his pockets and a wide moronic grin on his narrow face. He was hatless, with his black hair brilliantined back Valentino style and a long loose jaw clustered with acne. Of all the subhumans on the Prohibition Squad, Wagner was the easiest to despise, a hophead who loved to watch things come apart without getting a smudge on his peaked lapels. Rumor had it he was into a Beaubien Street pusher for twice what the city paid him annually.

  At length Hattie came around from behind the bar and squelched upstairs. Kozlowski told Wagner to keep an eye on things down there and followed her. I went that way. When the brothers started to accompany me I shook my head. They stayed behind. Jack was still taking advice then.

  There were four bedrooms and a full bath on the second floor. The door to the bath stood open, and inside a big brick-colored Indian with his hair in a queue was kneeling in front of the toilet heaving. He was naked as a jaybird and hung like a horse.

  The room stank of sweat and half-digested whiskey. After ten seconds I felt like joining him.

  Kozlowski, lighting his stogie, chuckled. “Well, he won’t need no stomach pump. What do they call you, Chief?” He flipped the match over the Indian’s shoulder into the toilet. It hit the water with a spitting sound.

  The sick man turned up a tragic face with unfocused eyes and a thread of vomit dangling from his chin. There was no room for comprehension there.

  “He’s from Oklahoma,” Hattie said, apropos of nothing. “We don’t ask them their names.”

  “Horseshit.” Kozlowski produced a pair of handcuffs from his hip pocket, hooked one of the manacles around the Indian’s left wrist braced on the edge of the bowl, and snapped the other around the pipe that ran up to the gravity tank. He patted the Indian’s shoulder. “Stay put till we get back, Geronimo.”

  “What did he do?”

  The lieutenant appeared to notice me for the first time. He had a mole at the bridge of
his nose that looked like a third brown eye. “Who the hell are you?”

  I showed him my police pass. His lips moved as he read it.

  “The scribe from the Times. I remember now. You broke the story on the Rosenstein kidnapping, right?”

  “Doug Keenan at the Free Press broke it. I was at the First Precinct when Rosenstein walked in free as lunch.” I pointed at the Indian. “So far the only thing he’s guilty of is tossing his jerky into a private facility. Why cuff him?”

  “Just marking my place. Where’s the cold stuff?” he asked Hattie.

  She led the way to a door at the end of the hall and unlocked it. Up there the splintering and crashing below sounded remote, like a simulated sports broadcast on WXYZ. I wondered where Hattie’s girls had gone. Their communications system was better than Detroit Bell’s.

  The room was a shoebox with a bed on a painted iron frame and a window looking out on a Pierce-Arrow sign. The dead man tangled in the sheets wore only a pair of boxer shorts gone gray from many washings. He lay half on his back with his scrawny legs twisted around each other and one hand clenching the mattress, yellow batting bulging out between the fingers. His eyes were half open and glittering, and all his teeth were exposed in a rictus wide enough to show they were false. He was bald with a white fringe. Someone had opened the window to vent the stench from his voided bowels, but the air was thick with it just the same.

  “Strychnine,” declared Kozlowski, chewing hard on his cigar. “It always makes them grin like Fairbanks. Anybody else?”

  “Just him,” Hattie said.

  “Who was with him?”

  “Lorraine. You need her?”

  “Don’t know yet.” An empty glass and a bottle of Hiram Walker’s stood on the nightstand. He lifted each and sniffed at it, then ran a finger down the inside of the glass and touched it to his tongue. He saw my expression and fashioned a rictus of his own.

  “My grandmama used to dose my papa with strychnine when he went off his feed,” he said. “Gives you an appetite if it don’t croak you first. Also it’s bitter as a drain crystal. This guy must of had tin tastebuds.”

  Hattie said, “The Indian spit his out.”

  “One lucky redskin.”

  The dead man’s clothes, consisting of a black wool suit, a white shirt, and a knitted black tie, were draped neatly over the back of a wooden chair. Kozlowski found nothing in the coat and went through the pants. He drew out a battered brown leather billfold and opened it.

  “ ‘Abel S. Turner, Justice of the Peace.’ Looks like he found some.” He glanced at the pictures in the other celluloid windows, then thumbed through the bills in the money compartment and put them in his pocket. Finally he returned the billfold to the pants and dropped them on the seat of the chair. “What was Oklahoma drinking?”

  “Hiram’s. I opened a fresh case tonight.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “It was part of last week’s shipment.”

  “The Roost?”

  “Riopelle.”

  “Who handled it?”

  “Couple of Joey’s boys made the delivery. I knew them both. I don’t know who was on the boat.”

  It was the kind of conversation I could never have written up in a way readers of the Times would have understood: a sworn officer of the law asking an East Side madam about her illegal liquor operation, the madam answering, and nobody getting arrested. If you want the real reason why the lid stayed on as long as it did, it was because nobody wanted to look like he’d just found out about it. Remember, it took a fresh kid to tell the emperor his ass was hanging out.

  “Get rid of it and everything else that came that day,” Kozlowski told Hattie. “Pour it down the sewer.”

  “Don’t you want it for evidence?” I asked.

  He looked at me with all three eyes. “Who am I talking to, you or your sheet?”

  “Just me. I like my fingers the way they are.”

  “Evidence ain’t worth shit if you don’t make an arrest. For all I know the stuff was poisoned before it left Canada. You ever try talking to a Mountie?”

  “If I did I’d remember.”

  “Well, for starters they wear Sam Browne belts with their pajamas.”

  Hattie said, “You know it was poisoned on this side.”

  He relit his stogie, which had gone out. I welcomed the reek of nickel tobacco in that room. “How’s Joey getting on with the Sicilians?” he asked her.

  “Okay. You know the Sicilians.”

  “That makes it the Jews. We’ll do a sweep, stick ’em under the light. They’ll get a tan and we’ll kick them. It’ll be like election time.”

  “Why bother?”

  “It’s no bother. I like to hear them kikes squeal when I shove my stick into their bellies.”

  “This is a homicide beef,” I said. “Who called the Prohibition Squad?”

  “On nights like this there ain’t much difference.”

  Homicide never did get the Turner killing. It went into the jacket unsolved. The various police divisions in those days were like feudal fiefdoms, and unless it was a case nobody wanted—a nigger killing in the Black Bottom, say, or a little girl raped with a Coke bottle in the warehouse district—it went to whoever got there first. Pulling the file on an old case required a scavenger hunt throughout the Criminal Investigation Division.

  “What about the Indian?” Hattie asked.

  “I logged a raid. I need a body besides just personnel and the j.p. here.”

  “Take Connie. It wouldn’t be the first time he ate on the county.”

  “I did my charity work tonight,” I reminded her. “Besides, I’ve got four hours left in my shift.”

  She glared up at the lieutenant. “What did I buy downstairs? They rescinded the tipover order three years ago. You need a warrant.”

  “We was told there was lives in danger here. I could of called the county wagon, put bracelets on the clientele, get their names printed in the papers. How many you think would come back, with twenty thousand blind pigs in this city?”

  A shot slammed below. The noises of destruction stopped.

  Kozlowski said shit. “That bug Wagner. Last time he put a slug clear through a keg and hit my best man.” He drew a stubby black revolver from his belt holster and hit the hallway running. We followed him.

  It was hard to see at first on the ground floor. When the two-legged termites had finished with the fixtures and furniture they had started on the walls, and a cloud of yellow plaster filled the room. As it settled I saw John Danzig standing in the center of a circle of bulls. They had their guns out in the firing-range stance, pointing at his head. He looked like the hub of a spoked wheel. Sergeant Wagner lay on his back at the kid’s feet with his knees drawn up, rocking from side to side and clasping the bottom half of his face with both hands. One of them held a revolver. Blood was sliding out between his fingers.

  Tom Danzig stood outside the circle with his arms hanging loose. Jerry the Lobo slid a hand into Tom’s pocket and was pushed away.

  The lieutenant threw down his cigar. It extinguished itself immediately in the tide of beer washing back and forth across the floor. “What.”

  “This puke took a swing at Wagner.” The speaker was a fat plainclothesman much softer than Kozlowski, in spectacles and a straw boater out of season.

  “Looks like he connected. Who shot?”

  “Wagner.”

  “Son of a bitch was waving it in my face.” The kid had both fists clenched but looked peaceful otherwise. A lock of his dark curly hair had fallen over one eye. I think he was enjoying himself.

  Kozlowski nudged Wagner roughly with his foot. “What’d you hit?”

  “My nofe if bufted,” Wagner said through his hands.

  “It went into the ceiling,” one of the uniforms said. “His piece went off when the kid poked him.”

  Kozlowski booted Wagner in the ribs hard. The sergeant whinnied, spraying blood. “You bastard, I was up there.”


  Fatso said, “The puke was acting smart, Lieutenant.”

  Kozlowski gnawed a cheek.

  “Clear a space,” he said. “Get away from him, for chrissake. He ain’t Leopold and Loeb.”

  The bulls backed off, lowering their weapons. Kozlowski holstered his revolver, then put a hand inside the right slash pocket of his raincoat and drew it out as a fist. He took two steps and stood in front of the kid, who had half an inch on him. The brim of the lieutenant’s hat was almost touching the kid’s forehead. He slid his knuckles up and down the raincoat’s lapel restlessly. “What’s your name?”

  “John Danzig.”

  “You a kike?”

  “What?”

  “A hebe. A yid. A sheeny. A goddamn pork-avoiding Christ-killer.”

  “What if I am?”

  They were the same words he’d said to me, but the lieutenant wasn’t having any. I didn’t see his fist leave his lapel. The crack was as sharp and as loud as the pistol shot earlier. The kid staggered back into one of the bulls standing behind him, who shoved him away. He fell down on one knee, got up, and fell again, pitching forward from the toes. That was the end of it. I’d lost enough money on the fights to know they don’t get up again once they go down on their face.

  His brother didn’t move then or later. He was the thinker as I said.

  Lieutenant Kozlowski flipped the little sap he’d had hidden in his fist and returned it to his pocket. Then he unhooked a small key from the chain attached to his belt. “Run upstairs and cut loose the Indian, son,” he said, handing it to me. “We got our body.”

  He was instructing someone to call it in from the box on the corner when I ascended out of earshot.

  I didn’t see Jack Dance again for two years. He was using his new name then and it was hard to believe he’d ever been off his feet.

  Chapter Three

  WHERE TO START.