“COME KIND OF SIGNATURE, I expect.” Anderson held the cartridge up to the light. “Know anyone who owns a Luger, Lieutenant?”
“Shit, half the population of Michigan’s German and the other half come back from the war with souvenirs. Who don’t?” He remembered his cigar and pegged it into his favorite corner. “Anyway, if the sheeny turns out Purple, who done it won’t matter. If it was up to the chief, the city’d pay him a bounty.”
“What makes him a sheeny?” I asked.
He pointed. “They didn’t shoot the end of his dick off. It was that way already.”
I didn’t pursue the point. In Lieutenant Kozlowski’s simple world, the inhabitants were divided into two camps: Those who had been circumcised and those who hadn’t.
He buttoned his raincoat. “When you finish digging that slug out of his noggin, run it over to Ballistics. We’ll blow some taxpayers’ money and pretend that Luger ain’t on the bottom of the river by now. Then when we don’t get noplace, we’ll hand it to Homicide. No sense jamming up the files at Prohibition with another open case.”
After Kozlowski went out, I asked Anderson if I could have the cartridge.
“Collecting souvenirs?” he asked.
“Sort of. You need it for evidence?”
“A bullet isn’t evidence until it’s fired.” He gave it to me.
I put it in my ticket pocket, gave him the high sign, and left on the trot. I wanted to ask Kozlowski a question, but a pair of raised voices at the door at the end of the hall broke my concentration.
“Nobody in without a badge or a pass,” the deputy at the door was saying.
“I keep telling you I haven’t been issued a pass yet. I just started the job. Here’s my press card.”
“That ain’t a police pass. Nobody in without a badge or a pass.”
Kozlowski joined them. “Pipe down. You want to wake up the stiffs and fuck up all the paperwork?”
“Man don’t have a pass, Lieutenant.”
The civilian swung his attention to Kozlowski. “Tom Danzig, the Times. We met once. Is someone afraid I’ll smuggle out a kidney in my pocket?”
“You think that don’t happen?” The lieutenant struck a match on the doorframe, scratching the varnish, and lit his stogie. “Where was it we met?”
“You wouldn’t remember. It was two years ago and I was working somewhere else.”
I’d recognized him before he used his name. He hadn’t changed as much as his brother. His jawline had hardened, making him appear more lean than slight, but his hair was the same sandy shade at the temples under a soft brown felt snapbrim and he was still fair where Jack was dark. He wore a tan double-breasted under a light topcoat, inconspicuously tailored, and the kind of necktie that didn’t exist in Kozlowski’s world, wine-colored silk that glistened softly under the harsh institutional light. If he was dressing like that on the sixty a week the Times had paid me, he wasn’t eating or paying rent. I thought about the thousand dollars Joey Machine had thrown at me, along with the promise to repeat the performance the first day of every month if I wrote what he wanted.
“Don’t ever tell a bull he don’t remember,” Kozlowski said. “It ain’t every day somebody gets himself poisoned on my shift.”
That was impressive, and I could see Tom knew it. The lieutenant had seen thousands of faces in two years and poisoning or not, the raid on Hattie’s had been just one more obligatory tipover in a career awash in them. Just because a bull’s bent doesn’t mean he isn’t a good detective. I watched Tom learn that, saw him file it away. That was the basic difference between the brothers. You could see Tom think, while everything Jack did came straight out of left field, as if some shadowy Muse had whispered a course of action into his ear just before he took it.
I saw something else too. I saw Kozlowski noting Tom’s clothes, putting them together with his announcement that he worked for the Times, and, although he hid it well enough from anyone who wasn’t looking for it, saw him relax. For all his professed amorality, a man who’s been bought is always at a disadvantage with others until he sniffs a kindred soul. In less than a minute the pair had stamped and pigeonholed each other, and only I saw it. The deputy was too busy yawning.
“How’s your brother?” asked the lieutenant. “Still running with the wops?”
“We don’t stay in touch. Right now I’m investigating a murder.”
“No kidding. So am I. If the chief don’t trust you enough to give you a pass, why should we?”
“It’s not a matter of trust. Can I help it if the killers in this town are more efficient than the bureaucracy?”
Kozlowski pointed over Tom’s shoulder with the butt of his cigar. “That’s your curtain line, bub. Take your bow.”
I put in an oar. “He’s the police reporter at the Times okay. I helped clear him for the job.”
Tom hadn’t taken notice of me before. Now he looked, made the connection. I had handed the letter of introduction directly to Joey, who had arranged things from there.
Kozlowski was looking at me too. My clothes didn’t satisfy him the way Tom’s had. “I didn’t know the Times and the Banner was on speaking terms.”
“You can call his editor if you want.”
He sighed. “Let him by, Pike. He ain’t Sacco and Vanzetti.”
The deputy shrugged. I would see that shrug in many different places as the decade wore on: Representing, in the long hangover after the ten-year binge of the twenties, a contentment just to keep one’s job.
The lieutenant left. I lingered. I’d forgotten what I was going to ask him anyway.
“Thanks,” said Tom. “I could have talked my way in, but you saved me some time.”
He couldn’t talk his way onto a public street without help; I’d been doing some pigeonholing of my own. But I said nothing. After a moment he shook my hand and headed toward the dissecting room. No mention of the letter. He knew I’d been compensated.
I patted my ticket pocket. Well, it was as good a way as any. I called after him. He stopped and turned. Fishing out the unfired cartridge, I walked down the hall and extended it. He took it automatically. “What’s this?”
“Give it to your brother next time you see him. Tell him he owes me.”
He wasn’t a full-fledged scribe yet. I left before he could ask any more questions.
I’m not clear even now on why I didn’t volunteer the dead man’s name, or speak up when Anderson made his discovery inside the silenced mouth. The stitched lips said as plain as anything that the man on the table had leaked information on the Canada run to someone in Pete Rosenstein’s camp, and the stashed cartridge, compatible with Jack Dance’s trademark Lugers, was as arrogant a boast as a killer could make, even if I was the only one who made the connection; Jack always assumed he and his works were better known than they were. True, I didn’t owe anything to the bulls. When an entire legal system pledges its services to a small band of thugs and pirates, the duties of citizenship are suspended. But I never thought of my silence in terms of sticking it to the authorities. I’m not a rebel. It’s tempting to think, because of what I said to Tom, that I was investing in a source of good copy, but that doesn’t answer everything. Maybe I just liked Jack. In those days it was becoming increasingly hard to accept the simplest explanation as the truth, but sometimes it was. Winter went, as winters will, even in Michigan. The investigation into the murder of Lewis Welker—for so the young man with the sealed lips had been identified when the bulls matched his fingerprints to a set on file at the Juvenile Detention Home—stayed alive on the front page of the Banner for a week, helped a little by Swayles when he shook off the mumps, then guttered out as the campaign to recall Mayor Bowles got too hot for the second leaders. (It wouldn’t have lasted even that long but for the needlework.) Ballistics failed to find a match either in its files or those of the Justice Department for the striatums on the nine-millimeter bullet taken from Welker’s brain, after which the case went to Homicide, who pulled in every known member of the Purple Gang, the Little Jewish Navy, the Unione Siciliana, and the Machine mob—all except the gang chiefs, who were always out of town during a sweep. The bulls posed with them for newspaper photographers in their hats and coats at the Wayne County Jail and then cut them loose. I still have a group shot taken by Fred Ogilvie for the Banner, with Jack Dance at one end turning to say something with a smile to the man at his right, and every time I come across it the faces look younger. Hatless and dressed in varsity sweaters, they’d have passed muster in a high school yearbook, not a Dillinger in the bunch. If Repeal and the Depression have done nothing else, they’ve taken crime away from the kids and given it back to seasoned professionals.
I didn’t do a column on Welker. I had brass then, but not that much brass. Instead I wrote a series on evangelists that didn’t tell anyone anything he didn’t already know or suspect and snared me no bonuses or nominations and only one letter, a scorcher from the chairman of the local chapter of the National Committee to Draft Billy Sunday for President.
As the spring floods receded, recall fever, inflamed by the News, the Free Press, and the Banner, and by Jerry Buckley on radio, mounted. In May, while Bowles was attending the Kentucky Derby, the News published a photograph of a bookie recording bets on the same race. This was not in itself newsworthy. What made it so was the fact that the photographer had been standing at a window in Bowles’s office when he pushed the button. Inspired, Police Commissioner Harold H. Emmons took advantage of the mayor’s absence to crack down on such handbook operations with a series of raids citywide. When Bowles returned, he fired Emmons. That action put the petition drive over the top, and the recall election was scheduled for July 22. If successful, it would make Detroit the first major city to recall its mayor. The eyes of the nation, to swipe a phrase from the newsreels, were on the Motor City.
Although neither the press nor even the demagogic Buckley would say it without evidence, it was clear to a blind deaf-mute that Bowles and his ring were in the pay of the men in sharp suits who smelled faintly of sour mash. When a Detroiter was in a hurry of an evening, he learned to detour around Riopelle and East Jefferson to avoid being delayed by a polite young man with a submachine gun while a cargo of liquor was being offloaded. “Where are the cops?” ran a close second to “Wanna buy a duck?” as the joke question of the decade. The terms “Vice Squad” and “Criminal Investigation Division” became double-entendres.
Thus unhampered by the watchdogs of justice, the gangs had little to look out for but one another, which kept them busy enough that year. They shot it out on the river and in the streets, in apartments and from the running boards of Cadillacs and LaSalles. As the days rat-tat-tatted by, the Battle of Lake Erie—Connie Minor’s battle, copyrighted and on file at the Library of Congress—became just one skirmish in an escalating war. Lewis Welker became part of a statistic that threatened to top the all-time high of 1926.
It’s hard for a newspaper not to look good in that kind of climate, but the Times suffered. The distant Hearst’s support of Prohibition was untenable, and a poorly planned series of articles about the policy racket’s promise to make any poor Negro a Cinderella rang tinnily amid the clamor to rid the city of gambling and every other vice not served in glasses. Joey Machine’s hand-picked boy Tom Danzig had a hand in that, but the decision to print the material was made higher up. I began to suspect that Joey’s pockets ran deeper than I’d guessed. He’d limp ten blocks on a blister to save two bits on a new pair of shoes, but when it came to improving his business he could be as generous as Schweitzer.
It was still black out one balmy morning in May when the telephone rang in my apartment. I came awake with my head doubled under my arm stork fashion. The bell rang seven times before I got the kinks out of my neck and found any feeling in the arm below the elbow. I tipped the candlestick off the nightstand and caught the receiver.
“Connie?”
“I’m not sure.” I turned on the lamp, looked at the alarm clock. “Jesus.”
“Wrong. I’m the guy that owes you a favor.”
I didn’t need any more waking up after that. In time I’d learn that Jack never identified himself over the telephone. He’d heard that the feds had tapped into Capone’s line and not being electronically gifted had come to the conclusion that they could eavesdrop on anyone’s conversation anywhere simply by flipping a switch. It was the only thing he was ever cautious about.
“What’s the deal?” I sat up.
“You know the Black Bottom?”
“I hope you didn’t wake me up to ask me out dancing.”
“Not the dance, shithead, the place. You know Crystal Street? Runs next to Hastings.”
“I’ve been there.”
“Bass Springfield’s got a room there. He ain’t got a phone. I need to get a message to him.”
“So go see him.”
“If I could do that, you think I’d call you? The war’s on, Al. Andy and Lon and me are squirreled in here.” He gave me an address on Howard. “The Purples got Baldy Hannion tonight. Gunned him in his car in the middle of Woodward.”
That took a moment to sink in. Something had gone wrong with the natural order when an Oklahoma train robber was shot to death at the wheel of an automobile in downtown Detroit.
“When?”
“Hey, I’m not talking to your sheet.”
“Sorry. What’s the message?”
“That’s it Tell Bass what happened. Tell him to get his ass down here and cover it on the way. That son of a bitch Rosenstein’s got a hard-on for the whole outfit.” “Why me? I’m not one of the boys.”
“You answered your own question, chum. Pete’s gorillas ain’t looking to put one in you. You’re the only one outside I can trust.”
“What makes you think you can trust me?”
“Lew Welker.”
I fumbled for my Chesterfields in the drawer of the nightstand. “Do you always repay a favor by asking for another favor?”
“He’s got a woman there, Nadine or Francine, one of them nigger names. Bass might want to send her on vacation.”
“I’ll tell him.” I got the address on Crystal and then the connection broke.
I’d been to the neighborhood many times, but never after two in the morning, which represented an unspoken curfew for whites in the Bottom. After that, if you were the wrong color and you were caught on the street, you stood a good chance of being bumped off a practically empty sidewalk and, if you still didn’t take the hint, the bulls might find you after daylight sitting in a weedy lot with your guts in your lap. I cranked up the Ford and prayed the moon would stay hidden.
The house was a two-story saltbox, whitewashed clapboard with the wood wearing through under the streetlamp out front, but the windows were clean and the strip of grass between the foundation and the sidewalk had been cut recently. Things are changing now, but in those days, residents of the most rundown neighborhoods kept them neat, even the alleys. I left the motor running and climbed the stoop. There was a movement in the shadows and a lanky Negro I hadn’t noticed in a cloth cap and a baggy suitcoat stopped leaning against a lightpole on the corner and passed under the streetlamp out of sight.
I rapped on the screen door. After a moment an old colored woman came to the screen without turning on a light inside. She had on a hairnet and a faded housecoat with gnawed elbows. Her face was a length of carved dark wood.
“Bass Springfield,” I said.
Her eyes took the slow tour. “You police?”
“No, just a friend.”
A long silence let me know what she thought of that. Finally she reached up and unhooked the screen door.
When I stepped inside she turned on a lamp. The parlor had a square of rug, threadbare but clean, two sofas with mismatched floral covers, and a crystal set on a painted pine table.
“Upstairs,” she said.
I climbed the stairs. In the dark hallway I knocked on a door with light showing under it. Bessie Smith was singing on a phonograph inside. The light went out, but the music continued.
“Bass?” I said. “This is Connie Minor from the Banner. We met last January.”
“What you want?” It was a young woman’s voice.
“Jack Dance sent me. I’ve got a message for Bass.”
“He ain’t here. You can give it to me.”
“It’s personal.”
“How I know you’re who you says you are?”
I stooped and slid my press card—not the police pass—under the door. I hoped she was a better reader than Springfield. After a moment the card poked back out. I retrieved it.
“He at the Red Door,” said the voice.
I knew where that was. I thanked her and left. There was no sign of the old woman in the parlor.
Three young colored men were gathered around the Ford with the hood folded up on one side and the motor still running. One of them was the man who had been holding up the lightpole before. I hesitated a beat, then walked between two of them and secured the hood. They smelled of sour whiskey and old lavender. The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight out.
The men stepped back when I nudged the car forward. The Red Door was just two blocks away but I wasn’t going to walk them. The trio followed on foot down the center of the street.
Puddles stood on Hastings from a recent rain, reflecting green and purple from the neon lit saloons that lined the block on both sides; the street had been outlaw too long to observe the usual blind-pig proprieties. I parked in front of a brownstone at the end of the block. Stepping down, I saw an Auburn two-seater on the other side of the street with two men inside. Their features were in shadow, but the boat-tailed Speedster was worth noticing in that neighborhood at four in the morning, especially when it faced the wrong way. As I entered the brownstone, the glass in the door reflected the three Negroes walking around the corner onto Hastings.
Two flights up I knocked on a door painted red and told the black face behind the go-to-hell panel I was there to see Bass Springfield. The panel slid shut. I listened to a muted cornet on the other side. The door opened.
They had gutted two apartments, set up a bar and a platform at one end, and brought in tables and chairs from any where at all. Three colored couples shared a sofa and a brown cigarette near the door. The air was smeared with smoke, tobacco and marijuana. The cornetist on the platform was growling his way through “Potato Head Blues” with help from a banjo and bass fiddle.
Springfield sat flat-footed at the bar on a stool that would have left anyone else’s feet dangling, with his crippled hands wrapped around a white china mug. Every eye in the place saw me put an elbow on the bar. The bartender, fat and bald in a pink shirt with garters, kept one hand out of sight under the taps.
“I remembers you,” Springfield said when I spoke. He had a soft cap pulled down to his eyes and was watching his image in a mirror advertising Listerine’s Halitosis Cure behind the bar.
“Jack sent me,” I said. “They got Hannion.”
He drained the mug two-handed. I smelled raw alcohol. “Celestine tell you where to find me?”
“Is that her name? You ought to send her away. Three men followed me from your house.” I described them.
“I told them to watch the place.”
“You knew about Hannion?”
“I expected Mr. Andy. He takes more chances. But I knowed it be one of us. Mr. Jack and them at the place on Howard?”
“He said to join them and watch your ass. By the way, there’s an Auburn parked across the street. Those friends of yours too?”
“No. They followed me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Make ’em wait.” He pushed his mug toward the bartender,
“They’ll be there when you come out.”
He said nothing. The musicians finished playing. In the silence between sets I heard a long tinkle of glass in the distance. I turned from the bar. Springfield grasped my arm. His grip was weak, but I hesitated. “My car’s parked outside.”
“It ain’t your car.”
More glass broke. I remembered the three Negroes. “They’ll get shot.”
“That’s covered.”
“You mean they’re armed?”
Everyone in the room laughed. The bartender took his hand from under the bar and filled Springfield’s mug from a bottle.
“What will they do to them?” I asked.
“Just rough ’em around some. They be walking home.”
“That won’t make Rosenstein any happier.”
“They ain’t from Rosenstein.”
I tried to read his profile. “Jack said—”
“Mr. Jack always was full of horseshit,” he said. “He knows they ain’t Purples. Them boys works for Joey Machine.”