WE HEARD THE PLANE before we saw it, a nasal whine that stopped and started in impertinent little surges, like an electric mixer with a loose plug. Then it grew out of a tiny smudge in an absolutely clear sky, widening and assuming detail as it approached, until we could see the box kite wings and the cigar-shaped fuselage and light shining through the wires and struts, the leather-helmeted head behind the windscreen. It passed over within a hundred feet, close enough to show the khaki patches on its olive-drab fabric and the way the wings bowed and flexed like a gull’s. Then it turned its nose into the wind in a long climbing loop and headed in.
Belonging as it did to the air, the machine seemed reluctant to land. The carriage touched down twice, bounded back up, and struck with a bone-shattering bang, the wheels lurching over uneven ground until the tailskid dug in and scratched up a brown cloud that scudded over and settled in a fine layer on our shoes. The aeroplane swung into a slow turn and rolled to a stop. The motor sputtered and died. The propeller feathered, reversed, and drifted around in a half-dozen lazy circles before standing still. Quiet fell with a thud.
Jack and I stood by Jack’s LaSalle in a field near St. Clair Shores. It was a blustery Monday morning in September, too windy for shirtsleeves, too warm for a topcoat, with the death-stench in the air that was fall in Southeastern Michigan. In half an hour Jack was due to meet Joey Machine on the Belle Isle Bridge.
Andy Kramm climbed down from the observer’s seat behind the wings, using the bottom wing as a step. Lon Camarillo bounded out of the cockpit straight to the ground and came our way behind Andy, unbuckling his helmet. The former ace was wearing his leather aviator’s jacket and puttees, with an ivory silk scarf wound around his neck and tucked inside his collar. Andy had on his cloth cap and mackinaw. He blew on his hands.
“Jesus, it’s cold up there,” he said. “My balls shriveled up no bigger’n cantaloupes. Anybody got a bottle?”
I gave him my flask. Lon joined us, carrying his helmet and goggles. The lower half of his face was dark with smoke and oil. The white outline left by the goggles accentuated his skull-like features. “When do I get a new bus?” he demanded. “The only time that old Jenny’s done better than sixty since the Big Show was when they brought it up on the truck.”
Jack said, “When we can afford a better aeroplane, we won’t need no aeroplane. What’d you see?”
“Ask Andy. I was too busy trying to keep us in the air.”
“That’s good hootch.” Andy returned my flask. “Looks copacetic. Seen Joey’s Chevy on the island and Joey standing on the bridge. No other cars or people close enough to do us a bother.”
“Sure it was him?”
“Had on that cheap coat and that hat he wears, the one like Hoover’s.”
“Homburg,” I said.
“That’s the one. Say, you all right? You look like you could stand a pull yourself.”
“I had a shock.”
Jack said, “I don’t like the coat.”
“It’s cold on the water,” said Andy. “Anyway, Joey hires the hard stuff. He don’t do it himself.”
“Bass is in the Doozy.” Jack flipped his head toward the dirt road that ran past the field, where the big car was parked. “You ride in back. Give us three or four blocks’ start.”
“My chopper there?”
“You’ll have to load it. I never did figure out how to wind up that fucking drum.”
“Joey said one car,” I said.
“I stopped taking orders from Joey a while back.” He was looking at me. “You sure you can do this? ’Cause if you can’t, I won’t. He can stand there till his dick rots and falls off.”
“I’m jake.”
“You better be. I don’t trust guys that get sick or have to go take a dump just before the shooting starts.”
“Lewis Welker,” I reminded him.
“What about him?”
“Your memory’s not that short.”
He nodded.
I had checked with the hospitals and the morgue, but nobody answering Mr. Norman’s description had showed up at any of them, and no complaint had been filed with the police department about a mess at the Griswold House. Frankie Orr’s clean-up crew was worth whatever he paid them. I had called in sick at the Banner two days in succession. I had lost weight. Every time I thought of food I saw Mr. Norman’s rack of lamb drenched biblically in blood. Actually, I was feeling a little better that morning, although Howard Wolfman and even Jensen the cartoon editor had remarked on my appearance. I’d told them I’d been fasting.
“I thought you were Greek Orthodox,” Jensen had said, lighting his pipe.
Lon brought me back to the field. “I’ll get the bird back in the hangar. It’s throwing oil like a bitch.”
Andy started for the Duesenberg and Jack and I returned to the LaSalle. He took his matched Lugers out of the glove compartment, the converted one sporting an extra long clip that extended three inches below the hollow handle, checked their loads, and put one in each side pocket of his suitcoat. I didn’t say anything about the ban on weapons. He ground the motor into life, swung the car around, and bumped down the rutted path that led to the road.
On the way down Jefferson he turned on the radio. He never listened to the entertainment programs that were beginning to flood the dial, just dance music. Despite the name he took, I had never seen him dance with anyone, or tap his foot when a fast tune was playing, or heard him hum during a quiet moment. For all I knew he was tone deaf. He preferred things happening, and when they weren’t he tried to create the illusion, and so the more frenetic the music the better he liked it. Jazz was a favorite, but he made no distinction between the corny trumpets and party whistles of Paul Whiteman and the smoky strains of Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club Orchestra. I always thought it was a shame he didn’t live to hear jitterbug. If he had, he might have had a better shot at dying of old age, but I doubt it. Whenever I think of him, there’s a hot number playing in the background.
Nearing the Belle Isle Bridge, he pulled off onto the gravel apron, cut the motor, and coasted to a stop, blocking the end of the bridge. The Duesenberg glided over two blocks back and parked. Jack set the LaSalle’s brake, cut the ignition. His window was open and I heard the water, the edged waves where the Detroit River broadened into Lake St. Clair slapping the seawall.
“Look at the son of a bitch,” Jack said. “Thinks he’s for Christ’s sake Napoleon.”
I noticed him then, leaning with his back to the railing halfway out to the island, a figure in a long black coat too heavy for the season although it was windy out there, the gusts molding the coat to the backs of his legs and pushing the hem out in front of him so that he looked like the letter J, his pale gray homburg held in place by his hand on the crown. The wind was kicking up little whitecaps on the water like paper sailboats.
“He looks on the square,” I said.
“He’ll be on the square when a priest shakes his stick in his face. Even then they’ll have to screw him into the ground.”
“What he said makes sense. This war isn’t making anybody rich. Who was it said you could spit in Joey’s face and steal his wife and he’d just laugh at you, but if you get in the way of a buck he’ll rip your heart out?”
“Phil Dardanello. Just before Joey blew him to hell.” He took out the Lugers again, checked the loads again, put them back in his pockets. Then he grabbed his door handle. “Anybody comes, get out and throw up the hood. Pretend you got engine trouble.” He opened the door, put a foot on the running board. I laid a hand on his arm. I had never touched him before except to shake hands.
“Are you on the square?” I asked.
He showed me his teeth. “Hell, Connie, I never know what I’m going to do till I do it.”
He left the door open, giving me an unobstructed view of the proceedings through a square frame, as if I were the only spectator in a movie house. I felt alone right away. Anyplace that Jack had been seemed twice as empty after he went. Out over the water, gulls swung like pendulums on the updrafts, their wings making lowercase m’s. That was the second letter that had occurred to me in a few minutes. I missed my typewriter. Hattie was right. I couldn’t marry her until the Banner granted me a divorce.
Jack made his way out along the bridge, a tall, broad-shouldered young man—barely a man, just turned twenty-one—in blue gabardine and saddle shoes and a pearl fedora set at an arrogant angle, one hand touching the railing from time to time because in that wind it would seem to a landlubber that the bridge was swaying, although it was solid enough for truck traffic. He was alone out there with the creaking of the gulls and the loud raspberry of a speedboat heeling around the angle of the island. There were always speedboats.
I’m not sure which came first, Jack’s slowing step or the movement of the man in the black coat and homburg, still fifty or sixty feet away from him. Maybe the two things were simultaneous, Jack getting close enough to see that it wasn’t Joey Machine standing there, that Joey wasn’t within a mile of that spot on that day, just as the coat came open and something that looked like a two-foot length of iron pipe swung up from underneath. There was something familiar about the movement, a wicked grace that reminded me of the private dining room at the Griswold House and a backhand sweep that severed Mr. Norman’s jugular even as Mr. Norman was cutting the meat on his plate. And I knew who the man was in Joey’s clothing.
Jack was fast for his size. I can still see him turning into the classic shooter’s stance, sideways to his opponent and offering the narrowest possible target as his right hand came out of his pocket with a Luger in it and his arm straightened at shoulder level. Dirty gray smoke billowed from the end of the sawed-off and slid sideways in front of the wind. I saw Jack lurch without losing his footing. I couldn’t see his gun because his body was in the way, but in the next instant I heard the round blooey of the shotgun and, just behind it, three rapid pops that had to belong to the smaller automatic, but not the one converted to full auto; Jack had gone with his best hand and single-fire for accuracy.
I didn’t hear the next few reports. They were lost under the whine of the speedboat on the water, approaching the bridge now with its throttle wide open. As it neared the place where the two men stood it slowed down, the noise tailing off to a burble directly under the bridge. At that moment the man in the black coat went over the railing.
His hat and shotgun flew as he plunged feet first through air, arms rotating. Something else came loose on the way down, black and shield-shaped with dangling straps, falling slower than the man, planing on the air currents like an autumn leaf until, just after the man hit the water, it sliced the top off a series of waves, pulling a plume of white spray. Then it tipped up and stood tombstone fashion for a long moment before sliding under. It was a bulletproof vest, forty pounds of nickel steel with a black fabric covering. I had tried one on that disastrous day on the police range when I almost wiped out the force with a runaway Thompson and had decided I wasn’t big enough to be a cop.
In the water, the man wriggled out of the overcoat, whose tails had spread like oil on the surface, and swam toward the bobbing boat, pulling himself along with an inexpert Australian crawl, head held up out of the water. Little white spurts erupted around him. I heard the pops and looked up at Jack supporting himself on the railing of the bridge with one hand and firing at the swimming man. The shots stopped just as the man reached the boat and was helped aboard by someone inside; Jack had emptied the magazine. Leaning awkwardly on his elbow on the railing, he switched weapons. I heard the burp of the doctored Luger, but by that time the boat was moving again, its bow lifting as the engine wound up. Long before it disappeared around the end of the island it had drawn out of range. Jack pushed himself away from the railing, still firing, and fell to his knees.
I had not moved since the first shot. Now the musical horn of the Duesenberg climbed my spine and I turned and saw Bass Springfield’s face working behind the windshield, a hood’s length away from the back of the LaSalle. He was gesturing wildly out his open window. I slid across the seat, pins and needles pricking my legs and feet as feeling returned below the belt, and stomped on the starter. It growled several times before I realized I hadn’t switched on the ignition. I did that and the engine caught. I stalled it twice trying to work the clutch, but on the third try I hit a happy combination of gears and gas and drove the car away from the bridge. The Duesenberg’s bumper clipped the LaSalle’s taillight as it swung onto the planks. I got out and followed on foot, crunching over the broken tinted glass.
Springfield and Andy Kramm were both out of the car when I reached it, Andy clinging uselessly to his beloved machine gun. Jack was sitting on the planks with one leg doubled under him, trying to ram a fresh clip into one of the Lugers and missing. The entire left side of his suitcoat including the sleeve was slick with blood. It had slid out under the cuff and stained his hand and gun so that you couldn’t tell where the flesh left off and the metal began. “Cocksucking wop,” he was saying. “Too yellow to do his own double-cross.”
“Mr. Jack, we gots to get you to a doctor.” Springfield was trying to circle his arms under Jack’s and smearing himself all over.
“It was Frankie Orr.”
Jack didn’t hear me. He was still trying to reload the Luger. “Wop cocksucker.”
Andy said, “Get him in back. We’ll use Teague. He don’t report bullet wounds.”
I told Jack again it was Frankie Orr. I don’t know why it was so important at that moment. There was blood all over, although not as much as Mr. Norman had shed. Jack stopped playing with the pistol.
“How do you know?”
The question distracted Andy. He straightened, watching me. He was still holding the Thompson. Its black muzzle was broad, a single flaring nostril. “Jack said you’re the one set up the meet.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know, but you know it was Orr.”
I couldn’t think of a way to say it.
“Lay off that,” Jack said. “He’s gutty. He ain’t stupid.” Springfield had his arms around him now and was dragging him backwards in the direction of the Duesenberg. Jack’s heels made smeary lines in the blood on the planks. “Drive the LaSalle back, Connie. Tell Vivian I won’t be home. Don’t say I got shot.”
She guessed anyway, when I brought the car back without him. She was on her way out somewhere in a white lambswool belted topcoat and a cloche hat with a clamshell purse in her hand. I said someone would be in touch. She didn’t say a lot, and what she did say I don’t remember. I don’t think it was, “Jack has ideas.”
It was a near thing. I was told later that the edge of the pattern had ground up Jack’s left upper arm as he turned, and pellets had lodged close to the heart. Too close anyway for Dunstan Teague, a former emergency room specialist at Detroit Receiving who had lost his license to practice medicine when he was caught removing drugs from a locked cabinet without authorization; he merely flushed out and stitched up those wounds and gave the patient a tetanus shot after plucking the lead out of the arm. Jack carried the remaining pellets to the grave. He had lost a deal of blood and burned up with fever, but it broke, and after ten days on a cot in Teague’s spare room he returned home twenty pounds lighter with his arm in a sling and a dashing new white streak in his curly hair where it tumbled over his forehead. He gained back the weight and found the use of his arm, but he never lost the streak. It gave him a branded look, like a man I had read about in a rival tabloid who was struck by lightning and bore the mark of the bolt in a dead white line from the crown of his head to the ball of one foot for the rest of his days.
Something else had changed, too. The go-to-hell spirit was still there and always would be, but he didn’t seem to enjoy himself as much. At times, when the world was turning around him, he would sit absentmindedly rubbing the spot where the pellets had entered his chest, and the expression on his face would put me in mind of his more thoughtful brother.
When I visited him in St. Clair Shores the first time after his return, I was stopped and frisked in the front hall by a pair of young men I had never seen before. Vivian rescued me, explaining that they were reinforcements hired by Andy. They had Purple all over them. Jack greeted me in the parlor, looking more relaxed than I had ever seen him in slacks and an open-necked shirt. He kept taking his arm out of the sling to light cigarettes and twirl the knob on the radio, looking for the bouncy music he liked. I told him how I knew the man with the shotgun was Frankie Orr. It was the first and only time I mentioned the incident at the Griswold House to anyone.
“Clyde Norman.” He rubbed his chest. “He carried the bag for Borneo in the Bottom when I was delivering there for Joey. I knew back then he was dipping.”
“I wonder why Orr hooked up with Joey.”
“Frankie’s a whore. I guessed that the first time I seen him.”
“Maybe it’s not just him. Maybe Borneo’s with Joey now. It makes sense when you think about it. That play at the bridge was too complicated for Joey.”
“I thought he was a fucking ghost till I seen the metal shining through the holes I put in that vest. I tried for his head then but I guess I missed.”
“He looked pretty healthy swimming away. What do you think, is it Machine and Borneo?”
“It don’t matter. Joey’s dead. He’ll fall down when he gets the message.”
In spite of what he said, the streets were quiet for a long time after the bridge fight. Meanwhile there was an election and Frank L. Murphy stepped into the mayor’s office handily. The Belle Isle incident notwithstanding, it was an indication of how much progress the problem of economic depression had made beyond the problem of lawlessness that he was voted in on his promise to create more jobs. There were more people in bread lines than in blind pigs.
Jack’s brother Tom was starting to get bylines in the Times. He wrote about everything but the policy racket, and it was evident that Joey Machine had abandoned his public relations strategy. I saw Tom at press conferences. He was getting better at asking questions, but I couldn’t shake the conviction that he wasn’t cut out for journalism. He was no plunger.
When I finally got around to calling Hattie again, a strange woman answered and told me she’d changed addresses. The woman didn’t know where she was living now.
October leaves fell, November gales swept them into the gutters. On the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving—a big weekend for the numbers, when everyone bet on 620 in honor of the year the Pilgrims landed—Joey Machine, accompanied by his bodyguard, Dom Polacki, and his bookkeeper, a grave fat man known as “Presto” DiPesto, but whose birth name was Aaron Stahl, left a house on Sylvester Street where it was rumored the accounts were kept on every vice game on the East Side and started walking toward a coffee shop on the corner. A dark blue Duesenberg with ivory side-panels drew abreast of them and a young man with dark curly hair streaked white in front cranked down the back window on the curb side and fired at them sixteen times with a machine pistol. He missed all three of them but killed a fourteen-year-old girl on her way home from early Mass.