THE WINDOW IN MY shared office was closed, but I could read the newsboy’s lips as he chased pedestrians down the sidewalk on their way to their cars and home. It was on the front page of the Banner he was waving: RIPPER FREED! The thick sans-serif letters as black as a mafioso’s moustache against the otherwise virginal page, the words stacked one on top of the other and filling the space from just below the masthead to the bottom. This time the kid who had carved the letters got credit under Graphics on the Page Two flag, but no more money than the dime an hour he earned sorting p’s and d’s into their slots in the typecases and cleaning up, despite having had to provide the FREED in a hurry; he had finished carving GUILTY only a few days earlier. It was a dramatic Page One by any standard, and I don’t suppose many of those who saw it dwelled very long, if at all, on the headline’s interior fallacy: If he’d been freed, then he was no longer the Ripper. In any case, the distinction is still ignored, and Jack’s has joined the long list of parenthetical names that appear in chronicles of the dry time: Al (Scarface) Capone, Fred (Killer) Burke, Charley (Lucky) Luciano, Jack (The Ripper) Dance. Time and legend are tougher than the courts.
My column had consisted of an analysis of E. Wharton Clay’s and Nathan Rabinowitz’s vastly different courtroom styles, with a passing reference to my special viewpoint from the witness stand. Howard had been surprised and disappointed that I didn’t make it more personal—BANNER REPORTER GIVES EVIDENCE was to have been the headline when the acquittal changed everything—but I said that Chuck Kobler, the Banner’s court reporter, had covered my testimony thoroughly in his story, as did every other scribe in town. In fact it irritated me to be everyone else’s beat and I wasn’t about to be my own as well.
Standing there at the window, I knew that a woman was on her way through the city room and that it wasn’t Andrea. No one was so crass as to whistle—that’s for the movies, like the cigar-chomping editor who says, “Why, you,” just before he slugs someone—but the chairs stopped squeaking as they never would if the mayor walked in wearing his inaugural top hat and red silk ribbon, and I was aware of a general lifting of the atmosphere, as in a stuffy elevator when a messenger boards carrying a bouquet of flowers.
Vivian tapped the open office door with the back of a gloved hand. She had on a turban with a small feather in it and a fur jacket over a pale yellow silk blouse and a forest-green broadcloth skirt that caught her legs several inches below the knees. I had been mourning the passing of the short flapper skirt before then, but the length accentuated her long slender calves. She was wearing fur half-boots.
I turned from the window. “I thought you’d be out celebrating with Jack.”
“I hate parties. I have ever since Southampton. Besides, I’d just slow him down.” She took in the office, Jensen’s empty desk. “Are you busy?”
“I almost never am.”
“I want to talk.”
I went over and took my hat and coat off the peg. They’d been covering a cartoon Jensen had bought last fall and tacked up, showing ex-Mayor Bowles and ex-Commissioner Wilcox trapped inside a bottle with three X’s on the label and a cork jammed into the neck. Already their faces were getting hard to place. “There’s a joint down the street.”
“I don’t feel like going to a joint. Can we just walk?”
It was a warm evening for late February but damp, with a light fog rolling in from the river. We walked in that direction. The beams of the car headlamps in the street seemed to bend in the mist at right angles, like searchlights trained on the surface of a lake. Walking beside me clutching the collar of her coat, Vivian lifted her face to the moisture. Her profile was her best feature, the high forehead and long straight Mediterranean nose and clean chin.
“I wanted to explain about Tom,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
“No one has to do anything for you. That’s how you work, isn’t it?”
I said nothing.
“That sounded wrong,” she said. “I didn’t like you at first, what you do. It was hard to think of reporters as human after what happened when I was divorcing Gus. Jack told me you did him a favor once. He didn’t say what it was.”
“It gave me an in.”
“I don’t think that’s why you did it. You like him, don’t you?”
“I don’t understand him.”
“That has something to do with it. I like him too. So does Tom, although he doesn’t approve of him.” She paused. “We haven’t done anything, Tom and I haven’t.”
“When did he start coming to your house?”
“After Sylvester Street, when Jack was in hiding. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t being bothered by police and reporters. He’s a solid man. Jack’s exciting, but he isn’t solid.”
“They both used to work for Joey Machine.”
“Tom told me. He said that’s over.”
“It’s over when Joey says so. He doesn’t acknowledge bad investments. You should know that if you’re thinking of leaving Jack for Tom because Tom’s solid.”
“I’m not thinking anything like that. I don’t know what I’m thinking.”
We crossed Jefferson with the light and walked along the river, a trough of milky fog with the Windsor skyline crumbling away to stacks of lighted windows on the other side. Dusk was sliding in in long connecting shadows.
“What do you think he’d do?” she asked.
“Kill you both,” I said. “Or one of you. Or he won’t. He wouldn’t know himself until he did it, or didn’t. You ought to know that by now.”
“He really didn’t mean to hurt that little girl. She ran into it.”
“He told you about it?”
“I asked him. It’s funny, being what he is and doing what he’s done, but Jack doesn’t understand death. Tom told me that when their mother died, their father wouldn’t tell them what happened or where she went. I think Jack’s still waiting for her to come back. Down deep he thinks they’ll all come back when they get tired of hiding. That’s why killing doesn’t mean anything to him.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
An icy wind skated the water and roughened our cheeks. We turned our backs to it and started back. “He won’t keep on missing, will he?” she asked.
“Who, Jack?”
“Joey Machine.”
I let a bull pass us in his long double-breasted uniform coat doing stunts with his nightstick.
“There’s a bookie named Arny D’Agostino,” I said. “Ex-bookie now; his brother takes care of him. A couple of years back some guys took him out of the smoke shop where he ran his book and strung him up by his wrists from a pipe in the basement of the Healy Building. They roughed him around a little, nothing new. Then they took a strip of gauze and one of the guys who had gonorrhea dripped onto it and they pasted it over Arny’s eyes and left him up for three days. By the time they cut him down he was blind for life. Joey figured he’d stolen about thirty thousand dollars from him over a period of eleven months.”
After a while she said, “And they’re trying to get him for unpaid taxes.”
“This is his business, his and Sal Borneo’s and Pete Rosenstein’s and the rest. They all took the same chances and they’re not in business to make it easy for the next guy up.” When you get to hell, chiseler, tell them Sal gets what’s his.
She shuddered and took my arm with an embarrassed little laugh. “I think I’m ready to go to that joint now.”
It was a loud little place that had been there since before the ink had dried on the Eighteenth Amendment, full of smoke and the smell of hot grease from the grill behind the bar. We waited ten minutes for a booth to open up and had gin fizzes under a caricature of George M. Cohan bearing his signature. You went there to watch people, to remind yourself you weren’t living on some burned-out asteroid in a dead solar system.
We had a drink apiece. During a lull in the din I said, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
She looked very young in the light of a candle guttering in an orange glass on the table. “I never knew a reporter to ask permission.”
“This one’s for me. I asked it once before, but we didn’t know each other then, and that was for publication.”
“What do I see in Jack?”
“Don’t tell me again he has ideas,” I said. “We’re in a depression. Ideas are cheaper than apples.”
“I run with winners.”
“One courtroom upset doesn’t make him a winner.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I married Gus Woodbine because my father wanted me to and because he looked like he had it all. Only he was destroyed by someone who had more. They said I drove him to suicide, but it wasn’t me. The Woodbine was his dream. More than that, it was a good automobile, maybe the best. When Ford and Chrysler and his own friends at General Motors squashed it, he never recovered. Big business made him a loser. So I moved up to big business.”
“Jack Dance is big business?”
“None bigger. Obviously you don’t know how much the alcohol business took in last year. Nobody does, because bootleggers don’t file taxes. It isn’t the money, though; it’s who’s on top. You know that game, scissors cut paper, rock breaks scissors, paper wraps around rock?” She made the accompanying gestures: two fingers, fist, flat hand. “I play that game with my husbands.”
“There doesn’t seem to be much percentage in it, for the risk.”
“Now you’re beginning to understand.”
I shook my head. “That’s Jack’s game, not yours.”
“Don’t let this Southampton accent fool you. As gamblers go I make Jack look like Mary Pickford.”
“So if Gus was scissors and Jack’s the rock—” I paused. “Well, Tom does work on a paper.”
She sobered. “Don’t try to be clever, Connie. Not on your feet.”
That ended the evening. A few minutes later I put her in a cab out front. I hung on to the door. “I won’t say anything.”
“I know. It gives you an in.” She leaned forward from the shadows in the backseat and pressed her lips to mine for a second. Hers were cool. Then she sat back and looked out the window until the cab drew out of sight, a girl from Southampton in furs and a turban in a place where they blinded you and cut your throat with a steak knife and blew you to pieces and threw you in the river and shot you in the eye because you were late coming home from church. She’d be just fine.
Frankie Orr’s wedding came after that, and then Joey Machine’s trial in the Federal Building in a wood-paneled courtroom with the United States seal behind the bench with its hypocritical eagle clutching an olive branch in one set of talons and a fistful of arrows in the other. Nathan Rabinowitz wasn’t present, having represented Joey only at his arraignment while his attorney of record, a tax lawyer named Cranston, like The Shadow, freed himself from a similar case in Washington involving a United States Congressman. A totally bald man with a handlebar moustache, who looked like a circus barker, he wore a bow tie and suspenders that showed when he hooked his thumbs behind them while addressing the court. The trial made front pages its first week—pictures of Joey and Cranston leaning their heads together at the defense table like lovers, Joey patting back a yawn while an accountant for the Bureau of Internal Revenue reeled off an interminable list of figures from his notebook, the gangster getting out of his famous Chevy while Dom Polacki held the door for him in front of the Federal Building—but without a body count or such ornaments as lunkhead bulls perspiring on the stand and platinum blonde witnesses with fox stoles and red, red lipstick, the story lost momentum in a hurry. The remaining two months of depositions, objections, motions, and private meetings in chambers were pushed to the inside pages by more photogenic, if less far-reaching, daily dramas. Photostats of pages from ledgers don’t move as fast on the stands as shots of tramps’ corpses found cut in two on the tracks by Union Station.
Not that the tabloids were reduced to such dregs. Frankie Orr, having bailed out of the East Side for the time being after Leo Campania’s passing, had assumed the pinball machine concession from Dearborn to Woodward Avenue beginning in March. His skull-busters pushed the nickel games, which repaid a penny a point above a chosen score, into blind pigs, whorehouses, and legitimate establishments until their cartoony sproings, whirrs, buzzes, and flashing lights became a familiar part of the local landscape. Detective Chief Kozlowski parlayed the anti-gambling sentiment at City Hall into a series of raids, smashing the machines to sputtering, snapping bits and confiscating the coins they vomited out. Unione lawyers then dug up a friendly Recorder’s Court judge who slapped a ninety-day restraining order enjoining the police from approaching to within forty feet of the machines, but the next day a Sergeant Swoboda, an alumnus of Kozlowski’s old Hamtramck neighborhood, led a plainclothes team into a dance hall on West Grand and they blasted away with revolvers and shotguns at four machines bearing labels clearly identifying them as the property of Orr’s Motor City Game Owners’ Association. Despite an argument that the shots were fired from a distance of forty-one feet, Swoboda was suspended for a month without pay and the judge who had issued the injunction fined Kozlowski five hundred dollars for contempt of court. Meanwhile city attorneys went to appellate and got the injunction reversed. It was a new kind of gang war, conducted entirely in the marble halls of justice where the crack of gavels rang like gunshots.
Lieutenant Hermann Gabriel of the Prohibition Squad, taking advantage of the confusion, tipped over fourteen blind pigs during the month of May. Fred Ogilvie, who with Ernie Swayles was invited along on one of the raids, snapped a picture for the front page of the grim-faced crew in fedoras and rubber raincoats seated under the tarpaulin of the confiscated beer truck they used for cover, armed with short-handled axes and black Thompsons and pump shotguns cut back to the slides.
With all that going on, none of the city papers caught a fire in Oakland County that destroyed a barn and its contents, chief among them a JN-4 “Jenny” biplane that had seen service behind American lines during the war. Sheriff’s investigators, combing through the ashes, found the remains of a simple incendiary device involving a can of high-test gasoline and a blasting cap, much like the bomb that had gutted the rented house on Howard Street in Detroit the previous June. The destruction of Jack Dance’s one-craft air corps came over the wires as a simple arson and was treated as filler by the Detroit papers that used it at all, the Banner among them. It was another message from Joey, subtler than the Campania murder, but an indication that the hundreds of hours in court hadn’t slowed him down. Even he wasn’t savage enough to order a killing while his case was being tried by an unsequestered jury, but a match job in another county could pass unnoticed by all but those for whom it was intended.
It was a waste of gasoline, however, and with the price having gone up to twelve cents per gallon; because late in May, when the complainant in The People of the United States of America v. Giuseppe Garibaldi Maccino had rested and the defendant was preparing to take the stand on his own behalf, Jack hit him hard, and at the very core of his kingdom on the river.