MOUSE, I’M NOT GOING to beg you,” I said. “There are stories and stories, and even the ones I get are deader than Isadora in twenty-four hours.”
“Not this one,” he said, jigging in his seat like a kid. On top of being a midget, Mouse was high-strung, and when you managed to get him off his feet he was always drumming his pudgy fingers and bouncing the foot crossed on his knee and jerking his head around as if he suspected someone was gunning for him. He kept his porkpie and oversize coat on indoors and out regardless of the season. I think he thought they made him look bigger, whereas they had the opposite effect, creating the impression that county officials had finally found a way to get rid of the downtown lobbyists by shrinking them. “I ain’t sure I should tell it to you, though. I’m thinking of shifting my operation to the Federal Building. I need a lever there.”
I signaled a passing waiter for another round. We were sharing a table in the Green Lantern in Ecorse, candles stuck in green prewar wine bottles on red-and-white-checked tablecloths within earshot of the crap tables in back. The waiter, also prewar—black handlebars and a bow tie—brought me a beer and a vodka gimlet for Mouse and left with our empty glasses. When Mouse lifted his glass to sip, I placed a twenty-dollar bill on the ring. He set the glass down on top of it.
“Thank you kindly, Connie. Things are slow at County since they kicked Jack Dance. It’s like he took the heart right out of the reform movement.”
“Is that why you were in the Federal Building, where you saw whatever it is you saw?”
“I didn’t see it. I heard it. A friend of mine saw someone getting into an elevator.”
“You don’t have any friends, Mouse. Just clients. Who’d he see?”
But he wasn’t ready to let go of it just yet. Like all small men, and Danny Moskovitch was the smallest I knew who didn’t talk with a sissy accent while Edgar Bergen drank a glass of water, he liked being the center of attention. “What do you know about due process?”
“J. Edgar Hoover calls you a yellow rat and you go to jail for a thousand years. Get to the point.”
“What would you say if I told you my friend saw Orville Cranston getting onto an elevator with one of the jurors in the Machine tax evasion case?”
He had me then. His sharp little face bent into a series of happy triangles, he drummed his fingers and bounced his foot. I folded my arms on the table. “What’s the friend call himself?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
I reached and snapped the twenty out from under the glass without spilling it. Big-deal Houdini stuff.
“Hey!”
“I can buy twenty rumors for a buck, Mouse. I need a name. The juror’s if not your friend’s.”
He looked troubled. “He didn’t say which juror. I got to clear it with him before I tell his name. It’ll cost you another twenty for his cut.”
“Take it out of your end.”
“That ain’t fair, Connie. Ten’s what I slip bailiffs to tell me what goes on in the jury room.”
“I’m bleeding, Mouse.” I sat back folding the bill between my fingers while he turned over his conscience, not exactly a job for a heavy lifter. I’d have paid him fifty if the tip was good, but he didn’t need to know that. Evidence that an attorney had established contact, accidental or otherwise, with a member of the jury in a client’s case was grounds for a mistrial at least. In this specific situation I suspected that more had passed between the two than just the time of day.
Mouse was about to speak, and I knew what his decision was going to be, when our waiter came back and told me I had a call. The caller wouldn’t identify himself. I said shit and got up. “Hold the thought, Mouse.”
“It’s almost lunchtime. I got to get back to County and earn supper.”
“I’ll make it quick.” I let him see me fold the twenty into my vest pocket.
The telephone was on the wall in the craproom. Eddie Berman the bouncer, a gray lump in a checked jacket, who bore no small resemblance to an iguana and carried an ash cane he used to pry fatmouths off their feet, shuffled away a discreet yard or so while I lifted the earpiece. The first thing I heard after I said hello was a long hawking gurgle, followed by a small explosion and then a rustle of paper tissue. “Minor?”
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant Gabriel?”
“You know the Ferry warehouse?” He didn’t seem surprised that I’d guessed who he was.
“Brush and Lafayette,” I said.
“Second floor, northwest corner. There’s a friend of yours here.”
I hung up fifteen seconds after he did and returned to the table to make my excuses. But Mouse had left.
Late June was everywhere. The air was bright with hot concrete, soft tar, cotton dresses, and loud radios in uncovered convertibles. I parked on Brush and walked around to the front door of the warehouse, a city block of brick arches and cement cornices the pigeons loved that looked like the Roman Forum, only more ambitious. A uniformed bull I knew slightly let me in and told me they were waiting for me upstairs.
“They who?”
“Lieutenant Gabriel and the chief.”
“Kozlowski?”
“You know another chief?”
A kid in livery, dressed for the offices upstairs, took me up in the elevator. When he opened the cage I stepped out into a wall of sweet grainy odor, the smell of tons of stored seeds and something else, a pleasant, cloying aroma that reminded me of Sunday afternoons after church and roast pork steaming on the table. I got my bearings and headed northwest. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, the shafts smoking with millions of golden seed particles, and lay on the bare floor in rectangular patches as in a cloister walkway.
I recognized the Laurel and Hardy figures of Gabriel and Kozlowski among a group gathered around an object in the corner, a sack of grain or something hanging from the beamed ceiling. A flashbulb flared, the dead bulb was plucked out and tossed to the floor, where it popped like a half-loaded shell in the room’s vastness.
“Fuck the sweep,” Gabriel was saying, his thin Cracker voice irritated, wobbling in the rafters. “Let’s just call Philly and have them grab him when he steps off the train. Isn’t that where he goes every time he caps someone, to visit relatives? The guinea’s a good family boy. They see a lot of him.”
The pork smell grew stronger as I approached, and long before they noticed me I knew what the dangling thing was, who it was, and my stomach did a slow turn.
Kozlowski spotted me. “Normally when we find ’em swinging, the first thing we do is cut them down,” he said without greeting, “see can we revive them. We didn’t need no medical examiner to tell us we didn’t have to bother this time, did we, Doc?”
“No, he’s been dead at least twelve hours. Hello, Connie.” The examiner, who had climbed a six-foot stepladder to examine the corpse while it was still suspended, was Paul Anderson, the man who had found the unfired Luger cartridge in Lewis Welker’s mouth. He was wearing a corduroy sportcoat with elbow patches, like a U of D professor’s, and a blue polka-dot necktie that ran out of material above his sternum after the long trip around his linebacker neck. “You can take him down now.”
His wrists had been wired to a steel beam that ran the length of the ceiling, after which a blowtorch had burned big oval holes through his clothes and suppurating blue scars on the flesh beneath. Somewhere along the way, either from pain or fear when it was happening—I couldn’t believe fear, not of him, not even then—or after the shock finished him, his sphincter and bladder had released, and under the odor of scorched cloth and roasted meat lay the stench of a public toilet. He was wearing his old cap and shabby suitcoat, the one Nathan Rabinowitz had had repaired for his day in court with Jack Dance. His expression wasn’t pained, but stoic, as it had always been, as it would always be now, until the worms got him.
Bass Springfield, the best left fielder the Biloxi Bullets had ever had. He had hit safely in thirty-eight consecutive games, his son was going to be mayor someday. In the two years I’d known him he had said maybe twenty words to me total.
While the police photographer, a swarthy slob with filthy nails and a soup stain on his hat, took pictures of the room, a morgue attendant I bribed regularly to steal autopsy reports went up the ladder with bolt cutters while his partner got to stand with his arms around Springfield’s hips to catch him when the wires parted. There were several plainclothes detectives standing around, some of them wearing the rubber raincoats and galoshes of the Prohibition Squad, holding useless axes and looking like guests at the wrong party. If Gabriel had brought a raincoat, he had taken it off, but his ubiquitous Panama was wrapped in cellophane. Kozlowski had on a new-looking Palm Beach suit and his old fedora and tiny wingtips. The suit had already begun to conform to his sloppy configuration.
“We got an anonymous call there was a still up here,” said Gabriel, I assumed to me, although he was watching the attendants. “Nobody here knew anything, I have it on their authority. Nobody had any business on this floor today. Maybe. My six-year-old nephew goes blind the same way every time his dog shits on my sister’s carpet. Anyway, we had to get a forklift to move the stacks of crates so we could get to Springfield. They put them there last night to block the windows, keep the torch flame from showing outside.”
Kozlowski thrust a blowtorch at me, unlit. I flinched anyway. “Go ahead, take it,” he said. “It’s been dusted.”
I took it in both hands, the first time I’d ever held one. It was heavier than expected and shaped like a watering can with a jet and a screw valve on top. Cool to the touch. I smelled kerosene.
Kozlowski said, “They left it behind, as who wouldn’t, get stopped on the street carrying a torch, ha, with a barbecued stiff upstairs. Smell the handle.”
I hesitated, then lifted it, sniffed. I handed it back.
“That stink don’t wipe off as easy as prints,” he said. “You’d think the son of a bitch would wash his hands once in a while.”
Gabriel produced a wad of tissues from a pocket and coughed into it. He made a business of folding and returning it to his pocket, for once without inspecting the results. “I saw that column you wrote a couple of weeks back, about Dance kidnapping Stink. The chief thought maybe you left something out.”
The last strand of wire let go with a noise like a guitar string snapping. The attendant on the floor woofed and almost sat down under the corpse’s sudden weight. Its arms remained stretched over its head, its knees didn’t bend. If its toes weren’t pointed downward the attendant could have stood it on the floor like a statue. Kozlowski laughed.
“You boys’re going to have to bust him in two to get him in the drawer,” he said.
Anderson said, “Not till I’m through with him. Postmortem contusions are hard enough to subtract from the rest without broken bones.”
“We know what killed him, Doc. All’s we need is when, exactly.”
“Tell me when he had supper and I’ll tell you when he died.”
I said, “They were holding Barberra in Springfield’s apartment. Springfield’s wife and baby were there. I don’t have to tell you why I didn’t write about that.” I watched the attendants roll the corpse like a log into the rubber bag they’d unzipped and spread on the floor on top of the canvas stretcher. It was as if Springfield’s stiff crippled hands had spread throughout his body.
“They probably blindfolded Stink when they brought him there and when they took him out,” Gabriel said. “They didn’t have to bother. Stink’s got ears and a nose and he can add up to twenty-one if he takes his shoes and socks and pants off. We sent a car for the woman. Maybe she saw something.”
“Are you arresting Machine?”
“We’ll talk to him.” Kozlowski relit his stogie. As often as they smoldered out, I figured he got them at the same place Jensen bought his pipe tobacco. “My guess is he was holed up with his lawyer all last night, or out whoring around in front of fifty witnesses. Sure you didn’t see nothing else that night?”
“A new Cord followed me for a while downtown. I lost it at the park.”
“Could you identify it?”
“I wouldn’t mistake it for a Studebaker in court.”
Kozlowski laughed his snorting laugh. “Yeah, ain’t them sheeny legals something. Okay, Minor. If you hear from your pal Dance, tell him we want to talk to him. We called his wife, she ain’t seen him since yesterday. Maybe he’s in the river.”
Anderson and the morgue attendants took the body in its rubber cocoon down in the freight elevator in back. The kid in the main elevator looked at me a second time when I got in. “You all right, mister? You look a little green.”
“Touch of influenza.”
“That’s tough. You see the nigger? I bet it was the Klan, them Black Legionnaires.”
“Shut up, you little bastard.”
“Hey, fuck you.”
Jensen was out of the office. I called Jack’s house in St. Clair Shores. Vivian answered.
“Did the bulls tell you what happened?” I asked without saying hello.
“No, they just wanted to know where Jack was. Do you want to talk to him?”
“He’s there?”
“It’s Connie,” she said, away from the phone.
“Connie, what’s up?”
“Jesus Christ, Jack, Joey’s looking for you. What are you doing at home?”
“I just stopped in to show Vivian I’m still kicking. What do the bulls want? I’m clean since May.”
There is a compulsion to tell about death. It’s still unique after all this time. I told him about Springfield. I didn’t leave anything out. There was a long silence on his end, and for once no music. Then something banged in my ear and I thought someone had been shot. More banging then. He was hammering the receiver against something, a wall or something. I shouted his name several times. A copy boy stuck his head inside the door curiously, then withdrew it. After a couple of minutes Jack’s voice came back on. There was a humming on the line now, the words were broken up by static. I figured the tin cup must be smashed almost flat. “I’m here, Connie.”
“You better get under somewhere,” I said. “The others too. Joey and Barberra are on the prod.”
“They better be. They better come with cannons and a fucking tank.” He thanked me for calling. We said good-bye.
I didn’t write about Springfield’s death. I let the others have that beat. Howard ran something from the well and when it appeared I was already pixilated. Somehow—I’d been to several places first and I don’t know now where it was or how I found it, she was moving every couple of weeks now to stay ahead of Gabriel—I landed at Hattie Long’s. I remember how she looked, the expression on her face when she saw me, its heart shape and astonished drawn-on eyebrows and beestung lips, I even remember what she was wearing, a silver lamé shift with a scoop neck and a chain around her waist, sandals with glittery heels, but I don’t remember what was said, or if anything was. I woke up with two girls, still drunk, one or both of whom I had seen someone mounting from behind, cowboy fashion, someone who looked a lot like the guy whose picture ran every day in the Banner on top of his column sucking a cold pipe. “That’s how Greeks fuck, honey,” said the other one, the one watching. The guy slapped her, just like a gangster, just like James Cagney. I had a sprained wrist the next day and Hattie charged me twenty dollars extra for dental work. The girl had a loose tooth. Johnston, Hattie’s bartender-bouncer-ex-prizefighter, backed the claim. “See if I come back to this dump,” I said, paying. I was still drunk. It took me an hour to find my car, by which time I was sober and mean. I rear-ended a Polish welder from Dodge Main on Joseph Campau and took a swing at him. Two bulls, one of them a mounted patrolman with spurs on his boots who smelled like Tom Mix’s horse Tony, pulled him off me. I was booked as a disorderly person. Howard Wolfman bailed me two hours later.
Professional detachment, that’s my middle name.