“HELLO?”
“Al, this is Phil in Chicago.”
“How are you?”
“Same. The back, you know. Plus I got some trouble with the Commission.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Just too goddamn many meetings. Sometimes I wish it was like in the old days with Sal. Somebody gave you a pain in the ass, you sent some boys over. You know. Now we have meetings.”
“Times change.”
“Times change.”
Pause.
“So what’s what, Phil?”
“It’s this Whitey Esposito. He unloads the ore boats at Ford’s there, the Rouge plant. They laid him off?”
“He went to you?”
“Don’t sweat it, Al. He knows me. I knew his old man.”
“He’s got a lot of balls. He’s off one day, he runs to you.”
“Al, the way we look at it down here, even if he’s not with us, one of the family, he’s a friend of ours.”
“I don’t give a shit whose friend he is. I got friends was laid off that same job. I’m in the middle of negotiations here. I can’t worry about no one man. He could be my brother, I got a whole union to think about.”
“Don’t get sore. I’m saying friends of ours shouldn’t get the same deal as the rank and file.”
“That’s the way it is, is it?”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“Phil, I tell you what. I don’t run girls, you don’t tell me what to do with my steelhaulers.” Click and dial tone.
Lew Canada switched off the little recorder. The reels stopped turning. He looked at Ed Wasylyk across the yellow oak table. The sergeant had traded his uniform for a plaid sportcoat, slacks, and a knitted blue shirt with a white racehorse embroidered over the pocket. His pouchy face looked older and less healthy without the starched blues. His hair, a mousy combination of brown and gray, needed trimming. “Who’re Al and Phil?” he asked.
“Phil Benito. He’s mobbed up down in Chicago, owns a string of laundries and whorehouses there. State Department’s in the middle of deportation proceedings against him. For soliciting, although he’s responsible for three murders that the Chicago P. D. knows of. He looks after Mafia interests here in the Midwest; that’s the Commission he was talking about. Al is Albert Brock. We had a tap on his line for about a month last year. That’s when the conversation you just heard took place.”
“This the American Steelhaulers Brock?”
“There’s another one?”
“You won’t hang him with this tape.”
“Hell, no. Every little kid in Detroit knows the steelies go hand-in-glove with the Cosa Nostra. We got others would tie Brock up in court till nineteen eighty, if we could only use them.”
“Who’s stopping you?”
“The Supreme Court, for one. Thirty years we been tapping phones, now they say we need a court order, which we can’t get without probable cause, which is why we tap phones in the first place. Anyway, Brock pays guys to sit in the dock for him. What we want is bars in his face.”
“How come?”
Canada showed his white teeth. He spent almost as much time brushing and flossing as he did in the shower. “You mean besides siphoning off the Steelhaulers’ pension fund to keep his paisano friends happy?”
“Fuck that. You don’t hear the members complaining.”
“Albert Brock could rape Ladybird Johnson live on Dean Martin and the rank and file would claim she attacked him,” Canada said. “That’s because he’d loan his last dime to a steel employee in trouble if it didn’t get in the way of contract talks. He knows which side his bread’s buttered on and who churned it. And he’s the only man who can keep the wops from robbing the union treasury blind while he’s national president and make them like it.”
“Sounds like a good argument in favor of leaving him where he is.”
“Which is what we’d be doing if he stayed smart and kept his nose out of Detroit politics.”
“I was wondering when we’d get around to the mayor,” Wasylyk said.
“Why’d you think I took you into an interrogation room to discuss this? The walls of my office stop two feet short of the ceiling. That squad room’s a direct pipeline to the Eyewitness News Team.”
“Cavanagh’s got a hard-on about Brock, huh?”
“More like the other way around.” Canada leaned forward and laid a hand on the table. His long, clean-pored face, shaved with a scalpel, reminded Wasylyk of the death-mask of some minor eighteenth-century English general he had seen once in the Detroit Institute of Arts. He wondered what the inspector’s nationality was. “What I say next stays in this room,” Canada said. “Cavanagh’s record squeaks: Second term in office, no garbage strikes, he’s got the race thing pretty much nailed down. No other big-city mayor can claim anything like it except maybe Daley in Chicago. And Daley doesn’t want to be President.”
“Jesus. I didn’t know he had the bug. I knew he was running for senator.”
“He’ll crap out. The party nomination will go to Soapy Williams, who raised the Democratic donkey from a pup in this state. Point is it’s the mayor’s shot at a national profile. Why not President? He’s young, Irish, and Catholic, just like JFK. The voters are always hoping lightning will strike twice. He could stir up some dust at the sixty-eight convention if Johnson doesn’t run. Hell, even if he does. A lot of people who voted for him two years ago are wishing they hadn’t.”
“Bobby Kennedy might have a thing or two to say about it.”
“That prick.”
“So what’s the Presidency got to do with Albert Brock? I know he ain’t running.”
“The American Steelhaulers Association is the most powerful labor union in the United States, maybe in the world. Brock controls a third of the blue collar vote in this country. How’s it going to look if the mayor of an industrial town like Detroit can’t claim a boost from a labor leader in his own backyard?”
“What’s Brock got against him?”
“He doesn’t like the way Cavanagh handled the contracts with some city employees. We intercepted a memo he sent to the head of the local last year, urging him to advise his people not to vote for re-election. Of course there were others. Labor support for the mayor dropped twelve percent in November.”
“He still won.”
“He might not have if Brock had brought his opposition out into the open. That memo was meant as a lesson, a little sample of what he could do if Cavanagh doesn’t toe the line. A line he has no intention of toeing for Brock or Princess Grace. Like you said, he’s got the bug. So we have to do something about Brock before he can get up to speed. The senate primary this fall is history. We’re looking two years down the road.”
Wasylyk fished a crushed pack of Pall Malls out of his shirt pocket and lit one off a kitchen match he struck on the table. He dragged in a lungful and tossed the curled match into a corner with the others. “I’m a cop, not a fucking press secretary. I thought you were too. I liked you better when I thought you was a sneak for Internal Affairs.”
“On the books, the unit was formed two years ago separately from I.A.D. to report directly to the mayor on charges of wrongdoing inside the department. ‘Wrongdoing,’ that’s what politicians call crimes in the eighty percent bracket. We do some of that; Cavanagh knew about those Grecian Gardens payoffs before Vice raided the place last January. What we really are is his private staff. That’s another piece of information that doesn’t go out that door when you do. The voters wouldn’t understand why a man in office in a free country would need secret police.”
“I’m one of ’em, I guess. My old man voted for Eugene Debs. So what’s the game plan?”
“Trace this Mafia thing to its source. We know Brock’s office is into Patsy Orr because of the muscle Patsy’s old man Frankie lent Brock twenty years ago when he was running for president of the local. Frankie Orr was a visionary, but he always looked too far ahead. That labor racketeering thing is what got him deported finally. Sal Borneo was supposed to go down for the same thing, but he died. You remember Sal. Frankie married his daughter.”
“Can’t tell the Sicilians from an A-bomb without a score-card. That the Sal our boy Phil was yakking about on the tape?”
“Phil goes back a ways,” Canada said. “Not many of the old gang left. That’s why Frankie’s kid Patsy is in charge.”
“Patsy the Crip. The old man must’ve strained him through a sheet.”
“Talk is Frankie’s still running the show from Messina. Anyway, if we can track one dollar from the Steelhaulers pension fund to Patsy’s pocket, we can send Brock up to Jackson for a year, or at least snarl him in the system long enough to forget about making headaches for the mayor. Hell, the exposure alone would play hell with his support at the grass roots.”
Wasylyk flicked ash at the table. “Tough case to make. Those Mafia boys got more places to launder cash than Liberace’s got teeth.”
“I never said the job was easy. You in?”
“What’s my part?”
“Nothing you haven’t already done enough times to have strong feelings about. Stakeouts, the odd shadow job, some time undercover if it comes to that. It won’t. I got a federal judge might come through with an order for a temporary wiretap when the time comes. When it does you’ll take your turn on the earphones. You know the drill.”
“Doesn’t sound a whole hell of a lot different from what I been doing twenty-nine years. I thought detective work was supposed to be glamorous.”
“That’s the spy game. You’ve been watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” The inspector rose and smoothed the crease on his black suitpants. “Hey, it beats boosting disk brakes.”
“The brakes pay better.”
“Lawyer fees cut into the profits. So you in?”
Wasylyk took one last drag and mashed the butt into an old burn-hole in the table. “I got nothing better to do but sit home and watch Days of Our Lives.”
“Swell. Come up to seven. I’ll introduce you to the squad.”
“I’m dead on my feet. What’s it, three o’clock?”
“Almost four. You’ll have to get used to hookers’ hours. Sub rosa units work mostly at night.”
“Well, the overtime ought to make up for a patrolman’s salary.”
“What’s overtime?”
“Shit. I should’ve guessed.” Wasylyk stood, bones cracking, and watched Canada gathering up the tape recorder. “How come you can get an order for a tap now and you couldn’t then?”
“We didn’t know then what we know now about this particular judge. Remind me to show you his file sometime.”
“How’d you fill it?”
“Tapped his private line.” Canada held the interrogation room door.