“IT’S FUNNY HOW THE second-and third-rate speaks all hung on to become restaurants and such while all the best ones got torn down or turned into laundromats. I interviewed Chaplin here when he was in town researching Modern Times, and the service isn’t any better now than it was then. How’d you track me down?”
His companion’s racing-changes between subjects made Canada struggle to catch up. He swallowed a mouthful of corned beef and rye and chased it with beer from a thick mug. “I called the Detroit Press Club. They told me you spend a lot of time here.”
Here was a busy restaurant in the warehouse district, a cave of a place cut into the side of a soot-stained brick building that was new when Detroit was the stove-making capital of the world, before Henry Ford saw his first piston. The walls were plastered with black-and-white pictures of federals with axes staving in kegs and cases of bottles, and the tables all had shelves under the leaves for stashing the evidence whenever the cop on the beat strolled past a window—a pretty conceit, as if the cop wouldn’t stop in to wet his own whistle. On a stage the size of a speaker’s platform, a girl in a turtleneck sweater and jeans with straight blonde hair to her waist sat on a high stool strumming a guitar and warbling a song about the Civil War. Consistency of theme was apparently not a priority.
“I keep up my membership, God knows why. I haven’t been near a typewriter in twenty years.”
Connie Minor, baptized Constantine, was a round little man with fine white hair brushed back over pink scalp and bright, intelligent eyes in a red face that made him appear jovial; an impression that faded within five minutes of meeting him. He tasted his chowder, recoiled, and poured ice water from his glass into the bowl. He wasn’t drinking. A coin-size medallion on a silver chain around his neck announced for the benefit of paramedics that he was diabetic.
“Before looking you up I read some of your columns in old issues of the Banner at the library,” Canada said. “They hold up better than anything else in the paper. Why’d you quit journalism?”
“I quit it the way Batista quit Cuba. While I was busy getting in tight with the Purple Gang and that crowd, the news business was developing a social conscience. I never did. I thought it was tough enough getting along as an individual without having to drag the whole human race with you. Still do, which is why Cronkite never calls. Oh, I bumped along for a while, did some vacation columns for the News and Times and a couple of radio scripts for The Lone Ranger when I really got desperate. I even wrote a book. I don’t imagine you read it. It was about Jack Dance.”
The Brock book was the first one the inspector had found time to read in years. “Was he as kill-drunk as they say?”
“Jack? He played cops and robbers his whole life. He thought everyone got up and brushed the dirt off after the shooting was over and went home.”
“What do you do now?”
“Sell power lawn mowers. Want one?”
“I don’t have a lawn.”
“That’s what everyone says. I sure do stink.”
Canada drank some beer. “Can we talk about Albert Brock?”
“You bought the soup.”
“Do you know Clinton Baedecker? He wrote a book about him.”
“I read it. It’s a joke. No, we haven’t met.” He blew on a spoonful.
“What’s wrong with it?”
He returned the spoon to the bowl. “Cold. I shouldn’t have added the water.”
“I meant the book.”
“I know.” He pushed the bowl away. “There are two million Steelhaulers in this country. A million and a half of them would carry Brock on their shoulders to the Cape of Good Hope and back if he asked them to. The rest are too young to remember what the union was like before he took over and cleaned house. A million of them easy would buy a book about Brock if it was properly respectful. Dr. Zhivago didn’t sell a million copies. Baedecker isn’t in the business to go broke.”
“Are you saying the book is a whitewash?”
“Come on, Inspector. You read it.”
“I read it as a cop. I’m asking your opinion as a journalist. Or as someone who sells power mowers.”
“There isn’t a thing in it you couldn’t get out of press releases from Brock’s office. Son of a poor trucker makes good through pluck and luck; that’s not a biography, it’s an episode of Leave it to Beaver. The first Greek laborer who refused to add another brick to the Parthenon until he got a second handful of grain hired someone with a broken nose to protect him from the broken noses the contractor hired to change his mind. To hear Baedecker tell it, you’d think Brock never shook a hand that ever held a blackjack.”
“He didn’t have any broken noses to back him up at that plant in Dearborn.”
Minor’s smile almost managed jovial. “You did read the book. The Reader’s Digest cut out that part.”
“Baedecker told me the strike didn’t amount to much.”
“Not if you don’t count several broken heads, courtesy of Sal Borneo and the Dearborn police. I was there. Were you ever hit by a leather sap?”
Rabaul sprang forward, clearer than memory. “No. Not by a sap.”
“It’s not much more fun to look at. Borneo’s thugs went through those auto workers like salt through a hired girl. Jack Dance was one of them.”
“What about Brock?”
“He fought his way clear. I caught up with him in a blind pig around the corner and interviewed him there.”
“I read your piece.”
“Not my piece. My editor spiked the piece I wrote and ran four inches about a commie uprising. If I ever had a chance to cultivate Brock as a source I lost it that day. I had a feeling about him, too. It sounds like hindsight now, but if you were to ask me at the time which one of the people I saw that day would still be talked about thirty-five years later—Well, hell. I picked Seabiscuit too and didn’t put any money down.” He sipped at his water.
“Borneo was boss of the local Mafia then?”
“They called it the Unione Siciliana in those days. Maybe they still do. But yeah. Joey Machine pretty much had to cooperate with Sal, and even Jack Dance listened to him now and again when Jack wasn’t chipping away at the Machine mob, which was pretty near all the time. Those were wild days. A bunch of us prided ourselves on knowing who was fighting who and who was neutral from one week to the next. These days, gang-watching is about as exciting as matching socks.”
“You’d be surprised.” Canada sat back, playing with his mug. “When did Borneo switch his support from management to labor?”
“Just before the press did. That’d be about the time Harry Bennett opened fire on strikers with machine guns at the Ford plant. The Mafia always was sensitive to public opinion; also the smell of money. There was getting to be a lot of it in the union kitties. Anyway, Borneo wasn’t making many decisions by then. He was under federal indictment for interstate labor racketeering and had suffered his first stroke. Someone else was calling the shots.”
“Frankie Orr.”
Minor looked away, at the girl, who was now singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “Frankie married Borneo’s daughter. I don’t know why he bothered. The old man knew what he was doing when he brought him in from New York.”
“You met him?”
“Just once.” He returned his gaze to Canada. “I was sitting as close to him as I am to you when he slit a man’s throat with the same knife he used to cut his steak.”
The inspector said nothing.
“It was in a private dining room at the old Griswold House. I don’t remember the man’s name. He was just some flunky who’d got on the wrong side of Frankie’s wallet. I remember he was eating rack of lamb, because it was floating in blood before he finished thrashing around. I haven’t been able to look at a plate of mutton since. Yeah, I met Frankie.” He drained his water glass and swallowed.
“Did you write about it?”
“In the book, finally. He’d been deported by then. I always had this idea that if I could write about it I could forget it. It didn’t work. Maybe that’s why I quit writing. What good is it if it’s not therapeutic?”
Canada said, “He’s back. Frankie is.”
Minor watched him. He went on.
“Patsy’s been spending a lot of time lately in a telephone booth across the street from the Penobscot Building. When we found out Frankie had disappeared from Sicily we asked Ma Bell for a record of long-distance calls placed to that number. It came through this morning. He’s in Puerto Rico, a place called the Pinzón Hotel in San Juan.”
“It’ll be the best one in town. Frankie was never one for rustic charm. Have you told the feds?”
“We’re sitting on it for now. They’d just yank him back and we’d have to start all over again. You don’t seem surprised he left.”
“I’m surprised he stayed as long as he did. Napoleon was on Elba only ten months, and he didn’t have TWA. When do you expect him back in Detroit?”
“Not right away. He’s working something, and whatever it is he won’t risk blowing it by calling attention to himself. Puerto Rico is American soil. He’ll be content there for a while.”
“Somebody knocked over a Negro policy operation last night on the East Side. That’s three recently, with two deaths. Think it’s connected?” He smiled at the inspector’s reaction. “I don’t write any more, but I read. A story like that has a comfortable, old-timey, Joey Machine School feel. The Orr style wasn’t all that different, for all the manicures and European tailoring.”
“It isn’t big enough. He already owns every game in town. Assuming they aren’t just independent heists, we think Patsy’s just showing off for the old man.”
“Patsy never got over starting out in an incubator,” Minor said. “You know something you’re not telling, but that’s okay. Why’d you tell me about Frankie when even the feds don’t know he’s back?”
“Because you haven’t told me everything you know about Orr and Albert Brock. And because all this you’ve been saying about not being a newshound any more is just so much bullshit. Were you in the service?”
“Four-F, both wars.” He touched the medallion at his throat.
“I was a Japanese POW for sixteen months. There was a mirror on the wall of the officer’s toilet where they took me twice a week for interrogation. The look on my face in that mirror while they were booting me around is the same one you’ve been wearing since I got here.”
Minor rested his forearms on the table. His left hand wore a University of Detroit class ring with most of the embossed letters worn off. “I spoke to Brock only that one time, after the Dearborn strike,” he said. “But I’ve been following his career. Call it guilt for that piece of crap the Banner ran instead of the story I wrote, but he made an impression on me. He handed out leaflets for Walter Reuther for a while, but the UAW wasn’t big enough for both of them and he took what he learned with him when he went back into trucking. Like most pioneers he was a realist. He knew that highminded idealism is no defense against brass knuckles. Thugs are cheap. He passed the hat, upped the ante, and hired some torpedoes right out from under the van lines and auto plants. A good ten percent of those heroic proles you see battling it out with strikebreakers in the old pictures are professional goons. In the process Brock had to have rubbed elbows with Frankie more than once. They were partners long before Frankie backed him for president of the local, probably even before Frankie’s father-in-law Sal switched sides. At one time, Borneo strongarms were fighting each other and collecting two paychecks. That’s something you won’t read in the history of the American labor movement.”
“Nor in Baedecker. How come you know so much, or are you going to pull out that old saw about protecting your sources?”
“Sources that need protection are generally unreliable. Whores are best. When they talk at all, they don’t lie; no reason to, they screw you for a living. I don’t look it now, but I used to know my way around the upstairs joints.”
“No wife to slow you down, huh.”
“Now you’re getting personal.”
It was said casually enough, but Canada was aware he’d stepped over some invisible threshold. He backed up. “What else did you hear?”
“The rest is rumor. Maybe a couple of union men martyred to the cause were actually eliminated from inside the ranks for reasons best known to Brock, meaning they were stealing from the strike fund or spying for the other side. A dispatcher named Pike vanished on a deer hunting trip several years ago, along with evidence tying Brock’s campaign committee to a series of hijackings in Ohio when the boss was up for re-election and the treasury was low. Even if you could prove murder you wouldn’t be able to trace anything back to him. If Frankie were that sloppy he’d have gotten life in Jackson instead of a one-way ticket to Palermo.”
“Theoretically that last one would be Patsy’s red wagon, not Frankie’s. There’s only so much you can do from across the ocean.”
“Where were you in nineteen forty when Stalin had Trotsky killed in Mexico?”
“Rumors don’t spend,” Canada said after a moment. “I need something I can show the mayor.”
“What do you want to do, topple Brock or scare him off?”
“He doesn’t scare.”
“I’d hate to see him fall,” Minor said. “Whatever he’s done he’s done for the union. The Steelhaulers know that, and it’s why they keep voting for him in spite of the occasional attempt by some full-of-himself politician to discredit him. You don’t claw your way to the top of an organization like that without getting blood and dirt under your nails, and only one man in a million can play ball with the Sicilians without giving them the field. Whoever follows him might as well hand them the key to the front door, because we only get one Brock to a generation, and the next one won’t have his luck.”
Canada smiled. “For a hard-nosed old bloodhound you sound an awful lot like a convert.”
“We graduated from the same class. The current breed of journalist spends more time combing his hair than grubbing around after a lead, and the next generation of union executive will come straight out of business school without knowing a clutch from a catfish. If us dinosaurs don’t stand up for each other, who will?”
“Does that mean you won’t help me?”
Minor produced a ballpoint pen and wrote a name and a telephone number on his paper napkin, which he slid across to the inspector. “Hang on to it. When I was young we didn’t give out ladies’ numbers.”
“Who is she?”
“Just mention me and tell her what you want. Whether she gives it to you is up to her.”
“Is this … ?” He left it unfinished.
“Her aunt was. I almost married her.”
Their waitress came over for the first time since she had served their meals. Canada paid the bill and the two went out into the brassy afternoon light. The alley that ran past the warehouse, paved with sun-bleached asphalt that had long since begun to degenerate back to the cracked earth beneath, ended at the river. Rusty iron rails crossed it in several places among piles of broken concrete. The riverfront on the other side was more of the same. Windsor always reminded the inspector of a boy constantly correcting his stride to match his father’s, even when the father stumbled.
Connie Minor was also looking at the river. “A lot of good whiskey came in over that water, under it too; there’s still a tow cable down there someplace. A lot more was just plain moose-sweat. The Canucks caught on early that it didn’t have to be good to make a profit.”
“Miss those times?”
“Not for a minute. I had them. That’s why I cut the kids more slack than most, even with all that’s happening in the colleges. If you don’t screw up early and often you won’t have any stories to tell when you get to be my age.”
“I’m fifteen years younger than you and there are some stories I’d just as soon not have to tell.”
“That’s the hell of it, Inspector,” Minor said. “You don’t get a choice.”