THE ADDRESS CANADA HAD written in his notebook belonged to a new brick ranchstyle in Allen Park, one of those architectural one-sided coins with fretwork and built-in flower pots in front and a back as plain as a Dixie cup. The flagstone path that ran past the picture window had been claimed by an overgrown juniper hedge. With an oath, Canada surrendered his shoeshine to the grass, still wet from the day’s rain. Evening shadows made black shag of the lawn.
The doorbell brought a small woman in her middle thirties to the screen. He took off his hat. “Miss Niles?”
“Yes. Are you Inspector—?”
“Canada. Thanks for agreeing to see me.”
Her short laugh was husky and entirely mysterious. She reached up and unhooked the screen door and he pulled it open and stepped inside.
Susan Niles had on a simple knitted dress—taupe, if he remembered the name of the color correctly from his married days—cinched at the waist with a pleated belt. In low-heeled slippers she was almost a foot shorter than her visitor. Her hair was ash blond, nape-length and swept to the side in an almost careless fashion that he liked, and her chin came to a point; the only fault he noted on short acquaintance. She turned away without offering to take his hat.
“We’ll talk in the living room. Can I get you anything?”
“Thanks, I just had supper.”
She stepped down carefully into a sunken room containing a lot of heavy furniture that appeared to be suspended a few inches above the pile carpet until he got close enough to see the thin steel legs. The walls were bare, but painted in soft colors that lessened the effect of no pictures, and where a television set would have stood in most households was a stereo in a walnut cabinet and a rack filled with LPs. Although the lights were on, she reached out and felt the wall switch. Canada knew then that the blue eyes were sightless.
“How is Connie?” She touched the arm of a plaid sofa and sat down.
He trusted his weight to a tulip chair and laid his hat in his lap. It occurred to him that he could just as well have put it back on. “He ought to get out of the lawn mower business. He hates it.”
“He needs the money. And he won’t go back to newspapers.”
“Did he tell you I’d call?”
She nodded. After a little silence she said, “I’m not Connie’s mistress, if that’s what you’re thinking. He knew my Aunt Harriett.”
“He said something about almost marrying your aunt.” He wondered where this was going.
“Long was her last name.”
He nodded, then remembered the uselessness of gestures and said, politely, “Oh?”
She smiled in his direction. “There’s a scrapbook on the table by your chair. I hope it isn’t too dusty. I got it out after you called. I memorized everything in it long before the glaucoma.”
He’d noticed it when he sat down, an old-fashioned ledger-size volume with thick boards bound in raveled green fabric. He transferred it to his lap and lifted the cover carefully to avoid smearing his hands. A brittle brown clipping from the old Detroit Times was pasted to the first page. The picture, taken with a flash and rubbed and faded with years, was of a woman in a cloche hat with circular penciled eyebrows, beestung lips, and Susan Niles’s pointed chin. MADAM TESTIFIES IN M’DONALD CASE, read the block headline. It was dated October 2, 1939.
He looked up. “You’re Hattie Long’s niece?”
“I thought you might recognize the name, being a policeman. Just about no one else would. She died when I was thirteen.”
“Some of the older officers were still talking about her when I joined the department. She ran a blind pig back when blind pigs were blind pigs. The Rooster.”
“The Cock,” she corrected. “The newspapers cleaned it up in print. It was named after the stuffed rooster in the window of whatever building she happened to be using between raids. You forgot to add that the blind pig was also a whorehouse.”
“I seem to recall that it was more than that.”
“It was where every politician and policeman above the rank of sergeant went to get paid off in town. When that came out during the grand jury a lot of vacancies opened at City Hall.”
“Thirteen Hundred too,” he said. “That’s how I got into the training program.”
“Until the day she died, Aunt Harriett thought I thought she was a stenographer. Young ladies didn’t read newspapers then. It’s funny how naive the truly jaded can be. All that time I was keeping that scrapbook. She was my father’s sister; if my mother ever found out I visited Aunt Harriett in her apartment—well, she didn’t. When Hattie died, I inherited a cigar box full of photographs. They’re all in the book.”
He turned pages. More clippings from the grand jury investigation into events surrounding the suicide of Janet McDonald, the jilted mistress of a corrupt police official, sprinkled among black-and-white snapshots with serrated edges of mixed groups seated around bar tables and smiling in front of automobiles with running boards and bullet-shaped headlights and picnicking on a younger, cleaner Belle Isle. The articles told him, if he didn’t know already, that the Grecian Gardens affair was nothing new in the history of the
Detroit Police Department. Most of the people in the pictures were unknown to him. In one, Hattie Long, in a low-cut gown with silver clips at the shoulders, sat at the back of a horseshoe-shaped booth with her hands resting on the arms of a skinny young man in a tweed jacket and crooked bow tie and an even younger roughneck wearing a two-hundred-dollar suit and the broadest grin Canada had ever seen. His curly hair needed trimming. Canada commented on the picture.
“The one on the left is Connie,” Susan Niles said. “The big one is Jack Dance.”
He looked closer at the roughneck, at the expression and posture of a youth well aware of his good looks. Nothing in his appearance suggested that he was the man the press had dubbed Jack the Ripper after bullets from his gun cut down a teenage girl by accident during a gangland assassination attempt on Sylvester Street. “He looks like the captain of a college football squad.”
“Aunt Harriett said he received more fan mail during his murder trial than Valentino.”
He turned over a few more leaves, questioning and commenting as he went. He didn’t know what he was looking for and the blind woman was no help. She seemed to be waiting.
By the time he found what she was waiting for he had seen so many lost faces he almost went past it. Two men were seated at a Formica-topped table with schooners in front of them and a forest of tall-necked beer bottles standing between. They appeared to have just noticed the presence of the camera and were turning in that direction when the picture was taken. The man on the left, dressed in a forty-dollar suit and the characteristic white socks of the last working-class generation, was Albert Brock; twenty-five years younger perhaps, dark-haired and powerfully built rather than stocky, but Canada had been staring at his likeness too much lately not to recognize him. The other man, older and dressed more expensively but constructed along similar lines, looked vaguely familiar. He had dark thinning hair cut short and a five o’clock shadow. Recognition nudged gently at the inspector’s memory.
Susan Niles interpreted the long silence. “You found it.”
“Harry Bennett. That’s Harry Bennett. When was this taken?”
“Connie asked the same question the first time I showed it to him. It’s dated on the back.”
He dismounted the photograph from its corners and turned it over. The notation, written in blurred pencil, read “Roseville 5/28/37.” He read it aloud.
“Aunt Harriet was operating a beergarden in Roseville then. How’s your UAW history?”
He ran a silent check of his knowledge of the United Auto Workers and caught himself shaking his head. “Not as good as yours, I bet.”
“On May twenty-seventh, nineteen thirty-seven, Walter Reuther, Richard Frankensteen, and other union officials gathered in front of the Ford plant in Dearborn to hand out leaflets. A gang of thugs hired by Harry Bennett beat them up and threw Reuther down the steps of the Miller Road overpass. The Battle of the Overpass, it was called.”
“That much I know. I didn’t know the date.”
“Not many do. You also might not know that a number of other unions went out on strike in sympathy as a result of the action. One of them was the Steelhaulers.”
It was as if a door in his brain had been opened to a room full of light. The blind woman sensed it; nodded.
“Brock was a shop steward for the Steelhaulers in nineteen thirty-seven,” she went on. “The question is, what was he doing having a beer—several beers—with the man responsible for the overpass fight when every other union man in town was burning Bennett in effigy?”
“We could ask Bennett.” But the answer was no less rhetorical than the question. Henry Ford’s strongarm chief, long since forced into retirement by the old man’s grandson, was an aging recluse, decomposing bitterly inside a ring of his own security men in a castle he had built for himself in Ann Arbor, turrets and all. Canada fingered the snapshot. “Who took it?”
“Aunt Harriett. She was a shutterbug after Repeal. I think she knew about the cancer early and wanted to leave some kind of record behind. She used to say the marks a prostitute makes generally burn away with the first cigarette. I was her favorite family member, so she left it to me.”
“If it can be proved Brock made some kind of secret deal with Bennett, the union will dump him in the next election. It wouldn’t matter how long ago it happened; the majority of the rank-and-file are old enough to remember Bennett and hate his guts. I wish there were some way to verify the date.”
“There’s a newspaper in the frame. Is the date visible?”
It was folded lengthwise on the table by Bennett’s elbow. The partial masthead identified the paper as the News. Part of a headline said something about Spain. Bennett’s left hand rested on the corner where the date would appear. “No,” he said. “But if this headline is about the Spanish Civil War, that would narrow it down to thirty-seven. We could blow it up, match the issue to the one on microfilm in the library or at the News. Bennett would probably be carrying around that day’s newspaper, but it wouldn’t matter if it were a week old. He certainly wouldn’t have it before the twenty-seventh, when keeping company with him wouldn’t be so incriminating. Can I borrow this?”
“You can keep it. I have no more use for anything in the book.” The blue eyes, entirely ornamental, were shadowless.
He placed the picture carefully in his billfold, closed and returned the scrapbook to the table, brushed the dust from his trousers, and used his handkerchief to wipe his hands. With nothing more to do, he stood. Her face followed him up. “Personal question,” he said.
“Why.”
“Yes. I don’t think you care about Albert Brock one way or the other. You’re not arbitrarily malicious.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I was a cop before I became an inspector. When you lose that you’re through.” He waited.
“That scrapbook is Hattie Long’s life,” she said. “As long as it just sits there she’s dead, really dead. This way—well, whatever the result, it’s like she’s still out there somewhere. Of course you’ll let me know what happens.”
He promised he would, and took her hand when she started to rise. She squeezed her thanks and let go. Her fingers were strong and calloused lightly at the tips. “What do you do, Miss Niles?”
“I teach Braille at Cranbrook.” She smiled, suddenly and dazzlingly. “Aunt Harriett might approve. I think.”
“I’ll bring back the picture.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’d like to.”
“All right.”
She walked him to the door. He put on his hat and opened it. “You see plenty for someone without sight.”
“I’m blind,” she said. “Not stupid. Good night, Inspector.”