THE LOCASTE WAS A converted navy minesweeper, stripped of armaments and painted white with jaunty red trim over the original battlewagon gray, but still martial-looking in its spartan lines and belligerent prow. A stiff breeze—the only one blowing within miles of Detroit on this blazing Wednesday in mid-July—wrinkled the aluminum-colored surface of Lake St. Clair and set smaller craft swaying, but the locaste sat like so much pig-iron in its slip while frustrated waves thudded its hull. In this, Canada thought, she was much like her master. The inspector walked out on the pier carrying his jacket over one shoulder and stopped at the foot of the gangplank, wondering if he was supposed to ask permission to come aboard. He had not been on a ship or a boat of any kind since he’d returned from the Philippines. Finally he went up. A large young man in a blue suit blocked his path at the top. He had fair hair and the beginnings of a sunburn on his cheeks and forehead. Canada showed his badge. It had as much effect as the sunburn.
“It’s a cop, Mr. Brock.” The young man raised his voice without turning away.
“He’s expected.”
Canada followed the young man along a new teak deck to the stern, where the president of the American Steelhaulers Association was sitting in a deck chair with his ankles crossed and a glass in his hand. Brock wore a white cotton short-sleeved shirt, pleated khaki shorts, a long-billed fisherman’s cap, and deck shoes on his bare feet. Small shoes, small feet. Canada wondered how a man could spend years double-clutching eighteen-wheel rigs and walking picket lines without pounding his feet as broad and flat as Swiss steak. The shoes were wearing through at the toes, the shorts and cap were dirty, the bill finger-marked and creased down the center, and the shirt was smeared with something that looked like old blood.
“Go find a movie,” he told the young man.
“Sure, Mr. Brock?”
“I get along with cops. Now.”
The young man started back toward the gangplank.
“Something with Dean Jones,” Brock called after him. “He goes to see those old gangster shows in the art houses, thinks he’s Mike Mazurki,” he told Canada, sitting up to shake hands. His grip was a knuckle-buster, the result of union election campaigns rather than truck driving, which he hadn’t done in decades. “Sit down, Inspector. In my work we do everything on our asses.”
Canada moved an empty deck chair into the shade of the aft cabin and sat. The change of angle gave him a view of a man in his middle fifties starting to take on flesh over large biceps and thick hairy thighs and around his waist. He had a healthy-looking tan and his face was handsome in a broad, solid, American working-class kind of way. He looked as if he could still clear a bar with very little help.
“Thanks for the time, Mr. Brock. I know you’re on vacation.”
“Vacation, hell. I’m getting the old girl ready to take some boardroom Hemingways up to Port Huron after salmon. They can’t fish for shit but you’d be surprised what you can do with them once you get them out of their air-conditioned offices and into some real clothes. Neckties just cut off blood to the brain.”
“I didn’t know you fished.” Canada was now sure it was fish blood on Brock’s shirt.
“I grew up in Rouge, you kidding? If I ever tried to dip a worm in that water he’d’ve crawled back up the line and slapped my face. My doctor told me to find a hobby for my gut. Slug of milk? It’s ice-cold.” He indicated a pitcher full of white liquid on the folding table next to his chair. When Canada shook his head, Brock topped off his own glass. “Too young, I guess. My theory is everyone who grew up during Prohibition is fighting ulcers. We thought we had a special obligation to drink as much liquor as possible, and some of that stuff they were passing off as Canadian would eat a hole in a brass bucket. What’s on your mind, Inspector?”
“I work for Jerry Cavanagh.”
The union leader showed his bottom teeth. “Guess I shouldn’t have sent Dan to the movies. You figuring to weight me down and drop me overboard or just leave me here for the gulls?”
“Of course I’m not here to shoot you.”
“Don’t act like it never happened. Well, it must be blackmail, then, because if it was a payoff he’d send a lawyer.”
“What have you got against the mayor? Don’t bring up that business about the city labor contracts; I don’t buy it.”
“I don’t like him.”
“You supported him the first time he ran.”
“I hated Miriani worse. That was then. I can’t stand the mick bastard. Let’s leave it at that.”
“I never thought I’d hear a politician say he wouldn’t support someone just because he didn’t like him.”
“I’m not a politician.”
“How long’s it been since you ran steel?”
“Politicians lie for votes; I never did. I won’t say I never lied. But not to the union. That kind of lie is like atomic fallout. You can duck it for a long time, but it’s still waiting for you when you come out.”
It was an opening, but Canada didn’t step through it. The photograph Susan Niles had given him remained in his wallet. So far Brock had navigated the course of the conversation. Canada changed that by changing the subject. “Are you acquainted with a man named Curtis Dupree?”
“Sounds French.”
He took the mug shot from the inside breast pocket of his coat hanging on the back of the chair and reached it over to Brock, who studied it.
“Well, he’s not French.” He handed it back.
“You don’t know him?”
“Never saw him. What’s he wanted for?”
“He belonged to the Steelhaulers.”
“There are two million Steelhaulers. Do you know every cop in Detroit?”
“We pried this one out of the trunk of his car at Metro Airport last Friday. He had a thirty-eight slug in the back of his head.”
“Then I guess I never will know him. What’s Cavanagh’s interest?”
“We’re pretty sure Dupree was the wheel man in an attempt on the life of one of Patsy Orr’s men last week.”
“I don’t know Patsy. I knew his old man, just to talk to. In the old days you had to know all kinds of people.”
“I think you know him better than that.”
Brock whisked away his milk moustache with a finger and set his glass on the table. “Why don’t we step on the gas? We’ll get there quicker.”
“Frankie Orr wants to start a war between the local mob and the Negro numbers operations citywide. The Negroes would lose and while his son Patsy’s recovering, Frankie plans to nail down the policy racket for himself. He couldn’t very well arrange the contract through his son, and any connected operation he went to would run to the Commission, who would have Frankie hit rather than take the heat from a race war in Detroit. I think he went to his only other local contact who could set up something this big. That’d be you.”
“I don’t owe Frankie Orr anything.”
“You owe him this boat and your office downtown and everything you’ve got on down to your skivvies. Everybody in town knows that except your biographer.”
“Can everybody in town prove it? Can you?”
“I’m not here to prove anything,” Canada said. “Dupree’s partner the triggerman could, if he’s still alive, but I don’t need him. I brought everything I need to stop this war.”
Brock watched him rummaging in his coat. “Thought you weren’t going to shoot me.”
Canada found his wallet, took out the snapshot, and handed it to the union leader.
“The whore,” Brock said after a moment. “She was always taking pictures. You stopped noticing after a while.”
“You have a good memory.”
“It was the only time I ever met Bennett. The miserable son of a bitch is hard to forget.” He turned it over and read the date.
“We tracked down the newspaper in the picture,” Canada said. “Friday, May twenty-eight, nineteen thirty-seven. The day after the Battle of the Overpass. I guess a dead cockroach would have beat out Bennett in a union popularity contest that day.”
“That was a UAW beef. That horse’s ass Walter Reuther wouldn’t have anything to do with me when I was working at Chrysler; thought I might snatch his goddamn presidency right out from under him. Would have, too. Anyway there wasn’t any love lost between him and the Steelhaulers. I thought I could negotiate a separate deal with Ford’s, but Bennett wasn’t having any. The stupid bastard thought he’d won that war. My guess is you made copies.” He gave back the picture.
“You should’ve grabbed the camera the minute it was taken.”
“Where would she go with it? The press was on Bennett’s side. Not that the picture means anything.”
“The rank and file might not agree. When one union goes out they all follow. Solidarity.”
“Bullshit. We fought each other as much as we fought the shops. Every third man was a management spy, and half the scabs who drove trucks when the Steelhaulers went out were UAW men who’d been banned from the auto plants.”
“That was then.”
Brock filled his glass with milk and drank it off in a draft. But for that he seemed as unagitated as when Canada had arrived. “I’ve been around too long. I’m working with business-school graduates who don’t know a gear box from a cigar lighter who keep telling me the history of the union I built. I always learn something new. Just yesterday one of them told me I ought to buy stock in one of the steel companies and run for a position on the board. It would give us a say in how the company’s run, he said.”
“Makes sense.”
“My folks kept ducks and chickens during the Depression. Fox killed the hen and all but one of her chicks. That chick started hanging around with the ducklings, ate with them and followed the mama duck all over the yard with the others. One day it followed her down to the river and drowned. Forgot it was a chicken, see. No,” he said, “you got to keep your ducks and chickens separate.”
“Ever considered retiring?”
“And leave it to those whelps? In six months you couldn’t tell it from General Motors.”
“Except for the Mafia.”
“They’ll get their hooks into GM too. I’ve been fighting those guineas straight uphill since nineteen thirty-one.”
“The strike at the Chrysler plant,” Canada said.
Brock tilted his head back, taking his face out of the shadow of his cap. The sun found pleats there that the cameras missed. “You did your homework. I’ve still got a scar on my scalp where one of those headbusters sapped me. It didn’t used to show.”
“That was before they switched sides.”
“They came around when everyone else did, including the papers. There’s no money in losing.”
“A race war’s too high a price to pay for Frankie Orr’s past support, Mr. Brock. It wouldn’t stop with the numbers parlors.”
“Don’t go Pat Boone on me, Inspector. I was getting to like you. You wouldn’t be here if your boss didn’t want to be President.”
“You don’t have a picture. I do.”
“It isn’t evidence.”
“Evidence is for lawyers. You know how it goes in politics. All you have to do is open a crack.”
“I guess you didn’t catch the news this morning. The union voted to kick into my re-election fund.”
“The shop stewards voted. They vote the way the rank and file tells them to, and the rank and file hasn’t seen this picture. Those business-school graduates you mentioned aren’t alone. Half the present membership wasn’t born when you were elected to head the local. They don’t know how bad things were before you became national president. But they all know about Harry Bennett and the Battle of the Overpass. That’s how it is with legends.”
“What’s your pitch?”
“The next time Frankie calls, you don’t know him.”
“If it was that easy, I mean, assuming he ever calls,” Brock said, “there wouldn’t have been any reason to deport him in the first place.”
“If it were that easy I wouldn’t need this picture for leverage. Taking orders from Frankie Orr or anyone isn’t your long suit.”
The union leader took off his cap, ran his fingers through his graying brush-cut hair, and put the cap back on. “I guess all this is off the record. Extortion isn’t covered in the police manual.”
Canada shrugged. He felt a confidence coming like cold metal against his spine.
“I always could bargain with Frankie,” Brock said. “We both knew if he pushed too hard some of it would slop over into the papers, and after the stink that went up when Joey Machine bought the farm he treated headlines like the clap. Now it’s like he doesn’t care. You can’t dicker with a man who thinks he’s got everything to gain and nothing to lose.”
“Can you hold him off?”
“That depends on how long.”
“Just through the hot weather. It’s hard to get up a good riot when you’re standing in snow ass-deep.”
Brock spread his hands, an eloquent move on the part of someone who understood the magic of gestures. It was good enough for the inspector, who held out the snapshot.
Brock took it. “What about the copies?”
“I didn’t make any.”
“Risky.”
“I didn’t think so.”
He tore it in half, then quarters. He put the pieces in his shirt pocket and patted it. “Wouldn’t want to be arrested for polluting the lake. What about the mayor?”
“You can only buy so much with a picture.” Canada rose.
“It’ll be business as usual when I get back from Port Huron. From here to election time I don’t plan to let up on him.”
“He’ll survive.”
Brock shook his hand. “You fish?”
“Never cared for it.”
“Too bad. Look me up if your tastes change.”