Whiskey River Read Online Free Page A

from him, for chrissake. He ain’t Leopold and Loeb.”
    The bulls backed off, lowering their weapons. Kozlowski holstered his revolver, then put a hand inside the right slash pocket of his raincoat and drew it out as a fist. He took two steps and stood in front of the kid, who had half an inch on him. The brim of the lieutenant’s hat was almost touching the kid’s forehead. He slid his knuckles up and down the raincoat’s lapel restlessly. “What’s your name?”
    “John Danzig.”
    “You a kike?”
    “What?”
    “A hebe. A yid. A sheeny. A goddamn pork-avoiding Christ-killer.”
    “What if I am?”
    They were the same words he’d said to me, but the lieutenant wasn’t having any. I didn’t see his fist leave his lapel. The crack was as sharp and as loud as the pistol shot earlier. The kid staggered back into one of the bulls standing behind him, who shoved him away. He fell down on one knee, got up, and fell again, pitching forward from the toes. That was the end of it. I’d lost enough money on the fights to know they don’t get up again once they go down on their face.
    His brother didn’t move then or later. He was the thinker as I said.
    Lieutenant Kozlowski flipped the little sap he’d had hidden in his fist and returned it to his pocket. Then he unhooked a small key from the chain attached to his belt. “Run upstairs and cut loose the Indian, son,” he said, handing it to me. “We got our body.”
    He was instructing someone to call it in from the box on the corner when I ascended out of earshot.
    I didn’t see Jack Dance again for two years. He was using his new name then and it was hard to believe he’d ever been off his feet.

Chapter Three
    W HERE TO START.
    Wide-Open Detroit was just yesterday, but so much has happened between then and now that it all seems like a half-pleasant dream that needs analyzing.
    We had a jump on the rest of the country in the bootlegging department for two simple reasons: 1. Ontario, Canada, which was also dry but permitted the manufacture of liquor for export, was only three minutes away across the Detroit River; 2. Michigan went dry a full year before the Volstead Act prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages kicked in across the United States. By the time New York and Chicago got into the business, Detroit had rumrunning down to a science.
    Not that there were many white coats involved. Although the practical Poles were mixing the stuff in their bathtubs in Hamtramck and selling it in Mason jars out of their car trunks on Joseph Campau, the main traffic was on the river. There the fastest boats in maritime history ran Coast Guard blockades to deliver crates of whiskey and barrels of beer to Cadillacs and Lincolns waiting on the docks in Ecorse—Robbers’ Roost, the locals had christened that stretch along Jefferson Avenue—and at the foot of Riopelle Street in Detroit proper. The demand always exceeded the supply, and the supply was greater than in the days when it was legal. Everyone, it seemed, was in the liquor business. You could stand before an anonymous apartment house on Michigan Avenue or Gratiot and guess how many windows belonged to blind pigs, just like the suckers who lined up in front of J. L. Hudson’s downtown to estimate how many marbles resided in the big jar in the display window and win a new Packard. Some experts said there were twenty thousand illegal drinking establishments in the city. Others said it was more like twenty-five thousand. There could have been a million. They didn’t register at the Wayne County courthouse.
    The city was growing fit to be tied, only you had to catch it first. America was on wheels and Detroit supplied the motors. Art deco buildings sprang up downtown like gothic toadstools; from 1923 to 1928 you couldn’t walk a straight path across the Grand Circle in the heart of the business district without tripping over a hundred sawhorses. It was a red-bandanna town with white-collar dreams,