Lost Girl Page 3
The city was settling down to dinner when we checked into work, and there were usually assignments waiting: a political meeting or charity banquet, with speeches; a late school-board session or a speech by the mayor; a feature story to be reported and written - about a lady, say, who had twenty-four cats and exasperated neighbors, or a pair of twins who had been reunited after forty years. We took telephone rewrite on routine crime stories from Chipper Morris, the superannuated permanent night man on the police beat. Sometimes, if Chipper was sick or on vacation, one of us would fill in for him on the beat. If there had been a fatal accident or a gas station attendant had been shot in a holdup, one of the guys in the office would take a car out to interview the family and bring back photographs - the “dead art,” we called it. We had wild conversations with crazy people who called the newspaper at night to share their delusions, and we settled bar bets with immense assurance. There was a standing joke about the cub reporter who told a caller that a full house beat a straight flush, and then got sent to cover a shooting at a poker game.
But the real work was the breaking news, which was unpredictable and always got priority: a big fire, a murder, a natural disaster, a baby down a well, a politician who died in the wrong bed. Sometimes all three of us would be out on the same story, covering different angles, with Sandy at the center moving us around and keeping us all informed. Sometimes we would stay on a story all night, working hours past our usual midnight departure and coming in just in time to write it for the first edition or phoning in to a rewrite man. Once Steve went out on an industrial accident over in Canada, a dozen men killed when a gravel pit caved in, and he was still chasing dead art on the victims at noon the next day. Phil Sanderson had one of the rewrite men call Steve’s wife Mary, out in the suburbs, to tell her he was okay and had eaten a good breakfast. That part of it was a lie, but we all thought it was a nice gesture. So did Mary.
We lived in dread of being beaten on a story. The word “scoop” was out of date and faintly ridiculous, and we never used it. But we grabbed each new edition of the Eagle and the Courier as the copy boys trotted them in, searching for the headline that would clutch at our stomachs - an angle on a story that we had overlooked, or a whole story we had somehow missed. Once I turned in a sidebar interview with the family of a girl who had been killed by a hit-and-run driver. It was sound enough; nothing wrong with it, as far as it went. But Al Greenberg had talked to some of the neighbors, and his sidebar in the Courier’s first edition had the tragic irony angle: the girl’s father had served time in jail for a hit-and-run accident, and now he was doubly punished. Clarence Mannion himself told me about that, calling me at home to chew me out. What did I think I was doing out there? Did I think people were always going to tell me the whole truth just because I showed up with big eyes and a notebook? I felt sick and stammered. It was bad luck, Sandy told me that evening, but it’s a good idea to check more than one source, too. On any story.
News is where you find it, Sandy said: keep your eyes open and your mind in gear. One of his cautionary tales was about a young reporter the city desk had sent out years ago to cover a meeting. Hours later, the kid called in and said he hadn’t been able to get to the story because the streets were full of people fighting. That turned out to be the great race riot of 1943, and the unlucky cub had to find another career. Unlike him, we were supposed to be able to recognize a story when we saw one. Over the years, I have learned that that isn’t as easy as it sounds: the biggest stories, like the slow decay of Detroit itself, are almost always the hardest to see - and the hardest to get your editors to print, too.
* * *
We three had all been marked by the Depression, stamped in childhood with the sense of economic peril: jobs could vanish, homes could be lost, there was no security. All our lives we would think twice before spending money. We were boys through World War II, chiming to the jingoism of the wartime propaganda, as sure of America’s nobility as we were of the ultimate victory. The sudden revisions of the Cold War, Korea and McCarthyism had disillusioned us, but only in part. Now, in the waning years of Eisenhower, we were bored and put off by the materialism and shallow complacency of the new suburban boom. Detroit itself symbolized the age, we thought, with its automotive dreamboats and backyard barbecues and poodle-skirted girls. It was just outside Detroit that the shopping mall was born, with Hudson’s department store chasing its customers to the suburbs. The Journal was implacably Republican in its politics, hailing Eisenhower as the incarnation of Midwest virtues. But we identified with the unknown pressroom subversive who kept committing a typographical error that always infuriated the editors. Every week or so, we would spot it again: “President Eisenhowever . . .” On a loftier level, we saw ourselves fighting the same guerrilla war.
But we weren’t all out of a stamping press; there were distinctions. Steve Cooper represented the future of reporting, a Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton with a nice wife and two kids in the suburbs. He was a likeable guy who looked like a Scott Fitzgerald hero or an old Arrow Shirt ad, with his classic handsome face and quick, engaging grin. His father was a Chrysler vice president who lived in Bloomfield Hills, and you would have said Steve would wind up in business or maybe the law, but he had a knack for the news business; as James Thurber once said, he could get it and write it and put a head on it. He could also think about it, with a fund of information and background that the old Front Page crew could only sneer at. Steve was obviously going a long way. He might even wind up in Washington with a national byline in the New York Times.
Ed Grabo was something else again: a second-generation Pole from a grimy downriver neighborhood among the steel plants, a bulky ex-Marine who saw the job as a real step up from his father’s life on the turret crane. Ed seemed disheveled and lumpy, with a round rubbery face and meaty lips, but he had unexpected stores of knowledge about politics and history. He was smart, and a good deal faster and harder than he looked - a good man to have around if things got rough. They sometimes did, in our late-night bar cruising: by the time we got off work, soon after midnight, the downtown bars had a lot of pugnacious drunks. Ed had a kind of easy assurance that deflated them. While Steve and I had been avoiding the Korean War with educational deferments, Ed was ducking bullets at the Chosun Reservoir. Then he went to the University of Detroit on the GI Bill, with a major in journalism. Along the way, he had shed a lot of his downriver, downscale background. Ed had learned middle-class English almost as a second language. He spoke slowly and precisely, mostly in complete sentences and never dropping his G’s. His war record got him a tryout at the Journal without the usual small-paper apprenticeship, and he was good enough to stick, in some ways the best reporter of us all. Steve and I might try to wing a story, accepting an obvious inference or writing around the holes in our reporting, but Ed worked by Sandy’s rules. He checked the spelling, even when the name was Smith: after all, it might be Smythe. He always got the age and address. He never shied away from asking the obvious question. If you were working one end of a story and he was across town on the other end, he gave you a lot of confidence.
I was a mixed breed. My father was one of the early movers in the United Auto Workers, an idealist who had fought beside Walter Reuther and Dick Frankensteen against Harry Bennett’s goons at the Battle of the Overpass at Ford’s old River Rouge plant. He had brought me up since my mother died when I was twelve years old, and I had soaked up his fierce socialism, his scorn for management and Republicans, his near-idolatry of Franklin Roosevelt. I also admired the reporters he sometimes hung around with, their wit and cynicism and all the things they seemed to know. At Michigan State, the Cow College, I had read The Front Page and Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair, and I relished the legends of Hearst and Richard Harding Davis. That had led me to journalism classes and the Gazette. Now, at the Journal, I was coming to understand the real newspaper world, but I still liked the work and the talk and the remnants of the old Ben Hecht swagger. Being a reporter was a fine grab-bag of experience, from hobnobbing with cops to interviewing a visiting archeologist about his excavations in Peru. You had to learn each new subject from the top down, a quick gloss of the latest news with enough background to write knowingly without embarrassing yourself. I thought of myself as a professional dilettante: in twenty minutes I could find out enough about anything to carry on a cocktail-party conversation.
But reporting was also a kind of evasion. I had spent my life waiting to be a grownup, to join the real world, and I was still one step outside it, hanging back. I told myself I didn’t take sides, but what I was really avoiding was commitment. Sandy once invited me to go along on some mysterious errand in Algeria. He wouldn’t tell me anything about it, just that he would square everything with the paper and I would find it interesting. I was young enough to think that being a secret agent would be romantic and intriguing, but there was a line I didn’t want to cross: the line between watching and doing. Looking back, I see that I granted myself no claim on the world and wanted to give it no claim on me. But at the time I saw myself in Plato’s cave, interpreting the shadows of real people and real events. Perhaps someday I would come out into the light, but not yet. Actually doing things was inherently ridiculous, exposed and risky; I might fail, publicly and shamefully. It was safer and smarter to lurk in the cave, a critic, carping at the mistakes other people made and keeping my own shortcomings secret. There was always the watcher in my skull to spot those, commenting caustically on everything I did, pointing out all my failures and gaucheries. He made me a spectator at my own life.
And that was Sandy’s long, gentle quarrel with me. I would learn, he told me once; indifference was a sin, even for agnostics. I argued, loftily, that it was a reporter’s first duty to stay out of the story, never to become
part of what he was writing and lose his cool about it. Sandy said you couldn’t stay out of a story, that as soon as you showed up your presence changed it, and there was no such thing as objectivity. But you could be fair, he said, and you could do that without being neuter or losing your sense of values. Most of the argument was implicit. Sandy asked his quiet questions and made his own small interventions: he got involved, and we could make what we liked of it. Mostly we didn’t even know what he was doing. Long afterward, when he died, it came out that he had kept in touch for years with some of the people whose problems he had written about. He had even sent some of them money. Sandy was never a camera.
* * *
Sammy Gold brought the beers from the bar and sat with us, leaving his bartender to deal with what customers were left. It was another late supper, three or four days after Molly’s murder, and the conversation was rambling around as usual, glancing off one subject after another, gossipy and unfailingly educational.
Sammy was a character, an old guy who had been some sort of minor hanger-on with the Purple Gang in the ‘30s. As a gang, it had been ordinary enough for the times: rum-running until Repeal, then the numbers, extortion, prostitution, loan-sharking, and the like. Not much to do with drugs; they would be just a specialty item for blacks and a few musicians until the marijuana and heroin boom of the ‘60s. The gang’s distinction was that its members were almost all Jewish. There were Jews in organized crime, like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, but in our part of the world, gangs were either Italian or nondenominational: the Purple Gang was unique as a big-league Jewish mob. Sammy was short, bald, and conspiratorial, speaking elliptically out of the side of his mouth, even about the weather. He liked to imply that he kept in touch, and sometimes you saw him in a back booth with some hard-looking characters who talked the same way he did, but nods and winks were all the information we had ever gotten from Sammy. He liked reporters, though, and so did his wife Norma, who often tried to lure us into serious literary discussions.
Norma was one of the prime attractions at Sammy’s: blonde, a former showgirl getting a bit thick, with her copious chest on display in black lace blouses. But her role was to be the gracious hostess of the place, helping out with the waitressing only as a favor to special patrons. Norma was a lady, refined, who had been to college, spoke correctly and never swore. She also took an interest in the arts, especially literature. She was partial to Faulkner but couldn’t stand Hemingway; she said he was nothing but chiaroscuro. I thought I knew what that meant but looked it up to be sure: in painting, the use of bold contrasting colors to create the illusion of depth. Norma had a bad case of Culture, but it wasn’t all phony. I liked her.
Norma had been fascinated and appalled by the Molly story, and tonight she wanted to hear more about it. That made Sammy impatient; the only crimes that interested him came with dollar signs attached, and he wanted to talk about the Senate hearings on organized crime. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas was mining the vein that year, hoping for some of the headlines that had made Estes Kefauver a presidential contender in 1952. So Sammy sent Norma off to make sure the bartender wasn’t dipping too freely into the till- “A11 the bastards steal you blind,” he growled - and laid into McClellan again. Sammy’s thesis was that the hearings were political bullshit, playing to the TV cameras by forcing mobsters to plead the Fifth Amendment.
“What’s so bad about that?” said Steve, who had been reading Kefauver’s book and was generally interested in the criminal world. “Dave Beck might still be president of the Teamsters if McClellan and Bobby Kennedy hadn’t laid him open last year. Beck took the Fifth when they asked him if he knew his own son. That’s memorable stuff.”
“It’s bullshit,” said Sammy. “Those guys don’t know anything.”
I thought those guys knew a lot more than we were likely to learn, reporting the local scene. Organized crime was clearly real, and Kefauver had drawn a lot of blood in Detroit by uncovering close and embarrassing links between the mob and some local businessmen. Even the Big Three were involved. Ford’s labor relations had been run for years by Harry Bennett and his goon squad, and as late as 1951, long after young Henry Ford II had the guts to fire Bennett, the New York gangster Joe Adonis held the contract to haul all the cars built at Ford’s plant in New Jersey. The crime convention in Appalachin, New York, had been uncovered by accident just a year ago, in 1957, and some of the fifty-eight men caught there were Detroiters. But when I tried to check them out, on a slow night when I was filling in on the police beat and schmoozing with homicide detectives to pass the time, I got the deadpan treatment. “Bonelli? Joe Bonelli?” said Lieutenant Al Flanders, all perplexity and furrowed brows. “Seems to me I heard of him, but it’s nothing but chickenshit stuff, you know? Fights and maybe a burglary, like that. Same with Dom Angelomo.” Joseph Zerilli, supposedly the mob’s biggest man in Detroit, drew a complete blank: to hear Flanders tell it, he had never heard the name. Maybe the police had been paid off, or maybe it was just healthier not to be curious. I had checked the Journal’s morgue, and there were no clips on any of the Detroiters before Appalachin. Did that mean we had never printed any stories about them? Sandy wasn’t sure, but he thought they had probably managed to clean out whatever files we had on them.
“Where’s the big money these days, Sammy?” said Ed. “If you were back in business, what business would it be?”
“What you mean, kid?” said Sammy, with a heavy wink. “I’m in the bar business.”
“No, where’s the real money? Gambling? Shakedowns?”
“Always popular,” said Sammy. “Put those together with sharking, you got a sound proposition.”
True enough. When a losing gambler or a small businessman scratching to make his protection payment had to borrow from a loan shark, the vigorish - the interest - could run to fifty percent a month. A missed payment meant a beating, and the vigorish kept running. Two misses could mean a broken kneecap. When the shark gave up hope of collecting, the deadbeat wound up dead: a reminder to other clients.
“But that’s chickenshit stuff,” Steve argued. “Around here anyway, the real money is in business. You have to find a way to tap into the corporate till.” Look at Sam Perrone, Steve said: Sam had broken one strike for old John Fry at Michigan Stove, and he was set for life. “Fry gives him the waste disposal contract, and he tucks away 50,000 dollars a year. That came out in the Kefauver hearings.”
“Ah, Kefauver,” Sammy said, contemptuous. “Tip of the iceberg.”
“Perrone’s son did even better at Briggs Manufacturing,” said Steve. “He gets the trash contract, takes his cut off the top and then hires back the old trashman as a subcontractor. Doesn’t do a lick of work.”
“Strike-breaking is just for openers in the labor rackets,” Sandy said. He had been sitting there, quiet, waiting for a chance to instruct us. “Running a union is the real ticket to big money.” Even a local union leader, he said, could shake down businessmen by threatening an organizing strike and going away when the company paid off. There were any number of ways to screw your own members: signing sweetheart contracts, for instance, in exchange for money under the table. Or you could get kickbacks from banks for running the pension fund investments, or make loans to your friends, or put local unions in trusteeship, and play games with the dues. “You can draw a fat salary and put all your expenses on the swindle sheet,” Sandy said. “You can build a house for yourself with the union’s money, sell it to the union as a presidential residence and live in it rent-free. Remember those two in the Textile Workers, the ones McClellan found last year?”