Whiskey River by Loren D. Estleman Page B

Polish taste: corpulent lamps with beaded shades and mohair overstuffeds and red roosters on the curtains. A floor model Radiola was tuned low to the Casa Loma Orchestra.
    I realized then that I had never seen Jack in repose; that he was always doing something, as if one quiet moment might cause the dynamo that charged him to shake itself apart. And I thought for the first time how exhausting it must have been just to be Jack Dance.
    Camarillo—Lon—sat opposite him cheating himself at solitaire. He looked badly emaciated in a BVD undershirt and loose pinstriped trousers, like French prisoners in picture books about the Great War. The bones of his arms stood out like umbrella staves. Andy Kramm, small and neat in an argyle vest, white Oxford shirt, and black pegtops, leaned against the kitchen arch sipping a Coke. He looked too young with his bright blue eyes and close-cropped towhead to have served in the war. Springfield was asleep upstairs, having stood sentry duty the previous night. But for the heavy ordnance the three might have been grown brothers come home for a reunion.
    I tried to get comfortable with a pad and pencil in a quagmire of cushions and antimacassars masquerading as a davenport. “Why’d you tell me Rosenstein had Hannion killed?”
    “I wasn’t sure you’d help if you knew it was Joey.” Jack began reassembling the pistol.
    “How deep are you into him?”
    “I bought a brewery. You figure it out.”
    “Why a brewery, with Canada five minutes away?”
    “Beer’s where the money is, but it takes up too much space coming across. I bailed a guy out. He was making that legal three-two wolverine piss and going under, so I bought the works.”
    He was being uncharacteristically modest. By the time it was finished, Jack Dance’s brewery would represent the largest single bootlegging investment in Detroit since the frantic six months following the passage of the Volstead Act. Pooling his chiseled profits with the resources of his handful of loyalists in return for venture shares, he had acquired the brewery and the warehouse that sheltered it and was at that moment engaged in retooling and in employing experts to improve upon the brewing techniques used by Machine in his less ambitious operation. With the help of an immigrant German brewmeister named Scherwein and three tank trucks purchased from a failed gas company in Toledo for deliveries to his commercial customers—the trucks painted to resemble Standard Oil tankers—he would threaten Machine’s East Side monopoly with a superior product offered at competitive prices.
    What Jack never mentioned, and what didn’t come out until he and Joey were both dead and Sal Borneo was defending himself in court against charges of income tax evasion and interstate labor racketeering, was that Jack’s major cash outlay involved bribing certain authorities to let his enterprise alone. For this he had borrowed heavily from loan sharks connected with the Unione Siciliana. It was an old underworld maxim that the Italians would sell a paisan into slavery for a greater share of the market, and here was one Jew willing to put it to the test. Meanwhile Borneo pocketed the proceeds and went on playing the disinterested mediator.
    I took down as much as Jack was willing to share about the brewery, as well as the details of his posturing in the face of the Machine threat, which was in the process even then of being resolved through Unione efforts. When I got up to leave:
    “Come back when this is over and cover my wedding.” Jack dry-fired the Luger at a kewpie doll on a shelf, testing the action.
    “Who threw the loop over you?”
    His smile over the pistol was actually shy. “Her name’s Vivian Deering. You saw her at the Graystone the night after the Erie run.”
    I remembered the woman with the Greek profile. “I know that name.”
    Andy said, “You should. She was Gus Woodbine’s old lady.”
    “She ain’t no old lady,” Jack said testily.
    It’s