Jericho Page 9

  That’s where the lawyer becomes even more important to the story, see. He was a real legal scholar. At the appeal he completely shot the Crown’s case out of the water, showing how witnesses had been bought with promises of leniency. The appeals judge overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. At the second trial, which began October 16 and ended on November first, MacLeod was acquitted, after the jury had been out nine hours. Now the cops were furious. But by that point everybody’s attention was on the war.

  When his conviction got quashed, Mickey was still awaiting trial on the unrelated matter of hijacking the booze truck. On that one he was convicted and stayed convicted and got sent down to Kingston for fourteen years. Halfway through the sentence, though, Mickey goes over the wall along with two other cons. There were suspicions they got help from some of the guards. There was an enquiry. The second of the three went his own way and was recaptured.Mickey and the third one beat a straight line back to Windsor, where they pulled off a bank heist for forty thousand in getaway money—a very big haul in those days, let me tell you—and made it across the bridge to disappear in Detroit.

  Now very few men have ever busted out of KP and lived to keep quiet about it. Mickey was a hard case all right but sometimes you get a grudging admiration for people that tough, even though you kind of hate yourself for it. Years went by and word filtered back up to Canada through official channels that the decomposing body of the fellow Mickey had escaped with had been discovered in a swamp somewhere in Mississippi. I think it was probably true. Everybody’s priorities had changed by then. The force and the Crown, I think, were happy to believe that Mickey must have died there too. Myself, I’ve always wondered if Mickey didn’t kill his travelling companion himself, the way a guy I once read about back in history somewhere killed his own dogs to keep them from fouling up his getaway.

  Today he’d be a very old man like me and we know how bloody likely that is, even for somebody that probably spent almost half his life taking it easy in Mexico, drinking those bright-coloured drinks and watching young girls come out of the surf.

  [Lonnie stopped talking, which was unusual for him, and stayed quiet for a long time. I thought that was the end of what he had to tell me. Then he started back up, like a TV that suddenly comes on again in the middle of the night.]

  Snaketown’s economy was what you would call diversified. Hostesses. Smuggling—goods and sometimes people. Boiler rooms selling penny mining shares over the phone.Bucket shops selling stocks in companies that didn’t even exist. Peddling gold bricks made out of lead to sucker lists of Citizens (there was a good trade in sucker lists). And yeah, dope too, though not like in your generation. And of course gambling, which included laying off bets. By the time I’m talking about, during the war and right after, there was so much legitimate money being coined on both sides of the river making vehicles for the army and then cars for the vets coming back that earning it the other way was never more of a cinch. There was so much money that the river stopped existing in a way. Or maybe it became a river of money and not just water, with two currents, you see, one flowing up and down and the other straight across from bank to bank.

  [I inherited my love of language from Lonnie.]

  For a while, Detroit took over from Chicago as the centre of gambling in the whole of America. This was before there was much of anything in Las Vegas except gophers and guys with lariat ties. Runners all over the country phoned their bets to the bookies that phoned them to Detroit where somebody else phoned them to Windsor or just carried them across the border. Getting into Canada was a snap, especially by taxi or bus. Going the other way was harder, so many Windsor cabs had Michigan plates to make it easier. Anyway, Windsor was where the risk was spread around. As far as gamblers were concerned, Windsor and not London was the insurance capital of Canada. The people in Detroit, they did all their accounting in Windsor. Snaketown was kind of the back office of the Circus over in Detroit, which appointed the Mayor of Snaketown, you remember him.

  [I reminded Lonnie of the time he took me along when he went to talk about building the sauna for the jockeys.Remembering, his face took on a little smile that showed off the weak circle around his mouth, where his dentures were.]

  Mr. S was a Greek named Nick Soumakis or, for some reason, Nick the Drum. Some said that this was because he used to be a musician. Believe me, he never played in no jazz band, though I guess he hired a lot of them in his day, for all those different nightspots he ran at one time or another, on one side of the river or the other: the Rounders’, the Egyptian, the Club Intime.

  The Soumakis family was big in the coal oil business. This is back when a lot of people used coal oil in their homes. Old people in East Windsor said they could remember him working for his father, driving a horse-drawn wagon with a big tank on the back. Personally, I can’t picture it, but this is what reputable people sometimes told me. Of course, reputable people will say anything that makes them seem more important than they are. Me, I was always happy just to be a handyman. That way I got to observe stuff. That way I could study history when none of the participants were watching.

  Today all you read about in the papers is this Free Trade deal. Brian Ef Mulroney didn’t invent Free Trade, the Mayor did. He moved back and forth across the border as easy as the wind and snow. I think it started when he realized there was no future in coal oil any more and gradually took over the family business and changed it into a vending machine company. He called on little places of business and asked them to take one of his machines, selling soda pop or cigarettes or what have you. At first the owner would get it for free and get a percentage of the money that went into the machine. Later he’d have to lease it. Mr. S would come around every so often, collect the coins in a big canvas sack with a hasp and a combination lock, and restock the machine. Then he’d send the store owner a cheque. He took in cash—silver is what I’m saying—but he’d only pay out cheques. You can see the possibilities. Of course, in time he had quite a few machines and a number of people working for him.

  Later he got into the business of actually leasing slot machines. This proved even more lucrative. This was at about the time that the Windsor cops got a brand new paddy wagon, a really big deal in the papers at the time, proof that the cops was keeping a lid on crime, arresting so many criminals that they needed to take them away by the wagonload. Of course, this was all nonsense. The raids on gambling joints and sporting houses were either a stunt or a question of an overdue payment, or maybe one of S’s enemies putting in the word. For the big guy naturally made a lot of enemies as he made money and branched out from machines into his own clubs and other things, if what I heard was true, getting people on the assembly lines to peddle dope to their co-workers. A lot of coloured people came up north to Detroit to get assembly line jobs, you see.

  Anyway, when the city bought its paddy wagon, S bought his own armoured car. It didn’t have writing on it but you knew right away that’s what it was. You could tell by how it was custom-built: a big square vehicle with an armour-plated cab and an armour-plated cube with slits in it. He was tired of people, people from Detroit I guess, holding up his collectors coming back with the heavy bags of silver, though usually of course it wasn’t only the bags they were after but the master keys. So S had everything brought to the armoured car and dropped through a slot. It all stayed locked up there overnight, usually inside a guarded building or in a parking lot behind a chain-link fence with lights shining on it. People that deal in cash don’t trust banks very much. Your grandmother used to get a kick out of me saying that we kept our savings in the Bank of Maxwell House.

  [At this point I couldn’t tell if the look of pleasure in Lonnie’s eyes came from remembering his wife in one of her good periods or general reflection about the old days. They had both vanished, but there were plenty of mementoes around. By this time he had moved into a room in the former Dempster Fireproof Hotel, the last of the old places still standing after they tore down the Prince Eddy in
′78. He’d known the Dempster in his youth as one of the locations where play took place. Now almost all the other buildings around it were gone. After being a hostel used by the social work agencies, the Dempster was turned into assisted housing for seniors. The halls smelled a bit of that disinfectant that comes in big plastic barrels. The clerk at the front desk sat behind a protective mesh screen, maybe a nod to the old days, maybe not.]

  As a person who never said much but always kept his ears open, the way a good historian is supposed to do, I heard two different versions of what happened next. One is that the Eyetalians in Detroit got serious about trying to take over S’s play by sending thugs into places of business to bust up the machines with ten-pound sledgehammers and once or twice tipping off Customs about dope coming across the border. The other is that S was the aggressor and used Cappy Smith and other people to make inroads in Detroit. The end result was the Dynamite Wars. You know about the Dynamite Wars, don’t you?

  [He wasn’t expecting a direct answer.]

  The Mayor of S-town was basically a pacifist who just wanted to make money and play Santa Claus at the Egyptian Supper Club in Detroit or someplace over on this side, where he was known for the generosity he showed to everyone on his name day—it’s a Greek thing. The Egyptian came after the Rounders’ and continued to be his main office even after he got into racing. One night somebody put a dozen sticks of dynamite stolen from some mine in Northern Ontario up against the side of the building. They didn’t go off. A few nights later somebody in a Packard threw dynamite at the front of the building, but the young Cappy Smith saw it rolling along the pavement and pulled out the fuse. He was handsomely rewarded for that act of bravery, I’ll tell you. The moral of course being it’s not only who you know, it’s being in the right place at the right time. The Border Cities Star later ran a story saying that the dynamiter with the bad luck was someone the Detroit Eyetalians had paid to be let out of the Michigan State Penitentiary at Jackson to do the job. As there was no record of his leave of absence, he had the perfect alibi if asked.

  [Lonnie still called it the Border Cities Star right up to the end almost.]

  Well, soon there was dynamiting right back. There was a big blast and the whole front of a nightspot in the Circus just fell out into the street like a slice of wedding cake. This kind of occurrence went on for a while. There was a lot of sympathy for Mr. S in Snaketown and other places because people thought he was trying to keep the Yanks out of here. Americans were coming over to little Windsor to pull robberies. A pair of them pretending to be architects got the blueprints of the biggest jewellery store in Windsor and somehow got a key made to let themselves in. They got away with eight hundred rings and diamond watches plus a lot of the stuff that people had brought in to have repaired. The newspapers didn’t know this was a poach job and blamed organized crime in Windsor. S was furious and got into a shouting match with the editor of the Border Cities Star. It ended when S’s phone suddenly went dead after he shot it. This was out of character, for he was a pacifist like I say, but he was upset.

  Cappy Smith was sent to investigate, a dangerous assignment. Cappy found out the stuff had been sold to a fence in Cleveland for twenty thousand. The fence, who later deceased, sold the stuff to Cappy for twenty-five if Cappy promised not to rat him out. Cappy then resold it to a couple of brothers who owned a small hotel in Toronto. Cappy told S about the original fence but let the story end there. But I think S found out pretty quick. At one time, they’d been like father and son. One time when Cappy was in trouble in the States, S, as a matter of civic pride you might say, put the arm on the various local people to come up with the money to get him out of the jam. But now bad blood broke out between them.

  S didn’t want any hustling at his spots. He was looking for gamblers, not boozers. He run maybe a dozen guys out of his places that he thought were lining up customers to stick them up. At some point during an evening, a client would go to his car for more money. The dumb guys would rob the client on the way back. The smarter ones would wait until he was in the game again and then break into the car or better yet steal it. The car, minus the loot, would always be found a few days later in the woods somewhere, run off the road.

  S’s first wife died of natural causes under mysterious circumstances. This was in the early days. A friend of your grandmother’s found the body. She told me how it looked, and it didn’t sound normal to me. People don’t normally bleed all to death after accidentally cutting themselves with a knife in the bedroom. For some reason, they had to send the corpse all the way to Toronto for an autopsy by the chief coroner himself, but no legal trouble came out of it. In fact, nobody heard or read any more about it. About the time Canada went to war against Germany, S married a second time. People said she was a singer at one of his supper clubs. Some even said she’d sung at the Imperial Room in Toronto, though I find that hard to believe. Maybe she sang in Detroit somewhere at one time, I don’t really know. It wasn’t the sort of thing you asked them about. She was named Lucille and she wore stoles with the foxes’ heads on one end and the little fox paws at the other, as was the fashion at the time. She tried to become a member of Society but the Citizens of Windsor with the dough wouldn’t let her squeeze in. She’d do things like hear about a high school that needed new gym equipment and then donate it all, only to have it refused. So she decided to go to the other side of the river and spend her way in over there. This turned out to be an important development in history because it sort of laid the groundwork for the end of the Dynamite Wars and the great bargain that S and the Eyetalians worked out together.

  The Ss decided to buy a place in Palmer Woods, one of the suburbs favoured by the big business cheeses in Detroit, the sort of people that belong to clubs, if you know what I mean. Mr. S must have spent a fortune on this shack. There was this enormous driveway and room for half a dozen cars in the garage next to it. Upstairs over the garage were servants’ quarters, though S didn’t use them for that purpose. That was where the bodyguards lived. In the main house, there were three bathrooms on the main floor and two on the second. I remember that. The master bedroom was huge, with big cedar closets you could stand in and swing around with your arms stretched out all the way. The furniture and all the dining stuff was really classy merchandise. There were paintings. I mean paintings. There were vases. The lady of the house pronounced the word so it rhymed with Roz’s. I know all this because for a while I had sort of free run of the place. It started with one of S’s middle-of-the-night phone calls.

  I went down to his place of business to meet him, and he tells me about the plans for their second home and the renovations that Mrs. S was already having done. He offered me a job, the biggest I ever had from him and the most dough too. “Workmen are crawling all over the house doing this and that,” he says, “and I don’t really know who all these guys are really working for.” He gave me a glance as if he was letting me in on a secret, or a worry. Which I guess it was. “I’d like to hire you to inspect all the work these fellows are doing, make sure they’re using the best materials, doing everything legal—and doing whatever my wife wants done.” I nodded. “It could take months,” he tells me. “But while you’re doing all that, I want you to watch and make sure the place isn’t being wired up or anything.” I felt like saying: But I’m no electrician, I don’t know anything about stuff like that. Instead I nodded again. This was always the best policy. So I spent the better part of one fall and winter going back and forth between Snaketown and Palmer Woods. It didn’t take long but it was like driving all night in order to reach the morning, and the other way around.

  [You can tell how much Lonnie loved to talk. I think it was his substitute for work once he got old, though maybe he was like that when he was younger too. As much as he loved yakking, though, he didn’t have the energy to go on for hours—not near the end anyway. So I have to piece his conversations together to make sense of em. When he got wound up, he always came back to the subject of this Cappy char
acter, like he did this next time.]

  Cappy Smith had a young brother named Pete. He may still be alive for all I know. He wasn’t all that much younger but couldn’t have been more different. They started getting into trouble together when they were kids, pulling off some petty robberies, smuggling a little contraband. Nothing very elaborate, but Pete was clumsy and was always getting them caught. I won’t tell you who told me this. As a historian I need to protect my sources even though they’ve all gone to their reward by now. Or maybe in some cases there was a reward out on them and somebody claimed it. The story is that Cappy selected a safe in an insurance office for them to blow and made the mistake of giving in to Pete’s whining about never getting anything important to do because he was the kid brother. So Cappy let him plan the job. It starts out with the two of them driving through Windsor with a painter’s ladder sticking out the back window by four or five feet. Nothing suspicious about that!

  Somehow they get to the alley that runs behind the building. But right where they want to climb is near a corner and there’s a street lamp shining on them. Pete’s so stupid he’s carrying a piece when all they’re trying to do is to break into a joint at night. In fact, he’s so stupid he takes out his piece like he’s going to shoot out the light. Cappy stops him just in time. First Pete and then the two of them are picking up stones and rocks and pieces of paving brick and trying to put the light out that way. Pete makes a lot of noise getting the ladder out of the automobile, and then it isn’t long enough to reach the top of the pole. In fact, it’s not long enough to reach the flat roof at the back of the building, where they know there’s a skylight that looks down on the offices they’re after. Pete stands there like an idiot, not knowing what to do. Cappy finally backs the heap up to the right spot and they set the ladder on the hood, which gives them just enough length for one of them to very carefully climb up while the other holds the foot of the ladder and keeps it from sliding off the car. What a pair of dummkopfs.