Hunting a Detroit Tiger (11 page)

“If he didn’t kill my father, then who did?”

“I don’t know,” answered Landfors.

I shook my head, silently echoing him, before venturing a question. “The reports said he was shot in self-defense. Supposedly your father had a gun. Do you know if he carried one?”

“Yes, I do know. No, he never carried one.”

“Own one?”

“He
didn’t. I do. Two of them: shotgun and a hunting rifle. Care to see them, Sherlock?”

“Uh, no, that’s okay, thanks.” A series of questions ran through my mind. How well did Connie really know her father? When had he reentered her life? Had they lived together in this house? And: Who had raised her after her mother died? Instead of giving her the opportunity to point out that those matters were none of my business, I said, “No more questions. Again, I’m sorry for your loss.” From outward indications, I was sorrier than she was about it.

Connie Siever hesitated, then changed the subject. “Have you seen Leo Hyman yet?” she asked Landfors.

His lips tightened. “Briefly. At the hall.”

“You two should make up,” she said. “Leo’s one of our best. I’ve known him since the Lawrence strike back in 1912.” I knew from playing in Boston that year that the successful strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was the IWW’s biggest victory.

“Your work with the mill hands has been an inspiration,” said Landfors.

It was Connie Siever’s turn to blush. She and Landfors were clearly turning into a mutual admiration society, and I felt I was becoming witness to the mating ritual of radicals.

Okay, one more question. “Did your father live here with you?” I asked.

“Yes.” She gave me a cold glare that discouraged any further questions. I returned a polite smile of surrender, and she shifted her attention back to Karl Landfors.

“What are you working on now, Connie?” he asked. Her name came off Landfors’s lips easily now.

“The Suffrage Amendment.” She darkened somewhat. “The loss in Delaware was a terrible disappointment. Only a few states left, almost all of them in the South. I’m setting my sights on Tennessee—their legislature votes on ratification in August.” She nodded toward the front of the house. “That’s what this meeting is about. We’re planning a trip to Memphis to organize the women there.”

Left out of the conversation, I occupied myself with trying to identify the black ornament pinned to her shirtwaist.

“Only need one more state,” Landfors said. “I’m sure it will pass.”

“You know there’s no such thing as a sure thing going up against the established order.”

“Yes, that’s certainly true.”

She checked the kitchen clock—more than the allotted ten minutes had passed—then leaned toward Landfors. That movement enabled me to see that the pin she was wearing was the figure of a black cat. “Would you mind giving us a little talk?” she asked him. “Some of the women are new to this, and a little timid. I’m sure a few words from you would be very rousing for them.”

“Well,” Landfors demurred, blushing a deeper red. I was tempted to throw cold water on his face before he set the house on fire. “It would be an honor . . . if you think they’d really be interested in hearing me.”

“Of course they would!” She stood and led us into the parlor, where the women were reseating themselves around the table.

“Ladies, may I have your attention?” They quieted, and she went on, “We’re very fortunate to have with us tonight Karl Landfors, a longtime activist and author of one of the classics of modern literature:
Savagery in the Sweatshop.
”

The ladies oohed and ahhed as if Landfors was a baseball star. Connie Siever then waved her hand at me. “And this is his friend Michael.” I garnered barely a murmur.

I was as out of place here as Karl Landfors would be on the pitching mound of Navin Field. Using the excuse of a headache, I begged off staying for the talk. There were no objections from any of the women—nor from Landfors—and I left to catch a streetcar for home.

On the ride back to Detroit, I summed up what I had learned. One thing was that Emmett Siever hadn’t owned a revolver—according to his daughter. The other thing I’d learned was that his daughter didn’t seem to care very much that he was dead.

F
riday was an off day in the schedule, an opportunity to sleep late and linger in dreamland. Unfortunately, the dreams I’d been having lately were ones that I preferred to avoid. After a fitful night with little rest, I was up for good an hour before dawn. I envied Karl Landfors sleeping soundly on the sofa.

After a cursory run through my morning bathroom routine, made simpler by seeing that my every-other-day shave could easily wait another twenty-four hours, I pulled on some heavy winter clothes, including corduroy trousers that I rarely wore in public because of the noise they made. I buttoned a maroon sweater-coat over a long-sleeved wool undershirt and turned up its shawl collar against the morning chill. My landlady wasn’t spending much of the rent money on heat; the radiators were cold and dormant. At one point, I thought they were kicking in, but the sound was only Landfors’s breath whistling through his nose.

I brewed a pot of coffee to help generate some internal warmth. Carrying a full mug of it, I felt my way through the dark parlor and sat down in the rocker, taking care to keep the creaky chair still. I held the mug up, warming my face in the steam, and returned to the same thoughts that had kept me awake during the night.

Why had Detective McGuire shown me the photo of Emmett Siever gripping a revolver? Was he a careless cop, letting me see something I shouldn’t have? I didn’t think so; McGuire had struck me as calculating, not careless. Perhaps it was a warning, as if to say, “We can do whatever we want, and you can’t do anything about it.” But that didn’t jibe with the impression I had at the end of the visit, when he seemed to encourage me to investigate on my own.

My sense was that McGuire had shown it to me so that I’d see for certain that something was wrong. Which raised another question: if the police planted evidence—the gun—why would one of them betray what his own department had done? Why would he disobey orders?

Finding no satisfactory answer to that question, I considered waking Landfors to get his opinion. Seeing him curled up in peaceful slumber, with his glasses off and his balding head bare, he reminded me of an infant—an infant gnome—and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I needed something else to occupy me for a while. It was still too early to get the morning newspapers, and I wasn’t eager to venture out into the cold anyway. The copy of
Main Street
on the table briefly tempted me, but I figured if Landfors liked the book, it probably wasn’t very good.

With the gray light of early dawn still too dim for reading, I clicked on the lamp next to my chair and settled for rereading the papers of the last few days. While on my third cup of coffee, I came across one of the stories about Treasury agents accusing the Detroit police of being on the payroll of bootleggers. I read it thoroughly, then flipped through the rest of the papers to study every article on the feud between the federal and local enforcement agencies. I started rocking in the chair, excited that I thought I had the answer to McGuire’s puzzling behavior.

The screeching of the rocker woke Landfors, who promptly contributed a foghorn yawn to the din. He reached for his spectacles; once they were securely hooked over his ears, he peered around bleary-eyed. Disappointment that his dreams were over showed on his face.

I stood and stretched. “How’d it go last night?”

His answer was drowned out by an explosion behind me. I spun to see my window disintegrate in a spray of glass shards. The booming report of a gunshot echoed up from the street below. “Get down!” I yelled at Landfors as I hit the floor.

Lying facedown, I heard the squeal of a car speeding away and the tinkle of broken glass raining on the hardwood floor. After a few long seconds, the only sound was of heavy breathing—and I wasn’t sure if it was mine or Landfors’s. It took a moment more until I noticed the hot prickly sensation running from my shoulder blade to my lower back. The irritation quickly blazed into a searing fire of pain.

I asked Landfors, “You okay?”

“What on earth was that?”

“My guess is somebody put a bullet through the window. And Karl . . .”

“Yes?”

“I think it’s in my back.”

Landfors carefully lifted my sweater and undershirt. I obeyed his instructions and lay as still as I could on my belly. Since he’d served in the Ambulance Corps, I trusted his judgment and took his word that the best thing to do for a possible back injury was to remain immobile.

“My, but that’s ugly,” he said.

“It’s bad?”

“No, just ugly. It doesn’t look like a bullet wound. Too small.”

“Glass?” I hoped it might be merely a fragment from the broken window.

“Don’t think so. But it’s right at the base of your spine. We better call a doctor.”

I thought of Dr. Wirtenberg, with his filthy instruments and rough manner. “Let’s not,” I said. “You told me you pulled a lot of shrapnel out of kids during the war. Think you can handle this?”

“I can try. There’s hardly any blood, so whatever’s in there probably isn’t very deep.”

“Shoulder stings like hell, too, Karl. Can you take a look at it?”

Landfors slowly pulled the sweater and shirt over my head. “You have one more wound next to the shoulder blade. Let me work on that one first before I go digging around your spine.” He went to the bathroom. “You don’t have much in the way of medical supplies,” he called to me. “All you have is some kind of grease.”

“Liniment,” I yelled back. “Whatever you do, don’t put any of that on me.” It was a mixture of Vaseline and Tabasco that a trainer had once given me for stiff muscles. It was not the thing to put on an open cut.

Landfors took tweezers from his travel kit and heated the tip with a match. It probably made for a more sterile instrument than anything Dr. Wirtenberg had.

Just before he began on the shoulder, I realized there was one sound I hadn’t heard: a police siren. “How come there’s no cops?” I said. “This is Detroit, not Chicago. How often are there shootings around here? Somebody should have called the cops.”

He paused to walk over to the window. “The street’s empty,” he reported. “Most people are still sleeping. And anyone who did hear the shot might have thought it was a car backfiring.”

Landfors then went to work on the shoulder wound. He stretched my skin with one hand, while the other manipulated the tweezers. It felt like my flesh was on fire. “Got it!” he said after a couple minutes of digging. He showed me a bloody BB held in the tip of the instrument. “Buckshot. You’re lucky it wasn’t close-range. With the distance, and having to go through the window, the damage isn’t much. The heavy sweater helped, too, I’m sure.”

“Would this count as being thrown from the train?” I said.

“You think it was the IWW?”

“Don’t you remember how Whitey Boggs greeted us at Fraternity Hall?”

“They usually don’t kill people.” Landfors moved down to my lower back and started probing for the pellet embedded there.

The pain was intense. Partly to take my mind off what Landfors was doing to me, I thought over my assumption about the Wobblies. Who else could it be? I was sure it hadn’t been one of my teammates: besides the fact that there was hardly a ballplayer alive who’d be up this early in the morning, they just hadn’t seemed
that
angry at me. Buckshot . . . a shotgun. Only last night, Connie Siever had mentioned having one. But she hadn’t even appeared upset about her father’s death—why would she go gunning for me? No, I decided, my initial hunch was most likely the correct one. Actually, Landfors and I were probably both right: it was the Wobblies who shot at me but not with murderous intent.

Through gritted teeth, I said, “This
wasn’t
an attempt to kill me, I don’t think. Like you said, it wasn’t likely to do much damage. If they wanted to kill me, why not wait till I stepped outside? Firing a shotgun into a second-floor window is probably more of a scare tactic.”

Landfors dug a little more firmly into my flesh. “Then I would say that this very well could count as being thrown from the train.” It felt like he was trying to drill a hole through me; I wished I’d thought to ask him for something to bite on. “Darn,” he said. “This one’s deeper than the other.” The tweezers hit a nerve that caused my leg to twitch like a sleeping dog’s.

As he worked, my thoughts traveled back to November 8, 1918, the day after my twenty-seventh birthday. I’d been haunted by the events of that day ever since, and they had colored my reaction to Emmett Siever’s murder more than I could explain to anyone else. But I decided to give it a try. “Something I never told you about when I was in France,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That stuff in the papers about me being a ‘war hero,’ and the things they claimed I did over there, it’s all a load of crap.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Landfors said calmly,“anyone who fought is a hero.”

“No, no—you don’t understand.” I took a breath. “Here’s what happened, what
really
happened. It was November, I was with the 131st Infantry, in France, and we were attacking the Germans at St. Hilaire. Hell, I didn’t know anything about being a soldier. The army rushed me through basic training in less than half the usual time, then they assigned me to the 131st, a National Guard regiment. You know why? Because it was from Chicago, and the Cubs’ management wanted me with a Chicago outfit—they thought it would make for good publicity.”

“I wondered how you ended up in a Guard unit, without ever having been in the Guard,” Landfors said.

“That’s how. Anyway, it all happened November 8, early in the morning. It was freezing; I remember thinking it was so cold they should have given both sides off that day. Of course, they didn’t. My squad was scouting what was left of some village. We split up, combing the area, going through abandoned farmhouses and bombed-out buildings.

“I turned the corner around a barn and there was a German soldier taking a leak against the wall. A boy in a German uniform, I should say, because he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. However old he was, he saw me and swung his rifle off his shoulder. Mine was at the ready, but I froze. Wasn’t till he got off a shot that I took aim at him. My fingers were numb from the cold; I could hardly feel the trigger.

“Finally, I fired. He returned it. I fired again. I swear we weren’t more than ninety feet apart, and we couldn’t hit each other. I kept trying to aim better and all I could think was that the kid looked as scared as I felt.” My voice caught as I continued, “Then I got him. Found out later, it was my last round.”

“Consider yourself lucky.”

“You know what the first thing I did was?”

“No, what?”

“Tried to see if I could help him, revive him somehow. He was dead, got him in the chest same as Siever was. Just some kid, taking his morning piss, and I killed him. That was my ‘heroic’ war deed.”

Landfors said, “I was there three years, and not much happened the way they say in the recruiting posters or Liberty Bond speeches. Now stay completely still; I almost have this one.” A few seconds later, he succeeded in digging the pellet out and stood up. “You have any bandages?”

That was one medical supply I did have, for spike wounds. I told him where to find them, and he returned with the gauze and tape.

As he bandaged the wounds, I went on, “Some lieutenant made up the story that I’d single-handedly wiped out a machine gun nest. Turned out our mission was a flop, so he decided to make up something that would give the unit a little glory. By the time I got back to the States, and the season opened, the Cubs were using me as a poster boy for baseball’s patriotism.

“They used me, Karl. From the regiment I was assigned to, to the stories they made up. It was an awful thing, killing that kid. Not something I’m proud of, and I hated the way they twisted things. I tried telling the truth, but nobody wanted to hear it, so I gave up.

“This thing with Emmett Siever is the same. They want to say I killed him, and they want to use me. I’m not giving up this time. I didn’t do it, and I’m gonna find out who did no matter what it takes.”

“I can understand you feeling that way,” Landfors said. “Put your shirt back on.”

I’d finished dressing when there was an urgent hammering on the door. It was my landlady, who’d just discovered the glass on the sidewalk and the broken window.

I let her in and tried to calm her down. She wasn’t satisfied until I agreed to pay for a new window and not let anyone shoot at me again. I wished I knew how to comply with that second demand.

Landfors then volunteered to clean the mess and board up the window while I paid a visit to the Trumbull Avenue station house to report the shooting.