Hunting a Detroit Tiger (18 page)

I went on, “You told me both sides spy on each other. So I assume you have somebody who keeps track of Donner. Do you know where he was the night Emmett Siever was killed?”

Hyman hesitated. “Off the top of my head, no. But then I never thought of him as having killed Emmett. The papers seemed pretty clear on the subject of who did the shooting.”

“I already told you the papers—and the cops—were wrong. You must have doubts yourself about what really happened; otherwise, you’d have let Whitey Boggs or one of your other guys kill me already.” I gave Hyman a chance to contradict me. When he didn’t, I continued, “Donner gave me an alibi for the night Siever was shot, but I found out he was lying.”

Hyman turned his head to Zaluski. “What do you think, Stosh?”

Zaluski answered from around his pipe stem. “I don’t see where telling the boy where Donner was can do any harm.”

“I’ll find out for you,” Hyman agreed.

“Thanks.”

“Reel change,” said Zaluski. “Give me some room, fellas.”

Hyman and I edged back as far as we could while Zaluski prepared to start the second projector when the film in the first ran out.

Another topic I wanted to explore was Donner’s position at Ford. The only time Donner had shown any worry was about doing baseball business on Ford company time. I wondered if I might use Donner’s moonlighting to get him in hot water with his bosses at the plant. “I went to see Donner at the Highland Park plant,” I said to Hyman. “How much power does he have there? Who does he answer to?”

“He has all the power he wants. He’s in charge of the Service Department—his own combination police department and spy service. Only one he answers to is Henry Ford, and I don’t expect Ford himself knows all that Donner has going on.”

“There were men in plain clothes there. Are they his spies?”

“His goon squad. Were they wearing bow ties?”

“Yeah, same as Donner.”

“He makes all his goons wear them—it’s how they dress for battle. A bow tie comes undone in a fight; a necktie can be used to strangle you.”

Zaluski finished switching projectors. When the next reel was whirring smoothly, he said to me, “Son, you mind cranking this a bit?” Tapping the bowl of his pipe with his free hand, he said, “Need to reload.”

“Sure!” I agreed. “But I don’t know how.”

“Just watch the screen and turn the handle fast enough that it looks right.”

I stood and took over the handle, keeping my eye on the infinitely peppy Wally Reid as he raced around on the movie screen. For several minutes, I cranked away. I first did it so that it “looked right.” Once I got the hang of it, I turned it just a tad slower and faster, enjoying the sense of power.

With a fresh bowl lit, Zaluski said, “Thanks, son. I’ll take it again.”

Reluctantly, I gave up the projector and sat back down. I briefly pondered another question I had for Leo Hyman: where had
he
been the night Siever was shot? Probably best not to put it exactly that way though, I thought. “Does Whitey Boggs always run the meetings?” I asked.

Hyman smiled. “When I’m not there he does.”

So much for the subtle approach. Okay, shift focus to make it seem I’m interested in Boggs. “You said he’s head of some committee?”

“Relief Committee.”

“How many committees you have?”

He smiled again. “Several. Stosh here is head of the Welcoming Committee.”

“Means I take the donations,” Zaluski said. “Damn!” The film had jumped a sprocket and it took him a minute to get it aligned again.

“How long have you been a projectionist?” I asked.

“I’m not. I only work here once a week. The regular projectionist has a lady friend he meets every Friday. He pays me to cover for him. Been doing it for a couple years now.”

Hyman spoke up. “Stosh used to be with Ford. Got fired for unionizing and now he’s blacklisted. Can’t get a regular job. We have a lot of fellows like that.” He added with a small smile, “At least Ford did give him some training for his other career.”

“What’s that?”

Zaluski answered, “I’m a ventriloquist. Do a little vaudeville and burlesque now and then.”

“You learned that at
Ford?
”

“Show him the Ford Whisper,” Hyman urged.

Keeping one hand on the projector, Zaluski turned so that I could see his wrinkled face and removed the pipe from his teeth. With his mouth barely open and his lips motionless, he said, “Ford has spotters who watch the men on the assembly line. If they see you talking, they report you. So you learn to talk like this. It’s called a ‘Ford Whisper.’”

“That’s good!” I said. “Can everybody who works there do it?”

“Not as good as Stosh,” said Hyman. “Whitey Boggs can’t hardly do it at all. Probably what got him fired was that they could see him talking.”

“Or unionizing,” said Zaluski. “He was active, too. The Ford Service Department gets any hint you might be union, and your ass is out of there. Boggs got fired just after I did.”

Through the booth’s window, I saw that he was cranking too fast. Angry shouts started coming from the crowd below. Zaluski returned the pipe to his mouth and his attention to the projector.

“One thing I don’t understand,” I said to Hyman. “Most of the Wobblies are workingmen, right? Factory workers and guys like that. Wouldn’t real workers be upset about Emmett Siever, a
baseball player
, getting involved—and getting so much attention?”

Hyman shook his head. “Not at all. We have writers, artists, all kinds of people in the IWW. That’s the point: one big union made up of everyone who works, no matter what kind of work it is.”

“Even baseball?” I still had trouble sometimes thinking of baseball as “work.”

He laughed and nodded. “Absolutely.”

“So none of the Wobblies had a personal problem with Emmett Siever?”

“No,” Hyman insisted. “Everybody liked him. He was an upstanding fellow.”

“Maybe recently. But I heard he was trouble back in his playing days. Even abandoned his daughter after his wife died.”

Hyman shrugged. “Not many of us could pass muster if we were judged by what we did when we were young.”

“Siever was a hell of a ballplayer,” put in Zaluski. “Saw him when he was with the old Wolverines, and again when he came to the Tigers in ought-one. Played with his head. Seemed he knew just where a ball was going to be hit, and he’d be there. Box scores don’t give you credit for brains, but he had ’em. Guts too. I was at a game in Bennett Park where I saw just what he had.”

“What happened?” I asked.

He took a couple of brisk puffs on his pipe. “Tie game, it was. Bottom of the ninth, one out. Emmett Siever—he must have been forty years old by this time—was on first base and Kid Elberfeld on third. Next batter—Ducky Holmes, I think it was—hits a grounder to second. Easy double play. Second baseman tosses it to the shortstop to get one out, and he relays it to first. But Siever wouldn’t get out of the way of the throw. He even jumped a little and took it smack on the forehead. Broke up the double play, Elberfeld scored, and Tigers won.”

“Jeez.”

“Yep. Siever was out for a week with blurred vision, but that’s the kind of player—the kind of
man
—he was.” Turning to look at me, he added, “So you can see why friends of his aren’t go to let the man who killed him get away with it.”

“I’m not gonna let him get away with it, either,” I said.

Hyman spoke up. “I got another place to be. You have any more questions for me?”

I thought a moment. “Yeah, one. Who’s taking Siever’s place? Who’s organizing the players’ union now?”

Hyman shook his head in a way that said he wasn’t going to tell me. Whether or not he knew who it was wasn’t clear from the gesture. “I’ll get back to you if I find out where Hub Donner was that night.” With that, he stood to leave. “Coming?”

I asked Zaluski if I could stay and watch the movie for a while and he agreed. Hyman reminded me that my grace period had only fifteen more days to run, then he left the two of us alone in the booth.

My impulse in wanting to stay was to ask Zaluski why Hyman hadn’t been at Fraternity Hall that night. I realized, though, that Zaluski wouldn’t tell me anything Hyman didn’t want me to know.

So we settled back and talked baseball. I took over on the projector a few times and Zaluski told me stories about the old Detroit teams—the National League champion Wolverines of 1887, with Dan Brouthers, Sam Thompson, and Charlie Bennett; and the three-time pennant-winning Tigers of 1907 to 1909, with Sam Crawford, Davy Jones, and George Mullin. In return, I told him a few things about Ty Cobb that he hadn’t heard before.

The conversation, and the smell of Zaluski’s pipe, sent me back to when I was a kid, sitting in my uncle’s general store while men gathered around the stove for cracker-barrel baseball talk. My Uncle Matt smoked a pipe, too, and sometimes he’d let me put an unlit one in my mouth.

By the time I left the theater, I was hankering for a pipe of my own and thinking that both Leo Hyman and Stan Zaluski knew more than they would ever reveal to me. The question was: how much of what they knew had to do with the circumstances of Emmett Siever’s death?

I
’d thought it a clever idea at the time. Now I was stuck with the result and not at all comfortable about it.

Eager to see her again, I had phoned Margie the first thing in morning and asked her to the Saturday game at Navin Field. She begged off, with the excuse that she needed to do some shopping. I knew that she’d been a bit annoyed with me yesterday—not for canceling the picnic but because I hadn’t told her earlier about the trouble I was in. I then asked her something that I didn’t think she’d decline: I told her that we’d been invited on a double date by Karl Landfors and Connie Siever, adding that Landfors was an old friend I very much wanted her to meet. After a slight hesitation she agreed to go. When I tried once more to talk her into coming to the game as well, she firmly said she couldn’t make it to the ballpark today.

I attributed my subsequent 0-for-5 batting performance to her absence. To Hub Donner, I attributed the Tigers’ coldly hostile attribute toward me. I was sure that every one of them had either read or heard about the newspaper stories. Not one of the players said a single word to me before, during, or after the game. I suspected that the only thing that kept them from committing outright violence was the fact that I’d been helping the team win games. That reprieve was probably soon to end, however, since I’d gone hitless and Dutch Leonard ended up on the short end of a 6-4 score.

At least Karl Landfors came through for me. After I’d explained to him about my story to Margie, he checked with Connie, and they agreed to back me up and join us for dinner.

Hence my present anxiety. Landfors and I were still in my apartment and the mere prospect of him seeing me with Margie had me already feeling self-conscious. The two of them had never met before; I didn’t know what they would think of each other. My only consolation was that Landfors would also be with his sweetheart, so he might be equally ill at ease about the double date.

He was certainly concerned about something. I watched Landfors as he fumbled with his necktie. He stood in front of the mirror above the phone stand, tying knot after knot, mangling each attempt, and angrily pulling the tie loose to try again. It was almost six o’clock and we needed to be leaving soon.

I had already primped myself to perfection and put on the new double-breasted blue worsted. “Want me to tie it for you?” I offered.

“No.”

Letting the tie hang loose around his neck for a minute, he picked up a yellow paper from the parlor stand. For the fifth time in the hour since the Western Union messenger delivered it, he reread its message, his face darkening the same as it had each time before.

Ever since the delivery boy gave it to him, I’d been badgering him to tell me what it said, to no avail. Landfors looked so troubled that I asked again, “What is it? Anything wrong?” I assumed somebody had died; why else a telegram?

He shook his head the same as he had the previous times I’d asked. “It isn’t anything. I hope.” Then he turned to me. “And what is it that you’re so wrapped up in?”

I’d been looking over a scrap of white paper as often as he’d looked at his yellow one. “Mine’s nothing, too.” No matter how many times I reviewed my calculations, my batting average had definitely dropped more than a hundred points in one day. It was still over .300—either .315 or .316—and any other time I would have considered that to be a terrific mark. But that brief period of batting over .400 had spoiled me.

Landfors took up the ends of his tie again.

I gave up trying to figure out my exact batting average and directed my thoughts to a subject almost equally depressing: Emmett Siever. “Has Connie said anything about her father yet?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“She was his only next of kin, right?”

Landfors paused from his battle with the necktie, which was never going to look right anyway because it was so twisted and wrinkled. “I believe so ... why?”

“So she inherits whatever he had?”

His eyes grew wide. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. The reason I’m asking is: if she inherits his possessions, shouldn’t she get whatever Siever had on him when he died?”

Landfors directed his attention back to the mirror and the necktie. “I suppose. Perhaps she’s already gotten his effects from the police. Why?”

“The cops claim Siever had a revolver on him. But I know he didn’t—not when I saw him, anyway. I figure if Connie could get it back, we might be able to find out where it came from. There must be a serial number on it.” The Colt .45 I’d brought home from the war had such a number, and I assumed it must help somehow in tracking a firearm.

“I doubt if the police will release the gun. It will probably have to stay in the evidence room.”

“What’s it evidence of? There was no crime as far as the police are concerned. Remember?”

“Hmm.” He made a final assault on the tie and succeeded in twisting a passable four-in-hand. “Close enough,” he sighed.

“Anyway, could you ask Connie to get her father’s things—including the gun?”

Landfors looked at me blankly.

“Don’t have to ask her tonight. Just whenever it seems like a good time.”

“Yes, certainly. I’ll try to slip it into the conversation.” His sarcastic tone and scowling face gave me the feeling this was not going to be a fun evening.

The waiter must have thought he was serving at a wake when he came to take our orders. Most patrons of the rooftop nightclub were flirtatious couples and carousing parties who’d come to drink and dance under the stars. Amid the good cheer, our table was an island of gloom.

Despite Margie’s and my best efforts, there’d been little conversation during the ferry ride. After awkward introductions, Landfors and Connie barely spoke to us. Margie asked me several times with her eyes what the matter was. I had no answer, other than Landfors’s grouchiness was apparently contagious and Connie Siever had come down with a dose of it.

It had been my idea to come across the river to Windsor. I thought it would make for a more relaxed atmosphere, being in Canada, and able to have a few drinks without worrying about Treasury agents swooping in to enforce prohibition. But Landfors and Connie were determined not to relax; they sat stiff and solemn, their clothes and bearing making them look like a black-and-white newspaper sketch of defendants at a trial.

The waiter asked again, “What will you have?”

Before Landfors could order us a pitcher of vinegar, I said, “Champagne and oysters. All around.”

Margie laid her hand on my arm. “You remembered!”

“No champagne,” said the waiter. “Beer. Labatt.”

I suspected they did have champagne, but didn’t want to waste it on people who didn’t look like they’d enjoy it. “Anything but Moxie,” I said.

“Beer is fine,” said Margie.

The waiter looked at Landfors. “Same for you?”

While Landfors cleared his throat to speak, Connie answered for him, “That will be fine, thank you.”

“No oysters, neither,” said the waiter. “Pretzels do?”

In one voice, the four of us answered, “Yes.”

Margie laughed, and even Connie cracked a small smile.

When the waiter departed, quiet overtook our table again. The only sounds were nearby conversations, the music of a “ragtime” quintet that had no concept of rhythm, and the whistles and bells of barges and ferries navigating the Detroit River.

The silence was almost paralyzing; I looked around, seeking something to comment on in the hope of sparking a conversation. From our location twelve stories above Goyeau Avenue, the lights of Detroit sparkled in the distance, shining brighter than the stars overhead. Candles on the tables flickered in the fresh, outdoor air.

Margie beat me to it. With a twinkle in her eye, she ventured, “Good band.”

Taking her seriously, Landfors nodded. “Very.”

Connie wrinkled her nose. After another awkward silence, she said to Margie, “I understand you’re in show business of some kind.”

Of some kind? I thought everybody knew who Marguerite Turner was. She was a
movie star.

“Yes, I am,” Margie said sweetly. “Vaudeville. I wrestle lions and alligators for people who buy tickets hoping to see me get my head bitten off. Our show opens at the Rex tomorrow if you’d like to come.”

“No, I’m sorry. I, uh, I have other plans.”

“Too bad. There’s a fire-breather in the show, too. Sometimes it gets pretty exciting.” She winked at me, then asked Connie, “What do
you
do?”

“Connie’s a suffragette,” I said.

“Suffrag-
ist!
” she quickly corrected me. “‘Suffrag-ette’ is what men call us. It’s a diminutive.” Landfors bobbed his head, agreeing with his date.

The band switched to a simpler number, some kind of fox trot, and couples around us got up to dance. I had an urgent desire to get onto the dance floor myself. Then it occurred to me that Margie might not be able to with her bad leg.

The waiter returned with four overflowing beer glasses and a large bowl of pretzels.

I lifted mine and said, “Here’s to, uh ...”

“Good times,” finished Margie.

I drank deeply and put down the glass half-empty. Margie’s was at nearly the same level after her first sip. We looked at each other, then grabbed up the beers again and raced to finish them. I beat her, but it ended up close. We slammed down the empty glasses and wiped our mouths.

Clearly not amused by our contest, Connie Siever took a dainty sip of her beer. “How did you two meet?”

“I threw a pie in his face,” Margie said. “Mickey was with the Giants back then, and he was making a movie at the studio where I worked. Poor boy looked so serious about it that I had to loosen him up.” She leaned forward and whispered, “A pie in the face will do wonders.”

“I can imagine,” said Connie. She shot an appalled glance at Landfors. I could tell that from now on she was going to be keeping an eye on Margie for flying pies.

“And how did you two meet?” Margie asked.

Connie lifted her chin. “Karl accompanied Mickey when he paid a call on me to claim that he didn’t kill my father.”

“Claim?” repeated Margie. Under the table, she put her hand on my knee and gripped hard; it felt like she would have preferred to have been gripping Connie’s throat. “If he says he didn’t do it, he didn’t. Are you saying he did?”

“Not necessarily. But no one else has been caught, have they?”

Margie’s fingers dug in more firmly. As I pried them loose, I said, “No. No, they haven’t. Not yet.”

We all paused while the waiter brought fresh beers for Margie and me. Landfors waved him off when he asked if he and Connie wanted more.

“Well,” Connie said, “whoever did it, my father’s still going to be dead. Can’t change that, so it doesn’t really matter, I suppose.”

Landfors put his hand on her arm in what he apparently intended to be a consoling gesture. But Connie Siever didn’t need any consolation. She seemed totally comfortable with what had happened to her father. And that fact bothered me at least as much as anything else about his death.

I took a swallow of beer and asked Margie, “May I have this dance?”

Her eyes lit up, and she nodded eagerly.

“Excuse us,” I said to our company, and took her hand to lead her to the dance floor. I sensed eyes turning to look at Margie. She was stylishly dressed, wearing a belted, golden yellow smock with a long, pointed white collar. Her flowing skirt was emerald green, and a silk scarf of the same color was loosely tied around her neck.

We easily fell into some step pattern that consisted mostly holding each other close and rocking back and forth in time with the music—it worked even better once we followed the rhythm of the same instrument. She bobbed a little with her limp, giving our swaying a syncopated beat.

I caught sight of Landfors and his date in conversation. I didn’t know how I came up with the crazy idea for the four of us to get together. We had almost nothing in common.

Margie must have been having similar thoughts. Affecting a snooty British accent, she whispered, “I don’t think Miss Siever cares for me at all.”

“It’s her loss,” I replied. “That woman is about as much fun as taking a bad hop to the—uh ...”

“To the ballocks?”

“That’s the spot.”

“Her problem is that she’s just too serious.”

“Perfect match for Karl.”

“It’s not healthy to be so serious all the time.” Margie broke her hands free from me and shot them up under my arms, tickling me till I laughed and squawked for her to stop.

Feigning annoyance, I grabbed her and held her closer and tighter to prevent any further tickle assaults.

“You know,” Margie murmured into my shoulder as we resumed dancing, “I worked for the Suffrage Amendment in California. Wrote letters, marched in a couple of parades ... I loved doing it. Especially when we won. But I’m damned if I’ll tell
her
that. I don’t need her approval for what I do or who I am.”