Whiskey River Read Online Free PDF Page B

whenever I scored. The second was an obituary.
    Two nights earlier, a driver named Little Augie Bustamente had plunged through the ice on Lake Erie at the wheel of a Stutz Blackhawk loaded to the roof with crates of Old Log Cabin. The car, part of a convoy, had driven too near the center of the lake where the current ran through. Little Augie was nobody’s loss, being a known wife-abuser and convicted rapist, but the whiskey and particularly the car, which was a good ten years newer and several hundred dollars more valuable than the rusty flivvers the Machine mob usually sent out on the ice, would be missed. Rumor said Joey Machine had given it to his mistress for Christmas and that it had been pressed into service without his knowledge when a Model T touring car caught cold at the last minute. I believed the second part, but not the first. Joey was too cheap to keep a woman, let alone give one a bucket that cost twice as much as the Chevy he drove every day without benefit of chauffeur. In any case, I flatter myself that my piece was the first eulogy ever written for an automobile. It drew letters for a week and H. L. Mencken bought the rights to reprint it nationally. The morning after it appeared in the Banner I found a check for twenty dollars bearing Howard Wolfman’s signature on my desk.
    I was pondering whether to spend the twenty on a new suit or a battery for my Ford—the stock market was definitely out—when the telephone rang. It was on Jensen’s desk; seniority. He took the receiver off the gallows, listened, and extended it to me without a word. I slung a ham onto the cartoon-cluttered desk and took it. “Minor.”
    “ Connie Minor?” The voice in the tin cup was deep and slow, like a Victrola winding down. It sounded congested.
    “There’s only one I know of,” I said.
    “I thought you was a dame.”
    I made a mental note to have my picture taken for the top of the column. “Sorry to disappoint you, kiddo. What’s your beef?”
    “No beef.” The owner of the voice cleared his throat with a gurgle. I guessed the condition was chronic. “If you got an hour this afternoon I want to talk to you about that story you wrote last night. My name’s Joey Machine.”
    I took the time and place down on a cartoon. I don’t remember if Jensen complained.

Chapter Four
    “Y OU KNOW MY REAL name ain’t Machine,” said Machine. “It’s Maccino, Giuseppe Garibaldi Maccino. If I had it to do over I wouldn’t make the change. Every damn scribe this side of the ocean can spell Joey Machine, and look at the mess it’s got me in.”
    I looked politely, but the only mess he appeared to be in at present had to do with introducing a triple-decker meatball-and-liverwurst sandwich into a strictly single-decker mouth. He was eating a late lunch at a cheap yellow pine desk gouged all over and stained with the residue of other lunches past. The office was twice the size of mine and contained half the furniture, a big echoey room with windows in two adjacent walls and bare floorboards that buzzed whenever someone gunned a motor directly below. The Acme Garage on Griswold was Joey Machine’s flagship. He and a partner, since deceased, had bought it in 1919 out of their salaries as fitters for the Michigan Stove Company, a small inheritance belonging to Joey’s wife, and the income from a still the partners operated on Belle Isle. Everything else had come later, including the liquor concession for the entire East Side and a graveyard at the bottom of Lake St. Clair for those who lacked Joey’s vision. Anyone could get a lube and an oil change in the garage, but chiefly the place served as the payoff point for every bull and city official on the Machine roll, or so the press suspected. Those parties serviced their private automobiles there with a regularity that defied any other explanation.
    The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago the previous winter taught Joey the importance of defending a garage against