Free Whiskey River by Loren D. Estleman Page A

on Van Dyke, then did Blossom Heath and floated from there to Doc Brady’s and the Arcadia Ballroom, where Don Redman was blowing saxophone with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. At one point it occurred to me that some of the liquor I was drinking had probably come over in the load I had helped escort. Somewhere, although I don’t recall stopping at her place, I collected Hattie Long, who had on a gold lamé shift under an ermine coat and one of those metal headpieces stuccoed with jewels like Marie Dressier wore in the movies, only on Hattie it looked less like the coronation of the Queen of the Dykes. I remember putting the arm on her for fifty when my pockets turned inside out over the blackjack table at the Green Lantern in Ecorse. My luck improved after that, but all told I figure that twenty I hadn’t gotten yet cost me two weeks’ pay.
    Once—Jean Goldkette was directing the band, so it must have been in the dining room off the Graystone Ballroom—a liveried waiter brought a green bottle with gold foil on the neck to our table. When he pointed out the gentleman who had sent it, I looked at Jack Dance in black tie and black satin lapels raising a glass of beer to me at a table in the corner. The woman he was with was no flapper. She was wearing black velvet off the shoulders and pearls, and her hair was long and blonde in an old-fashioned sort of way, no curling irons or peroxide. She had a long straight nose like a Greek statue and when she turned my way her eyes went past me as if I were a fern growing there. Hattie told me later I waved back at Jack with an idiot grin, “like you were separated at birth and he saved your life and you were partners in a gold mine in Alaska or something.” Women exaggerate.
    The next morning, standing in the same clothes I had put on the morning before, I watched Hattie drawing on her eyebrows at the little French Empire vanity a Hupmobile vice president had given her when he went back to his wife. The bedroom of her apartment on Livernois was fussily decorated in a high school cheerleader’s idea of Bourbon splendor, ruffled polka-dot bedspreads and flouncy curtains and gold fleurs-de-lis on pale blue wallpaper.
    “Did I propose to you last night?” I asked.
    “Not me.” She did something with a brush that made her chin look less pointed. “It was the hatcheck girl at the Addison. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”
    “I don’t remember going to the Addison.”
    “If you can’t hold your liquor, don’t pick it up.”
    “So when are the nuptials?”
    “She was already married to the bouncer.” She exchanged the brush for a lipstick.
    “I was wondering why my nose was so tender. I must’ve been drinking gin. Gin always makes me propose to hatcheck girls.”
    “All the more reason to take the pledge. Hatcheck girls always marry bouncers.”
    “If I were a sensible drunk I’d propose to you.”
    She painted on the beestung lips. “Don’t joke about it.”
    In the streetcar later I said, “Whoops.”
    I’d been in the office ten minutes when Howard Wolfman woke me up by crumpling a twenty-dollar bill under my nose. He looked country-squirish in Harris tweeds and a red silk necktie that brought out the pink in his eyes behind the gold-rimmed cheaters.
    “I got an angry call at home last night from an Agent McPeek with the Prohibition Navy,” he said when I snatched the bill.
    I couldn’t read him. My eyes were still woolly from the night before and I didn’t want to move my head too quickly for fear my brains would spring out like watchworks. I could read the twenty, though. I uncrossed my ankles on the desk, crossed them the other way, and stretched the bill in both hands. “What did the floating Keystone Kops want?”
    “He said the Navy patrols that part of Erie with Model T’s on skis and no battle like you described took place night before last or any other.”
    “The river was open that night. They were probably busy sinking some auto muckety’s