Free Whiskey River by Loren D. Estleman Page B

yacht off Belle Isle on the theory it belonged to Joey Machine. That’s all they’re good for, unless you want to run them in the funnies next to Happy Hooligan.”
    “Until that call came in I wasn’t going to pay you a bonus. That Bonaparte stuff is a little heavy for readers of the Banner. You want to watch that.”
    “Columnists’ disease. Every now and then I get the urge to prove I read a book.”
    “Fight it. This isn’t the Literary Digest. What’s in the hopper?” He inclined his white head toward the Remington on its slanty stand.
    I cranked up the sheet. “ ‘Now is the time for all good men to jump over the lazy dog.’ I’m stuck.”
    “Is it serious?”
    “Critical. Happens every day about this time.”
    He hesitated a stroke. “Swayles is out today.”
    “Another binge so soon after the last one?” Swayles was the Banner’s police reporter. They didn’t stay sober for long on that beat.
    “No, he’s really sick. Mumps. Can you run this down? I know it’s not your department anymore, but it might turn into something.” He handed me a sheet torn off a pad.
    I recognized the telephone number. “Who’s in the morgue?”
    “That’s the question. Two hours ago the police pried him out of the trunk of a stolen Chevy parked on Rivard.”
    “What makes him different from all the other John Does punched full of holes we run in the police blotter column?”
    “Somebody took a needle and thread to this one and stitched his lips shut. It might not be anything. Maybe we can make it something.”
    “Is he white?”
    When he screwed up his face like that he looked just like a rabbit. “If he weren’t, they wouldn’t have bothered to call it in.”
    “I don’t know, I was counting on going home and catching a couple of hours’ sleep. The column’s not due till four.”
    “I was going to ask. You look worse than Swayles. Big night?”
    “Chalk it up to research.” I checked my watch. “Anderson should be on duty. I’ll stop by the morgue on my way home.”
    Wolfman left and I got up to get my hat and coat from the rack by Jensen’s desk.
    “Need me?” Jensen relit his pipe for the eleventh time that morning.
    I shook my head. Wolfman, who wouldn’t blink at running a picture of a child cut in two by a streetcar, was strangely reticent about photographing corpses on slabs, and always had the cartoon editor do a sketch when he wanted to give readers an opportunity to identify a John Doe. Meanwhile the scribes at the Times kept a collar and tie in a file drawer at the morgue to put on the cadavers, and the boys in the darkroom airbrushed eyeballs onto their closed lids to make them look more lively.
    Fred Ogilvie stopped me in the hallway to show me proofs of head shots for my column. A short pudge with thinning black hair and a strawberry mark on the lower half of his face, Ogilvie had been hired off the Free Press at twice his former salary to take over the Banner’s photography department. I was in a hurry, so I picked one of me chewing a pipe I’d borrowed from Jensen’s desk—a mistake, as it turned out, because when the column went into syndication later, admirers started sending me tobacco and pipes. When I smoked at all I smoked Chesterfields.
    Fred said, “I kind of like the one with the hat.”
    “So does Winchell. Use this one, starting tonight. I’m sick of getting mail addressed to ‘Miss Minor.’”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    We were having a January thaw. The sidewalks were slushy and a wind was blowing up from Ohio that ought to have smelled of cherry blossoms. I walked the four blocks to the Coroner’s Court Building at Brush and East Lafayette. The balmy air woke up several brain cells I’d given up for dead, and by the time I got there I was feeling a good deal better than most people when they enter the morgue.
    It’s a corner construction like the Parker Block where the Banner lived, built in 1925 to replace the old facility in the northwest corner of the