“I’m telling you, Billy, if it weren’t for Pa —”
“If it weren’t for Pa what?”
“Just leave him out of this,” said Jack and walked away. Billy followed him to his car.
“Gosh, Jack, I didn’t know you cared. He’ll ask about you, you know. What should I tell him? That you had dinner reservations in Detroit? That you had to go harass our neighbours?”
Jack turned. “I mean it — leave him out of this.”
“He’s in it, Jack, like he always has been.”
“What the hell are you trying to prove, Billy?”
“That like your boss, you’re just a bum in a fancy suit. I’m the one out here on the homestead, looking out for my own. You’re a long way from Ojibway now, aren’t you, Jack?”
“You’re so full of shit you’d embarrass an outhouse.”
Jack climbed back into his Studebaker. He had wanted to ask Billy about Clara, his sister-in-law, but he was all out of polite talk.
“Shut down your little lemonade stand, Billy, before I have to come back and shut it down for you.”
Jack’s car kicked dust all the way up the path to the road. After regaining control of himself and the Studebaker, he got to thinking. Sure, what Billy said was true: smuggling was the family business and their pa was a player. But Billy was such a schemer, a sloppy one at that, and their pa could get caught in his undertow. Jack knew that unless he could get Billy to cease and desist, they were all headed for a heap of trouble.
Meanwhile, all fired up by the exchange with his brother, Billy decided to step up his operation and get his father even more involved. Locals started taking him more seriously. Eventually, a neighbour, Moe Lesperance, said he had a relative in Belle River who wanted in on the action. Billy was intrigued but played hard to get.
“Let me think about it.”
Belle River was centrally located at the top of Essex County — a rectangular peninsula framed by Lake St. Clair to the north, the Detroit River to the north and west, and Lake Erie to the south. On a map it resembled a fist delivering an uppercut to Michigan’s jaw. Where Lake St. Clair flows into the Detroit River, strip farms give way to a string of municipalities known as the Border Cities: Riverside, Ford City, and Walkerville, where the river narrows until it’s a mile wide at Windsor and you’d swear you can hear the factory whistles in Detroit. Next is Sandwich, and at the point where the river runs due south is Ojibway, a tiny farming community. Heading out of the Border Cities and then east along Erie’s north shore, you eventually hit Kingsville. If you travelled north as the crow flies, from there you’d wind up back in Belle River. Billy saw Ojibway and Belle River as strategic locations, providing easy access to waterways, Windsor and Detroit, and the interior of Essex County.
“You know, Belle River just might work,” he said to his father one day out of the blue. They were chopping wood in the yard. It was early December and their shoulders and arms were powdered with the season’s first snowfall. “We could set up a route along the back roads of the county. If we take Maidstone Crossing, we might even be able to pick up some extra business along the way.”
His father saw an opportunity to control the overland supply routes into the Border Cities. The neck of the peninsula was less than twenty-five miles of flat farmland with only a few passable roads and a couple of railway lines connecting it to the rest of the province. If they controlled that frontier, it would only leave the river, and the river was a fast-moving no man’s land.
“Tell you what,” Frank McCloskey said, “I’ve done a bit of business out there before. I’ll make the trip.”
Billy smiled. This is just what he wanted to hear. Plans were drawn up for an annex operation in Belle River. Boats would be refurbished over the winter, materials ordered for new docks, and stills fired up along the county roads.
Less than a week later, Lesperance got a call from his cousin Bernie. The deal was off. What Lesperance and McCloskey & Son were unaware of was that the Lieutenant’s boys were also knocking on doors in Belle River. Any operation that impacted negatively on their business had to be either assimilated or eliminated. They were finished making overtures; now they were delivering ultimatums. Frank McCloskey took Lesperance out to investigate, but now no one would even give them the time of day.
The Lieutenant called Jack into his office to explain this business with his family. Before stepping across the threshold, McCloskey asked himself which would be worse: to lie and say he knew nothing, or to tell the Lieutenant the truth and say he knew but hadn’t come clean. McCloskey lied. He owed it to blood being thicker than whisky. He swore to the Lieutenant that he knew nothing about their activities and in fact hadn’t had words with them in years. The Lieutenant wasn’t interested in the family history. He just wanted the matter resolved.
“Listen, Killer, the boys’ll take care of those frogs in the county, but I want you to lean on your father and brother.”
McCloskey said he would deal with it.
One of Billy’s overland suppliers was scheduled to make a delivery the next day. A provincial policeman being paid by Billy to keep the way clear reported this to Jack. The lesson to be learned here is that while good money might buy you information, better money will buy you a snitch. McCloskey headed the supplier off at Maidstone and relieved him of his whisky, his gun and, as an added touch, his pants.
“Next time you want to do business in the Border Cities, get in touch with the Lieutenant first.”
Billy phoned his contact the next morning and demanded an explanation. The contact told Billy what happened and said word was out that the Lieutenant was running things between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair.
“I’m telling you kid, you’re finished.”
The man hung up before Billy had a chance to form a reply. Billy tore the phone off the wall and hurled it through the kitchen window.
— Chapter 6 —
THE INSURGENT
By the end of the year the Lieutenant had accomplished everything he had set out to, so he threw himself a New Year’s party fit for a king. The guest list included not only the brash young bootleggers who helped him seize the day but also the police, lawyers, and city councilmen he enlisted along the way to ensure things continued to run smoothly.
The soirée was held at his palatial new digs on Richmond Street in Walkerville. He had purchased two side-by-side properties and levelled them both to make room for it. The classically-inspired pile took over a year to build and was an architectural assault on the dry establishment’s cozy Queen Anne manses. The guests arrived around eight o’clock, rolling into the semi-circular drive in their brand new Lincolns and Cadillacs. The men looked sleek and refined in their tuxes. The girls made their entrance in full-length furs that, once inside, they peeled off to reveal slinky shift dresses that barely reached to the tops of their stockings.
The main hall was done in Italian marble. Staircases curved to the left and right and between them stood the centrepiece to this enormous space: a sculpture of a winged goddess that stood over a shallow reflecting pool that tonight was filled with whisky. At the front of the reflecting pool was an ice dam, already melting, and below the dam was a model of an American city that by midnight would be awash in Canadian Club.
Guests were led to a great ballroom forming the north side of the house’s quadrangle. Rose-coloured walls were complemented by a wooden floor stained a rich amber hue. Sumptuous curtains with a striking Oriental pattern framed the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the garden, and the vaulted ceiling was adorned with a gold-and-turquoise mosaic reminiscent of a sunset over the river.
A band from Detroit had been hired for the party and they played all-out jazz, the real thing, not the