Page 4 of Shadow Ticket
Skeet came to learn about outdoor city light and how much and how little to expect from it in the way of comfort—plate glass window reflections, penumbras of lampposts at the ends of trolley lines to the edges of suburbs still officially to be named—haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and perfume in the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street, immersed too deep in lives that Skeet could never quite see any plausible way to step into…A Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally.
Skeet was to bounce his way through a string of his mother’s domestic arrangements, motherly enough instincts but little to no judgment in the matter of boyfriend material, with unintended consequences few of which worked out well, though there were exceptions.
“What’s that smell? Like rubber burning? What’s the oven doing on 375 degrees?”
“I noticed you weren’t hooking into the pocket so good, Knuckles—”
“Tell me it ain’t so.”
“Wanted to get it really clean for you,” Skeet kept trying to explain, as Knuckles yanked open the oven door, revealing through the billows of smoke a reeking and out-of-round ex–bowling ball. “Oh—no, what’d I do?”
Which is where a normal Milwaukeean would’ve brought out somepocket revolver and settled things on the spot, confident that no local jury would call it anything but justifiable homicide. Instead Knuckles thought he saw an educational opening.
“First thing anybody learns in this town is never put a bowling ball in any oven over a hundred degrees, what kind of upbringing you been getting anyways?” Jerking his head dramatically at the now unrollable Mineralite blob. “That used to be a custom ball, cost me 20 smackers, kid, that’s half of what’s left of your childhood settin pins, nickel a game and be thankful this ain’t Cleveland, you’d only get 4¢.”
So began Skeet’s pinsetting career, which would before long come to be described all over town as “illustrious.” A tough monkey with a number of speeds to his gearbox, Skeet quickly learned his way around a bowling environment unforgiving as any on the planet. Meantime, Knuckles having bid farewell, presently a new gent appeared who turned out to be not so parentally inclined. The blissful pair moved up to Shorewood leaving Skeet on his own, and good riddance.
As word spread, Skeet found himself in demand for all-night private sessions, trusted by bowling alley owners to keep order and lock up and even to acquire his own small crew of assistants. The tips kept rolling in, literally, the practice being to stuff dollar bills into the thumb and finger holes and roll the ball back gently, even respectfully, to the pinboy. After a while Skeet began betting on kegler outcomes here and out of town and before long this had grown to a sizable sum which Skeet had the good sense to keep out of the stock market and inside a safe-deposit box at Northern Trust.
—
Just as Hicksis rolling a form into the Underwood, Boynt bounces back in to cast a disappointed eye.
“Starting a ticket, I knew it.”
“Pay dirt here,” nonchalantly, “Wait and see.”
“Uh, huh.” Boynt is wearing his You Poor Fish look, which he thinks is motivational, but isn’t. “You know what happens around here any time our productivity curve even thinks about headin down Illinois way, back officejust sends in more of their time-motion snoopers. That what you want? Bifocal lenses everyplace you turn?”
“Relax, Boynt, I’ll keep this all off the swindle sheets…”
“Hicks, I’m a hard case, pity doesn’t come to me easily, but this is pitiful. These clients of yours—living at the edge of desperation, yet always managing to find you, and you know why that is, of course you do, don’t you, Hicks?”
“Prohibition?” Just a guess. Boynt blames everything on Prohibition.
“Because you’re a sap! A Board of Idiots approved and certified sap!—have I mentioned that before, I forget.”
“You mean in so many words?”
“Taken in by every two-bit crybaby comes pissing and moaning in under the door, no intention of ever paying on time, if at all, ’course not, why should anybody worry about overdue notices when they’re only coming from a sap?”
“Does this mean there goes my year-end bonus again?”
“Oh, and by the way, this truck bomb, before you type up your ticket? oddly enough I’m just off the phone with Badger All-Risk Fiduciary Life as well as the local Teutonia Society, and guess what, each of them just hired us to look into that very same incident, each thinking the other did it, and how’s that for peculiar, huh?”
“See, Boss? What’d I tell you?”
“When was that, I may not’ve been listening.” Boynt heads for his desk drawer, where if this was Chicago you would expect to find a pint of Old Log Cabin but here in Milwaukee it’s more likely to be Korbel brandy, a bottle of which Boynt now hauls out, looks at thoughtfully a while…“Nah, too early yet,” and stashes back in the drawer.
2
The crime scene, turns out, is in District 2, down the south side. You can still smell it. In the middle of a big scorch mark sits what’s left of Stuffy’s Speed Wagon, blackened fragments scattered across the pavement, dozens of detectives walking around aimless yet thoughtful, including a few from the bomb squad. “Hicks, don’t tell me you too? Criminy, they’re all comin outa th’ millwork for this one.”
“Me and who else?”
“Federal kiddies that nobody’s ever heard of.”
“Not the prohis.”
