Page 5 of Shadow Ticket
“They look more like bootleggers, except the suits are cheaper.”
Skeet, tagging along, spots a ball bearing among the wreckage, slides it into his pocket.
“What do you want that for, could be evidence.”
“Steelies. These can bring up to a dime apiece. Chicago Latin kids, they’ll pay top dollar for anything. Why, you thought it was something sentimental?”
Back at the district station house, another of these eccentric midwestern cop outposts running to turrets, steeples, several colors of stone and brick ranging from cream to dark crimson, upstairs in the captain’s office, passing around a bottle of Mistletoe gin.
“IMOPIO job, no question.” Rhymes with Pinocchio.
“Howzat?”
“Infernal Machine Of Presumed Italian Origin.”
“Somebody got the radio on? Is that accordion music, why, it, it sounds almost like ‘Way Marie’…”
“Well? It’s what they do, ain’t it. Remember these are the people who invented the meatball, the bocce ball—rolling objects, it comes naturally to them.”
“There’s the problem,” a bomb squad old-timer nods, “mode of delivery. Typical Italo whizbang tends to be absentee, time-delayed, slow-dripping acid, two-dollar Ingersoll slow-dripping acid, wired into the ignition, but seldom if ever rolled down the street by hand like it’s Bensinger’s Recreation out here or somethin, which any li’l pebble can throw your shot off, ain’t it, not the usual leaf-and-a-half special, capeesh, wanna roll it under a truck, has to be some local genius who can read this pavement like a golf green.”
“Or else precision-engineered, custom-built, self-correcting, maybe a li’l gyroscope inside.”
“You got it. Which is why this caper’s got German storm kiddies written all over it.”
“Or how about, somebody’s going to some trouble to make itlookItalian.”
“Uh-oh, who let the deep thinker in?”
Talk unavoidably spiraling back through time to 1917 and the bomb that went off at Central Station, downtown.
“A wop football in the station house, for Chrissakes. Safest place in Milwaukee you’da thought—nothing could touch us. Headquarters, throne of God, no bomb would dare to go off.”
“Just after roll call, I’m heading out to the street—suddenly all hell. Go running back in, no lights, everybody screaming and yelling…it’s really bad, blood, smoke…Worst thing was, we did it to ourselves, it wasn’t even meant for us, civilians find it planted next to some little church in the Third Ward, some strictly inter-Italian beef, bring it downtown, instead of ‘Get it the hell outa here!’ the desk sergeant thinks some detectives might like to have a look, so it ends up in the assembly room, and…”
“Second thoughts about staying on the job after that, you can bet. Pull the hook early, get into a safer line of work.”
“But that’s the thing, ain’t it. Nobody knew what safe meant anymore.”
Hicks must’ve had a funny look on his face.
“Sure, Hicks, your Uncle Lefty must’ve told you the story a couple hundred times before, maybe to you it’s just cops, but there are things we can’t ever share with any civilian, whatever we hear downtown, whatever we don’t hear, it’s all a closed circle. We’re MPD. Ever since that fateful night it’s always the force are gonna have first call, before all others, forever. Does that include God? Maybe. Arguments on both sides.”
“Just about to ask,” Hicks politely.
—
Along with hissoda-jerk career and a sideline in medicinal alcohol, Hoagie Hivnak runs unclassified ads you won’t always find in theJournal. Hicks, making his way past a couple of prohis collecting their weekly payoff, what appear to be large cartons full of ice-cream cones, gets to the Ideal Pharmacy in the lull between lunchtime and school letting out, and in the bright downstairs, the pleasantly chemical drugstore odor, multicolored syrup bottles, chrome fountain hardware vanishing down the counter into mirrored distance, finding Hoagie alone behind an empty counter trying not to drift into dreamland.
Grown older through Prohibition, Hoagie has still somehow not lost the adenoidal brashness of the prewar teenage soda jerk he started off as.
“Thirty years ago this was no place for kids, the words ‘soda fountain’ would send mothers all over town into fits, worse than ‘opium den.’ ” Leapers and sleigh riders one end of the counter to the other lingering all day over house formulas with cocaine as the main ingredient, once a common sight in Milwaukee till the spoilsports at the Food and Drug brought the hammer down, like a preview of Prohibition, “and now it’s all this wholesome family trade. Talk about depression.”
Hicks slides onto a stool and pretends to look over the menu on the wall.
“How about a banana split, everything except the pineapple, which I’m suddenly allergic to after that one the other day.”
The veteran seltzer jockey comes alert, and they commence their familiar novelty foxtrot, a bar and a half into which Hicks manages to find a $2bill and, trying not to think of what it might’ve bought him, like lunch for a week, watches it vanish before Hoagie even touches it. Magic. “Still want the sundae, that’s another two bits.”
