“You buddies with that damned cowboy who punched my nose?”

“I just got into town. Trying to get the lay of the land. But I’m hearing strange rumors.”

“Like what?”

“Rumor has it,” said Isaac Bell, “there’s a casino out in the middle of Lake Erie on a big ship.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Ever hear that?”

The bootlegger shrugged. “I heard they got a speakeasy in a dirigible.”

“Like the Germans bombed London with?” asked Bell. He had heard it, too. It was one of the crazier Prohibition tales floating around the Motor City. No one was clear how the giant airship remained invisible in daylight or how the customers got from the ground to the hovering casino.

“How do they get up to it?”

“They must have figured out how to land an airplane on it.”

Bell said, “I think I’ll stick to roadhouses. What’s your name, by the way? I’m Joe.”

The bootlegger gave him a long look and decided to play it safe. “I’m Joe, too. Pleased to meet you, Joe.”

They shook hands. Bell said, “I also heard about hijackers with a black boat.”

“There’s a lot of black boats on the river.”

“This one’s got a Lewis gun.”

Joe nodded sagely. “You can’t go wrong with Lewis guns.”

“Ever hear about a tunnel under the river?”

“Sure. They got a train tunnel.”

“For hauling whisky?”

“Yeah, you grease a brakeman and slip some on a freight car.”

“But you never heard about a tunnel just for booze?”

Joe looked Isaac Bell in the eye. “A tunnel would be a surefire way to haul hooch. If I had heard it, it would be my tunnel and I sure as hell wouldn’t tell anybody about it.”

Isaac Bell went back to the bar. Another fight broke out. It looked to Bell to be a staged battle intended to intimidate the paying customers and impress upon the owners the wisdom of paying for protection.

“Tarnation!” said Texas Walt. “Here we go again.”

Hatfield waded in. Ed Tobin joined him, trading his silver cocktail tray for a blackjack, and laid two men on the floor. The thug directing the theatrics pulled a gun.

Bell and Scudder moved swiftly to help. They needn’t have bothered. Light glinted on Hatfield’s scalping knife, and the gun fell from a hand flayed to the bone. Van Dorn waiters wrapped it in napkins and marched the gunman through the kitchen door. A woman stepped up for Walt’s autograph and the movie star obliged.

“Pay dirt!” he grinned when he got back to the bar. “We have finally attracted a higher grade of extortionist. He threatened to sell me protection ‘insurance.’ A step up from plain old ‘protection.’”

Bell said, “I’ll see if you put him in a talking mood.”

He found the gunman propped up on a keg outside the kitchen door, clutching his hand and guarded by an enormous Protective Services man. The napkins reeked of whisky that the Van Dorns had doused it with to prevent infection. He was white-faced with shock. But he retained the in-charge demeanor of a racket boss used to running the show.

Bell drew up another keg. “Hurt much?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you pulled a gun on the wrong guy.”

“No kidding. Where’d a movie star learn to use a knife like that? I thought they was all mamma’s boys. I never seen it coming.”

“In Hollywood,” Bell said, maintaining a serious expression, “they teach the actors the fighting that goes with the kind of movies they’re in.”

He passed his flask. The gunman pulled hard on it.

“Who are you working for?”

“You a cop?”

Isaac Bell took back his flask. “Do I look like a cop?”

“Then who are you?”

“I’m Gus,” said Bell, using the other standard name for the speakeasy doorman. “What should I call you?”

“I’m Gus, too,” said the gangster. “But it happens to be my real name. Who are you really?”

“I’m a guy who won’t pay for a shakedown but will pay for information.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Chicago,” said Bell, a city he knew intimately, having apprenticed there under Joseph Van Dorn.

“Where in Chicago?”

“Grew up on the West Side.”

“You know the Spillane brothers?”

“I put them out of business.”

This was true, although sending them to Joliet Penitentiary was not the way Gus interpreted it, judging by a look of respect and a knowing assessment of Bell’s high-priced duds.

“What are you doing in Detroit?”

Bell skipped his black boat rumors gambit and went straight to the heart of his scheme. “I’m looking for introductions.”

“To who?”

“Potential partners.”

The gangster perked up. “I thought Texas Walt owned the joint.”

“I have an interest in it. We’re looking for guys who know their business. So far, you are not a shining example of knowing your business, but maybe you’re just having a slow night.”

“Partners? That’s what I offered that son-of-a-bitch movie star.”

“You offered him protection insurance.”

“Any fool knows that means partners. You can’t run a business in Detroit without protection.”

“He doesn’t seem to need protection.”

“What kind of partners?”

“Supply partners. Partners we can count on for steady liquor. Do your bosses happen to be in the hauling business?”

“What makes you think I have a boss?”

“Bosses don’t barge into a joint waving a gun.”

“They do in Detroit.”

Bell regarded him thoughtfully. “Is that a fact?”

The gunman stood up. “Here’s another fact: You can go to hell.”

Isaac Bell drew his Browning and aimed it at the gangster’s as yet unwounded hand. “You want another crippled paw? Sit down!”

Flummoxed, the gangster gripped the blood-soaked napkins, sat back down on the keg, and cradled his hand in his lap. “What is going on?” he protested. “Where are all you guys coming from?”

“What do you mean, what’s going on? What guys?”

“Always in Detroit we fight each other. Now we got outsiders, torpedoes shoving into our operations. Hijackers.”

“What hijackers? Boats on the river?”

“You take your life in your hands on the river.”

“Have you run into a big black boat? Machine gun? Armor plate?”

“No.”

“Have you ever run up against the Jewish Navy?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing I’d want to happen again.”

Bell said, “It sounds like they put you out of business.”

“I’m waiting for winter. Drive across the ice.”

“It’s summer. How are you making a living in the meantime?”

“Snatch racket.”

“Who are you kidnapping?”

“Guys that can’t go to the cops.”

Isaac Bell indicated familiarity with the kidnapping business by raising a pertinent objection. “Guys who can’t go to the cops can be a handful.”

“Sure can. You gotta be careful who you snatch. You wouldn’t want to kidnap a Jewish Navy guy. You want guys with dough from bookmaking, whisky hauling, and girls; you want payroll bandits, loan sharks, auto thieves — except if they’re Purples. Purples would chase you all the way to Mexico.”

If Marat Zolner intended to make a criminal alliance in Detroit, as he had with the Black Hand in New York, the leader of the rising Purple Gang would be high on his list. The difficulty would be identifying him. As Walt had noted, Detroit bosses were killed right and left by the warring gangs, and even the cops were never sure who was on top.

“Who’s the Purple’s boss?”

“You have a lot of questions, mister.”

“I have a lot of curiosity,” said Bell. “What’s his name?”

“Forget it.”

“Would you like to go for a ride?”

“Where?”

Gus followed Bell’s gaze, past the kitchen and across the lot to a black Stutz sedan parked in the shadows, and his meaning sunk in. Leaning against it were Harry Warren’s toughest Gang Squad detectives. Grieving for the murdered Harry, they had no difficulty looking like gangsters who would kill without hesitation and enjoy it. Gus shook his head. “Look, mister…”