The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

“Everybody knows the Van Dorns have a new office down by the tracks,” said Clayton.

“Hoods and cops wonder what you’re up to,” said Ellis.

“They heard you’re asking about the tunnel.”

“It sort of happens,” said Ellis. “Word gets around.”

“Questions raise questions,” Bell snapped. “Go on!”

“Our bosses at the bureau caught wind of the tunnel, too. They’re hunting night and day. They reckon it’ll be worth a fortune in protection.”

“And they’re worried you’ll get there first,” said Ellis.

Clayton said, “Me and Ed knew they wouldn’t share it with us—they hog the big payoffs—so me and him did a little snooping on our own. Thinking maybe we’d get there first. We heard the tunnel guys drowned a bunch of Eye-talians working on it. They weren’t hoods, just some bricklayers and stonemasons.”

“Murdered ’em because they knew where it was,” said Ellis.

“It didn’t seem right.”

“Making us think that maybe getting rich off Prohibition isn’t completely right either,” said Ellis.

Bell stared hard at them, wanting to believe that they had stumbled onto valuable information but not clear about their motives. They gazed back, wide-eyed and guileless, and Bell recalled, with growing excitement, that a prison chaplain once told him that he was often surprised by the particular event that shunted a sinner to a righteous path.

“Do you know where the tunnel is?” he asked.

“Pretty fair idea,” said Clayton.

“Downriver,” said Ellis. “It starts on Fighting Island.”

“Comes up under a boathouse in Ecorse.”

This sounded pretty good, thought Bell. Fighting Island was logical—a large, empty mid-river island on the Canada side of the international boundary. Ecorse on the United States side was a lawless, wide-open town next door to Detroit with elected officials and cops in the bootleggers’ pockets.

“Do you know where the boathouse is?”

“Got some good hunches,” said Ellis.

Bell said, “There are two hundred boathouses on the Ecorse waterfront and dozens of slips.”

“Gotta be near the creek,” said Clayton, narrowing the location considerably.

“Where’d your hunches come from?”

“Heard our boss talking.”

“Any theories who dug it?”

“The boss thought Polacks started digging it. Polacks from Poletown. Started in Ecorse. Then Eye-talians pushed ’em out. Then there was talk of Russians.”

“Russians?” asked Bell, keeping his own information to himself. “Where did Russians come from?”

“Could be talk, but there’s thousands of foreigners in Detroit.”

“Where does your boss stand on this?”

Clayton’s answer suggested a second motive for their conversion: a healthy desire to seek shelter in Fort Van Dorn. “He died yesterday, killed crossing Michigan Avenue.”

“Hit-and-run. Could have been a Ford. Could have been a Dodge.”