Hap and I arrived in Milwaukee in 1937 during a September snow storm. It was so cold my nuts shriveled up like a pair of raisins, making me question Haps wisdom of wanting to quit the rodeo scene back in Texas and come back home. Luckily the snow melted the next day and we experienced a mild fall.
Hap still had to have something between his legs beside a horse so he hooked up with a fast growing company by the name of Harley Davidson in north Milwaukee that made motorcycles. He worked the third shift and slept most of the morning so we didn’t see much of each other until the weekends.
I, on the other hand, thought I could lengthen my life span by getting a job where I sat behind a desk instead of on the back of a crazy horse or raging bull, so I took an offer from the Milwaukee Journal, the flagship newspaper of the Beer Capitol of the World also known as the city of neighborhoods. I started as a copy boy but took advantage of the early demise of their crime scene reporter, Sammy “Snuffy” Schultz who arrived at a shooting scene a few minutes too early and caught a .38 caliber slug in his gut.
It wasn’t long before my heart took a big leap and I married this little cooze I met up in the Town of Brookfield. She was a bartender/ waitress at the Railroad Inn and was packed with a top that made you drool long before the salads were served. I swear she was taller lying down than she was standing up. Unfortunately, she believed I was something I never professed to be and when the truth got out, so did she, moving to Kenosha, hooking up with some guy tightening lug nuts on Nash Ramblers as they left the assembly line, leaving me hurting like Casper never came close to doing.
As usual, Hap was there for me when I fell, showering me with his words of wisdom.
“When are you going to learn, little buddy, when you see a women like that who has tits from here to eternity, you got to climb off once you reach the top because there just ain’t no more mountains to climb. Look at me; you don’t see none of this crap happin’ to me, do ya?”
“Hap, that’s because you’re so ugly, you couldn’t date a chimpanzee.”
“That may be true, Max, but at least I won’t be paying alimony from now until Jesus returns.”
I smiled as I held my head in my hands and groaned, “Hap, why do you have to be so damn smart after the fact when it doesn’t do me any good?”
Hap threw back his head and laughed. “Hell Max, then you wouldn’t be fun to be around.”
It wasn’t long before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor and Hap and I decided our country needed our considerable talent at fighting, so we joined the Army Air Corps. Hap going to Europe and I ended up in the South Pacific. Luckily for all the women in Milwaukee, we both came back without any visible scars. We both got our old jobs back and life was clicking on all cylinders.
Hap was working with an ex-fly boy by the name of Sam Galbraith who seemed to fill Hap’s head with some new scheme every night.
The newest one was to buy an airplane and start a charter business.
Evidently he had a line on a plane that he could get for a song and a few thousand dollars that he didn’t have. Since they worked the third shift, Sam reasoned they could fly business executives or cargo during the day and get back in plenty of time to cover their shift at Harley. The plane was a Model 17 Staggerwing Biplane that had the top wing staggered behind the bottom wing. It was manufactured in 1934 by Beech. It was specifically designed for business travel which was unusual in that era. This particular plane had powerful radial engines rated at more than seven hundred horsepower which made it faster than most military aircraft at the time. This plane also was the one that famed aviatrix, Jacqueline Cochran used when she won the Bendix Trophy Race in 1937.
When Hap finished telling me their plan and the fact that they got the interest of some guy by the name of Ralph Mills who was developing property in Menomonie Falls and points north and who evidently had more money than sense to throw in with them, I decided to take the money that was hiding in my whole life insurance policy that my ex took out on me and give it to Hap before she could get her hands on it. I figured if I died, it would end up hers anyway. My thoughts were I might as well spend it now and Hap was the closest thing I had to family so I might as well spend it on him.
So far I haven’t seen a return on my investment but Hap told me he has been receiving some nice dividends.
“You ever do it in a plane Max?” he asked.
“Do what in a plane, Hap?”
“Come on Max, you know what; get laid.”
“No I haven’t. I have a hard enough time getting laid on the ground, so doing it while I fly over Wisconsin hasn’t been high on my list of things to do.”
“Well, I’m here to tell you little buddy, it is an incredible experience.
All I can say is I am glad I was five thousand feet up because the screaming that little filly did would have brought the whole damn Milwaukee Police Department down on me if I was riding her at my place.”
“I’m happy for you. For some reason I felt I might have wasted my money investing in this flying bordello, but now I can see that’s not the case.”
If you factored out that investment, life was moving along pretty well for me and I was settling into a routine that seemed to fit my life style. I was sitting at my favorite booth in Rocco’s Pub, working the days’ crossword puzzle wearing my work clothes, a brown corduroy jacket, hiding my shoulder rig that held my .38 caliber Colt Detective Special belly gun, a Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt, blue jeans, with my rodeo belt buckle from my second place finish in overall points for the All Around Cowboy Award I won in 1937, and my Dan Post cowboy boots, when a squad car shot by with its siren screaming, lights flashing and tires squealing. I jumped up leaving a couple of bucks on the table which more than covered the cost of my coffee, providing a generous tip along with my half finished crossword puzzle for Eloise, my regular waitress and main squeeze. She had been working at Rocco’s Pub for as long as l had been hanging out there which was quite awhile.
I ran to my car, a 1941 Nash 600 Ambassador Convertible Coupe that I parked at the curb. I jumped in and noticed a parking ticket under my windshield wiper. “Damn, I cursed, another one.” I reached out, grabbed it, and threw it on the front seat next to a half dozen others.
I was turning the ignition before I even closed the door praying that the engine would turn over and fire one more time. I have been threatening to get rid of this car and get a new one but never got around to doing it. In its day, she was a beauty. It was the first mass-produced unibody automobile made in the United States. It got better gas mileage than its competitors because of its lighter weight and lower air drag. It’s equipped with overdrive and I can go about 600 miles on a tank of gas. In other words it gets 30 miles per gallon and in my financial condition I need to save anywhere I can. And it is made a little south of Milwaukee at Nash Rambler in Kenosha, Wisconsin which is a plus; as I said, Nash employs my ex’s new boyfriend and that keeps her off my back about late or missing alimony checks. The odometer reads close to two hundred thousand miles and it has served me well over the years. I taped a couple dozen pencils together and attached them to the metal rod sticking out of the floorboard where the accelerator used to be. I lost the pedal awhile back trying to lose an irate husband who I was taking some photos of with a young bimbo leaving the Bluemound Inn, west of Milwaukee in the small town of Brookfield. The guy was an ex Green Bay Packer who was washed up before his career started but that didn’t matter in Wisconsin. These guys eat, drink and sleep for free and they expect everybody to kiss their ass. His wife knew he was running around on her but couldn’t prove it.
That’s where I came in. I caught him red handed; unfortunately, he caught me red handed catching him red handed and he came after me with a vengeance as if I was a scrawny halfback. If he had shown the same ferocity he showed coming after me while he was playing for the Pack, he might have lasted longer than the six years he spent riding the bench. While getting away from him, I mashed the accelerator to the floorboard with an overwhelming fear that I was soon to meet my demise, causing the brittle rubber to break into a dozen pieces. I have been meaning to replace it but just never seemed to find the time. The fee I received from the ex Packer’s wife went to my ex and the rest I split between Rocco’s and getting a cracked tooth fixed, which is another story. I had to wire the passenger door shut after some whacko side swiped me down on Juneau Avenue last year while I was covering a double homicide. It would take a couple months pay to get it fixed and I could never get the cash together. This baby was like home to me. It might have felt that way as I spent most nights sleeping in the back seat, either alone or, on some occasions, with Eloise, when for some reason, she didn’t want me over at her place. I rented a flat over a plumbing supply shop down off Kilbourn Avenue. I couldn’t afford any furniture so all I had in there was a single cot from the Army Surplus store and an old couch and chair my sister gave me two years ago before she took off for California with her new husband. For end tables, I used a couple of crates that some pipe came in that I took out of the dumpster behind the building. I had one old lamp whose shade was torn and yellow from age. I had a hot plate and a refrigerator. The refrigerator came with the place and quit working when it pleased and that seemed to be whenever I put in a quart of milk and some cheese. I brought Eloise home one night and the refrigerator must have cut off in the morning as the place smelled like a rendering plant. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out maybe that’s why Eloise would join me in the backseat of my Nash but not at the flat. The flat was situated where a breeze couldn’t circulate through to cool the place so it was always hot in the summer and the smell from the grease on the plumbing pipes would waft up through the ceiling making it rather unpleasant to sleep at night. It was a cinder block building with no insulation so in the winter, the cold air would leak in from the walls, the floor and the ceiling and the place was always cold. Every time I flushed the toilet it sounded like the building would collapse. I rented it from my ex’s older sister who was a plumber. She couldn’t stand my ex and did it just to spite her. I think she hated my ex about as much as my ex hated me. This was a family feud that I liked.
She charged me fifty dollars a month and that included electricity as she didn’t want to go through the trouble of calling the electric company and having them come out to install another meter. The reason I continue to call this place home is that I need a place to store my stuff. If I kept it in my car, I wouldn’t have anyplace to take Eloise on those occasions when the heat rises from our loins and takes over our better senses.
Whenever the urge to get another car hits me, I either don’t have the money or the stomach to go to a used car lot and put up with some shyster trying to sell me a lemon for twice the amount of money it is worth.
I was lucky the engine fired and started to purr. Well, I call it a purr. Most people would call it an intermittent chug, burp, cough and sputter. I let out the clutch, which was beginning to slip a bit, and slammed the pencils to the floor. The old Nash lurched into traffic, belching blue smoke out the exhaust pipe amid the blaring horns of the cars I cut off as I started my pursuit of the police car. I changed lanes to get around a slow moving Cadillac filled with a group of elderly ladies. This was unusual as I was the one usually being passed by annoyed commuters heading to work or wherever they were headed as they entered the city. As I reached the first curve in the road, I could feel the chassis sway back and forth. This baby had independent coil spring front suspension when it was new but the past fifteen years it has been driven pretty hard. Well, at least for the last five years that I’ve had it.
Once I reached the straight away I punched the pencils again with all the force I could muster with my right leg as if that would make it go faster. I could hear the engine whine and groan, wishing I would ease up a bit and be more considerate of her advanced age. I could still see the flashing lights in the horizon but I was losing ground rapidly. I lost the last police cruiser I chased and I sure as hell wasn’t going to lose this one. I was desperate for a story. A story? Yeah, that’s right, a story. You see, I’m a part time beat reporter for a small town newspaper called the Daily Citizen.
My editor, Francis Wentworth, from THE Wentworth’s on Lake Shore Drive, in Beaver Dam, was losing patience with me and threatened to replace me with a pencil necked geek by the name of Horace Greenberg, who was currently working in the mailroom. Horace was a pain in the ass. Every time he passed my desk, he would stop and look over my shoulder to read what I was typing. He would make some comment like “You know, you should put a comma after door.”
“I’ll put a comma up your ass if you don’t get outta’ here, you piece of shit!” I’d tell him and he would run off with his tail between his legs until the next time he delivered the mail. It wasn’t like this job was that great. I mean the money sucked. I could make more money waitressing at Rocco’s, if I had legs like Eloise. I guess I just enjoyed sticking my nose in other people’s business and then writing about it. Sometimes it didn’t even seem like a job. Just something I did to pass time between beers and Eloise. But then ol’ Francis would get in my face and I would have to go to the corner drugstore and load up on more antacid.
So, I have been chasing squad cars for this daily rag in the town of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and its’ fourteen thousand, five hundred busy Beavers, for over five years.
After I returned from the war in forty five, I got back my job as a beat reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. As I said, I enlisted in the Army Air Corp and spent a lot of time in the South Pacific and saw a lotta shit happen. People tell me when I die, I’m going to hell, but I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to die to go there. I was there. So I didn’t want to put up with any more shit from my city editor who sat with his fat belly hanging over his belt and whose idea of a horrifying event was seeing some old Pollack whack his wife over the head with a kielbasa. One day we had a disagreement that caused me to make a career change. This disagreement landed me on the obituary page. I mean as a writer. It might have been better if I landed there in an article. After I plastered my editor’s nose across his face, when he gave me crap about not showing enthusiasm for my job, I decided my career needed some adjustment. I spent the next couple of weeks discussing my options with my agent, Tommy Hanson, the bartender at Hepfner’s Bowling Alley on North Avenue. Whenever I wasn’t at Rocco’s assessing Eloise’s legs and backside, I was giving advice at Hepfner’s to anyone who would listen, and there weren’t many, on who the Braves should get at second base and leftfield that would make them a cinch to win the ’57 World Series. They had unloaded one of my favorites, Jack Ditmer, who started at second base and did a good job. He was a solid player. Not flashy like some of those guys, but he got the job done. You could count on him hitting .270 to .280 every year. Not bad for a second baseman. Since they traded him, I said they should get Albert “Red” Schoendienst from the Saint Louis Cardinals. A perennial All Star and future Hall of Famer who the Cardinals thought was reaching the end of his career. The guy could hit. He had a lifetime batting average over .300. Red is just what we need in the number two spot hitting before Eddie Mathews, our All Star third baseman and Henry Aaron, who says he gets his lumber from Banner Lumber and who hits more bad balls than Liberace’s chin.
Since they moved Henry from leftfield to right, the Braves hadn’t been able to find anyone who could play leftfield without getting hurt or with any consistency. If Joe Adcock, the big six foot four inch, two hundred and twenty pound first baseman can recover from his knee surgery, the Braves would have a lineup that would scare the bejesus out of any pitcher.
Last year Rueben Gomez, the Puerto Rican pitcher for the New York Giants hit Adcock with a pitch and Joe took off after him with his bat. He chased him all around the outfield and into the Giants dugout. Gomez refused to come out and the Giants had to put in another pitcher and Adcock was ejected from the game.
Anyway, getting back to my dilemma, Tommy, the wise sage that he is, suggested I should seek employment in another city, especially if I wanted to stay in the writing racket.
“Racket? Whaddya’ mean by racket, Tommy?”
“Well, you can’t call it a job Max, he said. I see you in here just about every day and Eloise says she sees you more than she does Rocco. What about rodeoing? Isn’t that rodeo clown gig working for you?”
“It’s working for me, Tommy, but it’s only on weekends during the summer and I need more than that and I’m not going on the circuit anymore. I’m too old and busted up to get into that again.”
“What about that horse trading business, or that airline you and Hap and those other two goofballs own? Hell, you’re a renaissance man, Max.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Tommy replied. “I heard someone call a guy that once.” So, ignoring Tommy’s advice, I went to work for a buddy of mine who had a small private investigative agency, named Marcello and Associates. Associates turned out to be a portly old spinster, named Mildred Bates, who cleaned houses for rich Jews on the East side of Milwaukee on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of every week. Tuesday and Thursday she opened Marcello’s mail and answered his phone, when it rang. She wore her hair pulled back in a bun so tight that it caused her to have a perpetually painful look on her face. She was a short woman with thick glasses and a slight mustache over her upper lip. From what I could tell, her legs never saw a razor. They looked like the poster boys for Smith Brothers of the cough drop family.
Marcello was an ex fed by the name of John Marcello, a stocky Italian with a barrel chest and graying curly hair, who needed to get out of the house to save his marriage. So he got his license and hung out his shingle.
He said: “What the fuck you wanna do this for? You’ll end up gettin’ your nuts shot off by some broads’ husband or dropped in the Milwaukee River by some Guinea from Chicago.”
I convinced him he needed me and he agreed to split any fees he got for cases I handled for him. After a year I got my PI license and my name after his on his office door. So now Associates include a fat old Jew cleaning woman and a Swedish loser small town newspaper beat writer/private investigator/rodeo clown who changed his name from Hjerstedt to Fly. I changed my name because it’s a pain in the ass spelling it every time someone asked me my name. When I first told Marcello that I changed my name to Fly he was glad.
He said it would cost too much to have Hjerstedt painted on the door and he didn’t want to have to spell it and pronounce it every time someone would ask. I agreed with him.
Marcello had some good contacts with the Milwaukee Police Department so he was kept busy doing background checks on potential industry leaders and politicians and to help them with their backlog on warrants and repos. He didn’t trust me yet with anything heavy, so I got to do repos and chase horny husbands, like that ex Green Bay Packer.
Needless to say, I wasn’t making a lot being Marcello’s stooge, so I got this job at the Daily Citizen. Actually, I invented the job. I suggested to Francis that they needed a crime reporter covering the crime scene in Milwaukee and I had the experience and the time. I suggested I would work for peanuts and he took me up on it. I get paid a bit more than peanuts, but not much. My pay situation is why I hesitate on replacing this old Nash.
Today I was lucky; I caught up with the police car. The responding officers were Detective Sgt Harry Marshall and Detective Emily Williams, of the homicide division. My friendship with Detective Marshall went back eleven years when we both mustered out of the Army Air Corp together.
He went back to the Milwaukee PD and picked up his job as a homicide detective he had before he enlisted. He now has twenty years under his belt, most of it leading the homicide division. Detective Williams was the first female detective on the Milwaukee Police force. She was damned good. She had to be or she would be back at some precinct slapping it out with an old Remington typewriter and putting up with sexual attacks from the beat cops riding out the rest of their time before they retired. She was also hot!
Harry and I have had our moments over the years, but most of them have been pretty good. It seems I have a way of getting under his skin at times, but it’s my job. When he can get over my tenaciousness, he says it is over the top obnoxiousness; he can tolerate me as long as I don’t step over that line. That line is always changing it seems, so I have to continually assess how he feels at the moment.