The Disappearing Body

by David Grand

  Bright shafts of light swept the dark room until they all converged on a cot draped with a patchwork quilt. One of the officers bent down, lifted the quilt, and dragged out from under the cot a tarnished brass footlocker marked MW. The other officers gathered around and shined their flashlights onto the footlocker as the officer on his knees opened it up and pulled out eight sticks of dynamite wrapped in a two-day-old issue of the Globe.

  The bent officer replaced the bundle of explosives as he had found them and shut them away, and as the others filed out of the shack behind him, he gingerly carried the footlocker to one of the cars. Together, the men drove back along the Palisades in the direction of town as the sun crept up over the City’s skyscrapers.

  When they reached downtown Long Meadow, the cars split up, each driving to a different but similar-looking clapboard house just off Main Street. All the men removed their revolvers from their shoulder holsters as they pounded on the doors.

  Max Waters and Henry Capp, the leaders of the Long Meadow Munitions Workers Union, answered the loud knocks dressed in pajamas. When they opened their doors, they were wrestled down, shackled, and dragged from their homes as their wives and children screamed after them. They were both ferried to Delacort Prison, located on a small island in the harbor, where they were placed in separate cells and brought up on charges of sabotage and manslaughter.

  Back in Long Meadow, minutes after Waters and Capp were arrested, word spread, and a mob of union men, fresh out of bed, armed with guns and truncheons, converged on the plant. Upon hearing the news, the guards opened the plant’s doors and allowed the men to enter. They filed into the shops, the armory, and the offices. Once inside, the leaders of the mob manned the office phones and called the newspapers and the radio stations. They told the press that if Waters and Capp weren’t released by the end of the day, they would destroy the plant and take up arms against anyone who tried to stop them. They then called Narcotics Bureau Commissioner Harry Shortz.

  Harry Shortz received the call about the Long Meadow Munitions Workers Union while he was at the Hanover Hotel checking in on Murray Crown, owner of Crown Crackers and distribution man for the REM narcotics syndicate. As part of an agreement with the Narcotics Bureau and the State Attorney General, Crown was to testify against the leaders of the syndicate at a grand jury hearing the following morning. Harry wanted to get a look at Crown before he went on. He didn’t like what he saw. Crown was a sad puffy mess. He looked as though he was hopped up on laudanum.

  When the phone rang, Sergeant Pally Collins answered the call and tried to hand it over to Harry, who was sitting on the edge of the room’s bed, observing the disconsolate cigar-smoking Crown play out a hand of solitaire. “It’s for you, Harry,” Pally said.

  “Who is it?” he asked, still studying Crown’s beleaguered face.

  “Zelda.”

  “What does she want?”

  “He wants to know what you want,” Pally Collins said into the receiver. “. . . You, she wants you.”

  “I know she wants me. What does she want?”

  “Do you mind?” Crown protested weakly with a wet soporific glaze in his eyes.

  “Tell Zelda I’ll call her back from the lobby,” Harry said, watching Crown flip a card with the vigor of a lightbulb about to go on the fritz.

  “He’ll call you right back,” Pally said into the phone. “. . . Yeah, I’ll tell him.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “It’s urgent.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes, he says,” Pally said into the receiver and then hung up the phone.

  “Why don’t you take him with you,” Crown mumbled, still focused on the cards. “He grates on my nerves, this one.”

  “What nerves?” Harry said to himself. He turned to Pally. “Where’s the washroom?”

  “Right back there,” Pally said.

  Harry gestured to Pally to go out into the hall, then went into the bathroom.

  “If you need anything . . .” Pally said as he bent over Murray Crown, his lips close to Crown’s ear.

  “If I need anything . . .” Crown said to his cards.

  “If you need a tooth pulled or . . .”

  “Maybe a little bridgework done?”

  “How about I call Bubbles for a little entertainment?”

  “How about I take the Fifth?”

  “You’re losing again, Murray.”

  Murray turned around so that a shock of gray hair limply hanging over his forehead rested an inch from Pally’s nose. “Proctor Street,” Murray whispered with cigar breath. “We’ll see who loses what when I tell what I know about Proctor Street in the morning.”

  “That’s not a very smart move right there, that one you just made.”

  Murray turned back to his cards. “I know what I’m doing,” Murray continued, whispering. “I know what I know.”

  “I thought I told you to go into the hall,” Harry said to Pally as he stepped out of the bathroom.

  “I’ll be in the hall,” Pally said to Murray, his voice turning cold.

  Harry waited until Pally was gone. “I’ll be by early tomorrow morning to take you to the courthouse,” he said.

  “I so look forward to it,” Crown said, his voice as tart and juiceless as a squeezed lemon.

  “Try to cheer up, Murray.”

  Harry started out.

  “Hey, Mr. Commissioner . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “If anything happens to me . . .”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Murray.”

  “. . . tell Bubbles I love her.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. You have my word,” Harry said as he walked into the hall and shut the door behind him.

  Sitting on two folding chairs next to the door were Pally Collins and his partner, Sergeant Ira Dubrov. Pally and Ira were both heavyset men with fat cheeks. They wore spit-shined oxfords and waist-tight pinstripe suits. They talked through their upper teeth with a heavy South End accent that made them sound like they had midget fists permanently implanted in their cheeks. They were big men, like Harry, with big voices, big hands, big chests; unlike Harry, they were brash, not too attractive, and spirited like a couple of juvenile delinquents. To soften their coarse looks and rough demeanor—as part of a futile attempt on Harry’s part to make them appear above the fray (an attempt made after the papers started referring to Dubrov and Collins as Shortz’s goon squad)—Ira kept a meticulously groomed pencil-line mustache and Pally habitually wore a vibrant hothouse carnation in his lapel. Neither item seemed to fit. On the two of them, they looked like props from a bad Gilded Age costume drama and gave them the appearance of the very element they were trying to rid the City of. Regardless, Ira and Pally were cunning and resourceful, and because of that, for the many years they’d worked for Harry, they’d been his interpreters of the City’s underbelly, his eyes and ears, his most trusted men, whose influence on the bureau was probably equal or greater to that of Harry’s.

  “Has he been moping like this the whole time he’s been in there?” Harry asked.

  “Yeah,” Ira said. “Moping. Playing solitaire. Game after game after game after game. All through the fucking night sometimes. We offered to play a little gentleman’s poker with him . . .”

  “. . . but he won’t shut the fuck up,” Pally said. “So fucking dark, this guy. Every five minutes he’s wondering out loud why he just doesn’t off himself. He keeps saying, ‘Who do you think you bums are? You think you’re so goddamn invincible you can keep Johnny and Jerzy from getting to me?’ Forget it, I’d rather sit out here with Ira and pitch pennies.”

  “He’s scared,” Harry said.

  “He’s a nuisance,” Ira said. “Unpleasant. I don’t know how that wife of his puts up with him. How’d a beautiful woman like that ever get herself interested in a bum like him?”

  “You seen the jewelry he’s bought her?” Pally said out the corner of his mouth. “She lights up brighter than Ne
w Year’s Eve.”

  “On a stormy night,” Harry said.

  “What have you got against Bubbles, Harry?”

  “Nothing. I’ve got nothing against Bubbles, Ira.”

  “It don’t get much better than that. Really.”

  Harry smiled at the sight of Ira’s gorilla face rapt in thought about Bubbles Crown. “Anyway,” Harry said, “I want to know what you two think is the best way to get him to the courthouse tomorrow morning, without making a spectacle of things.”

  “I say we call Klein to work out the details,” Ira said.

  “Yeah, Klein,” Pally said. “He’s got a good head for that.”

  “That’s ’cause his head is so fucking big,” Ira laughed. “Have you ever seen such a big head outside of the fucking freak show?”

  Harry shook his head in mock frustration. “Who’s making the call?”

  “Me,” Ira said. “I’m making the call. I can’t stand looking at this wall for another minute.”

  When Harry and Ira reached the lobby of the Hanover, the concierge approached Ira and told him he had a phone call. Ira excused himself with his hands on his jacket’s lapels as he walked away from Harry and followed the concierge to a phone at the front desk.

  “Yeah, Dubrov here,” Ira said when the concierge had walked away.

  “It might interest you to know, Sergeant Dubrov,” a raspy voice said on the other end of the line, “that Victor Ribe is out of prison.”

  “Who is this?”

  “He’ll be up at Jack’s Basement Tavern . . .”

  “Where?” Ira asked as he hastily got out a pad and pen.

  “Jack’s Basement Tavern, four P.M., fifty-six West Eighty-third Street.”

  The phone clicked off. Ira stood with the receiver to his ear for a moment, the comic lines of his fat face smoothed over some as he looked around the lobby to see if he was being watched. He felt like he was being watched. He kept looking around until he noticed Harry looking at him from his phone booth. Ira then turned his head back to the phone and tapped at the line for the operator to get in touch with Klein.

  When Harry called his secretary and learned what had happened over in Long Meadow, and that he had been asked by the union to act as arbiter between them and the Department of Investigations, Harry immediately called Chief Investigator Lawrence Tines at his office in the Civic Center.

  “He’s over at Delacourt, Mr. Commissioner,” Tines’s secretary told him.

  “Can I reach him there?”

  “I’ll call him for you. Hold the line.”

  The secretary came back on a few minutes later. “What would you like to tell the chief, Mr. Commissioner?”

  “Tell him that the Long Meadow Munitions Workers Union has seized Fief’s plant.”

  Harry heard the secretary convey the message.

  “He’s aware of that, Mr. Commissioner.”

  “Tell him that they’ve asked me to arbitrate and that I’m on my way over there right after I get off the phone.”

  The secretary conveyed the message. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Tell him that I’d like to bring them some news to calm them down and get them out of the plant safely.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Tell him that if he could arrange to have Waters and Capp arraigned by the end of the morning and released on bail with the promise of a further investigation, I think I can get them out of there safely.”

  The message was conveyed.

  “He says they’ll be out within the hour, Mr. Commissioner.”

  “He does?” Harry sounded puzzled.

  “Yeah, he says he’s already sent them over to the courthouse.”

  “Did they confess?”

  The question was asked.

  “No, they haven’t.”

  “Anyway . . . tell him, thanks.”

  The message was conveyed.

  “He says, you’re welcome.”

  Harry hung up the phone and walked out of the phone booth, still wondering why that had been so easy.

  “Why do you look so stunned?” Ira asked as Harry walked toward him from the phone booth.

  “I’ll explain everything later,” Harry said. “What did Klein say?”

  “He said he’ll put his big head to work on it.”

  “Who called you down here?”

  “It was the wife,” Ira said. “Pally told her she could reach me here.”

  “How is Claudia?” Harry asked, his head still on Tines.

  “Fine, just fine. Riding my back like a jockey with a mallet. I should have married a broad with smaller fists.”

  “Maybe next time around,” Harry said as he drifted away from Ira toward the door.

  Indicting Jerzy Roth, Elias Eliopoulos, and Johnny Mann, the three principals who made up the REM narcotics syndicate, was Harry Shortz’s last order of unfinished business before he completed his final term as State Narcotics Bureau Commissioner. The syndicate had been a thorn in Harry’s side for as long as he had held his office. No matter what the bureau did, they could never get enough evidence on the syndicate to make arrests. Otherwise, Harry’s record was impeccable. Over the course of his tenure as Alcohol and Narcotics Bureau Commissioner—the longest served by any commissioner since the position was created—Harry miraculously managed to enforce the widely unpopular Prohibition laws without becoming unpopular himself; in fact, well after Prohibition’s repeal as head of the renamed Narcotics Bureau, he was still thriving, holding a level of respectability unrivaled by almost any other public official, law enforcement or otherwise. He had proved himself to be a man of the people, of the little guy, the down-and-out guy; and well into the Depression, when task forces were uprooting the state’s corrupt political machinery and sending its undesirables into retirement in droves, this meant something. It meant that Harry Shortz was flourishing. He had played it straight, and he had played it smart. He did it by not driving the little people into the ground. During Prohibition, he overlooked the small quiet gin joints and ragtag juice bars, and like an understated superhero from some kid’s comic book, made his name by picking fights in public with the larger-than-life South End gangsters who ran the big speakeasies, the gambling parlors, the dope dens, numbers rackets, and brothels; he took on the neighborhood thugs who were committing murders by the dozens, extorting thousands by the week, rolling over ordinary people by the minute to keep themselves in business. With Ira and Pally’s help, Harry Shortz soon inspired the same kind of fear and awe in the gangsters as the gangsters did in the City streets. The bureau busted up nightclubs, confiscated liquor, raided dope dens, exposed beat cops and ordinance men and crooked politicians with their pants down and their pockets outturned.

  Harry Shortz had not only avoided unpopularity in what was supposed to be an impossible arrangement, but had become so well liked in the Depression years that for the upcoming fall election he was nominated by the state’s Liberal Party to be their senatorial candidate. Building on his reputation and a long-held and well-known class bias, the very night he accepted his nomination, he started forging a social reform platform complete with coming-of-age stories about growing up alongside subsistence-wage miners in his hometown of Portsmith. Ostensibly, Harry’s interest in the everyday plight of the working man and woman made it as far as the shores of Long Meadow.

  When Harry left the Hanover, his driver taxied him to the North End Docks, where they caught a Barkley ferry. As soon as they were off, he walked upstairs to the ferry’s passenger landing for some fresh air and found himself blinded by a sudden fireworks display of bursting flashbulbs. He was surrounded by reporters. With his hands shielding his squinted eyes, he bellowed over the raucousness as if he were announcing a boxing match.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” he cried. “Please!”

  He dropped his arms and peered out onto the quieting deck, his controlled gaze looking into the eyes of the reporters. He plainly said to all of them, “The Long Meadow Munitions Workers Union has asked
me to act as arbiter between themselves and the Department of Investigations in the matter of Max Waters and Henry Capp. Seeing that I’m here, obviously I’ve accepted their invitation to do so. If I said anything other than that at present, I’d be showing bad faith. So, since I’m not here to talk to you people, at least not yet, why don’t you let me enjoy the rest of the ride across the river.”

  Harry had started to turn around and head for the lower deck, back to his car, when a reporter from the Herald called out, “How about taking a few questions about the syndicate, Mr. Commissioner?”

  Harry turned back. “What do you want to know, Spike?”

  “I want to know how you plan on breaking it up when half a dozen of its insiders have turned up dead since Crown’s arrest while the rest of them have gone on the lam.”

  “Last I heard, dead men don’t cause too many problems.”

  “What about the others who’ll end up back in the City once the heat’s off?”

  “Who says the heat’s gonna be turned off?”

  “Winter don’t last forever.”

  “I don’t follow that. You people follow that?”

  “Winter . . . the heat . . .”

  “Cute, Spike,” Harry said. “Real cute.”

  “Have you figured out how Crown was linked to Eliopoulos and American Allied Pharmaceutical?” another reporter broke in.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Harry looked around the room for another question.

  “Will you at least say when you expect to make arrests, for crying out loud?” Caruthers of the Times asked.

  “After Crown has testified.”

  “It’s good timing for you, isn’t it, Mr. Commissioner?”

  “It’s good overall, Mr. Caruthers.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”