The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  Michael nodded. ‘And there’s the dead end,’ he said.

  They fell silent, watched the traffic ploughing across the water, the gulls.

  ‘I buy the police conspiracy angle,’ said Michael. ‘I buy them dumping the voodoo stuff, turning up so soon. I even buy them getting the hotel owner to doctor the guest book. But what about the fingerprint? Tom’s fingerprint on the Powell brother’s watch? That’s the most damning piece of evidence in the whole case. And I just can’t see a way out of that.’

  Ida looked at him, frowned.

  ‘Any forensic can move a fingerprint,’ she said. ‘Find a touch plane in Tom’s room. Spray a print with ninhydrin, impress it onto clear tape, lift it, deposit it wherever you want. Flat surfaces work best, like the glass of a wristwatch. I know a professor in Chicago, an expert witness; he’ll testify to say all that fingerprint proves is someone in the NYPD was involved. Add it together with everything else. It all works in our favor.’

  Michael processed what she was saying, felt a tide of both relief and embarrassment rising up, tried to swallow it down.

  ‘What is it?’ Ida asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know that about transferring a print,’ he said quietly.

  As much as it provided hope, it made him feel out of touch, rusty, useless, old. She must have seen she’d knocked his confidence, bruised his pride, because her expression softened.

  ‘Why would you know about it?’ she replied, in a gentler tone. ‘It’s new technology. You’ve not been working for how many years? It’s why you asked me to come.’

  She looked at him and smiled, and it reassured him, warmed him, stirred some long-dead optimism inside him. This was exactly why he’d asked her to come, to feel that distant glimmer of hope.

  The ferry reached its slip and they disembarked with the other passengers, headed along 134th Street to the subway station at Cypress Avenue.

  ‘Have you told Tom about the police angle?’ Ida asked. ‘About what it means? The danger he’s in?’

  Michael shook his head.

  ‘I just told him to be careful,’ he said. ‘Explained what to do to keep himself safe.’

  They reached Cypress Avenue just as the last of the morning’s Sanitation Department trucks were rattling past, heading for the dumps to the north of the city. The grinding machines in the rears of the trucks were still churning, sending a grating noise into the air, trailing a stench down the street.

  They watched the convoy as it roared past, then Ida turned to Michael.

  ‘I’m going to go to my hotel and check in,’ she said. ‘Let me have the case jacket. I’ll go over it this afternoon and we’ll talk in the evening.’

  He nodded, passed over the binder. Then he took a spare set of keys for the apartment he’d rented in Midtown and passed them over, too.

  ‘So you’ve got the run of the place,’ he said.

  He’d offered to let her stay at the apartment, but she’d turned him down, choosing instead to book a room uptown. She took the keys, slipped them into her pocket.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do this on my own.’

  ‘Sure you could.’

  ‘I’m old,’ he said. ‘Old and rusty. I thought I’d retired and then Tom ends up embroiled in this. Last ten years I’ve been reading the paper and going fishing. Most I’ve ever done to challenge myself is the crossword. I should have kept my hand in.’

  ‘You didn’t know this was going to happen,’ she said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘It was bad luck we had to get involved in this, Michael,’ she said. ‘But not for us, for them. They framed the son of the best detective Chicago ever saw. They’re not going to know what hit them.’

  She smiled at him and the sentiment of her words began to have an effect. He smiled back and they hugged, and the wind blew down the street, icy and sharp, and Michael felt that glimmer of hope once more.

  11

  Monday 3rd, 12.03 p.m.

  Ida sat on the subway train as it rattled towards 125th Street station, staring at the map of the transit system on the opposite wall. Colored lines drooped across the city like spaghetti, black blobs marked the intersections, arrows the directions of travel. Just like the asterisms on the ceiling of Grand Central that morning, the map seemed to suggest everything had its path laid out, a predefined passage through the world. This was the reassuring fiction of maps.

  She thought of Tom roaming the streets of New York without direction or purpose, his life gone astray. Whatever he’d seen over in the Pacific kept him up at night, made him quit his hospital job, sent him stumbling through New York trying to make sense of it all. She thought how Michael’s life, too, had been shunted off course because of it, re-routed to a distant city. And so it was with Ida’s husband, who’d been wrenched away from her to fight overseas, leaving Ida behind to navigate his absence.

  The train pulled into 125th. She walked crosstown to Black Harlem, through streets that were quieter than they had been that morning. She arrived at her hotel, the Hotel Theresa, a towering building on 7th Avenue that took up a whole block between 124th and 125th. Ida wondered again why she’d chosen to stay in Black Harlem. She was a Negro, light-skinned enough to pass for white, so she had her pick of New York, but she’d settled for Harlem. Maybe the choice showed a lack of imagination, of the independence she liked to pride herself on. As she walked up its front steps, she looked up at the building’s white bricks and terracotta, its bay windows, delicate stonework, and thought on the differences with the Palmer Hotel, just a handful of blocks away.

  She stepped inside the lobby and crossed to the reception desk. ‘Hello. I’m here to check in, please.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Ida Young.’

  Again that imposter feeling from using Nathan’s family name.

  ‘Where you from?’ asked the receptionist.

  ‘New Orleans,’ said Ida. ‘By way of Chicago.’

  ‘I’m from Lafayette.’

  The girl smiled and passed over Ida’s keys.

  The room was small, but it was clean, and, best of all – it was warm. Beyond the bed was the entrance to a tiny bathroom, next to it was a dresser with a radio on it, and next to that a window that looked out onto Seventh Avenue. Ida took off her shoes and hose, washed her feet in the tub, ran warm water over them, felt it soothe her skin.

  She returned to the bedroom and shoved the bed into a corner, lay all the documents from the binder out on the carpet in tiles – the witness statements, police statements, crime scene snaps, fingerprint blow-ups, timelines, blood and fiber sample inventories, room layouts, floor-plans. She sat cross-legged in front of it all.

  She sifted evidence.

  She read everything once, read it again. So much of the evidence didn’t make sense or contradicted itself. So much didn’t add up. And on top of all that, she had a lingering feeling that she was missing something else, something important. She’d realized long ago that the things which nagged at her mind came in two forms – things that were present but shouldn’t be, and things that were absent but shouldn’t be. The things that were present created a feeling of confusion – the voodoo dolls, the fingerprint, the money and the dope. The things that were absent were more unnerving – the missing machete, the missing crime scene photos, the missing motive, the missing killer.

  But there was something beyond all that, and because she didn’t know what it was, it was all the harder to grasp. How did you clutch at an absence? How did you define the void that would solve it all? The only way was to construct the shape around the hole, its outline, and see what fitted into it. This was what she lost herself in.

  Time passed. Thoughts twirled, ideas spiraled. Certain points kept coming to the fore of her consciousness, making themselves known. Miss Hollis savaged in the reception. The Powell brothers sliced up. She put them aside. She thought about Bucek. White boy in Harlem. On the run six weeks. What had he been running from?

/>   She flicked through the morgue shots of Bucek. She looked at the wounds. She compared them to the wounds on Miss Hollis. She stopped on the photos of Miss Hollis’s midsection, the groin deformed by the machete, upward thrusts, a steel-bladed simulation of the act of love.

  She went back to the Bucek morgue shots, compared them to the crime scene photos. She looked at the mess the killer had made of the boy’s torso, noticing how his arms and legs had been left untouched. She looked at the flawless skin of his limbs and compared it to the skin on his stomach and chest, which had been ripped and slashed, lacerated so as to get to the life inside.

  As she stared at the wounds she got the feeling again that something was wrong. Ida was clinically detailed when it came to images. Get the imagery right and all the emotions and theories fell into place. What was missing from these images? The question bumped against her mind. She stared and tried to calm herself, waited for the answer to appear in the spotlight of her thoughts.

  Nothing came. Her thoughts broke off.

  She sighed and looked up at the window. Gray clouds spitting rain. She checked her watch. Hours had passed and she’d not made the breakthrough she needed. But equally in those hours, she hadn’t thought of Nathan, of loneliness, of fear. She decided to take a walk to clear her head while it was still light.

  She left the hotel and headed west through the afternoon gloom. She stumbled upon a park and decided to walk through it. The rain had melted most of that morning’s frost but some of it remained, in patches under bushes and trees, like ghostly white shadows. She sat on a bench, looked up at the branches dissecting the sky, the yellow globes at the top of the lampposts.

  She heard a noise behind her – a snake of children on their way home from a school trip. She watched as they disappeared northwards, taking with them their joyful, careless racket. The park became quiet once more, just the wind, the rattle of a newspaper delivery van on St Nicholas Avenue.

  A sense of loneliness crept up on her, of detachment. Everyone else’s lives in this unfamiliar place were continuing on as normal, moving forward as if she wasn’t even there, just as they’d always done. The city hadn’t pulled her in, hadn’t made a place for her, and so she was outside of it, looking in, contemplating her own absence from the world. That was the loneliness of walking through a strange city – the sense that this was what life looked like without you. This was how ghosts walked the earth. Would this be how she spent her days if she took the job in Los Angeles? Wandering around like a ghost?

  It was another reason she had come to New York, to see if she could hack it in a new city, to see if she had it in her to make the break she desperately needed if she had any chance of moving on from Nathan’s death, the break she was too scared to put into motion. In the shivering cold of the park, she imagined the Pacific laid out before her, the shush of the waves, glittering sunrise, endless sparkling blue.

  She rose and continued walking. She thought of Tom roaming these same streets. She’d known he was telling the truth in the jail about his endless walking because his behavior mirrored hers after she’d learned Nathan had died. She’d taken to working, Tom had taken to wandering the streets, walking all day so when he got home he passed straight out, rather than lie in bed reliving his traumas, wrestling with the bouts of nightmarish introspection Ida knew all too well.

  When Nathan had first been sent overseas, she’d faced the situation head on. She’d stayed glued to the radio and newspapers, absorbing the news like clockwork. She let it order her day, made it a routine and a ritual. She couldn’t pass a news-stand without scanning the headlines, checking for mentions of Nathan’s army fighting in Europe. When the radio was on in a shop or a bar she strained her ears. At the cinema her heart raced as the newsreels came on, raced again when she collected her mail each morning.

  And then at some point, fear took hold completely and she became too scared to look. She avoided it all, clung to the mantra that no news was good news. When she walked past a man on the street reading a paper, she no longer arched her neck.

  She learned to fear what lay in wait. It was the future that churned up people’s lives, that stood like a great blackness in front of the world, a void out of which were thrown wars and epidemics, hurricanes, earthquakes, a farrago of catastrophes. There really was no limit to the horror tomorrow could bring. And all that anyone could do was stay rooted in front of the blackness and be battered by it.

  So Ida turned and looked the other way, fell into memories of the past, because the past had one great advantage; you knew how it turned out. Even if it was terrible, at least it had certainty, and so provided comfort in unstable times, balm for the bewildered.

  Only late at night, in cold-sweat bouts of introspection, did she view this forced indifference as a betrayal of Nathan. And that was how it continued for over two years, until one day, a telegram came. It didn’t say much, except that he’d been killed on the field of battle in Normandy many days earlier. That his sacrifice was heroic.

  Ida spent months in a daze, her grief a barrier which made the world go silent. The days slipped by like distant traffic. Only when she was with Jacob did things seem real. He kept her tethered to the world, kept her from retreating completely into dreams of her life as it should have been, if only it had stayed on course. But even her relationship with Jacob was affected. She needed to make sure the bereavement didn’t damage him, so every interaction was muffled by that concern, was tainted by it.

  When Jacob was at school she immersed herself in work. When he went to sleep, she worked again, worked all the empty hours to stop herself from thinking, from falling down that pit in her mind that her thoughts dragged her to during any moment of stillness.

  Then in October of 1945, there was a knock at the door. A chubby young man in an army uniform squeezing his green beret in his hands. He told Ida he had served with Nathan. She invited him in, made him coffee. He had come from New York and was on his way back home to Ohio. He talked to her about Nathan and the years they’d spent together. As he spoke she realized how much of Nathan’s life in those final years had been lost to her and the chasm yawned once more. He told her he was with Nathan when he died, and asked her if she would like to know what happened.

  What to say? She wanted to know, but at the same time knew that the details of his death would make his ending definite, complete. Vague as things were, they were unfinished. Did the coffin need more nails?

  They came to a compromise. He stayed there and wrote it all down instead, filled pages. She made him food and more coffee. In the morning she took him to Union Station. They waved goodbye and never spoke again. She put the pages in an envelope, sealed it, left it in the sideboard and never opened it. And there it stayed, sometimes reassuring, sometimes sulfurous.

  Time passed. Jacob finished school and she lost him to a law degree in Berkeley that August and the apartment became ever quieter, and she was alone, really alone, for the first time in nearly two decades. It brought the bereavement into starker relief, concentrated it. What started as a mere sense of loneliness, became loneliness itself, grew, took hold. These last few months she’d realized loneliness had an undertow which could capsize her if she wasn’t careful. Then Michael called her about Tom, and she’d come. What better place to be lonely than New York?

  She returned to her hotel. Caught the elevator to her floor and as it rattled upwards she felt a pang of longing for her empty apartment in Chicago, the bed so often left unmade, its sheets so often rumpled with insomnia. She returned to her room and it was only then she noticed the hunger gnawing at her stomach. She called down to reception and ordered food. She ate and worked, the work pushing away bad thoughts, as always.

  She thought of the money. Of the heroin. Of the white boy. Another lost soul. She imagined Bucek dealing out of a Harlem flophouse. Couldn’t make sense of it. But the heroin stash was dealer-sized. The Medical Examiner’s report. Toxicology. Dope in Bucek’s bloodstream at overdose levels, suggesting Bucek was on
the needle, a heavy user, had mainlined just before the attack. He must have been completely out of his mind when whoever burst in and killed him.

  She went back to the crime scene photos – to the gashes and slashes, the blood. Again it nagged at her; something was missing from the photos.

  What was it?

  She put the photos down. She sighed. She looked out of the window, at the dark clouds scudding past in the night sky. Grand Central Terminal came to mind. The constellations on the ceiling. The gods in their robes being pushed along by invisible lines of forces, slaves to their predefined path through the world. Maybe this was why she’d felt unsettled when she’d looked at them. What she thought was a problem just for humans, also went for stars and gods. Maybe the whole of existence was an exercise in powerlessness, endurance, clockwork.

  She thought of the stars and fate, of divination, of entrails, slashes, the flawless skin on Bucek’s arms.

  She paused. Her thoughts grew still. Then realization rushed through her mind.

  That was it.

  The missing piece.

  She grabbed the morgue shots to make sure she was right. She was. Bucek was a habitual user. So why weren’t there needle marks on his arms? No astral map of puncture wounds or comet trails? How easy not to notice they were missing amongst all the cuts and gore. The toxicology reports were a lie. Maybe the killer juiced him up, or maybe the doc in the morgue. Bucek wasn’t a junkie, was just made to look like one in a clumsy cover-up.

  And just like that, tumblers fell into place, one after the other, unlocking a whole segment of the mystery. The void at the center of things took shape.

  Ida jumped up and scrambled for her bag, found the number for Michael’s apartment, called him from the phone on her bedside table.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Bucek wasn’t a junkie. He doesn’t have any marks on his arms. I’m looking at the morgue shots right now.’

  Silence on the line as Michael processed what she was saying.