The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  ‘This is a newer composition,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s called “Relaxin’ at Camarillo”.’

  There was a smattering of applause and a few members of the audience laughed, Shelton and Eubie among them, as if the name of the song was a joke.

  The saxophonist smiled wryly, then the band launched into the song, a slower number, beginning with a soothing melody that was played on the piano.

  Ida looked at Shelton and Eubie.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ she asked them.

  Eubie nodded at the men on stage. ‘Last year Parker and the rest of the band went out on tour to California. Parker couldn’t score dope so easy out there so he drank. Went crazy. Set fire to his room and ran through the hotel naked. He was arrested, sent to jail, then on to Camarillo. It’s the State Mental Hospital in California. Spent six months there. It’s got a drying-out program for junkies. Meanwhile the rest of the band were stranded in LA, had to sleep on couches till they could afford a ticket home. I guess the song title’s making a joke about it.’

  Ida nodded. Turned to look at the young men on stage once more.

  ‘Camarillo,’ she repeated, and she wasn’t sure why. The sound of it maybe, the way the syllables rolled off the tongue like they often did with Spanish words. She thought about Charlie Parker, heroin addiction, mental hospitals. Drew a parallel with Billie Holiday in prison on a dope charge, strung out and locked up and maybe crazy, as well. She thought about Tom and Cleveland, too. It seemed like madness and addiction followed the whole generation around.

  She mentioned the thought to Shelton and Eubie.

  ‘Sure,’ said Shelton. ‘Earlier this year the band had a different pianist, Bud Powell. He’s in the loony bin, too, now, getting electroshock.’

  Ida looked at the piano player on stage, hunched behind his instrument, sweat dripping off his face.

  ‘Ain’t a surprise,’ Eubie chimed in. ‘All you got to do is look around you. Something’s gotten out of control and it’s dangerous. World wars and people living in misery. If being rational’s brought us to that, maybe we should try something crazy. Even madness makes more sense than that.’

  Ida thought about this and looked around the audience again. She realized now that these were the city’s outsiders, its outcasts, the people on its margins, meeting together in a smoky, dingy basement, to create something that made sense to them in a society they felt increasingly alienated from. In this light, the sharp, anxious music took on a new meaning – it was apocalyptic music, a wailing against all that was wrong with the world, the broken future this generation had inherited. They’d come here to revel in a collective bleakness, and thereby their bleakness reduced.

  When the band took a break, Ida said goodbye to Shelton and Eubie, and headed out onto the street. She looked about her with new eyes, thinking torrents. She headed for 50th Street to catch the subway uptown. As she passed through the pulsing chaos of the streets, she thought again how the music she’d heard reflected it so perfectly; restless and simmering, overwhelming and fast.

  She thought about what she’d learned and allowed herself a smile. They had a reason for the killings. Now all they had to do was figure out who Cleveland was blackmailing, and why.

  25

  Friday 7th, 9.00 a.m.

  Michael received a phone call from Ida in the morning. She told him how her night had gone at the jazz club, that one of Cleveland’s old band-mates had supplied a reason for the killings – blackmail. It made sense, especially considering Cleveland’s clientele. Michael should have felt thrilled at the news that they’d finally made a breakthrough, should have echoed the excitement in Ida’s voice. But he was still brooding over what had happened at the hospital. Even after talking it through with Annette the night before he was still feeling bewildered and betrayed.

  ‘Cleveland’s pal gave me the name and number of someone we could talk to,’ Ida said. ‘Someone in this crowd he sold to. Edward O’Connell. Does the sound effects for radio dramas on NBC. I called his number a couple of times this morning, but no one answered. You want to follow it up while I go downtown and speak to Tom’s lawyer?’

  ‘Sure,’ Michael said. He copied down the number.

  ‘How’d it go with Tom’s old boss?’ she asked.

  He told her about his visit to the hospital. As he spoke he could hear the disappointment in his own voice, was surprised at how strong it sounded, even to his own ears.

  ‘It’s another lie again,’ he said when he’d finished.

  There was silence on the line a moment.

  ‘We need to talk to him about it,’ Ida said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘In the meantime,’ she said. ‘O’Connell.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He put down the phone, feeling no better for the conversation, and tried to focus on the task in hand. He called up the number he’d been given, figuring if there was no answer again he’d speak to Carrasco, ask him to look up the number in the reverse directory and get an address for it. But after a few rings, someone picked up, a woman with a frail, timeworn voice. She informed Michael that O’Connell had been a tenant of hers, but that the man had skipped out on her a few weeks back, in the middle of the night, owing a month’s back rent. Michael thanked her and hung up.

  He called NBC, asked to speak to O’Connell. Discovered O’Connell had left his job under a cloud about a month before he stopped paying rent to the landlady. The man had hit bitter days and disappeared.

  A dead end.

  Then Michael had an idea.

  He called Ida’s hotel and left a message, then he headed out. Walked to the public library on 42nd Street. In the information section, he managed to get a number for the American Federation of Labor. Called them up from a payphone in the library’s lobby. Asked what union a sound-effects artist would belong to. Explained to them what a sound-effects artist was. Waited. No one seemed to know, but they narrowed it down to two – the Musicians’ Union, or the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians.

  He needed to pick one. Was a man who made sounds a musician or a technician? Michael thought about the Musicians’ Union, its reputation for haughtiness and exclusion. Took a chance on the Technicians’ Union.

  He called back NBC. Thankfully, he was put through to a different person.

  ‘Hi, there,’ he said, trying to sound upbeat. ‘I’m calling from the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians and was trying to trace one of our members – Edward O’Connell. He worked in your sound-effects department until recently.’

  ‘What’s it concerning, please?’ said the woman on the other end of the line.

  ‘He applied for an assistance grant when he’d lost his job a couple of months ago,’ said Michael. ‘The application has been successful, but the address we’ve got for him is out of date. I was hoping he left you with a forwarding address for his final pay check, and maybe I could try that.’

  ‘This is a personnel issue,’ said the woman. ‘One moment, I’ll transfer you.’

  She did so and Michael spun the same lie again.

  ‘Let me check our records,’ said the man in personnel.

  Michael heard himself being put on hold, then a minute or two later, the man’s voice came back.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ he said. ‘You got a pen?’

  Michael jotted down the address – somewhere in Greenwich Village. He thanked the man, hung up, sat in the lobby and waited. He’d give Ida an hour, then head down to the Village on his own.

  Forty minutes later she turned up, looking annoyed.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘How’d it go with the lawyer?’

  She shook her head. ‘It didn’t. Went all the way down to his office. Got told he was in court. Waited in the reception for an hour, decided to go to the court and check the dockets. He didn’t have any cases on today that I could see.’

  Michael took this in, felt his heart sink a little.

  ‘I’ll speak to Tom,’ he said. �
�Start looking for a new lawyer.’

  She nodded. ‘How’d it go with you?’ she asked.

  ‘The number was a bust,’ he said. ‘O’Connell lost his job recently and skipped out on his old landlady. But I managed to get a more recent address.’

  He held up the scrap of paper with details he’d gleaned from NBC’s personnel department.

  ‘Shall we?’ he asked.

  They caught a taxi downtown, to a glum road of tumbledown townhouses off Washington Square Park. They rang the man’s buzzer, but no one answered. They rang the buzzer for the basement, figuring there might be a super with some information.

  An annoyed-looking woman opened the door to them.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘We’re looking for Edward O’Connell,’ Michael said.

  ‘He’s not in?’ the woman asked. ‘Why d’you want him?’

  Michael reeled off the same lie he’d used to NBC about being from the union. The woman eyed them, then nodded her head down the street.

  ‘Try the cafes on Greene,’ she said. ‘Where the rest of the loafers hang out.’

  Greene Street was a block east of the square. It had a number of cafes on it, some on first floors, some in basements. Michael saw what the woman meant about loafers. The Village seemed like a blue-collar neighborhood, but the people in these cafes seemed anything but – they looked like college students, artists, writers, poets in training, bohemians. They were mostly young, mostly white. For all their nonconformity there was a certain uniformity in how they dressed – horn-rimmed glasses, straggly beards, baggy sweaters, suede shoes, pants cut tight and tapered at the ankles.

  ‘Same kinda crowd that was in the club last night,’ said Ida.

  ‘You know what O’Connell looks like?’ Michael asked.

  Ida shook her head. They started on the corner of Greene and West 4th and went into the cafes one by one, asking for O’Connell by name. They used the union cover story again. They were met with blanks stares, apologies, and in a couple of places with hostility. In the sixth place they tried, a cramped basement that smelled of mold, they asked the barman and he nodded, pointed at a thin, slight man sitting at a corner table, reading a paperback Camus. Despite the close atmosphere in the place, he had a trench coat on over a thick woolen cardigan.

  They headed over.

  ‘Edward O’Connell?’ Michael asked.

  The man looked up from his book and raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name’s Michael Talbot. I was wondering if I could talk to you a minute.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘We’re looking for Gene Cleveland and a friend of ours told us you might be able to help.’

  At the mention of the name what little color there was in the man’s face drained. He shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know anyone by that name,’ he said, clearly lying. ‘Excuse me.’

  He rose, slipped the book into his pocket and pushed past them towards the stairs that led to the street.

  ‘Sir?’ said Michael, following him.

  O’Connell broke into a run, knocking over a table, spilling drinks, causing the barman to yell at him. O’Connell made the stairs and bolted up them, surprisingly quick. There was no way Michael could match a young man’s speed, certainly not upstairs.

  By the time they got onto the street, O’Connell was gone.

  ‘I told you I’m too old for all this,’ said Michael.

  ‘C’mon,’ said Ida. ‘Sooner or later he’s going to head back to his apartment.’

  They found a bar a couple of doors down from the apartment where they could sit and watch its front door. As they waited, snow began falling, a flurry that left a dull shine on the street and dusted the hats and coats of the people coming up and down the sidewalk.

  A couple of hours and three coffees later, they saw O’Connell heading up the street, looking over his shoulder, going inside.

  They gave it fifteen minutes.

  Ida went round to the rear of the building. Michael went to the front door and rang the buzzer. O’Connell’s head popped out of a window on one of the upper stories. He made eye contact with Michael and immediately disappeared back inside. Michael gave it thirty seconds before he was out on the rear fire escape, heading into the alley that ran behind the apartments. In a minute he’d be on the ground, with Ida pointing her gun at him.

  Michael walked round the back and it was mostly how he expected it to be.

  The man was lying on his back, a hand on his face, fingers pressed against a bloody lip. Ida was standing a yard away, her .38 trained on him.

  ‘We’re not here to harm you,’ she said.

  ‘Funny, I don’t believe you,’ said O’Connell, moving his hand away from his busted lip to look at the blood on it. He moved his hand towards his pocket.

  ‘Easy,’ said Ida, tensing.

  ‘I’m getting a cloth,’ said O’Connell.

  Ida nodded. The man pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and raised it to his lip. Ida heard Michael approaching, looked at him quickly.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Michael, holding out a hand to help the man up.

  O’Connell deliberated, took Michael’s hand and got to his feet.

  ‘We’re not with the police,’ Michael said. ‘We’re not with the people who are trying to kill Cleveland.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘We’re private detectives,’ said Ida.

  ‘And I’m the father of the man accused of killing those people in the Palmer Hotel,’ Michael added flatly.

  O’Connell stared at him, frowned. The earnestness in Michael’s voice and demeanor had an effect; the man seemed to soften a touch.

  ‘No shit,’ O’Connell muttered, in a tone that suggested this turn of events somehow pleased him.

  ‘We want to find the people who are after Cleveland,’ said Michael. ‘To clear my boy’s name. We need your help. Please.’

  O’Connell stared at Michael, appraising him, deciding. Michael weighed in with what he hoped would ultimately sway him.

  ‘I know you lost your job at NBC. I know you skipped out on your last landlady and you’re probably going to do the same with the new one.’

  Michael fished his wallet out of his pocket, pulled out five twenties.

  ‘I’ll give you all this, if it’ll help my son.’

  O’Connell looked at the money, looked at Michael, looked at Ida.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just put the gun down. Let’s talk inside.’

  O’Connell’s apartment was the size of a napkin, and as joyless on the inside as its exterior suggested. It was a one-room affair, with a bed and a bedside table, a cupboard and a sink. A suitcase sat in one corner on a luggage stand. Paperbacks were piled up on a brick-supported bookshelf.

  Michael wondered where the hell they were all supposed to sit.

  O’Connell turned the comforter over on the bed, gestured for them to sit on it. He took the suitcase off the luggage stand and perched on it, a little precariously, to Michael’s eye. He took a tobacco tin from his pocket and rolled a cigarette.

  ‘Bum deal what happened to your son,’ he said.

  ‘That’s one way to describe it,’ Michael said.

  O’Connell looked up at him for a moment, then got back to rolling his cigarette.

  ‘So you two are real detectives, huh?’ he said. ‘I used to work on a detective serial at NBC. Boston Blackie. You ever listen?’

  Ida nodded. ‘My son used to. When he was younger. Boston Blackie. Enemy to those who make him an enemy. Friend to those who have no friend,’ she said, repeating the show’s tag-line.

  O’Connell smiled.

  ‘Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, Perry Mason, Dick Tracy,’ said Ida. ‘I’d come home from work and have to listen to detectives all night.’

  ‘I guess they must sound kooky to the real deal,’ said O’Connell.

  Ida shrugged. ‘It’s entertainment.’

  O’Connell finished rolling his ci
garette, popped it in his mouth, looked around, grabbed a box of matches that was lying on the windowsill, in amongst a collection of pink ticket stubs from cinemas.

  ‘How’d you find me?’ he asked, lighting up.

  ‘We need to respect the anonymity of the person who gave us your name,’ said Michael, sounding more pompous than he’d expected. ‘Just like we’re going to respect your anonymity and keep you safe.’

  O’Connell thought on this. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be safe again,’ he said. ‘But I’ll try and help your son, if you help me with my rent.’

  Michael handed him over the yard he’d shown him in the alleyway. O’Connell took the bills with a nod of thanks, slipped them into the pocket of his cardigan.

  Michael turned to Ida. With a minuscule nod of the head she gestured back towards Michael, then towards O’Connell. So slight a movement only Michael would have picked up on it. He caught her meaning. He would run the questions while she would keep her eyes glued to O’Connell for twitches. It was like the old days in Chicago, when their minds worked in tandem, picking up the same cues, communicating wordlessly, with looks and gestures. An elegant partnership, underpinned by the unsaid.

  ‘We know Cleveland was blackmailing someone,’ said Michael, turning to look at O’Connell. ‘We’re guessing that was who attacked the hotel. The person who gave us your name said it might all be linked to your group of friends, to people who work at NBC.’

  O’Connell smirked. ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

  ‘Who was Cleveland blackmailing?’ Michael asked.

  O’Connell took a toke on his cigarette, exhaled. ‘Paul J. Helms,’ he said. ‘Congressman Paul J. Helms.’ He grinned at them.

  Michael’s thoughts raced, not an actor, not a radio star. A politician. A man with pull.

  ‘Over what?’ he asked.

  O’Connell shrugged.

  ‘Was Cleveland dealing to him?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ said O’Connell.

  ‘He was part of your circle?’

  ‘I guess,’ said O’Connell. ‘He came to a few parties.’

  ‘Narcotics parties?’