by Ray Celestin
‘Narcotics, sex, jazz,’ said O’Connell. ‘All those things the system hates. Helms was in town doing a publicity tour for some initiative he had going on. One of these things politicians do to show everyone what a swell guy they are. He did a couple of radio shows at NBC. A friend of mine got talking to him, asked him along to a party. He came, then he came to another one. We got friendly with him. You know how these things go. Then we’re all at a party one night, and Gene comes around to drop off a consignment. He sees Helms there and freezes. Asks me if I know who he is. I tell him he’s a congressman and Gene comes over all funny. I ask him if he knows him, and Gene says, yeah, sure, I’ve seen him around town.’
‘A couple of days later I see Gene in the square and ask what the deal is. He says he’s got some dirt on Helms, that he’s going to squeeze him. I ask what dirt but he won’t say. I figure Helms is a dope fiend or maybe a fairy like Gene was. I thought it was pretty low, you know. Gene doing something like that, but, live and let live, I guess.’
Michael frowned. ‘Gene was a fairy?’ he said. ‘Cleveland?’
O’Connell paused. ‘I thought you knew,’ he said. ‘Gene was blue-slipped out of the army. It’s why he was so angry and broke all the time.’
Michael nodded. Blue-slips were handed out to servicemen who’d been discharged under special circumstances. Neither honorable nor dishonorable, the blue-slip discharge was a way for military officials to wash their hands of any servicemen they suspected of homosexuality. The slips were also disproportionately handed out to Negroes. It meant losing access to GI loans, training, jobs – the other benefits the government had promised its servicemen as part of the GI Bill. Worse than all of that, however, was the stigma. The shame. Most men blue-slipped out of the army pretended they’d never served rather than admit to it.
‘How soon was this before Gene disappeared?’ Michael asked.
‘I don’t know. A month or two.’
‘You see him again after that?’
O’Connell shifted in his seat, stubbed out his cigarette, nodded.
‘Saw him after the House of Horrors happened,’ he said. ‘He turned up one night at my old place. Standing outside in the rain, looking like death. Said he needed money, said someone was after him. Thing about Gene is, he’s always been kinda … different. Got a loose board in his head, you know? A funny way of talking. That night he was raving, coming down off the dope and talking about how a demon was after him. Bible talk, you know? Crazy preacher stuff. I settled him down, we smoked a few joints. I gave him my bed for the night. In the morning, I loaned him some money, I was still working then. I came home in the evening and he’d disappeared. Never saw him again.’
‘When was this?’
‘The day after the murders at the hotel.’
‘Did he say anything more about the murders?’ Michael asked. ‘Did he say they happened because of this blackmail plot against Helms?’
O’Connell shrugged. ‘He didn’t have to,’ he said. ‘I figured it must be. But, I dunno, killing all those people … I can’t see Helms getting his hands bloody. He’s too smooth for that.’
Michael thought of Faron, of what Carrasco had told him about the man. ‘Did you ask Cleveland about this demon he said was after him?’ he asked.
O’Connell shrugged again. ‘I asked and he gave me this look like I was a fool. Gene can do that, cut you down with just a look. I thought it was maybe just him coming off the dope, making him crazy.’
‘And that was the last time you ever saw him?’ Michael asked.
‘Last time I saw him,’ said O’Connell. ‘But I got a phone call from him after that.’
‘When?’
‘About a month ago, when I was still at the old apartment.’
Michael looked at Ida. A month ago meant Cleveland might still be alive.
‘What did he say?’
‘Just called to say thanks for looking out for him,’ O’Connell said. ‘He told me he was holed up somewhere safe, somewhere no one would find him.’
‘In New York?’ Michael asked.
‘He didn’t say that,’ O’Connell said. ‘But I got the feeling he was still in town. If he’d gone away I think he would have told me, you know?’
Ten minutes later Ida and Michael were walking towards the square to catch a cab back uptown. Snow was still falling through the sky, whirling past the crumbling brownstones that lined the street.
‘We’ve got the name of the man behind it all,’ Ida said. ‘And a congressman, no less.’
She smiled at him, trying to cheer him up, but the breakthrough hadn’t done much to alleviate Michael’s gloom. He took his cigarettes from his pocket, lit one up.
‘So Congressman Helms is being blackmailed by Cleveland,’ he said. ‘So Helms hires Faron to take care of it. Faron turns up at the hotel and murders damn near everyone in it except the one man he was supposed to kill, and Cleveland gets away and goes into hiding.’ Michael paused. ‘What a mess. All those people dead just to protect Helms’s good name.’
He shook his head, took a toke on his cigarette.
‘You think the demon he was talking about is Faron?’ Ida asked.
‘Must be. The man walked into a diner a decade ago and slaughtered everyone in there, and he did pretty much the same thing in Harlem this summer.’
They turned a corner onto the square, headed for a hack rank on its opposite side.
‘Well, if O’Connell told us the truth,’ said Ida, ‘then Cleveland was still alive last month, and he might still be in town.’
She smiled at Michael once more, trying again with the cheery angle.
‘This is all good progress,’ she added.
‘Yeah,’ Michael said. ‘Yeah, it is.’
‘I was thinking we could ask Carrasco to pull the phone records from O’Connell’s old address,’ she said. ‘Might give us the location Cleveland called him from last month. That’s a lead.’
Michael nodded. ‘Helms and Faron,’ he said. ‘They’re our killers. All we need to do now is find them.’
PART ELEVEN
‘In expansive but bulging Harlem, on the thronging Lower East Side, in Hell’s Kitchen and in other districts where the scarcest commodity is living space, crimes of passion and violence flare with disconcerting regularity. Human and environmental factors produce a perpetual series of shootings, stabbings and assaults; burglaries and larcenies; robberies, rapes and murders. And aggravating the simmering volcano is that pariah, the narcotics dealer, who infests the vicinities most vulnerable to his wares.’
REPORT OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY,
COUNTY OF NEW YORK, 1946–1948
26
Thursday 6th, 2.11 p.m.
Harlem. Gabriel parked up the Delahaye and crossed 135th to the towering red bricks of the YMCA. He’d already been to Bumpy’s apartment in Mount Morris Park and been told the man was out playing chess. Gabriel knew where Harlem’s chess players gathered in summer – on the sidewalks outside the YMCA. But now, in the depths of fall, with winter coming on, he guessed they wouldn’t be in their usual spot. When he arrived he saw he was right – the sidewalk that in the warm months was lined with rickety fold-out tables full of kids and old men and gawkers, was filled instead with nothing but an icy wind whipping down the street.
Despite the cold, two boys were sitting on the steps that led into the building. They gave him a slant-eyed look. Stared from Gabriel to the Delahaye and back again. A white man on 135th Street must either be a gangster or a cop, and judging by the car, he wasn’t a cop.
‘Where’d the chess players go?’ Gabriel asked them, gesturing to the empty sidewalk.
The kids gave him a look like he was a moron, then one lifted a finger and pointed to the doors behind them.
Wise guys.
Gabriel peeled a twenty-spot from his roll and tossed it over.
‘Keep an eye on the car,’ he said. ‘You’ll get another twenty if I come out and the car’s still there.’
He went up the steps and through the front doors. A receptionist directed him to a wide, dusty sports hall at the end of the corridor. It was chilly and dim inside the hall. There was a smell of dust, mold and boiled cabbage. On the floor was a tight grid of tables at which the chess players sat. Studious types, quiet, hunched over, engrossed. Most of them still had their coats on, hats and scarves, too. They might as well have been on the sidewalk for all the good the building’s heating was doing.
As Gabriel scanned the faces of the chess players, a few people looked up, eyed him warily. He ignored them. He needed to find Bumpy, to ask him about Gene Cleveland, to maybe figure out why Benny was after him, if it had anything to do with the missing money. It probably didn’t, but Gabriel was running out of more substantial leads.
At a table in the far corner he saw a colored man with close-cropped hair, dressed in a plain gray suit under a sand-colored coat. Bumpy Johnson. Playing a match against a kid who couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. Gabriel headed over, slipped through the grid of tables. Bumpy looked up, saw him, frowned.
‘Gabriel,’ he said. ‘God’s most beloved angel. How’s life on Earth with no wings?’
Gabriel smiled. ‘I make do with a pigeon coop.’
‘On the Upper East Side? I’d love to see the looks on your neighbors’ faces.’
‘Trust me. You wouldn’t.’
‘Here for a chess lesson?’
‘Not exactly.’
Bumpy gave the kid a signal and the kid slipped out of the chair and slunk off to watch one of the other games. Gabriel took his place and eyed Bumpy as he started to move the chess pieces back to their starting positions. He was a hard man to pin down; ruthless leader of New York’s unruliest neighborhood, drug-runner, extortionist, switchblade master, but slight of build, a conservative dresser, a reader of philosophy. He’d spent a third of a ten-year prison sentence in solitary confinement, got through it writing poetry. He’d been so successful, half the gangsters in Harlem had started copying his style, his unabashed intellectualism, his book reading, his refinement. The man had single-handedly invented a stereotype – the intelligent, black hoodlum.
‘You mind if we play while we talk?’ Bumpy asked. ‘I don’t get much time to play these days.’
‘I ain’t much of a chess player,’ said Gabriel. ‘I never had the focus.’
‘No?’ said Bumpy, who didn’t stop resetting the board. ‘You surprise me. It’s all about focus.’
Gabriel lit a cigarette, organized the pieces on his side of the board. White pieces. When they were all set up, Bumpy looked up at Gabriel, nodded.
‘You don’t wanna pick for colors?’ Gabriel asked.
‘I always play black,’ said Bumpy. ‘I’m used to starting at a disadvantage.’
He smiled. Gabriel looked down at the board, thought about moving a pawn two spaces, changed his mind and moved it just one. Bumpy gave him a disapproving look.
‘How’s business?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Business is great,’ said Bumpy. ‘Can’t shift enough of this new Asian shit.’
Since the end of the war Genovese and Gagliano and Luchese had moved from weak, war-time Mexican heroin back to the more powerful Asian variety. Addiction rates had spiked and Bumpy had profited. While Italian Harlem in the east was Gagliano territory, Black Harlem in the west was run by Bumpy. He’d made a fortune inundating it with heroin on behalf of the Mafia, but his value was in more than that. In a city of hot heads and cold shoulders, where every race lived at sword point to the next, Bumpy was an ambassador, a middle man, a mediator, between the two sides of Harlem, between Italian and black gangsters, between civic leaders and thugs.
‘So what are you looking for, Gabriel?’ Bumpy asked. He was the only person who referred to Gabriel by his full name, drawing out the syllables in an accent that still contained a seam of Carolina in it, despite all his years in New York.
‘Must be important if you’re heading north of Sixty-fourth Street,’ he said.
Gabriel noted Bumpy’s reference to his home address, looked down at the board. Bumpy was already moving his heavy-hitters out from behind his pawns. Aggressive play. Gabriel countered as best he could.
‘A man named Gene Cleveland,’ said Gabriel. ‘You heard of him?’
‘Yeah. Why you asking? Didn’t have you down as a skip tracer.’
‘I heard he’s disappeared.’
‘Yeah, last summer.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Bumpy.
‘You think you can lay it out for me before the game’s over?’
Bumpy looked at the state of play. ‘Not likely,’ he said, with a smile.
They played another round of moves. Bumpy reacted to Gabriel’s almost instantly, reacting so fast it made Gabriel wonder exactly how many steps ahead Bumpy was thinking.
‘Cleveland’s small time, big trouble,’ he said. ‘Came back from the war, started selling dope. Our veterans didn’t get GI loans like the white boys did. Used to push horse out of a flophouse up near a Hundred and forty-first, and to some Midtown entertainment industry types.’Bout six months ago there was an incident in the flophouse. Four people murdered. You heard about it?’
‘The Harlem Horror House,’ said Gabriel. ‘Cleveland was involved?’
‘Seems that way to me. He was slinging dope out of the place. Then a bunch of people there got killed, then the next day Cleveland’s disappeared.’
Gabriel remembered the story from the previous summer. He’d noticed similarities to Faron’s m.o. at the time, but dismissed them when he saw a Negro living in the building, some veteran juiced up on voodoo, had been caught red-handed, literally.
‘They arrested someone,’ said Gabriel.
‘Just a wrong-place-wrong-time nigger. You know how it is. Being Negro in New York is just an accident waiting to happen.’
‘Not always.’
‘Always,’ said Bumpy. ‘You think ’cos I’m doing OK I don’t notice? When Costello wants to meet me for breakfast, where’s he do it? The Fifty-seventh Street Diner. I still ain’t got an invite to one of them breakfast get-togethers in his apartment. And don’t tell me you started letting darkies in the Copa?’ Bumpy stared hard at Gabriel.
Gabriel shrugged. ‘We had Lena Horne performing in the lounge last year.’
‘Yeah, performing. In the lounge. Your left flank is vulnerable, Gabriel. Focus.’
Gabriel frowned at the board, saw the danger and the fact that it was too late to do much about it. He thought about the murders in Harlem, felt panicky at the idea that Faron might have committed them, might have slaughtered yet more people.
‘You look into what happened?’ Gabriel asked, shifting a castle to the danger-zone.
‘Sure,’ said Bumpy. ‘No one knew anything. Not even the police. I figured it was rogue cops. Maybe the Mob. Which makes you coming around here asking questions intriguing.’
‘I’m as much in the dark as you are,’ said Gabriel.
‘Figuratively speaking,’ said Bumpy.
He nodded to Gabriel to indicate it was his move. Gabriel looked down at the board, and saw he’d been completely outflanked, that it was just a matter of time before he was in checkmate. He risked everything on a reckless counter-offensive, moving a bishop high up the board.
‘So four people were murdered in Harlem and you don’t have a clue what was behind it?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Yeah, how you like them onions?’ Bumpy said sarcastically.
‘You didn’t hear any names floating about?’
‘Nope.’
‘What about a guy named Faron?’
Bumpy paused, raised his eyebrows. ‘The guy that snuffed those cops back in the thirties?’
Gabriel nodded.
‘Ain’t heard his name in years. If he ever existed in the first place. What d’you know that I don’t?’
‘Just rumors. You hear about anyone else looking for Cleveland?’ Gabriel asked.
>
‘No one important,’ said Bumpy. ‘’Cept the brother they pinned it on. He’s trying to avoid an electric chair bounce and his pops used to be an investigator for the government out in Chicago.’
‘His pops?’
‘His pops is white,’ said Bumpy. ‘Now there’s a state of affairs. They hired some private detective from out West to look into it, too. I heard from my boys in Narcotics they’re sniffing around.’
‘You got a name?’
‘No, but I can get one, if you want.’
‘Sure.’
Gabriel took a drag on his cigarette, tried to make connections between Benny, Cleveland, Faron, the missing money, and now the murders in Harlem. To kill four people on Bumpy’s turf they must have had approval from someone. It must have been connected to one of the five families. But which one? The same one that helped Benny steal the money?
On the way over, Gabriel had thought Bumpy would provide him with some answers, instead what he’d told him had just raised more questions, confused things even further. He took another drag on his cigarette. Noticed how the sound of pieces being dropped onto boards all around him echoed about the place like raindrops.
‘Guess you were right about your focus,’ said Bumpy. ‘You’re in checkmate.’
Gabriel looked down at the board and its squares of day and night, victory and defeat.
Bumpy grinned. ‘See, you were here for a chess lesson after all.’
27
Thursday 6th, 7.35 p.m.
Gabriel headed back to the apartment to catch a few hours’ sleep, found it difficult on account of what Bumpy had told him about the murders in the hotel. He popped a couple of Nembutals and even then he couldn’t quite manage anything more than a broken slumber. Just after sunset he gave up trying, rose, took a shower.
He called Nick Tomasulo, Costello’s mole in Vito Genovese’s operation. Gabriel needed to ask him if Genovese’s appearance at the Copa had anything to do with the missing money. If somehow Genovese had found out about Gabriel’s investigation. Even though Gabriel knew Tomasulo was probably compromised, he prayed he had something to give him, because all Gabriel’s other leads were coming up short.