My Kind of Town

by John Sandrolini

  “Still there?”

  “Yeah. God-awful dive anymore. What do you want there?”

  “Answers, dear Sal, answers. Come on, buddy, walk with me,” I said as I took his hand and pulled upward. “I’ve got a little story to tell you on the way. . . .”

  There was just one thing Carpaccio had confided in me the night before that made me think any treasure had ever been hidden in the Lexington in the first place, let alone remained today. As proof of his rambling tale, he had produced a letter postmarked January 1942 that young Lieutenant O’Hare had purportedly sent to Toni Cavaretta on the eve of his shipping off to war. The last line of the letter stated that should anything ever happen to him she should “check the Lex,” for the key to his father’s affairs. The Roman numerals IV, MI, and C appeared together without explanation at the bottom of the page just above the signature.

  I’d laughed openly at that point, telling Carpaccio the letter was vague and could’ve been made up by anybody at anytime, but I knew Butch to be a prolific letter writer, and I did recall discussing his father’s “business dealings” in very general terms. He was under no misapprehensions about the nature of his father’s life—or its end. If the story of the letter were real, the affairs Butch mentioned would very likely have pertained to his father’s dealings with Capone, not more mundane family matters. As his former secretary, Cavaretta might well have been the best person in town to attend to any ongoing legal or real-estate holdings O’Hare Sr. had, especially if Butch had no inkling she’d been disloyal.

  I still couldn’t imagine that there’d be even a hint of O’Hare’s effects—and certainly no treasure—left over in the old grand dame hotel. Not after three decades of made guys scouring every brick of what Big Horn said had become first a bordello, and now a transient flop. And it’s not like some Outfit player was going to call WGN to report that he’d found Al Capone’s missing millions anyway. If they were gone, they were gone, and that was that.

  But I didn’t have anywhere else to start and had a whole day on my hands, and maybe, just maybe, I’d latch onto some clue while I was there. Sal and I would make the whole thing an adventure anyhow, just like when were latchkey children. It would all be harmless fun. Kid stuff.

  28

  During the years that Al Capone ran Chicago like a feudal city, he and his men inhabited large parts of the swanky Lexington Hotel on South Michigan Avenue, including the entire fifth floor. The newspapers made frequent reference to his fortified enclave just off the lake, a place no one was allowed to enter without being observed by Capone’s tommy gun–packing men. Exterior photos of the hotel had been published often enough that I could recall its appearance from memory, but very few of the interior ever got out. If ever a modern king had lived in a castle keep, it had been Capone at the “Lex.”

  The Lexington still stood at the corner of Michigan and Cermak, but it hadn’t fared any better than Capone in later life. A hobo’s camp of bottles and trash littered the street out front, and many boarded-up windows blighted the building’s ten-story face like so many gouged-out eyes beneath the tattered blue awnings. A bum slept in a stupor on a ventilator grate just down from the once elegant Venetian pillared entrance.

  The decline of the former high-end neighborhood shocked me. South Michigan Avenue—known as Motor Row for its dozens of beautiful rococo auto showrooms—had been a grand destination once. Now it was a slag heap.

  Big Horn was twitching a little as we approached, his cop instincts on high alert, his head swiveling from side to side as we entered the lobby of the derelict hotel. I wasn’t as concerned as he was—it was broad daylight and it was just another dead-end dive. I’d seen a whole lot worse. The revolving door was jammed so I pulled open a gilt glass and wood door, held it open for Sal, and then stepped inside.

  The place smelled like dirt. And booze. And a lot of other things, none of them good. The few bulbs that still worked in each of the chandeliers augmented the grayish light from the overcast skies flooding in through the dust-streaked lobby windows. Still, corpselike figures sat alone on battered couches in the recesses of the lobby, paper bags clutched tight in sinewy hands, vacant eyes staring out into another reality.

  The toll on the Lexington Hotel for the sins of the Capone era had been as absolute as it had been enduring.

  In the middle of the room, a fat guy in a bellhop’s jacket was viciously dressing down an older wino from behind his bully pulpit of the front desk. When he saw us staring, he called out, “Youse guys want something?”

  “A minute of your time, sir,” I requested, stepping toward him, dragging Sal in tow. Reaching the nicked burlwood countertop, I looked it and him over, noting the cigarette burns on the wood and the acne scars on his cheeks. “You the clerk, or the bellhop?”

  “Clerk, bellhop—manager, too, until he comes back from gurgling down his lunch. We ain’t exactly operating on an unlimited budget here.” He eyed us both as he spoke, clearly making us for something other than transients.

  “Does your boss know you push your clientele around like that?” I asked.

  “Those rummys? That’s all they understand, Dudley Do-Right.” He waved a condescending hand toward me. “Now look, it’s six bucks a night—or the hour—don’t make no difference to me how long you stay. Weekly rate’s thirty.”

  Sal leaned over the counter, into the clerk’s space. “What do you mean, ‘by the hour,’ pal?” he inquired in a low growl.

  The tub made a snarky face, put both hands on the counter, the sheen of his greasy skin jaundicelike in the gloom. “C’mon . . . middle of the day? No bags? Youse gotta be a coupla fairies. Don’t worry, it’s all right by me. We don’t ask no questions. Just pay your six bucks and get on with it.”

  Sal’s arm shot out like a piston head, slamming into the clerk’s forehead badge-first, his other hand grabbing a hold of Tubby’s bow tie and yanking him forward.

  Sal closed to three inches, spoke low. “Chicago police, shit-knocker. You ever say anything like that to me again and I’ll bury you under this crud-strewn floor.”

  He shoved him away when he was done talking, pulling the clerk’s tie loose in the process, the undone ends flitting down on his shirtfront as he recoiled. I’m pretty sure I could see the imprint of a shield between his narrow-set orbs.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Officers,” he sputtered. “I had no idea. Youse guys never come in here. H-h-how can I help you?”

  Sal looked my way, played up the police status I’d just been accorded. “Detective?”

  I gave the hapless bellhop the five-second disgusted look, taking in his porcine features and grimy clothes. “What’s your name, slob?”

  “Freel. R-Robby Freel.”

  “That German?”

  “No sir, Irish. Sout’side Irish.”

  I eye-checked Sal, spied his smart-ass grin, and heard him scoff, “Figures.”

  “Okay, Freel,” I said, making it up as I went, “here’s how it goes. We’re looking for clues to an old murder one of Capone’s guys pulled way back. We’re gonna need to take a look into that room of his.”

  Freel stared at me, his lips repeating my words, bewilderment spreading over his fat face. “Capone? Al Capone? That was thirty years ago. You puttin’ me on or some’tin’?”

  I straightened up, flexed my chest, took in a deep breath. “You obstructing justice, Freel?” I reached into my coat pocket for nothing in particular, watched him squirm.

  “No!” he almost shouted. “No, Officer, I’m not. I-I’ll get you the key to that room right away. I’ve got a guy downstairs who can help you. He’s just some dumb moolie—lights the boilers, keeps the elevators running—but he was here back in the Prohibition days, I’ve heard him talking about it. ’Course you never know with a shine, the way they lie and what.”

  “Freel . . .”

  “Yes, Detective?”

  �
��Shut up. One more crack like that and I’m coming over that counter for you.”

  He nodded silently and rapidly, the thick gears in his brain struggling to grasp what he’d done wrong. Whatever low-end torque they generated wouldn’t comprehend the nature of the blows I was itching to rain on him anyway—hard lefts on behalf of my partner, Roscoe Montgomery, a decorated Tuskeegee airman, and hard rights for the broken wretches in the hotel he so obviously enjoyed cowing. It was best that he just shut his mouth. But I still kind of hoped he didn’t.

  Freel picked up a house phone and dialed, then wet his lips and smiled nervously as it rang six or seven times. To his obvious relief, someone finally picked up on the other end. “Vernon, get up here right away. No, right away . . . please,” he begged the party on the other end of the line.

  It took a full three minutes for anyone to appear, Freel shuffling papers, straightening pens, and retying his tie twice while Sal and I eyed him from fifteen feet, mumbling low to ourselves about the state of the hotel, its inhabitants, and its help. Finally, a thin, older gentleman in a crisp blue uniform appeared from a service elevator and began to walk our way, gray head down as he crossed the lobby in a deliberate cadence, a pronounced hitch in his gait.

  “Yes, Mistah Freel?” he said when he arrived, fatigue, perhaps an edge of contempt in his rich, husky voice.

  “These men are detectives, they need to examine Mr. Capone’s old rooms. Please take them up to the fifth floor and assist them in every way possible.”

  The man in the janitor’s uniform turned to face us, a little dubious of two Italian detectives in Daley’s Chicago. Savvy, veteran eyes interrogated ours, brown irises still sharp despite the seven-plus decades on the deep-seamed eyelids, a hard-earned suspicion evident on his coffee-colored face.

  “Vernon Pryor,” he said at length, nodding just slightly as he spoke.

  I held out my hand. “Detective Buonomo. This is my partner, Detective, uh, Horn.”

  My outstretched mitt seemed to confuse him. Sal, too. After some hesitation, Pryor shook it, our eyes meeting as I took in a grip far firmer than his lean frame suggested. He shook with Sal also, and from the awkwardness of it, I could tell that Chicago policemen didn’t generally shake hands with the public—at least not the Negro public.

  I caught Freel watching too closely and froze him with a glare. Then Sal, Mr. Pryor, and I headed toward the elevator bank, Sal grabbing a glance or three behind him as we passed in front of the shabby grand staircase and navigated the hazards of what had once been the King of Chicago’s royal foyer.

  29

  The elevator was in better shape than could have been expected, although its inspection certificate was two years out of date. Mr. Pryor said that he maintained the elevators himself—motors to mahogany finish—but inspections were “outside his purview.” I liked his use of that word; it hinted at a refinement unanticipated in a custodian. I appreciated the pride he took in his work too, although it was tantamount to putting a streetwalker in Chanel in that place.

  What the doors opened to on the fifth floor, sadly, was definitely not a French salon. Once-rich wallpaper dangled down in irregular curls, water-stained plaster flaking down to the floor from the exposed walls. Hair curlers, cigarette butts, tin cans, and whiskey bottles littered the hallway, and a drunk was lain out on the floor so stone cold that Sal had to check him for a pulse with one hand while holding his nose with the other. If Capone himself had been on the other side of door 530 with a cocked Thompson at the ready, it still would have been a damn sight better than the hallway.

  But when Mr. Pryor turned the key and pushed open the door into the run-down suite, the only life inside was a pigeon sitting on a sill in the large cupola, taking shelter in an open window from the light drizzle now spitting down outside.

  We went over the room in detail for about twenty minutes, Sal grumbling the whole time that it was a waste of effort. Unfortunately, he was right. Too much time, too much decay had occurred. Mr. Pryor told us what he knew of the room—he said he’d begun working at the hotel as a steward in the late ’20s—but other than the fascinating bricked-over passageways Capone had built as escape routes, there wasn’t anything original left in his quarters save the green and lavender bathroom tiles. The room had been picked clean and made over several times. The furniture, the furnishings, the paint, the carpet, the curtains—everything from Capone’s time was gone. The only thing left was history, and the things the mind imagined thereof.

  Still, there was a presence in the room—a remnant of life. A life of great reach, of great magnitude, of great evil. I stood in the doorway assessing it all after the others had left. From this suite, the most famous criminal in American history had handed out decrees of life and death at the height of the Roaring Twenties. What parties, what meetings, what riches, what dreams this musty, ruined room had seen in its day. I could almost hear the laughing voices, the clinking scotch glasses, the tinny sound of King Oliver on the record player as the dark czar of the Jazz Age celebrated his life and his times until the stars hung low in the sky.

  Mr. Pryor was eyeballing me when I stepped into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind me. I was rather dispirited at finding nothing and I guess it showed.

  “Are you really a detective, suh?” he asked.

  I pushed a smile through pursed lips. “No. But my friend here is a police officer. Are you really a janitor, Mr. Pryor?”

  “Vernon. And I am now, but I had a long, successful life in between my tours at the Lexington—down in Bronzeville where a colored man could make a decent living once. That was before they chopped up the neighborhood, put those housing projects and that school in.”

  “They got your neighborhood too?”

  “Yes, suh. That mean you’re from over there on Taylor Street, Mistah . . . ?”

  “It is actually Buonomo. Joe. Yes, I am originally. Been gone a long time though.”

  He snorted through his nose, made sort of a laugh. “You go away again and they’ll snatch your home like mine—just you watch. That Daley doesn’t send any bulldozers through Bridgeport, you know, just everybody else’s neighborhood.”

  “Maybe we should send a bulldozer through Daley’s house,” I opined.

  Vernon laughed out loud. “Ha! I’d like to see that! I’ll do the driving, Joe.”

  “You’re on, brother.”

  Vernon Pryor had a certain undeniable charm. He’d clearly been done a bad turn or two along the way but was still soldiering on. And while he’d been living up north for decades, occasional traces of the rural South wafted through his smoky baritone as he spoke, enriching both his timbre and his vocabulary. In any event, he spoke a far better brand of English than anyone else I’d encountered in the last few days.

  As we waited for the elevator to wend its way down from above, the hum of the machinery growing louder as it neared, Vernon said, “Just what is it you’re really looking for here? Because you sure as hell aren’t interested in solving no murdeh.”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets, faced him. “Honestly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m looking for clues to Al Capone’s treasure.”

  His face stretched a solid inch, forehead rising as he took in my words. “Mmmmhmmmm. Why didn’t you say so? We keep the treasure in the basement. Cash, gold, jewelry, guns—it’s all there, just waiting for someone with the right claim check to come get it.”

  The elevator dinged as Sal shot me a thunderstruck glance, his eyes opening far faster and nearly as wide as the rumbling door of Mr. Otis’s automatic lift. I shook him off, smiling sardonically, well aware that Mr. Pryor was putting us on.

  “Okay, Vernon,” I said, waving him onto the elevator behind Sal, “so there’s no treasure here—I get it—but is there anything down there to see? Vaults? Tombs? Hieroglyphics? I think I still have my old decoder ring if it helps.”

&n
bsp; He didn’t answer, just pushed the bottom black button on the stack. As the door closed and the car began its descent, Vernon looked at Sal, and then at me, smiling in anticipation. “Let’s just go see, shall we, boys?”

  30

  The bowels of the Lexington were just about as bowely as they come. Massive, moldy, dank, decrepit, and dark—positively stygian beyond the short throw of the single workman’s lantern mounted on the bare brick wall above the elevator.

  “Damn,” Vernon muttered. “Forgot my torch and the breaker’s tripped again. Come on y’all, I’ll have to go reset it.”

  Senses primed, I pushed Sal ahead and followed Vernon into the depths. The last thing I saw as we cat-footed into the gloom was Sal’s hand going to his service revolver. Then the basement swallowed him up. Somewhere in the emptiness, I heard a low whooshing sound, rhythmic yet undulating. The hairs on my neck raised as the unnatural sound rippled throughout the darkness.

  “I gather you know your way around here pretty well, Vernon,” I said wistfully.

  There was no response.

  I called out again. No soap.

  “Vernon . . . ? Sal . . . ?”

  “Right here, Joe.”

  A flick of my Zippo lit an orange halo around my buddy in the coal-dark cavern. “Where the hell is Vernon?”

  “Dunno.”

  There was a dull click somewhere. I could feel my knees buckling as I went into a defensive stance. A second later, a row of hazy, yellow lights flickered on overhead, one after another like stoplights in sequence, down the entire spine of the low ceiling. Fifty feet away, Vernon stood next to an open breaker panel in the wall, smiling in the half-light of one of the bulbs.

  “I got it now, fellas. Over here, I’ll show you all around.”

  Vernon led us down toward the far end of the basement. As we walked, we passed between numerous rows of concrete pillars running laterally across the basement into the murk. Halfway down the immense basement, I noticed a set of metal double doors, faint flickers of flame escaping along their edges and the gap between them where they bowed open. Then I understood what the whooshing sound was.