by Don Swaim
“How do you know this?”
“He showed it to me at a clambake in his backyard. Guerre also had the cartridge clip, six cartridges, and a fired .32 caliber bullet. Told me he’s listing it in his will so his daughter will own it someday. Warned that he’d shoot me dead if I put it in the paper, but he never said I couldn’t tell you.”
“Where does this Guerre live?”
I took leave of Helen after promising to bring her to New York as my guest to see the year’s two biggest Broadway musicals, Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes and Cole Porter’s Red, Hot and Blue.
A little makeup did tricks. Even Papa Celestin was impressed by my disguise as a Cajun crawdad fisherman.
“You look like you just crawled out of the bayou, Tokol. You got the gumbo, all right.”
“Tanks, Papa, jest call me Hippolyte Boudreau.”
Celestin dropped me off at Guerre’s narrow shotgun house, where he sat on his front porch drinking a bottle of Dixie beer that looked so refreshing I almost regretted taking it away from him and batting him on the side of the head with it. Just to get his attention.
“That hurt, dammit,” he yelled.
He might have responded more aggressively, but he saw my itchy finger on the trigger of a Smith and Wesson.
“Don’t you know who I am?” he said.
“Yeah, you’re de plaice officer who done swiped dat gun what killed Huey Long.”
“What’s it to you?”
Guerre seemed to need a little persuasion, so we went inside to talk things over on a more intimate basis.
“You won’t get away with this, you bayou bastard,” he said.
“Say, I’m vary tursty, Gen’ral. Mind if I finish yo beer?”
“Go to hell.”
That merited one broken finger.
“You just signed your death warrant, swamp rat.”
That resulted in another finger.
“Now, Gen’ral, I don’t got all day. Need to know where dat doggone Browning is.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Which produced a black eye.
It took a bit more friendly persuasion, but Guerre finally agreed to turn the Browning over to me. He should have thanked me on his knees for sparing his shooting hand.
“You crawdad eater, we’re gonna search every swamp in Louisiana until we find you.”
“Gen’ral as my mama used say, pinch de tail and suck de head.”
After securing him with handcuffs to the radiator in his sale de bain, I said, “Now you jest stay rat cheer till somebody comes and lets you loose.”
Then I hopped into Celestin’s car for the return trip to New Orleans
“Laissez les bon temps rouler,” I told Papa, as I removed my disguise.
Back in the Crescent City, I said adieu to Celestin and went out on the town.
Despite the startlingly baroque ironwork of the Vieux Carré’s gates and balconies and the syncopated rapture emanating from the open doors of the saloons on swarming Bourbon Street, I sensed a forced gaiety—even as a drunk thrust a beer into my hand saying, “Drink, mon ami, the Depression won’t last forever.”
I cavorted intemperately with members of a female voodoo cult on Chartres Street. A woman calling herself Mambo Miriam stuffed a cheap rag doll in my pocket and demanded a hundred dollars, which I gave her without complaint.
She said, “On this doll you’ll place an article of clothing belonging to your most bitter enemy, mon chéri, and then you’ll inject pins into it giving him—or her—agonizing pain and even death.”
“But my most bitter enemy has been erased,” I told her, referring to The Man With Two Faces.
“But you’ll find another one easy.”
God knows Mambo Miriam put the gree gree on me.
The next morning, I wired both Darrow and Diana with my travel itinerary. Then, before heading to Rampart Street to catch the Panama Limited from Union Station to Chicago, I engaged a bonded, international courier to personally return to Vienna’s Museum of Military History the 7.65-millimeter Browning that had killed Archduke Ferdinand.
I appreciated Gaetano Gagliano’s gift-giving gesture, but sometimes you shouldn’t tamper with history.
We may have been in a dire depression, but the Illinois Central’s all-steel Panama Limited was about class: upper class. I could have flown to Chicago via Peoria on Chicago & Southern Airlines, but speed didn’t compare to a Pullman with private compartments, drawing rooms, bath, barber, valet, and ladies’ maids the entire route.
I encountered a casual acquaintance on the train, the elegant, bow-tied crooner Gene Austin, whose Victor recording of “My Blue Heaven” sold a million copies. I met him through Diana after Gene made a guest appearance on comedian Joe Penner’s radio show on WABC, Columbia’s New York station. For most of the trip Austin and I played gin rummy in the club car while he bragged about his exploits as a young American enlisted man under Pershing fruitlessly searching for Pancho Villa in the state of Chihuahua.
America flashed by: Shreveport, Monroe, Jackson, Memphis, St. Louis, Carbondale.
Inside, I dined and slept in luxury, while outside the landscape was littered with boarded foreclosed homes, junked cars, old tires, abandoned refrigerators, and furtive men walking the rails to nowhere. The nation was full of rot and ruin, and I wondered about the fate of our children, such as some baby born in this year of 1936 at, say, Wesley Memorial Hospital in Wichita, Kansas.
Nine-hundred-twenty-one miles and twenty-three hours after leaving New Orleans, the Panama Limited steamed into Chicago’s Central Station on Michigan Avenue along the lakefront.
Clarence Darrow himself was on the platform to greet me. He was tall, rumpled, tie askew, suspenders hitching up his baggy trousers, a forelock of his unruly hair flopping over his brow. While he was more stooped than the last time I saw him, his handshake was firm, and his eyes were clear and alert.
We had met a few years ago when I did some legwork for him in a racially tinged trial in which a Negro doctor was charged with murder after defending his Detroit home from a white mob. I’ll never forget Clarence’s closing words to the all-white jury.
I have watched, day after day, these black, tense faces crowding this court. Black faces now looking to you twelve whites, feeling that the hopes and fears of a race are in your keeping.
Darrow said, “I thought Diana would be with you, Tokol.”
“She’s flying in tonight from New York.”
Darrow was America’s foremost criminal lawyer. His devastating verbal dissection of William Jennings Bryan in the Tennessee Monkey Trial should have been a fatal blow to mysticism and superstition, but religion was impervious to science and reason, especially where the Bible carried more weight than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
We took a cab to his home in an apartment hotel at 1537 East 60th Street across from Jackson Park.
“I’ve lived in this building for the past quarter century, Tokol, and if I’m fortunate, I’ll die here.”
I greeted his wife Ruby, who busied herself in the kitchen while Darrow and I retired to his cluttered library, shelves sagging with books.
“I’m old, Tokol, tired. Just yesterday I went to Joliet to urge the State Parole Board to release an elderly black man, a former banker imprisoned for embezzlement. I intended to give up my law practice years ago, but somehow one cause followed another, which leads me to why I asked you here.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his easy chair.
“I did something I may now regret. It occurred when I represented a young man on trial for murder, Nick Bilinski, who was certain to be found guilty and sent to the electric chair. However, despite the odds I managed a not-guilty verdict.”
“Some of your legal arguments are classics, Clarence, such as the one in the Leopold-Loeb case. So it’s no surprise you won.”
“But it’s how I got Bilinski’s acquittal that places me in dire jeopardy. It was a controversial case. Nick was a local union leader arrested for
killing two men during a bitter coal miners’ strike in southern Illinois.
“The lower part of the state is nearly as rich in coal as West Virginia. One of the largest mines is owned by the Chlorite County Colliery Corporation, an obvious target for the Progressive Miners of America. The strike against CCCC was marred by bombings, shootings, and rampages in which the Illinois National Guard was sent to protect the miners brought in by the company to replace the strikers.”
“Scabs.”
“In labor disputes, the government invariably takes the side of the corporations, so the unions fight back any way they can. When Bilinski, a miner himself, was charged with murder, the PMA hired me as his attorney. He was accused of setting off an explosion that not only killed two strikebreakers but so badly damaged the mine it has shut down completely.
“I talked to Nick at length. God knows he had little—other than his union, a pile of debts, and a wife and four children to feed. And while he was unable to account for his whereabouts on the night of the explosion, I believed with all my heart Nick was not guilty. But the prosecutor, a man named Blaggot, intimidated witnesses, doctored evidence, and seated jurors predisposed against the union.
“It became clear that Nick stood no chance of being acquitted, and the judge, the prosecutor’s fellow golfer, was known to be an enthusiastic purveyor of the electric chair. All the eloquence I might muster would never save Nick. So I did the only thing I could do.”
He paused for effect, much as he had done in innumerable courtrooms.
“I bought the jury.”
“You what?”
“Tokol, jury tampering was the only way I could keep a decent, innocent family man from execution due to the prosecution’s deceitful case against him. Nick walked out of the courtroom a free man. But he never got his job back and he’s still deeply in debt.”
For a moment I was at a loss.
“The ethics may not be what one would expect of you, Clarence. But you won an acquittal for an innocent man, so in the long run I don’t see the issue.”
“Unluckily, my tactics were compromised. Unless I pay one-hundred-thousand dollars, an ungodly sum that I do not have, I’ll not only face disbarment and an unfortunate end to a long career, but bribery and conspiracy, which, if proved in court, will mean time in the penitentiary.”
“Blackmail.”
“Tokol, you were too young at the time so you won’t recall this, but in nineteen-twelve I was accused of bribing jurors in connection with a fatal bombing at the Los Angeles Times building. While the two defendants eventually pled guilty, I was put on trial. It was never about actual bribery, but solely because I was a defender of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, and a steadfast supporter of labor. Although the jury exonerated me, I cannot face the prospect of a similar ordeal.”
“Give me my marching orders, Clarence.”
“Reason with this blackmailer’s intermediary. At the least lower the amount of the extortion. The go-between calls himself Kana Kealoha.”
“What kind of name is Kealoha?”
“Hawaiian perhaps? Kealoha wants cash only, delivered to him personally in Chlorite County, where Nick’s trial took place.”
“What’s the evidence he’s using against you.”
“I’ve only seen photostats, but it includes letters with my signature, bank statements, deposit slips, photographs, and affidavits by some of the jurors themselves. I’m not certain how those records fell into the wrong hands. Kealoha claims the documents will be turned over to me once the money has been paid.”
That night, I discussed Darrow’s dilemma with Diana after she flew in via American Airlines to the unglamorously named Municipal Airport eight miles from the Loop.
“Those long layovers in Buffalo and Detroit almost did me in, Tokee, darling.”
She’d been taking flying lessons from Beryl Markham, the first woman aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. But Diana didn’t yet have her pilot’s license.
The Drake Hotel anchored the east end of Chi-Town’s North Michigan Avenue. Our tenth-floor suite overlooked the lake, seeming as wide as the Atlantic.
“If we can reduce the extortion amount with this Kealoha character’s middleman,” I said, “I might pay it myself, but I’m not sure Darrow would go along.”
“It’s a terrible idea, Tokee, darling. Not only does it capitulate to a criminal, which isn’t like you, there’s no way to know if this would be the end of it. The blackmailer could possess duplicate copies, additional evidence, and make more demands. Besides, you like a good challenge.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
We clinked our glasses of Camul Veneto Rosso.
I said, “Tomorrow, dollface, we’ll drive to Chlorite County, which I understand is the garden spot of the Prairie State.”
I bought an inexpensive Packard One Twenty LeBaron Convertible Victoria. It was flaming red with an ox-yoke grill and hexagons on the hubcaps.
“A bit flashy don’t you think?” Diana said.
“I want ’em to see us coming. And remember us when we’ve left.”
Darrow had arranged for us to stay in Chlorite City with an old acquaintance of his, Mrs. Maude Wilkens, who owned a guest house.
Out of Chicago we took Route 66 through Joliet, Bloomington, and Springfield. We saw auto camps, motor courts, tourist cabins, roadhouses, and filling stations. Cafes hawking souvenirs, candy, and cigarettes. Diners fashioned like Pullman cars, shacks advertising root beer and famous frankfurters. The telephone-pole monotony was occasionally broken by the small white-on-red Burma-Shave signs…
To get / Away from / Hairy apes /
Ladies jump / From fire escapes /
Burma-Shave
…and the occasional carnival accentuated by cotton candy, Ferris wheel, and tented freak show.
America the ugly.
At East St. Louis, we veered south onto Route 3. From profane Chicago we entered pious evangelical country, passing pretty steepled churches, occasional revival tents, and mourners praying for dead souls in marble orchards. It was farmland with fields of cornstalks rising on either side of the highway, cavernous barns exhorting Red Man chewing tobacco, and ramshackle crossroad burgs in the shadow of elephantine grain elevators.
As we entered Chlorite City, we passed the Miner’s Hat Diner with its roof shaped like a coal cracker’s helmet, complete with oversized ersatz lamp. It was closed tight, the windows boarded.
“I wonder what the specialty of the house was at the Miner’s Hat Diner,” I said to Diana.
“Blackened lung, of course, Tokee, darling.”
Why Chlorite still called itself a city, I didn’t know. Half of the storefronts were boarded up and most of the houses looked vacant, although the hotel was open. What the Depression hadn’t taken, the explosion at the mine did.
Maude Wilkens was a sprightly widow who had known Darrow during his apprentice years in Ashtabula, Ohio.
“Clarence was such a dear,” Mrs. Wilkens told us. “And so handsome.”
We left our bags in her parlor, then sought out Nick Bilinski.
“The CCCC mine is completely down,” he told Diana and me as we sat on the decaying porch of his modest frame house. “So I ain’t workin’. Sent the wife and kids to stay with her folks in Carbondale. Even though Clarence got me off that murder rap, the union don’t have nothin’ to do with me no more. If it wasn’t for Clarence I’d either be in Stateville or because of the ’lectric chair, six-feet under. I love the man, like he was my own pop.”
“Nick, Clarence sent us here to talk to a Kana Kealoha,” I said. “Know anything about him?”
“I heard about a stranger in town with some name no one around here can pronounce. Stayin’ at the Chlorite Hotel. From what I hear he’s a Duncan yo-yo man. Why do you want to talk to him?”
“Clarence has taken a sudden interest in yo-yos.”
That night, after a belt-breaking home-cooked meal whipped up by Mrs. Wilkens—far bette
r than Sardi’s on West 44th and a lot cheaper—Diana and I compared notes.
I said, “So what’s a yo-yo man doing in this godforsaken place?”
“He’s stringing us along, Tokee, darling.”
“Guy shouldn’t be hard to find in a burg this small.”
The next morning we encountered Kealoha on the playground of the Chlorite Primary School where he was entertaining the kids with the Elevator, Walk the Dog, Around the Corner, the Creeper, the Zipper, and Skin the Gerbil.
“So you’re from Darrow, huh?” he said to us as he packed up his yo-yos and put them in the trunk of his coupe. “You got the hundred-thousand grand? Bills only.”
“It’ll take a few days to put the money together. Who’s your client anyway?”
“You got a lot of moxie, mister. I may be a yo-yo man, but I ain’t stupid enough to tell you.”
“What’s to stop me from turning you over to the coppers, Kealoha, or whatever your name is?”
“Then my client hands the goods on Darrow to the law and the Chicago papers, so I ain’t worried. The documents is in a safe place. And them shekels better be forthcoming.”
“You’re actually Hawaiian?”
“Hawaiians is expert in the yo-yo arts.”
“There are no Hawaiians in southern Illinois.”
“With one exception, and you’re lookin’ at him.”
“The yo-yo’s your cover, such as it is. I saw your car on the street. Missouri plates. From St. Louis, I’ll bet. I think you’re some ex-cop gone bad.”
“Back to business, Mr.…”
“Tokoloshe. Don’t ask. It’s from the Zulu.”
“You got a counter offer, Mr. Tokoloshe?”
“Fifty grand. Provided I authenticate your so-called evidence first.”
“I can tell you right now my client ain’t gonna go for it. But I’ll let you know. Ya better come up with the dough by the end of the week, and you know where to find me.”
Kealoha climbed into his coupe and roared off.
Diana said, “Tokee, darling, we may be better off trying to find the actual blackmailer instead of dealing with this yo-yo individual.”