Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  “My angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.”

  Therese looked up at the corners of the room, that were much brighter now, at the bureau with the bulging front and the shield-shaped drawer pulls, at the frameless mirror with the beveled edge, at the green-patterned curtains that hung straight at the windows, and the two gray tips of buildings that showed just above the sill. She would remember every detail of this room forever.

  “What town is this?” she asked.

  Carol laughed. “This? This is Waterloo.” She reached for a cigarette. “Isn’t that awful.”

  Smiling, Therese raised up on her elbow. Carol put a cigarette between her lips. “There’s a couple of Waterloos in every state,” Therese said.

  the Starving Dogs of Little Croatia

  by BARRY GIFFORD

  Wicker Park

  (Originally published in 2009)

  Every man lives like hunted animal,” said Drca Kovic.

  “You make this just up?” asked Boro Catolica.

  “What is difference,” Drca said, “if it is truth?”

  The two men, both in their midthirties, were seated next to one another on stools at the bar in Dukes Up Tavern on Anna Ruttar Street drinking shots of Four Sisters backed with Old Style chasers. Brenda Lee was on the jukebox belting out “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” just as she did every December. Boro Catolica lit up a Lucky.

  “Ten years now Chicago,” he said, “and no truth more than Zagreb.”

  “At least here we drink in peace,” said Drca Kovic. “There we drink in war.”

  “Yes, but probably we end up lying still in alley with cats they are looking at us. Our eyes they are open but not being able see theirs.”

  It was seven o’clock on a Friday evening two days before Christmas. There were four inches of snow on the ground with more expected. Boro and Drca had been in Dukes Up since ten to five, thirty minutes after dark and twenty minutes following the end of their shift at Widerwille Meatpacking on Pulaski Avenue. The men worked full days Monday through Friday and half days on Saturday.

  “You notice old man Widerwille not so often check line now?” said Boro.

  “Probably too cold in freezer for him,” Drca said. “Blood is thinner.”

  The front door opened and two boys, both about eleven or twelve years old, entered the tavern, bringing with them a blast of icy air accompanied by a spray of new snow.

  Emile Wunsch, the bartender and part owner of Dukes Up, shouted, “No minors allowed! And shut that door!”

  “There’s a dead guy lyin’ out on the sidewalk,” said the larger of the two boys.

  The smaller boy closed the door.

  “How do you know he’s dead?” said Emile Wunsch.

  “He looks like Arne Pedersen did,” said the smaller boy, “after he died from Sterno poisoning last February.”

  “His body froze overnight,” the other boy said, “on the steps of Santa Maria Addolorata.”

  Boro and Drca went out, followed by the boys. Half a minute later the four of them came back inside.

  “It’s Bad Lands Bill,” said Boro, brushing snow from his head, “the Swede was from North of Dakota.”

  “The flat-nosed guy used to work at the chicken cannery?” asked Emile.

  Drca nodded. “His skin is blue and there is no breathing.”

  “We saw his eyes were open,” said the smaller boy, “so we stopped to look at him.”

  “He wasn’t blinkin’,” said the larger boy, “his tongue’s stickin’ out and it’s blue too.”

  The two Croatian men went back outside, picked up the body, and carried it into Dukes Up, where they set it down on the floor. Boro closed the door.

  “I’ll call the precinct,” said Emile Wunsch, “tell ’em to send a wagon. You boys can stick around to tell the cops how you found him.”

  Drca and Boro went back to their stools at the bar.

  “Boys, you want Coca-Cola?” asked Boro.

  “Sure,” said the smaller one.

  “I am Drca, he is Boro.”

  “I’m Flip,” said the larger boy.

  “I’m Roy,” said the other.

  “Okay they sit at bar?” Boro asked Emile.

  Emile was still on the phone to the precinct. He hung up and motioned to Flip and Roy to go ahead. The boys climbed up on stools next to the men.

  “You think corpse we should cover?” said Drca.

  “Why to bother?” Boro said. “Wagon coming.”

  “Did Bad Lands Bill drink here?” Roy asked.

  Emile came over with Cokes for the boys.

  “Not for a while,” he said. “He got laid off a few months back. Last time I saw him was in July.”

  Flip sipped his Coke as he spun around on his stool and looked down at the body. The eyes and mouth were closed.

  “Hey,” Flip said, “weren’t his eyes and mouth open when you carried him in?”

  “Yeah,” said Roy, “his tongue was hangin’ out.”

  Everyone stared at Bad Lands Bill. His skin was not quite so blue.

  “I guess gettin’ warmed up changes the body,” said Flip. “It’s good for him to be inside.”

  “That’s what Midget Fernekes said about himself,” said Emile.

  “Who’s that?” asked Roy.

  “A bank robber grew up in Canaryville,” the bartender said. “He was the first person to blow safes usin’ nitroglycerin. Midget said he learned more about safecrackin’ in the pen than he ever could’ve on the street.”

  Drca and Boro drank in silence. Emile poured them each another shot of Four Sisters, then busied himself at the end of the bar. No other customers came in. Roy and Flip finished their Coca-Colas and sat quietly too. For some reason it did not seem right to talk a lot with a dead man lying there.

  “The wagon oughta be here by now,” said Emile, who came around from behind the bar, walked over to the front door, and looked outside through the small window.

  “It’s a full-on blizzard out there,” he said. “Maybe you kids should go on home now, before it gets any worse. Drca and Boro and I can tell the ambulance boys what happened, if they can even get here.”

  “Go,” said Boro. “Drinks on house. Yes, Emile?”

  The bartender nodded.

  “Be careful of starving dogs,” said Drca. “They are hunting in group when weather is bad.”

  “This Chicago,” said Boro, “not Zagreb. Here dogs eat better than people of half of world.”

  Roy and Flip got down from their stools and took one more look at Bad Lands Bill. His skin seemed almost normal now and there was a peaceful expression on his face. Emile opened the door a crack.

  “Quick, boys,” he said, “so the wind don’t blow the snow in.”

  After Flip turned off Anna Ruttar Street to go to his house, Roy bent his head as he trudged forward and thought about packs of hungry wild dogs roaming the streets of Croatian cities and villages attacking kids and old people unable to defend themselves, feasting on stumblebums like Bad Lands Bill, especially if they were already dead. Roy brushed snow from his face. He wondered if Midget Fernekes was really a midget or if he was called that just because he was short. Roy worried that he could end up like Bad Lands Bill or Arne Pedersen, a rummy frozen to death on a sidewalk or in an alley. This was a possibility, he knew, it could happen to any man if enough breaks went against him. Roy tried to keep the snow out of his eyes but it was coming down too fast. He felt as if he were wandering in the clouds only this wasn’t heaven. He was where the dogs could get him.

  Blue Note

  by STUART M. KAMINSKY

  Woodlawn

  (Originally published in 1997)

  I was sitting in the Blue Note Lounge on Clark Street, just down the street from the Clark Theater. The Clark was the only place in town that had a new double feature every night, sometimes three features. I spent a lot of time in the dark at the Clark Theater, usually waiting for the Blue Note to open.

  Maybe it w
as 1955 or 1957. I know it was winter. I was twenty-four or twenty-six. One of those. I may not remember the year, but I remember that night when I heard Count Basie and Joe Williams and Sonny Payne going wild for a fifteen-minute drum solo.

  My name? Pitch Noles. Behind that name was another, the one I was born with, Mitchell Nolowitz. I made my living gambling, but not your ordinary gambling.

  I can hear the Count at his piano, lazily running his chubby, delicate fingers over the keys in that tiny, dark room. And that’s Joe Williams inside my head belting a baritone, “Oh well. Oh well. Oh well.” Keeping it up. “Oh well. Oh well. Oh well. Oh well.”

  Audience, most of them white, a few of them black, me in the middle with a Jewish fight-promoter father and a beautiful black mother with a voice that could bring tears. They hadn’t lived together since I was fourteen, but Izzy would call her every once in a while just to hear that voice.

  Mae would be coming by later. She would touch my face and be waved up on the low platform by the Count and she would sing. She would turn any song into the blues. She did a “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” low tempo, deep voice, melancholy voice. Everyone went silent when Mae sang, everybody. Even Joe Williams closed his eyes and smiled when Mae sang. She wasn’t Billie, Dinah, Ella, or Sarah. She was Mae. She would be coming.

  But now Joe was doing the singing, “Every Day I Have the Blues,” and Mae hadn’t made her appearance. People were moving their shoulders, dreamy or smiling; maybe both. Sonny Payne was drenched with sweat, his head turned at an angle as if listening to the now almost silent rapping of his own sticks against the taut skin. The blue light of the room quivered with wisps of smoke. I was at home.

  I nursed a beer and wondered, with my genes, why I could appreciate music but couldn’t carry a tune.

  Then Terrance “Dusk” Oliver sat down and placed a book on the table, facedown. He was compact, black, dressed in a $300 blue suit, a white shirt, and a red and blue silk paisley tie. He folded his hands on the table so I could clearly see his heavy silver skull-faced ring. I glanced at him. Dusk Oliver didn’t look at me. His eyes were on Joe, but his soul, if he had one, which many doubted, was somewhere else.

  When Joe finished and the Count decided on a break, I looked toward the entrance over the heads of the people seated at the tiny round tables.

  “She’s delayed,” said Dusk, his voice high, but don’t let that fool you.

  I looked at him slow, cool, blue in the Blue Note because Dusk Oliver was not a man to be questioned if you wanted to go through the rest of your life with both your ears and all your fingers.

  “She’ll be in, in . . .” he looked at his watch, “two minutes.”

  Terrance’s face was round, unblemished, hair cut short, eyes tiny and dark. I wondered, as I had before, what he did for fun. I knew he had studied philosophy and literature at Howard University. He was one of the few people who had turned philosophy and poetry into a practical business asset.

  “We sit,” he said, “here in the Blue Note, at the epicenter of delusion in the middle of the twentieth century.”

  Dusk Oliver was always giving out epigrams and books he had read in the hope of finding someone with whom he could talk as an equal. This was a difficult quest since he did not move in the circles of the highly literate and curious. I, with two years at Wright Junior College, was about the best he could do.

  A drink appeared in front of him. It dervished with little bubbles. Terrance looked at it and bit his lower lip.

  “You know who James Mason is?” he asked.

  “The actor, English,” I said, not looking at the door but joining Terrance in his fascination with the glass of ginger ale.

  “I’d like to meet him. That voice. I’d like to meet him. My bet is he read the fucking Marble Faun.”

  I nodded again. The possibility of James Mason having read Nathaniel Hawthorne opened no new areas of conversation for me.

  “You see that movie where he slammed the piano cover down on that skinny blonde’s fingers because she couldn’t get the song right?”

  There was a point to all this. I wasn’t sure what it was and I didn’t like what it might be.

  “Saw it at the Clark,” I said. “The Seventh Veil.”

  Dusk Oliver unclasped his fingers and pushed the book he had placed on the table toward me. “The Fountainhead,” he said. “Read it.”

  It was said softly, but it was an order. I took the book. It was hard to believe this educated numbers racketeer and supplier of street drugs with little patience for those who owed him money or homage had come to the Blue Note to give me a book.

  There was a flurry near the door. Mae appeared. I knew it had been two minutes. I didn’t have to look at my watch. If Dusk Oliver said my mother was coming through the door in two minutes, you didn’t have to check your watch.

  She nodded to a few people, wended her way through the tightly packed tables. She was wearing a black dress and something tight and glittery around her slim brown neck. She was a beauty. No doubt. She came to my table, touched my cheek, and looked briefly into my eyes with eyes like my own. She didn’t look at Dusk. There was something soulful in her smile that said all was not well in the smoke-filled demi-darkness.

  She turned and made her way around the small, low stage and through a dark curtain to the left.

  “Beautiful lady,” said Dusk.

  I nodded again. Maybe I would spend the night nodding until Terrance decided to ask me a question or simply disappeared.

  “She owes me,” he said, inching toward the point and leaning toward me. “She is beautiful, misbegotten, a wisp, a waif, Cleopatra, a waft of gardenia freshness when she enters a room. Mae is a piece of work.”

  This time he paused and looked at me for a response.

  “A piece of work,” I agreed.

  “Elegant.”

  “Elegant.”

  “Somewhere about six in the morning, that elegance will be marred by a missing finger,” he said.

  There was no sign of sympathy and I knew better than to look for one.

  “Unless . . .” he went on.

  “Unless?”

  He looked at his watch again and said, “You go to a house in Hyde Park with ten thousand dollars of my money and sit in on a poker game. You walk out of that poker game with a minimum of forty thousand dollars by five in the morning. You get in a car that will be waiting, hand the driver the money, and get a ride back home or wherever you want to go with half of everything you make over the forty thousand.”

  “And . . . ?” I asked.

  “Mae’s debt is repaid,” Terrance said.

  It wasn’t a request or a proposition. I was going to that game. Terrance was counting on my reputation. I was the Prince of the Tell, the Duke of the Giveaway. Some of it was conscious. Some of it was intuition that came from observation, a lot of it from my father. Once I picked twenty-three straight boxing matches correctly, both under- and overcards. I missed twenty-four because the guy I had picked suddenly got a pain in his stomach, doubled over, and took a desperation left uppercut that broke his jaw.

  I never bet more than a few hundred dollars on a fight and I never won more than a few thousand max at a poker table. I stayed below the lights. I liked Chicago, day or night. I haunted the Brookfield and Lincoln Park zoos, communing with the gorillas and chimps. Once in a while, I spent a night in a poker game with out-of-towners who saw a kid with a smile and more than ordinary luck. It had little to do with luck. Sometimes, much of the time, it had nothing to do with luck. When I wasn’t going to Marigold or Soldier Field or the Coliseum for a fight night, or sitting in a hotel room or the back room of a bar on Elston or Division, I hit the blues bars.

  “When?” I asked.

  “When Mae finishes,” Dusk said.

  Basie and the small traveling band came out one at a time and took their places. The audience kept talking.

  Joe Williams didn’t appear. The band settled itself and Mae entered—serious, bea
utiful, dark, and smoky. She looked down, moistened her lips. The crowd went quiet.

  She looked at me. I knew what she wanted. I couldn’t turn her down. I couldn’t refuse Dusk Oliver.

  We listened to my mother sing “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Blues for a Lonesome Child,” and more. I had the feeling that she didn’t want the set to end.

  Neither did the audience. Shaharazade in black and glitter putting off the inevitable.

  Finally, she stopped and bowed. The audience went well beyond polite. The Count clapped his pudgy fingers and Mae came out for another bow, but no encore.

  It was up to me.

  “Let’s go,” Oliver said.

  I sat with him in the backseat of a black Chrysler. The driver was alone in the front. I recognized him: Kelly “Two Punch” Jones, heavyweight, great black hope who went from being the man who could put away almost any man with two punches to the man who could be put away by almost anyone with two punches. He never developed even a three-punch combination. He went downhill fast. That was the pros. Now he had another profession and Two Punch was not to be trifled with by civilians.

  Dusk took a bundle of bills out of the pocket of his chestnut camel-hair coat, peeled off some of them, tucked them in my jacket pocket, and handed me the rest. “Put them away,” he said. “Leave the book in the car.”

  I put The Fountainhead down.

  We drove down Lake Shore Drive. The night was winter cold. Ankle-high mounds of dirty snow ran along the curbing. Late-night traffic was light, the windows were closed, Lake Michigan was quiet.

  “Three players,” Dusk said. “They think you’re my nephew.”

  The family resemblance would best not be questioned.