Tales of the Bagman

by B C Bell

  “Wow, Mac McCullough, civic minded citizen. It ain’t even Sunday and I feel like I’m reading the funnies.”

  “Look, I know you public relations guys deal in funny news, but… Just give me something, OK?”

  “All right, all right. Two things—and you owe me by the way. Sticks’s real name was Henry Cameron Jones. And, since he’s been murdered, nobody’s seen that singer Coco Blue or her manager Gary Blake.”

  “Thanks, Hunts. I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “Hey, hey! Prohibition’s not over—yet. And us upstanding employees of the City of Chicago don’t go in for that sort of thing. Oh, by the way, those concrete guys show up yet?”

  Mac had completely forgotten they were pouring concrete that day. Luckily he was right across the street. He stepped onto the car lot and pulled Crankshaft’s head out from under the hood of a Model-A.

  “Office, Crank. We gotta talk,” Mac almost pushed him inside.

  “Bet your ass we do,” Crankshaft answered. “I spent all morning putting up with these concrete morons treating me like a parking attendant. Had to move half the lot. If you’re going to do this kind of thing I’d appreciate you showing up.”

  “Yeah. What do you know about a man named Henry Cameron Jones?”

  Crankshaft’s eyes opened a little wider before he looked down at his shoes. “It’s Sticks Stone’s real name… He’s my little brother, Mac.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Aaah, well… Y’know, you’re always asking about stuff. I figured you’d ask me eventually anyway.”

  “You know why they killed him?”

  “No. Haven’t seen him since I left Harlem, after the war. Pretty obvious, though, it probably has something to do with those drugs we found. And the money.”

  “Was he a junkie?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask the cops?”

  “That’s the one thing I can’t do. I gotta keep The Bagman out of this.”

  “No, my friend, I think you’re already neck deep in this thing. Me too.”

  “You don’t know how deep, Crank,” Mac said, and proceeded to tell him about Coco Blue and her manager’s disappearance.

  Both of them sat down while Mac was still talking, then a heavy silence loomed in the air. Crankshaft stared into space. Mac tapped his fingers on the desk, then got up and started pacing around the room. He stepped outside the office, talked to the men pouring the concrete, and glanced at the job through a surveyor’s scope. Five minutes later, he walked back in the office and slammed the tin door behind him.

  “Crank, the foundation we’ve got to build on is drugs and money. It’s obvious I can’t go around questioning detectives. But I can talk to a drug addict.”

  ***

  Mac was glad it was already after five. He didn’t know any addicts, but he knew a guy who he had strong suspicions about. And one of the reasons he had suspicions about Wheezy Waldheim was because he had never seen him before three in the afternoon.

  Wheezy had been a big time gambler who carried a lot of cash around, even after the stock market crashed, until about a year ago when he’d started showing up in speakeasies and bumming cigarettes. He had all the symptoms: a constant case of the sniffles and he was broke all the time. In fact, the only time he didn’t look sick was after he’d just paid a visit to some shady-looking character and had excused himself to spend an inordinate amount of time in the men’s room. He was also a notorious stoolpigeon.

  Mac hadn’t even thought about Wheezy until he saw him step out onto skid row wearing the same suit he’d had on three weeks ago. It didn’t look like he’d ever taken it off. Poor guy was sinking fast. Mac crossed the street at an angle so he could intercept Wheezy, who looked like he was making his way down the sidewalk searching the ground for spent cigarette butts.

  A big, gloved hand seized Waldheim by the collar and pulled all ninety-seven pounds of him into the shadows. Wheezy dropped a handful of butts when he realized the two glowing eyes staring down at him were framed by ragged holes in a brown paper bag.

  “Hiya, Wheezy! How ya doin’?” Mac said, lifting him by the lapels.

  “You’re him,” Wheezy stammered. “You’re that guy, wants to take over Luries’ protection racket.” Waldheim stared up blankly, like he was watching the scene from far away.

  “Yeah, I’m me, Wheezy. Have been all day. And you’re you. All very philosophical, isn’t it?” Mac picked him up a little higher by what was left of his lapels. “I need your help. Seriously, just a couple of questions and then you can go back to your slow death. If that’s what you really want.”

  “I’ll help, I’ll help!” Waldheim held up his hand in front of him in a defensive gesture. “Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a few bucks I could borr—”

  “Maybe, Wheezy, maybe,” The Bagman said, lowering him back to the ground. It felt like if he didn’t keep holding him upright, Wheezy would just collapse into the ground. “Now listen to me. Listen. Let’s say I’m new in town, and I need a… a…” Mac wasn’t familiar with the lingo. “Some drugs… I’m addicted and I’m gonna die without it. Where would I go?”

  “South side?”

  “No, no. You’re guessing, Wheezy. No guessing. This is pass or fail. Let’s say I was on the North Side. And I needed a… a… a hit. But I had to stay incognito.”

  “I thought you hadda stay on the North Side?”

  “No, no. I mean, I don’t want anybody to see me. The fewer people see me, the better. Where do I go?”

  “How much money do you have?” Wheezy wheezed.

  Mac had to keep himself from throwing him at the brick wall in frustration. “I don’t know! Ten bucks,” he pulled a number out of the air.

  “Hang around outside the Bluebird on Fitzhugh. Somebody’ll ask ya eventually.”

  The Bluebird was a hotel in Mac’s old neighborhood where derelicts went to drink themselves to death. He didn’t figure it for the kind of place a ritzy band manager from New York like Gary Blake would hide out. Questioning Wheezy wasn’t working.

  So he had a better idea. Sort of. As much as he hated to, he had to make Wheezy’s problem work for him.

  “Come with me,” Mac said. He held his hand over Waldheim’s eyes. Then he took the bag off his own head, and put it over Wheezy’s, backwards, so the addict couldn’t see. He pulled him down the street to the De Soto and shoved him into the passenger seat, hoping Wheezy might live long enough to pull this off.

  “What‘re ya doing? Don’t hurt me!” Wheezy said, “I don’t know nothin’. Please mister, don’t. Don’t, don’t kill me, please.”

  “Don’t worry, Wheeze, I’m not gonna kill you. In fact, I’m going to give you just what you’re looking for.”

  For a guy who didn’t want to die, Wheezy was killing himself faster than anybody else would have bothered, Mac thought. He hated the idea of feeding the stoolpigeon’s death wish, but this was the only thing he could think of. He pressed the ignition and drove the car north, parked right across the street from the Green Mill. Wheezy stayed in his seat, shivering the entire time, not even trying to remove the bag from his head.

  Mac pulled him out of the car and marched him to the nearest alley. He took the bag off Wheezy’s head and put it on his own. It already smelled of mildew. Hopefully, Waldheim’s eyes hadn’t had a chance to adjust to the light just yet. From the look of them, they weren’t in focus anyway.

  Mac opened his wallet and slapped a $50 bill into Waldheim’s hand. “There ya go, Wheezy. Knock yourself out. Oh, and one more thing…”

  “Yeah…?” Wheezy said, spreading the bill out open and staring into the center of it.

  “Next time you need money, I want you to go wait in the alley, right by where Addison meets the Ravenswood tracks. Can you remember that? Maybe
I can help you out…” It was the alley across the street from Crankshaft’s Car Repair. Mac hoped there was something he could do for the poor guy, but right now he had to use him.

  Waldheim stumbled off, sniffing, and rubbing his legs. He put the bill in his pants pocket, stopped and pulled it out again as if to make sure it was still there. Mac took the bag off his head and trailed him—kicking himself the whole way.

  He didn’t know if this idea was going to work and, if it did, he didn’t know how. But, he’d just given the closest thing he had to a bloodhound the scent, and now he had to follow.

  ***

  When Coco Blue awoke it was dark. She hadn’t expected to live through the strangling. At first, she thought it was just the bruises that she felt on her face; it still hurt where the kidnapper had beaten her. She hadn’t understood she was blindfolded until she tried to yell for help and realized she was gagged, too. Her hands were tied to something just over her head, and her legs were bound to something by the wall. Struggling, she managed to pull herself up on the clothing rod she was hanging from, and pull the blindfold off. She was in a closet.

  It wasn’t the one in her dressing room.

  The big man, the one that had been in her dressing room, had something to do with the gunshots at the club—but that was all she had been able to figure out by the time the door opened.

  “Ah, I thought I heard you knocking around in here,” the man with part of an ear said. His voice sounded like sandpaper rubbing on an oil drum. “Got some questions. You wanna live, you better answer ‘em.” He pulled the gag out of Coco’s mouth.

  “Anything. Please, just let me go.”

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll get right on that. Questions first. I need you to tell me all about your boyfriend back there at the club.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  The scar-faced man slapped her.

  “Yeah, your boyfriend. The one you was talking to at the backdoor of the club, before you came back in.”

  “Antoine?”

  “Yeah, him. Antoine Jones.”

  “I just met him. Last night. First time I ever laid eyes on him.” A tear ran down her cheek. “Honest.”

  “Sounded to me like you two were meeting for a date tonight.”

  “We…we had planned to.”

  “Where’s he live?” He held his hand back in the air, slapped her again.

  “I don’t know. He was supposed to meet me at the club tonight. Six o’clock. We were going down to…” She had to think a second. “Maxwell Street.”

  “Where’s he work?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of sobbing out loud.

  “Maybe you get hungry enough. Maybe you decide you wanna live, maybe you’ll remember better, huh,” The scarred man said. He punched Coco in the stomach, hard. Then punched her again behind the ear. “Just don’t keep me waitin’ too long, honey. I been waiting fifteen years already.”

  Coco remembered she had stuck Crankshaft’s business card in the front of her brassiere last night. Then she fell into unconsciousness again.

  Chapter V

  Slam Bang Theater

  It was a test of patience trying to tail Wheezy. The guy walked so slow Mac wanted to pick him up and throw him further down the street, but the way Wheezy kept twisting in the wind he’d probably break in half. Wheezy kept stopping to check his pocket for the fifty-dollar bill and then stumbling down the sidewalk. Mac bought a pack of cigarettes at a corner newsstand and started smoking just so he could look busy. He should have rolled his own, he thought. Would have taken up more time.

  Finally… Finally, Wheezy went into a building on North Sheridan that had probably been built right after the Chicago fire: The Winston Hotel. Mac waited five minutes to make sure they’d let Waldheim in, circled around back to make sure Wheezy wasn’t just passing through, then went back around to the front.

  The place didn’t look too bad inside. It had probably been nice twenty years ago—nice enough that they hadn’t needed a screen in front of the registration desk. Cheap enough, now, that they hadn’t bothered to install one yet. Mac stepped up to the desk. The clerk ignored him, smoking and thumbing through an old issue of a Spicy Mystery magazine. Mac knocked on the counter.

  “Whaddaya want?” the clerk said. He needed a shave.

  “I was wondering if you could help me,” Mac said. “I’m looking for a couple of gentlemen that might be staying here.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Private dick?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad, ‘cause then I mighta’ let ya look at the register—”

  The words hadn’t even finished coming out of the desk clerk’s mouth before Mac grabbed him by the collar and dragged him over the counter, spilling everything on the desk to the floor. Mac pulled the man’s head back by the hair and stared down into his eyes.

  “Here’s how this works,” he said, through gritted teeth. “You let me look at the register. You answer my questions. And I give you a pretty picture of Abe Lincoln. Anything else—I crush you like a puss-filled maggot. Got it?”

  “I got it, I got it!” the clerk said, shaking his head. “Yes sir, yes…”

  Mac pushed him back across the ink puddle on the counter. “Now, may I please have a look at the register?”

  “Why yes, yes you may, sir,” the clerk said, trying to pull his shirt back in place, before he put the sign-in book on the counter and turned it so Mac could see.

  Patrick Waldheim, Wheezy, was the last entry. Room 201, if Mac had any more questions. He thumbed back through the pages to the night before and there it was. Blake Gary, room 225. Not much of an alias, Blake turning his name around like that, but Mac was grateful for the lack of originality.

  “Now, one more thing. Have you had a guy come through here with part of his right ear missing?”

  The clerk’s eyes rolled up into his head like he was thinking. “No, sir.”

  Mac pulled out a five and put it in the clerk’s hand. “Now, see how easy that was? I’m just hoping we’ll never have to go through that again, if ever I might require your services in the future.”

  “Oh. Uh, thanks, Mister.” The clerk said.

  “You’re welcome,” Mac said, and ran up the stairs. He didn’t think the desk clerk would call the cops on him, but he didn’t want to have to stay long enough to find out.

  He had to stop on the stairs because Wheezy was already knocking on somebody else’s door in the hallway—probably his dealer. Mac made a note of the room number for reference, and went directly to room 225.

  He thought about knocking, then reconsidered. He pulled his .45 out of the shoulder holster and kicked the door as hard as he could next to the knob. The door splintered out of the frame.

  A man in his shirtsleeves jumped off the bed and made for the window. There was a metal syringe and a rubber tube on the table next to him. Mac grabbed the man by the back of his belt, pushed the door closed with his foot, then slid a desk in front of it to keep it shut.

  “No! No!” The man was crying, sweating. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t steal it! Please don’t kill meee! Pleeease!”

  “I’m not here to kill you,” Mac said, putting his hand over the man’s mouth. “I’m just here to ask some questions.”

  The man gasped between sobs, and rubbed his watery eyes with his shoulder. “You a cop?”

  “No! I’m not a cop, already! I just have to ask you some questions.”

  “OKokokok…” the man said, sitting on the bed. He looked like he was about to collapse.

  “It’s OK, just some questions. Now, first off, are you Gary Blake, the band manager?” From the way his body stiffened it was obvious he was. “OK, Gary, it’s OK,” Mac said, calmly,
“I’m just trying to find out who shot Sticks Stone last night.”

  “I don’t know!” Blake wailed. “I swear I don’t. I had nothing to do with that. I answered all the cops’ questions.” He sobbed and then wailed again, “Back when I was aliiiive!” Mac slapped him across the mouth.

  “Snap out of it, Blake. I’m trying to help you here.”

  “Helpmehelpmehelpme.” Blake was hysterical, trying to catch his breath.

  “I will.” Mac pulled a fifth of whiskey off the chest of drawers and poured them both a snort. “Now, it’s obvious you didn’t have anything to do with the murder—”

  “‘At’s right, ‘at’s right, I didn’t.”

  “So all this hiding out, it’s about the drugs” Mac pointed at the syringe “or the money that was back in the room that Sticks had the key to.”

  “Yeah, yeah. He made me give him the key. Part of that money was the band’s take—for the tour. He was afraid I’d sneak off. He knew about the drugs.”

  “Did Sticks use the drugs?”

  “Naw, no. He drank like a fish, smoked like a train—but he didn’t touch the dope. It scared him.” Blake downed his drink. Mac poured him a little more.

  “So why would somebody shoot him?”

  “Dunno, I don’t know.” Blake was agitated, starting to sob again. Was he already drunk or was it the effect of drugs?

  “All right. It’s all right, Gary. You don’t know anything about why Sticks was shot. I believe you.” Mac drank, trying to make everything look casual, relaxed. “So, why are you hiding out? What are you afraid of?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m trying to find out. Soon as you tell me—Poof, I’m gone. I’m the wind.”

  “I’m hiding out ‘cause of the drugs, man. The drugs…” Blake started sobbing again, “I got the hotel manager to let me back in the room last night, and all the drugs, all the money… gone…” He gasped. “Now, I’m a dead man. I was responsible and now Cabrisio, he’s gonna have me killed.”