My thoughts flashed through my head at the speed of my hands. The whole works Ranalli had me involved in last night was as staged as vaudeville. He wanted me to find that dead bull up in the attic.
Ranalli’s men probably were watching the place and seen that flatfoot go in the house and never come out. He brought me along because he figured I’d spill it to the cops. He probably thought it’d be mighty easy to get the cops to play along with runnin’ Valentino, or whatever the hell his real name was, out of town if he killed a cop.
I smiled and speeded up my rhythm. Ranalli was playing chess while Valentino and the rest of us were playing checkers.
* * *
I got back to my flat to a ringing phone. It was Brawley in a mood.
“We got a call last night about a gun being fired on Peter Street, and found a stiff and one of our own dead,” he said.
I played dumb. “Any idea who did it?” I asked.
“One of our radio cars said he saw a make boring down a street near the scene that fit Ranalli’s bucket. We already talked with him, and he was out at some whorehouse with a roomful of witnesses.”
“Those aren’t real legit witnesses,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it’s good enough for the brass. Ranalli said it must’ve been the number that blew up his joint. It seems to check out, since the stiff was just ID’d as some ape from Brooklyn.”
“Who was the flatfoot you found dead?” I asked.
“Monroe Flori. He was some kid that was workin’ a simple patrol beat until he stepped up and volunteered for the unit that was handlin’ this whole mess with Ranalli.”
“That’s a bad way to go out,” I said.
“Yeah,” Brawley said. There was an underlying tension in his voice. “Guess what else the patrol said when he radioed in seeing Ranalli’s car? Said he thought he saw a big Negro riding shotgun.”
“There are a lot of big black men in this city,” I said.
“You are really startin’ to piss me off, Fletcher!” he growled. “Were you there last night?”
“If I give you the up and up, and you get the idea of bringing me in on it, I’ll play the part everyone expects me to play, the dumb colored man that don’t know nothing about nothing.”
“You’ll also be the dumb colored man rotting in a ten-by-ten cell, too,” he said.
“Okay, then I wasn’t there, and I don’t know nothin’,” I said.
“Goddamnit, just give me the dope! I ain’t gonna bring you in unless you played a major part in it, see!”
“Fair enough,” I said.
I gave him the whole yarn. When I finished, Brawley said, “And you think Ranalli set it all up?”
“Search me. He wanted me to go through the house, like he was expecting me to find something.”
“It don’t matter. He didn’t kill Flori, the mug gettin’ shoved into a drawer did.”
“What do you know about a guy named Valentino?” I asked.
“Some beauty actor that all the ladies would get their undergarments wet over.”
“Not that Valentino.”
“Only other Valentino I’ve heard of is some ugly mug that runs numbers in New York.”
“How’d you hear about him?” I asked.
“He tried to get Ranalli in on doing the numbers racket here, but at the time Ranalli was being brought up on racketeering charges.”
“Apparently, he went after Ranalli at his joint, and the goons that killed Flori were likely workin’ for him,” I said.
“Then he’s a dumb Dora,” Brawley said. “Whoever this Valentino is, him and his mugs came waltzing into town two days ago. We found his stronghold at some run-down dive on Chartres and Poland Avenue, near the wharf. A lot of them are holed up in the building, but there are over a dozen of them spread throughout the city, taking up rooms in hotels and the likes. We’re keepin’ an eye on them until the chief gives the green light to run the carpetbaggers out.”
“Was Flori watchin’ the goon on Peter Street?” I asked.
“Yup. Now that he’s dead, I doubt the chief is goin’ to have us sit around and wait anymore.”
“That’s what Ranalli wanted,” I said.
“The hell with what Ranalli wanted! We were going to toss them out anyway. The only thing that’s changed is they may not all be alive to get back to where they belong.”
CHAPTER 9
It was easy to spot the building on Chartres. It was the one with two New York apes standing outside of it in heavy wool herringbone overcoats and expensive suits. The building was an old four-story Philadelphia pressed-brick apartment, now abandoned. Its cylindrical cast-iron galleries were red with rust and currently being used as a premier perching spot for the city’s overpopulation of pigeons.
The two men didn’t pay much attention to me until I got out of the car and stepped closer to the building.
“No vacancies, so you might as well beat it,” one of them said.
“Is your boss up there?” I asked, ignoring his remark.
He didn’t answer, but something caught my eye up in one of the windows. A figure looked down but quickly moved out of sight.
“I guess he is,” I said. “Tell him William Fletcher wants to see him.”
“What about?” the other goon said.
“Until I speak to him myself, it’s about me wanting to sell some municipal bonds, get what I’m saying?”
“I get it. A wiseass,” he said. “This city is full of ’em. They don’t show that kind of lip where I’m from.”
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Little Italy, Manhattan,” he said.
“I didn’t know Little Italy was still there. I thought the Chinese sent all you dagos running to Brooklyn.”
The other one said, “Hey, I know who this coon is now. He used to be the number one black heavyweight contender until he dropped off the face of the earth.”
“I don’t care who he is. He better shove off before I find the nearest branch and lynch him off it!”
I was about to leave when another man came out the door. “Boss wants to see him,” he said.
The two guards stood with dumb looks on their faces as I followed the other man into a freight elevator with an iron roll-down cage. The makeshift shimmied and clanked all the way to the top as if it was hoisting up a full-grown elephant. It dumped us out on the top level and the man led me to one of the main rooms on the floor.
There, a group of tough guys stood around a man in a deep chair. The man’s grill had been burned. Long blond strands of coarse hair crept down his damaged face. In his lap was the kind of blonde you expect to be with such a crowd. She was very little, wearing a ridiculous red and black saloon girl dress with a lace-up bodice and fringe trim. It was the kind of dress worn by a woman starved for attention.
“You must be Valentino,” I said.
The comment caused the man to stare at me for a few lingering moments before standing straight up, sending the blonde to the hardwood floor. “I don’t like being called that. People think it’s real funny when I look like this,” he said.
“Sorry, it was the only name I had for you,” I said.
He ignored me, and took his attention to the blonde, who was still on the floor. “Get up off the ground, woman. You must excuse Ida. She’s a good woman, just not housebroken.”
When Ida had gotten up off the floor, he said, “Go powder your nose, we’re going to have us some man talk here.”
She gave the burnt man a nasty look and stepped out.
“You treat your ladies well,” I said.
“Better than most,” he said. “I suppose you don’t recognize me. Can’t say I blame you, considering the circumstance.”
“I don’t recall ever running into you before,” I said.
“Perhaps if you saw me as a fresh-faced twelve-year-old boy, it might paint a better picture.”
I gave the man’s disfigured face a harder look. “It does. You’re that Mallon kid.”
&nbs
p; “I’m quite sure you saved my life that day when you let me go,” he said. “There is no doubt that Storm, a name I’ve never forgotten, would’ve killed me when he found out my folks weren’t going to pay up.”
A moment of surrealness came over me as I looked at the little kid with the chubby cheeks, his facial features burned to the point he hardly looked human. The last time I saw the kid there was something not right about him and it still hadn’t changed. His behavior didn’t seem natural. “What happened to you?” I asked.
“You should’ve asked your friend Storm.”
“He did that to you?”
“Are you surprised? When I was barely in my twenties, he found me in New York. He blamed me for rattin’ him out to the cops and making him a fugitive. He took a blowtorch to my face and left me for dead.”
“And that’s when you patched yourself up and started a new life of crime, right?”
“Crime was nothing new to me,” he said. “It’s been part of my entire life. Where’d you think my folks got their roll from? Bootlegging at first and then they moved into other areas. After they died, I took over the operation.”
“Should have stuck to your numbers, kid. You’re out of your climate here. Johnnie Ranalli has got a lot of weight and the law has his back, especially after your hoods killed one of their own.”
“Ranalli took my money and failed to fulfill his commitment. When I find out where he is, we’re going to come to an understanding.”
“Storm is dead, leave it at that,” I said. “There is no profit with this hard-on you have with killing his daughter and locking horns with Ranalli.”
“Not everything is about profit.”
“That’s what losers say,” I said. “But you go right ahead and keep playing with fire. You’ll see soon enough it won’t just be your face that gets burned this time around.”
I was to the door when he said, “I’m grateful for what you did for me. That is why I’m allowing you to walk out that door. But if you want to know what happens to people that talk to me the way you just did, then perhaps you heard of what happened to Roman Perez.”
Roman Perez was a nobody blackmailer whose bloated body was recovered in a section of the old Erie Canal in New York.
The incident become big news because his sister Delphine was a popular socialite that hobnobbed with the elite, including newspaper editors, and brought a wave of attention to it and to the lack of results in finding the perpetrators.
“What’d Perez do to get that kind of treatment?” I asked.
“He made the mistake of trying to blackmail me,” Mallon said.
“Must’ve had something big for you to do that to him,” I said.
Mallon sat back down in his throne. “I guess you’ll never know,” was all he said.
* * *
The morning scarehead read, “THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS!” The papers reported that the “battle” kicked off around two forty-five in the morning with a truck pulling up in front of the Mallon kid’s stronghold. The few witnesses nearby told different accounts, ranging from it being a standard truck to a commercial one, and that either the driver didn’t jump out or did before it exploded, taking a large chunk of the building with it.
This was followed with a “no-holds-barred” attack on Mallon’s men who were holed up in rooms around town. Their rooms were busted into and they were either shot or the room was firebombed with them still in it.
One of the men, identified as Anton Delmar, didn’t want to go down so easy. He put a bullet in one intruder’s head as soon as they shot the door down. Delmar’s vitality was rewarded with a bullet from an M1918 BAR, shearing him in half. More than two hundred rounds were collected at the scene. Brawley told me later in the day that the boys that processed the scene said it was closer to a hundred, but the press had a habit of rounding their figures up to create more pandemonium.
Citizens and a police officer who didn’t identify himself reported police involvement in the attack, but the police department spokesman denied any such participation.
Ranalli’s Model B was discovered on the Metairie Road bridge that went over the Seventeenth Street Canal. Early commuters reported being blocked from traversing the bridge on both sides by a barricade of cars and heavily armed gunmen.
Ranalli’s machine had been torn into by an onslaught of heavy artillery and firebombed. Though the paper didn’t report who the attack was from, it was likely Mallon’s men doing some good old-fashioned retaliation.
The car was still burning like a funeral pyre when police arrived, and a fire crew had to be assembled to put it out. A body was found behind the wheel. Officers on the scene were quoted as saying that the car and body had been set on fire with a mixture of gasoline and motor oil, common components for the homemade hand grenade.
By the time the morning extra hit the doorsteps at sun-up, it was over. It was just another day outside as the news chattered over the radio waves as if a second world war had occurred.
Notwithstanding the reporters’ dire attempts to incite with their perfervid coverage, most desensitized and indifferent citizens went about their daily lives as if nothing occurred. Gangsters getting murdered seemed to them a fitting end to their kind. Mayor Robert Maestri seemed to mirror the public’s sympathy when he was quoted as saying, “The men who were killed were worthless members of society. They were men without religion or scruples, and a product of a foreign-based epidemic of undesirables that’s plagued American society for too long. They will not be missed.”
As the story progressed, details and accounts became clear. The fingers on the body in Ranalli’s car were preserved enough due to fire-retardant driving gloves that an identification was made. The scorched remains were positively identified as Johnnie Ranalli. Mallon must have got word of the attack, allowing him and most of his men to escape before the building was bombed. Seven unidentified men were killed from the blast. Mallon’s whereabouts at the present time were unknown.
That day, Zella stayed home. The weak sister club owner cancelled her performance and closed shop for the remainder of the day until he was sure the dust had settled. Zella said it was more like he was waiting to get his nerve back.
When I tried to call Brawley on the phone, I was told he was swamped at the station and couldn’t free himself to speak. I’d have to go to him during his lunch break. Most blacks would never bother going to a police station under their own free will. It’d be the same as tossing a sacrificial lamb into a den full of starving jackals. But working with jackals was nothing new to me.
Because of all the brouhaha that had happened, everyone in the smoked-filled detective bureau ignored my presence as I entered the room.
Throughout the room, ugly, hairy, and overweight middle-aged men conferred with others and mauled stacks of paper on their disorganized desks. The desks were wedged up against each other so tight it left little walking space. Budget tightening caused the overpacking, forcing separate units to share the same work space.
The majority of them paid no attention to me; the few that did looked up from their desks to cast nasty looks. I smiled back at them.
Brawley had situated himself at the back of the room. His desk, unlike the others, was well organized and free of clutter. When I got to him, he’d been looking over a court summons while chewing on a stuffed bologna sandwich.
It took me the time to find a chair and sit down in front of the desk before he looked up. There was a bruise above his left eye.
“What the hell did she throw at you this time?” I said.
“A rolling pin. Her aim’s getting better, and I’m really starting to worry about her safety.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said, “if she keeps up with this shit, I’m gonna snap on her, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”
“Maybe it’s time to think about cutting your losses before it gets to that. No dame is worth losing your job and going to jail, you know.”
“I suppose
that’d be the civil thing to do, right?” he said, raking his hands through his unruly hair. “What’d you want to talk to me about anyway?”
“I wanted to see if you got the time to find out what you can about Sal Mallon. That’s Valentino’s real name.”
“Why’s that name sound familiar?”
I said, “Mallon was the kid Bill Storm kidnapped. You must’ve seen it in the papers.”
“That’s just lovely. I’m supposed to be busting whores and going after junkies, and now you want me to stick my nose in this.”
“This tip might make you look nice and pretty to your superiors. That ain’t so bad, is it?”
“No, it ain’t,” he said. “But they’re startin’ to get a real good idea where this information is coming from. I shouldn’t have had you come here.”
It would not look good for Brawley if the department started to see him as someone’s puppet, especially when that someone happens to be a colored detective.
“Aw, don’t worry about it,” I said. “They all think I’m too dumb to actually be behind this kind of dope. If they go asking what I was doing here, tell them you brought me in for disorderly conduct.”
Brawley snorted. “That’ll fly real well.”
There was snickering in the background. I bowed around and saw that we had attracted a small audience.
“Best get on out of here before you draw any more attention,” Brawley said.
I went to leave, and found a couple of beefy men blocking my passage. They shifted to the side to allow me through, but not before one of them attempted to flip my hat off. I moved my head to the side, and made him miss by a wide margin. He didn’t like that, and made out like he was going to charge me before the other man grabbed onto him.
“No sense in gettin’ all worked up over a nigger,” he told him.
The other man grunted and muttered something that was barely English, but I didn’t stick around to try to translate.
* * *
By evening Zella stated she was hungry enough to eat a horse, so I told her I’d take her to a Cajun place that served stuff that was pretty close to a horse.
“I like your car,” Zella said on the drive out. “But it doesn’t seem to fit a sport like you. I could see you in a fancy roadster.”
The Red Storm Page 9