Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  LeDoux had told me that all the paper, except for one letter, came from the leather wallet, which somehow protected the paper from disintegration. The other letter had been found in the breast pocket of one of the shirts — it had fallen away from the body, and hadn’t been subject to the worst of the decay.

  He had bagged the wallet. It was longer than any wallet I’d seen and looked like it would fit into a breast pocket or a jacket pocket instead of the back pocket of someone’s pants. It was covered with a long, greenish-grayish stain that looked foul.

  I was happy the entire thing was bagged, so I wouldn’t have to smell it.

  I set it aside. LeDoux had already pulled the pertinent items, so I didn’t have to do much with it. I would want to look inside to see if there were maker’s marks or if someone had written a name or initials in it, small things that LeDoux might not think to look for.

  Then I turned my attention to the matchboxes. One had a paper label that was half worn away. It had been blue or green or some similar color, and the letters KITC were visible. I assumed the box contained kitchen matches, but I would check. Nonetheless, I wrote everything down.

  The other matchbox had The Four Deuces written on it, with cards with deuces of each suit sketched under the name. The drawing was crude, as if it were done by an amateur.

  The penknife had no real markings on the outside. But a lot of knife owners carved their names on the blade. I had promised I wouldn’t open the evidence bag, and I didn’t, but I was tempted.

  I started a second page in the legal pad I’d been using for my notes. This page was directed at LeDoux, asking him to look for certain things on the evidence when he examined it. The first thing I wanted him to do was see if someone had scratched a name on the blade of that knife.

  I also added the wallet to the list, asking LeDoux to check for maker’s marks or a hidden name.

  Then I looked at the coins. They were old. I hadn’t seen most of them since I was a boy. One was a Morgan dollar, with a woman’s face on one side. I seemed to recall that nowadays the Morgan dollar had value to coin collectors, but how much I didn’t know.

  The rest of the coins were also American — they had United States and their denomination engraved on them — but I had never seen them in circulation. That they had been in circulation, I had no doubt. They were worn from use. Even the dirt from the years in the tomb hadn’t hidden that.

  But the most interesting thing in my searches so far was the currency. The wallet had held one-dollar bills — three of them — and a single five-dollar bill.

  I had never seen anything like them. They were bigger than any money I’d ever seen before. The dollar bills had Washington’s portrait stamped on the left side and a bluish mark on the right. They were marked with the phrase Federal Reserve Note and they had the words New York prominently displayed on one side. One note had a reddish mark instead of the blue one.

  The blues were dated 1918, the red 1914.

  The five-dollar bill was the same size and general design, only it had Lincoln instead of Washington. It also carried the 1918 date.

  I marked the dates down and set the money aside to examine later. There were coin shops in Bronzeville that might help me with the money, should I need it.

  I had saved the other paper for last. The first item I picked up was a cocktail napkin. It had been folded, but it seemed remarkably intact.

  The notation LeDoux had made on the evidence bag said that the napkin had been hidden in a flap in the long leather wallet, underneath other pieces of paper, most of which were unreadable. LeDoux had even made a small drawing of where the napkin had been located and stapled it to the bag.

  The napkin itself had a small gold logo in the corner. All it said was Calumet-412. In ink, someone had written:

  Sorry.

  Love forever

  V.

  I stared at it, unable to make much sense of it. Yet it looked distinctive enough to be important.

  A tattered business card had been in the same wallet. The card came from a place called Colosimo’s, which claimed to be “The Best Italian Restaurant in Chicago.” It also had “refined cabaret and good music” as well as “public dancing” between four and one. The address, listed in small print below the name, was 2128 South Wabash Avenue, right in the heart of Bronzeville.

  Finally, there were the letters. The first one had pieces torn out of the center, probably by the mice as they ate their way to the bodies. That letter had a date — May 1, 1917 — and a salutation, Dearest Lawrence.

  The rest I had to piece together. It seemed that Lawrence’s younger sister was either writing the letter or had had something bad happen to her. “Ma” insisted on sending him a package. And Edwina had died. Her death was “a mercy” so Lawrence “shouldn’t be sad.”

  The only other intact area read:

  Ma thanks you for the money. She’s moving in with Aunt Lula, so if you want to write, do so care of Lulabelle at the Dickerson’s.

  The other letter was intact. It had also been folded up in that long wallet. The letter was written in ink again, only this ink was smudged, not by time, but by the writer. Dabs of ink marked the beginning of some of the phrases, as if the person hadn’t been used to using a pen.

  Zeke

  Coming 6 Nov morning

  train

  Miss you

  Darcy

  I didn’t have a lot to go on — no addresses, and only a few dates — but it was more than I’d had before.

  For the first time, I felt like I had a place to start.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Colosimo’s was not listed in the phone book. Neither was The Four Deuces. The missing listings were not a surprise. Nothing about this investigation was going to be easy.

  I left the Queen Anne just before lunch and ate at home again, for the benefit of my tail. Then I called Franklin Grimshaw to see if he remembered a business named Colosimo’s on South Wabash Avenue. He didn’t. And he didn’t recognize Calumet-412 either, although he did say that it made him think of a phone number.

  “You know,” he said, “like when we were kids.”

  “But there aren’t enough digits,” I said.

  “It depends on how old the number is,” Franklin said. “The phone company kept adding numbers as more and more people got phones.”

  Of course. I’d been thinking so hard about the other items I’d found that I hadn’t put this together. How old did a phone number have to be to only use three digits?

  “Would you mind asking around about both things? See if anyone knows what they are?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Can you tell me why?”

  “Investigation,” I said.

  He knew better than to ask for more, and I didn’t offer anything. I hung up, packed up the ledgers from Laura as well as the other items, retaped the envelope, and set it in my briefcase.

  I called Laura and told her I was returning the documents. She sounded strained. She said, “I’ve been getting hang-ups at home.”

  “Any idea who it is?” I asked.

  “None,” she said. “It might not even be related to this. For all I know it’s a wrong number.”

  My stomach clenched. She was right, but I worried that this had something to do with our case. “Be careful,” I said.

  “I always am,” she said, which wasn’t exactly true. But I didn’t argue with her. She was in a hurry, and so was I. She asked me to leave the papers with Judith, since she would be out of the office again.

  Then I got back into the van and headed uptown. The tail followed me. I wished Jimmy was in the van, so he could tell me if the driver was the same man. I had no way of knowing.

  I headed to Twenty-first and Wabash. It was a desolate part of town, near the Coliseum where, in June, the SDS had held their convention. The Coliseum was a decaying wreck, obviously built in the previous century and not maintained.

  Most of the buildings in that area hadn’t been maintained either, not even the one at
2128 South Wabash, the address on the business card. That building was relatively new — built or remodeled in the forties or fifties, I would have guessed — but not touched since. It looked like it was about to tumble down.

  Nothing on the building read Colosimo’s. Not a faded sign, not paint on the corner. The building did house a restaurant, but it had been closed for a long time. The windows were soaped and covered with dirt, and the door had been padlocked shut.

  A dead end, which was not a surprise, given the age of the money, the age of the letter, and the age of the bodies. So far, the indications that I had were that the skeletons had been in that tomb longer than forty years. They’d been put inside in the teens, not the twenties.

  I drove over to Michigan and went back to the library. I had a hunch that I would spend a lot of time here over the next few days as I worked the identification part of this case. I wished I was still in Memphis or even Atlanta. I knew the history of those cities as well as I knew my own.

  Chicago, pre-1950 or so, was a true mystery to me.

  Once again I parked near a meter rather than go to the parking garage under the Conrad Hilton like I would have done had someone not been tailing me. I grabbed the briefcase and headed into the library.

  I had planned to go through the same routine as I had the day before, but the library’s information desk actually had someone staffing it and no one stood in line to talk with her. I decided to take advantage of that small bit of luck.

  The librarian behind the desk was about my age, white, and slender, with graying hair pulled away from her face. Her entire body tensed as I approached and she bent over the desk itself, moving papers, as if she were pretending to work.

  I set the briefcase down, gently, then waited patiently until she couldn’t avoid me any longer.

  As she looked up, her gaze went to that scar on the left side of my face. Her lower lip actually trembled before she forced herself to smile.

  “Help you?” To her credit, her voice didn’t shake.

  “Thank you.” I made sure I spoke softly, trying to seem as gentle as I could. “I have a few questions if you don’t mind.”

  She steeled her shoulders. She minded, but she was going to act like she didn’t.

  “First, have you ever heard of a place called Colosimo’s? It was at—”

  “Twenty-second and South Wabash, I know. You doing work on Al Capone?”

  I was startled. I had thought, initially, there might be a Prohibition connection to that room in the basement, but once we found the bodies I had dismissed that.

  “Capone?”

  “Rumor has it that he invested in Colosimo’s with The Greek after Big Jim’s death.”

  “Big Jim?” I sounded like my Jimmy, repeating answers that startled me and made no sense.

  “Colosimo.” She had apparently forgotten her fear of me. “He was the first Chicago gangster, you know — or at least that’s what the historians say. In his day he was bigger than Capone. He was gunned down in the restaurant in 1920.”

  “And then it closed?” I asked, wondering if I had just found the end of the timeline for those bodies to have been dumped — sometime between 1918 and 1920.

  “Oh, no. That’s when The Greek stepped in. You know, Mike Potson? He wasn’t as well known, but he should’ve been. The word was he fronted a lot of things for Capone.”

  “Capone,” I said again.

  Finally her eyes widened a little. They were a bright blue, and quite intelligent, something I hadn’t noticed before. “You’re surprised by all this.”

  “I am,” I said. “I found this business card in a friend’s basement. It was for Colosimo’s which we’d never heard of, and I told him I’d ask about it. I didn’t expect this kind of history.”

  “There’s quite a bit of it in that period,” she said.

  “Prohibition,” I said, almost to myself.

  “No,” she said. “Even though Prohibition started earlier in Illinois than many other places in the country, that’s not what Big Jim was about. He was all about vice. He was the king of the Levee.”

  “The Levee?”

  She smiled and it softened her. She was actually pretty. “Chicago’s red-light district — the scourge of the early twentieth century. Everyone’s heard of Capone and the gun-runners and the speakeasies and the gangs battling for control of Chicago’s streets, but no one seems to realize that the fights were just as bloody twenty years before.”

  “The Levee was around Wabash?” I asked.

  “The city finally won when it put the Dan Ryan right through the heart of the Levee,” she said. “But until then, people used to visit all those sites. They’d start with Capone — he had a suite in the Metropole — and they’d work their way back. I think the Levee is infinitely more interesting.”

  I was beginning to find her interesting, mostly because of her enthusiasm for this topic.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because of the women involved.” Then she waved a hand. “I mean, it was tragic. It was the source of white slavery—”

  She hesitated just a bit. White slavery always had a worse connotation than other kinds of slavery, and it was all racial. Slavery was bad, the culture said, but white slavery was worse.

  “—and prostitution and gambling, but many of the people who got rich were the women.”

  “Madams?” I asked.

  “Much more than that. Have you heard of the Everleigh Sisters?” She paused as if she expected me to answer the question, then answered it herself. “Of course you haven’t, if you haven’t heard of Big Jim.”

  I beginning to feel as if not knowing who Big Jim Colosimo was had been a flaw in my education.

  “The Everleigh Sisters ran the most famous bordello in the United States. It was called the Everleigh Club, and it was on Twenty-first and Dearborn, not too far from Colosimo’s.”

  “I don’t understand.” I spoke with my usual forcefulness and the librarian jumped. So I softened my tone. “I thought you said these rich women weren’t all madams.”

  “To call the Everleighs madams is to raise other madams up. The Everleighs came into Chicago with a small inheritance and set up their house. They’d never worked in the trade, as it’s called, and they never wanted to. They made Everleigh Club a show palace, and advertised it worldwide. It was said that it outclassed the bawdy houses in Paris.”

  She, apparently, was impressed by that, probably because she’d never been in a house of prostitution. I had, and I had tried to help more than one woman escape the life. I had no romantic illusions about it at all.

  “The Everleighs became so famous that the mayor finally issued a special order to shut their house — and theirs only — down. He got reelected because he did that.”

  “And this is a good thing?”

  “For the sisters, yes.” The librarian grinned. It was a saucy look that I hadn’t believed her capable of. “They retired after twelve years of running the bordello, moved to New York, and lived there until they were a ripe old age. The last one died nine years ago. They made millions.”

  “Off the exploitation of other women,” I said, feeling shocked at her attitude.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “They paid their girls more than any other house by double — a prostitute in the Everleigh Club could easily keep a hundred dollars a week, not counting what she earned — and the Everleigh sisters never charged overhead or any of the other prices that took away a working girl’s wages. These girls kept fifty percent of what they earned, where most others kept less than ten percent. I don’t think that’s exploitation.”

  “But—”

  She held up a finger. “And it was said that the girls would often convince their clients to gamble rather than spend an hour in bed. The girls would get paid more if their clients stayed the night and sat at the card tables than they did if clients went upstairs for a quickie.”

  I stared at her, as shocked as I’d ever been by another person. Sh
e was not at all what I expected. “You’re fascinated by this.”

  “I hope to write a book about the Levee someday. I think it’s much more interesting than Prohibition. Vice is always going to be with us, Mr.—?”

  “Grimshaw,” I said.

  “Mr. Grimshaw. It’s unrealistic to pretend that we can rid ourselves of it. So I like the Everleigh sisters’ approach. I think if prostitution is going to be with us, let’s stop exploiting those poor girls, give them some personal power, and pay them a decent wage.”

  She had been speaking so fast, she was almost breathless. Then she caught herself, smiled at me, and flushed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You stepped right into my corner and found me a soapbox.”

  “It’s all right.” I was smiling too. “I’m fascinated. What happened to the Levee?”

  “It was subject to raids all through the teens, and by the early twenties very few businesses were left — at least of the original ones. Some were taken over by Capone’s gang, others by Johnny Torio — you know Johnny Torrio —?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, I could talk with you all day. He was one of the Big Four Gangster Chieftains of the early twenties. He—”

  “I don’t have all day,” I said awkwardly.

  “And you haven’t even gotten to your other two questions.” She smoothed her hair with one hand, as if catching herself. As the hand moved, she reclaimed her librarian persona. “You probably want to look at some books. I’d recommend that you start with Herbert Asbury’s Gem of the Prairie. It’s a history of the Chicago underworld written for the layperson. There are better histories, more recent ones, but his is the best written.”

  She wrote that down as she spoke, no longer looking at me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It covers the Levee and Big Jim and the Everleigh sisters. It ends with Capone’s arrest in 1931. It was written in 1940, so it still has a contemporary feel, which I think is a good thing.”

  I nodded.

  She looked up as she handed me the paper with the citation. The librarian persona was now completely in place. The woman who waxed enthusiastic about brothels had vanished.