Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘If Moran was behind it, someone would be bragging,’ said Al, shaking his head. ‘I put out feelers and no one’s talking. Plus it ain’t his style and he ain’t got nothing to gain by doing it on the down-low. I can’t start another war without knowing for sure.’

  ‘And the two casualties?’

  ‘Borelli and Scanlan copped it. Borelli was a two-bit alderman in one of the river wards, Scanlan worked for the Board of Trade. Small, Ford and Crowe ended up in hospital.’

  ‘And the mayor was all right?’

  ‘He had his stomach pumped,’ said Ralph. ‘He’s fine now, but his presence there complicates the situation.’

  Mayor ‘Big Bill’ Thompson – one of Chicago’s most corrupt politicians – had backed Capone for years, and Capone had backed him. But when Thompson had been re-elected the previous spring, he’d got it into his head that he could make a run for the presidency. He’d started building bridges and roads, an airport, creating jobs, and clamping down on his former mobster friends, raiding nightclubs and breweries, despite the fact Capone had contributed over a quarter of a million dollars to his re-election campaign, and Bugs Moran fifty thousand. Now that he’d been poisoned in a Capone-supplied hotel, the mayor might have every reason to suspect Capone himself had been behind it.

  Al stared at Dante, and Dante’s eyes again flicked to the makeup and scars, and he thought of Red Indians painting their faces before battle.

  ‘What do you think?’ Al asked, and Dante blew air through his teeth.

  ‘It could be someone with a grudge against one of the people at the party came up with a bullshit plan for poisoning them. Or it could be what you’re worried about . . .’ Here he stopped to look at the three of them and noted the concern on their faces. The second possibility was that the poisoning was an attack on the politicians because, the mayor excluded, they were paid-up Capone lackeys; then Al was facing an out-and-out attack on his organization.

  ‘If it was aimed at you,’ continued Dante, ‘then I think you got a helluva mess to deal with. And seeing as you’ve asked me all the way out here to Chicago, I’m guessing I’ve got a helluva mess to deal with, too.’

  Dante smiled and Al stared at him a moment, and Dante got worried that maybe his levity had been misplaced. Good moods were delicate things with Al, ripped apart on the slightest snag. Al could be charming and courteous one second, murderous the next. For all his refinement and elegance, back in the Torrio days, it was Al who had run the torture chamber in the basement of the Four Deuces Club. And recently Dante had heard rumors back in New York from his friends Lansky and Luciano that Al had been behaving ever more erratically, ever more unhinged.

  But then Al flashed a smile back and shrugged his shoulders, and Dante relaxed a touch.

  ‘Yeah, that’s about the size of it,’ he said.

  ‘Why me?’ asked Dante.

  ‘Ain’t no point having an insider look for a traitor. You wanna audit, you call someone from the outside. You built up a good reputation for being a fixer out in New York. I’ll pay you, and when it’s all over, I’ll cancel your debt. We got a traitor in our midst, Dante. I need you to find him. What do you say?’

  Dante paused a moment to take in his situation. He had already reconciled himself to accepting the job. He was in hock to Al from six years earlier, when he had rushed out of Chicago, and now Al was calling in the debt. He tried to gauge his slim chances of finding the traitor, his slimmer chances of getting through it alive, and the slimmest chance of all – that through the whole operation, Al wouldn’t discover Dante’s secret and take him out himself. Between Dante and his goal was an unfathomable void where the future would play its tricks, but his only choice was to make the leap.

  Ten minutes later, he stepped out of the funeral parlor and into the heat and verve of the scene outside. The crowds had been pushed back for the cortege to assemble, workers were loading the wreaths onto carriages, a fleet of policemen on motorcycles were arranging the escort. Dante stopped a moment in the shade of the funeral home’s entrance, lit a cigarette and turned to look at the gunman by his side.

  ‘You really Dante the Gent?’ asked the gunman.

  ‘Why d’you sound so surprised?’

  The gunman shrugged, suddenly looking youthful and naive.

  ‘Cuz everyone thought you were dead.’

  Dante thought a moment.

  ‘Stick around,’ he said, and the gunman laughed.

  Then the doors behind them opened up and they stood aside as the pallbearers walked out, straining under the weight of the platinum casket. They negotiated the steps and placed the casket on the horse-drawn carriage at the head of the procession, passing by a quartet of men wearing silk sashes identifying them as members of the Chicago Opera Company. Dante watched them a moment, then he craned his neck to see how far back the cortege went.

  When a gangland war was underway, tit-for-tat killings were followed by tit-for-tat funerals, with each gang trying to make their buddy’s send-off more impressive than their rival’s from the week before. And so Mob funerals spiraled in their opulence, becoming ever more monstrous and bloated with flowers.

  ‘Twenty-five carriages just for the bouquets,’ said the gunman. ‘Thirty limousines too. Sbarbaro said the cortege would be a mile and a half long.’

  Dante nodded. ‘That’s not a cortege, that’s a homecoming parade.’

  The gunman laughed, and Dante imagined the disruption the cortege would cause as the fifteen miles of road between the Sbarbaro and the Mount Carmel cemetery were closed down.

  ‘So you really Dante the Gent?’ the gunman asked again.

  ‘Maybe I am,’ said Dante, and he raised his hat to the boy and ambled onto the sidewalk. He passed the motley mix of mourners assembled there – bootleggers, racketeers, aldermen, assassins, congressmen, pimps and priests – so tight-knit that any person watching was left in no doubt as to the level and extent of the corruption eating away at the city. Even the undertaker himself embodied it. John Sbarbaro, as well as being the funeral director of choice for the city’s gangsters, was also one of the city’s judges.

  Dante slipped through the crowd, which seemed to have grown denser, and as he reached the corner of Grand Avenue, the marshal blew his trumpet to signal the procession was underway, and the two planes came back, flying overhead, swooping down so low the crowd let out worried cries, and everyone looked up, and the planes were already blocks away.

  Then they banked, and turned and headed back over the procession, and when they were above the throng once more, the bottoms of the planes opened up, and from their bowels was unleashed a downpour of blue flower petals. It was as if the airplanes’ propellers were churning up the sky itself, slicing it into blue flakes which waltzed their way to earth.

  When they realized what was happening, the crowd gasped as if they were at a fireworks display. Dante shook his head and wondered again what it was about gangsters and flowers. And even as he turned his back on it all and headed east, the petals were covering hats and clothes and smiling faces, as if the city had been caught under a sudden storm of blue snow.

  5

  Like many of Chicago’s twenty-five thousand speak-easies, the saloon on the corner of Madison and Wells Streets was technically a ‘cordial store’; a place where adults went to drink sodas, seltzers and colas till four o’clock in the morning. ‘Cordial stores’ became so widespread that the notion of them stopped being preposterous and they became instead an accepted aspect of city life, bothering no one except Chicago’s few remaining Anti-Saloon League members.

  To stop people in the street from looking into the store, the front windows were packed thickly with a display of the bottled drinks it was supposed to be selling: Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper, Canada Dry ginger ale, root beer, lime cordial. On a sunny day like today, the display of bottles created a stained-glass effect which washed over everything in the place: the bar, the tables, the afternoon crowd, all of them glowing with blotches of garish color, add
ing an air of impishness to the illegal drinking going on inside.

  Michael was seated in one of the booths along the back wall, waiting for Ida while she got them their drinks. He happened to be sitting in a patch of purple light beaming in through a grape-soda bottle and it caused the people walking past to cast him wary looks. For some reason purple made the smallpox scars on his face seem especially freakish. He lit a cigarette and watched Ida through the mirrors behind the bar as she waited her turn, standing next to some office girls who were howling at the jokes of a few clerks trying their luck.

  Men and women drinking together in bars was one of the ironies of prohibition. Back in the old days saloons looked to distance themselves from accusations they were brothels by refusing women entry. But speak-easies, by definition already illegal, had no reason to stop them, and so women flocked to the new drinkeries, meaning the law which was supposed to drag men out of the bars, ended up dragging women into them. Michael had heard from numerous saloon-keepers that the reason the number of bars in the city had trebled since the start of prohibition was the presence of women; and he had heard from numerous policemen that the reason the number of murderesses had trebled in the same time, was the presence of bars.

  Ida ordered three schooners of beer, paid, and headed back to the table, moving through the crowd slender as a knife. Michael was proud of his protégée, the best, most natural detective he had ever worked with. He thought about the nineteen-year-old slip of a girl he’d met almost a decade ago, a shivering, uncertain Southerner in the big city for the first time. The Pinkertons had taught her how to shoot a gun, pick a lock, drive a car, shadow a suspect; how to interrogate, bribe, coerce, coax, calculate – but all those skills were just refinements of a natural talent.

  She reached the booth, sat and passed him a glass, and they both drank. Then Michael took the photo of Gwendolyn Van Haren from his pocket and placed it flat on the table.

  ‘She’s not the kind of woman who melts into the background,’ said Ida, picking up Michael’s silver cigarette case from the table and helping herself to a Virginia Slim. Michael nodded and looked over the photo once more: the heiress in her perfect dress, beautiful, elegant and regal. But despite her natural bearing, there was something haunting her features, a melancholy, a forlornness, a distance, that oddly reminded him of Ida.

  There was an eruption of laughter from the bar, and Michael and Ida looked up to see the office girls cackling once more and the clerks patting themselves on the back. Then the front door opened and a man in a brown cotton suit entered. He spotted them through the crowd and headed their way. Lieutenant Ralph Stockman was short, pudgy and easygoing, and worked missing persons in the Detective Division.

  ‘How’s my two favorite Pinks?’ he said, flashing Ida a smile.

  ‘Doing good, Ralph. We got you a beer,’ said Michael, sliding the drink across the table. Ralph sat and took a long swallow.

  ‘This goddamn heat,’ he said, taking off his hat. ‘I think it’s making me lose my mind.’

  He sighed and passed them over a slim paper folder: the division’s investigation into Gwendolyn Van Haren’s disappearance.

  ‘Mullens and me caught the case,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it’s an odd one, even after you’ve accounted for the pedigree of the girl. She woke up one morning, asked the family driver to take her shopping, stepped onto the sidewalk in front of Marshall Field’s in the middle of the midday rush and disappeared. Into thin air.’

  Ralph made a waggling motion with his fingers, a magician casting a spell.

  ‘We spoke to the people at Marshall Field’s and no one remembers her entering. The Van Harens have an account there – when one of them visits, they know about it. We canvassed the locals and no one remembers seeing her. Took her photo up one side of the Loop and down the other. Not a thing. Then we drove over to chez Van Haren, and that’s when things got interesting. We didn’t get any leads, but there was a damn strange atmosphere in that house. Mullens and me both picked up on it.’

  ‘Strange how?’ asked Ida.

  ‘I dunno. It wasn’t just the usual unhappy-rich-folks strange. I can’t put my finger on it. But it was like every one o’ them had something to hide – the mother, the father, the driver, that goddamn butler. Couldn’t get a bean out of one of ’em. So we came back to the division, typed up our reports, and the chief took the file off us before the ink was dry.’

  Ida and Michael shared a look. Captain Hoban, the chief of the division, was a notorious Capone shill, and had for the last few years been looking to make a move into politics via a job opening in the State’s Attorney’s office – a job opening that never seemed to materialize.

  ‘I’m guessing someone in City Hall leaned on him,’ said Ralph, voicing what all three of them were thinking. ‘Anyway, my take on it was the girl wanted to disappear. She got in a jam, went on the run, and now she’s either drinking Margaritas in a Havana hotel, or the real world got the better of her and she’s dead and buried in a coal cellar somewheres. Until anything new surfaces, the case is unofficially shit-canned.’

  Michael nodded. The Van Harens had the political clout to get every cop in the division fired if they wanted to, and yet the captain was letting the case slide, and the mother had come to them begging for answers.

  ‘You get anything on the fiancé?’ Ida asked, and Ralph shook his head.

  ‘None of our lot caught the case. If the fiancé did disappear, no one’s reported him as an MP.’

  Michael thought a moment.

  ‘Thanks for this, Ralph,’ he said.

  ‘No problemo.’

  ‘How’s everything else at the station?’

  ‘Jittery as hell,’ said Ralph. ‘Everyone’s waiting for Capone versus Moran part two to kick off.’

  He raised his eyebrows, then finished his beer in a long gulp, and picked his hat up off the table. Michael passed him an envelope stuffed with five-spots. Ralph nodded his thanks, then gestured to the folder on the table.

  ‘I’ll need that back first thing tomorrow morning,’ he said.

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Michael.

  Ralph smiled at them both, his eyes lingering on Ida a little too long, then he shimmied his way out of the booth and, as he headed off into the crowd, the gaudy spots of color beaming in from the windows shifted over his form.

  Ida turned to look at Michael. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘First thoughts would be the fiancé killed her and ran away. That’d explain the simultaneous disappearances.’

  ‘Or maybe it was the other way around.’

  ‘Maybe, but she looks a little too delicate for that.’

  ‘Maybe they both committed a crime and they ran away together,’ Ida suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ replied Michael, ‘but that doesn’t explain the jittery mother, and the jittery police captain, and the house full of people with secrets. And then there’s what you found in your trawl through the gossip magazines.’

  Ida had told him about her discovery, how at some point the previous Christmas, in all the photos in the press, Gwendolyn had started wearing long-sleeved gloves to every event she’d been photographed at. It made sense in the winter, but when spring rolled around, she was still wearing the gloves, even at the engagement party where she’d been showing off her diamond ring. Long gloves, needle marks, the scars of slit wrists.

  ‘Suicide doesn’t explain the missing fiancé,’ said Ida.

  ‘Neither does an overdose.’

  ‘Maybe they’re in hock to a gang of dope peddlers.’

  They both went silent a moment. Then Ida finished her beer and stared at the empty glass.

  ‘So, shall we discuss the fifty-thousand-dollar elephant in the room?’ she asked, looking up at him.

  Michael had been hoping she wouldn’t bring it up.

  ‘What’s there to discuss?’ he said. ‘If we accept the money and anyone finds out, we lose our jobs. So we put the fact s
he made the offer in our meeting report, and refuse any payment.’

  ‘Or,’ said Ida, ‘we don’t put it in our report and keep the money if it’s offered us . . .’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so certain the mother’s going to pay out, even if we do find the girl. What if we find out she’s dead? Or it turns out she killed herself because the father was abusing her? You think Mrs Van Haren’s gonna pay to hear that?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Ida conceded, ‘but it’s worth a shot. Fifty thousand, Michael. We can finally get out of the Pinks, start our own office, retire even. You could send your kids to college, move out of the Black Belt.’

  He registered the exasperation in her voice. Both of them were getting sick of working for the Pinkertons. Interesting cases came along now and then, but much of the company’s work was odious at best – breaking strikes, coercing witnesses, acting as political security. On top of that, the company stifled Ida’s ambitions, always underplayed her role in their successes, despite Michael’s protestations. But with a family to support, and no savings, Michael couldn’t quit the job, as trapped as any of the other million or two wage slaves whose spirits the city harvested.

  ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal,’ Ida continued. ‘Fifty thousand dollars won’t turn up again. Not for people like us. I say we risk it all. Keep the offer off the report and see what happens.’

  ‘And if someone finds out and we both get fired? Detective jobs ain’t exactly easy to come by.’

  ‘They’re a lot easier to come by than fifty thousand dollars. We don’t have to file the report till tomorrow,’ she said, in a softer tone of voice. ‘All I’m saying is – think on it till then.’

  He looked at her and saw her frustration, saw all the opportunities that had been denied her through her life, as a woman, as a Negro, frustrations Michael could only just appreciate. And now a rich white lady had turned up and dangled more money than they could make in a lifetime in front of them, and the only thing standing between them and it was Michael’s skittishness.