Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  He crossed the lobby to the coat check and asked the girl there for the dog. She scooped him up off the floor and passed him over to Dante.

  ‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said. ‘What’s his name?’

  Dante paused. ‘I’m not sure. Virgil?’

  The girl gave him a funny look. Then he tipped her and returned to the Blackhawk.

  He opened up the windows, sat in the driver’s seat and went through the list of employees he’d received from Harris. Twenty or so names. He found the address for the missing waiter, lit a cigarette, started the car, and headed over.

  Julius Clay’s apartment was a small, tidy, two-bedroom affair in Hyde Park. Dante sweet-talked the landlady at the building entrance into letting him in, then he used his picks to gain entry to the apartment itself. In the man’s wardrobe Dante found a large gap where a half-dozen suits and shirts should have been hanging, and the man appeared to have taken all his shoes with him as well. Too many missing clothes for a three-week stint on the beach in Michigan City. The man was on the run.

  Dante didn’t find any clues as to where he might have gone, except for some letters from his daughter with a return address in Detroit. Possibly he could have gone there to hide out, putting his child at risk. Dante memorized the name and address and a few details mentioned in the letter in case he found himself having to spin her a story at some later date about how he was an acquaintance of her father.

  On the windowsill he found finger marks in the dust, and some street dirt on the floorboards just below it. Someone must have broken in via the fire escape a couple of weeks after the waiter had gone missing, meaning someone else was on the man’s trail.

  21

  Dante spent the next few days chasing down his leads. He spoke to the missing waiter’s colleagues at the Ritz, trying to figure out if any of them were in on it. He kept close to Inigo. He gathered information on the thirteen poisoned men, trying to figure out which one of them might have been the target. He tried to get in contact with the people who had arranged the champagne from six years ago – guessing that maybe the source was the same. But Dante’s old partner from back then, Saul Menaker, was awaiting trial on a racketeering charge in the Cook County Jail, and when he paid Menaker a visit, all his old friend could do was tell him the man who had arranged the original batch had been taken for a ride by ‘Machine Gun’ Jack McGurn four years earlier in the Westside Beer War.

  And so it went with everyone else.

  All Dante’s old connections were either dead, in jail, or missing. The life expectancy of a gangster in Chicago was twenty-seven years, and Dante’s friends didn’t seem to be averaging much beyond that. Their lives were short, and the city moved at a savage, deadly speed. Whole neighborhoods had changed color. In just six short years a new generation had grown up and replaced the one before it. The place he knew was now a vanished city, existing only in his memories, entombed.

  He steered clear of the neighborhoods where he might be recognized. He kept up a correspondence as best he could with the old fisherman who was looking after his boat back in Long Island. He paid visits to the shoeshine man.

  None of it helped.

  The more Dante got frustrated at his lack of progress, the more he realized how strange it was that he’d been asked by Al to undertake the mission in the first place, which led him to wonder if he’d been called to Chicago for other reasons, and so with the frustration came a jumpy feeling, a sense of impending doom that not even the dope could alleviate.

  When he slept, a reel of ghostly images spooled through his mind: Olivia on their wedding day, Loretta in the bar, an endless corridor in the county jail, Loretta’s black eye, the coat-check girl, the dog, a vaulted cellar stocked high with champagne, Olivia on the beach as perfect and easily bruised as a petal. Olivia in a pool of blood.

  On his fourth night in the city, an insistent ringing dragged him from this netherworld, and he opened his eyes and they darted to the coffee table instinctively: needle, stash, syringe, spoon. The ringing continued and Dante panicked. He threw the splayed pages of a newspaper over it all and ran for the door, and he was halfway there before he realized that it wasn’t the door that was ringing, it was the phone. The rooms in the Drake all had their own phones. Dante cursed his dope-addled brain, spun about and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mr Sanfelippo, sorry to bother you so late,’ said a nasally voiced hotel employee. ‘We have a Miss Loretta Valenti on the line?’

  ‘Put her through.’

  The line crackled for a moment, then Dante heard Loretta’s voice.

  ‘Dante?’ She sounded upset, voice croaky. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know who to call . . .’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s Corrie . . . I came home and there’s . . . Oh, God . . . there’s blood everywhere.’

  She let out a sob and there was silence for a moment, and Dante guessed she’d put her hand over the receiver; a few seconds later the line came back to life.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know who to call,’ she repeated.

  Through the opiate fuzz in Dante’s brain he tried to make sense of what was going on.

  ‘Are you still in the apartment?’ he said.

  ‘No. I ran out of there. I’m at a grocery down the street.’

  ‘Are you alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is there somewhere nearby you can go? A diner or cafeteria or something?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. I think so.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I mean . . . yeah. I know. There’s a cafeteria.’

  ‘All right. What’s the address?’

  ‘Blue Island and Twenty-first. On the corner.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Hold tight.’

  He put the phone down and rubbed his head and checked the clock on the wall. A quarter past one.

  Ten minutes later he was driving south through the hard-scrabble neighborhoods that lay west of the Loop. On the streets, the hawkers and shoppers and businessmen had been replaced by the city’s skeleton crew of gin soaks, dope heads, down-and-outs and prostitutes, all of them appearing with the darkness, as if materializing out of the texture of the night.

  He hadn’t driven through that part of the city since his return, and at one point he got lost, disorientated by the gap between his memories and reality. He had to stop and ask directions from a telegraph-company messenger who was walking along an otherwise deserted street. The boy set him on the right way, and Dante noted how he had something of the street hood to him, and he remembered how when he was a boy, kids from his neighborhood would get jobs as nighttime telegraph-company messengers, meaning they had an excuse to be out on the streets all through the night, cover for the thefts and burglaries they committed.

  Maybe not everything changed after all.

  Eventually he found the intersection Loretta had mentioned. He parked up and stepped into the cafeteria, a worn, dingy all-night greasy spoon that smelled of stale cigarettes and staler food. He looked around, saw Loretta bundled up in the corner of a booth and walked over.

  He’d checked in the mirror on the drive over a hundred times to make sure he didn’t look doped up, but he was still paranoid when he strode over and gave her a hug. She hugged him back and they both sat and he looked her over. She had a café-au-lait-colored shawl draped over her shoulders, her hair was pulled under a boudoir cap, and her hands were wrapped around a coffee cup. Dante ordered another from the man behind the counter, and asked her if she was all right. She nodded.

  ‘You call the cops?’ he asked.

  She shook her head, and Dante figured Corrado had schooled her.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘I came home and the door was kicked in and there was blood . . . all over the living room.’

  ‘And Corrado was supposed to be home?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll go in there and check thing
s out. Gimme the keys and the address.’

  She fumbled about her purse and handed him a set of keys.

  ‘It’s a block down Blue Island. Seven twenty-two. Apartment four.’

  ‘Stay here, all right? I’ll be back soon.’

  He drained his drink, hoping it would perk him up, then he walked around the corner to the Blackhawk, opened the trunk and took out the Colt. He affixed the coupling to the gun and then the Maxim silencer to the coupling, then he slipped the gun into his belt and headed to Number 722.

  He let himself in and climbed up two flights, stepping on the stair risers all the way so as not to make a noise. The door to Apartment 4 was ajar and Dante could see that both the door and the frame around the lock were twisted and buckled. He bent down to look at the damage. Scuff marks, jagged wood, a streak of dirt from the boot that had kicked it in. He stood, took the .45 from his pocket, held it aloft, and listened for a minute or so.

  Silence.

  He pushed the door gently and it opened with the slight give of a loose tooth. He walked down a short hall, the walls painted a vivid shade of green, and stepped into a living room; he looked at it through the gloom, staying still, scanning the space for movement, listening.

  After a few moments of stillness, the noise of insects the only sound disturbing the air, he switched on the light, revealing a spacious room in the middle of which was what looked like the leftovers of a tornado – a smashed coffee table, an upturned armchair, the rug swirled into a mound, broken glass, and the blood making the floor look like it had been painted red. The window was open and troops of insects had arrived to feed on the blood, making the apartment buzz in a detonation of life.

  On the far side of the room was the kitchenette, most of it hidden from view by a counter, behind which a gunman or two could easily be hidden. Dante stepped over the broken coffee table to the center of the room, his .45 trained on the counter. When he was underneath the light bulb hanging down from the ceiling, he lifted his free hand to it, grabbed the end of the shade, and swept the light in the direction of the kitchen, fanning it left and right, looking for body-shaped shadows that might be thrown against the back wall.

  Nothing.

  He let go of the light and it swung back into place, and he walked over to confirm there was no one there. The kitchenette was empty, but there was a can of peanuts and a bowl on the counter. He checked the rest of the apartment. It was all empty and untouched. He returned to the living room and inspected it once more under the jaundiced light of the sodium bulb.

  The blood was in a pool but was also streaked along the floor and on one of the walls toward the front door. He leaned down and peered at the broken glass: a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He stood and tried to imagine the arrangement of the furniture before the place was half destroyed. Then he returned to the bathroom to check for bloodstains, found none, and went back to the living room.

  He lit a cigarette, leaned against the windowsill and tried to reconstruct what had happened. The two glasses and peanuts meant Corrado had been in there with someone, then some other people burst in and attacked them. There was enough blood in the place to suggest more than just a fight – there’d been a stabbing or shooting. But if shots were fired there’d be bulletholes and the smell of cordite and the neighbors might have called the cops. So two men had burst in and there’d been a fight and they’d stabbed him and they’d kept him there long enough for the pool to form and then they’d dragged him out of there.

  Dante grabbed a cloth and a bucket and cleaned up the mess as best he could while the insects swirled around him. He grabbed a laundry bag from the kitchen, went into the bedroom and stuffed as many of Loretta’s clothes as he could into it. Then he went back into the living room, turned off the lights and was drenched in darkness once more.

  He stepped out into the corridor, kneeled in front of the lock and examined the mechanism. He pushed the lock frame back into position with the heel of his hand, and put the key in the lock. Then he closed the door and turned the key. He pulled it out and inspected the door once more. The jagged fault-lines spiderwebbing across the middle panel of the door would be noticed by anyone walking past, but at least the door was no longer ajar, and it wouldn’t open unless someone shouldered it.

  As he left, he checked the hallway and stairs a little closer. There were dots of blood and a couple of streaks on the wall about half a foot up from the floor. If a body was being dragged along by a couple of men and a stray bloody hand flopped against the wall, it would be at about the height of the streaks.

  Dante returned to the car, put the bag of clothes into the trunk and then returned to the cafeteria to find Loretta sitting where he’d left her.

  ‘You sure Corrado was in there tonight?’ he asked after he’d sat back down.

  ‘Sure I’m sure,’ she said. ‘He told me he was staying home to listen to the baseball.’

  ‘Who was with him?’

  ‘He was alone. What happened, Dante?’

  There was no way he could tell her the truth, or at least, the truth suggested by the evidence: that her boyfriend was either dead or soon to be so.

  ‘I’m not sure just yet,’ he said. ‘What was Corrado working on recently?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘He acting strange at all?’

  ‘Yeah. He’d been jittery the last couple weeks, on account of what happened to his boss.’

  ‘Governor Small? He was working for the governor?’

  Loretta nodded. Corrado must have been looking into the poison party on behalf of Governor Small. That was why he was at the Ritz the other day trying to strong-arm Inigo. And Corrado had gotten close to something and been taken out, which gave Dante a string of new leads. But as bad as Dante’s curiosity was, it didn’t feel right to be questioning Loretta just now.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to stay there,’ he said. ‘You wanna go stay with your sister or your ma or someone?’

  ‘Ma’s passed away. Four years ago. I could go to my sister, but . . . I can’t turn up there in the middle of the night, like this . . . I’ll check into a hotel.’

  ‘You can take my bed at the Drake,’ said Dante.

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘It’s fine. The place’s got a couch bigger than your apartment. I grabbed a few of your things while I was up there.’

  She thought this over for a moment and smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  Dante dropped some change on the table and they headed for the exit. They stepped out into the warm night air, crossed the street to the car and got in. Dante went to turn the key and paused and looked down the street at Loretta’s building. He imagined the car pulling up out front and screeching off down the road, then he imagined once more the struggle that would have occurred, the noise of it all.

  ‘What are your neighbors like?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s an old woman in the apartment opposite. I never met the others. Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Dante.

  He started up the engine and punched the accelerator and the Blackhawk roared into life, and he began the journey north. He’d been in Chicago just a few days, and in that time he’d acquired a hotel suite, two guns, a sports car and a dog, and now a stack of leads and a gangster’s girl on the run. He wondered if there was any reason to the way his life worked itself out, and as he drove up Blue Island Avenue, he mused that a man forever falling on his feet was still a man forever falling.

  22

  When they got back to his hotel room, Dante suggested they took the edge off Loretta’s nerves with a sip of whiskey, and the sip had turned into an empty bottle, two packs of cigarettes and the pair of them passing out on the sofa around dawn.

  As they drank they spoke of old times so as not to talk about what had happened to Abbate. Loretta railed at Dante for quitting town after Olivia died, drunk talk about how he had left her to deal with the mess of it all. Dante in turn told her about his dazed exit from the city, his years liv
ing rough and hitting rock bottom in a snow-covered park in the Bronx. He left out nothing except his addiction, which still caused him deep embarrassment.

  Loretta told him of how Olivia’s death had affected her, how she couldn’t really focus much afterward and how she’d got behind with her studies and dropped out of school. Another item to add to Dante’s guilt list. She told him how she was working as a waitress in a cafeteria on the beach to save up enough money to go back to school and finish her last semester. That was the bitch of it, she said, she was only one semester shy of graduating. But the money from the job seemed to drain away each month before she could put any in the bank. Then Corrado had turned up and she began seeing him out of a sense that he might offer her some protection, and now that protection was a pool of hastily mopped-up blood on her living-room floor. And so the conversation cycled back to Abbate despite their intentions and she sobbed and went quiet, and so did Dante, and at some point, they both drifted off into sleep.

  They woke up a few hours later to sunshine and the dog perched on the coffee table, staring at them. Dante offered to drive Loretta over to her sister’s, and Loretta accepted, saying she had to stop by her work to explain why it was she was about to take a couple of weeks off. On the drive over, they concocted a story about her having to look after a sick relative and they debated whether or not her boss would buy it.

  When they arrived, Loretta went inside to spin her lies to her boss while Dante took a seat on the balcony that overlooked the beach. People were packed tightly on the sand, and amongst them, peddlers and thieves moved about with practiced steps, seemingly unaffected by the burning heat. Children splashed in the shallows, and further out the rich in their yachts were the first to catch what breeze there was coming over the waters. As Dante blearily looked about the crowds, he realized the beach was the last place he wanted to be after a night of much drinking and little sleep, with its heat and burning sunshine and raucous noise.