Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘And if I did?’

  ‘Then, like I said, there’s some money in it for you.’

  The man stopped in front of one of the shacks, a large, half-collapsed building without a door, sitting at a slant among the reeds and grasses.

  ‘Then ye better come in.’

  Jacob followed him into the shack. It was dim and close inside, with the fetid air of a sickroom. The man laid down the sack and opened it up. Then he sat, drew a bottle of whiskey from his coat pocket, took a sip from it, and stared at Jacob. His look reminded Jacob of a drawing he’d seen once in a magazine, an illustration of a voodou witch doctor that accompanied a horror story set out in the bayous of Louisiana. The artist had drawn lines emanating from the character’s eyes, implying some kind of power in the man’s gaze, a mesmerism.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ the man asked, grabbing the sack and pulling it toward him.

  ‘I want to know what you saw,’ said Jacob, sitting on the ground.

  ‘Two men in a Cadillac throwing a naked girl off the bridge is what I saw.’ He started scooping handfuls of something out of the sack, and it took Jacob a moment to realize what it was in the gloom – sodden hair and lumps of lard.

  ‘Dead o’ night. Three, four weeks ago. Real big splash. How much ye paying?’ he asked, not looking up, laying the hair out in strips on the mud to dry.

  Jacob got his wallet, peeled off two fives and held them out in the gloom. The old man looked up at the notes, then at Jacob’s face, the line of his voodou glare as sharp as the policemen’s arc light cutting through the darkness over the canal.

  ‘I’m poor and I’m drunk,’ said the old man, his look infected with derision, ‘but I ain’t stupid.’

  Jacob peeled off another two fives and the old man nodded, a single judder of his chin. He reached over and took the cash.

  ‘You sure it was a Cadillac?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘I know one when I see one,’ said the man, folding the notes over and slipping them into an inside pocket. As he did so, his coat moved a little and Jacob caught a glimpse of rotting old newspapers, padded into the lining.

  ‘Ain’t like we get too many Caddies round here,’ the man continued. ‘A black one, it was. One of the new ones with the orange license plates. I didn’t get the number, before ye ask.’

  Jacob thought – orange plates had only been issued once, in the previous year, 1927. How many black Cadillacs were there in Chicago with ’27 plates?

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I don’t know, just before dawn. Sun was coming up.’

  ‘What were you doing out at that time?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Getting ready for work,’ the old man said, holding up a handful of salvaged hair by way of explanation.

  ‘I was walking across the mud there when I saw the Cadillac stopped in the middle of the bridge, lights off, engine off, and ain’t that strange, so I stopped to watch a little while, and two men get out, and they get a body out the trunk, coon girl, nice-lookin’. Naked except for some rope they had her trussed up with and some kind o’ paving stone or something tied to her. They heave her off the side, and then they watch her a moment and then they get back in the Caddy and drive off. Whole thing took no longer than a minute.’

  Jacob rummaged around his pockets for the photo he had of Anton Hodiak. He held it up and the tramp stared at it in the gloom. Jacob clicked his lighter on, and held it next to the photo.

  ‘Is that one of the men?’ he asked.

  The tramp stared at the photo a while, then shook his head.

  ‘Nah. That ain’t him.’

  ‘Look again.’

  ‘I’m telling you that ain’t him. I’d remember a face like that,’ he said, raising his voice, jabbing his finger at the photo of Hodiak, ‘with that goddamn smile carved into one side of it.’

  Jacob put down the photo of Hodiak, sighed, and switched the lighter off. He ran his hand through his hair and tried to think.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, a little exasperated, his theory about Hodiak being the killer not fitting at all with what the man was saying. ‘What did the men look like?’

  ‘One was tall and thin. The other was shorter, just a kid. Looked like a Mex maybe. And the tall one had scars all over his neck. Used to know a man in the boxcars like that. Caught the poison gas in his lungs back in the war and had the scars from where the doctors tried to fix him up. Maybe the same thing happened to the one I saw on the bridge.’

  Jacob thought a moment, not quite buying it.

  ‘How far away from him were you that you could see his scars?’

  The man glared at him again, annoyed that Jacob was questioning his account.

  ‘I told you I was on the mud,’ he said in an irritated tone. ‘Where it rises up to meet the bridge. They was on top of the bridge. Ten, fifteen yards.’

  Jacob nodded, took out his pack of Luckies, lit one, and offered another to the old man as a way to placate him. The old man thought a moment, then accepted, and Jacob passed him his lighter. As its flame approached the man’s face, Jacob saw he was much younger than he’d originally guessed. There were missing teeth, some wrinkles around his eyes, and that thick paste of grime scraped into all the crevices of his face as if with a trowel, but he was actually not much older than Jacob.

  ‘How old were the men?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘The one in charge was about your age, I guess. The Mexican one was in his teens, early twenties.’

  ‘And how were they dressed?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Fancy? Rough? Work clothes? Uniforms?’

  ‘Oh, fancy. Fancy, for sure. And not gangster fancy. Rich boy, prep-school fancy.’

  27

  The hotel was located in a skid-row neighborhood somewhere off Mohawk Street, an area too run-down to take the Blackhawk and remain inconspicuous, so Dante left the car at the Drake and took the dog for a walk. He headed downtown, zigzagging along the blocks, hoping to lose any tails, then he boarded an uptown tram. He journeyed all the way to the car barn near Little Hell, the oval-shaped piece of land in the middle of the Chicago River where Death Corner was located, an intersection so called because it averaged about a murder a week.

  From there, walking east down Chicago Avenue, he skirted around the manure piles lying uncollected on the sidewalk, then turned north up one of the smaller streets that led off the avenue. Dante walked past an open lot of land, and then a scrap-metal dealer’s, outside of which stood a line of emaciated, hollow-eyed men waiting to sell to the dealer pieces of metal they had stolen or collected and piled up in trolleys and crates in front of them. The men looked homeless, ragged, dirty, and Dante recognized them as junkies – heroin addicts who funded their habit by collecting scrap metal and selling it to junkyards.

  The phenomenon had started in New York, and Dante was surprised to see it had spread all the way to Chicago. The drug was making inroads all across the country, and with a gangster’s cynical eye, he wondered who the junkies’ suppliers were. As he watched them shivering in the heat, he thought how there was really only one difference between himself and them: wealth. Without money, he would be as desperate, dirty and hopeless as they were.

  He turned a corner, and saw a fleapit hotel further up the block. He stopped and checked the address the governor had given him and confirmed it was the place where the trigger was staying, the man the traitors had brought to the city to clear up after the failed poisoning, the man who had probably killed Corrado Abbate.

  Dante was one step closer to figuring out what was going on, and who was double-crossing him.

  A few doors down, on the opposite sidewalk, was another hotel, just as decrepit-looking. Dante went inside and ordered a room with a view of the street, and he sat in the window, watching the entrance to the trigger’s hotel for anyone coming and going that he recognized or could pin as a hitman.

  The first few hours drifted past in a daze. The sun dragged the day westwards, to another part of the world, and then
it was night, and Dante was drenched in a hot cold opiate sweat: he was starting to get the itch. He made himself a needle right there in the window, and when he plunged it in, the dog started barking at him, with what to Dante felt like angry disappointment.

  Then he pulled the needle out and the dog calmed down and Dante stared a moment at the aftermath, the pin of blood on his skin, the raised vein. He took the belt from his upper arm and noticed his sweat had dried onto the fabric of his shirt, tidemarks in rings of white across the blue cotton, like foam-crested waves rolling across an ocean. Looking down on it, he imagined he was floating over the waters of Long Island. He felt the salt breath of the sea, the relaxing sound of the waves. There was his boat, peacefully anchored up by the stitching of his cuff. He watched it a while, then his mind came back to the present. This was why he shouldn’t do dope on the job.

  For the next fourteen hours he carried on sitting in the window, chain-smoking his way through till morning, taking more hits, till at gone midday, his persistence paid off: a man walked out of the hotel and off toward the tram stop, and Dante saw four things about him that all said he was a triggerman on a job; a bow tie on, rather than a necktie, which could be used against him in a fight; a newly grown beard, ready to be shaved off once the job was done; a suit cut baggy around the midriff to conceal any weapons; and on his feet a set of heavy-tread, steel-capped boots.

  Dante quickly tidied himself up, left his room, and crossed the street to the other hotel; he passed by it, looking in as he went. Through the window he could see a hallway and a reception desk with pigeonholes behind it. Manning the desk was an acne-strewn kid who was simultaneously reading a copy of Moby-Dick and giving himself a manicure with his teeth.

  Dante walked back around, took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and entered the hotel.

  ‘Hello. How can I help?’ said the kid in a chirpy tone.

  ‘A man just exited here and jumped on a tram and he dropped this five-dollar bill on the street. At least, I think he did.’

  Dante passed over the five-spot. The boy took it and smiled at Dante.

  ‘What did he look like?’ he asked.

  ‘Tall. Beard. Brown hair.’

  ‘Okay. He’s one of our guests. I’ll see he gets it,’ and the boy folded up the bill and slipped it into an envelope and as he did so Dante ran his eye around the place – an old-fashioned lobby, a staircase, a corridor leading to the rear. He turned his attention back to the boy as he popped the envelope into a pigeonhole. Room 414.

  Dante found the rear entrance to the hotel on a quiet, narrow alleyway, lined with garbage cans. The door was safely bolted from the inside so he scanned the building for a way to break in. From every floor above him, clotheslines were stretched across the alley, heavy with washing, brilliant white shirts criss-crossing the blue sky, like so many souls floating to heaven. He wondered a moment how it was possible for all that fabric to shine so white in a city swirling thick with pollution, then he looked across from the clotheslines to the metal fire escapes that zigzagged across the brickwork all the way up to the roof.

  He checked the rest of the block. Three buildings down, someone had left a back door propped open with a battered wooden chair. Dante slipped through it, went up a flight of stairs till he got to a window, then climbed up the fire escape all the way to the roof of the block.

  He walked back along it, passing by the things people had left up there among the chimneys and clotheslines – plants in tin cans, tables and chairs, a camp-bed, an alarm clock next to a mattress, pigeon cages stacked one on top of the other, abandoned and rusting.

  When he reached the roof of the hotel, he lowered himself onto the fire escape and walked down it till he found an open window, swung through it into a corridor, and made his way to Room 414.

  He took a moment to get his breath back, then he put his ear against the door and listened. Silence. He bent down and inspected the lock. Cheap hotel issue, bought in bulk and a cinch to pick. He pulled the case from his pocket, got to work and a minute later he stepped inside.

  It was a small room, clean and tidy, with a window giving out onto the alley at the rear. Dante made a start on searching the place. He didn’t have much time for triggermen; they were the village idiots of the underworld, thugs who could find no other work except killing people. They were often twisted and malicious too, the kind of men who ensured that gunshot wounds were made wider by chewing the tips of their bullets, or who rubbed them with garlic or onion water so the victim’s wounds got infected. But every now and again Dante came across one who was intelligent, thoughtful, professional, dangerous. The fact that Dante couldn’t find a single piece of evidence in the hotel room revealing the man’s identity showed he belonged very firmly in this second camp.

  The break he was looking for came when he opened up the man’s suitcase, where he found a shoebox filled with odds and ends. He sat on the bed and went through it, and within a couple of seconds he realized what it was – a horde of items owned by the missing waiter.

  It was the triggerman who’d gone over to the waiter’s house before Dante, who had left those marks in the dust. And this is what the trigger had come back with; a photo Dante guessed must be of the waiter, books of matches from different bars and restaurants, a letter from the waiter’s daughter in Detroit, a bank statement, a receipt from a garage, and a betting slip with a phone number scrawled across the rear of it.

  The triggerman hadn’t dumped the trinkets he’d stolen, which meant he was still looking for the waiter. Dante went through the horde once more, slowly, turning each item over. Then he came back to the betting slip with the phone number on one side. He looked at the number, memorized it, then he flipped the slip over and looked at the bet, the name of a horse scribbled down in a hand so crabby Dante could only just make it out: Ganymede. Odds of twenty to one, twenty dollars down. The time and date of the race and the name of the racecourse, and the date the bet was made. And on top of all that information, a rubber stamp. Bookies all stamped their slips with their own stylized logo to keep the slips from being copied. This stamp was in red ink and had a design of a horse’s head in profile, with a ring of stars around it. Dante recognized it as belonging to Michigan Red, a narcotics dealer and bookie operating out of a pool hall in Cottage Grove.

  Dante returned everything to the shoebox and replaced the box in the suitcase. Then he went back to the wardrobe and checked the man’s suits. Every one was bespoke and the tailor’s tags stitched into the lining all showed addresses in Lower Manhattan, Little Italy. He checked the boots lined up at the bottom of the wardrobe and it was the same story. The trigger was from New York.

  Just like Dante had feared he might be. A distant sense of panic rose up in him, claustrophobia, a worry that the trigger might come back at any minute.

  He returned everything to how he’d found it, and went back to the alley via the roof, glad to be outside again. On his way back across the street, he passed the front of the trigger’s hotel slowly, and peered into the lobby. The gangly kid was still there, still reading Moby-Dick, but the pigeonhole for Room 414 was empty. As Dante had hoped, the temptation to steal the money had proved too much, and the trigger would be none the wiser.

  GENERAL CASE REPORT

  C.P.D. GENERAL

  CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT

  1. OFFENSE

  Murder

  2. DIST

  9

  3. BEAT

  907

  4. LOCATION

  Pullman Ice Works, Lake Calumet

  5. DATE & TIME OCCURRED

  Unkn.

  6. DATE AND TIME POLICE ARRIVED

  21 Jun. 28 0230

  7. VICTIM’S NAME (FIRM NAME IF BUSINESS)

  Abbate, Corrado. M/W/1888

  8. RESIDENCE ADDRESS

  Unkn.

  9. RES. PHONE

  Unkn.

  10. PERSON REPORTING CRIME TO POLICE

  Wilson, Leonard M/C/1878

  11. RESIDENCE A
DDRESS

  Apt. 9, 340 E. 55th Street

  12. RES. PHONE

  dna

  13. PERSON WHO DISCOVERED CRIME

  Wilson, Leonard M/C/1878

  14. RESIDENCE ADDRESS

  Apt. 9, 340 E. 55th Street

  15. RES. PHONE

  dna

  16. WITNESS NAME (A)

  None

  17. RESIDENCE ADDRESS

  dna

  18. RES. PHONE

  dna

  19. VICTIM’S OCCUPATION

  Private security / bodyguard

  SEX

  M

  RACE

  W

  D/O/B

  ’88

  20.A. TYPE OF PREMISES WHERE OCCURRED

  Ice Works

  20.B. EXACT LOCATION

  Hut #43 ext.

  21. TOOL, WEAPON OR MEANS USED

  Knife

  22. METHOD USED TO COMMIT CRIME

  see narrative

  23. OBJECT OF ATTACK OR PROPERTY TAKEN

  dna

  24. VALUE OF PROPERTY TAKEN

  dna

  25. TRADE MARK OR UNUSUAL EVENT

  dna

  26. VEHICLE USED BY OFFENDER/S

  Unkn.

  YEAR

  MAKE

  BODY STYLE

  COLOR

  Dark

  LICENSE

  OTHER IDENTIFYING MARKS

  27. NARRATIVE

  Patrol 907 sent to the above location by CC after report of a disturbance. On arrival met Wilson M/C/1878, a nightwatchman at the former Pullman Ice Works.

  Wilson stated that during his rounds at 0200 he noticed a section of fencing had been pulled down, and two men escaping through the fencing into a waiting car, which it was too dark to identify. He called in the report then discovered the body in a ditch surrounding one of the ice-huts. He led us to the ice-hut in question (#43). Found the body in the ‘moat’ of the ice-hut, lying on back. Numerous stab wounds across shirt / torso and slice across neck. No blood at scene.