Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  The building craze that had swept through the country over the decade had included the construction of an endless series of opulent cinemas. In Chicago alone there was the Renaissance-style Congress, the rococo-style Norshore, the baroque-style Tivoli, and as if in response to all this European influence, the Oriental, built to look like it was the home of an Indian prince. Each of them had an auditorium with more than three and a half thousand seats.

  Louis returned from the concession, already munching on the popcorn, and they went over to the ushers, who directed them to the balcony, where another usher directed them to the aisle seats of the section in the extreme far corner of the space, where the few other black souls who’d had the temerity to enter a downtown theater had all been lumped together.

  ‘Well, look at this,’ said Louis, sitting down. ‘They made us our own little ghetto. Ain’t that nice.’ And he burst out laughing, and some of the people sitting around them laughed too, while a few others turned around to give him disapproving looks. He shrugged and swept his hand in front of him, indicating the other few thousand seats in the place, half of which were empty. Both Ida and Louis were used to such things having grown up in New Orleans, but the cinemas in Chicago were supposed to be desegregated. And they had paid for tickets in the stalls, front and center.

  They settled down and watched the screen as the shorts flicked past. Then Louis leaned over and nodded at a pair of great black boxes on either side of the stage far below.

  ‘Speaker system,’ he said. ‘It plays back recorded sound so you don’t need musicians to accompany the film. Cinemas are sacking orchestras all over town. Loew’s aren’t hiring organists anymore. The union’s in uproar.’

  ‘What about you at the Vendome?’ Ida asked. Louis had a gig in the orchestra pit at the Vendome cinema in the Black Belt, playing there each evening before heading off to the nightclubs.

  ‘We’re safe for the moment, I guess. But with the sound systems and the speakies and the clampdown on the nightclubs, cats are getting jittery about where their next paycheck’s coming from. All everyone’s talking about is moving to New York.’

  Ida nodded. She knew New York was somewhere Louis was hesitant to return to after his brief stint there a few years earlier.

  They watched the last of the shorts and then the Buster Keaton feature came on. In a film-within-a-film structure, the movie showed Keaton as a cinema projectionist who falls asleep whilst screening a Sherlock Holmes film and dreams that he is Sherlock Holmes, going on a bizarre, mystery adventure.

  Ida and Louis wiped tears from their eyes as Keaton dodged freight trains, jumped off buildings, went on a ride through Los Angeles perched atop the handlebars of a motorcycle. Toward the end of the first reel, Louis took a reefer from his pocket and lit it up, and they passed it between them and laughed all the more for it, and when the lights went up and they wandered back out into the opulence of the foyer, they were red-eyed and spent from so much laughter.

  They stepped out onto the street and the heat hit them and it took them a moment to adjust their senses to the glare of sunlight and the rush of people and noise on State Street. The gage she’d smoked wasn’t helping, leaving her with a speeded-up heart and a slowed-down head. They said goodbye to each other, and Louis tipped his homburg onto his head, and she watched him disappear into the torrent of people cascading through the shafts of sunlight. Then she turned and headed up the stairs to the elevated station and waited for her train.

  She had met Louis through her father. When Louis was twelve years old he had been sentenced to an indefinite stay at the Colored Waifs Home – a Victorian correctional institution just outside New Orleans – for firing off a pistol in a New Year’s Day celebration. Ida’s father was the music teacher at the home and he’d taken Louis under his wing, coached him, brought him home to duet with Ida on the piano, and the two lonely children had become friends. They’d stayed friends through their teenage years in New Orleans, and through their twenties in Chicago.

  Whenever she spent time with him, it brought to her attention how their characters had changed in the years since they had moved north; Louis had lost his country-boy air and settled into a contentment with who he was. Ida, however, was still haunted by the insecurities she’d felt as a youngster. She’d always thought that at some point her self-doubt would fall away and she’d be like the adults she saw breezing through life, competent and self-assured. But here she was, approaching thirty and the realization was dawning on her that she’d never shed her sense that she didn’t quite fit in; that experience, unfortunately, did not equal confidence. All those things that she’d prayed she’d grow out of had turned out to be part of who she was – daunted, alone, at an angle to the world.

  Meeting up with Louis, who was on such good terms with life, who jumped into everything whole-hog and wholehearted, reminded her of her shortcomings, but also helped soothe her too. Alone, she felt the good times were always going on elsewhere; with Louis, she felt at the heart of things, invited to the party.

  The train arrived and she boarded and stared out of the window as it traversed the South Loop. The sun set, and by the time the elevated was snaking through the rooftops of Bronzeville, the sky was dusky and dim. She got off at Garfield Boulevard, and trudged down the stairs to the street.

  It had gotten dark and the road was buzzing with people. Music was blaring out of bars and clubs, loud enough to scramble her thoughts. The smell of Chinese food and barbecue floated in the heat. Revelers with eyes half lidded from dope and booze stumbled along the sidewalks, swaying in and out of the neon spill that colored the streets like electric stained glass.

  Ida headed away from the commotion, as always. She crossed a few blocks to her small, one-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a greystone in Washington Park, a quiet, mostly Negro neighborhood.

  When she got inside, she opened up all the windows and switched on the electric fan and tried to figure out what to do with the night. CBS wouldn’t be broadcasting Live from the Cotton Club till much later on, so she contented herself with flicking through the stations, seeing what was on, the buzz of the reefer still in her head, making her easily pleased.

  Anyone could set up a radio station so the airwaves were jammed with all sorts of broadcasters – newspapers, churches, shops, gas companies. Over thirty different languages were spoken in Chicago and Ida was sure every one of them was represented at least somewhere on the dial. She stopped to listen to a warm male voice speaking in a strange, Slavic-sounding language. It had a harsh sort of musicality to it, this unknown language floating into her apartment on a sea of a static. She tried to guess at what it was, putting a name to the swarm of syllables whose consonants rubbed together and sparked – Czech, Polish, Russian?

  She eventually stopped at a station playing light dance music. The performer was singing in the crooning style, the new, softer sound designed for the radio, that wasn’t so loud it blew out the vacuum tubes of the device, as did the voices of the opera and cabaret singers who were quickly falling out of favor. It would do till Duke Ellington woke up over in Harlem.

  She closed her eyes and tried to think about the case, to let the clues and leads and possibilities swirl about her mind, bump into each other, make connections, break, realign, like so many molecules of information. Time passed, and at some point, the Duke was up and playing some nocturne or fantasia, and she looked out of her window and saw the skyscrapers in the distance, towering over the city, lit by a million night-lights. The electric pointillism pricked her skin and a horde of feelings stepped out of the shadows. Each speck of light outside her window was a life carrying on without her, a life that she’d never touch, and the emptiness of that, the loss implicit in it, made her cry. That was the thing about the city: living amongst an ocean of strangers made the loneliness starker, sadder somehow.

  The feeling didn’t last too long. It never did. It washed over her and passed and she dried her eyes and eventually drifted off into a strange half-sl
eep. She dreamed of Chicago as a fairy-tale city, under the shadow of a scar-ridden king, a city of twinkling castles rising into the clouds, lakes in the sky, merchant princes, monsters, peasants, princesses trapped in golden palaces: poor, lonely damsels awaiting their fate.

  She awoke to the phone ringing. She rubbed her eyes and picked it up.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, is that Miss Davis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hello, Miss Davis. My name’s Jacob Russo. I’m a photographer with the Tribune and the Detective Division. I, uh, I’m sorry for calling so late, but I have a feeling we might be looking for the same person.’

  He had a deep voice, and he spoke quickly, nervous and uncertain.

  ‘And what person would that be?’

  ‘Lloyd Severyn.’

  Ida paused and thought a moment, wishing she wasn’t still half asleep, that she hadn’t drunk so much bourbon or smoked the gage. She ran through a list of people who knew she was looking for information on Severyn, and which ones had access to her home telephone number.

  ‘Why do you think I’m looking for a Lloyd Severyn?’

  ‘Let’s just say we know the same people at the Bureau of Investigation.’

  ‘And why are you looking for him?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you the same question. Perhaps we could meet?’

  30

  When Dante got back to the Drake from the stakeout, he peeled off the sweat-soaked clothes he’d been wearing for the last two days, took a long cold shower, and took a hit. Then he ordered some food for him and the dog, ate and passed out.

  He woke in the morning and ordered more food, and as he drank a coffee he browsed through the complimentary copy of the Tribune that had arrived with room service, and came across the report of Corrado Abbate’s body turning up at the old Pullman Ice Works. He put the paper down and thought a moment.

  He needed to head over to Bronzeville to replenish his stash and follow up the betting-slip lead, but just as he was planning it, the phone rang. It was Frank Nitti, informing him that Al wanted an update, that Al would be playing a round that morning down in Burnham, and Dante was expected on the course.

  Dante agreed to go over there and put down the phone. He thought about the timing of it all and what the hell he could tell Al. Since his chat with the governor, Dante had realized that Al was probably having him followed, hence Al’s gift of such a conspicuous car. Whoever was tailing him had probably told Al that Dante had spent the last two days in a hotel in Moran territory. Hence the timing of the phone call. Al wanted to know what the hell Dante was up to. Dante couldn’t tell him about the New York connection because he might incriminate himself, and he couldn’t tell him he hadn’t come up with anything either.

  He looked again at the diminished lump of dope on the table, then at his jittery hands, and wondered if he should go to the meeting shaking or doped up. The dog looked at him sternly, and Dante decided to wait.

  It took them over an hour getting to Burnham, a suburb far to the south of the city, where the mayor was a friend of Al’s, and the Outfit owned a nine-hole golf course, and Al’s caddie’s sister worked as a waitress in the clubhouse and gave Al special favors.

  Dante parked up in front of the clubhouse and ambled through the greens to the fourth hole, where Al, ‘Machine Gun’ Jack McGurn, Frank Nitti and Johnny Patton, the Mayor of Burnham, were just teeing off. They were all dressed in luridly colored golfing gear, Al’s get-up a particularly striking shade of lime. The four of them were surrounded by a small army of caddies and bull-necked bodyguards. As Dante approached, he noticed one of the hangers-on eyeing him, a man about his own age, with a bushy black mustache, wearing a brown suit with a matching bowler hat. Dante caught the man’s gaze, smiled at him, and the man gave him a surly look back.

  Dante reached the group just in time to see Al take a swing, and they all watched as his ball arced into the air before disappearing into a clump of trees to the side of the fairway.

  ‘I think you killed another squirrel,’ said Jack, and they all burst into howls of laughter, and Al shook his head, and handed his club to his caddie, and only then did he notice Dante standing at the edge of the group.

  ‘What’s with the mutt?’ asked Al, nodding to the dog at Dante’s feet. ‘They let you in the Drake with that thing?’

  Dante shrugged. Then they watched as ‘Machine Gun’ Jack teed up and took a swing and his ball traced an elegant curve in the air and landed slap in the middle of the green. Jack was one of the best golfers in Chicago. He gave lessons at the Evergreen Golf Course, might have made a fist of going pro if he didn’t make more money as a hitman for Al. After him, the mayor teed off, landing on the fairway, and the group went off in search of their balls, Al and his caddie and Dante heading toward the tree line.

  ‘So?’ Al asked, when they’d split off from the others.

  ‘So,’ said Dante. ‘It turns out a waiter at the Ritz called Julius Clay was involved. He skipped town the day after the poisoning and when I went round to his apartment the place had been searched. Professional job.’

  ‘I never heard of him. You ask about?’

  ‘That’s all I’ve been doing. There’s something else. Governor Small got agitated about the whole thing – figured it was a hit aimed at him – so he got his bodyguard, Corrado Abbate, to look into it. Abbate found something out, then someone took him for a ride, then his body turned up at the Pullman Ice Works the other day. So I went to see the governor and he told me Abbate had found some connection to a hotel uptown. I’ve been staking it out the past couple of days, but I didn’t find anything, so I’m guessing Abbate got it all wrong.’

  Dante turned to look at Al, trying to see if he’d buy the story. But Al stayed silent, gave nothing away, just kept his gaze on the scenery in front of him. They reached the tree line and stepped into the shadows and searched about for Al’s ball, and as they did so, Al lit a cigar.

  ‘So if Abbate got it all wrong,’ said Al, ‘how comes he ended up in the Ice Works?’

  ‘Beats me,’ said Dante.

  Al thought a moment, then began swiping his club against the undergrowth, trying to uncover his ball.

  ‘So what’s the next move?’ he asked.

  ‘The waiter,’ said Dante. ‘We find the waiter, we find out who was behind this. I’ve got an idea where I can track him down.’

  Al stopped to think a moment, rolling the cigar between his fingers, then taking a puff. Dante wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, noticing that his hand was trembling. And in that moment he realized, if Al was having him followed, he would know about Dante’s trips to the shoeshine man. He looked up to see Al eyeing him.

  ‘You don’t look too good, Dante.’

  ‘I’ve been living in a shithouse hotel room the last two days on a stakeout eating canned beans. How d’you want me to look?’

  Al continued to eye him, and Dante noticed there was something changed in his old friend, that there was a vacancy in his expression, that he was distracted by something. Then Al turned to look at the caddie.

  ‘You find it?’

  ‘Naw,’ said the caddie, a gangly teen who looked like he’d done a month’s worth of shaving in the last five minutes.

  ‘Nix it.’

  The caddie nodded, took a new ball out from the golf bag and put it down on a stretch of ground near the edge of the tree line, where Al had a clear view to the green. Dante looked at Al and Al shrugged.

  ‘I’m playing five hundred dollars a hole,’ he said, ‘and I’m already two grand down.’

  Dante nodded. He knew that all the men cheated at their golf, not just Al, and on more than one occasion they’d pulled guns on each other in the middle of a game.

  Al selected a club, swung, and the ball landed some way off the green. Al was as bad a golfer as he was a gambler. As they walked toward the rest of the group, Dante noticed that the man with the bushy mustache was staring at him once more.

  ‘Who’s t
hat with the brown suit and bowler hat and the dead rat on his lip?’ asked Dante.

  Al smiled. ‘Sacco. Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ said Dante, memorizing the name.

  They eventually made it to the green, where the other men continued to needle Al over his lack of golfing prowess. The more they ribbed him, the more Dante could see Al was getting annoyed by it, ready to burst at any moment. Dante needed to get out of there, get to the car, take a hit before his shakes got even worse.

  ‘Al, I might head back to town,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘I got leads to chase.’

  ‘We’re leaving soon, too. Stick around. Play a game.’

  ‘I don’t know how to play.’

  ‘Neither does Al,’ said the mayor, and the men burst into laughter once more, and Dante checked Al’s face, and could see the annoyance that had been building up had reached boiling point and Al could no longer hold it in.

  ‘Next hole we play robin,’ said Al softly, before stalking off alone toward the next hole. ‘Stick around, Dante.’

  Dante frowned and turned to the others, noted how the good humor had now been drained from the group, replaced by a mutual dread. He looked to the others to get a sense of what Al was referring to, but got nothing back. They all followed in silence, stealing nervous glances, till they got to the start of the next hole.

  ‘Whose turn is it to play tee?’ asked Al when they’d arrived. No one said anything for a moment, then Frank spoke up.

  ‘Johnny,’ he said.

  They all turned to the mayor, and a look of worry crossed the man’s face.

  ‘Come on, Al, what’s this shit? Always with the fucking robin,’ he said. ‘Give it a rest for once.’

  ‘You know the rules,’ said Al. ‘It’s your turn to play tee.’

  The mayor looked from Al to the rest of the group, who refused to meet his gaze; they were hanging him out to dry.