Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘Come on, Al.’ The mayor was pleading now, but Al didn’t respond, didn’t even look at him, just stared down the fairway, planning his shot.

  The mayor looked again at the other men, hoping for some sort of response this time round, but again none of them met his gaze except for Dante, who, not understanding what was going on, held up his hands and shrugged.

  Then after a moment, the mayor accepted his fate. He kneeled down on the grass, and lay flat on his back.

  ‘I guess I’m first,’ said Al, nodding at his caddie.

  The caddie walked over and placed a ball on the mayor’s chin, taking a moment to make sure it was balanced. Then he stepped back, selected a club and passed it to Al.

  Al lined up his shot. He swung his club down a few times, practicing his shot, stopping just short of the mayor’s face, causing the man to flinch each time, making him stifle a sob, making the ball wobble.

  ‘Let’s see how many squirrels I kill with this one,’ said Al.

  A look of grim determination crossed Al’s face. He tensed, and with what seemed like all his strength, he swung his club down in the direction of the mayor’s face.

  He hit the ball and it thwacked across the fairway, and the mayor let out a yelp as the club missed his face by a hair, a yelp that seemed to contain all the fear and dread that had built up in him over the last few minutes, and the relief that Al hadn’t caved his head in.

  Dante looked at the mayor’s face, saw the fear and powerlessness on it; then he looked up and saw Al staring at him, wild-eyed, and Dante wondered if the show was just because Al had gotten annoyed at his friends, or if it was a message for Dante, too, a demonstration of who was in charge. Or maybe it was something else, maybe Al was losing it, going steadily mad, and Dante felt a chill as he wondered what that meant for him, and for the rest of Chicago.

  ‘Who’s next?’ said Al.

  Jack stepped up, and his caddie laid down a ball on the mayor’s chin, and Dante realized the show wasn’t over quite yet, that they were going to play a full round like that, and on the next hole, someone else would be the tee. And all Dante could think about was how soon he could be in Bronzeville, picking up some small brown slabs of nothingness.

  BUREAU OF IDENTIFICATION

  DEPARTMENT OF POLICE

  CITY OF CHICAGO

  Name: Severyn, Lloyd

  Reg no.: 98282

  Alias:

  Color: White

  Residence: Apt. 1, 4702, S. Halsted Str.

  Occupation: Coal dealer

  Previous known residence/s:

  D.O.B.: 2/3/1894

  BERTILLION STATISTICS – DESCRIPTIVE

  Height: 1m. 85

  Head length: 18.7

  L. Foot: 27.0

  Col. obf eye, circle: Greenish

  Age: 22

  Eng. Height: 6’ 1”

  Head width: 16.4

  L. Mid. F.: 12

  Col. of eye: Brown

  Apparent age: 22

  Outside A.: 88.5

  Cheeks width: 14.4

  L. Lit. F.: 9.2

  Trunk: 91.7

  R. Ear: 6.6

  L. Fore A.: 48.8

  Forehead ad incl.:

  Nose projection:

  Ears:

  Hair: Dk. ch

  Forehead height:

  Nose length:

  Teeth:

  Complexion: Sal.

  Forehead width:

  Nose breadth:

  Chin:

  Weight: 173

  Forehead pecul.:

  Nose pecul.:

  Beard: None

  Build: Med.

  Marks, scars, moles, other peculiarities:

  Date description taken: 4/20/1916

  KNOWN ASSOCIATES

  Name: Brandel, Adam

  Name: Malloy, Shaun

  Alias:

  Alias:

  Address: 1542 Sedgwick Street

  Address: 780 Division Street

  Occupation: Unkn.

  Occupation: Florist

  D/O/B: 6/15/1888

  D/O/B: Unkn.

  Reg no.: 97284

  Reg no.: 87712

  Nature of association:

  Nature of association:

  Crim., ref CHC-29763

  Crim., ref CHC-29763

  Reg no.: 97761

  Reg no.: 89734

  ARREST AND PROSECUTION RECORD

  Date

  Charge & descr.

  Disposition of case

  Ref.

  Feb. 13, 1908

  Assault. (Street brawl)

  Sentenced to 6 weeks in Pontiac Reformatory.

  23-JoP-2892a

  Aug. 8, 1910

  Assault. (Street brawl)

  D.W.P.

  —

  Sep. 5, 1912

  Theft. (Robbing telephone coin boxes)

  Sentenced to 6 months in the House of Correction and fined $50 and costs.

  CHC-29763

  Jul. 17, 1914

  Malicious mischief.

  Unkn.

  SAA-­987346-­01

  Jul. 17, 1914

  Fraud. (Baggage check scam)

  D.W.P.

  CPD-14-899

  31

  The photographer sat at the desk in Michael and Ida’s office and told them his story in the same warm and jittery voice Ida had heard over the phone. In person the jitteriness was accompanied by an animated physicality – hand movements and shrugs and shakes of the head that made him an engaging presence. He was a little older than Ida, with a wiry build, and eyes of pale green that were ringed red through lack of sleep.

  He told them about the murder of a Capone stooge called Benjamin Roebuck in an alleyway three weeks earlier, and the death of Roebuck’s girlfriend, a cabaret dancer, and how two rich-looking kids, one with neck scars, were seen throwing her body off the Ashland Avenue Bridge. He told them how he’d investigated it all, and when he’d finished speaking, Michael voiced the question both he and Ida wanted to know the answer to.

  ‘You said the first murder happened three weeks ago? What was the exact date?’

  ‘The twenty-seventh.’

  Michael turned to look at Ida – the night Gwen had gone missing.

  ‘And what time was the murder?’

  The photographer shrugged. ‘The body was discovered in the morning, but it had been there hours. Any time between midnight and four or five.’

  Ida tried to put the timeline into some kind of order, and after a few moments she looked up to see the photographer staring at her.

  ‘I’ve told you my side of the story,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could tell me yours?’

  Ida turned to look at Michael, and Michael nodded, and Ida told him about Gwendolyn’s disappearance on the same night, and Coulton and Severyn’s likely involvement, and the photographer smiled as she spoke.

  ‘They’re connected then,’ he said when Ida had finished. ‘Coulton and Severyn killed Roebuck and then your missing girl stumbled on them while they were cleaning up.’

  Ida shook her head. ‘The dates match, but the timings don’t,’ she said. ‘Our men were at the Illinois Central station after eleven. They couldn’t have gone from there to the Southside with Gwendolyn already in the car, killed Roebuck and driven back downtown. Plus Gwendolyn said she stumbled on them with bloody hands earlier that evening. That was hours before Roebuck was killed.’

  ‘They could have split up,’ said the photographer. ‘I can’t believe that there’s two different men, tall and thin, with neck scars, committing separate crimes on the same night. If the list of owners of black Cadillacs comes back from the Automobile Division with Coulton or Severyn’s name on it, then that proves the link.’

  ‘I suppose it does,’ said Michael. ‘How long till you get the list?’

  ‘I don’t know. Later today, tomorrow.’

  ‘We’ve got a missing heiress,’ said Michael, ‘and a dead Capone stooge, and the two of them are probably linked by Coulton and Seve
ryn. The question is how.’

  ‘You’ve got Severyn’s file, don’t you?’ asked the photographer.

  Michael nodded. They’d picked it up the day before and spent much of the intervening period going through it. He grabbed the file from the desktop and tossed it to the photographer.

  ‘There’s nothing much in it,’ said Ida, who’d run the leads. ‘The address is years out of date and the KAs are dead. None of the other detectives in the division know much about him beyond that.’

  Jacob quickly scanned through the pages in the folder. Then he looked up at them again in turn when he’d finished.

  ‘What is it you want, Mr Russo?’ asked Ida.

  ‘Please, call me Jacob. Or Jake. I’d like you to send me any information you come across on the dead stooge and on Severyn. In return, if I uncover anything while I’m looking into my end of things, I’ll let you know. If you’re worried about divulging information to someone not directly in law enforcement, then send it to my friend in the Detective Division, Lieutenant Lynott.’

  He rummaged around his pockets, found a business card and passed it to Ida. She took it and inspected it and saw it was for the man in the division he’d already mentioned as a friend.

  ‘You can ask around the division. They’ll vouch for me, but I get the feeling you’ve already asked.’

  ‘We have,’ said Ida.

  ‘And what did you hear?’

  ‘Some people said you make a nuisance of yourself trying to solve unsolvable cases. Other people said you’re the best detective the division never had.’

  ‘I’ve heard people say the same about you two.’

  He looked at them and smiled in a slightly embarrassed way.

  ‘May I ask what your interest in this is, Jacob?’ Ida asked, sounding sharper than she intended. ‘Why are you so interested in tracking down Roebuck’s killer? He was just a low-level gangster.’

  ‘Every day I go to work and see lazy, incompetent cops not doing their job,’ he said. ‘And innocent people are dying because of it. I’m just trying to make a difference.’

  He smiled ruefully at the two of them, and Michael and Ida shared a look. He may have made a good detective, and looked every bit the earnest young man, but his response was too scripted, too self-righteous. There was another reason he was investigating it all, which he didn’t want to disclose.

  ‘All right,’ said Michael, ‘if we come across anything related to the killings, we’ll let you know, and if we get anything concrete on Coulton and Severyn, we’ll pass it along to Lynott at the Detective Division.’

  Jacob smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He stood and put Severyn’s file back on the desk. When he stepped forward Ida noticed his slight limp, as if his leg had gone dead while he was talking to them. They shook hands and after he left Michael turned to look at her.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘There was something off about him,’ she said, displaying her constitutional skepticism. ‘I don’t buy the concerned-citizen routine.’

  ‘What about the frustrated-amateur-detective act?’

  ‘That one I buy. I was one myself. I get him and his pal Lynott working cases on the side, but why’s he so interested in this one?’

  ‘Professional curiosity?’ said Michael. ‘It’s an interesting case. Eyes gouged out. Dead cabaret dancers.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ida. ‘His whole story brings it back to Bronzeville. Gwendolyn was meeting a go-between there, the stooge died there, and the stooge’s girlfriend was a dancer at the Sunset Café.’

  ‘Which is owned by Capone.’

  ‘Who the stooge worked for,’ said Ida. ‘This is all cycling back to that club, and to Capone. You think Capone’s involved with Gwendolyn going missing? Someone pretty high up’s trying to cover all this up.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Michael. ‘How about we give the dancer’s name to your pal. See if he can come up with anything.’

  32

  Dante returned to the Drake from the golf course in Burnham via the shoeshine man in Bronzeville. He shot up, took a moment to let the jitters melt from his body, then set about chasing down the only lead he had in finding the missing waiter – the betting slip he’d found in the hotel room. He called around some bookies he knew, asking them to check the odds on the betting slip, discovering in the process that the twenty-to-one shot the waiter had backed had never gone further out than sixteen to one on anyone else’s books. Dante thanked the men and headed straight over to Cottage Grove, driving through the city as the sun was setting, the color of it washing over the buildings, coating them in waves of red.

  As he drove he made a few loops and checked the rearview, trying to see if anyone from the Outfit was tailing him. But he couldn’t spot anything at all, and he began to wonder if Al really had set him up, if maybe instead the stress of being back in his hometown was sparking his paranoia. Then he realized how absurd it was that the fact that no one seemed to be following him was making him feel edgy.

  He parked up opposite the pool hall, which was located in the basement of a building just off 64th Street and was marked out by a large green neon sign, shaped like an arrow, pointing down the side of the building to the basement entrance.

  He headed down the steps and through the door underneath the arrow’s point. The place was spacious and quiet and so dimly lit it was impossible to make out anything except a bar to one side and beyond that a grid of pool tables, dozens of them, descending into the depths, each one illuminated by an overhead lamp hanging low over the green baize, like a lattice of emerald squares, floating on a sea of blackness.

  Dante headed over to the bar, catching glares from the pool players he walked past, all of them colored and pegging him for a cop until they saw the scruffy dog trailing in his wake. The barman glared at him. He was a six-footer, bald-headed, wearing a white vest that strained over his bulk. Dante smiled and took his hat off.

  ‘I’m looking for Red.’

  ‘He ain’t here.’

  ‘Tell him it’s his old pal Dante.’

  ‘He ain’t here.’

  ‘You always so quick with your answers?’

  ‘You want me to stutter?’

  Dante kept the smile fixed to his face as he slumped onto a stool and dropped his hat on the bar.

  ‘Well, I guess I’ll wait then. Fix me up a whiskey, will ya?’

  The barman glared at him for a few seconds more, then he sighed and slunk over to a phone lying on the counter. He picked it up and exchanged whispers with someone down the line, then he hung up, turned to Dante, and nodded his head toward the depths. Dante swiped his hat off the bar and turned toward the rear of the place, straining his eyes against the darkness, not able to make out how far back it extended.

  He walked down one of the rows, and after a few seconds he could finally see the rear wall, along which stood a row of booths, each upholstered in red velvet with its own overhead light. In one of the booths Dante could see Michigan Red, sitting in a swirl of smoke either side of a couple of knucklemen and a boy in a white shirt who looked simultaneously high as a kite and bored as hell.

  When Red saw Dante approaching a broad smile crossed his face.

  ‘Dante the Gent,’ said Red. ‘Back from the dead and you brought a dog.’

  ‘The dog’s not from the afterlife, Red, he’s from Chicago.’

  ‘And the difference is?’ Red grinned. ‘Take a seat.’

  He nodded to the two knucklemen and they stood and headed toward a door where the row of booths ended. The boy stayed where he was, sitting on the inside, slumped against the wall, eyelids at half-mast, his shirt open three or four buttons at the neck, revealing fresh skin and lithe muscles. Dante sat opposite Red and Red took a toke on the reefer he was smoking. Then he offered it to Dante, who shook his head.

  ‘Makes me jumpy,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah? Makes me the opposite,’ said Red, and once again he grinned. He was a thin man, his face long and skeletal, and when he smil
ed the skin stretched across his high cheekbones in a way that made him look delicate and gentle, feminine almost. He wasn’t quite light-skinned enough to pass for white, but his face was covered with freckles, and what was left of the red hair that gave him his name was slicked back with pomade. He was wearing a burgundy-colored three-piece suit, and a gold tie pin and diamond collar studs which glittered and flashed in the beam from the lamp.

  There was a sudden flood of bright white light and noise and Dante turned to see the two knucklemen had opened the door they’d been approaching and had stepped into a busy office beyond. Dante caught a glimpse of dozens of workers; a bank of phones, race lists pinned onto the wall; a blackboard full of calculations in spidery chalk; an annotated map of the neighborhood. And then the door shut, muting the sound and light, and they were flooded by darkness once more.

  ‘So? To what do I owe the honor?’ Red asked.

  ‘You heard of a waiter called Julius Clay?’ said Dante, and before he could stop himself, something twitched in Red’s face.

  ‘Sure. Why you asking?’

  ‘He served a few city bigwigs poison booze at the Ritz a few weeks ago and then he skipped town. I need to talk to him before some other people catch ahold of him and shut him up permanently.’

  ‘And you’re talking to me why?’

  ‘Because you’re from Michigan and he’s from Michigan and I found a betting slip of his with your stamp on it with the most goddamn generous odds on them I ever saw. Twenty to one on a horse every other bookie in town didn’t push past sixteen. Which made me wonder why you’re giving outsized odds on a sucker bet to a runaway waiter from the Ritz.’

  Red paused. He took a long drag on the reefer, held in the smoke for a few seconds, then blew it out into the light beaming down from the overhead.

  ‘Who you working for, Dante?’ Red asked, leaning forward and passing the reefer to the boy.