Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  As he said the last, a gap in the crowd appeared once more, and through the gap, Sacco turned and saw them, and for an instant he and Ida stared at each other and time seemed to slow.

  That’s where the line and the dark folks meet

  A heaven on earth, they call it Basin Street

  Then the gap closed again, and Ida and Jacob looked at each other and when the crowd parted once more, Sacco was standing, saying his goodbyes to his friends, and heading for the exit. They watched him flit in and out of the crowd and then he stepped through the front doors and was gone.

  Now, you’re glad you came with me

  Down the Mississippi

  Jacob turned to look at Ida with a concerned expression on his face.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure, I’m fine.’

  ‘You maybe want to head back home?’

  We took a trip in a land of dreams

  And floated down the river down to New Orleans

  ‘No. I’m fine,’ she said, shaking her head. She thought once more about hurricanes and storms, and realized she was a daughter of all that, and she had nothing to fear. She smiled and led him to the dance floor and they swayed along to the music and the energy that was washing about the place like so much rain.

  46

  Dante dressed in dark, inconspicuous clothes and together with the dog, left the hotel and jumped into the Blackhawk. It was pouring with rain outside, just the kind of weather he didn’t want for his trip up to the Millersville Roadhouse. He drove around the empty, rain-washed streets of the Gold Coast for a quarter of an hour, hoping to shake off any tails who might be following him, then he headed north out of the city, through the Bungalow Belt of Bennett pre-cut houses, and the ring of forges and steel plants, out into the hinterland beyond.

  About three hours into the drive he arrived at Millersville, an insignificant lakefront place where the only sign of life was the gas station at the end of town. Dante pulled in and filled up and asked the attendant if there was anywhere he could get a drink round there and the attendant sighed and said there was the roadhouse a couple of miles along and he explained how to get there.

  Dante carried on driving and after a few minutes he turned right onto a gravel track which sloped down toward the lake and afforded him a bird’s-eye view of the water down below, stretching all the way to the horizon. Either side of the track was a wood thick with pine trees and dripping with rain, through which he could see lights shining. He turned a bend and the roadhouse came into view – a long, single-storied building, squat and wooden, crowned with a shingle roof. There was an open space in front of it where dozens of cars had been parked, illuminated by spotlights on posts. Among the sedans and coupes, there were trucks and vans, the odd tractor, and speedsters with jacked-up suspensions – the super-powered cars bootleggers used to run cat-roads and county-line blockades.

  Dante parked up as near to the track as he could, reversing the car into a spot so that it was ready to accelerate out of there if he had to leave in a hurry. He pocketed his Colt and the silencer, then stepped out into the rain, and his foot sank into the mud of the parking lot. As he pulled his foot out of the mire, the dog bounded across the seats and out into the darkness, and Dante cursed his luck. Despite the rain he left one of the windows half open so the dog could get back in if it needed to, then he set off toward the roadhouse.

  As he approached he could hear the dull thud of music emanating from the building over the sound of the downpour. There was a man standing in front of the entrance, a huge man with a five-day stubble, wearing blue jeans and a red lumberjack shirt. He gave Dante the once-over, then swung open the door, and the roar of good times spilled out into the night. Dante nodded, wiped his feet on the canvas sacking laid out in front of the door, and stepped into a brightly lit, spacious room.

  There were people everywhere, men, kids from the local farms, old-timers huddled together in booths, sporting girls looking for marks. There was a band on the stage, playing jug music, and a dance floor in front of the stage where drunk couples were swinging around.

  Dante walked through the crowd scanning the faces, looking for anyone familiar. He got to the bar and ordered a beer and as he sipped it, he inspected the surroundings as subtly as possible, trying to figure out if there was anything there that could possibly be connected to the poisoning back in Chicago. He’d spent the day making phone calls and paying visits, trying to gauge what anyone knew about the place. But no one knew anything at all, and now Dante was here, the place seemed too far away and provincial to be associated with a sophisticated hit on Chicago’s politicians, and he began to wonder if the waiter had got things wrong, had misheard the delivery drivers when they mentioned the roadhouse as the source of the poison booze.

  Dante drank his beer and ordered another, and midnight came and went and more people arrived and the place got rowdier, the music faster, the dancing more frenetic. He finished his drink and headed for the outhouses in the yard at the rear of the building. He stepped into the night air and trotted through the rain, across a stretch of mud to a row of four stalls lined up over a cesspit. He entered one, relieved himself, then waited for the men in the stalls next to him to leave. Then he stepped back out, checked the coast was clear, and looked around. Just behind the stalls was a fence that ran parallel to the roadhouse itself, cutting off the view of whatever was hidden in the rest of the yard. Dante walked along the fence and heard barking. He guessed there were guard dogs on the other side of the fence and wondered what might be there for them to protect.

  He scrambled onto the fence, which was slippery with rainwater, and hoisted himself to the top, and looked about. On the other side was a clearing as large and as muddy as a football field, which stretched all the way to the tree line in the distance, where the hill descended toward the lakeshore. He couldn’t see the guard dogs, but near the middle of the field was a low wooden shed where he guessed they must be locked up.

  He hauled himself over the top of the fence, and dropped down as quietly as he could into the clearing.

  To one side was a track that led back around to the front of the building, and to the side of that track three vans were parked up. Dante walked over and inspected them. They were the same kind of vans the Outfit used for deliveries to Chicago. Inconspicuous enough, till you looked inside and saw them full of crates that were strangely free of any markings or stamps. Dante thought about the Outfit’s whiskey routes. Most of the organization’s liquor came from New York, courtesy of Frankie Yale, and there was the other route through Detroit, the mosquito boats that crossed the river there. But there was also the third, much smaller route that delivered bonded liquor from the warehouses and distilleries of Minneapolis and Milwaukee to Chicago. These vans had to be from that route, diverted to stop at this roadhouse. Whoever was in charge of that route must know the roadhouse, must somehow be involved.

  Dante checked the vans more carefully, and that was when he noticed where they were parked – at the end of a path that led down the hill to the lakeshore. Maybe whatever it was the vans were picking up was coming in via the lake. He hunched over by the side of the van while he took the Colt from his pocket and affixed the silencer to it. The silencer wouldn’t do much to stop any gunshots from being heard, but it dampened down the muzzle flash, meaning he could shoot the gun in the darkness of the woods without it so obviously giving away his location.

  When the Colt was ready, he slipped it into his belt, and set off toward the lake, making a huge circle through the woods. After a few minutes, he came out at the other end of the field, where the forest sloped down toward the lake. From where he was standing he could see a track winding through the trees to a secluded bay below him where, half hidden among the beach grass, a speedboat was pulled up onto the pebbles. It was as good a place as any to bring in shipments. A boat from Canada could anchor a mile or so out, and the speedboat could make trips out to the larger vessel to bring a load to shore. But the speedboat wa
s tiny; a large shipment of alcohol would have meant it going back and forth to the larger boat all night.

  So what the hell were they moving through the place if not booze? What was less bulky than booze but just as valuable?

  And in an instant everything fell into place, as if every clue and piece of information he’d come across since he’d arrived in Chicago had been tossed into the air and had fallen to the floor in perfect alignment. He thought about the ease with which he could pick up his dope from the man in Bronzeville; the fact that it was the same stuff he got in New York; the line of bedraggled junkies waiting outside the scrapyard; the fact that the city was starting to flood with the drug despite Capone’s distaste for it. He thought about what Red had told him in the pool hall, about the city changing, and people arriving from New York, and now he realized what he’d meant. Red was a heroin dealer, would know first-hand what was going on.

  Dante thought back to his connections in New York, the routes they had set up for getting the stuff into the country, Turkey to Marseilles to Canada to New York. But now someone had started to move it from Canada into Chicago, too. Against Capone’s wishes. It was sailed down and dropped off at the roadhouse and driven a few hours into the city and distributed there through a network that was already well established. And that was the great irony – they were doing it in Capone’s own trucks, trucks the police knew not to interfere with.

  It explained the poisoning. Someone was trying to get Capone out of the way. He was the biggest block to consolidating a heroin line into the city. Whoever was in charge of Al’s northern whiskey run was the traitor. Dante just needed to get back to Chicago and make a phone call and he would have solved it all. Simple except for the fact that it put Dante in danger. It was the same French-Turkish dope he got back home and the same route through Canada – which meant the people behind it were the men he associated with back in New York.

  His friends.

  A chilling hollowness filled him, a sense of loneliness rather than betrayal. He didn’t feel anxious at the revelation that he had fewer friends than he’d supposed, and more enemies. He felt foolish. But he supposed anxiety would come soon enough.

  As he was heading back to his car, he heard a noise, saw a flashlight cutting through the forest. He ducked down low, and scanned the surroundings. He saw the man in the lumberjack shirt who’d been standing by the entrance, side by side with another man, checking the vans in the yard, looking at the footsteps in the mud there. Dante cursed himself for being sloppy, and he crept backwards through the trees. Then he heard a noise in front of him. Barking. They’d set the dogs on him, and from the sound of it, the dogs had picked up his scent.

  He turned and ran, looking behind him, seeing the beam of the flashlight, black shapes bounding toward him. The incline made his knees and thighs burst with pain, left him out of breath, and the men were getting closer, the barking louder, and he turned around to check where they were, and he tripped on a tree root and a searing pain ripped through his ankle, and the next thing he knew he was on the ground, the muddy earth smacking into the side of his face.

  He spun about to see the two men step through the tree line and come to a stop. The one in the lumberjack shirt was holding two leashes, at the ends of which strained two Dobermans, black and lean, all muscles, claws and teeth. The other man was older, wearing a Stetson and a light grey summer suit; he had a shotgun in one hand, and a flashlight in the other. He stared coolly at Dante a moment through the gloom, then he turned the beam onto Dante’s face, blinding him.

  ‘Settle!’ the man in the lumberjack shirt shouted. ‘Settle!’

  And the two dogs stopped their foamy barking and sat on their hind legs and panted. And the two men stared at Dante, and in the silhouette world he could hear the rain, and the distant jug-band music bleeding out into the night.

  ‘Drop your gun or we’ll loose the dogs,’ said the older man.

  Dante frowned and turned to see his Colt still in his hand. He couldn’t remember taking it from his belt. If he relinquished the gun, he was as good as dead. Tortured to tell them what he knew and then shot and buried in the forest, or fed to the dogs. But if he didn’t relinquish it, the dogs would rip him apart, and so would the shotgun. He certainly couldn’t outrun them with his now injured ankle.

  ‘We ain’t gonna tell you twice,’ said the man.

  Dante didn’t move and the man sighed, turned to his companion and nodded, and the companion reached down to unleash the chain from the Dobermans and as he did so, the dogs began to bark and snarl and strain against their leashes, almost pulling the man over with their strength. Dante stared at the dogs, two bullets of muscle.

  And then there was a noise from the tree line and the man with the flashlight turned and a shape bounded out of the trees. His dog, but changed somehow; it was vicious, a stray, all teeth and claws, the fighting dog that he’d seen that first night at the beach. It jumped and sank its teeth into the lumberjack’s fist. Dante fired off a shot at the suited man, and there was a flashing in front of him, and the man spun about and fell, and the beam of the flashlight pirouetted through the darkness and thumped into the undergrowth.

  Dante fired again, caught the second man, and then the Dobermans were free. He aimed at them and emptied the chamber. But it was too late. In the stretch of ground illuminated by the dropped flashlight he saw that the two Dobermans had already torn his dog apart. With a sickening feeling, knowing there was nothing he could do, he stumbled to his feet, put his weight on his ankle, and ran as best he could through the last of the muddy woods.

  He reached the roadhouse, ran around its side, and prayed they hadn’t slashed the tires of the Blackhawk or disabled it in some other way. He reached it, fumbled the keys from his pocket, got in, gunned the accelerator, barreled onto the approach road and got the hell out of there.

  As he swerved the car onto the main road back to Chicago, a jittery feeling washed over him, a sense of safety mixed with aftershocks of fear. And it was only then that he noticed the steering wheel was slick with blood. And he looked at his hands and his arm, and his sleeve was dripping with the stuff, gushing out of a hole in his upper arm.

  He pulled over to the side of the road and eased his jacket off, the pain suddenly excruciating. He rolled up his sleeve and inspected his arm, but he couldn’t see much of the shotgun wound for the blood and gore. He tried to think what he could use to make a tourniquet. He took off his shirt and ripped off a sleeve, and after folding it over a few times, he managed to tie it up above the injury and the pump of blood slowed. Then he looked through his jacket for the tin box with his needle and dope, and he managed to make up a spike despite his shaking hands, and he injected himself and within a few moments the thudding pain in his arm had faded into nothingness and he took a moment just to breathe.

  The junk mixed with his adrenaline, the cocktail of it all surging through him, and with it came a flood of emotion, and he hunched over the steering wheel and for the first time in years he cried, and felt ashamed of himself for doing so.

  He wasn’t sure how much time passed, if it was moving quick or slow; he seemed to enter some timeless state, the sadness and panic and relief all flowing through him, making his heart race, each sob more painful than the dull throbbing in his arm and ankle. He knew he had to move or he’d bleed to death, but despite knowing this, his body didn’t act. Maybe he wanted to stay where he was and pass out and never feel anything again.

  But eventually, through no effort of his own, the tears dried, and his chest stopped heaving, and he opened his eyes and it was as if he’d woken from a dream. The rain had stopped, the air was fresh and clean, scented with the smell of the pine forest. He looked up at the lonely, rain-washed road in front of him and saw that above the earth a new day was beginning, sunlight sprinkled across the sky as soft and yellow as sawdust.

  And the beauty made him start sobbing all over again. But he wound down the window, rested his damaged arm on it, and tried to focus on
the pain, knowing it would keep him in the here and now.

  Then he started the car and wondered if he’d make it back to Chicago before passing out.

  47

  Ida and Jacob awoke in the cool of morning, soothed, refreshed, emptied of their dreams. They ate breakfast at the kitchen table and when they’d finished Ida called the office and found out a message had been left for them by the go-between, with the address of Coulton’s apartment.

  She took down the details on a scrap of paper and stared at the address. There it was, the bloodstained apartment Gwendolyn had been to before she disappeared. She knew roughly where it was, one of the desolate streets between West 47th and the Grand Trunk Railroad, part of the slash of slums that ran down the edge of the Stockyards like a scar.

  Ida felt a sense of relief as she looked at it, sure they would get their break there, that the solution to the mystery was in that apartment, that they were just a step away from finding out what had happened to Gwendolyn.

  She called Michael and arranged the details, then they headed out. They walked along streets that had been washed cool by the rain, the fire escapes and street signs still dripping with it, the sweetness still hanging in the air. They sidestepped puddles muddy with weeks of summer dust, and reached the tram stop and waited, looking up at the sky, which was still laden with clouds, appraising the chance of another storm.

  The tram dropped them off near the corner of 47th and South Loomis, a block from Coulton’s address. Michael arrived in a Pinkerton car, parked up, and they walked over to the apartment, passing the industrial buildings and factories that lined the outer edge of the Stockyards. A lucrative industry in slaughterhouse by-products had emerged in the shadow of the abattoirs – businesses that used the leftovers to produce leather and soap, shoe polish, glue, violin strings and perfume – and it was these factories that littered the area.