by Ray Celestin
‘Is this to do with the rich girl?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Detroit?’
‘Yeah. Get the kids out of school now.’
‘Is it safe to go home before we leave?’
‘Better not.’
Silence.
‘Better not?’ she repeated.
‘I’m sorry to have to put you through this,’ he said weakly, asking himself what kind of man put his own family under siege. More than once.
‘I’ll call you tonight when you’re settled in,’ he said.
‘All right.’
‘Annette, this is the last time. I promise you that.’
But she put down the phone and cut the connection.
He rubbed his temples and took a moment. He imagined Annette going home and telling the children they had to leave, imagined them rushing down a platform to catch a train. Then Ida’s image rose into his mind. After the firefight he had led her through the lines of police, sat with her through the initial questioning and the drive back to the station. The whole time she was quiet, withdrawn, shocked, the blanket they’d given her wrapped tight around her shoulders. They gave their statements separately, then Michael had asked to use a phone, and had been directed to the room he was in now.
He listened to the ticking of the clock once more and made another call, this one to the Pinkertons. He explained what had happened, where he was, and the need for a car and a safe house. Once it was arranged, he turned and stepped into the corridor and was surprised to see Walker, his friend from the State’s Attorney’s, standing there. Michael hadn’t seen him since the baseball game and for some reason he found his reappearance at the station unsettling. Walker was talking to two detectives, and he must have sensed Michael staring at him, because he turned Michael’s way, then cut the conversation short and headed over.
‘I just read your witness statement, and Ida’s,’ he said, motioning to the files he had in his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Michael.’
‘Can I have a look at Ida’s?’
Walker passed one of the files to Michael and he scanned through it, and it was only then he realized the full horror of what had happened in the Stockyards. Severyn had gunned down Jacob right in front of Ida, just a few inches from her face. No wonder she was wrapped up so tight.
He read it back once more. She might have been shook up but she’d kept everything in the statement as vague as possible: the address, the descriptions of the people involved, the reason they were there, those she suspected. The detectives must have known they were railroading them, but they’d probably hold off till they spoke to Pinkerton brass and figured out what the hell was going on. And when Michael’s bosses did find out they’d been investigating the Van Haren case against orders, they’d be suspended, then sacked.
‘Have the two dead shooters been identified?’ he asked.
‘One of ’em,’ said Walker.
‘Can I get a look at his sheets?’
Walker nodded. ‘Not here, though. There’s an interview room upstairs. Forty-seven. Gimme five minutes.’
Michael nodded and headed for the stairs, stopping by the washrooms on the way. He walked in, and splashed water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror, staring past the scars and the wrinkles and the bags under his bloodshot eyes, past the black voids in his pupils, staring past everything till he was staring at nothing, and a chilling emptiness filled him. And in that emptiness materialized the image of the man he had sent into the abyss a few hours earlier, and he wondered if it was the fifth or sixth man he had killed, and a gut-churning self-disgust filled him that he didn’t have the decency to remember them all.
Then another, stronger feeling: guilt at having put his family in danger. He should have seen it coming, he should have seen the risk. But he hadn’t. He made a vow to himself, that whatever happened, he’d be resigning from the Pinkertons. He’d put this case to bed, and that would be it. He’d look for less dangerous ways to make a living.
Walker was already in Room 47 when Michael arrived. He had the reports on the table and two paper cups of terrible coffee and a look of concern on his face.
‘Before I give you these, I want you to tell me what happened,’ Walker said. ‘Not what you put in the statement – the real deal, all of it.’
Michael decided to put his trust in the man and told him everything, not just as a means to get the files, but because he needed to talk to someone about it. He talked and Walker listened and nodded, and at the end he blew air through his teeth.
‘This is quite the mess.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘And maybe more messy than you think. The guns the shooters had – they were police issue. That’s going to complicate things.’
Michael thought a moment and nodded.
‘Best get started then,’ said Walker. ‘One of the shooters we haven’t identified yet. The detectives are sending his details down to the Bureau of Investigation in case he’s an out-of-towner.’
Walker picked up one of the files and opened it. ‘The other one was Abraham Roth,’ he said, passing the file to Michael. Michael inspected the mugshot pinned to the top sheet. It was the man Ida had shot.
‘A low-level enforcer. Petty raps all through his teens till he got busted in a fruit bar a few years ago, and after that he went silent.’
Michael frowned, flicked through the pages of the report, looked again at the photo. He was young, early twenties, with a sinister twist to his mouth. And something stranger: makeup, mascara, most of it wiped off before the mugshot was taken, but enough still there to make him look oddly androgynous. Michael checked the date stamp on the photo against the date the man got arrested in the fruit bar and saw they were the same.
He thought back to the ambush. The Hispanic kid walking down one end of the street, the car coming from the other. Then he remembered the story Ida had told him about Coulton Junior getting busted in a sweep on a fruit bar a few years back. Maybe it was a coincidence too that one of the shooters had a similar conviction or maybe it was what connected them all.
‘This bust in the bar sweep a few years ago,’ said Michael. ‘Can you get me a list of all the people arrested there? I reckon the Hispanic kid might have been one of them. We can get the kid’s name from that and maybe an address and some KAs.’
‘Sure,’ said Walker. ‘Gimme an hour.’
They both left the room and Michael went looking for Ida. He found her in a holding pen still looking traumatized, sitting with a female police-worker. Michael hated to see his protegee like this: shook up, pulling the blanket tight. There was something childish to the gesture, something so unlike Ida.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, sitting next to her.
She shrugged.
‘I arranged for a safe house.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I looked through the files of one of the shooters. I think I got an angle on the Mexican kid.’
She nodded, uninterested. ‘You get Annette and the kids safe?’ she asked, and Michael nodded. At some point he’d have to tell Ida the details of the promise he’d made to Annette, of his decision that even if they managed to make it through it all without losing their jobs, he’d be resigning anyway.
The door opened and a beat-cop stepped in, young and bright and smiling – everything they didn’t want to be around.
‘There’s a car outside,’ he said. ‘A driver from the Pinkertons.’
They drove over to the safe house in a heavy silence, the two of them staring absently out of the windows. When they arrived, Michael saw it was decent enough by Pinkerton standards: a two-room walk-up on the third floor of a greystone. Two men were stationed in the apartment, two men outside.
Ida perched herself on the sofa and said nothing.
‘You want me to call anyone to be with you?’ Michael asked.
Ida shook her head.
‘I’m going to head off and chase down those leads,’ he said, and she nodded,
and Michael left her there, feeling guilty about what had happened to her, guilty about leaving her, guilty about the fact she wasn’t up to carrying on the investigation just yet, and worried she might never be.
He stepped out into the street and nodded to the two Pinks parked up out front. Ida was safe, Michael’s wife and children were heading out of the city. It was time to get to work.
He found a bar and made a call to an armorer he knew, then he drove back to the station, hustled through the place till he found Walker and the two of them found a room to talk in. Walker held up the file of a Mexican man called Arturo Vargas.
‘I went through all the names from that bust. This was the only one that matched,’ he said, passing Michael the file. Michael took it and opened it up and recognized the face of Arturo Vargas as the shifty-looking boy from the ambush, probably the boy who had helped Severyn throw the dancer’s body off the bridge. He checked the file. A rent boy with a history of soliciting offenses and getting rousted in bars and brothels. Michael noted down his home address, his known associates. The address would have been abandoned long ago, but it was a good enough starting point.
‘Can you get me info on these KAs?’ said Michael.
‘Already did,’ said Walker, and he handed him a list of names and addresses.
‘Thanks. Are the police onto any of this?’
Walker shook his head. ‘Not while I’ve got the files. Plus they’re busy doing damage control on the police-issue guns, trying to figure out who they can pin it all on.’
‘How long can you keep these leads hidden?’
‘How long do you want?’
Michael thought. ‘Twenty-four hours?’
Walker smiled. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Michael’s house was dark when he got in: dark, empty and soulless with his family on the Wolverine to Detroit. He walked into the kitchen, found the stash spot under the sink and took out the wad of money hidden there. Then he went into the living room and sat on the sofa and didn’t bother switching on any lights. He lit a cigarette and waited, looking about the place. It was strange being there alone; he couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. What good a house, he thought, without a family to live in it?
He finished his cigarette and lit a second, and rolled his head from left to right, loosening up the muscles in his neck, easing the knots he sensed there. He could feel the fatigue in his muscles and bones, like he’d been exhausted for decades.
Then there was a buzzing at the door. He rose and turned on the lights and the brightness stung his eyes, and he let in the armorer. The man shuffled into the room with a great duffle bag weighing down his shoulder. He was a slight man, Chinese, cleanshaven and balding, dressed in a seersucker suit with a blue bow tie and a yellow carnation in his lapel. He’d always struck Michael as the kind of man who looked like he should be working in the theater, or as a roper in front of some vaudeville on the Michigan City boardwalk, trying to entice customers inside.
‘Nice place,’ the man said, putting the bag on the floor.
Michael forced a smile and nodded. The man opened the bag and laid his wares out in front of him.
‘A bulletproof vest, a twenty-gauge Chesterfield pump-action, a tommy with a Cutts compensator, two cartons of shot, and four fifty-round magazines for the tommy.’
‘How much?’
‘All in, let’s call it four hundred.’
Michael handed over the money.
‘Thanks. Now, you don’t happen to be in the market for any hand grenades, nitroglycerin, marijuana or cocaine?’ he asked, and Michael shook his head.
‘Fair enough,’ said the man. ‘Rental rate’s seventy per subsequent week.’
‘All right,’ said Michael. ‘Say, you deal anyone any police-issue tommies recently?’
The man shook his head. ‘I stay away from police-issue anything. Too many questions.’
When the man had gone, Michael loaded the weaponry into a bag. Then he locked up the apartment and stepped out into the Chicago sunset.
He had a car, and a bag full of guns, and a list of people to see.
49
Dante hobbled into the lobby of the Drake at some point around noon. His jacket had a gunshot hole in it and was covered in blood, and his trousers and shirt were smeared with mud, and his hair was plastered to his face from the rain, and he was limping badly. All of which caused the concierges and bellboys, and customers in the bar having their teas and coffees, to stop and stare at him as he crossed the space.
‘Morning, Pete,’ he said to the elevator boy. The boy gawped at him, then set the elevator going and after a minute or so Dante was unlocking the door to his room and stepping inside. He took off his jacket and went over to the phone and called the direct line for the Metropole and a gruff voice he didn’t recognize picked up.
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s Dante. Who’s that?’
‘It’s Tony. You sound rough. You all right?’
‘I need a safe doctor. Now.’
‘What happened?’
‘I got shot. I need him here now.’
‘“Here” being the Drake?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m on it. Gimme fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops.’
Dante put the phone down and his head swirled. He saw a pack of cigarettes lying next to the phone, took one out and lit it. He peeled off his shirt gingerly. Then he rummaged through his jacket for his things, made up a needle and spiked himself and while he waited for the pain to go away, and the help to arrive, he smoked the cigarette and stared at the dust swirling through the room in the sunlight.
He must have passed out because he heard a ringing at the door and he came to and shouted that the door was open. A small, pudgy man entered, holding a black leather Gladstone bag, wearing a stern expression and a dark grey business suit.
‘You Dante?’
‘Yeah, you the doc?’
‘That I am,’ said the safe doctor. ‘Name’s Herschel.’
The Outfit employed dozens of safe doctors, mostly men with legitimate practices, who, for a fee, would provide emergency medical services with no questions asked. The man crossed the room to where Dante was slumped on the sofa, and sat in front of him on the coffee table. He popped a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles onto his nose, and inspected Dante’s arm.
‘Just the arm, is it?’
‘The ankle, too.’
The doctor peered at his leg a moment.
‘Let’s take care of the gunshot first,’ he said, smiling. He went into the bathroom and returned with a bowl of steaming-hot water. He spread a towel across the coffee table, placed the bowl on it, and took his things out of the bag, setting them on the towel one by one. Then he lifted up Dante’s arm once more and inspected it all over.
‘Ordinarily I’d suggest a shot of morphine before we got started but I see you’re already self-medicating,’ he said.
The doctor cleaned the wound with padding and iodine, then he took a pair of forceps, sterilized them, and inserted them into the largest wound. Dante winced from the sheer pain of it and after a moment, the doctor pulled out a piece of shot, and then another, and then another. Each time he removed the forceps from the wound he opened them wide and a piece of metal clunked onto the glass of the coffee table.
‘Well, that’s the easy one done,’ the doctor said, referring to the larger hole. ‘These smaller ones are going to be a lot more painful.’
After the most excruciating twenty minutes of Dante’s life, the doctor inspected the wounds and judged all the shot to be out of them. He cleaned them all again with iodine, took some padding and wrapped it into place with bandages.
‘You’re all right for now,’ he said, ‘but there’s still a strong risk of infection. Change the bandages every few hours so they’re dry and clean, and if you see any signs of infection – increased discharge from the wound, a color change, a bad smell, swelling, red streaks on your arm, a temperature, you give me a call straightaway.
’
He pulled a business card from his inside pocket and placed it on the coffee table.
‘And if I don’t answer,’ he continued, ‘get straight down to the hospital. I’d hate for you to lose your arm because I was out making a house call.’
Dante nodded.
‘Now let me look at that ankle.’
The doctor confirmed what Dante already suspected – a serious sprain, but no break. He prescribed rest and a raised foot for a few days and ice packs to reduce the swelling, then with another smile and a nod he went on his way, leaving behind some spare bandages and padding and a bottle of iodine.
As soon as he’d gone, Dante turned himself around on the sofa so his bad leg was propped up on the armrest and he rested his wounded arm on top of his chest and he drifted into a deep and feverish sleep where he dreamed he was being chased through some endless, primordial woods by a pack of hell-hounds, and no matter where he ran, he always came to some ravine and had to face the choice of jumping into an abyss, or being ripped apart by the dogs.
A ringing noise awoke him hours later and he opened his eyes to see the room had been plunged into a raw darkness, illuminated only by the moonlight streaming in from the windows. He wondered if he should bother getting up to answer, but the ringing continued, on and on, piercing and shrill. He eased his legs off the armrest and as he did so the blood rushed into his mangled ankle and it pulsed with pain and he thought of calling room service and asking for some ice to be brought up. Then he stood, tested his leg to see if it could take his weight, and as he did so the wounds in his arm began to throb, and he wished he had made a sling for his arm before he had fallen asleep.
He stumbled across the room, but just as he reached the phone, it stopped ringing, and he cursed his luck, and slumped down in the chair next to it and peered out of the window. He could see from the clock on the building opposite that it had just gone eleven. He called down to reception and ordered ice and some food – a cheese burger and fries and a couple of bottles of beer – and the man at the other end asked if he wanted to order anything for the dog. Dante choked out a no and put the phone down, overwhelmed by a rush of loneliness.