by Ray Celestin
‘But on that final night the boy realized he had failed the father again, and the reason for that failure was the appearance of his fiancee, and by extension his sexuality. He suffered a relapse, took out his anger and frustration on the girl, killing her in the process, and then he shut down. Maybe before he was attacked and his face was destroyed, maybe after. He finally realized he could not be the two different people he had spent his life trying to be, and so he became neither, without personality, unable to respond to stimulus, unsure of who or what he was.
‘That is Dr Munroe’s assessment, at least. Perhaps at some point some new persona might arise, some third personality he can use to interact with the world, but given the severity of the trauma, I doubt it. I fear he’ll be like this for life, a body without a person inside.’
The doctor held up his hands, then placed them on the desk in front of him. Michael nodded, and stared at the untouched cups of tea.
‘So,’ said the doctor after a moment, ‘will you reveal his whereabouts? Or let us continue to treat him? I don’t see any benefit to anyone in forcing him through the court system. Dr Munroe will testify to the patient’s total inability, and the judge will send him back to an asylum, and all that will happen will be a waste of taxpayers’ money.’
‘I agree with you, doctor. But I’ll need to discuss it with my partner first. There’s the dead girl’s mother to think about, too. She has a right to know the truth. Perhaps, in the end, the decision is hers.’
‘I see,’ said the doctor, with cold formality. ‘Please let me know of her decision.’
Michael left the office shortly after that, and stood on the front steps of the building while he waited for his car. He looked up at the great white mansion behind him, shining in the afternoon sunlight, and he thought about the room at its rear, where Gwendolyn’s killer was strapped into a straitjacket, his face shorn of its eyes, his body shorn of its mind. It made him think about New Orleans, about folk tales of voodou priests bringing corpses back to life, and he thought of what Coulton Senior had told him in his office about voodou and money.
Then Michael’s car arrived, and he got in, and was driven through the arsenic green of the fields, back to the station, back to Chicago, mulling over voodou and the dreams of empires lying in tatters, and the residue and weight of the shadows that passed silently through the world.
July 24th, 1928
Dear Mrs Van Haren,
We would firstly like to offer to you our condolences on the loss of your daughter. This case was the most troubling and distressing we have had to investigate in our time with the Pinkertons and it affected us both deeply. We have put much thought into our decision to write to you, weighing your right to know the truth about what happened to Gwendolyn against the heartbreak we know it will cause you. As you have this letter in your hand, you already know our decision. What has been printed in the newspapers and in the Pinkertons’ own reports is somewhat true, but it does not tell the full story; below is what we believe to be the truth. We uncovered these details in painful circumstances, and at great personal cost, so we felt it only right that we present them to you, whether or not you choose to read them.
Your daughter spent the day of her disappearance trying to find Charles Coulton Junior so that she could tell him she was breaking off their engagement. She went to Bronzeville and met a man called Randall Taylor, a go-between, who gave her the address of an apartment Coulton rented, where he thought Coulton might be. The apartment was on a desolate road to the south of the Stockyards and Coulton used it as pied-à-terre.
Gwendolyn arrived there at some point after ten o’clock. But on her arrival, she happened to interrupt Coulton and his companion, Lloyd Severyn, as they were involved in cleaning up a violent crime. When she saw what they were doing, she rushed back home and, fearing for her life, attempted to leave the country. She packed a bag and caught a taxi to Illinois Central station, but en route, a few blocks from the station, Severyn caught up with her, abducted her, and took her back to the apartment.
While she was there, Coulton and she argued, and Coulton strangled and killed her. We do not believe her murder was premeditated, and Severyn was not involved in her death. In a panic, Coulton moved her body to the basement and hid it under the coals in the cellar and, later that night, fled the scene.
These are the broad details of what happened to your daughter, much of which overlaps with what you already know. Attached are copies of our personal case files, which detail the larger context of the events, the crime Gwendolyn stumbled upon that night, and how it was part of a conspiracy set up by Charles Coulton Senior whose aim was the establishment of a heroin distribution network in the city.
We thought we would write you these details personally so that you knew from us first-hand what we had uncovered, and would not have to rely on newspapers and the skewed reports of the police and our former colleagues in the Pinkertons.
My father, Peter Davis, often used to say that it’s best to know the truth, no matter how upsetting that truth may be. Throughout my life I have believed this to be valid and well-founded, but in writing this letter, I am no longer sure.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything in relation to this, we are always available to talk, and can be reached via the return address. Again, we offer you our condolences on your loss and hope you may find some measure of consolation.
With deepest sympathy,
Ida Davis and Michael Talbot
59
Footsteps echoed along the corridor of the hospital, and the man in the bed propped himself up, grimacing against the pain ripping through his stomach. There was a knock, and the door swung open, and the nurse leaned in and smiled.
‘A Mr Halpert here to see you,’ she said.
The man in the bed frowned, not recognizing the name.
‘Says he’s a movie producer,’ the nurse added, ‘from Hollywood . . .’ She rolled her eyes and grinned and the man in the bed smiled back at her and a memory rose up in his mind from what seemed like an age ago – a hotel bar, a Jewish man, suntanned, in Chicago looking for gangsters.
‘Ask him in,’ he said, and the nurse nodded and disappeared behind the door and a few seconds later Halpert stepped into the room. He had his hat in one hand, a briefcase in the other, and a broad smile on his face.
‘Mr Sanfelippo?’ he said, and Dante nodded.
‘We met at the bar of the Drake . . .’
‘Yes, I remember. Please, take a seat.’
Halpert smiled and sat, drummed his fingers on the crown of his hat.
‘How are the injuries?’ he asked.
‘Mending,’ said Dante. ‘The doctors had to remove four feet of intestines, but there’s been no infection, and the morphine keeps the worst of the pain at bay.’ The last of these statements was not strictly true, but Dante had found his visitors were more comfortable in his presence if they thought he was comfortable, too.
Halpert smiled and opened up his briefcase, took out a brown paper bag full of grapes and passed it to Dante.
‘Thank you,’ said Dante, stretching painfully to put the grapes on the bedside table. Halpert took a handful of them out of the bag and began popping them into his mouth.
‘How’s your hunt for actors been going?’ asked Dante.
‘My boss is recalling me to California.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘On the plus side, I managed to read that book on Capone – an early draft – and I think we’re going to go ahead and film it.’
‘That’s very brave. So what can I do for you, Mr Halpert?’
‘Well, after we had our chat at the bar, your line of work was pointed out to me by a third party, and that set me off to tracking you down. I’d like to offer you a job, Mr Sanfelippo.’
‘Thanks for the offer but I’m not an actor.’
‘Not that kind of a job, although you’ve got the face for it. As you know, we ‘ve got these gangster films coming up, an
d we need someone to act as an . . . overseer of authenticity. A consultant. To help keep them realistic.’
‘I see,’ said Dante, not quite convinced that such a job could exist. ‘The job title would be?’
‘Consultant,’ said Halpert, popping another grape into his mouth.
‘And what would my actual job be?’
Halpert grinned, as if the two had just shared a secret. ‘You’d be a fixer. For the studio. You’ve quite the reputation for it. Perhaps Hollywood is a more . . . relaxed . . . environment to pursue your talent.’
‘Which studio is this?’
‘Silly me.’ Halpert rummaged around his pockets and produced a card and passed it to Dante.
SAM HALPERT
Executive Producer, Howard Hughes Movie Productions Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, Cal.
‘We’re raring to go on Scarface – that’s the Capone film. It’d be a nice easy start for you. And after that, whatever Mr Hughes thinks you’d be good at. You’ll find Mr Hughes to be a very generous man. You’d have your accommodation paid for, first-class travel wherever you went, and the retainer would be substantial. Mr Hughes would even pay for you to visit the city of angels for a few weeks to see how you like it before you commit. We’ll get you on the Santa Fe Chief. It’s an all-Pullman – I came on it myself – buffet cars, lounge cars, dining cars. Only takes sixty-eight hours but you’ll wish it took more.’
Dante had heard of the train, ‘the rolling boudoir of the film set’. He thought of the last time he had taken a train to California, sleeping in a boxcar with three other hobos, freezing through the Sierra Nevada mountains, burning up through the desert.
‘Mr Halpert, would you like a first piece of advice? A freebie? Change the name from Scarface to something else. Al’s very sensitive about those scars.’
Halpert grinned. ‘See, Mr Sanfelippo, you’re proving your worth already.’
He got out a pen and pad and made like he was jotting down what Dante had said and Dante realized why the man was producing movies and not acting in them.
‘Your confidence in me,’ said Dante, ‘your job offer – is based on what you heard about me after meeting me in a bar?’
‘We’ve been looking for someone to come and work for us in this capacity for a while now. That was also one of my reasons to be in Chicago, though I couldn’t admit it last time we met. I made substantial inquiries about you. We’re sure you’ll be a good fit. Like I said, the age of the celluloid gangster is here, and maybe you could be a part of it.’
Halpert smiled and his hand went rummaging through the brown paper bag for more grapes.
‘Well, that’s a mighty fine offer. How long do I get to decide?’
‘As long as you want. Take some time to think it over and let me know. I’m leaving town in a couple of days, but you can contact me at the Drake before then, and via the Hollywood office after I leave.’
‘Thank you, Mr Halpert. I’ll have a think about it.’
‘You do that, and get well soon.’
The man rose, nodded a quick goodbye and walked out of the room, and Dante listened to his footsteps echoing along the corridor and into nothingness. He looked at the card again, tapped his fingers against it and tried to imagine California. Then he looked up at the drab hospital room. The afternoon sun was slanting in through the window, turning a section of the bed and the floor a golden orange. Loretta would be here soon, and he’d show her the card for the fun of it.
She’d been here every day over the last month. She was the face he had seen when he’d awoken after the surgery, and he’d felt her presence when he was drifting in and out of consciousness in the days just after the operation, strung out on hospital morphine while simultaneously withdrawing from the heroin. It was the longest he’d ever gone without it. The morphine helped; the fact that he was bedridden and couldn’t score helped even more. But for the first time in years, he actually wanted to quit. A strange feeling after all that time in the wilderness.
He looked at the bag of grapes, leaned over to pluck a couple out and as he shifted, he felt the pull of his skin against the stitches in his stomach and an avalanche of pain ran through him, and his mind jumped back to the night in the building.
He could only remember snatches of what had happened, but Loretta had filled him in. She had gotten him out of the building, found the car, somehow managed to get him into it, driven him to a hospital. She’d called around and managed to get Al there within a few hours, and he’d taken care of the rest – arranging for Dante to be moved to the hospital he was in now, where the doctors were on the payroll.
They’d kept watch on the newspapers for reports about Coulton’s death – all of them described it as an accident, a freak office fire responsible for the death of the financier and two of his associates. No mention of the bodies having bullets in them. Al claimed he’d done nothing to suppress any Coroner’s reports so they’d put the hush job down to someone in City Hall or the State’s Attorney’s office or maybe the attorneys that were crawling all over the remains of the man’s business empire.
Aside from that, Al put his weight behind getting evidence to disappear from the shoot-out on the elevated tracks. Heavy kickbacks for the officers investigating not to pursue who the mystery fourth man in the shoot-out was, to lose all evidence of Dante’s presence there. Fingerprint samples from the bullet-riddled car by the drugstore vanished from the file before they could be crosschecked.
When Dante had gotten some of his energy back and was a little more lucid, he’d explained to Al what had happened. He told him almost everything – that Coulton wanted to take out Al so he could take over his distribution network, that he’d teamed up with Sacco, who was his man on the inside. He didn’t mention the New York connection, not wanting to implicate himself. Al must have known, though, must have linked Coulton’s plan to the man coming to see him months earlier with a scheme to bring heroin into the city. Al had thanked him, told him he’d done a good job, and proceeded to make cracks about Loretta, and that’s when Dante knew he was in the clear.
Then he’d had the first of his unexpected visitors – Jacob’s girlfriend. She’d come by and sat awkwardly in the guest chair and they’d talked just as awkwardly, an odd, stilted conversation. She told him how she’d dealt with Severyn, how the police had found the nitroglycerin strapped to the top of a stand in Soldier Field. How the authorities, knowing the man who’d put it there was dead, were happy to keep it quiet, nip any outrage in the bud.
In a way, Dante was glad it was her who had taken care of Jacob’s killer. Between them they’d put the last few details in their place. He felt a chill run through him when she told him about Coulton’s plan to set Capone and Moran against each other; it was exactly the same plan Lansky and Luciano had talked about using on New York’s two biggest crime families – the Masserias and Maranzanos.
The news left Dante in no doubt as to the identity of the New York connection – it had to be his two friends, and it made him think of what Red had said, about the way Chicago ran on each man’s need to get one over on the next man, that the world turned on the friction of conflicting interests. Coulton and his friends had been using exactly that to further their ends, twisting that sad, simple truth about humanity to wreak a terrible violence on the city, and Dante and Jacob and the girl had all been dragged into the center of the storm.
Through all of it he and the girl had managed to survive, and now the two of them talked about it with the distant intimacy of veterans. They spoke haltingly and he realized that just like him, the girl was a traumatized soul, one who had difficulty expressing her troubles. But Dante had Loretta for support, and as he looked at the girl, he wondered who she had, and he felt sorry for her.
Then out of the blue she asked him if he was sticking around in Chicago, and he said he probably wasn’t. And when she asked him where he was going, he surprised himself by saying he wasn’t sure.
The girl left him her card, and told him t
o stay in touch, and he thought it was a strange thing for her to do until she explained why and it made Dante happy. And then she took the sunglasses out of her bag and gave them back to him and told him she didn’t need them anymore, and they both smiled.
Looking back on the meeting now, he wished the movie man had come a few days earlier, and he could have told the girl he was going to Hollywood. The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was as good a place as any for a new start. He looked at the movie man’s card once more, flicked it through his fingers. He’d call up the fisherman out on Long Island, tell him that he could keep the boat, keep the business, do whatever he wanted with it. He smiled at the thought of telling them, when they asked, that he’d decided to go out west to make movies. The age of the celluloid gangster was here.
Despite the pain, he leaned over and grabbed the bag of grapes, eating them as he watched the sun move lower through the window, unfurling a fan of golden light across the room. Just before it finally set, he picked up the card once more and looked at it, at the address on Santa Monica Boulevard, and then he heard footsteps approaching and Loretta stepped into the room, all long legs in the setting sun, her hair the red of furnaces and prairie fires.
‘What’s with the card?’ she asked, taking off her coat.
He thought a moment, and grinned.
60
The offices were small, and if she was being honest, dingy, but the rent was cheap and the location was central. She’d paid six months in advance, bought a desk and chairs, an electric fan, a pot plant, a radio, and an Artophone suitcase record player. She’d installed a phone line, and paid a stenciler to paint the name on the glass of the outer door in Times New Roman, gold with black trim: Ida Davis, Private Investigations.