Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  She’d placed ads in newspapers and magazines and business directories and told her old colleagues back at the Pinkertons, and the courthouses and the State’s Attorney’s and the police stations and the Detective Division that she was open for business, and asked them to send people her way if they could.

  Now it was just a question of waiting, and she surprised herself by not getting too anxious while she did. She had a feeling that bad times were coming, and bad times were good for detectives. Plus she still had most of the money left over from Mrs Van Haren’s check, enough to see her through years of bad times if she was careful and considered.

  She’d thought about Mrs Van Haren often in the weeks that had passed; she thought about the letter she and Michael had written, about what the letter didn’t say, about where the boy was, locked up in a lunatic asylum somewhere in Michigan. She’d had to convince Michael not to mention it, that no good could possibly come of it. She also thought about what the letter implied – that it was Mrs Van Haren’s actions in trying to marry her daughter off that had ultimately been the cause of her death. Mrs Van Haren must have been clever enough to spot the implication, and she’d still sent them the reward money out of her personal savings, despite the swirl of debts that was engulfing her family. Maybe it was the woman’s guilt at work, Ida had thought; maybe the money was her penance.

  Michael had taken his half of the cash and put it in trust for Tom and Mae’s education. Now Michael was semi-retired, taking up a consultant’s role at the Department of the Treasury. His refusal to be bribed by the State’s Attorney’s office had apparently caught the attention of some officials in the department who were looking for incorruptible men to assist in the training of new agents. Michael had offered Ida a job there, too, but she’d had enough of working for other people, had developed a distrust of large organizations. Her apprenticeship had come to an end and it was time for her to step out on her own. Although that wasn’t quite true just yet. Michael would be sticking around for a little bit, to help her out, especially in seven months or so when she’d need time off. She wasn’t sure how she’d deal with the business and the child, but she had Michael and Annette to help her out, Louis too, and she guessed that was enough.

  At the thought, she rose and walked over to the table in the corner where the Artophone was. She picked up the record Louis had dropped off, stared at the label, gold writing on black: Okeh Electric – West End Blues – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five.

  He had come by a few days previously with the record and a bottle of bourbon to christen the new office. It was unusual for him to bring her a record; he had released dozens of them over the years and he rarely made a point of giving her a copy. She’d put it on and they’d listened to it and she could tell at once why he’d made an exception for this one; it was something special, something she’d never heard the like of before. Whatever it was Louis had been searching for, the perfect form, he’d found it, pulled it into existence, and captured it on wax.

  They’d listened to it three times over before either of them spoke, then Louis told her how it took six weeks to get the records back from the pressing plant, so he’d had to wait that long to finally get to listen to what they’d recorded, and when he’d eventually gotten his hands on it, he and Earl couldn’t quite believe it. They’d spent hours hunched over the record player at the Ranch, smoking and listening to it on a loop, praising their good luck that it had turned out so well.

  Now she put the record on the platter and started it up, and then she went over to the open window and leaned against the frame, hoping the breeze would cool her down. The heatwave showed no signs of abating, and day after day the city still blazed with the sun, steeping them in sweat and sleeplessness. Her insomnia was exacerbated by the burns all along her back. Six weeks on and they were still tender and sore, and she had to apply ointment every four hours, and if she followed doctor’s orders, would continue to do so for the next two months. The gunshot wound wasn’t as bad, the bullet having passed through the flesh at the top of her shoulder, just grazing the bone. She’d come out of it all alive, mostly in one piece, and the experience of having survived it had shown her that she was tougher than she’d thought, just as Michael had always told her. There wasn’t any reason to worry; there never had been.

  Now she was on the mend, and the office was set up, and all there was left to do was wait for September to roll around, for the kick of autumn to shatter the pitiless heat.

  She looked down on the city below, at the busy streets, the traffic, the sunlight pooling on the windows of the skyscraper opposite, turning its facade into a honeycomb of yellow quartz. Then the music started up, with its distinctive fanfare, and a great hypnotic calm came over her, just as it always did when she listened to the song, as if the music was releasing into the air the drowsiness of a late summer afternoon, the mood of what it meant to be alive at that particular time, in that particular place. And it made Ida think of every summer that had ever been, and ever would be.

  And in that moment of stillness, she rubbed her belly where the bulge would form and knew that no matter what, the baby would be a perfect thing, as perfect as Louis’ song, because in nature as in art, perfect things were inevitable.

  She smiled to herself, and a warmth ran through her, and she thought how if the baby was a boy, she’d name it Jacob, and she drifted off into daydreams and after a minute or two, the song finished and the needle scratched around the final groove and the noise of the streets floated in once more from the window. She picked up the needle, returned it to its holder and stopped the record.

  And then there was a knock at the door.

  She paused a moment, put the record back in its sleeve, straightened herself up and turned around.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, and the door opened, and a tall, blonde woman stepped in, a guarded expression on her face, a blue-and-white sports dress hanging off her frame.

  ‘Hello, are you Miss Davis?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ida, stepping forward to greet her. ‘How may I help?’

  ‘I was looking to hire you. You’re the private detective, right?’

  Ida smiled and nodded and gestured to the chair at the desk and the woman sat, and Ida studied her first-ever customer, and her smile broadened; a blonde woman, it was always a blonde.

  Ida took her seat at the desk.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ she asked.

  The woman paused a moment, and then she began to tell her story, and as she did so, Ida felt the promise of a new adventure in the air, as tangible as the roar of the city outside, as electric as Chicago forging ever on into the future.

  ‘I heard a record Louis Armstrong made called “West End Blues”. And he doesn’t say any words, and I thought, this is wonderful, and I liked the feeling he got from it. Sometimes the record would make me so sad I’d cry up a storm. Other times the same damn record would make me so happy.’

  BILLIE HOLIDAY, c.1956

  AFTERWORD

  I have tried to make this book as factually accurate as possible, but as always with historical fiction, I sometimes had to choose between historical accuracy and telling the story I most wanted to tell. In some cases, different histories contradicted each other, or there was not enough evidence to determine what had actually happened. Below are some notes on where I deviated from established fact, or made calls between opposing accounts; any other deviations were either too minor to include here, or are my own errors or omissions, for which I apologize.

  Louis Armstrong’s journey to Chicago in the prologue is based on his description of that journey in his autobiography (Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans). I deviated from the story to include elements from other people’s accounts of their journeys northwards as part of the Great Migration, so that the episode became something of an amalgam.

  The Mafia funeral that starts the book is also an amalgam, in this instance of a number of Chicago gangster funerals: most notably those of Dean O’Banion and Mike Merlo in 1
924 (the latter is the source of the blue-flower theme). The planes full of flower petals are also based on fact. For ‘Diamond’ Joe Esposito’s funeral in 1928 two planes were indeed loaded with flowers to create a rain of roses; on the day, however, due to bad weather, the planes never took flight.

  Sherlock Jr., the Buster Keaton film Ida and Louis go to see, was actually released four years earlier in 1924. Keaton’s film of 1928 was Steamboat Bill Jr, perhaps his masterpiece. I chose the earlier, less well-regarded film as it closer fitted the book’s themes.

  Perhaps my greatest sin against history was the inclusion of the Long Count Fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. This fight actually occurred in September 1927, some nine months before the events of the book. I wanted to include both this and another landmark event – Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘West End Blues’. The latter, though, occurred in 1928. In deciding to fit both into one summer, I had to choose between misrepresenting the history of boxing, or of jazz, and ended up choosing the former.

  The recording is a seminal one, not only in Louis Armstrong’s life, but also in the history of jazz and popular music. Armstrong had spent years experimenting with song structures and forms for the solo (the form he established back then is still used across genres today). In the recordings he made in the summer of 1928 his achievements in these areas found their perfect expression. The 1920s was a decade of modernism and artistic avant-gardism – Armstrong’s radical innovation and experimentation means there is a case to be made for adding him to the pantheon of 1920s modernist stars, a case eloquently made in Thomas Brothers’ Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism and Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism and All That Jazz.

  Some readers may have noticed that the structure of this book copies the structure of Armstrong’s recording of ‘West End Blues’ as depicted in one of the later chapters. It was my intention to have this book completely follow the arrangement of the song, so that each character became a different part of the instrumentation. Unfortunately, I was not wholly successful; earlier drafts that faithfully followed the song’s structure had issues with plot and pacing, so I had to deviate slightly. I guess it’s best to say this book is almost structured according to the song.

  The arrival of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in Chicago, and the subsequent jam sessions between them and Louis and his band-mates, actually occurred a few months earlier as well, in November 1927.

  Throughout this entire period, Armstrong and Capone were indeed on familiar and friendly terms. The two got on so well together that their closeness was remarked upon by other jazz musicians who were in Chicago at the time.

  Poison booze was a widespread phenomenon during prohibition. The inspiration for the batch of champagne in the book was the real-life case of amateur chemists Harry Gross and Max Reisman, who developed an adulterant that would allow Jamaican Ginger extract (a medicine that was 70% ethanol) to pass Treasury Department tests while preserving its drinkability. Unfortunately, the adulterant they developed turned out to be a neurotoxin. Poisoned Jamaican Ginger led to thousands of cases of paralysis and death. The most common effect was a withering of the muscles in the foot and ankle, causing victims to walk with a peculiar limp or shuffle. The infirmity was so widespread, a number of blues songs were written and recorded about it.

  The conspiracy at the heart of the book – heroin dealers attempting to make inroads into Chicago – is based on fact. The ‘French Connection’ (the route through which heroin made its way from Turkey to the United States) was already well established in the late 1920s. New York gangsters (notably ‘Lucky’ Luciano) were already involved in the distribution and sale of the drug, whilst the older guard were against it. Capone was content to keep his focus where he had originally made his money – alcohol, gambling and prostitution.

  Luciano and his associate Meyer Lansky used the tactic of letting rival factions attack each other before stepping into the breach in the Castellammarese War in New York in 1930–1. The war was fought by the Masseria and Maranzano crime families for control of the city. Almost as soon as Salvatore Maranzano won and declared himself capo di tutti capi, Luciano stepped in, assassinated him, and set up a power-sharing commission. I thought it possible that if New York gangsters were looking to wrestle back control of Chicago in 1928 (as indeed they were), they might use the same tactic. Due to the timing of the Castellammarese War, however, Michael’s knowledge that it was brewing in 1928 is somewhat fanciful.

  Capone’s visit to the doctor I invented. Whether he knew about his syphilis in 1928 is hard to confirm, although he was certainly showing signs of it by then, having contracted it as a youth in Brooklyn. The first documented evidence of it is from 1932, when Capone underwent a medical examination on entry to the Atlanta US Penitentiary (the exam also revealed he was suffering from gonorrhea).

  The extent of Capone’s cocaine use is yet another matter for debate. That he used it is not in doubt, but the evidence that he was a habitual user seems to rest solely on his autopsy in 1947, which revealed that he had a perforated septum, a symptom of heavy cocaine use, but also of syphilis.

  Capone’s war with Bugs Moran reached its climax about eight months after the end of this book, in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. Capone hired men to attack Moran’s Northside Gang in their Lincoln Park headquarters. Posing as police officers, they lined seven of Moran’s men against a wall, then gunned them down. With Moran’s customary good luck, he was by chance not on the premises at the time. The massacre was the beginning of the end for Capone. Bloody photos of the incident made front pages around the world, the goodwill of the city turned against him, and the authorities allocated ever more resources toward having him imprisoned. He was convicted of tax evasion in 1931 and released eight years later, by which time he had been ravaged by syphilis, both mentally and physically. He died on his Florida estate in 1947, at the age of forty-eight, an invalid with the mental age of a child.

  A great introduction to the era is Bill Bryson’s excellent One Summer: America, 1927. For more information on the Chicago jazz scene in the 1920s, I would recommend Thomas Brothers’ Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism and William Howland Kenney’s Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History 1904—1930. The most enjoyable of the Capone biographies I read was Laurence Bergreen’s Capone: The Man and the Era.

  *

  Dead Man’s Blues is intended to be the second in a four-part series which charts the history of jazz and the Mob through the middle fifty years of the twentieth century. In an Oulipo-inspired conceit, each of the four parts will contain a different city, decade, song, season, theme and weather. Part three will be set in 1940s New York in the autumn. The weather, theme and song are yet to be decided, although for the latter, ‘Autumn in New York’ seems an obvious choice. Maybe too obvious. We’ll see. The main characters from the first two books will reappear in the next two.

  RAY CELESTIN

  London, March 2016

  Acknowledgments

  Huge thanks to Shemuel Bulgin, Mariam Pourshoushtari, Ben Maguire, Julia Pye, Tony Hemphill, Jane Finigan, Juliet Mahony, Susannah Godman, Sophie Orme, Josie Humber, Maria Rejt, and everyone at L&R, Mantle and Macmillan.

  DEAD MAN’S BLUES

  RAY CELESTIN’S debut novel, The Axeman’s Jazz, won the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger and was shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year Award. Dead Man’s Blues is his second novel. He lives in London.

  Also by Ray Celestin

  THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

  First published 2016 by Mantle

  This electronic edition published 2016 by Mantle

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5892-6

  Copyright © Ray Celestin 2016

  The right of Ray Celestin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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