Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

“Mom says when I grow up I won’t be like the men around here.”

  Roy’s father looked at him and said, “How does she know?”

  When Benny Lost His Meaning

  Roy was sitting at the counter in the Lake Shore Liquor Store on a Saturday morning in November sipping a vanilla Coke listening to Lucio Stella and Baby Doll Hirsch talk.

  “Remember Mean Well Benny?” asked Lucio.

  “Worked for Jewish Joe. Spidery little guy. Got rung up for killin’ a crooked cop.”

  “McGuire, in Bridgeport. The Paddy guarded the mayor’s house.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s out. Mastro seen him at Murphy’s day before yesterday, eatin’ a steak without his teeth in.”

  “What happened to his teeth?”

  “Guess he had ’em yanked in prison. Mastro said Benny put his choppers in a glass of water while he gummed the steak.”

  “He got plans?”

  “Probably.”

  “We should find out.”

  “How’d he get that tag, anyway?”

  “It was Jocko named him Mean Well because too often he did things he wasn’t told to do that didn’t turn out well.”

  “Such as?”

  “Time he offered Lou Napoli’s girl, Ornella, a lift to Lou’s crib, only Lou wasn’t expectin’ her and happened he was entertaining a waitress from Rickett’s at the moment. Napoli worked for Jocko and when Lou told him how it had come about Ornella stabbed him and he almost lost a kidney, Jocko said, ‘You know, Benny, he means well.’ After that, he was Mean Well Benny to everyone in Chicago, even the cops.

  “Shootin’ McGuire was a mistake, too. He thought it was McGuire had leaned on Jewish Joe, so he threatened him one evening in Noches de San Juan, a PR bar on North Damen. McGuire took offense, busted Benny in the mouth, so Benny parked a pair in the cop’s chest. This was after McGuire got thrown off the force.”

  “Maybe why he got false teeth in the joint.”

  Roy liked going with his father to his liquor store on Saturday mornings. All kinds of people came in and Roy liked looking at and listening to them, even and especially if they were a little or a lot crazy. A week later, a day before his ninth birthday, Roy heard Lucio Stella tell Baby Doll Hirsch that Mean Well Benny’s corpse was found with his throat cut stuffed into a garbage can in an alley in Woodlawn.

  “What could he been doin’ in that neighborhood?”

  “Probably lookin’ to do some woolhead a favor he didn’t need.”

  After Lucio Stella and Baby Doll Hirsch left, Roy asked his father if he had known Mean Well Benny.

  “He used to come around. Why do you ask?”

  “I just heard Mr. Stella tell Mr. Hirsch that Mean Well Benny’s body was found in a trash can.”

  “Some men’s lives don’t amount to much, son. They get on the wrong road and don’t ever get back on the straight and narrow.”

  The following Saturday morning Roy’s father took Lucio Stella and Baby Doll Hirsch aside and said something to them Roy couldn’t hear, then they left without finishing their cups of coffee.

  “Dad, did you tell Mr. Stella and Mr. Hirsch to leave because of me?”

  “I did.”

  “Are they on the straight and narrow?”

  “They don’t know what it means.”

  Sick

  A girl’s dead body was found on Oak Street beach by a man walking a dog at five o’clock in the morning of March 5th. The body was clothed in only a black raincoat; there was no identification in the pockets. The girl was judged to be in her late teens or very early twenties, the most notable identifying mark being a six-inch scar on the inside of her left calf. She had light brown hair and brown eyes, height five feet four inches, weight one hundred and five. When discovered, the body was coated with a thin layer of ice. Forensics determined that the girl had been dead since approximately seven o’clock the previous evening. Her stomach and abdominal tract contained only particles of food; she had not eaten for at least two days.

  Twelve days later, at four p.m. on March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day, perhaps the most festive day of the year in Chicago’s substantial Irish community in 1958, a forty-eight year old woman named Mary Sullivan, a native of Belfast, Northern Ireland, who had been a resident of Chicago for twenty-two years, filed a missing persons report at the Division Street precinct, claiming that her daughter, Margaret, had not been in contact with her since March 2nd. Margaret, who fit the description of the corpse found on Oak Street beach on the 5th, including the scar on her leg, worked as a waitress at Don the Beachcomber’s restaurant—a strange, or perhaps not so strange, coincidence—and had been living with another girl, Lucille Susto, twenty years old, a recent arrival in the city from West Virginia, who also worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in The Loop. When questioned by police, Lucille Susto told them that she had not seen her roommate since the morning of the 4th, before going to work. Her recollection was that Margaret was not scheduled to work at Don the Beachcomber’s that night, a fact corroborated by the manager of the restaurant. Mary Sullivan’s husband, Desmond, Margaret’s father, had been living in Ireland for the past three years and was not presently in contact with either his wife or daughter; Mary did not have a current address for him. At six-thirty on the evening of the 17th, Mary Sullivan identified the body lying in the morgue as that of her daughter, Margaret.

  The man who discovered the body was Paddy McLaughlin, a doorman at the nearby Drake Hotel, who had been walking a standard poodle belonging to a resident of the hotel. McLaughlin, whose brother, James, was a sergeant in the Chicago police department, reported his find to the police immediately upon returning to the Drake Hotel with the dog.

  “Look, Roy,” his mother said to him while they were having breakfast on the morning of March 6th, “Paddy McLaughlin’s picture’s in the Trib.”

  The McLaughlins were Roy and his mother’s next door neighbors; their sons, Johnny, Billy and Jimmy, were Roy’s best friends. Roy, who was eleven years old, looked at the photograph of Mr. McLaughlin dressed in his epauleted doorman’s uniform, the brim of his military-style hat fixed precisely in the center of his forehead, the tip of his aquiline nose almost touching his long, thin upper lip.

  “He found a dead body,”

  “I read the article, Roy. He must have had quite a shock.”

  When Roy saw Johnny that afternoon he asked him what his father had told the family.

  “He said there was nothing to tell other than seeing the girl lying on the sand wrapped in a black raincoat and then calling the cops. My Uncle James says if the body’s identified my dad’ll be called to appear at an inquest, if there is one. I’m thinkin’ about goin’ down to the beach to search for clues. Want to come with me?”

  Johnny was six months older than Roy. He was interested in science and read all about fingerprinting, blood types and various procedures involving detection.

  “The police are doing that,” said Roy. “What makes you think we can find something they won’t?”

  “Happens all the time. In the Hardy Boys books they’re always solving crimes the cops can’t. The other night on Ned Nye, Private Eye a kid discovered a foreign coin in a murderer’s apartment that could have belonged only to the victim, brought it to Ned, and that cracked the case.”

  A light snow was falling at eight-thirty the next morning when Jimmy and Roy arrived at Oak Street beach.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Roy said. “The snow’s covering up whatever evidence might still be around.”

  Waves collapsing on the sand sounded like cats knocking over garbage cans in an alley. Lake Michigan was wrinkled gray and black.

  “You can’t see anything,” said Roy. “Not more than a few hundred yards, anyway. No ships in the distance, no planes in the sky. We should go to the Drake and get hot chocolate in the coffee shop.”


  “My dad doesn’t come on duty today until ten,” said Johnny. “We’ll go over then. The manager’s a pal of his so we won’t have to pay. Come on, let’s see if we can find something.”

  After forty-five minutes of searching all Roy had found was a broken pencil and a used rubber. After he unearthed the rubber he asked Johnny if he knew if the girl had been raped.

  “If she was, it probably didn’t happen on the beach in bad weather. She didn’t have any clothes on under the coat, so if the killer molested her he did it somewhere else before he dumped the body here.”

  Johnny found a toothbrush, cigarette butts, one child’s size pink mitten and a broken neck chain. He held up the chain for Roy to see and said, “This might be something.”

  A cop came along and said to them, “What are you boys up to? This is a crime scene.”

  “It isn’t marked off, officer,” said Johnny.

  “The snow’s coverin’ up the markers. You lads had best be moving along.”

  “Do you know Sergeant James McLaughlin?” Johnny asked. “He’s my uncle. I’m Johnny McLaughlin.”

  “Well, when I get home tonight I’ll be sure to tell my wife, Kathleen, guess who I encountered on Oak Street beach this mornin’ in the sleet and snow but Sergeant James McLaughlin’s nephew, Johnny. Go on now, both of you.”

  “And my father’s Paddy McLaughlin, the head doorman at the Drake Hotel. He found the body.”

  “Next you’ll be tellin’ me your mother’s Rose of Sharon.”

  In the Drake coffee shop the boys sat at the counter and ordered hot chocolates.

  “I think the killer’s a rich guy who lives in a fancy apartment around here, on Lake Shore or Marine Drive,” said Johnny. “Probably somebody she knew who worked or she met at Don the Beachcomber’s. He raped the girl, strangled her—or maybe, if he was a real pervert, strangled her before raping her—then carried the body down in the dead of night.”

  Johnny and Roy were finishing their hot chocolates when Paddy McLaughlin came into the coffee shop and sat down on the stool next to his son’s.

  “Top o’ the mornin’, fellas,” he said. “Bobby, the night man, told me you were visiting. May I inquire as to your purpose?”

  “We were searching for clues to the murder,” said Johnny.

  “A cop ran us off the beach,” said Roy.

  Mr. McLaughlin put two quarters on the counter and stood up.

  “I’ll be goin’ on the job now,” he said. “See that you get home safely, detectives. Don’t hitchhike, take the bus.”

  The girl’s killer turned out to be a regular customer at Don the Beachcomber’s, who, as Johnny figured, lived a few blocks from the beach.

  “Johnny got it right,” Roy told Jimmy Boyle. “He pegged where the creep met her and where he lived. “Johnny knew it the morning we went to Oak Street to see if we could find a lead.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “No, Johnny just put it together. Maybe he got a feeling from the spot his dad discovered the body.”

  “I heard on the radio about people who have a special talent to tune in to the sick mind of a killer,” said Jimmy, “to identify with him. It’s called havin’ a sick sense.”

  Margaret Sullivan’s rapist-murderer was a 42 year old bachelor named Leonard Danzig, an architect, who told the judge at a pre-trial hearing that he had been searching for several years for a direct descendant of the sister of Jesus Christ, whom he believed, like her brother, claimed to have been fathered by the Holy Ghost. Danzig said he felt it was his duty to abort what he described as an immoral lineage in order to cease the false prophesies that had wrought chaos since the blasphemy of immaculate conception. Danzig’s rationale for the rape was to anneal “the unspeakable insult.”

  Leonard Danzig did not stand trial but was instead committed for the remainder of his natural life to the Hermione Curzon Institution for the Hopelessly Irreparable in Moab, Illinois.

  “Jimmy Boyle’s father says Danzig should have gotten the electric chair,” Roy told his mother. “What do you think?”

  “You can’t execute all of the sick people in the world, Roy. There are too many. Once you start doing that it would never stop.”

  “Don’t you think the world would be better off if Leonard Danzig wasn’t in it?”

  Roy’s mother, who had already been divorced twice and had a third marriage annulled, said, “Him and a few other men I can name.”

  The Best Part of the Story

  Roy and four other boys, all of them twelve or thirteen years old, were standing in front of Papa Enzo’s Pizza Parlor talking and smoking cigarettes, just hanging out even though the temperature outside was well below freezing. A foot of snow had fallen the day before, most of it had hardened and iced over, but the boys, wearing parkas or peacoats, did not mind the cold, they were used to the Chicago winters; only when a fearsome wind was tearing in from the lake did they not gather on the street, especially on weekend nights such as this one. They could hear Buddy Holly’s new record, “Maybe Baby,” coming from the jukebox inside Enzo’s.

  It was almost ten o’clock when Jimmy Boyle noticed Logo Leberko lurking next to the doorway of Papa Enzo’s restaurant.

  “Hey, guys, look—there’s that creep Leberko standin’ by the entrance. I thought he was still locked up at St. Charles.”

  “Nah,” said Tommy Cunningham, “Bobby Dorp told me yesterday they couldn’t keep him in the reformatory after he turned eighteen. They either had to release him or transfer him to Joliet.”

  “He and another guy robbed Koszinski’s Bakery, didn’t they?” Roy asked.

  “Tried to,” said Boyle. “It was so stupid. Leberko’s mother works there and when he and Dion Bandino stuck up the joint Logo’s old lady was behind the counter. Accordin’ to the article about it in the Trib, Leberko said, ‘Ma, I thought you weren’t workin’ today,’ and she said she was fillin’ in for someone who was out sick, so she identified him for the cops.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Roy. “They really went through with the robbery even though his mother was there?”

  “That’s the best part of the story,” said Richie Gates. “They had guns, my brother told me. He used to deliver cakes for Koszinski’s, so he heard all about it. Both Leberko and Bandino had ’em in their hands when they went in.”

  “Did Bandino get sent to St. Charles, too?” asked Roy.

  “Yeah,” said Cunningham, “but he got out sooner ’cause he was only fifteen.”

  “Leberko’s a moron,” Jimmy said. “Remember how he was always shakin’ down younger kids for their milk money at Clinton? He’d take their change then stomp on the kids’ lunchboxes and slap ’em around even though they’d already come across.”

  “He got me once,” said Richie. “After that I took off if I saw him in the schoolyard. He didn’t get past fourth grade, then they had to let him out when he turned sixteen.”

  “His old man was murdered in prison,” said Tommy Cunningham. “Other inmates set him on fire in his cell.”

  “No shit,” Jimmy Boyle said.

  “Yeah. My father thinks he was snitchin’ for the guards.”

  The door of Papa Enzo’s opened and two people came out, one of whom was Dion Bandino. Leberko came up quickly behind him and with an eight inch switchblade cut Bandino’s throat clear across. Blood exploded out of Bandino’s neck like flames being tossed out of a bucket, turning the snow at his feet into a sea of vermilion. For what seemed to Roy a long time, though it was only a few seconds, nobody moved except Leberko, who disappeared. Dion Bandino was dead and didn’t know it as his body accordioned down and knelt with his chin resting on his chest.

  Roy and Jimmy Boyle took off in one direction and Richie Gates and Tommy Cunningham in another without looking back.

  After they’d run as fast as they could for a few block
s, Jimmy and Roy stopped to catch their breath, and Jimmy said, “I thought Bandino would fall forward. He just dropped and didn’t topple over.”

  “I never saw anybody get their throat slit before.”

  “We can’t say nothin’ about it, Roy. Don’t tell nobody we were there. We don’t want the cops to make us be witnesses against Leberko. If somehow he beat the rap he’d come after us like he done Bandino.”

  “Why do you think he did it?”

  “Bandino must’ve caved, maybe said the stick-up was Logo’s idea, that he’d been forced into it by an older guy.”

  Roy was still gasping for air; even in the darkness he could see his breath.

  “I’m goin’ home,” he said.

  “Me, too,” said Jimmy. “Remember, don’t tell anyone we were there.”

  When he got home, Roy’s mother was sitting alone at the kitchen table. Her eyes were red and her face was swollen.

  “Hi, Ma, why’re you cryin’? Are you all right?”

  “Not really, no, Roy, but it’s nothing you have to worry about. Did you have a good time with the boys?”

  “It’s too cold to be outside.”

  “I’m going to make a pot of tea. Do you want some?”

  “No, thanks. I’m pretty tired. I’m going to lie down in my room. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes, Roy. It’s just that Dan and I have decided to not see each other any more. It’s for the best, I know, we’re really not a good match, but I feel like my dog just died.”

  “We’ve never had a dog.”

  “Oh, you must know what I mean. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a kind of death, nevertheless. There are all kinds of deaths. Some stay with you more than others, you’ll see.”

  Four days later the police found Logo Leberko hiding in the boiler room of an apartment building a few blocks away from Papa Enzo’s Pizza Parlor; scraps of food he’d scavenged from garbage cans were scattered on the floor and he was covered with rat bites. Roy and his friends were not questioned about the incident; other witnesses, including Dion Bandino’s companion that night, Arvid Gustafsson, whose mother also worked at Koszinski’s Bakery and was the person Leberko’s mother was substituting for the day of the robbery, fingered Logo as the killer.