Cold Was The Ground

by B A Black

  “Has he ever been out longer?” Houston asks. It’s Thursday now, fully six days later. A grieving, worried spouse might have come in sooner if this was truly out of pattern.

  “Once or twice,” she admits. “But Charlie always drops a dime before he stays out an extra night.”

  “When did you expect him back?”

  “Sunday evening.”

  “Did he call and tell you he’d be late?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Has he contacted you since then?”

  Mrs. Winsome shakes her head again, this time more slowly. Worry clouds her pretty features—genuine concern. “I didn’t know who I could go to. I didn’t know if it would be safe. I hoped it was nothing, that he’d come home with an apology and a hell of a hangover.”

  Houston can sympathize. She wanted to keep her husband’s secret, but she was worried.

  “You see why I can’t go to the police, Detective Mars?” she asks, looking at him with a tired, anxious expression. “I’m counting on your discretion.”

  “I see how you’re reluctant,” Houston says. “I’ll keep the details to myself, Mrs. Winsome. I promise. I need a couple of things to look into this—the names of your husband’s friends, where you last knew him to be, and any of his usual haunts.”

  “Haunts?” she asks.

  “Clubs. Speakeasies. Does he ever go out to the bath-house or Southside?”

  “What on earth would he find in Southside?” she wonders, looking more closely at Houston.

  “Good jazz,” Houston explains. “Chicago blues.”

  “Well,” she says. “I don’t know about that. He stayed away from those public places like that. He stayed out of the Levee, too. But there was a club, some old money thing. He never liked going, but he would.”

  She retrieves her purse and digs through it, producing a battered business card. There are two distinct, red, lip-shaped marks on it, one on each side.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I needed a blotter. You know how it goes—never a spare napkin when you really need it.”

  Her eyes dart to an old coffee stain on his tie. Houston takes the card, and she reaches across his desk to take his pad of paper, beginning to write on it with a slim, gold fountain pen in a fine, feminine hand.

  “Here’s his friends,” she says, writing them under a header that says “Knows:”. Under a separate column that says “Doesn’t Know:” she writes the names of both brothers and one or two others. “And here’s the address of his friend with the boat. The cabin has no phone line, but there’s a general store up the street where Charlie calls from. I went up, but no one was there, and the boat wasn’t docked. I don’t know how I’d find it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Houston assures her. “I’ll find your husband, alright?”

  Houston can see her worry and conflict, and he isn’t sure what should concern him more; that Charlie has met a violent end in the pursuit of his own pleasure, or that the lie he was living had finally become too much, and he had fled. Either spelled bad news for Mrs. Winsome.

  “I don’t care what condition you find him in if he’s alive, Detective,” she says, as if sensing his thoughts. “I just want to know he’s alright. It may seem strange to you, but we’re very close.”

  Houston doesn’t find it strange at all. If the marriage were miserable, Mrs. Winsome has the power to end it, and ruin her husband entirely with one well-timed phone call to the police.

  She’s kept his trust.

  ◆◆◆

  It’s past eleven p.m. when Houston locks up again. He stayed an hour to organize his thoughts after seeing Mrs. Winsome out to a cab he’d called for her. He shouldn’t take a case so close to home, but he couldn’t send her away. If her husband is really in trouble, no one will care if he gets justice. No one but Houston, his wife, and perhaps Charlie’s friends. If the truth comes out, Houston thinks they’ll figure out pretty quickly who the real friends were.

  Not to mention they need a case to keep the lights on.

  In Sal’s ashtray, Houston finds a crumpled but otherwise intact half-cigarette. He eases it back into shape with care.

  He’s got a long walk home, and the snow is still falling, covering up the treacherous black-ice scars of the streets like sins under a white down comforter.

  The city is rolling over in bed, the street lights off for the evening. Houston lights the cigarette with a bent match from his pocket, a matchbook from the Gates. It’s from the last time he’d been able to get Sal out to see some jazz, last year. When things weren’t so terrible. There was hope that America would quickly turn itself around. The sensations of smoking and working intermingle in his veins again, a Pavlov’s cue to focus.

  Houston exhales smoke and turns up the street toward his apartment building. He has a check from Mrs. Winsome in his pocket and a head full of rattling thoughts.

  He remembers the smoky room and sweet, soul-drowning sound of the music. The sugary, watered down alcohol that did its job anyway. The illicit thrill of Sal’s thigh pressing against Houston’s own beneath the table.

  Houston shakes the memory off and drops the burning filter of the cigarette butt in the pile of snow kicked up by the plows. It’s too late to get anywhere tonight, with the snow meaning even the night owls and party hounds will save their efforts for Friday. Houston’s hands are frigid in his pockets, the touch of wind freezing his cheeks and eyelashes.

  ◆◆◆

  Even his desolate, grey brick building, ten blocks from their office, looks like a warm and welcoming place. On the mat, he kicks snow off his shoes, slipping once on the three cement stairs, and then again on the slippery slushy remains of snow tracked in from other’s boots on the way to the elevator. The floor won’t be mopped, he knows, until Tuesday. The put-upon super has three other buildings on the block to see to, and he makes it work only by tight scheduling.

  Upstairs, Houston considers the problem of Salvatore’s addiction. He crouches down by the radiator and turns it on, pulling off his wet shoes and soaking socks, leaving them on the iron heater to steam out.

  In the sink, he fills a bucket with all the lukewarm water he can coax out of his tap, and adds a thin stream of pine-sol. He carries it and his ragged old mop back downstairs, barefoot.

  The floor is icy-cold, soaking wet, and filthy with tracked in slush and soot and black dirt. The repetitive work swinging the mop back and forth helps Houston think.

  Sal says—when he can be coaxed into speaking about it at all—that the seven inch bayonet scar on his back ails him relentlessly in the cold. It’s that which sends Sal into the teeth of the dragon, or so he claims.

  A pattern has emerged over the years of their acquaintance that suggests otherwise. It’s a part of their polite arrangement that the two detectives ignore what they saw about each other. They each have vices society would consider terminal flaws.

  When Houston finishes his chore, it leaves his thoughts as muddy black and turbulent as the mop-water. He’s too tired to find a solution. He can hope, however, that an active case—whatever he might think of the subject matter—will put Sal in motion, get him back up out of the slump. He drops the bucket as he empties it into the sink in the foyer’s cleaning closet, tired fingers faltering on the metal handle.

  He’s just picking up the bucket again when a neighbor’s door opens, and a shaking hand holding an ancient revolver emerges, gnarled knuckles clenched white on the massive gun.

  “It’s just me, Miss Malone,” Houston calls, keeping his voice quiet. “You should be careful with that old gun.”

  A woman’s face appears in the gap between the frame and the door.

  “Mr. Mars!” she scolds, sotto-voce. Her strong Irish accent makes the most of the intermingled relief and consternation in her tone. “What on earth are you doing in the hall in the middle of the night?”

  “The floor was covered in tracked in snow and water,” he says, displaying his mop and bucket. “I didn’t want anyone to slip.”
>
  “Ah, bless you and curse you, you scared me half to death.”

  “Sorry, Miss Malone,” he says, offering an apologetic smile. “I know it’s after midnight, I tried to keep it quiet.”

  “That cat of yours has been around again, too,” she tells Houston. “It’s too cold to leave him out all day now. You should keep him inside!”

  Easier said than done. “I do my best, ma’am, but you know cats.”

  She looks at him pointedly, her blue eyes covered in cataracts but undiminished. “I most certainly do. Wandering all day, up all hours of the night and into mischief. I’ve known a few cats in my lifetime, Mr. Mars. Have a little pity on your soulmate, now.”

  Houston promises he will, before heading upstairs to his own apartment. He sees no sign of the sleek black cat on his fire escape. It’s not his cat so much as a stray he feeds, as it wanders in and out. Sometimes, it comes in injured from a fight. Tonight, it fails to appear even when he sets out so tempting a lure as juice from a tuna fish can. Houston gives up after waiting for an hour at the window onto the fire escape, turning out his lights.

  2.

  He wakes the next morning chasing memories from his dreams, old attachments sticking to him like spiderwebs. His dreams are often nebulous and part-formed, but this one is clear and haunting and it chases Houston from his sheets and into the barely-warm air. He turns the radiator off and opens the window again. Though the cat’s still nowhere to be seen, his memories dissipate in the cold air.

  Houston gets to work five past nine, the bus nosing along the freshly cleared and still frozen streets. He unlocks the door and heads inside. The office is empty, cold. Habitually, he puts Eight O’Clock coffee grounds into the percolator and turns on the single burner beneath it.

  He reviews his notes from the previous night with his first cup. In the paper, he finds an article in the society pages about the Winsome Steel corporation, matching the pictures of the Winsome brothers to the names Mrs. Winsome had given them the night before. With his second cup, he considers their stern portraits and the bragging headline about how they’re giving generous funding to the winter gala. By the time he finishes the third, tossing restlessly on his sea of thoughts, Houston has brought out the lipstick-stained card for the club Charlie Winsome belongs to.

  Beneath the set red stain, it simply says “The 226 Club” and lists an address in the loop and a number. It’s not a dive in the regular sense; Capone spends time there, or so Houston hears. It’s too affluent for the likes of Houston, despite its proximity to any number of less reputable houses of drink. Not that any of Capone’s places have any real class—they chew up lives and spit them out, leaving bloody corpses in the streets when interests clash. This is one connection to the violently pounding heart of Chicago that has nothing to do with being a fairy. Maybe Winsome crossed the wrong wire with the mob.

  Either way, Houston will need backup when he goes in and asks around, and Sal has a face for business in a mafia joint. He needs his partner, and by 10:30, Sal still hasn’t shown himself around the office.

  On a normal day, Houston would make a note about his junior partner on his blotter, an idle threat to dock Sal’s pay for his absence. Today, with Mrs. Winsome’s case in his thoughts and the cold in the air, he doesn’t like the circumstances. Houston packs up, phoning down to the building’s operator.

  “Hey, Hugh,” she says, in a bright tone. “You gotta make a call?”

  “Please, Miss Wentz,” he protests.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, seeming belatedly to remember. “I know nobody calls you that. It’s just—would you believe it, Mr. Mars, but I know two Houstons! Musta been a boom after you set the trend.”

  Catherine Wentz is the niece of the building owner, provided with a job to which she was well suited as a favor to her father. She is always punctual, always cheerful, and never crosses a phone line. She is also, in a habit the telephone age seems to encourage, in love with conversation. All these traits Houston finds unobjectionable. It’s the nicknames where he draws the line.

  “Would Huey be any better?” she asks.

  “No, Miss Wentz.”

  “Alright, I got it. I won’t mess up next time,” she promises. “Can I put you through to somewhere?”

  “Actually, I have to step out of the office. My partner’s not feeling well today.” The lie passes easily over his lips, a candied pill. It isn’t the first lie he’s told to cover for Sal’s habit. “So if anybody calls in for us, I need you to take a message, please. I should be back in the afternoon.”

  “Okay, Mr. Mars,” she says. She won’t forget. “I hope Mr. Costanzo feels better soon. There’s a nasty cold going around.”

  Most likely, Sal will be back on his feet after several cups of black coffee; shaking off the last of the opium like rattling fall leaves. At the worst, a shot of whiskey will right him.

  “Thanks, Miss Wentz. I’ll tell him you said so.”

  Houston hangs up the phone and turns off the hot plate, pulling his coat back on. The snow has stopped, but the sky still hangs gray and threatening over the tired city.

  Houston knows, then, by looking at the hopeless sky. Somewhere out there, Charles Winsome is in trouble. Winsome hasn’t run off, but the filthy, dying city has opened its skyscraper teeth and eaten him up. Chicago is that big bad wolf of fairy tales—breathing loud traffic breath against your door and thinking always hungry thoughts.

  Houston locks the door to the practice, scowling at the peeling paint of the letters.

  It reads, Hou on Mars and Salvat n Cost.

  What is the cost of salvation? he thinks.

  Too much question, too early. The wolf has his partner in its teeth.

  ◆◆◆

  Houston finds him where he expects, and it’s as much relief as disappointment.

  Sal’s in the basement, in a small stinking hole with pillows on the ground, laid out in yesterday’s suit and today’s vacant smile. His hair is undone, a debauched rumple, his tie half loose at a lewd angle.

  Houston stops with his shoes sinking into the filthy sawdust that covers the floor, and looks down at the sprawled form of his partner. He passes his hand over his own face once, asking whatever higher power was listening for strength. Lead us not into temptation.

  “Sal,” he calls, crouching down to pry the mouthpiece of the opium pipe out of his partner’s strong fingers.

  Sal’s deep blue eyes are dilated almost black when he opens them and rolls his attention languorously toward Houston. He’s beautiful, uncollected like this, but it’s the treacherous beauty of a starving lion, at once on the edge of death and deadly, a threat to anything near.

  He’s drifting. Off in space, Houston thinks.

  “Hobbes,” Sal breathes, warm and affectionate. It’s like a cold shock and an electric spark in the same instant for Houston. Sal’s well-gone. He never uses Houston’s middle name in public.

  “You know what time it is, Costanzo?” Houston asks, glad the low light will hide his sudden flush. The pipe stem is greasy, and leaves a yellow stain on Houston’s fingers as he sets it aside.

  Sal blinks, swallows once. Experience tells Houston Sal’s mouth is probably dry. “Mars.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re really here?” Sal asks, eyes focusing at last on Houston.

  “Yeah,” Houston repeats. “We gotta go, pal. Work. You remember work, right?”

  Sal rouses himself slowly, as if all his limbs have gone bloodless and numb, requiring individual coordination. Houston takes his arm when he’s on his feet, swinging it up over his own shoulders.

  They walk out past men who have become the vacant mummies of the nickel shows, lying in their eventual tombs, enshrouded with their pillows and their pipes in this house of the dead.

  A shiver runs down Houston’s spine, a premonition of near-loss. Then they emerge at last into the sunlight of early afternoon, the red framed screen door banging shut behind them.

  The cold air seems
to revive Sal a little, like a slap to the face, and he pulls in a deep breath, coughing. He turns pale immediately, and a violent shiver runs through him.

  “You alright?” Houston asks, guiding his partner toward an alleyway in case he remembered to eat anything the night before, when the shakes give way to the inevitable next stage. Sal’s coughing takes on the forceful sound of gagging, and he shoves Houston away to double over with his palms pressed against the dirty wall between Lee-Lee’s and Minnie’s.

  It’s just after noon, but no one in the Levee gives Sal a second glance as he coughs steaming bile in thin streams into the filthy slush in the alley. When he’s done, Sal’s still a pale wreck, but his color is beginning to come back.

  Houston waits. Sal spits, once.

  “Okay?” Houston asks.

  “Yeah,” Sal says shortly, his voice raw. He straightens up.

  Houston presses two clinical fingers under Sal’s chin for his pulse, and finds it slow but steady. Maybe any longer in all that opium smoke and the depression would have been really dangerous.

  Houston straightens Sal’s tie, shakes his suit straight on his shoulders. “You’re a damn sight.”

  Finding a comb in his pocket, Houston makes short, sharp motions through the disarray of Sal’s hair, restoring it to order.

  “What are you, my mother?” Sal protests.

  “No, I’m your senior partner,” Houston says, angrily. “And I need you to work a case with me. That means I need to get a few cups of coffee into you. You look like a drugged out bum. We need to get into a diner.”

  Sal steps back, abruptly.

  “We have a case?” he asks, with a spark of real interest in his blue eyes. He looks better, more awake and more composed with his hair half brushed.

  “And we lost half a day on it already,” Houston says, handing Sal the comb.

  ◆◆◆