The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  They approached the reception desk, and through the wire mesh, Ida saw a tall, gangly Negro man leaning back in a chair, reading the sports section of the New York Mirror. On the counter behind him was a grid of pigeon holes, and a Bakelite radio, set to a station playing blues.

  The man eyed them over the top of his paper but offered no greeting.

  Carrasco flashed his badge. ‘NYPD,’ he said. ‘I called. We need to go over the crime scenes again and the suspect’s room.’

  The man looked at Carrasco with a blank-slate expression. Then he languidly turned to the pigeon holes behind him and grabbed three sets of keys, laid them out on the counter. Carrasco picked them up, handed them to Michael.

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ said Carrasco, guessing correctly that Michael and Ida wanted to go through the crime scenes on their own. ‘You got any questions, just shout.’

  Michael nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He turned to look at Ida. ‘Where d’you want to start?’

  She thought, remembered the details from the newspaper articles she’d pored over in the intervening weeks.

  ‘Tom had a room on the fifth floor?’ she asked.

  Michael nodded.

  ‘Let’s start there.’

  Room 502 was cramped and dreary, with an empty bed-frame in one corner, a wardrobe in another, and a table and chair underneath the window. A depressing room, made more so by the knowledge that this was where Tom had spent his last days before being arrested.

  Michael opened the case jacket, flicked through the paperwork inside, passed Ida a sheaf of crime scene snaps. The photos showed the room as the cops had found it on the night of the murders: a mattress and sheets on the bed, clothes on the chair, books on the floor, but most notably, voodoo-style trinkets, strewn all across the room. Strange things – straw dolls with screaming black faces, ornate crucifixes, an icon depicting the Virgin Mary surrounded by snakes, a miniature coffin filled with straw and mud.

  ‘This voodoo angle’s an attention-grabber,’ Ida said.

  Michael nodded, catching what she was getting at.

  ‘Tom says he never saw those things before in his life,’ he said. ‘Not till they showed him the crime scene snaps. I believe him on that. The boy hasn’t stepped foot in a church since he was fourteen years old. He’s not even religious, much less superstitious.’

  Ida nodded. Looked at the photos once more. In the silence, the sound of the radio in the reception area floated up into the room, the twanging chords of Guitar Slim’s ‘South Carolina Blues’, far off and ghostly.

  ‘You got Tom’s witness statement?’ she asked.

  Michael nodded, fished it out of the binder and passed it over.

  Ida scanned it. In his statement Tom claimed he was in bed asleep when he was awoken by the sound of a disturbance downstairs. He went to investigate. Saw the two dead bodies on the second floor, and the other two bodies on the first floor. Went into the room where one of the bodies lay and that’s when the cops burst in and arrested him.

  Ida looked up at Michael. ‘He’s saying he slept through four people being murdered?’

  ‘It don’t make much sense to me neither.’

  ‘And this is the story he’s sticking with?’

  ‘Yup.’

  She looked at him, sensing anger for the first time. The fact that there was still a spark of it in him allayed her concerns about his wellbeing. A little. She walked around the room, passed the window and peered out of it. On the street below someone had arrived at the root doctor’s shop, had turned on the lights. A neon sign she hadn’t seen before flashed, sharp against the pale autumn light – in lines of blue it depicted a skull in a top hat, and below it in green, the words Louisiana Voodoo. It made her think of New Orleans, of her parents, of everything she’d lost in the thirty or so years since she’d left home.

  Ida looked around the mean apology for a room once more and a dispiriting sensation quivered through her.

  ‘Let’s check downstairs,’ she said.

  On the way down, she inspected the walls and floorboards and risers for any stains or scratches or other clues that might by some miracle still be there after so many weeks.

  Nothing.

  ‘This is where the first two bodies were found,’ Michael said when they’d reached the second floor. ‘The Powell brothers.’

  He unlocked the door to room 202, the first door off the stairs, and they stepped inside.

  This room was larger than Tom’s, nicer too. There were two single beds, two wardrobes, a sink, a one-burner gas stove. Like Tom’s, the room was on the side of the building facing the street out front.

  Michael extracted more photos from the binder, passed them over. The first body lay in a puddle of blood out in the hall, multiple stabs wounds across the chest and stomach. One of the arms was tossed backwards, fingers touching the staircase’s bannister.

  The second body was in the room, lying belly down near the window. Blood splatter and streaks covered the wall. In a close-up from later on, the body had been turned right side up, revealing a deep gash across the neck, the white gleam of spinal column.

  ‘These were the two brothers who were in the voodoo cult?’ Ida asked.

  Michael nodded and took out more photos. Voodoo trinkets like the ones in Tom’s room. Also pamphlets from the Temple of Tranquility, the cult of which the Powell brothers were supposedly members. Ida studied the photos of the pamphlets. The Temple looked like a back-to-Africa church. She’d seen dozens of similar organizations in Chicago and had never understood their appeal.

  ‘What did the brothers do for a living?’ she asked.

  ‘No one seems to know.’

  She studied the room as it was now, compared it to the nightmare in the photos.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Michael said wearily.

  He handed her a photo of a wristwatch dusted with aluminum powder, revealing a fingerprint.

  ‘It’s Alfonso Powell’s watch,’ said Michael. They found it on his wrist. They matched the print to Tom’s left index finger.’

  Ida looked up from the photo to Michael, noted how ashen he looked, despite the red scars across his face. ‘What did Tom say?’ she asked.

  ‘Said he never came in this room, much less touched the bodies.’ He said it so flatly, it was almost like he was challenging her.

  Ida nodded, not rising to it. ‘Let’s carry on,’ she said.

  They locked up the room and descended to the reception area. Carrasco was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. He nodded when he saw them come down. The receptionist was still sitting in his chair behind the desk, reading the sports pages.

  They turned down the corridor which led to the rear of the building, passing a payphone affixed to the wall. In the shadows at the back they reached the door for room 103. Michael opened it up. It was even gloomier than the others, with the same layout and furniture as Tom’s room. There was a sprawling, dark brown blotch on the floorboards which Ida guessed was dried blood, long-since stained into the wood. The place reeked of death, even after all this time, despite the fact that lemon-scented detergent had been doused about the room and the window had been cranked open.

  The rain was coming in through the window, pattering onto the sill, dripping down the wall. The window had iron bars over it and beyond them Ida could see the alleyway to the side of the building. Next to the window was another door, heading, she guessed, into the yard at the rear of the building.

  Michael sifted papers and handed her more crime scene snaps. They showed the room drenched in blood, the body of a young, white male, blond-haired, lying by odd coincidence near where Ida was standing. His torso had been slashed repeatedly, exposed intestines making his mid-section look like it had exploded. He’d almost been hacked in two.

  ‘This is where the cops found Tom?’ she asked.

  Michael nodded. ‘Red-handed, supposedly.’

  Ida thought of Tom as a child, Tom as a doctor. She tried to make him the architect of th
e slaughter. Couldn’t. She looked again at the photos, at the images of the victim, Arno Bucek, the white boy who’d gone missing weeks before the murders then inexplicably had turned up in a Harlem flophouse. In amongst the photos were evidence shots, of the heroin and money that a blood-soaked Tom was apparently trying to steal from the room when the cops discovered him.

  ‘None of this makes sense,’ she said. ‘What’s Bucek doing in Harlem with two hundred and thirty-eight dollars in cash and twenty grams of low-grade dope?’

  ‘The cops say he was a pusher.’

  ‘A skinny Polish kid in the middle of black Harlem?’

  Michael smiled a bleak, knowing smile.

  Ida looked again at the photos, played spot the difference between them and the room as it stood before her now. The bed had been tossed, the mattress leaned up against the wall, covered in blood spray. Around the window frame were bloody handprints. She noted blood splatter, body positioning. She noted the distance markers the cops had set up. She noted scratches and grooves on the floorboards around the body, splintering patterns. She noted where the forensics had dusted for latent prints, their choice of touch-and-grab surfaces. She made a mental image of the room as it was on that night in August, looked up, meshed it with what she could see now, let the two form a single entity.

  But something wasn’t right. Something didn’t mesh. Didn’t add up.

  ‘You spotted what’s missing yet?’ Michael asked her.

  She looked up at him, saw a slight smile playing on his lips.

  ‘I’ve seen something’s missing, but not what.’

  ‘There’re no photos of the door,’ he said.

  She flicked through the photos. That was it.

  ‘All these close-ups,’ he continued. ‘And no one thought to take a photo of the door.’

  She walked over to the door and kneeled in front of it. She ran her finger down the edge of its frame. No scratch marks, no cracks. She examined its outside edge. That too showed no signs of having been forced, or having been recently repaired.

  ‘It’s quite the oversight,’ she said.

  They shared a look, acknowledging what it all meant. Then she rose and they went back into the reception, where the receptionist and Carrasco were as they’d left them.

  More photos. Diana Hollis, last of the four victims, the night receptionist. Not the quick kills afforded the Powell brothers. The scene looked more like what had happened to Bucek, except here the wounds were concentrated around the woman’s crotch. Hollis lay in the passageway leading out from the desk area. Close-ups of the partition and blood streaks across the floor suggested the killer went back there and dragged her out before killing her.

  ‘Hollis worked the nightshift here?’ Ida asked Michael.

  Michael shook his head. ‘She was filling in. I don’t think women work nightshifts much in hotels in Harlem. Not in these kinds of hotels anyway.’

  ‘Where was the regular guy?’

  ‘Night off.’

  Ida gestured towards the man behind the mesh. Michael nodded, indicating he was the one who should have been working that night.

  ‘He’s also the hotel owner,’ Michael said.

  Ida looked at the man through the mesh. His eyes didn’t leave his newspaper.

  She scanned the rest of the room. She noted the cheap linoleum on the floor, bubbling up in spots. She noted the stamped-tin ceiling, painted a muddy beige. She noted the payphone next to the stairs.

  ‘Any photos of the payphone?’ she asked.

  Michael sifted paperwork and shook his head.

  ‘How were the police alerted?’ she asked.

  ‘Anonymous phone call reporting a disturbance.’

  ‘Did anyone request the call records from Bell for that phone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Michael. ‘We’ll have to ask Carrasco.’

  ‘It’s worth a try.’

  They nodded at each other. Michael returned the keys to the receptionist, and together with Carrasco they stepped back out onto the street, stood on the sidewalk in the drizzle.

  ‘Well?’ Carrasco asked.

  ‘It’s a start,’ said Michael. ‘Thanks, buddy.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Anything you want me to do, let me know. You want a ride anywhere?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘But there is something else.’

  He asked him about the phone records, and Carrasco said he’d look into it. Then he hopped into his Plymouth and drove off and they watched the car disappear up the street.

  ‘He gets caught helping us out, it’s not just his job he’ll lose,’ Ida said. ‘He’s going to prison.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Michael, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Must be some favor he owes you. What did you do?’

  ‘Saved his life. And his family’s.’

  Ida smiled. Michael smoked.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said, ‘we can catch the subway to the ferry port.’

  They crossed the street, passed the root doctor’s shop, and through the gray sheets of drizzle, Ida saw the icy green neon of Louisiana Voodoo flashing in the gloom once more, the skull in the top hat.

  ‘So what’s your take on it all?’ Michael asked.

  Ida turned her gaze from the shop. ‘Same as yours, probably. It’s got police conspiracy written all over it.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Michael.

  ‘There’s the photos of the door to Bucek’s room going missing,’ Ida said. ‘Or never being photographed at all. Then there’s the anonymous tip-off and the timing. How the hell did they respond so quick? To reports of a disturbance in the middle of Harlem on a Friday night in the height of summer. Then there’s the hotel owner mysteriously taking the night off. Like he was tipped off. And then there’s all that voodoo junk. I mean, if I ever saw a police plant it’s right there. Me and you both know Tom isn’t superstitious. He’s a doctor, a man of science. The voodoo angle’s pure diversion. Racial bias, black magic stereotypes, zeitgeist hysteria. It’s all set up to send a jury off in the wrong direction. And the only people who could have put it there were the cops.’

  Michael nodded. ‘You see the root doctor’s shop over the road?’ he said. ‘I’m wondering if the responding officers didn’t go in there, boost the merchandise and dump it in their rooms.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past them,’ she said. ‘And then there’s the most important thing of all – the murder weapon. If the cops really did chase Tom out of Bucek’s room and catch him in the alleyway, where the hell’s the machete? He’d have to have thrown it away either in the hotel or in the alley, but the cops say they never found it. It’s good, Michael. We’ve got enough to go on. Enough to get started.’

  She looked at him to see if her words had provided him with any reassurance, but she couldn’t detect any emotion on his face. He took a drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Going up against the police isn’t good, Ida,’ he said. ‘Cops, conspiracies. Someone powerful was behind this. We’ve got to send a colored man into a court-room and try and convince a jury he’s telling the truth, and the good, white police of New York are guilty of framing him. And if the police are covering things up, it means Tom’s in danger. Every day he’s in prison they can arrange a jailhouse hit to keep him quiet. And if they hear we’re making any progress, that’s exactly what they’ll do. If they decide to attack, he’s as good as dead. My boy. Who I raised from a baby.’

  She stared at him, and realized that mixed in with his bewilderment, anxiety and anger there was another emotion too – guilt. It was irrational, but if anything similar happened to her son, she knew she’d feel the same. Somehow she’d find a way to take the blame off the boy’s shoulders and ladle it all onto herself.

  ‘So we’re working against the clock,’ she said. ‘Against the authorities, in a city that isn’t home turf, and we can’t let anyone find out what we’re up to?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘
I like a challenge.’

  She smiled at him and waited, and eventually, against his will, something broke inside him, and he smiled back.

  PART THREE

  ‘Costello has succeeded in becoming as mysterious a figure as the American underworld ever produced.’

  HERBERT ASBURY, COLLIERS, 1947

  6

  Monday 3rd, 7.32 a.m.

  Gabriel entered Costello’s study and crossed its wide expanse. The room was larger than most people’s apartments, and decked out much like the lounge, with expensive furniture under a high, molded ceiling. Costello was sitting at a giant mahogany desk on the room’s far side, silhouetted by the giant windows behind him. Across the acres of green-baize desktop from Costello sat Joe Adonis, Costello’s lieutenant.

  The two men eyed Gabriel as he walked towards them and took a seat. He put his hands in his lap to hide the shakes, covered them with his hat for good measure. He felt the moisture all over his head and wasn’t sure anymore if it was rain or sweat. He told himself again it was nothing; that they couldn’t possibly know about the racetrack accounts, not yet, not till the audit came back on the 13th.

  ‘And how is our favorite night undertaker?’ Adonis asked Gabriel with a smirk.

  Gabriel ignored the jibe.

  Adonis’s smirk morphed into a grin, and the grin turned his face into that of a child. Adonis was forty-five years old, but a perennial adolescent. And possibly the vainest man in New York. He was born Giuseppe Doto, but changed his name to Adonis after he read a magazine article about the Greek god of beauty.

  Costello frowned at Adonis. Adonis shrugged.

  ‘How’s the Copa?’ Costello asked in his low growl. Numerous bouts of throat cancer had left him with a ragged rumble of a voice. Despite this he still smoked a few packs of English Ovals a day.

  ‘Fine,’ said Gabriel. ‘Mayor O’Dwyer was in last night. I couldn’t make out his dinner companions. They left at about four in high spirits.’