The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  They sat and he gave them both a cheerless smile.

  ‘Ida. It’s good to see you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s good to see you too.’

  ‘Pop,’ said Tom, turning to look at Michael.

  Michael nodded and Ida picked up on some frostiness between them.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Fight in the food hall,’ said Tom. ‘I wasn’t involved, but I caught a stray elbow. It’s nothing.’

  Michael eyed him like he wasn’t entirely convinced. And neither was Ida.

  She glanced at the other prisoners sitting at the tables around them. Most of them looked accustomed to this world. Hard-edged men, bruisers, thugs, killers. And there was Tom, bookish, mild-mannered, caring and gentle, trapped in the same jail as them. If it came to a fight, to an assault, to an attack, the boy was as good as dead. How easy it would be for the cops to arrange a jailhouse hit to keep him quiet. She wondered if Michael had told Tom exactly how much danger he was in.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Tom said to Ida. ‘I need all the help I can get. I didn’t do this, Ida. I swear to God. I’m a doctor. All I’ve done my whole life is try and help people.’

  ‘I know, Tom,’ she said. ‘We’re gonna find out the truth and we’re gonna get you out of here.’

  At this he smiled and his downtrodden expression brightened ever so slightly.

  ‘Visiting time’s only half an hour,’ she said. ‘So we need to be quick. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions. A lot of questions that you’ve probably already answered a hundred times over, but I need to hear them from you. I had a look at the case details on the ferry over, and there’s a lot of inconsistencies, Tom. A lot of things in your account that don’t make sense. I’m going to ask you about those and you have to be honest. OK?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said. ‘Whatever it takes. Like I said, I didn’t do this.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s start at the very beginning – why were you living there, Tom? The Palmer Hotel? Why a dive like that?’

  At this he paused, the question touching a nerve. ‘Rent was cheap,’ he said. ‘I was down on my luck.’

  Ida picked up straight away that he was hiding something.

  ‘You weren’t working?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I quit the hospital a few months earlier.’

  ‘Why?’

  Again he paused, pained by the question. He shot a look at his father, then shrugged. ‘I was getting sick of it,’ he said.

  Another lie. Ida looked at Michael, could see the pain on his face. He knew Tom was lying too. If the boy stuck with this story, he didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘How long had you been living at the hotel?’ Ida asked.

  ‘A few weeks.’

  ‘And in your statement you said in all those weeks you never saw Bucek, the white victim, even once. Not till the night of the murders.’

  ‘That’s the truth. I would’ve remembered seeing a white boy in there.’

  ‘See, that’s the first inconsistency. He was signed into the guest register six weeks before the murders.’

  ‘I swear I never saw that kid in my life. That room they say he was staying in was closed up the whole time I was there. He didn’t live there. I never saw him, and the Powell brothers never did neither. They would have told me about it if they had.’

  ‘You knew the Powell brothers?’

  ‘A little. I got friendly with them after I’d moved in. We’d share a drink in our rooms some nights. I wasn’t part of the Temple they belonged to. The newspapers said I was, but they got that wrong.’

  ‘The Temple of Tranquility?’

  ‘Yeah. They take in dope addicts, try to wean them off it, preach all this Black Star Line stuff at them, you know, Marcus Garvey, back-to-Africa. They tried to get me to go down there a few times, but it wasn’t my thing. All that hokey voodoo stuff they found in our rooms? I never saw it before in my life. Not in my room, not in their room.’

  ‘So if you didn’t go to the Temple of Tranquility and you didn’t go to your job, what did you do all day?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What did you do all day? With your time? How did you spend it?’

  Tom shifted in his seat. ‘Walk,’ he said, sheepishly.

  ‘All day?’

  ‘Sometimes. I’d walk all the way down to Battery Park and back again. Catch the train out to Brooklyn or Queens and walk back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So maybe when I got home I was so tired I’d pass straight out. Some days I’d drink.’

  He looked embarrassed. Ida felt a pang of sympathy and she knew from her own bitter experience what he was trying to hide, and that this story about walking the streets was the truth.

  ‘Some days when it was raining I’d go to the library,’ he said. ‘There’s a soup kitchen in the neighborhood for veterans, I used to help out there sometimes, too.’

  ‘Is that what you did the day of the murders?’ she asked. ‘Go walking?’

  He nodded. ‘I woke up, washed, left the hotel. Caught the subway down to Coney Island, walked up the coast to Sunset Park. Bought a sandwich. Caught a bus to Brooklyn Heights. Walked the rest of the way home. I got back about nine.’

  ‘And when you got home,’ said Ida, recalling what she’d read in Tom’s police statement, ‘you went to sleep and woke up to the sound of screams?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tom. ‘I went downstairs and saw the Powells were dead, went into the reception area. I saw the money and the dope in Bucek’s room, stepped inside to take it, and that’s when the police arrived.’

  Ida stared at him. ‘Tom, I’m gonna level with you,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t look good.’

  ‘You don’t think I know that?’

  ‘This whole account doesn’t make sense. No one’s going to buy it. You need to tell us a plausible story.’

  ‘I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘You’re saying four people were butchered in the same building as you and you slept through it. All those people died and they only screamed once? It doesn’t add up. Plus, you walked into Bucek’s room because you saw his stash and money there?’

  ‘I was broke.’

  ‘Tom, if you want a jury to believe it was someone else who killed those people you’re going to have to explain why the killer left Bucek’s money and drugs out in the open, where you could see them from the corridor.’

  Tom looked at her flatly, with an inscrutable gesture that reminded her of his father.

  ‘And your fingerprint on Powell’s watch,’ Michael added quietly. ‘How are you going to explain that?’

  ‘I don’t know how any print got there,’ said Tom. As soon as he said it, he lowered his head, and Ida wondered if he was crying. She shared a look with Michael. Tom raised his head, and she saw his eyes were dry, stony.

  ‘I want you to tell me in detail what happened that night,’ Ida said.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I got home about nine and I went and took a shower. I was sweaty from the walk. I came back to my room, poured myself a few drinks and passed out. I had the radio on. I woke up at some point, heard something, screaming maybe. Heard a car outside. It was hard to tell ’cos the radio was on, and ’cos of the nightcaps I’d had, and how damn tired I was. I went back to sleep. Few minutes later I heard another scream. I woke up. I didn’t know what to do. I waited. Didn’t hear nothing else. Then I went down to see what was going on. Saw Lucius’s body on the second-floor corridor, Alfonso’s in their room. Suddenly I was back in the field hospital in Saipan. My head was spinning, I wasn’t thinking straight. I snapped out of it eventually, realized I’d better go check on Miss Hollis. Walked into reception, saw her all cut up, blood everywhere.

  ‘Then I saw the light on in the back room, at the end of the corridor, the door was open. That door had never been open in all the weeks I’d lived there. I walked over, looked in. I saw Bucek’s body, saw how cut up he was, and the first thi
ng I thought was what the hell’s a white boy doing here? Then I saw the money and the dope. I should have got out of there and called the cops. But I didn’t. I went in to take the money ’cos I sure could have used it. Next thing I know there’s police rushing into the room.’

  Tom looked at her, and across to Michael. Then something seemed to break in Tom, some wall whose debris tumbled out of him in a long, pained sigh.

  ‘That’s the God’s honest truth,’ he said. ‘I never killed any of those poor people. And whoever it was that did it, sometimes I wish they’d killed me too, so I wouldn’t have to be sitting here in this hellhole facing the electric chair.’

  He paused, his lip trembling, tears forming in his eyes. Ida could see he was telling the truth. As surely as he was lying about what he was doing in the hotel and why he’d quit his job at the hospital, she knew he was being honest when he protested his innocence. When he spoke again it was in a shaky voice, filled to the brim with emotion.

  ‘I don’t know what happened that night,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how that stuff got in our rooms. I don’t know why I didn’t wake up earlier. I’d been drinking, maybe that’s why. I had the radio on. My room’s five flights up from Bucek’s. Three flights up from the Powell brothers’. Here’s what I do know. Someone dumped all that voodoo stuff in our rooms. Someone put my fingerprint on Powell’s watch. Someone tipped off the cops ’cos they turned up there faster than any cop’s ever responded to anything in the whole history of Harlem. And none of us had ever seen Bucek before his body turned up in that room that night.’

  He lowered his head and sobbed.

  Michael reached out a hand and clasped Tom’s across the table. Ida looked around the room, at the other inmates, bruisers, thugs, killers. She thought again how easy it would be for the cops to arrange a jailhouse hit to keep him quiet. How if it came to an attack, he was as good as dead.

  10

  Monday 3rd, 10.57 a.m.

  As the ferry departed the island, Michael leaned against the railing and looked south across Ward Island to Manhattan, its monoliths silver and pale. In the distance coal barges and lighters blew their horns, seagulls squawked to one another in their jangling language, one noise more melancholy than the next.

  On the deck the same families who had been on the journey over sat in their places once more. The nervous excitement they’d displayed on the way there had evaporated. Even the children sat slumped in their seats, allowing the gulls to circle the boat unmolested. What had been an appealing river cruise on the way over, was nothing but a commute on the way back, an obstacle to the warmth of home. Michael had undertaken the journey countless times since Tom’s incarceration and he knew the feeling well, the depression of spirits, the grayness, the way the prison seemed to suck all the energy out of limbs and minds. It was on these rides back from Rikers, on the freezing waters of the river, that he missed his home the most, missed his wife all those miles away, was gnawed by sadness and guilt.

  He tried to imagine what a prosecutor and a jury would make of Tom’s statement, his feeble explanations, the fingerprint on the victim’s watch. It inevitably led Michael to nightmares of the chair, wood and leather and metal, crackling with electricity in the darkness.

  This was why he’d asked Ida over from Chicago. The best detective he’d ever worked with. His protégée, his colleague, his friend. If there was anyone who could help him find a glimmer of hope in the situation, it was Ida.

  ‘Smoke?’ she asked.

  He turned to see her standing next to him, holding out the silver cigarette case he’d passed on to her when he’d retired. Michael had received the case himself from his own mentor and he wondered what had happened to the man all those years ago in New Orleans. He plucked a cigarette from the case and they lit up.

  ‘You never told me what happened with the job offer,’ he said.

  She turned to look at him with an awkwardness that made him think of the nineteen-year-old girl he’d first met in Chicago almost thirty years ago, fresh off the train from New Orleans, shivering in the northern snow. He was proud of the woman his protégée had become, the way she’d dealt with all the traumas that had come her way, the death of her son’s father before the boy was even born, having to raise him alone, and then the death of the man she’d married afterwards, killed in the war. Sick at heart and lonely to her bones, Michael’s wife had said about Ida after a Christmas party a couple of years back. But she’d battled through it. Although, with her son going off to college, Michael guessed the loneliness had returned. For the first time in years Ida had that look she’d had when she was young; that lost look, that vulnerability, that sense that she was easily bruised.

  ‘The job offer,’ she repeated, almost wincing.

  A few months earlier she’d approached Michael and asked his advice about a job proposal that had come her way – an investigator from the Treasury Department whom Ida had collaborated with on a few cases had offered her a role in a new agency being set up in Washington. President Truman had signed the National Security Act back in July, formed the Central Intelligence Agency, for which Ida’s acquaintance was recruiting. The job would mean Ida leaving her own agency, taking up a post in California. She’d been debating whether or not to take the job ever since, and as far as Michael could tell, she hadn’t yet reached a decision.

  ‘It’s still on the table,’ she said eventually. ‘There’s security checks I need to pass. People need to vouch for me. I’m not exactly the regular type of person they hire.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you are.’

  They smiled, fell silent. Michael stared at the choppy waters ahead, felt Ida looking at him, thinking of a way to broach the subject.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Don’t sugar-coat it, Ida,’ he said. ‘If it was anyone else but my son we’d both be sitting here talking about how guilty he was.’

  ‘But he is your son. We both know him. We know he could never do something like that.’

  He paused, took a toke on his cigarette, nodded.

  ‘I used to be so proud of him. I gave him a chunk of the reward money from the Van Haren case and he used it to pay his way through medical school, became a doctor. How many colored doctors are there in the country? Then he volunteers to work as a medic in the war. And then he comes back, and what? He quits his job, moves to a flophouse, spends his days walking the streets, getting drunk with a pair of down-and-outs. I don’t know who that person is, Ida. I don’t know why he’s lying to us.’

  He met Ida’s gaze then turned to stare ahead again. In the waters near North Brother Island a tug-boat blew its whistle, long and plaintive.

  ‘Plenty of men came back from that war damaged,’ Ida said. ‘They don’t all turn into knife-wielding maniacs. I know your son told us some lies, but he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t kill those people.’

  ‘I know he was,’ said Michael.

  ‘So if Tom didn’t kill them, someone else did,’ Ida said. ‘That’s where we start. Someone else went in there, killed those people and left. Then Tom woke up in a drunken stupor, went down there, stupidly tried to steal the money out of Bucek’s room and got caught.’

  ‘Why would someone break in and kill them all?’ Michael asked. ‘Why them? Why that particular hotel on that particular night?’

  He’d been down these avenues of logic countless times over the last few weeks, and his suppositions all ended in dead ends, creating just as many questions as answers.

  He watched Ida take a drag on her cigarette, stare across the waves. They were approaching Manhattan now, could see the bows of the ships birthed along the docks.

  ‘Let’s put aside the crazed lunatic theory,’ Michael said. ‘Let’s say it wasn’t a random attack. Let’s say someone went in there to deliberately kill those people and then the cops went in afterwards to cover it up. Why did they do it? Why does someone walk into a hotel and slaughter its residents like that? And why do the cops
collude in it?’

  ‘Maybe someone broke in to steal Bucek’s stash and money and it all went wrong,’ Ida said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘All these people killed with a machete. You don’t take a blade to a smash-and-grab, you take a gun. And you don’t hang around cutting up bodies, and you sure as hell don’t leave the money and drugs there.’

  Ida looked at him and nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she sighed. ‘But whatever’s going on here, my money’s on it being connected to Bucek. He’s the piece of the puzzle that makes the least sense of all. He’s a white kid from Queens. He gets back from the war. He returns to his old job, living with his parents. Then one day he disappears, and turns up six weeks later dead in the Palmer Hotel with a pusher-sized pile of dope and money.’

  ‘And toxicology reports saying he had large amounts of heroin in his system,’ Michael added.

  ‘You don’t go from salaried employee to dope-addict-pusher in six weeks,’ said Ida. ‘And the whole time he was there, Tom never saw him?’

  ‘And neither did the Powell brothers.’

  Crime scene photos flickered through Michael’s mind. Bucek on a slab in the morgue. Pale, skinny. His torso slashed to pieces.

  ‘There is something I’ve been thinking about,’ Michael said. ‘But so far, it’s a dead end.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Ida.

  ‘Maybe Bucek was in there hiding out,’ Michael said, voicing the one conclusion he’d come to in all those weeks that seemed to make sense. ‘Hiding out from something or someone. He’d gone on the lam. And whatever it was he was running from caught up with him that night.’

  Ida mulled it over.

  ‘That works,’ she said. ‘Except for one thing. If you’re a white kid looking to hide out in New York City, why in the hell would you go to black Harlem? It’s the area you’ll stick out the most.’