by Ray Celestin
For years Gabriel looked at news reports from cities all over America and Canada, searching for reports of women knifed, or single acts of brutal violence. He found so many examples, yet none of them brought him closer to finding the man. And so Gabriel’s quest went on and he disposed of more bodies, buried them in evergreen woods, dropped them off at isolated farmhouses or tumble-down wrecker’s yards, and he rose higher up the family, but for all his questions and probing, he came no closer to his goal. And, meanwhile, Sarah was growing up, and Gabriel was putting her in harm’s way, but still he couldn’t stop.
And then came Pearl Harbor, and Gabriel, as the sole guardian of a child, was barred from being enlisted. He watched the world go to war, watched the chaos, the senselessness, and in the slaughter his own vendetta’s true nature revealed itself to him – petty, stupid, selfish, a waste of a life. He realized, in his lust for revenge, he’d misguidedly fallen into a criminal life, had endangered Sarah, and so he started planning his escape. As the war raged and the world ripped itself apart, he guessed that if Faron was anywhere, he would be at the heart of the slaughter, and Gabriel was happy to leave him to it. He boxed away all his feelings.
And now Faron was back, and all those carefully constructed boxes, the ones he thought were so strong, were breaking at the first sign of strain.
He heard a tapping sound, a rapping, and awoke with a start, to see someone standing on the other side of the car window.
‘My boss said you wanted to talk to me,’ said a kid standing to the side of the car, peering in.
Gabriel checked the clock – 1.15. Shit. He jacked the seat upright and got out of the car. The kid looked at him. Gabriel was still half-asleep. His mouth was dry and sour. Despite the cold, he felt like he’d sweated a bucketful during his nap.
‘You’re Aaron?’ he asked.
The kid nodded. He was still in his teens, gawky, acned, candle white. He wore a lumberjack’s shirt and a brown woolen jacket, held a gray metal lunchbox in one hand.
‘My name’s Gabriel, I’m an old pal of Benny Siegel.’
‘Gabriel Leveson?’ the kid said. ‘I know you, you work for Frank Costello.’
‘Yeah? You know a lot, kid.’
‘Benny mentioned you. Benny was my cousin.’
Gabriel paused. ‘Where d’you live, Aaron?’
‘Williamsburg.’
Gabriel nodded, got it. Benny had got a relative from the old neighborhood to drive him instead of using the hotel car service. Someone at a distance to Benny’s usual crowd, someone he could trust.
‘I wanted to talk to you about Benny,’ Gabriel said.
‘Benny’s dead.’
‘Sure, kid. Thing is, before he died he left some business unfinished, and me and some of your cousin’s other pals – Frank Costello, for one – we’re trying to wrap up his affairs. You answer some questions, there’s a few clams in it for you.’
The kid gave him a rabbit-in-the-headlights look. Maybe he didn’t buy Gabriel’s story, or maybe he did and he was scared.
Just then a train roared along the El tracks above them, belching smoke and noise, making the girders holding up the tracks rattle and shudder, dispersing a cloud of soot over the neighborhood.
‘All I did was drive him around,’ said the kid when the train had passed. ‘I didn’t get involved in any business.’
‘Sure, that’s all I wanna ask you about. Where you drove him.’
‘OK, but I gotta be getting home.’
‘I’ll give you a ride. You going back to Williamsburg?’
The kid nodded.
‘Hop in.’
The boy thought about it, looked at the car. ‘This is a Delahaye one three five,’ said the kid.
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll talk if you let me drive.’
The kid grinned. Gabriel tossed him the keys. They hopped in.
‘She’s a beaut. How much she cost?’
‘Nothing,’ said Gabriel. ‘I won her in a card game.’
The kid laughed. ‘Jeez.’
He started her up and they headed south, making for the bridge. Gabriel offered the boy a Luckie; he accepted.
‘So where’d you take him?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Oh, everywhere. Every club and restaurant and bar in Manhattan, it seemed like.’
‘You take him anywhere unusual, anywhere that wasn’t a nightspot?’
‘Not sure,’ said the kid, mulling it over. ‘Hotels. I took him to get his hair cut, I took him to a tailor’s. A hospital, uptown …’
‘A hospital?’ asked Gabriel. ‘Benny was ill?’
‘I dunno,’ said the kid. ‘He said it was for a friend.’
‘OK. Which hospital?’
‘I dunno if it was a proper hospital. Maybe like a clinic or something.’
‘You remember the name?’
Aaron shook his head.
‘You remember where it was?’
‘Sure. Riverside Drive. The first townhouse after the bridge.’
Gabriel nodded.
‘Oh, we went to a talent agency too.’
‘Union Square?’ asked Gabriel, thinking of Beatrice.
‘No. In Midtown somewhere. Swanky.’
‘You remember the name?’
‘Nah. But Benny said it was the agency that manages Louis Armstrong? You know, the singer?’
‘Sure,’ said Gabriel. He knew the agency. He knew the man who ran it – Joe Glaser, a low-level mobster who’d worked for Capone out in Chicago, running brothels and nightclubs, before he turned music-industry insider. Benny could have been trying to book talent to play at the casino, but Glaser had cornered the market in Negro talent, not the kinds of acts Benny would have at the Flamingo.
‘You take him anywhere else?’ he asked. ‘It’s real important.’
The kid frowned and took a heavy toke on his cigarette like that might help.
He looked up at Gabriel and shook his head again.
‘OK,’ said Gabriel. ‘You take Benny to any banks or anything?’
‘Banks? Sure, first day he was here. First National, just by Bryant Park. He went in with a banker’s draft, came out with a roll of hundreds.’
‘That’s the only bank you took him to? You sure?’
The kid nodded.
‘All right. You took him to the airport when he flew back to LA?’
‘Oh, sure. I dropped him off.’
‘He have a bag with him when he left?’
The kid thought. ‘I guess.’
‘Where’d you pick him up?’
‘His hotel.’
‘He make any stops on the way?’
‘Nah,’ said the kid.
Gabriel finished his cigarette. Crushed it in the ashtray on the dash. He looked out the window at the people on the sidewalk.
‘No, wait,’ the kid said. ‘We did stop off somewhere.’
‘Where?’
‘Uptown somewhere. Italian Harlem. He told me to pull up and wait, and he got out and came back a while later and we headed off. I remember ’cos he was late for the plane and he was kvetching about how he was gonna miss it, and then we stopped off for all this time. I thought it was screwy, you know?’
‘He take his suitcases with him?’
‘When he left the car? I dunno,’ said the kid, shrugging.
‘You remember the address? Where he went?’
The kid shook his head. ‘Nah. We were heading uptown, to La Guardia Field, it weren’t much of a detour.’
Gabriel thought, ran the angles.
‘OK, listen. I’ll give you fifty bucks if we go up there now and drive around and see if you can find it? Whaddaya say?’
Forty minutes later they were doing laps of Italian Harlem, driving down this road and that, the kid looking around trying to jog his memory. Just when Gabriel was thinking he’d made a bad call, the kid brought the car to a stop and grinned.
‘This is it,’ he said.
‘You sure?’
The k
id nodded, grinning still, proud of himself. They were on 4th, between 118th and 119th.
‘See that building down there?’
Gabriel followed the boy’s finger to a store on the corner. It was one of those cellar operations that sold ice in the summer, coal in the winter, and wood all year round. There was a board outside with a pad fixed to it, a pencil on a string. An old Italian man walked past, stopped to write his order on the pad then sauntered on.
‘While I was waiting for Benny to come back, two men came out the cellar with a block of ice the size of a table, all wrapped up in sacks, you know how they do it. Well, one of ’em slipped over and the ice smashed and went everywhere, all the kids in the neighborhood came rushing, and the two men were shouting at each other. I remember now. It was definitely here.’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure, I’m sure.’
‘OK, where’d Benny go when he got out of the car?’
‘Around the corner, I guess,’ said the kid, pointing down 119th.
Benny had turned the corner, so the kid wouldn’t see where he went: the kid who was a relative with no Mob connections, who Benny just happened to hire for the trip.
‘Drive down there,’ said Gabriel.
Aaron started the car and slow-rolled down 119th.
It was a nondescript street of nondescript brownstones. Unremarkable. Storefronts here and there. Certainly no banks for Benny to pay in the money. He had the cash with him. He went into one of these buildings. He dropped the money off. He got back in the car and flew to Los Angeles. A couple of weeks later he was dead.
Sitting somewhere in one of those buildings was two million dollars in cash.
29
Friday 7th November, 4.14 p.m.
Gabriel dropped the kid off in Williamsburg and headed straight back to the public library in Manhattan. On the third floor he received a tutorial from a librarian on how to navigate the Periodicals Reading Room, thanked her, collected a stack of celebrity gossip magazines and started going through them. Eventually, he found what he was looking for in a three-year-old copy of Photoplay magazine – a snapshot of Benny. It was in an article headlined Jean Harlow Gives Socialite Benjamin Siegel Acting Lessons. Gabriel shook his head at the word ‘socialite’, but the photo of Harlow and Benny was a good one. He looked dashing, his eyes sparkled. Even without the expensive suits and the charming manner, on his natural looks alone, Benny was a man who left an impression. Gabriel was depending on that.
He ripped the photo out of the magazine, then he ripped it in two, consigning the beautiful Miss Harlow to the wastepaper basket. He stepped out of the library to see that the sun had set and the city was buzzing with electric light.
He headed right back to East Harlem, but got stuck in a snarl of traffic, came to a complete standstill. As he waited, he sifted leads and evidence. He thought about Benny at the clinic, saying the visit was for a friend. He wondered if Benny had caught a disease out in Vegas. He wondered why Benny had gone to Joe Glaser’s talent agency. He wondered why Benny had met Genovese, had met Jasper, how he had learned that Faron was back in town.
The traffic inched forward. Start, stop, shift.
He watched pedestrians shuffle down the sidewalks, silhouetted by the glow spilling out from shops and diners and restaurants. In front of him dual strings of taillight rubies sloped their way towards the horizon.
Start, stop, shift.
Half an hour later he made it uptown. He parked near where the Morgenstern kid had brought him, stepped out of the car, buttoned up his coat, and crossed the street carefully as the earlier snow flurry had turned the sidewalks icy.
He started at the very end of the block, he knocked on doors, he flashed the police badge he’d bought off a retiring cop a few years back, he flashed the photo of Benny Siegel looking dashing. He explained he was a cop searching for a missing person – the man in the photo – who was last seen in the neighborhood over the summer. He possibly rented an apartment in the building, or visited someone there.
He buzzed for the building superintendents first, figuring they were the ones in the know. Once he’d run the rounds, he’d start knocking on individual apartments and going into stores. Then he’d move onto the next street, then the next.
No one recognized the man in the photo as one of the country’s most prominent Mob figures, a man who’d made a failed attempt at becoming a Hollywood actor.
It was well into evening when Gabriel hit gold. A building halfway up the third block he’d tried, a nondescript brownstone, with a super in a second-floor office with a sign on its door that read: NOISEY TENANTS GET TURFED.
‘Yeah, I know him,’ said the man when Gabriel flashed the photo. He was middle-aged, heavy-set, with a tobacco pouch hung round his neck on a string. ‘He rented an apartment in one of the buildings I look after. I manage four buildings on this street.’
He looked at Gabriel as if he expected him to be impressed.
‘What happened to him?’ the super asked.
‘He’s missing,’ said Gabriel.
The super gave him a couldn’t-care-less look.
‘His family are worried,’ said Gabriel, trying to add some emotional weight.
‘Like a wife and kids?’
‘Sure.’
The super scoffed. Gabriel frowned.
‘When did he rent the apartment?’
‘Coming up to six months ago,’ said the super. ‘He took out a six-month lease. It’s nearly running out. Saw him the first few days, then nothing. Didn’t realize he was missing.’
Gabriel didn’t buy the man’s story. The super must have known the apartment was empty, must have gone in there to check what was going on.
‘I need to see the room he rented,’ said Gabriel. ‘You open it up for me?’
The super paused. ‘Sure,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s in another building. Wait a mo.’
The super grabbed a wooly hat and a coat from inside the office, then a giant ring of keys which lent him the air of a prison guard.
Five minutes later they stepped into the living room of a sixth-floor apartment in a building a few doors down. The place smelled of dust and emptiness. The super switched on the light to reveal as unglamorous a place as Gabriel could imagine, as un-Benny a place, making Gabriel wonder if the super was confused.
The radiators hadn’t been opened for fall, meaning the place was freezing.
‘All these months this place has been empty,’ said Gabriel. ‘You didn’t thinking of checking in, calling anyone?’
The super shrugged, but underneath it, Gabriel could see the man was tense. He opened up the tobacco pouch hanging around his neck and started rolling himself a cigarette.
‘He’d paid the lease up front. Once I get the money what people do with the place is up to them, as long as they ain’t destroying it.’
Gabriel nodded. ‘Please don’t step any further inside,’ he said. ‘Contamination.’
The super nodded, like he was au fait with the police procedure Gabriel had just invented.
‘I’ll let you know when I’m done,’ said Gabriel.
A look of disappointment flashed across the super’s face. Then Gabriel closed the door on him. Slid the door chain into place. Once he was alone, he glanced over the living room once more. There were two wide windows looking out over the rooftops of Harlem, an armchair next to them, there was a sideboard with a radio on it, a sofa-bed, folded up, and a coffee table. On the other side of the living room was a kitchenette and doors leading off to a bedroom and a bathroom.
Gabriel quickly checked the kitchenette, the bedroom, the bathroom, returned to the living room. He walked over to the coffee table. There was an ashtray on it containing some cigarette butts, mixed in with some roaches, which didn’t add up as Benny didn’t smoke tea, making Gabriel wonder again if he’d got the right apartment. In the under-section of the coffee table was a wire-rack filled with magazines and newspapers. Something seemed odd about it, the way the newspape
rs were spread out.
He kneeled down, pulled a few out – copies of the New York Daily Mirror from the days in summer when Benny had been in town. In the wire-rack, where Gabriel had removed the papers, the corner of an attaché case was visible. Gabriel pulled it out. It was heavy, felt like it was filled with paper. He rested it on the coffee table and sat on the sofa-bed, which was surprisingly hard and ancient. He tried the catches. They sprang back at his touch. With a sense of expectation he opened the lid.
It was filled with promotional material for the Flamingo Hotel and Casino.
Gabriel smiled, shook his head, rubbed his temples. At least it proved this was Benny’s apartment.
He sifted through the contents – fliers, leaflets, prospectuses, suite lists.
He picked up one of the leaflets and studied it. There was a Disney-like illustration of the casino’s front aspect. The cement work curved and swooped, made the building look futuristic, exciting. A neon sign stretched up into a night sky that was smattered with five-pointed stars. Gabriel flipped pages – architect’s renditions of the casino floor, the pool, the deluxe hotel rooms, the buffet, the restaurant. There were facts and figures Benny’s accountants had cooked up – projected rates of return annualized over different time periods, enticing hints at the money second-stage investors could make. Gabriel had heard the stories about Benny selling bogus shares in the project, that he’d sold the ownership of the casino three or four times over, to investors who’d all lost out when Benny had been killed and the Mob had assumed control of the operation.
On the front of one of the leaflets was a photo of the hotel. It vaguely resembled the illustration. There were flamingos on the lawn outside, the ones Beatrice mentioned that died every day and had to be replaced.
He threw everything back into the case. Closed it. Returned it to the bottom of the coffee table. He tossed the room.
