The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  Rutherford stared at her, letting the silence press home his victory.

  ‘So you see,’ he said, ‘it’s in everyone’s interest for him to plead guilty. May I offer you some advice?’

  Ida didn’t know what to say. She nodded.

  ‘You’re not on home ground. Neither you nor Thomas’s father. This is New York. You don’t know how things work here. You’re far from home and that makes you powerless. My advice to you is to head back to Chicago before you do any more damage and see a boy lose his life unnecessarily.’

  ‘I’m here to save the boy’s life.’

  He let out an exasperated laugh. ‘Did you see the newspaper this weekend?’ he asked. ‘Milton Eldridge, the owner of the Palmer Hotel. He was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Now, Mrs Young, are you naive enough to think it really was an accident? Or do you truly understand what we’re dealing with here? The sooner Thomas pleads guilty, the sooner he’s out of danger. I’m trying to save his life.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ida.

  ‘Do you?’ He looked at her, then he sighed, wearied by it all. ‘Now if there’s nothing more,’ he said, ‘I have work to get back to.’

  He nodded at her and trotted down the front steps. She watched him go, feeling thoroughly beaten.

  She waited a moment, then descended the steps herself, found a bench, sat on it, took her cigarette case from her pocket and lit up, stared at the traffic slipping past. She’d let herself get swept up in the quarrel, had forgotten her usual policy of never arguing with lawyers. The wind blew against her, its coldness numbing the skin on her hands and face, making her eyes water.

  Rutherford’s news explained why Tom had moved to the flophouse in a hurry, why he had lied about what he was doing there. It explained why he never returned to the hospital to get his old job back – they would have asked to see his discharge papers. Rather than shame himself, he never reapplied. He used his savings to wander New York, to help out at a charity. He’d lied because he was ashamed.

  Then it dawned on her. She’d have to tell Michael. Before Rutherford did. She wondered how he’d react. She thought about Cleveland and Tom ending up in the same hotel, both of them blue-slipped out of the army. A thought came to her – what if it wasn’t a coincidence? What if Tom and Cleveland knew each other? What if she’d got it all wrong and Tom was somehow involved?

  She thought about Eldridge being killed and Rutherford’s acknowledgment that Tom was in danger. Offered up as if it were common knowledge.

  She exhaled wearily. Rutherford had shaken her faith, made her doubt everything. And then a worse thought struck her – what if Rutherford convinced Tom to plead guilty? He’d done a good enough job of convincing her. She summoned up the energy to rise, headed to the subway as a light snow started to fall. How on earth would she break the news to Michael?

  41

  Monday 10th, 11.30 a.m.

  When Ida got to 5th Avenue to meet Michael she found him standing under the library’s portico, looking small against the giant facade, the beaux-arts columns and sculptures and towering Vermont marble.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he asked when he saw her approaching.

  His breath steamed in the cold. She saw a wooden bench just next to the entrance and led him over to it. They sat. She told him everything. He listened and nodded and kept his eyes on the trees and lawns that encircled the building, the traffic skating up the avenue, the falling snow.

  ‘I see,’ he said, when she’d finished speaking.

  His expression was blank, and she wasn’t sure if it was because he was keeping something in, or was still too shocked to register an emotion yet.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she said.

  ‘Tell Tom to get a new lawyer.’

  ‘I mean about Tom.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Why didn’t he say anything? He lied and now it looks even worse.’

  ‘He was ashamed, Michael,’ Ida said gently.

  Michael paused, rubbed his temples. ‘All I’ve ever done is tried to do right by the boy, and his sister.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Blue-slipped. The boy went out there to be a medic.’

  ‘I know.’

  Michael stared once more at the snow-dusted cars and taxis heading down the avenue.

  ‘We need to speak to Tom,’ she said.

  Michael checked his watch.

  ‘We’ve missed the boat to Rikers,’ he said. ‘I’ll head on over there tomorrow. Come on, let’s work.’

  He rose and headed towards the doors. Ida watched him go, feeling a sense of disquiet, of things being bottled up for the worse.

  The library’s Periodicals Reading Room was located on the third floor, in a room which looked more like something from a belle époque mansion than a library. They requested copies of the Times, the Daily Mirror and the Daily News since the start of the year. They went through the homicide reports, looking for other murders Faron and Helms might have committed. They’d asked Carrasco to do a search, too, but knew it would take him a few days, so here they were trying to get a jump start. As they worked, Ida kept an eye on Michael, and felt stupid for doing so.

  They compiled a list.

  Dozens of murders.

  None of them looked like they had been committed by Faron, though. None of them linked in any way to Bucek or Cleveland or Helms or the Palmer Hotel or even Vito Genovese. The murders were, for the most part, mundane. Bar fights, muggings, burglaries gone wrong, brawls over money or women.

  The day wound wearily on.

  They went out to lunch, came back, continued. The sun dipped behind the skyline and the library’s lights came on with an electric mosquito buzz. The desks around them emptied one by one, but still nothing connected back to their case. They stayed till the library closed and as they stepped out into the bitter cold that lay like an anvil on 5th Avenue, Ida felt the sinking regret of a lost day. A day that had started badly and had gotten steadily worse.

  ‘I think I’ll walk back to the apartment,’ Michael said.

  Ida could see beneath his words the need to be alone, to wander the city and try and make sense of things. Just like her. Just like Tom.

  She nodded, and Michael walked off through the snow and she caught the subway up to Harlem. The express train was packed even before it reached 59th, so she had to stand all the way as it rattled and roared its way uptown, swinging passengers and lights this way and that. She tried to take her mind off the case. She scanned the headlines on the papers of her fellow commuters – snatches of information about the ongoing saga of the UN building, Jackie Robinson, the plan to partition Palestine, the HUAC hearings.

  Against her will her mind drifted to Washington, to the CIA, to the job in California that was hers now, the job helping protect America, the eternal war. She turned away, feeling that same anxiety she’d felt ever since Nathan had been drafted, of powerlessness in the face of history, of being beaten by the cavalcade thrown at her from the future.

  She got out at 125th Street and hurried through the snow and the sickly orange of the street lights back to her hotel. She walked past the notion stores full of cheap, flimsy clothing and trinkets, past the five-and-dimes, past a hall holding a revival meeting, past a bar on the corner from which emanated blues music, shaking the sidewalk. She thought of the bebop club. The saxophonist with all that fire inside him, the instrument just a tool for getting it out, a gasket, a safety valve. She heard the sound of his saxophone once more, skating through the air, fragile and lonely, but beautifully so.

  It was only when she got into her hotel room that she realized she hadn’t eaten dinner again. She’d have to call down to reception or go out for food. She lay on the bed to get a moment’s rest, her coat still on. The murders she’d spent all day reading about ran through her head. All those dead men. Killed so senselessly. So much pointless loss of life. She thought of Nathan and that silent time after he’d died. She thought of Jacob’s father. She thought of Mich
ael burying his pain with work, and how foolish that seemed.

  And then she realized with a corrosive dismay that burying herself in work was exactly the tactic she used for dealing with distress, too. She’d been ready to lecture Michael for something she herself was guilty of. Did she look just as foolish when she did it? Why did it look so bad when she saw it in another person, yet feel so natural to her? She felt her emotions welling up, and she closed her eyes and let them come, let them overflow.

  After a while she noticed that she was sweating. She was still wearing her coat on and the room’s heating was on. She opened her eyes, sat up, pulled her coat off. She rolled over and saw the call log from the hotel poking out of her handbag. She grabbed it, used it to fan her face. She figured she’d kill time going through it once more. She set it down on the bed. All the names and addresses and numbers blurred for a second, then came into focus. She ran her eye down the list and a name popped out at her.

  John Marino.

  She stopped, frowned, thought as to why the name tugged at her memory. Someone at the Palmer Hotel had called his number three times before the murders. Two incoming calls from his number as well. The calls all happened in the evenings, between eight and eleven.

  Then it clicked.

  The murders.

  Ida scrabbled through her handbag for the notes they’d made in the library, flicked through them. There he was. John Marino. Twenty-eight. A worker on the Brooklyn docks, disappeared six weeks before the hotel murders, the day before Bucek went into hiding. His body had turned up a few days later in the Hudson. He’d been stabbed in the torso multiple times, thrown into the river.

  Someone at the hotel had been calling Marino. Marino had been murdered, and the next day Bucek had gone on the run. Marino was the third blackmailer.

  Were there any more?

  Ida sat up and grabbed the phone and dialed Michael’s number. A new victim, and with the call logs a direct link to the Palmer Hotel. Evidence that might stand up in court. And, more importantly, a new lead to pursue.

  PART SIXTEEN

  ‘The business of carrying on crime today has been extraordinarily complicated by the use of front men, cash transactions, high-priced lawyers who know how to cut the legal corners, corporations and partnerships, and by concealed ownership of real estate and other assets. Cartels and corporations, with all their interlocking directorates and their legal and financial shenanigans, are miracles of simplicity by comparison.’

  HERBERT ASBURY, COLLIERS, 1947

  42

  Monday 10th, 1.25 p.m.

  Costello got out of the cab and looked about the Midtown spires rising high into the icy sky, the snow pirouetting between them. He found the number of the building, walked over. The doorman let him in; Costello slipped him a twenty. He approached the reception desk, asked for the ABC offices and was directed to the elevator bank.

  All the way up, the elevator boy shot him looks through the dull reflections in the fake gold panels on the back of the doors, wondering if it was the Frank Costello he was riding with.

  When they reached Glaser’s floor, he slipped the kid a twenty and walked down the red carpet to the office, stepped inside. The decor was sleek and plush. Cutting edge. Costello recognized some of the furniture from the design magazines Bobbie left strewn about the house – Scandinavian things she was pestering him to fill their own apartment with.

  He spoke to the receptionist, a girl he thought he’d seen somewhere, in a Broadway show maybe. She ushered him over to the sofas to wait for Joe Glaser. He sat. He waited. He blew his nose. He munched on cough sweets.

  He looked at the photos opposite, all the Negro musicians on whose backs Glaser had ridden from washed-up Capone stooge, to swanky Midtown respectability, to satellite offices in LA, to the mainstream. Glaser had started the agency with a loan from Jules Stein, the Chicago mobster who ran MCA, the Music Corporation of America, the talent management behemoth. Stein had run whiskey with Capone during Prohibition, had helped refine Capone’s book-keeping model. With Capone’s help, Stein had hired mobsters to scare nightspots into booking MCA artists, used stink-bomb and fire-bomb tactics. He cut sweetheart deals with the Mob-run Musicians’ Union. Stein and his associates had made MCA the largest talent agency in the country, representing not just musicians, but most of Hollywood, too.

  It was quite something, how a bunch of poor Russian Jews from Lawndale, Chicago had come from nothing to run much of the entertainment industry. And down through the years, Costello had worked with them on this and that, whenever the need arose. He’d never had a problem working with Jewish gangsters. He’d come up with Rothstein and Lansky and Siegel. Trusted Gabriel more than all his other fixers.

  Costello had always been like that. When he was seven or eight years old, he wandered one Saturday morning into the Jewish neighborhood in West Harlem that adjoined the Italian slum he lived in. An old bearded man approached him, pegging him for an outsider, offered him a penny to light his stove for him. Costello thought the request a strange one. The old man explained that it was a sin for an Orthodox Jew to light a fire or do any kind of work on a Sabbath. Costello went back the next Saturday, and the one after that, and soon he was the neighborhood’s Shabbas goy. He learned more about the religion, and on the dates of the Jewish holidays he upped his price to a nickel. Eventually, he married a girl from the neighborhood.

  The receptionist walked over to Costello and smiled.

  ‘He’s free now,’ she said.

  She led him through into a corner office. Joe Glaser didn’t look pleased to see him.

  ‘Frank,’ said Glaser.

  ‘Joe,’ said Costello.

  Glaser offered him a seat. A bizarre modernist confection of upholstery and strange angles.

  ‘What the hell is this thing?’ said Costello.

  ‘It’s a chair, Frank,’ said Glaser.

  ‘Looks like it should be in a b-movie about flying saucers.’

  Glaser scowled. Costello sat. They stared at each other.

  ‘How’s business?’ Costello asked.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You got a tan.’

  ‘I was in LA,’ said Glaser. ‘We’re setting up a West Coast office.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Costello.

  ‘America’s moving west.’

  ‘It’s always been moving west, Joe.’

  Costello sneezed. Chloroformed himself again with the eucalyptus-oiled handkerchief.

  Glaser eyed him.

  ‘I’m glad to hear business is good,’ Costello said, moving the handkerchief from his nose.

  Glaser gave him a get on with it look.

  ‘You hear about the meeting in the Astoria?’ Costello asked.

  ‘The movie men? Sure.’

  Costello thought of a delicate way to put to Glaser what the movie producer had told him in the art gallery.

  ‘MCA’s name came up,’ he said. ‘Ronnie Reagan’s name came up. I wanted to speak to Stein about it, but my phones being what they are, I thought I’d talk to you first.’

  The mobsters in charge of MCA were the same men behind Glaser’s own agency and Glaser was in close contact with them. So rather than picking up a bugged telephone to call them out in LA, Costello had come to see Glaser, to see if he might shed some light on what was going on.

  Glaser gave Costello a suspicious look, leaned back in his seat.

  ‘In what context did their names come up?’ he asked.

  Costello told him about the two movie producers, about Vito Genovese trying to swing the vote, about the producer saying it had something to do with Reagan and MCA.

  Glaser listened to what Costello had to say, put his fingers together in a steeple.

  ‘I think I know what this is to do with,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll let you know, but you need to talk it over with Stein when you can.’

  Costello nodded.

  ‘Reagan’s an informer for the FBI,’ said Glaser. ‘He joined a couple of organization
s a few years ago with links to the communist party he didn’t know about. He’s so scared of being accused of being a red, he’s gone on an anti-communist tirade to cover it up. He contacted the Feds out in LA, told them he could give them names of actors he knew were commies, gave them a whole list. Ratted out his own friends.’

  ‘And what’s that got to do with MCA?’ Costello asked.

  ‘Up till a few years ago Reagan was washed up,’ said Glaser. ‘A string of b-movie turkeys and too much carousing. MCA offered to rejuvenate his career, gave him the nudge to put himself forward for president of the Screen Actors Guild. They figured with Reagan in charge of the guild they could cut sweetheart deals.’

  Costello waved his hand in the air. ‘I already know all this,’ he said.

  Costello had heard about it from Jack Warner. Having an MCA stooge as the president meant the union was effectively being run by their members’ largest employer. It was a conflict of interest in the most brazen, glaring way imaginable, but Reagan was voted in regardless, on an anti-communist ticket. Much like the other unions in Hollywood, the Mob had used red-baiting to take control.

  ‘Well, if Reagan’s naming names,’ said Glaser, ‘and the studios are worried about witch-hunts, then maybe Genovese’s setting himself up as a solution.’

  Costello nodded. That was it. That was why he was getting involved. Genovese, like Glaser, like MCA, like many of New York’s broadcasting companies, was moving west. The Mob was supposed to be helping the industry, getting Communists and FBI probes and Congressional Committees off the studios’ backs. Genovese was making sure that didn’t happen. He was making things get worse, making it look like Costello and his men were failing to offer the protection they had promised, so he could step in when things were really bad and offer himself up as an alternative, and effective, solution.