by Don Swaim
Darrow had given us a list of the principals in Nick Bilinski’s murder proceedings, and the one who stuck out was the former state’s attorney, George Blaggot, retired after losing re-election, due in part to his blowing the Bilinski trial.
“This Blaggot is the likely suspect,” I said to Diana. “God knows he was the closest to the case.”
“But, Tokee, if Blaggot had all that incriminating evidence against Darrow, why didn’t he use it at the trial? He could have destroyed the accused and his lawyer all at once.”
“Greed. It was more profitable to extort Darrow than to accuse him.”
Blaggot was now a one-man practitioner working out of his house, where, we understood from Mrs. Wilkens, most of his meager income came from being a notary. The yard was uncut, the front screen door half off its hinges. When we walked in Blaggot was slouched bleary-eyed next to an empty bottle of rye at his desk.
He roused himself when he saw us, and when we explained that we wanted information about the Nick Bilinski trial, he sobered quickly.
“Whad’ya want to know?” he said defiantly. “I prosecuted that trial fair and square, and all I got for it was getting kicked out of office.”
“Clarence Darrow thinks otherwise, that you tried to rig the trial by intimidating witnesses and trying to influence the jurors.”
“That’s a crock. It was the other way around. If I’d done what Darrow said, how come he won and I lost?”
“Mr. Blaggot, did any of your evidence pertaining to Darrow go missing?”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s likely some incriminating material fell into the wrong hands.”
“Listen, mister, anything I had is all accounted for, and is boxed in the basement of the Chlorite County Courthouse.”
“In my opinion, you withheld a lot of that evidence during the trial and kept it for your own devious purposes.”
“The jury heard all there was.”
“You’re a bitter, defeated man, Blaggot, who is now trying to extort Clarence Darrow.”
Blaggot pushed back in his chair, fumbled at a desk drawer, and pulled out a .44.
“I oughta blow your head off, and yours too, lady. Darrow’s a dirty word in this house. Now back out of here before I plug you both for trespassing. I’ll give you to three. One…”
We did it in two.
Back in the car, Diana, said, “Tokee, darling, that man might have killed us.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the important thing. He’s convinced me he is the actual blackmailer. You saw how he hates Darrow.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Kealoha. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to talk to Blaggot himself again, so now we’re forced to go through the yo-yo guy. Of course, we could dispose of Blaggot directly.”
“You mean…?”
“You brought your blowgun, didn’t you?”
“But we have no actual proof.”
“Here’s how we’re going to get it. We shadow Kealoha until he leads us to the blackmailer. Which means, eventually, he’ll take us back to Blaggot. As soon as we find the two together that’ll cinch it. Case closed.”
“We stand out in this place, Tokee, darling. That blazing red Packard One Twenty LeBaron Convertible Victoria you insisted on buying…”
“Naw, we’re gonna fit right in.”
Diana and I disguised ourselves, she as a farmer’s wife in a wide-brim straw hat, striped dress to her ankles, white apron, and clodhoppers, I as a coal miner in helmet and blackened face, carrying a pick.
Diana said, “The pick seems a little obvious, darling. Why are you carrying it?”
“Professional pool sharks pack their own cue sticks, don’t they? Why wouldn’t miners carry their own picks?”
“You might want to wipe some of that coal dust off your face too.”
Diana made me stash the pick in the trunk of our Packard, which was parked ostentatiously in front of Mrs. Wilkens’ guest house to throw off snoopers as to where we actually were. We borrowed her battered ’25 Ford clunker parked in her garage.
Kealoha appeared none the wiser as we trailed him over the next three days—undoubtedly marking time while waiting for us to come up with the hush money. He seemed to know his way around, sleeping at the Chlorite Hotel, eating at one café or another, driving around aimlessly, doing a little fishing at the pond just outside of town, and seeing a movie called The Devil-Doll with Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O’Sullivan at the town’s lone theater, open only on Friday and Saturday nights. The movie’s title brought to mind the voodoo doll I acquired in the French Quarter, but hadn’t used on my new worst enemy. Yet.
Trailing Kealoha was boring—until he finally led us to…
Not Blaggot, but Bilinski. Or at least to Nick’s house.
“It’s not possible,” Diana gasped. “Clarence saved Nick from the electric chair.”
“Wait a minute. He’s not stopping at Nick’s.”
“Do you think he placed us?”
“Naw, he wouldn’t know us by our disguises and the jalopy we’re driving. Let’s stay on his tail.”
Kealoha drove past Nick’s, then along a meandering road until he reached the bombed-out mine owned by the Chlorite County Colliery Corporation. After unlocking the gate, Kealoha steered his car into the yard and parked.
“He left the gate open,” Diana said. “Probably doesn’t plan to stay long.”
“Won’t hurt to poke around inside.”
We hid the clunker in a grove of trees and walked cautiously through the gate. What was left of the mine’s auxiliary buildings was either wrecked or boarded up.
“Say, I see the mine’s entrance,” I said. “If it was sealed, it’s open now.”
“Let’s go in. At least for a minute.”
We pushed aside the remnants of a barrier at the mine’s mouth and entered. It was dark inside as expected, but we saw, much deeper within the narrow passage, a far-off light, almost beckoning. After walking three-hundred feet or more, we suddenly heard from behind us a rumble, then a boom, and were jolted by the percussive impact of an explosion. We fell to our knees, covering our mouths as the tunnel filled with smoke and powder.
A blast had sealed off the entrance to the mine, with us inside. Even by the meager light of Diana’s Zippo, which always accompanied her pack of Viceroys, we determined that the rubble was thick, heavy, and hard-packed. Without proper tools we’d never dig our way out.
“Dammit, dollface, if you’d only let me carry that miner’s pick like I wanted to…”
“Shut the fuck up, darling.”
Gasping from the dust, we made our way to the light at the far end of the passage. It turned out to be a miner’s torch propped on the ground. We were inside a substantial, rock-ribbed chamber, its ceiling far above our reach.
“We’re idiots,” I said. “Kealoha lured us into the mine, dynamited the entrance, and trapped us.”
“We got suckered, Tokee.”
“Bastard must have known we were tailing him.”
“I told you our disguises were crap.”
A slot in the ceiling opened abruptly, allowing in a shaft of light.
Kana Kealoha stuck his head through the opening.
“You folks fine and dandy down there?”
“Kealoha, you bastard,” I said. “Get us out of here.”
“That’s hilarious, Tokoloshe. Tell me another. You think we weren’t on to you?”
“We? So Blaggot’s in on it with you?”
“Y’know, Darrow’s crafty. We figured he’d send some heavies like you and the dame to try and throw a kink in the works.”
“Diana,” I whispered. “You still have that portable blowgun of yours?”
“Of course. Stored disassembled in an elegant satin-lined case originally designed for a flute.”
“Shaddup, down there,” Kealoha yelled. “Where’s the dough? You got it?”
“Sure, I’ve got it.”
“Tell
me where it is and I’ll let you out.”
“Not on your phony Hawaiian ass.”
“It’s gotta be in either that beat up Ford you’ve been driving or the Packard One Twenty LeBaron. Or maybe in your room at the old biddy’s house.”
“Or in some hollow stump in the woods. Could be anywhere.”
“Listen, Tokoloshe, if I don’t find the bills you’ll see me just one more time, which will be the last time you’ll see anyone but Miss Bitch down there. And even that won’t be for long.”
“You can’t intimidate us, Kealoha.”
“No? The mine’s doubly sealed off now, and will probably never open again. It’s unlikely your bodies will ever be found, so you’re standing in your own tomb. What’s more, Darrow will be exposed for the fraud he is, his great reputation as a do-gooder shot to shit.”
“Quickly,” I hissed to Diana. Get that damned dart off now.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying. I’ve got to poison the tip. It’s dark down here, and I can’t afford to slip.”
Kealoha said, “The only way out is through this sliding door into an upper tunnel, too high to reach, unless you have a ladder like I got up here, which won’t do you no good. Ain’t that a laugh? I know this entire mine, a natural cave and all the tunnels dug around it. I was a devil-driver, used to work with Nick Bilinski.”
“Bilinski?”
“I worked with a lot of guys.”
“You’d leave us here to starve to death?”
“Naw, Tokoloshe, I ain’t that kind of guy. Some of the hydraulics in the mine still work, so unless I get what I want, I’ll pump out all the oxygen in the room. It’ll be quicker for you to go that way. But don’t bother to thank me. I’ll be back.”
“Shoot it, dammit,” I muttered to Diana.
Too late.
Kealoha banged the lid shut, and we were again in near darkness, save for the narrow arc of the miner’s torch, already flickering, the batteries weak.
“What do you think?” I asked Diana.
“I think he intimidated us.”
“Just don’t panic dollface.”
“Why not?”
“If there’s any panicking to be done I’ll do it. Now let’s see what’s in this room while we still have some light.”
We found several closed boxes, broken tools, and assorted debris. When we opened the cartons we saw inside hundreds and hundreds of… yo-yos!
I said, “Kealoha must have been using this place as a storage area for his yo-yo scam.”
“Okay, Tokee, what’s next?”
I paced for a few moments in thought.
“That sliding door up there at the top,” I said. “It has a knob on it, so it must have been a regular door once with knobs on either side. Now it just covers the hole.”
“So? It’s thirty feet up.”
“We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of yo-yos.”
“And?”
“What if we were to string a batch of yo-yos together? Make a lasso. Then throw it until it loops onto the knob. We pull on the knob to slide the door so it no longer covers the hole. After that, we use the yo-yo strings as a climbing rope. And each yo-yo serves as a foothold.”
“Darling, that’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard. It’s sheer idiocy. Let’s start stringing.”
We went at it for several hours, mostly in blackness in order to preserve the batteries in the torch. Occasionally, Diana fired up her Zippo so we could confirm our efforts.
Then the ceiling door was pushed aside, and we again saw Kealoha’s silhouette filling the opening. He called down to us.
“Tokoloshe, we searched and searched, even had to take down the old bat while we pawed through her house. They took her to the hospital, but don’t know if she’s gonna make it. We found diddly. Then it occurred to me. There ain’t no blackmail money. You never got it together. You and your stacked lady friend drove all the way down here to the land of coal and God, which are one in the same, intending to do us in. You tried to scam the scammers.”
“We’ve got nothing to say to you, Kealoha.”
“I got something to say to you, wiseacre. No money, no air. Aloha!”
He slammed the portal shut. Within minutes we heard the sound of a generator starting up, and almost immediately felt the air—that requisite combination of oxygen and nitrogen—subtly, almost imperceptibly, abandoning our awful space, which was now suitable only as a catacomb. About that Kealoha was right.
Diana grabbed my arm. “Tokee…”
“It may take only an hour or two before the pump sucks out all the oxygen, so let’s work fast on those yo-yos. And don’t turn on the torch. We’ve got to conserve the light.”
It was a slow, tedious effort braiding the yo-yo strings into multiple strands strong enough to carry our weight, as well as securing the actual yo-yos as footholds.
I felt my lungs depleting, Diana did as well. Existence was running out for us.
“Just don’t move,” I told her. “Or save oxygen by not breathing.”
“You first, Tokee.”
Briefly, it occurred to me that our mutual energies might be better put to use by a final, spasmodic carnal diversion—but reality, you bastard you, intruded.
At last our lasso was ready. Then came the tricky part: throwing it high enough to reach and catch the knob. I missed on the first attempt, then the second, third, fourth, fifth.
“Try harder, Tokee, we’re almost out of air—and light.”
“Doin’ my best, dollface.”
Again and again and again.
Then, bingo!
“Okay, it’s hooked. Now I’m pulling it open.”
“Careful, Tokee, not too fast…”
There was always the chance Kealoha had bolted the lid from the top or placed a heavy object on it or even for the door to hit some sort of snag, but… No. Slowly, laboriously, I pulled. The door grudgingly moved, exposing the opening. Within a minute I felt the breath of decent, unused air. Not a rush, but subtle enough to let us know we would make it—provided we could yo-yo our way up to the top.
“You weigh less than me,” I told Diana. “You want to claim the honors, climb up there, and grab that ladder?”
“I don’t know. Tokee. I’m not very good at heights.”
“Aren’t you taking flying lessons?”
She managed.
After Diana lowered the ladder to me we were home free. Almost.
When we burst in on Kealoha and Bilinski at Nick’s house, the startled Kealoha tried to attack us with a yo-yo, but Diana quickly subdued him with a prick from her blowgun, the dart’s tip anointed with a diluted dose of Kyle’s venom.
Nick, on the other hand, was remorseful and burst into tears, disposed to spilling his guts.
“Okay, okay, it was Kealoha’s idea but I went along with it,” he sobbed. “And, yeah, I killed them two scabs. But if I confessed at the time I’d either get life or lit up in the chair. It was an accident.”
“No, you bastard, you planted dynamite.”
“The surface magazine was where the explosives, detonators, and blasting powder was kept. I knew the layout better than my wife’s butt, so I sneaked past the guards. I thought blowin’ up the magazine would make a damned pretty show, only I didn’t know two union busters would happen along and get in the way. Never meant to kill ’em. But we was on strike, so it was the workers against the owners, and the bosses held all the cards.”
“Darrow believed in you, Bilinski. He was sure you were innocent despite Blaggot’s criminal case against you.”
“Blaggot spooked the witnesses, falsified evidence. Yeah, Darrow got me off in spite of Blaggot, and yeah I conned my own lawyer. So what? He wasn’t exactly on the up and up himself.”
“He went out on a limb to save you, paying off the jury and witnesses. You knew that and blackmailed him.”
“I was desperate. Besides, Kealoha sucked me into it.”
“How?”
“We was pals. I k
new him from the mines before he went off to St. Louis and learned yo-yoing.”
“A Hawaiian in the mines?”
“He only looks Hawaiian. He’s Albanian.”
“So you and Kealoha, or whatever his real name is…”
“Shkelyim.”
“…hatched a plot to extort the very man who believed in you.”
“Darrow came out smellin’ like a rose, and I got nothing.”
“You can’t call a not-guilty verdict nothing. He saved your life, Bilinski, and you deceived him. How’d you get all those compromising documents in the first place?”
“The old boy trusted me, confided in me. He roomed in my house, so I intercepted his mail, pilfered his files. He never knew.”
“Gimme all the goods you stole from Darrow. Every damned scrap of paper.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Diana here will kill you.”
“Tokee, darling…”
“Or I will.”
We decided not to deliver Bilinski’s cache to Darrow. He’d be forever haunted for what he did with or without it. So we burned it in the empty parking lot of the abandoned Miner’s Hat Diner.
Back in Chicago, when we told Darrow about foiling Nick’s blackmail plot, he was both relieved and saddened.
“I trusted that boy. I do not defend his acts, causing the explosion and later trying to extort me, but I understand it. Poverty and desperation drive men and women to extremes beyond their control. You didn’t hurt him, did you?”
“He’s fine, but the yo-yo guy, who turned out to be an Albanian named Shkelyim, if I’m pronouncing it right, got an adulterated dose of cobra venom. After he came to we took him somewhere where he could contemplate his crimes. The bottom of an abandoned CCCC mine shaft. As for poor Mrs. Wilkens, she was clobbered on the head, but is recovering. Clarence, Bilinski admitted setting the explosion that killed those two men, so shouldn’t he stand trial again? He needs to be punished.”
“Nick can’t be tried again because of double jeopardy. In any event, punishment inflicted for the purpose of giving pain is cruelty and vengeance, and nothing more.
“I wish I had your idealism, Clarence.” I sighed in admiration. “Now that the extortion is out of the way, I guess you’re ready for your next cause.”
