I began: “‘Mr. Cudahy, we have kidnapped your son. You must pay six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin for his safe return. Mr. Cudahy, you are up against it and there is only one way out. If you don’t the next man will, for he will see the condition of your son and realize that we mean business. If you fail to follow any of these instructions, he will be returned to you permanently harmed beyond repair or even perhaps not at all. If you stray from the following direction, you may forever walk endless fields hoping to find his bones disintegrating amongst the corn, his tiny skull buried in dirt only to be discovered centuries later like so many other fossils of once vibrant animals now lost forever to time and unspeakable sadness.
“‘Men of the future might wonder at how they came upon such an artifact and the story behind its place buried in the earth. Yet none of them, no matter the exactness of their instruments and gadgets of which we now have no conception, will ever be able to figure the heartbreak behind their discovery. Your story of suffering will not be written in literature. It will be absent in the annals of history. Your child will have died alone and in pain of immeasurable magnitude that, in the grand scheme of what is precious in life and what is not, will only have cost you a dime on the dollar when held up to the light of your incalculable fortune.
“‘Thus we give these instructions, which are to be adhered to with the finest detail. The entire six-hundred-thousand-dollar sum must be paid in twenty-dollar gold pieces, in canvas bags containing ten thousand dollars each. Each bag must be placed in a bank messenger’s regulation valise. Put a red lantern on the front of your carriage. Leave your house at ten o’clock sharp, tonight, December Nineteenth. Drive out along Center Street, which runs from Omaha for forty miles. Some place along that road you will come to our lantern with a black and white ribbon tied to the bail.
“‘Leave the money there. Turn around and drive back to your home. If there is any attempt to capture us we will not try to get the money, but return your son to you after we have put acid in his eyes and blinded him. We will castrate him surgically with a pair of elastrator pliers so that he may never bear children. Being your only son, he will not be able to pass on your family name. The Cudahy line will end with him.
“‘Then you may lead him around blind and fruitless the rest of your days and tell the world the story of how you loved gold better than you loved your own flesh and blood. Don’t be misled by the police as Old Man Ross was, who never recovered his kidnapped son, Charley Ross, and died of a broken heart. Follow the instructions in this letter and no harm will befall you or yours. Sincerely, Bandits.’”
I removed my eyeglasses, folded the letter along its creases, and tucked both into my shirt pocket. I studied Eddie’s mouth, the only part of his face visible under his blindfold. It did not quiver or tighten. His jaw was loose as he continually sucked a cigarette. Already a pile of squashed butts were at his feet. If the letter had any effect on him at all, the young man did not show it. I wondered how I might solicit some emotion out of him. I broke off a piece of chicory stick for the coffee kettle and scooped ash from the legless stove with an old sardine can and looked out at the winter rain streaking tin down the window.
“Well, what do you think of that?” I asked.
Eddie cocked his head. His cigarette crackled with another inhalation. “I’d make it twenty-five thousand. Dad might pay that.”
“Is that your worth to him?”
“Would you stand for that cut?” Eddie asked. “Dad’s wealthy, but he doesn’t just have six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold lying around.”
“He’s a multimillionaire.”
“On paper and in his investments. His wealth is measured on his factory.”
“You’re a smart skate.”
“He’s a resistant man.”
“What about your mother? Is she the resistant sort?”
Eddie sat silently at that remark.
“You look a little pale, kid,” I said and patted my pockets. Inside my trousers I found a vial of stamina tablets. I shook the pill case like a maraca. “How about a little medicine? I have here some of Dr. Williams’ Brand Pink Pills,” I said, reading the label. “They might restore some color to your complexion.”
“I’m naturally light of pigment,” Eddie said.
“Perhaps something else, then? A spot of whiskey maybe? The stuff we got ain’t no goddamn good, but it’ll warm you up all the same.”
Eddie fussed with his handcuffs and squirmed in his chair to get comfortable. The heat from the stove was making him sweat. He’d already soaked a salty line into his baby shirt blindfold. “You’re a bad man,” he said.
I rocked in my chair. “I still have the material in me to do the right thing.”
“Having it and using it are two different things.”
“And you’d do well to remember it, seeing as how your fate is still on the balances.”
“There are probably five hundred men scouring the city for me right now.”
I looked out the window again, peeling back the carpet curtain. The Cudahy factory was still humming at a full tilt though it was nearing midnight. “Not yet there ain’t. I doubt some whether your parents have noticed. Strange, the sixteen-year-old son of an empire gone for a whole night and nobody’s keen to your absence.”
“When they do get keen they’ll rain hellfire down on your head.”
I thought on that some. I’d weighed the repercussions in my head so many times in the last two weeks I could no longer fathom all the possible consequences of the crime. There was no more logic to be calculated, only the panther pacing back and forth inside my chest. Still, Eddie’s suggestion to lower the ransom made practical sense. Twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of gold would weigh nearly a hundred pounds once placed in bags. Six hundred thousand would tilt the scales upwards of two and a half thousand pounds. Transporting that much weight in gold was hardly worth the effort even if we could manage the feat.
The math was economical, especially given the need for fleetness of foot in the face of what surely would be one hell of a tracking party at our heels. I groaned and removed the letter from my pocket again to make one last revision. I erased the figure demanding six hundred thousand and substituted twenty-five thousand. I might’ve asked Billy if he was willing to take such an alteration. But when the man had knocked himself out on granddaddy syrup at this pivotal hour, he lost his vote.
The matter was settled in my mind.
“Better get some shut-eye if you can manage it,” I told our captive. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day for you.”
Eddie licked his lips. “Maybe a little whiskey would help me sleep.”
I agreed. “Trying to sleep sitting up is rough business,” I said and poured a tall glass of whiskey from the bottle Billy had been drinking. I placed the glass in Eddie’s hands forcefully, spilling a little. “It’s rotgut. Best to drink it down quick.”
“Have you a mixing agent?”
“This isn’t a taproom.”
“I’ve not a trained tongue for hooch.”
I laughed and adopted an aristocratic tone. “Oh, many pardons, monsieur, perhaps a peck of twenty-year-old scotch, instead?”
Eddie let out his first unexpected whimper of the night.
I softened at his cry. “I think there’s some milk in the icebox downstairs,” I said and lumbered down the steps to retrieve a bottle of yak from the highboy. I brought the milk upstairs and filled Eddie’s tumbler to the brim. “There you be, kid. Slug it down.”
Eddie gulped the elixir in three labored pulls and smoked two more cigarettes before he relaxed enough to quit squirming in his chair. I leaned back in my rocker and closed my eyes for a few interrupted hours, waking every few minutes, dreaming for short bursts of things long past that would never pass me again.
VI
WHEN I FIRST came to Omaha, I had nothing
to my name but my daddy’s old wool suit, a wooly peach, two cheese sandwiches smeared with white mustard, a dollar plus sixteen cents, and one half-smoked green cigar I’d been saving since my train crossed the Colorado border. I’d never seen a building taller than two stories. When it came to towns, the biggest I’d ever known was a hovel called Soda Springs: one mud street with a canvas saloon, a sheet iron hotel, and a combination bank and general store. Omaha might as well have been New York City to my young impression.
My elder sister had been living in the city for some time and operated a brothel in the downtown sporting district. The Sallie Purple. She named it after herself even though her name wasn’t Sallie and there wasn’t a speck of purple in the whole place. Her given name was Mary Elizabeth, but that seemed too virtuous a combination for a woman running her own whorehouse. I, for one, would’ve appreciated that kind of raillery. Maybe even named the place Saint Mary’s Parish. For kicks. Just to rile the Catholics and confuse a few Lutherans. Still. It’s not good business to upset your most loyal demographic.
The Sallie Purple was unpretentious in every sense: a two-story, white clapboard affair with a flat rubber roof and a tangle of telephone wires snaking out to their connecting street poles. Old whiskey barrels filled with water were spread out on the wooden sidewalk to combat future fires. For all its aesthetic modesty, the spot was one of the most raucous harems in the city. Besides whores, it proffered gambling of all stripes: billiards, roulette, poker, faro, dice, and a lottery wheel. The sign above the front entrance—in sharp green lettering—declared: IF YOU HAVE A FAMILY THAT NEEDS YOUR MONEY, DON’T DALLY HERE.
Why the sign was done in green lettering instead of purple still remains one of the great mysteries of my life. Forget the existence of God, what happened to the dinosaurs, and all the hooey about the pyramids. What I really want to understand is why my sister, of sound mind and body, started calling herself Sallie the Purple, named her whorehouse as such, and then painted her sign green.
This world. There’s nothing in it but the daffy.
And no one was daffier than Tom Dennison.
Sallie had warned me about the man. All I was hoping for was a job. Maybe working behind the bar on some nights.
“That’s easy,” my sister told me the day I had arrived in town. “But you got to understand something. You won’t be working for me. You’ll be working for Mr. Dennison.”
I’d never heard of the name Dennison before but could assume what kind of man he was. Every city had one of them to some degree or another. “I’m not sure I’m one to get mixed up in the politics of it all.”
“You’ll have to whether you want to or not.”
“All’s I want is a job, sis,” I said.
“Look, if you want a job in this city, you got to pay for it. Most people pay with a vote. Some pay with their particular skills, if they have any. But everybody pays. I pay. Mr. Dennison is my partner. If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t have a place to call my own.”
“So he owns you and you own that whorehouse? That’s how it works?”
“He owns the city. And let me tell you straight out, there’s no bucking it. These are dangerous men. They don’t carry their guns just for the company. You toe the line like I toe the line and you’ll find that you can make some serious money here.”
I laughed. “What a gag.”
“It’s no gag. It’s good business. The only business, actually. Everyone needs the assistance of a go-between these days. That’s how the world spins, and that’s how money gets made for both sides, I hate to tell you.”
“Right, this Dennison feller is the finger, and you’re the one wrapped around it.”
“No, he’s Mr. Dennison and I’m Madam Purple.”
“Madam Purple, huh? You know, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”
Sallie grabbed my arm. She had the strength of a man. A two-hundred-pound former Irish beauty queen with a streak of hippopotamus mean in her blood. “Smarten up, would you?” she said. “You want to make your own way in this city? Then you have to play by its rules. You want a job? You can have it. You want to start up your own business someday like me? You can do it. But what you can’t have is the naiveté to call me a pawn. I’m a middle-of-the-road proxy, nothing more.”
“Oh yes. I’m sure I’ve sorely misjudged you. I’m sure the reason you’re sitting in that basement going through those gambling tickets is to put the winnings in your pocket.”
“Believe it or not, there are things more valuable than a dollar. Especially when you already got barrels full of them.”
“Like what?”
Sallie stepped forward and straightened my jacket lapels. “Like friendship. Like allies. And, like I said, I’m a fence. You think I get along all by own gumption?”
“You’re getting fleeced is what you’re getting.”
“Well, everybody needs friends.”
“You sure got a funny way of making them.”
“And yet I still have them.”
I exhaled.
“What’s got you all bollixed up anyways? You just blew into town an hour ago, and already you want to upset the apple cart?”
“You’re getting shook down is what’s got me bollixed up.”
Sallie took my hand by the wrist and pulled me so close I could smell what she had for breakfast. Eggs and pineapple. She said, “Let me tell you a little something. You can think what you want of me but that mouth of yours could get us both into a lot of trouble if the wrong person heard you talking like that. Mr. Dennison comes by for a weekly visit, and I don’t want him stopping by any more than he already does. My house used to be run by a woman name of Bethany Bashman. She was the second or third biggest player in this city. Bigger than you or I will ever be. Woman used to swan around town like she’d just stepped out of a bandbox, and now she’s got to buy her groceries on credit down at Blubaugh Brothers. I wouldn’t want that happening to me. Or to you.”
A few days later, Mr. Dennison came calling when I was closing down my sister’s whorehouse for the night. He walked in from the street like a man ready to split lightning. The main billiards room was empty, all the chairs stacked upside down on the tabletops and the stiff organdy curtains pulled shut across the picture windows when Dennison came up to the counter, dressed neat as a new coin. He wore a brown herringbone suit and a brown felt crusher with the brim nearly touching his eyebrows. His ocean gray eyes cased behind a pair of owlish spectacles. A diamond stickpin centered in his white tie. I was busy restocking the shelves behind the bar and didn’t hear him come in at first, didn’t even know what the man looked like, when Dennison tapped his large onyx ring on the oiled counter three times to get my attention.
I spun around and wiped off my apron. “Sorry, pal. Closed up for the night.”
Dennison smiled. Two big goons stood just inside the doorway, wearing suits that looked like they’d been bought off the rack and bulged under the arms from the pieces in the shoulder holsters. “I know you’re closed. I left my coat in here a few hours ago. A single-breasted fox-hair coat.”
I knew the jacket. It’d been left on the coat tree in the private smoking room reserved for the bigwigs and big gamblers. All checkered flooring and felt walls, dim as an opium den. I had checked the pockets during my closing duties and found thirteen hundred dollars in one of the side pockets. No one in the city carried that much cash, and very few would ever see such an amount all at once in their entire lives. I retrieved the coat from a broom closet behind the bar and handed it to Dennison who folded it over his forearm like a waiter’s towel and searched its pockets, finding the cash still intact.
He counted out the cash in front of me: two five-hundred-dollar bills, a one-hundred-dollar bill, and ten twenties. Sucking furiously on a toothpick, Dennison took his time in considering my disposition and appearance.
At last I asked, “Is something
the matter?”
“What’s not the matter? I got over fifty whores out of commission this month with the only French thing in this city that’s not on a dinner menu,” Dennison said, referring to the recent syphilis outbreak throughout the city, “a police commissioner who thinks he needs to raid a bunch of my stuss houses next week to pacify the new reform mayor, and a wife who spent more money redecorating our guest bedroom than Ida McKinley did renovating every room of the White House.”
“I meant with the coat,” I said.
Dennison peeled off a hundred-dollar banknote from his stack, reached out, and forced the bill into my palm. “You go on and keep this for yourself. What’s your name, son?”
Startled by the gesture, it took me a moment to reply. “Pat.”
“Pat what?”
“Pat Crowe.”
Dennison raised an eyebrow and looked back at his two gunmen, who hadn’t moved from their spot by the front door. “Sallie’s brother?”
“That’s right.”
“The brother the bartender, huh? You enjoy this kind of work?”
“I enjoy anything that pays me, sir.”
“Forget money. What gives you pleasure?”
I pursed my lips, unsure of how to respond.
“Do you know who I am?”
“You’re Tom Dennison,” I said, then added, “the political boss.”
Dennison chuckled and held out his jacket with an outstretched arm. One of his gunmen stepped forward and took it off his hands. “That’s the name for it, I suppose, silly sounding as it is. But it’s a job just like any other.”
I held out the bill Dennison had given me. “Not saying I don’t appreciate the offer, but I can’t keep this.”
“Why can’t you?”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I know you’re just about the most honest person I’ve met in a long time, which is a lot more than I know about most people. Never heard of a man returning that kind of money to a person. Never in my life. Probably never will again. You seem like a smart kid. Good size, too. I could use a man like you. You ever need to make a little extra money, you come see me at my place on Farnam Street. You know where I am on Farnam Street?”
World, Chase Me Down Page 5
