Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  Dante smiled at the remaining guards and lit a cigarette. He heard a roaring noise in the air, and along with the rest of the throng he looked up to see two planes soaring like a scream against the sky. The crowd gasped and rippled as the planes swooped low, then the pilots turned the machines upwards and flew toward the sun, disappearing into its blaze.

  The crowd set to wondering what was going on, and Dante turned his eyes back down to earth, took off his hat and wiped some sweat from his brow, hoping the gunman would come back soon and he’d be admitted to the funeral parlor, to get out of the heat. He had been hoping that by leaving New York he would avoid the sweltering temperatures there, but if anything, Chicago looked like it would be even worse for it this summer.

  Four days earlier Dante had been on his rum-runner boat in the waters off Long Island. Ever since the start of prohibition, three miles off the coast, just far enough away to be in international waters, a daisy chain of boats selling liquor had sprung up. Going by the name of Rum Row, it ran from Florida in the south to Maine in the north, and the busiest knot of boats on the whole line was the Rendezvous, to which the restaurateurs and cabaret men of New York caught speedboats each night, in search of high-quality imported booze.

  Among the flotilla of boats that made up the Rendezvous, Dante had the reputation for selling the best liquor of all. He personally tested every crate – at great risk considering some of the poisons that were passed off as alcohol. And it was there off Long Island, among the floating warehouses, that a motor launch had approached one night and Dante had been informed by the men on it that his presence had been requested back in Chicago by his old friend Mr Capone. Dante’s mind had raced to the city of his birth, a city on fire with gangland murders and bombings, a beacon of urban chaos, burning like a sunset over the Midwestern plains. He left his business operation in the hands of the two men he worked the boat with – a grizzled former crab fisherman from Florida and the man’s grandson – and he packed his bags for Chicago.

  Four days later, standing outside the Sbarbaro & Co. Undertaking Rooms, he was still none the wiser as to what Capone wanted. He had put feelers out in New York before he left; subtly, trying to gauge what might be the reason, but all he got back was what he already knew – that the tit-for-tat bombings and killings had quietened down after the elections in the spring, that the deadly gang war between Capone and Bugs Moran had abated, and that the city was on the edge of an uneasy truce; still split down the middle between the two, with both armies on standby, a pair of cymbals ready to crash. And Dante had been dragged to the center of it all by a draft it was impossible to dodge.

  As he dwelled on it, the door to the funeral parlor opened, the gunman exited and nodded at his colleague, and the colleague turned to look at Dante.

  ‘Mr Capone will see you now.’

  2

  Ida Davis stood at the window of her office on the ninth floor of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency building and tried to catch something of the tepid breeze that was wheezing in from outside. A thin sheen of sweat was prickling the skin between her shoulder blades, threatening to drip down her back and soak through the cotton of her blouse. The sun had only been up a few hours and already the skies were silky with heat, the city roasting, set to endure another day in the endless heatwave that was unfurling through the summer.

  On the avenue far below, the morning traffic was crawling along. Sunshine glinted off running boards and grilles, and even the road itself was shining with unusual ferocity, a ribbon of blazing light stretching away in either direction, making blotches of Ida’s vision, forcing her to squint.

  On the corner opposite, a homeless Negro woman was screaming to no one in particular in a thorny, worn-out voice that the unnatural heat of that summer was the beginning of the end of times, that Chicago – modern Gomorrah, city of wicked and greedy men – was about to burn in the sweep of the Angel Gabriel’s fiery blade. A little further along the sidewalk, two beat-cops were approaching her with their hands on their nightsticks, shoulders hunched like boxers.

  Ida closed her eyes a moment and hoped for an end to the hot spell, for the coolness of autumn, the blue light of winter. Somewhere in the distance she heard a church bell tolling nine, but the sound was weak against the roar of the city. She had lived in Chicago for almost ten years, but the constant noise of the metropolis, the unearthly growl of it, was something she could never quite get used to.

  Then in the distance she heard a mechanical whine and opened her eyes to see two planes arcing through the sky like a pair of iron lovebirds. She frowned, watched them a moment, then turned her gaze back down to see what had happened with the raspy-voiced prophet, but neither the woman nor the policemen were anywhere to be seen, just the unstoppable flow of pedestrians cascading along the sidewalk, the traffic unleashing its miasma of pollution into the air, where it swirled and shimmered in the heat, warping and distorting the view.

  ‘You all right?’ asked a voice from inside the office.

  Ida turned to see Michael, who was seated at his desk, looking up at her from some paperwork.

  She nodded. ‘Just soaking in the car fumes.’

  Michael smiled, then there was a knock at the door and they both straightened up.

  ‘Mrs Van Haren,’ announced the receptionist, poking her head around the edge of the door frame. She backed out of the room and a tall, thin, middle-aged woman stepped into the space vacated and strode toward them. She was dressed in a suit of gunmetal grey that hung off her frame in a way that suggested recent weight loss, recent grief. On her head was a cloche hat with a peacock feather tucked into its brim, and as she approached, the feather wafted in time with her step, a jauntiness that seemed at odds with her otherwise somber demeanor.

  ‘Mrs Van Haren,’ said Michael, standing and holding out his hand to the two seats opposite him.

  The woman sat in one chair, and Ida sat in the other, and when they were settled an awkward smile ricocheted between the three of them.

  ‘I’m Michael Talbot and this is my colleague, Ida Davis,’ said Michael, and the woman eyed them both before a flummoxed expression crossed her face. Ida knew the look; the woman was unsure of the etiquette involved, having never before consorted with anyone as outlandish as a pair of detectives, especially a pair as outlandish-looking as Michael and Ida.

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ the woman said, in a voice as prim as her appearance. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

  Michael shook his head. As Mrs Van Haren took a cigarette case from her handbag, Ida took in the woman’s platinum rings and manicured nails. She lit her cigarette with a shaking hand and inhaled deeply. There was something cold about her, something poised and severe, an icing of rigidity with which she was trying to hide her jitteriness.

  The previous day, when they’d heard that a Mrs Van Haren had booked an appointment with them, Ida had done a little digging, had found out it was one of the Van Harens who was coming to visit; one of Chicago’s most distinguished families, and until recently, one of its richest. There was talk in the financial press of the family business being mismanaged, of plummeting earnings per share, profit warnings, investor unrest. There was also talk in the society pages of the family’s heiress daughter becoming engaged to a Charles Coulton Junior, a man from a family of greater, but more recent, wealth whose new-money status caused the articles Ida had read to be laced with jibes and snobbery.

  ‘You’re the detectives that solved the Brandt kidnapping?’ Mrs Van Haren asked, and Michael nodded.

  ‘And the First National gold robbery?’ she continued, and Michael nodded once more. They’d also solved dozens of other cases over their years in Chicago – blackmails, burglaries, murders, heists – most of which had never made it into the papers, much to Ida’s relief. The woman must have asked someone who the best detectives in Chicago were, and been pointed in their direction. And now she was trying to match up the two unlikely Southerners before her with whatever notions her imagination had conj
ured up from the press reports she’d read.

  Michael, the non-imaginary version, was somewhere past fifty years old, as tall and thin as Mrs Van Haren; his face had been heavily scarred by smallpox, something that made him look ghoulish in a certain light, pitiful in another, and had the benefit of giving him a strangely ageless quality. Ida was twenty-eight and unusually beautiful, if a little awkward, a girl whose defining characteristic was that she was a Negro light-skinned enough to pass for white, a trait that had left her feeling like a misfit for most of her life. The pair of them spoke with New Orleans accents, the easy-flowing cadence marking them out as migrants from that dark city at the other end of the Mississippi from Illinois, brought to Chicago on the same river that before them had brought voodou and jazz, cholera epidemics and tens of thousands of the South’s poor.

  Ida met the woman’s gaze as it lingered over her and she smiled, and the woman smiled back in a strained way before taking another fierce drag on her cigarette, the grey of the smoke swirling about the grey of her dress. Ida usually felt uncomfortable in the company of those born into great wealth; it had been her experience that behind the gentility there always lurked a contempt, a sense of entitlement, a confident belief that the world had been especially reserved for them. But with this woman, she wasn’t so sure.

  ‘My daughter has gone missing,’ she said eventually, a tremor in her voice.

  ‘When?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Three weeks ago.’

  ‘And the police?’

  ‘The police have made no headway into finding her, and knowing the police in this city, I doubt they ever will.’

  Michael shared a look with Ida. Police incompetence and laziness were to be expected in Chicago – but not when the family being dealt with was the Van Harens.

  ‘Where was she last seen?’ asked Ida.

  ‘Marshall Field’s. One of our drivers dropped her off outside the store and that was the last anyone saw of her.’

  ‘Had she been acting unusually in the days before she disappeared?’ asked Michael.

  ‘No, Mr Talbot,’ the woman said. ‘There was no unhappiness, no fretting, no angst.’

  Ida thought back to the society pages she had read the previous day. Judging from the articles, the daughter seemed to split her time between the usual high-society events and putting in long shifts doing charity work at Jane Adams House and a project in Hyde Park helping young Negroes from the Southside.

  In the photos, Ida had spotted something odd – a clue in the missing daughter’s clothing – that made her question whether Mrs Van Haren was telling the truth about her disappearance.

  ‘My daughter was about to get married,’ she continued. ‘And that, perhaps, is the strange thing about this – her fiancé has also disappeared.’

  ‘And you don’t believe they eloped?’ asked Michael.

  Mrs Van Haren shook her head.

  ‘We approved of the marriage. The wedding was to be one of the highlights of the summer. And then a few weeks before the ceremony, both of them disappear. From different places. On the same day.’

  ‘And the fiancé?’

  ‘Still missing also,’ she replied flatly, looking down at the cigarette in her hand. ‘I’ve been over it a million times. If it was kidnap then why no ransom note? If she has wound up in a hospital, or God forbid, a morgue, then why hasn’t she been recognized? If she was being blackmailed, then why didn’t she ask for money? If she ran away with some lover, then why did her fiancé also disappear? It doesn’t make sense. How can one of the richest, most beautiful girls in the city disappear off a sidewalk in the middle of the day?’

  Mrs Van Haren looked at them as if she’d asked them a riddle, a crossword clue that was infuriating her.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she repeated, desperation seeping into her voice. She mumbled something, then started shaking, and Ida could see the ice was cracking; a moment later she burst into tears, and her previously grey face was suffused with blood. She fumbled a handkerchief from her purse, more to hide behind than to dab away tears, and Ida leaned over and put her arm around her, felt the woman’s body shake and convulse.

  ‘Gwendolyn is my only child,’ she continued. ‘Can you imagine the terror of not knowing what has happened to her?’

  She opened up her handbag, took a photograph from it and passed it to Ida. It was a studio shot showing a woman in her early twenties seated in front of a floral screen, wearing a Canton dress of printed crepe, her hair marceled into a wave and dotted with pearls. Ida recognized the girl from the social pages of the newspapers. Gwendolyn Van Haren was strikingly beautiful, a gracious kind of beauty, containing as it did a hint of strength in the high cheekbones and forthright stare.

  She passed the photo to Michael, who looked at it for a few seconds, then put the tips of his index fingers together, and Ida, seeing the sign, nodded back at him.

  ‘We’d be happy to look into your daughter’s disappearance,’ he said and Mrs Van Haren stared at him for a long moment, almost in disbelief, before a smile scrabbled onto her face, a weak-looking smile that was out of practice, unsteady on its feet, a smile that got Ida’s sympathy purely because it seemed to be struggling so very hard just to exist.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Talbot, Miss Davis,’ she said, her voice warmed by a rekindling of hope. ‘Thank you.’

  She sniffed and dabbed at her tears again, and the peacock feather in her hat moved about jauntily; Ida looked up at it, and the eye at the center of the feather seemed to stare back at her in an accusing sort of way.

  ‘May I ask where your husband is?’ Michael asked.

  ‘He’s away overseeing business out west,’ she replied stiffly.

  Ida wondered exactly what she meant. The family had made its money on the railroads, helping set up Chicago as the nation’s main transportation hub. But now the family money seemed to rest solely in investments, and bad ones at that, and Ida wondered what business could be more important to a man than the job of finding his own daughter, and consoling his tormented wife.

  ‘What are the next steps?’ Mrs Van Haren asked.

  ‘We’ll see what the police reports have to say, and take it from there.’

  ‘You’ll be consulting with the police on this?’ she asked, and for the first time there was an edge in her voice, and the handkerchief in her hand increased its trembling ever so slightly.

  ‘We have friends in the Police Department,’ said Michael, using as vague a terminology as possible for the army of corrupt cops the agency had arrangements with. ‘Under the circumstances, I’m sure they’ll be willing to grant us access to the case files.’

  He smiled and Mrs Van Haren smiled back, uncertainly.

  ‘I’d like to ask for your discretion in this,’ she said. ‘The police, despite their many failings, have kept quiet.’

  ‘We keep all client information confidential,’ said Michael, and Mrs Van Haren nodded.

  ‘After we realized she was missing,’ said the woman, ‘we – that is, my husband and I – put together a reward for her safe return. Fifty thousand dollars. We were to go to the papers with an announcement, but the police warned us against it. That money is still earmarked for whomever it is that finds my daughter, including you. I need to know what happened to her,’ she said, the pleading tone returning to her voice. ‘I need to know where she is.’

  ‘That’s a generous offer, Mrs Van Haren,’ said Michael, ‘but it’s against company policy to accept enticements.’

  She nodded, and fished about her purse for another cigarette.

  A few minutes later, after they’d taken some further information, they were all standing and saying goodbye and Mrs Van Haren was walking out, face ashen once more, the feather bouncing resolutely in her cap.

  ‘What do you think?’ Michael asked after she had left.

  ‘She’s hiding something,’ said Ida. ‘And I’m guessing that fifty thou she mentioned was supposed to be hush money. She doesn’t want the police involve
d and her husband’s suspiciously absent.’

  ‘As is the fiancé.’

  Ida nodded and walked over to the window to catch the breeze once more. She thought again of the photos of Gwendolyn Van Haren she’d seen in the magazines and how they didn’t tally with the story her mother had told. She peered out of the window a moment, and was glad to see that the homeless woman was on the street corner once more, screaming about the opening of the Seventh Seal, the throne of God, the devastated earth.

  Ida turned and sat on the windowsill and looked at Michael.

  ‘How does one of Chicago’s most famous heiresses disappear off the street into thin air?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Michael. ‘Let’s find out.’

  3

  The blood trail started in the heart of the Federal Street ghetto, on a cobbled road near the Rock Island and New York Central Railroad lines. In drips and splatters, it skipped northwards and turned a corner into a narrow alleyway, past broken crates, garbage cans, grease stains and scraps of rotting food, until it eventually stopped a few yards from the alleyway’s other end, in a rich, syrupy puddle, on top of which lay the source of all that blood: the body of a middle-aged white male, finely dressed, spread-eagled, mutilated and dead.

  There were two people in the alleyway with the corpse, a beat-cop and a crime-scene photographer. The rest of the officers had been sent out to canvass the locals, or man the cordon at the mouth of the alley, and the detectives who’d caught the case had gone to the pool hall around the corner to use the phone and await the Coroner’s physicians.

  The beat-cop, a lazy, scuffed-knuckle type, was supposed to be keeping an eye on the evidence, but was instead rolling a cigarette whilst leaning against the service entrance to the kitchen of the Mai Wah Noodle Palace, whose wall made up one half of the alleyway.

  The photographer, who went by the name of Jacob Russo, was in the process of setting up his camera on a tripod to catch a close-up of the dead man’s face.