Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  Jacob was in his thirties, tall and rumpled, and he went about his business with the world-weary manner of a war correspondent. He locked his camera, a Voigtländer Bergheil, onto the base plate of the tripod; then he looked at the light around him, and tried to guess at the right exposure settings. The alleyway was so narrow, and the buildings either side of it so tall, that they managed to cut out all the sunlight, leaving the slender strip of asphalt they were on as shadowy and dark as an underground sewer. On top of that, the chop-suey joint whose wall the beat-cop was leaning against had a huge neon sign running down its corner, and the light from the sign was flooding into the alleyway from State Street, flashing purple and red in two-second intervals, washing over the dead body like an electric tide, ebbing and flowing: purple . . . red . . . purple . . . red . . .

  ‘Like a goddamn carnival,’ said the beat-cop, grinning at Jacob and popping his cigarette into his mouth. Jacob nodded back, though he’d thought the neon looked more like a warning beacon, an echo of things to come.

  He turned to look at the mouth of the alley, at the sign stretching thirty feet up the corner of the building: CHOP SUEY . . . NOODLES . . . CHOP SUEY . . . NOODLES . . .

  The words alternated with the image of a Chinese dragon, looking lost in its electric body, pondering the foreign soil below.

  Jacob turned his attention from the sign to the corpse and studied it a moment. The victim was in his fifties, he guessed, and was dressed like a gangster – double-breasted suit adorned with a buttonhole carnation and a breast-pocket handkerchief, shoes patent leather, covered by spats. Not the type of man you’d expect to find dead in an alleyway in the most crime-addled part of the crime-addled Black Belt.

  Stab wounds littered the man’s sizable belly and chest, but it was his face – a tough, lined, mustachioed face – that caught Jacob’s attention. The man’s eyes had been gouged out. The eyeballs placed, quite daintily, a few inches from the head, where they lay atop the greasy asphalt like a pair of peeled lychees, catching the reflection of the neon sign, the dragon appearing at intervals on their glossy white domes.

  After the stabbing and the gouging, the man had been finished off with hands around his throat – where there was a ring of blue and yellow bruises. What was left of his face bulged unnaturally, the blood having rushed into it during the strangulation, causing lips and nose and cheeks to swell, veins to pop, making the face less human and more like a plastic Mardi Gras mask, half melted in a fire. And on top of all of that, the face was flashing purple and red in two-second intervals.

  The man’s left hand was thrown back behind his head, the right stretched out sideways, almost touching the restaurant’s trash cans, which were lined up along the wall and giving off a rich, pungent smell of rotting meat and fish sauce.

  There was something peculiar about that hand.

  Jacob shuffled over to get a closer look, lowering himself down onto the asphalt which felt strangely warm to the touch. He took a flashlight from the messenger bag at his hip, switched it on and shone it over the hand. There were shards of dark green glass buried deep in the skin of the man’s palm and fingers, dozens of them, peppered all over. Then Jacob smelled it – the tang of champagne wafting off the glass-embedded skin, and beneath it, a chemical smell, sharp and burning. It had been years since he had smelled it, but he knew in an instant what it was – the scent of chemically altered alcohol.

  He paused a moment to breathe, and a searing pain shot through his foot that brought him back to the here and now. He rose and stretched out his leg, flexing the wasted muscles around his ankle. He looked up to see the beat-cop smirking at him, but Jacob, accustomed to being treated like a joke by the Police Department, ignored the man and set about moving his tripod over to catch a shot of the victim’s hand.

  He readied the Voigtländer, then poured some magnesium powder into his flash lamp and raised it above his head. He pressed the shutter release and when he heard the camera’s timer whirring he set off the flash lamp and there was a fireworks thump as the magnesium exploded and sent a wave of whiteness cascading around the alley, transporting them for an instant into a realm of dazzling nothingness.

  Then the purple-red reality faded back into view and Jacob watched as the powder sent a cloud of smoke into the air which wafted toward the beat-cop and sent him off into a coughing fit.

  ‘Goddammit,’ the man said, shooting Jacob a venomous look through the gloom, wiping pearls of spittle from his lips.

  Jacob suppressed a smile and made like he hadn’t noticed. He slipped a dark slide into the camera and took out the plate, tossing it into his messenger bag. Then he leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette and looked again at the body: the two nightmarish craters where the eyes should have been, the third crater of the man’s mouth, open as if he was still surprised at what had happened to him.

  Jacob heard a noise and looked up toward the pale nickel of sunlight at the mouth of the alley. A car had pulled up on State Street and two men from the Coroner’s Office hopped out, bulky leather Gladstone bags in their hands. They met the detectives, who were stepping out of the pool hall at about the same time, and after conferring a moment, they ducked under the cordon rope and headed into the alley.

  ‘Ain’t there no goddamn lights in here?’ said the older of the two Coroner’s physicians, squinting through the gloomy neon haze, prompting his assistant to take a flashlight from one of the Gladstone bags. He turned it on and as its beam cut an angle through the gloom the men got to work on the body.

  ‘What’s the nearest funeral parlor to here?’ asked the lieutenant.

  ‘Gracie’s. Two blocks away,’ replied the younger of the two doctors without looking up. ‘It’s a coon place.’

  ‘It’ll do. Let’s get wrapped up here quick. Before the Chinks next door put the body on the menu.’

  The lieutenant grinned at his own joke, and Jacob made eye contact with the younger detective. They nodded at each other. The young detective turned and headed back toward the mouth of the alley, and Jacob followed him. They stepped out onto State Street, and were blinded by the sunlight a moment; then the young detective – Frank Lynott – produced a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket.

  ‘Your limp’s worse,’ he said. ‘You okay?’

  Jacob nodded. It always happened when he kneeled for too long. If he did his stretches and stayed mobile, people hardly noticed his limp, but after sleep, or after crouching, or after any period of inactivity, he moved with a noticeably uneven gait.

  Lynott lit up and they surveyed the scene on the street: a group of young men were milling about the cordon at the mouth of the alley; others were heading into the pool hall or the noodle parlor; taxis were looking for fares.

  A few hours earlier, when the man was being killed in the alleyway, just a few yards away State Street would have been alive and jumping, with the clubs open, and music blaring, and gin hawkers working the queues. But no one had noticed the asphalt tango going on in the alley. Or if they had, they hadn’t concerned themselves with it.

  ‘You manage to get anything good before the Coroner’s men got to work?’ Lynott asked, turning to look at Jacob with a sly grin.

  ‘Sure,’ Jacob replied, wiping a sheen of sweat from his brow.

  Coroner’s physicians were appointed on the Coroner’s personal recommendation, and the recommendations had long since become an opportunity for backhanders. So of the twenty-six currently working in Chicago, not a single one actually had any experience as a pathologist, and only one was affiliated with a hospital: a consultant on a children’s ward. All of which meant it was only a matter of time before the two doctors in the alleyway compromised, contaminated or destroyed any evidence remaining. And both Jacob and Lynott knew it.

  ‘The attack started somewhere nearby,’ Jacob said. ‘In an alcohol stash spot between here and the Rock Island railroad tracks. He was stabbed there, but he managed to get out, probably by smashing a champagne bottle into his attacker’s face. He s
tumbled all the way here, by which point he’d lost too much blood from the stabbing, so he collapsed. The killer followed the blood trail, caught up with him, pulled that trick with the eyeballs, then strangled him.’

  ‘Jesus. He gouged his eyes out while he was still alive?’

  ‘I think so. Strangler victims’ eyes fill with blood from the pressure. Those ones on the street are as white as marble.’

  ‘And the rest of it?’ asked Lynott.

  ‘He’s got glass embedded in his hand. Dark green glass, thick. And his hand smells of champagne. Means he was attacked somewhere there were champagne bottles nearby. He picked one up and retaliated. The blood trail leads back to the railroad tracks. There’s no bars or cathouses down that way, so the only other places there’d be champagne at hand would be a bootlegger’s stash spot. Plus the man’s dressed like a gangster, so he was probably down here doing business and something went wrong. I’d check the hospitals for anyone admitted looking like they’d had a bottle wrapped into their face. If they’re not the killer, they’re at least a witness.’

  Jacob paused and thought of telling Lynott about the caustic smell on the dead man’s hands, but after a moment he decided against it, not sure if a faint, almost indiscernible scent that he might have imagined really constituted evidence. They both smoked silently and stared out at State Street a while.

  The two men had grown up on the same block, had both dreamed of becoming detectives. But Jacob had been barred from entrance because of his leg, so Lynott had put him forward for the job of crime-scene photographer, and Jacob had landed it. He visited crime scenes, developed the prints, studied the minutiae, cultivated an eye for what was important. And this was the reason why he was a standing joke in the Police Department – Jacob was an outsider with a limp and more talent than any detective in the division.

  On the opposite sidewalk, the door to one of the cheap hotels that lined the street opened up, and a couple stepped out into the glaring sun, rubbing their eyes, looking dog tired and sleepless. The man, a Negro, and the woman, a blonde, nodded at each other and wordlessly went their separate ways. That was something else about the Black Belt – black men with white women, white men with black women – the mixing that occurred in the city’s ‘Black and Tan’ interracial jazz clubs often ended up in the flea-ridden hotel rooms that overlooked the strip.

  Something about the scene tugged at Jacob’s thoughts, a memory waiting in the shadows, just outside the spotlight of his consciousness.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lynott, who’d noticed him frowning at the hotel front.

  ‘I dunno. Something about this reminds me of something. Like I’ve seen it all before.’

  ‘You seen a guy get stabbed, have his eyes gouged out and strangled?’

  ‘When you put it like that, you’d think I’d remember.’

  They grinned at each other and carried on smoking.

  ‘There’s something else bugging me about those eyeballs,’ said Jacob.

  ‘That they’re looking at the trash cans?’

  ‘The vic got killed in the middle of the night. He’s been there hours. How comes no rats ran off with them?’

  He turned to look at Lynott, and Lynott shrugged, and Jacob continued to mull over the murder. As hellish as the crime scene was, what tugged at his thoughts was the image of the couple leaving the hotel. He had a sense it was connected, and he wanted to know how.

  ‘I’ll get someone to see where those blood trails start,’ said Lynott after a moment. ‘We better get back.’

  Jacob nodded. They stepped out of the sunshine of State Street back into the shadow of the alleyway, becoming shadows themselves except for the tips of their cigarettes, which glowed red in the gloom.

  4

  Dante sat at the back of the funeral parlor’s viewing room alone but for the corpse, which had been laid out in a casket at the front, surrounded by a few thousand dollars’ worth of delphiniums and irises. The casket lid was latched back and open – a big deal for Sicilians: the casket had to be open for two days and two nights for the soul to ascend to heaven. The belief had led to some of the underworld’s more moronic hitmen finishing off their victims with a shotgun blast to the face, ensuring a disfigurement, a closed casket, purgatory, hell.

  This old man’s face, though, was damaged by nothing more than the buffeting of life – a few wrinkles, grey hair, a smattering of liver spots. The casket was lined with blue velvet, and the corpse was dressed in a blue suit with a blue rose in its lapel. Dante wondered if the color theme was some dying wish, or if the man’s friends had simply gone overboard.

  In the silence, he heard the drone of the planes overhead once more, then something closer, footsteps, and he turned to see three men enter the room: Al, his brother Ralph, and his bodyguard Frank Rio. Al grinned when he saw Dante, and Dante grinned back, trying to cover up his shock at how much Al had changed in the six years since they’d last met.

  They crossed the room and embraced, then Al stood back and they regarded each other. Al was much fatter than Dante remembered, balder too, and strangely pale, looking ten years older than he actually was. The fine food, cigars, booze, cocaine, the stress of forever having to guard against assassins and intrigues – all the ingredients of la malavita were taking a devastating toll on Al Capone.

  ‘Long time, Dante,’ said Al in his trademark soft-spoken voice, barely louder than a mumble. ‘How’s the Big Apple?’

  ‘Ripe for the picking.’

  Al flashed him a grin, and slapped him on the back.

  Dante and Al had run together years before, both of them up-and-comers in Torrio’s Mob. But while Dante had left Chicago and wandered across the country like a haunted ghost, Al had stayed in the city and become the overlord of its underworld, ending up in charge of an organization that controlled most of the booze, gambling and prostitution in the city, that turned over a hundred million dollars a year, out of which Al paid for the elections of mayors, governors and senators. Prohibition had unleashed the biggest crime wave in American history, and Al had ridden it all the way to the top. If there was an undisputed winner of the Volstead game, it was the prematurely aged twenty-nine-year-old standing in front of Dante, five foot seven, grey eyes, hair the color of bark, a knowing smile playing on his lips.

  Dante said hello to Frank, and then to Al’s brother Ralph, who coldly nodded back a greeting. Ralph ‘Bottles’ Capone was just one of the brothers involved in running the organization. While Al was the Outfit’s outer face, always dressed to perfection in dazzling suits, smiling for photo shoots, turning up at galas and sporting events and political rallies, Ralph took care of beer distribution.

  ‘Condolences on your loss,’ said Dante, nodding toward the casket.

  ‘He had it coming,’ said Al. ‘Last viewing’s about to start, let’s talk.’

  They pulled some chairs into a horseshoe and sat, and Al leaned back, moving into a beam of light coming in from the windows, casting the scars on the side of his face into bright relief. Al was painfully conscious of the scars, three of them, bumpy and purple, raked from his ear to under his chin. He’d caught them years before in a barroom brawl in Brooklyn, and he used a mix of talcum powder and concealer to cover them up. This attempt at controlling his image didn’t work, so among Al’s numerous nicknames – Snorky, King Alphonse, Al Brown – was the one he detested, Scarface.

  Al looked at Dante a moment before he spoke.

  ‘We got a traitor in the Outfit,’ he said. ‘I want you to smoke him out.’

  Dante thought a moment, surprised by the request, but trying not to let it show on his face.

  ‘Ralph,’ said Al, nodding to his brother, ‘you wanna fill Dante in?’

  Ralph nodded and cleared his throat.

  ‘About three weeks ago there was a poisoning at the Ritz. Some of Big Bill Thompson’s group booked out a private room for a shindig. Food, girls, cards, booze. The mayor was there, the governor, two former senators, the State’s Attorney,
the head of the Employers’ Association, a judge at the municipal court. They got served a round of champagne before the meal and an hour later two of them were in the morgue and the rest were in hospital having their stomachs pumped.’

  Dante nodded. The list of men was a who’s who of the Capone-sponsored end of the Republican Party. If the booze had done its work more thoroughly, Capone’s political base would have been all but wiped out. And worse still, the press and the government would have turned their attention onto the Outfit, and special censure would have rained down from the murky agencies in Washington being set up to deal with exactly this kind of organized crime.

  ‘Poison booze?’ asked Dante.

  Ralph nodded, and Dante pretended to think.

  ‘Our boy at the hotel ran interference on any press stories and tried to figure out where the batch they’d been served had come from. He traced it through front-of-house into the kitchen and from there to one of our deliveries.’ Ralph jabbed at his own heart, indicating that someone in the Outfit had supplied the killer alcohol.

  ‘I picked it up at our end, traced the delivery. The batch had come from one of our warehouses. It had been driven out to the Ritz in one of our vans, by two of our boys, and the two boys and the van were nowhere to be seen. Until three days later when they turned up in a field outside Lockport, burned to a crisp with bulletholes in their heads. We’ve been digging into it from every angle, and none of it makes sense. Like Al said, it looks like someone on the inside is trying to take us out, but we ain’t got a clue who.’

  Ralph held up his hands and Dante nodded.

  ‘And it’s not Moran?’ he asked, turning to look at Al.

  Bugs Moran was the head of the Northside Gang, Al’s main rivals in the city. He had a penchant for leather jackets and was nicknamed ‘Bugs’ because he was buggy, crazy, homicidally violent and not very clever. Moran had made more than a dozen attempts on Al’s life in a little over a year and a half, until Al had called a peace conference at the Hotel Sherman and they’d agreed to divide the city between them. The truce was still holding, shakily, but everyone knew the slightest tremor could send it tumbling.