Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll have a think on it.’

  ‘Talk to Annette about it too,’ she said with a mischievous smile, guessing Michael’s wife would take Ida’s side in the argument. Michael gave her a look, then smiled and shook his head, already getting the feeling he was being backed into a corner.

  ‘So when do we go round to the Van Haren residence?’ she asked.

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ Michael replied. ‘Let’s spend the afternoon ringing around the hospitals, asylums and morgues. Maybe give someone in Narcotics a call. You never know, this case might be over before it’s started.’

  He finished his drink and they left the cordial store, stepping out into the heat and haze of Madison Street, where the cabs, carriages and touring cars were all caught up in a snarl of traffic that was somehow worse than usual. The sidewalks were overflowing with people, thousands of them, and Michael thought how hard it would be to find a girl in a city the size of Chicago. He put on his hat and thought of his own daughter and the pit of despair he’d face if she ever went missing. Why was it the older he got, the more easily his mind wandered down the path to hell?

  His thoughts were interrupted by a whining noise far above them, and they looked up to see two planes flying south, heading toward the airfield near the lakeshore. They watched them a moment as they flew by, then a speck appeared in the air, something small and delicate swirling in the heat. Michael frowned at it, trying to figure out what it was, and after a few seconds, when it had wafted nearer, he realized – it was a single blue rose petal, a lone piece of confetti. Michael and Ida shared a look, confused as to where it could have come from. Then they watched as it floated the last few feet to earth, landed on the sidewalk, and was instantly turned to oil by the unceasing march of the pedestrians.

  6

  Jacob worked the crime scene till noon. Then he packed up his camera and tripod and left Bronzeville, catching a trolley north across the city through streets choking with traffic. He rested his head against the window frame and closed his eyes and imagined the heat becoming so strong it melted the road and the buildings too, the stone turning gooey, the whole city falling to earth in a great, grey sludge of cement. Then he opened his bleary eyes, realized he’d fallen asleep, and tried to stay awake till he reached his stop on Taylor Street.

  Eventually he arrived, lugged his tripod and camera off the trolley, and walked the last few blocks to his building. He climbed the stairs, opened the door to his apartment and stepped into the living room. He put down the tripod and the camera, headed over to the windows, opened them up, then left again, descending five flights to the super’s room in the basement. Like many of the building’s residents, he rented a shelf in the super’s refrigerator. He knocked and the super’s daughter opened up, a teenaged, red-haired girl, listless and antsy in the heat.

  He asked her to grab him a couple of the cold beers he had in the cooler, and he leaned against the door frame and watched as she approached the hulking white metal icebox in the apartment’s kitchen, yanked open the handle and took the bottles out. Everywhere Jacob looked there were new and wonderful gadgets pushing them forward into the future – refrigerators, radio sets, vacuum cleaners, electric razors. But Jacob could afford pretty much none of them, not after he’d paid for his photographic equipment. The girl turned to see him staring in her direction, and she smiled to herself, returned to the door and languidly held out the bottles for him to take. He thanked her and made his way back up the stairs.

  By the time he’d returned to his apartment his ankle was throbbing, so he sat on the sofa and cracked open one of the beers. He waited a moment, then smelled the beer, and the beer smelled okay, so he took a sip. He lit a cigarette and looked across the room at the huge copperplate map of the city he’d pinned to the wall there – the only picture he’d ever brought into the apartment. He’d put it up when he’d got his first job as a crime-scene photographer. He’d started sticking little red pins in it, one for every scene he’d attended. But within a few months there were no spaces left around the areas that he was usually called to, so he’d abandoned the project, taken out the pins, and now there were just holes scattered across the map, perforating most thickly the neighborhoods that were highest in violence.

  There was something a little uneven about the layout of the city, with the shoreline running top to bottom, the lake on the right, the city on the left, as if the whole of it was split into two ill-matched halves. His eye ran over the neighborhoods one by one: Bronzeville in the south, full of poor Negroes; the Gold Coast in the north, full of rich whites; the Loop in the center, with its banks and offices and fancy hotels; and next to it the Stockyards and the railyards; through to the jumble of ghettos beyond.

  He looked again at the places where the pinholes were clustered most thickly and noted how the neighborhoods richest in crime also had the most colorful nicknames – the Black Belt, the Spaghetti Zone, the Bloody Nineteenth, Little Hell.

  Chicago was the world’s third-largest city, but it led the way in murders, bombings, hijackings, graft, bootlegging and kidnaps. Police officers only received a month’s training before they were let loose on the streets, and as the department was short of detectives, those untrained men were as quickly promoted. It meant a third of all murders went unsolved, convictions for gangsters were non-existent, and the Police Department managed, on average, to accidentally kill an innocent citizen every week.

  The situation left Jacob feeling as if every fool, robber and good-for-nothing had a job on the police force, while he – an intelligent, talented war hero – was barred from entry, all because of a bad leg. It was hard not to let the unfairness of it fill him with resentment and anger. Every now and then he caught himself composing rants in his head about the injustice, the stupidity. He tried to train himself out of it. He’d figured long ago the only way to deal with the situation was to work on cases regardless, ignore the fact that he wasn’t allowed to have a badge and just do what he was good at. He picked crimes that he knew he could make a difference on, the unsolvable cases actual detectives couldn’t be bothered with, the ones where the relatives were left feeling shortchanged.

  In the years since he’d returned from the war he’d supplied the evidence that had led to dozens of convictions, all on cases the division had left to grow cold, and perhaps better than that, he’d helped prevent miscarriages of justice – he’d helped set free innocent men whom lazy or hateful cops had decided to frame. Every unusual case that came along was an opportunity to prove them all wrong, to assert himself against a system that wanted to keep him down.

  He finished his beer and went into the darkroom. He pulled down the blinds, and hooked sheets of plasterboard over the sills to stop out the light. Then he switched on the overhead, and the room was flooded with a garish mix of red light and thick shadows. He closed the door, shoving a draft excluder against it, and got to work.

  In the darkroom’s stifling heat he conjured up, as if from the grave, the images of death he’d recorded that morning, bringing the horror back to life, extending its scream beyond the confines of the alley, releasing it back into the world by the magic of developing chemicals and fixative onto photographic cards in a palette of pearly white and grey. Then he took the photos out of the wash bath one by one, and hung them up with wooden clothes pegs onto the wires that criss-crossed the space.

  By the time he was finished, over an hour later, he was drenched with sweat and feeling woozy. Nothing to do now but wait for them to dry. He stepped out of the room into the relative coolness of the rest of the apartment. He took a long, cold shower, changed into cotton trousers and a white vest, brushed his teeth, and went back to the living room. He grabbed the second beer and stepped through the window onto the fire escape, sat, lit a cigarette, and opened up the beer. He waited, then he drank and chained Lucky Strikes and passed the afternoon watching the view: the tenements close by, the elevated trains snaking between their rooftops, the pale skyscrapers beyond
them, and the steam cranes raising yet more towers into the sky.

  He watched the children playing in the street below, the housewives gathered around the porches. In the heat, people rushed to get outdoors. Some went to the park or the lake, or bought tickets to the cinemas which were air-cooled, or they sat on trolleys, by the windows, hoping for an artificial breeze as the cars looped through the city. But most just sat on front steps, or took chairs out onto the sidewalk, or laid down picnic blankets on paving stones and the wisps of grass that grew up in the cracks, the last sorry vestiges of the prairie.

  And when evening turned to night, people dragged their mattresses out onto the fire escapes or rooftops to sleep in the cool there. In New York, which was sharing the dangerously hot weather, hundreds of people were decamping to Central Park every night – mattresses, blankets and alarm clocks in tow – and come six the next morning, the park was a-roar with alarm clocks going off. Jacob knew how it would pan out here; the communal feeling of the women and children in the afternoon would give way to drunken fights between the men in the night, the weather and the drink heating their anger to boiling point.

  Someone somewhere switched on a radio and light music, crooning, wafted through the air. That was the other thing about the heat – open windows everywhere meant one radio, one record player, one piano, could infuse a whole neighborhood.

  Jacob checked his watch and went back into the darkroom and separated out the prints. He’d made three sets: one for himself, one for the cops, one for the Tribune. Like most of the city’s crime-scene photographers, he moonlighted with Chicago’s bloodthirsty press. It was a conflict of interest that no one much minded – the newspapers got to print an unending stream of gore, and the police received backhanders and help from the editors if they ever needed it.

  When the photos were in three neat piles Jacob flicked through them all, studying them one by one, looking for clues amongst the carnage, but all he saw was a parade of images both ghastly and mundane; blood splatters; a pinstripe suit; glass embedded in skin; a homburg hat lying in the bull’s-eye of a white chalk circle; the eyeballs, also outlined in chalk, making them look oddly cartoonish.

  Jacob sighed and carried on, checking the data that filled the frames, the cards placed next to each piece of evidence with reference numbers on them, dates, hours, distances. But nothing jumped out at him, and after more than a dozen rounds through the set, he laid them all out in a grid on the floor and checked them again; then when that didn’t work he jumbled them up in a black-and-white confetti, hoping the randomness might spark something.

  But it didn’t.

  As he stared at the dead man’s image, he noticed a song coming in through the window – Ma Rainey’s ‘Deep Moaning Blues’. He closed his eyes and listened to the music, and couldn’t help but feel that those blues had been written specially for this dead man, this unknown victim of the city.

  In the darkness he saw once more the couple leaving the hotel. He knew the place well, had been called there often enough. It was only a hotel in the loosest sense of the word, more a flophouse for drunks and junkies and gangsters down-at-heel, for newly released convicts and transients of every description, a place where alcohol, firearms and fragile egos mixed together in a way that kept crime-scene photographers like Jacob in work, documenting the aftermath. The place also rented out rooms to hookers by the hour, or eager couples that had nowhere else to go.

  And as Jacob thought on that, realization washed through his mind like a flood.

  He jumped up and ran into the poky bedroom in which he stored his archive of old photos, started ripping open the envelopes in which they were kept. Four years earlier he’d attended another crime scene in the Black Belt where a man had been stabbed to death and had his eyes gouged out. A Negro man this time. In the flophouse on State Street.

  Eventually he found the set he was looking for. Paul Kellett. The man had gone to the hotel with a white woman he’d picked up in a nightclub in the early hours of a Saturday morning in November. And another man had broken in on them, killed Kellett and nearly killed the girl, had left Kellett’s eyeballs on the mattress, pupils pointed at the wall.

  Jacob stared at the photos, a little faded, a little yellow in the corners, but there it was, an almost identical attack.

  He shot into the living room and put a call through to the Detective Division at the 2nd District station, police HQ.

  ‘Frank? It’s Jacob.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Paul Kellett.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Negro. Killed in a State Street flophouse four years ago. Someone broke in and stabbed him to death and gouged his eyes out. It’s identical.’

  There was silence on the line for a few seconds before he heard Frank’s voice again.

  ‘Shit. I’ll pull the files.’

  Lynott hung up and Jacob put down the receiver, drumming his fingers on it, thinking how he could pass the time. He went back to the bedroom and fumbled all the envelopes back into place, save for the ones from the Kellett murder, all the while cursing himself for not having made the link earlier, worried that maybe forgetting such a gruesome case was a sign he’d seen too much murder and cruelty in his life.

  Then his phone rang.

  ‘You’re not gonna believe this,’ said Lynott when he’d picked up. ‘A man named Anton Hodiak was convicted of the crime. A killing-floor worker. Hated blacks, especially ones that slept with whites. Killed Kellett and nearly killed the blonde he was sleeping with. Pulled the same trick a few days later on a different couple. Except this time he kidnapped the girl too. Kept her locked up in his apartment for a few weeks. Tortured her. Neighbors called the police on him after they heard her trying to break out. He received a death sentence in 1925, commuted to life a year later. Then he was pardoned by Governor Small last year and was released from Joliet in January. He’s been on the loose in Chicago ever since.’

  7

  Michael stood amongst a clutch of straphangers as the streetcar rattled its way south, feeling faintly weary from his afternoon’s work. He’d called all the morgues, hospitals and asylums in the city and its surroundings, checking with his people for any stray young blondes that had arrived in the last few weeks, claimed or unclaimed, but he’d drawn a blank with all of them. And the whole while he’d been thinking about Ida and Mrs Van Haren and the money, and whether to accept it. Even though he knew he couldn’t make a decision till he got home and spoke to his wife.

  He stretched out his back and rolled his head left and right to ease the tightness in his neck. Age was spreading through his body like a stain, making it feel bulky, unwieldy. Nowadays every bone had a fault, every tendon a kink, every muscle a knot. God only knew what would happen when the rest of it started to go.

  As the streetcar moved ever southwards, more of the white passengers disembarked, and more Negroes boarded, until Michael was the only white left. When they reached the stops to the west of the Stockyards, the streetcar filled with workers knocking off their shifts, hard men, killers of cattle, life-beaten and worn-looking, swathed in the stench of dried blood. The smell mixed with the terrible heat of the day and soon enough the streetcar reeked like an abattoir and Michael had to fight the urge to put his free hand to his nose.

  When they arrived at 47th Street he fought his way off and began the short walk home, moving from the grand buildings of the strip to the more run-down streets beyond, passing by dilapidated greystones and housing complexes, crumbling churches and foul-smelling trash cans, left to grow rancid in the summer heat.

  Being one of the only white people to live where he did made Michael an object of suspicion, of sideways glances and frowns. But he was always smartly dressed, and with his razed red face, something of a fearsome prospect. The locals who knew him didn’t mind him, and the others assumed for a white man to be that far south, he must either be a policeman or a madman or a gangster, all good enough reasons to leave him be. Any animosity directed toward him
never went further than dirty looks and jokes behind his back. If anything he felt a sense of pity from the people who knew his story: There goes the white man who was fool enough to marry a black woman, and now he has to live here, with us. Used to be a policeman too. Had to quit the job and head up north. When people heard the couple were from New Orleans, there were rumors, too, of witchcraft, of voodou, of her putting a spell on him, and him marked like the devil for his troubles.

  It was a strange place to live after growing up in the Big Easy. The neighborhoods back in New Orleans were poor, but they had always been poor; the slums were composed of shacks built in the mud. But in the Black Belt, the run-down houses had once been luxurious, with ornamental stonework, columns and railings, all built along grand avenues. Rich people had made these streets, lived in them, then moved off somewhere better, and their abandonment still haunted the area, leaving a sense of desolation in the air, of having missed the exodus.

  Even after nearly ten years there, Michael hadn’t quite gotten used to it, and neither had Annette. There were enough similarities between New Orleans and Chicago – both cities founded by French traders, both lying between a river and a lake, both filled with blues and jazz and beautiful architecture, the Paris of the South and of the Midwest respectively – but the similarities were never enough to make the place truly feel like home.

  Just as he was turning the corner onto his street, he heard a commotion down an avenue, turned onto it to investigate and came across a crowd loafing about a tall, four-story, redbrick building. Three Black Marias were parked up outside the place, a clutch of Negro men were sitting on the sidewalk in handcuffs, and a group of locals had stopped to watch the show. The front door of the building had been broken open, and policemen were coming and going. On the top floor, where all the windows were open, Michael could see more officers milling about.