Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  Dante and Menaker had picked up a dozen cases to see if they were any good, not knowing that the chemists had overstated their qualifications, and the process, more often than not, turned the alcohol toxic, more toxic than any of the other adulterated booze on the market. By the time Dante had realized the alcohol was poisonous, he had already given away most of the bottles, inadvertently killing six people in the process, including three members of his own family.

  It was a stroke of bad luck that it was his little sister’s high-school graduation day; the girl having received a scholarship to study literature at UC, Dante’s parents had decided to throw a celebratory meal and they had asked him to get them some alcohol. He’d dropped off a case of the champagne at his old family home on his way to another delivery and promised to pop back there when he was done. While he was gone, his parents had opened up the champagne, toasted his sister’s success, and within a few minutes they were vomiting blood. By the time they got to the hospital Dante’s mother and sister were dead, and his father and brother were both invalids.

  In a daze he’d run around town frantically trying to trace the remaining bottles, and he’d returned home in the early hours, selfishly expecting to find some solace in the arms of his wife. But he hadn’t accounted for the bottle he’d left in his own kitchen, and he came home to find Olivia and her sister splayed out on the linoleum in a pool of vomit, bloodied urine, broken glass and the fatal champagne.

  He had rushed Olivia and her sister to the hospital, feeling sick as he entered the place for a second time that day, the doctors asking what they’d had to drink and where they’d got it. He remembered sitting next to his wife in the hospital bed as she’d died, and coming back home the next morning, sleepless and dazed, responsible for the destruction of his whole family.

  He’d climbed to his apartment, sat on the sofa, staring for what seemed like hours at the stains on the kitchen floor. Then he had gotten up and, still in a daze, had walked to the Illinois Central station. He’d left the door to the apartment open, his car in the street, the bank accounts, the bootlegging operation, his other business interests. At the station he called Al, telling him he was going on the lam, telling him he’d owe him one if he could clean things up, keep the police from tracing him. Al agreed, asked him where he was going, and Dante had hung up, got on a train and never looked back. Until now.

  The mix in the spoon reached a liquid state, and Dante snapped his lighter closed. He grabbed the syringe he’d bought at the pharmacy and placed the needle into the mixture and pulled the plunger up, and then he lifted the syringe to his eye, inspecting the liquid trapped in its thin, glass prison. He got out of the car and sat on the sand in front of it, leaning his back against the fender. He stared out across the lake and watched the glow of a night train moving along the horizon, its line of lighted windows like an illuminated dragon. Wind rustled through the dune grass, water sloshed, all of it hypnotic and calming.

  He wrapped his belt around his upper arm, found a vein amongst his scarred skin and slipped the needle in, the city lights reflecting on the glass of the syringe. When he had finished he pulled the needle out and looked up at the dragon of the night train pushing silently through the moonlight, and he felt the cool warmth rushing through him, his muscles relaxing, his mind at ease, his self dissolving till he was nothing but a collection of sensations and responses, nerve-ways warm and tingling, and in that nothingness he found peace at last, and he listened to the movement of the waves as if they were lapping inside his own soul.

  In the distance the dragon train had disappeared, but he could still see the lights of ships far out in the lake, plowing a course north to the freezing waters of St Ignace, Lake Huron, Canada. He closed his eyes and wondered if he should go back to see the people he had run away from all those years ago, go and see what remained of his ruined family.

  He had wandered around the country shadow-like after he’d left Chicago: a hobo riding boxcars, scavenging food, stealing. He’d tried to end it all a few times, but something had always pulled him back. He fell in with a pack of needlers on a train through the Appalachians and in the clean, crisp mountain air he had learned the habit. After a few years he wound up in New York, in the depths of winter, and had collapsed from lack of food, frostbitten, in a park opposite a church in the Bronx. A priest had rescued him, fed him, gave him work and a place to stay, and from there he’d managed to build a life, but it wasn’t really him anymore, now it was just a bandage he’d hoisted over his wounds, and he often found himself watching himself acting the part of being himself.

  Aside from the operation on his boat off Long Island – the operation that involved him personally testing every crate he sold – he started trying to help people out, and further gained a reputation as a fixer: he intervened in disputes, found runaways and missing product, made news stories and blackmail notes disappear. If people had a problem that needed fixing, they came to Dante, guessing him to be the image he cultivated – easygoing, debonair, a man with panache, not realizing he was just a washed-up excuse for a human being who’d run away from killing six people and destroying his own family, who was too weak to do away with himself, a man who could only silence the horde of demons running around his soul by injecting himself with dope every few hours.

  And whenever he came across bad booze in New York he chased it down zealously, and built a reputation for that as well. He guessed maybe that was part of the reason Al had asked him back, aside from his reputation as a fixer, aside from him being an outsider.

  He wondered again if Al knew about his dope habit and he thought back to the meeting that morning. Maybe he’d blamed Dante’s sweat on the heat, the bags under his eyes on tiredness from the journey. Despite his cocaine use and drinking, Al hated heroin and the people who used it, equating it with weakness, femininity, untrustworthiness. It was why he didn’t deal in the stuff, missing out on all the money Dante’s friends – Luciano and Lansky – were making from it back in New York. Al refused even to employ dope heads, had them beaten and thrown out of the Outfit if they were ever discovered within the ranks.

  It was only a matter of time before he found out about Dante, discovered that the man to whom he’d entrusted this most delicate mission was weak and couldn’t be trusted. Dante wasn’t sure what would happen when Al found out about him. Maybe he would send his bodyguard Frank after him, or maybe ‘Machine Gun’ Jack McGurn or any of the other psychopaths on the Outfit’s payroll. Dante had entered a new world back here in Chicago, a dangerous and changed world it would take all his wits to navigate.

  In the distance, the barking of the dogs got louder and angrier, accompanied by howls and yelping. He heard a rustling in the reeds and he broke off his reverie, opened his eyes and looked behind him. Something was moving in the undergrowth, scrabbling about. He padded around to the driver’s side of the car, reached in and took the Colt from the pocket in the door. Then he inched over to where the reeds were rustling about, and used the nose of the gun to part them. In a splash of moonlight, he saw a stray dog licking its wounds, young and small, with straggly brown fur. The dog had a cut along its face, hair ripped out of its back. It looked up at him with fearful eyes, wondering if it was about to get into another fight.

  Dante got down on his haunches and inspected the dog more closely.

  ‘It’s okay, boy. It’s okay,’ he said softly, but the dog still cowered.

  He thought for a moment, went back to the car and returned with a water canister and a cloth. He poured some water into the canister cap and put it on the sand in front of the dog. The dog thought a moment, then came forward and lapped up the water. Then Dante poured some of it onto the cloth, and took hold of the dog and wiped the wounds clean.

  When the work was done, Dante stood and looked at the dog, and the dog looked back at him with an expression Dante couldn’t quite fathom. Then Dante smiled, tipped his hat and returned the canister and the cloth to the trunk. He sat in the driver’s seat with both the d
oors open, catching the breeze. As he was lighting a cigarette he heard a noise and turned to his side to see the dog sitting on the ground by the passenger-side door, its black eyes gleaming, fixed on him, looking grateful, masterless, lonely. Dante thought a moment before patting his hand on the passenger seat, and the dog jumped into the car and sat down next to him. Dante smiled, stroked the dog’s head and the two of them stared out at the lake.

  In the morning, the sun would beat down mercilessly on its surface and a haze of moisture would rise into the air and drift over the beachfront, peppering the city with lake water and corrosion and suffocating humidity. No respite for Gomorrah. Except here, now, in these few dark hours of cool, in the no man’s land between the prairie ghosts and the lake nymphs, with the last light of the dragon rushing through him. He stared out at the black mass of water, to the vastness of Canada and the Arctic beyond, to the black mass of the sky above, in which the world was just a suspended mote, and in his oblivion he thought how much better it would be if every void was strapped with stars.

  PART TWO

  DUET

  ‘All the tints of the racial rainbow, black and tan and white, were dancing, drinking, singing, early Sunday morning at the Pekin Cafe. At one o’clock the place was crowded. Meanwhile a syncopating colored man had been vamping cotton field blues on the piano. A brown girl sang. Black men with white girls, white men with yellow girls, old, young, all filled with abandon brought about by illicit whiskey and liquor music.’

  NEWSPAPER REPORT QUOTED BY THE

  CHICAGO COMMISSION ON RACE RELATIONS, 1922

  ‘Slumming parties are apparently pleased with the atmosphere of sensuality in Chicago’s nightclubs and find delight in seeing the intermingling of the races.’

  THE JUVENILE PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION,

  CHICAGO, 1923

  9

  The morning after their meeting with Mrs Van Haren, Ida and Michael booked out a car from the car pool in the basement of the Pinkerton building and drove across town to the Van Harens’ mansion.

  ‘What did Annette have to say?’ Ida asked Michael when they had left the Loop, and were heading north up LaSalle Street. She’d been surprised by Michael’s call the previous night, and even more surprised that he’d agreed to risk their careers in not reporting Mrs Van Haren’s offer of money.

  ‘She said new jobs were a lot easier to come by than fifty thousand dollars,’ said Michael, turning to smile at Ida.

  She nodded, then turned to look at the road ahead with a sense of optimism. She’d realized long ago that even when her apprenticeship with Michael was over, she wouldn’t be getting promoted, that she’d never be a lead detective, that the men at the top of the organization were of the opinion that the only role for a Negro girl in the company was as an assistant, a footsoldier, someone who was good for getting information out of Negro witnesses and nothing more. After nearly ten years of being a Pinkerton she was starting to feel trapped. If she wanted to move up in the world, she and Michael had to strike out alone and start their own business. But they couldn’t do it without money.

  Now, however, with Mrs Van Haren’s reward, there was a chance for independence, for being everything she could be. ‘Self-determination’ the commentators in The Chicago Defender called it. As she sped through the sunshine that morning with Michael, she could feel the new possibilities as palpably as the lake breeze whistling through the car, and almost against her will, a smile formed on her lips.

  ‘Objectives for today?’ Michael said, bringing her back to the here and now. She turned to look at him and he gave her the grin he used whenever he was testing her.

  Ida thought. ‘One, interview the driver that dropped off Gwendolyn on the day she disappeared – see if there’s any holes in his story. Two, try and figure out what’s going on with the missing father and why he ain’t around. Three, see if we can pick up on the atmosphere in the house that Stockman and Mullens noticed. And four, in light of the phone call with the State’s Attorney’s last night, try and figure out how they found out so quickly that Mrs Van Haren had employed us. I miss anything?’

  ‘If you did, I can’t think of it.’

  Soon enough they were sailing down roads lined with luxury apartment blocks and bloated Queen Anne-style mansions, all of them set in spacious grounds and so sun-soaked Ida imagined they could be in Florida or California. The Gold Coast was the city’s millionaire district, a neighborhood of sandy beaches and gilded bank accounts populated mostly by Chicago’s merchant princes. It was located on the northern lakeshore and perched where it was, it somehow felt detached from the rest of the city, untainted by the smoke of the forges and the blood of the Stockyards. But perhaps even that wasn’t quite enough; if the Gold Coast could have detached itself from the rest of Chicago and floated a mile or two out into the lake, it probably would have done so.

  Ida checked the address and they turned off the main road and onto a cross-street and Michael parked up outside a great house whose white walls shimmered in the sunshine. They got out of the car and walked up a long, curving driveway that cut through vibrant lawns, sparkling and jeweled, an effect that made the house look like an island floating in the middle of a green sea. Further on a row of high fir trees ran along the property’s boundaries, demarcating the land, isolating it.

  The house itself was three stories high and along its front was a row of Doric columns and to its side a porte-cochere, where a stocky man was washing a collection of luxury cars. The man paused in his work when he saw them approaching, and Ida wondered if he was the driver who had dropped off Gwendolyn at Marshall Field’s.

  They reached the front of the house, climbed a stone staircase and rang the bell. A few moments later an old man in a butler’s uniform opened the doors, an ancient Negro with a gnarled body, half bent over, shoulders misaligned, a smile on his face that seemed to be frozen into place.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Michael. ‘Is Mrs Van Haren in?’

  ‘Mrs Van Haren is indisposed.’

  Michael and Ida frowned and shared a look.

  ‘We had an appointment.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the butler, as if remembering something, ‘you must be the two detectives. You’re here to talk to Mr Meeghan, our driver?’

  The butler held up a hand and they walked back the way they had come, then to the side of the house where the man had been cleaning the cars.

  ‘George, the detectives,’ said the butler, before taking up a position under the porte-cochère, within earshot, his hands dangling by his sides, one hanging shorter than the other on account of his oddly sloped shoulders. Michael introduced himself and Ida, and the driver nodded back. He had a ruddy complexion, with thinning hair colored a Saharan yellow, and the kind of build that suggested bodyguard more than driver.

  Michael ran the questions, and Ida watched. They always split their interviews up like this – one talking, the other scrutinizing the interviewee’s face and body for any disturbances at anything mentioned. Michael had trained her in how to study humanity closely enough to spot these things, and now she never missed even the grain of a lie.

  The driver repeated the story they’d already read in the police reports. He’d picked up Miss Gwendolyn in the Duesenberg and had driven her from the house down to Marshall Field’s; the last he’d seen of her, she was disappearing into the crowds outside the store on North State Street.

  ‘Did she look anxious or perturbed on the way over there?’ Michael asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did she do anything unusual on the days leading up to her disappearance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have any information you think might be useful?’

  ‘No.’

  And just for a second, the man’s eyelids flitted, as swiftly as mosquito wings.

  ‘What was Miss Gwendolyn like?’

  And now something else disturbed him; a niggle of energy flickered through his face, a by-product of the ef
fort involved at having to come up with a lie.

  ‘Beautiful and happy.’

  Michael managed to tease a few more details out of the man: after he had dropped her off at the store he had driven back to the house and stayed there till the evening when he had taken Mr and Mrs Van Haren out to the opera, driving them back around one o’clock. No one realized Gwendolyn hadn’t come home from her trip till the next morning.

  As they spoke, Ida had a notion that someone other than the butler was watching them. She broke off from keeping her eyes fixed to the man and looked about her, and caught sight of a figure standing in one of the upper windows: a chubby young Negro girl in a maid’s outfit, peering down at them. Their eyes met and a worried look came over the girl’s face. She jumped back from the window and disappeared into the darkness so quickly Ida wondered if what she’d seen had been an apparition.

  Then Michael wound down the interview and he looked at Ida and she inclined her head to the left a little to indicate the driver had lied. Then the butler walked over to them and they headed back along the path.

  ‘I’d like to interview the maid, please,’ Ida said to the butler.

  ‘Mrs Van Haren said you were only to interview Mr Meeghan,’ the man replied, still smiling.

  ‘I know and I understand that, but it’s important I speak to her,’ said Ida. ‘If Mrs Van Haren were here, I’m sure she’d agree.’

  The butler looked at her again with that smile still stuck to his face like it was a permanent fixture. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. I’ll walk you to your car.’

  He continued on down the driveway, and Ida tried to get a handle on the situation, eventually figuring that maybe the absent Mr Van Haren had given the butler instructions to allow no one into the house.

  ‘I understand your position,’ she said. ‘Mr Van Haren told you not to let us inside.’