Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Here’s the thing, though,’ she continued. ‘If you don’t let us in, we’ll tell our friends in the Police Department about it. Lieutenants Stockman and Mullens – the two men that visited here a few weeks ago. They’ll have to come back to see what you’re hiding, and maybe they’ll make a racket this time – squad cars, Black Marias, gongs blaring. Maybe they’ll do it at five in the morning. Maybe they’ll have to take you into custody. And all because you didn’t help us.’

  She looked levelly at the man, and noticed how his smile was still managing to hang on to his face by its fingertips.

  ‘But if you let us in to talk to the girl, we won’t tell Mrs Van Haren, and we won’t tell the Detective Division, and Mr Van Haren’ll never find out, and things’ll go back to just how they were. So what do you say?’

  Two minutes later they were inside the house, walking through an air-cooled hallway, shoes clacking on a milky-colored marble floor, the sound echoing shrilly around the vastness of the place. They approached the bottom of a grand staircase and stopped.

  ‘Wait here, please,’ said the butler. ‘I’ll go and fetch her.’

  When he had gone, Michael turned to look at Ida with a quizzical expression.

  ‘She was watching us from a window,’ she said. ‘Looked scared as a rabbit.’

  Michael nodded. ‘And the driver?’

  ‘Lied about having any information that might prove useful, and about the girl being happy.’

  ‘Suicide?’

  ‘That’d explain why Mr Van Haren ordered the butler to keep us out of the house.’

  ‘You want me to stall the butler?’ asked Michael. ‘Give you some time alone with the girl?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It might give me the chance to have a look around the place. Good work, by the way – coercing the butler.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ida. ‘I suppose it was.’

  They smiled at each other and as they waited for him to return, they looked about the hallway; despite the fact it was filled with antique furniture and oil paintings and objets d’art, Ida felt it looked empty somehow, sterile. It possessed the same coldness she’d observed in Mrs Van Haren the day before, the sense that the place, and the people in it, had developed a layer of frost.

  ‘A whole new world,’ Michael said, and Ida nodded.

  She heard the sound of footsteps approaching and looked up to see the butler return.

  ‘You can talk in the drawing room,’ he said.

  He led them down a corridor, then another, then another, over what felt like acres of ash-wood parquetry. Eventually they reached a door and the butler opened it, holding up a hand for them to enter.

  ‘May I use the restroom before we start?’ asked Michael and the butler gave him a funny look.

  ‘Very well. This way, please.’ And the two men walked off back down the corridor and Ida stepped into the drawing room.

  It continued the theme of the hallway – large, high-ceilinged, full of high-ticket furniture and air-cooled to freezing point. There were a couple of tall windows on the far wall, through which the morning sun was shining. At the bottom of the windows was a pair of armchairs, and standing next to them was the girl Ida had caught spying on them earlier, the same scared-rabbit expression on her face. Ida crossed the room to greet her, smiling as she did, trying to relax the girl.

  ‘Glad to meet you. My name’s Ida.’

  ‘Glad to meet you too, ma’am. I’m Florence,’ said the girl in a Southern accent.

  She looked even younger in the sunlight streaming in from the windows; a little chubbier too, the blue-and-white maid’s uniform straining against her hips.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Ida asked.

  ‘Ocean Springs, Mississippi.’

  ‘Well, I’m from just down the coast, New Orleans,’ said Ida, hoping to create a sense of sisterhood. But the girl’s manner was cautious and guarded, and on her face was a flummoxed expression Ida had seen countless times: she was trying to figure out Ida’s race, and by extension, exactly how formal she should be.

  Ida took a moment to look around and think of a way to buy herself some time. Outside on the lawns she could see a pair of tennis courts, wrapped in a dark green wire-frame fence, looking as empty and unused as everything inside the house. And beyond them, a path, disappearing through a gap in the tree line.

  ‘Say, Florence, you been outside today?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, it’s such a lovely day and all, how about we talk in the garden? Does that door over there open up?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Thinking nothing of it, the girl stood and went over to the French doors that opened onto the lawns at the rear of the house, and the two of them stepped outside. Ida closed the door behind them, and guessed they could make it to the tree line before the butler came back, and despite herself, she smiled at the thought of the man returning and finding them gone.

  ‘You been in Chicago long?’ Ida asked as they skirted the tennis courts.

  ‘’Bout two years,’ said the girl with something approaching a sigh. Ida knew well enough the feeling of being far away from home, how difficult it was to adjust to somewhere new, with its own strange rules and particular forms of love and hate. Back South people like her and the girl only had to deal with white prejudice – which was prejudice enough – but up here, they got it from other black people too, for the fact that they were newcomers from the South. And the stratifications continued further down the lines, divisions arose between Southern blacks that had recently arrived, and those that had been there a while, and between those that were from the upper Southern states as opposed to those from the lower Southern states. Florence was at the bottom rung of all these social ladders, and yet she was working in a good position, as a live-in maid for one of the most prominent families in Chicago.

  ‘How’d you get the job?’ asked Ida.

  ‘The cook’s husband’s a cousin o’ mine. He sent me up.’

  ‘And you like it here?’

  ‘Sure. Work’s not too bad, and I get my own room.’

  ‘And what about Miss Gwen? You like working for her?’

  ‘Oh, sure. She’s real nice. Ain’t dicty or bossy or nothing. She was getting me lessons at that charity she worked at. Reading and writing.’

  ‘The charity in Hyde Park?’

  ‘Yeah. They got classes for Negroes. She was there every day. Didn’t do it just for show, you know, like some of those other rich girls. She believed it. All that change-the-world stuff.’

  Ida smiled and tried to imagine what life was like for Florence and Gwendolyn. The two girls, not much different in age, were both sheltered in their own ways, both adrift in a house that was empty except for a handful of distant, older folks. If Gwendolyn had confided in anyone, it would have been her maid.

  ‘She sounds nice.’

  ‘She is,’ said the girl a little wistfully, as if she realized halfway through talking that she should have been using the past tense. Then a thought seemed to pass into the girl’s head and her face brightened and she smiled.

  ‘I remember once we went to a dress shop in the Loop. I’d gone with her downtown on account of I needed to pick up some tickets from the station for Mr Van Haren. Well, the shop owners wouldn’t let me through the door. Said colored servants had to wait on the street, or better yet, around the corner. I weren’t fussed but it was winter and it was snowing something fierce. That was my first Chicago winter. Didn’t really know what cold was till I left Galilee. Well, Miss Gwen kicked up a fuss. I mean, a real fuss. Refused to leave the shop or spend another cent there till they let me in with her. Told ’em she’d close the family account at the place.’ Here the girl smiled. ‘They put me by the fire and even got me a chair to sit on.’

  Ida smiled back and they reached the tree line and turned down it, onto a long shaded avenue.

  ‘She seem different to you b
efore she disappeared?’

  The girl paused. ‘No, ma’am,’ she said, her words flecked with falsity.

  ‘Tell me about the day she disappeared.’

  The girl flinched, then composed herself and told Ida her own version of what had happened, and it dovetailed well enough with the other accounts, but Ida could see the girl was holding back and an idea formed in her mind.

  ‘What did Miss Gwen say to you the morning she left? About where she was going?’

  ‘Just that she was going out shopping.’

  Ida nodded, making out like she hadn’t picked up on the massive hole in the girl’s story. She wondered how pampered Gwendolyn was – if she could have run away without Florence’s aid, without help packing her bags and arranging tickets.

  ‘What about the night she disappeared?’ asked Ida.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, Mr Meeghan said Mr and Mrs Van Haren went out to the opera and then they got home late and they didn’t realize Miss Gwen hadn’t come home till the next morning. Isn’t that odd? That it took them so long to notice?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You didn’t say nothing to them?’

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘But Miss Gwen told you she was just going out shopping in the morning. You were at home that night. You knew she hadn’t come back, but you didn’t say anything to anyone?’

  The girl stayed silent and Ida could see her clamming up, drawing in her shoulders as Ida circled around the lies.

  ‘Did Miss Gwen know how to drive?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ said the girl, a new formality in her voice.

  ‘Out of all the servants, who stays over each night?’

  ‘Just me and Mr Richards, the butler.’

  Ida stopped walking and turned to look at the girl.

  ‘Listen, Florence, I’m gonna level with you, because I like you, and you remind me of me ten years ago, and I’d hate for you to lose your job when all you were doing was trying to help out Miss Gwen.’ As Ida spoke she could see the tears welling up in the girl’s eyes, and she felt a sharp pang of guilt for manipulating her emotions. She thought about the distance of the house from anywhere there was a transport connection, how Gwendolyn couldn’t drive, how no one was home that night apart from the two girls and the butler, who was probably in bed. Ida came up with the most likely explanation that fitted the lies: Gwendolyn had come home from the city that night, when no one was around except Florence, and then she’d run away. Without any stations nearby or a car to drive, she’d had to call a cab. Ida decided to gamble and unleashed a lie.

  ‘We spoke to the neighbors,’ she said. ‘They told us they saw a taxi that night, come to pick up Miss Gwen, and that you were with her. You’re in trouble, girl. Why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  The two of them stood there a moment, pressed in between the two rows of fir trees. And the girl burst into tears, and Ida reached over and hugged her.

  10

  After Jacob had made the connection between the murder in the alleyway and the murder in the hotel years before, Lynott had gone searching for info on the perpetrator of the former crime. He had found Anton Hodiak’s file in the Bureau of Identification, but the details it contained were scant – it listed no known associates, and his former address no longer existed, having been demolished to make way for an apartment block. It did list, however, the address of Hodiak’s former employer, and they figured it was as good a place as any to start looking for him.

  They met the following morning on Halstead and 42nd Street and as they walked toward the Stockyards entrance, Lynott passed Jacob a folder.

  ‘That’s your boy,’ said Lynott.

  Jacob opened the folder and saw it was Anton Hodiak’s ten card – his file from the Bureau of Identification. Clipped to the front page was a photo of the man they were looking for. Hodiak was stocky, with a thick neck, close-cropped hair, and small ears that projected awkwardly from the side of his head. But the thing that was most noticeable was the scar on the side of his face; it ran from his eye to his ear in the shape of the smile that was missing from the man’s lips. It gave him a disjointed air, as if Jacob were looking at him from multiple angles all at the same time, like those Cubist paintings from France he’d seen in the Tribune.

  They stepped through the Romanesque arch which marked the entrance to the Stockyards and approached the guard-house just inside it. Lynott spoke to the guards and one of them consulted a map and found the company they were looking for, a small concession on the west side. He announced that he would accompany them as it was likely they’d get lost without him. The Union Stockyards took up a whole square mile in the very center of the city, and was, by any definition, the largest abattoir in the world, home to over fifty meat-processing companies and twenty-five thousand workers, who in combination produced more than three quarters of America’s meat.

  They thanked the man and he sauntered out of his guardhouse and took them into the heart of the slaughter. They walked along a wide track of caked mud, passing by drovers herding cattle and armies of blood-soaked men. It was a multiracial workforce, and the guard explained the divisions.

  ‘The East Europeans and the Negroes work on the killing floors,’ he said, ‘the Mexicans work the freezers and hide cellars, and the Irish handle the livestock. Germans run the trains and the boats. The different groups are always trying to kill each other. Works out well for the bosses though.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Whenever the workers try to unionize it fails because they can’t organize across race lines, so the pay and conditions never improve. Divide and rule, boys.’

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled ruefully, and they carried on trudging through the dust. They passed by mammoth warehouses, manure mounds, railroads and canals, elevated walkways that rattled with the footfall of cows and pigs. As they journeyed the air became ever thicker with the shrieks of animals, the smells of blood and manure, disinfectant and diesel. Jacob started to get the sense that they were traversing somewhere different, an inner circle of Chicago, a city within a city, a more hellish, more distilled version of the one outside.

  And in amidst the stench and excrement and industrial killing, Jacob noticed something bizarre: tourists – groups of them being led about the place by tour guides as if they were visiting a Hollywood studio. They skirted by a gaggle of them and the guard smiled.

  ‘We’ve been on the sightseeing trail for years,’ he said boastfully.

  The killing fields may have given birth to one of Chicago’s many nicknames, the Abattoir on the Lake, but behind the name was a truth the city took pride in: it was Chicago that fed the nation.

  ‘This is it,’ said the guard, when they reached a long barn-like building with a roof made of corrugated sheets. ‘You gonna be long?’

  ‘Not too long,’ said Lynott.

  ‘I’ll wait here to take you back,’ the guard said, leaning against a fencepost, lighting a cigarette, and pushing his hat down in front of his face.

  Lynott and Jacob stared at the man a second, then they stepped into the building, taking a moment to adjust to the dimness and the monstrous heat inside. The place was long, tunnel-like, and taken up by rows of men standing in front of rows of carcasses hanging upside down from hooks in a tight, precise grid formation.

  Behind the nearest section of the grid a man was walking up and down, keeping an eye on things, looking vaguely as if he might be in charge of the operation. Lynott approached him and they spoke, and as they did, Jacob watched the workers on the killing floor.

  As each row of men approached a row of dead cows they lifted long-handled meat cleavers into the air and sliced downwards, driving deep gashes along the animals’ undersides. After each stroke, there was a pause, then the bellies of the cows emitted a hissing sound, and the slashes spread wide, as if of their own accord, and the animals’ intestines, stomachs and other organs flopped from their carcasses and into the trays wait
ing for them on the ground with a great smacking sound.

  The trays were on wheels and youngsters, half bent over, scurried along the blood-soaked floor, pushing the trays over to a group of men who sifted through them, and the cattle on hooks were pushed along by some unseen force, and another set of carcasses arrived on the moving-chains for the men with the cleavers to step forward and disembowel.

  The whole process took no longer than ten seconds, start of loop to end, and Jacob thought what it must be like for those men to stand there and perform that same slicing action six times a minute, for twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week, for the rest of their lives.

  He remembered hearing somewhere that John Ford got his idea for a car-assembly plant by watching the workers at the Chicago Stockyards, how intricately the jobs were divided for maximum efficiency, though as the person who told him had quipped, the Stockyards were less an assembly plant, and more a dis-assembly plant.

  Jacob heard Lynott say something, and he looked up to see him and the overseer heading toward a huge metal door. The overseer swung the door open and they stepped through into a cooler – a vast, refrigerated space from whose ceiling hung hundreds more animal carcasses. The man nodded to a desk and chair in the corner, where a second man was sitting, then left, closing the door behind him, and the roar of the slaughter dimmed to nothing. That was when Jacob felt it, the blissful coolness of the place.

  Jacob and Lynott walked through the frozen carcasses toward the desk where the man looked up at them and smiled. They saw he was wearing gloves and a scarf over a suit and tie.

  ‘Coolest place in the building,’ the man said. ‘How can I help you?’

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pouch of Bull Durham tobacco, took off the gloves and began rolling himself a cigarette. As he did so, Jacob took the opportunity to look the man over. He was in his fifties, short and round with eyes too far apart, granite-colored hair, cratered skin.

  ‘You used to employ a man named Anton Hodiak?’ asked Lynott, flashing his police badge.

  ‘Anton?’ asked the man. ‘For fifteen years. What’s happened?’