Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘What did he do for you?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Killed cattle, what do you think? Did it with a smile on his face, too. And I don’t mean the scar.’ The man grinned and made a looping motion in front of his face with his index finger.

  ‘You know he was convicted of murder, right?’

  ‘He got a bum break. He was wrongfully convicted and pardoned.’

  ‘You seen him since he was released?’

  ‘Sure. I gave him his old job back.’

  At this Jacob and Lynott shared a look.

  ‘He’s here?’ asked Lynott.

  ‘He was. He left town a couple of months ago.’

  ‘Where’d he go?’

  ‘Florida,’ said the man. ‘Said he wanted to see if he could make a go of things down south. That’s why he came back here after he got released, to save up money for the trip.’

  ‘So after he was released from murdering two people, you gave him his old job back?’ Jacob said.

  ‘He was pardoned,’ said the man defensively, lighting the cigarette he’d rolled. ‘The Lord God says forgive. And what did he ever do except kill a couple of niggers that slept with white women? They should’ve given him a goddamn medal.’

  ‘He also tortured one of the white women,’ said Jacob.

  The man thought about this a moment, then shrugged and took a drag on his cigarette, and the smell of tobacco wafted through the frozen air, and in the stillness, Jacob realized how cold he was getting, the freezer making the sweat all over his body feel like ice.

  ‘You got his address on file?’ asked Lynott. ‘Here or in Florida?’

  ‘Nope,’ said the man. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Nothing. We just wanna talk to him. You know anyone that could help us?’

  ‘I done told you he left town,’ said the man, shaking his head, returning the pouch of Bull Durham to his pocket.

  ‘Let’s just say we wanna verify that,’ said Lynott. ‘You know where we can get hold of any friends or family?’

  The man shrugged.

  ‘Says in his file he got arrested for assaulting another worker here in the Yards. You know anything about that?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Sure. That was years ago. On account of his little sister,’ said the man, smiling. ‘The girl got herself knocked up by a coon that worked on the killing floor for Armour and Co. She screamed rape, but you know what girls are like these days. Anton pressured her to get rid o’ the thing and the doctor ended up killing her. So Anton went about setting things right. Put the coon in hospital but not before he ripped Anton’s cheek open with a cattle hook. Hence the scar.’

  Jacob flipped through the folder, looked through the dates. The attack on the co-worker had been a year or so before Hodiak started attacking other Negroes he’d seen around town in the company of white women.

  ‘If he contacts you again, or you find out he’s still in Chicago, you give us a call,’ said Lynott, handing over a contact card.

  ‘Sure,’ the man said sarcastically, raising his eyebrows. ‘Now unless you’ve got any other questions, the door’s over there.’

  Twenty minutes later Lynott and Jacob were standing outside the Stockyards on Halstead Street once more, where the sun was sparkling gold onto the paving stones and cars and storefronts.

  ‘I’ll send a wire down to Florida,’ said Lynott, ‘see what I can find, but the more I think about it, the more I figure Hodiak ain’t our guy.’

  ‘The deaths are identical,’ said Jacob. ‘His little sister dies cuz she slept with a Negro and now he’s running about town killing anyone that crosses the race line.’

  ‘We don’t know the dead guy in the alley was crossing the race line. And even if he did, it doesn’t make sense. All the attacks before were on Negroes with white women, like his little sister. But a white guy with a black girl? No one gives a shit about that except Negroes.’

  ‘Come on, Frank. You know how it is with these screwballs. They start on one thing and get worse and worse. And what if he’s seen another white girl on the street with a Negro and he’s kidnapped her and got her holed up somewheres, like the last time?’

  ‘Then that’s Florida’s problem, cuz that’s probably where he is. Let’s wait to hear back from them, okay?’

  ‘Can I keep the photo?’

  Lynott stared at him, and then there was a noise behind them and they turned to see a man in uniform lead a gaggle of noisy tourists out of the Stockyards and down the road toward a motor-bus. They waited till the group was a few yards away, then Jacob turned to look at Lynott.

  Lynott sighed, unclipped the photo from the ten card and handed it to him.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Jake.’

  11

  After the butler had led Michael to the restroom, he told the man, curtly, that he could find his own way to the drawing room, and the butler had left him alone, probably wanting to rush back to Ida and the maid. Michael gave it a few seconds before he padded off down the corridor in the opposite direction, found a staircase and ascended it. He walked along another corridor, checking doors. Most of them gave on to guest bedrooms, many of them covered in dust sheets. What good were all these rooms, he thought, without people to live in them?

  After a while he arrived at a set of double doors, opened them gently and peered into a large bedroom murky on account of its curtains being drawn. Through the gloom he could see it was a fussed-over room, draped in doilies and fabrics, as if the owner was making every effort to soften their world. And lying in the bed was Mrs Van Haren, asleep, completely still. Michael frowned, noted the bottle of pills and the glass of water on the bedside table. He walked over and checked the bottle: Pentothal, sleeping pills. Had she taken them herself or had someone used force, keeping her out of the way for the duration of Michael and Ida’s visit? The butler’s words floated into his head – Mrs Van Haren is indisposed – then he stepped back out and closed the door.

  A few yards down the hall, he found Gwendolyn’s room, identifying it by the pictures dotted around the place. He entered, looked about, then crossed to the dresser to inspect the photographs lined up in silver frames. There were a few shots of Gwendolyn with her parents, looking bored on holidays or dressed stiffly at formal events. There was one of her and some matronly, rich-looking white women standing outside what looked like a school with a group of young Negro students. But most of the photos were of the girl and her friends, a set of flappers, all of them tall and blonde and moneyed-looking. Michael put down the last of the photographs and noted what was missing: not a single shot of her fiancé.

  There was a door to an adjoining room and he stepped through it into a long, bright bathroom covered in emerald-green tiles. In the middle of the room was a huge claw-foot copper bathtub, buffed up to a high golden brown. Under a frosted window was a dressing table with a mirror above it, ringed with light bulbs. Michael looked through the items on the counter: Max Factor face powder, perfumes by Isabey and Charles of the Ritz, dozens of lipstick tubes with the new swivel-top design – all of them perfectly clean of dust. If the girl had had a bottle of morphine in the dressing table, a vial of cocaine, a few of her mother’s sleeping pills, they had long since been cleaned away by the staff. Then he noticed that something else was missing – no razor-blades.

  He went back into the bedroom and rifled through the girl’s wardrobes – they’d even taken away her belts. No photos of her fiancé, and no means by which to kill herself. Michael thought on that, and on the girl’s mother passed out in a room further down the hall, and the house began to feel like a gilded cage. He checked his watch and figured he still had enough time to search both rooms for hiding places, for stashes of whatever it was Gwendolyn might have been hiding. He walked back into the bedroom and got started.

  ‘I didn’t know I was doing wrong,’ Florence said through her sobs, and Ida soothed her with a hand on her back like a child. They were still alone, standing in the avenue of fir trees at the rear of the house.

&n
bsp; ‘It’s all right. I won’t tell anyone. Just let me know what happened.’

  ‘Miss Gwen came home that night, when everybody was out, and she was in a mess. Crying and upset.’

  ‘Where’d she been?’

  ‘Bronzeville.’

  ‘The Black Belt? What was she doing down there?’

  ‘She’d gone looking for Chuck – Mr Coulton – that’s her fiancé . . . to find him, to tell him she was breaking it off.’

  ‘What was Chuck doing in Bronzeville?’

  ‘He wasn’t there. See, Chuck hadn’t been around the last few weeks. He’d kinda gone missing. He does that. Miss Gwen wanted to find out where he was, she . . . she’d found something out about him and she hadn’t been sure about the whole thing anyway, and she’d finally decided to track him down and tell him it was over, break off the engagement. But she couldn’t break it off cuz Chuck had gone missing. But there’s a man in Bronzeville, a Negro, Randall Taylor. He’s connected with Chuck. I don’t know how. Miss Gwen went down there to see him, to find out where Chuck was. She’d got it in her head that Taylor could tell her. So she was going to meet him, find out where Chuck was, then go over to see Chuck and tell him she was breaking it off. But . . .’ The girl let out a sob, and Ida waited.

  ‘Something happened that night. Wherever she’d been. Something awful. She’d seen something.’

  ‘Seen what?’

  ‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. She wasn’t making any sense. She kept saying something about blood and bloody hands, and having blood on her hands. She was so scared. Said she had to get out of town or someone was gonna kill her.’

  ‘Someone meaning who? Coulton? This Taylor character?’

  ‘I don’t know. I told you, she wasn’t making much sense. She said she’d catch the train on out to Montreal, that she’d leave while no one was around and that I wasn’t to tell anyone. Not her folks, not anyone. She said she’d call Miss Lena when she was safe, and Miss Lena would call here and let me know.’

  ‘Miss Lena?’

  ‘Lena Jansen. She’s a friend of Miss Gwen’s. Then it’s just like you said it was. She asked me to pack her things and to call the station and book her a suite on the train out to Montreal via Detroit that night. Then I called a cab and when it arrived she got in it and that was the last time I ever saw her.’

  ‘What name’d you use to book the train?’

  ‘Mine. Florence Smith.’

  ‘What was the time of the train?’

  ‘I can’t remember what time it left. Eleven, eleven-thirty. It was the overnight from Illinois Central.’

  ‘And what was the name of the cab company?’

  ‘Gold Coast Cars.’

  ‘All right, you’re doing good, Florence. Just one last question – what was it that Miss Gwen found out about Coulton? The thing that made her want to call off the engagement?’

  ‘I don’t know, Miss Ida. I honestly don’t,’ Florence said, sniffing back tears. ‘I did wrong, didn’t I? I let her go and didn’t tell no one and now Miss Lena ain’t heard from her at all. Nothing in three weeks.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to Miss Lena?’

  Florence nodded. ‘She’s good. Miss Gwen, I mean. She’s a real good person, you know. Not a bad bone in her body. Why’s it always the good people bad things happen to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  And just then they heard a rustling at the end of the path, and Ida looked up to see the butler and the driver turn the corner into the avenue and angrily head toward them.

  12

  A couple of hours after Jacob had returned from the Stockyards he received a call from Lynott.

  ‘The dead man from the alley’s been identified. Benjamin Roebuck. I pulled his file.’

  ‘And?’

  Lynott gave him the broad outline of Benjamin Roebuck’s life, one that had been spent bumping along the bottom of Chicago’s criminal ladder.

  ‘There an address?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘Yeah, it’s six years out of date. I already put a call through. No joy.’

  ‘What about known associates?’

  ‘One. Basil “Three-finger George” Georgiev. The two of them got arrested together a couple of times, rousted once in a brothel sweep and then on a safe-cracking job. You wanna hear about it? It’s a peach.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jacob.

  ‘They were trying to blow a safe in the headquarters of the Typographical Union on Halstead, but Georgiev fucked up measuring out the nitroglycerin and he lost half his hand in the explosion. Hence the nickname. After they got released Georgiev had a string of drunk-tank arrests and nothing more. Meanwhile Roebuck got a job doing muscle work for Capone. I can’t quite figure out yet which one of the two was the brain cell of the operation.’

  ‘The dead man worked for Capone?’

  ‘For the Outfit, yeah,’ Lynott replied.

  ‘Are you gonna pay Georgiev a visit?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘No, cuz Roebuck’s murder is now being pursued by the Detective Division as a street robbery gone wrong.’

  Jacob paused and rubbed his temples.

  ‘He still had his wallet and jewelry on him, Frank. He had his eyes gouged out.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why it went wrong,’ said Lynott.

  ‘You got any idea what’s behind it?’ asked Jacob, perturbed by the news that someone in the division was trying to cover up the crime.

  ‘Gimbrel.’

  Jacob nodded. Pete Gimbrel was a thug of a cop in the Detective Division, a captain who beat confessions out of suspects with a set of brass knuckles engraved with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. An interesting choice of agent for whoever it was trying to cover up the crime.

  ‘Maybe Capone put the word out he wants it buried,’ said Frank. ‘Anyway, I shouldn’t even be talking to you about it. Something about all this stinks, Jake, and I ain’t in a position to follow it.’

  ‘You got the KA’s address?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘Sure. You got a pen?’

  Jacob wrote down the known associate’s address on a piece of paper and slipped it into his breast pocket.

  ‘You get any witnesses come forward for the murder yet?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the Black Belt, pal, what do you think? And the hospital angle’s not working out great neither. The reports came in while we were at the Yards. We found six people with matching wounds admitted the night before last. But none of them fit. Everything’s looking like a dead end.’

  After they’d finished speaking, Jacob left his apartment and caught an electric to Little Poland, hoping the victim’s known associate, Basil Georgiev, might be able to provide some clues as to why Benny Roebuck had ended up eyeless and dead in a Bronzeville alleyway. He got out at the end of the line and walked the last few blocks to Augusta Street. It was a wide road, well maintained, dominated on either side by towering, residential buildings whose wood-paneled design made the street look like it was bordered by two rows of giant barns, transplanted from the prairies and dumped in the city to grow monstrous.

  Jacob arrived at the address and rang the bell and a middle-aged woman answered the door, wiping her hands on her apron, looking harried and perplexed. Jacob asked for Basil Georgiev, and the woman, a bitter look crossing her face, told him to try his luck at one of the neighborhood bars, reeling off a list of local drinkeries in an irritated, skittering voice before slamming the door in Jacob’s face.

  He did the rounds and found the man in bar number three, a Polish beer hall that had made it through eight years of prohibition with not the slightest compromise to the Volstead Act. Jacob walked in and asked the barman if Basil Georgiev was there, and when the barman gave him a blank look he tried the nickname – Three-finger George – and the barman pointed to a sodden man at the end of the bar, stooped over the counter with a liquor lean, disillusion written all over him. Jacob made his way over, and when he got close, he could smell the alcohol sweats
rolling off the man in plumes. He sat on the stool next to him and the man looked up and Jacob smiled hello.

  ‘You’ve got that look in your eye,’ said the man, in a clear voice that surprised Jacob with its lack of slur or tremor.

  ‘What look?’

  ‘The look of someone who wants something. What is it?’

  ‘I’m a reporter. I wanted to ask you some questions about Benny Roebuck.’

  Jacob took the press pass he’d wangled from his editor at the Tribune out of his pocket and showed it to the man. ‘There’s a couple of drinks in it for you.’

  Georgiev stared at Jacob as if he was insulted by the offer, then a sour grin crossed his face. He nodded, and downed what was left in the glass in front of him.

  ‘I’ll have a large Canadian Club. The real stuff.’

  Jacob called the barman over and ordered them a couple of glasses. He took out his cigarettes and offered one to Georgiev, who accepted, taking it from the pack with his damaged hand, a hand split right down the center: thumb, fore and middle finger in place, then nothing, just a jagged line disappearing into the darkness of his sleeve.

  Georgiev caught Jacob staring, and Jacob flicked his eyes away, feeling something of the embarrassment he guessed other people felt when he caught them eyeing his limp.

  The two men lit up and the drinks arrived and Jacob looked about the place. It was cavernous and dusty, with a rustic smell to it – barley and hops – that made Jacob wonder if they weren’t brewing beer in the basement. Planks of rough, unvarnished wood covered all the walls, making the place feel dim, like he ‘d stepped inside the stomach of a wooden behemoth. Aside from Jacob and Georgiev, there were only two other customers in there, both of them at a table in the shadowy depths, hunched over a chessboard.

  ‘I haven’t seen Benny in a good few weeks,’ said Georgiev after taking a drink. ‘I heard he got turned into a stain on the sidewalk.’

  Jacob nodded, surprised at the flippancy, and he wondered if the two friends had fallen out.

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ said Jacob. ‘I was trying to figure out what Benny was doing down in the Black Belt in the first place.’