Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘Half of Chicago’s down in Darkietown. Dancing to that jungle music.’

  ‘But Benny wasn’t on the strip.’

  ‘The newspaper said they found him on State Street,’ Georgiev replied with a quickness that surprised Jacob.

  ‘He was found just off State Street, but he was attacked out in the Federal Street ghetto. That’s not near the clubs. No one’s going down there unless it’s on business.’

  Georgiev thought a moment, and as he did Jacob stared at him, at the red veins spiderwebbing across his glassy eyes, at his discolored skin, a shade somewhere between Jack Daniel’s and bile. The man was ill, Jacob realized, dying.

  ‘He had a girl out that way,’ Georgiev said. ‘Nigger girl. Worked the cabarets.’

  Jacob frowned and Georgiev grinned.

  ‘Old scams and new fools,’ he said.

  ‘She was after his money?’

  Georgiev laughed. ‘He didn’t have any. Benny and money were never together for long. What’s the matter, you don’t drink?’ Georgiev said, pointing a finger at Jacob’s untouched whiskey.

  Jacob lifted the glass, swilled the whiskey about, smelled it, then downed it.

  ‘So why was she with him?’ he asked, putting the empty glass back on the bar.

  ‘I don’t know. All I do know is it was strange. She was a good-looking girl, half his age. I tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘How long were they seeing each other?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘What kinda angles was Benny working when he died?’

  Georgiev shook his head. ‘I don’t know. He always had a hundred things on the go, every one of them a four-flush.’

  ‘Anything that might make someone want to kill him?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I heard he worked for Capone sometimes.’

  At this Georgiev frowned and paused a moment. ‘He worked for a lot of people.’

  ‘Was he working for Capone when he died?’

  ‘I don’t know, and I don’t like questions about Mr Capone. Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘Look, Benny never did nothing big for anyone. Slug jobs for the union, twenty-five dollars apiece. Pineapple-throwing, finger-snapping, pulling out nails. Ugly things. Uglier still the look on his face when he did them. Like the grin a man gets with a woman. Maybe something he did ended up getting him killed, maybe not.’

  Georgiev shrugged and stared at Jacob, his face hardening, and Jacob realized he was starting to annoy the man.

  ‘You know how I can get ahold of the girl?’ he asked before he lost Georgiev in a cloud of ill will.

  ‘She’s on the act list at the State-Congress Theater. The Cotton Candy Girls, or the Lollipop Girls. Something like that.’

  ‘She have a name?’

  ‘Esther something.’

  Georgiev turned away from Jacob and downed what was left of his Canadian Club.

  ‘You offered me two drinks if I answered your questions,’ he said, his tone leaving Jacob in no doubt that the interview was over. Jacob ordered another large whiskey and in the silence between the order being made and the drink arriving, Jacob watched as Georgiev stared at the bar, at the grain of the wood, the rings of that morning’s glasses fading inexorably into nothingness.

  ‘Did he suffer?’ Georgiev asked suddenly, looking up at Jacob, concern and tenderness in his voice, and Jacob was again surprised by the man.

  ‘He was dead before his head hit the pavement,’ Jacob lied, and Georgiev nodded and turned quiet, and in the silent void that followed, Jacob studied his face, the jaundiced skin, the seared eyes suffused with a piercing sadness, and he felt pinpricks of guilt for having questioned the man.

  The drink arrived and Jacob paid, said his goodbyes, and left Basil Georgiev in the dank, wooden belly of the beer hall, with his large Canadian whiskey, to continue his rush into the void alone.

  As he was heading back to the tram stop, Jacob noticed a Cadillac slow-rolling down the street, then pulling up a few feet from the entrance to the beer hall. He hustled along the sidewalk, guessing that such an expensive car in such a down-at-heel location could only mean one thing – gangsters. He reached the corner of the block and turned around to see what was going on. The car idled on the street a moment, then the back doors swung open and three men exited, and Jacob recognized the third of them by his leather jacket: Bugs Moran, the head of the Northside Gang. He was in his late thirties, chubby, with side-parted hair, and a drooping, hangdog expression.

  Jacob stood back and leaned against a shop doorway, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. He watched as Moran and the two men walked into the beer hall, and the driver switched off the car’s engine. Five minutes later they exited again, got in the Cadillac and drove off, leaving Jacob wondering if Moran had been in there to see Georgiev, and if he had, why he was going to see the friend of a dead Capone stooge.

  As he headed back home he mulled it over, wondering if Benny Roebuck had been murdered by Anton Hodiak, or if the dead man had been involved in something that went right to the top of Chicago’s gangland hierarchy.

  13

  After Ida and Michael had been all but thrown off the Van Haren property, they drove downtown to Illinois Central to see if Gwendolyn had actually made it onto the train bound for Montreal. If she had, there was a chance she was still alive, that she was safe from whatever it was she was running away from, that they could make the trip to Montreal themselves and track her down, maybe offer her some protection.

  They parked up a couple of blocks from the station, then walked through the shade of its thirteen-story clock tower, through its great arch and into the rush of people moving about the platforms within. Thirty train-line operators ran services out of Chicago’s six intercity stations, making Chicago the center of the country’s rail network, a waystation, a sorting office for the disenfranchised of the world, and nowhere was this more apparent than at Illinois Central, where the available routes open to someone fleeing the city were countless and entangled.

  They consulted the timetables placed in huge bound ledgers across one wall of the station, consulted the route maps, and figured there were only a couple of services Gwendolyn could have taken at that time of night – the Twilight Limited and the Wolverine. A woman at the Michigan Central Railroad desks told them that someone using the name Florence Smith had indeed booked a cabin on the red-eye Wolverine to Detroit, with an onward ticket on the New York Central Railroad to Montreal, but that the woman had never actually boarded the train. Somewhere on the cab ride between her house and the station, Gwendolyn had disappeared.

  ‘I guess we need to speak to the cabdriver,’ said Ida as they walked away from the booths.

  ‘I guess we do. Your turn to drive,’ said Michael, tossing her the car keys.

  A half-hour later they were back in the Gold Coast, pulling up to the garage and filling station that was the home of Gold Coast Cars. They walked through the concrete yard where the company’s fleet of Model 06 sedan cabs was parked up, all of them painted in a scheme of yellow and black, making them look like a swarm of bumblebees.

  They stepped out of the sun into a space filled with cars undergoing repairs, automotive equipment, spare parts. People were milling about – mechanics, and drivers in the company’s porter-like uniform – but no one paid them any attention. They spotted a desk in one corner, covered in documents and telephones, behind which sat a fat man who looked like he was in charge. They walked over and he glanced up at them from his paperwork.

  ‘Destination?’ he asked, picking up a pen. He was in his sixties, Ida guessed; his eyes were rheumy and his mustache was tinted mustard yellow from decades of nicotine.

  ‘We’re here from the Pinkertons,’ said Ida, showing him her ID.

  ‘We don’t do corporate discounts,’ the man replied, in an odd sort of voice.

  ‘We’re here to speak to one your drivers,’ she said, ignoring t
he sarcasm. ‘Someone picked up a girl from the Van Haren house on the twenty-seventh, sometime after ten p.m. You keep a record of that kind of thing?’

  ‘Sure I do. Why you asking?’

  ‘That’s confidential.’

  The man stared at her a moment. He ran his gaze from her face down to her ankles and back up, and Ida could almost feel his eyeballs scraping against her flesh.

  ‘What are you anyway?’ the man asked, frowning at Ida’s skin, at her hair with its ever-so-slight kink in it. ‘A dago or a coon?’

  No matter how old she got, she felt a stab of sadness when it happened, a hopeless feeling that some things would never change. The anger always came later.

  Michael made a move toward the man, and Ida put her hand up to stop him.

  ‘You going to help us or not?’ she asked.

  ‘You here on State’s Attorney’s business?’ the man responded.

  The Pinkertons often worked with the SA, and when they did, they were on official business, and people could end up in official trouble if they didn’t cooperate. But when they were on a private job, they had no such legal authority, and the man seemed to know all of this.

  ‘No,’ said Ida, ‘it’s a private matter.’

  ‘Well, then, there ain’t no reason for me to help you, is there?’

  The man grinned, and leaned back in his seat and folded his arms in front of his chest, as if he’d just issued them a challenge.

  ‘No. I don’t suppose there is,’ Ida sighed. ‘Like you said, things’d be different if we were here with the SA, or the Secretary of State’s Automobile Division. Isn’t that right, Michael?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘We do a lot of work for the Automobile Division,’ she continued. ‘Running checks on missing cars, accident investigation, insurance scams. What was the one we did a few weeks ago?’

  ‘Oh, that was a real peach,’ said Michael. ‘A garage owner in Calumet City. Caught him leaving tacks on the road coming up from Gary. A half-mile from his repair garage. Did a roaring trade selling new tires to those poor folks whose old ones he’d punctured.’

  Ida nodded and turned to look at the man once more.

  ‘Funny thing about our friends in the Automobile Division,’ she said. ‘Something else they do is check the roadworthiness of business vehicles. Like taxicabs. Now wouldn’t it be a coincidence if tomorrow morning a few of our friends from the division came down here and impounded all your cars while they conducted a spot inspection?’

  She turned to look at Michael.

  ‘That would be a coincidence,’ he said.

  Then they both turned back around to look at the man, their faces as blank as oven doors. The man glared at them a moment, then he rose and stalked out into the main floor of the garage.

  ‘Dumb Southern fucks,’ he muttered as he passed.

  They turned to watch him walk over to a shelf, take down a ledger and consult it. Then he shouted through the gates to the men in the yard.

  ‘Someone get me Weiler!’

  Then he returned to Ida and Michael and sat back down at the desk, glaring at them all the while.

  A few seconds later a Negro in his forties, tall, solidly built, hair cropped short, walked into the garage. His boss watched him like a hawk as he walked over to them.

  ‘These two wiseguys are from the Pinkertons,’ said the boss. ‘Tell ‘em what they need to know.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said the Negro. He turned to Ida and Michael and smiled.

  ‘Donald Weiler,’ he said, holding out a hand for them to shake.

  As Michael reached out, Ida looked down and noticed something that made her stop – the skin on the man’s hands was a ghostly white, bleached all the way up to the elbow, where there was an inch or so of indeterminate color, then his brown skin resumed, all the way up to where he ‘d folded up his shirt-sleeves.

  ‘The Stockyards,’ said the man, looking at Ida with a smile on his lips. ‘I do shifts in a salting pit.’

  Ida had heard of the thing before, but never actually seen it – years of working in the Stockyards rubbing salt into pork had bleached the pigment from the man’s arms and hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to stare.’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s quite something, ain’t it?’ he said, looking at his own hands, turning them over, as if appraising an antique. ‘Maybe if I did the rest of my body I wouldn’t have to keep working here,’ he said, before bursting into a laugh which caused the boss to look up from his paperwork with a scowl.

  ‘Is there anywhere we can talk that’s a little less noisy?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Weiler.

  He led them out into the yard and around to the side of the building, where a patch of asphalt sloped down to a fence that separated the garage from its neighbor. A few hosepipes lay about, and the asphalt was wet and glittering in the sunshine.

  ‘I guess this is about the Van Haren girl?’ said Weiler, leaning against the fence and taking a pack of cigarettes from his trousers.

  Michael gave the man a quizzical look and he shrugged.

  ‘Ain’t nothing else happened to me that’d make two Pinks wanna come talk,’ he said, smiling again, but more guarded this time. He lit his cigarette and inhaled.

  ‘What happened? Someone kill the girl or something?’

  ‘Why d’you say that?’ asked Ida.

  ‘Cuz it was damn clear she was in a jam and running away from someone.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell us what happened from the start?’ said Ida.

  ‘Sure,’ the man replied. ‘I got the call and drove over to the house and the maid was waiting out on the street. I knew the house. I mean, I knew whose house it was, what family lived there. The maid told me to drive round to the back and keep the engine running low. I got round there and the maid hustles the girl out through the gardens. The girl’s got a suitcase in her hand. Looked shook up, you know? I went to put her case in the trunk but she said she wanted it on the seat next to her. That’s all right, I said. She got in the back, told me to head for Illinois Central and I did.

  ‘The whole way she’s looking over her shoulder, biting her nails, agitated, jumpy. When we were a few blocks north of the station there was a holdup on Clark and she starts getting more nervous, you know. And then she tells me she’ll walk the last few blocks, and gets her purse out and throws me a five-spot. Says keep the change. I asked if everything was all right, but she just nodded and jumped out.’

  The man finished the story with a shrug and took a drag on his cigarette.

  ‘You remember what time this was?’ asked Ida.

  Weiler thought a moment. ‘Can’t say as I do. I picked her up ‘bout ten maybe. Ten-thirty. Me and the boys at the cab station were listening to the game on the radio and I got annoyed I had to take the call before it ended. Maybe it was coming up to eleven by the time she paid up and hopped out.’

  ‘You remember exactly where you were when she jumped out?’

  Weiler took a puff on his cigarette, rubbing his chin.

  ‘Not sure. Maybe between Ninth Street and Eleventh. I can’t say more than that.’

  ‘And after she got out – you see where she went?’ Ida asked.

  The man shook his head.

  ‘You notice anything else after that?’

  ‘No. I drove on up to the station and got in the rank to catch a return fare.’

  ‘You speak to anyone about this? The cops?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Well, if anyone does come asking questions, you keep your mouth shut and give us a call.’

  Michael handed him a card and the man took it in his strange white hands, stared at it a moment and nodded.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ said Ida.

  ‘Pleasure,’ he said, grinning back at her.

  ‘You work here and at the Stockyards?’ she asked.

  ‘I do night shifts at the Yards when I can, seeing as
neither job pays enough.’

  A lot of the companies in the Stockyards worked around the clock, having realized from the example of the city’s steel plants and forges, which ran like a ring of fire around Chicago, that it was cheaper and more profitable never to switch anything off.

  ‘Must be tough,’ said Ida.

  ‘You know how it is, they whistle while you work,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the garage. ‘Ain’t the worst work in the Stockyards. I could be sweeping lard.’

  ‘What’s so bad about that?’

  ‘The smell. It never comes off. People been retired ten years and they still stink of it.’

  14

  The Chicago’s Greatest Burlesque was a ‘refined’ burlesque show on an unlimited run at the State-Congress Theater, a tumbledown venue in the dingier end of the South Loop which showed two-reel movies in between the live acts. Jacob headed down there for the matinee and found the place about half full with patrons who were exclusively male and exclusively drunk. Any pretense that the Chicago’s Greatest was a ‘refined’ burlesque was quickly slashed – Jacob had to sit through a Scottish minstrel brigade, a couple of ancient Keystone comedies and a ‘chicken concert’ of Irish bagpipes, which the rest of the audience lapped up.

  Eventually the Lollipop Girls came on, to cheers, wolf whistles, boisterous obscenities and riotous applause. The Lollipops were eight Negro girls in skimpy, sequin-strewn dresses and feather hats, dancing a jazz variation of the cancan as the pit band played up-tempo ragtime numbers. Jacob scanned the faces of the girls, trying to figure out which one had, until his untimely demise in a Bronzeville alleyway, been dating Benny Roebuck. Not one of them seemed stupid or desperate enough.

  Jacob left a little before the girls had finished their second dance routine and headed over the road to a grocery. Out front were three or four rows of shelves containing fruit and vegetables wilting in the summer heat and picking up a dusting of fumes from the cars driving by on State Street. Also on display was a selection of hastily slapped-together bouquets. Jacob bought one of the less dead-looking ones and headed back to the theater, circling the exterior till he found the stage door.