Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  So they turned their attention to Senator Deneen. Michael had been offered a job in the State’s Attorney’s office to drop the Van Haren case, and if what Michael’s friend Walker had said was correct, the State’s Attorney had made the offer because Senator Deneen had pressured them into it. Michael called a contact in the Republican Party, asked for a list of donors to Senator Deneen’s election campaign, and there was Charles Coulton Senior’s name right near the top. The father of Gwendolyn’s fiancé, the man whose son had gone missing without a missing person’s report, must have been the one who was behind it. From Coulton to the State’s Attorney’s to Michael, the power had been exerted down the links. Chicago was like that, a city of lines and force.

  It turned out the man’s business address was just a couple of blocks from Pinkerton HQ, at the bottom of the La Salle Street Canyon, so Michael had gone down there early the next morning, and now he stood outside, watching the cars coming and going in front of the building. Coulton owned it outright, had built it himself, all twenty-five floors, renting out twenty-three of them to other businesses and keeping the top two for himself.

  Michael took a puff on his cigarette and craned his neck to look up at the building. It was clad in Connecticut limestone and like so many other buildings constructed in the years since Carter and Carnarvon had discovered King Tut’s tomb, it was decorated in the Egyptian Revival style, with art deco lines running along its stonework depicting Nile reeds, Papyrus leaves, lotuses, scarabs, suns and jackal-headed gods, making it look like a new temple to an ancient religion.

  At the building’s very pinnacle was some kind of golden statue Michael couldn’t make out. He put his hand up to his brow, to dim the glare and get a better view, but the light streaming down from the sky was too strong; it bounced off the asphalt underneath and rebounded off the walls in a billion haphazard zigzags that stung and dried his eyes. More lines of force pressing down from above, needling him, obscuring the bigger picture.

  Outside the foyer of the building, a succession of Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs and Isotta Fraschinis were pulling up to disgorge captains of industry at the building’s entrance. Doors were flung open by porters in pristine white gloves, and men stepped out onto the red carpet and were whisked up in elevators to their new Mount Olympus at the top of the building. After a few moments a Bentley saloon pulled up and two men stepped out. Michael flicked his cigarette onto the asphalt and trotted across the street.

  ‘Mr Coulton?’ he said, and the two men stopped and turned to look at him. Despite the heat both were dressed in somber black business suits. Coulton was tall and well-built, and if it wasn’t for the surroundings, and the suit, Michael would have taken the man for an aging street thug.

  ‘My name’s Michael Talbot. I’m a detective at the Pinkerton Detective Agency.’

  ‘Ah, the man who rescued the Brandts’ baby from those kidnappers.’

  Michael paused. The accent, the intonation, the choice of words, they all seemed wrong. They were coarser than those he was expecting, more inflected with the street, with the east coast, with the slums of Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore. The man was trying to conceal his true accent, and Michael looked at him again, and once more had the impression of a gangster in a well-cut suit.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Michael.

  ‘The Brandts are fine people. We were all so relieved. Well, what can I help you with?’

  ‘I just wanted to thank you for my new job at the State’s Attorney’s office, and I was wondering if we could discuss the details.’

  Michael watched intently as the muscles of Coulton’s face pinched in confusion. The man must have heard by now from his informers at the State’s Attorney’s that Michael had turned down the job offer, yet here he was, offering his thanks, pulling the rug from under the man’s feet. Coulton was wondering if there had been a miscommunication, and Michael was hoping the man’s curiosity might gain him an audience.

  As Coulton stared at Michael, deciding what to do, the man who had exited the car with him stepped forward and smiled.

  ‘Mr Talbot. My name is Mr Smith, I’m Mr Coulton’s personal secretary. We’re very busy at the moment, but if you’d like to arrange a meeting, please call me on this number.’ He held out a business card and looked him in the eye. The delivery was smooth, and Michael smiled at the irony; Coulton’s lackey had the sophistication, the well-heeled manner, the accent, that Coulton himself was striving so hard to ape.

  Michael returned Smith’s gaze and saw that one of the man’s eyes was glass, an expensive replica of his good eye, perfect enough to be almost unnoticeable.

  As Michael took the card, one of the building’s doormen approached.

  ‘Is everything all right, Mr Coulton?’ he asked, stretching out his back and shoulders. Behind them a couple of cars had pulled up to the entrance, were waiting to discharge more men into the building, and the stoppage was holding them up.

  Coulton stared at Michael for a moment longer, then he lifted a shaking, stubby finger into the air.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said to the doorman. And then to Michael, ‘You’ve got five minutes.’

  They turned and walked into the foyer of the building, a foyer which was vaulted and tall enough to fit a greystone in, but which was filled instead with an ice-cold draft from an air-cooling system which bit through Michael’s sweat-drenched clothes and into his skin.

  They crossed to an elevator bank underneath a mural of the eye of Horus, stepped into a private elevator and travelled all the way up to the twenty-fourth floor in silence. Then they walked down a pristine corridor, through a glass door into an office the size of Michael’s apartment. Unlike the Egyptian-themed foyer, the decor here was aristocratic country house: dark polished wood, damask chairs, velvet drapes, all of it trying to add a touch of the ancien régime. Far from making Coulton look like whatever it was he was aspiring to be, the decor highlighted how far short of it he was, making him seem even more like a street hustler.

  And in that moment it occurred to Michael why there was not much to be found on Coulton’s beginnings: the man had changed his name. It was exactly the kind of name the man would have chosen if he’d had the choice, a name that fitted in with the furniture and the accent and the business suit and the car. Michael scrabbled together a cliché of a life, a boy from the streets making some money, moving out west, laundering the money and changing his name, getting wealthier, building skyscrapers, marrying his son into what, by Chicago standards, was old money. Except his son didn’t like girls, was more interested in slumming it in jazz clubs, and all the plans for a respectable legacy had crumbled. And now both the boy and his would-be wife had disappeared, and the man was having to entertain a Pinkerton detective in his office.

  ‘What are you doing here, Mr Talbot?’ Coulton asked once they were seated at his desk, the secretary hovering behind Michael, near the door.

  ‘I wanted to know why you didn’t file a missing person’s report when your son went missing. As far as I can tell, he’s your only immediate family, and it’s been weeks since anyone saw him.’

  ‘My son makes a habit of disappearing. He’s a good-for-nothing. He disappears, only to reappear a few weeks later in a police cell or a drunk tank, or worse. While you’re asking where he is, he’s probably drinking cocktails in a Mexican brothel. He’ll turn up eventually, and when he does there’ll no doubt be a bill attached. A bail note, a blackmail note, a gambling debt, a fee to pay to a journalist to keep his mouth shut. If I called the police every time the boy disappeared there’d be no officers left on the street. Why didn’t I report him missing, you ask? I’ve been on the verge of disinheriting him for the last decade is why.’

  ‘But this time his fiancée has disappeared too . . .’

  ‘His fiancée is as stupid and flighty as he is. In that, they’re an excellent match. I take it by your questions that you’ve not taken up the job offer with the State’s Attorney’s office?’

  ‘No.’

>   ‘You lied to me earlier?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have talked to me otherwise.’

  At this Coulton paused a moment, then nodded.

  ‘You’ve chosen a dangerous path, Mr Talbot. And all for what? An air-headed bleeding heart who’s chosen to run away, and a wayward boy who’s drunk in a hole somewhere. Why are you so interested in all this?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘I’m interested in doing right by the girl, and by her mother.’

  Coulton laughed, a scoffing, belittling laugh.

  ‘You fooled me with that face of yours. I didn’t take you for a do-gooder. Look out of the window, Mr Talbot. We’re in Chicago. There’s no room for do-gooders here. We’ve got almost double the murder rate of New York and more bombings than any other city in the country. We’ve got a jail that inmates can walk out of, a lunatic asylum one in four patients escape from, we’ve got a governor who’ll pardon you if you pay him enough, a senator who’s so corrupt he wasn’t allowed to take his seat in the Senate, and we just had an election dubbed the Pineapple Primary because of the number of hand grenades used in it. If you think this city has any time for do-gooders you’re a damned fool.’

  Michael looked at the man as he finished his rant. It was the kind of pre-prepared speech people thought up in their spare time and looked to unleash whenever they found the opportunity, and Michael had walked right into it.

  ‘Now unless you have any actual business here, I’d like to get on with mine.’

  ‘I just had one question, before I go. You built this place?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘It’s mighty impressive. Outside, right at the top, there’s a gold statue. I couldn’t tell what it was from the street. The building’s real tall, and with the sun shining down . . .’ Michael shrugged and wondered if he was laying on the slow-witted Southerner act a little too thick. Coulton frowned, not sure if he was being made fun of. Then he pressed his fingers together in a steeple.

  ‘It’s Plutus, the god of wealth. The Board of Trade Building will have its sculpture of Ceres, and I have my Plutus.’

  ‘I see,’ said Michael, wondering why the man had put an ancient Greek god atop an ancient Egyptian building. Michael guessed he must have said it sourly, because Coulton glared at him.

  ‘You have something against wealth, Mr Talbot? Are you one of those Bible-reading fools who think money is the root of all evil?’

  It was the second time Coulton had suggested Michael was a fool, and the man probably hadn’t even realized he’d done it. Michael had always been of the impression that it was possible to get through life on a shortage of manners, or of money, but never both. Michael, not having much money, opted to be well-mannered. Coulton, it seemed, was his reverse.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Michael replied.

  ‘Yet you refused to take a job that would have seen you much wealthier than you are now. The money could have moved you and that half-bred family of yours into somewhere respectable.’

  ‘Oh, the Southside’s respectable enough for me.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Coulton said. ‘You look the picture of contentment. A playwright in ancient Greece wrote a play about Plutus. The god was blind and distributed wealth randomly. Then his sight was restored and he began distributing it according to who deserved it, and you know what happened? Chaos. Society collapsed.’

  Michael nodded, getting the point. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come by your money? When I was reading up about you, the papers didn’t have much to say on the subject.’

  Michael saw a flash of anger in Coulton’s eyes.

  ‘I don’t much like your attitude, Mr Talbot.’

  ‘I don’t much like it either.’

  Coulton glared at him a moment longer, then as if he’d realized something – maybe that Michael was trying to rile him – he paused, and smiled.

  ‘I made a little money in my youth,’ he said, ‘through hard work. I invested the little money, and it attracted more money. That’s the way these things work.’

  ‘Money attracts money,’ said Michael.

  ‘Exactly. Like gravity.’

  ‘Or voodou,’ Michael muttered, wanting to rile the man further, to see what he was like when angry. But Coulton didn’t take the bait.

  ‘You’re from New Orleans, aren’t you, Mr Talbot?’ he said, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I went to your city once. Saw a witch doctor. Had my fortune told. For fun. I suppose there is a voodou to money, a magic, a force. You want to know what the similarity between voodou and money is?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘They only work if people believe in them.’ Coulton grinned, and Michael thought for a moment and grinned back.

  ‘I suppose you’ve got a point there,’ he said.

  ‘I do indeed. Money is life, Mr Talbot. Without it, who knows what terrors lie in store?’

  Michael studied him a moment, running the brim of his hat through his fingers. He didn’t need any more time with this man. Clearly he was involved in it all. The only question was how.

  ‘Well, I better be going. Thanks for your time.’

  Michael smiled and Coulton eyed him as he stood and headed for the exit. The secretary with the glass eye moved toward the glass door and opened it, but just as Michael was reaching it, he remembered something.

  ‘I almost forgot,’ he said, stopping, and Coulton looked up at him. ‘You got your scripture wrong. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Love of money is the root of all evil. Big difference, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

  Michael smiled and Coulton glared at him. Michael popped his hat onto his head and walked out through the glass door, back into the corridor, to the elevator, to the eye of Horus, to the turmoil and roar of LaSalle Street roasting in the heat below.

  26

  As Jacob walked along the canal, dawn came on, ruby and white, promising another day of heat and hazy weather, the light giving shape to the colossal gas storage tanks, factories and refineries that lined the wasteland either side of the waterway. Beyond them was the bridge. It had been raised to let a steamboat pass through, so on either bank, opposite halves of it were pointing up into the dawn like two great iron fingers.

  On Jacob’s side, just before the bridge, stood a collection of old huts and shacks running along the water’s edge, in front of a makeshift wharf where a few rafts were tied up. The rafts were jerry-rigged and flimsy, made of scrap wood and twine, operated by vagrants who salvaged the effluent poured into the water by the abattoirs, skimming animal fat and hair off the surface to sell on to lard-makers and packagers.

  Jacob figured if the cabaret dancer’s body was dumped into the canal, then it was dumped at night, so the only people who would have been abroad to witness it were the tramps living in the shacks at the bottom of the bridge. He trotted down the bank to the shacks, and began looking about for people to question.

  Those he came across were either drunk or half asleep or crazed, and Jacob soon figured that any of that shantytown’s inhabitants who had their wits about them were probably already out on the waterways scavenging for food.

  Midday came and went, and the afternoon wound on, and still Jacob hadn’t found anyone with any useful information. He left the canal bank and in amongst the factories found a cafeteria, where he had an early dinner. As he walked along the bridge on his return to the shantytown, he paused a moment to look down at the canal, straight as a road as it ploughed its way to meet the Des Plaines River, twenty-eight miles southwest. The canal was just one part of the network of railways, waterways and roads the city cast across the hinterland, using it to pull in people and goods with the grim determination of a fishing-boat captain, rearranging the landscape so that Chicago was at its center, the organizing principle.

  A familiar feeling came over him, one he’d often experienced when contemplating the city’s mammoth industrial power; that being in Chicago meant being a cog in some colossal, unfathomable m
achine which was endlessly manufacturing, building, forging, transporting, on such a vast scale that it was impossible for any one man to fully understand the extent of what the city had planned. It was a disorientating sensation, a feeling of powerlessness, insignificance, detachment.

  He looked again at the great forges blasting jets of fire into the air, leaving behind them thin trails of purple smoke, sliced by the rust-colored rays of the sun. The clouds of soot and smoke would hover over the canal and the city, and make the humidity even worse, only dispersing if the wind decided to blow the right way and push the clouds out over the lake. He wiped the sweat from his face, looked at the shantytown below him, and went down onto the bank once more.

  A little after sunset, a raft pulled up at the wharf and an old bearded man tied it up, then heaved a sack over his shoulder and made his way across the planks laid down in the mud at the canal’s edge. Despite the heat, the man was wearing a thick winter jacket and a woolen hat, and grime and soot were smeared so thickly across his face that in the darkness Jacob couldn’t even discern his skin color. Jacob thought of the girl, burned white by the canal, and this vagrant, grimed black by it.

  He walked over to the man and fell in step with him.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ said Jacob.

  ‘No, ye ain’t,’ said the man, keeping his gaze on the path ahead.

  Jacob, flummoxed, took his press card from his pocket.

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ he said. ‘I wanted to ask you some questions and maybe there’s some money in it for you.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  Jacob looked at the man. The sack he had over his shoulder was foul-smelling and canal water was dripping out of it, splattering onto the hard-caked mud of the bank.

  ‘I was wondering if you were around here one night a few weeks ago. Maybe saw a body thrown into the canal off the bridge?’