by Ray Celestin
Officer #601 called central 0215 for assistance and for Coroner’s physician and for officers from the Detective Division to attend the scene. Search of body discovered wallet, necktie, cigarette packet.
Items in wallet:
1) Business cards identifying man as Corrado Abbate, Private hire bodyguard
2) Photograph unkn. woman (White)
3) Small change
4) Card from the Gaynes Club, Bar / Restaurant
Assisted Coroner’s physician, removal of body, awaited detectives till 0330 on site.
Time completed 21 Jun. 28 at 0630 hrs.
REPORTING OFFICER
Hunter, F.
STAR
433
REPORTING OFFICER 2
Kirby, B.
STAR
601
SUPERVISOR APPROVING
Sullivan, M.
28
Sick of being stuck in traffic, Jacob descended from the electric and stepped into the chaos of Michigan Avenue. He shimmied through six lanes of speedsters, roadsters, runabouts and sedans that were crawling along, nose to tail, and when he reached the sidewalk, he merged into the mad swirl of pedestrians and continued southwards till he reached Trib Tower, the recently completed neo-Gothic skyscraper that was the home of the Chicago Tribune. It was thirty-six floors of stone and glass shooting arrow straight into the clouds, topped with a tour de beurre roof that was modeled on Rouen Cathedral, and garnished in so much stonework it was as if some careless chef had sprinkled sculptures across its facade.
Jacob stepped out of the glaring sun and into the building’s foyer, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust and then the lobby came into view: high-vaulted, spacious and glittering. The lobby was the paper’s public face and was designed to provoke awe. Chicago had a lot of newspapers, but it was the Tribune that mattered, with the third-largest circulation in the world, and the only major daily in the city not owned by Randolph Hearst.
Jacob trotted down the steps into the lobby proper, past the lines of people queuing at the pinewood desks, and crossed to the rear. He caught the elevator to the fourth floor and came out into the newsroom, the roaring epicenter of the paper, a chaos of men and machinery and rushing noise.
If there was anywhere that could be called the heart of the city, the newsroom of the Tribune was it, the place where all the information Chicago generated was ordered and made sense of, condensed every twenty-four hours into forty pages of three thousand words each. The vastness of the effort and the breakneck speed at which it happened left most of the people working there broken; the journalists and editors, legmen, rewriters, copy boys and cutters, all of them getting by on a steady diet of alcohol, cigarettes and cynicism, fourteen-hour work days and non-existent marriages.
Jacob walked through the mess of it all, passing by the steam tables and the rows of journalists’ desks, each one abuzz with men and women, jackets off, shouting into telephones or typing away at noisy Remington Model 12s; passing by pneumatic tubes shooting parcels between floors, basket conveyors rattling along overhead. The noise was deafening and people had to shout to make themselves heard, which only made it worse.
He headed to the picture editor’s office and picked up his paycheck for the last few sets of photos he’d delivered. Then he crossed to the other end of the newsroom and got in the service elevator at the back and pressed the button for the basement. The doors closed and the roar of the newsroom disappeared. Jacob closed his eyes, and he realized how tired and sleepy he was.
He guessed he must have nodded off for a few seconds, because the thump of the elevator reaching the basement jolted him awake. He stepped out into a long cement corridor, cool and quiet, damp and lined with great metal pipes. At a line of lockers, he opened one up and took out a bottle of development fluid he’d left there. He slipped it into his messenger bag, and then carried on going, toward the furthest depths of the basement, where a quiet, dank office housed the most knowledgeable and intelligent man in the building.
Jacob knocked on the door and stepped into a cavernous space full of filing cabinets and reference books, in the middle of which was a desk and fifteen-foot-long blackboard where Oscar Lowenthal was working. He was tall, and a little stooped on account of his age, with grey hair clumped around his ears. He was scruffy in a professorial way, an effect amplified by his bow tie and brown cardigan, worn as there was a pleasant, subterranean chill in the office.
Lowenthal turned to smile at Jacob, revealing behind him a grid of black-and-white squares he’d drawn on the blackboard, and next to it, a scrawl of clues and answers and letter counts, a babelism of words broken down by dashes and parentheses into their syllables.
‘And how is the inquiring photographer?’ asked Lowenthal.
‘Good,’ said Jacob, slumping into one of the chairs at the desk and tossing his hat onto the paperwork. He closed his eyes for a moment, enjoying the coolness of the basement.
‘I don’t know how they can work up there,’ said Jacob. ‘In this heat.’
‘The newsroom?’ asked Lowenthal, putting down the chalk in his hand, and heading over to the desk. ‘It’s not so bad. I used to know an editor at one of the Hearst papers downtown, firmly believed that alcohol produced better copy, so he encouraged his workers to drink on the job. The newsroom was infamous for its reek of vomit.’
He sat on the other side of the desk and Jacob opened his eyes and they looked at each other across the battlefield of Lowenthal’s desktop. They were friends by chance. Jacob was one of the few employees to use the lockers in the basement, and his happened to be on the route to Lowenthal’s office. The friendship had progressed somehow from the two of them passing the time of day to drinking sessions in which Jacob would listen to Lowenthal’s war stories from the newsrooms of the previous century, tales of Old Chicago, the million pieces of trivia the man had stored in his head.
‘Something’s troubling you,’ said Lowenthal.
Jacob thought a moment, and nodded in the direction of the drinks cabinet, where Lowenthal’s green celluloid visor of days gone past was hanging from a hook. Lowenthal poured him a Hennessy and Jacob told him about the investigation. When he had finished, Lowenthal mulled over it all.
‘A dead Capone stooge in an alley,’ Lowenthal said, ‘and his Negress cabaret-dancer girlfriend dead, too. Both of them with their eyes plucked out. And maybe Bugs Moran is involved, and maybe Capone is involved, and since it’s being covered up, someone in the Police Department is definitely involved. But I don’t think this killer, Anton Hodiak, is involved.’
‘Come on. The eyes, Lowenthal. And the stooge had a black girlfriend.’
Lowenthal shook his head. ‘The stooge maybe. But I’ve seen plenty of bodies dragged out of canals or left to rot in fields with the eyes plucked out by some bird or rodent. You said the stooge had glass in his hand. Maybe he smashed a bottle into someone’s eyes and the gouging was revenge. And as for the black girlfriend – half the city’s going down to Bronzeville on sex safaris. Plus, there’s the two rich kids dumping the girl’s body off the bridge. Hodiak’s a killing-floor worker – the lowest of the low.’
‘Well, he’s got rich friends somewhere, seeing as he paid off the governor for a pardon.’
Lowenthal dismissed the suggestion with a wave. ‘He probably got that pardon because the Ku Klux Klan raised a collection, or appealed to the governor – he’s their man after all. No, it doesn’t fit.’
Lowenthal steepled his hands together in front of his face and continued slowly. ‘The only thing you know for sure – as long as the tramp on the wharf isn’t lying – is that two rich kids in a Cadillac dumped the girl’s body off the Ashland Avenue Bridge. Which means they’re the only ones you know for certain are involved. You ask me, the thing’s veering toward money.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Jacob.
‘Cover-ups cost money. So do Cadillacs. And certainly so do rich kids. Things in Chicago only happen because of money. Look at what th
is city’s given birth to – skyscrapers, private detectives, assembly lines, financial derivatives, mail order, meatpacking . . . all of them invented here and concerned, in one way or another, with efficiency and its green-backed child. We even name our neighborhoods after commodities – the rich whites live in the Gold Coast, and the poor Negroes in Bronzeville. Money’s the magic that turns the wheels. In Chicago it’s never cherchez la femme, Jacob, it’s cherchez la loot. You need to ask yourself who’s got money to make by killing the stooge and his girlfriend, or more likely, who’s got money to lose if they stay alive.’
Jacob nodded. He’d been certain that the killer was Hodiak, but Lowenthal made a convincing case that he wasn’t, and now Jacob was losing confidence in his hypothesis, and by extension, his own skills of deduction. He rubbed his temples and looked at the crossword, half composed on the blackboard, and studied the answers that had been filled out – Queensbury, slugger, turnbuckle, Schmeling. A boxing theme. Lowenthal liked to keep the crossword topical.
‘Is that in aid of the match?’ asked Jacob, waggling his finger at the blackboard. The bout for the heavyweight championship of the world was to be staged in Chicago at the start of July.
Lowenthal nodded. ‘The fight should be good for you,’ he said. ‘Word is, every famous person in the world’s going to be descending on Chicago to watch it. You could be out snapping celebrities in hotels instead of corpses in alleyways.’
‘Not really my kind of thing.’
‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’
They settled into a comfortable silence, and Jacob closed his eyes, his mind swirling about the plughole of sleep.
‘You look tired,’ said Lowenthal after a moment.
‘I feel it,’ said Jacob, opening his eyes. ‘Can I use the phone quickly before I go?’
Lowenthal nodded and returned to the blackboard, and Jacob put a call through to the Detective Division.
‘It’s me,’ he said when Lynott picked up at the other end. ‘There’s been developments.’
He told him about the stooge’s dead girlfriend in the canal and the two rich kids with a ’27 Cadillac.
‘I’ll put a call through to the Automobile Division,’ said Lynott. ‘Should have a list of them in a day or so. What’s the description of the two kids?’
‘One Hispanic, early twenties, average height. Second one was in his thirties maybe. Tall and thin, scars across his neck. Maybe a veteran.’
‘All right, I’ll get in touch with the Bureau and the Automobile Division. I’ll call you when I know something.’
It took Jacob an hour to get home, and when he did, he spent the rest of the morning studying the photos of the dead girl in the canal he’d developed the night before, looking for details, lying on his couch in the heat with a beer he’d gotten from the super’s daughter. It was a recipe for falling asleep on the job, which he did, and at some point in the evening, he was awoken by the sound of the phone ringing.
‘Jacob? It’s Frank. I got something for you. First up, I got a call from our liaison in Florida. Anton Hodiak was picked up in Jacksonville four weeks ago for assaulting a Negro outside a brothel. He’s been in lock-up there ever since, awaiting bail. There’s no way he could have been involved.’
Jacob paused to let the news sink in, feeling foolish and put out.
‘All right,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
‘Sorry, bud,’ said Lynott. ‘We all got pet theories that don’t work out.’
‘Yeah, yeah. What’s the other news?’
‘Nothing on the Cadillac yet, but I got something on your veteran with the neck scars. Turns out you’re not the only one looking for him. Seems a dick at the Pinkertons is looking for the same man – a tall thin veteran with a broken voice and scars on his neck. The Pink made an inquiry earlier this week. She had a name for him too – Lloyd Severyn. Know anything about it?’
‘First I’ve heard of it.’
‘Well, the Pink goes by the name of Ida Davis. Quite the spellbinder by all accounts. Works with that freak with the smallpox scars. They’re the ones that solved the Brandt kidnapping a couple of years ago. Remember?’
‘Sure, I remember. The Trib had us on shift round the clock.’
‘Maybe you should give her a call. Might be you two are investigating the same case. You want her number?’
29
Ida met Louis late that afternoon on a bustling corner of the Loop and they took a turn down Michigan Avenue. They caught up on things, and Ida told Louis about her investigation into Gwendolyn’s disappearance, the fact that on the day she disappeared, the girl had met a go-between in Bronzeville by the name of Randall Taylor.
In the years since the two of them had moved from New Orleans to Chicago, every now and again Ida asked Louis for help in an investigation. Louis was by no means an underworld figure, but the jazz clubs he worked in served booze, and booze was bought from criminals, and so the worlds of nightlife and crime had become ever more intertwined over the prohibition years, meaning, more often than not, Louis knew someone who knew someone who could help Ida find what it was she was searching for.
‘And you think this go-between might be involved?’ Louis asked.
Ida shrugged. ‘She went to meet him the day she disappeared to find out where her fiancé was. Then a few hours later she went back home scared witless.’
Louis nodded. ‘I ain’t heard of a Randall Taylor,’ he said, ‘but I’ll ask around.’
‘Thanks,’ said Ida, and they walked on a little bit more.
‘How’s things with you and Alpha?’ she asked.
‘Good. I’ve moved Clarence in with them and he’s doing good. Got his smile back after all these months.’
Clarence was Louis’ adopted son. The boy was the product of Louis’ cousin being raped by the white man she worked for as a maid. The father refused to acknowledge the boy, and when the cousin died a few years after the birth, Louis had adopted him to save him from the orphanage, even though, at the time, Louis was still only a teenager himself. A few years into his guardianship, the boy had fallen from a balcony at Louis’ home back in New Orleans and hit his head while Louis was supposed to have been looking after him, and the fall had left the boy slow. Louis had forever felt guilty about what had happened, had spent most of his money on doctors to care for the boy, and when he’d settled down in Chicago, he had brought him up to the city, and Alpha and her mother helped take care of him.
Ida remembered Louis telling her Clarence hadn’t much liked it when they were living with Lil and her ma – Louis’ wife and mother-in-law had tried to force Clarence to live by the house rules, had made no concessions to the fact that he had a brain injury. Alpha’s family, by contrast, treated him with warmth and affection, like one of their own.
‘You seen much of Lil since you split?’ Ida asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Louis, an odd expression on his face. ‘Maybe a little too much.’
Ida nodded and had the sense not to push the subject. She liked Lil and was sorry to hear things had gone badly for the two of them. Lil had been good for Louis, had pushed him to start his own band, to train, to be a star. When Louis’ mother was ill back in New Orleans the previous year, it was Lil who went down south to get her, braving the worst floods ever to hit the country. When they’d buried her, it was Lil who took care of the arrangements.
They turned onto Lake Street and found themselves under the elevated railroad. The sun shining through the tracks above cast everything below into alternating oblongs of light and shade, which slid over the contours of the street as they walked, warping over cars and fire hydrants and awnings like bands of oil.
‘What about you?’ he asked.
‘What about me?’
‘What’s happening romance-wise?’ he said, raising an eyebrow. Ida felt the same embarrassment she always felt when asked the question. Nothing was happening apart from her work. It never did. No loves or flings, no crushes or infatuations or one-night
stands. It was nothing that she minded, but she felt other people expected more, and that expectation meant she couldn’t ever answer the question without squirming, without feeling that maybe there was an emptiness there, that maybe she was floating through life in danger of becoming a cautionary tale in a lonely hearts column.
‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘I’m kinda busy work-wise.’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Louis, nodding sarcastically and grinning, and she smiled and slapped him on the arm and they walked on in silence for a little, contemplating the rush of people, the buildings, the illuminated signs which flickered in the artificial dusk of the elevated’s shadows.
When they reached the L station they turned onto State Street and found themselves in front of the Balaban & Katz Movie Palace, and Louis stopped to read the sign above the entrance: Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. – Screenings Every Hour on the Hour.
‘You seen it?’ asked Louis, and Ida shook her head.
‘A Sherlock Holmes you haven’t seen?’ he said sarcastically, poking fun at her love of the detective. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said. ‘Place is air-cooled, we can chill for a bit.’
‘I dunno, Louis,’ she heard herself saying. Louis caught on to her apprehension and gave her a stern look. And in the silence between them, an elevated train roared past on the tracks above, a thunderstorm of iron rolling through the sky.
‘Let’s risk it,’ he said, once the train had pulled into the station. ‘Plus it’s a Sherlock Holmes, it might give you an idea for your case.’
They bought two tickets and stepped inside the foyer, feeling instantly frozen by the air-cooling. Louis went to the concession to buy a box of popcorn and Ida looked about the place. The building was seven stories high, and the lobby took up five of them, containing mezzanines, balconies, chandeliers and a staircase which, a sign informed her, was modeled on one in the Paris Opera House.
