Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘I work for Al.’

  ‘And that’s where I start wondering if the heat’s gone to your head. From what I’ve heard, Al probably wants to kill this waiter too. So I don’t see how I’m helping the man out by helping you . . .’

  Dante frowned, surprised at Red’s position. Almost all the city’s Negro gangsters had good relations with Capone – he let them run their own affairs as they wished, so long as they bought their booze from him. He made sure the police didn’t bother them, helped streamline their operations, and increased their profits. Red’s refusal to help with an Outfit request suggested something had happened between the two of them.

  ‘Al doesn’t know about this lead,’ said Dante. ‘Not yet. You gimme his address, I guarantee I won’t touch him and he’ll have a few days head start before I slip.’

  Red eyed him.

  ‘You ride into town on your own, Dante?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And it’s really Al you’re working for? Not anyone else?’

  Dante paused at the question, at the insinuation. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Red shrugged. ‘There’s been a few folks coming out here from the Big Apple these last few months. Stirring things up. I’m just wondering if you’re one of them.’

  ‘I came here at Al’s request,’ said Dante. ‘But if you want to tell me a bit more about the others, I’m all ears.’

  ‘Oh, it ain’t nothing,’ said Red, suddenly coy, and Dante guessed the worry had shown on his face, because Red’s tone had become full of faux reassurance. ‘It’s just I see things in my line o’ work. See how the city’s changing, how the people change. Chicago’s always changing, except in one respect.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The fact it’s always hungry enough to bite you in the ass.’

  Red smiled and raised his eyebrows, then turned to reclaim the reefer from the boy.

  ‘Your boss is setting the city on fire,’ he said. ‘The worst thing that ever happened to this town was Torrio stepping down.’

  Dante had heard similar sentiments expressed by many of the old-timers. When the city was run by Johnny Torrio, Capone’s predecessor and boss, it ran on a live-and-let-live policy. There was enough money for every gang to profit, if every gang stayed within the mutually agreed boundaries of its bootleg domain. But when Torrio stepped down, Capone started a process of ruthless consolidation, kicking off the series of inter-gang conflicts that became known as the Beer Wars, taking out one gang after the other, subsuming each little kingdom into his own. And now, out of all those little kingdoms, there were only two outfits left in the city, Capone’s and Moran’s.

  That was the narrative peddled about the underworld, but it wasn’t quite true. Torrio never handed his empire to Al Capone, he handed it to the Capone brothers. All of them. Al just happened to be the one who courted the limelight. If Al’s brother Frank hadn’t been killed years earlier in an election-day shoot-out, chances are it would have been him in charge of the Outfit. And the Torrio days, too, had had their fair share of violence and gang war, something else that got lost in the history.

  ‘You know what I’ve realized in the years since I moved to Chicago?’ said Red. ‘This city runs on one man trying to get the better of another man. Feeds on it. All that competition, all those men trying to grab a dollar before the next man. That’s the voodou that gets a million workers outta bed in the morning, builds the buildings, turns the world.

  ‘But you take that shit to the extreme like Capone has? Then all you get is war. Which is what we’ve had since he decided to make himself king. And you know what’s funny? People love him for it. They stand and cheer when he sits down at baseball games, you know that? There was a magazine poll the other day asking Harvard students who they respected the most. Your boy Capone was on the list. Up there in the top ten with Gandhi and Ford. I mean, I get why he does it – making himself famous, giving out turkeys at Christmas, setting up soup kitchens – so he can get the people on his side. He even got the niggers thinking the sun shines outta his ass. But all that publicity, for a gangster? It can’t last. What I’m saying is this ship you on is sinking. And if I give you information on this runaway waiter, it’s like I’m stepping on board, too.’

  Dante thought a moment and nodded. Then he leaned in to speak to Red softly. ‘Here’s the situation,’ he said. ‘Whoever’s behind this poisoning, they’ve sent a trigger after your pal Julius. A trigger he doesn’t stand a chance against. If I can talk to the man, I might be able to hold off the trigger and Capone. If not, he’s as good as dead. And this isn’t Capone asking – it’s me. I’m in over my head on this and I need some answers, and I need your help.’

  Even as Dante spoke he could hear the emotion breaking into his own voice and was surprised by it – the undercurrent of stress. Red eyed him, seemingly just as surprised, then he deliberated, running the options through his head.

  Years earlier, Red had set up a telegram switchboard in a room above a train station that sent race results to his offices in Chicago six or seven minutes before all the other bookies in the city got the news. He’d hired an army of men to place hundreds of tiny last-minute bets on the races, a scam which wrung the rest of the city’s bookies dry. If Dante could trust any of the city’s gangsters to evaluate the situation and make a rational decision, it was Red.

  He leaned forward, staring levelly at Dante, tapping his fingers against the tabletop. ‘Dante the Gent . . .’ he said, almost to himself. ‘A man whose word you can trust. Ain’t that how you got the name?’

  ‘I don’t know how I got the name. And truth be told, I don’t much like it. But I’ve never gone back on my word.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Red eventually. ‘I’ll speak to my man, and if he wants to talk to you, I’ll arrange a meet. But if you do go back on your word, I’ll find you, and I’ll slice you. Whether you’ve got Al’s backing or not. Understand?’

  Dante nodded. ‘How comes you and this waiter are so tight anyway?’ he asked. And Red grinned, leaning back in his seat, relaxing.

  ‘We came here from Michigan together. On the train up we got jumped by a bunch o’ white kids coon-hunting. He saved my life. Got a broken hand stopping me from catching a hammer blow to the head.’

  Red lifted his hand up in front of his face, acting out what the man had done all those years ago. ‘I give him good odds on his bets as a thank-you. Don’t mean much to me on account of the shit-for-legs horses he’s always backing, but . . .’ Red finished off with a shrug – What can you do?

  Dante nodded. ‘And he came to you for money before he skipped town because the people behind the poisoning never paid him?’ And as he watched Red for a reaction, he saw a tiny jerk of a muscle somewhere.

  ‘Stay sharp, Dante,’ said Red, playing it off good-naturedly. ‘I did a friend a favor, let’s not call it a sin.’

  Dante nodded, thought a moment.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Red.

  ‘You reminded me of an old Jewish saying of Menaker’s – If on the Day of Atonement, you have no sins, look at your good deeds.’

  Red considered this, then said, ‘Ain’t that the truth. How is the old man?’

  ‘He’s in Cook County looking at twenty to life. Thanks again for all your help.’ Dante held out a hand and Red shook it and winked at him, then he looked at the dog.

  ‘You know, as sidekicks go, he fits you just right,’ said Red.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. He a shaky dog, jus’ like you.’

  33

  Of everything he was exposed to in 1920s Chicago, nothing puzzled Louis more than the slumming. Negro Southerners like Louis had arrived in the North and found the place cold and lonely and unwelcoming, so had helped create a new culture in its cities, a culture that looked back to the South and forward into the future, a culture that was vibrant, modern, sophisticated and, most of all, black. It was all so new and exciting that white people flocked to Bronzeville to experience it.

/>   The first whites to arrive in the Black Belt were jazz aficionados, music students, young, male and awkward, willing to brave the dangers of the slum to hear the music of tomorrow: a white teenage rebellion, set to a soundtrack of urban, black songs.

  Many of these whites began taking the music they heard in the Southside and playing it in the hotels and cabarets in the center of town, where black bands were barred by the racist Musicians’ Union. They played the music on the radio and got to sell their records in the main parts of record stores, not in the ‘race records’ sections. They were getting rich off the music Negroes had invented, and for all their enthusiasm, the financial exploitation of someone else’s culture left many of the original jazz musicians feeling short-changed, and they came up with a name for the whites that stole their music – alligators. The appropriation of jazz was so complete that people across the country who’d spent the last few years dancing to the music, assumed it had been invented by white people.

  The spread of the music’s popularity inevitably led to a change in the types of people pitching up in Bronzeville, from jazz zealots to tourists, from poor whites to idle rich. The trickle turned into a torrent, and then it seemed like the whole city was shunning the Loop to come and dance in the Southside, much to the annoyance of the Musicians’ Union.

  Eventually even Gold Coasters started flocking there too, the children of the men who owned the factories and corporations that so ruthlessly exploited the Black Belt workers, turning up in Bronzeville and treating it like an amusement park. And so the people who had been there from the beginning complained bitterly that these newcomers were not only ruining the neighborhood, they were destroying the culture, too.

  It was the influx of these rich whites that led to the rise of the go-betweens, the Negro fixers who arranged nights out for them in Bronzeville. Many of Louis’ colleagues found it distasteful, and looked upon the go-betweens as something like guides, the type of friendly natives you might hire if you were going on safari in Africa. But if the Southside was the jungle, and the go-betweens were the guides, what did that make the people who lived there?

  There was a sad inevitability, it seemed to Louis, that the whole thing would end up with missing rich girls, grieving mothers, criminal investigations. And this was what soured his thoughts as he got ready that evening, a rare night off from his gig at the Vendome, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom at the Ranch – the apartment he rented with Earl and Zutty, the two other members of the ‘unholy three’.

  Louis had been there all day, smoking gage and working on some new arrangements with Earl for the recording sessions they had booked in for the next week. Then they’d eaten and he’d washed and now he was ready to step out into the night.

  He headed north up Calumet Avenue, into the heart of Bronzeville, to 35th Street and the Sunset Café. The strip was pulsing with music and people; queues outside the clubs; ‘hipsters’ taking sips from hip-flasks they’d secreted in purses, pockets, garter-belts; dealers selling bonded bourbon at eight dollars a pop, hustling through the neon rain cast onto the sidewalks by the illuminated adverts high above. Louis passed through it all, nodding hello to the people he knew – the bouncers, fans, jack-rollers and pimps, the old-timers sitting on kitchen chairs slamming dominoes onto shaky tables.

  When he reached the Sunset he walked to the front of the queue, and the bouncers nodded at him, and the rope was lifted and he stepped inside. He walked through the foyer and into the main hall and was assaulted by a wall of noise, from the band playing on the stage, and the hundreds of dancers throwing themselves around the floor, and the people seated at the tables behind.

  He headed for the bar and ordered a drink, and while he waited, he looked out over the dance floor and the frenzied people there. He could never quite get used to it. In New Orleans people danced slow to the blues, the music was made that way. But in Chicago the music was much too fast for that; the people threw their bodies about with abandon, with no thought or time for romance.

  Louis’ drink arrived, and he paid, took a sip of it and lit a cigarette. He watched the stage where a chorus line made up of twenty-four girls light-skinned enough to almost pass for white came to the end of their dance number, and a young emcee – Cab Calloway – came on and introduced the next act. As he reached the end of his patter, Cab spotted Louis at the back, and when the next act was safely underway, he made his way through the crowd to greet him.

  ‘Hey, Cab,’ said Louis, ‘how’s the second-best jazz player in Chicago?’

  ‘I don’t know, Louis, you tell me.’

  They laughed and hugged each other. When Louis had worked at the Sunset the previous year, he’d given Cab his big break, and now that Louis had moved to the Savoy, the younger man had gone on to be the star attraction at the place.

  ‘How’s the Sunset keeping you?’ Louis asked.

  ‘It’s all good ’cept the raids. Half the band’s talking about upping sticks and heading out east.’

  ‘Yeah, so’s everyone else. You think we’re all gonna end up in New York?’ asked Louis, who thought back to his time in that city with something approaching dread.

  ‘We all ended up in Chicago, didn’t we?’

  Cab tapped a cigarette out of a case and lit it up and they looked around and spotted a group of rich young Gold Coasters walking in, already drunk and boisterous. They both watched as the group were given prime seats at a table near the front, from where they could request songs and throw tips onto the stage more easily – a big deal for the performers since tips often amounted to more than their actual pay.

  ‘This go-between you’re looking for, he’s gone on the lam,’ said Cab, and Louis turned to look at him. Louis had called his friend that afternoon, knowing he still worked at the Café, and had asked him for information.

  ‘Yeah? How so?’ asked Louis.

  Cab shrugged. ‘No one’s seen him for weeks. Disappeared into thin air. None too soon neither, the man’s bad news.’

  ‘Why’d he run away?’ asked Louis.

  ‘He was pimping out a few of the girls that worked here, without telling Capone about it. You can imagine how that went down.’

  Louis nodded. Although Capone wasn’t legally the owner of the Sunset Café – Capone was legally the owner of nothing except a modest family home in the Chicago suburbs whose mortgage was yet to be paid off – the Sunset Café was an Outfit venture, with Capone having a personal stake in it. When Louis and Earl had played there, Capone had been their boss in a roundabout way, had visited the club often, and they’d got to know him more as a patron of the establishment and a jazz fan than as the nightclub’s owner.

  Capone also ran most of the prostitution in the city, and if Randall Taylor was pimping out girls who worked in one of Capone’s clubs without cutting Capone in, then he had every reason to go into hiding.

  ‘So the Outfit found out?’ asked Louis.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cab. ‘I figure a man stupid enough to run girls from an Outfit joint is probably stupid enough to be doing a dozen other things he’d wanna run away from. There’s rumors about this cat.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as he weren’t your average go-between. He ended up working exclusively for this gang o’ rich kids. I mean real rich, even for the Gold Coast. Rumors say he’d arrange parties for ’em in buffet flats. Paid for girls, and sometimes boys too, to go along and keep ’em happy, and afterwards, so it goes, some of those girls and boys never made it back home. Like I said, they’re just rumors. But all the chorus girls backstage, they all say they know someone who knows someone who went to one o’ these parties and disappeared. One of these girls was even talking ’bout voodou.’

  Louis frowned at him and a heavy silence descended on them. Cab took a drag on his cigarette, and they watched as a pair of waiters rushed over to the Gold Coasters’ table to set up champagne buckets and ice.

  ‘What about this girl? Esther Jones?’

  ‘She was one
of the dancers here. She was also one of the girls Randall Taylor was pimping out.’

  Louis nodded. Ida had called him earlier with the name, asking him to dig around. Now it turned out the dead dancer was linked to the go-between, and the go-between was linked to the missing heiress.

  ‘You know anyone that might know where this go-between’s gone?’

  ‘Yeah. He got a lil’ brother, Stanley. He’s an alky cook, makes moonshine in the basement of a cathouse where Randall got a few of his girls holed up. Might be worth looking at.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess it might.’

  Cab gave him the address, then they leaned against the bar and watched the show for a while longer.

  ‘I better get back. They’re almost done,’ said Cab.

  The two men hugged.

  ‘Hey,’ said Cab, just as he was about to leave. ‘I got some comp tickets to the Whiteman gig next week. You wanna come?’

  ‘Whiteman’s coming to town?’

  Cab nodded. ‘Playing the Chicago Theater. He’s bringing Bix Beiderbecke. Maybe you should come along and check out the competition,’ he said, grinning at Louis mischievously.

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  Cab grinned again, then turned and disappeared into the crowd, and Louis leaned back to survey the scene once more. On the dance floor, he spotted a few Negroes dancing in amongst the whites. Although it was Chicago’s most famous Black and Tan, the Sunset’s high prices – a dollar entry at weekends, and more on drinks – kept most colored people out. Louis watched them all as he mulled things over, nursing his drink. For the Orleanais musicians like Louis who provided the soundtrack to Chicago’s racial intermingling – musicians who had grown up in a culture of violent segregation – to walk into a nightclub and see whites and Negroes dancing together was a sight that evoked an unsettling mix of emotions.

  In the clubs blacks and whites might dance together, laugh together, maybe go to one of the hotels close by and spend the night together. But in the morning they would most likely wake up and head back to their own segregated worlds. The Musicians’ Union would continue to stop Negroes from playing in the hotels and ballrooms of the Loop; housing covenants would continue to stop Negroes from moving to the suburbs; beaches and cinemas and fairgrounds would continue to be segregated; and when bands like Whiteman’s came to town, Louis wouldn’t be allowed to play with them: much like boxers and baseball players, black men and white men were barred from sharing a stage as equals.