Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  37

  The audience at the Vendome on State Street at 31st was almost exclusively Negro, and it whooped and clapped as the compere announced it was time for the feature piece of the evening’s entertainment – a solo from Louis Armstrong. Louis stood and smiled at the crowd, then made his way through the pit where he sat with the rest of the orchestra.

  He climbed the steps to the stage, and stood alone in front of the closed curtain, in the circular burn of the spotlight. He looked out over the expectant faces arrayed before him and tried to make a decision about what he would play that night.

  Sometimes for his feature act he would sing a song, often a tune called ‘Little Ida’, but that particular night he didn’t feel like singing, so instead he raised his trumpet to his lips and blew out the opening bars of the music he’d become famous for playing, a piece from the Mascagni opera Cavalleria Rusticana. When the crowd recognized the melody, roars and clapping rolled around the one-and-a-half-thousand-seat auditorium.

  As Louis found his way into the piece and it began to flow out of him, he noticed two men enter through the doors at the rear and approach the only pair of empty seats in the front row. The first was a hulk of a man in a jacket that seemed indifferent to his shape; the second was thin and dark, and was dressed in a lime-colored suit. Louis knew them both; they were night undertakers, men whom criminals paid to dispose of bodies. They also worked for Capone, two of the numerous Negro gangsters the Italian employed and, by all accounts, treated well.

  As Louis played, the two men took their seats and then they started staring at him, so relentlessly that even though there were another one and a half thousand faces there to cast his gaze over, Louis’ eyes kept on returning to those two men against his will, like a tongue to an ulcer. He wondered if their appearance was related to the visit Louis had paid to the Sunset Café. Maybe someone had talked to Joe Glaser, the Sunset’s manager, and Glaser had talked to Capone. And now Capone had sent local toughs down to the Vendome. Or maybe it was to do with something else entirely. He prayed it was.

  He did his best to continue with the solo, feeling exposed and jittery and unsure of himself. And eventually he reached the end of it, and the crowd stood and cheered, even though it wasn’t one of his best.

  He took a bow, and returned to the pit, arranged his sheet music and looked up to see the two thugs still glaring at him, their stares boring a path through the forest of flutes, clarinets, trombones and music stands poking into the air. Then the curtain on the stage rose and revealed the venue’s cinema screen – the Vendome was both a live music venue and a cinema, with its twenty-strong orchestra providing musical accompaniment to movies and newsreels as well as giving recitals in between the films.

  On the stage, the screen filled with the silver image of the Pathé newsreel logo, and as the logo was replaced by a shot of a dusty Indian reservation in Oklahoma, Erksine Tate, the band leader, swooped his baton into the air and down again, and the orchestra launched into one of Brahms’s ‘Hungarian Dance’s. Through the sea of moving hands and elbows and heads in the orchestra pit, Louis made eye contact with the two thugs, and one of them raised a finger into the air and made a twirling motion with it, and Louis got his meaning and nodded back at him, and the arrangements agreed upon, Louis relaxed a touch. Whatever they wanted, he ‘d find out at the end of the performance.

  When the newsreel came to an end, the orchestra performed another classical piece and then the feature film started, Street Angel, a German production about a girl on the run from the police. Louis managed to make it through the whole film without missing his cues, despite the presence of the two men in the front row.

  Eventually the feature finished, and there was a final, short recital, and then eleven o’clock rolled around and the show was over, and the musicians all filed out of the pit to their room backstage. Louis smoked a quick cigarette and left by the stage door, opening it up to see the two thugs waiting for him in the alleyway there. He smiled at them, tipped his hat, and addressed each of them in turn.

  ‘Eubie. Johnson. Enjoy the show?’

  ‘It was superb, Louis,’ said Eubie, the wider of the two.

  ‘Terrif’,’ chimed in the other. ‘Those krauts really know how to shoot a flick.’

  ‘What did you want to see me about?’ he asked.

  ‘Capone’s calling you in,’ said Eubie. ‘Tomorrow at the Metropole. Room four-oh-six. You got that clear?’

  ‘Clear as gin. He say what it was about?’

  Eubie gave him a look, then he tipped his hat at Louis, and the two of them turned and strolled off down the alleyway. Louis watched them as they walked through the trash littering the ground, turned onto State Street, and disappeared in the glare of its bright lights.

  He shook his head, ruing his luck, and trudged down the alley toward State Street too, on to his gig at the Savoy. He was being called in, and the prospect filled him with dread, even though he and Al had been on good terms when Louis had worked at the Sunset. Like most of the young men in the city, Al was a jazz fan. When the man and his entourage turned up in the clubs, they mixed with the musicians as if they were equals, for the most part.

  When trumpeter Doc Cheatham needed a job, Louis asked Al, and Al got him one. When Earl was going on a trip and was worried about security, Al sent two bodyguards to keep him safe. When the bassist Milt Hinton was in hospital after a car crash, Al made sure the doctors treated him well. There was even a rumor that for Al’s birthday a few years previously, some of Al’s friends kidnapped the pianist Fats Waller, and forced him to play at the three-day-long birthday party at the Hawthorne Inn, sending him on his way at the end of the debauch with a sackful of dollar bills.

  There was still, however, an undercurrent of racism to it all. Louis remembered an occasion when Al asked Louis’ old bandmate Johnny Dodds to play him a number and Dodds had told Al he didn’t know it, causing Al to tear a hundred-dollar bill in two and give one half to Dodds with the words, ‘Nigger, you better learn it for next time.’ Dodds had smarted over that for days, and still harbored a grudge against Al for it. But what could you do with a grudge against a man like Capone? About as much as you could when he called you in.

  38

  The previous day Dante had driven with Loretta through the skyscraper maze out into the countryside west of the city. They’d found a meadow somewhere, pulled the car over, and sat on the grass, drinking from a bottle of Canadian Club. They stayed there all afternoon. Loretta slept a little, and Dante left her for a bit and risked a shot. And maybe it was the peaceful setting, or the whiskey, or the dope, but over the hours, Dante finally relaxed.

  Then she woke and they watched the sunset and then the ocean of stars above them, the night sky entangled in the trees, the furrows of the fields smudged with moonlight. Loretta had cried and Dante had comforted her and when they were both worn out they slept, and drove back to the city in the dead of night.

  Loretta had said she didn’t want to go to her sister’s, so he ‘d taken her to the hotel, and as the sun was coming up, eliminating the last thin wisps of night from the sky, they parked up outside the Drake and went inside. She lay down in the bed to sleep, and Dante saw that a bellboy had left a message for him – a phone number. Dante called the number despite the early hour, and the call connected to Red’s pool hall in Hyde Park. Someone there gave him a place and a time and hung up.

  Relief ran through Dante. He washed, ate breakfast, and headed out sleepless to the station to catch the morning train to Michigan City. He walked around the station a few times, making sure no one was following him, then he hopped onto the train.

  Two hours and a fifty-mile train trip later, he was sitting on the benches outside Hagenbeck’s Freak Show Deluxe in the blazing heat, wishing the missing waiter had picked a better spot to meet. The promenade ran along the lake front and was packed with the usual attractions – burlesque shows, tattoo parlors, candy stores, souvenir shops – all of them thronging with people, most
ly day-trippers from Chicago and Gary and South Bend.

  Dante thanked God he could view it all from behind the protective green film of his sunglasses, saving his eyes from the solar glare bouncing off the white beach, and the parched planks of the boardwalk.

  After a few minutes, a man approached, a Negro in his fifties, slight of build and well-dressed, with grey hair cropped close and tidy. Dante recognized him from the photograph he’d seen in the trigger’s hotel room. The man made eye contact with Dante and they nodded at each other before he walked over.

  ‘You Red’s friend?’ the man asked.

  ‘Yeah. You’re Julius?’

  The man nodded. ‘Let’s walk,’ he said, and he held up his hand to the promenade. Dante stood and they proceeded along it. He took out a cigarette and Dante saw a great scar down the man’s hand, a groove in-between the middle bones, and Dante guessed it was a memento from the hammer attack Red had mentioned.

  After they had gone a few yards, they reached a lookout point where the boardwalk bulged out in a semicircle over the beach, and there was a row of benches with penny telescopes lined up along the railings for looking out over the waves. The man found an empty bench and sat on one end of it, and Dante sat on the other.

  ‘Red said you were a man who could be trusted.’

  ‘I’ll stick by what I told Red,’ said Dante. ‘You tell me everything that happened and I’ll help you out. The men who killed the delivery drivers are after you, and they’ll be here soon enough. I’ve no doubt of that. And when the Outfit finds out – and they will – then you’ll have two lots of killers on your tail. I can stall the Outfit for a while, but these other men, no dice.’

  Julius nodded solemnly. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Start at the beginning. How’d you get roped into it?’

  ‘That was down to Dorsey and Pete. The two deliverymen. One day they hung about after a delivery and asked me if I wanted to make some money. I didn’t know ’em so well. They’d drop off the booze at the kitchen and I’d oversee sometimes. That was it. But I said sure, and we went to a bar together.’

  ‘When was this?’ Dante asked.

  Julius shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Must be a couple o’ months back,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember.’

  Dante nodded, and gestured for him to continue.

  ‘So, we went to a speak and got some drinks and they told me they’d had an offer to drop off some booze in the kitchen with the usual batch, and to make sure that batch made it to a party in a few weeks’ time. They’d handle the delivery part of it. All I had to do was make sure it was their crate of booze that got served up. I asked them what party it was, and they told me it was that Republican shindig.’

  ‘Did they ask you to serve a particular person at the party?’ Dante asked. ‘Like, make sure Governor Small or the mayor or someone gets a glass?’

  ‘No. They never said nothing about that. Just said make sure it gets served is all. I knew straightaway it was a hit. I guess they saw it on my face because they said it wasn’t like that, that no one was gonna die. The idea was to make ’em all end up in hospital, get the story in the papers, make ’em all lose face. I didn’t believe ’em but . . . They made out like these orders were from Capone himself. How’s a darkie waiter with no juice gonna say no to a man like Capone? I didn’t realize till I spoke to Red these two had switched.’

  Dante nodded. Plenty of hustlers around town pretended they worked for Capone, using the name to coerce people into doing what they wanted them to do. It was a dangerous game for the hustlers to play – if they got caught, they were as good as dead – but it showed how even Al’s name alone had power, like a magic word, a voodou spell that could summon up a demon. Such was the length of the shadow Al cast over the city, and the minds of the people who lived in it.

  ‘They didn’t say anything about who was employing them?’ Dante asked.

  Julius shook his head. ‘Just that it was an Outfit job,’ he said. He took a last drag on his cigarette, then he flicked the butt onto the boardwalk and wiped it out with his shoe.

  ‘The deal was I was going to get fifty upfront and fifty afterwards. That was the first time I figured they were out to gyp me. I figured I’d book my holiday for the day after, so I could hightail it if it all went wrong. Damn glad I did. When I saw those bodies being wheeled out of the hotel I knew I’d been right first time, and then I was really on my heels.

  ‘Next day I was supposed to go round to this address to collect the other fifty. Guess I’ve had too many dealings with those kinds o’ people before, so I figured I’d go round there on the sly. See what was what.’

  ‘And the address?’

  ‘Thirty-three thirty South Morgan Street. I ain’t ever gonna forget that shit. It was one of those streets where the basement steps are in front of the houses, you know? So I went down the steps of one of the houses opposite and just watched the place for a bit. I didn’t see Dorsey or Pete, but about a half-hour before I was supposed to be there, a car pulled up, and three men got out and headed into the building, all of ’em carrying big heavy bags. That’s when I knew for sure the fix I was in.’

  The man shook his head, and Dante could see he was still shook up, still pulsing with the nervous energy of someone who’d managed to escape death by a slip. And as much as he was telling his story in return for Dante’s help, Dante could also see that the man wanted to unburden his secrets, find some relief in reliving it all at a safe distance.

  ‘I got the hell out of there. I went to see Red. Me and him go back. It’s on account of saving his life I got this.’

  He held up his hand, and this time Dante saw the wound from the palm-side, where he guessed the hammer had hit. The man watched Dante stare at the wound, then he put his hand down and continued talking.

  ‘Red gave me some cash and I caught the train out here and waited, and then a couple of days later I found out in the paper that Dorsey and Pete were dead, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell to do, and then Red called and told me there was a man looking for me, a man from the Outfit, but that he could be trusted.’

  He turned to look at Dante with an inquisitive look, and Dante recalled the man’s earlier comment about being suspicious of those types of people, and Dante wondered if he meant gangsters or Italians or white people in general. Dante nodded, reassuring him once more that he’d keep his secret.

  ‘All right,’ said Dante. ‘I need to ask you a couple more questions.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘They ever say anything about who they got the booze from?’

  ‘Nah,’ Julius said, shaking his head. ‘They never said who. But they did say where. Said they had to go on up to the Millersville Roadhouse before they paid me. You know it?’

  Dante shook his head.

  ‘Drive north up the Milwaukee Road. You hit Millersville after two or three hours, depending on how fast you’re going.’

  ‘You’ve been there?’

  ‘Nah. I’ve passed through once or twice. Man like me ain’t got no business stopping though.’

  ‘Okay. The men with the bags you saw going into the house, what did they look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was a way away and my eyesight ain’t that good no more. Three big guys. Scary-looking. Outfit types.’

  ‘And the car?’

  ‘Black Cadillac sedan.’

  Dante nodded and thanked the man. They went quiet and Dante’s mind raced and he lit a cigarette for something to do. If there was no single target for the poisoning, then it was an attack on Capone. The waiter’s information opened up new avenues of possibility, and now Dante felt he was not far from solving the mystery. Just a step or two more and he ‘d have it wrapped up, and maybe then he could get the hell out of Chicago.

  ‘So?’ Julius said. ‘The deal was I tell you what happened and you helped me out. I’m still waiting for the help.’

  Dante paused, and sighed. How to tell
the man the rest of it, that his life might well be over, all for fifty bucks?

  ‘I’m in charge of the Outfit’s investigation into all this,’ Dante said. ‘I’m the one standing between you and Capone putting a hit out on you. I’m not gonna say anything. I promised Red. You’re free to go on your way and I’ll keep what you said quiet for as long as possible. Enough time for you to get away. But eventually, someone in the Outfit’s going to come look for you – I can only stall them for so long. The worse news is some other people are going to come looking for you, too. The people that killed the drivers, the same men you saw at the house that day. I’ve seen one of them and I know that if it’s between you and them, you don’t stand a chance.’

  Dante paused, and took a puff on his cigarette.

  ‘If I were you,’ he continued, ‘I’d move somewhere a lot further away from Chicago than Michigan City, maybe keep going till you hit a coast. And I’d move today, right now. I’d change my name. Lay low. And maybe in a few years’ time, you might be able to leave the house without looking over your shoulder. This life you got now, it’s over. I’m sorry . . .’

  Dante looked at the man and saw him staring at his hands, which were folded over each other in his lap. He could sense the fear, the realization that this was only the beginning, that he’d been lucky so far, but if he wanted to survive it’d take years more of being lucky.

  ‘I’d also tell your daughter to go to the police. The men searched your apartment, found her address on an envelope. They’ll go looking for her. They’ll try and use her to find you.’

  Dante looked over again and saw there were tears in the man’s eyes, holding the reflection of the sunshine glinting on the lake. Dante stood, reached over and squeezed the man’s shoulder, hoping the gesture wouldn’t come off as patronizing, hoping it would provide him with some comfort at least. Then he took his wallet out of his pocket and peeled off five twenties and held them out to the man.

  ‘It’s from Red,’ Dante lied, not wanting to offend him. ‘Said I was to give it to you as a gift. Use it to get somewhere safe.’