Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  ‘I came back. Not long ago.’

  She eyed him again, exchanged a guarded look with the tall man, and Dante studied her face, saw it was a strange mix of delicate and hard-edged, exactly the kind of girl Dante imagined Jacob would have gone for.

  ‘The newspaper said Jacob was in the company of Pinkerton detectives when he died. I’m guessing that’s you?’ said Dante, turning to look at the tall man.

  ‘Both of us,’ said the girl. There was a wire of loneliness strung through her words, and Dante wasn’t sure if she was Jacob’s girlfriend, as he’d first imagined, or just someone he was working with.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you then,’ he said. ‘To know what happened.’

  The girl and the tall man exchanged looks again.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said, and the tall man thought a moment, then stepped back. The girl straightened her dress and peered about her.

  ‘Maybe a walk might clear my head,’ she said, gesturing to a path snaking through the graves. Dante smiled and they stepped over to it, their shoes crunching on the gravel as they went.

  ‘My name’s Ida.’

  ‘Dante.’

  ‘I know. Jacob told me about you.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That you accidentally poisoned your family, caused Jacob’s ankle to wither, then ran away.’

  She said it so flatly Dante didn’t know if she was deriding him or not. He shrugged.

  ‘Yeah, that’s about the size of it,’ he said.

  She looked at him, but said nothing, and Dante wondered if this was her personality – quiet and intense – or if the shock of Jacob’s death had stained her character.

  They walked past rows of gravestones, their granite sparkling in the sun, and Dante took in his surroundings, noting the Pinkerton men and cops dotted about the perfectly clipped hedges and lawns, all of them keeping Dante and the girl in their sights, guns at the ready.

  ‘I can’t believe I fainted,’ she said. ‘I thought you were Jacob. For a moment . . .’ And she trailed off and turned away.

  ‘I was older than him by fourteen months,’ said Dante, trying to explain the similarity, but she didn’t seem to hear him, so he switched subject. ‘You were with him when he was killed?’ he said, and the girl nodded.

  ‘You mind telling me what happened?’ he asked.

  She peered down at her feet, as if her memories were down there amongst the grass. Then she looked up at him, and told him her story, how she’d been investigating a missing-persons case, and the case had led her to Jacob. She spoke in that same flat tone, businesslike, as if it had all happened to someone else, as if she was in a courtroom, relating the details to a lawyer. She didn’t get ahead of herself, or miss out facts, or stumble over her words, and Dante wondered how it was that she could seem so distanced from it all. As she spoke, he learned how Jacob had spent his last few weeks, looking into a murder in Bronzeville, and how it was somehow linked to the disappearance of the heiress that the girl was seeking.

  ‘Why was Jacob so interested in it?’ Dante asked, and the girl tilted her head to the side.

  ‘I wasn’t sure of that at first, either,’ she said. ‘But he explained it to me before he died. It was on account of Roebuck. The Moran stooge who was killed in the alleyway. He’d broken a champagne bottle into someone’s face the night he died, and when Jacob inspected his body he saw the glass shards on his hands and smelled the alcohol. He realized from the smell it was the same chemically altered stuff that had killed your family. He told me about it. How you brought some champagne round for your sister’s graduation party, and how it . . . well, I guess you know better than anyone what happened. Jacob vowed if he ever came across similar booze he’d track it down.’

  She carried on speaking but Dante couldn’t hear; his thoughts were shrieking, his heart thumping against his chest.

  ‘Poison booze?’ he said. ‘Jacob was investigating poison booze?’ and he could hear the emotion in his voice, and the girl turned to look at him.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, frowning.

  ‘What night did the stooge die?’ he asked.

  ‘The twenty-seventh.’

  The night of the poison party. Ideas began shooting through his mind like fireworks. A Moran stooge had died with poison booze on him the night of the poisoning. Moran was behind it. Moran had hooked up with some out-of-towners and a traitor in the Outfit. Jacob had stumbled onto it via his police work and had chased it down for the same reason Dante had – the poison booze that killed their family. They were investigating the same case, for the same reasons. After all these years it was still obsessing them both, and that was when it hit him – Jacob had died investigating poison booze; Jacob had died, inadvertently, because of what Dante had done all those years ago. The last member of his family had gone to the grave because of Dante, too.

  He shook his head, instinctively, as if maybe by doing so he could dislodge the thought. He knew he couldn’t dwell on it, he had to keep his mind on something else lest he fall into the pit once more.

  ‘Tell me again about Roebuck’s murder,’ he said, his voice strained.

  ‘Why?’

  For a split second he thought about telling her the truth, because revenge was the only thing he could think of that would keep him from drowning in his guilt.

  ‘Because I think you, me and Jacob were all looking into the same crime,’ he said.

  She frowned at this. ‘You’re investigating a crime? For who?’

  ‘Capone.’

  She paused a moment, then shook her head. ‘I think maybe you should tell me first what it is you’re doing in Chicago.’

  As she said it, Dante looked up and saw they were reaching the end of the path, where it met the cemetery gates, and on the other side of them, a little further down the road, was a cafeteria.

  Five minutes later the two of them were sitting across from each other in a booth at the back. The girl clutched her coffee mug with one hand, and raised her cigarette to her lips with the other, in an almost mechanical motion. Dante took a drag on his own cigarette and looked about the place: it was bright, airy and high-ceilinged, with large windows that caught the blast of the sun. Two Pinkertons were by the door, and another two by a car parked outside. A waitress was standing on tiptoes behind the counter, in front of an electric fan, trying to cool herself down.

  Dante took a sip of his coffee, then told Ida about the poison party, how it was the same booze, the same night, how it pointed to an out-of-towner and a traitor, and now Moran. The girl asked him some questions and they got onto the subject of the two men, Coulton and Severyn, and their involvement with the disappearance and a plan they supposedly had hatched to turn the city upside down. And it all fitted perfectly with what he had been investigating and the solution to the mystery unfurled like a rolled-up rug.

  ‘Chuck and Severyn found a traitor in the Outfit,’ said Ida, ‘and between the traitor and Moran and some out-of-town heroin connection, they were going to take out Capone. But something went wrong that night with the stooge, and Gwendolyn stumbled into it.’

  ‘It all makes sense,’ said Dante, ‘apart from where these two men you’re looking for got the idea for it. It doesn’t sound like they’re the type to be involved in something this high-level.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve got a connection to someone – Moran, or the traitor, or the heroin dealers.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Dante.

  They both fell silent and thought, and after a moment, the girl frowned, as if something had just occurred to her. Then she looked up at him.

  ‘The traitor,’ she said. ‘I think I know who it is. Someone from the Outfit was following us the last couple of days before Jacob died. Maybe it was him. A man called Sacco. I didn’t know him, but Jacob recognized him.’

  ‘Average height, brown mustache?’ asked Dante, remembering the name, and the man, from the golf course in Burnham.

  Ida nodded.

  ‘Sounds like it’
s him,’ said Dante. ‘Did Jacob say anything about him?’

  ‘Just that he saw him getting arrested a few months ago. And that he was in charge of one of the Outfit’s whiskey runs.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  Dante mulled it over and the girl looked at him, puzzled.

  ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘If they tried to wipe out Capone once and they failed, it means they’ll probably try again.’

  And at this they looked at each other, and it seemed to Dante they both felt some new weight pressing down on them.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ she asked.

  If another hit was being planned on Al, he needed to finish it as soon as possible, whether he was implicated or not.

  ‘I need to find out if Sacco really is the traitor. And if he is, track him down,’ he said. ‘Before anyone else dies. Then I’ll go after Severyn. If I find him, I won’t save him for you.’

  ‘I kinda figured on that,’ she said.

  He thought about the men in the forest, and the professional whose hotel room he’d broken into. ‘There’ll be more people coming,’ he said.

  ‘I kinda figured on that, too,’ she replied, and took another slow drag on her cigarette and looked at him.

  Dante stared back, imagining he was Jacob looking at her, trying to feel what his brother had felt, and in the silence, somewhere in his body, as real as a broken bone or a ripped muscle, the abyss opened up again.

  ‘He forgave you,’ she said out of nowhere and Dante frowned.

  ‘Jacob?’

  She nodded. ‘He said you’d run away after the poisoning and he’d never seen you since. He said he was angry at first, but then the anger dwindled, and he forgave you. He missed you.’

  He stared at her, not believing it. It was just what he needed to hear, just what would soothe him, and that must have been why she’d said it – she’d made it up to make him feel better.

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘He said after the anger and the blame, the sad thing was that he missed you.’

  Her look was so earnest, so free of artifice, that he realized she didn’t have the guile to lie about something like that, and he began to persuade himself it might be true. He swallowed down the emotion that was welling up inside him, that same despair he’d had since the roadhouse. He couldn’t let the feeling take hold of him, not now. He wanted to tell her that he’d promised himself he’d visit Jacob when the case was wrapped up, but he knew how pathetic it would have sounded, and he knew if he tried to explain himself he might break down. So he swallowed the feeling and said nothing, and the two of them looked at each other, each acknowledging wordlessly how broken they were. Two strangers made familiar by grief.

  Then her eyes became watery and her cheeks flushed, and something about the intimacy of it made Dante feel wretched that he was trying to suppress his own emotions. She looked at the table and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

  ‘I can’t abide crying in front of a stranger,’ she said, her Southern accent stronger in her distress.

  ‘How do I get in contact with you?’ he asked, and she opened up her purse and scribbled down a phone number and a name. Dante pocketed it, and told her she could reach him at the Drake. Then he stood and put some change on the table for the drinks. He thought a moment and took the sunglasses from his breast pocket, and held them out to her.

  ‘Take them,’ he said. ‘They’re good for covering tears.’

  He left the cafeteria, and as he walked down the street to his car, he suddenly felt alone and the despair came rushing back, and he wished Loretta was there with him. She was supposed to have come to the funeral but hadn’t shown up, and for the first time he wondered what had happened to her.

  He got into the Blackhawk, wound down the windows, and sat for a moment, and it was then, in the stillness, with nothing to distract him, that it hit him: the loneliness; the horror that his only brother had gone to the grave and they hadn’t patched things up; that he had to face what was coming alone, with a ruined ankle and a ruined arm and not much of a hope at all.

  His heart raced and panic coursed through him, turning his legs to jelly. In those moments of heaving dread, he realized he was as good as dead, the only thing keeping him going the thought that he had to stop them first.

  52

  Ida watched Jacob’s brother walk out of the cafeteria and she shook her head. They’d had six years to make up, to become brothers again, and now, they would never be reconciled. She downed the last of her coffee and called the waitress over to get the check, and as she did so, she noticed something on her hand: a comet of mud streaking across her palm, soil from the funeral.

  The waitress arrived and Ida handed her the change Dante had left on the table. Then she headed to the restrooms, feeling the eyes of the Pinkerton men boring into her. She stepped inside and saw one of the two sinks was occupied by a waitress applying makeup. They caught each other’s eyes in the mirror and the waitress smiled at her, a hand raised to her face, thickening her eyelashes with kohl.

  Ida smiled back and approached the free sink; she turned on the faucet and the waitress’s eyes flicked down to Ida’s hands where she spotted the mud.

  ‘Coal?’ asked the waitress as she flicked the brush against her lashes.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Coal dust? On your hand? I get it at home all the time – it’s a damn pain.’ The waitress smiled at her and Ida peered at her hands. They were under the running water now, the smudge slowly fading into nothingness, black particles streaking along the white porcelain of the sink.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Ida, ‘it’s mud, from the cemetery.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the woman, abashed, looking once more at Ida’s mourning clothes.

  ‘My condolences,’ she said, smiling again, before turning back to the mirror. ‘Of course,’ she added in a mutter. ‘Why would you be using coal in this weather?’

  She finished with her makeup and sashayed out of the restroom, leaving Ida alone, staring at her hands in the water running from the faucet. She thought about what the woman had said and looked again at the sink – the water was running clear now.

  She turned off the faucet, walked out into the cafeteria, past the Pinks in the booth and out onto the street, where Michael was leaning against the bonnet of the car they’d been driven over in, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘I know where Gwendolyn is,’ Ida said, her gaze level on Michael. ‘You got a car?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘It’s back at the safe house.’

  ‘Let’s go pick it up then.’

  The Pinks emerged from the cafeteria as she said it and Michael nodded at them, and they all got into the car and drove back to the safe house.

  When they got there, the men pulled Michael aside and he spoke to them privately, arranging the details of the story they would be telling HQ. Michael had seniority over the men, and more importantly, their respect, and when the bargaining was done, he came over to Ida and nodded.

  ‘You wanna go and get changed before we leave?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  Michael looked at her a moment, then they headed toward a Chevrolet parked down the street.

  ‘What did you arrange with them?’ she asked.

  ‘We lost you in the cemetery. You ran away through the gravestones after the funeral had finished. I chased after you, but you disappeared.’

  ‘No one’s going to believe that.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose they will.’

  ‘Plus it makes me sound like a hysteric.’

  ‘I know.’

  Michael drove at a clip and as he did she told him everything Jacob’s brother had revealed to her, and they discussed it, and both of them agreed he was telling the truth, and they planned what to do next. Then in less than half an hour they were back at Coulton’s apartment, back on the muddy street near the Stockyards where they’d been ambush
ed. The sun was setting by the time they arrived and the murky light lent the place an even more depressing air than it had had on their first visit. They drove round the block a couple of times to make sure no one was lying in wait, then they parked up and went round to the trunk of the car. Inside was a large leather holdall which Michael opened up, allowing Ida to see the stash of guns in it.

  ‘Are you armed?’ he asked. Ida shook her head, and Michael took out a .38 and passed it to her, after which he took a flashlight from the trunk and closed it. Ida checked the gun and put it in her handbag. Then they approached the building.

  Michael opened up the door while Ida stood guard and they stepped into the dusty old lobby once more. Michael switched on the flashlight and found the door to the basement. He picked it open and they descended a flight of stairs.

  He waved the flashlight around, trying to gauge the size of the space they had entered. It looked like the coal store took up the whole floor-plan of the building, and the place was awash with the stuff – a sea of coal covering every inch, rising up in the corners where it was heaped against the walls, so that it almost reached head-height. There was enough here for all the apartments in the building to see out a winter, if any of the apartments were occupied.

  Ida should have thought of it earlier; Coulton was the only resident in the building. He and Severyn could come and go there undisturbed, could dump whatever they wanted in that basement. They’d had the apartment cleaned spotless except for that residue in the sink that Ida had mistaken for mud from the day’s rain. It was only the waitress’s comment that had made her realize the connection, and the only reason there’d be coal in the sink in the middle of a heatwave.

  They stepped carefully off the stairs and onto the bed of coal and looked around. Next to them was an alcove packed with shovels and buckets. They picked up two shovels and turned to look at each other, wordlessly acknowledging the situation. They could smell it on the air, just below the layers of dust and coal, the faint, sour scent of death. They picked their way over the coals to where the smell was worst and Michael put the flashlight down on the surface and they both used the tips of their shovels to scrape away the top layers of coal.