Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  After a few minutes, the smell getting steadily worse, a piece of dirty white cloth came into view. Then within that cloth, an arm, a sleeve, a broken gold bracelet, a manicured hand, all of it covered in a layer of soot. Beneath the one hand was the other hand, the two of them clasped together.

  Ida turned to look at Michael and they put down the shovels and carried on removing the coals by hand, piece by piece, until they could see her face, grimy, swollen from the strangulation, robbed of its beauty. Michael sighed and picked up the flashlight and shone it down on their discovery. It was then that they noticed how she had been buried: on her side; her hands raised in front of her face, palms together, the posture of someone in prayer. Her eyes had been closed, and her hair was laid away from her face. They’d placed her down there with care, with remorse, with love, and Ida tried to tally that with what she knew of Coulton and Severyn, and it didn’t quite make sense.

  ‘Look how she’s been laid out,’ said Ida. ‘Like they cared.’

  ‘Maybe they did,’ Michael said. ‘It’s a good place to hide a body. Coulton and Severyn’s names aren’t on the lease, there’re no other tenants, the carbon in the coals would keep the smell filtered in, and even if it didn’t, the whole neighborhood reeks of the Stockyards anyway. She could be down here for years before anyone stumbled across her. But, still . . . you’d think at some point they’d come back and move her.’

  ‘Maybe they were going to but something went wrong,’ said Ida.

  They looked over Gwendolyn’s body once more, her hands clasped together in prayer, her blonde hair breaking over the coals. Ida started to feel sick, disgusted and angered by what they’d done to the girl.

  ‘Let’s cover her back up,’ she said. ‘I don’t want the rats to get to her.’

  Michael nodded.

  ‘And then let’s go and find out what happened,’ she added.

  ‘Go and talk to the boy?’ Michael asked, and Ida nodded in turn.

  A grim determination to bring it all to a close had seized her, and this boy whom Michael had found, the one who’d helped ambush them, who’d helped dispose of the dancer’s body, they’d get him to talk.

  As they carefully replaced the coals over Gwendolyn’s body, Ida thought about Jacob’s funeral, about his death and the way in which Gwendolyn’s life and dignity had been stripped from her, too – all of it done by a group of men in search of nothing more than money.

  The anger that had been building up in her had turned into a desire for vengeance, the same desire that had seized her in the Stockyards just after Jacob had died, the desire that over the last few days had all but disappeared. Now she wanted to find Severyn more than ever, make him pay for what he’d done to Gwendolyn and Jacob. She remembered what Jacob had said about having the courage to not look away. She’d closed her eyes in the Stockyards, but not anymore.

  53

  Five minutes into the drive from the cemetery to the Metropole Dante spotted a tail – a black sedan, three or four cars back, switching lanes a little too eagerly. He turned left off his route, and left again, and the sedan followed him all the way, and when he made a third left so he was back on the road where he’d started the manoeuver, the black sedan turned the corner behind him once more. Either they were amateur shadows, or they were sending him a message, or they just didn’t care.

  He parked up in front of the Metropole and ran into it as fast as the pain in his ankle would allow. He caught the elevator up to the top floors and when the doors opened they revealed Al’s suites in a state of half-emptied disarray. Packing crates were stacked up in the hallway and a chain of removal men were lugging boxes toward the service lift.

  Dante pushed past the men and into the main suite, but the room was empty save for a gaggle of Al’s captains and some kids, and a few removal men. Dante saw Frank Nitti locking documents into a strongbox. He limped over and Frank looked up at him.

  ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ he asked.

  ‘I got shot.’

  ‘They didn’t do a good job.’

  ‘Where’s Al?’

  At this Frank frowned. ‘He’s over at the Lexington. We’re moving.’

  ‘To the Lexington?’

  ‘Al didn’t tell you? He’s taken ten rooms. He’s getting scared about all this Moran stuff. Reckons he’ll be safer there when the war kicks off.’

  Dante noted the use of when.

  ‘What’s so safe about the Lex?’ he asked, the Lexington only being a couple of blocks further down the street.

  ‘The coal tunnels,’ said Frank. ‘In the basement. They come up all over the neighborhood. Al reckons we can use them as escape routes. Who shot you?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Dante. ‘How do I contact Al?’

  ‘Hobble over there.’

  ‘You got phones there yet?’

  ‘Sure. Call up and ask for George Phillips. Now, you gonna tell me what happened to you?’

  ‘Not just yet. Who’s in charge of the Minneapolis–Milwaukee whiskey run these days?’

  ‘Sacco. George Sacco,’ said Frank.

  ‘What’s his story?’

  ‘Nothing much. He’s a local hood. Him and his kid brother have worked for us for years.’

  ‘How long’s he been in charge of the run?’

  ‘A couple of years, maybe,’ Frank said, shrugging.

  It was all the confirmation Dante needed, and it fitted with what the girl had told him. Sacco was the traitor.

  ‘Where is he? I need to get hold of him.’

  ‘This about the poison booze or about you getting shot?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Maybe both.’

  ‘You’re pegging him for the poisoning?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Maybe. Where is he, Frank?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was supposed to be here today to help with the move but he never showed up. You want me to ask his brother?’

  ‘His brother’s here?’

  Frank nodded and gestured to a group of men on the other side of the room, a cadre of young guns heaving file binders into a trunk for the trip down the road.

  ‘Which one is he?’ Dante asked.

  Frank frowned.

  ‘Shit. He was there just a minute ago,’ he said, before shouting at the men on the other side of the room, ‘Hey! Where’d Sacco go?’

  ‘He just left,’ one of the men shouted back. ‘Didn’t say where.’

  Frank turned to look at Dante, finally realizing the urgency of the situation.

  ‘If I wanted to get hold of him where’d I go?’ asked Dante quickly.

  ‘He works out of a bar in the Near West Side. Schiller’s. You want a home address, I can ask around.’

  ‘Do it. Leave a message at the Drake. And stay close to Al, I think someone’s going to try and whack him. Maybe Sacco.’

  Dante turned and ran out of the place as best he could. When he got into the hallway, he checked the elevator needle – it was going down, a couple of floors below him. He took the stairs, trying to put the pain in his ankle out of his mind, and he rushed into the lobby as a silhouette flittered through the revolving doors into the sunlight outside.

  Dante made it to the street to see a man run across the road and get into a cream-colored coupe. Sacco’s younger brother. Dante hobbled over to the Blackhawk, punched the ignition, gunned the gas, and managed to get into lane just a couple of cars behind him.

  Then Dante spotted the shadow car from earlier – the sedan – behind him again. Sacco turned left into a narrow side street, and Dante followed, and it was only when Sacco slowed down in front of him that Dante realized his mistake. The shadow car turned in behind him, and Dante was trapped on the quiet street between the two cars, a sitting duck.

  He floored the gas and his car lurched forward, mounted the sidewalk with one set of wheels, and rammed past the coupe in front, the sides of the cars scraping and screeching, a door handle popping into the air. Then Dante was through and he swerved back onto the road half a second before he w
ould have smashed into a lamppost. His car fishtailed but he got it under control and ripped a left at the next junction, but then he lost control again, crashed into the back of a parked car and smacked his head against the steering wheel.

  The world spun about him, his vision a kaleidoscope of fuzz and glinting blur. Then he got his brain into gear, opened the door and tumbled out of the car onto the sidewalk. A few yards back, on the other side of the road, he saw the sedan screech to a halt and the men step out, two of them with Colts, one with a tommy gun, and all of a sudden the street was ringing with bullets and pandemonium; people screaming and running for cover; drivers braking to avoid the gunmen; slugs ripping holes into Dante’s car in a roar of fire and noise.

  He looked up and down the street and saw a drugstore a little further up: Jones & Sons Drugstore – Medications, Ointments, Firearms, Sundries. Between him and it, a row of parked cars. He fumbled his Beretta from his pocket, got into a crouch and ran half bent to the store and pulled himself in.

  He looked about the place and saw it was empty. He locked the door and hobbled toward the counter, behind which the tommy guns were lined up in a display case on a high shelf. As he tried to get to the guns he was brought up short by the sight of an elderly man and a girl cowering in the space behind the counter.

  ‘I need a tommy gun. And magazines. Now.’

  The old man stared at him, frozen in fear, then he collected himself and stood and hustled across the floor. Dante peered at the girl who was staring at him, terrified, then he moved back to the front of the store and peeked around the window. The men were walking across the street to where they guessed he was lying behind his car, to finish him off. Dante recognized one of them – the man in the suit from the forest up in Millersville. Dante studied him carefully, looking for signs of a bullet wound, of the injury Dante had caused when he’d shot the man in the woods, but he couldn’t find any.

  He turned back around to see the old man put the gun on the counter, and haul a crate of drum magazines up next to it. Dante hobbled over to him, took out his wallet.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  The man looked surprised. ‘The gun’s two hundred and ten. The magazines are three dollars for a twenty-shot, twenty-two dollars for a fifty-shot.’

  Dante laid three hundred on the counter.

  ‘Keep the change.’

  He loaded a fifty-shot onto the gun and walked back to the front of the store. He looked through the glass again and saw the three men had ceased turning their bullets loose, and were scrambling back to their car. Dante opened the door and the little girl stared at him.

  ‘What did they do?’ she asked, and Dante thought a moment.

  ‘Killed my dog,’ he said.

  He stepped out into the street and walked across the road as the men were approaching the sedan. They were turned away from him, but in that moment, he didn’t care. He lowered the tommy gun and squeezed the trigger, and the burn of bullets seared the air. He’d never fired a tommy before and wasn’t prepared for the kickback, so fearsome and wild he lost control. A salvo of bullets skipped off the road and bounced into the air. Then he got a fix on it, lifted the gun upwards, and saw just how wildly inaccurate a weapon it was; why the army and police had refused to use it for so many years; why the gun companies ended up selling them all to gangsters. As the bullets pumped out he had to sway the gun back and forth to find his mark and the men’s car pinged and sparked. He caught one of them in the back and he dropped to the ground, and the remaining two turned tail and ran.

  Dante eased off the trigger, and the bullets and noise stopped and an eerie quiet descended onto the street, silent except for the sound of the men’s frantic footsteps pounding up the road and the hiss of the damaged cars. He ran after them, the pain in his ankle no more than a dullness now.

  They turned a corner onto a side street, and then onto a main road, this one roofed by elevated railroad tracks up above, the planks and gaps casting the street into zebra stripes which shuttered and flickered as Dante ran through them – light, dark, light, dark. As people saw the tommy in Dante’s hand they cleared the street with screams and gasps. Then there was an L train passing on the tracks above them, rattling like a slot-machine jackpot, an explosion of sound and noise.

  The men turned into a station on the corner, up two flights of stairs, bursting into the ticket hall, hopping the turnstiles, more stairs and then they were out on the platform, jumping onto the tracks, running along them. Dante paused, took a moment to catch his breath, checked the line and jumped onto the tracks too, his ankle searing with pain as he landed. Finally, there was empty space between them. He leveled the gun and squeezed off a few rounds, which skittered into the planks near the men’s feet. Too far away now to get a good shot.

  He ran after them along the boards and tried not to look down at the gaps between the planks, the two-story drop to the road below, where cars were zooming up and down the street.

  In front of them was a bend in the tracks, and the two men disappeared behind it and when Dante turned the bend too he saw a train bearing down on them, a roaring cavalcade of metal and weight, enough to rattle his bones from yards away. The driver blasted his horn, deafening them, the ear-shattering squeal of the brakes like nails on a blackboard. The man from the forest leapt out of its path, and then Sacco jumped, too.

  Just a second too late.

  The train caught him while he was in the air, swatting him like a fly. His body seemed to compact as it was hit by the onrushing train, and then it bounced upwards, arced over the tracks and the guardrails, into the air above the street, and hung there for what seemed like forever, limbs as splayed as a doll’s.

  And then he dropped, plunging two stories down to the street, where he landed with a crash on the asphalt just as a car reached the spot, not braking fast enough.

  Dante stopped running, thoughts helter-skelter. His stomach seemed to drop out of him and the muscles in his gut wrenched. The train had stopped a dozen or so yards in front of him. He saw the driver through the glass of the cab, shock on his face, and next to the stopped train, on the other set of tracks, was the man from the forest. Down below a woman was screaming.

  Then the train-driver clambered out of his cab, and Dante saw the blood smeared along the front of the train’s metal face and he thought again of a swatted fly.

  The man from the forest looked up and they made eye contact, and then the man burst into a run, and Dante followed. He ran on the tracks, past the halted train, and all the passengers in the windows were staring. Ahead he saw the tracks widening out, a bulge where two lines crossed each other, and beyond them, a station, the start of a new line, where a train was turning, looping from one set of tracks to another. Dante skipped onto the opposite track and the man did likewise, but as he did, he stumbled, fell forwards and disappeared from sight.

  Dante ran over. The man was lying on the tracks, squirming, his leg caught between two of the planks. Dante approached and the man looked up at him. They were both breathless from the chase, horrified by what they’d seen. Dante looked at the man’s foot, and made a judgment on how long it would take for the cops to get there and find them.

  ‘It’s gonna be painful getting out of that,’ said Dante.

  ‘Fuck you,’ hissed the man, and he tried again to pull his foot out of the gap. Dante sat on the rail next to him, put a hand on his racing heart. His lungs burned and his breath was labored; he was dizzy from blood loss, his ankle was throbbing and he hadn’t shot up since that morning.

  ‘Even if you get your foot out, I’m sitting here with a gun,’ he said. ‘I give it five minutes before the next train comes, less before the cops show up. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll help you out.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said the man.

  Dante shrugged. He took out his cigarettes and lit one up, despite his breathlessness and the burning in his lungs. The man was squirming desperately now, trying to wrench his ankle free, and Dante could see from the g
ritted expression on his face how much it was costing him in pain. Dante looked at his own ankle, tried to rotate it, wondered if he’d done himself permanent damage, and thought of his dead brother. Then he caught sight of the man out of the corner of his eye, saw that he’d stopped struggling, and they stared at each other, an endless moment.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he said eventually, and Dante took a drag on his cigarette, making sure he didn’t reply too quickly.

  ‘Who’s running the operation up in Millersville?’

  ‘George Sacco.’

  ‘I already know that. Who’s he working for? There’s a New York connection.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘What do you know then?’

  ‘Nothing. Just that Sacco came up with the idea of piggybacking the whiskey run to distribute dope.’

  ‘And you never asked who he was getting the dope from?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you know about the poison booze at the Ritz?’

  At this the man flinched, then tried to play it off with a grin. ‘Nothing,’ he said, unnaturally.

  Dante took a puff on his cigarette and looked down the line again.

  ‘Well, would you look at that,’ he said. ‘The train’s early . . .’ And he nodded to his left, and the man turned to see another train turning slowly through the loop, about to head in their direction. The man looked back at him, genuine fear in his eyes.

  ‘I got something,’ he said. ‘Help me outta here and I’ll spill.’

  ‘Tell me first.’

  ‘I know who Sacco was working for.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Charles Coulton.’

  ‘The kid?’

  ‘His father. Coulton Senior. He had the connection to New York. Through someone he knew in Washington. The kid and his friend were just along for the ride.’

  Dante stared at the man, thoughts pell-mell, skittering off into different directions, then zoning back in on what the man had said, and his memories started to coalesce.