by Robert Greer
Franklin Watts’s voice erupted from the walkie-talkie. “Figures.” Watts, also a Straight Creek tunnel veteran, hadn’t been around for the first year of the tunnel bore—the worst year on the dig, old-timers still claimed—but he’d spent the next four years underground, and the dig’s blueprint had been stamped indelibly into his psyche as well.
Confident that the rush of water was subsiding and relieved at having pinpointed the source, McPherson said, “I’m gonna check the far side of the hole I got down here.”
“Don’t press your luck, man,” said Watts. “You’ve told me what I needed to know. Get the shit outta there.”
McPherson shook off his boss’s order with a defiant nod. Uttering the words in the same cadence that he and his drift-front mining team had once used to get themselves started every day, he chanted, Fool me once, shame on me, mishandle the mountain, shame on me, rumble-tumble, rumble-tumble, always on me, always on me, get up and go, digger man, digger man.
The rhyme’s simple meaning, a mantra that every miner kept tucked inside the self-preservation corner of his brain—run for daylight when you hear the unmistakable rumble-tumble of a cave-in—wasn’t lost on Watts. “I said get the shit out of there, Cornelius! You hear me?”
McPherson smiled, knowing he’d won one more tiny battle with the mountain. “Franklin, Franklin, Franklin. Wasn’t but a couple’a minutes ago you told me this ol’ tunnel of ours was built to stand every shake, rattle, and roll the man upstairs could deliver. But I hear you talkin’. I’ll be outta here and up there with you in that warm supervisor’s bunkhouse soakin’ up the sunshine in two shakes of a tit. Just gotta check out one more thing.” Clipping his walkie-talkie to his belt, McPherson walked through what was now only a limp stream of water spitting out of the mountain. Brushing a shower of muck off his leg, he worked his way to the middle of the truncated hole in the tunnel wall. A river of tile grout, tree roots, and silt swirled around his feet as a blast of freezing air rushed out of the hole in the tunnel’s wall to greet him. Shivering and rubbing his hands together, McPherson cupped a hand above his eyes as he strained to see between two pieces of bowed rebar into the dark hole. “Thought you had me,” he shouted into the ten-foot-wide cavern. “You thought you did, you thought you did, you thought you did, rumble-tumble, rumble-tumble, digger man, digger man.”
The brief resurrection of his mining glory days quickly faded, and the thrill of his tiny new victory over the mountain was short-lived. Reasoning that now wasn’t the time to push his luck, he shook a fist at the cavernous hole, shook his head, and turned to leave. Walking off the length of the hole, he counted off the footage: “Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Twelve foot long, right on the money, damn!”
Eyeing a crumble of concrete at his feet, he noticed what looked like a stubby tree limb lying a few feet beyond his right foot. Deciding he’d take the limb back as a final souvenir of his nearly forty years of wrestling underground with nature, he stooped to pick it up. It wasn’t until he took a knee that he realized he wasn’t looking at a tree limb, or a broken support timber, or a fractured bearing joist, or even a misshapen piece of steel I-beam. What he found himself staring at, as his eyes expanded and his spine tingled with quixotic numbness, was a frozen, well-preserved, and amazingly intact human forearm.
A rush of curiosity and then disbelief overwhelmed him as he examined the appendage, turning it gently around in his hands, holding it up to the light, rotating it back and forth. The arm, severed at the elbow, was a darker, almost ebony version of what it had been in life, and the remaining skin, patches of it having been stripped away, had the rough, uneven texture of tree bark.
As frigid air continued to rush through the hole in the tunnel wall, the gears in Cornelius McPherson’s head ground to a halt, and his whole body suddenly turned numb. It wasn’t the air streaming from the belly of an angry mountain that had unnerved him; it was something much more eerie, more unsettling and profound. There was something unmistakably recognizable about the severed arm. Continuing to hold the dark, lifeless form up to the light, he turned it around and around. There was no question about it—it was a forearm he recognized, an appendage stripped from somebody he’d known.
He wanted to say, No, wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, It can’t be! It’s gotta be some kinda postearthquake mirage. But there was no mistaking it. The arm bore an immutable and unmistakable signature that told anyone who’d ever seen it before exactly whom the arm belonged to. As dark as it was, and as rough and reptilian as the remaining skin appeared, the red, white, and blue flames that encircled the frozen appendage and the words breed love just above the wrist told McPherson that the arm had belonged to one of the five men from his long-disbanded Straight Creek tunnel crew. It was the forearm of the crew’s gently spoken, well-mannered rock-hauling truck driver who, in the two years he’d worked with McPherson, had seemed sensitive, secretive, and above all lonely. Cornelius McPherson had known him during that time simply as Ducane. Sad-faced Ducane. And he remembered Ducane telling him in a breathless whisper one night, after they’d spent a weekend drinking and whoring outside the windswept mining town of Hanna, Wyoming—in a voice that had a strange, incisive edge to it—that he knew who had killed President John F. Kennedy.
McPherson knelt and laid the forearm reverently at his feet. Shaken in a way he hadn’t been for more than thirty years, he pivoted and stared into the dark cavern in the mountain, wondering whether any more of Ducane’s body parts were inside. But more than anything, he found himself wondering just how Ducane had ended up trapped behind a wall of concrete, steel, and tile. He continued asking himself that question as he scooped the arm back up and headed toward the east portal, recalling as he slipped his way over boulders and twisted metal, shattered glass and stalled cars, that the man calling himself Ducane, as far as he could remember, had not been injured even once during the Straight Creek tunnel dig. As he stumbled toward daylight, a cold shiver swept through him, and he found himself thinking about the fact that the man called Ducane, the man who’d told him that he knew who’d killed JFK, had simply turned up missing one day thirty-seven years earlier, never again to show up on the job.
PART II
The Past
Chapter 2
Gary, Indiana, November 1, 1963
Killing never sits easy with compromise, and Antoine “Sugar Sweet” Ducane recognized all too well that that was what he’d been hired to do—suck hind teat, ride shotgun, and grind it out as a compromise, second-string trigger-pulling alternate in a high-stakes game of murder. Murder that had the potential to alter the very course of U.S. history.
Ducane didn’t like playing second fiddle, never had. Not six years earlier, when he’d been forced to come off the bench to lead his New Iberia, Louisiana, high school football team to a state championship. Not when he’d given up dreams of being an artist after his high school sweetheart had blasted a hole in the psychological armor he’d always used to hold people at bay, leaving him for a Gulf Coast oil rigger. Not during the three years immediately after high school, when he’d boxed his way up the long-rigged, mob-controlled National Boxing Association ladder to become a middleweight title contender, only to get sponged out of the title picture by the Louisiana mob when it was pointed out that he was Creole, not the great Italian Rocky Marciano hope they’d been trolling for. And finally, not even when, as no more than a tagalong wheelman during the fourth in a series of Baton Rouge bank robberies, he’d been ordered in the midst of a robbery gone sour to kill a man and had done his best to oblige.
As they were racing away from the bank, one of his two cohorts had screamed, “Off the pig!” The man who gave the order had a bullet from the bank guard’s .38 police special lodged in his upper thigh. Sugar Sweet Ducane had dutifully pumped two slugs from his mother’s .32, a gun he’d stolen from her as an inquisitive, morose teenager, into the security guard’s gut. Against the odds, the security guard had lived. The exsanguinating robber hadn’t, but
more importantly for the man called Sugar Sweet, in the wake of that robbery he never saw the inside of a police station, much less prison or jail. His mother had connections—important ones—the kind that enabled people like Ducane to forever skirt the law. When all was said and done, Ducane, free as the breeze, had garnered $13,000, half of the dead bank robber’s take, for staying cool and on point during the shoot-out, his baptism by fire. His reputation had been made as a solid soldier in the underbelly of Louisiana organized crime, someone who was willing to execute an order under fire.
More importantly, pumping two slugs into an overweight bank security guard who would end up losing half his bowel ultimately earned Sugar Sweet Ducane a shot at being onstage in the American crime of the century.
Now, as he sat in Theodosia’s Elbow Room, in the heart of the black community of Gary, Indiana, off center stage for the moment in a spot that afforded him necessary invisibility, all he could think about was the fact that playing second fiddle, no matter the upside, was as thankless and shitty a job as a man could get.
It was a humid, sticky, surprisingly warm Steel City November afternoon. The entry door to the Elbow Room had been propped open, allowing a narrow ribbon of light to dance into the otherwise darkened bar. The burning-coal and sulfur smell of blast furnaces and coke ovens churning out steel wafted into the bar, which was linked by a corridor to a liquor store next door. The family-owned bar and liquor store sat just two blocks west of Broadway, the main drag in this city of 180,000.
Antoine eyed the stream of light arching along the floor, sniffed like a bird dog on point at the intruding, acidic, bitter-smelling Steel City air that carried with it the ground-up human smell of mid-twentieth-century American industry at its zenith, and said to the bartender who was standing a few feet away, “How ’bout hittin’ me with another JW Black?”
The barkeep, a long-necked giraffe of a black man with a misshapen head and steely gray eyes, grabbed a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black Label from a shelf to his right, half-filled a tumbler on the bar-top without once looking up, plopped a single ice cube into the amber liquid, and slid it down the bar toward Antoine. “You wanna run a tab?” His soft-spoken response was barely a question.
“Nope. Two’s my limit.” Antoine forced a painful half smile. The pain was courtesy of a barely functional temporomandibular joint that had been crushed in a horseback-riding accident when he was ten. Since then, it had hurt him to smile, chew, or French-kiss a woman. That riding outing had been a birthday gift from his mother, and she’d been so distraught over the accident that she’d had the horse shot and babied Antoine ever since.
Smiling back, the barkeep blinked Sugar Sweet’s features into focus, wondering as he did where the man with the light parchment-colored skin, thick, sandy-colored mop of unruly hair who preferred the limes in his drinks on the rot was from. As the barkeep turned and ran a damp, dirty rag down the bar’s surface, Antoine asked, “How far’s the South Shore Train Station from here?”
“Dead north up Broadway and just past downtown. Twenty-two blocks on the money.” The barkeep eyed Antoine quizzically. “You headed for Chi-Town?” Antoine didn’t answer, having learned long ago never to share his business with a barkeep. He’d already made three trips to Chicago in the past two days, driving a rented Pontiac, which he’d now returned, the thirty-five miles around the tip of Lake Michigan to the Windy City’s predominantly black South Side. There he had met with the people who’d hired him, scoped out the lay of the land, and purchased the things he needed to simplify and carry out his job. At the end of each of the two days, after practicing and refining his part in a much larger mission, he’d made his way back across the Illinois border to disappear into the bowels of the Steel City.
Only four other people besides Antoine and the bartender occupied the dimly lit bar. A pudgy, nervous-looking white woman sat drinking alone at a table against the wall opposite the bar, several feet from Antoine. Three men occupied another table a few feet from her. Two of the men were dressed in bibbed overalls that fit too tightly. The third, a coal-black man with an elongated, rectangular face, was dressed in a pair of faded jeans that looked as if they’d been washed a thousand times. All of the men seemed intent on applying just enough intoxicating lubricant to their minds and bellies to allow them to suffer through one more eight-hour shift at U.S. Steel.
Antoine scooped his floating, dried-out lime from his drink. As he dipped his head to lap the film of bittersweetness from the drink’s oil-slick-like surface, a thin, brown-skinned man rushed through the door, shouting in a mix of Spanish and English with his right fist raised skyward. “Bitch!” he screamed. “You’re a common whore! Puta! Vete a la chingada! Whore! Whore! Whore!” He’d cocked the opposite arm, prepared to strike the woman, whose eyes flashed fireballs of hate when she tossed the drink she’d been nursing into his face. “Coño!” he screamed, toppling the table over onto her.
The bartender, whose move around the bar was fluid and swift, was on top of the man in a half-hair of a second. Twisting the man’s right arm behind him and speaking to him in the calmest of tones, the barkeep said, “I told you not to come back in here today, Arturo.” The bartender eyed the woman sympathetically as, wrapping his other arm around Arturo’s neck, he ushered the now hammer-locked, inebriated Puerto Rican toward the open doorway. “I told you the next time you came in here drunk, I’d call the cops,” said the barkeep, sounding as calm as when he’d given Antoine directions to the South Shore station.
Eyeing the largest of the three unruffled men at the other table, he said, “Willie, how about runnin’ next door and gettin’ me Speed Scott—saw him go in the liquor store a few minutes ago.”
The man responded with a look of bewilderment. “You gonna buy Arturo a pack of trouble, you sic a cop like Scott on him.”
The barkeep shook his head. “He brought it on hisself. Now, hurry up,” the barkeep ordered as Arturo, wiggling in defiance at the mention of Speed Scott’s name, tried to escape his grasp.
The man named Willie lumbered out the door, and within seconds a short, thick, muscle-bound, fair-skinned black cop in plainclothes sauntered into the bar. “Arturo, you drunk again?” Speed Scott shook his head and glanced in the direction of the woman, who’d barely looked up. “Whiskey and women, whiskey and women,” Scott lamented as Antoine moved past him, walking very deliberately toward safety and the bar’s open door.
Sugar Sweet’s exit was soft and imperceptible, the touchdown of a falling leaf. Quickly he was outside, enveloped in daylight and beyond the range of a small-time, small-city cop who could have been his undoing; beyond the battered woman who’d sought out shelter in a bar; and away from detached, intoxicated mill workers and inquisitive bartenders. He’d skirted trouble in less time than it took, as his mother loved to say, for a lecherous Holy Roller preacher to make a date by winking at a woman in the front pew. Striding north up Adams Street, he made his way toward the rancid-smelling rooming house where he was being warehoused, prepared to wait out his date with history or hell.
Santo Trafficante Jr. took a bite of jumbo-sized deep-fried Gulf Coast shrimp and paused to savor the flavor. Then, slapping a fist defiantly into his right palm, he said to one of the men squeezed on each side of him in the back seat of a white Lincoln Continental limo, “Point is, Carlos, you’ve got us puttin’ our future in the hands of some half-breed nigger.” Trafficante was a sad-eyed, thin man with a long neck, a flat, prominent forehead, and a gunshot scar on his upper left arm. He controlled all the organized crime in Florida, a state where his long-entrenched family had helped create the language known as Tampan, a cross featuring the Italian and Spanish dialects favored by early-twentieth-century mobsters.
“You’re eatin’ colored-folks food, ain’t you?” countered Carlos Marcello, godfather to the Louisiana and east Texas mafia. Marcello, born in Tunis to Sicilian parents and known in crime circles as “the little man,” controlled the lion’s share of all gambling in the Pelican State. Lea
ning back in his seat and smiling, he patted the Cuban cigar in his shirt pocket as he eyed Johnny Rosselli, Chicago’s mob boss, who sat on the other side of Trafficante, then popped a shrimp into his mouth and studied the undulating line of black faces that looped from the order window of White’s Shrimp House, a Chicago South Side soul food legend, to within fifteen feet of their limo. Extracting another shrimp from the grease-soaked, quart-sized carton sitting on the exhaust hump between his feet, Marcello said softly and politely, “Colored people sure can cook, I’ll give you that. Shit, I can’t tell this shrimp from the ones they fry up down home in Louisiana. It’s like they’ve got a motherfuckin’ worldwide franchise.” Marcello licked a dollop of hot-sauce-saturated shrimp batter off his thumb and reached for another deep-fried nugget, eyeing it as if it were a prize at the bottom of a box of Cracker Jack. “Umm, umm, umm.”
“Don’t come in your pants, Carlos,” Trafficante said. “This ain’t no meat-beatin’ contest.” Leaning forward and glancing out the limo’s tinted window, Trafficante asked their burly driver, “See anything suspicious?”
Incensed, “Handsome” Johnny Rosselli, a sharp-nosed man with a penchant for expensive sunglasses and equally expensive hats, barked, “Goddamn it, Santo, this is my territory!” He swept his right arm around in a quarter circle, nearly slamming Trafficante in the chest. “Colored, white, gentile, Jew, or Jap, I control these waters. Ain’t a chance in hell anybody’s peepin’ our show. Now, would you sit back in your seat, eat your fuckin’ shrimp, and try not to ask Tony about security no more?”
Flashing Rosselli a look that said, Pipe down, Marcello asked, “Are we here for a fuckin’ sparring match or business? I know it’s your turf, Johnny. Santo is just bein’ thoughtful, and you gotta be thoughtful when you’re usin’ an outsider on a job like this. No question, we’re pushin’ the envelope here.” On trial in Louisiana for conspiracy and looking uncustomarily hounded, Marcello took a sip from a twenty-four-ounce container of lemonade. He’d had to work hard to get away for this meeting in Chicago, and he was teetering on the edge, exhausted from trial prep and a two-year jousting match with the feds, but he had as big a stake in the outcome of their project as anyone, so he was there. “I know Ducane,” Marcello offered. “Down my way his rep’s fuckin’ golden. He’s done half-a-dozen jobs for me when I couldn’t use boys out of Corsica or the East Coast. He’s a hungry dog, one I pretty much raised from a pup.”
