EQMM, March-April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Bad as the kidnappers were at planning, they were worse at improvising. They'd driven out in the country somewhere, dug a hole the size of a grave, trussed Cavanaugh up like a pig on a spit, and tossed him in. Something was rigged to keep him breathing, but the whole thing collapsed when it rained that evening and the poor fellow suffocated, which explained why payment of the ransom didn't result in delivery of the goods.

  "The police told me about it, and I told them to make sure Francine never found out,” said Arthur, “but next day there it was on the front page. Poor thing fainted dead away when she read it.” He shook his head sadly. “I had a hunch I couldn't trust the police. That's why I didn't tell them about marking the bills."

  "But what was the point of marking ‘em if you didn't tell the coppers?"

  He explained that he was pals with a network of bankers from Wall Street to San Francisco. He'd alerted them to be on the lookout, and quite a few bills had shown up on the East Coast within a year of the kidnapping. He'd hired a private eye out there, but the investigation went nowhere. Now, after a long hiatus, the bills had begun turning up again, only this time closer to home.

  "That's what I know for a fact,” Arthur said. “Here's what I know in my gut. Frank was lured by a woman. Women were his weakness."

  "It's a common failing,” I observed, but irony will never be Arthur's long suit. He continued to explain the role a vamp must have played in the kidnapping.

  Frank Cavanaugh got a phone call shortly before noon the day he was snatched. He told his secretary he'd be out on business through the lunch hour, and never returned. The secretary told the police it was a woman who'd called. She assumed it was another secretary, because that's how the hoity-toity make appointments with each other.

  Arthur thought otherwise. “You see, Frank didn't have many appointments, because he didn't have much to do. He wasn't cut out to be a banker, that's for sure. I had him downtown with me for a while after the marriage, trying to teach him a few things, but by the time he was abducted I'd sent him over to our Midway branch. I have a competent fellow in charge there who didn't let him get in the way. That was about all I could hope for."

  The marked bills were showing up at a bank in Duluth. Arthur wrote the banker's name down and said he'd be expecting me. Then he handed me a sealed envelope. “I want you to track down the kidnappers and give this to them,” he said. “Unopened."

  That was half the job and it was odd, but not as odd as the rest. Arthur wanted me to meet with his daughter when I returned. I was supposed to tell her that I'd donned a pair of brass knucks and brodericked a confession out of one of the torpedoes who'd kidnapped her husband. He'd told me that Cavanaugh hadn't been buried alive after all. He'd tried to escape because he missed her so, and they'd shot him dead.

  "Tell her they dumped his body in the river or something,” he said. “Then she can forget about finding his remains. I can't bear to see her pining away any longer."

  The next day I made my way to Union Station and boarded the morning train to Duluth. I chose a window seat and threw my patrimony, a carpetbag with a wooden handle, into the luggage rack. We chuffed slowly up the Phalen Creek ravine, passed through my north-side stomping grounds, then nearly came to a stop behind the shop ponds, so the boiler man could throw a shovel of coal on the pile.

  The dirt-poor families that lived in old boxcars on the siding relied on that coal for their winter heat. It was an act of kindness by the Great Northern that kept many from freezing to death, but raised the mortality rate from black lung, too. My schoolmate Tommy Quinn hacked himself into an early grave from coal smoke, which sad betiding led to the only enduring relationship with a woman I've ever had. I got to spooning with his sister Maggie behind St. Andrew's after the funeral, and we'd been seeing each other off and on ever since.

  We gained speed quickly once we left the yards. Rows of stunted corn flashed by. Off in the distance I saw a water tower shimmering in heat waves off the surrounding farmland. A dust storm had blown through a few days earlier. Everything—trees, corn, barns—was coated with Iowa topsoil.

  Funny how your thoughts, which might seem to be highballing down a track of their own, find their way back to whatever is pressing. Thinking about coal fires, and Maggie, and the intimacies Maggie and I had shared, reminded me of something wicked I'd done with another gal. It happened on the only occasion when I'd crossed paths with the widow Cavanaugh's late husband.

  The Chamber of Commerce chose Frank Cavanaugh to be Boreas, King of the Snow, for the 1928 Winter Carnival. He selected the usual assortment of society janes and dishy downtown shopgirls to be his princesses. Boreas and his pals wine and dine the princesses, and do battle with Vulcan the Fire King. It helps if both monarchs are hams, because their clashes are mostly rhetorical. Cavanaugh fit the bill nicely. Not only was he a man about downtown, he was an amateur thespian who looked good in a costume, and was very quotable.

  At the end of the Carnival, Boreas is deposed and Vulcan reigns supreme. As the Fire King himself said when he knighted me: “Vulcan battles to end the cold of winter and bring warmth back to Saint Paul."

  You might wonder how I attained knighthood. Easier than you'd think. I hung around Tin Cup's with some neighborhood fellows, amongst them Joe Rogers, who was well known because everybody knew him. I don't know how they knew him, but his nickname helped. He came by it honestly, by confronting a Hun who had the temerity to walk into Tin Cup's and order a drink. “Get the hell outta here!” said Joe. “Who're you to order me around?” the Hun replied. “I'm yer worst nightmare, ye heathen bastard,” was Joe's now-famous rejoinder. The Hun backed out cursing, and Joe's been “The Night Mayor of Rice Street” ever since.

  Due to his notoriety, the Night Mayor was named Duke of Soot for the 1928 Carnival. He arranged knighthoods for several of us from Tin Cup's. We spent ten days during the shank of the winter doing battle for Vulcan. Our routine consisted of dressing up in red capes and devil's horns, rubbing coal dust on our mugs, and riding round town drunk on a fire truck. We had a free pass to leap off the truck any time we saw a bunch of dames and bring warmth back to St. Paul by giving them a big sooty smooch. The gals always acted alarmed, and some of them were truly outraged (I personally got slapped twice), but mostly they put up a token struggle, then left the mark of the Vulcan on their puss for days to show that they were certified tomatoes.

  Good clean fun, but cold work on a winter eve. It was comfier crashing the Snow King's soirees. That was how we made war on His Highness. By busting in and besmirching the princesses.

  Boreas employs his own shock troops. Traditionally they're coppers, which means they're just Rice Street rowdies in uniform. My friends Jack Moylan and John O'Connor were in the Palace Guard that year, as was another bull I knew, a bent gumshoe named Jimmy Philben. Jimmy fled St. Paul a few years later, about an hour ahead of the G-Men.

  On the evening I was thinking about on the train, Frank Cavanaugh was at the Lowry Hotel, regaling his court with bootleg hooch and funny stories. The gals’ laughter turned to mock horror as we descended upon them. The Palace Guard put up some token resistance, and I vaguely recall His Majesty protesting vigorously—"good sirs, unhand these maidens forthwith” or something like that—but what I recall vividly is a kiss I got from a shop gal. She was nearly as tall as me, with taffy blond hair done up in thick braids on top of her head and that toast-colored skin Norsky dames sometimes have. When I kissed her, she stuck her tongue in my mouth.

  I was shocked. I still made the odd confession back then, and the first thing that came to mind was, how am I going to explain this to the priest? I must've looked stupefied.

  She stepped back. “Aww, did I scare you?” she said. “Thought'cha wanted a kiss."

  The Night Mayor swooped in and grabbed her before I could respond. Then the Duke of Clinker's crew arrived and added to the chaos. I never did get her name, but I can still see the brazen smirk on her face and feel the heft of her. She was quite an armful. />
  King Boreas is the Chamber's official glad-hander until the next Carnival, so Frank Cavanaugh was in the papers regularly over the following year. I'd often see pictures of him shaking hands with one mucky-muck or the other. That must've been right after he married Francine, when his father-in-law still had hopes for him.

  The conductor came through to check the luggage racks. “There a bar car?” I asked.

  "No hooch until after lunch is served,” he replied, “and we'll be in Duluth by then.” He must've seen the disappointment on my map. “Try looking at the scenery,” he said.

  People are always suggesting things I can do instead of drinking. The scenery was right up there with some of their other ideas—bowling, model airplanes. Nothing but stumps and blackened tree trunks as far as you could see. When I was a kid you could smell smoke from the forest fires up here back in St. Paul.

  Duluth turned out to be a little town perched on a steep hill, next to a large body of water. I didn't see just how large for a while. The water was mostly hidden by industrial buildings and big piles of reddish-brown rock when we rolled in, and my first stop was a windowless gin mill a few steps from the depot.

  Once fortified, and having gotten directions, I trudged up the hill to Second Street and entered a brick building with North Shore and Iron Range Bank of Commerce chiseled into the granite facade. A guard gave my carpetbag the fish eye, but it wasn't too long until I was ushered into the president's office.

  I leaned across the desk to shake hands with a tall fellow who rose to greet me. He had thinning blond hair and a grip like a teamster. Arthur had written his name down, but I couldn't pronounce it so I simply uttered mine.

  "Martin McDonough."

  "Jusseri Jalkanen. Sit down."

  Turns out the Finns pronounce J as Y, which made his first name sound like “usury,” which probably explained the wry smile when he introduced himself. He had lots of gold in his teeth. Behind him was a picture window that looked out on what might as well have been the Atlantic Ocean. There was no end to it.

  "That's a lake?” I said.

  "Dat's Da Lake,” he replied. “Lake Superior. Every morning I wake up and tank God for dat lake.” He jerked a thumb the size of a dill pickle back over his shoulder toward the yards. “See all dem rock piles? Dat's iron ore. Dey send it down here from da iron range in hoppers, and load it on ore boats. Whole damn country's in a depression, but dey're still making steel in Gary, Indiana, and as long as dey do, da railroad and da mining company need a bank in Duloot. And by God, I got one. Two blocks from da terminal.—How's Arthur?"

  "Fine, but his daughter is still grieving."

  "Terrible ting, dat.” He opened a drawer and pulled out two century notes. “Here dey are."

  We examined the little curlicues. They say money talks, but those bills weren't telling me what I needed to know. “Any idea where they came from?” I asked.

  "Yah. In a deposit from da lending co-op, up in Virginia. It'll take some detective work to find out how dey got dere. But dat's what you do, ain't it?"

  I assured him it was, with more bravado than confidence. I was a long way from St. Paul, and the coppers who provide most of the information I trade in.

  "How far is Virginia?” I asked.

  "Too far to walk. Fifty miles, uphill all da way.” He stood, and motioned me to join him looking out the window. “Dere's a train unloading right now, see.—Tell ya someting. Dey never even fired da boiler on dat bastard once dey got ‘er out of da mine. Just aimed ‘er for Da Lake and braked ‘er on da curves. Twenty hoppers with seventy tons of ore in each one. Took about an hour to roll ‘er down here. Going back, now dat's different. Tree, maybe four hours. I can get you on if you want. Why not? You could save a few bucks. Udderwise it's da jitney bus, and dat usually breaks down on da way."

  I agreed and we strolled down to the yards together. I asked if he got many century notes through his bank. Very few, he told me, but more from where those marked bills came from than anywhere else. The Virginia lending co-op tended to be the collection point for cash from the Crane Lake area, he explained.

  That rang a bell. Crane Lake was an old bootlegger's route out of Canada, a remote and wild region where many a gangster and percentage-copper kept cabins. Redhots on the lam often holed up there, ready to pop over the border on a moment's notice. I knew for certain that the fugitive gumshoe Jimmy Philbin lived on Crane Lake. He told me so himself when he tennis-shoed into town for his father's funeral, wearing a wig and dark glasses.

  Jalkanen and the engineer conversed in their native tongue while the boiler fired up, then it was time to get aboard. Jalkanen wished me luck. “Careful,” he cautioned. “Dat's no ordinary bank up dere."

  I'd have questioned him about that, but we were under way.

  The engineer was a laconic fellow and the boiler man was busy shoveling coal most of the time. To call the trip uneventful would be an understatement. I could see how rolling down to Duluth might be a thrill a minute though. You could tell from the way the engine labored that we were climbing a steep grade, and every few miles a hairpin curve slowed us to a near halt.

  The land was mostly logged over. Poplar grew where the big pines had been, thick but not high. Off in the distance I could see a few stands of remnant evergreen. We whistled our way through some villages, Cotton, Forbes, Central Lakes, and arrived in Virginia three hours after we left Duluth. It was dusk when we came to a stop at the lip of a huge, horseshoe-shaped hole in the ground.

  "Dat's da Mesabe,” said the engineer. “Biggest open-pit mine in da worlt.” I could see train track looping down the side of the pit, and some electric lights aglow at the bottom, but not much else.

  "We're at da end a’ Chestnut Street here,” he said, as I climbed down from the locomotive. “Dere's some saloons and a hotel a few blocks back."

  The joint I chose was called The International. It was well named. The barman spoke English, but the patrons were gathered in knots, gabbing amongst themselves in alien tongues. They had one thing in common, though, the crust of red dirt on their boots.

  A couple of moochers who apparently knew some key words in each language were working their way from one end of the bar to the other. I kept an eye on my carpetbag as one of them hovered nearby. He was a tough-looking guy in a corduroy worker's cap. His boots were clean. “Ain't seen you here before,” he said.

  "Ain't been here before,” I replied, but the conversation improved some after I bought him a drink.

  His name was Pete Urbina. He told me he was from Jugo-Slavia, that he'd mined copper in Michigan, and iron ore here and over in Hibbing. He'd quit because of the dust. He'd been organizing for the CIO until the strike settled. Then he got to drinking too much. “The OIC cops worked me over coupla times,” he said.

  "What's an OIC cop?"

  "Oliver Iron Company. They don't like organizers."

  "I'm lookin’ for a cop,” I told him. “Actually he's an ex-cop. Lives over on Crane Lake. Jimmy Philbin, ever heard of him?"

  "Nah, but them Crane Lake guys don't give yuh their right name anyways. How come you're lookin’ for a copper?"

  I told him I was a private eye and Jimmy was an old friend. He advised me to skip the fleabag down the street and stay in the municipal cabins on Green Lake, at the edge of town.

  It was good advice. I spent a comfortable night for a buck, plus fifty cents for bedding. The cry of the loon lulled me to sleep.

  Next morning bright and early I walked into the Virginia Cooperative Bank, a storefront with no tellers, no cages, nothing but a strongbox and a desk. A fellow with a black moustache and broad shoulders crossed by suspenders was seated behind the desk. A sign on the wall said: LOOK AT THE BANANA! EVERY TIME IT LEAVES THE BUNCH IT GETS SKINNED! JOIN THE CO-OP.

  "I'd like to ask a favor,” I said.

  "You the guy talked to Petey Urbina last night?” he replied.

  "Uh, yeah."

  He reached under his desk and pulled out a Colt .45.
“I'll do ya a favor, ya Pinkerton bastard! I won't shoot ya if ya turn around and walk out the same way ya come in."

  "Easy. Jesus! Do I look like a Pinkerton?"

  It was a dumb question, but it set us on the path to resolution. I told him the truth, embellished for dramatic effect. He lowered the gat as I spoke, and eventually stuck it back where it came from. I'd say he was intrigued by the heartrending story of a brutal crime that left a young widow pining, and an intrepid private eye in search of justice. I was moved myself.

  "So you think this copper was in on it?” he asked, when I finished.

  I shrugged. “He knows who's who up there. That's a start."

  He opened the strongbox and pulled out a roll of bills wrapped in a deposit slip. “This is from the Crane Lake Store,” he said. “Came in yesterday."

  There were three century notes in the wad. One had the curlicue mark.

  "Think they'll remember where it came from?” I asked.

  "Maybe, but they ain't gonna tell you. They don't like people snoopin’ around, ‘specially private dicks."

  "Told'ja, he's a friend."

  "Yeah, and I believe ya. But they won't."

  He helped me arrange a ride up to Crane Lake. A sawbuck covered the trip in a Model A, with my big-mouthed drinking buddy Pete Urbina at the wheel. I grumbled about the fact that he nearly got me shot, but Pete just scoffed. Should've known better than to say you're a detective, that was his attitude.

  I'd have discussed it with him, but the ride wasn't conducive to conversation. Breeze whistled through the open windows, and the rattling of the frame made it hard to think, let alone talk. The so-called road was naught but two parallel ruts through pine woods, aspen thickets, bogs, and along the edges of scummy green swamps. It was rocky and potholed, but Pete didn't let that slow him up. In fact it spurred him to accelerate. “MIGHT GET STUCK IF WE SLOW ‘ER DOWN,” he shouted, when he noticed my alarm.