Cahokia jazz, p.15
Cahokia Jazz, page 15
‘So?’ said Drummond. ‘Anything I want to know about in there?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Told you so. Well now, lookee: it’s four o’clock. Nothin’ else is goin’ to happen till that train reaches that station. Time to knock off and seek out the hair of the dog, don’t you think?’
‘Nope,’ said Barrow. ‘It’s four o’clock, and I’m due at five at the something-or-other Foundation on Division and 3rd, where the princess of the moon is gonna set me straight. So there’s just time for you and me to grab a car and go back to Germantown to talk to Mr Weiss at Hamelin’s drugstore.’
‘Seriously?’ said Drummond, sitting up suddenly.
‘Yeah.’
‘Then no, Joe. Absolutely not. Not a good idea.’
Barrow studied him curiously. The good mood seemed to be evaporating as quickly as it had come, earlier.
‘Why not?’
‘Because …’ Drummond glanced around the room, then slid over to speak without being overheard. ‘Because – you know you don’t ask questions about where the, shall we say, supplements to your pay check’ve been coming from? And you know I’ve been gently, uh, negotiating our way to seein’ a little more from the takata boys, ’cause they’re the ones whose liquor business is buildin’ up to operate at scale? Well … Weiss is kinda my contact there. And I don’t want to kick over that particular house of cards, okay? Things are at a … delicate stage.’
‘I see your point. But I think we got to do it anyway. This is a murder, Phin.’
‘Oh, Joe, they’re all murders. All of the deadbeats, and the ladies with their heads stove in, and the country boys who come in with a truck full of ’shine to sell without checkin’ whose turf they’re on – all of ’em doing the human thing, of turning to meat that turns to mould that keeps the grass growing.’
‘This one’s different. This one’s set the city on its ear.’
‘It has that,’ agreed Drummond with a gleam of a smile.
‘So I think I’ve got to go down there.’
‘Shit,’ said Drummond.
‘I’ll go on my own if you like – no need to mention you’re my partner.’
‘Shit, shit, shit. Shee-it. You crazy conscientious bastard. I am not letting you go into Germantown alone to talk to gangsters, not with what’s kickin’ off over there today, by all accounts. You’re really goin’ to insist on this?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shit.’
5
‘That’s them,’ said Drummond. They were parked on the corner behind Hamelin’s, looking through the plate glass at a row of four male backs perched on chrome stools at the drugstore counter.
All the way west along 2nd Street they had been passing turbulent little groups of takata men. At first, often pushing and shoving in small scrimmages with takouma in Police Department blue, broken storefront windows nearby. After that, as if passing beyond a boundary line into a zone the Department could not hope to police just now, less ruckus but many intersections featuring pickets in Klan robes, selling a special edition of Fiery Cross and holding placards – printed placards, not homemade ones – that said AMERICAN LAW FOR AMERICANS and WHITE HOMES IN DANGER. Barrow even saw one Klansman on a horse equally draped in white, doing the hooded cavalry thing popularised by Birth of a Nation, a movie the Klan were constantly showing at union halls and church socials. A kid was feeding the horse an apple. Businesses were open over here, with no broken windows, but there was a kind of semi-holiday mood in the air, an excitement waiting for its outlet. Heads turned to stare at him in the passenger seat of the Model T, then grudgingly swung away again at the sight of Drummond at the wheel, grinning and waving. ‘Suckers,’ he was muttering as he grinned. ‘Suckers and assholes, suckers and assholes.’
But the guys in Hamelin’s seemed immune to the stir outside. They were taking their ease with cigarettes or toothpicks, heads tilted toward each other as they chatted through their business, thick shoulders bunching and rolling the suit jackets.
‘That’s Weiss on the end,’ said Drummond – not much in particular to see between hat and jacket but yellow-blond hair and a wide neck scraped red by the barber. ‘Right, if we’re doing this, let’s get ’er done. The things I undertake in the sacred name of friendship are just an astonishment to me.’
And before there was any chance for discussion about what they were going to do and say in there, he hooked out a billy club from under his seat, and was on his way with it through the corner door of the drugstore. Barrow, having no choice, jumped out and followed, and was just in time to see Drummond, striding across to the counter and smiling wildly, swing the club at the head of the first wise guy as if trying to whack a coconut off a stand. He always did move horribly quick in a brawl – a spider scuttling from harm to harm. There was a crack now like glass breaking, and the victim flew forward onto the shiny marble counter and slumped there in a mess of spilled coffee. But torpedoes number two and three were up off their stools instantly, one reaching for Drummond’s throat, the other wheeling round on Barrow, blade already magically in hand.
Barrow abandoned his belated groping in his pocket for the knuckles and swayed back. The knife went past his nose in a silver arc. He leaned back in and went fast for the knife arm with both hands, throwing his weight to tip the mook back off-balance towards the counter.
He was stronger than most people, but this guy – gorilla brows, a fur of black hairs on pale hands – was wide and low-slung. He was planted on the red vinyl floor like a wrestler, and Barrow couldn’t quite get the leverage to push his thick arm across and slam the elbow on the hard counter edge. One good downward blow against the direction of the joint would crunch bones.
But it was like trying to uproot a fireplug, moving the guy across. He got him part of the way there and stuck, face a foot from the other guy’s, hard impersonal concentration on the gorilla face which probably matched his own, scrabbling and stumbling, locked arms straining. Barrow got him an inch or two further down onto the counter; the guy flexed, heaved, pushed the inch back up again. And managed to switch grip on the blade so it became a spike pointing sidewise at Barrow’s face.
Seconds had passed but the fight already felt as if had been going on for a long time. Something was going on with Drummond, but Barrow was closed into the small world of this one combat, this one pair of heaving bodies.
He reached with a leg to swipe at the gorilla’s footing. The gorilla, thinking in parallel, used his free arm to try to land a kidney punch on Barrow. It didn’t connect with much force through the swinging fabric of Barrow’s coat but it jolted him, and as the gorilla fell back he lurched forward, and the tip of the knife jabbed into him somewhere above his right eye. Cold slicing of the steel going through skin; hot gushing, immediate, as blood poured down into his vision on that side. The gorilla gave a grunt of satisfaction, but Barrow had him fully off-balance now, and he jerked the knife arm wide and away at last, and shoved the heel of his left hand under the black-stubbled chin, ready for the slam—
But then there was a gunshot. They froze without letting go of each other, and both Barrow and his wrestling partner looked around and took in the state of things elsewhere in the drugstore. Drummond was bright red in the face from being choked, but he had his .38 against the head of the man trying to do the choking. Weiss, in turn, had a big automatic out and had it levelled at Drummond’s head. There was a smoking hole in the white ceiling. A door still swinging behind the counter suggested that the soda-jerk had sensibly high-tailed it.
‘What the fuck, Detective?’ said Weiss, which was very much Barrow’s feeling too. ‘What. The. Fuck?’ A solid, placid Bavarian farmer’s face, the kind of face from which you’d expect to be buying cheese or a churn of milk, and a calm, placid voice, marked by the traces of an accent which said he’d come over just that little bit too old to have his larynx entirely remodelled by America. Only his eyes told you why Mrs Hopper could have thought he was the devil. They were a blue so pale they looked frosted over, on their way to the blind white of glaucoma, and the bleached holes in his pink skin declared that, out of the face of the farmer, something icy and utterly indifferent was looking.
‘Have you gone mad?’ Weiss continued. ‘Are you experiencing some sort of breakdown? In comes a lunatic with a bat and up we jump thinking the enemy is at the gates; but no, it’s you and your pet redskin. I was under the impression we had an understanding. Am I mistaken, Detective? Do we not have an understanding?’
‘We have an understanding about the liquor business,’ said Drummond thickly. ‘We don’t have an understanding about murder.’
‘Ah,’ said Weiss, looking from Drummond to Barrow and back again.
‘I just thought I’d underline that, to get the conversation off on the right footing.’
‘And you couldn’t think of another way of saying so? – Tommy, Gunther, let go of them.’
Drummond’s opponent let go of his neck. Barrow and the gorilla detached carefully from one another, the gorilla no doubt feeling in his racing heartbeat as Barrow did in his the unnaturalness of halting before one had finishing crushing the other. He reached for a handful of paper napkins and held them to his head, blinking away blood. Drummond and Weiss lowered their guns but did not put them away. The henchman hit with the bat still sprawled in his brown puddle.
‘Of course we know nothing about any murder,’ said Weiss blandly. A remarkable statement considering that Weiss’s organisation, and probably the men in this room, had provided the majority of the corpses the Murder Squad had spent the last year dealing with. But Weiss seemed to have decided, despite the smell of cordite in the air and the trail of scarlet drips Barrow was leaving, to stonewall as he would have done in a courtroom.
‘My colleague has a few questions he feels he’s gotta ask you all the same,’ said Drummond.
‘A very few, I hope,’ said Weiss. ‘Well?’
‘Fred Hopper,’ said Barrow. ‘Killed on Sunday night on the Land Trust roof.’
‘A tragic case,’ said Weiss. ‘Nothing to do with us. Done away with, poor fellow, by one of you roten heiden, according to what I read in the newspaper.’
‘Roter neger,’ said the gorilla who had cut Barrow.
‘Now, now,’ said Weiss.
‘You lent him money,’ said Barrow. ‘How much?’
‘Before the vig? Fifty dollars.’ Weiss shrugged. ‘I’m in a lot of different businesses.’
‘His wife said you were threatening him – threatening the whole family. She met us at the door with a gun.’
‘How unpleasant for you. Where is she, by the way?’
‘Gone,’ said Barrow. ‘Far out of reach. Why do you ask?’
‘A payment is due. Is that all?’
‘No,’ said Barrow. The napkins had soaked through. A hot salt trickle was running down beside the corner of his mouth. ‘Where were you on Sunday night?’
‘Ah,’ said Weiss. ‘Happily, I can tell you exactly. I was at a fund-raising concert for the Evangelische-Lutherische Kirche on 3rd Street and Beaumont, playing pinochle and other harmless games of chance until 11 p.m., when my dear wife Clara and I had the pleasure of entertaining the minister and his wife to a late supper at our house. They stayed until nearly one in the morning, discussing the church extension. Then I and Clara went peacefully to bed. Together.’
The gorilla snickered.
‘That’s a very detailed alibi,’ said Barrow.
‘Isn’t it. And now I think that’s all—’
‘One more question—’
‘He is persistent, isn’t he, your … colleague,’ said Weiss to Drummond. ‘And not very well-informed about his own best interest. You should explain things to him, before somebody loses their temper. Point out to him that very soon there will only be jobs for good and polite boys with his particular complexion. Those angry citizens outside’ – nodding to the Klan picket on the opposite corner – ‘may be, how do we say, blinkered when it comes to alcohol, but they are very sound on the racial question.’
‘The “racial question”?’ said Drummond. ‘My, that’s some high-soundin’ talk to be comin’ from a purveyor of bathtub gin, you ask me. Ten-dollar words for two cents’-worth o’ shit, if you asked me.’
‘Nobody did,’ said Weiss.
‘One more question,’ pressed Barrow. ‘What is your connection with the Land Trust?’
‘None!’ snapped Weiss. ‘I have no connection with it. Why would I? A ridiculous institution, that exists to obstruct me, and every other businessman. A warehouse in Columbus or Detroit, no problem; a ranch in Texas or California, sign on the line. In this city, thanks to your Land Trust, I can’t even own my own house. Now, we are done. You are leaving.’
‘Sure,’ said Barrow, ‘only, it’s interesting. Here you are, a man with, like you say, warehouses in Columbus and Detroit, ranches and what-have-you all over; and it ain’t really bathtub gin you run, is it. What I hear, if I’ve understood correctly, you’re the fellow for the real stuff. You’re the one keeps the genuine scotch flowing. You’re no small-timer. You think big. So, why would you be loan-sharking fifty lousy bucks to a deadbeat clerk, and taking the time to terrify his beat-down wife? Unless, that is, you were keeping him motivated – keeping him gingered up to do some other thing …’
‘Get him out of here,’ said Weiss to Drummond. ‘And don’t ever bring him back, and don’t come yourself till I ask you to. I give you this one chance to remember which way around this works.’
*
‘Happy now?’ said Drummond, as they walked to the Model T.
‘Shut up, man,’ said Barrow. He looked at Drummond doing his loose-limbed, self-contented strut, and he had one of those moments when the familiarity strips off things. He thought, why am I hanging around with this weasel of a human being?
‘I mean, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be happy? You’ve checked the box for virtuous ol’ Doyle. Weiss has an alibi. End of story.’
‘Phin, I’ve had a bellyful of crazy today. Just shut up.’
‘Well now, that’s—’
Barrow punched Drummond’s near shoulder. Not quite full force, but not a friendly sock on the arm either. Drummond sprawled back against the hood of the Ford, and as he came up, his blue eyes wide, his hand jerked towards his holstered .38. He checked himself, but Barrow saw it.
‘Ah-huh,’ he said. ‘What are you gonna do, Phin, shoot me?’
‘I wouldn’t even haveta. I could just leave you here and let the Klan eat you up.’
Weiss’s boys were spectating through the plate glass, and the onlookers on the corner were indeed stirring. They’d seen a takata coming to blows with a takouma.
‘See,’ said Drummond, ‘from my point of view, I just found a way to get you what you said you wanted, even though it was a load of damn non-sense, and nothin’ to gain from it but trouble.’
‘See, from mine, you just got me cut up and covered in blood. I coulda lost an eye!’
‘Keep your voice down, man.’
‘Oh, now you’re cautious. Okay, get in the damn car and drive.’ Barrow looked down at his watch, and spilled another thick drool of red straight onto the glass. He wiped it off. Five minutes to five. ‘Drive me to Division and 3rd, and this Foundation place.’
‘You’re not still plannin’ on going to that damn lecture thing, are you?’ said Drummond, starting the engine.
‘Why not?’
‘Well – your clothes are kind of a mess, and I’m thinking, you should maybe get a doc to look at your head?’
Barrow prodded his brow, and found a pulpy gash there, through to the bone, still running hot and liquid, though the previous flow was crusting on his cheek. A lot had soaked into his shirt. The pain was coming in as his body calmed. Pulses of nausea too.
‘Just drive.’
*
Partway through a roundabout route back, doubling to the north on back streets to reach Division without passing the trouble spots, Drummond tried again.
‘Look, I take it for granted that you can handle yourself,’ he said.
‘You take a lot for granted.’
*
And at the kerb outside the immense glass vitrine of Couma Hashi’s store, back in the shaded depths of the business district, where violet was creeping into the slot of sky overhead and money still mostly cushioned out the stutter of trouble breaking the rhythm of the city – Drummond said, ‘What’ll this take, an hour, two hours? I’ll come back and get you, and we can go find a doc then, maybe a drink to take the edge off.’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Barrow.
6
COUMA it said on a pure white awning over a stark and mostly empty window, where one dress, one hat and one coat were arranged like treasure. There was a bell to get in through the bronze-sheathed glass door, with two plates below it, the bigger reading COUMA again and the smaller one THE ALTEPETL FOUNDATION. Barrow buzzed, and had time to take in, in the door, the reflection of a man grotesquely out of keeping with what was waiting on the far side, a domain of luxury too elegant to require decoration, and wealth too extreme to require price tags. Superimposed on a carpet in oatmeal silk, and white wooden cabinets like the ones in the Moon’s own home, a dishevelled hulk was standing in the twilight, with a mashed brow and an eye sealed shut with crusted blood, and ruined clothes.
