Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (38 page)

She seemed proud of that.
Then her gaze met mine and she was back in the present.

“That’s why Mayor Daley leveled our neighborhoods, you know,” she said. “Retaliation.”

“He remembers that?” I asked.

“Remembers, hell,” she said. “He was in the gang that started the murders.
He says he wasn’t in the riot, but you go look it up.
He became head of that gang right after.
How does that happen to a boy who won’t get involved? He hates us.
He’d kill us all if he could.”

She spat those last words. She hated the mayor as well.

“You look it up,” she said.
“They call it the Chicago Race Riot, like it was our fault.
Race.
That’s always a code word for Negro.”

“But your husband didn’t disappear then.”

She shook her head.
“The city was afraid, afraid it would get worse and we’d burn them out of their homes or something, I don’t know.
But things calmed, more or less.
And in September the weather eased.
By October, things wasn’t exactly back to normal, but they were better. That feeling — you know that feeling, that t
e
n
t
erhooks feeling?—”

I nodded.

“It was gone by then.
The mothers in the neighborhood, I remember us talking, saying maybe it would be safe to take our babies out of the Black Belt now and again.
Maybe by Christmas, we thought.
Maybe then.”

Her voice faded. She looked at the wall.
I realized she was fighting tears again.

“He went to work,” she said
,
so softly I could barely hear her.
“He went to work on Wednesday and he never come back.
And no one knew what happened.
No one would tell me.”

“Where did he work?” I asked, even though I had a hunch, a hunch I wasn’t sure I wanted to have.

She blinked, seemed to gather herself, and then straightened, looking at me with a mixture of sadness and shame.

“He was the piano player to a coon shouter,” she said.

A coon shouter.
I hadn’t heard that expression since I was a boy.
A coon shouter was a white person
,
usually male
,
who sang Negro-inspired songs while dressed in blackface.
Al Jolson was probably the most famous coon shouter of them all.

“So he worked in a white speakeasy,” I said.

She nodded tightly, as if she expected me to say more, say something judgmental.
No wonder she had trouble finding help.
She had been right about people looking down on each other, and the only thing worse than a coon shouter from a black point of view were the blacks who helped him get rich off our music.

“Was that speakeasy Colosimo’s?” I asked.

She closed her eyes.
“You found him, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said softly.
“I think we probably did.”

THIRTY-NINE

The idea that her husband’s body might have been found broke through Minnie Pruitt’s tough facade.
She didn’t cry — she’d been living with this too long to cry — but she was silent for a moment.

I didn’t press her.
I waited until she was ready to talk again.

“Skeleton,” she finally said.
“That means there’s not much to identify.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She didn’t yell at me for calling her ma’am.
She probably didn’t even
notice.

“So you need something else to go on, maybe things he was carrying, things he wore.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She nodded, then sighed.
“I can’t help much.
I sewed his name into everything he owned because he had a little uniform he was supposed to wear at work — his trained
-
monkey uniform, he called it — and because he was colored, he wasn’t allowed to take it out of the building.
He had to change there.”

“Can you describe it?” I asked.

“I never saw it.
I wasn’t supposed to go to the Levee.”
The way she said that implied that she had.

“But you did.”

She nodded.
“After he
…
disappeared … died
,
I did.
I went two nights later, found someone to watch my children and took the trolley up.
They wouldn’t let me in.”

“Colosimo’s wouldn’t let you in?” I asked.

“Yes.” Her gaze met mine.
The sadness and humiliation were back. That moment was as alive for her as this current one was.
“I couldn’t go in the front door, and no one would let me in the back, so I sat there, in the alley, watching people come and go, and asking about my husband.”

I could just imagine her
,
frightened and alone, in the worst section of town, trying to get information on her husband.
Clutching at people’s arms, asking them for help.

“Finally, one of the busboys — who wasn’t a boy
,
he had to be older than you are now — he come out and pulled me aside.
They probably sent him because he was colored, as dark-skinned as my Juni.
He said he ain’t seen Juni for two days, and when someone don’t show up for work, he got fired.”

It sounded like she was quoting now, but she was staring at me.

“He didn’t expect my Juni back ever.
So I asked if anyone seen him leave that night, and no one did.
At least no one I talked to.
No one seen him after the last show, no one knew what happened.”

“What about his clothes?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I wasn’t thinking clear.
I never did ask.
I was thinking he walked home, got beat, and was lying in a ditch somewhere, dying.
I got folks looking for him, but they never did find him.
No one did, and people started looking at me funny.
They started thinking maybe he had enough of me and the children and had gone off.
It wouldn’t
a
been hard.
The train stations weren’t far from the Levee. That’s one of the reasons it opened where it did.
And the more people said that…”

“The more you thought it,” I finished for her.

She closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands.
“Fifty years,” she whispered.
“For fifty years I thought he’d left me, I
hoped
he’d left me, and at the same time I hoped he was dead, because then he hadn’t left at all.”

Hector peered in again.
He seemed overly concerned for a mere friend.
I held up a hand, mouthed “It’s okay,” and then nodded toward her.
He grimaced at me, but backed away from the window.

Finally, she lifted her head.
Still no tears, but she looked ragged. She looked old.

“He wore a ring,” she said, extending her left hand.
“It isn’t much, but it was what we could afford back in those days.
He never took it off.
He always carried a jacket because you never knew when the wind would come off the lake.
His was flannel, heavy.
And he had a knit cap I made for him.”

“No identification?” I asked.

She let out a small ironic chuckle. “We didn’t have driver’s licenses then.
No one thought of carrying something that said where they lived or who they were.”

Minton hadn’t said anything about a ring, but I would ask.
“Was the ring engraved?”

She shook her head.

And then, because I couldn’t help it, I looked at hers again.
“You never remarried.”

She teared up, and this time the tears threatened to spill over.
“I never knew if he was dead or not.
I kept thinking maybe he would come home….”

She swallowed hard, then wiped angrily at her face, looking away from me as if the tears embarrassed her.
Then she extended her hand.

“It’s not that distinctive,” she said. “But it’s what we got.”

I touched her ring. The metal was thicker than I expected — my adopted parents had rings they got during the Depression, and the gold was so thin it felt like it would snap with the slightest pressure.

Her ring was scratched and worn with time.
Would his be? I didn’t know.

“Did he know a family named Baird?” I asked.
“Maybe a Gavin Baird?”

She shook her head.

“How about a man named Mortimer Hanley?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.
“I don’t know for sure.”

So as far as his wife knew, over a distance of fifty years, Junius Pruitt hadn’t had a run-in with anyone connected to the Queen Anne.

“Did he walk home alone?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He said he didn’t. Said he always had friends from work go with him, but I couldn’t find them either.”

“Couldn’t find the friends or couldn’t find anyone who walked with him?”

“He wouldn’t let me meet the Colosimo’s people.
He was happy to have a job doing what he loved — that piano was something, he said — but the people weren’t.
He said I didn’t need to know them, and I agreed with him.
Foolish of me, I know.”

I shook my head. “It’s not foolish to protect your family.”

She gave me a half-smile.
“When the protection backfires, it is.”

I stirred, making it clear we were nearly done.
“By chance did he mention anyone named Lawrence?”

She frowned.
“I don’t recall the name.”

“How about Zeke?”

“Zeke Ellis.” She said the name like a prayer.
“I haven’t thought of him in a hundred years.”

“Where is he now?”

She shook her head.
“He run off.
He got word that his woman was coming up from Alabama, and he took off out of here like she was the devil herself.”

I frowned, remembering the intact letter that had been found in the wallet. “Was her name Darcy?”

“Oh, yeah.
Sweet thing.
Cried buckets when she found that he’d left her again.”

“Where’s she?” I asked.

“The Negro section of Oaklawn cemetery.”

Another closed door.
“Is there anyone who might remember Zeke? Anyone you can think of?”

“He had a woman here.
Her name was — Vivienne? Viola? Vita? — something like that.”

“Do you know where she is?” I asked, doubting that she would when she didn’t even know the woman’s name.

“No, I don’t,” Minnie Pruitt said.
“But Felix out front, he would.”

We left the woodshed and went back to the main room.
Hector tried to pull Minnie aside, but she wouldn’t let him.
Instead, she took me to Felix.

Felix turned out to be a grizzled
,
bent-over man of about ninety.
He had a hearing aid twice the size of one ear on his left side, and an old-fashioned hearing horn that he stuck in his right.
He sat on a wide rocking chair in the back of the main room as if he’d been placed there eons ago and abandoned.

Our conversation consisted of my shouted questions and his shouted responses.
No one played cards during that, and a number of people helped interpret for me and for him.

Apparently Felix, whose last name was Cayton, wasn’t the marrying kind, and everyone knew it.
Still
,
Vivienne Bontemps had gotten involved with him.
She had given him two children before deciding he wouldn’t make an honest woman of her, even though he’d already told her that.

He continued to support the children until they reached fifteen — he was a good man after all, a lot better than they were, the ungrateful bastards, never visiting their old man now that he had only a few good years left.

I could see why they didn’t, and half the people listening rolled their eyes midway through the question-and-answer session.
I learned nothing of Zeke, except that he had vanished
—
and good riddance too!
—
and that, not Felix, had broken Vivienne’s heart.

Vivienne Bontemps sounded like a stage name to me or a very sad joke.
Bontemps, unless I missed my guess, was badly pronounced French for “good time,” and I had a hunch, although I couldn’t ask it at the top of my lungs and I doubted Felix would answer me at the top of his, that he had met her at one of the whorehouses in near the Levee, maybe one of the Bronzeville houses that took colored women.