Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (40 page)

Her head was bent, her expression pained.

“When was that?” I asked.

“October 28
th
1919,” she said
,
with such a firmness that I knew she had regretted doing it.

“Why’d you end the relationship?” I asked.

She was still staring at the note. “Because I found a letter from his old girlfriend from Alabama, saying she was moving here.”

“It didn’t say she was going to move here,” I said.
“It said she was coming here on the train.
All it did was give the date and time.”

She raised her head, and her eyes were filled with such anger I almost leaned back.
“Darcy was moving here. That’s what that letter meant.”

Vivienne hadn’t yet realized that I had seen the letter too. It would come to her.

“How do you know that’s what the letter meant?” I asked. “It didn’t say anything like that. Did Zeke tell you?”

“He didn’t have to.
It’s not like now
,
when people just traveled on a whim.
If Darcy was taking the train to Chicago, she was going to stay here.
And Darcy could barely read and write. She wasn’t going to pour herself onto the page.
Me and Zeke, we both knew she was coming up here to live.”

“You talked with him about it,” I said.

“More like shouted at him,” she said.
“He said he didn’t ask her. He said he didn’t want to see her, but I didn’t believe him.
Then when he run off, I figured it was to prove to me that he didn’t want anything to do with Darcy.
I kept expecting him back in a year or two, and I was going to show him.”

“That’s when you met Felix.”

“I already knew Felix,” she said. “Felix took care of me.
Someone had to.”

Then the color left her cheeks.
She had been more honest with me than she had intended to be.

“Felix managed you, didn’t he?” I asked gently.

Her gaze was wary.
“That’s a nice word.
Managed
.”

I waited.

She sighed and shook her head.
“He took care of me.
Someone told Big Jim that I was passing not two weeks after Zeke left.
Big Jim threw me out of Colosimo’s and told most of them on the Levee that I was a colored girl.
I lost my place to live, I lost my man, I lost everything, and to make it worse, I was pregnant.
So Felix, he offered to help me out…”

She frowned, closed her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying, and opened them very slowly.

“My children don’t know this,” she whispered.

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I said.

“I haven’t said anything about this in forty years.”
She put a hand to her forehead.
“It must’ve been Zeke.
You mentioning Zeke.”

I nodded, but didn’t add to it. She was still in a confessional mood.
I was going to let her talk.

Then she tilted her head.
“You saw the letter.”

She finally realized what my comments meant.
“Yeah,” I said.

“It was in the wallet too?”

I nodded.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, then put her hand over her lips.
“And a fin? Did it have a fin?”

“A fin?”

“A five-dollar Treasury note.
The large size, you know?
Old money.
Zeke always kept a fin, said you never knew when you’d need a bit of grease.”

“He bribed people?”

She rolled her eyes.
“He lived on the Levee. Of course he bribed people.”

“And he visited you in your rooms, even though no one knew you were black?” I asked.

“I visited him,” she said. “No one other than employees could come into Colosimo’s.”

“You lived there?”

“Near there.
There was a network of buildings we all used.”
She leaned toward me.
“You didn’t tell me.
Did you find a fin?”

“Yes,” I said.

“God.” She stood up and walked to the small window that overlooked the hedge between her house and the neighbors’.
“All these years I thought he took a flyer.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think he was with Junius Pruitt and maybe someone named Lawrence.”

“Lawrence Talgart, the fucking bastard,” she said.
“Yeah, it would make sense those three were together.”

Then she turned, and she looked perplexed.

“But you said you found them on the South Side.
Not in the Levee?”

“No,” I said.
“Closer to Hyde Park.”

“That makes no sense.” She sat back down. “Zeke wouldn’t go through Bridgeport for nothing, not after the riots.”

“Maybe he and Lawrence walked Junius home?” I asked.

“Walked.” She snorted. “They always drove Junius home, dropped him half a block away so that wife of his wouldn’t know what he was doing.”

“What was he doing?” I asked.

“Anything that paid him,” she said.

“Minnie Pruitt said he was a piano player.”

“And he was, for about two hours a night.”

“What did he do for the rest of the night?” I asked.

She took a deep breath.
“He enforced.”

“He was — what? A bouncer? A muscle man for Colosimo?”

She smiled and adjusted her sleeves over surprisingly thin arms.
“We didn’t call them bouncers then, but that’s sort of what the job was.
He made sure the girls didn’t get hurt, and no one trashed up the club.
He wasn’t muscle.
Colosimo used Italians for muscle.
He was scary brawn.”

“I thought he wasn’t very big.”

“He was big enough,” she said.
“And he was black.
Black-black
,
the kind white folks find terrifying.”

“Why didn’t he tell his wife what he did?”

“Protecting white ladies of ill repute?” Vivienne said that with just a touch of a fake English accent.
“Minnie couldn’t handle the fact that he played piano for a white man doing ‘race music.’
Imagine how she’d’ve reacted when her husband’s real job was keeping an eye on ladies of loose morals and even looser clothes.”

That sense I’d had the day before, a sense of history still living for these women, came back strongly.
And I felt like I was digging into a pool of anger and misunderstandings that was so deep there was no real way to get to the bottom of it all.

“Do you think he enforced against the wrong person?”

“And got my Zeke killed?” She shook her head.
“Big Jim made sure you knew right up front which customer could beat a girl to death if he wanted to.
In fact, Big Jim had a room off to the side just for those men.
So no one could hear the screaming.”

She shivered.
I clenched my fists, pushing back anger at something that happened decades ago, something that was so long past many people didn’t even know who Big Jim Colosimo was.

“If you say those three were together,” she said, “then something happened after work.
They didn’t work near each other.”

“So Zeke didn’t work for Colosimo,” I said
,
remembering a remark she’d made earlier about only employees going into the building.

“Zeke worked for Zeke,” she said.

“And who did Lawrence Talgart work for?”

“Whoever’d hire him.” She shivered again.

“Why didn’t you like him?”

Her entire body seemed to collapse in on itself.
“He knew.”

She paused.
I waited, and when it became clear she wasn’t going to say any more, I said, “He knew you were passing?”

“And that I loved Zeke.
He knew, and he told me I could buy his silence, and I did.
Once a week.”
She shivered a third time.

He was dead, I reminded myself. And if he wasn’t dead, he was so old that it no longer mattered.

“Did Zeke know about this?”

“You think he’d let Lawrence drive him around the city if he knew?”

I didn’t know.
But she didn’t think so, and that was all that mattered.

“What did they do together?”

“Found people to con.”

“Do you know what the con was?” I asked.

“Usually something simple.
Renting a ride in Lawrence’s Model T — which was still pretty rare, especially for a black man to have — or making change.
They loved that one. Asked some sucker for change, then passed bills and coins around so fast that person never knew they got shorted till a lot later.”

Variations of that scam survived even now.
I’d seen a lot of drug addicts use it in Memphis.

“But they ran a floating card game, usually set up by Lawrence
,
with Zeke in it as the dealer.
He was good at pocketing money and chips and at getting folks to win more than they should so that they’d bet more than they should, and then some ringer’d take them for all they were worth.
They made a lot doing that.”

“Could they have scammed the wrong guy?”

“They were always scamming the wrong guy,” she said.
“The question is did that guy figure it out?”

It was a good question, and one that might be difficult to discover the answer to after fifty years.
So I tried another tack.

“Did Zeke know anyone named Baird?”

“He didn’t,” she said. “I did.
Name was Gavin.
A little white mama’s boy, determined to spend every dime of the family fortune.
He’d run through most of it by the end of the war.”

My fists relaxed.
Finally, a connection, even though it was a tentative one.
“He visited you?”

“Till that summer.
Heard he ran out of money, might even have to get a job.”

“Did he?”

She shrugged.
“I know that Felix asked me later if I’d consider a few nights with Gavin Baird
,
because he’d been asking about me.
I said I’d rather walk the street.”

“Was he mean to you?”

She shook her head.
“He had mean friends, though.
And without Junius or someone like him, I just didn’t feel safe.
Specially if Gavin wanted to share.”

No wonder she hadn’t told her children any of this.
I was a little amazed she was telling me.

“Did he share before he ran out of money?” I asked.

“Not with me,” she said. “Some of the other girls. They hated it. They hated him.
He watched. They said it was like he was storing up secrets.”

He’d stored up quite a few, but not the kind she was thinking of.

“Was one of his friends Mortimer Hanley?” I asked.

She shook her head.
“I’d remember that name.
No.”

“Any other names come to mind?” I asked.

“No.” She answered a little too fast. A few names clearly did come to mind, but she wasn’t willing to share them.

“These were all white men?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said softly.

“Men it was worth holding secrets about?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

“Some of them still around?”

She looked at me.
“I said I don’t remember. I mean I don’t remember.
You understand?”

I did.
They were around, and she was afraid of them.

“Do you think any of them could have hurt Zeke?” I asked.

“They didn’t even know Zeke,” she said.

“But say they did. Say Zeke interrupted them with one of the girls or cheated them in a card game.
Would they have hurt him?”

“They’d’ve hired someone else to hurt him.”

“Do you know who that someone else might’ve been?”

She gave me a half smile.
“You know, it doesn’t matter.
They’re all gone.
Lost in the gang wars.
The life of one of those white boys who went with Big Jim
,
and later Johnny Torrio or
T
he Greek
,
was pretty damn short.”

“You think they’re all dead?” I asked.

“The ones that worked the Levee?” she said. “I know they’re all dead.
The ones that worked later, mostly for Capone, there’s still some of them. But Zeke disappeared before anyone heard of Capone or any of those bums.”