Leavin' Trunk Blues (14 page)

For the next two hours, he read through police reports, endless depositions, and the trial itself. Dawkins, Williams, and Elmore King were interviewed. They all said they saw Ruby fighting with Lyons the day he died. They all talked about the tension in Lyons’s life and said he was about to lose the record company.

The trial lasted a couple of days. Ruby’s public defender called a few witnesses that only seemed to help the prosecutors. Prosecutors said Ruby sometimes carried a gun on her right hip and had a violent temper. Ruby’s defense attorney spoke vaguely of Lyons’s enemies and known ties to criminal activities in the South Side. Both said Lyons was a gambler. A womanizer. Ruby was obsessed with her career. Prosecutors said that was her only interest in Lyons.

There was blood on Ruby’s sheets and the detectives had found a murder weapon. A rusted ice pick coated in her fingerprints.

Nick flipped back to the deposition of a man who also saw an argument with Ruby and Lyons. The type was blotted and crooked from an old hard-banging typewriter.

Direct Examination

Q: Will you please state your name?

A: James E. Scott

Q: What is your address?

A: 645 Thirty-first Street.

Q: That is Chicago?

A: (mumbled affirmation)

Q: What is your occupation?

A: Musician.

Q: What was your relationship to Mr. Lyons?

A: Play harmonica on his records.

James E. Scott.
Dirty Jimmy Scott
? Dirty Jimmy was a pretty well known session musician in the fifties and sixties, but Nick never placed him at those late King Snake recordings. Nick had seen an interview with him within the last few years. Maybe he was still around but surely not at a forty-year-old address.

Q: You saw them arguing?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Was she upset?

A: Yes, sir. She called him all sorts of names. Things I can’t repeat.

Q: Did she threaten him?

A: Yes, sir. She said she was going to kill him.

Q: Did she have a weapon?

A: Yes, sir, we all seen the gun.

Nick’s heart sank. Everything fit too neatly.

Still, Nick wrote Dirty Jimmy next to the names of Elmore King, Moses Jordan, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Gerri from the Palm Tavern. Nick glanced back through the transcript. He listed the names for the prosecuting attorney, Ruby’s defender, and a detective named Butler. He was the one who put her away with exact details about Ruby and the crime.

Nick found a battered Xerox machine and copied selected parts of the file.

“Williams and Dawkins?” he asked the clerk.

“I can’t find anything with those names,” she said. “Was anyone charged?”

“I don’t believe so.”

‘You could put in a request for the homicide file, but that could take weeks.”

He made copies of their death certificates and scribbled his office number at Tulane on one of the pages.

The woman took the torn, musty box away to its hidden slot in the cavernous room. As Nick walked outside, he noticed random patterns of shoe prints in the thin layer of snow and ice.

Stagger Lee strolled down the center of the Robert Taylor Homes with kids trailing behind him like he was the motherfuckin’ pied piper. Not as many as there used be. A few years back, he’d sit in the playground surrounded by kids and hand out sacks full of presents. He’d give them bicycles, candy, and even twenty-dollar bills. Shit, money was nothing. Grew like a fungus around the projects. Rock was working strong then. Made a man forget about pussy, about his family, about everything but shoving cash into that pipe. Reason he never touched the shit. Hell, he just drank Coca-Cola and laughed at those fools.

He bent down to a little boy and gave him a couple of Tootsie Pops from his Santa sack.

“Merry Christmas,” the little boy said in a small voice. Burr-headed child with wide eyes. Didn’t understand how things worked yet. He thought the world was full of possibilities. Give him a week with Stagger Lee and he’d learn urban law.

Stagger Lee rubbed the boy’s head. “You remember me. Okay?”

The boy ran off toward a row of boarded-up buildings with CONDEMNED signs shaking in the December wind. Kids were his future, always had been since he came to Robert Taylor. Babies cried in the apartments around him, choking and wailing into the world of crap they found. He gave them jobs.

The high-rise ghettos were about the closest thing to hell you could get on this earth. No one planned on the turf wars, the power out in the summer heat, or the open sewers that made your eyes water from the smell of decaying shit.

He stood and stared down the straight shot of State Street. The brick buildings made him feel like a forgotten king, all his people scattered to the wind. The snow was caked on windowsills and in door frames filled with rotted plywood.

A couple more kids walked over to him all bundled up in the cold. He handed them a couple of Walkmans. They’d been good this year, unloaded a whole bunch of shit. A couple of Twon’s boys. Future gangs kids.

Stagger Lee was the one who brought the gangs all together. They all came to him for advice: Vice Lords. Disciples. Mickey’s Cobras. In the beginning, he ran four lieutenants under him who controlled kids on the street comers. He liked them young. Teens could smell the cash.

Sure, they died quick. If street punks didn’t get them, the crack would. But the cops couldn’t get to Stagger Lee. He never kept the drugs around him and never got close to the corners. To the Chicago police, he was just a shadow.

But his world was crumbling. Street corners were cleaning up and money was starting to flow back into the old neighborhoods. Damn if they weren’t going to even tear old Robert Taylor down next year. The whole damn projects were going to be gone. Now, how was he supposed to run a business? Most of the buildings had already been closed, folks moving out. He made less money this month than he had in twenty years.

All he had to do was walk down the bare halls of The Hole and feel the low tide coming. He’d wait till the wrecking ball came and then he’d find something else.

Billy Lyons
. His name was a forgotten friend. Reminded him of the days when whiskey poured into his hands like gold. He thought about those first days after he broke away from hustling in Memphis and the big hit that changed his life.

Stagger Lee adjusted his leather dog collar.
One last score to make.

--

The Iranian man called his pawn shop the Gold Mine. The shop was only a few blocks away from the shells of Robert Taylor and used to be the place to trade in stolen TVs, car stereos, and jewelry. Man used to have so much hot shit moving through his shop, cops had to close him down about every other week. But now, the Gold Mine moved slow. The Iranian guy had a Christmas tree blinking behind barred windows and advertised a jewelry sale with one of those mobile plastic signs.

But Stagger Lee didn’t give a shit about the man’s gold. He just needed a tool. Yeah, if he took care of this Travers, like he did all the others, man would set him up. He could get enough cash to set up shop somewhere else, get the lads workin’ for him again, and get out of the hole of shit where he’d lived for the last two years.

Stagger Lee pounded on the front door and saw the man scurry away from his seat—his brown face bright with fear—and disappear into a back room. Stagger Lee pounded some more and saw the lights go black inside.

So he’d be like this, he thought, as he walked down the row of concrete block stores. Nothing in them but For Rent signs. Stagger Lee saw a fat hunk of concrete on the broken asphalt ground and wiped the snow from its rocky edge.

He bounded back to the front of the Gold Mine and tossed it through the front door’s glass. The door shattered and Stagger Lee cracked off the remaining pieces of ragged glass with the fat edge of his ice pick. Same old ice pick he’d used back in the stockyards all those years ago to chip off the ice from bloody sides of beef.

Stagger Lee bent at the waist and walked through the door frame and into the shop filled with outdated televisions, broken-down stereos, and six glass cases filled with jewelry. In the darkness, the cases of gold and silver glowed like something out of a fuckin’ museum.

Stagger Lee searched the walls for what he needed as the old Iranian man walked into the room with his hands over his head. Shaking.

“Please,” the man said.

“Where are they?”

“What?”

“I want a forty-four.”

Man walked with his hands over to a side case and nodded his head down. Stagger Lee walked over, past a crate filled with discount porno movies, and looked down at dozens of Glocks and 9 mm’s.

“I said a forty-four,” Stagger Lee said, grabbing the man by his black hair and pounding his face into the black case. His face became a torn, bloody mess in the cracked glass.

“Please, please. I have family. Please.”

“A forty-four.”

The man slowly turned around and reached for a bunch of keys on his waist. His hands trembled so much the keys dropped to the floor. He looked down at the ground and back at Stagger Lee.

“You better get goin’.”

The man reached down to the floor and reached for the keys. He turned back and unlocked a wooden case behind him. He kept his eyes on Stagger Lee as he pulled out a finely oiled, blue steel .44. Just like he used to have hack in the old days.

He delicately dropped it into Stagger Lee’s huge hands and raised his arms again. The Iranian man had a scruff on his face and a thick gold medallion around his neck.

“Good boy,” Stagger Lee said. “I’ll take it.”

“Go in peace,” the man said.

“1 will,” Stagger Lee said reaching into his black overcoat and pulling out a hollow-tipped bullet and inserting it into the spinning cylinder. “I will.”

He aimed the gun between the shaking man’s eyes and pulled the trigger.

Nick jumped on a southbound El to Forty-seventh Street hoping Peetie could help him find Florida and Jimmy Scott. He rode the rambling elevated train and thought about the three men of King Snake and how their deaths could fit together. After the last jarring stop, he walked over to the Soul Train where an old woman told him Peetie was upstairs sleeping.

Nick took a back staircase to an apartment and knocked.

After a few minutes, the knob jiggled and Peetie opened the door wearing a tattered red kimono robe and a shower cap on his head. He rubbed his eyes and jumped back a few feet when he saw Nick. He tried to close the door, but Nick stuck a Tony Lama into the frame.

“Peetie, it’s me. Nick Travers.”

The man’s tired eyes shot wide open. He backed up into his apartment, closed his robe around him like a prudish grandmother, and held his hands in front of his body. Nick thought he might piss down his leg.

“Peetie? You all right, man?”

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. His head tilted and eyes turned to slits. He dropped his shoulders and gave a new look of understanding.

‘You just kind of came up on me,” Peetie said. “I was asleep, havin’ some kind of wild dream about Halle Berry and a donut. Man, I just wanted to keep that thang goin’. Hey, you just scared me is all. Not awake yet. It’s cool. It’s cool.”

“You sure?” Nick asked, smiling. “I can come back. You look a little whacked out, man.”

“No, come on. Sit down. How you know where I live at?”

“Lady downstairs told me.”

“My auntie. She don’t like me sleepin’, say I’m a no-good drunk . . . and I don’t even drink.”

Peetie had a coffee table and a couple of wobbly director’s chairs by a large bay window like you’d find in an old Victorian home. An unmade murphy bed leaned from closet doors and a twenty-year-old television sat on a crooked stand. Peetie walked into a small kitchen, yawned, and opened a lime green refrigerator collaged with naked Asian women.

“Hey, you want one of them Snapples?” he asked, scratching his ass. “Got me two cases of them down at the market for five bucks. Ain’t that some shit? I’m gonna make me some coffee to wash ole Miss Berry out of my mind. My dick still wide awake.”

Nick sat into the director’s chair and looked out of the window down onto the street. A Yugo with tinted windows and curb feelers rambled past, blaring its stereo. A little boy walked a mangy dog down the slush-filled sidewalk. Steam belched from a crooked pipe at a restaurant across the street.

“Snapple?” Peetie asked again.

“Coffee’s fine.”

“Man, can’t unload that shit. Some kind of iced tea. Nobody wants to drink tea out of a bottle. I just bent over on that thang. Hope you don’t mind instant. Got me a deal on them Folgers crystals too. . . . You know they used to switch that coffee at one of them real nice restaurants downtown and nobody could tell the difference? All those rich folks thought they was drinkin’ Colombian but they was really drinkin’ this shit. Wooh . . .”

“Peetie, you remember a friend of Ruby’s named Florida?” Nick asked, staring at one of the most complex collections of LPs he’d even seen. Floor to ceiling vinyl. Cassette tapes. Hundreds of boxed reel-to-reels.