The Cuban Club Read online

  His mother’s husband was standing on the porch holding a flashlight.

  “The back door was open,” he said. “What are you doing out there?”

  Roy remained at the foot of the porch steps, looking at this man he never wanted to see again. He could feel the snow leaking around the edges of his parka hood, water dripping onto his neck.

  “I heard a scream,” Roy said.

  “You probably had a nightmare. Lock the door after you come in.”

  The flashlight clicked off and Roy’s mother’s husband went inside. The snow let up a little but there still was no light in the sky. Roy sat down on the bottom step. It was almost Christmas and he knew that what he wanted was what he didn’t want.

  LOST MONKEY

  Secret Jones cleaned windows in rich people’s houses during the day and returned to the houses when he knew the occupants would be away and burglarized them. Secret worked alone and made a steady living. He lived modestly in a small apartment on North Avenue but took a two or three week holiday once a year, usually a luxury cruise to either Caribbean or Mediterranean ports-of-call during the fierce Chicago winters.

  Nights he wasn’t working, Secret Jones often stopped into Roy’s father’s liquor store to mingle with other characters who used the store as an unofficial meeting place. Secret was one of the few Negroes among mostly Italian, Irish, Jewish and Eastern European men who hung out at the sandwich counter, seated on stools nursing lukewarm cups of coffee, nibbling stale doughnuts and smoking cigarettes and cigars, or just stood around talking or pretending to be waiting for someone. The liquor store was in the center of the nightclub district and stayed open 24 hours. Roy’s father was usually there or in the vicinity from noon until four or five in the morning. Nights when he didn’t have school the next day, his father let Roy hang around “to figure out for yourself what bad habits not to pick up.”

  Secret Jones was one of the men Roy enjoyed listening to.

  “You know how I got my name?” Secret said. “My daddy was sixteen and my mama was fifteen when I was born and they wanted to keep me a secret, so that’s what my grandmama called me, Mamie June Jones, my mama’s mama. She was the one raised me. This was in Mississippi. My daddy bugged out before I could know him and my mama got on the stem and died of alcohol poisoning when I was four years old. How old are you now, Roy?”

  “Nine.”

  “I been on my own since I turned thirteen, after Mamie June passed. I come up to Chi on the midnight special with nothin’ but what I was wearin’, no laces in my shoes, no belt for my trousers. Thirteen years old stood in Union Station with nothin’ in my pockets, that’s for real. You’re lucky you got a daddy looks out for you. That’s what life is about, Roy, or should be, people lookin’ out for each other, whether they be blood related or not. Here it is 1956, ninety-one years since President Abraham Lincoln freed my people and there’s still places in this country I get shot or strung up I go there. Ain’t that a bitch! Same all over, some folks bein’ left out or rubbed out and nobody do anything about it.”

  “Quit cryin’, Secret,” said Hersch Fishbein. “It ain’t only your people catch the short end. How about my six million Hitler done in?”

  Hersch, Secret and Roy were sitting at the counter. Hersch worked days at Arlington Park racetrack as a pari-mutuel clerk and sometimes at night at Maywood when the trotters were running.

  “You hear about Angelo’s monkey?” Hersch asked.

  “The organ grinder?” said Secret.

  “Angelo’s my friend,” said Roy. “Dopo sits here at the counter with me and dunks doughnuts in Angelo’s coffee.”

  “Somebody stole him.”

  “Why would anyone steal Dopo?” Roy asked.

  “Sell him,” said Secret Jones. “Smart monkey like him. People pay to see him do tricks.”

  Hersch nodded and said, “A carnival, maybe.”

  “How’d you hear?” Secret asked.

  “Saw Angelo on Diversey, grindin’ his box. Had a tin cup on the sidewalk. ‘Where’s Dopo?’ I asked. ‘Disappear,’ said Angelo. ‘I can no passa da cup anna play at same time.’ ”

  “We should look for him,” said Roy.

  “Hard findin’ a little monkey in a city as big as Chicago,” Secret said.

  Roy went outside where his father was standing on the sidewalk in front of the store talking to Phil Priest, an ex-cop.

  “Dad, Hersch says someone stole Dopo, Angelo’s monkey.”

  Phil Priest laughed and said, “A wino probably ate it.”

  Roy punched Phil on his right arm.

  “Take it easy, son,” said his father.

  “You’ve got to do something, Dad. Angelo can’t make a living without Dopo collecting coins and tipping his hat.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, Roy.”

  Roy remembered the time he was sitting at the counter doing homework and Angelo and Dopo came in and Dopo picked up a pencil and began imitating Roy, making marks on a piece of paper.

  “Dopo helping you,” Angelo said.

  Roy looked up and down the street. It was ten o’clock at night, not a good time to start hunting for Dopo. Roy would begin the next day asking around the neighborhood if anybody had seen Angelo’s monkey, although Angelo had probably already done that.

  Phil Priest took off and Roy’s father said, “If Dopo doesn’t turn up, the organ grinder’ll get another monkey.”

  “I don’t like Phil Priest, Dad. Mom says he was a crooked cop, that’s why he was kicked off the force. I didn’t like what he said about Dopo. It’ll take a long time for Angelo to train a new monkey.”

  Roy walked back inside. Hersch and Secret were arguing about the best way to fix a horse race. Hersch said you had to have the jockeys in your pocket and Secret said it was better to juice the nags.

  “None of the bums who hang around your dad’s store are on the level,” Roy’s mother had told him. “Some are worse than others.”

  “Why does Dad let them stay there?”

  “Those men are just part of the system, Roy. Being on the game is all they know, they grew up with it.”

  “I’m growing up with it, too.”

  “You won’t be like them,” said his mother.

  Roy’s father was still out on the sidewalk, talking to a man Roy had never seen before. The man walked away and Roy went out again.

  “Dad?”

  “What is it, son?”

  “Mom says when I grow up I won’t be like the men around here.”

  Roy’s father looked at him and said, “How does she know?”

  WHEN BENNY LOST HIS MEANING

  Roy was sitting at the counter in the Lake Shore Liquor Store on a Saturday morning in November sipping a vanilla Coke listening to Lucio Stella and Baby Doll Hirsch talk.

  “Remember Mean Well Benny?” asked Lucio.

  “Worked for Jewish Joe. Spidery little guy. Got rung up for killin’ a crooked cop.”

  “McGuire, in Bridgeport. The Paddy guarded the mayor’s house.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s out. Mastro seen him at Murphy’s day before yesterday, eatin’ a steak without his teeth in.”

  “What happened to his teeth?”

  “Guess he had ’em yanked in prison. Mastro said Benny put his choppers in a glass of water while he gummed the steak.”

  “He got plans?”

  “Probably.”

  “We should find out.”

  “How’d he get that tag, anyway?”

  “It was Jocko named him Mean Well because too often he did things he wasn’t told to do that didn’t turn out well.”

  “Such as?”

  “Time he offered Lou Napoli’s girl, Ornella, a lift to Lou’s crib, only Lou wasn’t expectin’ her and happened he was entertaining a waitress from Rickett’s at the moment. Napoli worked for Jocko and when Lou told him how it had come about Ornella stabbed him and he almost lost a kidney, Jocko said, ‘You know, Benny, he means well.’ After that
, he was Mean Well Benny to everyone in Chicago, even the cops.

  “Shootin’ McGuire was a mistake, too. He thought it was McGuire had leaned on Jewish Joe, so he threatened him one evening in Noches de San Juan, a PR bar on North Damen. McGuire took offense, busted Benny in the mouth, so Benny parked a pair in the cop’s chest. This was after McGuire got thrown off the force.”

  “Maybe why he got false teeth in the joint.”

  Roy liked going with his father to his liquor store on Saturday mornings. All kinds of people came in and Roy liked looking at and listening to them, even and especially if they were a little or a lot crazy. A week later, a day before his ninth birthday, Roy heard Lucio Stella tell Baby Doll Hirsch that Mean Well Benny’s corpse was found with his throat cut stuffed into a garbage can in an alley in Woodlawn.

  “What could he been doin’ in that neighborhood?”

  “Probably lookin’ to do some woolhead a favor he didn’t need.”

  After Lucio Stella and Baby Doll Hirsch left, Roy asked his father if he had known Mean Well Benny.

  “He used to come around. Why do you ask?”

  “I just heard Mr. Stella tell Mr. Hirsch that Mean Well Benny’s body was found in a trash can.”

  “Some men’s lives don’t amount to much, son. They get on the wrong road and don’t ever get back on the straight and narrow.”

  The following Saturday morning Roy’s father took Lucio Stella and Baby Doll Hirsch aside and said something to them Roy couldn’t hear, then they left without finishing their cups of coffee.

  “Dad, did you tell Mr. Stella and Mr. Hirsch to leave because of me?”

  “I did.”

  “Are they on the straight and narrow?”

  “They don’t know what it means.”

  SICK

  A girl’s dead body was found on Oak Street beach by a man walking a dog at five o’clock in the morning of March 5th. The body was clothed in only a black raincoat; there was no identification in the pockets. The girl was judged to be in her late teens or very early twenties, the most notable identifying mark being a six-inch scar on the inside of her left calf. She had light brown hair and brown eyes, height five feet four inches, weight one hundred and five. When discovered, the body was coated with a thin layer of ice. Forensics determined that the girl had been dead since approximately seven o’clock the previous evening. Her stomach and abdominal tract contained only particles of food; she had not eaten for at least two days.

  Twelve days later, at four p.m. on March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day, perhaps the most festive day of the year in Chicago’s substantial Irish community in 1958, a forty-eight year old woman named Mary Sullivan, a native of Belfast, Northern Ireland, who had been a resident of Chicago for twenty-two years, filed a missing persons report at the Division Street precinct, claiming that her daughter, Margaret, had not been in contact with her since March 2nd. Margaret, who fit the description of the corpse found on Oak Street beach on the 5th, including the scar on her leg, worked as a waitress at Don the Beachcomber’s restaurant—a strange, or perhaps not so strange, coincidence—and had been living with another girl, Lucille Susto, twenty years old, a recent arrival in the city from West Virginia, who also worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in The Loop. When questioned by police, Lucille Susto told them that she had not seen her roommate since the morning of the 4th, before going to work. Her recollection was that Margaret was not scheduled to work at Don the Beachcomber’s that night, a fact corroborated by the manager of the restaurant. Mary Sullivan’s husband, Desmond, Margaret’s father, had been living in Ireland for the past three years and was not presently in contact with either his wife or daughter; Mary did not have a current address for him. At six-thirty on the evening of the 17th, Mary Sullivan identified the body lying in the morgue as that of her daughter, Margaret.

  The man who discovered the body was Paddy McLaughlin, a doorman at the nearby Drake Hotel, who had been walking a standard poodle belonging to a resident of the hotel. McLaughlin, whose brother, James, was a sergeant in the Chicago police department, reported his find to the police immediately upon returning to the Drake Hotel with the dog.

  “Look, Roy,” his mother said to him while they were having breakfast on the morning of March 6th, “Paddy McLaughlin’s picture’s in the Trib.”

  The McLaughlins were Roy and his mother’s next door neighbors; their sons, Johnny, Billy and Jimmy, were Roy’s best friends. Roy, who was eleven years old, looked at the photograph of Mr. McLaughlin dressed in his epauleted doorman’s uniform, the brim of his military-style hat fixed precisely in the center of his forehead, the tip of his aquiline nose almost touching his long, thin upper lip.

  “He found a dead body,”

  “I read the article, Roy. He must have had quite a shock.”

  When Roy saw Johnny that afternoon he asked him what his father had told the family.

  “He said there was nothing to tell other than seeing the girl lying on the sand wrapped in a black raincoat and then calling the cops. My Uncle James says if the body’s identified my dad’ll be called to appear at an inquest, if there is one. I’m thinkin’ about goin’ down to the beach to search for clues. Want to come with me?”

  Johnny was six months older than Roy. He was interested in science and read all about fingerprinting, blood types and various procedures involving detection.

  “The police are doing that,” said Roy. “What makes you think we can find something they won’t?”

  “Happens all the time. In the Hardy Boys books they’re always solving crimes the cops can’t. The other night on Ned Nye, Private Eye a kid discovered a foreign coin in a murderer’s apartment that could have belonged only to the victim, brought it to Ned, and that cracked the case.”

  A light snow was falling at eight-thirty the next morning when Jimmy and Roy arrived at Oak Street beach.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Roy said. “The snow’s covering up whatever evidence might still be around.”

  Waves collapsing on the sand sounded like cats knocking over garbage cans in an alley. Lake Michigan was wrinkled gray and black.

  “You can’t see anything,” said Roy. “Not more than a few hundred yards, anyway. No ships in the distance, no planes in the sky. We should go to the Drake and get hot chocolate in the coffee shop.”

  “My dad doesn’t come on duty today until ten,” said Johnny. “We’ll go over then. The manager’s a pal of his so we won’t have to pay. Come on, let’s see if we can find something.”

  After forty-five minutes of searching all Roy had found was a broken pencil and a used rubber. After he unearthed the rubber he asked Johnny if he knew if the girl had been raped.

  “If she was, it probably didn’t happen on the beach in bad weather. She didn’t have any clothes on under the coat, so if the killer molested her he did it somewhere else before he dumped the body here.”

  Johnny found a toothbrush, cigarette butts, one child’s size pink mitten and a broken neck chain. He held up the chain for Roy to see and said, “This might be something.”

  A cop came along and said to them, “What are you boys up to? This is a crime scene.”

  “It isn’t marked off, officer,” said Johnny.

  “The snow’s coverin’ up the markers. You lads had best be moving along.”

  “Do you know Sergeant James McLaughlin?” Johnny asked. “He’s my uncle. I’m Johnny McLaughlin.”

  “Well, when I get home tonight I’ll be sure to tell my wife, Kathleen, guess who I encountered on Oak Street beach this mornin’ in the sleet and snow but Sergeant James McLaughlin’s nephew, Johnny. Go on now, both of you.”

  “And my father’s Paddy McLaughlin, the head doorman at the Drake Hotel. He found the body.”

  “Next you’ll be tellin’ me your mother’s Rose of Sharon.”

  In the Drake coffee shop the boys sat at the counter and ordered hot chocolates.

  “I think the killer’s a rich guy who lives in a fancy apartment around
here, on Lake Shore or Marine Drive,” said Johnny. “Probably somebody she knew who worked or she met at Don the Beachcomber’s. He raped the girl, strangled her—or maybe, if he was a real pervert, strangled her before raping her—then carried the body down in the dead of night.”

  Johnny and Roy were finishing their hot chocolates when Paddy McLaughlin came into the coffee shop and sat down on the stool next to his son’s.

  “Top o’ the mornin’, fellas,” he said. “Bobby, the night man, told me you were visiting. May I inquire as to your purpose?”

  “We were searching for clues to the murder,” said Johnny.

  “A cop ran us off the beach,” said Roy.

  Mr. McLaughlin put two quarters on the counter and stood up.

  “I’ll be goin’ on the job now,” he said. “See that you get home safely, detectives. Don’t hitchhike, take the bus.”

  The girl’s killer turned out to be a regular customer at Don the Beachcomber’s, who, as Johnny figured, lived a few blocks from the beach.

  “Johnny got it right,” Roy told Jimmy Boyle. “He pegged where the creep met her and where he lived. “Johnny knew it the morning we went to Oak Street to see if we could find a lead.”

  “Did you find something?”

  “No, Johnny just put it together. Maybe he got a feeling from the spot his dad discovered the body.”

  “I heard on the radio about people who have a special talent to tune in to the sick mind of a killer,” said Jimmy, “to identify with him. It’s called havin’ a sick sense.”

  Margaret Sullivan’s rapist-murderer was a 42 year old bachelor named Leonard Danzig, an architect, who told the judge at a pre-trial hearing that he had been searching for several years for a direct descendant of the sister of Jesus Christ, whom he believed, like her brother, claimed to have been fathered by the Holy Ghost. Danzig said he felt it was his duty to abort what he described as an immoral lineage in order to cease the false prophesies that had wrought chaos since the blasphemy of immaculate conception. Danzig’s rationale for the rape was to anneal “the unspeakable insult.”