Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (33 page)

The librarian behind the desk was about my age, white, and slender
,
with graying hair pulled away from her face.
Her entire body tensed as I approached and she bent over the desk itself, moving papers, as if she were pretending to work.

I set the briefcase down, gently, then waited patiently until she couldn’t avoid me any longer.

As she looked up, her gaze went to that scar on the left side of my face.
Her lower lip actually trembled before she forced herself to smile.

“Help you?” To her credit, her voice didn’t shake.

“Thank you.” I made sure I spoke softly, trying to seem as gentle as I could.
“I have a few questions if you don’t mind.”

She steeled her shoulders.
She minded, but she was going to act like she didn’t.

“First, have you ever heard of a place called Colosimo’s?
It was at—”

“Twenty-second and South Wabash, I know.
You doing work on Al Capone?”

I was startled.
I had thought, initially, there might be a Prohibition connection to that room in the basement, but once we found the bodies I had dismissed that.

“Capone?”

“Rumor has it that he invested in Colosimo’s with The Greek after Big Jim’s death.”

“Big Jim?” I sounded like my Jimmy, repeating answers that startled me and made no sense.

“Colosimo.” She had apparently forgotten her fear of me.
“He was the first Chicago gangster, you know — or at least that’s what the historians say.
In his day he was bigger than Capone.
He was gunned down in the restaurant in 1920.”

“And then it closed?” I asked, wondering if I had just found the end of the timeline for those bodies to have been dumped — sometime between 1918 and 1920.

“Oh, no.
That’s when The Greek stepped in.
You know, Mike Potson?
He wasn’t as well known, but he should’ve been.
The word was he fronted a lot of things for Capone.”

“Capone,” I said again.

Finally her eyes widened a little.
They were a bright blue, and quite intelligent, something I hadn’t noticed before. “You’re surprised by all this.”

“I am,” I said.
“I found this business card in a friend’s basement.
It was for Colosimo’s which we’d never heard of, and I told him I’d ask about it.
I didn’t expect this kind of history.”

“There’s quite a bit of it in that period,” she said.

“Prohibition,” I said, almost to myself.

“No,” she said. “Even though Prohibition started earlier in Illinois than many other places in the country, that’s not what Big Jim was about.
He was all about vice.
He was the king of the Levee.”

“The Levee?”

She smiled and it softened her.
She was actually pretty.
“Chicago’s red
-
light district — the scourge of the early
twentieth
century.
Everyone’s heard of Capone and the gun-runners
and the speakeasies and the gangs battling for control of Chicago’s streets, but no one seems to realize that the fights were just as bloody twenty years before.”

“The Levee was around Wabash?” I asked.

“The city finally won when it put the Dan Ryan right through the heart of the Levee,” she said.
“But until then, people used to visit all those sites. They’d start with Capone — he had a suite in the Metropole — and they’d work their way back.
I think the Levee is infinitely more interesting.”

I was beginning to find her interesting, mostly because of her enthusiasm for this topic.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the women involved.” Then she waved a hand. “I mean, it was tragic.
It was the source of white slavery—”

She hesitated just a bit.
White slavery always had a worse connotation than other kinds of slavery, and it was all racial. Slavery was bad, the culture said, but white slavery was worse.

“—and prostitution and gambling, but many of the people who got rich were the women.”

“Madams?” I asked.

“Much more than that.
Have you heard of the Everleigh Sisters?” She paused as if she expected me to answer the question, then answered it herself.
“Of course you haven’t, if you haven’t heard of Big Jim.”

I beginning to feel as if not knowing who Big Jim Colosimo was had been a flaw in my education.

“The Everleigh Sisters ran the most famous bordello in the United States. It was called the Everleigh
Club
, and it was on
Twenty-first
and Dearborn, not too far from Colosimo’s.”

“I don’t understand.”
I spoke with my usual forcefulness and the librarian jumped.
So I softened my tone.
“I thought you said these rich women weren’t all madams.”

“To call the Everleighs madams is to raise other madams up.
The Everleighs came into Chicago with a small inheritance and set up their house. They’d never worked in the trade, as it’s called, and they never wanted to.
They made Everleigh
Club
a show
palace, and advertised it worldwide.
It was said that it outclassed the bawdy houses in Paris.”

She, apparently, was impressed by that, probably because she’d never been in a house of prostitution.
I had, and I had tried to help more than one woman escape the life.
I had no romantic illusions about it at all.

“The Everleighs became so famous that the mayor finally issued a special order to shut their house — and theirs only — down.
He got reelected because he did that.”

“And this is a good thing?”

“For the sisters, yes.” The librarian grinned. It was a saucy look that I hadn’t believed her capable of. “They retired after
twelve
years of running the bordello, moved to New York, and lived there until they were a ripe old age.
The last one died nine years ago.
They made millions.”

“Off the exploitation of other women,” I said, feeling shocked at her attitude.

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “They paid their girls more than any other house by double — a prostitute in
the
Everleigh
Club
could easily keep a hundred dollars a week, not counting what she earned — and the Everleigh sisters never charged overhead or any of the other prices that took away a working girl’s wages.
These girls kept fifty percent of what they earned, where most others kept less than ten percent.
I don’t think that’s exploitation.”

“But—”

She held up a finger.
“And it was said that the girls would often convince their clients to gamble rather than spend an hour in bed. The girls would get paid more if their clients stayed the night and sat at the card tables than they did if clients went upstairs for a quickie.”

I stared at her, as shocked as I’d ever been by another person.
She was not at all what I expected.
“You’re fascinated by this.”

“I hope to write a book about the Levee someday.
I think it’s much more interesting than Prohibition.
Vice is always going to be with us, Mr.—?”

“Grimshaw,” I said.

“Mr. Grimshaw.
It’s unrealistic to pretend that we can rid ourselves of it.
So I like the Everleigh
s
isters’ approach.
I think if prostitution is going to be with us, let’s stop exploiting those poor girls, give them some personal power, and pay them a decent wage.”

She had been speaking so fast, she was almost breathless.
Then she caught herself, smiled at me, and flushed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You stepped right into my corner and found me a soapbox.”

“It’s all right.” I was smiling too.
“I’m fascinated.
What happened to the Levee?”

“It was subject to raids all through the teens, and by the early twenties very few businesses were left — at least of the original ones.
Some were taken over by Capone’s gang, others by Johnny Torio — you know Johnny Torrio —?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, I could talk with you all day.
He was one of the Big Four Gangster Chieftains of the early twenties.
He—”

“I don’t have all day,” I said awkwardly.

“And you haven’t even gotten to your other two questions.” She smoothed her hair with one hand, as if catching herself.
As the hand moved, she reclaimed her librarian persona.
“You probably want to look at some books.
I’d recommend that you start with Herbert Asbury’s
Gem of the Prairie
.
It’s a history of the Chicago
u
nderworld written for the layperson.
There are better histories, more recent ones, but his is the best written.”

She wrote that down as she spoke, no longer looking at me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It covers the Levee and Big Jim and the Everleigh
s
isters.
It ends with Capone’s arrest in 1931.
It was written in 1940, so it still has a contemporary feel, which I think is a good thing.”

I nodded.

She looked up as she handed me the paper with the citation.
The librarian persona was now completely in place.
The woman who waxed enthusiastic about brothels had vanished.

“You had two other questions?” she asked.

“I assume that
T
he Four Deuces is part of the Levee?” I asked.

“It was the first place Capone ever worked before he became a known gangster,” she said. “He murdered ‘Ragtime’ Joe Howard there in 1924.
It was as famous as Colosimo’s, just not as nice.”

“Nice as in fancy,” I said.

“In all ways,” she said.
“It opened in 1914.
It was Joe Torrio’s place, funded, they say, by his uncle Big Jim Colosimo.”

It seemed to come back around to Colosimo’s.
I wondered what the connection was to my case.

“But
T
he Four Deuces became famous — in a seedy and corrupt way — in the twenties.
It was raided
,
oh
,
probably two dozen times in the Deaver administration.”

“I assume Deaver was a mayor?”

“You need to read some Chicago history.” She smiled at me, then caught herself, and returned to the librarian again.
“Yes.
He was a mayor in the twenties.
Did you find something
with The
Four Deuces as well?”

“A matchbox,” I said.
“With just the name and some cards on the front.”

“Oh, a classic!” she said, clasping her hands together.
“I’d love to see it.”

“I’ll try to remember to bring it in,” I said, even though I wouldn’t.
No sense in telling her it was all part of a grisly investigation.

She grinned again, that librarian mask lost forever.
“You said your name was Grimshaw?
I’m Serena Wexler.”

I extended my hand. “Bill Grimshaw.”

She took it without hesitation, as if she’d forgotten her initial fear of me.
Maybe she had.

“I’ll be sure to ask for you when I remember that matchbox,” I said.

Her grin widened.
“And any time you have questions about that period.
I’m not an expert, but I’m trying to be.”

“You sound like an expert,” I said.

“I’d love to give tours,” she said softly.
“You know, old murder sites — where Dillinger was shot by the police, the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre — but those neighborhoods are so bad, some of them, and I doubt anyone but me would be interested.”

“You never know,” I said.
I had a hunch a lot of people would be interested.
“Thank you for all your help.”

“You said
you had three questions,” she said, amazing me again with her memory.

“Oh, yes,” I said.
“I found a napkin with the other items.
It had only
Calumet-412
written on it, but the writing was in gold.”

“It’s a phone number,” she said. “Odd that it would be on a napkin.
Written in gold? As if with a gold pen?”

“Printed,” I said, “as if someone made a lot of them.”

“Hmm.
I would wager it’s a phone number for either a speakeasy or a vice house.
Something no one wanted to advertise.”