Luciano Guerriero - Chicago Noir

“How come?” I asked, and he looked down, embarrassed, then turned his head and started to open the purse, sad that the whole thing had ever happened maybe.

“He was number ten,” he said.

“How come the purse then?”

“I don’t know,” he frowned, out of breath. “You want it?”

“No,” I replied. “It’s bad luck. I won’t touch it.”

“That settles it,” he said, “I don’t want to think about Shirley again,” and even as he was talking, I was sure neither of us was having it. Cannonball Adams was number ten, the tenth fellah to have fooled around with Shirley. Somewhere out there, I was sure, was number eleven.

I glanced over at Seamus’s big red face. He looked like he had lost the big fight. His left eye was twitching. He shrugged his thick shoulders then emptied the rest of the tiny purse in his lap. Inside there was a handkerchief and a makeup kit. A pair of fake eyelashes fell on out next. They landed right beside me, just like that, almost blinking. I didn’t say a word. I just stared at them. They were thick and black and tired and lovely. He tipped the purse over and what came out next was like a song where the lady singing mentions your name, but directly, something like, “I’m in love with a boy who makes my heart spin/I’m in love with a boy, a boy named Jim.”

It was a white business card that fell out, with a picture of a blue genie coming up from a lamp. I picked it up and saw that, on the other side of the card, it read:

THE BEARER OF THIS CARD IS HEREBY

GRANTED THREE WISHES

It was those moments, those strange moments where I caught the lines no one else seemed to be hearing, those strange moments like the one I was having, that made me want to go into a church again so badly.

“What’s it say?” Seamus asked.

“It says I got three wishes.”

“Three wishes? What for?”

“For finding it. Sure,” I said, “three wishes? That’s easy.”

“Sure.”

“For my first one: huh. Well. Well, I wish I could sleep more soundly.”

“How’s that?” Seamus asked.

“I’m up all night. I hear things. I get afraid. I get afraid ghosts are sitting in my parlor, you know. I’m counting sheep until daybreak.”

“A grown man like you?” He smiled. “You oughta be ashamed.”

“Sure I am. Ever since I was a kid, though. I get in bed and that’s all I think about. Ghosts.”

“You’re gonna throw away a perfectly good wish on nonsense like that?” Seamus grunted. “Really. You oughta be ashamed. Why don’t you use it on something you need? Something you always wanted, maybe.”

I looked down at my sad Stacy Adams with the hole in the toe and said, “O-key, then, I take it back. For my first wish, a new pair of shoes.”

“You’re gonna waste ‘em on a pair of shoes?” Seamus moaned. “That’s terrible.”

“That’s what I need.”

“That’s terrible,” he repeated.

“O-key, then you can have the next one.”

“O-key,” he said, and I should have seen it coming, down the block, right up the street. “O-key. I wish I knew where Shirley was right now.” He whispered it and I nodded, without a word, letting that one pass as quickly as I could.

“O-key, for my last one...” I said. “Huh, I dunno. Maybe I’ll keep it for a while.”

“That’s smart,” he said, but even as he went on talking, I was already thinking. I held the card in my hand and thought of my Slingerland traps, the greatest drum set I had ever had, pearl finish with red sparkles, my kit which was now sitting in the front window of a pawn shop on Ashland, and the thought was this: “I wish I don’t end up a two-bit just like everybody.”

It was our job to drive around. Seamus had been hired to collect certain things from certain people and he would give me a cut of his pay for me to drive, because although he could set a fellah twice his size down on his back, he couldn’t keep his hands still on the wheel. It was a decent enough job but nothing I was too proud of. Seamus would borrow a car from his employer and then we’d drive around all night. It was always easier at night and the music they played on the radio was always a lot luckier.

In the soft gray silence of morning, after we drove around, searching for certain people on street corners, in bars, in the arms of girls they did not trust, I’d mope back to the apartment to try and sleep. It would be too quiet. At one time a lady with a pet canary had lived in the apartment beneath me and they sang along together, every morning, the lady being lonely, wishing for some man to do her duet with maybe. Then the little orange canary got out of its cage, crawled in a hole, and got caught in the wall. For a while, very, very late at night, the lady would sing and it would sing back from behind the plaster. But then it was quiet and not even “Body and Soul” would help locate where the bird had vanished. The lady moved out finally. There were still white sheets all over the furniture and it made me wonder if, like the rest of the town, she had given up on something.

I’d come home alone, lock the apartment door, and switch on the light. If I looked in the hallway mirror I might see a ghost. My uncle, who was a night watchman, taught me how to spot them. There was a ghost of a bootlegger who would appear in my bedroom late at night, dressed in a borrowed white sheet with two black holes for eyes. You could try and convince him he didn’t belong there, but it was impossible. The only way to get rid of him was to switch on the radio and slowly turn the dial until there was a song he recognized and somehow it would remind him that he had died. It was a shame. Here I was, a grown man, superstitious and afraid of the dark, and being afraid of the dark is what got me into the kind of trouble I was always in.

Like the way it usually went, Seamus came by the next night and asked me to help him put the fix on Mr. Number Eleven. He was all busted up about it. He was stuttering and wringing his hands nervously. I locked the apartment door and took my glasses off because I was not about to go through breaking them again, and he said, “All you got to do is drive me, Jim,” and so I put my glasses back on my face.

The elevator arrived and we stepped inside. The two old black cleaning ladies were already there. They had boxes and bags of garbage and old clothes and were whispering to each other. One of them was saying, “It’s not like they didn’t try to help him. He just went off on his own. He couldn’t get it off his back, that stuff. He moved in with that white girl and he couldn’t be good, and just like that she stabbed him to death. That girl, that girl’s gonna reap what she sows. I told her. She needs the cure. The only thing gonna save her now is Jesus. But she’s not interested. She won’t hear it. She ain’t never gonna be happy until she lets herself be saved. I know it. I’ve had my share of it. Hardening your heart like that. I don’t know what you call it, but it sure ain’t living. That boy’s dead two days now, stabbed. My man’s been gone for ten and it hurts like yesterday.” The lady looked me over and smiled and said, “What size are you?” and I said, “Size?” and she said, “What are you? About a nine?” and out of one of the boxes came a pair of black shoes. They belonged to whoever had been stabbed, and even in the shaky light of the elevator I could tell that they would fit fine.

The fix was going to be put on a fink named Langley. He had a horse face and played the trumpet around town with Davey Trotter, the clarinetist and arranger. Apparently, Langley had also slept with Seamus’s wife and now, including Cannonball Adams, the count was up to eleven. Most of them were musicians, stage actors, or semi-pro fighters, one was even a southern jockey. The wife had a hot spot for anyone whose name was in lights. It seemed to me that if Seamus found out about one more, just one more, it might end in someone’s murder maybe.