“The girl used to dance at La Paloma. Jasmine Ford. I don’t know if that was her real name.”
“It wasn’t. Not her first name, anyway. Marlene, Marla, something like that. You thinkin’ what?”
“Where’s she’s got to, that’s all.”
“You ready to do something dumb again, huh?”
“I’m not a smart guy like you, Freddie.”
Harry Castor walked toward LaSalle. He had a room there, a basement. A real comedown, he thought, every time he woke up there or came back to it. No place to bring Jasmine Ford. Castor came from Kansas City, Kansas. He was a musician, a drummer. In Chicago he jammed with guys he met hanging around the clubs, sat in here and there when the opportunity arose. Harry was getting in until he got shot one night in a currency exchange where he’d gone to cash a check from one of his rare gigs. A teenager was killed trading gunfire with a security guard and Castor got caught in the crossfire, taking a slug from the punk in his left hand. The bullet passed through the palm and put a permanent crimp in his career as a percussionist.
After he recovered from the gunshot wound, Harry partnered with Freddie DiMartini selling phony home burglary insurance policies. Roy’s friend Jimmy Boyle’s uncle, Donal Liffey, had done time at Joliet with DiMartini; according to Jimmy, Liffey was the mastermind behind the insurance scam.
“Uncle Donal says this hustle is foolproof,” Jimmy told Roy. “He has his own guys rob an insured house once in a while and he pays off. Those homeowners tell their friends about the Midnight Insurance Company and they sign up, too. It’s just him and DiMartini and a new guy, Harry Castor, used to be a jazz drummer. I like Harry. He has a hole in the palm of his left hand he keeps a hundred dollar bill in.”
Roy and Jimmy were in the same fifth grade class. They were walking to school together when Jimmy told Roy about his uncle’s operation.
“What do you mean he keeps a C-note in a hole in his hand? How’d he get the hole there?”
“Some yom was tryna stick up a currency exchange and Harry walked in on it. The guard draws on the yom, they go high noon, and Harry takes one in the hand.”
“Who shot him, the stick-up man or the security guard?”
“I don’t know, and neither does Harry. I asked him and he said the slug went out the other side. Could’ve been from either gun.”
A couple of months after Jimmy Boyle told Roy about the scam, the two boys were sitting in the kitchen in Jimmy’s house after school eating liver sausage sandwiches when his Uncle Donal came in with Freddie DiMartini and Harry Castor. Donal Liffey, Jimmy’s mother’s brother, lived with them. He had supported his sister and her son since Jimmy’s father was run down and killed walking home at one A.M. from Milt’s Tap Room on Elston Avenue two years before. The driver kept going and there were no eyewitnesses. Donal, a bachelor, moved in a few days later and had become the most significant male figure in his nephew’s life. Jimmy thought his Uncle Donal was the smartest man in Chicago.
“Hey there, me bucko,” Donal said to Jimmy. “Who’s your pal?”
Donal was a small but well-built man with thick black hair and squinty blue eyes. He’d been a pretty good amateur lightweight in his youth, and at forty-two he maintained his fighting weight. Donal idolized James Cagney, the way he’d been in City for Conquest, where he played a boxer who gets blinded by an opponent’s unscrupulous corner men. “All the pros thought Cagney had been a boxer,” Donal liked to tell people, “but he hadn’t. He was a good dancer and knew how to move, he had the footwork. He spoke Irish and Yiddish, too. Did you know that?”
Freddie DiMartini was only slightly bigger than Donal but he leaned to his right both when he walked or stood still. He said it was because when he was a kid a horse pulling an ice wagon had kicked him in his back, but Donal knew Freddie had taken a beating in reform school that partially crippled him. A guy who’d been in reform school with Freddie told Donal that DiMartini had been stealing the other boys’ comic books and they had ganged up on him.
Harry Castor was a large man with big shoulders and big hands, one of which had a hole in it.
“Harry,” said Jimmy, “Roy wants to see the Benjamin.”
“Harry walked over to where Roy was sitting and held out his left hand, palm open. There was a corner of a bill that had been folded over a few times with the number 100 showing.
“Your dad owns Lake Shore Liquors, doesn’t he?” Donal asked Roy.
“Yes,” Roy said.
“He’s a stand up guy. His name’s Rudy, right?”
Roy nodded.
“He did me a good turn once. You got good taste in friends, Jimmy.”
Donal shook Roy’s hand and then the three men went into a back room and closed the door.
“Does your mom work?” Roy asked Jimmy.
“At Woolworth’s on Minnetonka. She’s the head of the sewing counter. Uncle Donal tells her she should quit but she likes doin’ it. She has friends there she says she’d miss if she didn’t see ’em every day. Uncle Donal pays the bills but my mother says what if somethin’ happens to him like happened to my father?”
Six weeks later something did happen to Jimmy’s Uncle Donal and to Freddie DiMartini, too. They were shotgunned by a man whose house they were breaking into at three o’clock in the morning. Donal was killed and DiMartini was blinded.
“What about Harry?” Roy asked Jimmy Boyle.
“He split,” Jimmy said. “He was probably there, maybe drivin’ the car, but nobody saw him. My mother got a letter yesterday and the only thing in the envelope was a folded-up hundred dollar bill.”