Hip-Deep in Alligators, page 5
part #3 of Jimmy Flannery Series
I looked at Shelby and figured he'd have good reason to want to take a bite out of anybody on two feet and wearing shoes.
"Why don't somebody farm them like they do with mink?"
"Well, it's being tried, in Zululand, Thailand, and down in Florida," she says. "But there's a strong tendency for male crocodilians to fight to the death among themselves. They're also very cannibalistic, so there hasn't been much success."
"Which brings me to my next question. Is stories about man-eating alligators and crocodiles fairy tales like the ones about them living in the sewers?"
She shook her head and crooked her finger at me, telling me I should take a walk with her.
"The attacks are usually provoked, deliberately or unknowingly, by humans invading the territory of big males. Some observers say one thing, some another, but alligator attacks in Florida are not uncommon as the human population encroaches on the alligator's habitat. There is serious injury sometimes, but no deaths that I know about in recent years."
We go down along the lagoon until we come to a monster what is half in and half out of the brakish water where some reeds are growing. It's like he's hiding there waiting for a fool to wander by and make his dinner.
"That's Max, a rare Cuban crocodile," she says. "He's twenty-seven feet long and, by our best estimate, fifty years old. He was captured while feeding on what was left of a nine-year-old boy. But whether Max did the killing is in question."
"How can you tell old Max is a crocodile and not an alligator or a caiman?"
"See the long fourth tooth in the lower jaw?"
"That fang?"
"That distinguishes crocodiles from alligators."
"So, are you saying that you could tell was a bite made by a crocodile or an alligator?"
"On meat not too badly decomposed, I think a person could make that determination."
"Do you think you could look at a person what was chewed in half by a crocodilian and tell was it one or the other?"
"You have to understand that people bitten in half is not my field of expertise, but since I doubt there are too many people in the city who would know one crocodilian bite from another, if you happen to have such a person lying around, I'd be happy to take a look."
THIRTEEN
"In nineteen thirty-three, thirteen million animals passed through the slaughterhouses and packing plants. A considerable number of hides was shipped out to tanneries in other cities, but considerable more stayed right here in the Consolidated Manufacturing District."
This is Leo Adelman talking. He's a short, thick man with arms like an old wrestler. He's wearing a sleeveless undershirt in the heat, but he's got a stained leather apron on that almost drags on the floor at his feet. His chest and shoulders are white and look like suet, the flesh sagging on his bones under his armpits. From six inches above his elbows down, his forearms are as brown as a pair of cordovan shoes, and the muscles are laid out like the tracks down to the yards, all coming together at hands and fingers that look as stiff as leather.
"How old you think I am?" he says. "Go on, take a guess."
"Sixty-four, -five ?" I say.
He hoots like a train. "Gotcha. Don't feel bad. I get everybody. I'm eighty-two. Whattaya know about that?"
"I think it's wonderful."
"You know why?"
"No, why?"
"Because I've been tanned like an old horse hide is why. I've been working in this tannery for sixty-four years, since I'm eighteen. It's amazing, ain't it?"
"Yes, it is."
"Twenty years ago, I'm sixty-two, this gunsel, this loan shark, this crippler, comes to break my arms and legs. My brother Harold—he's dead—was into the son-of-bitch for a hundred dollars. Don't ask me why. Harold was already out of town. I tell this foolish money lender that Harold is out of town, so he tries to break my arms and legs because I'm related. Whattaya think of that?"
"I think it's pretty awful."
"It wasn't so awful. I broke his arm."
"Good for you."
"Not so good for me. He comes back with a gun. He points the gun at me and he pulls the trigger. And whattaya think happens?"
"I ain't got a clue."
"Who could have a clue, you wasn't there? See this?" He shows me this raised white scar along his right arm. "I throw up my arms like this to keep from getting the bullet in the face. You know what I mean? It was like instinct."
"And what happened?" I say, knowing that's the right question.
"That slug just bounced-you hear what I'm telling you?-bounced off my arm. Feel that."
I felt his arm. It was like a piece of sole leather.
"I'm tanned. When I die—if I ever die—I told the wife she should have a suitcase made out of me. She should have something to put her clothes in when she goes to Florida, the merry widow."
"Mr. Adelman. . ."
"But that was the heyday of tanneries. You know how many tanneries we got now? We got maybe eight, and half of them ain't really tanneries. They're more like animal-stuffing shops."
"Taxidermists?"
"You got it. Today, I'm not the biggest. I never was the biggest, but I was a hell of a lot bigger than I was back there in thirty-three. Now, you know what I do? I do specialty leathers. Shark. Alligator. Snake."
"That's what I heard."
"You want to see?"
I say I do, and we go from his office into this evil-smelling place where maybe ten or eleven blacks and Latinos are working around big vats and huge board tables.
"Snakes is very hard to generalize about," Adelman says. "The thickness of the skin can vary considerable. Even if you got a very old snake, it can have a very thin skin if it just went through a molt. Right after you take off the skin, as soon as possible, you flesh as much fat and meat off the skin as you can. Then you scrape off the scales, just like it was a fish, or the leather won't be flexible. You didn't know that, did you? It's amazing."
"Well, I don't know nothing about any of this. That's why I'm here. But I'm really more interested in crocodilians than snakes."
"Crocodilians? You know the lingo. Already I think I've got some kind of expert here. What kind of an expert do I got here?"
"I picked that much up from talking to Professor Luger."
"You know this girl? I know this girl. Such a sweetheart."
"Professor Luger said you knew her."
"I do work for the zoo on animals that die. They want the hide tanned, not stuffed. I don't do stuffing."
"Taxidermy."
"That's right. I don't do it."
"The crocodilian hide?"
"I got a crocodilian hide. Whattaya think of that?"
I think that Mr. Adelman is a much shrewder and more devious man than he pretends to be.
"I'd like to see it."
He walks me over to a tank from which a smell is coming. It's like chalk and corruption with an edge to it that bites. I look inside. All I can see is still black liquid.
"Whattaya think, it's swimming around?"
He picks up a long pole with an end blunted with a ball of rags and pokes it around in the liquid until he finds the hide. Then he maneuvers it so when he lays it on the edge of the tank and leans on the end, the pole lifts the hide up out of the stuff.
"Slaked, caustic lime and water. That's all there is to it. Nothing fancy. Now you got to delime it. This hide's almost ready for that. Tonight we'll put it in a soak of cider vinegar and water for thirty-six hours. Then we can start the tanning. Whattaya think, it's easy making you a wallet?"
He drops the hide back into the tank.
"What kind of crocodilian is that in there?" I say."
"That there is an Orinoco croc. The biggest I ever see. So, okay," he says, putting the pole back.
We start walking back to the office, him talking all the way.
"An exotic hide like this I don't use chrome alum. I go back to the old way with vegetable tannin I extract myself. I use black oak, hemlock, and sweet fern. It takes a long time. Weeks, maybe months, for a hide like this. I take eight gallons of diluted vegetable extract, an ounce of salt, an ounce of alum, a quarter-ounce saltpeter, and three pounds of gum gambier. You know what is this gum gambier?"
We're in the office, and he takes off the apron and hangs it up.
"You don't want to know what is gum gambier. What is it you want to know?"
"I'd like to know where you got that hide in there?"
"It was sold to me by a trucker."
"What company?"
"An independent. I don't remember the name. I really don't."
"The driver have a name?"
"What name? Are we going to be bosom pals? Why do you want to know? You from some agency?"
"What agency did you have in mind?"
"One of them agencies for the protection of endangered animals?"
"No, I'm not from one of them agencies."
"So, what's your interest?"
"A man was killed by a creature like that one in there."
"Killed where?"
"Right here in Chicago."
"In the zoo?"
"In the sewers."
"It's amazing, ain't it?"
"So?"
"If you didn't find the beast what did it, I can tell you it wasn't that one in the vat. That one was dead when it got to my front door. Dead in transit."
"Transit to where?"
"To a zoo out to the West Coast," the man said.
"But you don't know."
Adelman leans his hip on the edge of his desk. I guess he thinks it makes him look nonchalant, but his legs is so short he just looks like he's going to slip off his toe and fall.
"Look here. I don't know who you are, you come walking in here asking me so nice how do you tan a crocodile hide. If I was the angry type, I'd tell you to get the hell out of here. But I got nothing to hide. I'm not a poacher and I'm not a receiver of stolen goods. This person comes to me with a dead crocodile. I don't know where it was going or why it was going there. He said a zoo. So, all right, a zoo. All I see is a dead crocodile worth quite a piece of change, I tan its hide, worth what any rotten piece of meat is worth, I don't tan it. So I buy it. Why not?"
"You're in business, you do what you think you got to do. You make up your own mind what's right, what's not so right."
"It's a dead animal."
"I understand that. What killed it?"
"Somebody cut its belly open." He's a little bit bothered by that. "It's going to rot no matter how it died. I didn't kill it. It depreciated the skin."
"Could you identify the trucker?"
"A Latino. They all look alike, what can I say? A ring in his ear. Greasy hair. Two-toned shoes. Half the Latinos in Chicago got two-toned shoes."
"Would you take a look at the man chewed in half?"
"Sure, I'll look, but I can tell you, I wouldn't know one from another."
He gets his coat and I take him down to the morgue. He looks. But it's just like he warned me, he can't tell the difference.
We're standing in the El station before he walks up one stairway to the platform where the trains are going one way, and I walk up the other where the trains are going the other way.
"How did you happen to come to my place?" Adelman asks.
"Well, I went to four of the other tanneries before I got to you, Mr. Adelman."
"You must know a lot more about tanning hides than you ever wanted to know."
We shake hands and he goes up one set of stairs and I go up the other.
FOURTEEN
I go over to see Ruth Kuba.
She lets me in before I even knock on the door, like she knows I'm coming.
"How did you know I was at the door?"
"I sit in the window in the dark and look out at the street. It's only in the dark of night that I can pretend to myself that I am home on the island and not in a strange land."
"Why did you come here?"
"Everybody, nowadays, who comes to America from this place and that, say it ain't because of the chance to make a better life, but because they are political and will die if they be sent back. This, however, is the truth of why I came on a boat that was like a wash pan with holes in it everywhere. I land on the coast of Florida, and I stay for a while in Miami. But the Ton-Ton Macou are after Ruth Kuba even when she flees to America. So I leave Miami and go into the heart of the land."
"You mean to tell me they send enforcers into this country to get the people who run away?"
"Not to get, to kill. And not everybody. Just special ones."
"What makes you special, Mrs. Kuba? You shouldn't take offense."
"I fought Papa Doc Duvalier with everything I had after he kill my husband, my father, my two sons, and my daughter. I got no guns. I got no followers. I got no power except the power of spells, curses, and enchantments, and the ignorance of the people in the palace."
"Now, wait," I say, raising my hand, not wanting to tell her that I don't believe in magic, but not wanting her to think I do.
"I know you don't believe. How could it be that you would? But your people in the long ago believed in the banshees, cluricaunes, and the Deeny Shee. And some still do."
"I never heard of these folk. . ."
"Not folk but spirits and fairies."
". . .you mention. Fairies I know, though we call them gays nowadays."
She laughs, even though the joke is so old I almost fell out of my cradle the first time I heard it.
"Also leprechauns I've heard about. My mother—God keep her—tells me stories about such creatures when I was a small boy."
"Someday we talk about such things and I teach you plenty," she says, cutting me off. "Believe or don't believe, there's some that did and do."
"But not Papa Doc?"
"No, not that one, but people all around him. Every time one dies, I send a message like it was my spell what done it. After all, the appendix, grippe, and a hundred other maladies are going to kill everybody sooner or later. When the old man dies, I send a message to Baby Doc and say I put a spell on him."
"I doubt the son would believe such things, and even if he did, that wife of his wouldn't."
"That's what they say, but I tell them this and that, which seems to them only a witch could know. They don't believe but they believe. You understand what I'm saying?"
"So, all right, Papa Doc is dead and Baby Doc is living someplace in France where he ain't even welcome. So, if you got an ache for home, now's your chance."
"I ain't got the money, on the one hand."
"If you declared yourself an illegal, the Immigration would probably deport you."
"However would I come back again?"
"I didn't know you had that in mind."
"Oh, yes. There's things about America—about Chicago—that makes me hope. I come to America illegal. If I declare myself and get sent back to Haiti, how am I ever going to come home to this city again?"
"I see what you're getting at. What you'd like is to have your cake and eat it, too."
"I never heard this saying, but it is one hell of an idea, and the vessel of a lot of truth. This is so of everybody, ain't it, this wanting to have the cake and eat it, too?"
She lifts her head all of a sudden. "It's time to fly my birds. The sun is sinking and the air is getting just a little bit cooler. Go up on the roof and wait for me."
I go up the stairs to the roof, which is just like the roof of my own building, bubbling tar, wooden catwalks, and all. It's the time between day and night when everything seems like it's buried in glass. Like one of them little balls you get at Christmas with a little scene inside, you know? When you shake it, the snow whirls around in side? Well, the city looks like that, only there is no snow swirling around because it's very hot.
Then I hear a rushing sound and I look up. These pigeons—gray, white, silver, and light blue—come spiraling up out of the air shaft and gather way above my head. Next thing I know Ruth Kuba is standing next to me, chuckling softly in her chest. I never even heard her come up the stairs or walk across the roof, so maybe there is something magical about her. We watch the pigeons sweep in long arcs from here to there and back again.
"Did you come to tell me you can help me about my babies or you can't?"
"Mr. Dunleavy down to Streets and Sanitation says he'll go talk to the people at the Health Department, and see what he can do. He also want you should promise me to take the birds out of your bathroom."
"I'll tell you what, I see what your friend can do, I'll see what I can do."
"Well, that sounds fair enough."
"We are in agreement, Jimmy Flannery, say no more."
FIFTEEN
The next morning I'm looking at such a full day that I'm already going to be long gone by the time Mary comes home, her taking a late shift for a friend. I leave her a note what says, "You want to get married Sunday? I got the afternoon open between two and three." I don't do it very often, but every now and then I remind her that it's all very nice living together like we're doing, but if I had my way, we'd make the commitment.
Sometimes my old man sees a note and writes at the bottom, "Please do it and put the boy out of his misery. Do it for an old man's sake."
So far, after a note like this, Mary tells me she wants to be dead sure before taking the leap with me. She's also especially sweet and loving that night, so the notes are not a total waste.
My first stop is Missing Persons, which is not exactly a separate department or office, but which is more like a bureau what collects data from group and area, and keeps it all together in a computer bank. The head of the administrative office is a lady by the name of Rebecca Guilfoyle, half-Jewish, half-Irish, like my Mary, who is one of the first, if not the first, cop of the female persuasion recruited into the Chicago PD. I'm not talking about lady officers what used to handle the switchboards, did the clerical and a little fieldwork on rape and juvenile. I'm talking about a street cop wearing harness, packing a gun, and knocking heads.
