The Riverview Murders

by Michael Raleigh

  Whelan navigated his roundabout way through traffic and the tree-lined streets of the Lincoln Park neighborhood, eventually ducking into Kingsbury Street, a long, narrow alleyway that ran along the river behind factories and vacant lots and the huge Finkl steel foundry. The scrap yard occupied a flat piece of land along the river between Cortland and North Avenue and marked itself with hills of scrap metal, a yellowish cloud of dust, and the constant growl of engines, dozens of engines, a hundred engines.

  So this is where they all come, Whelan thought.

  There were ten thousand of these trucks in the city, and they always seemed to be headed south, always loaded down with far more than they should be allowed to carry, always traveling at approximately eight miles per hour and frequently leaving bits and pieces of their load on the street behind them, and Whelan had never known exactly where they were all going. Like termites scuttering back to the nest to give goodies to the Grand High Termite, these rickety trucks on antique engines and bald tires were coming here, to the edge of the world.

  Whelan realized he’d come in with the rest of the convoy and now was in a long line of them. He pulled off to one side, parking the Jet next to the remains of a plywood wall and hoping no one would mistake his car for scrap.

  Belching smoke and gas fumes, the trucks moved in an ellipse around a small shack on high wooden stilts. One by one, they pulled onto a steel platform, waited while they were weighed, and a moment later a woman’s arm came out the shack window and handed the driver what looked like a check. The trucks then pulled out of the long line and unloaded their odd piles of steel, tin, and copper where a couple of men in blue work uniforms and hard hats directed them. Both wore surgical masks.

  From the hundred truckloads, a new mound of scrap metal grew at the side of the road, fifty feet high and a hundred feet around, made up of wire and pipe, metal scraps and rusted sheet metal, old boilers, bathtubs, refrigerators, washing machines and stoves of a dozen types and representing several generations of technology: once the hottest items on the block, they were all just scrap here.

  A pair of heavy machines on ten-foot tires roared and growled and worked at the mound; a bulldozer pushed and dug at the mound to compact it while a backhoe scooped great mouthfuls of scrap from the far side and fed it into a high steel structure that resembled a garbage disposal gone mad. At the far end of this structure, fifty yards away, new mountains were being formed of shredded steel that glistened in the warm afternoon sun.

  Above it all, a yellowish cloud had formed, a cloud that seemed half smoke and dust, half noise, and threatened to suck away all the blue in the sky. Whelan winced at the constant roar of the engines and the grinding, cracking sounds of scrap steel being ground and crushed into heaps. There was nothing to breathe, no escape from the sun, and the acrid things that hung in the air made it seem ten degrees hotter. Every other place in Chicago, it was a crisp sunny morning in early fall. Here it was whatever season was native to the underworld.

  Whelan waited beside the platform for a couple of minutes but no one got out of the trucks, and he was running out of time. He went back toward his car and then, as an afterthought, approached one of the men in the hard hats.

  Up close, the man looked to be Mexican, and his dark eyes showed puzzlement over the surgical mask. He looked past Whelan and shouted over the roar of the bulldozer.

  “Watch the trucks!”

  Whelan moved a few feet away from the traffic and came closer.

  “Noisy place.”

  The eyes crinkled in what Whelan presumed was a smile and the man nodded.

  “All the time, noisy.”

  “These drivers come in every day?”

  “Every day. Some guys two times every day.”

  “Do you sell steel to the foundry over here?”

  “No. It goes other places—Michigan, Indiana, sometimes Canada.”

  “Do you know the drivers?”

  The man shrugged.

  “I’m looking for an older man, a guy—”

  “White guy, black guy, Mexican guy, what kind?”

  “White guy. Older. Named Fritz.”

  The man squinted against the acrid air and nodded. “Blue truck.”

  Whelan looked around. “Here?”

  “No. Not now. He was here already. He come real early. Maybe nine, nine-thirty. Blue truck. He’s tall and skinny, right?”

  The man in the photo had been a couple of inches taller than any of his friends. “Right.”

  The man squinted and waved a truck into the long oval line, then looked back at Whelan.

  “What you want him for, this guy? He owe you money?”

  “No.” Whelan produced a business card and handed it to the man. “I’m trying to find a guy he used to know, a long time ago. I just need to ask him some questions.”

  The man studied the card for a while, then handed it back to Whelan. “He maybe come back late. Four o’clock, four-thirty.” He shrugged. “Sometime he come back, sometime no. Come back and pull your car out of the way. You see him. Blue truck, say FRITZ on the side. He don’t come back, you try nine o’clock tomorrow. Every day he come.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  The man shrugged and moved a step away, beckoning a dusty red truck to close up ranks and get in line.

  Seven

  Whelan went back to his car, squinting against the smoky air and trying not to breathe till he got inside. He started the car, glanced at the dashboard clock, and saw that he had less than a half-hour for lunch. He shook his head. Not enough time. A proper lunch didn’t have to be expensive or fancy or exotic, but you had to do it right, and that meant taking the time to enjoy it. Sure, you could eat lunch in a half hour, in twenty minutes, even fifteen. All over America, they made schoolkids eat their lunches in twenty and then wondered why the kids were half-crazy the rest of the day. Whelan understood why.

  The hell with it, he said.

  Mrs. O’Mara had found herself a place in the old neighborhood. Usually it happened that a group of people who grew up together spread out later in life, separated sometimes by attitude or income, and frequently by geography. Whelan could name half a dozen of his friends from boyhood who now lived in the suburbs, and one was out in Oregon and another in Wisconsin. But once in awhile, you came across a group of people who happened to stay rooted to the old neighborhood no matter how many changes it had seen. In poor neighborhoods, this was the rule rather than the exception. For whatever reason, Margaret O’Mara’s house was no more than four or five blocks from the spot where someone had taken a picture of her brother in uniform, and whether she knew it or not, Chick Landis was her neighbor. And if the Herb Gaynor on School Street proved to be the one she’d known, then all three were within a mile of one another.

  You could see Hamlin Park from Mrs. O’Mara’s front stairs. A small park, just one city block in area, it had been the hub of Whelan’s childhood—the closest thing to a real park with a field house and swimming pool. Just a couple blocks west of the park was Clybourn Avenue and the Lathrop Homes housing project. And, up until Labor Day of 1967, when it closed forever, the great mad spectacle of Riverview Park.

  He half-expected the door to open before he reached it. Instead, he was greeted by a note taped to the little diamond-shaped window in the center.

  It was written in the language that Whelan recognized as incipient panic.

  Mr. Whelan.

  I am not here. Am at shop. Sorry. Please come over to shop. 2012 W. Belmont. I am there.

  Mrs. M. O’Mara.

  “The shop” proved to be a small storefront on Belmont, approximately in the center of Antiques Row, a long strip of Belmont dotted with a mixture of genuine antique stores and a few junk shops. Mrs. O’Mara’s was called the Tea Rose, and apart from the elegance of its name, it was apparent that she owned one of the junk shops. Whelan sat in his car for a moment and studied the shop. The casual customer might not be able to tell what kind of shop it was: her window display feature
d a great deal of semiworthless glassware and crockery alongside a wonderful hand-carved oak table. Some of it was marked, some bore no tags, and Whelan wondered whether Mrs. O’Mara knew the junk from the antiques. Whelan had been inside every antiques shop on the North Side, frequently in the company of Sandra, who loved old things and was knowledgeable about a great many. He preferred the junk shops because you never had any notion of what you might find, and his great love was the Queen Mary of junk shops, the great, sprawling, smelly, smoky, raucous Sunday-morning circus that was Maxwell Street.

  A little cluster of bells on a leather belt made Christmas noise when he opened the door and two people gave him quick looks. One was a tall dark-haired man in glasses and a worn bomber jacket. He frowned briefly in Whelan’s direction and went back to his business, peering at a heavy wooden picture frame with the intensity of a hawk at breakfast. The other was Margaret O’Mara. She was standing a few feet behind the hawklike man and working at her chin with her chubby fingers. When she saw Whelan, she blinked, glanced at the dark-haired man and gave Whelan an apologetic smile.

  “Oh, Mr. Whelan. I’m sorry…we’re just—this will take five minutes, five minutes.”

  “That’s fine, Mrs. O’Mara. I’ll just have a look around.”

  “Let me know if you see anything you like,” she said in a voice that had gone instinctively back to business mode. She looked slightly embarrassed, then turned back to the dark-haired man, still tugging at her chin.

  “Twenty on the frame,” the man said in a monotone. She hesitated and he gave her a quick squinting look, as though trying to get a fix on her.

  “Twenty? I was asking thirty. All right.” She made a little shrug and took two steps forward to keep up as the man moved on.

  He picked up a small porcelain basin with faint tracings of gold leaf around the edges. After a moment, he shrugged and said, “Twenty-five on the planter.”

  Mrs. O’Mara moved a step closer. “I thought thirty-five because it looks English.”

  He cut her off with a quick shake of his head. “Nah. It’s Hull. It’s American. Twenty-five?”

  “All right,” she said quickly.

  The dark-haired man put it on a countertop next to the mirror. Next he did his hawklike assessment of a standing lamp, made a little grimace, and walked on. The standing lamp had apparently done something to displease him. He moved on and picked up a small mirror, holding the reflecting surface up to the light, then turning it over to examine the back.

  “I can do thirty on this.” He held the mirror up for her examination.

  “All right,” Mrs. O’Mara said with a little sigh, and Whelan wished he didn’t have to watch her being steamrolled.

  The man nodded and placed the mirror with the other items he’d bid on. As the man walked back, Whelan saw him glance quickly at an ornate wooden armchair. The man picked up a milk-glass vase, held it up and said, “Ten on the vase?”

  “Oh, I guess that’s okay.” The man had paused in front of a pair of painted ceramic figures and Mrs. O’Mara seemed to relax a little. He looked at the bottom of one figure, then picked up and examined the second. He made a little shake of his head as though calculating, stood perfectly motionless for a moment, then said, “Fifty on the figures. I could do fifty.”

  “Oh dear. I think I’m asking ninety for the pair.”

  “A hundred, you’ve got marked here.” He flashed his teeth at her in a friendly grin, but his eyes hadn’t gotten the message yet.

  “A hundred. Well, I can take ninety.”

  “Nah. I mean, maybe I can do sixty-five. It’s what they’re worth, really.”

  “Occupied Japan, they are.”

  “Who’s gonna give you ninety?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the man that gave me a hundred for the last pair. He collects Occupied Japan figures, you see.”

  The man blinked twice, shrugged, said, “Seventy.”

  Mrs. O’Mara said, “No thank you,” and the man wore the surprised look Whelan had seen in fighters who underestimate their opponents.

  “All right, ninety for the pair.”

  “Ah, that’s wonderful.”

  “Well, I guess that’s it for now.” His eyes made a sly sweep of the room and his gaze rested on the chair. “Still got that great chair, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you asking again?”

  “One fifty.”

  He looked directly at the chair now. “Beautiful chair. You came down a little, I think.”

  “A little.”

  “Need to come down just a little bit more. One fifty is a lot to ask…” His eyes made a little survey of the room and it was obvious that he really meant. Nobody’s going to pay one fifty for anything in a junk shop.

  “Ah, well.” Mrs. O’Mara made a self-deprecating shrug, then smiled. “Can I offer you a cup of tea, Mr. Logan?”

  The question seemed to puzzle Logan, till he realized she’d just ended their session. “Uh, no thanks. Let me pay you what I owe you here. One seventy-five, right?”

  “Right.”

  He pulled out a checkbook and made hasty, scratchy sounds, then tore the check out with a short, sharp motion. Mrs. O’Mara beamed at his check and then went over to put it inside her ancient-looking brass cash register. The man wrapped the ceramic pieces in newspaper and then made several trips outside to pack his purchases in his car. When he was finished, he waved an airy good-bye to Mrs. O’Mara and left with the walk of a man late for many appointments.

  When he was gone, Mrs. O’Mara looked at Whelan. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I forgot about this appointment.”

  “It’s all right. It was fun to watch. Nice work.”

  She pursed her lips in an effort to keep from smiling. “Oh, sometimes you make a dollar or two.” She let the smile out of its cage. “The frame cost me a dollar. That milk-glass vase, I found at Amvets. It cost a quarter.”

  Whelan nodded. “You didn’t get that chair for pocket change, did you?”

  “It was mine—when I was married to O’Mara. We bought it at a resale store in New York. That fellow is going to buy it, I think. You just have to be patient with these things.”

  “He’s a dealer?”

  “No, he’s sort of a finder. He sells to dealers.”

  “A picker?”

  She gave him a surprised little smile. “Yes, that’s what we call them. He’s a good one. He sells to the best dealers, so I know I can hold for my price now and then. He’ll buy that chair at one twenty-five and sell it to a dealer for two hundred, and some poor soul will buy it from a beautiful shop somewhere for four fifty. It’s crazy.” She shook her head. “He can’t figure out how much I know, you see. Poor man, he sees I’ve got a little junk shop and thinks I don’t know the worth of things.” She made a clucking sound and then looked at Whelan with raised eyebrows, looking light-years away from the dithering old woman who’d come to his office.

  “A cup of tea, Mr. Whelan?”

  “That’d be fine.” She nodded and went into her back room, and Whelan browsed while she made clinking and stirring noises from her back room. She emerged a couple of minutes later carrying a tray with cups, saucers, cream, sugar, and a porcelain teapot. She also had a little plate of what appeared to be sugar cookies.

  The elegant little tray came to rest on a small round table in front of Whelan. “Grab yourself a chair, Mr. Whelan.”

  Whelan looked at the delicately made antique chairs, most of them cane- or rush-bottomed, and made a shrug of helplessness.

  “Take one of those nice cane chairs, Mr. Whelan. They’re just chairs, they were made to sit in.”

  He pulled the strongest-looking chair over and perched on the edge of it. She handed him his cup and saucer, then lowered herself onto a great fat armchair near the window, effortlessly holding her cup and saucer. Whelan sipped at his tea and burned his lip. Across from him, Mrs. O’Mara drank hers and nodded in satisfaction. She reminded him of a house cat sunning its
elf.

  “Have a cookie. Is your tea all right, Mr. Whelan?”

  “It’s fine.” He reached for a cookie, hoping it would take his mind off his burning lips.

  “This is Irish breakfast tea. Maybe it’s not what you’re used to. You’re probably used to Lipton’s.”

  “Uh, no. Actually, the tea I usually drink is what they give you in a Vietnamese restaurant.”

  “Do they have Vietnamese restaurants now?”

  “They have every kind under the sun, Mrs. O’Mara, and I eat in them all.”

  She squinted at him slightly, and he wondered what he’d done wrong this time.

  “You’re not married, Mr. Whelan?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have…” Mrs. O’Mara caught herself in the act of saying “a girlfriend” and gave him a stricken look. She suddenly found the depths of her teacup vitally interesting, as though reading her fortune in the leaves.

  He shifted slightly in his chair and felt himself blushing slightly for the first time in years. “I, uh, I have someone I see, but we never—we haven’t, you know, talked about getting married.”

  I’m babbling. She has me babbling now.

  “Oh. Well, that’s good.”

  Whelan was about to ask why but caught himself. A man could be lost in conversation with this woman, he thought, tossed this way and that upon the rocky shoals of her mind and destroyed.

  “Mrs. O’Mara, there are a couple of things you mentioned yesterday that I’d like to ask about, just to clarify them in my mind.” She nodded and looked into the bottom of her teacup and he pushed on.

  “First, I don’t want to pry into old things that are better left alone, but…from what I’ve been able to learn, something happened just before the war broke out.”