Herb Gaynor made the slightest shrug of one shoulder, and Whelan was convinced it was the maximum movement he was capable of. “Can’t think of anybody,” he croaked. “All of ’em dead now.”
“Oh, they’re not all dead,” his wife countered. “A lot of them, though. Surprising how many. And poor Michael. Murdered, Mr. Whelan. That poor man. What a terrible way to go. You think about all the things a person survives—he fought in World War Two, he was wounded, he traveled all over the country, he survived all of that, and then some…some nut kills him.”
“How did you hear?”
“It was in the paper. It was in both papers, we get them both.” She looked off in the direction of the darkened windows and Whelan wished he hadn’t done so much to remind them of death. To change the subject, he pulled out Mrs. O’Mara’s envelope.
“I have an old photo you might be interested in. I think you’re both in it.”
“All right,” Dan Gaynor said from across the room. His father didn’t look as though he’d heard, but his mother craned forward with a look of interest.
“I’m in it? What picture would that be, I wonder?”
Whelan held it out and she took it, holding it carefully by the edges. She moved back a couple of steps and lowered herself gingerly into a wooden armchair with a little pained gasp.
“Arthritis in both hips,” she said to Whelan, and made a little shrug. “Oh, my Lord, look at that. There they all are.” Her eyes grew wide as she scanned the old photo. As she studied it, he studied her and noted, besides the youthful skin, the untouched but graceful hair and long eyelashes. Her nails were perfect, done in a darkish pink and flawless, her skirt unwrinkled, her blouse crisp and spotless. The older women he’d seen this well put together were usually in far grander surroundings—in huge mansions along the lakefront and climbing out of limos on Michigan Boulevard.
She stared at the picture for more than a minute without saying anything more, then shot a quick look at Whelan and at her son. “This is North Avenue Beach. Oh God, this must be back in 1940 or somewheres around there. Herb? We’re in the picture, Herb; it’s that whole group.” There was a dreamy, preoccupied note in her voice. Then she looked at her husband and frowned. “Put your glasses on, Herb, if you want to see anything,” she said, and the dreamy tone flew away.
Herb Gaynor was almost but not quite galvanized by his wife’s hectoring voice. He struggled to get upright, felt around on the side table for his glasses, then managed to get them on. Slowly, he reached out and took the photo from his wife’s outstretched hand. His skin was dark, mottled with liver spots and sagging, his arm bony compared to hers. For a moment he held the picture out almost at arm’s length. It shook slightly.
After a moment, he gave a short nod. “Nineteen thirty-nine. Maybe ’40. Just before the war, anyhow. Yeah. Huh. They’re all there. Got a dozen of these.”
He held it out for his wife and removed the glasses. Mrs. Gaynor took the picture back and gazed at it with obvious fascination.
“Oh, we don’t have this one. We have lots of pictures from this time, but we don’t have this one.” She shook her head slowly. “There we all are. Some of the boys in this picture were dead within a very short time of this.” She tapped the picture with a nail. “A couple of them never came back from the war.”
“That’s what I understand.”
She gave him a puzzled look, then nodded. “Maggie. If you’ve talked to Maggie, you know about that.”
“Can I see?” Her son leaned forward slightly.
She handed him the picture and for a moment he scanned it.
“Okay, I see Dad. Do I know any of these other—where are you, Mom?”
“Oh, who cares?”
“I do. Where are you? Oh, okay, here. The babes, huh?” He shot Whelan a quick smile and looked back at the photo. “Hey, Mom, you were a hot number. Look at you in that suit.”
“Oh, stop,” Mrs. Gaynor said, waving him off. She shook her head and blushed slightly. “Ridiculous old bathing suits. Now the girls at the beach are hot stuff.”
“These other two aren’t bad, either.”
“The one in the dark bathing suit is Maggie Colleran. The tall one is Betty Henke. She’s way out in the suburbs now, I don’t even know which one anymore. They were both great girls.”
Dan Gaynor handed the photo back and got up. “I’ve got to go.” He nodded to Whelan. “Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.”
Mrs. Gaynor gave him her cheek and told him to have a nice time.
He shrugged. “I don’t expect to. You don’t go to these for fun.” He said, “Bye, Dad,” and left the room.
Mrs. Gaynor flashed Whelan a look of mother’s pride. “He’s going to a fund-raiser for the Democratic party. He’s thinking about going into politics. He knows a lot of people in the party, and these affairs are good for his career.”
“Pretty impressive,” Whelan said. Mrs. Gaynor nodded and glanced at the photo again.
“I was wondering if you knew where any of the people in that photo are?”
“Oh, no. We don’t hear from anybody now. And some of them are dead, you know.”
“I know. I’m told that Fritz Pollard is still around, and—”
“Who told you that?” she asked, interested.
“Chick Landis.”
“Chick Landis,” she repeated in a dead voice.
“He seems to provoke the same reaction in everybody.”
She turned her head and made a face. “I never liked that man.”
“Who’s that? Landis?” her husband croaked. “Watch your wallet with that one.”
She shot him a quick look, then faced Whelan. “He caused more than his share of trouble for people. I wouldn’t accept anything he said.”
“What kind of trouble? Did he cause you trouble?”
She made a little waving motion with one hand. “No, no, just…people who knew him. He was kind of a gangster. At least he knew gangsters. That was the kind of man he was. What did he tell you about Fritz Pollard?”
“Not much. Just that he’s still around, hauling scrap metal and things like that. I got the impression Landis hadn’t seen him in a long time, and I take it that you haven’t.”
“No, like I said, we don’t see anybody from the old days.”
“How about his brother, Casey? Have you ever heard anything about him?”
“Oh, I’m afraid he’s dead, too, Mr. Whelan. Long time ago. Poor boy. Haven’t heard his name in years. Casey Pollard, he’s talking about, Herb.”
Herb Gaynor cleared his throat with apparent difficulty. “We heard he was dead. He was a drinker. Dead now. Good thing, too.” Gaynor gave Whelan the look that goes along with a father’s sermonizng. “He was no damn good, mister.”
Mrs. Gaynor shot her husband an embarrassed look. “Oh, Herb, that’s not fair.”
“Like Landis?” Whelan asked.
“No, not like Landis. Landis is a crook, always been a crook. Small-time, thinking he was big-time. I had to kick his ass for him a couple times in the old days. But that Casey Pollard, he was trouble. He was no good. Always in trouble with the cops, always. Turned out to be a bum, too. Living on the streets like a bum. Good place for ’im.”
“Herb. Stop.”
Gaynor tried to lean forward in his chair, the better to ignore his wife. “She didn’t know ’em the way I did.” He tilted his head toward her. “She don’t know.”
“Well, I did too know them, at least—”
He waved her off and looked at Whelan. “The both of ’em were no good. Especially the young one. Little shit that he was.”
“Well, Herb, he came from a very bad home. And Fritz was always nice. He was always very pleasant to me.”
“Nah, he was a con artist, too. The both of ’em—you couldn’t trust ’em far as you could throw ’em, and Casey was dangerous.” He fixed Whelan with a knowing stare. “Goddamn jailbird, that little shit. He did time for robbery, armed robbery
.” The prospect of malicious gossip seemed to have worked a miraculous cure on Herb Gaynor. Maybe if you gave him the chance to dish up enough dirt on the old gang, his emphysema would disappear forever.
“How about Gerry Costello?”
Mrs. Gaynor pursed her lips and shook her head. She looked at Herb, who now wore a blank look, as though he’d just about run out of gas.
“Oh, God knows, Mr. Whelan. I’d be surprised if he was still alive.”
“He was sick?”
“Well…I mean mentally. Maybe physically, too, but Gerry Costello just wasn’t all there, you see. I think his war…his war experience was a very terrible thing for him, more than for most, I mean. He was wounded and he was captured by the Germans and God knows what else. When he came back, he just wasn’t all there. I remember seeing him a couple of times after the war, once at a big party at a church hall, but he just sort of dropped out after that. I heard once that he was a recluse, staying in his house all the time. I haven’t heard his name mentioned in twenty years, so I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
Whelan nodded and got to his feet, then decided to toss out one more question, pointless though it might be.
“There seems to have been some trouble just before the war, something that made a few of these men want to leave town in a hurry. Would you know anything about that?”
They were shaking their heads before he was finished. Herb Gaynor opened his mouth for a pronouncement, but his wife got there first.
“That was Chick Landis,” Ellen Gaynor said. “It had nothing to do with Herb. He was never in any trouble. He was a working man already when Landis and those others were still punks.”
“I didn’t think it had anything at all to do with your husband. Do you have any idea what it was all about, this thing with Landis?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have any idea.” She looked at her husband, who said nothing.
“But you knew it involved Landis as soon as I mentioned it.” He smiled and she gave him a stricken look. “What was it?”
“I…I just know he was in trouble.”
Whelan kept his eyes on her but was conscious that her husband was staring at him. He decided to push a little. Leaning forward, he said, “Mrs. Gaynor, let me ask you something else…”
“She don’t know about any of that.”
Whelan looked back at Herb Gaynor. The sick man seemed to be trying to get up. He grabbed at the arms of his chair with clawlike motions. His eyes were shining—whether with emotion or with the effort of getting up, Whelan was unsure.
“You wanna know about that time? Awright, I’ll tell you. He robbed somebody. He was a thief, Landis. He always had a scheme for making money or…or just takin’ it. He robbed somebody, that’s what he did. Somebody you didn’t screw around with, understand?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure. Do you know who it was?”
Gaynor shrugged but had to look away. “I dunno. Some Kraut, that’s all I know.”
“Well, that’s a start. Let me ask about one other thing. A name that keeps coming up from those days is Ray Dudek.”
Whelan watched their reaction: She shut her eyes, he looked off in the direction of the window and made a little shrug.
“I know he was a friend of yours—he’s in that picture, too.”
“Of course. Poor boy. He was killed in a robbery.”
“And was he involved in…in this thing Landis put together?”
“He was just a boy before the war,” she said, hands flat in her lap.
“Oughta ask Landis,” her husband said. One side of his body was shaking, and in his eyes Whelan caught just a flash of what a young Herb Gaynor had looked like angry.
“That would mean talking to him again, Mr. Gaynor, and that’s not a prospect I relish.”
Gaynor relaxed with visible difficulty and nodded. His wife gave Whelan a half smile, and he was decided to leave before he upset them even more. He waited as Mrs. Gaynor struggled out of the chair and then walked with her into the hall. At the door, he thanked Mrs. Gaynor for her time. “I hope this wasn’t too much of a strain for your husband.”
“Oh, he’s stronger than he looks. He has good days and bad days, you know. He just has very hard feelings for Chick Landis. Landis was a hateful man.” She reached back inside and came up with her old-fashioned manners. “But it was very interesting to talk to you, and it was delightful to see that picture of all those old faces. Please, Mr. Whelan, give my number to Maggie. I’d love to talk to her sometime. Tell her to give me a ring someday if, you know, if she feels like it.”
“I’ll do that.” He shook hands with her and left.
In his car he summoned up the image of Chick Landis, conceited and gone to fat and in the money. He thought of the celebrities on Landis’s wall and what he’d just heard, and shook his head.
Just who did you rob?
On his way back to the land of dead refrigerators and bald tires, he stopped at a Vienna place on Clybourn and grabbed a cup of coffee. He leaned against a window counter and looked up Clybourn, once the main thoroughfare in a crowded blue-collar neighborhood. Up the street he saw the projects where half his relatives had lived—in a simpler time when moving into the projects meant running water year-round and no rats. In the distance, a white concrete overpass loomed like a futuristic bridge over the old street. The overpass had not been there when Whelan was a child. Beyond it, he knew, were Area Six Police Headquarters and De Vry Institute of Technology and a shopping center, but none of them had been there during his boyhood, either. In those days, you drove up Clybourn and you could see the park, you could see the two-hundred-foot steel skeleton of the Para-chutes and the tops of the roller coasters and the haze from the food tents and the thousands of smokers. And you could see the dark silhouette of Aladdin’s Castle. From this hot dog stand, you might have seen Aladdin’s giant face peering out at the world.
Nine
At 4:20 he was sitting in his car with the windows rolled up against the fumes, sipping the bad coffee and watching the endless procession of all the junk trucks in the world.
Whelan would have sworn that none of the trucks he’d seen this morning had gone home, that they’d been moving around like this all day in a long noisy ellipse, eating one another’s exhaust and making the sounds a truck makes just before it gives up the ghost. Many of them had the names of the owners printed on the doors or the sides of the bed, and most of them hinted at the wishful thinking or grandiose notions of the owners: Brownlee IRON HAULING AND SALVAGE; TOM’S SHEET METALS; R & K HAULING; P. SANDERS SCRAP AND SHEET METAL; R & S SALVAGE. The Mexican in the surgical mask was still there, idly motioning trucks over to dump their loads and move on. His eyes showed dark above the surgical mask, dark and tired and irritated.
The orangish haze overhead had nearly solidified and Whelan wasn’t sure he could handle the noise for much longer.
He saw the blue pickup about the same time he finished the coffee. A thin white man and a short young Hispanic sat in the swaying cab. The truck was laying down its own dark cloud of exhaust. Rust had taken large bites out of the wheel wells and along the doors, and the load of scrap made the whole body of the truck wiggle and shake. On the side of the door, someone had printed FRITZ’S SALVAGE badly in white paint.
He waited till the blue pickup joined the little dance around the shack and then got out and headed for the spot where the truck would have to stop and be weighed. When the pickup eased onto the scale platform, Whelan slid around to the driver’s side. He found himself looking into a gaunt dark face of hollows and beard stubble, with close-set brown eyes, intense brown eyes.
“Fritz?”
“What?”
“I need to talk to you after you drop off your load. I’ll wait over by the Mexican guy there.”
The eyes widened but before the driver could protest, Whelan walked away. A moment later, the blue pickup pulled over to the growing pile of scrap and the two men got out to unload. Their haul seemed
to comprise a pile of badly damaged pipe, a few pieces of sheet metal, scraps of aluminum siding and a partial coil of copper wire. Watching them pile their take onto the growing mountain of scrap, Whelan wondered if they’d be physically able to handle some of the bathtubs and heavy appliances carted in by some of the other haulers.
When they finished, Whelan stood by the open door on the driver’s side. Fritz Pollard was taller than Whelan had guessed but walked with a slight stoop. He was winded and his dark blue shirt was sweat-stained, and the little Latino man was soaked through. If this was a typical day in Fritz Pollard’s life, Whelan didn’t envy him.
“I’m Paul Whelan, Mr. Pollard.” He held out his business card and Pollard took it with the look of a man who has seen only trouble from people with business cards.
“Detective? What you want with me?” His young companion climbed into the truck and pretended to see nothing.
“I need information. I’ve been hired by Margaret Colleran, whom you knew a long time ago. She’s trying to find out what happened to her brother Joe.”
Pollard was shaking his head before Whelan finished the sentence. “I don’t know nothing about that. Can’t tell you a thing. Now let me—”
“Maybe there’s something you’ve heard that would be helpful.”
“Mister, I don’t know nothing about what happened to Joe Colleran, ’cept that he’s dead.” Pollard spoke in a curious monotone, as though detached from the conversation, and if Whelan hadn’t seen the eyes, he’d have thought Pollard was bored.
“Do you know that for certain?”
“I’m just saying what I heard.”
“Who told you?”
“I don’t remember. Now—”
“Just give me a minute…”
“Hey, move the truck. Hey, blue!” the Mexican was yelling. “Hey, move it or you gonna lose it.” He laughed and waved Pollard’s truck out.
“Where can we go to talk?” Whelan asked.
“I already told you—I don’t know nothing. Now get the hell out of my way.” Pollard caught Whelan with his long wiry arm and pulled him away from the cab of the truck, digging his long nails into Whelan’s shirt. The movement and the strength behind it took Whelan by surprise, and by the time he had his balance, Pollard was clambering into the truck with surprising agility.
The Riverview Murders Page 12