Killer on Argyle Street

by Michael Raleigh

  Makowski, the first victim, had been shot at close range with a .22 caliber gun; the other two had been stabbed to death with what was described as a long thin blade—but just in case the reader missed the connection, both papers ran helpful leads, referring to a “string of brutal knife murders” and “a bloody series of gangland executions.”

  Whelan almost missed the final piece of information, and soon wished he had. He was going through the various accounts one last time when he noticed a slight change, given without further explanation. In the Tribune account of April 12, the dead men were listed with aliases: “Mathew Makowski, also known as Mathew Blair, Barry Nelson, and Rory Byrne, also known as Rory Martin,” and Paul Whelan felt the wind leave his lungs.

  He sat back in the chair and looked out the high window where he could see the heavy gray sky. In his mind’s eye he saw a group of young boys sitting on the rocks at Addison, surrounded by baseball gloves and a half-dozen battered Louisville Sluggers. One by one, the boys peeled off sweaty T-shirts and dove into the cold lake, then crawled out onto the rocks again, hyperventilating from the icy water. Even at this distance, he could make out the faces of a young skinny Paul Whelan and the handsome Bobby Hansen and Artie Shears and a half-dozen others, including a moody boy named Mickey Byrne, along with Artie Shears one of his favorites, always one of his favorites. A thin dark-eyed boy given to long thoughtful silences and almost always shadowed by his baby brother, Rory. Parents died early and the boys went to live with an elderly aunt, and from near-poverty to the real thing. A pair of troubled children with no luck. And now they were both gone: Mick had come back from Vietnam with a mind on the verge of collapse. A year after his discharge he’d been in a mental hospital in Seattle, and a little later, Whelan had heard from a mutual friend that Mick was living in alleys and gangways. Later, news reached him that Mickey Byrne had made it to Portland, and he was going to go no farther: Mick had been admitted to a VA hospital for tuberculosis.

  What Whelan remembered most about Mickey Byrne was his fierce loyalty, to his friends and especially to his little brother, a pugnacious boy in constant trouble. He wondered how Mick would have taken this final hard news.

  He couldn’t be certain how Bauman had made the connection between himself and Rory Byrne but he was certain Bauman knew. Why he had decided to involve Whelan was still an open question, but there could be no mistake about his intentions: there was no such thing as coincidence where Detective Albert Bauman was involved.

  Whelan gave a distracted nod to the woman at the circulation desk as he left. He went across the street and into Wells Park, found an empty bench and had a cigarette. He hadn’t been close to Rory Byrne—there had been too great a difference in age between them, but the news was disturbing. Again and again his thoughts went back to that little knot of boys sunning themselves on the rocks, hard-luck boys some of them, and he was reminded of the death of Artie Shears, who had been his closest childhood friend. He thought about Artie, dead in an Uptown alley and Rory Byrne and Mickey, and by the time he’d finished his cigarette, he’d begun to shiver. He realized that he was angry as well, and fought his sudden impulse to call Bauman: plenty of time for that later. First, he wanted to see if he could come up with something that Bauman didn’t know.

  Logic said to hit the group home next, but one of the places Mrs. Pritchett had mentioned was a sandwich shop that Whelan had been in once or twice, a little place on Broadway a couple doors from the Uptown Theater, and Whelan had a hunch about it. As he drove east from the library, he remembered stopping in the place once in the evening and seeing a group of teenage boys crowded into a back booth. None of them could have been more than sixteen or seventeen, and he wondered now if one of them had been Tony Blanchard.

  The smells of an overworked deep fryer and a grill in constant use struck Whelan as soon as he pulled open the door. A double row of green Naugahyde booths ran parallel to a gleaming white counter with perhaps one patron for every three stools. On the far side of the counter a thin pale man scraped at the grill surface and bopped to the country music coming from the jukebox. He had three patties of meat sizzling in the center of the grill, with the buns lined up alongside them. A few inches away, he had three eggs taking shape. A huge pile of onions sat to one side and slowly went opaque.

  He took a seat across from the grill, for the sheer enjoyment of watching a short-order cook at work. Down the counter, a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair in a net tore off a bill and put it down in front of a man who just nodded when she called him “Sweetie.” She moved soundlessly down the counter to Whelan.

  “Coffee, hon?”

  He nodded. Any place where the help called you “hon” was worth the support of the community. “Sure.”

  She padded off to the coffee machine and came back to pour his coffee. A little blue tag on the front of her blouse said her name was Helen. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No, but I’d like to ask you a question.” He took out his business card and laid it on the counter. Helen studied it for a moment and lines appeared on her forehead that hadn’t been there before. “It’s not about you,” he added.

  She shot a glance at the cook, more to see if her orders were up than to see if he was listening, then gave Whelan a short nod.

  “I’m looking for a boy who hangs out around here. His name is Tony Blanchard. Know him?”

  She met his eyes for a moment and then said, “I know a Tony.”

  “Average height, light brown hair that he wears kind of long, tattoo of a comet on this arm.” Whelan tapped his right forearm and looked at her.

  She pursed her lips and seemed on the verge of shaking her head when her honesty got the upper hand. “Right. What about him?”

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “What’s ‘lately’?”

  “Last couple of weeks.”

  “No,” she said quickly and relaxed. “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Would you tell me if you had?” He raised his eyebrows and the waitress fought off a smile. Whelan took a sip of his coffee. It was scalding and black and thick, and the little place had his attention. “Well, now,” he said to himself. To her, he said, “Good coffee.”

  “We grind our own beans,” she said. “And no.”

  “Pardon?”

  “No, I wouldn’t tell you.” She pointed to the card still lying on the counter. “That don’t mean anything. You’re not a cop, I don’t have to talk to you. People usually talk to you when you show them that card?”

  “Yeah. But first they say they’ve never met a real private eye before.”

  “My ex hired one. And he was an asshole, pardon my French.”

  “Burgers up,” the cook muttered.

  “The detective, or your former spouse?”

  “The both of ’em,” she said, and smiled.

  “Burgers up,” the cook said, louder. He stirred and scraped a little pool of eggs in the center and half turned to stare at her.

  “And so’s he,” Helen said and jerked a thumb in the cook’s direction. She looked at Whelan expectantly and then laughed. “Excuse me. If I don’t jump when Napoleon here tells me to jump, he’s gonna have a baby.”

  She turned slowly and met the cook’s stare, and soon he found the scrambled eggs interesting. The waitress picked up the three plates waiting at the grill’s edge and walked down the counter, sliding one plate toward each of three waiting diners. A moment later she returned to Whelan.

  “So what do you want with that boy?”

  “I want to find him.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s what I do. My specialty. People come to me and ask me to find somebody. I don’t follow people’s wives and I don’t peep into keyholes. If you don’t want to talk to me, somebody else will—eventually.” After a second’s pause, he added, “I hope.”

  She leaned up against the counter and studied him, and he had a chance to do the same. Up close he could see that she was nearer to sixty than fort
y but she’d probably been something special in her time.

  “And when you find him, then what?”

  “Then I tell the lady who hired me. And I have to tell the police. They’ll want to question the kid but as far as I know he’s not a suspect in anything.”

  She was shaking her head as soon as she heard “police.”

  “But I don’t think I’m going to have to talk to them, because I don’t think I’m going to find him.”

  “Why is that?” she asked, pretending to sort her checks.

  “Because I think he’s dead.”

  The woman blinked twice and then looked away. Some of the color was gone from her face and the heavy makeup now just made her look older.

  “Maybe I’m wrong. But the police have been looking for him and he hasn’t turned up in weeks so…” When she said nothing, Whelan took another sip of his coffee.

  “He’s just a kid. He’s not sixteen yet, I don’t think.”

  “I know. I think he started hanging around with the wrong people, and several of them wound up dead.”

  “Who were they?”

  Whelan recited the names to her. “Ring any bells?”

  “No. These are kids?”

  “No. Adults. Grown men. Youngest one was twenty.”

  She nodded as though confirming a suspicion. “I never saw him with no men. Just other boys.”

  “Like who?”

  She shot him a quick look but it was too late. “I don’t know their names.”

  “You know him but you don’t know anybody he hung out with? That make any sense at all to you?”

  She looked past him and seemed to be watching something out on the street. Whelan fed her a line.

  “I know he was living with another boy for a while, or with the boy and his brother.” Something moved in her face and she looked away.

  “Who was that boy, Helen? Was that Marty?”

  She met his eyes finally. “Yeah, Marty. He stayed with Marty sometimes. He didn’t have no family, Tony. He stayed with different people sometimes. This boy Marty lives with his brother over on Winthrop.” He wanted to ask her about the other boys but had a feeling that she’d given him the most likely place to start looking.

  “Got an address or a last name?”

  Helen hesitated and then said “Wills” in a resigned voice. “I don’t know his address.” She shook her head and Whelan wondered whether she was more upset over the possibility of the boy’s death or the fact that she was giving out information.

  “If it helps any, Helen, I’m good at what I do. If he’s out there I’ll find him and nothing’ll happen to him, and that will be because you helped me.”

  She nodded and looked around. Then she seemed to have an afterthought. “How come people got you looking for him? How come the cops can’t find him theirselves?”

  “Hard to say. Sometimes people talk to me when they won’t talk to a cop.”

  “Maybe that’s smart. We get the beat cops in here, they’re okay. But one time a detective comes in here and starts pushin’ everybody around, and I told ’im to go piss in the wind. Big fat one, this was.”

  “Crew cut, ugly clothes.”

  “That’s the one. You know him, huh?”

  “Yeah, I sure do.”

  “Ain’t he a damn blowhard.”

  “That’s a pretty fair assessment. He could use a little more polish.”

  “Honey, I know what he could use, and it ain’t polish.” Helen allowed herself a hard smile and then moved away as a diner a few feet down the counter held up his empty coffee cup.

  When Whelan finished his coffee, he left her a couple of singles for her trouble. In the chilly little space between the inner and street doors, there was a pay phone with a phone book. He paged through it rapidly and found a Daniel Wills on the 4700 block of Winthrop. As he pushed his way out onto the cold street, Whelan reflected on the waitress’s spirited description of Detective Albert Bauman and understood why Bauman had left this particular interview to Whelan.

  Three

  There were trees on this block of Winthrop, three of them, and one of them looked as if it might still be alive, but they were the only things that grew here. The green had been scoured from what had once been lawns, and windows were patched with masking tape and the flaps from cardboard boxes, and doors hung loose from their hinges. The buildings lining both sides of the street were big, heavy brick affairs that, like much of Uptown, had once been showpieces, the homes of the upper middle class and even the well-to-do. Now the buildings were owned, like the dog-eared office building where Whelan himself rented space, by people who lived as far from the city as they could get and counted money for their hobby, never venturing into town till the city managed on the rarest of occasions to summon them for court appearances to explain a thousand and one violations.

  There were people in many of the windows, some of them white, most of them black. In one window, a group of big-eyed brown skinned children sat with an older woman dressed in a sari. The people in the windows stared at Whelan and he thought a few may have wondered about him, but most were probably just wondering when their luck would change.

  The address he was looking for proved to be a red-brick apartment building of six units, with rounded sides and turrets at the north and south ends of the roof. The gray marble around the front door and the scrollwork just under the roof told him that it had once given itself airs but now realized it was just another Uptown tenement. He parked and went up the stairs.

  At the door, he rang the bell marked WILLS—1B and got no answer. He tried the door and it opened immediately. Nothing like a little security if you lived in a tough neighborhood. At the door to 1B he listened for a moment. Inside someone was listening to rock music. Whelan waited and then knocked twice.

  Over the music, a man’s voice yelled out “Yeah? Who’s there?”

  “Dan?”

  “Yeah…who’s that?”

  “It’s Paul Whelan.”

  “Paul who?”

  “Whelan. It’s about Tony.”

  The music died and Whelan heard nothing for several seconds. Then a chair scraped along linoleum and he heard several footsteps in the direction of the door.

  “He ain’t here. He don’t stay here no more.”

  “We know that, sir,” Whelan said calmly. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”

  The man’s confusion was audible, then he crossed the room to the door and opened it six inches. A pair of large dark eyes looked Whelan up and down. “Yeah?” the man asked, a little more quietly.

  “I need to ask you a few questions about Tony, Mr. Wills.”

  The eyes moved down to Whelan’s hand, as though expecting to see the badge.

  “I’m not a cop. And none of this is about you.”

  The door opened wider and Whelan got a look at the man inside. He was in his middle to late twenties, medium height, with a blotched complexion and dark uncombed hair that hung down his face and nearly obscured one eye. He was thin and there were dark brownish circles under his eyes and he smelled of cigarette smoke.

  The picture of bad health, Whelan thought. “Can I come in?” he asked.

  “If you’re not the Man, I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “No, but this would be a good way to save yourself trouble down the line. If you don’t talk to me, you will talk to them sooner or later.”

  The man muttered something like “Aw, fuck me,” and swung the door open. He walked back into his home and fell rather than sat on a sofa. Whelan followed him in and pushed the door shut behind him. On the floor near the sofa was a can of beer. Wills noticed Whelan staring at it.

  “I’m fucked up from last night.”

  “You look pretty sick. Okay, let’s make it fast, then. Your brother Marty hangs around with Tony Blanchard and Tony stays here sometimes.”

  “No, man, he don’t flop here no more. Got his own crib.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”


  “Does Marty know?”

  “I don’t know, ask him.” Wills shook his head and took a sip of his beer. He groaned and lay back on the couch.

  “Okay, where can I find him?”

  Wills squinted up at him and tried to retrace his steps. “No, he don’t know nothing about Tony, man. I just…you know. Hey, I’m real sick.” He lit up a cigarette. Whelan shook his head: great hangover remedy. Beer and a cigarette before lunch.

  “I told you before, I’m not a cop. Somebody wants to find Tony, and if I can’t find him, this person will probably bring in the police, then you’ll be talking to them. I need to find Tony. I have no other interest in you or your brother. This person I’m working for didn’t come right out and say it, but he thinks Tony may be in some trouble. The kind that affects a guy’s health.”

  Wills stared at him and then nodded. He took a pull at his cigarette, a sip of his beer, then belched. “He’s in trouble, all right. He been running with wrong fucking dudes and some bad shit went down, and now the shit’s hittin’ the fan, you know what I’m saying?”

  No, I speak only English, Whelan thought. “Yeah,” he said. “Jimmy Lee Hayes. Those people.”

  Wills pointed a finger at him. “There you go, man. And I ain’t gettin’ into that shit, no way I’m gettin’ into that shit. I never had nothing to do with their whole fucking program.”

  “Nobody thinks you did. Now Marty—”

  “Marty didn’t do nothing for them. Tony did, and now he’s in deep shit. Look, man, Marty can’t tell you where Tony is.”

  “He might be able to give me somebody who can. Where can I find him?”

  Danny Wills sighed. “He’s at work. Works at that place across from the Jewel. The cajun chicken place.”