Killer on Argyle Street

by Michael Raleigh

  “I ain’t telling nobody shit,” the white girl said. She had large blue eyes and crooked teeth and dark hair dyed an unearthly shade of red, the color of cherries and tropical flowers. The black girl in the dreadlocks laughed.

  “…and I’d appreciate it if you’d just listen to me for a second. It’s not about you, and I don’t need you to inform on any of your friends…”

  The black girl looked ready to laugh in his face.

  “…and it will be the fastest ten bucks either of you ever made.”

  The white girl opened her mouth and the black one nudged her with an elbow. “Listen up, girl. Man want to give us money.” She looked up at Whelan over the blue plastic rims of her glasses and he saw a girl used to doing business on the street.

  “Ten bucks each?”

  Not what I had in mind, Whelan thought, but I’m making a whopping five hundred for this one. He nodded. “Each. But I don’t have time for anybody to jerk me around.”

  “What you want to know?”

  “I’m looking for Tony Blanchard.” The white girl began to roll her eyes. “And if you don’t have anything at all for me, you can walk, lady.” The girl glared at him. “I’m looking for Tony Blanchard. Other people have been looking for him, probably here, and maybe they talked to you girls. But I want to find him and if I don’t, he’ll be in more trouble than he is now.” The girls gave him a practiced stare, two would-be streetwise kids showing how bad they were.

  “You hang out here every night?”

  The black girl smirked. “I don’t hang out nowhere every night. I move. I don’t even stay in the same crib every night. I’m a poet. You want to hear some poetry?”

  “No. For ten bucks I shouldn’t have to hear any poetry. For ten bucks I want to find Tony Blanchard.”

  “Why?” She smiled coyly. The girl was missing a tooth on the bottom.

  “I’ve been hired to find him.”

  “By who? He didn’t have no family.”

  “By a woman he used to stay with.”

  The girl considered this and shrugged. “He ain’t been up here. Don’t nobody know where he at.”

  “Do you know where he might go to get out of trouble?”

  The girl shook her head and Whelan told himself that ten bucks didn’t buy much these days.

  “Okay, let’s try something different, then. If you can’t help me find him, maybe you can help me find the person who’s after him. If Tony hasn’t been around here, he probably thinks this person knows this was one of his hangouts. He probably saw the guy here.” Something changed in the white girl’s eyes and she didn’t look so tough now. The black girl refused to meet his eyes. He gave it a push.

  “Maybe you saw this guy. I don’t need much—a name, if you heard Tony mention one, a description. I know I’m looking for a white guy.”

  An almost imperceptible nod from the black girl. “Old nasty white dude.”

  “You have my complete attention.”

  “Glasses. Big teeth. Got teeth like a horse,” she said, and the white girl giggled. “Little skinny-ass face, got those pinched-in cheeks like he don’t eat. Stand with his hand in one pocket and suck on his cigarettes, like this…” The young street poet thrust one hand into her stained ski jacket, let her shoulders slope and pretended to be watching people on the street.

  “Gray hair? White hair?”

  “Got ugly hair, that’s what he have. Ugly old white hair.” She picked up one of her tiny braids and held it straight up. “His hair stick up on top of his head like he just woke up and forgot to comb it.”

  “Tell him about the dude’s eyes,” the white one said. “He gots these weird eyes like somebody, you know, like hypnotized his ass.” She looked at her friend.

  “Look like he’s dead, those funny eyes. Look like a zombie.”

  “He made a nice first impression, huh?”

  The black girl gave him the over-the-rims look again. “Mister, this was one ugly-lookin’ motherfucker. His mama shoulda kep’ him home.”

  She glanced at her companion and the two girls gave in to their laughter. The black girl held out her hand, palm up, and the white girl ran her palm across it, and they shook their heads and just lost it.

  Whelan waited till they could calm themselves and then said quietly, “Got a name?”

  “Name oughtta be ‘ugly,’ ” the black girl said and they started laughing again.

  “I take that for a ‘no.’ Did Tony ever talk to either of you about this man?” The white girl gave her friend a sidelong glance and both kept their silence.

  “He did,” Whelan said, “but you don’t want to tell me anything he said. Okay. Did Tony ever see this man when you were around?”

  They nodded.

  “What did he do?”

  “What do you think, man?” the white girl said. “He booked. He ran down that alley.” She tilted her audaciously red head in the direction of the alley behind the doughnut place.

  Whelan thought for a moment. “When was the last time you saw Tony?”

  “Ain’t seen Tony in weeks,” the white girl said.

  “And when was the last time you saw the older man?”

  The white girl looked at her companion and shrugged. “That night it rained?”

  The black girl nodded. “Right. That big rain. He was just standing out there in the rain.”

  Whelan felt a little flutter in his chest. He took out his money clip and pulled out two tens. He handed one to each girl. “Thanks.”

  The bills disappeared in microseconds. The girls grinned at him. “You see Tony, tell him Angie said ‘Hey,’ ” the white girl said.

  “And Jozette,” the girl with the dreadlocks said.

  “I’ll do that. And here,” Whelan said, handing them each his card. “If you see that guy around here, call me. If you see Tony, tell him to call me.”

  They stared at his card and did their best to look indifferent. Whelan nodded to them and walked away. When he was a dozen or so paces from them, the white kid yelled out, “Good luck with that old ugly man.” She appended half a dozen obscenities in case Whelan didn’t know how she felt.

  Whelan didn’t bother to turn around. As he walked, he could hear them, convulsed with their humor, assured of their own invulnerability. He shook his head. There were few things as pitiful as young girls trying to sound hard.

  At the corner, he surveyed the groups of laughing, gesturing kids. The ones who were just slumming, the kids from middle-class homes or the ones who drove in each night from the suburbs, they’d be back in their beds by midnight. The other ones, the genuine street kids, would have darker prospects. He thought about the two tough young street girls and wondered if either one would see her eighteenth birthday.

  On the way back, he rolled down his window to let in the wet lake wind with its half-hearted promise of spring. In his boyhood, on nights such as this, they’d gather on somebody’s porch and talk baseball. He could still see the faces around him on the stairs: Artie Shears and Mickey Byrne and Hansie Becker and the others. Somebody bouncing a ball off the top of the porch and someone else swinging an old bat and talking about the hotshot equipment he’d buy when he saved up enough allowance: new bats, spikes, a glove, maybe. You were always going to buy a new glove someday, a Wilson A-2000.

  On his car radio they were playing Cannonball Adderley’s version of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” and Whelan felt good because the two little street girls had just given him his first good news in days, the first reason to believe that Tony Blanchard was alive. The big rain, the first occasion of the year when Mother Nature had decided to drop something other than snow on Chicago, had been less than a week ago.

  The Koreans were closing up inside Larry’s but there was no sign of Marty, and the apartment where Marty lived with his brother was dark. Whelan drove north on Sheridan toward Argyle Street. The signs of the local business kept the traveler posted as to the ethnic makeup of each section. He drove past St. Augustine’s Indian Center, pa
st the Burger King and McDonald’s, past a new Mexican restaurant and a place proclaiming itself HOJAS OTONOS—AUTUMN LEAVES SUPERMARKET AND LIQUOR. A few more blocks and he was in Southeast Asia again.

  The biting wind that said “Rites of Spring” to Whelan apparently still said “Demons of Winter” to the people on Argyle Street. It had driven most of the natives into hiding but he could see inside the steamy restaurant windows that business was good in New Chinatown. He parked where he’d parked earlier in the day and walked down toward the Apollo. The street bore a different set of smells now, the odors of things cooked in sesame oil and stirred in a wok, dough being deep-fried, meat on an open grill.

  As he walked, he took note of the clientele of each restaurant. You could tell the best ones: they were full of Asiatic people. Lucky Grocery Market was closed, inhabited now only by the row of unhappy ducks. A few doors down, the square-built old man who’d been so busy sweeping that afternoon was now sitting in a table in the window of the little Vietnamese place, smoking a cigarette. Whelan waved to him and the man stared. Vietnamese sat at several tables along the wall but there was no sign of the woman who owned the restaurant.

  The crowd at the Apollo was half of what it had been in the morning. His waitress was gone but the fat man was still working the grill. Whelan got a cup of coffee and took a seat in the window where the cop had been reading the paper on his last visit.

  He smoked and sipped at his coffee and watched the street, and the only Caucasian he saw was the one reflected in the window.

  After the second cup he ordered some soup, to justify taking up their window space, but no one seemed to care. When he finished the soup and the third cup of coffee, he picked up a discarded paper and began idly paging through it. In the sports section he found the annual story he’d come to love, the one where the manager of the Cubs, a man no more than a hairbreadth from unemployment, waxed ecstatic over the new faces in the Cub pitching rotation. A “solid rotation,” the soon-to-be-fired manager said of the embattled knot of men who’d just been shelled by the East Coast hitters. Whelan shook his head and smiled, then stopped, aware that someone was watching him. He looked out at the street and caught the faintest trace of a figure moving out of his line of vision.

  Whelan had only impressions but they were enough: a slender figure in denim, Caucasian, long hair. He tossed the paper on the counter, ran out of the restaurant and collided with a pair of young Vietnamese men.

  “Sorry,” he said, and shot past them. Up ahead of him, the slender figure was already a half block away and making for Kenmore. Whelan ran east on Argyle on a parallel course but could see he was close to losing the runner. In the middle of the block he dodged cars and crossed Argyle, reaching the far side just as his quarry crossed Kenmore and cut up the side street heading south. When Whelan finally made it to the corner, he crossed to the far side of Kenmore, stopped and scanned both sides of the street. A young black man walked toward him and dropped his eyes as he approached Whelan.

  “Did you see somebody run up this street?”

  The young man made a stiff shake of his head and kept his eyes focused on the sidewalk.

  Right, Whelan said to himself. He trotted toward the alley and then came to a stop. Nothing was moving in the alley, in any direction, but he had a sense that whoever he was chasing hadn’t had time to make it any farther. He moved quietly into the alley, all the while telling himself this was a very bad idea.

  Twenty feet in, a fat gray cat jumped out from a dumpster, gave him a disdainful look, and trotted away. Whelan moved a few feet farther, stopped and was about to turn back when he saw the movement from the corner of his eye. He spun to block it but the blow still caught him across the top of his head.

  He heard himself groan and fell to the pavement. He heard the wooden clatter of something falling to the ground, the scrape of footsteps on the concrete, someone moving out of the alley fast.

  He stayed down for a moment, cradling the top of his head in both hands and rocking back and forth. A searing pain, dizziness, a sudden rush of nausea. An egg was forming, quickly, a large hard egg and he thought he felt moisture. Eventually, he pulled himself into a sitting position and took long slow breaths to calm his stomach. When the nausea subsided, he looked around. His assailant was gone, the cat was gone, the rats in the alley were probably gone. A few inches away he saw what appeared to be a table leg. He reached over and pawed it toward him.

  “Damn.” He felt the egg again and looked at his fingers—a slight bloodstain but nothing melodramatic. No one appeared in any of the windows, no witnesses to his embarrassment. Whelan sighed and allowed himself the small indulgence of sitting in the alley for a while, hoping only that no one would see him.

  When he was certain he could stand, he got up and left the alley and went up the street to his car, half expecting to find a shattered windshield or slashed tires. Nothing. The only damage to the Jet was the damage it bore in noisy dignity every time Whelan drove the car—rust, loose things rattling around under the hood, belts near death, something working its way to freedom in its undercarriage.

  Whelan got in and started the car, then took a look at himself in the mirror. The egg wasn’t that obvious—he just looked like a guy with a bad haircut.

  He spent a pointless half hour cruising the streets and alleys of the area, then widened his search to include some of the Uptown streets where he’d seen kids huddled together in boredom. Eventually he gave it up.

  He hit a couple of buttons on the radio and found a rock station playing an old Beatles tune, “Getting Better.”

  For you guys, maybe, Whelan thought. But as he drove away from Argyle Street he saw that there was another way to look at it. I guess I must be doing good—two days on this, and I’ve already pissed somebody off.

  Eight

  His lump hurt when he woke the next morning, and when he showered, and even more when he combed his hair. To compensate himself, he made a vegetarian omelet and bacon, lingering over his breakfast and three cups of coffee and listening to music. Eventually he went out to work. There was a crisp wind from the north and that hurt his head, too.

  Whelan was sitting in his car outside Larry’s at ten-fifteen when Marty Wills appeared up the street, struggling in to work. Whelan couldn’t be sure at this distance, but he believed he was watching a young man in the throes of a murderous hangover.

  Good. We’re all walking wounded this morning.

  He got out of his car and walked up the street to intercept the kid. The midmorning sun had burned off most of the chill, and he felt slightly uncomfortable in his canvas vest. Halfway up the block, he stopped and waited—Marty hadn’t seen him yet. The boy walked head down with a slight lurch, stumbling once over a hole in the pavement. He was within ten yards of Whelan when he looked up. What he saw stopped him in mid-stride.

  Whelan saw Marty mouth the word “fuck,” and for a second he thought the boy would bolt.

  Go ahead, Whelan thought. For once, I’ve got a guy I can outrun.

  To the boy, he said, “Morning, Marty. I need your help.”

  Marty stared at him and said nothing. He breathed through his mouth like a man who has come a great distance.

  “Not feeling so hot, huh?”

  Marty gave him a sullen look and muttered, “I got the flu.”

  You got that mean ol’ bottle flu. “Well, it’s the flu season. I take tomato juice myself.”

  Marty turned slightly green and looked away.

  “Or sometimes, if it’s really bad, a raw egg.” Marty gasped. “But a lot of people can’t eat a raw egg. Tuna salad’s good—high in protein, so it’s good for the lining of your stomach.”

  “Aw, man, gimme a break.”

  “Just trying to be helpful, Marty. Listen, the other day when we talked, you told me about Les but I think the guy I need to find out about is a different guy entirely. I think you’d know this guy if you saw him. Older man, white hair, glasses, funny eyes, big teeth.”

&nb
sp; Whelan caught the look that danced across Marty’s face. The kid tried on a couple of expressions, boredom, nonchalance, but Whelan had seen his eyes.

  “You’ve seen him.”

  “I see a thousand people at work. I see a hundred old guys with glasses on the street. Fuckin’ neighborhood’s crawling with ’em.”

  “Not like this one. And I think if you saw this one walk into Larry’s you’d shit in your pants. That’s what I think.”

  Marty studied his shoes. Muddy high-top gym shoes, tongues out and laces undone. “I gotta go, man. I’m late.”

  “Is he after you, Marty? Or just Tony?”

  A pleading look came into the kid’s eyes. “He don’t know me from fucking Adam. I wasn’t in that shit.”

  “I heard different.”

  “I give a shit what you heard,” Marty said, but he wasn’t convincing.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Like I know every old blow job on the street? Like we’re friends or—”

  “Chill out, Marty. Which would you prefer? For me to find him, or him to find you?”

  Marty looked around for a moment, licking his lips and breathing through his mouth. Whelan shuddered and took a step back: wine breath. Muscatel? Richards? Thunderbird? What did the amateurs drink these days?

  “Whitey, his name is.”

  “Got a last name?”

  “No. I don’t know, just Whitey. ‘The old man’ is pretty much what everybody called him.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “I toldja, I didn’t know ’im.”

  “But Tony did.”

  “I don’t know, why don’t you ask him?”

  “Whitey was the guy I asked you about, wasn’t he? Jimmy’s partner?”

  “He wasn’t nobody’s partner, man.”

  “What was he, then? Competition?”

  “He was an old fuckin’ creep.”

  “What else can you tell me about him?”

  The boy shot him a look full of venom. “He looks like a fucking skull, man. Like a corpse. The dude’s face looks like somebody sucked all the juice out of it.” He shook his head as though to clear it of the image.