Killer on Argyle Street

by Michael Raleigh

  “Morning,” Whelan said.

  “We’re not open,” she said and her dark eyes said she hadn’t seen anything to be afraid of in years.

  “Good, then we have time to talk,” he said, and flipped a card on the bar. “You must be Ronda.”

  “We already got one of these,” she said, picking the card up and then dropping it.

  “I’ve been passing them out all over town. Gave one to Ed, one to Bobby Hayes. If you want, give that one to Jimmy Lee Hayes.”

  She met his gaze and a mirage of a smile appeared at the corners of her mouth. He decided in her day she’d been pretty, and wondered whether running the tavern or life with Ed had put the lines in her face. “Who?”

  “Jimmy Lee Hayes. Bob’s big brother.”

  She placed the card in front of him. “Don’t know the man.”

  “I like this place. Nobody knows anybody. Jack the Ripper could drink here and be sure of his privacy.”

  Ronda’s look said she could handle Jack the Ripper and Whelan and anybody else fate sent her way on a bad day.

  “Well, maybe you could have Bobby give me a call when he comes in. Tell him I need to talk to him about his brother. I have something he’ll want. If he doesn’t call me, I’ll just have to come back.”

  Ronda said nothing, but folded her arms across her chest. She met his eyes for a moment, then picked up his card, glanced at it once again, then dropped it. Whelan walked casually toward the door, admitting to himself that it had been a grandstand play, but sometimes a little grandstanding was good for the soul.

  Outside, he heard bird noises, an angry robin. It seemed to him that robins were always angry—perhaps that was why there were so many of them. He stopped for a moment to locate the bird. The trees here and across the street in the park were in the midst of their early May transformation, a remarkable change that always seemed to take about one week—less for the cottonwoods, which appeared to bud overnight. He found the robin in the middle of a barren-looking catalpa tree that hadn’t quite caught the spring fever with its neighbors. High in an oak across the street, blackbirds were eyeing him and calling out to one another. Whelan thought of Lester the fence and shuddered. Alfred Hitchcock understood the birds.

  Somewhere on the first floor someone was yelling into the phone in Korean but he knew in seconds that he was the only living thing on the second, and the realization did not bring happiness. The lights were out in A-OK Novelties: apparently Nowicki gave himself weekends off from whatever larceny he was involved in.

  Whelan paused at the top of the stairs and listened. The air in the hall was stale and unmoving, and he was fairly certain he was the first person to enter the hall today. He went inside his office and opened the window, then popped the lid on his coffee. For several minutes he stood blowing on the coffee and watching the steam sail off the top and out onto Lawrence.

  Four men dead. A man everyone believed dead was trying to catch up with Paul Whelan. A dead man was trying to take him out.

  For what? He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out onto Lawrence. Not the boy, he didn’t think it was over the boy. It was more complicated than that.

  Something I might find out, or something I already found and just don’t see.

  The phone made him jump and he caught it before the second ring.

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Hello, Shelley. Nobody else seems to be glad to talk to me today.”

  “That’s because you’ve been sticking your nose in their business.”

  “Which happens to be my business.”

  “Nice profession.”

  “My mother wanted me to be a priest.”

  “They all do. They think they can keep you out of trouble that way. You had two calls.”

  “Who?”

  “One could’ve been a wrong number. He hung up.”

  “You know it was a ‘he’?”

  “Yeah, he kinda grunted when I answered, like he was irritated. The other one was your friend, Mr. Charm School.”

  “Bauman? Early for Bauman.”

  “Said he had information.”

  “All right. Thanks, Shel.”

  “Take care now, baby.”

  “I really try.”

  “Sure you do,” she said, and laughed in his ear.

  To kill time, he went through the motions of cleaning his desk and sorting the top drawers of his file cabinets. After forty minutes, he gave it up and went out for a fresh cup of coffee. When he came back, the phone was ringing.

  So that’s all I have to do, he thought.

  He answered on the third ring and his caller hesitated. In the background he could hear music, it sounded like Dottie West.

  “Whelan?”

  “Hello, Bob. Stop in for a little pick-me-up?”

  “I just come in to say ‘hey’ to a buddy of mine and I get this message. Says to call you. So here I am, son.”

  “I’m glad you called. We’ve got a complicated situation here.”

  “What’s complicated about it?”

  “We’ve got a problem, you and I. You see, somebody almost ran me down last night and it was your car, Bob.”

  “I was here at Ronda’s all night. You can ask anybody here.” Whelan could almost hear him winking at the woman behind the bar. He wondered when the place stopped being “Ed and Ronda’s.”

  “I’ll bet I could. But I didn’t say you were driving, I said it was your car.”

  “My car? My car was settin’ right out…”

  “And it gets better: you know the driver.”

  “I do, huh?” The smile was gone from Bobby Hayes’s voice.

  “Yeah, I believe you do. Big man, black hair, wears it slicked back kind of the way you do, sideburns. But a big guy. Denim jacket, it looked like.”

  “Don’t sound like nobody I know.”

  “I don’t have the time, Bob. Somebody tried to run me down and I got a good look at the plates and the driver. Now, I don’t know why anybody’d want to run me down, especially somebody I’m not interested in at all. But I did get the plates, Bob, so I’ve got the owner of the vehicle by the balls, if you catch my drift.”

  Bobby Hayes breathed into the phone. “Don’t nobody really know what you are interested in. Can’t nobody figure you out.”

  “You guys are a bunch of bad listeners, Bob. I’ve been telling everybody from day one, I want this kid. Tony Blanchard, nobody else, not you, not your ‘deceased’ brother. Anything that was going on with your brother’s people or this Whitey character, that’s none of my business as long as I find the kid. I don’t find the kid, I keep asking questions and then I’m about at that point where I think I involve the police. ’Cause, you see, Bob, I get paid if I find the kid. Cash money.”

  “They’s lots of ways to make money.”

  “Maybe so, but right now I’ve got my teeth into one. You help me out with my problem, I won’t make any more for you.”

  Bobby Hayes laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, a little wobbly, unsure of its footing. “What kind of trouble could you make for me?”

  “Things change, Bob. I’ve got a little more to bring to the table than I did the first time we talked. I know a lot.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “What I don’t know, is where the kid is. That’s where you can help.”

  “I don’t know nothing about him.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Well, you spread the word among your, ah, principals and let me know. Maybe we can set something up.”

  “What for? There ain’t nothing to talk about.”

  “Have it your way, Bob,” he said, and hung up, wondering if he’d regret it. He thought for a moment and decided he’d be grateful if he were still around to regret things.

  He sat sipping his coffee and eventually the phone rang again.

  “Hello, Snoopy,” his caller said. “What do you want now?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what do I want’? I was returning your call.”

  “Just jerking your
chain. Actually, I called to share information with you.”

  “I’m deeply moved.”

  “Don’t mention it. We got the word on old Lester. The M.E.’s report.”

  “And?”

  “Lester’s still dead.” Bauman chuckled. “Okay, we got time of death, sometime Wednesday morning. Method of death, puncture to the heart, thin blade. Surprise, huh?”

  “What else?”

  “One of the birds was dead, too.” Bauman snorted. “I guess old Lester was poisonous.” He laughed and then Whelan heard him inhaling one of his little cigars, and waited.

  “So what you got for me, Whelan? Anything?”

  For a moment he had no idea how much, if anything, he was willing to give up. Then he heard himself say “I told you about the brother, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, old news.”

  “Okay, I’ve got something more lively for you. Somebody tried to kill me last night. Tried to run me down in the street in front of my house. My feelings were really hurt.”

  “Get a look at the car? See the plates?”

  “It was dark and it happened pretty fast. Dark car. Black, maybe blue.”

  “Right, maybe brown, too, right? Maybe purple, maybe burnt fucking umber.”

  “Hey, how about if I run you down in the dark and see how good your color perception is?”

  “What about his tags? See his plates?”

  “No.” Whelan paused a moment, heard Bauman expelling breath and bad attitude. “But I saw the driver.”

  “And?”

  “It was a guy I’ve never seen before. A big white guy with dark hair, slicked back, I could see the sheen off his hair. And sideburns, long sideburns.”

  “Coulda been Elvis,” Bauman said. Then, in a different tone, “How big?”

  “Hard to say, he wouldn’t let me measure him. But better than six feet and built heavy. I think he was wearing a denim jacket.” He waited a moment, then asked, “Sound like anybody?”

  “Yeah, Elvis,” Bauman said, but he was thinking.

  “Okay, well, I’ve got another little thing for you. I think I’ve got a place for you to check out.”

  “What kinda place?”

  “A place where you might find Bobby Hayes. Maybe even his deceased brother, who knows? It’s on Marshfield up by—”

  “Montrose. Forty-three-something Marshfield, right? Yeah, we know about that place, Whelan. And we know Jimmy Lee Hayes isn’t in there. We’ve got the place under surveillance, we seen the brother come and go a few times, even saw you checking it out. You see? Your Police Department is on top of it, Whelan.”

  “Have you brought Bobby Hayes in for questioning?”

  “What do you think? Of course we’ve brought him in for questioning. And he went right into his hillbilly-in-the-big-city shtick.”

  “I’ve seen it: he claims not to know anything, doesn’t know the kid, doesn’t know any of the deceased members of his brother’s play group, hasn’t seen his brother.”

  “I know all of that, Whelan. Try to make a better use of your time, okay? What else you got?”

  “We’ve tapped me out.”

  “All right. Nice talking to you, Whelan.”

  “How come you’re in such a good mood?”

  “It’s a nice sunny day and I’m talking to my friend Whelan, and we got dead birds in this case, and I got a partner who’s a really amusing guy. Know what he came in wearing today?”

  “A gold lamé shirt?”

  “Better than that. A hickey. He came in with a hickey on his neck, way up where you can see it. Does great things for his professional image. You know: ‘Sir, we got to ask you some questions, so please ignore this big purple thing on my neck.’ ” Bauman cackled into the phone and Whelan waited for him to collect himself. “See, Whelan? It’s a great world if you keep your sense of humor.”

  “I see that.”

  “Later, Whelan.”

  Late in the afternoon he was standing in the window with his eighth cup of coffee, watching them put together a new message for the big marquee of the Aragon Ballroom and feeling that he’d wasted a day. The men outside the Aragon seemed to be having trouble with the name, a famous bandleader from Mexico. The man’s name seemed to be either Lupe Reyes Guerra or Lupe Guerra Reyes, and for a time they seemed to have trouble locating enough “e’s.” They were just finishing when the phone rang one more time, the call he’d been waiting for, though he couldn’t have said who he wanted to hear on the other end.

  “Whelan?” Bobby Hayes breathed heavily into the phone, sounding as though he’d just run the hundred.

  “Yeah. What’s up, Bob?”

  “Well, you wanted information about that kid.” In the background Johnny Cash was wailing about Folsom Prison, and Whelan heard the clink of ice dropped into a glass.

  “Right. Got something I can use?”

  “We got to talk.”

  “I thought that’s what we’re doing now.”

  “Yeah but…there’s somebody else you need to talk to, then you’ll have the whole story.”

  “Have him call me. I’ll wait here. I’ll wait here forever, Bob.”

  “He ain’t gonna call you. He needs to know if you’re gonna make trouble for ’im. Got to see you face to face.”

  Whelan laughed. “He’s already seen me face to face.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He can come to your office.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Bobby Hayes was silent for a moment, then said, “How ’bout Ronda’s?”

  Whelan thought for a moment. Counting Ronda, there would be at least three hostile people there. “Nope.”

  Bobby Hayes made a little growl of exasperation and Whelan heard him slap the bar or the side of the phone booth. “You know Roy’s?”

  “The garage? Sure.”

  “There.”

  Whelan was about to laugh when he had an idea. “Meet you halfway, Bob. I’ll be at the garage, but I’m not going inside.”

  “What? So how you expect…”

  “Take a deep breath, Bob. I’ll pull into Roy’s driveway. I’ll get out of my car and stand right next to it, and you fellas can come out and talk to me right out in the open. Get some fresh air and watch the cars go by and look for odd license plates and everything.”

  For a moment Bobby Hayes said nothing and Whelan wondered if the suggestion had left him speechless. “Now wait a minute…” he began.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Can’t do it like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not…out in the open.”

  “Bob, put your thinking cap on. If you were me, would you go alone into a garage to meet with a guy you think tried to kill you?”

  “Nobody’s gon’ do nothin’ to you.”

  “Right. I feel reassured. Sorry, Bob. We do it my way.”

  “This ain’t gon’ work.”

  “It’s all you’ve got, so it better work. Call me back and let me know what you decide. I’ve got to go.”

  “All right, wait. Wait. Lemme think.” Bobby Hayes breathed into the phone for a five-count, then said, “Okay, but you be alone.”

  “I’m not bringing anybody else into this. It’s mine. And so is the money I’ll be making.” Right, he thought, all five hundred dollars of it.

  “All right. Nine o’clock at Roy’s.”

  “Is Roy going to be there?”

  “Shee-it, we don’t need that. What kinda car you drive, son?”

  Whelan laughed. “Bob, you’re probably the only guy that doesn’t know that. Ask Jimmy.” He hung up. For a moment he felt a tight little surge of satisfaction that he was forcing it all out. Then he thought about what he had just agreed to do, and his complacency died young.

  In the next couple of hours he drove back to the rooming house on Windsor and cruised the block several times, then drove back up to Argyle Street. He made three circuits of the neighborhood, drove up and down alleys and parked for half an hour
at a time on the main drag and watched the foot traffic. Then he went home to kill the rest of the time he had on his hands.

  As he entered his house, he glanced at his phone. If he had an answering machine, he knew, there would be several messages on it, most particularly a call or two from Sandra McAuliffe. They wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant messages. He thought about the many moments in the past two days when it would have been no trouble at all to call her. It occurred to him that he was close to blowing a relationship, and he wondered if, at an unconscious level, it was intentional.

  What the hell am I doing?

  For an hour he sat in his armchair and listened to old jazz records, Miles Davis and Jimmy Smith. When it was nearly seven o’clock he toyed with the idea of going out for something to eat, then gave up the idea of food almost immediately. Another idea soon took hold: Larry’s Dog ’n Chicken Shack should be closing up soon.

  Night was claiming the city and he could see Marty and the Korean woman stacking stools on the counter and sweeping the outer area. Behind the counter, the Korean man cleaned the grill. At a few minutes before eight, the Korean couple unlocked the front door and Marty emerged.

  This time Marty Wills got into a car, a Pontiac shed of its original paint and clad now in nothing more than a dark primer. Whelan hadn’t seen the car before but knew the driver. Danny Wills stared straight ahead as his brother climbed in, then pulled out into traffic and went north on Sheridan. The unpainted Pontiac weaved almost into oncoming traffic to get around a bus and Whelan was content to use the bus as a shield. At the corner of Sheridan and Argyle, the Pontiac stopped and Marty Wills got out, cast a quick look at his brother, and moved quickly up Argyle. He was carrying a white paper bag.

  Whelan turned onto Argyle and parked, got out, and began following Marty, keeping to the north side of the street. Marty Wills was almost a block ahead. From time to time the boy shot quick glances over his shoulder, and at one point he froze as a car moved slowly by. A squad car rolled up from the opposite direction and the boy went rubber-limbed into his normal strut, the sullen teenager afraid of nothing.