“I heard that pause. Come on over.”
“No. Like I said, I’d be dogshit company. I’ll call you tomorrow—if you’re going to be home.”
“Call me tomorrow? For…what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Breakfast? Maybe we can go out someplace.”
She hesitated. “I don’t like this.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” he repeated, and believed it.
She sighed. “Be careful, Paul.”
“I will,” he said, and was about to add something when she hung up. He stood there for several moments with the phone in his hand, trying to interpret her sign-off and tone of voice, and wondering if he’d just managed to put the finishing touches on the best thing to come his way in years.
Sleep was slow in coming. He lay on his back and thought of what he’d seen in the last two days and decided that there was a way of finishing this one after all. The decision brought no great satisfaction but the more he examined it, the more he realized that it was the right one.
In the morning he called her. He could hear music in the background, and she sounded cheerful.
“Do you want to go out for breakfast?”
“No, I don’t think I do. But I’m glad to hear your voice. I’m glad you’re all right. I had visions of you hopping in your car and going somewhere you don’t belong and getting hurt.”
“I just thought…Do you want to do anything?”
“I don’t know. I know I don’t want to have breakfast and make small talk for an hour and then get dropped off.”
“I thought we might spend the day together.”
“Just when I start to write you off, you show rare glimmers of good sense. Come on over.”
In the end, they spent much of the day walking up and down the lakefront and settled for lunch from a hot dog stand at the North Avenue Beach. He felt relaxed for the first time in more than a week and realized she was aware of it.
When they returned to her house he busied himself with her admirable collection of take-out menus, an assortment that almost but not quite rivaled his. He was turning a Chinese menu over when he realized she was standing in front of him. She wore a thick white chenille robe and was gazing at him with a little half smile.
“Put the menu down,” she said. He let it drop and as she lowered herself onto his lap, she allowed the robe to fall. He put his hands to her skin and was about to say something when she put her mouth on his.
He was able to finish perusing the menu an hour later. Dinner still seemed like a good idea but had lost some of its urgency. Whelan could now envision going another hour without dinner, but Sandra was in the shower. She was singing and her voice, he noted, had not improved with excitement.
She was still singing when she emerged. She had her hands in the deep pockets of her robe and a flush had appeared on her cheeks.
He dropped the menu and crossed the room to her. She leaned against the living room wall and let him push against her. His hands found their way inside the robe, and he kissed her.
“My own freshly showered woman,” he said.
She kissed him again and pushed him away. “Could be your own—if you played your cards right.” She took a couple steps away. “And you couldn’t do any better. I don’t care how many women you know.” She was smiling but there was a challenge in her green eyes.
“That was never in question, Sandra.”
She shrugged. “I just wanted to say it. Now order me dinner.”
Whelan ordered enough Chinese food for six, and when they’d made it through pot stickers and moo shu pork and shrimp in garlic sauce and Peking chicken, they spent an hour sipping coffee and reading the Sunday papers.
At ten, he decided to leave.
“I’ll call you tomorrow. In the afternoon.”
“Okay.” She got up and walked to the door with him. At the door she put her arms around his neck and pushed her body against him. “You could stay, you know.”
“I was thinking about it but…I think I’m going out to check on a few things before I actually call it a day.”
She drew back, as though he’d said something offensive.
“Easy, there. I’m just going to be looking around, trying to figure a few things out. I’ll stay in the car. Mostly.”
She shook her head. “I guess I should feel flattered that you pay so much attention to me when we’re together, because you are the most obsessive, the most preoccupied man I’ve ever known. Be careful.”
“I will. I’m just going to try and get this thing over with.”
“When do you think that will happen?”
“Tomorrow,” he said with a great deal more confidence than he felt, and he could see she wasn’t buying it either.
Argyle Street was busy and the people coming out of the restaurants with their steamed-up windows looked happy, happy and a little chilled, hunching shoulders against the wind and grabbing at their collars. Most of them were Vietnamese and would have told him it was a cold night. Whelan drove with his window down and let the crisp lake wind fill his old car. He made the pass by the little restaurant where he hoped all of this would end soon, and a few moments later swung by the garage on Broadway where a man had been found dead within hours of talking to Paul Whelan.
At Wilson and Broadway he stopped for the light and idly scanned the people crossing the six-way intersection: black people and white people, a couple of short, stumpy old Russian men, a pair of skinny black teenagers, a Latino woman with a small child, an African looking woman pushing a laundry cart, a Vietnamese couple watching their neighbors with wary looks.
You ought to be looking wary. Go on home, folks, there’s a killer on the street.
Fifteen
The flat-faced man was working the bar at Ed and Ronda’s and he gave Whelan a careful nod, then looked around for his cigarettes.
I make you nervous, Whelan thought. It’s the company you’ve been keeping.
“Hello, Ed.”
Another nod.
“You heard about Bob Hayes?”
Ed lit up a cigarette and blew a little cloud of smoke into the air. “Heard they found him up by a garage. Somebody cut ’im.”
“What else did you hear?”
“That’s all I know.”
“You knew him pretty well, didn’t you?”
Ed pursed his lips and shook his head. “Nope. He drank here a few times, liked to talk. That’s all. Couldn’t tell you a thing about him.”
“How about Jimmy? You knew Jim, I think Bob told me that.”
This new tack seemed to catch Ed in midthought, paralyzing him. Whelan could see Ed’s poor mind working on a way out. The barman fought to keep his eyes from meeting Whelan’s.
Finally he consented to the faintest nod. “Knew him to see him, wasn’t anything more than that. He come in for a drink, that’s all. Not regulars, neither of ’em.”
Whelan nodded. “How about a Coke?” He put a few singles on the bar and fished out a cigarette, going through all the motions of a man settling himself in for a long afternoon in a friendly tavern.
Ed watched him with a forlorn look in his close-set eyes. Whelan had known many men like Ed, men of modest intelligence and less intuition, who could no more hide their feelings than change their height. Whelan could read Ed’s look with no difficulty: old Ed was merely wishing Whelan would vaporize, have a heart attack, choke on an ice cube. Old Ed wished him dead.
Whelan played with his matches and cigarettes while Ed slapped ice into a glass and held it under the soda gun. He set down the Coke and said “seventy-five.”
“Thanks. Listen, you’re from the South, right?”
“No.”
“I could’ve sworn you were…”
“Ronda’s from the South.”
“Oh, right. She heard about Bobby Hayes?”
He shrugged. “She heard what I heard.”
“How’d she take that?”
The little brown eyes showed some spark. “He was
n’t nothin’ to her.”
“Of course not, that’s not what I meant, Ed. I just meant, you know, women get all bent out of shape about these things.”
Ed shrugged and looked up and down his bar. “She got a little shook up.”
“Bobby Hayes called me a couple hours before he was killed. He called from here. This would be Saturday afternoon.”
Ed’s confidence made a modest comeback. “I wasn’t working. Can’t tell you a thing.” He even smiled now.
“Then I’ll need to talk to Ronda.”
“What’s she gonna tell you?”
“Well, Ed, you never know that until you ask. Where can I reach her?”
The quick sullen look that Ed gave him said a lie was on its way and Whelan was grinning before the bartender even spoke.
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Come on, Ed. How hard can it be to keep track of your wife?”
Ed looked around for his cigarettes, found them next to the register, then fumbled in his shirt pocket for a book of matches. “She’s at home. No, I think she’s on her way here,” he muttered.
“On her way?” Something in Ed’s answer didn’t make sense but he let it go. Ed was watching the back door.
“Yeah. She’ll be here, I don’t know. Maybe half an hour.”
Whelan took a sip of his syrupy Coke, put it down and nodded. “I’ll be back later. Thanks.”
Ed was silent as Whelan left, but Whelan could feel the other man’s eyes in the small of his back.
He got into his car and started it up, then drove around the block. When he’d made one leisurely circuit, he drove up the alley and pulled up next to a garage covered with graffiti. Windows down to allow in the cool air from the lake, he hit a couple buttons and found Ella Fitzgerald doing “Mack the Knife,” the live version where Ella forgets the words and decides to make up a few verses of her own. Ella was singing her apologies for annihilating the song when Whelan saw the red Chevy come up the alley and pull into the little parking lot behind the tavern. A moment later, Ronda got out and closed the door, then walked toward the tavern.
From a distance, Ronda still had a young woman’s walk and he had to admit that in a tough, leathery way she was good-looking for her age. He got out of his car and called out her name. She turned, squinted in the sun and went tense when she recognized him.
“Afternoon. I wonder if I could ask you a couple more questions.”
He watched her face and, tough as she was, it gave up a lot more than she’d have wanted to. Whelan saw the little look of fear, then the quick glance over her shoulder at the tavern. Then she was regrouping, an alley cat caught on the back stairs.
“What kinda questions? I got to get inside. I’m working.”
“I know. You heard about Bobby Hayes?”
She nodded and the flinty look in her eyes wavered a little.
“He was waiting to see me that night. Did you know that?”
“Mister, he didn’t tell me how he spent his Saturday nights. I don’t know nothin’ about what all he did when he left my place.”
“You were working when he called me.”
“How would you know that if you weren’t…”
“Ed,” he said happily.
From six feet away he could hear her teeth grinding, and the tightness in her posture told him Ed was going to have a long afternoon.
“You remember him making a couple of calls? Come on, Ronda, I heard him smack the bar when I said something he didn’t like.”
She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I was busy. I don’t stop and listen every time somebody uses the phone.”
“Didn’t sound busy. I could hear the jukebox. Johnny Cash was singing and nobody in your place was talking. Maybe you had a full house and they were just being respectful to Mr. Cash. Who was he with, Ronda?”
“Wasn’t with nobody I recall.”
“Big guy, dark hair, kind of slicked back. Long sideburns. Name’s Jimmy Lee.”
She shook her head and put on a casual expression but she was chewing on the inside of her cheek.
“I think you know who I mean. In fact, Ronda, I think you know a whole lot about all of this. More than I do, that’s for damn sure. I think you know all about Whitey, and I think you know a lot about Jimmy Lee Hayes, who tried to kill me the other night, which sure puts us on different footing than I thought we were on.”
She blinked, met his eyes to see if the last part were true, then looked away. “You’re talking to the wrong gal. I run a tavern and you got a problem with some people that drank in it, that’s all.”
“Maybe so. I actually hope that’s all true. Because the guy out there who killed Bobby Hayes is a bad guy, Ronda, and there’s no telling who he’ll kill next. I’m just going to make sure he doesn’t kill the kid I’ve been looking for. I’ll be seeing you later, ma’am.”
He stepped out of Ronda’s path and watched her as she made her hasty way into the bar. She turned at the back door, shot him a quick look from the corner of her eye and went in.
In his days as a beat cop, he remembered conversations about how much of his life a cop spends sitting: in the squad car, over coffee and doughnuts, on the bar stool. Now that he was on his own, it hadn’t gotten all that much better: he walked as many places as possible, but when it came to surveillance or the numbing boredom of waiting out a suspect’s next move, he found himself frittering away great chunks of the day, whole irretrievable pieces of his life.
He was sitting in his car and watching an evening go up in smoke, and the waiting was torment because he’d decided on a long-shot course of action and had no idea where it would take him. He sighed and sipped at the coffee, long since gone cold and not much good when it was fresh, and watched the activity inside the little Korean snack shop.
When Marty began slipping on his Army coat, Whelan said “Here we go,” and got out of his car. The Korean locked the door behind Marty, and Whelan gave the kid a couple of seconds, then came out of the next doorway and grabbed his elbow.
“Come on, Marty.”
Marty gave a sudden yank but Whelan was ready and slipped around behind him, grabbed the kid’s other elbow and the fight was over.
“What the fuck is this shit?”
“Take it easy and I’ll tell you in the car.”
“Car? What the fuck, what car?”
“Quit swearing at me, Marty, or I’ll pop you one.”
He half led, half pulled the kid to his car. “We’re just going to talk,” he said, and when some of the stiffness left Marty’s bony shoulders, shoved him into the front seat of his car. “And you can’t outrun me, not on your best day.” Marty swore again but the resignation in his face told Whelan he’d bought that one, too.
Grinning to himself, he walked around the front and got in. As he went through the labors of starting the car, he looked over at Marty. The boy listened to the erratic sounds coming from under the hood and curled his lip.
“Your car is dogshit, man. Oughtta put a fucking bullet in your engine block and sell the rest for parts.”
“Funny, an expert on cars wasting himself in a corn dog stand. You’re keeping your light under a bushel.”
The Jet continued to make grinding sounds and the sullen teenager muttered to himself, something that sounded like “torch the whole fucking thing” and Whelan allowed himself a quiet chuckle, grateful for the distraction. Then Whelan pulled out into northbound traffic on Sheridan.
“Just relax. This won’t take long. At least, I have hopes.”
“Where we going?” Marty asked, and his sudden wide-eyed look said he had at least a general idea already.
“Argyle Street. We’re going to Argyle Street.”
“No fuckin’ way,” Marty said, and turned suddenly toward the door. Whelan grabbed the soft part of his arm. There wasn’t a lot to it, but enough to hold onto, enough to pinch.
“Sit down. I know where he is, Marty. I followed you Saturday.” He took his eyes off the roa
d and met the boy’s gaze. Marty stared at him open-mouthed, gone speechless with guilt.
“Shit.”
“I would have found him anyway.”
The boy made a long groan through clenched teeth and whacked his head against the window.
“Cut it out, Marty.”
The boy half turned toward the door and scrunched his thin frame up into something like a fetal position.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
After a while, Marty uncoiled and stared at the street. “So what do you want me for?”
“I want this to go smoothly. I don’t want trouble for anybody, not him, not me, and not…not anybody. You get me in, that’s all.”
“No. No way, man. I don’t give a fuck—”
“Ease up, kid, take a deep breath. You get me in, or I come back with the cops, and that makes trouble for somebody, if not for all of us. Just get me in. I’m not going to do anything to him.”
“What do you want with ’im, then?”
“Maybe nothing,” Whelan said, and meant it. “Maybe he stays where he is.”
The boy cursed again, this time under his breath, and looked straight ahead. In moments, they were on Argyle Street, and Whelan drove past the little Vietnamese restaurant and this time didn’t look in. He turned the corner and parked at the mouth of the alley, fought the urge to have a quick smoke, and then looked at Marty.
“Show time,” Whelan said, and got out of the car. He was around to the passenger side before Marty opened the door.
Marty slumped back into character, rolled his eyes, let his shoulders go slack, and crawled out of the car like a man asked to clean toilets. He swung the door closed and then thrust both hands in his jeans.
Whelan patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s get it done, Marty.” He took a deep breath, grinned at Marty and hoped the boy couldn’t sense his fear. He stayed a couple paces back as Marty, head down, plodded into the alley. Marty’s worn-out running shoes scraped casually against the alley pavement.
Forget it, kid, Whelan thought. They won’t hear it over the beating of my heart.
Killer on Argyle Street Page 21