Killer on Argyle Street

by Michael Raleigh

  Three or four doors down the alley they stopped at a small brick garage with a red steel dumpster beside it. The dumpster was filled to overflowing, and Whelan saw boxes and cans marked with Vietnamese characters.

  Marty stopped and gave Whelan a sullen look.

  “Lead the way, Marty.” The boy made a little shrug and walked up the gangway and through the yard. He stopped at the back door and looked down.

  “Is this it?”

  “Whaddya think?”

  I think I want to get it all over with, he thought. “Go ahead in, then.”

  Marty nodded and opened the wooden door. Inside, Whelan found himself on a small concrete staircase leading down into a basement. From somewhere above he heard the sounds of several women speaking in Vietnamese and occasionally the harsh, nasal voice of an older man. The old man was apparently a laugh riot: he sang out something and the women filled the air with a burst of high-pitched laughter. The old man yelled something and one of the women sounded near to losing it.

  Down the stairs, Marty stopped again and stared at the door into the basement. Whelan moved down quietly till he was directly behind the boy. He could smell the sweat in the kid’s musty cotton jacket, and he could almost feel the fear, and he felt sorry for him but this was the way it had to be done.

  “Go in, Marty, or knock, but do it.”

  Marty knocked twice, then turned the doorknob and pushed it in. Whelan felt the cool damp air pushing out into the stairwell, and he had just taken the first step into the basement when Marty turned and slammed the door against him and began screaming for whoever was inside to run. The door caught Whelan across the forehead but he took most of it on his shoulder, and then he pushed back.

  “Get out,” the boy was screaming, “I’ll kill the fucker,” and a slender shape was attempting to boost himself out a side window. Marty spread his legs and took a martial arts pose.

  “Come on, you fucker,” Marty said. He was panting and red-faced, and Whelan just went straight at him and took him out with a shoulder in the chest. He felt a fist graze his ear and then Marty was falling in front of him. Whelan crossed the basement in three long strides and grabbed the escaping boy around the legs and pulled. They fell back onto the concrete floor and Whelan landed on his left elbow. Pain shot up through his arm all the way to the shoulder. The boy began flailing and squirming to get away, and he was yelling in Whelan’s ear. Whelan felt the kid’s bony fingers clawing for his eyes. He put a hand on the kid’s face and pushed, coiling back, and gradually rolled himself over so that he was on top of the boy.

  He sat up and tried to catch his breath and was about to tell the kid that the fight was over when he caught movement from the corner of his eye, something coming at him, and he raised his arm. The object struck him on the forearm and near the shoulder and Whelan fell backward and off the boy.

  He rolled across the floor and to his feet like a boxer after a flash knockdown, and when he came up he had both fists cocked. The right arm throbbed and didn’t seem to want to stay up but he tried not to show it. Behind him, Marty Wills scuttered out of the way and Tony Blanchard scrambled over to him.

  Whelan stood and faced the old Vietnamese man. He didn’t seem so old or so small now, and the hands Whelan had seen wielding a broom as though it were a great weight now held an ax handle. The old man shouted something in Vietnamese and Whelan could hear the panicked voices of the women upstairs, but there was no trace of panic in the old man’s pale brown eyes. No panic in his face or posture either, but a different message there: this was a fighting man, a man who’d seen violence and deep trouble and hadn’t found any reason to run from it, and Whelan wasn’t getting past him.

  The old man advanced and when Whelan began to circle, sidestepped to cut him off. The ax handle changed hands and the old man had gone righty to lefty, a seventy-year-old with Marvin Hagler moves. He feinted with the ax handle and forced Whelan to take a step backward, and now Whelan was trying to see where the two boys were.

  The old man swung the wood and Whelan took it on the forearm, where it found the spot that it had already softened. Whelan shot out a jab and the old man moved his head, not as fast as he wanted to but enough so that the punch merely grazed him. He poked out casually with the ax handle and it caught Whelan a stinging blow just under the chin, and Whelan was wondering if he was outclassed.

  Whelan moved to his right and the old man came straight in, shouting in Vietnamese, and Whelan was trying to say something to keep him off, and he could hear Marty yelling behind him. The basement room seemed to be filled with shouting people, and he felt hot and short of breath. He was bracing himself for the old man’s next assault when he caught movement from his left and a tall khaki figure flew at him. The flying tackle took him off his feet and he landed with the other man on top of him. He punched at the new assailant and they began to roll, the other man digging his fingers into Whelan’s jacket for leverage. Whelan grabbed a handful of the man’s hair from behind and tugged, and then the other man was scrambling off him.

  Whelan stumbled to his feet and faced Mickey Byrne. Ax handle raised, the old man took a step toward Whelan and Mickey moved to cut him off.

  “No, no!” He held up a hand and the old man stopped, his gaze going from Mickey to Whelan. Mickey Byrne stepped between them and stared around the room, his gaze finally coming to rest on Whelan. He was panting and there were blotches of unhealthy color in his face and a red mark on his cheekbone where Whelan had caught him with a punch, and his hair clung wet and matted to his skull.

  “Get outta here, Paulie, or you’ll get killed. Just walk, man.” Mickey Byrne bent over, hands on his knees, and panted.

  “Wait, Mick.” His breath came in gasps and his own voice sounded unsteady. “Talk to me.”

  “No, get out. There ain’t shit to talk about, just get out. You come back, you’re dead. There’s shit going down here you don’t know about.”

  Whelan studied the other man’s ravaged face. Mickey Byrne smelled of cigarettes and old cotton, his clothes bagged on him like castoffs. He’d been twenty pounds heavier as a boy than he was now at thirty-six.

  “I know enough,” Whelan said.

  Mickey shook his head. “No, man. You don’t know what’s goin’ down. You’re gonna get yourself killed. You come back here and I won’t be able to save your ass again.”

  “You sure you want to?”

  Mickey Byrne blinked several times, incredulous. His mouth opened but nothing came out and his eyes reddened. “What do you think I just did?” He looked over his shoulder at the old Vietnamese man, who stood in a half crouch, waiting for any sign that he was needed again.

  Behind them, Whelan could feel the eyes of the two boys on them. A rustling noise and then a quick whisper told him someone watched from the stairs and he wondered, just for a shiver in time, if he’d make it out of this one.

  Mickey Byrne followed Whelan’s gaze to the back stairway. “That’s just the women from upstairs. The restaurant.” He looked at the old man and nodded, said something short in Vietnamese.

  A boy’s voice said “Mick?” and Mickey Byrne nodded, wheezing, and said, “It’s cool.”

  Some of the tension left the old man’s body but not much. Whelan reached inside his shirt for his cigarettes. He shook one out and held the pack out to Mickey. Mick nodded, still laboring to get wind into his lungs, and pulled one out. Whelan lit up and held out the match, then waited as Mick Byrne puffed. Both men began coughing at almost the same moment.

  Whelan shook his head and tried to think of something to say but was more aware of all the damage he’d sustained.

  “I’ve been in this room less than a minute and I hurt in about eight places.”

  “Shouldn’t’ve come here,” Mick Byrne muttered, his hand moving to touch the bruise on his cheekbone. Whelan noticed that Mick’s knuckles were red, and one of them was bleeding.

  “Now what?” Whelan asked.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, m
an.”

  “Maybe so, but here I am.”

  He looked at the Vietnamese man, who remained unblinking and ready a little more than an arm’s length away. The man regarded him with pale brown eyes, intelligent eyes. Not the eyes of a porter but of someone far different. Eventually the old man’s gaze moved from Whelan to Mickey Byrne, and Whelan could see that the old man still needed convincing.

  “Does he speak English?”

  A glimmer of humor appeared in the brown eyes and answered Whelan’s question.

  “A lot better than you speak Vietnamese, Paulie.”

  “I never learned it. You did, though.”

  “I learned a little in-country, some back here.”

  Whelan wanted to ask where but other things needed to be said. “I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt the kid, Mick.”

  Mickey Byrne shook his head. “Anybody finds out where he is, anybody comes here after him, is gonna get him hurt. Now we got to find him another place.”

  “No. You should finish this up. You should help me end it.”

  “No, man, I don’t even know why you got into this.”

  “Long story.” He took a puff of his cigarette and looked at each of the men in the room. In the doorway he could see the faces of two women, one of them the owner of the restaurant. Her breezy self-confidence seemed to have left her. Whelan studied Tony Blanchard. The boy looked bewildered.

  He looked at the Vietnamese man again and said to Mick, “I’d sure feel better if he’d drop the ax handle.” The old man stepped back and lowered the ax handle but his expression left no doubt whether he’d be willing to reconsider.

  Whelan studied Mickey Byrne for a moment. Mick’s face was set in anger and stubbornness and for a moment Whelan felt they’d both stepped twenty-five years into the past.

  “I don’t know why you’re here, Paulie.”

  “I was hired. It’s what I do. I’m a private detective, people hire me to look into things—usually to find somebody. And that’s what I’ve been doing.” He looked at the boy still sitting on the concrete floor. “Mrs. Pritchett. She hired me to find you. If you knew what I’d gone through to find you, you might trust me. Now we’ve got something in common. Somebody wants to kill both of us.”

  “He didn’t know nothing about that.”

  “I understand. He thought I was the guy following him.”

  “Guys.” Mickey Byrne held up two fingers. “There’s two of ’em.”

  Whelan pondered this, looked to the boy for confirmation. “You ever gonna talk, Tony?”

  For a moment the boy stared as if he hadn’t heard. Then he glanced at Mick. “He’s right,” the boy said. “There’s two of ’em.”

  “Wait, wait,” Whelan said. “I need to sit. I hurt.” He lowered himself gingerly onto the floor. The concrete was cold against his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Mick crouched down in a stoop. Whelan looked at the boy. “Whitey and who else?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw the other guy up close. He wears a baseball cap, though.”

  “Why do they want you, Tony?”

  “ ’Cause I saw the old man waste a guy.” The boy shrugged, as though this had just been a nasty piece of luck, and then Whelan remembered this was a boy who hadn’t had much in a long time.

  “Who was the man you saw killed?”

  “Chick Nelson.”

  “I think the other guy is Jimmy Lee, Tony. Looking for you.”

  The boy frowned and gave Whelan a disbelieving look. “Jimmy’s dead.”

  “Nope.”

  The boy stared at him. New possibilities took root, and his face lost what little color it had left. “Man, why would Jimmy be after me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know the ‘why’ of most of this.” He looked at Mickey. “I don’t know why you’re in this.”

  “Rory.” Mick stared at him and color rose in his face. He seemed to be daring Whelan to question his motives.

  “Okay.”

  “This asshole killed Rory and those other ones, the guy Tony saw him kill.”

  “I think he killed at least two others. He killed Les, the old fence.” The boy blinked and Whelan hit him with the rest. “And they found Bobby Hayes dead on Saturday. You know Bobby?”

  The boy made a nervous nod and his eyes went a little glassy. There was something pitiful about the little comet tattoo on his arm, a child’s attempt at bravado. Whelan nodded toward the basement door. “They found him about two blocks from here, at about eight o’clock Saturday night. He was that close. That’s why we have to finish this.”

  “He won’t talk to cops, Paul. He talks to cops, people’ll find him. He won’t be safe.”

  Whelan stared at Mick for a moment. “You think he’s safe here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I made it in, for Chrissake.”

  Mick looked at the old man and then back at Whelan. “You think you would have made it out?”

  “I can help you with this, Mick. I know people, I know the cop who’s investigating these other murders. He’s all right. You want this kid to live out the year, we have to take the other guy off the street.”

  “We’re takin’ care of business right here, Paul. Get out of here, man, this has got nothing to do with you now.” He indicated the boy with a nod. “You found him, you can tell that lady he’s all right. I’ll make sure he calls her when this is over. Now get out of here, Paulie, you don’t belong here.”

  “You don’t belong here, either, Mick.”

  Mickey gave him an oddly complacent look. “Yeah, I do. This is exactly where I belong. Now get out, man.”

  Whelan struggled to his feet. The shoulder hurt where he’d taken a blow with the ax handle, and he wondered if he was bleeding under his shirt. “All right.” He moved toward the door, then paused. “What are you going to do now?”

  “We’re gonna get him out of here, for one. I’ll think about the rest later.”

  “Hope you know what you’re doing, Mick. Hope you all know what’s out there. This guy kills people in broad daylight and disappears.”

  “He can change how he looks,” Tony said in a small voice.

  “He can what?”

  Tony nodded earnestly. “He can change himself. With, like disguises. Sometimes he looks like some kinda foreigner, like a tourist, you know? He wears disguises.”

  Whelan sighed. “That’s great. Have you seen him, Mick?”

  Mickey Byrne nodded. “I don’t know, I think so. He looked like a street guy. Just like an old guy that lives in alleys. Like me.” Mick pinched the butt of his cigarette and took another drag and refused to make eye contact. Whelan left.

  Outside, he took the chill night air into his lungs in great gulps. He wanted a drink and a hot bath to nurse his many injuries, and a place far away from Argyle Street. He drove up to Broadway and hung the left and drove on to Lawrence. He was waiting for the light to change when a group of young people emerged from the Green Mill laughing. They all looked to be in their twenties, a mixed group that included a couple of good-looking women and a black kid in a beret and a tall white guy with blond hair in a ponytail. A few feet from the cluster of handsome healthy young people, an old man dug through the trash basket on the corner and came up with a half-wrapped sandwich. Whelan watched the old man and then he was remembering another old man, one in a doorway not far from this corner, a skinny, toothless old man in a blue cap. That one had looked dazed and scared and now that Whelan thought about it, was probably neither. He thought about Bauman’s “informant” up at Roy’s garage and shook his head. His heart was beginning to pound and he felt hot. A motorist behind him leaned on the horn to tell him the light had changed and Whelan gunned the Olds and moved through the intersection. He turned up Racine and as soon as he could, made a swing back up to Broadway.

  You old shit, he thought.

  As he drove, he imagined himself calling Bauman. “Hey, Bauman, about this old guy Willie? There ain’t no Willie, old buddy.”
/>   Sixteen

  Lights were on in the rooming house, lights in one front window on the first floor and two on the second. Whelan shook his head. In a logical world, he’d be able to narrow his attention to three rooms. But in a logical world, Paul Whelan would be out somewhere with a certain green-eyed social worker instead of sitting in his car about to bring in a killer.

  As he got out of the car he told himself he was a trained ex-cop and a passable boxer, he could take an old man with a knife, and then a little voice told him that was probably what Makowski and Nelson and Rory Byrne and even Bobby Hayes had all thought. He stopped at the curb. Makowski. Not Makowski: he had been shot. All these others, even Les, had been stabbed. Whelan wondered what had made the killer use a .22 for that one.

  No old man met him in the hall this time. Whelan yanked at the inner door and found it locked. He worried at the door with a credit card but realized he’d need tools for a lock like this one. He went around to the back.

  The rooming house owner was obviously a cost-conscious sort of guy: the back of the building had no light, no rear gate. Whelan stood at the bottom of the staircase and peered up into the blackness, listening and waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the absence of light. After perhaps thirty seconds, he began to ascend the stairs. He took them slowly, pausing every three or four paces to listen. Halfway up, a man yelled, somewhere up the street, and took the breath out of him. At the first landing he stopped. A small window in the back door appeared as an orange square of light and gave him visibility of several feet. He moved to the window and looked in. Inside he had a clear view of the long narrow hall running between the rooms, a quiet, empty hall. He turned the doorknob and it opened. With the slowest of movements he pulled at the door and then he heard the noise.

  It was directly above him, on the second-floor landing, a soft muffled sound, and then it was still. With slow, delicate movements he let the door close, turned the knob to its original position and then stood for a ten-count. Then, moving as carefully as he could, Whelan crept to the foot of the next flight of stairs. He peered up the stairs to where the orange light from the door faded and was swallowed by the darkness above, and then began his slow climb. Half a dozen steps up, the staircase began to turn, a tight curve that made the climb harder and concealed the top of the stairway.