“You’re recording all your conversations?”
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, it makes some of ’em nervous and others couldn’t care less, but I give ’em a few bucks for their time and it seems to cut through a lot of objections.”
“I bet it does.”
“But I think you’d be better at the kind of thing I’m trying to do. These aren’t…you know, these aren’t Studs Terkel’s people, exactly. A lot of these guys just don’t like to talk, aren’t used to it. Most of them, when they do talk to me, just answer exactly what I ask and don’t give me anything more. I get a lot of one-word answers. I think you’d know how to get things out of them.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“I do. It’s what you’ve always been good at. Probably why you took to this line of work. And I hear you’re good at it.”
“At certain aspects of it, I am. I like to talk to people. I can find people, that seems to be my strong suit. I sure don’t make a lot of money at it, though.”
“I bet you make whatever you need. But Paulie, that’s not the only reason I want you to help me.” He laughed with embarrassment. “I think I need a bodyguard. I can talk to these guys during the day but I think at night, when it’s dark and a guy can get a few cocktails into his system, I can get more out of them, but that’s when I don’t want to be roaming around by myself. I swear, sometimes I get the heebie-jeebies down here. I spent an hour one morning crouching down in an alley with an old burnout black guy, kept stopping in the middle of his sentences to stare at me like I was gonna rob him or something. And this guy, the one I told you about—”
“The guy that acts like somebody’s after him?”
“Yeah, when I’m with him, after a while I start to feel like I’m on the run, like I’m being watched.”
“You’ve got to be careful down here, Art. I don’t know…” He wanted to be able to say something encouraging, even offer his help in some limited form, but he couldn’t see spending his free evenings wandering around with Art and interviewing derelicts. “You see, Art, I don’t really have a lot of time right now, and there’s—”
“You’re wondering about money, right. I know, but I could make an arrangement with you, share a percentage. And I could come up with some cash to give you till then, I know I could.”
Art Shears looked off into a corner of the office for a moment, obviously running schemes through his mind, searching for the aforementioned cash.
“No, no, Art. I didn’t mean money. I just meant, there’s the question of time.”
“Oh.” Art looked puzzled and Whelan laughed.
“Surprised, huh? Doesn’t look like I’d ever be busy?” He grinned and took out a cigarette. As an afterthought he held the pack out to Art who took one, eagerly.
“Thought maybe you gave it up, Art.”
“You kidding? No, I just didn’t get around to buying a pack this morning.”
Art blew smoke and indicated the office with his free hand. “No, it looks like you’re doing fine, Paul, I just thought…you’re working on something, huh? For that lawyer?”
“No. At the moment I’m trying to figure a way to get him to quit paying me in little pieces. I don’t really have anything else at the moment, but the problem is, I can’t commit blocks of my time or even make anything like this a regular deal, you know?” Shears nodded slowly, disappointment coming into his eyes.
There was a knock at the door and Whelan said, “Come on in, Ricky.” A young black boy came in with a white paper bag and set it on the desk.
“Two-oh-six, Mr. Whelan.”
Art Shears made a move for his pocket. “Hey, I got this, Paul.”
“The hell you do. You’re my guest. I do this for total strangers, Artie. Why can’t I do it for you?” He gave the boy $2.75. “Keep it, Ricky.”
“Thanks, Mr. Whelan.” The boy closed the door and could be heard skipping down the hall.
They sipped coffee and nibbled at the chocolate donuts and Whelan bought time with small talk while he tried to find a way out of Art’s “project” without discouraging him. He stared at Art, saw how the man gulped the donut and the coffee and realized what a joke it had been for him to think of coming up with a retainer. He thought about Art’s book and told himself this was not a way to run a business, not even a dog-eared one. It was unprofessional, it was irritating, it was an imposition. He watched Artie Shears wolfing down the donut. An inconvenience. No, a favor for my oldest friend on earth, who looks like he’s run out of favors as well as luck.
“Okay, Artie,” he heard himself say. “This is what I think I could do. You pick out a couple, three of what you consider tough interviews, stubborn folk, or just a couple times when you think you’d really want somebody with you. And I’ll come along a couple times and we’ll work together. I just can’t make it, you know, a regular thing. Sometimes…sometimes a case comes my way and I have to put a lot of time into it, day and night for five, six, seven days in a row, a couple of weeks sometimes. And I get paid for it. I don’t work often but when I do, it’s worth good money to me, so I really have to keep myself available, you know? And I can’t turn down a case if it’s my type of case. I mean, I live pretty close to the edge, financially.” There was a glimmer of understanding in Art’s eyes and he nodded.
“I don’t want to cramp your style, Paul. Just for the hell of it, what’s a private investigator cost these days?”
“Oh, a big agency with a lot of staff and the latest technology will cost you your left nut. Me, I get two hundred a day and expenses.”
“Two bills?” Panic showed clearly in Art’s face, and he showed a lighter shade of pale.
Whelan laughed. “Easy, Art. Don’t hyperventilate in my office. I’m not gonna charge you.”
“Well, I gotta pay you something.”
Whelan shrugged. “If your book sells, you can give me a few bucks. But I’ll do this for old times. And you can buy me dinner when we do the interviews.”
“Such a deal! How can I lose?”
“Don’t see how you can.”
They finished their coffee and made some more small talk about the heat, the Cubs, politics and old times, and at 11:15 ran out of conversation. Art Shears got up and shrugged. “Middle of the week? What do you think, Paul? Wednesday, Thursday?”
“Okay with me. Just give me a call.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon. I want to see how things go with these meetings I got.” He took Whelan’s hand. “I appreciate this, Paul, I really do.”
“My pleasure. I think I’ll get a kick out of working with a genuine writer.”
Art pumped his hand again. “You’re the best, Paul. I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow.”
He sat back in the chair and watched Art Shears leave. He waited a moment and then went to the window. Below him, Art cut across Lawrence and made his way toward the corner, a bony, disheveled man, a man running out of luck. He could just barely make out that Art Shears was smiling, and that had to count for something.
Two
A car backfired somewhere down near Wilson and he woke with a start. He had fallen asleep with the TV on again, almost a nightly occurrence. There was a movie on now, a wonderfully cheap monster movie shot in a few days, using filters to give the impression of night shots. He stared at the set for a moment, and the faintest trace of warning came to him, a split-second before the phone began its startling clamor.
“Hello?”
There was a hesitation, then a swallowing noise and then Marie Shears’s voice. “Paul? Is that you, Paul?”
“Yeah, Marie. Marie, what’s wrong?” His stomach began to knot up.
She began to speak and sob at the same time. “Artie’s dead, Paul. Somebody killed him.”
“Oh, no…” His voice sounded hollow, distant, and he was having trouble concentrating. There was some mistake.
“He was down there…” and she let go of it, gave herself over to her grief and it was thirty s
econds before she could speak. The knot in his stomach turned to nausea and he forced himself to think about Marie, to do or say something helpful. He thought he’d never heard anyone so heartbroken and wondered if she cried for Art’s death or for the beaten, hard-luck man, down at the heels and frayed at the edges, that he’d become.
She sniffled and swallowed and was in control when she resumed. “They found him in an alley up by Wilson and Broadway. Near the el tracks. Somebody hit him and fractured his skull. Then they went through his pockets. Oh, Paul, why would they kill him? He would have given them his wallet. Why couldn’t he get a break just once?”
She began to cry again and he realized that very little of this was for herself; she was still the same class act she’d always been. He bit off the thought, and when she seemed to feel better he let her talk for a moment, then asked her some general questions to get a handle on what had happened. Her brother had gone down to identify the body. The police believed it was a simple robbery: Art’s wallet was gone and when Marie told them he’d carried a small tape recorder, that clinched it.
He asked a few careful questions about the boys and her financial situation and she broke into the middle of one.
“We’re okay, Paul. You can stop beating around the bush. We’ve been getting by on what I make and what we had in the bank, and Tommy pays board now. And when there’s something major or unexpected, my dad helps out. He’s a professional grandpa of Depression vintage. Wants the boys to have a million and one chances. Besides, you know, Paul…Art hadn’t really made any kind of money for a while. We weren’t looking for him to…support us or anything. We just hoped he could get himself straightened out.” Her voice fell and he sensed her embarrassment at having to speak this way about her dead husband.
He sat there with the phone to his ear and told himself that Artie Shears was dead, that he’d never see him again. He remembered the other times in his life when he’d received phone calls like this, the call about his father, and he felt weak.
“He called me yesterday, Paul. Just yesterday.” She sighed. “He said you guys had been in touch. I was glad about that.”
“Oh, sure. We got together a couple of times,” he lied. A harmless lie. “We talked about his book.”
“About the derelicts?”
“Right.”
She was silent for a while. When she spoke again, it was in a tired voice, resigned. “You know, when the police came, my first thought was, ‘It was that damn book, otherwise he wouldn’t have been down there,’ but that’s not true. He was just lost, Paul. He’d been drinking, and there was some gambling, and, lately, half the time I talked to him he was…you know, high. And other times he was in these incredibly upbeat moods, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He talked like he was about to win the Pulitzer or the…the lottery or something. You wouldn’t believe it.”
Whelan said nothing, but knew a man living off a bottle would have his moments when the world seemed to be his oyster.
“I think something was bound to happen to him sooner or later, Paul. Like he would get drunk and fall asleep in that little room of his…” she broke off for a moment and then composed herself. “…you know, fall asleep with a lighted cigarette and…that would be it.”
He fought the urge to speak for a moment: better to say nothing than to say something foolish.
“You make the arrangements yet, Marie?”
“No, not yet.”
“Will you need any help?”
“I don’t think so, no, but I’ll call you if I do, and I’ll let you know when…everything’s going to take place.” She sighed. “We probably won’t even find out who did it, you know? Yesterday he was alive and this morning he’s dead in an alley in Uptown.”
“Did, uh, the police say they have any leads?”
“No. The man I talked to was a Detective Bauman. He said it just sounded like a mugging that got out of hand.”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
She thanked him again and he felt helpless and clumsy and was thankful when she hung up. He went into his kitchen to boil water for some instant and glanced up at the wall clock: midnight, and there’d be no sleeping till the wee small ones. He dropped two spoonfuls of coffee into a red cup and tried to understand that Art Shears was dead. And he acknowledged his guilt, not that he hadn’t been with Art to prevent his death—he just wished with all his heart that, on the second-to-last day of Artie Shears’s life, he’d been able to take him seriously.
The death of Arthur Shears was mentioned briefly in the Tribune the following morning. The news story gave the place as the alley behind 4540 North Broadway. The article said that the police had no suspects and that robbery was believed to be the motive. On the obit page there was a paragraph describing Art as a former Trib reporter believed to have been doing research for a book on “urban problems.”
Whelan looked again at the little news story, read the address: an alley two and a half blocks from his office. He needed to see it.
A little before nine, as the streets filled with overheated people going to work and getting on with normal lives, he found it. The alley was a little dogleg between an appliance store and the back of a six-flat that had been cut up into a dozen or so apartments. The bend in the alley came just ten yards or so from Leland Street. There was nothing to see. No chalk outlines, no bustling technicians, no reporters, just a narrow strip of patched concrete over the old brick alley, lined on both sides with fast-food containers, mud-gray newspaper and broken glass, much of it the green glass of wine bottles. The alley saw little more than foot traffic these days, and weeds grew in cracks down the center and along the sides.
He paced up and down, searching the ground for nothing in particular, looking over his shoulder, walking faster as his frustration grew. He turned the corner at the angle of the dogleg and stumbled, literally, over a pair of legs. The legs belonged to a skinny gray-haired man who slept folded over in the bricked-over doorway to an old garage.
“Shit!” The man awoke with a sputter and swung his legs out in a rickety attempt to right himself. He pushed off the wall with his arm but couldn’t hold his own weight, and when he tried to scowl at Whelan he couldn’t focus his eyes.
“Sonofabitch.”
“No, I’m not. Take it easy, babe. Relax.” Whelan crouched down in front of him and held his breath as the man spewed muscatel fumes at him.
“Whoa! Been drinking our breakfast again, huh?”
“Who’re you?” The man’s head wobbled back and forth as though unmoored and Whelan shook his head involuntarily at the man’s bony arms and legs. The blue shirt he wore bagged on his frame, and a good four inches of ankle showed from each pant leg.
“I’m a detective. I just need a little help.”
“I jus’ drank a bit.” The man showed worry and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Lordy, you sure did that. Not a crime, though. And I’m not a cop, I’m a detective. You know a guy was killed here night before last?” The man nodded slowly.
“I heard.”
“What did you hear? Remember?”
“Nothin’. Jus’ some guy got hisself killed. Busted his head open.”
“Hear who he was?”
“Jus’ a guy, is all.” The man’s eyes began to focus now and he wet his lips continually. “Hot. ’S real hot.”
“Yeah. Gonna get hotter.” And you’re thirsty already, Whelan thought. He shook his head and gave the man a buck. The wino struggled to his feet and went shuffling off toward Leland. Whelan walked a bit farther down the alley and knelt down beneath a brick wall with NO LOITERING painted across it in white. There was blood on the pavement. As far as he could tell, it was only in this place, this one place, and this was where it had happened. Art hadn’t staggered around or run with his injuries. He’d just fallen. Here. In time the August sun would fade it and the city winds would scour it with grit and a gracious rain might wash it away, but right now it was here. Whelan
forced himself to look at it and a series of unasked-for images came into his mind now, of the young Artie Shears standing at Whelan’s door and asking if he wanted to go swim off the rocks, Artie Shears whacking away at a softball, Artie Shears and Paul Whelan passing the same dime bottle of R.C. back and forth behind Artie’s house. Smiling, confident Artie Shears, who had always been a little bolder than Whelan, a little smarter, better-looking, more popular: an odd recollection now, for the grinning boy’s face held no hint of failure or sickness or trouble, and certainly no foreboding that he’d end his life in an Uptown alley.
He looked around and a slight movement caught his eye; he looked up. In a third-floor window of the cut-up six-flat a man watched him. No derelict, this was an older man, perhaps in his sixties, with close-cropped white hair. He watched Whelan with unmistakable suspicion, and when Whelan stood up suddenly, the man disappeared behind a faded green curtain.
Whelan went quickly up the back stairs, stretched to get across a missing step and knocked at the door on the third floor. A couple feet away, the sun-bleached curtain moved slightly and the face appeared again. It was a tan face, the face of a man who has spent much of his life outdoors, and the man watched him through dark, heavy-lidded eyes.
“Yessir?” the man said through a screen.
“Sir, I wonder if I could talk to you.”
“Depends who y’are.”
“I’m a detective and I’m looking into the killing that took place here the other night.”
The man stared at him for a moment, frowned and shook his head. “Already told you folks everything. Talked to you already ’bout this. You gonna worry me to death over this?”
“I just want to ask—”
“Didn’t see no badge, either.”
“I’m a private detective.”
“Then I got nothing to tell you. You want my story, you get it from the other one.”
“The police detective?” He fished for the name Marie had mentioned. “Bauman? That the one?”
Death in Uptown Page 3