Death in Uptown

by Michael Raleigh

  “That he’s dead.”

  Trying hard to be tough, and he liked her for it. “No, Jean, I don’t think he’s dead. That, you might have heard about. He’d have some kind of identification with his belongings and the authorities would somehow have gotten a hold of you. It doesn’t always happen that way but the odds are fairly good that you would have heard. What I was going to say was that he might have left town. He could be anywhere in the country.”

  He watched her eyes widen and saw that the thought had never occurred to her that he might have kept on moving, might literally have gone underground.

  “I want to get all the unpleasant stuff out of the way, so I want you to understand this: he could be in Seattle, he could be on a dirt road in Texas, he could be in Mexico. And if that’s the case, he’ll be real tough to find unless you have other resources.”

  She composed herself. “Speaking of which—what are your…rates, do you call them? Your charges?”

  He sighed. “Like I said, I won’t really be putting full time into this for a while, so I don’t see how I could really charge you a normal fee or anything like it. And if nothing turns up around town, there wouldn’t be any point in taking your money.”

  “But you’ll still be spending your time.”

  “Some. I can do some of these things over the phone in a half hour. I can do most of it out of my office.”

  “It doesn’t seem to me that you’ll ever get rich, Mr. Whelan.”

  “Something I’ve never wanted to be. Time’s a lot more important to me than money. Now, down to business. Do you have a picture of Gerry?”

  She grinned and went fishing in her bag. With a couple of deft movements she pulled out a snapshot.

  “It’s not, you know, real recent.”

  Whelan groaned. “Oh, Lord. A graduation picture?” He looked at the photograph and shook his head. “Not real recent, huh? You have a gift for understatement.”

  “Well…we had a few others but they just…they weren’t very good. We had one, it was taken at a wedding. Gerry was drunk. You wouldn’t even recognize him.”

  “How am I going to recognize him from this? You know what this is? It is a creature unique to this society, a genuine artifact of American folk art, the graduation picture. Think about it—did yours look like you?” She shrugged and looked sheepish.

  “Mine sure didn’t. Made me look like Gary Cooper. The idea is to produce for each family one shot, just one shot, of the little darling they want, the way they want the world to see him. You have a clever photographer, tricky lighting, an airbrush, and he takes two dozen shots to increase his odds. He checks out the kid when he comes in, wearing a tie that’s crooked and his father’s suitcoat. With the proper slant of the head and the right amount of savvy from the photographer, you get miracles: a profile shot and nobody’ll notice that Johnny’s left eye is two inches lower than his right eye. You get Johnny to look up at the camera, like an angel trying to make eye contact with God, and nobody sees that Johnny’s got no chin. And teeth, you want nice teeth for Johnny? No problem, the photographer’s an artist, an unsung artist. Out go Johnny’s bad teeth and in go Burt Lancaster’s. No cowlick, straighten his nose, brush away the creepy sideburns he’s wearing, wipe off his attempt at growing a mustache. Maybe Johnny’s got ears like a fruit bat, so Ma and Pa ask the photographer to go that final yard and give Johnny nice ears. The result is one of these.” He flicked the photograph with his nail and Jean Agee laughed. It was not a nervous laugh anymore, but husky, throaty and rich and had the sound of something used often.

  “It’s a nice picture, Jean. It just probably isn’t Gerry the way I’d see him. Tyrone Power, maybe, but not Gerry. I wish I had the drunk shot.”

  She gave him a rueful look and pointed to the picture. “This is how I like to think of him, though. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Maybe it’ll do what it’s supposed to do. Okay, I’ll make a few calls and do a little marching and we’ll see what happens. Is there somewhere I can reach you? I assume you’re staying at a hotel.”

  “I’m at the Estes Motel.” She wrinkled her nose and Whelan laughed.

  “Interesting choice. You get to experience the Magnificent Mile without paying top dollar.” The Estes was one of several small motels at the south end of Michigan Avenue, out of the “action” but close enough to reach it. There was nothing remarkable about any of them, and a tourist with money wouldn’t give them a second look, but you could stay in one and tell your friends you had a room a block or two from the Hilton.

  “Did you plan it that way, Jean?”

  “The cabdriver took me there from the train station. I told him I wanted to stay in downtown Chicago without spending a lot of money. It was his second choice. First he took me to a place called the Quality Inn. There was a nasty-looking tavern right across the street from it.”

  “Have you gotten to see any of Michigan Avenue?”

  “Oh, it’s gorgeous. I really had no idea a big city would look like that.”

  She looked over her shoulder out at Lawrence and he read her thought.

  “But this is more like what you pictured, right?” She smiled and nodded. “Well, okay, Jean. I’ll give you a call in a day or two and report on what I’ve found.” A thought struck him. “You know, I may not be able to reach the people I need to talk to till Monday. People have a way of disappearing from the office on Friday afternoon in the summer.”

  She smiled and pursed her lips and the dimple reappeared. “I know I should just go back to Hope, but I can’t leave. I’ve been here three days and it’s driving me crazy already. I’ve called my mother twice long distance.”

  “Long distance on a hotel phone?”

  She looked away. “I’ve got some money. I was going to go to Mexico with two of my girlfriends in September, so I’ve got that much to spend looking for Gerry. And that’s why I’d feel better if we could talk about money. Isn’t there a…couldn’t I leave a deposit? Or something?”

  “A retainer. A retainer is customary. You can give me a hundred dollars if that’s convenient, Jean.” She smiled, fished in her purse, came out with a wallet and drew a crisp hundred-dollar bill from it.

  “A word of free advice: don’t carry big bills, don’t carry all your money on you, don’t carry all your money in one place on your person when you go out.”

  She laughed and looked embarrassed. “That’s some ‘word.’ I’m breaking all the rules at once, right?”

  “Not all of them.” He signaled for his check, paid the bill at the register, then went back and left the waitress half a buck.

  Outside on Lawrence they stood in front of the restaurant and watched traffic for a moment and he realized he didn’t know quite what to do next. She looked at him and nodded.

  “I’d better be going.”

  “I left my car at home, or I could give you a ride.”

  “That’s okay. I can take a cab.”

  He flagged a Checker just pulling away from the pool hall and the cabbie hit his brakes and left a layer of tire on the pavement. He took her across the street to the cab, opened the door and helped her in. As she tucked her legs under her, the denim skirt rode up her thighs and he looked away as she fought with it.

  “Driver, the lady would like to go to the Estes Motel on South Michigan.”

  The driver, a Nigerian-looking man in his fifties, nodded curtly. He looked at Jean Agee. “I’ll be talking to you, Jean.”

  “Just give me a call and let me know what’s going on, Mr. Whelan. Maybe you could even come down and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. Or lunch, even.” She smiled and tried to look casual.

  “Best offer I’ve had all day,” he said, and closed the cab door.

  He struck out with the utilities: no one had any record of Gerry Agee or Gerald Agee under any spelling. He went out. Late afternoon and the people of the street were running out of gas. On Wilson, where he made a quick stop at the Wilson Men’s Club Hotel to show Gerry’s picture, the dan
cers weren’t dancing anymore. The neighborhood was parboiled and the boogiers had gone off in search of doorways. The street was still crowded with strolling groups of kids, Vietnamese women, students emerging with a groan from the air conditioning of the college into the lung-searing air of the street. No one at the hotel recognized the young choirboy type in the photograph. On the corner by the newsstand, he showed the picture to a couple of old men who ignored it and asked him for change. He gave them each a couple of quarters. A well-dressed man in a light blue summer suit stopped and stared angrily at Whelan.

  “Don’t you realize you’re helping them buy more poison?”

  “They eat sometimes,” Whelan said, walking away.

  “You’re just poisoning them,” the man persisted.

  “Mister, you’re out of your league here.” He walked up Broadway. Across the street, in front of the Walgreen’s where Art Shears had bought his last drink, a young dark-haired cop was flirting with two pretty Vietnamese girls. The cop waved to him. Whelan returned the wave. He no longer remembered the cop’s name and told himself to take a look at the nameplate next time they were close.

  Near Leland, where the el tracks made a gray curve across Broadway, an empty storefront bore a new sign:

  SOON HERE

  KAMPUCHEA RESTAURANT AND GROCERY

  CAMBODIAN & CHINESE FOOD

  He wondered what Cambodian food would be like and guessed it would be somewhere between Thai and Vietnamese, which made it a winner. “Hot damn,” he said to himself. Then he realized he’d be trying this one by himself, more than likely. In the past, he’d tried out the new restaurants, the new cuisines, with Liz, who liked to eat almost as much as he did. He wouldn’t be taking her to this one.

  A drunk was urinating against a telephone as Whelan entered the alley. The man wobbled slightly and sprayed the area for several feet in each direction.

  “Hey, don’t let me interrupt,” Whelan said.

  The same somber face watched the alley from the third-floor window. Whelan waved and went up the back stairs calmly, making no effort to be quiet. When he reached the third floor, he saw the sun-bleached curtain move and banged on the screen door. When no answer came, he banged some more, louder, rhythmically, for perhaps half a minute.

  “Lemme alone!” came the voice, louder than he’d heard it before. Angry and frightened.

  “I just want to ask a couple questions. You don’t even have to let me in. How the hell can that hurt?”

  “I don’t want no trouble. I’m by myself here. Some of these goddamn people are crazy.”

  “Yeah, right. And they killed a friend of mine right down here in your alley and I want to find them.”

  “I talked to the cops. Talked to you, too. You said you weren’t a cop. Now get outta here.”

  Whelan took a deep breath to stem his rising anger, told himself that this was just a bleached-out old man living his last days in a place that terrified him. “Okay,” he said to himself. “Time to bring out the big guns.”

  “Hey, buddy. Look out your back window for a second.” The curtain moved slightly, then moved a few inches, till Whelan could see the old man’s pale blue eyes and the old man could see the twenty-dollar bill he was holding up to the window. The eyes seemed to latch on to the bill for a moment, and then the old man surprised Whelan by laughing, a high-pitched wheezing laugh but genuine, and the old man shook his head.

  The curtain fell back and he heard shuffling footsteps in front of the door and the old man’s voice muttering, “This place is like a goddamn movie.” The door opened and then the screen door, and Whelan found himself staring at a slightly potbellied old man of medium height. His white hair was thin and worn short but hadn’t been cut for some time: it was beginning to cover his ears and his collar. He wore a faded flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows. He smelled musty, a stew of old cotton, body odor, mildew and cooking smells.

  He looked Whelan over briefly and then stepped back from the door. “You come on in. I don’t need nobody knowin’ my business.”

  “Thanks.” He entered the apartment. The old man moved back a few steps and stood in the center of his little kitchen, unsmiling, and watched Whelan look around.

  “It ain’t exactly Buckingham Palace, is it.”

  “Nothing wrong with it,” Whelan said, looking around. A battle was being fought here, a time-honored, familiar battle, and the old man was losing ground. The place was dusty and there were dirty dishes in the sink—a plate and a bowl and some silverware—but this was not a dirty apartment. There were a couple of hanging plants on the curtain rod over the back window and there was a vase of some sort on the kitchen table holding a few sprigs of dried flowers. He pointed to the vase.

  “My ma used to keep dried flowers on the kitchen table,” he said to establish some common ground.

  “Habit I picked up from my wife,” the man said. His late wife, Whelan knew. He could smell the ancient yellowing linoleum and the dry wood around the doors and windows and the tired dusty padding of the old man’s furniture but could tell that this was a man who made a daily effort to stave off loneliness by keeping busy around his place, to fight off disorder and eventual surrender by keeping things together. Somewhere in the background Whelan was aware of a metallic voice, a radio.

  The old man shrugged and said, “Come on into the front. I like to sit there. It’s cooler.”

  Cooler it was, dark and almost comfortable. The stained shades were pulled down and there were more plants, in heavy stands in the various corners of the room. There was a short green couch and a heavy armchair, into which the old man sank. On the table beside him there was a yellow clock radio that made a jarring contrast with the forestlike darkness of the room. The old man saw him looking at the radio.

  “I like to keep it on. Listen to the news. I got a TV there,” he said, pointing to a small black-and-white on a folding table on the far side of the room. “I don’t look at it much, though. I like the radio. It’s what I grew up with.” The pale eyes studied Whelan for a moment and then he looked at his radio.

  “It’s a nice one.”

  The old man’s face brightened. “Five bucks. At that pawnshop over on Wilson.”

  “Got yourself a deal.”

  “You gonna stand there all day? Take a load off.” Whelan sat on the sofa. “You like radio?”

  Whelan nodded. “Yeah. I watch a little TV but I listen to the radio a lot. Some things radio just does better. Ballgames.”

  The old man nodded. “Yeah, I like the ballgames on the radio.”

  “And fights. There’s nothing like listening to a big fight on the radio. I remember listening to them with my dad, late fifties, early sixties: Marciano and Archie Moore, Patterson and Moore, Patterson and Johanssen, Clay and Liston. There isn’t any way watching a fight on TV can touch that kind of suspense.”

  The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Marciano and Archie Moore? You don’t look that old.”

  “I’m thirty-nine.”

  The old man nodded. “I heard ’em all on the radio, as long as they been puttin’ ’em on the radio. I heard Dempsey.”

  “You don’t look old enough.”

  “Yes, I did. I was seven or eight. Heard the first and second Tunney fights. Like yourself—I listened with my old man and my grandpa.”

  Whelan leaned back on the sofa. “Dempsey, huh?” The old man nodded and looked around the room and Whelan tried to get him back. “Cub game tonight.”

  “I know. Nine-oh-five from Houston. I’ll listen for a while but they just can’t play there in that place with the roof on it.”

  “You have a nice place here.”

  “I like it fine. It’s what I got, so I’m satisfied. A lot of people my age, they’re in homes or on the street. And I got a place of my own.”

  “You all right? I mean, around here?”

  A smile came to the old man’s face. “Are you nuts? Who’s all right up here? Nobody belongs in a neighborhood like thi
s, but it’s the way things are.”

  He looked around his living room for a moment and Whelan tried to plug the silence.

  “Look, why don’t we go up the street, get a sandwich and something cold to go with it. And if you feel like it, you can tell me—”

  The old man snorted. “You think you got to feed me?” He looked at his furniture. “It ain’t much, is it. No, I don’t guess it is. Seems like something to me, though. It’s clean…well, a woman wouldn’t think it was clean, but it’s probably as clean as your place—am I right?” Whelan laughed and nodded. “And, anyhow, I lost my woman fourteen years ago. That’s when I moved into this place. Makes more sense for one person to live in a small place. But at least I got a place. I ain’t living in a cardboard box like some of these poor bastards. And the rent’s paid, yes sir.” He jabbed a knotty finger at Whelan. “Oh, I know what you thought. You thought for twenty dollars I was gonna do cartwheels and piss in the wind. Well, let me tell you something—”

  “I didn’t think anything like that at all, I was out of ideas. I was desperate to talk to somebody who could help me, that’s all. There was no insult intended.”

  The old man appeared to be mollified. He nodded slightly and tapped his fingers on the worn arm of the chair.

  “You’re a private detective, you said. That last time.”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t a case for me. This guy was a friend of mine and I want to see somebody’s ass in storage for it.”

  He realized he had suddenly leaned forward and started to raise his voice, and he sank back onto the sofa, slightly embarrassed. The old man raised his eyebrows.

  “Not as slick as you like to let on, are you?”

  “Nope. Guess not.”

  “You any good at this kind of work?”

  “Mostly I find runaways. And, yeah. I’m good at that. I don’t exactly know why, I just am. But like I said, this isn’t a case.”