Death in Uptown

by Michael Raleigh

  He leaned for a few minutes against his trunk and finished his cigarette. He’d have to get an early tow or the city would tow it for him, to a city pound conveniently located in a burned-out neighborhood somewhere at the outer edge of the solar system, and if he didn’t get it out in time, it would be a skeleton when he saw it again.

  Add the cost of a tow to the price of two new tires, and his wallet was taking as bad a beating as his face. He started walking toward Lawrence and eventually caught a cab home, where he had a couple of beers and soaked himself in the tub for half an hour. He looked at the late news for a few minutes, heard nothing to cheer himself up and decided the only way to improve his day was to end it. He went to bed.

  It was hot and airless in the room and he twisted and tangled himself in the sheets till he began to drift off. He was dreaming, a dream in which many people were chasing him up and down streets he didn’t recognize, and as he ran a ringing sound filled the air, and he woke to the sound of his doorbell. He looked at his alarm clock: 1:15. He’d been in bed for perhaps forty-five minutes.

  There was a pause and the ring came again, long and insistent, and he pulled on a pair of pants and went to the front door. Through the small window in the door he could see a person moving around the front of the porch and apparently peering into his front window. He grabbed an umbrella from the hall tree, pulled the door open and stepped directly out onto the porch.

  “Something I can help you with?”

  Jean Agee let out a yelp and nearly fell backward over his banister.

  “Jesus, Jean, what are you doing here at this time of night? Do you know what these streets are like at night?”

  She seemed to have trouble catching her breath, and her eyes went to the dark object in his hand. He held it up.

  “It’s just an umbrella. I didn’t know who was out here. I had a little trouble earlier tonight and I thought you were the fella I had my trouble with, come calling again. And somebody broke in over the weekend.”

  “Oh, dear. What kind of trouble did you have? Were you hurt again?”

  He winced at “again” and smiled. “Not much. I got at least a draw this time. The other guy took off. I was doing pretty well till he kicked me.” He pointed to his midsection, saw her look down and realized he was wearing no shirt.

  “Oh, it left a mark.” She took a couple of steps forward, raised her hand but did not quite touch the long red abrasion just below the ribs. Whelan swallowed.

  “Well, come on in and tell me what you’re doing here.”

  Inside, he sat her on his couch, went to his bedroom and put on a clean shirt.

  He came out buttoning it. “Get you anything? I’ve got some beer.”

  “Will you have one if I have one?”

  “Sure. I’m a perfect host.” He fetched a couple of the dark Augsburgers and she made a sour face when he came in.

  “Dark beer. I don’t know if I can drink dark beer.” She laughed nervously and took a beer from him.

  “Glass?”

  “No, this is fine.” She took a long pull and gulped some of it down, and he knew she was trying to guzzle the whole thing without tasting it. She looked around his house. “This is…nice.”

  “Why is that so amazing?”

  She smiled at him and there was high color in her cheeks. “’Cause I’ve seen your office.” She laughed.

  Whelan laughed and wondered why he was so nervous. “I don’t live in my office. I live here, so it’s got to be decent.” She nodded and looked around again and sipped at her beer, still holding her breath as she drank.

  “You want to tell me why you’re here at this time of night?”

  She nodded and picked at the label of the bottle. “Yes. But give me a minute, all right? Would you tell me how you got hurt?”

  “I got a little daring and went down to the park to see if I could find…one of the guys I’ve been looking for.” He noted his own hesitancy and realized that, despite what Captain Wallis had told him, he was still trying to make Gerry Agee out of Billy the Kid. He thought for a moment and it struck him that the captain and J.B. hadn’t seen the street boy he was looking for: they’d reacted to Whelan’s very sketchy second-hand description.

  “Jean, how tall would you say Gerry is?”

  Her eyes widened and a new look came into them, and he repeated, “How tall?”

  “Taller than you. Six-one or six-two. Why?”

  “In the picture, his hair looks blondish. Would you call him blond?”

  She hesitated and then said, “It’s sort of brown but it’s really a reddish-brown. If you see him in the sunlight, you can see all these little red highlights…Why do you want to know about that? You think the man you had the fight with…you think it was Gerry?” She was incredulous.

  He looked at her before answering. She was sitting rigidly at the far end of the couch, body language screaming mistrust at him. He saw that her powder-blue sweater clung to her breasts and that she’d put on eye shadow, but there was nothing for him in her eyes at the moment.

  “I’m not even saying…” And then he nodded because it was the truth. “It’s…there’s a possibility, that’s all.”

  “A possibility of what?” Openly hostile now.

  He sighed and shook his head. “A possibility that your brother is the young guy I’ve been looking for.”

  “You’ve seen the picture—is it him?” She leaned forward a little, challenging him to make some sense.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t look like him, but you know what I think about that picture. And it was dark, and this kid had a couple weeks’ growth of beard on his face, and his hair was hanging in his eyes and he was throwing punches. But his hair was red.”

  “Gerry’s not a redhead. Nobody’s ever called him a redhead.” She watched him and he saw himself from her vantage point, a beat-up private eye with a seedy office in a lousy neighborhood, a guy given the simple assignment of finding her brother and then turning it into something hateful and insulting.

  “I only said it was a possibility. I’m looking for a bunch of people I don’t know, people I haven’t seen, for the most part, and I’m trying to make sense of what little I know. Maybe it wasn’t Gerry tonight. Probably wasn’t. But there are a couple of things I haven’t told you…about Gerry.” He sighed and wanted her to leave, wanted to be back in bed.

  “Like what?” Posture said defiance, eyes said something else.

  “At the YMCA they told me a couple of things that I didn’t think necessary to tell you. I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily unless I…Shit. They told me Gerry was frequently heard talking to himself in his room.”

  She gave him a smirk, eyes still worried. “A lot of people talk to themselves. I do. You probably do. What’s the big deal?” She shook her head slowly and bathed him in contempt.

  “These were conversations,” he said bluntly. “He was talking to other people and…they were talking to him. They were angry conversations, Jean, confrontations with people, and they made him angry and he was heard bellowing at these people and speaking in different voices.”

  Her mouth opened and the anger drained from her face to be replaced by shock. She tried to speak and began to breathe audibly through her mouth and she started to shake her head.

  “He was always so sensitive. Things got to him that didn’t bother other people. And his drinking—is it possible that all of this was because of his drinking?” She looked to him frankly for insight that would soften this portrait of her cherished brother.

  Whelan looked at her and saw a girl who’d long suspected that her brother had lost it and he was bitterly angry at having to confirm it all.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But if you’re asking me to give an opinion, no, I don’t really think so. But there was something else that bothers me. He had a…a thing for these guys on the street. The derelicts and winos. He really disliked them.” He shrugged to himself and looked down at his bare feet.

  She began to cry, so
ftly at first and then louder, and he made no move toward her. He held himself rigidly and refused to allow himself to touch her. She covered her face in both hands and let it all out, and only an idiot would have thought she needed somebody’s hands on her.

  Whelan looked down at the rug and waited, and when she was done crying he looked at her. She was facing him on the sofa, cheeks wet and red and tears still running out of the corners of her eyes and making dark smears of mascara. She sniffled, straightened, fished in her purse for a handkerchief and came up empty, and he bounded up to get a Kleenex, relieved to be doing something useful, to be moving. He handed her a couple of tissues, waited till she’d wiped her face and dabbed at her eyes. She smiled at him and there was shyness in it, awkwardness.

  She looked at the makeup smeared on the Kleenex. “I bet I look like something out of a horror movie.”

  “Not to me.”

  She smiled again, said, “Thank you,” and looked down at the rug.

  “I’m really sorry about all this,” he said.

  “I know you are. And it has nothing to do with you. You’re a kind man and you—well, you’re very honest. I’m grateful for that. You don’t really think I’m as naive as I sound, do you? I knew there was a good chance you’d find out that Gerry was dead, or that he was living in the gutter like these poor old men, or that he was in…well, jail or something like that. I knew that. It’s just that I don’t want to know he’s been responsible for something terrible like this. I just can’t face it, and I sure can’t take that home to my mom. I’ll make something up if I have to but I won’t tell her something like that about her son. I won’t.”

  Somebody else probably will, he thought, but said nothing.

  “Look, there’s also a chance, a good chance, that he has no connection with any of what has happened. If we look at the facts, we don’t have much. A couple of guys at the Y said he had some problems, and they’re apparently things you weren’t totally aware of. It doesn’t mean he’s killed anybody. I just want you to be aware of the possibilities.”

  “But what you said about him…in his room. That was true?”

  “Yeah. That was true.”

  She looked down. “So we can say he came here and lost his mind. That much seems to be true.”

  “We’re not doctors. Maybe he has moments when he has trouble telling the difference between reality and his own…He needs help, wherever he is. That’s the way you should probably think about it.”

  And I hope that’s all it is.

  When she seemed to be composed, he lit a cigarette, waited a few moments and then leaned toward her.

  “It might be time for you to think about heading back to Hope. I can always call you there with my reports. I don’t see what can be accomplished by your staying here. You’ll spend a lot of your money and waste your time.”

  He started to say more but stopped, shrugged and took a puff on his cigarette.

  She looked at him for what seemed to be a long time and then smiled. “You’re really a nice man. I feel like I’m complicating your work. But you don’t have to worry about me.”

  “It’s none of my business, Jean, but you’re making me nervous. I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for…all day, and I called you once or twice yesterday.” He felt his face redden. He hadn’t intended to tell her that if she didn’t ask.

  She nodded. “I know. I knew you were trying to get in touch with me and I knew I was acting crazy. Behaving strangely. I knew I was. I just didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

  He cleared his throat and looked down as he spoke. “Look, if I was out of line the other night, if I offended you—”

  She laughed. “Oh, you weren’t out of line. I think I was, probably. And I felt a little strange about it the next morning, but it never occurred to me that you were the one that was at fault. I just felt a little weird about it, you know? So I didn’t want to face you right away, at least not till I’d had some time to think about everything. But that wasn’t why I didn’t want to talk.”

  “Feel like talking about it?”

  “Sure. I woke up yesterday morning and couldn’t shake the feeling that Gerry’s dead. That he’s dead and he’s been dead for months and we didn’t know it. So I just went out and tried to have something to eat and couldn’t. I started walking. I must have walked for two hours, I have no idea what neighborhoods I went through. At one point I must have been in a poor neighborhood: there were a lot of vacant lots and some abandoned buildings and all the people were black, and they were staring at me like I was a crazy woman. Then I realized I was crying and had tears in my eyes and everything.

  “Then I was in this strange place where everybody was shopping, there were blocks and blocks of stores and it was really kind of neat but it smelled awful, it smelled of onions, the whole neighborhood smelled of onions.”

  “That was Maxwell Street. You covered some ground, girl. That’s a far piece from the Estes Motel. It’s kind of a Chicago landmark, Maxwell Street. You probably missed some bargains—and you should have stopped and had a Polish with grilled onions, then you wouldn’t have noticed the smell.”

  She laughed and covered her eyes with her hands. “I had no idea where I was. Then I found a phone and called my mom just to hear a familiar voice but I couldn’t talk to her for more than five minutes because I started thinking about how much all this could hurt her. When I was finished, I got a cab and had him take me to a museum.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the elephants in the fighting pose, and the dinosaurs.”

  “The Field Museum.”

  “Then I went and sat on a bench near the lakefront, where the boats are parked.”

  “Moored.”

  “Whatever. I sat there in the sun and got all sweaty and felt sorry for myself. I’d probably have stayed there all day but this repulsive man came over and sat down next to me and started saying gross things to me. I got up and walked away and when I looked back, he was saying something to some young boy riding by on a bike.”

  Whelan laughed. “Hurt your ego, huh?”

  She laughed with him, buried her whole face in her hands and laughed till her body shook. When she calmed down, she took a sip of her beer, made a face and looked at him.

  “I just don’t know how to deal with your city, Mr. Paul Whelan. I don’t understand it. It scares me and it’s fascinating, and I think half the people in it must be lonely and I think I’ve seen twenty or thirty people on the street who are just plain crazy. And the real reason I didn’t talk to you yesterday was that I really wanted to, badly. I wanted some human contact.”

  He felt suddenly embarrassed and tried to joke it off. “What about the man in the park?”

  “Very funny, but not what I had in mind. I—well, do you still want to know why I came here?”

  “I guess I know. You’re scared and you feel alone. You—” He shrugged. She finished her beer and looked at him, and just to be doing something he got up and took it from her. She stood and took his hand and pulled him to her and he was surprised at her strength. She put both hands around his neck and kissed him and he dropped the bottle. He pressed against her, felt the firm young body against him, felt her nudging against his crotch. He could smell her perfume and soap and the smell of sweat and her tongue was in his mouth. She broke it off and kissed him again and bit him, and he could picture the perfect little white teeth, and he ran his lips across her neck. His hands moved up and down her back and down to her hips and then his fingers were under her sweater, touching her skin. He moved his hands around to her stomach and she stepped back a little to allow him to lift up her sweater. When his fingers touched her breasts she groaned and he heard himself gasp.

  “Been as long for you as it has for me?”

  “Yeah,” he said through clenched teeth, and led her to his bedroom.

  She bent over the bed and kissed him on the forehead.

  “What time is it?” Then he noticed she was dressed. “Now where
are you going?”

  She laughed. “To my room, to get a shower and put on fresh clothes and go shopping. I ruined the past two days. Today I’m going shopping at your famous stores.”

  He got up on one elbow, suddenly self-conscious about his unkempt self and unwashed body. She looked perfect and he could smell her perfume. When she kissed him, he smelled his mouthwash.

  “Wait—” She paused at his door. “Are you gonna let this get to you like—”

  She laughed. “No. No way. Call me tonight.” And she left.

  He stared at the alarm clock till its features came into focus: 6:30. He sank back onto his pillow and his nostrils were rewarded with the scent of Miss Jean Agee of Hope, Michigan, and he decided to lie there for a while.

  Eleven

  The mechanic told him the tires couldn’t be saved. Whelan asked him to look at the air-conditioning system, too, and the guy said the car would probably be ready by noon. He took a Lawrence Avenue bus to the office.

  They must have parked the Caprice around the corner so they could surprise him, and they did, stepping out of the doorway of Sam’s Carniceria just as Whelan passed it. Bauman blocked his way and a pedestrian behind Whelan tried to pass and said, “Excuse me,” and Bauman barked, “Go around!” and the man did. Rooney stood a little to one side, near the curb, and Bauman flashed his badge and this time held it long enough so that passersby and even gawkers from the bus would know that Whelan was being rousted.

  “You’re a prick, Bauman. That’s the longest anybody’s ever seen your badge.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Whelan. We’d like a word with you.”

  “What’s going on now, Bauman?”

  Bauman looked at Rooney. “His office, okay?”

  Rooney shrugged and looked distastefully at the building.

  “C’mon, Roon, it ain’t gonna bite.”

  “I’ll even order coffee,” Whelan said, and Bauman gave a short flat laugh, then took his elbow and gave him a little shove toward the building, a shove they both knew was unnecessary.

  Inside the office, Whelan called the coffee shop and ordered coffee and some donuts. Then he put down the phone and said, “Now what, boys?”