Death in Uptown

by Michael Raleigh

  Bauman looked at Rooney and raised his eyebrows. Rooney frowned.

  “You were at Clarendon Park last night, Mr. Whelan. Correct?”

  “That’s a safe bet, Detective Rooney. You saw me.”

  “Can you give an accounting of your movements the rest of the evening?”

  Whelan gave a truncated version of his bizarre evening and had their undivided attention when he described his encounter with Billy.

  Bauman leaned forward and made a show of examining his face. “No fresh ones, huh? Musta done pretty fair, eh, Whelan?”

  “About a draw. I landed a shot but he was better with his feet. We rolled around on the sidewalk a little bit, then he booked. He’s fast, I’m not. He got away.”

  Bauman scratched his check and said, “Lemme see your hands.”

  Whelan held out his hands, knuckles out.

  “Got a boo-boo there, Shamus. That one’s swollen.”

  “Like I said, I landed one. Nothing fancy. Smacked him a good one just under his eye but that was about it. I’m no street fighter.”

  Bauman nodded and looked at Rooney. “Well, he ain’t gonna get no rematch now, is he?”

  Rooney ignored him and looked at Whelan with his sad, rheumy eyes. “Mr. Whelan, this street punk, this Billy the Kid, was found dead in the park this morning by a jogger.”

  Whelan felt the nausea uncoil in his stomach. “How?”

  “He was strangled. He was beat up pretty bad, too, but I talked to the M.E. and he says cause of death strangulation,” Bauman said. “Pockets pulled inside out and all that good shit.” He stared unblinking at Whelan.

  “Know when it happened?”

  “Not for sure.”

  “No, we don’t,” Rooney said curtly, and Whelan decided to ignore him whenever possible.

  Bauman inclined his head to one side. “The M.E. guy took a wild guess and said around midnight. Or pretty soon after.” He smiled. “Now when did you say you were there, Whelan? Like that Sinatra song? ‘In the wee small hours of the morning’?”

  “No, I was home by then.” And I’ve got an alibi, he thought, but held it back, his hole card. Then a thought struck him. “And you’re pretty sure I didn’t do it, or we probably wouldn’t be here. We’d be down at Area Six.” Rooney squinted and looked as though he would debate the point but Bauman grinned.

  “Maybe so, Whelan, maybe so, but you gotta admit you don’t look so good on this. And while I’m at it, you want a piece of advice?”

  “No.”

  “It’s free. Give some thought to, you know, finding something else to pay the rent, okay? You got your ass kicked—what, twice since Friday? Great record.”

  Whelan ignored him. There was a knock on the door. “Here’s breakfast, guys.” He went to the door and paid the kid for the coffee and donuts and handed the bag to Bauman.

  “Could I see the body?”

  Bauman sipped his coffee, burned his lip, said “Goddamn. What for?”

  “I have a client. She’s looking for her brother.”

  “You told me. So what? What’s that got to do with this?”

  “So there’s a little nagging voice I been hearing that says her brother might be Billy the Kid.”

  “You saw ’im.”

  “It was dark. I want to see him in the light.”

  Bauman bit into his donut, tore away a third of it in one bite and mumbled, “Why not.”

  He suppressed the urge to hold her and forced himself to stand with one hand in his pocket as the morgue attendant opened one of the compartments and pulled out the gurney. He could almost feel her stiffen, saw the utter terror in her face and saw Bauman watching her with interest. The detective studied her face intently but still found time to give her body a careful once-over. The attendant looked at her, then at Whelan. He was a young man, in his early twenties, and it was obvious he hadn’t worked here long. There was no color in his face and he continually wet his lips and blinked. He seemed to sense that the appointment was Whelan’s and finally said, “You wanna view the, uh, body now, sir?”

  Whelan looked at the girl and nodded. The attendant pulled the covering back from the upper half of the body and stepped back.

  The breath went out of her and her eyes bulged and her mouth worked, and she began shaking her head. She looked at Whelan and shook her head again and turned to grab his shoulder.

  “It’s not him, is it?”

  “No.” She buried her face in his shoulder.

  Whelan looked at the face of Billy the Kid and realized how little resemblance there was between this dead boy of the streets and the face of youthful promise in the photo. Grasping at straws. In death, Billy’s face took on a different aspect; it was not the face of a hardened street fighter but a boy’s face, the face of a young one who would always be a little confused, always kept a little off-balance by the world, always losing. He saw the small bruising beneath the right eye and felt a pang of remorse. He looked closer, saw the red marks on the throat, the deep marks half hidden by the red hair, where the boy had been struck. He looked at the attendant and shook his head.

  The young man covered up the face and slid the body back into its compartment, clearly as relieved as anyone that the process was over.

  Outside, Whelan helped her into the taxi and looked at Bauman. The detective was still watching Jean. He looked at Whelan.

  “So who is this broad?”

  “I told you. She’s a client. Looking for her brother. It was a long shot, but I thought maybe…” He shrugged and looked around.

  “So he’s a runaway, or what?”

  “He’s running, all right, but he’s not a teenager. I think he’s out on the street somewhere. He’s a drunk, for one thing.” He thought for a moment, then pulled out the picture. “Want to take another look?”

  Bauman glanced at the picture. “The choirboy. No, I don’t need to take another look. If I see him, I’ll let you know.” He looked back at the girl. “That’s a nice piece. Real nice.” He looked at Whelan with surprise. “You layin’ her?”

  “We’re gonna take up a collection, Bauman. Send you to charm school. No, I’m not.”

  “But you’d like to. I’d love to get next to something like that. But that broad’s half your age, am I right?”

  Whelan looked at Jean. “Yeah, she’s half my age.”

  They said little as the cab took them back to the Estes. He wanted to talk but there was a brittleness to her silence and he let it go. When she got out of the cab, she leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “You still want me to call tonight or should I leave you alone for a while?”

  “No, call me. I’ll probably be spooked now.” She forced a smile.

  “You look tired.”

  She forced another smile. “A friend of mine kept me up late.” He laughed, relieved, and watched her go into the motel.

  The car was ready. The mechanic, a slender Mexican named Joe, had put on a complete set of tires, explaining that the two good ones were too worn, that a car with new tires on only one side of the car would continually pull to the bad side. There was Freon in his air conditioning system now. Tires, Freon, labor and the tow came to $305.

  “I’m having a bad week,” he told the mechanic.

  “Next week gonna be better.”

  He drove south to Fullerton, to the Lincoln Park Lagoon. He got out and walked, finally stopping beneath an enormous cottonwood that had to predate the park and most of the city. He sat there and had a cigarette and went over the night again, reveling in it, rehashing each glorious, surprising second of it, and after a while had to laugh at himself. With an effort, he made himself think of her brother. Some way or another it would be necessary to make an end of this search, to put some sort of answer together for her, if they were to have any chance together.

  Then it struck him that the answer might end it. If Gerry Agee turned out to be the dark figure in Whelan’s imagination, the animal who killed derelicts in a sick fury, then t
his thing with Jean Agee was over. And if Gerry was a corpse somewhere in someone else’s morgue, then it was over, too. If the kid was dead, or if he turned out to be a killer, then the girl would go back to Michigan and, consciously or not, would do everything a normal person does to wipe out the recollection of evil. They might have a tearful last evening together, and promise to get together as soon as things calmed down, but Whelan knew enough of the human reaction to trouble to know he’d never see her again. He tried to look six months, a year into his future, and couldn’t see anybody but Paul Whelan.

  He finished his smoke and told himself that he had another job, that it was a good time to get busy.

  He stopped back at his apartment for a quick turkey sandwich and left again. He drove the same streets, over and over, seeing the same knots of men standing on the corners, the same listless faces in the windows, same curtains knotted carelessly back to let in the breeze. Some of the faces stared back at him, some made him for a cop, others frowned, recognizing him, and he realized he’d cruised some of these isolated pockets of Uptown a dozen times.

  He passed the Sal Army Center and saw J.B. blocking the entry of a very drunk young man. At a stoplight, two Puerto Rican girls in short skirts and tank tops waved at him and he realized he’d been staring at them.

  He drove back to the building on Beacon. He parked his car down the street and sat there for a while listening to the radio and trying to think. It seemed to him that squatters normally took the lower floors of an abandoned building, and Sharkey was supposed to be up in years. But the apartment on Sunnyside had been on the second floor, and from where he sat he could see that the boards had been removed from the third-floor windows of an apartment. He looked up at the windows and sighed. A smart guy would wait till dark and have a chance of finding someone in the place. A smart guy would also then get his behind kicked in the rematch.

  Well, I’m not a smart guy and I want to see what’s up there. Now.

  He went around the corner and entered the alley that ran behind the building. The backyard was a concrete courtyard. There were piles of trash and yellowing newspaper, and a large heap of scorched wood, presumably from the building’s innards, and an ash-coated steel drum where street people had warmed themselves in harsher weather. Not that this weather wasn’t just as harsh. The building cut off what little breeze came in from the lake and Whelan felt as if he’d entered a microwave. A small movement caught his eye and he found himself looking into a pair of dull yellowing eyes in a yellow face. A thin ragged man sat on the cement in the shade of the staircase and watched him. Whelan nodded slightly and looked away. Then he looked up at the third floor.

  He thought of asking the old man who stayed on the third floor and decided it was pointless. He went quietly up the stairs, going slowly and listening for anything. At the curve between the second and third floors he looked up and went the rest of the way watching. The staircase led to two apartments on the third floor. On the porch outside the first he stopped and looked around. It appeared that squatters had begun the process of stripping the building for firewood. One railing was gone completely, making the far side of the porch a perilous place to be; the trapdoors leading to the roof were gone over both apartments, and the screen door was missing on the nearer one. The windows of this apartment were shut; the one farther from him had a window open, a kitchen window, just cracked a couple of inches or so but open nonetheless. He moved over to the door, put his hand noiselessly to the doorknob, took a breath, turned it and put a shoulder into the door.

  It opened without resistance and he was hit by the airless heat within, by the dry smells of ancient wallpaper and crumbling plaster and rotting wood, and from beyond this kitchen, other smells, the rank smells of human life at the lowest rungs of existence: garbage and rotting food and human waste. He waited for a moment to listen, and became aware of a human presence: a man’s sweat, the musty odors of old clothing, and he knew he wasn’t alone. He took a step, heard linoleum crack and fought the sudden and powerful notion that he was going to die.

  “Anybody there? I need to talk to somebody, that’s all. Just a couple of questions.”

  He moved forward to the door of the kitchen, listening, holding his breath and feeling the sweat rolling down his back and neck. And then he just stopped.

  He was standing at the door to what had once been a dining room, presumably a place where a normal happy family took meals, and in it was a human being. Whelan held his breath and his motion and suppressed his fear, and listened. The person in this room, whose existence was at that moment nearly palpable, was not moving, not breathing. He moved forward into the darker room and stooped down low and peered straight ahead to allow his eyes to adjust; a few feet beyond, he could see the empty living room, lit by the open window on the street side.

  Gradually he could make out piles of trash in the corners of the dining room, fast-food containers and paper cups and what appeared to be a small pile of blankets. On the floor between living and dining room was a discarded coat. And in the center of the room, facing the front and the intruder as he’d done in life, was a dead man. He heard a pained voice, his own voice, saying, “Oh, Lord.”

  He walked over to the body and knelt down, knowing before he could actually make out the features that this was Hector. Hector Green, loyal friend and bodyguard and a hard man to cross.

  He stooped down and put his hand to the floor for balance and touched something thick and wet and sticky. There was blood on his fingers, congealed blood, thickly clotted, more black than red, and there was more on the far side of the body. He pulled the man up by one shoulder and saw the surprised look on the face and, lower, the deep gashing across the stomach and chest. He’d been stabbed and slashed in several places. The front of Hector’s old flannel shirt was matted, a shiny mass of blood, and Whelan thought he might be sick. You can never get used to it, he thought, and took a deep breath. He looked at the dead man’s face and felt a rush of pain.

  “Couldn’t take you in a fight, old buddy, could he? I bet you were a good guy, Hector.”

  He looked around the room and felt a rush of frustration. I’m gonna find them all after they’re dead.

  He allowed the stiffened body to roll back to its original position and got up to have a look around, knowing it was useless. There was no sign of the hunted man called Sharkey who was somehow the explanation for all this. If Hector was dead, how far away could Sharkey be? Could he continue to survive without his bodyguard. Okay, he thought, now I’m looking for one old guy that can’t move too fast. There was no blood that he could see in any of the other rooms, no sign that there had been violence at either of the doors, no second corpse. The front door wouldn’t lock and it looked as though someone had put a shoulder into it, but that was as likely to have been Hector and Sharkey first getting in as it was their assailant.

  He called Bauman from a public phone, got Rooney instead. Then he gave his news, heard the suspicion in Rooney’s voice, the irritation at having to go out in the heat and tramp around in a boarded-up building.

  Life’s hard, Rooney.

  “Bauman’s in the can, Whelan. We’ll be there in a couple of minutes. You stay there, you hear? You stay there.” Rooney was muttering to himself when he hung up.

  “A couple of minutes” proved to be twenty, and Whelan met them at the curb when they pulled up. A few seconds behind them a squad car rolled to a stop.

  Bauman emerged from the car, hitching his pants up as far as they’d go under his belly and squinting in the sunlight up at the building. He did not look at Whelan.

  “Rooney said you’d be here as soon as you got out of the can. What were you doing in there, Bauman? Having a tender moment?”

  Bauman turned slowly and stared as though he hadn’t heard him.

  “What? You got a problem?”

  “It was just a joke.”

  Bauman stepped a little closer to him. “Oh, I wouldn’t fucking joke, pal. We got two guys down inside of twenty-f
our hours and you were lookin’ for ’em both, and we got your statement that you duked it out with the one and you discovered the other one.” He studied Whelan for a second and then spoke under his breath. “Right now, I don’t know you. Anybody asks, you’re just a fuckup that thinks he’s some kinda detective from the movies.” He looked at Rooney, said, “Let’s go,” and then nodded curtly to the two uniforms. He gestured for Whelan to go first, and they all went around the back of the building.

  Inside the apartment, Bauman bent down by the body as the other officers searched the place. Whelan saw the detective touch the dead man’s forehead. Bauman nodded.

  “Well, you’re a pretty good detective, Whelan. You’re a sharpie, all right. This is a dead guy, just like you said. There’s blood and he’s been stabbed.”

  “Have fun with me, Bauman. Enjoy yourself.”

  The detective shook his head and stood up, looking candidly at Whelan. “I ain’t enjoyin’ this. It ain’t a challenge or any bullshit like that. And you know what’s really putting a hair up my ass about this, Whelan?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I keep thinking maybe I’m wrong. I keep thinking it’s gotta be one of us.” He pointed at Whelan with the index finger, at himself with the thumb. “One of us, babe. And I know it ain’t me.” The smile now, bloodletter’s smile.

  “I didn’t kill him, Bauman. Get serious. I didn’t kill anybody.”

  Bauman shrugged. “I’m just a simple guy, Whelan. I gotta add up the facts and see what I get, and right now what I get don’t look good for you.”

  “You taking me in?”

  Bauman tilted his head as though he hadn’t thought of it. “Why not?”

  He was taken to Area 6, a flat brown building on the exact spot where, as a boy, he’d visited Riverview Park, the last of the old-time amusement parks, with his parents. He met a lieutenant named Nichols, who seemed to go out of his way to give Bauman his head, and he was taken into a rectangular room with soundproofing across the ceiling. The air in the room was stale and smelled of cigarette smoke, and he knew it was no accident that it was the only place in the building that the air conditioning didn’t seem to reach.