Death in Uptown

by Michael Raleigh

  There were the usual murders and robberies and fires and swindles and revelations that aldermen were running their wards like medieval barons, and finally, in the second week of July 1969, there was the amazing story of Albert Becker. It was all there, in both the Tribune and the Sun-Times, pretty much the same story and treatment, a classic story with familiar scenes and players. A man respected by coworkers and neighbors, a solid member of his community, the archetypal successful American family man: a wife, two kids, a bungalow on the Northwest Side half a mile from the bank where he’d worked since it opened in 1952. A safe, sane existence on the surface, bearing almost no resemblance to the life he led on the sly. The story was basically as Bauman had outlined it except that the numbers were slightly more interesting: it was only a guess that Becker had taken a quarter mil with him. There was evidence that he’d skimmed, over the years, up to four hundred thousand dollars beyond that, and blown much of it through his gambling, but no one knew for sure. Predictably, both papers insisted on running the same picture of Albert Becker: it was a little blurred and the man in it, who only faintly resembled the corpse on the Uptown roof, was smiling and looked like something of a nebbish. Neither paper had any kind of edge in the information provided and the angles in coverage were pretty unimaginative.

  It wasn’t until he hit the follow-up stories that it came together for him. In a front-page article that took second billing to a major North Vietnamese advance, the Tribune reported that Mrs. Francine Becker, wife of the fugitive banker, had taken her own life. Despondent over her abandonment by her husband, shaken to her heart’s core by the knowledge that he’d led a double life and humiliated before friends and neighbors, the tormented woman had asphyxiated herself in the garage after carefully making arrangements for the children to be at her sister’s. Whelan shook his head. What a waste, what an unnecessary death.

  The Sun-Times carried a similar article but with one difference, a picture. A family portrait, taken in presumably happier times. It was a standard type of portrait, generic middle-class photography from some storefront studio, with beaming parents and stiffly smiling children. And it was all there. Whelan felt the breath go out of him, felt a dull ache behind his eyes. He sank back in the chair and sucked in air and felt the churning in his chest and stomach. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then composed himself and reexamined the photograph.

  Becker had been an unprepossessing man, even in his better days, but there was nothing in the face to suggest the criminal urges that apparently directed his life. Francine Becker was a sweet-faced woman, fleshy, perhaps a few pounds overweight. But it was the children in the portrait that riveted Whelan’s attention. The girl was older, perhaps ten when the picture had been taken, and the little boy was a couple of years younger, and it was not the features, indistinct at best in the blurry microfilm of the photograph, that caught his eye, but rather something in the facial expression of the boy, and in the girl, a smile and the faintest tilt of the head. He’d seen them, these traits, and he’d seen these two children as adults, had in fact just driven one to a bus station and had the night before made love to the other, and for a moment, for just a sliver in time Paul Whelan felt perfectly alone in the world.

  He shut off the viewer and sat back for a moment. What was the con game called that they’d worked on him? A variation of the Big Store, maybe. Did it matter? He suppressed the urge to leave, forced himself to think the thing through carefully and see the true issues rather than the personal ones. There was, of course, the issue of his bed, of his love affair, of his physical and emotional dependence on the girl he’d just taken into his life, and there was the issue of friendship, of offering “aid and solace” to a boy in distress.

  But other things were, on a very primal level, more important and he had to do something about those. He drove back to his office, oblivious to the growing traffic of late afternoon. At the office he had a cigarette and stared out his window at the traffic on Lawrence, at people with simpler lives heading home, leaving to endure stifling subway cars and stop-and-go traffic and hot apartments, and he wished his life was, just for this one day, one of those. At five o’clock he thought of calling Jean Agee. He called Bauman.

  They put his call in to Violent Crimes and a flat voice told him Bauman was out having something to eat.

  “I need to leave a message, then. It’s important. Tell him to call Paul Whelan at the office. Tell him it’ll make his day.”

  “All right, sir,” the dead voice said.

  Twenty minutes later Bauman called. “So you got a lead, huh? Hey, we’re cooking down here, Whelan. I got guys workin’ on half a dozen things.”

  “Figured you would,” he said, and hoped Bauman would do it all and say it all and make the rest of the call unnecessary.

  “Yeah. I got people out talking to one of the bank officers, a V.P. that got left holdin’ the bag when Becker went South, and we found the president, he’s retired now and livin’ in Sarasota, so I got local people down there goin’ out to talk to him…”

  He heard Bauman ticking off several other leads and shook his head. A lot of nothing.

  “I got something for you, Bauman,” he said, cutting the detective off in midsyllable.

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “I’ve got it all. I’ve got your killers.”

  “Killers, huh? You make it more than one.”

  “Yeah, more than one. I got the killers, I got the motive, I got the whole shot.”

  There was a momentary pause at the other end.

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “I am.”

  “You don’t sound so happy. How come?”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “You’re a pretty smart fucker, Whelan.”

  “No. I’m not. Not nearly as smart as I used to think.”

  “Whatever you say. Be right over.”

  “Don’t bring Rooney. He depresses me.”

  Bauman was laughing as he hung up.

  He put the phone back and turned his chair back to the window. For ten minutes he stared out over the street and smoked and went over and over in his mind the events of the past week and a half, looking for the one incontrovertible hole in his thinking that would tell him it was all a mistake, that his gut was right and the picture was a fluke. He picked up the phone and called her.

  “It’s Paul.”

  She laughed. “Oh, I know who it is, you don’t have to be so formal. Want to come down and have dinner? I’ll show you what I bought. And I got you something.”

  “I got your message. Good shopping trip?”

  “The best!” she said breathlessly. “Stores like this are just a new experience to me. I’m not even sure they have stores like this in suburban Detroit where all the fancy houses are. Paul, I…I just let myself go and spent hundreds of dollars. I used two different charge cards to get it all in.” She laughed. “I’ll be paying for it for the next year but it was worth it.” She stopped for breath.

  “I can’t make it for dinner. I’m tied up,” he said, and hoped he had punctured the mirth.

  “How come? Something with your case?” She paused and added, “Anything about…Gerry, Paul?”

  “The first one. I don’t have anything on Gerry. Listen, I can come down a little later, maybe.”

  “Okay. Come on down later. You don’t have to call, just come down. We can get burgers someplace or something.”

  “Sure.”

  Another hesitation. “You don’t sound good. Are you all right? Do you want to make it another night?”

  “No, I’m just a little…out of it. Preoccupied. I’ll be down between seven and eight.”

  They said goodbye and he hung up and sat at his desk waiting. About ten minutes later there was a knock and he could see the heavy form of Bauman tensed outside his door.

  “Come on in. Since when do you stand on ceremony?”

  Bauman pushed the door out of his way and stopped just inside. “

 
“Traffic’s a bitch. Accident at Lawrence and Ashland, got a bus stalled in the middle of the street. So, you got something good now, Shamus?” He grinned, then squinted at Whelan. “You don’t look so good, Whelan.”

  “I feel worse.”

  Bauman took a few steps into the office. “So, whaddya got for me?”

  “I got stories for you, Bauman. Sit down. I got stories for you.”

  Thirteen

  After he talked to Bauman he went home and sat for a time in his living room. His wall clock told him he’d never make seven, that he’d be lucky to make it by eight, but he sat in the old stuffed chair and focused on street noises and tried not to think about it. Eventually he pushed himself out of the chair and got ready, changing shirts and washing up. Just like a date, he told himself.

  Bauman called just before he left.

  “No luck at the bus station. Coulda gone anywhere,” he said, biting off the ends of his words and wheezing into the phone. Whelan could almost hear him sweat, and could picture the detective’s fat fist squeezing the life out of the phone.

  “He’ll turn up. Or she’ll tell us where to find him.”

  “I know he’ll turn up. And we’re checking your broad out now, we’ll check out her address and then we’ll find him. We already talked to people in Michigan and California.” There was a pause. “This ain’t the way to do this thing.”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s the natural way.”

  “Natural’s got nothin’ to do with it. We should just go in and pick her up like any other scuz and throw her ass in the wagon and go down to Six to book her.”

  “You can wait a few minutes. It’s not going to kill anybody. I just want to do this my way.”

  “Okay, fine,” Bauman said, and it was anything but fine.

  The sky over the lake was bleeding its colors and he thought he caught just a whiff of autumn, the cold lake smell that would eventually usher in winter.

  She opened the door on one knock and her perfume caught in his nostrils, and when he just stood there like a man who’s knocked at the wrong door, she laughed and clasped her hands behind his neck and kissed him open-mouthed and greedily. He could hear her husky breath and his own panting, and then gently peeled her off.

  “Let’s go inside. I’m shy.”

  She grinned and pulled him in by the hand, the way a girl in college had once tugged him reluctantly onto a dance floor. She closed the door with a dainty movement of her foot and pushed him into a chair, then eased herself into his lap, snuggling till she was comfortable.

  “So how’d it go?”

  “What?”

  “Your…you know, your work, dummy.”

  “All right. I…I did all right. I got what I was looking for.” He looked away. She ran a finger across his upper lip and he could smell the soap. She had just showered, and he wished he could stand mindless in a stream of scalding water.

  “So,” he said. “So you grew up here, huh?”

  He felt the faintest start but she smiled and blinked.

  “Me? No, I’m not from here. We lived in Detroit when I was little but I don’t even remember it. The whole neighborhood’s torn up now. We moved to Hope—”

  “Now, how, exactly, did you set this up?”

  She did a double take, blinked comically and shook her head. “Set what up? What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think, Jean, I think you came into town with old Don and you did legwork for him, that’s what I think. You were his ‘operative’ till he found out I was involved. The police had very little and he figured he didn’t have to worry about them. They weren’t going to put everything else aside and jump on this business. He was counting on them not being able to put a lot of manpower into a couple of dead bums. Then he ran into me.”

  He looked at her and held his stare. She shrank back and shook her head again.

  “Paul, you’re just…just rambling and you’re not making any sense. Have you been drinking? You don’t smell like it, but—and who’s Don?”

  “Don is your little brother, darlin’.”

  Now she moved as though frightened, slipping quickly off his lap and putting space between them. She stood a few feet away with her hands on her slender hips and let him get a good look at her.

  “You’d better go. Call me tomorrow when you’re…when you feel better. I’m not mad or anything, Paul, but you’re making me…uncomfortable.”

  Whelan laughed, surprised that he could still see humor in anything. “You’re uncomfortable? How do you think I feel, knowing you’ve been jerking a little chain for a week and a half and it had me on the other end?” He sat back, put his hands behind his head and watched her.

  “Don is your brother. Not Gerry. Don. I was kind of surprised about that, using your real names, but you didn’t think anybody’d ever see the two of you together to make a connection. Hell, the people in the old neighborhood probably don’t even remember your names. It’s been fourteen years. No, old Don was working the street and he found out the guy he killed in the alley behind Broadway and Leland was somebody’s friend. My friend. So when I started showing up on the street every day asking questions he probably made it a point to meet me sooner or later—I think he actually tried to break in one night. Then he needed somebody to let him know what I found out. Somebody to keep him posted. And that was you.” He pointed a finger at her. “I just never would have believed how far you’d go to get information. And…what was going to happen if you found out I really had something? Were you going to help him kill me?”

  She began to shake her head slowly. “You’ve got to stop this, this is, crazy, Paul. I think you’re losing your mind or something.”

  “Aw, knock it off, lady.” He leaned forward in the chair suddenly and she gave a little cry of fear.

  “I saw the picture, Jean. I saw you and Don and your mother and father. I saw the family portrait. The Becker family of Chicago.”

  She breathed through her mouth and said nothing. She ran her hands up and down the sides of her jeans, looked off for a moment to compose herself, and nodded.

  “Okay. You know about it, then. You saw the picture, but you don’t know everything. You don’t know how it was for us, how we lived, how it felt when my mother killed herself.”

  “No, I don’t. You’re right.”

  “He killed her. He just killed her. He swindled all those people who liked him and trusted him, and then he left us all, and it killed her. And it made…it made Donnie a little bit crazy. It really did.”

  “Did he understand? Wasn’t he a little too young to put it together?”

  “At first, yes, but…he was really a bright little kid and it didn’t take long for him to understand what had happened. And later, when he realized that…that his father was still alive somewhere, he became obsessed by it.”

  “So you—what? You searched for him?”

  “Oh, no, not at first.” She smiled at him. “I was trying to be normal. I didn’t even want to think about it and I think I blocked it out for a long time, for years. We went to live with my aunt in Michigan and I wanted a normal life, I wanted to have friends and go to school and go out with boys.”

  “What changed it?”

  “For me? Nothing changed it for me. But he called one night. He called to talk to my aunt and she asked him to talk to me. He was drunk and blubbering and talking about how much he missed us—” She was looking past him as she spoke, eyes narrowed. She said nothing for a moment, then looked at Whelan. “We talked about it all the time after that. Donnie was—we just started looking for him. Hooked because it seemed like something that ought to be done. Donnie made it a full-time job. He went out West looking for…for him. Denver first, then he tracked him to San Diego, found out he was calling himself ‘Sharkey’ and traced him to Bakersfield.” She stared down at the floor.

  Whelan watched her and felt somehow off-balance, and wondered if he really had this thing put together yet.

  “I need the who
le thing, Jean. Keep talking.”

  “Eventually he found out that my…my father had been living in a little rooming house in Bakersfield and somebody told him that my father got tired of the West Coast, that he needed money and thought he could get his hands on some back here. So Donnie came to Chicago.”

  “And did some poking around, right? Stayed at the Lawson YMCA for a couple of months.”

  She stared for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. He wanted to ask around, find out where men like my father would be likely to end up. He went to your Skid Row area—”

  “Not much of that left now.”

  “And he looked around where he was staying, hung around in that little park where a lot of crazy people are?”

  “Bughouse Square, everybody calls it.”

  “And then he started looking around in Uptown.”

  “How did he get a job as a minister’s assistant?”

  “It’s something he’s done before. He’s really clever, he can talk people into a lot of things. He had done some carpentry work for a storefront minister in San Diego, knew the names of a few little churches out in California—”

  “And put together a little resume for himself, huh?”

  “Yes. He thought it would be a good way to look, talk with people without attracting attention.”

  She held out her hands to him and her face grew red and tears welled up in her eyes. She came forward slowly, shaking her head.

  “But I never thought he’d kill anybody, I never thought he could do that, Paul. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  And without knowing how or why he was off the chair and holding her, trying to calm her, contrite and confused and on the point of panic.