Windy City Blues

by Marc Krulewitch

  As he spoke, my mind wandered to Tamar’s apartment and the ancient woman staring at Jack’s picture while rocking her way to oblivion. When the call dropped, my attention returned. I didn’t know how long the line had been dead and I had a sick feeling the old guy might have gone to sleep for the last time. How could I have blown him off like that? What was the matter with me? His call had been a gift, a chance to be with him as he rid himself of that worn-out body. He had gotten great mileage from it, had kept it long past when one usually traded in for a new model. Just like his antique cars, Frownie was a classic. I had to see him.

  A half hour later, I arrived to find the front door wide open and the sound of quiet weeping. Helen, Frownie’s nurse, sat next to his bed, crying into her hands. Frownie lay dead with the phone on his chest.

  “I’m not sure why I’m crying,” she said. “It’s my job to help people die. The young ones get to me but not usually the old.”

  Frownie’s eyes and mouth were open, giving the appearance of utter disbelief that Death had finally paid a visit. I said, “Once you got to know him, he was hard to let go of. A lot of people will be crying over this old guy.”

  A policeman knocked on the door. The ambulance arrived a few minutes later. I watched the paramedics zip Frownie into a bag while Helen signed documents with a cop. I called my father. A caretaker answered and told me he was napping. I asked him to pass on the sad news and then called Kalijero.

  “Frownie died.” No response. Police radio traffic in the background. I said, “I thought you might want to know, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, yeah, thanks. He was a good man. Let me call you back.”

  A strange feeling of disappointment came over me, as if I had anticipated commiserating with Kalijero. I talked with Helen awhile and then wandered around the condo examining the various collectibles Frownie had acquired over the years. His impeccable antique car collection reflected the pride he felt in the craftsmanship of bygone eras. Inside his home one felt his appreciation in the meticulous care of the maple drop-leaf dining table, the mahogany console, the Art Deco couch and chair, even the square wooden “High Fidelity” box that looked as if it had just been purchased. I fingered through a fantastic vinyl record collection. The sleeves were hardly worn, the corners barely frayed. Glenn Miller and the like, well dusted and the records in their prime. No scratches.

  I opened a beautiful mid-century walnut credenza and found a leather-bound photo album. Most of the photos were groups of men in suits with wide lapels and neckties decorated in bizarre geometric patterns. In his younger days, Frownie cast quite a dashing image in the fashions of the era. A few faces looked vaguely familiar as people I had once called “Uncle,” although one photo in particular with Frownie’s arm around a young man struck me. Stocky, square-headed, jet-black hair. I left a message on Kalijero’s phone asking how a picture of a very young Kalijero had found its way into one of Frownie’s photo albums.

  —

  Tamar stood in the doorway to her apartment, wearing silk drawstring pants and a T-shirt. In her arms she held a bag of garbage. I had been standing in the hallway about ten yards away, killing a little time, but began walking toward her as soon as I heard the door open.

  “Hi,” I said. “Somebody walking out let me in. Am I early? I guess I should’ve buzzed anyway.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Tamar said and dropped the bag down the garbage chute, where it clattered down to the cellar. “Come in.”

  At the door, she surprised the hell out of me by taking my hand. She led me into the candlelit residence shared with her elderly aunt, who remained in the rocking chair in front of Jack’s photograph. Tamar directed me to a small sofa on the room’s other side. Two plates with pastries awaited us on a coffee table.

  “Those are puff pastries, aren’t they?” I said.

  Tamar laughed. “They’re called taplune,” she said and watched me take a bite. Its sweet, nutty taste made me forget the world had any problems or that I practiced veganism. We ate while I chattered on mindlessly about the pastry. Tamar politely listened and reciprocated with useless information about traditional Georgian food. Meanwhile, the old lady started mumbling—soft at first and then loud enough for me to recognize a foreign language.

  Tamar sighed. “She’s talking to St. Andrew again.”

  “What about?”

  “She wants him to set her up on a blind date with Peter.” Tamar laughed loudly, startling me. “Sorry. Any idea what it’s like to take care of a crazy old lady? I gotta laugh. Otherwise I’ll end up acting like her. Maybe you should laugh more, Jules.” Tamar put the last of the pastry in her mouth and stared at me.

  “I laughed when you referred to the Department of Revenue as being run by gangsters.”

  Tamar smiled and nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “Elon the Gangster. Do you know what he looks like?”

  “I saw a picture of him taken in the late seventies. Skinny, dark-haired, average looking. Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Anyway, I’m sorry for leaving so abruptly that night, but something about you upset me. Suddenly, I felt alone, even though I stood right next to you. I had to leave—I really don’t understand it.”

  “This is about me not having a regular family. That upsets you.”

  “It’s about you not caring whether or not you have a family, or just a true blood connection.”

  “Who said I didn’t care?”

  Tamar put her plate down and scooted a bit closer. “You don’t have to say it. It’s all over you. I see it in your eyes. You exude loneliness.”

  The temptation to angrily defend my psyche from her presumptuous attack almost won the moment. “It’s just how things worked out. I’m fine with who I am. Why can’t you accept that?”

  Tamar thought about it. “It’s too foreign a concept for me to accept. It contradicts how Georgians are brought up. Families are crucial for survival—”

  “Yeah, yeah, all this blood and honor stuff.”

  Tamar couldn’t stop staring at me. She must care about me, I thought. Why else would she give a damn what I felt? I extended my arm along the back of the couch, a distance that overlapped Tamar’s position and a statement impossible to misinterpret. She stayed put, showing not the slightest display of discomfort. I knew I had a chance.

  “A guy yelled at me today,” Tamar said, looking into my eyes. “He said we had stale pastries and compared us to a terrorist organization.”

  “Anyone darker than milk is a suspect nowadays.”

  “You are the darkest person I ever met. So you must be the terrorist.”

  I moved my hand close enough to play with a lock of her black hair. She did not object and kept her eyes on me. The prattling from the old lady’s conversation with St. Andrew became background noise, like a radio tuned to a foreign broadcast, but then the old broad startled me with a hacking cough that became a desperate struggle for air. I looked over at Tamar, who seemed not to notice the ruckus.

  “It’ll pass,” she said and then leaned forward to meet my mouth with hers. Had the old lady let out a shattering death rattle right then, I would have known only the sensation of Tamar’s lips against mine. Unfortunately, a moment later I opened my eyes slightly and caught a glimpse of the rocking chair and all the coughing sounds rushed back to my eardrums.

  “What?” Tamar said, noticing my perplexed look. “She’s fine. Don’t worry.”

  She slid onto her back, pulled me on top of her, and wrapped her legs around me. Despite the eroticism, the old lady and her guttural mumbling were an acoustic impotence device. I maneuvered my arms around Tamar’s waist and slid off the couch to my knees.

  She laughed. “What’re you doing?”

  What I was doing became obvious when I stood and she fastened her arms around my neck as I carried her to the bedroom.

  —

  Tamar’s alarm sounded at four A.M.—baker’s hours. She had gotten up once already to clean up the old lady and put her to bed. She acc
epted her responsibilities without complaint.

  “There are worse shifts,” Tamar said. “We have people starting their shifts at five P.M. and then working all night.” She ran off a list of activities that needed to be accomplished before the bakery doors could open in two hours.

  We held hands walking to my car. I dropped her off in front of the Kutaisi Georgian Bakery where, in the darkness of an October morning, Tamar would take over the duties from those who had spent the night mixing, rolling, cutting, frying, baking, frosting, and decorating dough.

  After the rapturous spell that follows the consummation of a new relationship wore off, I thought over the previous days’ events. Who was this man who delivered cash to Konigson and arranged the nonexistent surveillance of a schizophrenic framed for murdering a parking officer? Rich Jones, too, needed my immediate attention, but considering the way he fled from the lobby, finding him might be difficult.

  Then I thought about how Kalijero could have been acquainted with Frownie since childhood. Musings over that accompanied me the rest of my drive home. Any scenario to explain this relationship seemed too absurd to consider. Frownie came from West Side Jewish Orthodox immigrants. Kalijero from Greek Orthodox immigrants. Twenty-seven-year age difference. How the hell did they even know each other?

  30

  Punim was not accustomed to my staying out all night, and I could tell by the way she strutted about, whipping her tail, that the cigar-sized hairball on my pillow was no accident. Not until sated with hearts, livers, and kidneys did she return to the loving little pussycat I knew. I changed the pillowcase, passed out, awoke around nine when Kalijero called.

  “Frownie was a good man. He went in his sleep, I hope.”

  “Something you want to tell me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean?”

  “No idea. That dead parking officer. Did you say he was Russian?”

  “Georgian. When did you first meet Frownie?”

  “Long time ago. Are they, like, Russian in their religion? Eastern Orthodox?”

  “Jimmy, when did you first meet Frownie?”

  “I don’t fucking remember! Now answer my question. Do they have the same religion over there?”

  “They’re both Orthodox—you’d think a Greek would know that. What difference does it make?”

  “Not sure.” The line went dead. Somehow, Kalijero was getting a perverse thrill from hanging up on me, that was the only explanation.

  Standing in the shower as hot water poured off the top of my head, it occurred to me Dad and Frownie had a secret regarding Kalijero, something more than the obvious anger over putting Dad in prison. After getting dressed, I returned a missed call from a number I didn’t recognize. A woman’s voice said, “Hello, Mr. Landau? Elaine Reilly of Reilly’s.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m just swell, thanks. You had mentioned wanting to speak to a soon-to-be-retiring police detective named Calvo?”

  “Thank you for remembering.”

  “Believe it or not, he just asked me to squeeze him in for an appointment today. He’d like to be introduced to one of my apartments.”

  “I see. And he arranged a private one-on-one showing of this apartment with an associate of yours?”

  “Debbie will expect Detective Calvo around eleven o’clock this morning for a one-hour interview.”

  She gave me the building’s West Town address and imitated Mae West with an invitation to see her sometime. I think she was half serious.

  —

  I took Halsted all the way to Milwaukee, not far from Reilly’s, and easily found parking on a side street in front of a row of rehabbed bungalows. The building where Calvo would have his “interview” had spent the previous eighty years as an industrial warehouse before becoming a luxury loft community starting in the low one-millions. The factory gray, high-gloss concrete floor of the visitor lobby created a kind of seedy-chic appeal next to the exposed urban-brick walls. Glass partitions framed the steel security door of an inner lobby that kept stragglers like me away from the elevators. I counted three displayed security cameras, two disguised as Art Deco wall sconces.

  For some reason, a smattering of red leather club chairs had been the chosen seating arrangement for the lobby. Comfortable, perhaps, but stylistically incongruent. The seats should’ve been slashed open to help the lobby’s hardscrabble statement. People of all ages came and went, many dressed in classic overcoats and fedoras as if living some kind of captains-of-industry fantasy.

  A vintage industrial furniture magazine helped me kill a half hour until Calvo emerged from the elevator, looking sleepy but contented in that disheveled-fat-man way. I waited until he pushed through the outside door then ran to within ten feet of him as he waddled down the sidewalk. I didn’t want to judge a regular Joe for walking around with his jacket open and shirt untucked, but as a city employee, Calvo could at least try putting himself back together after rolling around with a hooker on the public’s dime.

  I slapped Calvo’s back, startling him. “How ya doin,’ Ray?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked, squinting at my shiner.

  “Think Reilly’s but without the black eye. Remember? You called me Jimmy Kalijero’s little bitch?”

  I could hear the rusted, worn-out gears in Calvo’s brain grinding away as he tried to recall events from four days ago. Then a circuit jumped and his eyes opened a little wider. “Yeah, I remember. That murdering psycho Baxter killed himself. Case closed. Piss off.”

  “Actually, my case is wide open and you’re in the middle of it.” Calvo chuckled and started walking away. “It’s all on surveillance, Calvo.”

  He stopped then turned around. “What’re you talking about?”

  “In that building. You just spent the last hour with a prostitute.”

  “Bullshit! And it’s none of your business anyway.”

  My turn to laugh. “Paying for sex on the public payroll is none of my business?”

  “How do you know who I was with?”

  “Hidden webcams, dude! You’re an Internet star! Your porn name is Calvin Cock, but we could use your real name if you’d rather have the notoriety.”

  Calvo looked unsteady, queasy. He glanced around but there was nowhere to sit. “You got nothing. Nobody cares about this sort of thing anyway. The whole world’s sneaking out for quickies.”

  “Really? You think the people of this town don’t care if their public servants visit whores on the clock?”

  “What’re you, some kind of reporter now? Is that it? You got a story to sell?”

  “Now that you mention it, I do. I also have contacts with the Republic and The Partisan.”

  “What do I give a shit what they print?”

  “Ever thought your impending retirement may be premature? That’s right, Ray. All those years of goldbricking down the drain.”

  Calvo’s jaw clenched. “How much?” He was thinking more bribery could pacify his misbehavior.

  “I want to know who paid you to conduct Gordon Baxter’s surveillance from Reilly’s bar instead of outside his apartment.”

  From the look on his face, you’d have thought I had demanded a million bucks in cash. “What do you mean?”

  “Stop it, silly boy. You were assigned to watch Baxter. He was the prime suspect in the Gelashvili murder. Instead, you sat around the bar with your pals reminiscing about your pathetic careers. Why would you so brazenly disregard your duty on a murder case if someone had not either told you it was okay, or paid you to do so?”

  “A lot of guys blew off that assignment. Why don’t you hassle them?”

  “Because I’m hassling you. Never should’ve called me Kalijero’s bitch. That hurt my feelings. So you start talking to me or I’ll have Internal Affairs, the auditor general, and every news outlet in the Midwest crawling up your horny ass.”

  Calvo attempted a derisive laugh. “Nobody cares. You don’t know how things work, Landau. Yo
u think you got pull? You don’t got shit.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know. When they’re caught with their pants down, cities love finding a scapegoat. And then they come down hard for show, to let the world know how serious they are about corruption. When they’re done frying your whore-loving ass and things calm down, everybody goes their own way, everything gets back to normal, and you’re on the street with no pension.”

  Loud breathing through his nose. Then he mumbled something and forced himself to take deep, slow breaths. “All right. A guy came to me. Never seen him before. This guy told me I’m gonna be assigned to watch a suspect for a murder case. But he said to just sit around, do nothing. I was supposed to hang out nearby in the guy’s neighborhood. He gave me an envelope with cash and said there would be another one coming when the case was closed.”

  “It wasn’t just you,” I said. “I didn’t see anybody even pretending to be casing Baxter’s apartment building.”

  “Yeah. The other guys didn’t even bother going over there, so I followed their lead. We was all short-timers.”

  “All those dopes in the bar about to retire?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get that second envelope?”

  “Yeah. Fatter than the first.”

  I asked what the guy who delivered the message looked like and he described the package courier at Konigson’s office, ill-fitting clothes and all. At this point, I had no reason not to believe Calvo. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by jerking me around. I got the feeling his heart was about to explode, and I preferred not to be around when it did.