“They still do the Beatles medley?”
The kid winced. “People ask for it, man.”
“How about the Temptations number, where they dance around in little white shoes, they still do that?”
The bartender nodded and stared as the musicians set their cases down and turned to face him.
“Hey, kid,” one of them said. “What’s shaking?”
He shrugged.
“Where’s all the broads?” the drummer said, affecting surprise, and the others laughed.
“Time to go,” Whelan said. He winked at the kid and made his way to the back as though he’d done it a hundred times. He knocked once, a voice said “Yeah?” and he opened the door.
Hoban looked up from the business at hand, which was apparently lunch. Spread out on the desk was the bloody aftermath of a rib dinner—a half-eaten salad, a sauce-soaked piece of white bread, a little plastic container of cole slaw, and, in the midst of it all, a mound of rib bones, gleaming and white like a paleontologist’s dream, and on one or two Whelan thought he could actually see tooth marks. He stood staring at it for a moment; whole villages in Asia didn’t eat this much in a day.
“Whaddya need?” Hoban asked, punctuating his question with a little gesture with a rib.
If I said I needed food this guy would jump out of his shorts, Whelan thought.
Hoban chewed a moment and then stopped. It was a small room and Hoban just about filled it, and Whelan felt as if he’d intruded on someone in the bathroom.
“Just a minute of your time,” he said. “A few questions about Harry Palm, just one more time. You can go on with your lunch, sir.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, I can’t even have a bite in peace.” He tossed the rib onto his desk and splattered sauce on his chest.
A bite? This was a bite? I’m watching Godzilla eat lunch.
“It will just take a minute, Mr. Hoban. You know how it is, we come up with something new, we have to run it by you.” He pulled out a small spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen, clicked the pen nervously a few times, and looked at Hoban.
The huge accountant eyed him sullenly, a child deprived of his privileges.
“Detective Bauman spoke to you already, probably, but let me ask this: did Harry have any business dealings that you are aware of that were, ah, acrimonious? Anybody he dealt with that was angry with him, unusually angry?”
Hoban sighed. “What, I gotta go through this bullshit again? Yeah, everybody was pissed off at Harry. Okay?”
“Yes, sir, but was there anyone who was more than a little pissed off? Anybody who was pissed off for a long time? Any loud arguments that you remember? Altercations…”
Hoban picked up the rib again and bit meat off the end. “Yeah, for Chrissake, there were a half a dozen of ’em, they all wanted a piece of him. His ex-wife, for one, he wouldn’t send her shit, never paid alimony, he was fucking proud of it.”
Whelan looked at him calmly. “I’m talking about customers, sir. His customers, not the bar’s.”
Hoban held up both hands. “Hey, we don’t run that kind of joint. This is a nice place, people come here for a couple of cocktails and some nice music—”
“Gimme a break, okay, Hoban? I’m not talking about your operation here, I’m talking about Harry’s. I want to know if there’s somebody who he had trouble with over his business.”
Hoban looked down now and Whelan could tell what was coming.
“I donno nothing about what he was doing. I donno who he was dealing with or…”
“Anybody he was afraid of? Anybody ever come here looking for him, anybody that made him nervous?”
Hoban started to shake his head and Whelan held up one hand.
“I’m not a cop.” Hoban looked at him and his mouth opened. There was sauce on his lips. “I’m private, but I have proof that Harry was dealing here—here, on your premises, and I’ll turn it over to the cops if you stonewall me here. I want to know if there’s anybody that ever came in here that made him nervous.”
“I didn’t want him dealing that shit here, I didn’t want to have nothing to do with that. I tried not to get involved in that stuff, so I don’t know who he might have had some trouble with. He had a couple problems. There was this black guy one night, another bookie. He wanted a piece of Harry. Said Harry wasn’t gonna make him look like a fool in front of his people. Wanted to take Harry out back and kick the shit out of him. We called the cops and he left.” Hoban shrugged.
“You give that to the cops?”
“Sure.”
“Anybody else he had problems with?”
Hoban gave him a tired look, a look that said, You’re not going to go away, are you? He sighed. “I know there was a guy that came in here one time asking for Harry, and when I told Harry about it, he got this look like he was gonna shit in his pants, said he had to do some fast dancin’.”
“A big man, bald?”
He shook his head. “No. I think I know who you mean, but no, this was another guy. A guy with one arm. Little guy, dark hair, kind of good looking, but he looked like somebody not to fuck with, you know the look?”
“Yeah, I know the look. Our prisons are full of it. This guy have a name?”
“He didn’t say, and Harry didn’t tell me, he just looked like he fucked up and had to fix it real fast.”
“What about the big man I mentioned. You said you knew who I was talking about.”
Hoban belched, a long, low rumble. You make a nice first impression, Whelan thought. Hoban shrugged.
“If it’s the same guy. Big, bald guy, completely bald. A little beard here,” Hoban said, touching his chin and coating it with sauce.
“Ever see any trouble between him and Harry?”
“No. Harry wouldn’t dick around with somebody like that guy, though. He looked like serious trouble.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s all I know about it. Like I said, I tried to stay out of it, you try to run a joint with that shit goin’ on and you’re dead in the water, you know?”
Dead in the water. “Yeah, you’re right. Well, thanks for your time. I’ll let you get back to your lunch.” He got to his feet. “Looks good. Where do you order from?”
“Place up on Broadway. The Carnival.”
“Really?” Whelan gave him a surprised look, looked down at the one-man picnic, and shook his head. “They’re open again already? I thought, you know, when the city closed them down they’d be out of business for at least a little while.”
“Closed them down?”
Whelan nodded. “Did that guy die? Probably not, but…” He shivered. “Salmonella, I had it once. Ever had that?” Hoban shook his head and looked owlishly at his ribs.
“Well, thanks for your time. Enjoy your lunch.”
When he left, the Hightones were doing their unique rendering of “Eleanor Rigby.” It wasn’t exactly the way Lennon and McCartney had intended it, but they had probably never intended any of their tunes to be polkas. He waved at them from the door.
“Very nice,” he yelled, and the lead singer winked at him.
From the King’s Palace he went to the Hild Library on Lincoln and did a little homework. It took him a while to find the story, but it was there, in the Sun-Times from July 30, 1982. There wasn’t much to it, just the account of a yacht going up in flames a half mile off the breakwater at Monroe. The initial story said a man had been seen on the boat before it finally went under and that police and coast guard vessels were searching for the body.
The papers for July 31 and August 1 mentioned only that the missing man was Philip Fairs, a wealthy Arlington Heights businessman and that foul play was not suspected. A newspaperman or a cop could read between the lines and tell that they were thinking suicide from the get-go, but the word wasn’t mentioned till the body was found several days later. The paper for August 2 had an account of the discovery of the body, identified by his wife, and the first mention of the police theory that Fairs had set f
ire to the boat and taken his own life. There was a brief and sketchy summary of Fairs’s moribund finances and the oblique suggestion that these financial woes had led to his suicide. That was all.
Whelan went back to the office and found his mail: a chain letter and the electric bill. He tossed the chain letter in the wastebasket and, after a moment’s thought, tossed the electric bill as well. He’d pay when the electric company sent the warning notice, which was to say, about a day before they sent the turn-off notice.
He called his service and Shelley answered.
“One call, baby. Officer Charm School returned your call. That was his message, too.”
“How long ago?”
“An hour, maybe.”
“Oh. Well, won’t do any good to call him now. Thanks, Shel.” He hung up and sat at his desk for a moment, planning a general strategy for the next day—ask a few more questions about Harry Palm, see if he could get anything out of Bauman, then perhaps do a little legwork on Vosic. He thought again about the case Mrs. Fairs had presented him with and told himself there was nothing to it, no reason to get involved. He wasn’t convinced yet that there was a connection between Phil Fairs and Harry Palm, but their paths had crossed and they were both dead. It would help him figure out whether he was spinning his wheels if he could just get Bauman to talk to him for a few minutes.
A year ago they had done their share of talking. Whelan had been investigating the murder of his friend Artie Shears when he first met Bauman. After their reluctant partnership during that case, Whelan had been half convinced that the city’s most belligerent detective had somehow accepted him as—what? Not a friend, actually, because as far as he knew, Bauman had no friends, a fact that would have surprised no one who actually knew the man. You didn’t make friends with someone like Bauman, you became his acquaintance or you took him on as an assignment. There was never any question of getting close.
In the past year Whelan had seen Bauman perhaps a half dozen times, once in a bar—Bauman had bought him a drink, made some small talk, and then left a few minutes later, and Whelan was certain that the man was simply making a hasty exit because he didn’t want company. For whatever reason, Bauman had thrown up a wall around himself again. The other times Bauman had been out in the gray Caprice with his partner, a rotund, pink-skinned man named Schmidt; Schmidt smiled all the time and seemed to be eternally in the midst of a snack, usually a Snickers bar. Whelan half suspected that assigning Schmidt to Bauman had been an inside joke.
He left the building and walked down Lawrence. In Sam Carlos’s Carniceria, where price fluctuation was limited only by the boundaries of Sam’s imagination, an argument was in progress. A short Latino woman leaned over the counter and put a stubby finger into Sam’s face. Sam still masqueraded as a Puerto Rican, charged whatever he thought he could get away with, and lied to everyone about everything. Occasionally a customer, usually a woman, punched him out. Whelan believed that Sam would some day get around to selling road kill.
Half a block from his house a girl came backing out of a gangway and collided with him. She shot him a quick look and dismissed him immediately. She was a small woman, very young, thin, and sharp-featured, with dark brown skin, an Eartha Kitt type of woman. She wore a tight black skirt of a shiny material and a bright orange tube top. She took a few steps till she was closer to the curb, then looked back into the gangway. Her lip curled and she muttered something to herself.
A man emerged from the gangway, a big-bellied man with a broken leg. He was wearing light blue slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt and narrow tie. He had a cast on his right leg and the cast apparently went up over his knee, so he walked as though he were on stilts and hadn’t quite gotten the feel for them. Over his shirt pocket there was a name tag: HELLO—MY NAME IS CAL. The man named Cal staggered out into the sunlight, a very busy man, for he was attempting to straighten his tie with one hand and zip up his fly with the other, and since he hadn’t fastened his belt yet the zipper was proving to be an obstacle to his grooming. He glared at the thin black woman as though she were to blame for his unkempt condition.
“You come on back here, you,” he said, and there was a cottony quality to his speech, a bad case of marbles in the mouth.
I see by your appearance that you’re with the pharmacists’ convention, Whelan thought. Five-forty on a hot August afternoon and this poor lost turista already had a load on, and his zipper was stuck and he couldn’t dance anymore and his date wouldn’t slow down so he could catch her.
“I say come on back here, you,” he growled. He said “Bitch” to himself, then, as an afterthought, said, “You gimme my money back, you hear?”
The small woman stopped her retreat. He had her attention now, perhaps more of it than he’d really wanted. She wheeled around and came back till she was a few feet from him. She put her hands on her hips and leaned forward, putting her hard little face just an arm’s length away.
“You wanted some, you got some, you paid for it. You don’t get no money back, baby. This here,” and she patted her hip, “this ain’t nothing you can try out. You gimme some money, you get what you need, that’s it.”
Still fumbling with his pants, with the belt now, the man moved his broken leg toward her and shook his head.
“Wasn’t worth no twenty dollars. Ain’t no way that was worth no twenty dollars, no sir.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. A drunk with a broken leg had just said she wasn’t worth twenty dollars. For a second Whelan thought she’d whack him one. She took two more steps and put her face in the man’s face. The conventioneer took a step back and put his weight on his good leg, unsure of himself now, in somebody else’s neighborhood, in somebody else’s town, aware of his broken leg and probably scared to death of black people anyhow.
“Mister, I gave you what you needed. Wasn’t no time limit on it, wasn’t nothing said it got to last an hour.” She laughed. “You the only one can make it last long, baby. Ain’t my fault it didn’t take but half a minute.”
“It didn’t take no half minute,” he said, defending his manhood. “Prob’ly more like a minute. Anyway, you coulda made it last longer, or you could—”
“That ain’t how it works, honey. You paid your money, you got some. That’s all there is. You ain’t gonna get no more, baby. Next time, do it sober, maybe you last longer.” She sniffed and turned to walk away, and he grabbed her.
He had his chubby hand on her upper arm and he pulled, yanking them both off balance. There was a look of alarm in her eyes and she tried to pull away, but he held on and grabbed her shoulder with his other hand.
“Get your hands off me, you mother f―—”
“I get my money or we do it again.”
He stumbled slightly as she attempted to wrest herself from his grip.
“You want to let go of that lady?” Whelan said.
They both looked at him simultaneously. The tourist gave him a quick once-over. He wasn’t sure of himself but he wasn’t terrified, either. He was Whelan’s size, six one or so, but a good deal heavier, maybe two thirty and a lot of it fat. He looked Whelan in the eye.
“Mind your own goddam business.”
“Let go of the lady. We don’t do so much of that anymore. We don’t grab our women and slap the shit out of them in public. Come on, friend, take your hands off the lady.”
“She owes me money. Besides, this ain’t no lady, mister, this here’s a hooker.”
“I don’t owe him nothin.” She was still defiant but he could see the alarm in her eyes—probably what every prostitute must fear every day she’s on the street.
“Come on, pal. You don’t want to make this serious.”
“I just want my money, that’s all. I didn’t get what I wanted, no sir.”
“That’s your problem. But you can’t slap a woman around. Let her go.”
The man pointed a finger at him. “You think I’m afraid of you?”
“Buddy, nobody’s afraid of me, but I’ll tell
you this, I don’t think any guy with a cast on his leg is ever gonna take me. Not ever.” Especially a fat guy, he thought.
The pharmacist thought it over and came back down to earth, but it was too late. People had gathered around them and a gray Caprice backed up Malden and stopped when it was even with them. A large shape in a bright orange knit shirt squeezed itself from the passenger side, hitched up its trousers, moved its shoulders uncomfortably, and plowed its way through the bystanders, and Whelan felt very sorry for the errant pharmacist, whose life had now gotten complicated.
Detective Albert Bauman of the Chicago Police Department pushed a couple of wide-eyed Vietnamese men out of his way and looked at the girl, the tourist, and Whelan.
“What’s this, Whelan, a demonstration? You makin’ a citizen’s arrest?” There was a slight glimmer of amusement in Bauman’s eyes.
“I was just helping these folks sort out a problem. They have what the TV people would call a business deal that went sour.”
Bauman turned to the tourist. “Why do you have your hand on this woman? Get your hand off her.”
“She owes me some money,” the man said, “and I was just—”
“I don’t give a shit about that—sir. Take your hand off her or your whole body’s gonna be in a cast.”
The man ran his free hand through his hair. “You can’t threaten me,” he said in a voice rich in doubt.
Bauman stepped closer to the man and just raised his eyebrows. The man let go.
“So what’s the beef here?”
The man shrugged and tried to smile. “She just owes me a little money and—”
“For what, sir?”
The man looked around, mumbled something with his hand across his mouth, and looked down.
“For what? I didn’t hear that. For what?”
“For a little, you know, a little, uh, fun. You know.”
Bauman looked at him for a moment, then at the bystanders. He fished inside his jacket, came out with his shield, and waved it at the onlookers.
“All right, now. Get lost. Show’s over. Police officer. Let’s move it, g’wan.” He glared sullenly at the audience till they began to shuffle off. When they were gone he addressed the tourist again.
A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 5