“You gave this woman money for sex?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Where you from?”
“Arthur, Nevada. I’m in town for the convention…”
Bauman squinted, looked at Whelan, shook his head. “Arthur, Nevada? That’s a place?”
“Yes, sir,” the pharmacist said. A good deal of his color was gone as his trip to Chicago had suddenly become a nightmare. Whelan could almost see the man picturing the reaction back home.
Bauman cleared his throat. “It is illegal in the city of Chicago to solicit sexual favors for the promise of money.”
“Oh,” the man said.
“And you paid this woman money?”
“Well, she’s a prostitute.”
Bauman shook his head. “Prostitution is illegal within these city limits, pal.”
“But she is one, she said…”
“You gave her money, sir?”
The man started to nod and his eyes clouded. His entire body seemed to sag as he viewed the prospect of spending a night or a week or who knew how long in a Chicago jail wearing a cast and a name tag that said HELLO: MY NAME IS CAL.
“So what were you gonna do here? They beat up their women in Arthur, Nevada?”
“No, sir. I wasn’t gonna hurt nobody.”
“What are you doing up here, anyway? This is Uptown, this ain’t one of our tourist attractions.”
“Taxi driver took me here.”
“What for?”
The man shrugged. “Girls. You know…well, girls.”
“No.” Bauman shook his head. “There’s nothin’ like that up here.”
“The cab driver said—”
“I don’t give a shit what he said. We don’t have that shit here.”
The man gestured toward the girl, unable or unwilling to contradict Bauman verbally. Bauman dismissed her with a wave.
“Amateur night, pal. What you’re looking for, they don’t have it up here. This ain’t, you know, Vegas or something like that. This cabdriver, probably a foreigner, right? Your foreigner, he wants to drive a cab, make a few bucks, be helpful. Can’t even read the street names, most of ’em. Guy was probably from Nigeria. We got a lot of Nigerians driving cabs here.”
“This was a white guy.”
“There’s a lot of white immigrants. Coulda been Yugoslavian or Polish or Greek.”
“He didn’t have no accent.”
“Okay, fine, it was just a guy tryin’ to deliver the goods, only we don’t have the goods here. And I know. I’m the law here.”
“Well, she’s the one you oughtta be talking to, she’s the one selling it. You oughtta arrest her.”
Bauman shook his head and Whelan could see how much he was enjoying himself.
“Nope. I’d have to arrest you. It’s illegal to buy it, pal. Besides, I’m not Vice. I’m Violent Crimes, which is what it looked like you were thinking about. You wanna put your hands on this woman, I’ll be happy to take you in.”
“I don’t want no trouble. I’m just here for the convention.”
Bauman seemed to notice the name tag for the first time. “The pharmacists’ convention? That one?” He shook his head. “You guys are a civil disturbance. I feel like we’re runnin’ a day-care center. Tell you what, just get the hell out of here. Find another cab and go back to your hotel. And zip up your pants, for cryin’ out loud.”
The tourist stumped off, mumbling his thanks and his renewed intention to become a model visitor. The girl started to slip away between a couple of parked cars.
“Hey, darlin’. C’mere.” Bauman held up a finger and beckoned. The girl stopped in mid-stride and came back sullenly.
“You free lance or what? Somebody’s stable?”
She shrugged.
“C’mon, I don’t have all day. So who’s pimping?”
She looked up toward Lawrence. “Got an agent. That what you mean?”
“An agent, huh? Whatever. He around?” He saw her looking up the street. “Tell him to come out. Where’s he at?”
She pointed up the street.
“Go on, tell him.”
“Frankie? Hey, Frankie, the po-lice, he say to come out.”
Whelan watched with interest and in a moment a man ducked his head out from around the corner of a building. Then the front of a bicycle wheel appeared and the man peeked out again.
“Hey, you. Out!” Bauman took a couple of steps toward the building and the man came out, bicycle and all. “Over here,” Bauman said. “And bring your, uh, transportation.”
The man coasted out on the bike and pedaled out as casually as anyone could under the circumstances. He looked around as he rode, a country squire taking the air in his neighborhood.
Whelan laughed. “This is style, Bauman. Take a lesson. I like this guy.”
Bauman shot him a hostile look. “Style, my ass. This guy is an asshole.”
He made an abrupt move of his hand and the pimp pedaled a little faster. He was young, about the same age as the girl, and white, with slicked-back hair and bushy eyebrows and heavy-lidded eyes. He was trying mightily to grow a mustache and the early crop was disappointing, so that it looked as if he’d just had a very dark milkshake. In spite of the heat he wore a black jacket of some shiny material and the entire outfit was crowned by the cigarette dangling from his mouth, because no one had ever told this one that nobody rides a bike with a cigarette dangling from his lip.
Bauman put his hands on his hips and made a show of looking him over. He glanced over at his car and shrugged, then looked at the young pimp again.
“So you’re the newest talent on the street, huh? A pimp on a bicycle. Okay, I’ll admit it’s a new wrinkle. How old’re you, Moe?”
“Twenty-four,” the pimp said, looking nonchalantly from Bauman to Whelan. “And I’m not doing shit, you’re just hasslin’ me—”
“Shaddup. And how old is jailbait here?” He jerked a thumb at the girl.
“I’m nineteen,” the girl said quickly.
“Your IQ is nineteen, lady.” He looked at the pimp. “Frankie, that’s your name, right? Frankie? Okay, Frankie, let me run it down for you, okay? You speak English, right? Or do I have to find an interpreter for you?”
Frankie sighed, rolled his eyes, and tossed the cigarette out onto the street with a deft flick of a thumb. “Yeah, I speak English.”
“Good, good. You’ll go far in the world. Can’t do shit without English. Now, take this teenager out of here, and take you and your bicycle and your ass out of my line of vision. Find work, Frankie. Make something out of yourself. Get a man’s job, kid. I see you up here again, I’ll feed you one of your nuts.”
Frankie turned his racer around and took off with the young woman trotting a few feet behind him, trying to talk to him. Bauman gave Whelan a blank look, walked over to the driver’s side of the Caprice, said something to the man inside, and took the radio and made a call. Then he came back to Whelan.
“You having them picked up, Bauman?”
“I’m having a pimp on a bike picked up. The little hooker I don’t care about. Some hookers aren’t bad people, but pimps are all assholes and I know this guy will be on some other corner in fifteen minutes. That all right with you, Whelan?”
“Perfect. I assume you’re returning my call in person.”
Bauman gave him a slow look but said nothing.
“Now if I could just get about two minutes of your time.”
“For what? I’m a busy guy.” Bauman looked up the street, hitching up his pants. Whelan looked him over; up close A1 Bauman was showing some wear. Beneath the sheen of sweat his big, round face was red, skin blotchy, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were more pronounced. His clothes were clean and the crewcut appeared to be newly minted, so he was still going through the motions, but Whelan could tell that Bauman was doing his health no favors. The indestructible Albert Bauman, detective extraordinaire and general loose cannon, wasn’t going to have to worry about old age, sim
ply because he didn’t want to reach it.
He caught Whelan studying him.
“Whaddya looking at?”
“Your shirt. You look like a giant tangerine.”
Bauman looked away again and Whelan thought the detective was suppressing a smile.
“I need a little background for something I’m working on.”
“Good for you. I’m in a hurry, Whelan. My partner’s waiting.”
“Who’s the lucky cowboy? And what did you do to Schmidt?”
Bauman gave him an irritated look. “I didn’t do nothing to him. Guy was sick. They give me the two oldest, sickest detectives in the city as partners. First Rooney and then that guy.” He shook his head.
“Got a new one now, huh?”
“Yeah, I got a new one,” Bauman said tonelessly.
“So what’s this one like?”
Bauman looked at him again. “You looking to meet somebody for your social life, Whelan? Go meet him yourself, okay? I’m busy.”
“Fine, you’re having your period again. Look, I need a little help.”
“Got nothing to do with me, Whelan.”
“Wouldn’t kill you to return a favor, Bauman. Besides, you owe me lunch.”
Bauman reached into his pocket, came up with a little roll of bills, and started to pull off a twenty.
“Okay, Bauman, save the theatrics. You don’t owe me a lunch, you don’t owe me any favors. That better?”
“Whaddya want?”
“Anything on Harry Palm.”
Bauman’s eyes widened and he gave Whelan an incredulous look. “No, no, we don’t do that dance, uh-uh. That’s an ongoing investigation. Nothing to do with you, Mister Private Dick.” Bauman stressed and stretched the word dick.
Bauman stared at him, waiting for a reaction. Whelan simply looked at him, thinking. He took a shot in the dark.
“Let me guess, Bauman. There are still a few guys in Six that don’t like me so much, and you’d shit in your pants if word ever got out that you were associating with a guy who was your social inferior. Ruin your image, wouldn’t it?”
Bauman snorted. “I don’t worry about my image.”
“Yeah, you do. You think about it from the time you wake up in the morning till you toss back your last shot of Walker’s DeLuxe. Fine. You don’t owe me shit. But I have a genuine reason for asking about Harry Palm and maybe I’ll come up with something while I’m working on this other thing. As a matter of fact, we both know I will, because we both know I’m pretty good. When I do, you’ll have to ask me for it.”
“I’m real worried about that, Whelan. I’m real worried that you’re just a lot smarter than I am.”
“Never said that. I just think I’ll do a little better because I don’t have your attitude.”
Bauman gave him a malicious smile. “Nobody’s got my attitude.” He tapped his chest.
“Hitler did. Eventually nobody would invite him to parties.”
“I’m my own party,” Bauman said and walked over to his car.
“Have a nice day, Bauman.” He watched the detective stuff his heavy form into the Caprice, and as the car pulled away it occurred to Whelan that some people, people unused to human contact, don’t rush headlong toward it when it appears in their lives; they run from it, they fight it off, they beat it with sticks.
Four
Once inside the house he checked the mail and went back out, got into the rusting brown hulk that the Jet was fast becoming, and drove. At Wilson and Ashland it stalled, and as he wrestled with the ignition and pumped the gas pedal and cursed the old car he tried to calm himself with a mental picture, the picture of Paul Whelan behind the wheel of a red-and-white Chevy Blazer or a Jeep Cherokee or a Ford Bronco, something with size and an engine that didn’t fall into a coma when you stopped for a light, something with pickup and four-wheel drive, something that would laugh at the Chicago snow and take potholes like bumps in the pavement, something with an air conditioner that did more than make noise and a radio that didn’t turn itself off. A fight between two teenagers in front of his house a few weeks back had cost him his car antenna, and he could only be sure of getting WGN and one other AM station.
He found Vosic Enterprises with no trouble. It was a squat building on Greenview just off Diversey, a new red brick building with rounded corners and narrow windows with dark glass, and the double doors in front were shaded by a royal blue canopy that ran the width of the building. On it, in large white letters, was the name VOSIC and nothing else.
“Humility,” Whelan said. He parked across the street from the building and watched. Vosic Enterprises was closing up shop. There were only three vehicles still in the parking lot, all of them up against the wall of the building: a blue Lincoln Town Car that looked as if it spent its life in a garage, a nondescript van, and, in parking space number one, a bright yellow sports car, low-slung and exotic. It dawned on him that he was looking at a Lotus. A Lotus convertible. He stared at it for a moment; there were cars whose existence was confined to the Auto Show and the pages of Ian Fleming novels, and this was one of them. Whelan smiled to himself. Gee, I wonder which one the boss drives.
As he waited and listened to the news on his car radio, two men came out the back of the building. One was tall and thin and wore a sweaty work shirt; he opened the rear door of the van and put a box inside. The second man was small and dark haired and the empty left sleeve of his shirt was pinned up; Whelan remembered Hoban’s description of the man who’d come looking for Harry Palm. Both men then climbed into the van, with the tall one driving. A moment later a young blond man in a beige summer suit and dark glasses came out the front and got into the Lincoln and drove off.
Finally the front door opened and a security guard held it for a very tan blond man. He wore a powder blue summer sport coat and white slacks and shoes. He waved breezily at the guard without quite looking at him, walked around the corner to the lot, and hopped into the Lotus without opening the door. He burned rubber leaving the lot. Whelan decided he couldn’t in good conscience let him go. There was, after all, nothing quite like tailing a rich man.
Surveillance of the rich, he had been told, is simple because they strive so mightily to be noticed. This was one of the many simple truths he’d inherited from Walter Meehan, the brilliant retired detective who had been his mentor when Whelan first set himself up as a private investigator. And like all of Walter’s seemingly oversimplified advice, this piece was true. They wanted to be seen, these people, and even when they adopted some form of concealment or secrecy—dark glasses, say, or tinted windows in the limo—they still traveled in a Cadillac the size of an aircraft carrier and went home to a building with forty rooms and a sentry box out front. What was the point of being rich if no one noticed?
Whelan followed Rich Vosic to Diversey and then west to Ashland. When he was within a car length he could read Vosic’s plate: I RUNIT. The Lotus went south on Ashland and pulled up in front of another building with a blue canopy, this one announcing VOSIC REALTY. He ran in and was out again in less than two minutes. Then Whelan found himself headed east on Diversey, three car lengths behind the Lotus. Vosic drove in a modest version of “the gangster lean,” a pimp-inspired driving style that required the driver to slouch down in the front seat with one hand casually flung across the back of the seat and his eyes approximately level with the top of the steering wheel. At the stoplight at Lincoln and Diversey a carful of young Latin kids pulled up beside Whelan, the vibrations from their stereo rattling his doors. He turned to see four handsome grinning faces bobbing in time to the music. The driver waved to him and one of the faces in the back seat said, “Nice car, man.”
Whelan laughed and hoped the light would change soon: the bass from their radio was bouncing off the fillings in his teeth. The light changed and they laid rubber pulling out ahead of him and around the car in front of them, heading toward the lake, where there were approximately a half million other people splashing in the unmercifully icy water
of Lake Michigan or dancing in the sand. This was the changing of the shifts—the kids who had been at the beaches all day, at Fullerton and Montrose and Foster and North Avenue and Oak Street, were heading home in a long, dusty column like defeated bedouins, and they were being replaced by hundreds of cars full of kids who would spend most of the night at the lakefront.
Whelan followed Vosic up Lincoln Avenue through the heart of the Lincoln Park neighborhood with its maddening traffic. The yellow Lotus went from lane to lane, cut effortlessly between larger, slower cars, and pulled ahead, like a pat of butter sliding across a hot skillet. Half a block from the Biograph Theater, Vosic pulled up in front of a hydrant, put on his hazard lights, and ran inside a small restaurant calling itself the Hard Knox Cafe. Whelan drove a few yards past the restaurant and double-parked. From where he waited he could see into the alley where John Dillinger had been shot up by police and FBI agents some fifty years earlier. He remembered being taken to the movie house by his father many years before to see a pair of Joel McCrea movies. Across the street there had been a tiny, roach-infested theater showing different oldies three times a week, the Crest Theater. At the time they had been the high points of the neighborhood. Now it was as fashionable and expensive a place to live as there was in the city, a neighborhood overrun by single people, awash in eateries and taverns and places to see shows or hear music. He was never comfortable in the neighborhood; on a couple of occasions he’d accompanied Bobby Hansen up here to listen to jazz in the smaller clubs. Bobby, three times divorced and a self-proclaimed ladies’ man, insisted that more than half the single women in Chicago lived within a mile of the Biograph Theater. Perhaps it was true, but it was Whelan’s impression that all the single men in the city lived there, too.
He watched in the rearview mirror as Vosic came out of the cafe and got back into the Lotus. Whelan let the Lotus pass him and then followed.
Vosic took him on a tour of the North Side, up Lincoln to Wells, through Old Town and south to Division, and Whelan knew they were heading for Rush Street.
A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 6