Whelan laughed. “This is how it was before they invented boxing.”
The Puerto Rican boy was visibly angry, and he stood directly in front of the Indian and threw punches, his hands dropping lower and lower, and he never saw the hook that caught him just at the jawline. He went down heavily, got up at six, and fell over on his side again, and the referee waved his hands over him. Alvin Thunder limped across the ring with hands high in the air and Sonny Riles climbed in through the ring ropes and hugged him.
Tom Cheney watched the little celebration. “All his fights like this?”
“All of them. Except sometimes he runs into a smart fighter who doesn’t get so carried away, and he gets knocked out. He’s never been involved in a decision.”
Tom Cheney shook his head. “Don’t seem to be the kind of fighter that lasts long.”
“No. He gets hit with everything. He’ll be through soon. With another trainer he might get hurt. Luckily, Sonny Riles is his trainer and Alvin has no illusions about being the next Roberto Duran.”
They settled back to watch the next bout, but Whelan was through for the evening. He kept his eyes on the ring, but his mind was on a bald, heavily built man with a goatee who had done business here with Harry Palm and come looking for him at the King’s Palace.
Vosic’s car was gone when Whelan returned to the Rush Street bar and he decided not to jeopardize his next move by going inside the place. Instead he went up the street to a tiny hamburger place that called itself Banquet on a Bun. There were three booths, two of them taken, and one waitress. She was having a hard night. One of the booths was filled with four teenagers, loud and liquored up and bent on jerking her chain. They ran her back and forth between the counter and the booth and laughed and giggled among themselves. Finally she came over to take Whelan’s order.
She was somewhere in her late thirties, with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and held with combs on either side. She had intelligent brown eyes and a sprinkling of freckles against very fair skin; she wore the time-honored black-and-white uniform of the greasy spoon waitress, and though she wouldn’t have chosen it for herself, she was one of those women who look good in it. There was a hint of rueful humor in the eyes and laugh lines around them. At twenty she had probably been something special, and she still had some of it.
“Tough night, huh?”
She shrugged, shot a look at the booth full of adolescents, and smiled. “It could be worse. There could be more of them.”
“Or they could be pharmacists.”
She rolled her eyes and then laughed. “They’ve been here. They act like they’ve never seen women before.”
He ordered a double cheeseburger and a chocolate malt and watched as she brought his order to the dark, hairy man presiding over the grill; as Whelan watched him, his little paper hat fell off his head and revealed vast quantities of black hair. A moment later she returned to the boothful of kids, and they seemed to be getting to her now. He saw her go red at something they said and then she dropped their check on the table.
“You’re finished, guys. Go hassle your parents.”
She walked back to the counter and one of the kids said something and she turned and pointed to the door.
“Pay your bill and leave.”
One of them, a little bigger than the rest, leaned part of the way out of the booth.
“I don’t need to take no orders from you, lady.”
“Yeah, you do,” she said.
“You can’t make me do shit. Fat old broad.”
“She looks just fine to me,” Whelan said.
The waitress gave him a surprised look and the cook turned, carving knife in hand. “Whatsamatter, Pat?”
“Nothing,” the waitress said.
The kid looked at the cook and at Whelan.
Whelan indicated the cook with a nod. “He killed a guy once. I’d say you’re outnumbered.”
The other kids started to mutter to the big one and gradually, grudgingly, they tossed money on the table and left.
When they had gone, the waitress brought Whelan’s food.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
He noticed that she wore no ring. “My pleasure.” He thought of making a joke, making small talk, and found himself just a bit gun-shy. Another time—there was plenty of time, he thought.
He caught a couple of innings of the Sox game from Oakland and had a dark Beck’s and more cigarettes than he needed. Time to quit, time to do something. Time to jettison some habits. He wasn’t worried about drinking yet, but he was smoking more and was conscious now of the amount of time he spent alone. Some men could make a life out of being alone, seemed to prefer it. Not Paul Whelan, he said to himself. He thought about Liz, from whom his only communication had been a terse Christmas card, and felt old scars beginning to sting.
He thought of the waitress in the hamburger place and then tried to remember the last time he’d actually asked a woman out.
You don’t know a damn thing about her…Yeah, I do. She has nice eyes. The eyes tell everything.
He recognized the car by the sounds of the dying muffler and got up to check. It was rounding the corner when he got to the window but he waited and it reappeared thirty seconds later, a beater full of men haunting the street, drawn by the promise of the trouble they could make for the black man who’d had the balls to move in with a white woman. All else was quiet and the car’s wheezing engine could be heard pumping out its last few hours of life.
You drive exactly the car you belong in, he thought.
They drove by the black man’s house a third time and someone yelled out “nigger,” and then the car was gone. Whelan saw a face appear in the window of the house, a black face. The man looked out at the street, oblivious of Whelan looking at him, a worried man watching over his life.
Five
He called Area Six and was told that Bauman wasn’t in yet. On a hunch he asked for Landini, but he wasn’t in yet, either.
“Please leave a message for either of them to call Paul Whelan, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said tonelessly.
He had no one else to call now—Jerry Kozel was no longer on the Chicago police force, having relocated and moved on to something presumably more lucrative and certainly a little easier, working for a north suburban police force whose most serious problem was teenagers cruising on Saturday nights. It was just as well; Jerry Kozel, his longtime partner, no longer had much to say to him. The last time they’d seen each other had been at a Cubs game, and Jerry had talked to him like an alderman running for reelection: “Hi, Paul, good to see you. You look great. How’s everything? Great, great. Gotta run, Paul.”
He stepped out onto the porch and looked around. It was cool and pleasant, with no warning of what it would be like later that day, when a south wind would carry hot air and dust like nature’s scouring pad through the city and people would run for cover.
He walked up Malden to Wilson. Near the corner a pair of sheriffs deputies were going through the nasty steps of an eviction. A black woman in her sixties or seventies sat in the sun on a kitchen chair and watched as strangers emptied her apartment and deposited the belongings of her entire life on the gray soil of the front yard. Dull eyes stared from half a dozen windows in the apartment building, most of them on the woman, most of them probably wondering how they’d handle this. He stopped and watched the deputies; they did their work and didn’t meet the old woman’s eyes or his.
He shook his head. What the hell do we call this? The American Dream. In a country that congratulated itself daily on its quality of life, people were still put out on the streets with all their possessions. Some of them were young, people with families, but most of the ones Whelan had seen were old, people with no place to go, especially in Uptown. He remembered another eviction in Uptown, this one witnessed by a pair of elderly Russian Jews. They had stared at the grim procedure as if they were watching a killing.
Whelan looked at the old woman. T
here was something very wrong here, and he wondered how many other countries in the “civilized world” had such a process. He went over to the woman and stood beside her, fishing in his pants pocket. He came up with a little wad of money in an Indian money clip—a twenty, a ten, a five, and a couple of singles. He took out the twenty and folded it up small, then handed it to the woman without looking directly at her.
“This help you out any, ma’am?”
She said nothing for a while and eventually he was forced to face her, the only man here of this entire group who was looking at her. She stared at him and then her eyes moved to her possessions, lingering for just a moment on each of them, and slowly her head began to shake. She seemed to have no inclination to speak and he knew that this was no moment for false consolation. He stood there with the twenty in his outstretched hand and told himself he’d stand there till she took it. Eventually her dark, bony hand reached slowly and grasped the bill.
“Thank you, sir,” she said in a low, soft voice, and then added, “God bless you.”
“My pleasure, ma’am,” he said and backed away. He turned to the nearest deputy. He was young and pale-skinned to begin with, but he looked positively sick to his soul, a tight-lipped young man with moist, dark eyes who quite clearly was getting more than he’d bargained for in this day’s work.
“Human Services coming out, Deputy?”
“Yes, sir. They’ll be out any minute now. They’ll get her fixed up.”
“You hope.”
He turned and walked away, no longer needing coffee. I have a feeling, he said to himself, and I want to share it. He went back home and got into his decrepit, rusting car and decided to let the workday begin, and he found himself wishing, violently, that for just the duration of this morning he could be Bauman. Bauman would find something to hit.
There were seven or eight cars in the lot of Vosic Enterprises this time, and the Lotus was exactly where he would have expected it to be, in the slot marked NUMBER 1. Number two was empty, and Whelan took it. He went around the front and swung the heavy glass door open, felt his body go limp in the wave of cold air, and found himself face to face with a young blond kid in a khaki uniform with a Harrison Security Agency shield on his shoulder.
He smiled at the kid, who had a clipboard and a facial expression that said he represented the forces of righteousness and order.
“Getting hot out already,” Whelan said, smiling. The guard gave him a blank look.
“He likes this shit, the heat.” Whelan shook his head.
“Who’s that, sir?” The guard looked confused.
“Rich,” Whelan said. “He likes it. Always has.”
The kid nodded. “Oh, right.” He looked up the hall and nodded again.
“He’s in, right? I saw the pimpmobile out there.”
The guard grinned now, one of the boys, in on everything, and Whelan patted him on the shoulder. He was by the guard in two steps. Then he stopped suddenly and turned.
“Hey, don’t tell him I said that, all right? I’m trying to sell him something.”
The guard laughed; he’d put it all together now. Another loudmouthed salesman. He shook his head and resumed his position with his clipboard. Whelan walked past a pair of large offices in which several people worked in cubicles under a bluish light. Piped-in music hung in the air everywhere and forced Andy Williams on defenseless ears. At the far end of the office the one-armed man was piling boxes on a two-wheeler as effortlessly as any man with two arms.
Whelan headed for an impressive double door with VOSIC stenciled on one side. As he pulled the door open he heard the Andy Williams song fade off, only to be replaced immediately by another Andy Williams song. Whelan asked himself if this could be punishment for the sins of these office workers.
The foyer inside was dominated by a desk, and the desk by a young woman who formed the final line of defense before one actually reached the inner citadel of Rich Vosic Enterprises. She was as predictable as the license plates and the car and the white shoes, and her desk had been placed so that she filled the room and the viewer’s eyes. This young woman was a little darker than the one Whelan had seen Vosic meet the night before—younger, too, perhaps twenty-two, twenty-three. Whelan watched her beat the hell out of a computer keyboard, almost keeping time with the music that came out of her desktop radio—Smokey Robinson did battle with Andy Williams and sent him running, and it didn’t seem to bother her at all that two songs assailed her at once. Across the room he saw a clouded glass door with the simple message, stenciled in a sort of italic script, RICH VOSIC, PRESIDENT.
Whelan let the door close behind him and waited there for the young woman to look up. She didn’t. She hammered away at the keyboard for a minute or so, then stopped with her long, dark fingers poised just above the keys and said, “Yes? May I help you?”
“Yeah, turn off Andy Williams.”
She looked up and lit up the room with a smile. Perfect white teeth and dimples, large brown eyes, and thick, dark eyebrows that had never been tweezed or plucked. She gave her head a little shake.
“I can’t turn it off. It’s everywhere. Even in the john. The ladies’ room.”
“Is he in?” Whelan nodded toward the door.
“Uh, yeah…” She gave him the quickest once-over he’d seen in years, took in the blue guayabera shirt, and decided he didn’t quite fit in. “He’s kind of busy.”
“Me, too. And so are you, and you’re talking to me. Just buzz him and tell him I need…oh, maybe five minutes of his time.”
She pursed her lips and gave a little nod. “Who may I say is calling?”
“Paul Whelan. I’m an insurance investigator.”
Something lively seemed to move in her eyes. She’d heard the term before. It didn’t exactly make her jump out of the pale blue summer blouse, but it got her attention. She picked up the phone and hit a small white button. She waited, then said, “Hi. A Paul Whelan to see you.” She listened for a moment, then said quietly, “Insurance investigator.” Then, “Oh, I don’t know,” and another pause, then a laugh. “Okay.”
She looked at Whelan, tilted her head to one side, and grinned about something she wasn’t going to share.
“You can go in,” she said, and her tone told him that insurance investigators were no match for Rich Vosic.
Vosic stood in front of his desk, facing the door. He was in quite a different color scheme this morning, wearing a kind of berry-colored shirt and pale pink slacks. The white belt had been replaced by a crimson one, the white shoes by gray suede loafers with dark red trim. Whelan had seen many men like this before, but they’d all been in clothing ads. He fought the urge to look around for a walk-in closet.
Vosic pushed himself off the desk, extended his tanned and manicured hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Rich Vosic.”
Whelan shook the hand and said, “Paul Whelan.”
“How you doing, Paul?” Vosic said, and Whelan instantly understood the man’s particular brand of magic, knew instinctively what made Rich Vosic work. Vosic had what TV people called the “Q-quotient,” a vague combination of characteristics supposed to account for a person’s charisma. Whelan had seen it before, particularly on the police force, in those officers who seemed to advance at an accelerated pace, the ones who wound up as lieutenants when their classmates from the academy were still street cops looking for sergeant’s pay.
It helped that Vosic was handsome and that his looks held up close, but it was more than a good tan and blue eyes and a full head of blond hair. When Rich Vosic asked how you were, every pore and fiber and muscle and nerve of Rich Vosic radiated concern, the eyes wouldn’t blink and wouldn’t leave yours, the smile hung out there for the duration, and you believed that Rich Vosic really wanted to know how you were. This was the kind of person who studied you and made small talk and pumped you with selfless questions about your life and your work and your tastes and opinions as though you were the single most interesting person he’d ever encountered. Fa
ces like this often made it into commercials and sold you things you didn’t need and couldn’t afford, and sometimes they wound up in the nation’s penal institutions, but some of them stayed outside and made a lot of money. Whelan looked Rich Vosic over and thought that this one would be murder in negotiations, would make fortunes on the golf course or over lunch. Women would love this face, and they’d love it even if Rich were scarred and pockmarked.
“Come on, Paul, let’s take a load off,” Vosic said and walked around his desk to sit down.
It was a massive piece of mahogany, its top gleaming and uncluttered, an outward sign of a man in total control or one with nothing to do. Whelan admired the desk as he sat down. It was an aircraft carrier, obviously chosen as much for its size as its quality, for the width of this desk put space between the visitor and the man who owned it, and the space was obvious, impossible to overlook or misunderstand. Vosic might as well have been seated on a platform.
“Carmen said you’re an insurance investigator.”
Whelan took out the little vinyl wallet where he kept his cards and slid one across the desktop. Rich Vosic studied it for a moment and then frowned.
“You’re…independent? She said you were with an insurance firm, I think.”
“I do a lot of work for various companies—liability groups, general carriers, law firms—” He waved his hand in the air. “But, yeah, I’m independent.”
Vosic nodded and continued to smile, but the smile no longer went all the way up.
“How can I help?” He made a little self-deprecating shrug: the ignorant country boy asked to perform beyond his gifts. Then he grinned. “I don’t guess you’re looking to buy some great software.”
Whelan smiled and said, “No. But you can help, I’m sure of that. I’ve been asked to investigate a former associate of yours.”
“Okay,” he said slowly.
“This would be from your days with High Pair Enterprises.” He paused here and took his cigarettes from his shirt pocket, noted the slight flush that spread across Vosic’s face, and took out a smoke. He milked the moment, fished out his lighter, dropped it, held up the cigarette, and asked, “Mind?”
A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 8