A Body in Belmont Harbor

by Michael Raleigh

  The old man was screaming at him and the two teenagers were calling him names but keeping their distance. A pair of squad cars turned the corner off Lawrence and Whelan leaned against his ax and waved.

  The cop cars pulled up a few feet away and Whelan was wondering if they would buy his story, and then one of the two kids clarified the issue by running. A lean young cop took off after him, grinning—a former track star, Whelan suspected. The cop caught the kid inside of thirty yards and when he came back he wasn’t even breathing hard.

  A gray-haired sergeant whose name plate said SHEA came over to Whelan.

  “Did you make the call?”

  “No. I think one of my neighbors did. I came out to stop them.”

  “What are you, a hero?”

  “No. I just got a little pissed off. They were burning a cross over there.”

  “You got blacks living in that house?”

  “Mixed couple.”

  The cop nodded. He looked over his shoulder at another officer, who was talking to Mr. Landis and Mrs. Cuehlo. The old man was making dramatic gestures at his broken window and Mrs. Cuehlo had lapsed into Italian, a sign that she was under great stress.

  Across the street the lean young cop was questioning the old man and the two teenagers and Butch, who still hadn’t made it up onto his feet. He left the four with his partner and approached the sergeant. The cop talking to Whelan’s neighbors came over and joined the conversation.

  “So what’s their story, Bill?”

  The lean cop shrugged. “They said they were just passing through and they saw this cross burning and they stopped to watch.”

  “Tourists, they are.” Sergeant Shea folded his arms across his chest and nodded. His brogue seemed to be thickening with each sentence he spoke.

  “Then this guy here came after them all with an ax,” the lean cop said. “Hit the one guy in the ribs with it and then beat up on their car.”

  The sergeant pursed his lips and nodded. “Not bad. Not a bad story at all.”

  The other cop indicated Mr. Landis and Mrs. Cuehlo. “These people had their windows broken. They think it was those guys. The old guy there, he says this car cruises this street every night and these guys yell out something about the people that live there. Something, you know, racial. And the old woman…she started talking in Italian, I think, but…she was saying…like, her cat’s dead, or something.” He made a little shake of his head and looked helpless.

  “Somebody killed her cat a few months ago. She’s never been the same. Could have been these guys,” Whelan said helpfully.

  The sergeant looked at the four men across the street, then up at the night sky. Then he began to laugh. He put his hand across his eyes and shook his head. “Is there anybody around here that isn’t nuts?” He looked at Whelan. He pointed a finger at him and winked. “And I know you, lad. You’re a rent-a-cop. You’re also a friend of our beloved Albert Bauman. You were a police officer for a time, am I right?”

  “That’s right.”

  The sergeant looked around at the various personalities surrounding him and then studied the car. “That looks like the work of somebody with an ax.” He raised a silver eyebrow at Whelan.

  “No. It’s just a beater. That’s how it looked when they drove up.”

  “With no windshield? How could they drive it?”

  “You can see through the hole, probably.”

  The sergeant looked amused. “And the slashed tire?”

  “It was flat already.”

  “And they drove it here?”

  “You never drove on a flat?”

  The sergeant’s face compressed into a smile and a set of wrinkles and then he nodded. “What I can’t figure out is the broken windows. Why would they break the windows?”

  “Vandalistic impulses. I don’t know, maybe they wanted to call attention to themselves. They did set fire to the cross, you know. They wanted people to see it.”

  The sergeant nodded. The cop who had spoken to Mr. Landis spoke up. “That white-haired man wants to file charges about his window and the cross. He said they were lighting it when he came to his window.”

  The sergeant looked at Whelan. “And you, lad—will you testify in court?”

  “Sure. That big guy there, he took a swing at me. For no reason.” The lean one gave him an odd look and Whelan could see that this cop didn’t like him.

  “Oh, I’ll bet. All right, boys, get their names and addresses and tell the old gentleman to get dressed. Book these four.” He squinted at the home of the interracial couple, shook his head.

  “I don’t understand why people have to marry outside their own kind.” He sighed and looked at his watch.

  “You want a cup of coffee?” Whelan asked.

  The sergeant looked at him and shrugged. “Why not?”

  Thirteen

  In the morning the charred wood of the cross was lying in the grass where it had been left and Whelan felt sorry for these people—nice thing to come home to.

  He walked up Malden to Wilson, where the evidence of a hot Friday night in Uptown was everywhere. Broken beer and wine bottles lay in the street, and on the sidewalk at the corner of Malden and Wilson somebody had lost his shirt. There was blood on it and on the sidewalk a block or so up Wilson, and at the corner of Racine, right across the street from the fire-house, the street was littered with the glass-and-chrome aftermath of a car accident. The cars were still there—a candy-apple-red Mazda with its front pushed in and a rust-eaten Ford wagon with no plates. Bluish cracks spidered the windshields of both cars and there were large indentations from the drivers’ heads.

  There was a domestic argument in progress in front of the Wilson Men’s Club Hotel, which now sported a new sign and, in keeping with the many advances of feminism, was calling itself the Wilson Club Hotel. A man and a woman of almost exactly the same size and build put their faces together and shouted at the top of their lungs, red faced and sweating. The man shot a quick look at Whelan as he passed.

  Whelan went to the Subway Donut Shop on Broadway and had a quick cup of coffee and a doughnut. Woodrow came in and Whelan offered to buy him a cup of coffee, but Woody just held up a five and showed a mouthful of tobacco-stained teeth.

  “My check come yesterday.”

  “Fine. Want to lend me a hundred bucks?”

  Woody laughed and walked away, shaking his head.

  Whelan watched the street traffic of a Saturday morning in Uptown, watched the tired, sweaty men and women of the street and the people walking quickly by with shopping carts and laundry baskets. It was time to go to work.

  He couldn’t see the Lotus, and a pang of disappointment went through him, but the other cars parked in the lot told him that Vosic Enterprises worked Saturdays. He pulled in and parked next to the van.

  The young security man smiled and nodded.

  “You guys put in a lot of hours,” Whelan said.

  “Just till twelve on Saturdays.”

  Whelan nodded and held up the remains of his black desk phone. “Got something for the man,” Whelan said. “Now he can’t say I never gave him anything.” The guard smiled and looked confused and Whelan made his way back to the executive offices.

  Carmen was wearing powder blue today and looking like an Italian’s idea of heaven. She glanced up but did not smile at him or speak. Her eyes moved to the phone in his hand but she just frowned slightly.

  “Morning, Carmen. Where do you want me to put this?”

  The frown deepened and darkened. “Put what? What is it?”

  He looked at it. “It’s a phone. It’s a replacement.”

  “Replacement? Look, I don’t know anything about any replacement phone, and Rich told me you have to talk to him before you set foot in this office again.”

  “Okay, that’s fine. I don’t really need to see anything this time. You pretty much gave me everything I needed last time. I am a little disappointed that Rich isn’t here. But I’ll see him later. I’ll just put th
is phone down here.” He set the black phone down on a desktop beside a sleek gray one, then bent down and took the gray phone’s line out of the jack in the floor. He wrapped the wire around the gray phone and picked it up.

  “So…just tell Rich I said ‘hey.’”

  “Wait a minute. What…where are you going with that phone?”

  He gave her a little smile. “My office. He knows where it is. You have a nice day, now, hear?”

  He turned and tucked the phone under his arm and left her staring openmouthed at him. Just outside the door the tall, thin workman was hooking a new monitor up to a computer in a small cubicle. Ten feet away and Whelan could smell him; it was the second time he had smelled this man. He stopped and watched the man work and eventually the workman realized that someone was watching him. He turned, saw Whelan, and straightened up.

  The man had long arms and big hands, a massive jaw, and deep-set brown eyes under the heavy dome of his forehead, thick, dark hair, and dense brows. Raymond Massey in a work shirt. There were dark circles under the eyes and his skin had a greenish pallor to it. Raymond Massey with a hangover.

  The man took a step forward and seemed to be having trouble deciding what to do with his hands. He jammed them into his side pockets, then brought them out again and put them on his hips: then he thrust them into his hip pockets and lifted his chin toward Whelan.

  “You need something?” His lip curled a little. A bad smell and a worse attitude.

  “You look a little bit like Lincoln. You know that?”

  The man blinked and looked confused. Then he put on a smile. “I don’t have no beard.”

  “Yeah. And he took a bath now and then.”

  It took the workman a second to realize that he was being insulted, and then he took a step forward.

  “You got a problem?”

  “Yeah, what you’re doing to the air I’m breathing.”

  “Maybe somebody should kick your ass for you, mister.”

  “Yeah, and maybe I should just clock you upside your head with this state-of-the-art telephone. Come on, Slim.”

  The man gave him the time-honored stare of the tough guy who’s trying to be patient.

  “You did a pretty nice job on my office, there, Abe. You didn’t set any records or anything, but you got my attention.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” The man tried on a little smile.

  Whelan took a step closer to him and the man shuffled his feet slightly. “You know my problem? My problem is I’m always talking to people in language they don’t understand. Let me try again. You wrecked my office. You did it when I wasn’t there. You made me angry. Come again sometime, when I’m there, and I’ll pound pencils into your ears. Or take a whack at me now, and you’ll be shitting this telephone for a week.”

  “You think you’re some kinda badass.”

  “I think I’ll embarrass you in front of your coworkers, that’s what I think. And you think so, too.” He gave the thin man a little wave and left.

  He left the office area and patted the young guard on the shoulder. The guard looked questioningly at the phone but said nothing. After all, they were now friends.

  He drove back to Uptown and parked around the corner from his office. A group of black men in their thirties stopped their conversation and watched him get out of the car. He nodded to them, several of them nodded back, and one said, “All right.” He went up to his office and dropped off his spiffy new phone, then went back out for a cup of coffee. He headed up Broadway toward the Wilson Donut Shop under the El, picked up the paper, and walked slowly, reading the paper and trusting to the kindness of other pedestrians to avoid a collision. At the darkest point of the street, where the great steel bones of the El tracks made a tunnel of Broadway, something caught his attention.

  Where there had been an import store carrying a thousand kinds of junk there was something else. The windows were covered with paper and there was a City of Chicago Building Permit in one of them, but the news was in the other window—a small, hand-lettered sign announced the coming of a new enterprise to Uptown: a restaurant.

  COMING SOON TO THIS PLACE, the sign proclaimed. NEW GREEK RESTAURANT WITH FRESH, HOMEMAKE FOODS, 100% AUTENTIC GREEK FOODS. RIGHT HERE, HOUSE OF ZEUS RESTAURANT.

  The sign was good news to him, but two questions formed in his mind. First, what kind of Greek restaurant called itself House of Zeus? And second, what was there about this sign that seemed familiar? He shrugged and told himself to be thankful for any new restaurant.

  He was reading the sports section when Vosic’s call came an hour later.

  “Whelan? Rich Vosic here.”

  “Rich? I’ve been waiting breathlessly for your call.”

  There was a pause, an incredulous pause.

  “What are you, some kind of wiseass? You want to spend some time in the shithouse, or what? You come into my office and play head games with my secretary and rip off my phone—”

  “Now wait a minute, Rich. It was a trade. I left you the one your guys destroyed and took one of yours. You’re a businessman, Rich—what could be more fair?”

  “My what? My guys? What is this, the movies? I don’t have any ‘guys,’ Whelan.”

  “On the contrary, my friend, you have several. And a really interesting group they are, too. There’s the tall, skinny one that smells like an onion and looks like Lincoln with constipation, and there’s old Larry, the little dark-haired guy with one arm. And who knows what else you’ve got there in the cages in your basement. Anyhow, your professional staff trashed my office and busted up my phone. I wasn’t here to receive guests, so I couldn’t accord them the hospitality for which I am famous. But I thought I’d drop by and let you know how I felt, Rich.”

  “Yeah? Is that some kind of threat? You think I’m afraid of some busted-up ex-cop—”

  “Oh, goodness, we’ve been digging, haven’t we.”

  “Yeah, and it wasn’t hard. I know all about you, pal.”

  “We’re not pals anymore. You broke my phone.” He heard a sigh and smiled into the phone.

  “Look, Paul, there’s a misunderstanding here—”

  “Don’t call me Paul anymore. I hate it when assholes call me Paul. Call me Mr. Whelan.”

  Another pause. Then a long, loud exhalation. “Okay, asshole.”

  “Good, Rich. Let’s take off our costumes.”

  “You don’t listen so good. That’s what the real problem is here, that’s the problem. I tried to get you to see you were fucking around with things you didn’t understand, but you didn’t want to hear about it. I warned you.”

  “A warning is a threat. I hate threats. I behave badly when I’m threatened. I steal phones.”

  “Ha ha, you’re a comedian. You didn’t like what happened to your office? Okay, how about this? Imagine that happening to your face, hard guy.”

  “You’re not going to try it yourself, are you? You’re gonna ask Mr. Henley to give it a whirl, right?”

  There was a short pause, as though Vosic were rearming himself. “You know, Whelan, I can honestly say that whatever happens to you will be your own fucking smartass fault. One hundred percent. What happened to your office is your fault, and whatever happens to you is your fault.”

  Whelan laughed. “It takes maybe eight seconds to get you to admit that you’re responsible for what these simians did to my office. All right, Rich, let’s look at what we have here. I’m talking to your late partner’s wife and looking at your old files and asking around about your less savory acquaintances, and you warn me off and then you trash my office—now, do you honestly think I’m gonna let go? You basically told me that just about every hunch I’ve had so far is on the money. And Rich, here’s the real problem, from your perspective: you think I’m the only thing you have to worry about. That’s true, isn’t it, Rich?”

  There was the slightest pause and then Vosic snorted into the phone. “Hey, go play head games with somebody else, Whelan, somebody
stupid enough to listen.”

  “Okay, Rich, old buddy, but a word of advice: be careful who you talk to these days. You’re surrounded.”

  “I’m what? Surrounded? What’s that supposed to mean? That another wiseass joke?”

  “No, not this time. You’re surrounded. I can’t think of a single person you can trust, except maybe Carmen, and I doubt she’s gonna be much help.” He listened for a moment to Vosic’s silence and then hung up.

  Whelan had a cigarette and looked out his window. Up the street he could see the El trains pulling in and out of the Lawrence Avenue Station. He blew smoke out into the dirty air and told himself that for everything there were consequences, and he could now await the consequences.

  Rich, I think we’re both in a little trouble.

  Janice Fairs answered on the first ring, and when he identified himself her voice made ice on the phone.

  “What is it that you want, Mr. Whelan? I believe we’ve concluded our business. I can’t imagine what else we have to discuss.”

  “I guess we don’t understand each other, Mrs. Fairs—”

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” she interrupted. He heard her inhale smoke and blow it out and he could almost see the hard smile on her face.

  “I just would have thought you’d remember what Fred Myers told you about me. I don’t just drop everything because somebody sends me money. You get me involved in something and then you expect me to get out as soon as it gets interesting.”

  “I can’t see how it is any concern of yours now, Mr. Whelan. It is no longer a business involvement for you, and it’s certainly none of your affair personally.”

  “Whoops, there you’re wrong. They made it personal. These are really lousy people, Mrs. Fairs. And not as sophisticated as I thought at first. They make threats, they follow me, and now they’ve done the unpardonable—they tore up my office and made it clear to me that if that wasn’t message enough, they’d be happy to tear me up, too.”