The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  “I have no time to traipse around town, Mr. Whelan. I made several phone inquiries, but…” Hill didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

  Phone inquiries indeed. Whelan suddenly had a mental picture of David Hill knocking on doors in the inner city and trying to sound “down home.”

  “And the West Side is a little different from what you’re used to, I suppose.”

  The lawyer’s jaw muscles went tight. “Have you ever heard of Harlem, Mr. Whelan?” More consonants seemed to appear in Hill’s speech when he was angry; his pronunciation grew even more precise.

  Harlem. Yeah, Harlem, Whelan thought. A place you’ve only read about in the papers, Mr. Hill. He realized his attitude was showing. Don’t let the client think you’re a smartass, Whelan.

  “I just meant it’s hard to scope out a new city. So what do we have to go on? A couple of addresses and what else?”

  “The names of a few people he knew here. People he knew in the past, at any rate. I don’t know what else.”

  “No family here; wife, children?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “A description? Better yet, a picture, a recent picture?” He made no attempt to hide the hope in his voice.

  Hill reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a couple of snapshots. One was small and square and blurry, and age had yellowed both the paper and the image. It showed a tall man in his twenties standing near what appeared to be a riverbank, with the faintest hint of mountains in the distance. The second snapshot was a little better, a photo of the same man, now in his late forties, dressed in a baggy suit and looking ruefully at the camera, as though unhappy to be caught in its lens. It was a clear picture. He flipped it over and saw it had been dated by the developer. August 1975: nine years old.

  “This is everything?”

  “It is what I have from the client.” There was dismissal in Hill’s voice. He looked around at the office and made a little sniffing sound.

  “Just out of curiosity, can you tell me who referred you to me?”

  “A colleague,” Hill said, pursing his lips. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose with a knuckle.

  Suddenly you’re a man of few words, Whelan thought.

  “Well, there are only three lawyers I know of who’d recommend me for anything, and one is out of town and another one is in the hospital, so I’ll guess it’s G. Kenneth Laflin.”

  “That’s correct. It was Mr. Laflin.”

  “Well, if you’re accustomed to doing business with Ken Laflin you might not like doing business with me. I tend toward the informal.”

  Hill’s eyes went to Whelan’s corduroy shirt. “I see that,” he said crisply.

  “It’s clean,” Whelan said.

  “I meant no offense.” He looked at Whelan without expression, but his right hand slipped into the side pocket of his suit coat. A cigarette case came halfway out and then, as Hill became aware of it, disappeared back into the pocket.

  Whelan fished his cigarettes out of the pocket of his vest and brought out a pair of ashtrays from the desk drawer.

  “I could use a smoke, Mr. Hill. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Hill brightened. “Of course not. I think I’ll join you.”

  The cigarette case made its second appearance. It was flat, square, and magnificent: tortoiseshell and, from the peculiar color of the brass frame, an antique.

  They went through the steps of the smokers’ ceremony: pulled out their smokes, tapped the filtered ends against box and case, lit up, filled Whelan’s office with little gray-blue clouds, and avoided each other’s eyes like a pair of rug traders about to do business.

  Whelan found himself studying the lawyer surreptitiously. He noted Hill’s face, his haircut, the manicured hand holding the cigarette, the shoes polished to brilliance, the suit without a wrinkle, and the word that kept coming to him was “perfect.” It was just as well that Hill wasn’t going to do his own legwork. The folks in the projects weren’t gonna give up a whole lot to a guy who came in talking New York through his nose and looking like an ad from GQ.

  A thought struck him. “Mr. Hill, do you belong…are you by any chance a new partner of Ken Laflin’s?”

  Utter silence in the room. They looked at each other, and Whelan was conscious of the street noises on Lawrence, an argument in front of the pool hall, the noisy, gaseous-sounding brakes of a bus.

  Hill’s eyes widened and a smile transformed him, sent color spreading through his face. He shook his head and laughed. “Mr. Whelan, do I look stupid to you?”

  Whelan laughed too. “No, it was just a scary thought, that’s all.”

  “Be a whole lot scarier if it were true. Mr. Laflin is…” He waved a hand in the air.

  “A piece of work. Yeah, he is. I’ve always thought his law degree is the one thing keeping him out of the joint.”

  “He may get there anyhow, Mr. Whelan. They put lawyers inside now, you know.”

  “In what capacity do you come into contact with him?”

  “We—uh, collaborate occasionally. You see, Mr. Laflin doesn’t like to deal directly with the brothers, if you know what I mean. I’m a middleman.”

  “You mean he needs somebody to translate Laflin-ese into English when he deals with street folk.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hill puffed on his cigarette and Whelan waited for a moment, then said, “So what’s your gut feeling about this man?”

  “No idea. He might be out there, he might be dead. I just need to tell the client something firm. If Mr. Burwell is still alive, I hope you’ll find him.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Hill shrugged. “I report that to the client.” He cleared his throat. “And now to the matter of the fee.”

  “If you’ve done business with Ken Laflin, my fees won’t scare you off.”

  Hill looked at him with amusement. “Does the man pay you, Mr. Whelan? Does he actually write you checks?”

  “Yes, but our financial arrangements are what you might call Byzantine. He never, ever pays without a reminder, never pays on time, and never gives me the whole thing in one shot. I swear he lives to jerk me around over my bills and receipts.”

  Hill nodded and looked around and pushed his glasses back up on his nose again and cleared his throat.

  “What do you charge, Mr. Whelan?”

  “Two and a half a day, plus expenses.”

  Hill raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  Go on, Whelan thought. I’ve been waiting all my life to hear a lawyer tell somebody else he makes too much money.

  Hill considered his words. “If this should stretch on without resolution, Mr. Whelan, we will have to curtail our efforts. My client is willing to spend only so much.” He reached inside his suit coat and came out with a long slender checkbook similar in color to the cigarette case, except that it was alligator. Turtles and alligators had given their lives so that Mr. Hill could look nice.

  A pen appeared in Hill’s hand from nowhere, a companion to the cigarette case. He wrote out a check and signed it with a flourish, looked at it, waved it in the air the way Whelan had seen people do in old movies, and handed it over.

  “There’s your retainer, sir. Will that do it?”

  “You bet.” Five hundred would do it indeed. Nicely.

  “Now, what else do you require?”

  The party was over; Hill had crept back into his shell. Once more he was a lawyer from the East Coast.

  “The addresses you have. Names of the people you mentioned, from the old days. I suppose it would be too much to expect some of the old letters themselves.” Hill gave one brisk shake of the head. “Any names he used.”

  Hill tilted his head slightly to one side. “Interesting. Why do you assume he used more than one?”

  “You mentioned he’d been in some kind of trouble and left town. A man who starts over after legal trouble generally uses a new name.”

  “I never said he was in legal trouble.”

 
“No, and I’m not assuming he was in any. Just that if he found reason to roam from place to place he might also have found reason to change or alter his name.” Whelan shrugged. “I know people who change their names just to get the utilities turned back on. Money trouble is enough reason for a man to change his name. And God knows there are enough people having money trouble at any given time in this country. It’s the one thing that never changes.”

  Hill shook his head slightly and reached into his jacket pocket again. When his hand reappeared, it held a tiny notebook in the same alligator cover as the checkbook.

  “I’ll have to take your word about that, Mr. Whelan. It would never occur to me to change my name. Have you ever considered changing yours?” He looked at Whelan with a cold half smile.

  “Yeah, when I was sixteen, I wanted to join the Ringling Brothers Circus. Thought about changing my name to Barney Bates. I wanted to be a juggler. My mom wouldn’t let me take food with me, so I had to give it up.”

  The lawyer said nothing and began writing with the tortoiseshell pen in the little notebook. As he wrote, he recited.

  “Actually, this man did use another name. He has gone by the name Samuel Terry.” He tore a sheet from his notebook and leaned forward to lay it on the desk. “I’ve listed the addresses I have for him.”

  Whelan picked it up and glanced at it. There were two addresses, a pair of first names—Oscar and Henry—and the words Maxwell Street.

  “Who are these two men?”

  Hill shrugged. “People he knew at some time or other.”

  “No last names?”

  “I’d have given them to you.”

  “And Maxwell Street? Why Maxwell Street?”

  “Apparently this man operated a booth of some kind on Maxwell Street.”

  Whelan looked away. A “booth” on Maxwell Street? More likely a card table on three legs or a blanket laid along the curb.

  “Do you know Maxwell Street?”

  “I’ve been down there.” He shook his head. “I stopped by one afternoon. Someone had told me it was an interesting place, with an open-air flea market. Perhaps it was once, but now it just seems to be a lot of shops selling things at discount. A lot of hats, cheap watches, gold chains, cassettes. A funky place. I saw no flea market. And it smelled. Onions and garbage.”

  “It always smells. You get used to it. And Maxwell Street, Mr. Hill, is like a back-alley Brigadoon. It only comes to life on Sundays. That’s when you see the real thing. It’s not what it once was, not as big and not nearly as good, but it’s different.”

  Hill nodded and looked past him.

  “And you can’t tell me anything more about this man? No idea why he left town or where he went?”

  “I believe there may have been some trouble with creditors. And my client thinks the man spent at least some time in Mexico.”

  “Might help if I could have a few words with your client.”

  “That is not going to happen, Mr. Whelan. My client has already given me everything possible about Mr. Burwell. And I don’t see what there is to be gained by going through—”

  Whelan held up one hand. “Easy there, barrister. I don’t tell you how to practice law, and you can keep your opinions about finding people to yourself. This is what I do. You find a man by learning about his life, by looking for names and places that had some meaning for him. You put together a mental grid about where he’s gone and who he’s known, and sooner or later you find him, if he’s still there. If this man is still around, I’ll find him.”

  “You have a high opinion of your skills, Mr. Whelan.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  “Have you ever failed?” Hill looked amused.

  “Sure. I once spent some time looking for a man who didn’t exist, because somebody wanted to keep me occupied. And a couple of times I’ve found who I was looking for and was sorry, because they were dead and I had to tell their people.”

  Hill made a little right cross in the air and shot his cuff back to look at his watch. It looked to be a fine watch. “Is there anything else?”

  Whelan held up the photos. “No. Guess not. These are dog-shit pictures, by the way. Might as well give me his baby photos.”

  “They’re what we have.”

  “You said late fifties. Tall? He looks a little taller than average in this picture.”

  “About six-one. I’m told he has a scar over the right eye. Scar tissue like a boxer’s, was the way it was described to me. And going bald near the top of his head.”

  Whelan studied Hill for a moment, and then the lawyer ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Well, Mr. Whelan, I have appointments.”

  “How about a number where I can reach you?”

  “I prefer to contact you. Do you have an answering service?”

  “Oh, do I ever. Yeah, twenty-four hours. But I need a phone number. It’s something I ask for from every client.”

  “All right.” Hill frowned, took out a little leather case, and drew out a business card.

  Whelan looked at it. “Near North Side.”

  “New Town, they call it.”

  “Realtors in Chicago have a name for everything.

  “I must be going.” He stood up and then seemed to be taken by a sudden thought. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked past Whelan to the window. “Damn!” he said. “Hey! Get off that car!” He looked at Whelan. “There are a bunch of kids on my car!”

  “Local custom, Mr. Hill,” Whelan said, but Hill was already at the door.

  The door slammed.

  He went to the window that looked out on Lawrence. In a moment David Hill appeared, striding purposefully across the street against the traffic. There was a gleaming dark-blue Buick Park Avenue in front of the pool hall with half a dozen of the neighborhood kids sitting or leaning on it. Hill yelled something at them and made imperious gestures. The boys slid off his car in movements rich with lethargy and nonchalance and didn’t look back at him. David Hill looked at the glorious navy finish on his car and leaned over to stare at one spot. He fingered it, shook his head, walked over to the door, and opened it. Just as he was getting in, he looked quickly up at Whelan’s office.

  Whelan nodded. Hill turned away and gave him a curt wave as he slid in behind the steering column.

  “Nice meeting you too,” Whelan said.

  Two

  Day 1, Friday

  The first address on David Hill’s paper was 1036 South Racine. It was an entrance at the very beginning of the Jane Addams Homes, a housing project that formed part of what they were now calling the ABLA Homes Complex. As projects went it was neither forbidding nor particularly big, a low-rise complex of red brick three stories high that stretched to the west and the north for several blocks. Beyond it to the west rose the real thing, one of the infamous high-rise projects. A few hundred yards away was the tight little cluster of Italian homes and businesses called Taylor Street, unchanged and unchanging for generations. The families in this project were black. They could do their business in the Italian neighborhood, they could wander in for a pizza or an Italian ice or a bag of garbanzos or a beef at Little Al’s, but the welcome mat was withdrawn after that.

  Whelan’s father had once told him that Chicago was like the Middle Ages: a bunch of little fortified towns continually at war with one another, but occasionally sending each other restaurants. There was a Greek town and a Polish town and a Chinese town and several Irish towns and a couple of Italian towns and a whole lot of black towns, and the geography was murder on the tourists.

  He parked in front and noticed with amusement that the car two spaces ahead of him was a dead ringer for his own car, the redoubtable Jet: a badly rusted brown Oldsmobile whose insides were a mass of wounds and transplants, a car near death.

  From a window on the second floor, a black woman watched him get out of the car. She was gray-haired and fleshy and stared in straight-faced curiosity as he locked his car and walked toward her entrance.

>   The entrance faced a little courtyard with a rectangular lawn gone to rust brown and a pair of trees of heaven at each end. The entrance on the opposite side had a small bench, and two old black men sat beside each other, talking quietly and sharing what looked like a bag of peanuts. One watched Whelan. The other man looked straight ahead and nodded to his friend’s conversation, and Whelan would have bet the rent that he was blind.

  He pushed open the heavy green door and found himself in a small hallway that wore a coat of graffiti. Some of it was gang graffiti, some simply the semiliterate ravings of boys obsessed with the need to write about the local girls. There were phone numbers and sexual boasts and badly spelled profanity.

  And there were smells that took him back many years, to a housing project on the North Side along the Chicago River, the Lathrop Homes, that was a mirror image of this one. His grandmother had lived there and as a boy he’d spent his share of time with her, for his family had lived just down the street on Clybourn.

  He remembered these smells: pork chops or chicken frying in a cast-iron skillet, cleaning compound, disinfectant and roach killer, and over it all the pervasive odor of incinerated garbage, as though the air were made of smoke.

  He studied the names on the mailboxes for a moment and then rang the first-floor bells and went on up. There was no answer at any of the three doors at the first landing.

  At the second-floor landing he paused in front of the garbage chute and looked at the doors on either side. He knocked on the one on his right.

  From within he heard the shuffling sound of someone coming to the door, someone not in a hurry.

  “Yeah?” Who’s that?”

  “Hello? Ma’am?”

  “Yes?” The door opened two inches, just the length of the narrow chain that held it.

  Whelan held up his wallet and showed his license. “My name is Paul Whelan. I’m a private investigator. I need some information about a former tenant.”

  The woman looked him up and down.

  Come on, lady, he thought. You made me for a cop as soon as I got out of the car.