The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  “It would help if I could talk to one of these women.”

  “You out of luck there, Whelan. The little white girl, she got killed in a car accident.”

  “What about Mamie?”

  “Like I said, she went out to California.”

  “Did he ever hear from her again?”

  “Didn’t nobody ever hear from Mamie again.”

  “It was just a thought.”

  O.C. sighed. “Old Sam, he had an eye. Color didn’t make no difference to him. For a while back there, he was takin’ out this Chinese girl. And I told you about the woman he was seein’ up north by you.”

  Whelan nodded. He surveyed the room once more. David Hill sat back in a folding chair and gazed in the general direction of the casket.

  Whelan patted O.C. on the back. “I’m taking off.”

  “Drop by my place or give me a call.”

  He nodded. “Good night, O.C.”

  “Night, Whelan. And thanks for comin’ out.”

  Nine

  Day 6, Wednesday

  O.C. had given him the block and the approximate location on it, so it didn’t take long the next morning to find the place where Sam Burwell had lived. It was on Broadway, across the street from a tired-looking supermarket and a few doors down the street from the Salvation Army building at Broadway and Sunnyside. Storefronts lined the block, some of them occupied, others empty and with meager prospects for ever being used again. There were a pair of down-at-the-heels businesses on the ground floor of Burwell’s building: a tire shop with a group of men standing in front and a video shop that boasted triple-X rated movies and action films in three languages.

  The door to the second floor stood between the shops. There were four names taped to the doorframe below the bells: SANCHEZ, HALEY, ROGERS, and PITTS, and an empty space where a piece of tape had recently held a fifth name. A little star had been pasted next to HALEY. No mailboxes. Whelan tried the door, gave it a little push, and went inside. The hall was dark and a little pile of mail cluttered the bottom step. He bent over and spread the envelopes and fliers out: several for Umberto Sanchez, one letter from the VA hospital addressed to James Pitts, but the majority for Mrs. Violet Haley.

  He inhaled the smell of rotted wood, old linoleum, plaster gone to powder. The banister was gone, so he put a steadying hand on the wall as he went up. Paint and plaster came loose at his touch and fell to the stairs with a skittery sound.

  The second floor appeared to be divided into five tiny apartments, and the first one had a dull brass star on the doorframe. He knocked.

  “Who’s that?” A woman’s voice, low and flat, bereft of emotion.

  “Mrs. Haley?”

  “What?” the woman said aloud, then lower, to herself, “What now, for chrissake.”

  Whelan stood in the hallway and heard nothing; she wasn’t coming to the door without a good reason.

  “Mrs. Haley, my name is Paul Whelan. I’m a private investigator and I need some information. Can I talk to you for a moment?” He could hear her moving around inside. She muttered something and then she was quiet.

  “Mrs. Haley, I can pay for information.”

  He was surprised when the door opened slightly—she’d been standing next to it. She was squinting at him through tinted glasses that distorted her eyes and made them look sleepy.

  Three inches of cheap door chain separated them, an illusory security. Anyone could put a shoulder into the door and tear the chain in half.

  She puffed at a cigarette and blew her smoke through the opening.

  “You don’t look like no detective.”

  “Here.” He held open his wallet and showed her his license.

  “Hold it closer. I can’t see so good.”

  Whelan thrust the license closer and saw her nod. The door closed briefly, the chain rattled off, and she swung it open. He could see just over her shoulder into a small, neat apartment. To the left, he caught the merest glimpse of the bedroom. The bed was made, covered with a taut beige bedspread.

  Mrs. Haley blocked his way. She wore her bathrobe, a peach terry-cloth robe out at one elbow. Her gray hair hung over her forehead and into her face.

  She smelled of coffee and a thousand cigarettes and mildewed cotton, but she straddled the doorway like a guard and he had a feeling this was one old woman who could handle herself on the street.

  “What do you want?”

  “A man was living here, named Sam Burwell.”

  Her mouth tightened and she thrust her chin toward the last door in the hall. “Him. The colored one.”

  “A tall thin black man in his late fifties.”

  She nodded.

  “He was found murdered down near Maxwell Street.”

  “I know. The cops was here already. Before you.” She seemed pleased to be able to tell him he wasn’t the first.

  “When?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. Yesterday or the day before. So what do you want to know?”

  “I was wondering if I could have a look around in his apartment.”

  She frowned. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be doin’ that.”

  Time to gamble a little. “The officers investigating this, detectives Durkin and Krause—those are the ones you spoke with, am I right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you can call them if you want official permission. I can wait. They already consulted me about this on Sunday.”

  She looked confused for a moment, then shrugged, as though it were all part of her routine.

  “Don’t make no difference to me anyways. Come on.”

  She moved past him, padding down the hall in blue canvas men’s shoes that showed the joints of her toes. In front of the last door, she fished in the deep pockets of her robe and came up with a ring full of keys, then went through them one by one till she found one with a strip of blue tape on it.

  She put it into the lock and opened the door.

  “This is it. It’s a mess, I’ll tell you that. This ain’t how I rented it to him. I ain’t had no chance to clean up in here.”

  “Your building?”

  She frowned as if the question were ridiculous. “No. I’m the manager. The owner, he lives out on the Northwest Side. Polish fella. Speaks English, though. Don’t have no accent.” She looked questioningly at Whelan. “So go on in if you want.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and went inside. When she continued to stand in the doorway, he smiled. “I’ll probably stop by and ask you a few questions before I go. Is that all right, Mrs. Haley?” She opened her mouth to speak and he added, “Your name’s Violet, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, Violet. Vi. People call me Vi.” She frowned slightly. “How’d you know my name?”

  Whelan shrugged. “First thing an investigator learns. You don’t go into a place without knowing the names of the people in charge.”

  A faint smile worked at the down-turned corners of her mouth. She gave a little nod. “I’ll be inside. You stop by when you’re done here. Just pull the door shut—it locks itself.”

  “Okay, Vi, and thanks again.”

  She shuffled off in her men’s shoes, leaving the scent of cigarette smoke behind her, and shot the quickest look at him over her shoulder as she entered her apartment.

  Whelan took a long first pass around. It was really just one long rectangular room divided into different living areas by the paint on the walls and the type of furniture.

  Sam Burwell’s last home had been a barren place to settle for, but it was no worse than most of the apartments and rented rooms Whelan had seen in Uptown and better than some. It had glass in all the windows, for starters, a rug on the floor of the area that served as both bedroom and living room, and a tiny refrigerator that sat atop a homemade counter in the shallow nook that passed for a kitchen. The door, once white, had gone beige with age and grease, and there was a dark, permanent mass of fingerprints around the handle. Inside, Whelan found a hard little loaf of sandwich bread, a package of salami dark
ening at the edges, and a bottle of ketchup.

  There was a beer can in the sink and the tray from a frozen dinner, with a fork in it, but there were no other dishes around. He opened the cabinets above the ancient sink: they were empty except for a little black scattering of mouse droppings.

  Recessed into the back wall was a sort of closet made by hanging a blue cotton curtain across the angle where two walls met. A handful of men’s clothing items hung there, and a faded blue canvas bag with a United Airlines logo lay on the floor. The bag was empty.

  The countertops bore nothing but ashtrays, all but one empty. The last one sat in the corner of the kitchen close to the apartment’s only window. It faced the alley and the backside of another flyblown apartment building where Whelan could see an old man sitting out on the fire escape and sipping at a Pepsi. The ashtray held a couple of unfiltered Camels, both smoked down to the end, still bearing the marks where he’d held them pinched between a thumb and a fingernail. Whelan leaned against the counter and pictured a man standing in front of the window, smoking and watching the alley or the people in the next building or the sky.

  He opened the drawers of the bedside table, looked inside. One was empty. In the other, he found several pairs of boxer underwear, three pairs of socks, and a blue bandanna handkerchief.

  The bathroom was little more than a toilet and a face bowl. A makeshift shower had been installed in a corner of the tiny room, with a ceramic basin hastily laid in the floor to catch the overflow from the shower. One towel hung limply over the shower curtain. There was a small bar of soap on the sink but he saw no toilet articles.

  The bed went with everything else: a soft skinny mattress on a folding spring with some casters so that it could be wheeled into a corner and free up some space. The bed looked slept in but clean, and there was no ashtray near it.

  Whelan moved to the center of the room and surveyed it from one side to the other, moving slowly and trying to miss nothing. When he was finished, he sat down on the little two-seater couch that constituted the living room and had a smoke, trying to force himself into the picture he was getting.

  It was all here, the clothes, the meager food in the cooler, the cigarettes, the can of beer. There was nothing actually wrong, but no matter how Whelan added it up, he could not produce the image he was looking for. He looked around and shook his head.

  He didn’t live here.

  Whelan closed the door behind him. Down the hall a door made a delicate click and he smiled. He walked down to Violet Haley’s apartment and knocked once. The door opened immediately, and Mrs. Haley stood in front of him, giving him a wide-eyed look meant to convey surprise.

  “Yeah? Oh, you’re back. Find what you was looking for?”

  “Uh, no, can’t say I found a whole lot at all. I wonder if I could ask you a few more questions.”

  She shrugged. She’d made a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to put herself together. The robe had been tossed—literally, onto the couch, from where it could be seen sliding slowly down onto the floor—and replaced with a yellow housedress with a floral print and one button missing in the middle of the stomach. She hadn’t brushed her hair, opting instead for a hairnet to keep the chaos confined to the top of her head.

  Mrs. Haley thrust her hands into the pockets of the housedress and stuck her chin out. “So ask.”

  Something tells me I’m not going to be asked in for coffee, Whelan thought.

  “Okay. How long had Sam Burwell lived here?”

  “I dunno. Couple months, three months.” Whelan nodded. Maybe Bridgeport, the accent. Mrs. Haley said “tree” instead of “three” and had a number of other speech mannerisms that put one in mind of the late Richard J. Daley, who had made the Bridgeport accent a national landmark.

  “Can you tell me anything about his habits? What he did, any visitors he had?”

  “Don’t know nothing about him. Kept to himself, I’ll say that for him. Wasn’t noisy, ’specially for colored. Not like some of the others, not like this guy,” and here she cocked her head to the left to indicate the apartment next to hers. “That’s Sanchez. He’s Mexican.” She shook her head. “They’re noisy people, your Mexicans. Like to play that horn music all the time, drive me nuts. And they talk real loud, they kinda chatter, all at the same time, and I—”

  “Did Sam Burwell have visitors?”

  She shut her mouth abruptly and gave him a look that might have been irritation, but he couldn’t be sure through her dark glasses.

  “No. Well, not usually, anyhow.”

  Not usually. Time to play hunches. “How about the lady?”

  Mrs. Haley pursed her lips and gave a little shake of her head. “I figured you knew about her. That kinda thing, that ain’t none of my business. People wanta carry on like a couple teenagers, that’s their business.”

  She was staring at him, and he thought he could see the traces of a smirk, of inside knowledge.

  “Tell me about the lady.”

  Mrs. Haley made a little hissing sound out the side of her mouth and nodded. “I could tell you about that one, all right. Her and all the other ones like her. Tell you one thing, that one, she’d never get a place here. I wouldn’t have her under my roof.” Mrs. Haley nodded slowly, having suddenly become the property owner as well as guardian of the public morality.

  “Let’s see if your description matches what I’ve got.”

  A pair of high arching eyebrows shot up from behind the glasses. “Well, she was one of them.”

  Whelan tried to conceal his surprise.

  “She come to see him in his flat. But you know what she was, don’t you?”

  “You think she was a prostitute.”

  She shook her head at Whelan’s stupidity. “Well, whaddaya think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. You tell me.”

  “Well, I know my way around, and I can tell one of them when I see one. Don’t matter how they’re dressed. That’s somethin’ you can’t hide, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “How was she dressed?”

  “Like somebody with money, that’s how. She had her hair done up fancy and she wore, let’s see, one time she wore a blue dress, real tight, and another time she had on a green skirt and a white blouse like somebody that worked in an office.”

  “What else can you tell me about her?”

  Mrs. Haley’s face took on the look of insider knowledge. “Let’s see. She was pretty light-skinned for colored, and kinda tall. Tall and skinny, had her hair dyed red, wore short skirts tryin’ to act like she’s young. And she wore those spiked heels, made this goddamn clicky noise up and down the hallway, she might as well’ve made an announcement. I’ll tell you somethin’ else, too.” She bent forward, warming to her subject. “She couldn’t walk in those things. She damn near fell one time.”

  “You watched her.”

  Mrs. Haley’s mouth opened in confusion. “Well, what’s that mean? Yeah, I like to know what’s goin’ on in my building. This whole building is my responsibility. Something goes wrong here, and it’s my neck, so, yeah, I watched that one. You bet. You woulda watched her too. Acting like she’s some kinda young kid and she’s probably older than me.” Mrs. Haley gave him a smug smile and shook her head at the other woman’s folly.

  “Anybody else come to see him? How about a young black man? Tall, wears glasses, very well dressed.”

  She gave him a blank look for a moment, then shook her head.

  He thought of Perry Willis. “How about a shorter guy, also a young black man?” Another shake of the head, irritated this time.

  Whelan stared at the woman. She seemed uncomfortable, and he realized she wanted him to leave. A new idea struck him.

  “You’ve been in there since the police came, haven’t you?”

  Her mouth opened and she shrugged. “I manage the building. I had to go in, see if there was anything else goin’ on there.”

  “In a dead man’s apartment? What would be going on there?” He won
dered whether she’d taken something from the apartment, something that would give him information. “Mrs. Haley, I need anything anybody can tell me about this man. If you took anything from the apartment that might give me information, I’d pay you for it and nobody would know about it.”

  She gave a little shake of her unwashed hair. “I didn’t take nothing. I ain’t a thief.”

  “All right. Thank you for your time.”

  She opened her mouth quickly, and he realized she was worried about the money.

  He pulled out his money clip and handed her a ten. “That’s for your trouble.”

  She smiled slightly, folding the ten and jamming it into one of the pockets of her housecoat.

  “You come back if you need any more information or…you know, anything.”

  “Thanks, I might do that.”

  She nodded and shut the door.

  Up the street they were beginning to line up for the next meal at the Sal Army, where there was a new officer in charge. His friend, the delightfully independent Captain Wallis, had been transferred. Whelan wondered if the new officer would be as streetwise and resilient as Wallis and decided it wasn’t likely.

  In front of the tire shop, a pair of black men in their forties were examining a set of used tires. Whelan approached and nodded when they looked at him. They nodded back and said nothing.

  “You fellas know any of the people upstairs?”

  The older of the two men shrugged. His companion shook his head.

  “I’m interested in a tall thin black man who lived there. Name was Sam Burwell.”

  The older man looked at him. “The one that got killed.”

  “Right.”

  “Didn’t see no badge.”

  “I don’t have one. I’m retired. Did you know Sam?” Whelan dug his cigarettes out of a vest pocket, shook one out, and held out the pack. The men each took a smoke and Whelan lit all three.