The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  At Wilson and Broadway the cabbie pulled up to the curb and said, “Gimme five bucks and we’ll call it even. I was goin’ this way anyhow.”

  Whelan handed him a ten and said, “Keep it. Buy yourself a beer.”

  The cabbie looked at the ten and grinned. “Okay, buddy. Appreciate it. Hey, you ever need a cab at night, look me up. When I’m waitin’ for a fare, I use a cabstand at Lincoln and Halsted.”

  “Up the street from the Biograph? Okay. Have a good one.”

  He got a dark Berghoff’s from the refrigerator and turned on his stereo. Time for one more call.

  “Blue Note,” O.C. said in his best innkeeper’s monotone.

  “Paul Whelan, O.C.”

  “Whatcha need, Whelan? A good drink? Cold beer? It ain’t but three customers here tonight.”

  “I’ll take a rain check. Tonight I just need information. I found that old drummer you mentioned. Buddy Lenz.”

  “Where at?”

  “Down on Maxwell Street.”

  “Poor old Buddy, he’s half crazy. But I guess you found that out for yourself.”

  “He’s about what I’d expect. Could be useful, though. You think he’s worth talking to?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Did you ever hear of any trouble between him and Sam?”

  “Naw, he hung around Sam a bit when Sam was, you know, down there selling. Thought he had some kinda talent for finding stuff. Sam give him a buck now and then to eat. Buddy wouldn’t hurt nobody.”

  He remembered what Nate had said about Sam Burwell arguing with a man in a sweatshirt. Arguing over money, he’d thought. But this thing wasn’t about money; none of it was about money. “That’s pretty much what I thought, O.C.”

  He sipped at his beer and decided he needed to drown his sorrows in food. A late-night club sandwich, perhaps. He went into his kitchen and rooted around in the refrigerator. There was promise here: thin-sliced turkey, maple-cured ham, tomato, cheese. He piled meat and Monterey jack cheese on three large slices of rye and tossed it all in the toaster oven till the cheese was bubbling and threatening to go brown. He put on a couple of thin slices of one of the last of his own tomatoes, spooned on a little hot giardiniera, and cut it.

  After a bite, he was already beginning to feel better. Then the phone rang. He crossed the room and picked it up to hear a man breathing heavily on the other end.

  “Hello?”

  “This is a friend,” the voice rasped.

  “Bauman. What happened, you lock yourself out?”

  Bauman’s hoarse laugh filled the phone. In the background, Whelan could hear country music and a man arguing in a loud voice.

  “Okay, I’ll wait till you can control your puckish sense of humor.”

  “Hey, Whelan, c’mon, you can take a joke. You’re the great joker yourself.”

  “Where you at?”

  “No fucking idea. But I got something for you.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “You got a slight—uh, problem.”

  “How slight?”

  “Mark Durkin. That’s how slight.”

  No surprises there, he thought. Bauman was humming with the music.

  “You like Patsy Cline, Bauman? Should have figured you for a Patsy Cline man.”

  “I like everything, Whelan. I’m just a happy-go-lucky guy. So what’d you do to piss Durkin off?”

  “Told embarrassing Durkin stories to his partner.”

  Bauman laughed. “You told him about the lost squad car?”

  “Seemed like the proper thing to do.”

  “Oh, you’re a bad man.”

  “So what did you hear?”

  “I heard he’s got a hard-on for you. I heard he wants a piece of you real bad. Don’t know what he’s got in mind. Sure you didn’t do something else besides tellin’ funny stories?”

  “Can’t think of anything else,” he said, but he remembered the look in Durkin’s eyes the other night. That look was about more than embarrassing stories.

  “Better watch your back door, Whelan. He’s a nasty prick. He ain’t gonna do Marquis of Queensbury with you.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Bauman.”

  Bauman laughed. “You can buy me dinner. If Durkin don’t whack you.” And he hung up.

  Whelan put the phone back on the receiver and stood there for a moment. A cop could do a lot to a car, a cop could disable a car in a dozen ways and maybe make it look like kids. Any cop could.

  Whelan sat in his darkened living room with the window open to let in the chilly air and its smells of coming winter. He thought of the cold silence in the empty blue bus, and he didn’t want to think about what that meant. As he sipped his beer, he listened to a little jazz and then moved on to a rock station that played some early Bob Seger and Lou Reed. He thought of the people he still had to see and imagined that each visit, each interview, had an observer in the shadows, that everything he did was being watched. He had been ready to put a face and a name on this observer, but all that had changed. The watcher in this vision had no features, and Whelan could no longer tell even the color of his skin.

  Thirteen

  Day 8, Friday

  He woke up early the next morning and sat for a half hour at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, listening with one ear to the news and going over what had happened. It looked no better in the cold light of morning.

  A fog had settled in during the night, and Uptown looked like London on a bad day. He walked to the office and called his service, and a fluted singsong voice greeted him.

  “Hello, good morning, Paul Wee-lon Detective Sarvices.”

  Whelan sighed. When he least expected it, when his resistance was at its lowest, Abraham Chacko would unfailingly materialize on the other end of the phone.

  He swallowed, remembered to speak slowly and carefully, took a deep breath and spoke firmly into the telephone. “Hello, Abraham. This is Paul Whelan.”

  There ensued the traditional moment of confusion, signaled by a long silence. Then, as Abraham sorted out the possibilities open to him, Whelan could hear the little Indian’s fevered breathing, could almost feel the tension in his panic-stricken chest, could sense his fervent wish to be spirited away to Calcutta or Bangalore.

  Just when it seemed that Abraham would be unable to complete the conversation, his cheery voice rang out. “Hello, good morning, sar. You are Mr. Whelan.”

  “I believe so. For a moment I thought you’d tell me I wasn’t in.”

  Abraham laughed, a chirpy laugh. “No, no, sar, I know that you are you and not someone who he is calling you. This much I know.”

  “You are a top-notch telephone operator, Abraham. Indispensable. Where is Shelley?”

  “She is coming late.”

  “I see. Any calls?”

  “No calls as yet, sar.”

  “Well, it was nice to chat with you, Abraham.”

  “Excuse me, sar. I wish to inform you that I am having the interview for a job today.”

  The morning was looking up. “So you might be leaving us?”

  “Yes, sar. I am having the interview for the position of Chicago Police Dispatcher.”

  “God help us all,” Whelan muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said God helps us all, Abraham. Good luck to you.”

  “Thank you, sar. Good-bye, sar.”

  Whelan sat holding the phone for a moment and a tremor went through his body. When the shudder had passed, he made a call he’d been wanting to make for days.

  The call was to the New York Bar Association, and it disappointed him, for it told him that David Hill was indeed a member in good standing of the bar of the State of New York and had been for the past three years.

  He killed the better part of an hour and a half getting a battery from an auto parts shop on Broadway and riding a cab down to Maxwell Street. When he’d installed the battery, he drove to within a half block of Halsted. He was walking to the blue bus when he came to a sudden stop
.

  A small crowd had gathered on the corner of Halsted and Liberty, and there were two police cars parked nose to nose a few feet from the corner. Beyond them he could see a dark blue Caprice with M plates. The uniformed officers were just visible a few yards past the bus.

  Whelan parked and crossed the street. At the entrance to the tire yard, a pair of young men were craning for a look at the police officers.

  “What happened?”

  They looked at him and one pointed to the bus. “They found some old dude back there.”

  “Dead?”

  The speaker nodded. “Somebody wasted the dude.”

  Whelan moved past them and around the tire yard. Behind the bus was a vacant lot overgrown with tall weeds. A house had once stood here. Whelan could make out the sidewalk that had run up to the front and a section of concrete foundation that was still visible along one side. Now it was a receptacle for discarded things, a couple of wine bottles and a shot tire and a filthy denim shirt. And where the weeds met the back of the bus, three cops stood looking down at something in the grass and a fourth was on his haunches.

  Whelan moved closer until he could see the body. The cop on the ground said something and one of the other cops shrugged, then turned slightly and saw Whelan.

  “Back on the sidewalk, sir. Over there.” He was a large man with a well-developed gut, and he was sweating in his leather jacket.

  Whelan looked at him. “Can I take a look? I think I knew him.”

  The cop hesitated for a moment, then gestured for Whelan to come closer.

  It was Nate, as he’d known it would be. He had been strangled with a dirty gray section of clothesline and the rope was tightly wound round his neck. The swollen, constricted face bore little resemblance to the old man from the back of the bus.

  “Yeah,” Whelan said. “His name is Nate. He lived in the back of this bus. I think he did some work for the guys that sell tires out of this lot.”

  “Know where we can find them?”

  “No.”

  The cop on the ground straightened up. He brushed off his hands, hitched up his trousers, and squinted at Whelan.

  “How do you know this guy? You work down here?”

  “No. I talked to him a couple of times down here. I don’t really know anything about him except his name.”

  “Pockets are turned out. Nothing on him.”

  “Robbery?” Whelan asked.

  “We don’t know yet, sir.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it though, does it?”

  The cop inclined his head slightly. “Why do you say that, sir?”

  “I used to work out of Eighteen. I never heard of a robbery where they strangled the victim.”

  The cop seemed to relax. “Yeah, I’d say that’s a new one on us, too.”

  The older cop studied him for a moment. “We might want to talk to you about this later. Got a number we can reach you at?”

  Whelan fished out a card and handed it over.

  The cop held the card out at arm’s length and read it. He raised his eyebrows at the other cops. “Private investigator. Is that what’s gonna happen to me when I get my twenty in?”

  One of the other cops laughed. “You’ll never get out: you’re always gonna have half a dozen mortgages to pay off.”

  The cop who had been studying the body took the card. “You know anybody this guy had a problem with?”

  “No. Like I said, I didn’t really know him.”

  The cop nodded slowly and said nothing. Whelan started back toward the rear of the bus. Something made him look up. Mark Durkin was leaning against the rear bumper and puffing at a cigarette. He stared at Whelan for a moment, saying nothing. Durkin’s hair clung damply to his forehead: a drinker’s sweat. Like Bauman, he’d sweat in a snowstorm. In his eyes, there was an unnatural brightness that had nothing to do with drink. Whelan had seen eyes like Durkin’s before, but their owners were usually wearing cuffs.

  Whelan nodded. “Durkin.”

  Durkin moved his head almost imperceptibly and took another drag on his cigarette. As Whelan walked away, he could feel Durkin’s eyes on him.

  He spent a few minutes driving around the back streets on the off chance that he could find Buddy Lenz. At Fifteenth and Morgan he found a thin white man in a winter coat rifling through several boxes of discarded produce.

  “Do you know Buddy?”

  The man paused and looked at Whelan with a tomato in his hand. “Got a smoke?”

  “I got a whole pack. I’m looking for Buddy.”

  The man approached the car and Whelan held out his cigarettes. “I ain’t seen Buddy today. I seen ’im yesterday. Not today.”

  “Where does he stay at night?”

  The man shrugged, then pointed toward the tracks to the south. “He flops under the viaduct there sometimes. Sometimes he goes down to the missions.”

  “Long walk.”

  The man shrugged. “He likes to walk. Always says that.”

  “Thanks.”

  Whelan made one pass through the viaduct, then back again, and checked another one a half block west. No one was sleeping in the damp tunnels. He left Maxwell and headed back to the office.

  The sun had burned its way through the morning’s fog and the day promised warmth and a soft southerly wind, but a man was dead and Whelan had seen that man’s face. A man was dead and just hours before his death he’d called Paul Whelan. He wanted to believe Nate had had his own enemies, that Nate’s death had nothing to do with him, but it wasn’t a convincing argument.

  As he drove back to the office, he punched buttons on the radio, trying to find music to take his mind off the dead man in the weeds, the look on the swollen face, but it was not a morning for music, and before he’d gone four blocks he had turned the radio off.

  He grabbed a newspaper from the box on the corner and went up to the office. He made a quick call to David Hill’s office and was greeted by the sunny voice of Pilar Sandoval.

  “Is Mr. Hill in?”

  “No, he is not,” she said in her crisp manner. “He is in court today.”

  “Excellent place for him,” Whelan muttered and the young woman laughed.

  “Oh, Mr. Whelan. I didn’t recognize your voice.”

  “Hello, Ms. Sandoval. You seem to be in good spirits.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Mr. Hill isn’t in!” She laughed. “Is there a message?”

  “Just tell him I called. If he gives you a hard time, ruin his day: tell him I’ll keep calling till I get him.” After he’d hung up, Whelan spent a moment staring at the phone. He was wondering about the possibility of Pilar Sandoval sharing with him the names of Hill’s current clients. He shook his head. Something told him that, no matter how irritating her boss was, Ms. Sandoval wouldn’t divulge his private business.

  He needed lunch. He needed lunch and cheering up, and there was but one place to go.

  Half a dozen hard hats from the CTA yards already occupied the two best booths in the House of Zeus, and three kids with pierced ears and noses and hair dyed tropical colors shared an order of Greek fries, and a bag lady had either dropped off to sleep or died on a small table near the counter.

  The floor show was already in progress when Whelan entered.

  “I hope I didn’t miss anything,” he said to one of the hard hats.

  The man smiled and nodded his yellow helmet in the direction of the counter. “Just started.”

  Three people stood at the counter holding little red plastic baskets and harangued Rashid about their contents. A few feet away, Rashid’s cousin Gus stood with the air of a penitent and listened to an apparent lecture from a sickly looking man in a dark suit. Occasionally the man in the suit took his eyes off the list he was reading from and fixed Gus with a hard look. A young black man in a shirt and tie emerged from the kitchen shaking his head and said something to the pale-skinned man, who gave Gus a disgusted look and added an item to his list.

  Oh, boy, Whelan thought: heal
th inspectors. This should prove to be a test for both sides.

  He took his place next to the angry customers: a short fat woman, a tall black man in his forties, and a young woman who could have been Filipino. Instead of dealing with each case individually and defusing some of the hostility, Rashid had elected to face all three of his accusers simultaneously, allowing them to unite and let their anger undergo some kind of mutation. He’d started out with three irritated patrons and now he had a lynch mob.

  As nearly as Whelan could make out, the complaints were, from left to right, cold gyros on a stale pita, a hamburger burnt to cinders, and an Italian beef whose odd color matched its troubling odor.

  All three customers were speaking at once, and Rashid held out his hands in the gesture of a politician calming his crowd and said, “Please, please, everything is okay. Everything is okay.” He caught sight of Whelan out of the corner of his eye and burst into his wondrous white-toothed grin, an unlikely flash of ivory.

  “Oh, Detective! Very nice, very nice to see you. My friend, he is detective. This man in my restaurant is detective.”

  The short chubby woman peered up at Whelan with distaste. “I don’t care if he’s the Pope. I want my lunch. And I don’t want this.”

  “Little problem here, Detective, but nothing so bad,” Rashid said hopefully. He favored each of his customers with his teeth again. “I will personally”—and here he slapped himself on the chest—“serve each one here.”

  “You the one served us in the first place,” the man said. He looked at Whelan and held out his charred burger. “Look here, man. Look like it was in the Chicago Fire.”

  “I am waiting here the longest,” the Filipino-looking woman said. “Twenty minutes I am waiting. This beef, look at his color.”

  Rashid pretended to examine the beef and shrugged. “It is how it comes to us. From farms. In America,” he added, hoping to share at least some of the blame with the embattled farmers of his adopted country.