The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  She held up two fingers. “Big one with blond hair, kinda young, and a little one, skinny, dark hair, kinda red face. I could smell liquor on that one. The big one, he asked all the questions.”

  “What did the other one do?”

  “He just looked around, like he was bored.”

  “All right, Mrs. Haley. Here.” He handed her ten bucks.

  The cigarette came out of her mouth and she smiled as she palmed the bill. “I tol’ ya last time to call me Vi.”

  “You did. I forgot. Well, thanks, Vi. I really appreciate it. And if you hear anything else, call me at this number.” He handed her a card.

  He walked down the stairs. Halfway down he turned to look at her. She held up his card and grinned at him.

  The line outside the Sal Army office now stretched around the corner onto Sunnyside. Whelan walked to his car, got in, and sat there for a moment. Like his first visit, this one had served only to confuse him. He still couldn’t put a name to the black woman who had visited Sam Burwell, and now it was obvious that someone had slipped into Burwell’s apartment to drop off his kit. Why? With nothing in it to give even the identity of the owner, the kit itself was harmless.

  He started his car, listened to his engine groan for a moment and thought about the bored Mark Durkin.

  Sure you were bored, Durkin. You had the case made already.

  Whelan thought about that for a moment. The real question was why Durkin thought he had the case made already.

  He parked on Ashland in front of a burned-out liquor store, took a long look at the bunch of kids watching him from an alley and crossed the street. Half a mile away he could see the Stadium, and there was almost nothing to obscure the view but four blocks of vacant lots and liquor stores. There was a chapel on one end of the block, and a liquor store across Madison in the other direction, and set back a little from the street was the building Whelan was looking for. Covington’s new landlord was the City of Chicago, and the median age of his new neighbors was probably close to seventy, for this was Senior Citizen Housing.

  A security man on the ground floor halted Whelan’s progress and a woman at the gray desk made a call to see if Mr. Covington was accepting visitors. She gave a short nod, put down the phone, and told Whelan he could go up.

  “Ninth floor, apartment nine-oh-five,” she said, and when he looked back at her from the elevator she was still watching him.

  On Covington’s floor the hall was hot, the air thick with the odors of frying lard and cigarettes and the acrid smell from the incinerator. At the door to 905 he knocked, and a deep hoarse voice said “All right,” and Whelan then waited for almost a minute for the door to open. From within the apartment he could hear shuffling sounds and a scraping noise he couldn’t quite place, and then the door opened and Whelan saw that he had reached another dead end.

  George Covington was a big man in a blue flannel shirt and glasses. He was in his sixties, going bald on top. The man’s face was deeply lined and his eyes were red-rimmed, made huge by the dense lenses of his glasses, and Whelan now understood the scraping sound, for Covington leaned his great bulk on a metal walker. He struggled to get out of the way of the door and nodded at Whelan.

  “Mr. Covington? My name is Paul Whelan. I’m a detective working on…a case, and I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “Detective.” Covington wrestled with this for a moment and seemed to weigh it against the opportunity for a little company. No contest. “All right,” he said, backing slowly out of the way and motioning with a jerk of his big head for Whelan to come in. “You can sit over there in that chair,” he said, looking at a lumpy armchair near the window, and Whelan crossed the room and planted himself in it.

  Covington moved slowly back to his own chair, across a little side table from Whelan, put the walker to one side and dropped his large frame into the chair with a grunt. He peered into a cup, took a sip, and looked at Whelan. “You want some coffee? I can make you some coffee.”

  “No, sir, I’ve been drinking it all day.”

  “I like coffee. I can drink coffee all day. Used to be able to drink something else all day,” he said, and chuckled. His voice suited him perfectly, deep and dry and beginning to show cracks.

  “We all have to slow down eventually,” Whelan said.

  “Well, I’m gonna make me some more.” He watched as the old man hauled his big frame out of the chair, could actually hear the cracking of the man’s joints. Covington stood, wavered a bit before steadying himself on the arm of his chair, then grabbed his walker and crossed the small room to his kitchenette. Whelan could see the rest of the room now: on the floor just barely showing from behind the old man’s chair was what appeared to be a small portable oxygen tank.

  Whelan sighed. He could hear the old man’s raspy breathing from across the room. “Talked me into it,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll have some coffee too.”

  “Good,” Covington said, smiling.

  It was instant, mixed weak to make the jar go further. Whelan nursed his and shared a smoke with Covington and asked a few perfunctory questions about Sam Burwell. For his trouble he learned that Covington hadn’t heard that Burwell was dead, hadn’t seen him in ten years, if not twenty. Whelan knew he’d wasted his time coming here and something else as well. Without realizing it, he’d been counting on tying things together when he found Covington. He sipped at the bad coffee and allowed the old man to ramble for a few minutes about the old days. Covington allowed as he had made a few mistakes in his youth. When Whelan finished his coffee, he left the rest of his smokes, tossed in ten bucks for the old man’s trouble and left.

  He pulled up in front of the church at a little before seven, parked, and then sat in his car listening to the radio. The disk jockey had dug up an old Ramsey Lewis number called “Le Fleur.” Dozens of people were entering the church hall, pausing to have animated conversations before they went in, calling to one another from across the street, holding up the food they’d brought. Whelan told himself he was watching the crowd, but he knew he was sitting there because he was an outsider and didn’t want to go in till the last possible moment.

  When he saw several of the people casting puzzled looks in his direction, he decided to get it over with. He crossed the street and went inside. At the door a young man blinked in mild surprise. Whelan said “hello,” and the young man nodded and then said, “The donation is five dollars, sir. All you can eat.”

  “I feel like I’m stealing.”

  St. Anna’s had a new school and hall to go with its museum-piece rectory, and at the moment the hall was flooded with light and music and people. At the far end, a long paper sign proclaimed the event to be A TASTE OF THE WEST SIDE, and just below it, a young man in a luminous lavender suit was playing deejay, and a couple of young schoolgirls were already dancing with each other. A few feet away, a couple of boys approximately the same age as the girls went through an impressive array of dance moves for an audience largely made up of other boys. Whelan wondered at what point the boys would deign to notice the girls.

  He was intensely conscious, not of his color but of his intrusive presence in a private celebration. Not that he hadn’t dressed for the occasion: he wore a new pair of tan slacks and a dark red long-sleeved sport shirt, and he’d made the gesture of polishing his old oxblood shoes.

  Whelan walked the length of the hall, noting the many faces that turned his way, polite faces and some of them outright friendly, taking him perhaps for a friend of Father’s, but all of them curious at the presence of this unknown white man. He realized he’d been hoping to see someone else there who was not a parishioner—a white cop maybe, or a firefighter, or the guy that ran the local Chinese restaurant. And he felt foolish for the thought.

  If there was an overriding feature of that hall it was its smell: it was dominated by the aroma of food and by women’s smells, a wondrous mix of perfume and cologne and powder, of clothing taken
from cedar chests and, in the cases of a few of the older women, mothballs. He looked around for Father Brennan but didn’t see him. He didn’t see Perry Willis either. It was just as well: too early to spoil the evening. He scanned the crowd carefully for a moment and then his nose went to work: he sniffed at the air and began walking toward what would be the kitchen of the hall. He took a few more paces and then stopped.

  At first glance it appeared to be a solid wall of food. When he was able to calm himself, he saw that he was standing before a row of tables laden near to breaking. Behind these tables were more like them, and behind these and at a slightly higher level were the windows of the hall kitchen, themselves stacked with Saran-wrapped pots and steaming bowls. His nostrils were overmatched. He’d expected a couple of nice tables of soul food and a few All-American standards, ribs and greens and maybe a ham and the usual church-supper array of potato salads and macaroni salads and cole slaw. He was thus unprepared for the splendors now encountered.

  Hams there were, and several different recipes for greens, but there were dozens of other items as well, including catfish and three kinds of sausage and four different versions of Swedish meatballs. There was a smoked turkey the size of a German shepherd, and a sliced pork tenderloin, slabs of ribs cut into three-rib pieces for individual portions, and rib tips and short ribs of beef and the nasty little peppered sausages known as hot links. A few feet away to the left he found the dessert table, the sin of gluttony taking earthly form in the guise of sweet potato pies, pecan pies, angel food cakes, chocolate layer cakes, peach tarts, and apple cobbler.

  He knew he was staring but was powerless to show his hard-earned manners.

  “I died. I died and went to heaven,” he said, and heard someone laugh. He turned and saw a young woman with a Tupperware bowl shaking her head at him. She set the bowl down on the table and looked at an older woman behind the table.

  “Sound like this is one hungry man here.”

  “Better feed him before he dies on us.”

  They snickered and Whelan grinned at them. “My mother told me never to be the first one at a party to eat, but I notice nobody else is ready.”

  “Oh, they ready, honey,” the older woman said. “They just waiting for Mrs. Simmons. Mrs. Simmons says eat, they’ll eat.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Father Brennan grinning at him. “Well, you took us up on our invitation and now you’re meeting all the women.”

  “You throw a mean party, Father.”

  He cast a proprietal look around the hall and nodded slowly. “We sure do.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  The priest looked at him. “With what?”

  “Your parishioners. They know how to enjoy themselves.”

  Father Brennan studied him for a moment. “They’re poor, Mr. Whelan, they’re not dead.” He waved to a woman at the far end of the hall, exchanged wisecracks with the people beginning to belly up to the tables, then looked at Whelan. “Perry’s here. He just came in. You want me to bring him over?”

  “Did you already ask him to talk to me?”

  “Yeah, but only because I don’t think he’s done anything wrong.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I don’t either. But I think he might know something, and I’m running out of places to look.”

  “You could give it up,” the priest said in friendly malice.

  “I don’t do that. Once I’m in, I stay in till it’s over.”

  The priest smiled. “I’ll bring Perry over.”

  “No. Enjoy your party. I’ll find him myself in a few minutes.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  “I could use some.” Whelan watched the priest join a group of his parishioners.

  He had no trouble locating Perry Willis. Dark and intense, Perry stood along a wall by himself and sipped at a cup of coffee. They picked each other up at almost the same moment, and Whelan felt almost drawn over by Perry’s close-set eyes.

  “Mr. Willis.” Whelan nodded.

  Perry nodded, drank his coffee, and looked out at the room over the rim of the cup. He gave a short wave to someone at the door, then let his gaze return to Whelan. “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Yeah. Without the attitude and the sucker punch this time.”

  Perry looked down into his cup and made a halfhearted shrug, but Whelan could tell he was embarrassed. He waited for Perry to speak.

  The young man looked around the room and shook his head. “Father Mike, he said you think I’m some kinda crazy gang-banger.”

  “Not really. You seem to be wired a little tight, but under the circumstances—”

  “I apologize. Sorry about that shit, man. I ain’t popped nobody since I was in school. I felt bad about my poppa, I felt real bad, and I needed to hit somebody. And I didn’t know nothing about you. You were just some white dude come around looking for him, and next thing he’s dead.”

  “I was trying to find him. I never actually laid eyes on him. I think he was already dead when I started looking for him.”

  Perry nodded, looked down into the cup as though for answers, then squinted at Whelan. “What were you looking for him for? He owe somebody some bread?”

  “No. I was hired to find him by a lawyer. He said a relative of your father’s was trying to get in touch with him.”

  “That’s what you said that time. On the phone.” His voice seemed to lose a little steam at the admission about the phone call.

  “And that just made you more suspicious. Because there was no other relative.”

  Perry gave him a frank look. “Right. Wasn’t nobody else left, so I knew there was some weird shit going down, and my father was in the middle. Wasn’t nothing new about that, but didn’t mean I had to like it. So who’s this lawyer?”

  Whelan hesitated and Perry made an exasperated little hissing sound. “You gonna whip that lawyer-privacy thing on me?”

  “No. I guess not. I’m not working for him now, I’m working for O.C. Brown. The lawyer’s nothing to me. His name’s Hill and he’s got an office on the North Side. I can give you his phone number if you want it. But he still maintains that he’s working for a family member that wanted to get in touch with your father.”

  The young man was shaking his head before Whelan could finish. “Wasn’t nobody else. Just him and me. He had a brother in Georgia that passed when I was a little boy, and his sister, my aunt, she passed about five years back. That’s all he had, man, except for me.” He stared down at his shoes for several moments, and when he looked up his eyes were starting to moisten at the corners. “So what you want to know? O.C. and me, we had a talk. He says you’re all right, and you know O.C. and my father were tight. So what you want to know?”

  “Let’s get the hard stuff out of the way first. Did you and your father have trouble?”

  “Yeah, we did. Hard to be patient with a drinker, man. And he was a drinker. He come to me for money a lot of times and I give it to him, but I’m telling you he like to wore me out with it. My wife and I, we’re trying to put the bread together for a house. So my father and me, we had some words. He give me some shit a couple times when he had drink in him, and I had to walk, man, ’cause I was afraid I’d smack him upside his head.”

  He stopped and looked at Whelan.

  “Why you want to know how we got along? You think I hurt him?”

  Whelan looked at him for a moment and knew the answer. He shook his head. “No, I don’t figure you for a killer. But there’s somebody out there who is, and he’s still out there.”

  “What about those little-shit gang-bangers?”

  “That’s all they are. I think this was something different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve learned that someone was looking for your father about a year ago, and he saw somebody following him in a car.”

  Perry nodded. “He told me that. Told me about all of it. But the dude in the car w
asn’t the one askin’ about him. The one in the car was a brother, the other one was a white man.”

  “They could have been working together. How much did you know about his life? I mean his private life.”

  Perry shrugged. “He had him a crib on the North Side. He was makin’ a little bread doing drywall and stuff like that for a dude out south beginning of the summer, but that was finished. Lately, he was just sellin’ his stuff down there at Jewtown.” Then he surprised Whelan with a smile. It was a broad boyish smile that made Perry seem little more than a teenager. “Had him a lady up north, too.”

  Whelan smiled. “God bless ’em both. What do you know about the woman?”

  “I know she was white. He was kinda funny about telling me, behind that. Thought I wouldn’t like him stayin’ with a white woman, but I was glad for him. I don’t get into that shit.” He shot Whelan an embarrassed look. “Probably don’t seem like that to you, but it’s true. I don’t have no problem with anybody.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Tess. Called her Tess.”

  Whelan stared at him for a moment. “I heard her name was Mary.”

  “No, I never heard him say anything about any Mary.”

  “Ever hear him talk about another woman in his life, a woman named Mattie?”

  “Sure, man, he used to see Mattie, but that wasn’t no big thing. Mattie kind of religious.”

  “How about somebody from the old days. A woman named Mamie?”

  “Never heard him talk about her, either. Seem to me, you know a lot about my poppa.”

  “For the past week I’ve done nothing but ask people about him. You get to enough people, you can learn things about somebody his family doesn’t even know.”

  “You’re pretty good at it, huh?”

  “I know people who are better. But nobody as stubborn.”

  “You got that right,” Perry said with a half smile.

  “The people who were following him—did he ever put a name to them? Ever give you an idea who they were?”

  “No. I don’t think he knew.”