The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  “The last time you talked to him—can I ask about that?”

  “It’s cool. We didn’t have any trouble the last time.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “He was straight. And he was feelin’ good.”

  “He didn’t seem to have anything on his mind?”

  “No. Everything was cool. It was a Friday. He come up for dinner, and my wife made pork chops for him. I had a couple beers in the house for him, too. When he left, I give him forty bucks. It was payday.”

  Perry had to look away, and Whelan decided he’d asked all his questions.

  When the young man met his eyes again, he seemed composed. “Not much help, was I?”

  Whelan thought for a moment. “You gave me the woman’s name.”

  “You said you had another name for her.”

  “Yeah, but I already knew it wasn’t the real one. I just wish I knew why.”

  “You think you’re gonna find out who did this?”

  “Yeah, I do. It may take awhile, but…yeah, I’ll find out. Thanks, Perry.”

  “Wasn’t anything, man,” Perry said, and they shook hands. “And I’m sorry about—that other thing.”

  “It’s all right.”

  Whelan waited till the other man was several feet away and about to speak to some friends.

  “Hey, Perry? Something I wanted to say the other night and I didn’t get a chance. I’m sorry about your father.”

  Perry nodded and smiled.

  “All right, y’all. Time to dine!”

  The speaker was a heavyset woman of average height with a voice like the horn on a freighter and the bearing of a field marshal. Whelan figured this had to be Mrs. Simmons.

  “Come on, get in line, let’s eat.” She took a slender boy by his shoulders and forced him into line. “Come on, baby, don’t let these men keep you away from the food. You need to be putting some meat on those little bones.” She spied a woman joining the line at the other end. “You finished already, honey? ’Cause that’s the part of the line you’re at.”

  A chorus of laughter forced the other woman to move to the other end of what was becoming a long line. Mrs. Simmons stood her ground, directing traffic and keeping order where chaos wished to take hold. Whelan watched her: men ruled the world only because women like this let them think they were in charge.

  “How’d it go?”

  He turned to see Father Brennan. “Not bad.”

  “Did it help any?”

  Whelan thought for a moment. “Yeah, but I’m still not sure how. He gave me one piece I didn’t have before: I just don’t know where it fits.”

  “He’s a good guy.”

  “Just doesn’t want anybody to know it. But you’re right.”

  “What are you going to do next?”

  “I was thinking about eating.”

  The priest put a hand on his shoulder. “Better get in line, brother, and don’t do anything to get Mrs. Simmons mad at you.”

  “And risk public humiliation? I’m not that stupid.”

  The priest walked away and Whelan stood near the food tables waiting for the line to wear itself out. Hundreds of people moved by and didn’t seem to be making a dent in the incredible spread.

  He filled his plate and found a seat at the far end of an empty table. Three elderly ladies took over the other end. They sat down, acknowledged him with polite nods, then noticed the steaming pile of food threatening to overrun the boundaries of his groaning plate. He squirmed. “I know,” he said, “but the guy ahead of me had even more on his plate.”

  The oldest of the women peered at him from over half-glasses. “Young man, can you really eat all that?”

  “If I can’t, I’ll die trying.”

  When he was finished with his little mountain of food and had made two runs at the dessert table, he had a smoke and a cup of coffee. Then he stopped by to thank Father Brennan again and left. The air had a bite to it, and he drove with the window down. He punched radio buttons and came up with Jimmy Smith, and cranked it up. At a stoplight on Roosevelt Road, a dignified black couple in a big Buick did a slow double-take at him, a white man and his moribund car in the middle of a black neighborhood.

  It was still early, so he drove up Roosevelt to Halsted and made one slow circuit of Maxwell Street. The shops were all hiding behind their folding steel gates and the back lots were empty, but clusters of men stood on corners huddled over trash-can fires and a few slumming carousers lined up at Jim’s for a late-night snack between taverns. He drove the back lots looking for Buddy and keeping his eye on the rearview mirror.

  On his way home he thought about what little he’d learned: about the woman named Tess. Something told him that was her real name, that Sam Burwell had used her real name with his son. What Whelan had to figure out was why Burwell had needed to lie about her name to begin with. There was at least the chance that there had never been any “Mary,” no white woman in Uptown who waited tables, that Sam Burwell was one of those lonely men who invent women for themselves.

  He swung by the cab stand at Lincoln and Halsted, but Frank the cabdriver was long gone. Eventually Whelan admitted he had no real excuse to stay out. He went home and had a beer and watched half of an old Errol Flynn movie. In this one, Flynn, Tasmanian accent and all, was ridding San Antonio of riffraff. He got off good lines, romanced Alexis Smith, shot a hired gun, and brought justice to the city of the Alamo. Where was Errol when you needed him?

  Sixteen

  Day 10, Sunday

  On Sunday morning Whelan was already awake when the alarm went off at seven-thirty, and by eight he had showered and made a cup of coffee. He was blowing on the coffee to cool it off and half listening to the radio when he heard the news: another body had been found Saturday afternoon down on what the young woman newscaster called “the city’s old Maxwell Street Market.” The victim was described as a white male in his late forties or fifties, identified as Buddy Lenz, a homeless person known to frequent the area. The newscaster mentioned that this was the third body found in the area in a week.

  Indian summer had gone south as quickly as it had shown up. Whelan could see his breath in the early morning air, and the Jet coughed and hacked and died when he tried to start it. Eventually it came to life, and though the heater was long since dead, it was slightly warmer inside the car.

  He parked in the dusty lot behind the Maxwell Street Station and trudged east. It was nine-thirty and the side streets and back lots were jammed with vendors and bargain hunters and gawkers and kibitzers. Across the lots on Fourteenth the Mexican food vendors were already setting up shop, and the smell of corn tortillas mingled with the wood smoke and the ever-present odors of grilling onions.

  He picked and shouldered his way through the crowd, stopping to watch a young man in jeans haggling with an old vendor over a china bowl. The young man turned the bowl repeatedly in his hands, quoting prices and not looking at the old man, and Whelan made him for a picker, the kind that sell to the big dealers. Eventually the old man said something and the young one finally looked at him and nodded. Money changed hands, the old one grinned and tucked it away in his pants, and the young one moved on toward Halsted with the bowl, peering at every table he passed.

  Finally Whelan saw it. Over where the crowd thinned out near the viaducts, a group of small boys and several men were standing around a small square of weed-strewn vacant lot. He could make out the yellow tape of the police line.

  They’d long since moved the body, and the early morning wind was making short work of the yellow tape. It was down on one side and beginning to work loose from a tree around which it had been wrapped. The loose end made a sharp flicking sound in the wind. Whelan could see no blood.

  A few yards away, a squad car was parked at the entrance to the viaduct. Two uniformed cops stood outside, one leaning against the driver’s side door. He didn’t think either of them had been at the scene when Nate’s body had been found. He stood there for a moment and lit up a ciga
rette, then walked over to the squad car. “Did you find the body?”

  The cop leaning against the door gave him a long look and said nothing. He was gray-haired, with shrewd blue eyes and rosy cheeks.

  The other cop took a step forward. “A citizen found the body, sir. Why?” He was younger, looked young enough to be in the Academy. He kept one hand on his belt as he spoke, reminding Whelan of Jack Palance’s gunfighter character in Shane: a young cop striving mightily to cultivate a bad attitude and a hard-guy walk.

  “I knew him.”

  “How’d you know him, guy?” the older cop asked.

  Whelan shrugged. “I been coming down here for years. I buy produce over here.” He nodded in the direction of the Mexican vendors on Fourteenth Street. “And this is where I buy, you know, all my light bulbs and batteries and stuff like that. I know a lot of these guys.”

  The older cop nodded and watched him.

  “How was he killed?”

  “Like the others,” the older cop said, and tilted his head to watch Whelan’s reaction to the lie. Doing a little fishing of his own.

  Whelan squinted and shook his head. “There were others?”

  The older cop pulled himself off the car door and reached in through the car window for his smokes. He shook one out and lit it up. “Yeah, there were others. But they weren’t killed the same way. You don’t know about them?”

  “I’m only down here on Sundays.”

  “An old picker was shot couple weeks ago by a bunch of kids. And a guy that lived in a bus over there on Halsted, somebody strangled him. Friday, this was. This guy, somebody stabbed.”

  “Three guys in a couple weeks. Seems like a lot to me. I always felt pretty safe down here.” The cop said nothing. Whelan looked again at the little plot of ground. “They cleaned it up, huh?”

  “Wasn’t much to clean up.”

  “I thought people bleed a lot when they get stabbed.”

  The older cop squinted at him and shook his head. “Not always.”

  Right, Whelan thought. They don’t bleed where the body is dumped, just where it happens.

  “Thanks,” Whelan said, and walked away. He was careful not to look back.

  He couldn’t say it had come as a surprise, but now that he had seen the spot where they’d found Buddy Lenz, he felt worse. At the corner of Fourteenth Place and Morgan he stopped to light a cigarette. A traffic jam had formed between Morgan and Peoria, as cars attempted to move through the crush of people. A green station wagon bumped a pair of young Latino men and one of them pounded his fist on the hood. He and his companion glared at the driver, an elderly black man who just stared straight ahead.

  Whelan puffed at his cigarette and totaled it all up for himself. Three men were dead and the killer was still out there, and the killer knew him. And who he talked to.

  He tailed me, he took my car out, he watches me. I’ve talked to him, Whelan thought. I’ve talked to him. Time to finish this.

  He took a final puff from the smoke and tossed the butt in a muddy puddle along the worn curb, then walked over to Thirteenth.

  The dog with the holes in his coat was still there, as was the bear. The dog looked the same but the bear was showing the rigors of his work: stuffing was about to burst out of his stomach, and the dog had gnawed and worried at the ears till they were just ragged stumps. The old man was there too, ignoring the dog and watching for customers. He smiled and nodded when he saw Whelan.

  “Hello, Jesse. How’s business?”

  “Pretty fair, pretty fair. Did me some good early. Sold a set of dishes, six-piece setting. Got a good price for it.”

  “I’m glad you’re doing okay. It’s getting to be a dangerous place to make a living.”

  Jesse squinted up at him. “You know about old Sam, then?”

  “Yeah. And the others.”

  The old man nodded and looked down at his makeshift table. “That fella, that Buddy? I bought a few things from him. Wasn’t bad, as a picker. Just a little—” and he tapped one finger at his temple.

  Whelan nodded.

  “Didn’t know the old man in the bus, though. We didn’t speak. He didn’t speak to nobody I know of, ’cept maybe to the men there in that tire place.” He rearranged a few items on his table and shook his head. “This always been a good place. All kinds of people come here and mix, and there’s no trouble. Never been any trouble like this.”

  “It’s gonna be over soon.”

  The old man gave him a sharp look. “How you know that, son?”

  “A hunch. Just a hunch. See you around.”

  “Go easy, young man.”

  The pot-bellied knife vendor’s spot was empty but the blond sisters were there.

  Whelan stood a few feet away from the sisters and watched them. They were in the middle of a sale and it was an education. A man was interested in a pocket watch, and as he dickered with the women over the price, they took turns commenting on his offers or on the qualities of the watch. They stood at opposite ends of the long table and forced the man to turn his head from side to side in order to address them. It soon became apparent that they were wearing him out. Then the negotiations ended and the man stared at the watch for a long time. Finally he said something and the woman closer to him, the younger one, shrugged. In the background, the older one nodded and the sisters let their eyes meet for a second. The man handed money to the younger one and she jammed it into a pocket of her windbreaker.

  Whelan waited till the man had left with his watch before he approached. “Morning.”

  The older one nodded and smiled, but he could tell the younger one remembered him immediately. She said nothing.

  “I was here last week and we spoke about a fellow who used to set up a few feet from here. Sam Burwell.” The woman nodded slowly, still refusing to say anything. Whelan looked over at the older one and saw that she was as nervous as she’d been last week.

  “I found out later that he died. Killed during a robbery, they told me.” The two women both folded their arms and looked down, unaware that they’d adopted identical poses. “Now, you didn’t know him, as I recall.”

  The younger one met his eyes briefly. “Right. We didn’t know him.”

  Whelan nodded and looked around at the activity of the street. Then he caught the woman’s eye and smiled. “Then can you tell me why you went to his funeral?”

  The older one took a step back and the young one’s eyes widened.

  “We don’t want no trouble, mister. We don’t cause no trouble for nobody,” the older one said. Whelan caught just the faintest hint of an accent: German, maybe Yiddish.

  “But you did know him.”

  “Yeah, we knew him. So what?” The younger one had regained her footing and her moxie, and she wasn’t about to be pushed into a corner.

  “So you didn’t tell me the truth when I was looking for this man, and now he’s dead. And I’m real suspicious about everybody who lied to me because I think one of the people who lied to me killed him.”

  The woman’s eyes grew enormous, and he heard a sharp intake of breath from her sister. “They said some kids did it. A robbery, like you said.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think it had anything to do with kids or robbery or anything else that the cops say. I think somebody down here killed him, and those other two men as well.”

  “You can’t think we had anything to do with it.”

  “Yeah, I can. Women can kill.”

  The older one came forward. “We wouldn’t have done nothing to him. He was a real nice man.”

  “So you did know him. And you went to his funeral.”

  The young one shrugged. “Like Minna said. He was real nice.”

  “If he was so nice, how come you can’t help me find out what happened to him? Doesn’t it matter to you?”

  “Mister, we’re scared to death now.” Minna, the older sister, took a couple of steps forward.

  “I need to know if you saw him talking with anybody un
usual or if you saw anything at all that struck you as odd.”

  The younger one sighed. “We saw him talking to that white fella they found.”

  “Buddy.”

  “Yeah. That man came to see him a lot. Sometimes he had stuff to sell, but I think mostly he came by to borrow money.”

  “Anybody else?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about anybody that seemed to be hanging around here, maybe watching him?”

  The woman gave him a wary look. “A man in a car.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I don’t know. Dark, black or brown.”

  “A well-dressed young black man, maybe?”

  She frowned. “No. I don’t think so. I couldn’t see him good but I don’t think it was a colored man.”

  Whelan waited and, when it was clear that nothing else was coming, said, “He had a woman. A lady friend. If I could find her, I think I might be able to get somewhere. Did you ever see him with a woman?”

  The younger one looked down and pursed her lips, but the older one let her eyes go big with suppressed excitement. She was watching her sister, and Whelan would have sworn there was mirth in her eyes.

  “What do you want to tell me, Minna?”

  She couldn’t take her eyes from her sister. She nodded. “Helena went out with him a couple times.”

  Helena wheeled quickly. “That was nothin’. I wasn’t his girlfriend. It was just some drinks.” She swung her head back toward Whelan. “It was nothing.”

  “You went with him for a couple of drinks.”

  “That’s all it was.” She glared at Minna and Whelan saw her clench and unclench her fists. “All it was. A couple of drinks. He was a nice man and that was all there was to it.”

  “Well, thank you for your time, ladies. You’ve been very helpful.” The sisters were still glaring at each other when he looked back. He took a long look at the woman called Helena.

  He parked in front of the Blue Note and ignored the sullen glances of a trio of teenagers on the corner. When he pushed open the door, a rush of old tavern odors assaulted him. He could smell the cleaning compound and the fresh soap in the glassware sinks, but it would take days to cut the tobacco smoke from a busy Saturday night. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but he was aware of the faces along the bar that turned to stare at him.