The Riverview Murders

by Michael Raleigh

  His partner looked at him with something like amusement. “No. He liked it. That’s his shit over there, he was fishing. This was probably his favorite place.”

  The big man lit a thin dark cigar and puffed, then shook his head.

  He blew smoke out over the lake and didn’t look back till the white-uniformed officer was a few feet away. Then he flicked the cigar into the greenish water and hitched his pants up over his stomach.

  “Hello, Al.” The sergeant smiled and then nodded first at the big man and then at the younger man.

  The big one returned the nod. “So how was Florida?”

  “Oh, it was fine, Albert. You ought to go down there some time, spend a couple weeks in the Florida Keys. Do you a world of good, although I don’t know if the Keys are ready for Albert Bauman.”

  “They got taverns and dancing girls?”

  “Taverns, they got. About a thousand of ’em. And they got girls, all kindsa girls. Don’t know if they’d dance for you, though, Al.”

  Bauman smiled, then turned and gestured with his thumb in the direction of the dead man. “There he is.”

  The sergeant frowned. “Just an old guy out fishing, huh?”

  A younger officer had come up behind the sergeant. “What we got here, Mike?”

  “Albert’s gonna tell us.”

  Bauman looked for a moment at the young officer as though daring him to interrupt. Then he turned and looked at the body.

  “Gunshot. Just one.”

  “Through the heart?”

  “Nah. Missed the heart, didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. Poor fucker died of shock, or loss of blood, one or the other.”

  “Robbery?” the sergeant asked.

  “Uh-uh. Still has money in the wallet, watch, ring. Nothing gone that I can see.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking somebody came up to this old guy while he was fishing and killed him. Somebody he knew.”

  “Why?”

  Bauman turned to face his young partner.

  “Why somebody he knew?”

  The big man pointed to the fishing gear, the white plastic bucket and poles, the small cooler. “His stuff is all over there. He got up and came all the way over here. Least that’s what I think.”

  “So?”

  “So he saw this guy coming. You see a stranger coming, you think he might be trouble, you look straight ahead and hope you’re wrong. You pretend you’re invisible. You see somebody you know, somebody you know means trouble for you, you start moving. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this guy saw trouble comin’ and tried to move out of the way. I don’t know if he was gonna jump into the water or what. It’s not that deep here. But the guy caught him and it was lights-out.” Bauman looked around at the concrete surface of the breakwater, then bent over the corpse again and lifted the man’s jacket away, using two fingers. He examined the man’s fingers and nails, his wrists. “No struggle. Happened fast, or the other guy was just quicker.”

  “So what do you make, Albert?”

  “Fuck if I know. Somebody wanted to waste this guy and he got it done. Who knows why. But I’d bet good money on one thing: I don’t think it was, like, coincidence that he caught him out here at the end of the breakwater with a fishing pole in his hand. What I think is, we got an organized-type guy here.”

  He looked again at the dead man and shrugged. “He don’t look like somebody you’d think would have enemies.”

  “Ah, you never know, Al,” the sergeant said, taking out a cigarette. “The whole world’s nuts.”

  Paul Whelan circled the block twice for a parking spot and wound up two blocks away from his destination. Pulling up the collar of his jacket against the wind, he told himself he was having a bad day and began walking south on Broadway.

  The dark-haired young woman at the desk looked up and raised her eyebrows in interest as Whelan pushed his way through the door; then she broke into a grin.

  “The difficult Mr. Whelan,” she said in her musical voice.

  “Hello, Pilar. Did anyone ever tell you that you always sound as if you’re about to break into song?”

  “No. Most people hear my business voice and think I’m a robot. Or they think I’ve got an attitude. A man yesterday accused me of being a recording.”

  “You don’t sound like any recording I’ve ever heard. And what’s this ‘difficult Mr. Whelan’ business? Is that what he calls me?” Whelan heard the note of surprise in his voice and smiled in an attempt to convince Pilar that he didn’t care what her boss called him.

  “Sometimes. I believe this was about a bill.”

  “Lawyers always think other people’s bills are unreasonable,” Whelan said.

  She looked down at her desk blotter and a dimple appeared in one cheek. “No comment,” she said. Then she flashed her brown eyes at him and indicated the door behind her with a nod. “He’s expecting you.”

  “Of course. Would I just invite myself over?”

  “Sure. You always have before,” she said, and started slitting open an envelope with a long silver instrument that looked like a high-class scalpel.

  Whelan paused to admire the new door: it was dark, heavy, respectable, and, unlike its predecessor, solid wood. The old door had been thin plywood, hollow between the layers, and an angry man whose wife had come to this office for legal services had put his fist through it. Whelan knocked once and then turned the knob without waiting for permission.

  David Hill sat back in the large leather chair like a man fighting gravitational force. He was staring at his ceiling, head pressed back against the chair and one arm dangling over the side. In the dangling hand, he held a piece of paper. Gradually, his gaze came down to earth and his eyes met Whelan’s.

  “Not exactly obsessed with punctuality, are you, Whelan.” It wasn’t a question and Whelan didn’t bother to answer it. He closed the door behind him and found his way to the visitor’s chair.

  “Nice door.”

  “The other fellow was paying for it, so I went first-class.”

  “You rang, Excellency?”

  “Go easy on the smart-ass stuff, Whelan, I’m having a difficult enough day.”

  “A lawyer having a bad day? This is tragic.”

  David Hill looked at him for a moment and shook his head. His glasses were on the fancy desk pad, and without them, Hill’s face took on an unfinished, somehow unprotected look.

  “Sit down. I didn’t call you to have you insult me. I have business to send your way. I need an investigator.”

  “You look like you need medication.” Whelan leaned back and fished around inside his jacket for his cigarettes.

  Hill ignored the comment and tossed his own tortoiseshell cigarette case and matching lighter on the desk. Whelan gave up the search for his own cigarettes and lit up one of Hill’s.

  “So what’s the situation?”

  “One that’s right up your alley. I have a client I can’t do anything for—an elderly woman trying to find a missing relative. Don’t smirk, Whelan. This is different from the previous…” Hill let his voice trail off.

  “I sure hope so,” Whelan said, and allowed himself a small smile as the lawyer momentarily broke off eye contact.

  “This one is courtesy of Mr. G. Kenneth Laflin.”

  “So what can you tell me?”

  “The client’s name is O’Mara. Margaret O’Mara. She’s looking for a brother who may or may not be deceased. I really think we’re talking about a street person. She had a hard time bringing herself to talk about the possibility that he’s dead, but if he is, I think she is the last remaining member of the family.”

  “So this is definitely not about money.”

  Hill waved one hand in the air. “All that she really wants is for somebody to look for her brother.”

  “So I’m supposed to check this out? Why can’t we just go through the Social Security people and the VA and—”

  Hill shook his head. “You really do think I
’m just jerking your chain. He disappeared, Whelan. He didn’t just die. He disappeared, and none of the normal channels are going to help anyone find him.”

  Whelan ground the cigarette out into Hill’s stylish ashtray. “Sorry. This sounds pretty pointless. A street person who disappeared—how long ago?”

  “Long,” Hill said. “I didn’t go into much detail with her.” David Hill idly picked up a letter and squinted at it.

  Whelan studied the attorney for a moment, decided it wasn’t likely that David Hill ever talked to a client without going into detail, and then plunged in anyway. “Okay, a street guy who disappered a long time ago and is probably buried as John Doe in some public cemetery. Maybe in someplace like Seattle or Galveston. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  Hill put down the letter and smiled. “Use your fabled resourcefulness, Whelan. And make some money. You’re a businessman, Whelan, albeit not a very sophisticated one. This is a customer for you. Do you want to pursue the case, or should I direct the woman to another operative?”

  “You don’t have any other ‘operative,’ and quit talking like a lawyer.”

  David Hill gave him an amused look. “It’s what I went to school for, Whelan. Why can’t I use it?”

  “Put that way, fair enough. So this lady is going to contact me?”

  “You should be getting a call from her. She’s a nice old lady, Whelan. I honestly didn’t know what else to do for her. I thought if you couldn’t help her, you might know somebody who can. A cop, maybe.”

  “Well, it’s not as though I’m real busy. But don’t make a habit out of this, all right?”

  Hill grinned. “Next one will be the blonde with the Swiss bank account.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Whelan drove back home and parked in front of his house, then ran in to check the mail. If there had been any mail this early—two hours early—he would have been astounded, but he was compelled to check it all the same, and then irritated with himself for his irrational behavior.

  She wasn’t at his house and there wouldn’t be anything in the mail from her when it finally came. There had been no reason whatsoever to run home. But he had no doubt he’d do it again tomorrow. There wouldn’t be a card from Sandra tomorrow, either.

  He told himself he was handling this badly. It was just a vacation, after all, a ten-day trip to England with her girlfriends from college, planned more than a year in advance—before they’d started going out, she had said. It meant nothing and she would soon be home. That was one way of looking at it; the other was that Sandra McAuliffe, his woman, his first healthy relationship in many years, was off trotting around in London with three other women in their early forties, two of whom were now divorced.

  He’d met the three women and he already knew the itinerary: they were going to see Shakespeare, they were going to the best restaurants, they were going to museums, they were going to see castles and ruined abbeys, to shop where the beautiful people shopped, and they might even go out dancing. It was all harmless, and he hated the thought of it, all ten days of it, and harbored the irrational hope that she’d get tired of it all and come home early. She wasn’t due for another week.

  Several times in the past two days, he’d found himself rehashing their conversations and reinterpreting Sandra’s words, her moods. For perhaps a week before she left, she had been vaguely distant, and more than once he’d realized she wasn’t listening when he was speaking. He’d ascribed it all to her preoccupation with the trip, but the cold inner voice that delighted in the pronouncement of final sentences and the presentation of bad news told him it had nothing to do with the trip. And the truth of the matter was that Whelan believed the voice.

  Two

  On the second floor, just outside his offices—Paul Whelan Investigative Services—Whelan paused and listened at the door of his only neighbor on the floor. A light was on inside A-OK Novelties and he could hear Mr. Nowicki, ostensibly the proprietor, yelling profanities into the phone. Whelan waved at Nowicki’s door, mouthed “Good morning,” and went into his office.

  He popped the lid on his coffee and scanned the first few pages of the Sun-Times for good news. There wasn’t any. Two people had died in fires, one of them a typical Uptown fire less than three blocks from his office. The first cold snap of the year could be counted on to bring death to a neighborhood like Uptown. Come December and January, Uptown would be among the leaders in two separate categories: deaths by fire and deaths by exposure. When “the Hawk” showed up and brought a windchill that could scour flesh, they found the bodies in doorways every week. And when the big cold air masses came in and wrapped themselves over the town to stay, the street folk froze at the rate of one a day. Sometimes more.

  But the weather was only the most obvious enemy of the old ones on the street. A few days earlier, the papers had carried the story of an old man found murdered out on the breakwater at Montrose Beach. It was in all ways a senseless killing, apparently a random act of violence. The man had been shot to death but not robbed. There were no witnesses. All Whelan could remember about the killing was that the man had been in his sixties and a resident at the Empire, a large home for the elderly on Wilson, in the heart of Uptown. Whelan knew the building well: a pinkish monster that sprawled across most of a city block, home to several hundred people, all of them united by age and indigence.

  Whelan had consoled himself with the knowledge that, if nothing else, the case would be pushed, officially or otherwise, by a certain ruddy-faced Violent Crimes detective named Bauman. There were dozens of other detective teams that might get the call on this, but if a homicide involved a homeless person or, as in this case, an old street type, Bauman, the truly difficult, the tireless, the obsessive, the very tenacious Albert Bauman, would make it his business.

  He looked up at a diffident knock at his door.

  “Come in. It’s open.”

  The woman who pushed open his door was in her sixties, perhaps older. She was short, chubby, silver-haired, and disoriented, and the goggle-eyed look she gave Whelan’s office said this wasn’t quite what she’d expected. One of the lenses in her glasses was measurably thicker than the other, giving her face the faint suggestion of lopsidedness. Eventually, her gray-eyed gaze found its way to Whelan. She stopped just inside the doorway and seemed to be on the verge of panic. People frequently wandered into the run-down little building, some of them looking for businesses or offices long gone and others just operating on a different sort of compass.

  “Morning. Can I help you with something?”

  “Hello, sir. Are you Mr.”—here she consulted a tan envelope and read from it—“Whelan? Are you Mr. Whelan?”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am. Come on in and sit down.” When the woman just stared in confusion, he came around his desk and made as if to hold the guest chair for her. She folded her free hand atop the one clutching her little black purse and stepped cautiously toward the chair. With a quick glance at Whelan, she allowed herself to drop onto it, then sat looking straight ahead.

  Whelan caught himself about to sit at the corner of the desk and realized this would be too close to physical contact for this timid woman. He went back around the desk and took his seat. The woman met his eyes for a moment, seemed to regret the decision instantly, and found an interesting spot on the wall just above Whelan’s head.

  “You’re Mrs. O’Mara.”

  She seemed to relax at this indication that she’d been expected. “You knew I was coming, then.”

  “Mr. Hill told me.”

  She nodded. “He’s such a nice young man.” She spoke with a note of wonder in her voice, and Whelan knew that this was one old Irish lady who’d just met her first and only black attorney.

  “Can I get you a glass of water?” He indicated his beloved watercooler, which sat gurgling a few feet from his desk and invested the office with a blue glow.

  “No, thanks. I knew some Whelans in the old days. Frank Whelan. And Faith, her name was. His wife.”


  “I don’t think they were any relation.”

  “But Whelan’s an Irish name.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Now, Mrs. O’Mara. Mr. Hill gave me a general idea of what you wanted done. You want to locate—”

  “It’s about my brother Joseph.”

  “Right.”

  “I already talked to the police. They were nice. They said they couldn’t do anything for me. It was all so long ago…” She let her voice trail off and sat there, hands folded on her little purse, head turned to the left. For a moment Whelan wondered if she was about to cry. Then she seemed to catch herself and looked him in the eye. “Mr. Hill said you can find anybody.”

  “That’s a nice thing for him to say,” Whelan said. Something Hill would never say to his face, of course, for fear that the price of Whelan’s services would go up. But here was a witness that he’d said it. Whelan already had another person’s testimony that the bodacious Detective Albert Bauman had ventured a similar opinion.

  Hill and Bauman: I have the beginnings of a cult following.

  “But it may be an overstatement. No one is foolproof at this sort of thing. There are a lot of things that can affect a missing person’s case. For example, a lot depends on whether the person you’re looking for…” Is dead, Whelan said to himself. To Mrs. O’Mara, he said, “Well, is still, you know, around. Or if this person wants to be missing.”

  The old woman shook her head. “I don’t think Joseph would want to be missing, not from me. I’m his sister.”

  “It also makes a difference how long the person has been out of communication.”

  Mrs. O’Mara stared at him this time, blinked once or twice behind her glasses, and looked embarrassed.

  “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Mrs. O’Mara?”

  “Oh, well…you could say it’s been a long time.”

  Bracing himself, Whelan picked a pencil out of his drawer and began fiddling with it. “Uh, how long since you last saw your brother? Approximately.”

  “Oh, well,” she said again, and shrugged, and when Whelan was certain she’d say nothing more specific, Mrs. O’Mara blurted out. “Thirty years.”