When Rashid was finished, Whelan felt like clapping. He was fighting to keep a straight face when he realized that the restaurant reviewer was looking at him. He quickly trained his gaze on the overhead menu.
“Quite a place, Mr. Whelan.”
“Yes, it is. I like to think there isn’t another one anywhere like it. At least not in our solar system.”
Kermit Noyes had apparently lost interest in him. He was squinting around at the improbable murals, in which ancient Persians and Medes in shiny armor slaughtered Greeks. “God, is this gory! Hey, Wally, how about that wall there?”
Cigarette in mouth, the photographer jettisoned his dark raincoat and shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”
“I thought, me at that table with a couple of plates of food in front of me and that picture of the temple behind me.”
The photographer shrugged and Kermit Noyes looked at Whelan again. “So what do you recommend?” Rashid and Gus hovered nearby, cutting and chopping onions and tomatoes, and pretended not to be listening.
“Oh, it’s all interesting. I thought when you guys did a review, you didn’t introduce yourselves until you were leaving, if then.”
Kermit Noyes smiled. “This isn’t a straight review. This is a feature. It’s part of my ongoing series on ethnic Chicago.” He frowned when it occurred to him that Whelan wasn’t aware of the series. “I’m covering the entire spectrum of restaurants in the metropolitan area.”
“Good luck.”
Noyes shot an uneasy look at the two Iranians and leaned closer to Whelan. “Listen, what kind of place is this, exactly?”
“It’s pretty much what you see. A Greek restaurant run by Persians.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“What does sense have to do with it? This is Chicago. I’ve eaten in a Chinese restaurant with a Greek cook and a Mexican restaurant run by an Irishman. You think this is weird, you should have eaten at their other place: the world’s first and last Persian A & W.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Go with it. It’ll look good in your series. As far as ordering food here, for starters, I’d recommend what they do best.”
“The gyros, probably, huh?”
“No. They won’t admit it, but what they do best is their own cooking. Try the shalimar kabob or one of the other Persian things. I think you’ll like it. I know I—”
Kermit Noyes’s patronizing smile stopped him. “I’ve eaten dozens of Persian specialties in other restaurants, so I’m quite familiar with them.”
“Well, that’s what I’d recommend. And if you come here again”—Noyes raised his eyebrows, exuding smugness from his every pore, and Whelan was powerless against the wave of irritation that crested and engulfed him—“try the ham and cheese.” He winked at the boys, who beamed at him like proud fathers. In all his long, harrowing association with Gus and Rashid, there had always been a ham sandwich on the menu, and he had never known anyone to order it.
“The ham and cheese? Huh. Well, okay. Thanks.”
“And I’ll have the shalimar kabob, guys, with a large root beer.”
“Coming right up, Detective.” Rashid leaned over and raised a conspiratorial eyebrow. “You see the sign?”
“Rashid, planes coming in to O’Hare see the sign.”
“You like him?”
Whelan considered for a moment. “It is a thing of great beauty. It shows…it shows passion. That’s what I like most about it.”
“Cost a lot of money.” Rashid’s eyes bulged with the enormity of the expense.
“Lot of bulbs, Rashid. Lot of everything.”
“Good for business, though. This sign, it tells the people, House of Zeus is here!”
“I think it tells them a lot more than that, Rashid.”
Rashid nodded and gave Whelan a little pat on the shoulder. “You are special customer.”
“Thanks, but tonight”—Whelan nodded toward the self-absorbed journalist—“that guy right there is your special customer.”
Rashid winked. “I know how to speak to this kind of people. I know how to handle him, this one. I will take care of him.”
“Oh, I know you will, Rashid.”
Whelan’s food was ready in a few minutes, and he found himself a spot at a small table in a far corner, from which he could watch the high jinks of the other patrons. The guy at the back table still hadn’t moved, but the other diners seemed captivated by the presence of the photographer and what was obviously a very important little man. Kermit Noyes played to the crowd. He waved his arms and gesticulated, sighed and shook his head, posed with his hands on his hips and gave Wally the Photographer his instructions in a voice that would have been audible to the crowd at a Blackhawks game.
Whelan ate his shalimar kabob, which had a nice bite to it tonight. He no longer felt guilty about recommending the ham and cheese: if anyone deserved an evening in the leaden company of a piece of salt-soaked meat from the early Cretaceous, it was Mr. Kermit Noyes. Whelan finished his dinner, waved to the boys, and left, pausing only to take a pulse on the guy in the back booth. It wasn’t great, but it was a pulse. Whelan glanced at the remnants of the guy’s meal: When he came out of his stupor, he could finish his fries.
Outside, the sign still bathed Broadway in the glare of a midday sun and Whelan decided to go back to work.
Five
The sky was still the color of a robin’s egg, but the sun had dropped off the edge of the table and the night had lost ten degrees. A loose line of people, young couples mostly, made their way toward the Music Box for some sort of festival of foreign animation.
He parked on Waveland and sat in the car for a moment. The radio was tuned to a jazz show on a small suburban station. The signal was weak and the disc jockey spoke in a voice only dogs could hear, but he was spinning very old vinyl. Bunny Berrigan, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, powered by the maniac drumming of Gene Krupa. His parents’ music, and the music of the young men on the beach in Mrs. O’Mara’s picture. Somewhere in a box in his closet, Whelan had a picture very much like it, of another group of young people on a beach just before their world had gone nova.
In the photo were his parents. A number of the young faces in that photo had not come back from World War II. and his father had come close to being one of them. His wounds had earned him a stateside assignment for the duration of the war. Whelan even had a picture of his father like the one the old woman had of her brother: a cocky young buck in navy whites, prepared to conquer the Pacific.
As he climbed out of the Jet, Whelan wondered how many of the people in his parents’ photograph were gone now. Probably half, he thought. Probably half, maybe a little more. Not quite the casualty rate of Mrs. O’Mara’s little group. And at least four of Mrs. O’Mara’s young men had died violent deaths, two in the war, two more murdered. One missing and—Whelan presumed—dead. A lot for one picture.
Crown Liquors was a serious tavern: no one looked up when Whelan pulled open the door. There were a dozen or so patrons lining the rectangular bar, not including the middle-aged couple arguing in the front window. A little cirrus cloud of cigarette smoke hung just over the heads of the drinkers, like some alien life-form about to suck out their minds. In the back of the long room, four young Latino men played pool and mocked one another’s skills. They were the only customers Whelan’s side of fifty.
A tall white-haired man held court over it all. He was easily six three and big-boned, and his short-sleeved sport shirt displayed enormous forearms. He nodded to Whelan and interrupted a three-way conversation, the apparent subject of which was Babe Ruth’s bat.
The bartender turned his attention to Whelan.
“What’ll it be?”
Whelan scanned the handwritten signs on the walls announcing the bar’s various specials. An Italian lager could be had for half a buck and any of a number of American whiskeys were going at fire-sale prices. Then his eyes fell on a sign proclaiming that a shot of Courvoisier was going f
or seventy-five cents and a “jumbo” could be had for ninety.
“Nobody’s ever offered me French cognac for under a buck. I’ll have one of your jumbos.”
The bartender nodded and came up with a hefty shot glass and poured an ounce and a half of cognac.
“Water back,” Whelan said, and the man nodded and filled a small glass. “One for yourself?”
The old man smiled. “Give it up twenty years ago.”
“What did it take?”
“My old lady sayin’ she was taking the Greyhound back to Memphis.”
“That would do it for me.”
The barman shrugged. “You have twelve kids by a woman, you develop an attachment.” He winked again and took a single from the pile of bills Whelan put on the bar.
When the bartender gave him his change, Whelan held out a business card. The bartender grinned. “Last one of you I saw was looking for me.”
“I’m looking for someone who was a friend of a former customer of yours. Michael Minogue was the customer.”
The bartender grew serious. “Wasn’t that a damn shame. Probably kids, probably some damn drug addict. Those are the ones that go out looking for old men. I’d like to see one of those little pricks jump me.”
Whelan looked at the old man’s big hands and wide shoulders and decided not to bet against the bartender. “I’m trying to track down a fellow who grew up with Mr. Minogue, a fellow named Joe Colleran.”
“Don’t ring no bells for me.”
“I don’t think he ever drank here. Is there a man named Archie who comes in here? Or a guy named Fred?”
The bartender looked down the bar and nodded. “Down there. See that short fella there at the bend in the bar? That’s Archie. Fred’s in the can.”
“Would you do me a favor and ask him if he’d mind talking to me? I’ll buy him a drink. Fred, too.”
The bartender shuffled the length of the bar, spoke for a moment with the man at the far end and returned a moment later.
“Says come on down.”
Whelan grabbed his drink and moved to a stool next to the old man. Archie looked straight ahead of him until Whelan was seated. Up close, Archie was pushing seventy and losing mass as he did. He was swimming in a blue work shirt and work pants meant for a tight end. He had a remarkably big head and gray eyes magnified by a pair of Woodrow Wilson-like bifocals, so that he gave the impression of great intelligence. Baggy clothes or not, he was clean, meticulously so: close-shaved, nails clipped, and the scant strands of white hair left to him were combed straight back. He looked Whelan up and down and was smart enough not to start the conversation.
“My name’s Whelan and I’m looking for a man named Joe Colleran. I understand he was an old friend of Michael Minogue and I was wondering if I could talk to you about him.”
“About this Colleran or about Michael?” Archie spoke precisely, like a man used to considering his words.
“Either.”
“I only knew the one.”
The bartender set a bottle of Hamm’s in front of Archie and another at the vacant spot to Archie’s right. Whelan waited as the old man wiped the mouth of the bottle and then carefully poured half of it down the side of his tilted glass. Then he held it up and saluted Whelan.
“Slainte,” he said, and took a sip.
“Slainte,” Whelan said, taking a sip of his shot.
Archie looked at him and nodded. “I knew you were another Irishman. Anyhow, I still don’t know this man you’re looking for.”
“I didn’t really think you would. I was wondering if Michael Minogue ever talked about the old days and the guys he grew up with. This Joe Colleran would be one of them. As far as I know, they roamed around the country and even ran a tavern together down in Florida for a while.”
Archie nodded. “Sure he talked about those times. Old men will talk about anything, son, and he was no different, except that he didn’t do it as much. He was more interested in talking about the events of the day. But he talked about the tavern he had. And he mentioned his partner.”
A man emerged from the rest room just the other side of the pool table. He was a tall, angular man with a long jaw and a high, hard 1940s-style pompadour that looked as though it could withstand small arms fire. He was resplendent in a baggy red bowling shirt that read PAT’S SHAMROCK INN across the back in peacock blue lettering. The tall man took his seat beside Archie and picked up his new bottle of Hamm’s. Archie turned to him and jerked a thumb in Whelan’s direction.
“Fella wants to know about old Mike and a friend of his.” Fred nodded as though this made all the sense in the world. “The beer was on him.”
Fred saluted Whelan with the Hamm’s.
“What can you tell me, Archie?”
“Not much. To tell you the truth, he never called the man by name, just ‘my partner.’ He didn’t call him Joe. At least not to my recollection.”
“Did he mention any of the people from the old days?”
“Talked about this fellow in real estate a couple times. Don’t remember the name, but I got the impression Mike wasn’t overly fond of this guy. Said he was the kinda guy that always landed on his feet.”
Real estate. Whelan thought back to his conversation with Mrs. O’Mara. “Landis, maybe? Chick Landis?”
“That’s the name. Yeah. I guess this guy Landis, he was in and out of trouble and never spent a day in jail. From what Michael said, I guess they were all in some sort of trouble once, the whole lot of them. Kind of a wild bunch, it sounded like.”
“Did he ever tell you what kind of trouble?”
Archie sucked at the tiny remains of his Lucky, blew out smoke and ground the butt in the little tin ashtray. “Nope, but I can tell you it was genuine, honest-to-God trouble.”
“How do you know that?”
Archie gave him a sardonic look over the top of the Woodrow Wilson glasses. “It was serious enough for them all to leave town for a while till it cooled down. He told me once that he was one of the few people in the world that could say the war saved his ass. That’s how he said it, too—‘saved my ass.’ Now you can ask around and you’ll hear a lot of different stories, but you won’t find a whole lotta guys that enjoyed World War Two.”
“He’s the first I heard of.”
“Well, that’s what he said. Got themselves mixed up in God knows what and had to find a hole to crawl into. Little while after that, we declared war on the Japanese and these boys had an excuse to stay out of town for a while.” Archie paused but seemed to be recollecting something, and Whelan gave him time.
“You shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t talk much about this man you’re looking for. You see, I think it really bothered him to talk about the past. He didn’t like it. It was a lot of stuff that he didn’t want to remember. One night, he was in here and he was really upset because he saw this young kid who apparently looked just like one of those fellows from the old days. Just a young guy in a crowd, somebody who didn’t know Mike from Adam. But a spitting image, he said, and it made him remember things he didn’t want to remember. You know how that is…” Archie paused, squinted at Whelan, and smiled. “No, you don’t. You’re not really old enough yet to know about that.”
“Did he ever tell you he was afraid of anybody now?”
Archie looked at Whelan for a moment as if surprised by the question. “No, he didn’t. But he did ask once if anyone had come in looking for him. You remember that, Chuck?”
The big bartender raised his eyebrows.
“Do you remember when Michael asked if anyone had been in looking for him?”
“Yep. That wasn’t no more than a month ago, seems to me.”
“What did he say?” Whelan asked.
“He said a guy had been following him on the street. Wanted to know if this guy come in here asking about him.”
“That sounds like someone who knew him.”
“Never said,” the bartender muttered.
“Anybody asking about hi
m would know him.”
“Not necessarily,” Archie said in the voice of one who lives for arguments.
“And did this man ever come in?”
The big bartender shook his head, then moved away to serve a customer who had just come in.
“What did Michael say about this man?” Whelan asked.
Archie pursed his lips. “He just said this guy had been following him around, watching him. Mike said he saw the guy down at the lake when he was fishing and then again on the L platform when he was waiting for a train.”
“Did he say what the guy looked like?”
“Like somebody who lives on the street. Kind of dark, you know, they get that windburned look from exposure to all the elements. Not an old man, though. He thought this fellow was younger. I think that’s why it spooked him a little. He was a feisty guy, Mike was, but this was a younger man. Middle-aged guy, from what he said.”
“Clothes? Did he describe the man’s clothes?”
“Dark jacket of some kind, like a windbreaker. And a baseball cap—red baseball cap. And this one time, he said the guy was wearin’ a long, heavy wool coat, even though it was like eighty-five degrees out.” Archie shook his head. “You know, he came all the way here, on the El and the Addison bus, to drink in a decent place where nobody would bother him. That neighborhood he lived in, I wouldn’t give you two cents for it.”
Whelan looked at Fred. “Any of this ring a bell for you, Fred?
“Yeah, he told me about this guy he thought was followin’ him. But I never saw the guy.”
“Well, thanks for the tip, and the conversation.”
“Don’t mention it,” Archie said, and then leaned closer to Whelan. “This guy that just come in, I think he’s been watching you.”
The Riverview Murders Page 6
