“Oh, show him the mess in your study, Walter,” a new voice said.
“Hello, Lily.” Like her husband, Lily Meehan did not appear to have weathered much. She was a small woman with whiter hair than her husband’s but younger skin and lively gray eyes. Whelan hugged her and she kissed him on the cheek. He handed her the wine.
“Thank you. Should I serve it with lunch?”
“That’s for you. I don’t drink wine.”
“Now, Paul Whelan, give an accounting of yourself.”
“My bills are paid, I’m not drinking any more than usual, I still have the house and my office rent is paid.”
She nodded. “Time to take a wife.”
“Nobody asked you,” Walter said fondly.
“Show him your soldiers and be quiet.”
Walter led him into a small room off the dining room, flicked on an overhead light and laughed when Whelan gasped.
There were thousands of toy soldiers in this room, marching bands and cavalry troops and horse artillery units, even a horse-drawn field hospital. They lined shelves and inhabited glass cases and the windowsills, and in the middle of the far wall, a pile of faded, damaged-looking ones awaited Walter’s ministrations.
Walter Meehan stood beside him and seemed ready to erupt with joy at the chance to show off his little companions.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Some of them are more than a hundred years old, Paul. The men who made them, the women who painted them so beautifully—it was almost always the women who did the painting—the little boys who played with them, they’re all long dead. I think about the people behind them. I think about the people the figures represent, too.”
“Just like when you were a policeman, Walter.”
“Perhaps.” He lifted a red-coated horseman off a shelf. “This is one of my favorites. He is an officer of the Romanian cavalry, in the era before World War One. Look at him, he thinks he’s the whole thing, Paul. The Romanian cavalry! All these countries, they all thought they were the genuine article, Paul, and then the twentieth century came and warfare was serious and brutal and complete, and the men in pretty uniforms were gone. I don’t know if these fellows could fight, but I’ll bet they made a wonderful parade!”
Whelan smiled and put an arm around him. “Your collection is too big. What would you save if the house burned down?”
Walter Meehan surveyed his troops and nodded. “I’d save Lily. But I’d think about the five knights out in the dining room. They’re Courtenays. I paid a thousand dollars for the five of them, and they were a bargain.
“It’s true, Paul, he did,” Lily called out from her kitchen. “A thousand dollars for the little men. Lucky the children are out of the house.”
Walter shot a long-suffering look in the direction of the kitchen, then turned back to Whelan. “Before you faint, come and sit down.”
They sat at the big oak dining room table with its rosemaling designs and watched Lily Meehan set her table. She brought out a salad featuring her cherry red tomatoes and a loaf of warm French bread and a tureen of new potatoes, and then she came back one more time with a platter of salmon.
“Here we are,” she said unnecessarily.
“Good God, do you eat a lunch like this every day?”
Lily Meehan fixed him with an acidic look probably reserved on normal occasions for Walter and said simply, “Omidon.”
“My grandmother used to call me an omidon. She used to call me all sorts of things in Gaelic. She could swear in it.”
“Special lunch for a special guest, Paul,” Walter said, and Lily pointed with her fork.
“Take some fish. It doesn’t keep.”
They talked of old times and current events and common acquaintances from the police force and the Meehan children, and Lily force-fed Whelan and her husband until the salmon was but a fishy memory.
After lunch Whelan helped them clear the table and then went into the living room, where the three of them had coffee.
“So are we ready to cut to the chase, Paul? What was it you wanted to ask about?”
“Sorry about this, Lily. This is an old one, Walter, and I’m not sure you’ll be able to dig back far enough.”
“He remembers everything,” Lily said.
“If he doesn’t, nobody does. In the course of another investigation I came across an old crime that is somehow connected to my case.” He spent a couple minutes running down what he’d learned about Joe Colleran. Through it all, Walter Meehan watched him with his boyish blue eyes and said nothing. Twice he scribbled a little note to himself on the back of an envelope, and he frequently nodded, but he did not interrupt.
“Here’s the first thing I want to try out on you. Raymond Dudek.”
Without hesitation, Walter shook his head. “The name by itself means nothing. I knew a fellow named Dudek once, but no Raymond.”
“Okay, now try Seaman First Class Raymond Dudek, and Riverview.”
A little stunned look came into Walter Meehan’s eyes and he nodded slowly. “The boy who was stabbed. By Aladdin’s Castle, it happened. I can remember it as clearly as I can see you.”
“I know you can.”
“Poor boy. Just home from the service—he wasn’t even out yet, he was up there at Great Lakes—and he was stabbed. It was very terrible. He was quite a handsome young man, and this was a beautiful summer night. I remember there was a little group of very pretty young women in summer dresses, all standing with their arms around one another and peering back where the body was. I have a feeling Riverview was never the same for any of them after that.”
“I’m sure. What else do you remember about it?”
“I remember that his wallet had been removed. We found it a few yards away, no money in it. He had a ring that they had tried to remove, but it stuck on his knuckle so they gave up on it. Sure I recall that one, Paul. A sailor coming home, and a killing at Riverview. I don’t remember anything of the kind ever occurring before that at Riverview. We had fights there now and then, boys from different neighborhoods, black boys and white boys, that sort of thing, but never a murder.”
“A robbery, then.”
Walter Meehan blinked at him and seemed to be distracted. “That was our official assessment.”
“And your own?”
A little smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. “What do you think, Paul? Do you think that’s how you’d do it if you needed money? In the city’s most crowded place? On a hot summer night in Riverview?”
Whelan laughed quietly. “No, I don’t think I’d look for such a big audience.”
“And if you did, would you pick a young able-bodied serviceman? A fellow who’d just come back from physical training and perhaps had seen action? And this fellow, from what I recall, he was all muscle. Not a weight lifter type, you understand, just a lean young guy with no fat to him. I don’t think that’s who I’d choose.” Walter looked away again and then said absently, “Stabbed from the front, no less. Up close and from the front. Not how I’d do it.”
“Nope, I guess not. But I was told that Ray Dudek had a short fuse, that he was quick with his fists. Maybe this was a fight. He got into a fight and the other guy panicked and knifed him.”
“No one saw or heard any kind of disturbance. A fight like that has its own sounds. You’ve seen hundreds of them. You can hear them half a block away and they take time to develop, the noise draws a crowd: loud talking, profanity, shoving, people yelling. No one heard anything. No one saw any kind of fight. Witnesses saw this young man smoking out in front of Aladdin’s Castle, and two minutes later he was dead. It doesn’t sound like a fight to me.”
“No. So what else can you tell me? Do you remember the suspects?”
“Not well enough to be helpful.”
“What if I helped you with names. Do you remember the name Landis? Chick Landis?”
Walter smiled. “Of course. What a piece of garbage. And he still is, from what I know. Yes, I
suspected him because he was there that night. He was seen talking to the sailor earlier. But—”
“Do we know that for sure?”
“Yes. He denied it at first, but there were witnesses. He was seen going in.”
“What do you remember about Landis?”
“He had a sheet. Nothing prodigious, you know, but a sheet nonetheless. Grand theft auto, charges dropped. Gambling—he ran a little book. Known associate, that sort of thing.”
“Known associate of who? Whom, I mean,” Whelan said, with a quick look at Lily, a former English teacher.
“Low-level dirtballs. No one famous.”
“Did Ray Dudek have a record?”
“Not that I recall.”
“I keep running into hints that these guys and the ones I’ve been talking to, that all of them were in some trouble before the war. It had to be something in their neighborhood, it seems to me, and that was your beat. From what I can tell, it had something to do with a robbery. What it was, I don’t know, but it was something that would make a bunch of young men run like hell to get into the service.”
Walter stared at him for a moment and then a little reddish color came into his fat cheeks. “I don’t know about this poor kid at Riverview or these men you’re looking into, but there was something involving Landis just before the war. Just before Pearl Harbor, it seems to me.”
“A robbery.”
“Yes.”
“Somebody with a German name.”
“You seem to know enough without my help.”
“Table scraps, Walter. I need to put it together. I heard it was a German guy.”
Walter thought a moment and shook his head. “Not German, Dutch. His name was Hoegstra, I think his first name was Jan or something like that, but he called himself Joe. He was Dutch.”
“Who was he and what happened to him?”
“He was a gambler and errand boy for the North Side mob, a small-time fellow who thought he was going to be Chicago’s first Dutch gang leader. And what happened to him was that he was robbed. After a card game he ran, in the back room of a saloon over on Clybourn and Damen—Yancey’s Shortstop, it was called. Anyway, this card game he ran, which was fixed, had just broken up and the players were slinking off into the bushes to lick their wounds, and our fellow Hoegstra was staggering down the street with his pockets bulging and a bunch of young kids jumped him. There was a fight and Hoegstra was pretty badly beaten up—his head hit the sidewalk, he got a concussion, that sort of thing.”
“So they hit a mob guy and took his money.”
“They probably didn’t know he was connected in any way, and there was some doubt at the time that Hoegstra was actually anything more than the lowest-level functionary. But that’s what they did. And Mr. Hoegstra put the word out that these were local kids and he’d recognized at least one of them. Probably Landis, who had done errands for him. Hoegstra let the word out on the street that he was going to kill the ones responsible. That probably explains the sudden onset of patriotism in these fine young men when Pearl Harbor was attacked. There was also some speculation that Hoegstra hadn’t been playing with his own money that night—that he’d been out collecting beforehand and thought to make a little off his employers’ profits.”
“Is it possible that Hoegstra was responsible for the killing of Ray Dudek?”
Walter Meehan gazed at him for several seconds and Whelan realized he was calling up the old memories. “Five years later?” He shrugged. “I don’t know whether he was on the street at that time,” he said with a slow shake of the head. “Hoegstra also had seen a sudden need to seek out other climes. We found the body of his partner stuffed into the trunk of a green Packard. Their employers apparently tired of their incompetence. This was late 1943, as I recall. A couple of very vivid killings, Paul. I remember both of them well. Not that I saw many that were nondescript, you understand.”
“When do you know for certain that Hoegstra came back?”
“Much later. In the fifties. I don’t know what sort of hoops his former associates made him jump through to reclaim his good standing in their community,” Walter said, chuckling. “But he came back and eventually we busted him for a number of things, all small-time. An irritant to society rather than a menace. He still enjoyed playing the big shot but he was finished. You would have enjoyed Hoegstra, Paul. He looked like a wharf rat and dressed like the chorus in Guys and Dolls. But, given his antisocial proclivities, we were forced to send him into exile.”
“And he’s dead now?”
“I never heard one way or the other. But if he’s still alive, he would be in his seventies.”
“Was this man capable of murder?”
“Who can say? He was a loudmouth, full of braggadocio, full of hot air. In the course of his business dealings, he was known to have manhandled a few people. I never thought of him as a killer, but this affair was personal for him, so who knows? Have I succeeded in muddying your waters enough?”
“No. I think you’ve clarified a couple of things. As I hoped you would.”
Walter stared off into space for a moment and when he looked at Whelan again, he shook his head. “A good policeman wants…closure in these things. What always frustrated me most were the ones that seemed solvable but were somehow never closed. This case of yours, Paul—it’s possible that you’ll be talking to the killer of that boy at Riverview. And I was always troubled by the belief that I talked to the killer as well. I never believed what I was supposed to believe about that boy’s murder. Ah, I’m babbling.”
“No. I really needed to run some things by you and I think you’ve helped. And”—he looked at Lily—“I got a lunch out of it.”
She nodded toward her husband. “He wouldn’t mind so terribly if you were to stop by sometime and talk, even if you weren’t working on a case. Nor would I.”
Whelan felt himself blushing. “I think about the two of you a couple times a month and tell myself I’m going to come visit. I’m embarrassed. It’s not as though I’ve got a lot of better things to do.”
“Are you still unattached, Paul?” she asked.
“Uh, officially, yes.”
“But you’re seeing someone?”
“Yes.”
Walter sighed and gave her a warning look. Lily shot him one back.
“Bring her over sometime when you think she’s known you long enough to put up with your boring elderly friends.”
He got to his feet. “I don’t have any boring friends, Lily, especially not you two.”
They said their good-byes and Walter walked him to the door. At the top step, he patted Whelan on the back.
“Come and see us. Bring your ladyfriend or come alone.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Do you see anyone from the job?”
“Al Bauman. Remember him?”
Walter laughed. “Who could forget him? A land mine waiting to go off. Is he well?”
“For Bauman, yes. And he’s grown on me.”
“Oh, I always liked him. He was the most intelligent of all the detectives I met back then. I just thought he’d ruin his health.”
“He’s still working on it.”
“And you’re friends?”
“Yes, I think we are. Came as a surprise to me, Walter.”
Walter indicated the park across the street. “Some of those old men on the benches are friends of mine. If you had told me thirty years ago that my sweet Lily and I would retire into a neighborhood full of Russian Jewish grandmas and grandpas, and that we’d like it, I would have laughed in your face.”
“Sounds like a good mix, Walter. You’ll be learning about Mother Russia and there’s no one I’d rather have them learning about us from than Walter Meehan.”
Walter Meehan shrugged and Whelan went down the stairs and across the street to his car. Inside, he gunned the engine and sent a cloud of slate gray exhaust into the air.
“I’ll call the cops,” Walter Meehan shouted, and went inside laug
hing.
Twelve
“I’m back in the office for a while, Shel. More or less.”
“More or less is right. You had a caller actually ask if you really have an office, or just a phone service.”
“Who?”
“A Ted Riordan from Riordan Accounting Services.”
“That it?”
“Nobody else is interested in detectives today.”
“Good. Thanks, Shel.”
“Toodles.”
He pressed down the button on the phone and dialed Ted Riordan. This time he got a person, not an advertisement.
“Riordan Accounting, Ted speaking.”
“Paul Whelan, Mr. Riordan. Thanks for calling back. You mentioned something when we met that just occurred to me now.”
“What was that?”
“Your uncle’s wallet.”
“His wallet? What about it?”
“You said it was full of old lottery tickets and holy cards.”
“So? You looking for a new way to pick your numbers?”
“No. I was wondering if you still have the holy cards.”
“Uh, yeah, I do. I mean, what do you do with ’em, you know? I never know what to do with them. I just keep ’em.”
“Everybody does. You go to a Catholic wake, you get a holy card in honor of the deceased and you’re afraid to throw it away because it’s religious.”
Riordan laughed. “The nuns used to tell us they were blessed and you couldn’t throw out anything that was blessed. What do you do with ’em?”
“I toss ’em in a drawer.”
“That’s what I did with Uncle Mike’s. His are in with mine.”
“Could you grab them while I’ve got you on the phone?”
“Well, sure. Hang on.”
Riordan returned a moment later and said, “He had a lot of ’em. Probably friends, mostly.”
Time to play hunches.
“Read me the one for Joseph Colleran.”
“Okay. That’s the guy you were asking about, right? Here it is. ‘Joseph Owen Colleran. Born January seventh, 1917. Died October nineteenth, 1975.’ What else do you want, the funeral home?”
“No, I don’t need anything else.” Then as an afterthought, he asked, “Where was he buried?”
The Riverview Murders Page 17
