The Riverview Murders

by Michael Raleigh

  I have eaten at the House of Zeus, and they tell me that I may live.

  Rock on, Mr. Noyes, Whelan thought.

  And the estimable Mr. Noyes did indeed rock on, admitting that the excellent fries and cold root beer had lured him into a false sense of security, encouraging him to make, to Whelan’s mind, the most disastrous of mistakes, a blunder to rival Custer’s dramatic charge into the largest Indian village on the planet, Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia without mittens and galoshes: Mr. Noyes had ordered the deep-fried shrimp basket.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Whelan said. A couple of the construction workers looked up. Whelan pointed to the review. “He ate the shrimp. He’s lucky he’s not on the obituary page.”

  One of the construction workers looked away, unwilling to be drawn into conversation with an eccentric.

  Whelan read the rest of the review, including Mr. Noyes’s description of the shrimp as “a nightmarish descent into the world of toxic waste,” and concluding with his final rating: “I give the House of Zeus a half star for boldness, for its owners’ audacity in calling this sewer a restaurant, and for the favor they have done me, for I now know the location of the worst restaurant in Chicago, if not the continent.”

  Whelan reread the review, finished his coffee and left Best Steak House renewed.

  He was parked fifty yards away from Landis Realty, the songs on his radio drowned out at intervals by the guttural urban roar of the Ravenswood El pulling into the station almost directly overhead. The sky had long since gone a rich navy blue and the steady rush-hour flow of people from the El station had exhausted itself, but there was still business being done inside Landis Realty, deals were being cooked, money was being made. If he peered long enough through his side mirror, he could occasionally glimpse Junior Landis strutting through the office, and there were still a couple of women hard at work, but he couldn’t see into the inner chamber where Chick Landis was wheeling and dealing. Whelan was glad there was no one to ask him what he was doing.

  “Surveillance,” he would have said. Any time a detective didn’t know what to do next, he began to call all his activities “surveillance.” He told himself there was little likelihood that this would be productive, but felt justified by the degree of his dislike.

  Whelan saw the young Landis enter his father’s office and come out smiling. The kid looked too cheerful to be upset, and Whelan had to admit that meant nothing he had said or done had gotten to Chick Landis.

  When it looked as though Landis Realty would continue to sell real estate and make money long into the night, a vehicle pulled up. This was an entrance guaranteed to attract notice, for the car entered the one-way street from the wrong end and proceeded to park backward in front of Landis Realty. The car itself would have engendered comment, for it was the length of the USS Forrestal. Whelan nodded appreciatively, for he had seen this car only a few hours earlier, in front of the ramshackle tavern on Belmont that had the nerve to call itself Lucky’s.

  This is promising, Whelan said to himself.

  The driver flung open his door and just missed having it taken off by a Yellow cab coming up the street in the proper direction. The cabbie hit his horn, yelled out the window and gestured at the Cadillac, and Hoegstra yelled obscenities and threatened violence. He pulled his long bony frame out of the front seat with a stiffness born of liquor as well as age, stood for a half-second and then fell back against his car. When he was apparently satisfied that he wasn’t going to topple over, he reached down under his seat and came up with a crowbar.

  Hoegstra hefted the crowbar, pushed himself off against the roof of his car and slammed the door. Then he staggered toward the door of Landis Realty. At the curb something caught his attention: the blue Buick Park Avenue, and Hoegstra lurched toward it, his dark raincoat flowing and flapping out behind him like gargoyle wings.

  Drunk or not, he attacked the Park Avenue with surprising speed, and it was clear to Whelan that Hoegstra had done this before. He started with the side windows, first the driver’s side and then the one behind it, then brought the bar down against the doors themselves and left each one bruised. He moved back a couple of drunken paces, spread his feet for balance and seemed to be assessing his workmanship. Then he lurched to the front and brought his bar down on the hood twice, raising sparks and creating a pair of large gashes. The next victim was the windshield, which he turned with a pair of whacks into a concave bubble of shattered glass. Apparently this was more exertion than Hoegstra was used to, for here he paused and leaned against the hood of the Buick, gasping and staring straight ahead.

  The door to Landis Realty opened and the kid came out, yelling and gesturing, and when he saw that his opponent was an old man, he broke into his charge, which lasted until he saw Hoegstra turn and raise the crowbar. The kid circled the old man, right fist cocked back and spewing street challenges while Hoegstra cursed in a hoarse screech, banging on the hood of the Buick.

  “I’ll bust you up, old man,” young Landis said, and the old man snarled at him and swung the crowbar.

  Chick Landis emerged now, followed by one of the young women from the office and a middle-aged man who looked terrified.

  “My fuckin’ car!” Landis yelled. When he saw who was ravaging his beloved wheels, he charged onto the street bellowing and screaming. In seconds the two Landises had Hoegstra between them, the young one still circling with his fists up, the older one pointing with his chubby finger.

  “You’re dead, you bastard, you old fuck, lookit my car!”

  “I’ll take him out, Dad,” the kid said.

  Your heart’s not in this, kid, Whelan thought.

  “You son of a bitch,” Landis shouted, and Hoegstra cackled and stared with his bulging yellowed eyes at Landis, then whacked the hood of the Buick again with a gravelly shout.

  “I’m gonna kill you, you prick!” Landis screamed, and drew closer.

  The younger Landis came in from the other side and threw a looping right hand that caught Hoegstra on the shoulder at exactly the same moment as Hoegstra swung the crowbar at Chick Landis, catching him on the forearm.

  Chick yelled, “Ow, goddammit!” and drew back, clutching his arm. Hoegstra lost his balance and fell backward onto the car and the kid was on him in two quick steps. Whelan saw the kid’s fist come down twice on Hoegstra and decided it was time to break this one up. He slid out of his car and ran across the street, yelling for the kid to let the old man up. A crowd had gathered near the Buick and one of the women from Landis’s office was crying.

  Hoegstra was partially hidden by the burly frame of his attacker and Whelan could see the younger man’s heavy fist coming up and down, pistonlike. Then Whelan heard Hoegstra growl, and the crowbar reappeared and came down on the crown of the kid’s head. The young Landis screamed and sank to the street, holding his head in both hands and rocking back and forth. Chick Landis was holding his injured arm and still screaming that he was going to kill Hoegstra, and then Whelan was between them.

  “You!” Hoegstra yelled, and raised the crowbar again.

  Whelan faked a punch, then put a shoulder into the old man, knocking him into the car fender. Hoegstra fell to the street and lost his grip on the weapon.

  Squad cars appeared from both ends of the street and Whelan took a couple of steps back and folded his arms. The cops from the first car pulled up in front of Hoegstra’s car and the second squad rolled in behind the wounded Buick.

  Time to blend in with the scenery, Whelan thought. He moved closer to a group of men who’d come from the direction of a tavern on the corner.

  All three of the would-be pugilists were down on the pavement. Landis was rocking around theatrically and clutching his arm as though it was no longer fully attached. His kid was seated on the blacktop a few feet away, head in his hands. Only Hoegstra looked as though he hadn’t heard the final bell. He struggled up on one knee, fought the tail of his unwieldy coat and made snarling sounds as he reached for his crowbar. One o
f the two uniforms stepped on the bar and wagged a cautionary finger at him.

  “Uh-uh, guy. I think you been bad.”

  A third squad car came up the street the wrong way, this one carrying only a white-shirted sergeant. He got out, hitching his pants over a tight round stomach and squinting at the scene. Whelan recognized him as Sgt. Michael Shea. Sergeant Shea came forward slowly, shaking his head, and Whelan took a couple more steps back into the shadows and wondered if he could make it to his car without being seen.

  Landis was being helped up now by one of the officers, and his son made a fine macho show of shaking a cop’s hand off his arm and struggling to one knee. He paused there and shook his head as though to clear it.

  Whelan would have bet the rent that Hoegstra would be the one to give the cops trouble, and he was right. The old man righted himself, wobbled a little and then made a sudden lunge for Chick Landis. A young cop jumped into his path, nightstick held chest high, one hand at each end.

  “Back off!” the cop said, and Hoegstra went around him. The kid cop was good: with a minimum of movement, he cut off Hoegstra’s path and got the nightstick under his chin. He lifted it sharply and moved the old man back, slightly off balance, and then pushed him up against the car. He bent Hoegstra backward onto the hood of the Buick and held the stick under Hoegstra’s chin.

  Whelan waited a moment until the four uniforms were all occupied with the brawlers and Michael Shea was talking to one of the women from Landis’s office, then slipped off toward his car. A few steps later, he chanced a look over his shoulder and Michael Shea was staring at him. Whelan nodded and the old cop crooked his finger at him.

  The jig is up.

  Sergeant Shea put his hands in his pockets and strolled a few steps to meet him halfway.

  “Mr. Whelan, am I right?”

  “Yes, Sarge. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, for starters, you can talk to a lonely old man surrounded by youngsters,” he said, indicating the four young cops. Shea had slipped effortlessly into a County Galway accent. “And you can tell me how it is that yourself keeps turning up wherever there’s trouble.”

  “There’s trouble everywhere, Sarge. Have to stay in your house to avoid it.”

  Shea nodded slowly but squinted, first up at the sky, then down at the ground, then at Whelan.

  “What I’d like to know is, how is it that you’re here? You seem to turn up in the oddest places. I get a call that some asshole is burning a cross on some colored guy’s lawn and I find you there in a donnybrook. Swinging an ax, I recall, and doing damage to a citizen’s automobile.”

  “It was across from my house.”

  “Then I get a call about a dead body in Lincoln Park and there you are, in the company of my old friend Albert Bauman. And now a call comes in, we got a free-for-all going in front of a real estate office. I show up and there you are, like the bad penny. Tell me, son, do you cause all these things? Our Albert seems to think you’re a sharp young fella. Are you really a menace to the community instead?” The old cop wrinkled up his nose and fixed a pair of blue eyes on Whelan.

  “I’m dogged wherever I go by bad luck.”

  The old cop stared till Whelan met his eyes and Whelan smothered the complaints of his conscience. “You can’t think I had anything to do with these old clowns fighting over a car. Come on, Sergeant.”

  “What I think, Mr. Whelan, is, if I answer another call anywhere in this Urbs in Horto, this City in a Garden, and find you, I’ll arrange accommodations for you over at Six and you can begin your rehabilitation.” He turned without waiting for an answer and walked away.

  Whelan went to his car, started it up, and pulled away. He hit a button on his radio and it gave him McCoy Tyner and a very large band. He had to admit that he felt a little guilty about his role in old Hoegstra’s raging performance, but only a little. He told himself it would justify everything to know what this little piece of street theater really meant.

  I’m having a bachelor Friday night: first the fights, then dinner, something traditional. He decided to have one of Fena’s lovely pizzas at Joe Danno’s tavern.

  Thirteen

  Saturday morning ushered in a cold rain, with low, heavy clouds and a nasty wind from the north that carried the rain slanting down onto the streets. Whelan got up at nine, turned up the heat against the window-rattling wind and drove to the newsstand at Wilson and Broadway, where the happy little man from Pakistan sold him a Sun-Times.Whelan drove back home and decided not to fight the weather. This was a day for a four-course breakfast, for college football on TV and lounging in the bathtub with a book.

  He cut onions and a green pepper, then chopped the tail end of a piece of ham. While they simmered in a pan in a little pond of melted butter, he broke three eggs into a steel bowl, poured in a little milk, a handful of grated Parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper, then began to beat the eggs to death.

  He put three sausages in the toaster oven and when they were almost done, poured the eggs into the frying pan and put a couple pieces of toast into the toaster. He was halfway through the omelette when he saw the story little more than a couple of inches of one column deep into the paper.

  SECOND MAN SLAIN ON LAKEFRONT

  The body of an unidentified man was found by a jogger in a grassy area near Foster Avenue Beach. The man, described as a white man in his late fifties or sixties, had been shot once in the head, apparently at close range. It was the second murder on the lakefront in less than a month. Earlier this month, the body of a gunshot victim was found on the Montrose Harbor breakwater. Police have no motive in the slaying, and there is no evidence of a connection between the two slayings, according to Detective Albert Bauman of Area Six Violent Crimes Unit.

  No evidence of a connection, Whelan thought. Right.

  Bauman, of course, wasn’t in when Whelan tried him at Area Six, and the detective who answered the phone sounded distracted. In the background Whelan could hear him typing on a computer keyboard.

  “What’s this in regard to, sir?”

  “It’s a personal call, actually.”

  The detective relaxed. “Now why would you expect to find him here with all us normal types? He’s never here—he’s like the wind!”

  “I never thought of him that way. If he calls, tell him Whelan needs to see him.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Whelan read the article again and wished there was a description of the victim. He told himself that there wasn’t a thing to connect it logically to his case or to Michael Minogue. Nothing except the leaden feeling in the pit of his stomach that it was connected, and that he would be able to identify the body. He thought of Dutch Sturdevant.

  The rain had stopped but the bench in front of the Empire Hotel was empty. He parked at the edge of the bus stop and walked toward the entrance of the building, trying not to acknowledge the heavy pressure in his chest. At the door, he paused and looked around. As he pushed his way into the lobby, he heard someone calling his name.

  It took a moment to focus on the direction of the voice. Eventually he saw Dutch Sturdevant, Walkman in place, standing in front of the Burger King across the street. Sturdevant waved like a kid at a ball game and Whelan found himself grinning as he crossed the street.

  “Too wet for bench sitting, Dutch?”

  “Nah. I don’t care if I get my ass a little wet. I just got hungry. I wanted a piece of pie. You should see what we gotta eat over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of his home. “They feed us things you can’t identify. We play fucking parlor games to figure out what we’re eating. The meat’s gray, the chicken’s gray, the salmon—the salmon’s yellow. What the hell kinda salmon’s yellow? I fed mine to the rat in my room. Now I think his feelings are hurt. So what’s up, kiddo?”

  “Just dropped by to see how you were,” Whelan said.

  “I’m great. It’s Saturday, my favorite day.”

  “What happens on Saturday that’s so special?”

 
“Now? Not a thing, kid, but I’ve had seventy years of ’em and I liked ’em all.”

  “Cup of coffee?”

  “Why not?”

  Whelan bought them both coffee and saw Dutch watching a kid across the aisle digging into one of the little individual pies.

  “Another pie, Dutch?”

  “I’d get sick.”

  Whelan handed him two dollars. “Go get us each one. Make mine blueberry.”

  “I been looking for that truck,” Dutch said a moment later through a mouthful of pie.

  “I appreciate that.”

  Dutch nodded and bit off enough pie to fill both cheeks. He wiggled his scraggly brows and eyed Whelan’s untouched piece. His lips were an unearthly blue, his cheeks still jammed to bursting, his hair stuck up along the back of his head like the crest of a bird caught in the rain. An old man to give the neighbors sleepless nights, Whelan thought.

  “You gonna eat that?” Dutch said.

  “No. I’m not hungry. Here, you take it,” Whelan said, shoving the pie across the table.

  “Great.” He smiled contentedly at his pie.

  “Haven’t seen the blue truck, huh?”

  “Uh, nope.” Dutch shot him a quick look. The old man made a pretense of surveying the room. He sniffed and scratched at his ear and squinted and looked around like a man making a decision. “You ever think maybe you’re getting suspicious about things that there’s nothing wrong with? In your line of work, I mean?”

  “All the time. I think it’s one of those side effects that you can’t avoid. Like that stare the cops have. Why? Have you noticed something out of the ordinary around here?”

  “Not around here, no.” Dutch looked embarrassed. “This was over…you know. By you, actually. Your office.”

  “I see.”

  “I was taking a walk and I decided to see where you have your office, in case I ever gotta go see you there, you know?”