The Riverview Murders

by Michael Raleigh

  “He went into the service late, after the older guys, and after Herb: I think you started seeing him then. When he came back from the service, you started seeing each other again—but it didn’t last long. Herb was back and working, and you were supposed to be his, but you were having Ray Dudek’s child and Ray wasn’t…he didn’t feel the same way you did. He was breaking things off with you. I know he was.”

  She smiled and shut her eyes and shook her head like an elderly teacher with a slow pupil, and he started over.

  “He just wasn’t interested. He was interested in other women, Maggie O’Mara, for one, and from what I hear, probably the next girl to come around the corner. Maybe he was interested in half a dozen other girls, who knows? But he was through with you and he made it clear. And there you were with a jealous boyfriend or fiance or whatever Herb was, and another man’s baby. But most importantly, you wanted Ray Dudek and he didn’t care. So you killed him.”

  She stared at him and gripped the arms of her chair till her knuckles went white, but she held on to that smile for dear life.

  “Mr. Whelan, I was with the other girls, with Maggie and Betty, when they found Ray. I was never out of their company all night. That terrible night.”

  Whelan nodded. “I guess not. So you had Casey Pollard do it. He made it look like a robbery, and he also lifted Ray’s discharge papers—probably so he could pass for an older guy. The discharge papers were all he had on him when the cops found his body. But I think you hired Casey to do it and that’s probably where your troubles began.”

  She looked away finally, toward the hall, and her eyes seemed to focus on some invisible scene. When she faced him again, she had composed her features once more.

  “Mr. Whelan, I think you had better leave. I don’t have to listen to this filth in my own home, with my husband on his sickbed…”

  “I have more. You married Herb Gaynor and had Ray Dudek’s baby, and he grew into a fine son who is the most important thing in your life.” Whelan shook his head. “That face, Mrs. Gaynor. I noticed that face the first time I saw him, I just couldn’t put the two together. But put your son with that fair hair and pug nose next to a picture of Ray Dudek and I think anybody could see the resemblance.”

  Mrs. Gaynor stared at him, her large eyes suddenly looking very confused, very puzzled. A stiffness seemed to take over her body and he could almost see her caving in.

  “What I wonder about is how Herb never saw it.”

  She shrugged. “You don’t notice what you don’t want to see. If your wife or girlfriend had a baby, would you be watching to see if the baby looked like one of your friends? Herb never saw anything except what he wanted to see and what I told him. I told him our son had his mouth and his eyes, and that was enough for Herb.”

  “Will you tell me why these other men had to be killed?” When she refused to answer, he added, “I know you hated them.”

  She looked away again and when she spoke, her voice was a tired voice, strangely younger-sounding.

  “They knew. They all knew. I could see it in their eyes, especially Michael Minogue. He hated me—always had, you know. Thought I was stuck-up. He never said anything, he didn’t have to. I knew what he thought, and I wanted to kill him. I knew he’d cause me trouble someday.” She looked sullenly around her crowded living room, and Whelan followed her gaze till it fell on the picture of her son. A cherished son to protect from the truth.

  “Why now?”

  “I didn’t know. I had lost track of Michael Minogue. He came back and I—someone told me about him.”

  “Casey Pollard.” She looked away.

  Whelan thought for a moment. “You had something going with both of them, Ray and Casey, while Herb was in the service.”

  She grimaced. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Casey was a boy. You saw that picture, he was a little boy at the time. During the war, he was just a teenager. He was too young to get into the war. I had no interest in him whatsoever.”

  “But he was pretty interested in you. Now if I have this figured right, you were seeing Ray whenever he came in from Great Lakes and then you found out you were pregnant. You went to Ray, he wasn’t interested.”

  She was silent for a moment. “He didn’t believe me.”

  “So you had Casey kill him for you that night.”

  “I didn’t do a thing.”

  “Maybe not, but you had it done. You convinced Casey to kill him for you.”

  Mrs. Gaynor stared at him for a moment and Whelan could see her collecting herself, changing gears. Changing directions. “I didn’t convince him of anything. He would have done anything for me. He would have jumped off a building for me. Besides, he hated Ray, he was terribly jealous of Ray.”

  “And you always kept in touch with Casey, all these years?”

  She stared at him with pure distaste. “Casey was trash. He followed me home, I think he followed me home a number of times. He wanted money, he always wanted money, all his life. And then he told me about Minogue. He told me he’d seen Minogue. I had thought…I’d heard he was gone again. And I don’t know anything about what Casey did after that.”

  “Oh, I think you do. He followed Minogue for you and you took it from there. You had already tried to kill Minogue once before, the night you ran Joe Colleran down.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “That’s what Michael Minogue told people—that he thought someone was trying to kill him. I think that was you, Mrs. Gaynor. Maybe it was just an impulse, I don’t know. Maybe you would have gotten it right the next time, but I guess Minogue knew it was time to lie low.”

  She looked across her living room as though she heard nothing.

  “And I know Casey didn’t kill Minogue. Someone using a forty-five automatic did that. The same person killed Casey, probably because he couldn’t possibly be trusted with all of this. And probably for the same reason, that same person went to Fritz Pollard’s place and blew holes in the wall and in Fritz and left him lying in his own blood on the floor.”

  She shuddered slightly but refused to look at him. Whelan leaned forward and spoke in a harsh whisper.

  “It smelled like a slaughterhouse, Mrs. Gaynor. You’re a dog-shit shot. Hard to handle a gun with that much of a kick, isn’t it? There was blood everywhere on the floor, I stepped in it, I slipped in it. You probably got it on yourself, and you left part of a bloody handprint on the wall, a very small handprint. There was probably blood on your clothes. It would still be on your clothes, maybe on your shoes, at least in traces. I think he died looking at you. He tried to get up out of bed and you popped him another one and then he tried to get up off the floor, before you finally got it right.

  “You did all that, Mrs. Gaynor. You planned it; you set it up. Before that, you followed Michael Minogue for weeks, watching for an opportunity to kill him. You were seen. He saw you himself.”

  “That’s absolutely crazy. No one saw me anywhere. Good Lord, this is crazy.”

  “A number of people saw you. They saw you following Michael Minogue, they saw you following me, Mrs. Gaynor. It was you that watched my office—someone saw you in a doorway, wearing your husband’s hat and coat. The walk had me fooled—I knew about Casey Pollard’s limp and his size, so I thought it was Casey everybody was seeing. And it was you, in men’s clothing. You have a limp, too, from your arthritis. The clothes faked me out. I didn’t put it together till one night I heard a 1940s singer talking about her bandleader throwing his overcoat over her in the rain. She talked about walking around in a strange town wearing a man’s overcoat that made her feel like a kid playing dress-up.” Whelan sat back in the chair and watched her, then dropped the last of it on her.

  “And you were seen that night. You waited for the right moment, maybe just after sunset, and you walked out there and shot Michael Minogue at point-blank range. And you were seen. People will be able to identify you from your little costume.”

  “You should leave, Mr. Whelan.”


  “I’m going to. Just tell me—I just want to know who else you were going to kill.”

  She stared at him and a look of satisfaction came into her eyes. A slight curl took hold of her lip and she pointed one elegant finger at him.

  “You.” The finger wavered slightly and her voice came in a harsh rasp. “You.”

  He looked into her chilling eyes and nodded. “Well, sorry to disappoint you. But we’ll see each other again, I’m sure.” He got up to leave and she shot a quick look at the hall again.

  “Forget it, Mrs. Gaynor. By the time you made it to the hall closet with that bad hip, I’d be long gone. Besides, how many rounds do you think you have left? Ever put a fresh clip in it?”

  She blinked and looked confused, and he shrugged.

  “A clip, Mrs. Gaynor, is the little metal container with all the bullets. The gun doesn’t keep firing unless you feed it.”

  Whelan turned and walked to the door, listening for any sudden movement behind him. He had his hand reaching for the doorknob when it opened and revealed Dan Gaynor. He gave Whelan a slight frown, looked past him to his mother, and was about to ask something when she screamed.

  “He’s crazy! Don’t let him out, call the police!”

  The young Gaynor looked from Whelan to his mother and then threw his weight into Whelan, clutching Whelan’s jacket and moving forward into the hall. Whelan could feel Gaynor’s nails digging in through the material of his jacket, and he went slamming backward into a wall with the other man’s full weight pressing into him. When he felt the other man move slightly, he sidestepped, grabbed Gaynor by the lapels of his coat, and threw him shoulder-first into the wall. When Gaynor bounced back and came at him, Whelan put a shoulder into him and threw one quick jab, catching Gaynor in the mouth. The younger man went down heavily onto his hip. He was feeling his lip as he climbed to his feet, and Whelan backed toward the door.

  In the background Mrs. Gaynor wailed and screamed for help, and now Whelan could hear Herb Gaynor shouting in his hoarse voice from the distant bedroom, and over them both, their son began to yell.

  “Ma, what the hell’s going on? Ma, you all right?” He pointed at Whelan. “You son of a bitch, you stay there,” he shouted. “Ma?”

  “He’s crazy,” Mrs. Gaynor wailed, and she made for the hall closet. “He’s trying to kill us all!”

  Dan Gaynor looked away for a moment and then threw a sucker punch as he came at Whelan once more. The punch caught Whelan on the cheekbone but he was turning his head so it did little damage. He threw one of his own, felt his knuckles on bone, and then threw a combination as he moved to his left. Both punches landed, but Gaynor was still swinging. A right missed Whelan’s head and a left caught him just under the eye. He thought he could feel the other man’s ring dig into his skin. Whelan grabbed him by the hair and butted his head into the wall. They grappled and Gaynor tried to get his fingers into Whelan’s face. In the background he could hear Herb Gaynor cursing and coughing, and Mrs. Gaynor sobbing, and he could hear her coming closer, almost to the closet.

  And then she had the gun.

  Whelan held up his hand and yelled, “Don’t do it!” just as the small window in the door exploded and sprayed shards into the back of his head. He backed away and she pulled the trigger again and the explosion seemed to be next to his ear. Gaynor gave up his grip on Whelan and screamed, “Ma!” and Whelan moved to the door.

  Eight feet away, Ellen Gaynor held the automatic with both unsteady hands and turned her head slightly away as she squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber. She squeezed again and nothing happened.

  Conscious of Gaynor’s labored breathing and his own gasping for air, Whelan moved backward till he could feel the doorjamb.

  “I told you, Mrs. Gaynor,” he said, panting. “Gotta feed the sucker or it won’t work.” He looked at her son. “You call the cops like your ma said. I’ll wait in my car.”

  Three units showed up, all uniforms, then a Tac Unit car. Whelan was leaning on his car with his license in hand, and when the officers approached, he just told them he thought Bauman should be notified as soon as possible.

  A hard-looking cop with WITOWSKI on his nameplate took him over to a squad car and told him to climb in back. Whelan had to take a second look at him: pale blond hair and high cheekbones and a fighter’s flat, swollen nose. He looked enough like Ray Dudek to be a blood relative. Whelan slid across the backseat of the squad car and that was where he was when Bauman and Landini rolled up the wrong end of the one-way street.

  Bauman came out hitching up his pants, green pants with a mustard-colored shirt and a sport coat that was a nightmare of orange and beige and colors yet to be named. A moment later Landini came up beside him, tugging at the sleeve of a formfitting cashmere sweater. Landini’s face looked a little pale, and he seemed to be squinting as though he’d just been exposed to bright lights. They spoke to a pair of the cops on the front lawn of the Gaynor house and Whelan winced when both detectives took a long slow look in his direction. He could almost hear Landini snort. After a brief conversation, Landini went inside and Bauman strolled up to the squad car with the air of a man who has nothing but time. At the car, he paused for a moment, hands on his hips, and stared at Whelan. Then he leaned in through the window and his heavy red face seemed to fill the entire front seat.

  “The notorious Paul Whelan, the scourge of the North Side, brought to justice at last.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Whaddya call this shit, Whelan?”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “That would be hard.” Bauman glared for a moment and then seemed to relax. “And you got boo-boos, too. Lookit your face—you wake up tomorrow, you’re gonna look like ground chuck.” Bauman waved a thick admonishing finger at him. “See? What did I tell you? You nose around in my business and bad things happen to you. Now look at yourself. You’re in the shitter, Whelan.”

  “Talk to your troops. Get me the hell out of here. I have things to tell you.”

  “Oh, now you got things to tell me. How ’bout our deal, you know, where you gimme what you got and I don’t have to wait till it’s in the paper before I find out about it?”

  “I didn’t have anything to give you that made sense until—I had to check some things out. Then I put it together. That was less than an hour ago. I wanted to ask some questions for myself.”

  “Look how it all turned out. See that guy over there, the rook?” Bauman half-turned and nodded in the direction of a shiny-faced young cop who was watching the traffic go by.

  “He thinks this was a home invasion. You broke into this nice old couple’s house, Whelan?” Bauman’s eyes glittered with suppressed mirth. He tried to give Whelan his best badass stare and then had to look away.

  “Have a nice time, Bauman. The ‘nice old lady’ in there killed at least three people. When I go to sleep tonight, I’m going to dream about her face, and in my dream she’ll be emptying an automatic in my direction.”

  “Yeah, Witowski told me. If this wasn’t so weird, I’d be pissed off about this. But we got all kinda stories here, Whelan, gonna be hard to sort ’em all out. The son thinks you were shaking down his folks. The old lady says you’re some kinda madman, she was just defending herself. The old man don’t say shit.”

  “But when you get the nice old lady’s gun back from Ballistics, as I know you will, you’ll find out all kinds of interesting things about it.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t need you to tell me what I’m gonna find out. If you were so smart, you wouldn’t be sittin’ here beatin’ your meat in the backseat of Witowski’s car.”

  Whelan turned away in irritation. In the doorway of the Gaynor house, he could see Landini in conversation with someone he couldn’t quite make out.

  “I think I need to file charges.”

  Bauman nodded and said, “First we talk, Shamus, and I need the whole thing. Then we can do other kindsa business.” He squinted into the distance past Whelan
and Whelan turned to see what he was looking at. Another squad car made the turn on the street, this one driven by a sergeant.

  “Oh shit,” Whelan said.

  Bauman grinned again. “It’s your great personal friend Sgt. Michaeleen Shea.”

  Whelan slunk down in the backseat and leaned his head against the panel of the door.

  “You know what he’s gonna say, Whelan? He’s gonna say you’re a menace to the entire community. What was that he called you? A catalyst? Some kinda catalyst.”

  “Commotion,” Whelan muttered. “A catalyst for commotion.”

  Sixteen

  By the time he’d given everything to Bauman and the cops were through with him at Area Six, the sun had made its exit. He stopped at the Vienna stand on Clybourn and had a couple of hot dogs. He was less than three blocks from Mrs. O’Mara’s house but he couldn’t bring himself to see anybody else.

  It was dark when he got home. He picked up the mail on the way in, a bill, a couple pieces of junk mail, and what appeared to be a check from G. Kenneth Laflin. He tore open the envelope and examined the check. It was for less than half of what Laflin owed him. Attached was a DayGlo orange self-stick note that told Whelan someone had misplaced some of his expense receipts. The remainder of Whelan’s fee would be “forthcoming.”

  “Forthcoming. A prison sentence is forthcoming. Your death is forthcoming, Laflin.”

  He pushed open his door and stopped to admire his face in the hall mirror. Bauman was right: by morning, his face would look like fresh sausage. Where Gaynor’s ring had caught him, the skin was a mass of bruise and abrasion, with a darker red oval in the center, like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. The other eye was swelling along the side, and a faint bluish tinge to the skin showed where he’d have purple tomorrow.

  He took four or five steps in and stopped completely. He couldn’t have said exactly how he knew, but there was someone in his house—in the back of the house. He took a step back. In the hall closet behind him, he had a bat, an ax, and a snow shovel. Moving quietly he backtracked to the closet and grabbed the bat. Then he went forward. It occurred to him that the simplest thing would be to get the hell out of the house and make the call, but it was his house. And he didn’t think he could face another blue uniform again.