Killer on Argyle Street

by Michael Raleigh

  “Easy there, slim. I’m not a cop.”

  One eyebrow lifted and told him that Ricardo was a hard sell.

  Whelan fished a card out of his shirt pocket. “That’s what I do.”

  Ricardo studied the card and the eyebrow went back to its parking space. He looked at the card longer than he needed to and Whelan knew he was buying time. This was a first for Ricardo: he’d probably been rousted by every kind of cop and guard and security man, brought in for two dozen offenses, real and imaginary, but never buttonholed by a private detective. The boy’s face was a road map of life on the streets: he had fresh scratches on one cheekbone, a slightly swollen left ear and more scar tissue than Tony Zale. It was a bad year for the children of the poor, particularly if they were living on the street. You had to dance faster than the next guy, faster than guys you hadn’t even imagined yet.

  “I’m looking for Tony Blanchard. I know the cops were here and left empty-handed, and I’m sure everybody had a few chuckles over that. But now it’s different. I’m working for a lady that wants to find him. Her name is Pritchett.”

  Ricardo finally looked up from the card. “That black lady he used to stay with?”

  “Yes. She wants to find him.”

  Ricardo shook his head. “That boy don’t want nobody to find him.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Nope. Ain’t nobody here seen ’im.”

  “Why do you think he’s laying low?”

  Ricardo gave him a sardonic look. “ ’Cause somebody gon’ shoot his ass.”

  “You know who?”

  Ricardo put up both hands as though to ward off trouble. “No, man, I don’t know nothing about that shit.”

  “Who would?”

  Ricardo shrugged and looked around the room.

  “Any of these kids hang around with Tony?”

  “Nobody here.”

  “Who?”

  “White boy named Marty.”

  “Does Marty come in here?”

  “Not no more.”

  “Where would you look for Marty?”

  “I don’t look for nobody.”

  Whelan rooted around in his pants pocket and came up with a couple of singles. He put them in Ricardo’s palm. Ricardo looked at the singles, then at Whelan.

  “Got a cigarette?”

  Whelan gave him a smoke and a light, and the man behind the counter yelled that they had to go outside if they wanted to smoke. Ricardo pushed his way out onto Wilson Avenue and Whelan followed him out.

  “You’ve got my number on the card. If he shows up, use it.”

  Ricardo glanced up and down the street and tried to look bored. Another pose, and the kid had this one nailed, too.

  Two

  The day had gone raucous in his absence. A Sun-Times delivery truck had tried to pass a cab on Lawrence and had taken off a few layers of the cab’s paint. The cabbie and the truck driver stood a few feet apart and gesticulated dramatically for the crowd that assembled hoping to see a fight or something exotic. Two doors west of Whelan’s building, Sam Carlos and a dark, curly-haired man stood next to a fruit market truck and bellowed into each other’s faces. In his right hand, Sam held a bruised nectarine or peach as a prop, and as Whelan watched, the devious little grocer squeezed the fruit till its pulp squirted out between his fingers. He held it up and pointed to it and the other man shook his head and yelled something in what sounded like Greek. Their noses were almost touching, an Uptown Eskimo kiss, and finally Sam broke off the discussion by tossing the nectarine at the window of the other man’s truck. He missed. The nectarine sailed on over the truck and found its own target with a wet splattery sound. From the knot of people watching the other altercation Whelan heard an angry yell and grinned over at Sam.

  “Nice shot, Sam.”

  Carlos said “Oh-oh,” looked at Whelan, waved and went back into his notorious little grocery, where nectarines like the one he’d just flung at a neighbor went for a buck apiece on a good day and buying meat could be an adventure. In the grocery store of Sam Carlos, an Armenian passing himself off as a Puerto Rican, once a food item hit his shelves, it gained eternal life.

  The coffee in his bag was probably getting cold. Whelan took one last look at the cabbie and the deliveryman and went inside his building. At least the squirrel was gone.

  He hadn’t opened the door yet before he realized he had company. The air in the dusty hall was ripe with the smells of Right Guard and bad cigars. He sighed.

  The man in the guest chair in Whelan’s inner office gave no sign that he was aware of Whelan entering. He went on smoking, as he’d apparently been for some time and, predictably, without opening a window. The man sat in the chair as if it belonged to him. And, Whelan knew, the man probably believed that he owned it as he felt he owned the streets. Whelan closed the door behind him, crossed the outer office to his desk and slid into the chair. He set the bag with his cup of coffee on the desk. His visitor was a big man, with brush-cut brown hair shot with gray. He wore a thick gray wool coat with dust on one shoulder, and beneath it, a brown polyester sport coat with lapels like a pair of wings, a jacket out of style mere minutes after it came out of a factory in Korea. Smiling slightly, the visitor stretched, showing a vast expanse of stomach just barely held in by the orange knit shirt.

  “Got a new water cooler, huh? Prosperity’s a helluva thing.”

  “Right, and you’ve got a new shirt.”

  “Yeah. Like it?”

  “Sure. You look like a three-hundred-pound sunburst. The last time I saw that shade of orange, it was on a pumpkin.”

  A smile played at the corners of the man’s mouth but he swallowed it. “Yeah, and I’m wild about your clothes too, Whelan. Salvation Army had another sale?”

  Whelan didn’t answer. He got up and opened the window onto Lawrence. A chill pushed its way into the room and brought with it street noises and the smell of diesel fuel from a passing truck.

  “Hey, you wanna gimme a cold?”

  “I figured if I let it get cold, you’d be more inclined not to dick me around and you’d come to the point faster.” Whelan pried off the lid and took a sip of his coffee. It was still scalding, and he set it down quickly.

  “Whatsamatter, Whelan? I can’t visit my local private operative to shoot the shit?”

  “You got my message?”

  “Yeah, I got your message. What’s there to tell? I send you a nice lady who’s got a runaway for you to find and you wanna know why?”

  Whelan took out his cigarettes, Bauman shook his head. “Dogshit habit. Those are bad for you,” he said. His big hand went inside the sport coat and came out holding a pack of skinny cigars.

  “Oh, no. Here, wait,” Whelan said. “I bought you a present.”

  “You missed Christmas by four months.”

  “For next Christmas, then. Just don’t light up one of those little nasty things.”

  “Aw, you’re gettin’ fussy on me.”

  “That’s right. They smell like snakeshit. Here.” He slid open the desk drawer and came out with a cigar in a long narrow silver case. He slid it across the table at Bauman.

  Detective Albert Bauman squinted at him, tilted his head to one side and said, “What’s the deal, Shamus?”

  “I already told you. You don’t want it, leave it, but don’t light up one of those things. After you leave, my office always smells like somebody died in it.”

  Bauman picked up the cigar case, studied the label, then opened it. With the air of a man settling down to a fine dinner he held the cigar to his nose for a moment, took it away, then sniffed at it again. He made a little nod toward Whelan.

  “That’s nice. Maybe I don’t care what the catch is.”

  He bit off the end, took the wet tobacco in his fingers and deposited it carefully in Whelan’s ashtray. Then he raised his eyebrows and grinned. “What? You thought I was gonna spit it out on the floor, right?”

  Whelan smiled. “Wouldn’t have surprised me.”


  Bauman shook his head. “You’re gonna smoke these things, you have to do it properly. Same with drinking. You want to drink good booze, you better know how to act.”

  Whelan studied the little red splashes in Bauman’s cheeks, the swollen red tissue of his nose, and decided not to answer. He watched Bauman hold a match to the far end of the cigar and puff away. In seconds the office was filled with the powerful aroma of genuine leaf tobacco.

  “So where’d you park Detective Landini and his gold chains and his pungent gentleman’s cologne?”

  “You don’t like the way he smells either, huh, Whelan? I sent him on an errand. I just told him I was coming up here to look up my friend Paul Whelan the Sleuth and he decided to go check out a couple people we need to talk to.”

  “He’s not real fond of me.”

  “Don’t take it personally.” Bauman indicated the office with a wave of the cigar. “Nah, it’s this. He don’t know why he has to associate with somebody livin’, you know…”

  “On the fringe? The lunatic fringe, maybe?”

  “I guess you could call it that. He still don’t understand a guy that was wearing the blue and pretty good at it, and then just dropped it for this.”

  “And you do?”

  “Do I care?” Bauman made a little shrug and took a long pull off the cigar. After a long moment, he exhaled; thick gray smoke came out of his mouth and both nostrils.

  “You’re not supposed to inhale cigars, Bauman.”

  “All of a sudden you’re an expert on cigars, Whelan? Or you’re a doctor maybe? Lotta people inhale cigars.”

  Whelan put up both hands in an “I surrender” pose. “Okay, let’s talk. How come you sent Mrs. Pritchett to see me?”

  “So she could, uh, avail herself of your hot-shit detective skills. How’s that? Your legendary, uh, cognitive powers.” He grinned. “To get her outta my hair, all right?” Bauman puffed at the cigar, took it out, looked lovingly at it. “That’s real nice, Whelan. Need a nice whiskey to go with this—but it’s a little early.”

  “For you?” Whelan snorted. “All right, tell me about this kid.”

  “He’s dead.” The cigar went back into his mouth and smoke came out.

  “Did you tell her that?”

  “I told her what the real skinny was, Whelan. I told her there was a good shot that we ain’t gonna find this kid. This Tony Blanchard, he was no choirboy. Street kid.”

  “I know that much already. And most of them are harmless.”

  “Some of ’em. But this kid wasn’t hanging around in the record stores, Whelan. He was a runner for a bunch of fucking thieves. Bad things happened to the people he was hanging around and now nobody’s seen him.”

  “Things? You mean like homicides?”

  Bauman shrugged. “Hey, it comes from writing reports. Interferes with my beautiful command of the language. Yeah, we got three, four homicides that we think are connected.”

  “We? Walking the party line on this one? That’s a new wrinkle.”

  Bauman made a half shrug. “They gotta be right sometime.”

  “And Tony Blanchard worked with these people.”

  “More or less.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like I said, he was a runner. Errand boy.”

  “And do we have a theory about why these guys were killed?”

  “Everybody’s got theories, Whelan.”

  “And would you like to share one with me?”

  “No.”

  “Might help.”

  “Don’t see how. Got nothing to do with you.”

  “But you think the boy is dead.”

  “No question. All the grownups he was hanging around with wind up dead, what are the chances he’s still around? He was supposed to be smart, Whelan, but none of ’em are that smart.”

  “So you sent me this nice lady, and I’m supposed to take her money and look around for a kid that’s dead, and then I’m the one that breaks it to her.”

  “You’ll do a better job checkin’ it out than we will. We got no time for street kids, Whelan. I’m looking for the guy that took out all these other people, I got no time to look for this nice lady’s kid. It’s not even her own kid, for Christ’s sake.”

  Whelan sat back and watched Bauman for a moment. A familiar feeling had come to him, a feeling from poker games, an unpleasant feeling usually associated with the loss of money, self-esteem, intellectual balance.

  “You think the kid’s alive.”

  “I don’t think shit, Whelan. If this kid is alive, I think I sent this lady to the right guy. This is you, Whelan, this is right up your alley, roamin’ the streets and playin’ in the mud makin’ new friends among the street guys and lowlifes. Figure it this way, if he’s dead, somebody’ll probably find a body and then we’ll be the ones that gotta tell the lady. If he’s still around, you’ll find out—and then you can tell me and maybe it’ll do me some good.”

  “What’ll it do for me?”

  Bauman grinned. “You’ll earn the gratitude of the Department. Maybe get an honorary badge or something.” Bauman seemed to have an afterthought. “And as for taking the lady’s money, if you find the kid, you won’t feel bad about it. If you don’t…you’re a grown man, Whelan, you got a conscience.”

  Whelan sighed, stared at Bauman and said, “Last seen?”

  A long slow shrug. “Four, five weeks.”

  Whelan said nothing and Bauman took a puff at the cigar, then stole a quick look at him.

  “Well, you’re right. It doesn’t sound too promising, Bauman. You give me a kid who’s known to associate with several people that have already wound up dead and then you tell me he hasn’t been seen in maybe a month. Sounds like this boy’s dead.”

  “Like I said. So. What else you need from me, there, Shamus?”

  “I got a description from Mrs. Pritchett. Any place you think I should look?”

  “He’s a kid, Whelan. Look wherever fine youths congregate at night. We looked but you oughtta look yourself. Sometimes people don’t wanta talk to me. Maybe they’ll talk to you, Whelan.”

  “Gee, why wouldn’t they want to talk to you?” Bauman gave no sign that he’d heard but Whelan knew better. Bauman got to his feet. He stared for a moment at the almost two-inch cylinder of ash about to drop from the end of his cigar.

  “Supposed to be the sign of a good cigar, you know. How long you can keep the ash from falling off.” He made an all-but-imperceptible movement and the ash fell onto Whelan’s carpet.

  “Whoops!” he said, happily. “Well, I’ll be in touch, Whelan.”

  Whelan stared at the little cone of ash on his floor and didn’t look up till Bauman was at the door. “Okay, Albert.”

  The detective paused with the door half open and glared at Whelan for a two-count. “Don’t call me that.”

  Whelan smiled. “I keep forgetting.”

  Detective Albert Bauman was still glaring when he left the office.

  Whelan sipped at the coffee, staring at the list of names and addresses, and wondered just what kind of con Detective Albert Bauman had going. “Only one way I’m going to find out,” he said to the office furniture.

  The first stop was not a known hangout for street kids: the Sulzer Library just west of Uptown. On the second floor, he cast a quick glance at the younger of the two librarians, a willowy young woman with auburn hair. He’d noticed her before and the look he saw in her eyes seemed to suggest that she’d noticed him. Turning toward the microfilm section, he put the thought from his mind. Who needs more trouble, he thought.

  In the past year and a half, Whelan had experienced two moments when it seemed that a woman was coming into his life for something more serious than the occasional exotic dinner. The first, a cheerful, even-tempered woman named Pat, had faded from his life when her ex-husband had come back to her after an absence of more than seven years. He thought about her seldom, primarily from a sense of self-preservation.

  The se
cond person to break into his bachelor preserve was an introspective woman named Sandra McAuliffe, whom he’d known for seven months. There were times when they seemed to be gravitating toward something permanent, and others when her deep mood changes or his long hours of silent preoccupation drove wedges into their evenings together and made them glad to be rid of one another. She was a tall, big-boned woman with dull blond hair shot with a trace of silver: she was also two years older than Whelan. Her age made no difference to him but he thought it bothered her. She was intelligent, well read, laughed easily when the mood was on her and was the best company in bed he’d ever had. There were moments when his years of solitude seemed to catch up with him and he was desperate to be alone, but in the months he’d known her, he hadn’t made it through a day without thinking of her. She loved his restaurants and the odd city places he showed her; she made him laugh, introduced him to new writers and cooked for him. She also drew into herself once a month and picked fights without warning. A brief, sharp argument a week ago had put distance between them once again, and he hadn’t called or heard from her.

  Whelan allowed himself a quick look at the red-haired woman. She met his gaze for a moment and then looked past him, and he told himself it was time to go to work.

  It took him no time at all to find what he was looking for: the kind of story he was interested in always ran within the first half-dozen pages. In twenty minutes he’d found the story in both the Tribune and the Sun-Times. In another half hour, from references in the first story he’d tracked down the earlier ones.

  The homicides—Bauman’s “things”—had occurred in the last week of February and the first three weeks of March.

  They were young, these dead men, one of them little more than a teenager: Mathew Makowski, 20, Barry “Chick” Nelson, 32, Rory Martin, 30. Northwest-side addresses were given for Makowski and Nelson, but the initial information on Martin was vague. That the killings were related was obvious from the circumstances—the three knew each other, all had previous records and were believed to have been involved in an organized form of burglary and occasional car theft. Police were said to be investigating a related matter, the possible homicide of the group’s leader, a man named Jimmy Lee Hayes. Hayes’s blue Grand Am had been abandoned near a small strip of park along the Chicago River. An anonymous tip had given the police the car’s location and the paper hinted without really saying it, that the body had been pushed into the river.