Killer on Argyle Street

by Michael Raleigh

  “Is that standard practice here? The kids work outside the home?”

  Mollan nodded. “They’re not bums so we don’t treat them like bums. They’re expected to perform certain chores around the home and earn money toward their keep. Most of the money they bring in we put away for them. The majority of our kids finish school while they’re here—Tony didn’t, but he did everything else we advised him to do.”

  “You sound like you like the kids.”

  Mollan shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but I understand them. I worked with ’em a long time, here and other places.” He looked around the room.

  A black teenager stuck his head in the doorway. “Can I have some juice?”

  “Go ahead, Reynard,” Mollan said.

  “Me, too?” A grinning white boy poked his head around the black kid’s body.

  “Don’t try my patience, Donnie. He’s sick, you’re not. Get some juice and get back upstairs.”

  Mollan looked at Whelan. “On a good day, there’s nobody here between eight and three, they’re all in school. Today we’ve got one home sick and one truant. I’m supposed to meet with his principal in about an hour.”

  “I think I can guess which one is the truant.”

  Mollan nodded and seemed to be distracted momentarily.

  “He’s a good kid, though,” Purcell put in. “School bores him. After the life he’s had, I can see how school would seem boring.”

  Mollan looked at Whelan. “When he came to us, he’d been sleeping in an abandoned car in a vacant lot. God knows what else was going on in his life.” He squinted as though remembering something, then looked at Whelan. “Do you know anything about what happens to these kids on the street?”

  “Not the way you do, but in general, yeah. Prostitution and sickness, malnutrition, random violence…”

  “AIDS. Murder. Rape. People cutting them out of the herd so they can use them. There’s people that go around looking for them, particularly the real young ones that haven’t got any street sense yet. They—”

  “People kill them,” Greg Purcell broke in. “There’s no other way to put it. They just kill ’em, like they’re not real people.” He seemed to catch himself and looked down quickly at his coffee.

  “It’s pretty goddam frustrating,” Mollan said. “The cops find them in doorways and alleys, and most of them they have to bury.” Mollan gestured toward the doorway where the young truant had just appeared. “An abandoned car,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Can you see yourself living in an abandoned car? Me, neither. But can you imagine what a kid like this, what his days and nights are like?”

  “No. I’ve known some homeless adults and I’ve tried to imagine what that would be like for one of them, and I can’t, so I wouldn’t begin to understand what it would be like for a kid.”

  “Adults got a better chance to live. And some of ’em, at least, had a life before things got screwed up. Most of these kids never had what you’d recognize as a life. Most of them come from poor families or families where there was no father around. Some of ’em were abandoned. Lot of them have been abused, one way or another. Lot of them…” And Jack Mollan let his voice trail off. He stood looking down at the worn carpet and shaking his head.

  “Every one of them’s got a story,” Greg Purcell said, as though needing to puncture the silence.

  Whelan looked around the room. “Those two kids seemed pretty comfortable with you. This seems like a place I’d want to stay in for a while if I’d been on the street.”

  “Some of ’em, you’d like to keep forever,” Purcell said. “But you can’t, you know…” He shrugged and shook his head.

  “You can’t protect them all their lives,” Mollan finished for him. “You can’t live their lives for them. They can’t stay forever, and some of them, to be honest, want to be on their own. I mean, they’re like any teenager that way—they want a car and steady money and to call their own shots. And when they’re ready to go it alone, when they’ve got a few bucks and some idea what they’re gonna do, we say, ‘Hey, God bless,’ and they leave. And we cross our fingers.”

  “How long do they stay here?”

  “Depends on the kid and whatever extra baggage he’s got to deal with while he’s here—but it’s an average of seven months, maybe eight.”

  “And when Tony left, he was together?”

  The young one nodded and Mollan made a shaky motion with his hand.

  “You’re not sure,” Whelan said.

  “With Tony it wasn’t always easy to tell. He was quiet, for one thing, kept a lot to himself. And his situation was a little different—as far as we can tell, he didn’t come from a bad home, just, you know, his life disintegrated when his mother died. It happened to him really sudden, he wakes up one morning and he’s an orphan. He didn’t have any other family. But there was no previous history of him leaving his home or being tossed out, no violence…”

  “Could that have made him less prepared to handle his situation?”

  “Absolutely. And that was part of his problem. He was pretty angry when he first came here, and very confused. He had a home once and now it was gone.”

  “And what is he like now, if he’s out there?”

  “Who knows?” Mollan said. “If you’re asking me, is he violent? —no, I can’t see it. I don’t see that kind of a change. He wasn’t violent before and he wasn’t violent here, so I don’t think he’s out there stomping old people for SSI checks. But it doesn’t sound like he was able to handle it on his own.”

  “What do you think happened? Old contacts?”

  Mollan nodded. “I think he had to have somebody to give him orders and somebody he knew got him in with this…” He groped for a word and Whelan could see him trying to avoid the cliche “gang.”

  “Burglary ring, the police said.”

  “Yeah. I think somebody he knew was already in with these guys and it was easy for Tony to be sucked in.”

  “After he left here, did you ever see him or hear from him?”

  “One time. I ran into him on the street. This was over by the ballpark. I think he was already in with these people. He seemed real uneasy, anxious for the conversation to end. I don’t know what he was doing or what he was into, but he was embarrassed.”

  “Is there anybody from his life outside this home that he might have gone to?”

  Mollan shook his head. “He didn’t have anybody. Nobody we knew of, anyway. We weren’t aware of the lady you’re working for until, you know, later.”

  “How about anybody from here?”

  Mollan blinked. “What? You mean the kids? No, he wasn’t in touch with any of the kids.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  Mollan gave him an irritated look. “I don’t know anything for sure. Do you? I just think between Greg and the other staff here and myself, we’d know if anybody here was in touch with Tony. If he was in touch with any of these kids outside the home, it would get back to us. But you’re missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “He didn’t know these kids. It’s a whole different group. He maybe met one or two of them just before he left us, but basically he was gone before these kids came into the program.”

  “Can you think of any of the kids who were here when he was here, anybody he might be running with now?”

  “No. There was a kid who was here before I took this position. Sonny Portis. Sonny left the home in about Tony’s second month here, and they may have known each other outside before Tony came here.”

  “Where can I find Sonny Portis?”

  Mollan shook his head. “He’s dead. He lasted about three months on the street. Not one of our, uh, success stories. Greg can tell you more about him than I can. I never knew him.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Somebody stuck him. Drug deal gone bad,” Purcell said. “In an alley up by Clarendon Park. He walked out our door and we never saw him again. It happens that way sometimes.”
r />   “Did you ever hear Tony talk about Argyle Street? New Chinatown, some people call it—Little Chinatown.”

  “I know what you’re talking about. No, never.” Mollan looked to Purcell. The young counselor shook his head. “Far as I know he never went there. Why?”

  “Somebody told me I might have some luck up there. That Tony knew somebody there.”

  “News to me.”

  Whelan finished his coffee and stood. “Well, thanks for your time. And for the coffee. It’s cold out there.”

  “Yeah, spring in Chicago. There’s a word for that, you know? Two words together that contradict each other.”

  “An oxymoron.”

  “That’s it.”

  Whelan handed Mollan his card. “If you think of anything, or hear anything, please give me a call.”

  “We will.” Mollan shook his hand and opened the door. As Whelan was leaving, he opened his mouth to speak and then seemed to change his mind.

  “Were you going to ask if I thought he was still alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t like to give people false hopes so, no. It doesn’t look real good. Everybody he knew turns up dead, we have to assume that the person or persons responsible wanted him, too. The fact that nobody’s seen him in weeks makes me think he’s not out there. The police are looking for him as well and he still hasn’t turned up so…I don’t think we’re going to find him.”

  Mollan nodded slowly, the calm nod of a man who has just heard exactly what he expected to hear. “Thanks. Good luck.”

  Whelan waved and went down the stairs.

  Seven

  The sun was just setting and the dampness in the air made for a cold night, but he could smell the fish in the lake. Smelt season, old men with three or four nets in the water, sitting on the jagged rocks with lanterns and a couple of beers and waiting out the smelt. He sat in his car for several minutes and listened to the radio and turned it all over in his mind. It had occurred to him that much of the ground he had to cover had already been covered by the police. If he didn’t find a way of doing it differently, he was simply wasting his time. He remembered what Mrs. Pritchett had said about the area where Tony hung out at night: a place where a lot of kids went, a place with a doughnut shop. Whelan put that together with the tattoo and thought he had a pretty good idea where to look.

  There had always been something seedy about the strip of Belmont that ran from Sheffield to Clark. The neighborhood around it had undergone that familiar rebirth that always accompanied a massive infusion of money but Belmont itself had remained slightly disreputable, like the reprobate cousin who won’t dress up for family parties. On the side streets around it, homes went for $200,000, but Belmont was still the far side of the tracks.

  Over the past ten years, entrepreneurs of every stripe had jumped into the strip, and to the handful of quaint ethnic restaurants from the old days—Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican—there was Muskie’s hamburger stand, a video arcade, a punk nightclub calling itself “Berlin,” and a leather shop, along with holdovers from the past—a pawn shop, a couple of junk shops, a greasy spoon under the tracks, an Army surplus store, a pair of tattoo parlors and a hotel for transients.

  What Whelan was looking for, however, was at the eastern end of the street: a big, brightly lit, pink-and-white Dunkin’ Donuts franchise where street kids gathered most nights. It was still a little early for them to congregate.

  Whelan parked and went looking for dinner. He settled on Ann Sather’s, an old-time Swedish diner where six bucks gave you your choice of about fifteen entrees and a dozen side dishes. As always, the place, recently converted from an old funeral home, was packed with a cross section of Northside humanity: young couples, groups of gay men, families with screaming kids, and at the counter, solitary men from the hotel across the street. He wrestled with the possibilities and settled on Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach and a side of stewed tomatoes. Here, they threw dessert in for the price of the meal and he had a peach cobbler.

  The waitress brought him a bill for $5.71 and he shook his head. “I feel like I’m stealing.”

  “Good. Leave a big tip,” she said and strutted away.

  Night had taken over and the entire populace seemed to be on the street. A stiff wind licked off the surface of the lake a mile to the east and filled the air with the smells of water and fish. It was a cold wind but for as long as Whelan could remember he’d associated it with spring and for the first time he realized winter was finished. In the window of the transients’ hotel across the street from the restaurant, a couple of men in their fifties sat in barrel chairs and watched the street life go by. Whelan shouldered his way through the crowd and headed for the corner. The kids were already gathering in front of the game room near the tracks, and he saw half a dozen standing outside a video rental store. When he was a few yards from the Dunkin’ Donuts, he crossed Belmont against the traffic and earned a blast on the horn from a stressed-looking guy in a new Buick.

  Just inside an alley near the corner, three kids put their faces together by a telephone pole and did business. He saw money change hands and a tiny plastic bag appear, and the flashiest dressed of the three kids walked out of the alley pocketing his money.

  Just like old times, he thought.

  He passed the tattoo parlor at the mouth of the alley and the junk shop beside it where a kid could dress in the height of adolescent fashion, and a shop that sold plaster statues and paints to decorate them, and turned into the parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts.

  There was no single spot where they congregated: the kids stood in clusters in the parking lot and on the sidewalk surrounding the place and at the bus stop and outside the entrances to the place. Inside, the ones with money lined the table along the windows and nursed coffee or hot chocolate and munched on doughnuts.

  Whelan leaned against the wall of the plaster shop and lit a cigarette. For a minute he smoked and watched the kids on the street as discreetly as he could. Eventually it became obvious that there were several distinct groups here, and he thought he could make them out: city kids looking for a hangout, genuine street kids, and suburban kids here to imitate city kids and find adventure. The city kids, white or black, had a breezy raucous way about them, high-fiving and laughing and calling one another names; the suburban ones dressed to imitate the city kids, particularly the black ones—baseball caps worn at odd angles, baggy pants and shirts. The street kids were a group apart. A couple of them were already beginning to look like street people, a little more wrinkled, more unwashed than the ones who’d just left Mom and Pop in front of a TV set. These kids weren’t as demonstrative or noisy, they watched everything—the other kids, the cars pulling in, the people passing by on the sidewalk. Twice while he studied them, Whelan saw kids watching him and he had no doubt that one or two of them had already made him for a cop.

  He imagined street cops or a guy like Bauman trying to get information from the kids on what they fantasized was their own turf and shook his head. There had to be a way to do this.

  Whelan tossed the cigarette into the street and went to the doughnut shop. The air inside was steamy and smelled of sugar and things frying in oil, and cigarette smoke—they smoked, these kids, all of them—and cheap cologne and bubble gum, and a half dozen of them watched him walk in.

  The girl at the register was having trouble ringing up doughnuts and coffee for three girls. A few feet from her, a serious-looking man put out bismarcks and longjohns in perfect rows. He seemed out of place, an accountant or computer programmer dropped into the world of doughnuts and coffee. Whelan watched him till the man noticed and turned. The man raised his eyebrows behind silver-rimmed glasses.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  Whelan could feel the eyes of several of the kids on him. He smiled at the man and said, “I’m lost. I need directions.”

  The man came over and Whelan stepped a few feet away from the nearest customers. He pulled out his busi
ness card and a pen and began drawing on the back of the card.

  “Can you show me how to get to this address?” When the man squinted and bent over the card, Whelan said in a low voice, “I’m a private detective. I’m trying to find a boy who used to hang out here. Tony Blanchard.”

  The man never looked up from the card. He shook his head. “Don’t know the name.”

  “White kid, long hair, tattoo of a comet on his arm. Average height, skinny, scar on his chin.”

  “Oh. I remember the tattoo. He hasn’t been here in—oh, it must be a month.”

  “What I need is for you to look around—here or outside in your parking lot—and tell me somebody who you saw him with, or somebody he talked to.”

  The man leaned back and looked around the room. In an unnecessarily loud voice, he said, “A cab driver might be able to take you there.”

  “I’m driving,” Whelan said. Quietly, he added, “Lighten up.”

  The man bent over again, grinning. Having an adventure break from the doughnuts. He pointed to Whelan’s card and said, “Two girls in the parking lot. Black one and a white one, the black one wears those little tiny braids.”

  “Appreciate it,” Whelan said. He slid his card under a napkin, stood back and shrugged. “Well, thanks anyhow.”

  Shaking his head, he left the restaurant. He took the long way through the parking lot, pretended to be looking at street signs, and then made his way toward the girls in a long loop. He never made eye contact till he was almost within arm’s reach, but the black girl had already made him when he looked at them.

  “This is who I am,” he said, holding up a card for both girls to look at. “I need information, and…”