Killer on Argyle Street
Page 27
“Mr. Whelan, I thought sure that boy was dead.”
“Tell you a secret, so did I, but you have to keep looking to know for sure. Anyhow, I’ll get back to you.”
When she hung up, he wondered what he’d do if the boy didn’t contact him. He thought of the Indians in the hills of Mexico who hunt by pursuing their prey for days, literally running down the deer till the animals are exhausted from the chase.
I’ll run you down, kid. You better show up.
He spent much of the afternoon on the phone, with Abby and Father Collins from St. Augustine’s Indian Center and with several people that they put him in touch with, and when he was done he thought he had something solid to offer Tony Blanchard. In the long run, he knew, there were no guarantees. Tony Blanchard was still just a street kid and for all Whelan knew, these things he was trying to accomplish were just ways of buying the kid time. There was no guarantee the kid would have any kind of a life. Whelan thought about Marty Wills for a moment: nobody was buying Marty any time. He wasn’t on the street but anybody who got a good look at Marty’s older brother would have a pretty fair idea what Marty’s prospects in life were going to be. After a moment’s reflection, Whelan decided it wouldn’t hurt him to drop in and see the foul-mouthed, sulky boy sometime.
Finished with business, he sat and stared at the phone, trying to convince himself he was not nervous about making one last call. He got up and poured himself a drink from the water cooler, then had another. When he was back at the desk, he lit a cigarette, took a puff, then picked up the phone and began dialing her number. His finger slipped and he had to start over, irritated. The whole world was going Touch-Tone and Paul Whelan was still rotary.
The receptionist forced him to identify himself and he waited a long moment till Sandra MacAuliffe came on.
“Hello, stranger. You know that song, Paul?”
“Yeah. Barbara Lewis. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. You said you’d be busy wrapping things up. I thought you might call late last night but…it’s okay. How are you?”
“I’m all right. It took me a little longer to wrap things up and they didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. It was…shit, it was messy. It wasn’t pleasant, and I didn’t call because I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even you. But I want to talk to you now.”
“You said you were all right but you’re not. Is…how is your friend?”
“Mick? He’s all right, he wasn’t part of it. He’s…I’ll tell you about him over dinner. I mean, are you free?”
She laughed. “I was going to tell you I was busy but that’s not playing fair. Sure, I’m free. If other guys call me I tell them I’m busy.”
He blinked and wrestled with this information. “Do they? Do other guys call you?”
She laughed again. “Oh, once in a while they do, yes, they sure do.”
“Oh.”
“We can talk about that some other time. Is the boy all right?”
“More or less. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself but this kid and his friend Marty, they’re just a couple of sad cases. The only thing I did was make sure they didn’t get killed. I didn’t do a thing to ensure that they’re gonna have good lives.”
“Who can?”
“Nobody, I guess. So how about dinner?”
“Where?”
He thought for a moment and then nodded. “Someplace where the service is slow and I’ll have your company for a long time.”
“Nice comeback,” she said.
He closed up the office early and drove to Waveland Park, then parked in the long narrow lot nearest the tennis courts. He lingered for a while at the edge of the big saucer-shaped depression used for the baseball diamonds and watched a high school team practicing. Then he headed for the rocks.
The wind had died down and the dark green water of the big lake slapped at the rocks and rolled off again. Whelan found a dry spot at the very edge, a square white rock with a red heart painted in its very center. The heart proclaimed that Andy loved Amy. The date was July 4, 1975. He wondered where Andy and Amy were now, and figured the chances were pretty slim that they even knew each other’s whereabouts.
The only company he had were a pair of fishermen, one white, the other black, both in their sixties, who sat a few feet apart and watched half a dozen lines for any sign of a bite. They had identical white plastic buckets and the same number of lines in the water, and as Whelan watched them he could see that they were talking, without ever taking their eyes off the water.
He looked around and remembered steamy days when the boys from his street came scrambling over the rocks after a long game back at the diamonds and tossed themselves into the waves. He could see those boys, filthy with the infield dust and sweaty and jubilant, all talking at once as they spilled down onto the last line of rocks and into the water. Yelling and laughing and calling out to one another, all confident that the summer would never end and they’d probably live forever. In his mind’s eye he could see them all, the Marklin boys who fought constantly and Hansie Becker always struggling to hide a German accent, and Bobby Hansen and Paul Whelan and poor Artie Shears and Rory Byrne, and standing at the very edge of the rocks, testing the water with one skinny foot, he could see Mickey Byrne.
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