Death in Uptown

by Michael Raleigh

  “Thanks for the smokes, mister.” He looked dubiously at the woman. “And for the money, too.” He grinned at her and they were off, moving a little faster this time, all smiles. Whelan watched them leave the alley and then went back to his car. As he was getting in, a gray car pulled into the alley mouth, stopped, backed out and went back toward Broadway.

  It began to rain as soon as he was in his car, and soon it was coming down hard, a sky-darkening rain that overwhelmed the rotting blades of his windshield wipers and soon made it impossible to drive. Eventually he pulled over on Broadway and waited it out. He listened to the radio and the tattoo of the rain on his roof, and when it abated, he went on, window open all the way to suck in the cooling air and fresh smells that would be gone by morning.

  The Earhardt Funeral Home was a small two-story limestone building on Montrose. It was just six-thirty when he pulled into the little parking lot behind the building and he was glad to see the half dozen cars already there.

  Two men in dark suits paused in conversation when he entered the parlor of the funeral home, a crowded little room with several sofas and a half dozen or so armchairs crammed into its corners. He did not know the men, nor the two women sitting quietly on one of the sofas. One of them smiled slightly at him, a gray-haired woman, and he nodded, then looked down at his blue blazer to assure himself that he looked all right.

  The actual viewing room was off to the right of the parlor, a long narrow room with folding chairs along both sides and, at the far end, the coffin. There were a half dozen people sitting stiffly on either side, and they looked at him as he entered. He recognized none of them but thought several of the men looked like newspaper types.

  Marie Shears and her sons were at the far end of the room, a couple of feet from the coffin, and talking with a white-haired man. Marie turned away abruptly and came forward to greet him.

  His heart skipped slightly and he was embarrassed. At forty, Marie was no longer girlishly pretty but was more eye-catching than ever. The flecks of gray in her dark hair gave her a regal touch, and the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth gave her face character. She was trim as ever, a slight woman who could take charge of a room simply by entering it. He’d known her longer than he’d known Liz, almost as long as he’d known Artie, and once, in the distant world of his youth, he’d been absolutely awestruck by her. At eighteen he’d given pursuit, lost out to Art and let it drop for good, but he knew he’d be attracted to her till the day he died. He wasn’t troubled by the knowledge, believing there were people in the world who worked on your chemistry in ways impossible to analyze, and who retained that ability forever. He bit his lip, told himself some things just could not happen and held out his hand.

  “Paul,” she said, then slapped his hand away and hugged him. He inhaled the smells of cologne and soap, held his breath, patted her lightly on the shoulder and pushed himself gently away.

  “The years are nicer to you than they are to anybody else.”

  “Baloney. I look forty and you know it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like anybody else’s forty, and you know it.”

  “I’m glad you—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “All these stupid things we say at wakes. Like you wouldn’t have come or something.”

  “I know. It’s why people dread them. You say stupid things all night and then you go home feeling embarrassed. Those are the boys, huh? Amazing.”

  “Isn’t it?” She smiled proudly, then took him by the arm over to the boys.

  She made the introductions and the boys shook hands stiffly, and he understood how miserable they were to be here. The younger one’s eyes went back to the coffin several times as they made small talk. Tommy, the older boy, seemed to take more interest in him when Marie introduced Whelan to the white-haired man as Art’s oldest and best friend. The white-haired man proved to be Bill Friedman of the Sun-Times, with whom Art had been scheduled to meet for lunch in a few days. Marie noticed a group of newcomers standing in the doorway and went to greet them, and Whelan moved between the boys as Mr. Friedman went over to have a seat.

  “So how you guys doing?”

  They said “Okay” almost in unison and then looked around uncomfortably. He looked over at the coffin and then at them. He remembered them both as very small boys, carried by a beaming Art Shears who seemed to have everything possible in life going for him. He remembered his envy of Artie, who had a noisy cluttered life and people in his house when he came home. They were good kids and he wanted to say something to help but knew there was nothing.

  “It’s a miserable time, isn’t it.” They nodded and looked at him.

  “I had to do it for both my parents. All night people are gonna be saying stupid things to you, telling you how proud your dad was of you. All I can tell you is…it’ll pass. You’ll be all right. It’ll take longer for your ma, though. You’ll have to remember that, and be patient.” Matt, the younger boy, looked down and swallowed.

  “Anybody asks, you tell them your old man was a good guy, the kind of guy that attracts friends to him without effort. He went through his whole life being just that, a good guy. A special guy. I knew him for almost thirty years.”

  Tommy, the elder, looked at him, smiling slightly. No tears, a tough one. “Thanks, Mr. Whelan. He…he was having his troubles, you know? He—”

  “Everybody has troubles. Some people never quite come out of them. It doesn’t lessen their worth. It doesn’t make them different people than they were all their lives. Troubles or not, he was the same guy.” Whelan smiled at him. “Nothing personal, guys, but I knew him a lot longer than you did, longer than anybody who’s likely to show up tonight.”

  Both boys were smiling at him now and Whelan suppressed the urge to say something more.

  “Excuse me, fellas.” He moved to the casket.

  Art Shears was wearing a blue suit with gray pinstripes. With the heavily caked makeup and artificial shaping of the face, he didn’t look much like either the boyishly handsome Artie Shears of Whelan’s youth or the haggard, unhappy man in his office a few days earlier, regardless of all the lies people would tell his family tonight. But it was Artie, and for a long time Whelan could do nothing more than stare in disbelief. There was no sense to this, no fairness to it, and it made a difference to him that this had happened when the guy had been in a tailspin. He stared at the face and swallowed, and put his hand on the dead man’s folded hands. Then he knelt down on the little cast-iron kneeler and said a prayer for an old friend whose hard luck was over. When he was through praying, he waited a moment for his eyes to dry.

  He’d hoped to make a fast, quiet exit but the boys cut him off a few feet from the casket. They held out their hands and he shook with each of them.

  Tommy looked at him in curiosity for a moment. “You’re still a detective?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I do.”

  The boy nodded and looked at his younger brother. “Are the police going to find this guy?”

  He saw that they didn’t want to hear the usual bullshit.

  “They might. They might not. But I think I might take a look, too. I know people down there.”

  The boys smiled at him and he moved on to their mother. They spoke for a moment and he noticed with relief that the room was filling up. There would be a crowd for Artie.

  Marie watched the people filing in and seemed to relax.

  “There’ll be plenty of people here tonight, Marie.”

  “I know. It’s not for me, Paul. It’s for the boys. I want them to see that people…cared about Art.”

  “I think that’s what they’re gonna see. I don’t know if I’ll be here tomorrow night, Marie, but I’ll be at the funeral.”

  She turned to him. “Paul, could you—”

  “Be a pallbearer? I’d have been pissed if you hadn’t asked. Yeah, I’ll he there.”

  She squeezed his hand and he felt pity for her, now that her marriage wasn’t going to have a chance to heal itse
lf. He bit off the impulse to tell her he intended to look into Art’s death. It was the last thing she needed to be reminded of. Right now, it was just a wake: the man in the casket was not the victim of violence, simply a dead man. He gave her a hug and left. Outside, it was raining and Whelan was pleased. His father had always said that rain at a funeral was a good thing, a proper thing. He’d never explained why.

  Three

  He woke at five-thirty to the sound of someone leaning on a horn and couldn’t get back to sleep. It was airless in the old house, and the day was expected to be a carbon copy of the three before it. Heat wave in Chicago. A muggy week in August in Chicago. He thought about Artie, pictured him shuffling down Wilson and up Clark in the heat, pursuing a book and a new life.

  He turned on the radio to a jazz station and wandered into the kitchen to boil water for coffee. He caught the tail end of an old Wes Montgomery tune and then the weather report, confirming what he already knew. There would be a lot of uncomfortable people in this town today, and the ones in Uptown and on West Madison and other streets like them would be worse off than anyone: a derelict had no refuge from the heat. He’d watched them on Wilson, over by the college where they sat on benches or the lawns and stared numbly straight ahead of them till rousted, then moved on into the alleys looking for shade. Shade and water. Once, for the better part of an hour he’d watched an old man, an obvious veteran of the street, moving from a doorway to the shadow of a building, then into a gangway and a succession of halls, constantly on the move to avoid the sun and the occasional complaint of a resident, and Whelan had realized he was watching the man’s daily routine to escape the sun. There was another, less successful routine for such folk in the bitter, gnawing cold of January and February, when dozens of them simply died in doorways a few feet from warmth.

  He sipped his coffee and thought of Liz. Later he’d have to drop by and pick up his things, and he was in no hurry. If anything, he was cured of the notion that certain relationships are fated to be, for he’d wasted the past three years on this one, trying to resuscitate a dead one from his youth. At times it filled him with a dull ache, a hollow awareness of time slipping away from him. Time to find a new one, start something with someone new. He nodded. Sure, and just how did one do that? How did a man pushing the big four-oh meet women? Time to call Bobby Hansen, maybe, for whom women had never been a problem—at least not till he married them. Bobby, perennial ladies’ man, had been married and divorced four times. Whelan laughed. Still, Bobby at least knew some women: Whelan knew Liz and the half dozen or so waitresses who took his orders.

  He got up and went to the back window to look hopefully at his garden. “A moribund enterprise,” Mr. Sterne across the alley had called it. Sterne was a speech professor at Loyola whom Whelan occasionally engaged in conversation simply to enjoy his slightly archaic turn of phrase.

  Well, it was a moribund enterprise, this little square of Chicago dirt that his father had been able to bring bursting to life with a dozen kinds of vegetables and rows of gaudy flowers planted simply to please Whelan’s mother. Under Whelan’s stewardship it grew dead things, yellow things. It gave up the occasional cucumber, but Whelan knew even the dead can grow cucumbers; he’d managed a couple of medium-size tomato plants but most of his tomatoes were dead or dying, some of them burned yellow in the dry heat and intense sun, and the others eaten or simply clawed up by Mrs. Cuelho’s cat. Whelan caught just a faint brown furry movement across the yard and opened his window suddenly. The cat leaped over the connecting fence without touching it.

  Whelan nodded. “Later, asshole.” And the cat probably understood, for Whelan now made daily attempts to connect tomatoes with fear in the cat’s twisted psyche, showering the animal with pebbles whenever it appeared in his yard.

  He showered and left the house, his hair still wet. He decided to head for air conditioning. The Greek on the corner of Lawrence and Broadway had an air conditioner that would chill the Gobi.

  There was life on the street now. People were moving off to work and Mrs. Cuelho was on her porch—she was always on her porch, as though Mr. Cuelho had banished her there for unconscionable behavior. Whelan waved to her and she gave him a curt nod. Relations had soured since she’d caught him heaving a brick at her cat.

  A gray Caprice was parked behind Whelan’s car. It had been washed recently and gleamed in the morning sun. He took a casual look inside as he passed it. The backseat was alive with garbage: fast-food containers, crumpled napkins, empty cups crushed and tossed into the seat. Aftermath of a hot date?

  At the Greek’s he had the cholesterol platter: three eggs, toast dripping with butter and a side each of bacon and sausage. After he ate, he walked up Lawrence to the A&W to get coffee.

  “Hello, detective,” Rashid said. Rashid was the taller and thinner of the two Iranians, and was delighted to have a detective as his neighbor.

  “Hi, Rashid.” He sat at the edge of one of the stools at the counter. “I need a cup of coffee to go. The Greek has lousy coffee.”

  “The Greeks, they don’t know about coffee. The Persians, we invented coffee, did you know that?”

  “Can’t say I did. Large, black.”

  From the door to the back room a head appeared, a large head with shaggy black hair that sprouted at strange angles from beneath the obligatory white cap. This was Gholam, Rashid’s partner and cousin. He nodded and grunted.

  “Hey, Gus. So what are you making today, Rashid?”

  Rashid grinned and showed what seemed to be fifty or sixty teeth. “This one chicken biryani. You will like this guy.”

  “Biryani?”

  “Yes, chicken biryani. This guy is spicy guy. You will like.”

  “Persian chicken?”

  “Yes. Absolutely, yes.”

  “No.” Gus came in carrying a box of frozen fish fillets. “Is not Persian. Is Pakistani food.”

  “No,” Rashid said. “Is Persian food.”

  “No,” Gus insisted. He looked at Whelan and grinned slyly. “You eat that shit, you get the runs. I don’t eat that shit.”

  “No, you eat this other shit, this American shit,” Rashid said. He stood with hands on hips and glared at his cousin. His head was thrust forward and he nodded, reminding Whelan of an angry vulture.

  “I eat what I want.”

  “Yes, you eat this hamburger shit and these hot dog shits and these chili dog shits and I cook good Persian food and you make jokes.” He looked at Whelan in exasperation. “He comes here, he forgets our country, where culture began, he wants to be American.”

  “He is already. So are you. Everybody is. It’s easy,” Whelan said.

  Rashid shook his head and went back to his chopping and stirring, then buried his hands in a stainless-steel mixing bowl for a while. He seemed to be kneading something. Whelan looked around and wondered about his coffee. He looked up at the food signs.

  “You know, Rashid, I think you guys have created an American original here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like your menu.”

  Rashid grinned over his shoulder. “I got new one, too. Besides this guy.” He set down the mixing bowl and walked over to a large crock-pot. He opened it, stuck in a large fork and came out with a dripping mass of what seemed to be seaweed.

  “See? For the black people. It is ‘greens’. ‘Colored greens’ it is.”

  “It’s…uh, collard greens, Rashid. ‘Collard.’”

  “Yes, well, they like this guy. So I gonna serve him up when they come in.” He winked, the American entrepreneur making a score.

  “Good idea. Listen, how about a cup of coffee?”

  Rashid gave him a stricken look. “Oh, my God. I’m sorry, detective. I get him right away.”

  Whelan took his coffee, told Rashid he’d see him later for some chicken biryani and left. There were already a half dozen men outside the pool hall on the corner but it was too early for the kids that usually inhabited the block. Sam Carlos waved to him through the grocery window.<
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  He had been in his office less than ten minutes when there was a knock on the door.

  “It’s open. Come on in.”

  Two large men entered the office, a tall thin man with a long Irish face and pale blue eyes, and a heavy man, almost as tall, with a red face and a dark brush cut. The thin man was in shirtsleeves; his companion wore an ugly green plaid sportcoat.

  “Paul Whelan?” the heavy one asked.

  “Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

  The man flashed a badge and put it away again in a practiced movement.

  “Hey, better practice that, detective. I almost got a look at it.”

  “You saw it.”

  Whelan smiled. “Could’ve been tinfoil. Could’ve been, you know, some Guatemalan general’s chest ornaments. Could’ve been—”

  “It’s a badge, sir,” the tall one said, calmly.

  “Anyhow,” the heavy one said. “I’m Detective Bauman and this is Detective Rooney. We’d like to ask you some questions about, ah, Arthur Shears.”

  “Sit down. There’s another chair over there.” Rooney pulled over a chair and both men sat down. Whelan caught a whiff of Right Guard and thought he smelled cigar on one of them. He had a sip of coffee as they arranged themselves in the chairs. They exchanged a glance and Rooney cleared his throat.

  “We know Mr. Shears was a close friend of yours and we’re sorry about the way he died, and we’re sure you’ll want to help us out.”

  “Sure. I called you guys yesterday—”

  “Yes, sir, we know that. Was there something in particular you wanted to tell us?”

  “No, I just wanted to see if you had anything yet.” He looked from Rooney to Bauman, who stared unblinkingly at him. Good Cop and Bad Cop, except that he had a feeling Rooney was always Good Cop and Bauman always Bad Cop.

  “Mr. Shears’s wife indicated that you were close friends. You grew up together.”

  “Right.”

  “And you saw each other often.”

  “Not as often as Marie thinks. We actually just talked for the first time in more than a year last—”