Death in Uptown

by Michael Raleigh

  Bauman snorted. “They’re all on the run from something.”

  “Well, he’s running now.”

  “Yeah, he sure is. He’s trying to stay alive.”

  “But you’re sure he wouldn’t be the killer.”

  “No, but I think he knows who whacked Shinny and your friend and he don’t want to be next.”

  Whelan looked out the window. “And you’ve got a suspect, you said. A real one” Bauman smiled and said nothing. “So you’re ahead of me, detective.”

  Bauman got to his feet. “Guess so. You just don’t talk to the right people, my friend.” He walked toward the door. “See you around, Whelan. And if you hear anything, I want it, hear?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t gimme that ‘sure’ bullshit. You don’t know me, either, Whelan, or you’d know I’m good. I’m real good and I’ll find this fucker if he’s still around.” He nodded curtly and left.

  Whelan pulled his chair over to the window. For a long time he watched the street traffic, the el and the cars and the men standing in bored groups by the pool hall, and gradually it came to him. He saw the pale, frightened face in the window above the alley and realized the difference a badge sometimes makes.

  Six

  After a while he went out for cigarettes. He made a circuit of Lawrence, Broadway, Wilson and Sheridan. In front of the Popeye’s Chicken on Broadway he saw Don Ewald talking earnestly to a heavy-set woman with a shopping bag; the woman seemed to be looking for a way around him. Behind Ewald, a taller young man with sandy hair seemed to be adding a few words to the conversation. Whelan turned the corner quickly but Ewald saw him and waved. He waved back and thought he saw the other young man give him an odd look.

  A young woman was standing at his office door when he got back. Even before he reached the second-floor landing he could hear her nervous pacing. He heard her sigh and took the last few steps in a hurry.

  “Hi. Are you waiting to see me?”

  The young woman turned quickly. “Are you Mr. Whelan?” She was slim and dark-haired and very young.

  “Yes. You must be Miss Agee.” She nodded and smiled. He fumbled for his key, fumbled putting it into the lock, dropped it on the floor and laughed at himself. He opened the door finally, held it for her, closed it behind her and dropped his cigarettes.

  “I like to make a good first impression. Cool nonchalance is what I try to cultivate.” She laughed nervously and he decided he liked her already. “Have a seat, Miss Agee.”

  The office suddenly seemed dusty and smoky and he opened the window wide.

  “Were you waiting long?”

  “Oh, just a minute or two.” He could tell she’d been out there awhile; probably all the time he was strolling through the neighborhood, she’d been pacing in his dark, airless, foul-smelling hallway. A bright sheen of perspiration covered her face and neck.

  “I got your messages, Miss Agee.”

  “My first name’s Jean.”

  “Jean, okay. Paul Whelan.” He stuck out his hand and she shook it. She sat back and looked around for a moment at his office.

  “I’ve…I haven’t been in the office much lately, so it’s kind of dusty.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” She turned around in the chair and looked back out through the clouded glass door to the hallway. “Are…are all the other offices empty?”

  “There’s an accounting firm down the hall.” The jittery accountant had just become ‘an accounting firm.’ “And the first floor’s full.”

  “Oh. I just didn’t see anybody else on this floor.”

  “No, they’re all on vacation, I think.”

  “It would scare me to death to sit up here all alone,” she said breathlessly, and laughed.

  “It scares me sometimes. I don’t come in to work at night very often.” And he found himself laughing. He looked at her. No one would ever call her beautiful, perhaps not even pretty. But cute. Terminally cute. Short dark hair framed a round face, with large brown eyes, a pug nose, a small mouth with full, swollen-looking lips. When she smiled, a dimple puckered one cheek. She wore a denim skirt that stopped a modest inch above the knee and a sleeveless white tank top. She was small-breasted and athletic-looking and she reeked of sunshine and fresh air and seemed wondrously out of place in his office. In Uptown, for that matter.

  “What can I do for you, Jean?” He thought his voice had suddenly developed a reedy quality, and he cleared his throat.

  “I’m trying to find my brother.”

  “I see. And how did you hear…how did you come to me?”

  She flushed prettily. “Well, actually, I called another…agency. That I found in the, you know, the phone book. The Jacobsen Agency.”

  He nodded. “Good outfit. Very high tech.”

  “And they recommended you.”

  He tried to hide his surprise. “That was neighborly of them. They say why?”

  “They said they were completely tied up, that all their…people were, you know, busy with another operation. That’s what they called it, an operation.”

  Whelan laughed. “And they didn’t say their ‘people.’ They probably said ‘resources.’ ”

  She laughed a little. “They did. That’s what they said. All their resources.”

  “It’s how they talk over there. But they’re busy, all right. They specialize in debugging. About a week and a half ago, surveillance devices were found in a booth in a downtown restaurant. Nice place, fancy place, that caters to politically prominent people, and this particular booth is the favorite of a group of our fine public officials believed to have ties with organized crime. The Jacobsen Agency was called in to do a sweep of the restaurant, and when all the other high-stepper-type restaurants went into a panic about bugs in their booths, every joint in town wanted the Jacobsens to do a sweep. So they’ll be busy for a long time. And they’re going to be very rich very soon.”

  She smiled. “They said it was your specialty, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Finding missing people. Missing persons, I mean.”

  “I guess it is. You want to tell me about your situation?”

  “Well, I’m from Hope, Michigan. Do you know Hope?”

  “Oh, sure. Been through Hope a few times,” he lied. He was surprised at himself, but only once before had a female client ever come to the office, a much older woman. The sunlight coming through the window picked out reddish highlights in Jean Agee’s hair and he was conscious of her perfume. “Nice little town,” he embellished.

  She took out a Kleenex and wiped along the sides of her nose and he straightened.

  “Listen, Jean, it’s kind of hot here. Let’s go down to the coffee shop and get some coffee. We can talk there.”

  She seemed to be relieved at leaving the office and he prayed that the little cafe under the tracks would have its air conditioning cranked up. They went out and Whelan waved to Gus and Rashid, who made strange Persian gestures toward Jean Agee and rolled their eyes.

  The greasy spoon, a tiny, nameless restaurant that could seat two dozen people on its best day, had a small menu, decent coffee and a wonderful air conditioner, and a wall of cold air struck them as they opened the door. He heard Jean Agee make a little moaning sound.

  There were five booths, four of them taken, and he slid the girl into the last one. He waved at Rickey, the delivery boy, and a chatty woman in her fifties took their order, coffee for Whelan and iced tea for Jean Agee.

  “So, Miss Agee…Jean, you’re looking for your brother. And do you have reason to believe he’s in Chicago?”

  “Yes. He moved here. I mean, eventually, he came here. He wrote us—my mom and me—from here. He said he was going to find work here.”

  “When was that?”

  “March. Late March.”

  “And that was the last time you heard from him?” She nodded. “No calls, letters, nothing?” Another nod. “And he made contact with no one else?”

  “Nobody I know of.”
>
  “All right. Tell me about your brother. Let’s start with a name.”

  “Gerry. His name’s Gerry. Gerald, really. He’s three years younger than I am. So he’s twenty-two.”

  Whelan nodded. She looked younger than twenty-five. “What else can you tell me?”

  She frowned. “He’s very…serious. He’s sensitive, he takes things very hard, and he’s been having trouble, ever since he got out of the service. He just…” She shrugged. “He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He tried a number of different things in Hope, just to please Mom, really, but he was miserable. He started drinking—no, that’s not true. I think he was drinking in the Army.”

  “Lots of people drink in the Army.”

  “Well, he started drinking really heavily. Sometimes outside the house, in taverns and places like that.” Places like that. She sounded as though she’d never been in one. “And then at home. We kept finding bottles under his bed and in his closet, and in his drawers under the clothes. And he got into some, you know, some trouble. Just like any other young guy, really.”

  “Well, what kind of trouble? Did he murder anybody?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like—Oh, you were joking. Okay, you’re right, he’s my brother so I assume everything he did is normal.” She blushed prettily and Whelan swallowed. “He got into some fights, he and some friends of his. In the taverns. You have to understand, Mr. Whelan—well, you’ve seen Hope, so you know there isn’t a lot to do there. Gerry is very intelligent and he’s a very…complicated person and I think he should have gone to college. Instead he went into the Army because most of his friends were going into the service or into trades.”

  “So after he started getting into trouble, then what? He left town?”

  She nodded. “He was giving Mom some money every month but he still managed to put some away for himself, so he left and said he was going to try to get into construction, get some experience and maybe get into a trade union. He said he wanted to use his hands, wanted to get into something where he could travel around the country and, you know, be able to find work, be employable. So he came here. And it, I don’t know, it just didn’t work out for him.”

  “How long did he…How long has he been here?”

  “He got here in the fall, in September.”

  Lousy timing for anyone who wanted to get into construction, Whelan thought, but held his tongue.

  “He called at Christmas and told us things were working out real well for him, but they really weren’t.”

  “Where was he living?”

  “The YMCA.” She smiled and he could tell that she thought she’d just given him vital information.

  He sighed and said, “Which one?”

  She blinked, opened her mouth and then closed it abruptly.

  “We have…a lot of YMCAs, Jean. Do you know which one?”

  “I’ve been there. I went there to find him. It’s very big. And it’s on Chicago Street. Chicago Street in Chicago, Illinois. Gerry thought that was funny.”

  “Chicago Avenue. That’s the Lawson YMCA. It’s the flagship. The big one. I used to eat in their cafeteria when I was a police officer. My precinct house was just down the street from there.”

  She brightened visibly. “You were on the police force?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Why, does that make me a better detective?”

  “Well…doesn’t it?” She was serious.

  “Whatever gives the client confidence,” he said. “Okay, your brother was staying at the Lawson Y till—when? Do you know for sure? What did they tell you when you went there?”

  “Our letters started coming back in March. They couldn’t forward them, the people at the YMCA. The last one Gerry wrote us was from March, March seventh or eighth, and he was still there then.”

  “And you had no one here to call, no family or friends?”

  “Nobody. I think that was part of the appeal for Gerry.” She leaned forward. “He was really starting to think of himself as a washout, you know? He wanted to get a new start somewhere but it had to be a place where no one could watch him. In case he, you know—”

  “In case it took him a couple of tries to get it right.” She smiled and nodded. “Okay, so what did you find out when you went to the Y?”

  “They couldn’t give me an address or anything. They said he just left to move to a new neighborhood, to get closer to construction projects.”

  “They say which one?”

  “This one.”

  He nodded and took a sip of his coffee. To buy himself a moment, he looked around the restaurant. A cabdriver he knew was just getting up from the counter and they waved to each other. When Whelan looked at the girl again, her eyes were clear and there was an expectant half smile on her face. Why bullshit the girl?

  “No address up here, huh?”

  “No.” Her eyes read his and the smile began to fade.

  “Jean, people don’t move into this neighborhood looking for work. This is not what you’d call a big…you know, a big construction area. There isn’t much of that going on here. New buildings don’t go up very often around here, old ones get burned down. Uptown is a—” He fumbled for a polite way to describe the neighborhood. “—sort of a low-rent district. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She nodded hesitantly. “It’s one of your bohemian areas. A lot of artists and people like that, like the Village?”

  He looked away for a moment to keep his face straight. Uptown, haven for struggling artists.

  “Not exactly. There are a few people up here who just live here because it’s cheaper, but the general population is just poor. It’s a port of entry for a lot of people—a guy from Mississippi might come up here with his wife and kids in the family beater, looking for work, and more than likely he’ll wind up in Uptown. And with a fairly good chance he’ll wind up living in the beater for a while. There are a lot of homeless people, hundreds of derelicts, runaway kids, new immigrants from Southeast Asia and a lot of other places. There are also a lot of drug addicts and disturbed people, people generally down on their luck. It’s not a nice place and not a safe place, and I’m telling you these things because if a young guy from Hope, Michigan, came into town with a few bucks in his pockets last fall and wound up here six months later, it’s not because he found a ground-level spot in the construction industry but because he’s in trouble. You told me he has a history of drinking trouble, well, this is the place for men—and women—with that kind of trouble. If Gerry’s up here, he’s not in such good shape. I might be wrong but that’s what I think.”

  Her face seemed to stiffen and there was something odd about her color, and Whelan suddenly realized she was holding her breath. She looked just past his shoulder and he saw her bite her lower lip, and he looked away and sipped his coffee and didn’t look back till he heard her sniffle.

  She was not the first person whose naïveté he’d been forced to stomp on. It was always necessary at some point but never easy, and there was a pain in the brown eyes that made him wince inwardly.

  She straightened in the booth and did nothing to wipe away the tears that ran in twin tracks down her cheeks; her lips formed a swollen little pout but her eyes were frank and challenging.

  “Mr. Whelan, when he told me he was moving to Chicago I was sick to death, I knew it wasn’t the place for him, I just knew it. I told myself it could work out for him, it might be the best thing for him, but when he left I could have just died. But I came here to find him, and that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t care if this is a nice neighborhood or not, but…could you find him for me? Or just find out if he’s alive.”

  He smiled at her. “I never had a sister. I would have liked one just like you. Well, I can try, but there are a few things you should know. One is that I’m involved in something else right now, something important to me personally, and quite frankly, it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near finished. So I couldn’t promise you anything like full time on this. It might even be
best for me to recommend another detective.”

  She pointed a finger at his chest. “I want you to help me.”

  “Any special reason?”

  She looked slightly flustered, shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I just do.”

  “Okay. Next thing is, if Gerry’s still here, he won’t be easy to find. It’s hard enough to find somebody on the street, but there’s a good chance that Gerry’s taken some steps to make sure he doesn’t get found. He might not even be using his own name.”

  She gave a little shake of her head. “Gerry is my best friend. My brother and my best friend. He wouldn’t hide from me.”

  “If you were that close, all the more reason why he wouldn’t want you to see him living in a place like this. You’ve got to understand that he’s probably living in a dump, he’s working some menial job if he’s working at all.” She opened her mouth to debate further but he stopped her with an upraised hand. “But there are ways to look, some steps we can take to determine whether he’s living here in a normal pattern.”

  “Normal pattern?”

  “Sure. We can find out if he’s got gas, electric or a phone, like a normal person, or if anyone else knows anything about him, any of the state or city agencies. The V.A., since he was in the service, Public Aid, Unemployment.”

  She smiled. “Is it that easy to get information from all those places?”

  “Hell, no! It’s illegal, some of it.” The waitress looked at him from the next booth and gave him a little smile, and he lowered his voice. “It’s illegal now for the utilities to give out information about who has service. But I know a guy at the gas company, and a woman I did some favors for works for the phone company. With Commonwealth Edison, I’ll have to use my boyish charm.”

  “Your serenity, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “Your serenity. You seem to be a very…serene person.”

  He laughed. “Actually, I’m having a very bad week.”

  She smiled sympathetically. “You hide it well.”

  He shrugged. “Anyway, I know people at the government agencies, and they don’t have to withhold information from me, so maybe we’ll turn up something that way. But I’m still not optimistic about your situation. I think you have to be ready to accept the fact—”