In the front courtyard of the building a pair of older men passing a bottle froze when he approached. He nodded to them and looked straight ahead and they moved off to one of the side doorways.
He stopped a few feet from the center door and looked up at the second-floor window and as he did so, something moved, quickly. He swallowed and went on, through the broken door, up the dank, foulsmelling staircase, past the first-floor landing and up to the second, and as he climbed, the air around him seemed to grow more humid and his breathing became more labored and his heart raced, and he knew he hadn’t been this frightened, not even close, since Vietnam.
He paused at the second-floor apartment, debated whether to crash through and maintain surprise or knock and then go in. He listened at the door. For a moment, there was total silence; then, gradually, he became aware of breathing, of a heavy, wheezing sound somewhere away from the door and then a shuffling noise and the creak of old floorboards, and he realized that whoever was inside was about to leave the back way. He turned the doorknob and the door opened and then caught on its chain. He heard the shuffling sound more clearly and wanted to call out, then put a shoulder into the door. The chain did not give at the first impact and he swore and hit it again and the chain broke. As he entered the apartment he was aware of the sounds of a door opening in the back, and then he heard the wheezing again. There was the smell of sweat and sweet wine close by, and he had just fixed the source of the smells somewhere to his right, when, as he turned, a heavy blow to the side of his head knocked him against the wall. Another punch caught him just below his left eye and he smelled the man’s breath and dirty clothes. He swung out of instinct, caught nothing but air with his left but landed a glancing right to the man’s ear and was rewarded with two body shots that dug deep into his stomach and made him groan.
Great, I made him mad.
He felt himself sliding down the wall and stopped trying to punch back, covering his head tightly with his arms. A foot caught him in the side just as he hit the floor. He fell over on one arm and was kicked in the shoulder. He rolled onto his back and was about to roll over onto his knees when a shoe caught him in the side of his face.
“Oh, shit.”
He lay back and listened to his own gasps. Somewhere just beyond his line of vision, the other man panted and gulped air. Whelan heard himself groan.
“You leave him be, hear? You come back around here, I’ll bust your ass good.” The man’s voice trailed off to a gasp at the end as though he didn’t have the wind for such a sustained speech. Whelan lay on his back and hoped the man wouldn’t kick him anymore. He heard the man stagger from the room, heard the sound of a backdoor slamming, heard voices outside, then silence.
The left side of his face throbbed, all of it, from jawline to socket, and his ribs hurt and there was a dull pain just above his ear, and for a moment he thought he would vomit. He had a sudden recollection of a similar moment twenty years earlier, on another hot summer night over in Hamlin Park when he’d gotten in the way of the local crazy and spent half the night lying in the bushes with a closed eye and a fat lip.
Yeah, this brings back fond memories.
He lay there for what seemed to be a long time, gradually becoming aware of the noises of the street, sounds that a normal man would not notice or be aware of, the drone of cars going by down Wilson, the seemingly random, patternless conversations of passersby or the men in the vacant lot, or the old ones having a cocktail in the doorways. He heard a quarrel over money and negotiations over a bottle of wine, and from an apartment somewhere, a woman screaming obscenities in a voice filled with pain, and the sounds of glass breaking. In the background, far away, sirens and the low rumble of the el, the screech of tires and the whine of bad brakes. He was aware that he was beyond the fringe of his own world, that he could die in this rank airless place and no one would know for a week. He was making mistakes, large ones, and he counted himself lucky that he hadn’t paid more heavily.
He got to his feet and leaned against the doorjamb to pull himself together. He looked around in the blue glow of the moon coming in through the window, tucked in his shirt, brushed dirt from his trousers, ran his fingers through his hair and left.
Outside, the streetlights seemed glaringly, gaudily bright and the courtyard was alive with activity. A new group of men stood in the open doorway of the side entrance working on Friday night’s bottle. A pair of teenagers leaned against a beater parked out front, and across the way from him, a skinny, dark-haired man with what looked to be dried blood on his cheek muttered to himself and drew back into the doorway when he saw Whelan.
He took a breath and tried to walk casually out through the front gate, as though he’d just popped in for a look. He looked calmly around when he reached the old brick gateway, then turned onto the street. He looked up and down the sidewalk and headed north on Dover. A few feet ahead, a large shape separated its shadowy bulk from the trunk of a huge cottonwood.
“Hey, snoop. How ’s the detecting business?”
Whelan stopped abruptly. Another law of life had proved to be true: at such moments in life, one can expect to meet the last person one would want to see.
“You don’t have a home, huh, Bauman?”
“You’re walking kinda funny there, inspector. You start partyin’ early, or what?” Bauman squinted at him, grinned, craned his head forward and pretended to be having difficulty seeing in the glow from the streetlight.
“Hey, what happened here? You got an owie, Shamus?”
“I met with what they call ‘foul play.’”
Bauman came closer and examined Whelan’s face. He grunted and raised his eyebrows. “Who’d you run into, Marvin Hagler?”
Whelan hesitated for a moment, half wondering if Bauman already knew what had happened to him, then decided he was simply being paranoid. Bauman grinned amiably, tilted his head to one side and made clucking sounds.
“Nice work,” he said, and Whelan felt a sudden, delicious urge to paste him one in the mouth. Another time, maybe. And it would have to be a sucker punch.
“How come you can never get a cop when you need one, Bauman?”
“You got one now. So talk to me.”
“I believe I’ve found these guys, and I think I just made the acquaintance of Hector.”
“Yeah? In there?” Bauman gestured with his chin.
“Yeah. It’s where they’ve been staying, I guess.”
Bauman gave him a short appraising glance, “How’d you know that?”
“You gotta know who to talk to, detective.”
Bauman surprised him by laughing, and the laugh was genuine.
“Ah, I ain’t so surprised, Whelan. I heard you were pretty good. You got your ways, I got mine. So you got a line on ’em, huh? This is their flop, huh? Or it was till tonight.” He laughed again.
“Yeah. I guess I flushed them now.”
“Do us any good to look around? You were in there awhile, they’re probably long gone by now.”
“How would you know that?” Bauman gave him a stiff shrug and looked away.
“Should we go in and have a look, Whelan?”
“Waste of time. I heard them leaving.”
“Them? You sure?”
“I heard the sounds of two men. One jumped me. Pretty big, he seemed. Pretty good, too. I think I landed one and he landed about twenty. Smelled of muscatel. He warned me off.”
Bauman looked at him. “What’d he say?”
“Said, ‘Leave ‘im be.’ Said if I came back he’d bust my ass good. Seemed sincere, too. I heard somebody else leaving just before this guy belted me. I figure it was Hector watching the door and Sharkey leaving.” He looked at Bauman closely. “You were out here all the time. Tailing me.”
Bauman shrugged.
“So where’s your partner?”
Another shrug. “I’m on my own time here. I’m, you know, doing my own thing. Got nothing to do with him.”
“On your own time.”
“You need a hobby, detective.”
Bauman smiled slyly. “This is my hobby, Whelan. It’s what I do for a living, it’s what I do for kicks. It’s me, babe.”
“You’re a piece of work. I’ll give you that.”
Bauman nodded curtly. “You’re right. I am. Come on, let’s go get you put back together. I’ll give you a lift to your place. That where you want to go?”
“It’ll do.” The Caprice was parked in front of a hydrant at the far end of the block. Bauman put in a call on the car radio to get the beat cops watching for Hector and Sharkey. Then he drove Whelan home. He followed Whelan in, looking around the place with interest.
“This is nice. Great old house. Dogshit neighborhood, though.”
“Hey, the yuppies are moving in. A couple of houses across the street were just sold to young couples with money and delusions of grandeur. This was my parents’ house. I moved in after my ma died.”
Bauman looked around and nodded absently. “Mine died a long time ago. Long time ago.”
“Sit down. There’s beer in the fridge. And pop.”
“You got an ashtray?”
“On the mantel.”
He went into the bathroom, turned on the light, looked in the mirror and laughed. Hector, if that was who it was, was a very efficient bodyguard. There was no blood to speak of, except for a cut at the top of his ear, but one cheekbone was swollen and already a deep purple, and there was a blue bruise along the side of his right eye. The bridge of his nose was pink and swollen and there was a dark abrasion along the left side of his face where Hector had kicked him. That one would be darker by morning. If none of the swelling or discoloration went away, he’d be damn near unrecognizable tomorrow.
“Jee-zus. This guy did a nice job.”
He heard Bauman laughing in the next room. “I was afraid to break it to you,” he called out. “Your career in pictures is through.”
Whelan washed, got ice from the refrigerator and wrapped it in a towel, then came into the living room and sat in the armchair across from Bauman, holding the ice to his injuries for a minute or two apiece.
Bauman puffed at a small, thin cigar and looked at him for a moment, then burst out laughing.
“Yeah, I’m a million laughs, Bauman.”
“Naw, naw. I’m not trying to be a prick. It’s just that…well, it just occurred to me, I prob’ly got to take you off my suspects list now.” He laughed again and, after a moment’s hesitation, Whelan joined him.
“I understand you’ve been asking around about me.”
“Who told you? That Kozel?” Whelan shrugged. “That’s who told you.”
“He used to be my partner, Bauman. Don’t get pissed at him. He’s not your friend, he’s mine.”
Bauman nodded. “Fair enough. I just wanted to get a line on you. Figure out what kinda guy you were, ’cause you were stickin’ your beak into this stuff so deep. I wanted to find out who you were.”
“So now you know.”
Bauman smiled and shook his head. “Not hardly, babe. All I know is you’re honest and you were a straight cop. That’s all I know. And far as it goes, I got nothing on you that says you’d be a killer.”
“We talked about this already. We both agreed I’m not a killer.”
“You never can tell, though. Never can tell who’s gonna turn killer.”
“No? Well let me help you out there. You can shorten your list. Take me off.”
“If I do, so what? Don’t mean a thing, don’t mean you’re not involved.”
“Come on, Bauman.”
“I got too many questions about you. So how come you’re not a cop no more? You like it, I can tell you like it. You were a straight cop, you got citations—”
“It was too much. This was my beat. I got sick of it.”
“This?” Bauman frowned. “How’d you get a beat in your own neighborhood?”
“I didn’t live here. My folks did. I lived up on Armitage.”
Bauman raised his eyebrows and grinned. “Ooooh, trendy.”
“No, not then it wasn’t. The Young Lords had their headquarters in the church across the street from my house. On a hot Friday night there were fights all up and down Armitage. Cook in the local restaurant took a knife to one of the gang kids and the restaurant got firebombed. The local liquor store was burned out three times in three years.”
“Montoya?” Bauman’s smile widened.
“Yeah. You know Montoya?”
“Oh, sure. That was my beat when I was a uniform. Sure, I know Montoya. I got the call on all three of those fires, Whelan.”
“Ever find out who did it?”
Bauman shut his eyes and began to laugh. “Montoya.”
Whelan laughed and Bauman nodded. “It’s true. Couldn’t prove shit. All the Fire guys could prove was that it was arson. Witnesses saw a Latin guy setting one of ’em. Montoya said it was this other Mexican, named Ruiz. Owned a liquor store up the street, but we think it was old Montoya, playin’ the persecuted businessman and collecting on his insurance.” Bauman’s thoughts seemed far away for a moment, then he looked pointedly at Whelan. “So how come you left, really? You got a citation the month before you left.”
“That was the reason. Not the citation, the way it happened. It was just the last in a long line of things. That day, the one I got the citation for, you know what happened?”
“Yeah, I do. You and Kozel responded to a call, stopped a robbery, Kozel got hit—”
“Yeah, Jerry got hit.”
“And one of the perps.”
“Yeah, by Jerry. And I hit the other guy but he lived. So Jerry got hit, and both of these guys, these two young clowns that thought they were the Daltons, coming out of this liquor store at us with their guns going. And they got hit, and a guy across the street got hit and a woman inside the store took a stray round, and the squad car took a half dozen rounds and caught fire and I just stood there looking around. There were five people down and a car on fire, and for a moment it was like I was in a chopper above it, looking down at the bodies and the flaming car, and I could see Jerry on the sidewalk, not moving and his eyes kind of staring up at me funny, and I had this…pressure in my ears. I couldn’t hear for a minute, and I thought for a second I was back in Vietnam and I think I was pretty close to losing it. And that was it for me. No more cop.”
He was looking down at the rug, and when he looked up again he saw the surprise in Bauman’s face.
“You were in ’Nam?”
“Yeah.”
“And you saw action?”
“You could say that. I was a medic. I never shot anybody but I saw all the same shit.”
“I thought you said you voted for McGovern.”
“I sure did. I would’ve voted for him twice but that tradition seems to be dying out. Yeah, sure I voted for him. Anybody who could have gotten some of those poor fuckers out in one piece, I would have voted for.”
“A medic, huh?” Bauman nodded slowly.
“Yeah, a medic. I don’t kill people. So take me off your list. The guy you’re looking for lives in an alley someplace—”
“No.” Bauman pointed a tobacco-stained finger at him. “It’s not one of these guys. It’s an outsider. It’s somebody who don’t live here. These guys don’t kill like this. We got two people dead and a couple guys lyin’ low so they don’t get whacked, and you can’t tell me a wino is behind it all, you can’t. It’s an outsider.”
Whelan looked at Bauman for a moment and decided that it all made sense, solid sense. Unless someone out there living on the street was not what he seemed.
“So tell me, Whelan. Why are you a private eye?”
“I’m not sure I can explain it. I don’t work for anyone else, for one. I don’t punch a clock, I decide when I’m going to work and for whom. I do things that interest me—I only take certain kinds of cases. Runaways and missing pers
ons, mostly. I work for people that need help. I provide a service, I don’t follow somebody’s wife around or anything like that.”
Bauman gave him an amused look. “I had you wrong, Whelan. You’re not a sleaze, Whelan, you’re a weirdo!” He laughed and flicked a long gray column of ash at the ashtray.
Whelan pointed a finger at him. “But you are, too, Bauman, or you wouldn’t be wandering around here at night on your own time.”
Bauman took a puff on his little cigar. “What else I got to do? Might as well do something useful.”
“You do this for every case, or just this one?”
Bauman stuck his chin out. “All of ’em. All of ’em. Specially if the department drops one. I stay with all of ’em. I mean, eventually I got to let go of an old one and pick up on something new. But I stay with ’em. You never know what’ll turn up if you keep the pressure on.”
“So we use the same advanced, scientifically proven method. The dog method.”
“What’s the dog method?”
“You know, you sink your teeth in and clamp ’em down and shake the thing till the meat falls off.”
Bauman nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I do. And also I play hunches. Lot of hunches, since I got a lot of time.”
“So what is it about this case? You guys were giving out that robbery line five minutes into it and I don’t think for a minute that you bought it.”
Bauman wrinkled his nose. “Department does. They got a hundred open homicides any one time, a lot of ’em the kind that get into the papers, so—”
“So a couple down-and-outers aren’t such a big deal in the greater scheme of things. So why does it make a difference to you?”
Bauman blew smoke. “They’re all the same to me. It’s just that these ones aren’t gonna get solved unless somebody goes out of his way.”
Death in Uptown Page 14
