Death in Uptown

by Michael Raleigh

  “He had a problem with winos?”

  “Like I said, he was a country boy, you know? He just thought all the winos were dirty, lazy…you know, scumbags. He never gave anybody here any trouble, but the old guys would come in off the street to nurse a cup of coffee in our cafeteria, and Gerry didn’t want anything to do with them.”

  Whelan looked around the lobby and then nodded. “You’ve been a lot of help and I appreciate it.”

  “Hey, no problem.”

  He stepped out from the cool darkness of the lobby and the heat sucked his breath away. As he walked back to his car, he nursed a growing unease and realized that Jean Agee’s case had gotten a little more complicated.

  He drove east on Chicago to Michigan, eased the Jet into the barely moving traffic on the Magnificent Mile and allowed himself to watch the pedestrians—tourists, many of them—business types and stunning young women out shopping. He thought of Liz, and something tightened in his stomach. He got onto Lake Shore Drive and cruised past Oak Street Beach where the scenery caused him to lurch out of his lane and nearly into a Porsche. The driver gestured angrily with a car phone and Whelan ignored him. He allowed himself another look at the hundreds of young women sunning themselves shoulder to shoulder or playing volleyball; there were young men with many of them and Whelan couldn’t remember ever having been a part of anything like it. For him, the lakefront had always been a place to take long walks and think.

  He had told himself he’d wait till he had something positive to report to Jean Agee before calling her, but it now looked as though that wouldn’t be anytime soon. He went back to the office to think. Across the street they were changing the marquee of the Aragon again. The Salsa Revue was apparently off to visit other ports, and Monday night there was to be BOXING: ROMEO VS. TILLIS 1O RDS.

  He called Shelley.

  “One message, baby. Miss Jean Agee.” Shelley chuckled.

  “And the message, Shel? Before you convulse yourself.”

  “No message, doll. She just asked if you were in and giggled a little and got nervous and said to forget about it.”

  “She’s kind of lost in the big city, Shel.”

  “So you gonna show her the sights?”

  He laughed. “No, she’s a little young for me. There are laws, Shel.”

  He fiddled around with his desk for a while, paged through the phone book looking for a mechanic to have a look at his car’s air conditioning system, and finally found himself calling Jean Agee at the Estes Motel.

  “Hello, Jean, this is Paul Whelan.”

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Whelan. I, I called you this afternoon…”

  “I know, that’s why I’m calling.”

  “I know this is probably irritating of me, I know you said you’d be in touch and keep me, you know, posted, but I thought I’d call and see if you had any, um, leads yet.” She stopped for breath. “And I had some ideas,” she added quickly.

  “It’s no irritation, Jean. I’m just a little embarrassed that I don’t have anything to report yet. I’ve made a number of inquiries at places where I have contacts, and I made calls to the utilities and, basically, no one seems to have seen or heard of him. Also, I went up to the Lawson Y, asked around there.”

  “You did? The YMCA?” There was a tiny doubt in her voice that Whelan couldn’t read. She said, “Uh-huh,” and then it occurred to him that this wasn’t what she’d expected to hear. She’d already been to the Y and this probably didn’t seem like the most impressive detective work.

  “You’re thinking I spin my wheels on unnecessary things, right?”

  She laughed and he could almost see her embarrassment. “You read minds, Mr. Whelan?”

  “No, but I know the way most people view the work, and it’s not really the way it is. Follow a police detective around if you want to understand monotony and wasted time. No clues, Jean, just people and their observations and recollections. All you’ve got, usually.”

  “No clues at all?”

  “Oh, sometimes there are, but mostly it’s a matter of covering the same piece of ground from every angle, asking the same questions of a widening circle of people till something turns up. And I just haven’t turned anything up yet.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sure you will—did you find out anything new at the YMCA?”

  “Not really.” No reason yet to tell her that her brother might already have gone off the deep end, that he held enraged debates with himself, that he’d probably land in a padded cell before long.

  She said, “Well…” and stopped. “I just thought I’d call and…” She wanted to talk.

  “So,” he said, and went fishing. “Are you getting to see any of Chicago?” Then he felt embarrassed: he’d asked her almost the same thing at their first meeting.

  “I…I take walks during the day. Lots of walks,” and she giggled. “And I stay in my room. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t really go out at night by myself so I stay in and watch TV. I was in the park—Grant Park, right?”

  “Across from you and down the street? Yeah, that’s Grant.”

  “It’s so enormous. I walked around there this afternoon.” She stopped and before he could fill the gap, she sighed and said, “I was wondering…Maybe, maybe you could come down sometime, and I could buy you dinner and we could talk more about Gerry.”

  “Oh, well…anytime,” he heard himself saying.

  She laughed again and said, “We could do it tonight.” It was more of a question than a statement.

  “It so happens that I’m free,” he said, and laughed with her.

  “Is this…am I imposing?”

  “No, not at all. My evenings are particularly unplanned these days. I’d be happy to come down, and we’ll talk.”

  “I feel so stupid. I guess…I’m just not used to spending this much time alone, and I’m sure not used to being alone at night.”

  “Do you still live at home?”

  “I did till about eight months ago. I’ve got two roommates now.”

  He was going to force conversation further but realized there was no need.

  “Why don’t I come by around seven? Too early?”

  “No, no, that’s fine. I’ll be starving by then anyhow,” she said, and laughed. He hung up the phone and listened to the conflicting signals he was hearing from himself: discomfort, just slightly, and excitement.

  She opened her door smiling but the smile took a dive when she saw his face.

  “My God, what happened to you? Oh, Mr. Whelan, if that happened while you were looking for Gerry, I’m really—”

  “No, no, no, nothing like that. I overstep sometimes, and that’s what happened here. I went somewhere I didn’t belong and I had to take a few lumps. It’s not as bad as it looks—most of it I got falling down some stairs,” he lied.

  He left his car in the parking lot of the Estes Motel and they took a long, slow walk over to State Street. The Loop was emptying out and there was a cool breeze coming in from the lake that brought the smells of the beach and the rocks and the harbor, the old fishing smells of his youth.

  Amid the dark wood and bustle of the Berghof they ate sauerbraten and Wiener schnitzel and she spoke of her life in Hope, Michigan, and of her brother Gerry, and it was clear to Whelan that this young woman’s world would never look the same if anything were to happen to her brother. He got her to talk about her lifestyle, about her two roommates, Linda and Karen, about her job as receptionist and sometime assistant to a very busy young dentist. He made a few disparaging remarks about dentists and their gouging prices and she laughed, and told him he had no idea at all, and went on to talk about the prices her employer commanded.

  “My jaw hurts already.”

  “Your wallet would hurt when Dr. Walling was finished with you.”

  “I’d just tell him I couldn’t afford to have teeth anymore.”

  “Oh, no, you wouldn’t get off that easy. He’s got more payment plans than a furniture store. He could get ten dollars a month
from you for the rest of your life.” And she threw back her head and laughed heartily.

  He found himself questioning her, subtly probing for her personal history. She was single, had never married, had been “close” once. That there was no steady man in her life he assumed already: a girl stuck in a strange town would be calling her boyfriend, not strangers. He had her on the verge of launching into an account of that last serious attachment and then she appeared to catch herself in midthought. She gave her head a little shake, forced a smile and said, “That’s old history.”

  “Old war stories, I call them.”

  “Don’t you ever talk about yourself?”

  “I don’t know…I just…I don’t try to conceal anything.” He shrugged and realized he was slightly embarrassed.

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” she said quickly.

  “Oh, I don’t mind—”

  “It’s just that all I know about you is that you were a policeman. You said that.”

  “Right. I was a police officer for a long time.”

  “And before that?”

  He laughed. “Before that, I was in Vietnam. Actually, Vietnam and college—a couple of tries at college. Once on the G.I. Bill.”

  “You live alone?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ever been married?” He frowned and she wrinkled her nose. “Come on, you asked me.”

  “You’re right, I did.”

  “And I’m being nosy, I know I am. I won’t stop where you did.”

  “I’ve never been married. And I don’t really mind talking about myself, honest.”

  A seriousness came into her eyes. “You don’t really have to tell me anything. I just want to talk and I think…I have this feeling that you’re a very…unusual person. And I want to know why. If I’m prying, we can just talk about something else.”

  “No, you’re not prying.”

  “Have you lived alone all this time?”

  He laughed and fell back in his chair and she went a deep red and then joined him.

  ‘I’m sorry, it just came out.”

  “It’s all right. No, I had the usual male roommates a guy has and then I started living alone. And your next question, if you actually get around to asking it, will be whether I had any women in my life during all this time I’ve been a bachelor.” She nodded. “The answer is yes, several. One in particular that I’ve been…that I was seeing off and on for a very long time.”

  “And recently,” she said, catching the change in tense.

  “Right. Up till just recently. We met when we were kids and then we ran into each other later and got…involved. And broke up. And I got drafted and went to Vietnam, and when I got back I ran into her again and we started it up again and she wanted to get married. Her life had been going on at a normal pace, you see, while mine had been suspended. And I just wasn’t ready to get married. Mentally I wasn’t in the greatest shape, Vietnam didn’t improve anybody. So we broke up again and a year or so later she got married to somebody else. Her marriage wasn’t a good one, they couldn’t work a life out. They even had a kid eventually, and I think it was a last shot at doing something that might make their marriage work.”

  “That’s a shitty reason to have a baby,” Jean said coldly.

  “It’s a stupid reason, but she turned out to be a good mother. It didn’t help her marriage any, though.” He looked around for a moment. “She’d been divorced a couple of years when we ran into each other again. One thing led to another and we started seeing each other, but I had a feeling that this time it was doomed from the beginning. I was just as interested in her the second time around, but her marriage—or the clown she was married to—took something out of her. She wasn’t quite the same person. She wasn’t as trusting, for one thing. And she was no longer desperate to marry Paul Whelan. So we saw each other for a long time and dated other people along the way and we just finally put an end to it. She’s moving to Wisconsin.” He shrugged and didn’t know what else to say.

  “Now I know I’m prying, and I’m making you uncomfortable. Want to tell me about being a detective?”

  “Sure. Why not?” She sat with her elbows on the table and leaned forward slightly as he spoke. Her yellow summer dress set off her tan, her walks in the park had sunburned her cheeks and nose, and he was conscious of her perfume. She listened intently as he spoke about a couple of his cases and then began to reminisce about his days as a police officer. He sipped at a glass of Berghof dark and chattered and was aware that a pair of well-dressed young men at a nearby table were having trouble keeping their eyes off Jean, and he was pleased.

  And eventually it surprised him not at all to find himself talking about Art Shears. He hadn’t felt this much release talking to anyone in years.

  “That’s the other case you’re working on?” She looked horrified.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Oh, I feel terrible. I’m taking your time from something really important to you. Oh, Lord, Paul. I had no idea.”

  “It’s all right. Basically I make the same rounds, ask the same people about Gerry and…the other people I’m trying to find. Besides, I’m not getting very far on that one, so it’s good for me to have another situation to concentrate on.”

  “But how did you get hurt?”

  “Poking around an abandoned building at night.”

  Her eyes widened. “An abandoned building? Oh, wow. My God, do you do this kind of thing all the time?”

  “No. I’d have given it up long ago. It’s not an exciting job. But two of the men I’m looking for were staying in this building and I tried to catch up with them there. And I guess I did.” He laughed and she joined him.

  “And I screwed up royally. They won’t be back in that building again now that they know I’ve found their place.”

  “Now where do you look?”

  “Who knows? Another building, the parks, I’m really not sure. It’s the kind of situation where I need time or luck. Enough time passes, they’ll come out and somebody’ll see them. Or I’ve got to get lucky”

  “Maybe they’ll leave town.”

  “I doubt it. How would they leave town?”

  She opened her mouth and shut it suddenly, and he took a stab at her thought.

  “Take Amtrak, huh? No, these folks have pretty limited mobility, in general, and the two I’m looking for aren’t kids anymore. One of ’em is probably in his fifties or sixties. His days of riding boxcars are long gone.”

  “Why can’t they go to another neighborhood?”

  “In another neighborhood they’d stand out. In Uptown a man can sleep in the alleys or in a doorway or in the park or in a burned-out building, or in a packing carton in a vacant lot, and nobody says anything because the neighborhood is a wreck and because there are thousands of people doing the same thing. And anyway, I’m not all that sure they ever have the luxury of thinking that far ahead.” He looked at his watch. “Right now, most of them are close to where they’ll bed down for the night, and a lot of others are looking for a place to sleep. They’ll sleep in all those strange places, and tomorrow, they’ll wake up trying to figure where to get food or money, where to get a drink. It’s gonna be ninety-five or so tomorrow, so they’ll spend most of the day trying to figure ways to stay in the shade. That’s their life: looking for food, looking for a drink, looking for water on a hot day, looking for shade, trying to keep whatever they find from somebody who wants to take it from them.”

  “What do they do in winter?”

  “A lot of ’em die. Usually, that first really frigid night of winter, there are a couple dozen people who die in Chicago. Most of them are these people that live on the street. They just die.”

  She looked at him for a moment without blinking, then swallowed and looked down at her nearly empty plate. “That’s horrible,” she said quietly. “What a…terrible way to end your life.”

  “Yep. I’ve always thought so.” Jean looked away and a moistness appear
ed in her eyes and he took another whack at mind reading.

  “But your brother’s not out on the street, Jean, or I would have heard. I’ve asked in a lot of places and he’s just not out there. He might have a room somewhere, and maybe he doesn’t come out except to eat or…I don’t know, look for work. And based on what I’ve found out about him, he’s not a talker, he’s not somebody folks are going to remember because he doesn’t say anything to anybody. But it’s more likely, I think, that he’s not around here at all. There’s no evidence that he ever was. Only something somebody told us at the Y. You know, it wouldn’t take long for a smart kid to realize that there wasn’t any work to be had in Uptown.”

  “What about your…you know, your contacts with the utilities?”

  “Nothing. No record of him.”

  “I had an idea.”

  “Yeah, you said. Let’s hear it.”

  “If you got all the records of people that just had utilities turned on in, let’s say, April or May—”

  “His name wouldn’t be there.”

  “No, but maybe something similar to his name would be.” She straightened and gave him a little half smile, proud of her newfound street savvy.

  “Not bad, farm girl, but all I can do is try names on them. We’d have to come up with a probable alias and people would check it out for me. You can’t get the kind of information you’re talking about, it has to be subpoenaed, and that means a court can get it but a private investigator can’t. A guy with clout probably can, a high-level cop, maybe, but not me. Besides, it would probably be a waste of time. If Gerry’s out there, which I’m beginning to doubt, he’s got a small place, a room somewhere or a little furnished place. Something like that.”

  He told himself he believed what he was telling her, but behind it all was the residue of what people had told him about Gerry Agee, and other, darker possibilities. “And like I said, there’s a good chance he’s gone. That he’s in…California.” Her eyes widened and she smiled. No, you don’t think he’s gone, he told himself. You hope he’s gone, and for her sake, you hope he’s been gone for weeks.

  “Maybe he’s gone back to Michigan.”