“What? I ought to what, sir?”
“You ought to stop calling me ‘sir,’ for starters. I said you ought to think of it as a vacation. It’s the only way. When you get out of one thing and you don’t have a clear notion of what you’ll do next, you have to think of it as a vacation, as a breather for yourself. A man gets laid off from a factory or fired from an office, he has to think of it as a period of readjustment, a time when he’s getting a line on what’s available to him. If you think of it as a time when you’ve…failed, well, you’re a failure. And it shows. People will sense it when they talk to you. You won’t impress anybody.”
He looked ahead as he spoke, occasionally glancing at the swimmers and sunbathers, and then he realized the boy was staring at him. He shot a quick look at Don and saw that the kid was grinning.
“Okay, I sound like I’m bughouse, right?”
“No, I thought it was great. I never heard anything like that. Do you really believe that?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Yeah, I really do. I think everybody screws up now and then. Everybody changes jobs, loses jobs, loses ability or interest and has to find something to do with himself. We live in a pretty tough society, Don: nobody realizes it, but we do. Just ask any guy who’s been laid off how his community treats him, how it looks at him. So, what you want to do now, if you don’t mind all this curbside advice, is to look at this as an opportunity to scout around and find something better for yourself. Maybe you’ll find a ministry that’ll he better suited to you—that, I don’t know anything about. But don’t go home thinking you’re a failure, which is what you’re thinking right now. All right?”
Don laughed. “All right. I’ll try that.”
“Okay, but the time you’ll have to remember that is when you face your folks, okay? You didn’t fail: it just didn’t work out.”
The boy seemed to be visualizing the impending meeting with his parents, then nodded slowly. Whelan stole a glance at him. A baby-faced boy, his naivete clear to anyone. A thought struck him as he turned off the Drive and headed into the Loop, a thought he’d had once or twice before but for mere seconds, and he went fishing.
“So tell me: is Tom gonna last out there on the street?”
“I think so. He’s not like me, Mr. Whelan. He’s pretty tough. He’s a country boy but these people on the streets, they don’t intimidate him at all, the the teenagers, they don’t bother him. If anything…” and he looked out the window.
“What were you going to say?”
“He gives it right back to them. If somebody tries to scare Tom, he gets hostile. You should see him, Mr. Whelan. These two Southern boys were making fun of us one day and Tom told them to get lost, and one of them said something about, you know, taking care of Tom, and Tom’s face just changed completely. He went after that boy and both of them ran. And for a while after that, he was really tense and I think it was because he didn’t get his hands on that boy. He wanted to fight.”
Whelan looked at him, then had to hit the horn as a cabbie cut him off crossing Michigan.
“If you come back to this town, kid, don’t drive in it.” He hit the brakes as another cabbie tried to shoehorn himself into Whelan’s lane.
“You’re sweating, Mr. Whelan.”
“It’s what I do when I’m frightened, Don.” They waited while a semi squeezed painfully out of an alley onto Randolph and put traffic on hold.
“Did Tom ever seem to have particularly strong feelings about the derelicts?”
He could sense the boy’s hesitation. “Oh, I don’t know…”
“Did he ever say anything?”
Don looked at him. “It’s just that he’s not used to them, that’s all. He doesn’t understand how they could let their lives go so far downhill.”
“He doesn’t have any use for them, huh?” Don nodded slightly and looked away. “And he’s a pretty streetwise boy, in his way. He’s been doing this a lot longer than you, I guess. Am I right?”
Don looked at him with embarrassment. “Oh, no. That’s the…that’s the thing that really gets me. I’ve been here almost a year. It’d have been a year in September. Tom just got here in April. He’s only been here a few months and he’s pretty much at home already. He’s a…you know, a natural.” The envy in the boy’s voice was clear.
Whelan was thinking about the damage a muscular, streetwise young man with a hostile nature and a hatred for derelicts could do. He tried the picture of Tom Waters pacing in a room at the YMCA and snarling at ghosts and he felt a growing nausea.
He pulled in front of the Greyhound Bus Station and felt a pang of nostalgia, saw a younger Paul Whelan coming home from Vietnam by bus after his plane had been rerouted to Detroit.
“Well, here we are, Don.”
“Thank you for everything, Mr. Whelan.”
“My pleasure. Good luck, Don. I think you’ll do just fine.” He held out his hand. Don took it eagerly.
“I hope so, Mr. Whelan. And I’m gonna tell everybody in Bakersfield that I worked with a private detective.” Whelan laughed and watched Don Ewald enter the cavernous bus station, escaping from Chicago.
He used a corner phone to call Reverend Roberts. Tom Waters hadn’t come back from an early errand. He was less than a mile from the Estes, so he drove over to see if Jean was back yet.
He went directly to the room. A maid was cleaning it. He stuck his head in, asked if anybody was home and got a suspicious look for his pains. Uncertain, he went across the street to Grant Park and sat for a while, watching a group of Texas tourists in Stetsons and cowboy boots and a group of Japanese businessmen taking pictures of each other. After half an hour and three cigarettes, he went back to the Estes, struck out again and left.
He drove back to the Way Mission but a sign on the door told him it was lunchtime. It was dark inside. He went back to his office, took in the mail and deposited all of it in the wastebasket. He called his service.
“Well, Mr. Romeo Whelan.”
“Hi, Shel. What’s happening?”
“Apparently you’re happening, hon. So this Miss Agee is now something more than a client?”
He felt himself blushing and Shelley gave him her great whiskey-throat laugh.
“You suggesting I’ve been unprofessional?”
“Baby, I’m suggesting you’ve been lucky. She called twice. Said to tell you ‘Jean’ called. No more ‘Miss Agee.’”
“An operative occasionally gets to know his clients on a first-name basis.”
“I guess. She still sounds young.”
“She is. But I’m in no position to be fussy. What did she say?”
“First she called to see if you wanted to meet for lunch around noon. But then she called and said she’d be home around four or five. And she says maybe she’ll let you take her out to dinner. Also, she says to tell you she bought you something.” Shelley laughed again.
“Wonderful. I love presents from women. Anybody else?”
“That dinosaur you been running around with. Officer Friendly.”
“Bauman. What’d he want?”
“Your ass, I think. He wants you to call him right away at Area Six. Right away, Paul. He called twice, too, and he wasn’t nice.”
“He’s not nice, most of the time.”
“I’d whip him into shape.”
“Somebody ought to. Well, thanks, Shel.”
“Good luck tonight, hon,” she said, and she was laughing as she hung up.
“Bauman.”
“Nice telephone manner. Whelan here. What’s up?”
“Well, Mr. Invisible. Where you been, Whelan? Keeping the streets safe?”
“I had to drop somebody off in the Loop.”
“That little piece you been chasing?”
“No, somebody else,” he said, irritated. “So, you called me. What’s up?”
“Well, now,” Bauman drawled, playing with him. “I got something. Got an FBI report right here in front of me, very interesting report.
Dunno what it all means yet, but it’s interesting.”
“Come on, you got an I.D. on the prints already?”
“Hey, what rock you been living under? I put in a Code One, they get me a report on prints in eight, ten hours max. Yeah, I got an I.D. Name wasn’t Sharkey, like I was sayin’. The guy’s name was Albert Becker. Ring any bells, Whelan? Set off any alarms?”
“Not yet. Should it?”
“I dunno. Maybe not. I just thought maybe you’d know something, maybe you know more than you let on. This Becker, he’s actually somebody. He was in the papers once. Nineteen sixty-nine.”
“I was in Vietnam in 1969. What did this guy do?”
“Embezzlement. He was a banker. Hotshot banker at a little savings and loan on the Northwest Side. You know, one of those dinky little banks, all their clients were Loogans or Polacks. Anyhow, this Becker, he pretty much took this bank down. He split one day with a quarter million bucks. They investigated, found out he’d taken out a lot more than that over a five or six-year period. He’d been milking that bank, setting up phony loans that went directly into his pockets, having them write off the loans. And he spent it all. Seems the guy liked to play the ponies and pretend he was a big shot. Played the trotters, played the parlay cards, you name it. Anyhow, the shit hit the fan and this Becker went South. Took his money and got the hell out. He was never found. Left his wife and kids and a bungalow on a nice quiet street and went underground.”
Whelan said nothing. Now he had it all, though there were still connections to be made. He had the killer and things were falling into place. A thrill of anticipation went through him. Then he saw the anxiety-ridden face of Art Shears and told himself not to take too much pleasure in his accomplishments.
“Whelan? You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I was just thinking.”
“That’s good, ’cause I was thinking, too. We got something here. Somewhere in this guy’s life is what we’re looking for. His killer. We got his killer now, Whelan.”
“You think?”
“Oh, yeah, I think. We find out who took the flak at the bank and I think we got a pretty good idea who whacked him.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, but he was thinking that there were shortcuts.
“Think about it, Whelan. I’ll be in touch.”
“This mean I’m not a suspect anymore?”
Bauman snorted. “You ever work for a bank?”
“They wouldn’t have me,” he said, and laughed.
Tom Waters was exactly where Whelan had first seen him, on Broadway just down the street from Leland, speaking to a pair of aged drunks and looking as though he alone knew the way to the truth. Whelan parked under the tracks in the bus stop and walked across the street.
The drunks were beginning to walk away and Waters was looking frustrated, forcing himself to smile and continue to talk to them. Whelan heard him mention “the apostle Paul,” something about a hard-living man who knew when to turn his life around. He stopped in midsentence, aware of someone behind him.
“Oh. Hi, Mr. Whelan.”
“Tom. Nice eye.”
Waters looked embarrassed. It was indeed a nice eye, swollen partly shut, a deep purple, doing nothing for his ministry. The left side of his lip was slightly enlarged and there was a cut visible just where lip met teeth. Whelan nodded to him.
“You got tagged a couple good ones, huh?”
Tom Waters shrugged and his hand went to the eye. “Yeah. I guess I let ’em catch me off my guard.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. He was pretty good. I went a couple rounds with him and he left a few marks on me, too.”
The young man’s face showed confusion. He frowned. “You know these boys? The ones who—”
“I don’t know any boys, Tom. I know Hector, though. I knew him, at least. I fought him in an empty apartment, just like you did. And he was pretty good. You had an edge, though: you had a knife, so you won yours and I lost mine.”
He heard the slightest quaver in his voice and felt a dull rage growing, a solid pressure in his chest. Waters’s eyes were distressed and he took a step backward.
“I’m not following you, Mr. Whelan. I don’t have a knife. And this had nothing to do with Hector…” He looked at Whelan for a moment, wet his lips and said, “Have you been drinking, Mr. Whelan?”
“No. No, I haven’t. It’s a little early for me, Tom.”
Tom Waters scratched his cheek, gave his head a little shake and tried again.
“I think we’re talking about two different things. This happened in my neighborhood, just some teenagers who came out of a gangway, there were no knives or anything like that. I guess I was pretty lucky about that.”
Whelan held his stare to make the boy squirm. Tom Waters simply stared back in obvious confusion and Whelan realized he hadn’t prepared for this reaction. For a moment he considered popping the kid a quick one, just to get a rise out of him. Tom Waters watched him, his face full of concern, and it was obvious that he wasn’t going anywhere and he wasn’t going to say anything more.
“Tell me, Tom, where’d you spend the afternoon? Packing? You must be just about ready to split, huh?”
Waters looked surprised. “No, I wasn’t packing. I’m not going anywhere. Oh, you’re talking about Donnie. He left. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.”
“Yeah, I know all about Don. I drove him.”
“Well…I’m not leaving, Mr. Whelan, unless Reverend Roberts gets rid of me for my stupidity. I wouldn’t leave on my own, though. I love this work.” He thought for a second. “And I spent part of the afternoon in a police station. I’ve never been inside one before. It was really interesting.” Waters was grinning, Whelan said nothing.
“They found the boys who jumped me. I got one of ’em.” He chanced a small, prideful smile. “I broke his nose. It was a right, I think.”
Whelan looked at him for a long moment. “Would you be willing to go back to the police station with me? To prove your story?”
Waters frowned, then sighed. “I don’t know what any of this is about and I don’t know why I have to prove anything but…sure. The boys are all being held. The one I hurt went to an emergency room to have his nose looked at and they got him there.” He studied Whelan’s face, misread it and shook his head.
“I know you don’t think much of us, Donnie and me—I didn’t even want to get involved with your work because I thought you’d just laugh at us. You probably don’t even have much use for the Reverend Roberts, he probably seems a little silly to you with his storefront church, but he’s a great man. I’ve never met a man like him. I’ve seen him take a person off the street and turn him into a man of Christian fiber.”
“He seems to be a fine man.”
“But you think Donnie and I are a couple of hicks, right? I know I make mistakes, and the Reverend seems to think fighting back last night was another one, but I’m not afraid of any of these people. I’m here to help and I can’t be pushed around. I fight back and then I go out and do my work.”
The little oration seemed to relax the boy, and he settled back on his heels, hooked his hands into his back pockets and watched Whelan.
Whelan realized with disappointment that he believed him, and that he probably liked him as well. Out of place, this boy was, out of his league, maybe, but cornfed and stubborn and ornery and honest.
“A lot of times we…we get a little suspicious of people who are different from us. I don’t think you’re a fool; you’re different. Different from me, at least. I don’t understand you. My problem, not yours. I owe you an apology. A man was killed sometime yesterday and I thought he might have left a few marks on whoever killed him, the kind of marks you’re wearing.”
Waters shook his head. “You live in a violent world, Mr. Whelan. You’ve seen more death than you should, it seems. Don’t you ever want to leave it all?”
“Sure. Sometimes. But escaping is something very few people do successfully. Cit
ies are full of people who’d like to escape and never get around to trying it.”
“But your work—”
“My work is sorting out other people’s troubles, and sometimes there is violence in it. Believe me, I try to keep it to a minimum.” He smiled. “I’m sorry. I was…I got carried away.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Whelan.”
“I owe you lunch.”
“Okay,” Tom Waters said.
He went back to his car. There was a ticket under the wiper.
“Oh, outstanding.”
He got in, put on the seatbelt and started the Jet, and thought for a moment. Maybe Tom Waters wasn’t out of the woods yet. It would be a bizarre coincidence for a killer to be mugged on the streets of Chicago after killing someone, but just bizarre enough to happen. He thought about it for a second. No.
He went back to his office, thought of calling Jean but forced his mind back to his work. He needed to have the whole story, to have at least what Bauman had but he was in no mood to talk to Bauman. He swore softly to himself: it meant a trip to the library and working with the accursed microfilm machines, but there was no other way.
The Hild Regional Library had the Chicago papers and the New York Times on film. It took him time to find what he needed. It took several attempts to thread the thing properly—on his first try, he turned on the machine and the microfilm pulled itself loose, treating the entire viewing room to the whack-whack-whack of loose film slapping against the table. Behind him he heard an attendant snicker, but he politely refused her offer to thread it for him.
The index told him he was looking for papers from June and July of 1969 and eventually he had the spools on correctly and the film threaded into the viewer and went whirring through life in Chicago in 1969. It gave him an eerie feeling to see these papers for the first time: he’d been in Vietnam and had seen no hometown news. A surprising amount of space was devoted to the meteoric performance of the Cubs, in first place all summer and pounding lumps on all comers, giving no hint of the awful collapse that would bring summer to an end for baseball fans all over the city. There were many stories on Vietnam, grandstand plays by politicians on both sides of the political fence, allegations by both newspapermen and congressmen that the military were distorting the news from the front, inflating the body count, using dead cattle and domestic animals in the count, anything to convince an increasingly skeptical public that we were beating Charlie’s ass. He laughed at a story that an underground student newspaper at De Paul had given the “Mandrake the Magician” award to the Viet Cong for having been killed off in their entirety at least a dozen times by the Pentagon’s count but still continuing to fight.
Death in Uptown Page 26
