Whelan smiled and sat back. Bauman finished his beer, wiped his lips, balled up his napkin, and took a hook shot for the trash container at the near end of the bar. It fell three feet short.
“Got your party manners tonight, huh?”
“This guy’s got a guy in a coma at his bar, you think he cares if I drop a napkin on his floor?” He waved to Raul, who was pouring water from a glass into a potted palm in the window.
“As long as you’re having a good time, Bauman, that’s all I care about.”
Bauman looked down at the wreckage of his dinner. “I did have a good time. Best Mexican I’ve had in a long time. And hey, you’re buying, what a deal.”
Raul came over.
“We’ll take the check, Raul.”
Raul stared at the table for a moment, did his impression of a man performing the lower math functions, and said, “Twenty bucks.”
Whelan laughed. “The man has a mind like a calculator. Funny thing, it always comes out even like that.”
“Even the tax, huh?” Bauman asked.
“Don’t get Raul started on taxes, Bauman.” He handed Raul twenty-five dollars.
“I pay taxes,” Raul said, warming up, “I pay lots of goddam taxes—licenses, too, all these fucking licenses. Gotta have a license for the jukebox and the cigarette machine, gotta have a liquor license and a goddam food license…”
“It’s a complicated world, Raul,” Bauman said and laughed.
Raul took his money and walked away, still muttering about his burden from the government.
Bauman patted his stomach. “How about an after-dinner mint, Whelan? We can go to this joint next door.”
“Fine with me.”
The “joint next door” was Kelly’s, and after the greenhouse humidity of Raul’s, Kelly’s air conditioner was a shock to the system. There were a dozen or so customers now and the bartender held up a finger to Whelan.
They took a pair of stools at the street end. At the far end of the bar the Cubs game was in progress and half a dozen upturned faces watched. Whelan looked at the screen and saw that the Mets were batting and that there seemed to be a great deal of screaming and cheering from the Shea fans. The batter was tall, slender Darryl Strawberry, and he was smiling. Better not to watch, Whelan thought.
Bauman looked around. “Nobody I know here.”
“What did you expect? It’s been a long time since you were a street cop up here.”
Bauman shrugged. “I used to come here a lot, though. Used to play horseshoes here. There was a couple old guys could throw shoes with anybody. One of ’em didn’t even have a home, lived in a car under the tracks out here. This was an okay place. Weren’t any of these fern bars yet, so there was…you know…”
“All kinds of people,” Whelan said. “I remember. I used to drink here once in a while. Every kind of person drank here—De Paul kids and tin-knockers and half the police on the North Side and lawyers and whatever.” He looked around as the bartender came over.
“Beck’s is okay, Whelan, right? A dark?”
Whelan nodded and Bauman ordered two beers and a shot for himself.
Whelan looked around at the red-flocked wallpaper and studied the wondrous back bar, a relic from a bygone age when people built things slowly and with the best available.
The bartender brought the drinks and Bauman paid. He was sipping at his Beck’s when the back door opened. Bauman looked and then groaned.
“What’s the matter, Bauman?”
“Old guy that just came in. Used to work out of Town Hall. I don’t need to talk no cop talk. Wanna go to the joint across the street?”
Whelan looked out the front window at the saloon that would eventually become Raul’s Cantina. “The Friendly Tavern? Yeah, that would be about your style.”
“Cut ’n shoot bar?”
“They haven’t had a shooting yet, but it’s not a place to bring your best girl on a Saturday night.”
“Remember the Harvest Moon over on Lincoln?” Bauman asked.
“Sure. I never did find out if that story was true, about the guy bringing in the head. Do you know?”
“Nah,” Bauman said. “Always sounded like fairy stories to me.”
“Well, this gin mill across the street isn’t quite in that class, but they can’t get through a weekend without a good-size beef.”
Bauman studied the tavern with a look that was almost wistful. “Gotta check it out sometime. So. You got a theory about why this Vosic guy might have anything to do with Harry Palm’s, uh, untimely death?”
“Nothing I’d put in writing.”
“You got something, Whelan, I know you. You got an idea, anyway.”
“From something Harry Palm allegedly said to my client, I wouldn’t be surprised if Vosic was a dealer himself. If he was, and we know Harry was, that would be a source of some friction. I don’t know. That’s all I’ve got so far. He could be a dealer.”
“Or he could be an asshole businessman that never broke a law in his life.”
Whelan remembered Vosic’s eyes as he’d listened to Whelan’s fabricated biography of George Brister. He knew the look, could tell when somebody was feeling his collar go tight. “Maybe so, Bauman, but I don’t think so. This guy’s dirty, you’d know it as soon as you saw him.”
Bauman was about to say something and then stopped with his mouth open. A slight smile came to his lips. “Oh, here we go,” he said.
Whelan followed Bauman’s gaze through the window. Across the street a cluster of bodies was jammed into the door of the Friendly Tavern, half a dozen bodies, and they spilled out onto the sidewalk, three on three. There were arms waving and punches being thrown and Whelan saw a pool cue swinging, and Bauman was off his stool and to the door before Whelan could speak.
“C’mon, Whelan,” Bauman said over his shoulder. “You’re deputized.”
“Just what I wanted.”
Outside Kelly’s the sport coat dropped to the sidewalk and Bauman slipped his watch into a pants pocket, then turned to Whelan.
“What we got here, Whelan, is civil unrest.” Then, grinning and flushed and sweating from whiskey and Raul’s hot sauce and an August night in Chicago, he stalked off into the street. A cabbie hit his brakes and screamed at Bauman, and the detective whipped out his shield, flashed it, banged his big fist on the hood of the cab, and stormed on. Whelan walked in front of the cab. The hood was dented.
The cabbie hit his horn. “I’m with the stocky gentleman,” Whelan said and followed Bauman.
The six aspiring combatants had drawn up loose battle lines and every one of them had something in his hand—a couple of bottles, a bicycle chain, a car antenna, a pool cue, a pair of chukka sticks. The pool cue made it a beef over money and a game of eight ball, Whelan thought, but more likely it was about something else—summer in the city, heat and liquor and somebody with woman trouble or somebody out of a job. It had just begun to go dark and there would be fights like this in taverns all over the city. This one was shaping up to be a dandy.
Bauman hit the sidewalk on the far side of the street and grinned at Whelan over his shoulder.
“These guys brought all their equipment, huh?”
The guy with the chukka sticks was the biggest of all of the fighters, and the chukka sticks said he’d been looking for it; he put his back to the wall of the tavern and dared the others to come after him. His teammates, the ones with the antenna and the chain, and both small, skinny men, took a few feverish swings at the three brawlers facing them and then took off running.
“Arright, break it up. Police officer,” Bauman yelled, and no one seemed to care.
One came sprinting past Bauman with a bigger man in pursuit, and Bauman took the second one out with a forearm. The little one with the antenna took the opportunity to swipe at Bauman with his weapon. He missed with his first swing and was bringing his arm back for another shot when Whelan caught his arm from behind, grabbed him by his hair, and ran his head into a parked c
ar.
“Hostile little shit, aren’t you?”
He let the man drop to the ground and followed the beefy form of Chicago’s finest. Bauman waded in, bellowing orders, identifying himself as a police officer and clubbing at everything in his path.
The guy with the chukka sticks opened the forehead of one of his assailants and Bauman pulled a second one off and threw him through the front window of the dry cleaners next door. Glass rained on the sidewalk and a crowd began to form on both sides of the street. Another man appeared in the doorway, a new contestant, holding a Budweiser bottle over his head and yelling some sort of personal war cry. He came pounding out of the tavern and Bauman took him out with a straight right.
Two more came out of the saloon. One had a beer belly that hung far over his belt and threatened one day to touch the ground, and the other was muscular and wore a dago T to show it off. He was grinning and Whelan knew this one was an asshole. They both ran for Bauman. Whelan came up from behind and caught the fat one by the back of his hair, pulled him around, and buried a hook in the epicenter of all that flesh. His arm went in so deeply he feared it would be sucked in, never to be seen again, and then the fat man went down and began to make retching sounds at the edge of the sidewalk.
A squad car pulled up and the youngest street cop ever to leave the academy emerged from the driver’s side. No one came out the shotgun side and Whelan cursed one-man squad cars. The boy cop put on his hat, pulled out his stick, swallowed, and advanced on the roiling mass of street fighters.
The guy with the bicycle chain came up off the sidewalk where Bauman had planted him. He looked at Bauman, saw Whelan watching him, and decided to take a swing at Whelan instead. The chain caught Whelan on the forearm and then, on the backswing, grazed the side of his head. Whelan stepped inside on him, hit him once in the ribs and then with a kidney punch, and bounced a straight right off his jaw. The fighter went down on all fours.
The young cop yelled for everyone to stop and Whelan laughed. The fat guy was up on one knee and muttering death threats and Whelan kicked his hand out from under him and then sat on him. He looked up at the kid.
“Yeah, I know. You’re a police officer. So’s he.” He nodded in the direction of Bauman, who was standing amid three prostrate forms and trading punches with the one with the chukka sticks. The guy in the dago T was sitting on the side walk, shaking his head.
The chukka warrior made karatelike lunges and grunted and postured. Bauman’s hands flashed out faster than Whelan would have believed possible, and the man was no longer holding his beloved sticks. Bauman threw the sticks over his shoulder and took the guy out with a long, looping right as two late entries came at him from the tavern.
The young cop moved to assist him and Whelan just shook his head. “Nah, let him do it. He likes it.”
The kid looked at him uncertainly, watched Bauman throw hands at his two newest opponents, and then said, “Who is that guy?”
“Errol Flynn’s ghost,” Whelan said, and when the boy looked at him in confusion, added, “That is Detective Albert Bauman of Her Majesty’s Berserkers.”
The kid nodded once, then a second time, eyes wide. He looked at Whelan and grinned, a small boy meeting Babe Ruth.
“That’s Bauman? No shit. Bauman,” he said, and nodded to himself. “Got to give him a hand.”
“No. Just give him room.”
The bodybuilder in the dago T came up off the canvas one more time and bounced a hook off the back of Bauman’s head. Bauman yelped, shoved the man he was fighting into a wall, and turned on the bodybuilder.
The muscle man bounced on the balls of his feet, grinned, posed, nodded, and threw jabs at the air.
“C’mon, fat boy, show me something,” he said.
Bauman advanced with his right up under his chin and his left out and looked about as difficult to hit as the Water Tower. The bodybuilder threw a sharp little combination. Bauman’s head moved six inches each way and the punches caught nothing, and then he waded in with a few of his own.
Whelan watched in wonder as Mother Bauman’s favorite son worked out. He glanced over at the young cop, whose facial expression said he was experiencing the afterlife.
“Take a long look, kid. You’re watching a master. You’ll never see a fat man move like that again in your life.”
And then it was over. Whelan was still sitting on the fat man. The bodybuilder was leaning up against a parked car. His nose was broken and his left eye looked like a diseased plum, his career on magazine covers over before it began. A crowd from Kelly’s and Raul’s and the grocery store on the corner now pressed around the scene. Half a dozen men lay in various stages of unconsciousness on the sidewalk. The proprietor of the cleaners came out to inspect the damage to his front window; a pair of legs still protruded from inside his establishment. Traffic on Webster had come to a halt as the number 37 bus had stopped in the middle of the street to allow its passengers to have a look.
Summer in the city, Whelan thought.
Two more squad cars pulled up at right angles to the sidewalk and four cops were now moving toward the scene.
And in the middle of it all, legs spread apart and his right still cocked, Bauman breathed through his mouth and waited for the rematch. Gradually he focused on the uniformed officers and nodded.
“Hello, Al,” one of them said.
Bauman nodded and wheezed.
“Been having a workout, have you?” asked the oldest of the cops, a heavyset man with sweat stains on the back of his shirt.
“There’s been a disturbance of the peace, Bernie. I want all of these fuckers arrested.” Then, as an afterthought, he pointed to Whelan. “Except this guy.”
The sergeant looked at Whelan. “And who are you, to merit such special treatment?”
“I’m his kid,” Whelan said and got up off the spongy body of the fat man.
The young cop was telling one of the others that the big man was Bauman, Al Bauman, and somewhere across the street, somebody from the Kelly’s crowd was applauding. Whelan walked over to Bauman.
“You all right?”
“I look hurt to you?” Bauman said, still panting.
“No, you look like a guy that’s going into cardiac arrest.”
Bauman tucked in his shirt. “From a bunch of slugs like this? That’ll be the day, Whelan.” He started across the street to retrieve his Day-Glo jacket and then stopped in the middle. He nodded to Whelan. “Hey, Whelan, I had a real nice time. We gotta do this again.” And he grinned. Then he was shouldering people out of his way.
Oh, not if I have a choice, Whelan said to himself.
Eight
He sat in the Jet and listened to the last few innings of the Cubs game. It was the quietest baseball crowd he had ever heard at Shea Stadium, and he knew they weren’t smiling anymore. The Cubs were leading six to three, Lee Smith was blowing fastballs by overanxious Mets hitters, and the Cubs didn’t seem particularly impressed by the Mets jinx. Four strikeouts and a groundout in the final two innings and Lee Smith had a save and the Cubs, the amazing Cubs, were still in first place with no sign of letting go. On the radio the announcers were coming slightly unglued and Whelan could just imagine Harry Caray singing one of his homemade ditties about the local heroes.
Who says there’s no God? Whelan said to himself.
The knuckles on his right hand were swollen and the middle one on his left was skinned. His head stung a bit where the bicycle chain had struck him but there was no blood, just a slight lump. It was cooling off a bit and there was a lake smell in the air as a breeze from the east pushed its way through the exhaust smells of the crowded North Side.
Let’s see what the boys are up to, he thought, and pulled out onto Webster.
Rush Street glowed several million watts brighter than the rest of the city, and it seemed that half the population and all the cabs were there, spilling out their loads of tourists and swingers and drunks and playing bumper cars with the rest of the traffic. Neon
flashed in a hundred colors and rock music blew out onto the street from the open doors of taverns.
Vosic’s car was gone from the space in front of his tavern. On a hunch he turned up a side street and into the alley that ran behind Rick’s Roost. He cruised past and saw a pair of cars parked in the half lot just outside what seemed to pass for a beer garden. The Lotus was there. The “beer garden” had room for half a dozen tables and they all seemed to be full, for the young folk, Whelan knew, loved to share their food and drink with the insects that ruled the night. He drove through the alley and back onto Rush, then parked up the street from the tavern in a no-parking zone and watched through the rearview mirror. Right in front of his car a pair of rumpled, sweaty middle-aged men stopped two slinky young women and apparently attempted to sweep them off their feet. The women shoved them lightly out of the way and walked on without looking back.
Twenty yards up the street a pair of tiny black boys break danced to the music from one of the bars, and they were drawing quite a crowd. They were good, these little boys miles from their homes, and they didn’t miss a beat or a step. As Whelan watched they were joined by a drunk with a name tag. The man, gray haired and bulging through his blue shirt, insinuated himself between the boys and attempted to match their steps, to the delight of the onlookers. When they hit the pavement and began twirling around on their backs, he hunkered down and pushed himself in a half circle, succeeding only in ripping the back of his shirt. And when the boys stood on their heads and defied gravity, the pharmacist bravely got into a sort of primitive handstand and then fell back, rolling off the sidewalk and falling between a couple of parked cars. A pair of chunky men with name tags came out of the crowd and helped him to his feet, then gave him a handkerchief. He appeared to be bleeding from a cut over one eye.
A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 13
