A Body in Belmont Harbor

by Michael Raleigh

  Carmen wrinkled her nose. “Probably his wife. Soon to be ex-wife.”

  “Oh. He likes ’em tall, I guess. She looked to be about five eleven.”

  Carmen looked up again quickly. “No, she’s real little.” Carmen stared at him and he thought he saw hurt there. He looked back at the files and when he stole another glance at her she was staring off across the room and her face was flushed. Whelan thought he had the story of this particular office pretty well figured out.

  “Probably business, then,” he said and nodded as though that were the most logical explanation, but he could see that Carmen had other ideas. Time to ask things. “Listen, Carmen, what’s the guy’s name, the big guy that I see with Rich?”

  “What big guy?” she said irritably.

  “The one with the shaved head and the goatee. Big, heavy guy, looks like a wrestler or something.”

  “Oh, him.” She curled her lip faintly and shook her head.

  “He works with Rich, I think,” Whelan said.

  “No. That’s Henley.” She made an expression of complete distaste. “He doesn’t work here.”

  “Well, no, I knew that, but I thought maybe at the bar…”

  “No. He drinks at the bar. Drinks and fights. He’s really a jerk.”

  “No, maybe I’m confusing him with someone else. First name’s Jim—”

  She gave her head an irritated little shake. “His first name is Frank.” She looked away again and he paged through the files, leaving her to her hurt feelings.

  He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just scanning the same pages to see if anything struck him the second time around. It came no clearer this time. If anything the picture of George Brister was muddier, the general impression of High Pair was more shadowy, and he wondered how much these files left out. He scanned Brister’s personnel file, wrote down the three firms in Oregon and Washington that Brister had listed as former employers, and came away with the same impression, that there was no reason any employer in his right mind would hire this man.

  He looked at the little stack of green folders and spread them out on the desktop like a poker hand. There were fourteen or fifteen of them, including a folder each for Vosic and Phil Fairs. He pulled them out and spent a moment looking at Vosic’s. It told him nothing of importance; if anything it was too clean to match the slick young high roller who currently ran things. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, graduate of Michigan State University, and in every way the all-American boy, two years on the baseball team and a degree in business. Military service in Germany with an honorable discharge.

  Phil Fairs was apparently more of a wanderer. He was from La Crosse, Wisconsin, and had attended Michigan State at the same time as Vosic—probably where they met; he could envision a couple of Wisconsin boys starting up a conversation on the long train ride back home. Fairs had graduated with a degree in management and he, too, had enlisted and served in Germany. Whelan nodded to himself—if you enlisted in the early seventies you didn’t have to go to Nam, and these two guys had decided they wanted to see Europe, not Vietnam.

  From that point on they seemed to have gone their own ways with little obvious contact, though Whelan knew that an executive starting his own company doesn’t have to put together a personnel file for himself that dots all the i’s and crosses the t’s. But Vosic seemed to have stayed in the Midwest and become something of a young hotshot in the rapidly expanding computer industry while Fairs got himself jobs with several importing firms in the Midwest, then abruptly showed up in California and then in Oregon, where he served as vice president of a small computer firm. There was a short stint in Oklahoma where he listed himself as a “developer” and then several positions in short order back home in the Midwest, now with computer firms, the last one a software company. A year after that job he and Vosic started a company.

  He scanned the personnel sheet again; Oregon stood out clearly, but he’d lived and worked in Eugene, while Brister had lived and worked in Portland. Whelan looked at the two personnel files again and then at Vosic’s. It was Fairs who had worked in Oregon, yet Vosic had apparently brought Brister into the firm. He looked at the personnel sheet for Brister again and saw Vosic’s name listed as his reference. Where did they know each other from?

  Yeah, Rich old boy, you got something over on your partner here. I just wish I knew what.

  He closed the files, lay them on the desk, and nodded at Carmen. “Thanks again, Carmen. Have a nice day.”

  “Yeah. You too,” she said without feeling.

  If I keep coming back here, he wondered, will I get more confused each time?

  Back at the office, he called Roy Swenson in Seattle.

  “Hello, Roy. Paul Whelan.”

  “Do I owe you money?”

  “Not yet. I might owe you some, though. I need a little help and my arms aren’t long enough.”

  “All right. How’s your life?”

  “My life is all right, but it’s dull. Business is a little slow, too. How’s yours?”

  Swenson started to say something and then began coughing. He laughed. “Pretty hectic. So I’m smoking more, as you can tell. We’re working on a couple of industrial espionage things out here, Paul. They’re keeping me pretty busy, actually busier than I’d like to be, but the company that’s paying the bills is rolling in money and I can’t say no.”

  Whelan laughed. “I guess you don’t want any more work at the moment.”

  “Well, for an old friend…what’s the job?”

  “I’m trying to find somebody who worked here for a while and originally came from Seattle. I’ve got the names of three companies he worked for and an address he gave as his last residence in Seattle. I wonder if you could check them out for me.”

  “What do you really want to know, Paul? Since I know you could make some calls yourself and run up your phone bill.”

  “I want to know if anybody has seen or heard from this man in the last two years. That’s what I really want to know. I think he might have come back to Seattle after…after some trouble he was involved in back here.”

  “Okay,” Swenson said, and Whelan gave him the particulars.

  “This’ll take at least a day, Paul. Is that all right?”

  “You’re doing me a favor, Roy. You do what you can. I’ll pay you for this one.”

  “No. I’d much rather you owe me a favor,” Swenson said, and he laughed. A former FBI agent and an old friend, Swenson occasionally went cross-country on his cases.

  Whelan smiled. “I think I’d rather pay you—I know you’ll collect on a favor and it’ll cost me dearly,” and he laughed.

  He sat at his desk and thought for a few minutes and made notes to himself, then spent almost forty minutes on the phone. He called old contacts at People’s Gas, at Illinois Bell, at Commonwealth Edison, and at the secretary of state’s office. He did not really expect any of the calls to turn up anything, and they didn’t, but simply confirmed what he had expected—there was no record anywhere in Chicago of a George Brister, he wasn’t receiving service from any of the utilities, and as far as the state’s computer was concerned, he wasn’t driving, either. There was no automobile license issued to George Brister and there was no driver’s license. He got exactly the same answers on Frank Henley.

  He called Janice Fairs.

  “Yes, Mr. Whelan, something interesting?”

  “I’m not sure. I wanted to run something by you.”

  “Run, by all means.”

  “You said Vosic had brought George Brister into the firm, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did they meet?”

  “Brister worked for him. I thought I told you that, Mr. Whelan.” There was impatience in her voice, a tired teacher with a stupid pupil.

  “So you did, but the personnel files of High Pair don’t really spell that out. On Brister’s application Rich Vosic is given as the only local reference. He lists a number of places, primarily in the Northwest, but no company
that had anything at all to do with Vosic. Where would they have known each other from?”

  There was silence at the other end. Then he could hear her lighting up a cigarette. “I have no idea, but…how important can that be? He probably put down all kinds of inaccurate information on that application. We’ve already established that the man was a hopeless alcoholic.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Fairs, the only thing I’ve established to my satisfaction is that Brister was a genius at covering his tracks.”

  He heard her exhaling smoke. “I don’t know, Mr. Whelan. It’s very hard for me to imagine that slovenly drunk as anything but a derelict. And a…a hireling.”

  “Well, maybe he’s a derelict now. I have a little experience with derelicts, and they’re not easy to find, but I’ll tell you one thing: when George Brister worked at High Pair, he was no derelict.”

  “He was a drunk, Mr. Whelan, no matter how we romanticize him.”

  “So was Grant. Maybe Churchill.”

  “Well…”

  He cut her off. “I have another question to ask you: did you ever hear the name Frank Henley? Or meet anyone by that name?”

  He heard a little intake of breath and then what sounded like the beginnings of laughter, then she caught herself.

  “Frank Henley? Ah, someone connected with Rich, Mr. Whelan?”

  He hesitated before answering, wondering what he was hearing in her voice. Then he said, “I believe so. And maybe connected with Harry Palm.”

  “I see,” she said, and now he knew she was acting.

  “You know him,” he said.

  “Oh—I couldn’t say that—I’ve heard the name, Mr. Whelan.”

  “From whom? Your husband? Or Harry Palm?”

  She hesitated again and he could hear her puffing away to buy time. “Not from my husband, Mr. Whelan. But maybe it was from Palm.”

  He shook his head at the phone; you know the case has gone bad when the client starts lying.

  “All right, Mrs. Fairs. I just thought I’d ask.”

  “Certainly. What will you do next, Mr. Whelan?”

  “Have lunch.”

  She laughed without mirth. “You are an unusual man.”

  “Not as unusual as the people you have me talking to, Mrs. Fairs,” and this time she laughed genuinely. There was a pause and he knew she was waiting for more. He wasn’t going to give it to her. Not now. He told her he’d be in touch and she said good-bye with reluctance.

  He sat back and swiveled around in his chair so that he could watch street traffic. Across the street, just in front of the Aragon, a young white guy with neat creases in his jeans was panhandling and getting nowhere.

  Serves you right, kid, Whelan thought.

  He watched the clean-cut panhandler and told himself that the whole world was overrun by con artists, millions of con artists, selling fake watches and hot radios and plastic jewelry and repro antiques, and bogus stocks, everyone in a mad scramble to make a dollar. He thought of Janice Fairs and wondered what her scam was. It was when you didn’t know what you were being conned out of that you were in trouble.

  He had lunch at the Cafe in the Park. The cost was high—he had to eat outside—but the overall effect on a bruised psyche was worth the sacrifice. Other folks all over the city were sitting in crowded beer gardens, inhaling exhaust fumes and pigeon guano, but Whelan was here, at the north end of the Lincoln Park Lagoon, at one of the city’s little-known treasures, watching a handful of rowboats and the reflection of the first clouds he’d seen in days. There was a faint breeze from off the lake and he could hear gulls not far off.

  He had a burger and an iced tea and then took a walk, first east to the lake and then north along the rocks and bicycle path past the Belmont Gun Club, where a half dozen men with grim facial expressions shouted “Pull!” and then blasted away with shotguns at little black disks made of clay.

  The nation’s last line of defense, Whelan told himself. After the Commies overrun our defenses and defeat our armies they’ll have to reckon with these guys with the pump shotguns, and then they’ll be in deep shit, and if the Reds come at us with little black clay disks, it’ll be all over in a matter of seconds.

  His walk took him past the crowded little patch of park where the gay men came down to the water and sunned themselves. Hundreds of gay men sat on blankets and towels or tossed Frisbees and bought hot dogs from the enterprising young vendor who brought his pushcart there every day. As long as Whelan could remember, gay men had collected at this place in summer. In the old days there had been only a handful, but the times had changed and now there was a crowd, and people left them alone.

  He found himself walking past the squat cream-colored building that housed the Belmont Harbor branch of the Chicago Yacht Club and realized that he was near the place where the late Harry Palm had been found. He stopped a few yards farther and looked at the boats—hundreds of boats, literally hundreds, and this was just the iceberg’s tip of Chicago’s summer flotilla. All along the harbor, from Addison to Belmont, they were moored, sailboats and big twin-engine cabin cruisers and little, brightly colored speedboats, and there were hundreds more of them at anchor at Diversey Harbor and many, many more downtown off Grant Park in Monroe Harbor, the boats of the rich man and the social climber and the fisherman and the guy who just wanted to crack open a sixpack and waste gas.

  If you stood there quietly and made an honest attempt to block out the city noises behind you, there was a different sound here—not a city sound but the gentle tolling of boats at anchor, of lines striking melodically against steel and aluminum masts, of chains rubbing against hulls of wood and fiberglass. There were people in Chicago who lived on the water for half the year, people who actually lived only for these times, people who became dark and wind burned and took on water smells that were so deep in their pores and hair that they couldn’t be washed away. For a long time, as a young man, Whelan had wanted to be one of them. A man he knew, a news anchor for one of the local stations, had actually pulled it off, buying a yacht and quitting his job and living now as a sailor in an existence that Whelan couldn’t fathom. His fascination with the idea of a life on the water had passed, but there were times like these when the water seemed a friendlier world.

  He walked along the fence lining the harbor and looked at the fanciful and self-congratulatory names—Papa’s Dream, Bad Girl, Who’s on Top, Hot Stuff, Weekend Warrior II, Top Dog, Harlan’s Holiday, Mama’s Hideout.

  A block farther on there was a spot where the harbor wall curved, and the gradual lowering of the lake’s level in recent years had revealed the little beach, more of a sandbar, where they’d dug up Harry Palm. Whelan walked over and looked at it. The constant action of the lake tides had smoothed it over and deposited a new collection of seaweed and floating trash and there was nothing to indicate that a man had been buried here. Whelan tried to form a mental image of the killing, tried to picture where a killer would have had to hide to surprise Harry Palm—if the killing had taken place here. Finding Harry’s car in the lot a short distance away made it likely. Harry Palm’s obsession with his car was legendary—he wouldn’t have let it out of his sight for more than a few minutes unless there was someone to watch it for him.

  Whelan leaned against the fence and looked at the sand, then at the water; the lake was getting a little cleaner every year, they said, but you’d never know it by looking at the harbor water—it was discolored, fouled by gas and emissions from the boat engines, and paper cups and fast-food containers floated here and there, tossed carelessly from boats ten miles out and inevitably brought back to the city by the action of waves and tides. Between a pair of small sailboats moored close to the shore he could see a chunk of watermelon rind bobbing like a green buoy.

  A small dinghy left the shadow of the yacht club and carried a pair of white-haired men out to a boat moored in the center of the harbor. They were both dressed entirely in white, as though they had the next court at Wimbledon. Whelan looked
at the yacht club building again and decided to play a hunch.

  He got through the black steel gate to the yacht club and was no more than three feet inside when he was met by a sign that read MEMBERS ONLY and a guard whose eyes said the same thing.

  “Can I help you, sir?” the guard said.

  “Uh, yeah. I’m looking for Rich Vosic.”

  “I haven’t seen him yet today, sir.”

  “I was supposed to meet him at the office. He told me if we missed each other he might be down here having a late lunch.”

  The guard shook his head. “Hasn’t been here yet, sir.”

  “We used to run around together on this little bitty boat he had. Little white thing—The High Pair, he called it. I don’t even know if he still has it. I’ve been on the coast for a couple of years.”

  The guard grinned. “Oh, he’s got a boat, all right. It’s not little and it’s not white.” He nodded back in the direction of the water. “Fifty footer, sky blue. That’s a boat. Twin Mercs, lotta chrome, built-in bar, sleeps six. You name it, he’s got it on that boat. Top of the line.”

  “Like everything else he buys,” Whelan said.

  “You got that right,” the guard said.

  “Hey, listen, he was telling me the cops found a stiff here a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Not here,” the guard said, laughing. “Down at the other end of the harbor. In the sand.”

  “Who was he, a member that didn’t want to pay his dues?” The guard smiled. “Nobody around here knew him. He was some kind of small-time gangster.”

  “A gangster? Good old Chicago, just like the movies.”

  The guard indicated the club with a nod. “You want to wait in the bar, sir?”

  “No, no. If I start drinking now I’ll need a nap.” He waved and went out again.

  Rich Vosic’s boat wasn’t the biggest of the cabin cruisers but Whelan found it with no trouble, for it was the newest and the most colorful and it was easy to picture Vosic on this boat, of all the boats in Belmont Harbor. It was a gleaming seagoing dream, capable of taking a man anywhere he could go on the water and for about as long as he needed to be there; a torpedo might take it out, but it wouldn’t even notice bad weather. It was glossy and ostentatious and exactly the kind of boat that would appeal to a man like Rich Vosic, and it was called The Score.