He stared at the wreckage of his office and listened to the sounds of his quickened breathing and wondered if his face was as hot and red as it felt. Time to exert some control here, Whelan. He sighed and tried to assess the damage in terms of replacement problems and cost. The swivel chair would have to be replaced. The seats could be reupholstered, he could get a new calendar, new pictures for the walls, and he could buy new folders, blotters, and pens. The names on the Rolodex weren’t all that important, many of them being former clients whom he wasn’t likely to be talking to again. Most of the numbers he needed he kept in his head or had written down on a notepad next to his phone at home. He felt a moment of panic as he thought about his home. Maybe they were there right now.
He looked down at his telephone. Had to get a new phone, though. He nodded to himself. Yeah, a new phone, and I know exactly where I’m going to get one. He exhaled and told himself he was starting to feel better already.
It took more than an hour to put some kind of order back into the office, and it was still a wreck. Bare walls, a desk, a couple of badly damaged chairs, no phone.
There was no one else on his floor to ask; the nervous bookkeeper who had been the only other tenant on the second floor had finally given up his crepuscular existence in the building and gone on, perhaps to better quarters, perhaps to prison.
He stopped down on the first floor as people were getting ready to close up shop. The baby photographer hadn’t noticed anyone unusual in the building but, as he put it, “This is Uptown. What’s unusual up here?”
No one else had noticed anyone or anything, a fact that confirmed an old suspicion for Whelan: you could come in and torch the whole building, murder half its occupants, and knock out all the windows, and no one would notice. He left the building feeling tired and dirty.
He used the pay phone in the little greasy spoon down the street and called Janice Fairs, who, according to the switchboard operator, wasn’t in. Then he went home.
They hadn’t been to his home. The office had been intended as a warning, and they probably thought it would be enough. He opened all the windows and took a cold beer out of the refrigerator, then sat in the living room and listened to the street noises. He thought about the neat little office building with the blue awning and how ironic it was that such an impressive modern structure was filled with primitive types. There were a lot of men connected with Vosic Enterprises and he had the feeling they were all looking for a piece of Paul Whelan.
She had her hair up and was wearing a powder blue sundress and a small amount of makeup. She was smiling and there was a touch of red in her cheeks that made her look ten years younger.
“Hi,” she said. She looked him up and down; he’d put on his one summer sport coat and shined his shoes, and he wondered if she had any idea of the lengths he’d gone to.
“You look nice,” she said.
“Not as nice as you,” he said honestly. “I feel like I’m robbing the cradle.”
She laughed. “I love a man who can lie.”
“You should meet the people I’ve been meeting lately.”
She invited him in and puttered around in her bedroom for a few minutes and he studied the apartment. Small and neat with only a few pictures on the walls. In the dining room there were bookshelves from floor to ceiling but the bottom shelves were empty, and the table and chairs in the room seemed small for the amount of space. He decided she hadn’t lived here long.
She came out of her bedroom putting a pin into the back of her hair. “Ready.”
“Nice place. You just moved in, right?”
The question seemed to take her by surprise and he saw a frown flicker across her face. Then she smiled. “How did you know that?”
He laughed. “Easy, Pat. I’m not a weirdo. It’s what I do for a living.”
She looked around her place. “But…what is it that tells you I just moved in? It doesn’t look dirty to you, does it?”
“No, no, not at all. It looks like you lived in a smaller place and now you’re in a bigger place. You like pictures on the walls and books on the shelves but you’ve got unused space on your walls and shelves, and that usually means a person hasn’t had a chance to buy new stuff. If you’d been here any time at all I think you’d have all those bookshelves filled.”
She looked at the shelves, then at him, and raised her eyebrows. “Can you figure people out that fast, too?”
“No. Nobody can. People are special. Places, situations, those are fairly simple, because facts usually add up to only a couple of possible scenarios, but anything’s possible with people.” He got up from the chair. “Let’s eat.”
When he took her to the car it was his turn to be uncomfortable. He looked at the ungainly brown hulk of the Jet and told himself he’d get a new car some day. “Don’t worry, it runs,” he said.
“Hey, at least you have a car.”
She slid into the front seat and he closed the door.
“We’re going to Chinatown.”
“The last time I was in Chinatown I was young.”
He laughed. “It hasn’t changed.”
They drove through the great, gaudy gate of Chinatown and their noses were assaulted by the smells of three dozen restaurants all fighting for attention. There were street signs in Chinese characters and imported gift shops with carved ivory and ornate screens and big, ornate restaurants filled with Caucasians and small, barren cafeteria-style restaurants full of Chinese. Whelan promised himself he’d eat in one of them some day, probably during the day. If you visited Chinatown during the day you saw a different place, a Chinese community rather than a tourist area—Chinese men in conversation on the street corners, Chinese women doing their shopping, headless ducks hanging in the store windows, and Chinese shopkeepers weighing fish and whacking away at meat with huge cleavers.
They walked without touching through the crowded street and a night done up for Friday till they reached the far end of Wentworth and Lee’s Canton.
They spent some time musing over the menu and making comments and in the end settled on shrimp in garlic and black bean sauce, Mongolian beef, and, at Whelan’s suggestion, enough appetizers to feed a small village—eggrolls and crab Rangoon and shu-mai.
Once dinner was ordered he found himself curiously unable to get a conversation going. His thoughts went back to the violence of his wrecked office, to his conversation with Rich Vosic, to the volcanic man who called himself Henley, and, most of all, to the surprising sight of Janice Fairs entering her hotel with the younger Vosic. He was confused and preoccupied and it didn’t seem to be the best night to take a new woman out to dinner.
He took out a cigarette and held it up. “Mind?”
“No. I smoke, too, remember?” She reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You’ve gone quiet.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Work is interfering. I have a…a problem with something I’m working on.”
“Fine. Let’s talk about work, then.”
“No, this you don’t want to hear about, believe me.”
“Well…how about telling me what a private detective does. I assume it’s not at all like television.”
He laughed and told her she was right, and in a few moments he was firmly launched on a description of his work, his background, his family, his career as a police officer, and finally Vietnam. She watched him while he talked and it made him a little self-conscious, and he hoped he wasn’t sounding pompous.
“You have intuition for this work? Instincts?”
“I guess so. People tend to open up with me. I’ve tried a lot of different techniques, but you have to go with the one that works best. In my case it’s the most mundane approach possible—I get people talking and I listen, I listen carefully, and eventually, if they have something to tell, I pick it out. I’m not much good at the Sherlock Holmes-type thing, you know, scanning a room and noticing the most minute detail that’s out of place and extracting the significance of that detail.”
> She was silent for a moment and then asked, “Was Vietnam a terrible experience for you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it was. I just never expected in my lifetime to be in a situation where I was afraid almost constantly. It showed me a side of my nature that I didn’t want to see. But other guys had it a lot worse. And a lot of them didn’t come back.”
“I’ve heard about…about the dreams some Vietnam vets have. Do you have those?”
“Not exactly. I came back pretty much intact, emotionally. But I was a medic, I pulled a lot of guys out of firefights, guys who were pretty horribly shot up. I still think about them a lot. And…and I pulled a couple of kids out who died later. I still see their faces. Those ones really bother me. See, I was older than almost everybody around me. I was twenty-two when I was drafted. A real smart guy. I’d already dropped out of college. A few months in Nam and I suddenly had a deep appreciation of college. I went back after I got out of the service. Anyhow, all the guys around me were just kids, it was incredible, they were all teenagers. Say what you want about the war and the morality of it, but the worst thing was that we fought it with teenagers, just conscripted kids, not grown men. We sent hundreds of thousands of eighteen-year-old boys overseas and nobody in authority even blinked.”
He leaned back and realized that it was the closest to a sermon he’d come to in a long time, and he was embarrassed. Pat was smiling.
“I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be. It’s the most intelligent thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about that war. Everybody always wants to talk about our…responsibility or our role, everybody wants to deal with the politics of it or with the idea of morality. But this is an issue that puts it in a different light.”
“Little boys,” Whelan said. “That’s all they were. A lot of proud, patriotic old men flexed their muscles and we sent over a half million little boys.”
He felt uncomfortable and was relieved when the waiter came with a tray bearing the appetizers. When they had finished with the appetizers, the main courses came and conversation kept to a minimum.
When dinner was finished they went to a lounge at the edge of Chinatown and had a couple of drinks. She got him talking about his past, about Liz, and when he was finished he asked her about her life. He learned that she’d been married for twelve years, divorced for the last seven, that she’d had two years of college and then dropped out to support her husband while he got his degree, and that he had divorced her soon after graduation. Later she lost her job when her company relocated to Ohio. She became a waitress because there was nothing else available to her and she was still supporting her daughter. Her daughter’s name was Maggie and she was going into her second year at Northern, and Pat had plans to become the city’s oldest college student in the very near future. She talked about her daughter for a while and then he got her talking about her husband.
Eventually they both grew silent. Whelan wondered if the evening was shot. They’d spent an hour talking about the most painful and depressing events in their lives and had succeeded only in making each other uneasy. He thought about the trouble he was about to have in his life and of the way this case had caught him totally off guard, and he just wanted to be home with a cold beer and something mindless on the television.
He became aware of his own silence and laughed. “There’s nobody who can make conversation like Paul Whelan. Want to talk about fatal illnesses now? Ax murders?”
She smiled. “You’re sure it’s not me?”
“Pretty sure.”
“What did we do wrong?”
“We skipped the small talk, for one. It’s one of the things you do with people you like. At least I do.” He shrugged.
“That’s nice to know. Well…” she said, making little lines in the sweat on her glass. “I’m not having such a bad time; I found out you’re exactly who you appear to be, and that’s reassuring. Besides—” She took a little sip at the melting ice in her drink. “—the night is young and there are all kinds of ways to fix it.”
“Such as?”
She gave him a pointed look over the rim of her glass. “You could take me for a walk on the beach.”
A walk on the beach, he thought. I’m in a time warp.
He couldn’t sleep, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He could still smell her perfume on him. He thought about her for a while, about how different his life could be with a woman in it. Then his thoughts turned to the trashing of his office and the people he’d become involved with and what might be in store for him.
He sat in his darkened living room and smoked and thought, and then he heard the car again. This time it stopped, and then he heard hoarse whispering and the sound of low laughter, and his heart began to beat faster. He got up and went to the window.
The beater was parked directly in front of Whelan’s house and they were already crossing the street. One was carrying what seemed to be a sort of wooden frame and another had a gasoline can, and at least one of them held a baseball bat.
He stood there, fascinated, watching the four men work in the front yard of the black man and gradually realized what they were doing. They were going to burn a cross.
The house was dark and the black man’s car was nowhere to be seen. Maybe they weren’t home. He saw the big one plunge the cross into the ground and then one of the young ones was dousing it with gasoline, and another one came forward and tossed a match. There was a soft whoosh and the cross was burning. He heard laughter.
What do you do now? he wondered. What do you do when four slugs come into your neighborhood, on your street, and burn a cross? He started to say something and stopped.
Time to make the call.
He was heading out to the kitchen phone and stopped himself. He could see his father, no street fighter, no tough guy, but a genuinely good man, and he knew what his father would have done—he would have said something. Somebody else could make the call.
Outside, the four men were having a party. Whelan went to the front hall, opened the door to the hall closet, thought about taking a baseball bat, and then decided on his father’s ax. What the hell, he thought, why not make a good first impression.
He stepped out onto his porch with the ax on his shoulder and came quickly down the stairs. He looked at the four men, then at the darkened windows of his neighbors.
Somebody had better make the call.
At the foot of the stairs he picked up a couple of large rocks from what had been his mother’s garden. He tossed one through Mrs. Cuehlo’s window and the other through the window of Mr. Landis’s place on his right, and the Uptown night was filled with the sounds of breaking glass.
He stepped out into the street. The four men turned at the sound and squinted across at him.
“Party’s over, boys. Get off this man’s property. I called the cops already.”
The big one stepped into the street and moved toward him. He was not quite as tall as Whelan but a good thirty pounds heavier, maybe more if you counted his gut.
“This here is none of your business. We run this nigger out of one neighborhood already.”
“Why don’t you go back where you came from.”
“Who the fuck are you?” The big man’s eyes went to Whelan’s ax.
“I’m the happy woodsman.” He shifted the ax suddenly and the big man jumped and moved back. Whelan shot by him and moved to the burning cross. He whacked at it with the blunt end of the ax and it came loose. Another whack and it listed badly to one side. He hooked the ax head around the main pole and the cross came down.
“See? All gone.”
One of the young ones made a move in his direction and he held the ax out where the kid could see it. The big one came closer.
“This is a white man’s town, mister, and we’re white men. I’m a white man, motherfucker.” He slapped his chest and nodded.
“No,” Whelan said. “I’m a white man. You’re something else entirely.”
The big man narrowed his eyes and Whelan wa
ited for him to make his move. Behind him the old one pointed to Whelan.
“He’ll stomp your ass good, boy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Take ’im, Butch. He ain’t gonna use that ax.”
Butch. This guy would have a name like Butch. His heart was pounding now and he was breathing through his mouth. He hefted the ax and waited. Across the street he could see people coming to their windows. Mr. Landis was out on his porch, inspecting his window, and he thought he could see Mrs. Cuehlo watching from a darkened living room.
The big man called Butch looked around him at his three companions, smiling and hitching up his pants; he pretended to look up the street to his right and Whelan got ready for the sucker punch that was coming from that side.
The big man brought his arm around in a roundhouse swing but Whelan was already side stepping and swinging the ax under the punch. The dull side of the axhead caught Butch square in the ribs and he went down gasping and holding his side.
“Oh, shit. Shit!” He rolled around on the black man’s lawn and panted, then curled up into the fetal position.
Whelan pointed the ax at the young one closest to him. “See? See what you did? You told him I wouldn’t use it and where did it get him? He’s never gonna believe anything you say, pal.”
“You got no call to hit him.” The old one backed up but kept an accusing finger pointed at Whelan.
Whelan looked at him. “You old slimeball. If you had any kind of a life you wouldn’t have time to worry about blacks or anybody else. That his car?”
“That’s my car,” the old man said, doubt creeping into his voice.
“Well, let’s tune her up.” In the distance he could hear the sirens, and now he could feel it all go out of him, the fear and the tension and his anger, and for a second he saw the face of the man called Henley and he was no longer worried how all this would turn out.
He walked across the street to the old man’s beater and brought the axhead down on the windshield, and the old man screamed. A square gash appeared in the center of the window and white cracks radiated out from it. He swung the ax down, blade first, on the hood and the blade cut deeply into the metal. He stepped back and took a lowball hitter’s swing at the front tire and it blew out with a noisy pop and a hiss.
A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 22
