He made it to his stairs and sat down, clutching his head in both hands. A moment later he looked up, saw that his assailants were still on the street, and got to his feet and went inside. He locked the door behind him and threw the deadbolt, then went to the kitchen for ice. He wrapped half a dozen cubes in a dish towel and put it to his ear. It felt hot to the touch and there was already swelling. He sat at the kitchen table nursing his injury for ten minutes. When he went back to look out the window, the van was gone.
When the throbbing in his ear subsided, he called Janice Fairs and was told that there was no answer. He didn’t bother to leave a message. He sat at his kitchen table for a long time, smoking cigarettes and putting ice to his ear and going over what he knew about the players in this little show. He believed he wouldn’t have to worry about a visit from any of Vosic’s people now. He could predict that these two would report back to the boss that they’d kicked Whelan’s ass and left him lying in the street. But all these encounters with Vosic’s underlings were just the preliminaries. Eventually he would have an opportunity to meet Mr. Henley. That would be the real thing.
He sighed and went to the bathroom to study the damage. His ear stuck out from the side of his head, discolored and swollen. I have Carmen Basilio’s ear.
Fourteen
He came out onto his porch the next morning expecting at least a hint of a breeze and was hit by sheer, motionless heat. Nine-thirty on a Sunday morning and it was already miserable, and there would be no mercy in the afternoon. He walked south to the corner and then up Wilson. At Wilson and Racine the two wounded vehicles from Friday night’s action were gone, replaced by one new car, a custom-painted Camaro with mag wheels and racing stripes. The front was pushed in like a bulldog’s upper lip and you could see the engine. Hell, you could probably take the engine without anybody making much of a fuss. The car was half in the street, half on the sidewalk. A couple of feet away was the culprit, the actual cause of the accident—a lamp post that had refused to get out of the Camaro’s way. Now it leaned slightly toward the street and wore some of the Camaro’s yellow paint.
In front of Truman College there was a lively discussion under way among a group of street people; they were old and sun browned and all of them looked hot, and they’d be a lot hotter before the day was over. On days like this some of the local eateries charged money for a glass of ice water, to keep the street people out.
He bought a newspaper from the Walgreen’s on the corner and had breakfast at the New Yankee Grill. He ordered sausage and eggs and hash browns and coffee, made small talk with Eva the waitress, and learned that she was planning a trip to Tennessee. He caught her noticing his ear, but she said nothing. She saw a lot worse at the counter every morning. She brought him his food and left him to his breakfast and newspaper.
Whelan took a quick look at the front page and decided not to bother; a headline said there had been seventeen shootings over the weekend, six of them fatal. A steamy weekend in a crowded town where there were too many weapons and not enough money to cover up people’s troubles. Seventeen shootings so far and no reason to believe Sunday would be any better.
He put the paper down, finished his breakfast, and had a cigarette with his second cup of coffee. At the far end of the counter a short, skinny man in a filthy T-shirt and a wool cap was staring at the change in his hand and trying to make it multiply itself. The man looked up at Eva, who waited silently for him to make his decision, then back down at his change. He made a little shrug of his shoulder and took a step backward.
Whelan raised his hand, caught Eva’s eye, and tapped himself on the chest. She nodded and told the man he had enough money for something. He mumbled something to her and she went away, coming back with a cup of coffee and a danish. She set it down in front of him and, as an afterthought, set a glass of ice water in front of him. Then she winked at Whelan. By the time she came out to give him his bill, the old man had gulped down all the water.
She set the bill down beside Whelan’s cup and refilled it.
“Here you go, Sugar.”
“Don’t be calling me those names or I’ll get ideas.”
She smiled. She was a small-boned girl with plain features and a slight ridge to her nose that said it had been broken, but she had long, honey-blond hair and wide, youthful blue eyes.
“If I didn’t have an old man already, I’d let you get ideas. You’re a nice old boy. You drink?”
“What? Do I drink? Well, a little…not much, though.” She nodded, winked at him, and went away, and Whelan wondered if a man who drank was the major problem in Eva’s life.
He left her three bucks and then paid his bill at the register, where the owner’s fat little wife was staring, as always, at a small black-and-white TV.
He took a walk east, to the lake, and walked up to Montrose Beach and out onto the breakwater. At the end of the breakwater he sat down and smoked a cigarette. He wasn’t alone; you were never entirely alone on the breakwater. A few feet away from him, a ma-and-pa fishing team had four lines in the water and their gear spread out behind them, blankets and brown bags of food and a radio and a thermos. At the very end of the breakwater a lone fisherman stared into the water as if he could will the fish onto his hook. Whelan had been out on the breakwaters all along the lakefront and the experience was always the same, no matter what the neighborhood—a quarter of a mile out on the lake, the city was massive and seemed to run on forever. There was silence, broken only by the harsh honking of the gulls and the wash of water against the steel and concrete side of the breakwater. He had always believed that fishermen in Chicago, at least the ones who came down to the lake, fished largely because they were able to leave the city here, to put time and space between them and the crowded, noisy places where they lived. Many of the fishermen were elderly, many were black, most of them had no money. He stared out at the boats, at the inviting isolation of the lighthouse, at the dark green water of the big lake, and thought about his case, which now seemed to be a jumble of contradictory facts with a hole at its center. He wanted to be finished with this case, with these people and their petty jostling for power and place.
For a moment he allowed himself to feel some sympathy for Vosic and his dead partner Fairs, both taken unawares by a personality of unimaginable complexity and formidable intelligence, a man able to con everyone around him and throw up defenses and disguises at will. What he was uncomfortable about was motive.
If this man who came and went and slipped back into the shadows was indeed George Brister, why was he back? If indeed he had ever left.
He thought about Henley again, the strange color of the eyes. Contacts. He wears contacts. And now Whelan remembered how Henley looked at him in the bar and thought he could see something else in the eyes, something more than hostility. A challenge. He was challenging me.
Eventually he made his way home. During the course of a hot, listless Sunday he made half a dozen attempts to contact Janice Fairs. Each time he was told that there was no answer.
He called his service on a hunch and sighed as Abraham Chacko’s voice fluted across the lines.
“Hello, good morning, Paul Way-Lon Investigative Services.”
He sighed. Almost five o’clock and Abraham was still telling people “good morning.”
“Hello, Abraham.”
Abraham made a little bark of excitement. “Oh, yes, Mr. Paul. I am recognizing your voice.”
That’s a first, Whelan thought. To Abraham he just said, “You are an excellent answering service person, Abraham. And please accept my congratulations on your impending fatherhood.”
“Yes, yes, my wife, she is going to have a baby.”
“That’s usually how it works. You’re a lucky man. Do I have any messages?”
“Yes, you have one message. He is Mr. Richard Vosic.”
“Did he leave a number?”
“He said he will call you back, sir.”
“Very good, Abraham.”
There w
ere four Richard Vosics listed in the phone book but only one of them lived on the Gold Coast. He called but got no answer. On a hunch he called Rick’s Roost.
A man with a hoarse voice answered. “Rick’s Roost.”
“Is Rich there?”
“No. Haven’t seen him today. He don’t come in on Sundays, usually.”
“Okay.” As an afterthought he asked, “How about Henley?”
There was the slightest hesitation and then the curt response. “Don’t know him.”
“Big guy, bad attitude, shaved head, green eyes, goatee?”
“Can’t help you.”
Right, he thought, and he hung up.
Over the course of the next two hours he called Vosic’s home number half a dozen more times but got no answer. It was almost seven o’clock and he decided to go out and eat. On an impulse he called Pat.
She answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”
“Hello, Pat. This is Paul Whelan.”
“Oh…hi.” He listened for signals, for her state of mind, for anything. He heard silence on the phone, music in the background. George Benson, it sounded like.
“I, uh, I was just going to go out for a bite to eat and I thought I’d see if you’ve eaten yet.”
There was a hesitation. “I’m…I’m eating right now, Paul.”
“Oh. Sorry to interrupt. I’ll just…” He couldn’t think of anything to say and began to feel irritated that she wasn’t saying anything to help him out. And then it struck him: she wasn’t saying anything because she couldn’t. She had company.
“I have wonderful timing. I’ll give you a buzz sometime during the week.”
Another hesitation and then, simply, “I hope so.”
“I’ll be talking to you. Enjoy your evening.”
After he hung up he sat there and pondered the fact that another man was spending the evening in her home, and he wondered what that meant. At the very least it meant that the other man knew her better, was more involved with her, had some sort of established relationship with her.
So what did you expect? he asked himself.
Monday broke airless and humid and there was a thin, wet film on the stairs, the sidewalk, and his car, as though the city were sweating. The sun fought through a thin, gray screen of cloud and the air smelled of rain. On the car radio he learned that there had been eight more shootings over the weekend. The weekend had also been hard on the visiting pharmacists—four had been arrested on drunk and disorderly charges, one had driven a rented car into the wall of Wrigley Field, one was missing, and another had gone off the deep end after a night of drinking and was holed up in a Baptist Church, claiming sanctuary. All he would tell police and newsmen was that he was never going back to Pittsburgh.
Whelan called Vosic as soon as he arrived at the office, got Carmen, and was told that Rich wasn’t in yet. He asked her to let Vosic know he’d called. She said she would and hung up without saying good-bye or anything else.
He went out and got a cup of coffee from the little greasy spoon down the street, and when he got back, his phone was ringing.
“Paul Whelan.”
“Whelan? Rich Vosic. We gotta talk.” He spoke fast and there was a tension in his voice that Whelan hadn’t heard there before.
“You want to take a swing at me with a tire iron like your, uh, professional staff did?”
Vosic sighed. “All right. Maybe that was…things just got out of hand. It was a bonehead play all the way.”
“Your first bonehead play was to hire those two primates. Sending them to see me was the logical conclusion. You’re just lucky they didn’t break into my house, Vosic. Then I’d have to do something perverse to your Lotus.”
Vosic muttered something and said, “Look, I said I was sorry, all right?”
“No, you didn’t. You said it got out of hand. You talk like an executive, Rich. Executives never say they’re sorry. They talk about ‘underestimating’ and ‘misjudging’ and things getting ‘out of hand.’”
“All right, all right. I’m sorry. You happy now?”
“My ear looks like it belongs on somebody else’s head.”
“Yeah, huh? Well…” He could almost hear Vosic smiling into the phone at this little victory.
“So you wanted to talk to me yesterday, huh?”
Vosic sighed again. “Yeah. I, uh…we might have a little problem.”
“We? I like your style. You send two guys after me with a tire iron and a wrench and all of a sudden we’re teammates.”
“Ah…they were just supposed to, you know, put a scare into you. I told ’em you needed a little convincing to quit fucking around with me. And I still think so. But they weren’t supposed to do any major damage, Whelan. I told you, it got out of hand. And what the hell, Whelan, you got your licks in, right? You banged ’em both up pretty good, from what I heard. So it’s all over now, all right?”
“You sent these two mutants to do me some damage. It’ll be over when I say it’s over.”
“Yeah? Well, I think there’s more important shit coming down. We gotta talk.”
“So you said.”
“Look, I know you don’t like me much, but maybe you’ll come out of this with something. I don’t know.”
“Information, maybe?”
“Yeah. And maybe, ah, something else.”
“I got paid already. But I’m not through. It’s not how I do things. I still have some questions—now I’ve got more questions than I did before.”
“Okay. You got questions, I got answers. I can answer some of your questions. Let’s get together.”
“Talk to me.”
“Over the phone? Shit. No, I’m not saying any of this over the phone. No way.”
“I can come by your office.”
“No, no, not here. I’ll come see you.”
“When?”
“Later. I got some stuff to take care of. I’ll be at your office—let’s say four, four fifteen. We can go get a beer someplace and talk. You won’t regret it. I’ll lay it all out for you. You’ll have the whole thing, Whelan.”
“All right. I’ll see you around four.”
He hung up and sipped at his coffee and shook his head. A man who drove a Lotus and lived like Diamond Jim Brady was coming to see him at his office in scenic Uptown.
He called Janice Fairs at her hotel again and was told that she was not in. The voice on the other end told him that Mrs. Fairs had left no messages.
He put down the phone and sat there for a while thinking. He envisioned the man pouring gasoline on the deck of the boat and wondered once again how Phil Fairs had been murdered.
The autopsy.
He made a call to the morgue and talked to a man who identified himself as Investigator Morris. The investigator was an older man and garrulous, a man who enjoyed his job and had been doing it for more than thirty years. He didn’t remember the Fairs investigation but was happy to look it up.
“All right, sir. What did you want to know?”
“I’m interested in the autopsy findings.”
“There was no autopsy. Wasn’t necessary.”
Whelan said nothing for a moment. “There was no autopsy?”
“No, sir. Next of kin identified the body, cause of death was obvious. No real need for an autopsy, sir.”
He thought for a moment. “But it’s my understanding that this man had been in the water for a long time.”
“You can identify a body by what the deceased was wearing, by his personal effects, his jewelry, his watch, and so forth. You don’t always have to perform an autopsy, sir. Sometimes these things aren’t so complicated.”
He’d called to learn something and found something else. A new scenario began to unfold for him and he was hardly listening as the old man regaled him with tales of the eerie things pulled out of the big lake. When he hung up he remained at his desk smoking. Now he needed to know about the name.
At the library he consulted the microfilm of the Chicago
papers for the first weekend of August 1982 and learned nothing to confirm or refute his new theory, only that Philip Fairs had been buried after a one-day wake at Pinewoods Cemetery in Arlington Heights.
Then he used a pay phone in the library to call the cemetery, where a young woman informed him that there was no Fairs family plot, as such. Philip Fairs had apparently purchased three gravesites, one each for himself and his wife. The third was occupied by his mother.
“And what was his mother’s full name? Can you tell me that?”
“Josephine Henley Fairs,” the young woman said.
There was time to kill before his meeting with Rich Vosic. He had a hamburger and a cup of coffee from a small diner down the street from the library, then drove to the lakefront. Whelan cruised Lake Shore Drive for a while and eventually headed back to town.
It was beginning to cloud up, fast, and the weather report on the radio promised a summer storm, a big one. The air was getting denser, the humidity palpable, and it wasn’t getting any cooler. He hardly noticed the traffic as he drove back, feeling a giddiness rising in him, a lightheadedness tempered by the knowledge that a man had been murdered and buried under another’s name. For a moment he felt a rush of sympathy for the unsuspecting alcoholic who had been brought into town, set up, and killed here.
In his mind’s eye he saw the beautiful blue boat in Belmont Harbor, a great, sleek wonder of a boat, a place where a man might live. A house without an address.
He parked around the corner from the office again and then looked around for the Lotus. Instead he saw the blue van that Vosic’s two henchmen had been driving on Saturday night. He approached the van carefully, coming up behind it from the passenger side. There was no passenger, only a driver, and he would tell Whelan nothing, for he was dead.
He slipped inside the passenger side and felt Vosic’s neck. The skin was clammy, going cold, but Rich Vosic had not been dead for long. His face was dark and puffy and the huge red hand marks on his throat nearly covered it. He climbed out of the van and made his way back to his office, then stopped a few feet from the building. No, you’re in there, he thought. Lotus or no Lotus, it would be obvious why Vosic was parked here in the middle of Uptown.
A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 26
