“He goes straight out in this, Whelan, he’s dead.” Bauman punctuated his opinion with a nod.
“Yeah, I think so.” Whelan said. “This time.”
He looked up at the heavyset detective staring out over the lake. Bauman’s knit shirt was soaked through now, his graying hair plastered down. He made a little shake of his head. He studied Whelan for a moment.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like something big did the samba on you. Lookit your ear. Looks like fucking radar.”
“Sit down and I’ll give you what I have.”
Bauman spun around, hands on his hips. “No, I ain’t gonna sit down, Whelan, I don’t sit in the fucking rain.” He looked at the two uniformed officers.
“Bring him over to Six, arright? And drop by his house and let him get a dry shirt.” He gestured toward Whelan’s wet guayabera. “He’s got about forty of them Mexican things. He ever has to leave the country, he’s all set.”
Whelan got to his feet and looked at Bauman’s mustard-colored knit shirt.
“Don’t go down to Mexico in that, Bauman. In Mexico they shoot things that color.”
On Tuesday he gave himself the morning off. His ear was still not back to its original size, and his cheek was bruised and swollen from the fight with Fairs and there were long, red marks down his back from Fairs’s nails.
He lay in bed for a long time, listening to music, then went out and walked down to Lawrence to get a paper from the box on the corner. He returned to his house and ran a large tub of very hot water, then climbed in with the paper and a cup of coffee.
The pharmacists were gone, finally, all of them. The drunk in the church had been talked out of his refuge and into returning to Pittsburgh. It was not clear why he had sought sanctuary or even whether there was still such a thing as sanctuary. The missing pharmacist was located in Lincoln Park, where he had apparently been locked in the Small Mammals House.
Most of the news, however, was about the storm that had struck Monday evening and taught the city that the lake still ran things on occasion. Winds upward of eighty miles per hour had taken out hundreds of windows, blown signs off businesses, and knocked people over in the streets, causing injury to many; the winds had uprooted trees and torn down fencing and the great gold cross atop Holy Name Cathedral had been pulled nearly off the spire. On the Kennedy a semi had been overturned by the sheer force of the storm and a driver with a few snorts in him claimed to have been forced by the winds into a utility pole. But the worst of the damage had occurred along the lakefront, and after reading about it for a few minutes Whelan decided it was worth a look.
He drove down Belmont to the lake and pulled into the parking lot of the yacht club. The harbor was already busy with boat owners and park district workers trying to undo what the storm had done, but they hadn’t made a dent in it yet.
Leaning against the cyclone fence, Whelan counted fourteen boats either capsized or sunk. The stern of a big sailboat stuck ten feet out into the air, its bow imbedded in the soft harbor bottom. A few boats were simply lying in the water on their sides, and crews were working on these first, just to be able to say they’d achieved something. The harbor was strewn with bits of wreckage, large and small, and a little farther down toward Addison Whelan could see a spot where the storm had thrown two big yachts against one another, staving in their sides.
“Think this is bad? You should see Monroe Harbor. A lot more boats there.”
Whelan turned to see a man in his sixties or seventies looking at him. The man nodded and Whelan smiled. “Haven’t been down there yet.”
“Worse than this, even. Lots more boats, lot of small ones, so there’s lots more down in the water.” There was a trace of a smile on the old man’s face and his eyes, magnified by his glasses, were wide with wonder.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Whelan said.
The smile took wings. “I have.” The old man nodded. “I have. Only the boats were a lot bigger.”
Whelan looked at him. “The war?”
“Pearl.” The old man winked and nodded. “Pearl,” he said again, the single syllable understandable to anyone who had been alive at the time.
“This must seem pretty minor to you, then.”
“No. Always seems kinda sad to see a boat down in the water, no matter how big the boat is. Like a lot of people went to so much trouble, and something just wrecked it all. Like it wasn’t such a big deal.”
The man said nothing more, and Whelan could see he was staring out at the lake and seeing something far different. Whelan watched the lake and wondered when it would give back the body of Phil Fairs.
Epilogue
They found Fairs on Wednesday, washed up along the rocks between Montrose and Foster beaches. It was unclear whether he had drowned or died from his injuries, which appeared to be significant. This time there was no doubt; this time the body didn’t have time to bloat and disintegrate in the warmest lake water of the year, and this time there was no one changing the clothing on the corpse before it went into the water.
This time they played it by the numbers—fingerprints and dental records proved beyond any doubt that the body was that of Philip Fairs.
A day later they found the body of Janice Fairs. She was still tightly wrapped in the tarp, so that her body was relatively undisturbed.
The storm had cooled the city off—for exactly twenty-four hours. The heat had returned, the wind was gone, and the whole town turned to tinder. He was bored and listless and found himself thinking more and more about the woman named Pat. He put off calling, and he recognized why. It would take an effort for him to start a relationship, to work at it, and he wasn’t sure he could do it. And the knowledge that there was another man in her life, that Whelan might come in second in a two-horse race, made it complicated.
I’m too old for this.
He heard himself thinking and then heard himself answer, Jesus, Whelan, you’re only forty.
He was walking up Broadway with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, heading toward the office to go through the motions of work. He had just passed under the El tracks and was crossing Leland, within a few yards of the place where his friend Artie Shears had been killed a year earlier.
When he was in the middle of the street, a car made a fast turn off Broadway and came to a tire-squealing stop a couple of feet from him. He froze and then spun around to say something to the driver.
Bauman leaned out the window on the driver’s side. His round face was red and sweating and he was heaving with laughter.
“Why dontcha watch where you’re going, there, Snoop? You wanta live to collect that pension?” Bauman chuckled and looked at Landini. The younger man sat in the passenger seat and looked with mild amusement at his partner, then regarded Whelan with a look Whelan couldn’t decipher.
Bauman put a cigar into his mouth. Another motorist turned onto Leland and hit his horn. Bauman waved his arm irritably.
“So go around!” He stared at the driver as he passed, then looked back at Whelan. He tilted his big, square head to one side and made a show of examining Whelan’s injuries. “Hey, most of your owies are gone. You see they found your buddy, Whelan?”
“Yeah. I saw.”
“So how come you’re not happy? That was a nice piece of work. Even Landini here thinks you’re smart now. They’re gonna give you the keys to the city.”
“I doubt it.”
Bauman’s smile faded. “You don’t look so good, Whelan.”
“I’ll live.”
“You need some cheering up, huh? Okay.” For a second he thought Bauman was going to say something friendly, and then he saw the gleam in the detective’s eyes. “You’re always telling me about restaurants. I got one for you. The new joint up the street here. Been there yet?”
“No. I passed by there a couple times but it wasn’t open.”
Bauman grinned. “It’s open now. Nice place,
Whelan. You’ll like it. I guarantee it.”
“Come on, Bauman. How good can a Greek place be that calls itself House of Zeus?”
“Oh, it can be pretty special. Remember, you heard it here first, Shamus.”
Whelan watched the gray Caprice drive off and he went up Broadway, then walked past Lawrence and his office to have a look at the new eatery.
It wasn’t much to look at—a double storefront with a primitive sign overhead that simply said HOUSE OF ZEUS in large, uneven white letters against a sky blue background. The windows were littered with white letters proclaiming the presence of GREEK AND ALSO MIDDLE EASTERN FOOD and, in smaller letters, HAMBURGERS.
There was a primitive quality to the sign and the lettering in the window, a cave-painting quality to the awkward attempt to draw a Greek temple. Standing in front of the temple was either a Greek warrior or a cheerleader with a punk hairdo. Still, Whelan had seen his share of unprepossessing, even ugly restaurants that turned out to be little treasures of ethnic or down-home food, and he wasn’t about to rule out the House of Zeus because it was homely.
The sign on the door said OPEN, and he did. A pair of black men sat in a booth along one wall and drank Cokes and shared a large basket of Greek fries. There were two dozen tables and half a dozen booths, and the walls and ceiling were painted a dark blue. There were fake swords and shields on the walls and imitation brass light fixtures attempting to look like candles, and there was a man standing behind a short, dark counter, and this man was grinning at Whelan.
“Hello, Detective,” the man said, and Whelan looked at him. He stared at the man behind the counter, a dark, slender man with a great mop of thick black hair and a mouthful of gleaming white teeth, and as he stared, the man’s body began to shake with laughter. He shut his eyes with mirth and laughed and nodded, and when he could speak again, he nodded again.
“Yes, yes, it’s me. It is me, your old friend.”
Whelan looked at him for a moment and then smiled. “Hello, Rashid.”
“Hello, my friend.” And Rashid began to giggle.
The kitchen door opened and another man came out, this one bigger and heavier than the first, a round-faced man whose longish dark hair billowed out from beneath his paper chef’s hat.
Whelan stared at him and said, “And hello, Gus.” Rashid’s cousin Gholam smiled.
“Hello, Detective.”
“Nice hat.”
Gholam pointed to the hat. “Now I am the chef.”
“Bah. He is for sure no chef, this one,” Rashid said.
Gus snorted. “Who is the chef, then, you? Who is cooking the food?” He looked at Whelan and jabbed a thumb at himself. “I am the one cooking this food.”
“What happened to California? You got tired of the sunshine and all the girls?”
Gholam turned slowly and looked at his cousin. There was manslaughter cooking here.
“Yes, ask this one what happen with California. Ask him, the poisoner.”
Whelan smiled. “Did you actually poison somebody, Rashid?”
Rashid put his hands on his hips and shook his head slowly, an aggrieved Iranian. He looked up at Whelan and held out his hands. “I poisoned nobody. There was no poison, just…just unfortunate problem. Unfortunate problem, this was the whole thing.”
“Old food, that was whole thing. I say ‘Throw it away,’ you say ‘No, we can use him in something else, like the Chinese people.’”
Rashid gave Whelan an embarrassed look. “Recycling,” he said. “In California, everything is recycled.”
“We don’t recycle our food much, Rashid. You, uh, run certain risks there.” Whelan looked from one to the other and laughed. “So now you’re back in town and you’re Greek.”
Rashid and Gholam looked at each other and burst out laughing, a couple of Middle Eastern sharpies having a good day.
“Yes,” Rashid said. “And now we’re Greek.”
“And what’s on the menu this time?” Whelan asked.
Rashid wiggled his thick eyebrows and grinned. “Shalimar kebab, falafel, shish kebab, gyros, hamburger, cheeseburger, french fries, grilled cheese, pizza puffs.” He grinned again.
“Onion rings?”
“Sure.”
Whelan nodded. “That’s the same menu. That’s exactly the same menu as the A and W.”
“Only now, it’s Greek!” Rashid looked at his cousin and they laughed again.
“The streets are paved with gold, guys.”
“Yes, yes, paved with gold,” Gholam said.
And Rashid said, “You bet.”
Whelan looked around at the bargain basement attempt at decoration and at the two con artists who had been run out of California for peddling salmonella and thought of a certain woman who might appreciate the House of Zeus, and decided it wasn’t such a bad day after all.
“Okay, guys. Make me lunch.”
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A Body in Belmont Harbor Page 28
