Maxwell Street Blues

by Marc Krulewitch

  Maxwell Street Blues is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2014 by Marc Krulewitch

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  ALIBI and the ALIBI colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7720-7

  www.readalibi.com

  Cover design: Caroline Teagle

  Cover photograph: © Jason Mrachina/Getty Images

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  About the Author

  1

  “I feared you wouldn’t know me.”

  His ashen face did not remind me of the quaint grifter or winsome confidence trickster. Nor did I see an aging racketeer broken by prison. But I knew Bernie Landau—my father. He found me through “contacts” who specialized in making sure people were found. He wore dingy gray slacks with an argyle cardigan sweater that draped his eighty-year-old frame as though slung over a wire hanger. His pasty cheeks sagged like someone had disfigured a clay face. In his hand he gripped part of a rolled-up newspaper as if his sixteen-year absence had fostered an intense desire to smack me.

  “It took you a week to find me?” I said. “Did your people try the phone book?”

  Dad shrugged. “I only got sprung ten days ago. And I wasn’t sure finding you was such a good idea. I thought maybe you’re still mad at me.”

  I didn’t buy his weak attempt at regret. Either way, I had more anger for the Fed bastards who took our house, our cars, my ten-speed Peugeot, and, for fun, tore down the basketball hoop and backboard from the garage roof. As a freshman in high school, I came home one day to find it mangled on the driveway where I’d spent many hours winning championships on last-second shots.

  “Interesting line of work you’ve chosen, Jules,” Dad said and fell back into an old overstuffed leather recliner, failing to notice the black-and-white cat whose privilege it was to sleep there. He regarded Punim’s screech and subsequent catapult off his shoulder as one might notice a wandering gnat. He settled in and fingered the stuffing that bulged from a large tear on the armrest. Then he searched the bare white walls of my apartment while his face morphed into a familiar scowl. I watched his eyeballs follow my favorite scratch zig-zagging down from the crown molding and dead-ending at the baseboard. “Hound-dog business been good to you?”

  “I’m thrifty. And don’t worry about the cat.”

  Dad fidgeted in the chair and took a breath. Then he started tapping the rolled-up newspaper against his knee. “Is this what life looks like without the curse?”

  The curse referred to our family history, starting with Great-Granddad, who made a fortune among his immigrant brethren of pushcart peddlers working the open-air market of Chicago’s Maxwell Street. From this miserable residue, Great-Granddad guaranteed a dependable stream of extorted money and earned the monikers of iron-fisted ward boss, political dictator, city hall chieftain—and scoundrel. In addition to committeeman, he also held offices with fancifully arcane titles such as City Collector and City Sealer of Weights and Measures. Some of my relatives called him the smartest man they ever knew and pointed to his chauffeur-driven limousine on a municipal salary as proof. Others pointed to the same thing and called him a gangster. Regardless, those who knew him or knew of him understood why the scandal of Great-Granddad’s remembrance inspired passion sixty or more years after the man died in my father’s childhood bed. Where better to assign the blame for a family’s perpetually bad attitude?

  Dad leaned forward and stared into the hardwood floor. “That college you went to have a president?”

  “Of course, why?”

  “We got a college president here in the city, President Tate. You know he’s tearing up Maxwell Street?”

  If it were possible to nod one’s head sarcastically, that’s what I did. “The poor getting screwed again. What a surprise. And wasn’t it our family who first made their money by shafting the poor down there?”

  Dad gave me an angry glare. “Times were different. That’s where we got our start—but now it’s part of history. And we’re part of this history, whether you like it or not. You can’t run away from your family, you know. It’ll follow you wherever you go. And I’m not ashamed of it and neither should you be. Anyway, one of those preservation groups tried to get Maxwell Street designated as a historic site. But that son of a bitch Tate beat them down, and now he’s gonna crap all over it!”

  Despite his cadaverous appearance, Dad was still full of piss and vinegar. “I never claimed to be ashamed,” I said. “And you can’t just blame Tate. There are trustees and legislators to hate, too.”

  Dad tried and failed to look disappointed in me—which of us had just gotten out of prison? He said, “How can you live like this?” and then added, “What kind of work have you been getting?”

  At age thirty-one, I had dozens of contacts and a neat apartment in a two-flat on North Halsted Street. Husbands and wives behaving badly paid my rent and kept raspberry sorbet in the freezer. An observer might conclude my frequent naps and lack of close friends signified unhappiness. But I didn’t give a damn what others thought and had long ago reconciled with my undiagnosed sleep disorder. Friends? They always disappointed you. Besides, I’d kept plenty busy since expanding into the realms of background investigations, surveillance, and skip traces. Living the dream.

  Dad was really asking why my suburban nurturing had not begotten a career that included retirement accounts, paid vacations, and health care that didn’t rely on places called The People’s Clinic or the emergency room.

  “You find out yet what a bullet can do to a man’s head?” he asked.

  “Give me time.”

  “You act reckless in your li
ne of work, and it could be a short career. After you’ve felt the end of a muzzle pushing into your skull, then you can be a smart ass.”

  I looked forward to that day just to say I knew what it felt like, assuming I survived. “So what do you want?”

  Dad winced as he pushed himself up from the chair and walked to my Wall of Blame, a collection of psychotic-looking adulterous faces I had proudly captured. He seemed older than his eighty years. Then he walked to the window that overlooked the street. “Remind me: for this you went to college?”

  “You went to college, too.”

  I thought I got to him, but he countered with a smile and a nod. Then he took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “You’re a sharp little prick,” he said and handed me a check for two thousand dollars.

  I hadn’t seen a dime from the man since he went away. “What the hell is this?”

  “When’s the last time you saw Snooky?”

  “What’s the check for?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  Snook was a CPA and a close friend of the family. Snooky’s father, Henry, was my dad’s original business partner. As a manufacturer’s representative for ladies’ coats, Dad would go on the road selling the lines while Henry stayed in the showroom. Together they had built a profitable numbers racket among the shop owners of apparel stores in the little towns downstate. Dad called it an “untapped niche market.” Acute leukemia killed Henry when Snooky was a young teenager. Dad treated him like a second son and Snooky let me adopt him as my big brother. He jokingly called me “the little brother I always never wanted.”

  Snooky introduced me to folk music when my parents didn’t know Bob Dylan from Bob Hope. He showed me how to roll my first joint and gave me a bong for my fifteenth birthday. For my sixteenth, he introduced me to Bunny, who took my virginity. Snooky later told me she owed him a favor for advice on hiding cash from the Feds. Dad could’ve cut his prison time in half had he given up Snooky and his pals.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think we had lunch a few weeks ago.”

  “Do you know what he was up to? Like who he was working with?”

  “The only legit client he talks about is Audrey, who owns a tattoo shop. I think he’s got a hard-on for her. All the hoods he calls Guido.”

  How many upper-middle-class suburban boys hung out with gangsters’ bookkeepers while smoking pot and laughing their asses off at descriptions of Guido showing off his earlobe collection or Fat Mackerel shitting his pants after a phony no-knock raid? Snooky loved to laugh, and we did a whole lot of laughing.

  “I guess you don’t read the paper much,” Dad said, then tossed the metro section at my feet. “This one is three days old.” Above the fold, a headline screamed about the alarming number of unidentified meth-heads full of bullet holes found on the streets. Below the fold, a smaller headline introduced a murder victim with a name. “Snooky took two bullets in the head,” Dad said.

  First the room swayed, then I saw flashing white spots. I closed my eyes for several seconds, then opened them to a wave of nausea washing over me. Somehow, I found the couch before my knees buckled.

  A year after Dad got busted, Mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died six months later. My father’s associates invited me to move in with them, since Dad already shared a much bigger house with hundreds of guys wearing orange jumpsuits. As a child I had spent many summer afternoons at one or another of these uncles’ houses, learning the art of opening the door without letting someone in unless they answered the right question. I also became proficient at stuffing piles of cash into shoeboxes and stacking them in the hollow space under the stairway. “You’ll grow up to be a good earner,” they liked to say. But I wanted to live with Snooky.

  I’d probably be dead or in prison if not for Snooky. He talked me into going to college, even drove me down to Champaign every fall to make sure I got settled in. Snooky wasn’t thrilled I chose investigations as a career, but that didn’t stop him from setting me up with Sid Frownstein, a kind of legendary hard-boiled snoop from the old school who had deftly walked that equivocal line between investigation and manipulation until he retired to a lakefront condo and a hobby of restoring antique cars. It was Frownie who first told me stories of my family’s infamous past. When Frownie became my mentor, Dad wrote me his last letter, the one in which he threatened to break out of prison and beat my ass if I followed in Frownie’s footsteps. From that point on, I had no doubt what my career would be.

  “They found his body on a pile of construction debris,” I said, reading from the article. I noticed a small photograph of the heap next to an advertisement for cosmetics. “Three hundred and fifty dollars in his wallet. Credit cards untouched. And what the hell was he doing on Maxwell Street? Snooky had no dealings on the South Side.”

  Looking out the window, Dad said, “I thought you never talked business.”

  I answered through a lump in my throat. “Payback for setting me up with Frownie? You want to buy my silence for two grand?” I didn’t know if I meant it.

  Dad turned and stared at me as if reading the words off my forehead. “I don’t believe my ears. Is this really how you turned out?”

  “Snooky liked how I turned out.”

  “Snooky was like a son to me—you know that! You think I’d kill him? Your father’s a killer—that’s what you think?”

  I didn’t answer. If Dad killed people, I wouldn’t have minded that much—although his killing Snook would’ve pissed me off.

  “Sixteen years later you show up to tell me Snooky’s dead. What else you got?”

  Dad sat back down in the recliner and started rubbing his forehead. “I want you to find out who killed him and why.”

  Tears spilled out of my eyes. “Suddenly you trust me with this?”

  “Snooky was family. You can only trust family with finding the truth. You may hate my guts, you may hate where you came from, but I think you’ll be honest.”

  “I never said I hated where I came from—whatever that means.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Once you start investigating murders, history has a habit of getting in the way.”

  “We were a family of petty criminals. Who gives a shit?”

  Dad gave me a savage look. He wanted to address my comment directly but instead said, “Christ, what you don’t know. What you don’t see. But like I said, I think you’ll be honest. And if I’m paying you, that’s the least I expect.”

  I had always imagined my first murder case would arrive via bereaved widow or suspicious life insurance company. But in that moment, everything seemed appropriate, if not logical.

  * * *

  The next morning, before heading to Sheridan Road, the passageway into the land of leafy communities dotting Lake Michigan’s beaches, I wasted twenty minutes in the muggy July heat trying to remember where I parked my 1983 Honda Civic. I was a son of the North Shore, but the territory neither held a special place in my heart nor evoked pangs of nostalgia. Having gained entrance through the ill-gotten dividends of my father, I considered myself an ersatz alumnus.

  Frownie lived in a five-bedroom penthouse with spectacular views of the shoreline. After Frownie cut me loose, he said his door would always be open. He had that broad, uneducated Chicago accent straight out of central casting. “Come here, ya little schmuck,” he said when I appeared at his door. He grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me to his chest. His viselike grip defied the appearance of a skinny geezer old enough to remember Prohibition. He power-walked five miles a day up and down the beach—in any crappy Chicago weather. His scrawny arms were made of rebar. “C’mon, I wanna show you somethin’.”

  I followed him from his apartment into the underground garage to a row of perfectly restored antique cars. “This is my latest baby,” he said. “Lincoln KB Convertible Coupe, 1933 …”

  When he finished describing how he copped his first bare breast in the rumble seat of the same car, I said, “Nice, Frownie. Can we go upstairs and tal
k?”

  You’d think a man whose career earned him the trust of drug dealers, killers, pimps, and police chiefs wouldn’t be so sensitive. “I’m just an old fart, is that it?” Frownie said. “I got nothin’ better to do than bore young pricks like you?”

  “I need to talk business.”

  Frownie smiled. “I know. Let’s go.”

  As we walked to the elevator I thought of our first meeting, how he demanded I explain why a North Shore college boy wanted to become a private investigator. A final exam had never been so mentally exhausting. I would say something like, “I want to help people get peace of mind,” and he would snarl, “Don’t give me that helping people crap! Be a nurse if you want to help people.” This went on for what seemed like hours. Not until I lost my temper and shouted, “I want to be out in the dirty stinking city full of scumbags, and be my own boss, looking for whatever, telling someone to go fuck themselves” did Frownie begin to take me seriously.

  Everything in his condo looked gloriously vintage; nothing looked old. The maple draw-leaf dining table, the mahogany console, the Art Deco couch and chair. Even the square wooden “High Fidelity” box looked as if it had just been purchased new. I fingered through the vinyl record collection. The sleeves were hardly worn, the corners barely frayed. Glenn Miller and the like were well dusted and in their prime.

  I sank into the leather couch while Frownie stood with his back to me and poured a drink from his custom walnut and granite bar. “You started drinking yet?” Frownie said. When I hesitated, he said, “Ya gotta start drinkin’, Julie. You can’t go into a saloon and order ginger ale. Nobody’s gonna take you seriously.”

  “Relax, I’m a drinker,” I lied.

  Frownie handed me a tulip-shaped glass half-filled with an amber-colored liquid and sat across from me in a high-back parlor chair. I watched his nose hover a couple inches from the rim before he carefully swished the fluid around and sipped. I imitated his routine, pleasantly surprised by the warm smoky flavor.

  “Ever had single malt?” Frownie said.

  “Many times,” I said, and Frownie laughed because we both knew I had lied again. “And another thing, I cuss a lot more than I used to.”

  Frownie wasn’t impressed. We sat in silence for a few moments before he said, “You never worked a murder case with me. I didn’t train you for that—and for a reason!” Frownie’s words provoked an unexpected ache of sadness. A quivering lip gave me away. “And it ain’t ever a good idea to get all emotional on a case. You spent a few years following me around, asking questions. And you asked the right questions, good questions. That’s how I know you can do this job. But murder is a whole different game.”