The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  “So he hires you to go prowling around the West Side, huh? Afraid to go out and look around himself, huh? Afraid of the brothers.” Durkin smiled.

  “He is a brother, Durkin.”

  “A shine lawyer, you’re workin’ for?”

  “Hardly anybody calls them that anymore. Except you.”

  Whelan waited for another question.

  “Okay, this soul brother hires you to find this guy. Then what?”

  “Then nothing. I hadn’t found him yet. I spent some time talking to people that knew him, but I never got close.”

  “Never, huh?” Durkin looked at his nails. “Whelan, you’re supposed to be pretty good. How come you didn’t find him?”

  “I just started looking a couple of days ago. I got the impression his friends didn’t want me to find him.”

  “Why would they? White guy come lookin’ for one of the brothers, nobody’s real eager to give it up. And they all made you for a cop, Whelan, you can count on that. You never lose that look or that walk. You ask questions the same way…”

  “No. Asking questions is something I do my own way. And I would’ve found this man eventually.”

  Durkin looked at Krause and made a little snort. “Always gets his man. He’s a Mountie, this guy. Is that it, Whelan?”

  “Have your fun, Durkin. I find them often enough that I’m not out looking for a regular job. I would’ve found this guy.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody else found him. And now he’s dead. And we found him, too. Puts you in third place. So we’re gonna go through the people you talked to and get it right. Starting with this lawyer.”

  It took half an hour for Whelan to run down all the people he had spoken to or questioned. When he was finished, they stood. Krause nodded and said, “Thank you,” and Durkin just nodded. Whelan shut the door after them. He put on a record, an old one, Bill Evans. His room filled with the plaintive, haunting sounds of a piano man long dead, and he found himself thinking of a dead peddler he’d never even seen.

  I’m out of this one, he told himself.

  Monday brought a gray morning with a little bite in the air, a lake breeze filled with water smells, and the promise of cold weather. Football weather, night fishing weather. The street seemed quieter. The street people huddled in doorways or on staircases and waited for the sun to make an appearance.

  He called David Hill, but the attorney wasn’t in yet. After ninety minutes in his office Whelan had had no visitors and his phone had rung only once, a salesman attempting to convince him to buy magazine subscriptions. At ten-thirty he went out for a cup of coffee and a short stroll around the neighborhood.

  A group of young black kids stood outside the pool hall across the street and watched him. His corner was getting to be a little bit tougher with the appearance of these kids, from the subsidized high-rises just to the north that had created a larger black pocket in Uptown to go along with the dozen or so other population groups.

  When he got back to the office, he decided to get aggressive. He pulled out his new Rolodex and was about to start calling legal firms he’d done investigations for to see if anyone had any work for him. As he picked up the phone, he heard a faint shuffling sound outside his door. He stopped and listened but heard nothing. The noise came again as he started to dial, and this time he put down the phone quietly and walked quickly across the office to the door. Someone moved slightly, just outside his office door.

  Whelan waited for a ten-count and then yanked the door open.

  O.C. Brown stood in the hall with one hand in his trouser pocket and a navy blue fedora in the other. He wore a dark blue suit with acres of lapels, and a white shirt that had been starched and ironed the old way, and a bright blue-and-white tie just wide enough to have gone in and out of fashion at least twice. Light reflected off the glassy shine of his narrow-tip black oxfords. Whelan thought Brown must have cut quite a figure when he was twenty-two.

  “Mr. Brown. Hello.”

  O.C. Brown straightened, grasped one wrist with the other hand, and nodded.

  “Morning, sir.”

  “Come on in,” Whelan said, and stepped aside to allow the older man in. He led Brown into the inner office and offered him a chair, then went around the desk and sat down.

  The sounds and smells of Lawrence Avenue rushed through the half-open window, and Whelan became conscious of the noise and the cold north wind that was beginning to make the old shade flap.

  “Should I close that?”

  “No, no. Feels good.”

  “How about the noise?”

  Brown smiled. “I run a tavern for twenty-six years, sir. Noise is part of my life. I hear it when I’m sleeping. I wake up in the middle of the night, and I hear people banging empty glasses on the bar and calling ‘O.C., hey, O.C.’ ”

  As Whelan took out a notepad and a pen from the center drawer, he watched Brown take in the barren office with its sparse and largely unmatched furniture.

  “Probably not what you expected.”

  Brown glanced at him, slightly embarrassed. “It’s just fine. You’re not an office man, probably don’t spend much time here. You’re a man of the streets.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Knew it soon as you come into my place. I could see by the way you looked at us, how you carried yourself.”

  “You sure it wasn’t just my cop walk?”

  Brown pursed his lips. “No, you got that, all right, but you didn’t act like no po-lice.”

  Whelan studied the older man for a moment. There was a slight stiffness to Brown but he was fighting it. He looked from wall to wall as though something might catch his attention, then forced himself to look Whelan in the eye.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Brown?”

  He took out a cigarette and shot an ashtray across the desk. The old man relaxed slightly, took out a pack of unfiltered Chesterfields, and shook one out. When they had both lit up and colored the air smoky, Brown cleared his throat.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Sam. Sam Burwell. The police—”

  “I heard. I talked to them. And I’m sorry about your friend.”

  Brown gave a little shrug and seemed to be looking at his shoes. “We went way back. Way back.”

  “The police probably told you a little more than they told me. Like when he was killed.”

  “They didn’t know, but”—he shot Whelan a slightly guilty look—“nobody’d seen Sam in a couple weeks.”

  “When did the police come to talk to you?”

  “Sunday. Late Sunday. Sam had one of my matchbooks in his pocket. That and his driver’s license, only things he had. I think they come by my place first, ’cause Sam’s driver’s license didn’t have a—you know, a current address.”

  “Did he have one?”

  “Yes, sir.” Brown puffed on his Chesterfield and then ground it out, wasting most of it.

  Whelan sighed to himself and looked out the window. Sometimes you had to pry things out of the old ones, even things they wanted to say.

  “You wanted to talk about Sam, you said.”

  “Yes, sir. I’d like to do something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d like to do something about this. About him dying like…like that. I’d like to help.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to be involved in that, Mr. Brown.”

  Brown looked down at his hands. He wore a large gold ring on his right hand. It had seen rough usage, the hand: the little finger was permanently curved and the nail on the middle finger was shattered. Whelan’s father had had a nail like that; once smashed so completely, the nail would never grow again.

  Whelan watched the old man and felt oddly embarrassed. “It’s not…it’s illegal for me to become involved in an open police case. They’d have me out of business for that.”

  Brown nodded. “That lawyer that you were working for, he know?”

  “I haven’t been able to get hold of him, but by now I assume the police
have informed him of Sam’s death. I’ll give it a couple days, then I’ll talk to him, just to wrap things up.”

  “They didn’t tell you nothing, the police?”

  “No. You know the way it is. They’re not in the habit of offering information to begin with, and one of the investigating officers is…somebody from the old days.”

  Brown raised his eyebrows slightly and looked interested. “You don’t get along, huh?”

  “We’re not fishing buddies. I’m the last person he’d tell.”

  “They told me it was robbery. Couple of little boys.”

  “Did they say why they thought it was robbery?”

  “They said he didn’t have any money on him.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a man who walked around with much.”

  “No, sir, but he’d have had some. He made a few dollars down on Maxwell Street. Made some money in the neighborhood, haulin’ things. He had an old Ford pickup. Good with cars, too, and he helped me out now and then. He wasn’t no bum, Mr. Whelan.”

  “That’s not how I meant it.”

  “And his ring was gone too. Had one of those silver Indian rings. They took that too.”

  “How little were these little boys?”

  “Fifteen, sixteen.”

  “Do they have a particular reason for suspecting these two kids?”

  Brown shrugged. “Been a lot of trouble with some boys down on Maxwell. Bunch of young boys been robbing folk, waiting around late in the day when people packing up they goods. They beat one man ’cause he wouldn’t hand over his watch. The po-lice think maybe these boys waited till Sam was loading up to go home and killed him.”

  “Did they find his truck?”

  “No, sir. Seems to me whoever killed him probably took the truck, drove Sam to this place where they found him, and…” He made a little wave with one hand.

  “And you don’t think it was the kids.”

  Brown looked at him. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yeah, you did. You were talking about these boys and you switched to ‘whoever killed him,’ which means you’re at least entertaining the possibility that the police are wrong.”

  Brown shifted in his chair and studied Whelan.

  “Seems to me you like to put words in other folks’ mouths.”

  “I never heard it put exactly that way, Mr. Brown, but, yeah, that’s one of the things I do. Sometimes it helps people come to the point.”

  Brown mumbled something to himself, and Whelan could make out “telling me I can’t come to the point.” Then he put his head down and gave it a little shake. Whelan could see where the gray hair was starting to thin near the top. “Want to talk about ‘the point’? I’ll tell you ’bout the point. The point is that these boys knock folk upside the head, but I never heard anything about them shooting anybody.”

  “And what do you plan to do about it, Mr. Brown?” Whelan asked, for he saw what was coming.

  Brown slapped his hands on his legs and glared at Whelan. “What do I plan? I plan to hire you, sir. What you think I come all the way here for? ’Cause I like riding the bus? Spent half my damn life ridin’ buses. Rode a bus up here with my folks. Damn Halsted bus don’t even come all the way here. Had to walk more than a mile—”

  “Take it easy.”

  “Don’t you be telling me how to act. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Whelan. You one patronizing young man, you hear?”

  “Maybe I am. It’s not intentional. Go ahead.”

  Brown straightened out his tie and cleared his throat again. He didn’t appear the least bit mollified, but eventually he went on.

  “I’m not comfortable with all this here.”

  “I understand that.”

  “It seems to me there’s all kinds of other information here that somebody ought to look into. Seems to me somebody ought to be asking a few questions on the street—”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Sam thought somebody was followin’ him. He told me somebody been following him around. Watching him.”

  “Where?”

  “Down there, Jewtown.” Brown shot Whelan a quick look. “Maxwell Street. Sam always called it Jewtown. That’s what we called it in the old days, Jewtown.”

  Jewtown. There’d been a time when every neighborhood, every group in Chicago had a nickname, and the names ranged from the slightly disparaging to the outright racist. It was the city of Jewtown, Buffalo Town, Bucktown, Chinatown. City of Sheenies and Micks and Loogins and Ricans and Coons and Krauts and Polacks and Dagoes. You could still hear the names in the saloons: nothing had changed but the scope of things you could call a member of another group in public.

  “He said somebody’d been watching him. Said he could feel it.”

  “Did he ever actually see anybody?”

  “One time he said somebody followed him in a car.”

  “On Maxwell Street?”

  “No. Down Ogden, this was. Followed him down Ogden.”

  “Got a description of the car?”

  “Naw.”

  “And the other times, when he felt someone watching him—this happen on Maxwell Street or in the neighborhood?”

  “Couple times on Maxwell.” A curious look came into the old man’s eyes. “Couple times up here.”

  “Up here?”

  “Sam stayed up here, Mr. Whelan. In Uptown. Had a woman he was seeing. White lady, this was.”

  Whelan struggled for a moment with the image of a gray-haired man O.C. Brown’s age calling on a lady. He stopped when he realized that Brown was watching him with a sly smile.

  “You never lose that, son. Not completely. You think when you get a little gray, you’re gonna die? You think your thing gonna fall off when you get old?” He was grinning now, and Whelan was genuinely embarrassed. “An old man, he gets a little bit now and then. He gets a little.” Brown gave him an amused look and then his facial expression changed again. “Couple of folks in the neighborhood told him people been looking for him, too. White man, one of ’em was.”

  “Before me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I heard that too.”

  “You heard it where, Mr. Whelan?”

  “A blind gentleman in the projects over on Racine.”

  “Mr. Ellis. You were talking to Mr. Ellis.”

  “Right.”

  “I knew Mr. Ellis in the old days. Schoolteacher, he was. Smartest man I ever met.” Brown took out another cigarette and lit up.

  “Did Sam have an idea who that man might be?”

  Brown appeared to hesitate, then shook his head. “No.”

  “What about the driver of the car that followed him? Was it a white man?”

  “No. He said that was a brother.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “That’s it.”

  Whelan thought for a moment. “What else have you got, Mr. Brown? I think there’s something else.”

  Brown didn’t answer for a long moment. He puffed at his Chesterfield, studied it as though he’d never seen one before, set it down in the ashtray, and looked down at his hands.

  “I got one other—you know, one other item. One other thing.”

  “Want to share it or do I have to guess?”

  Brown shot him an irritated glance. “That lawyer, the one says he’s working for Sam’s kin. What exactly did he tell you?”

  “Just what I said, that a relative was looking for Sam. Didn’t say who or how many or where they lived. He let it slip that the relative was a woman. Somewhere east, is my hunch.”

  “Sam didn’t have nobody out east, Mr. Whelan. Only one Sam got left was right here. His son, and that’s all.”

  “I didn’t know about the son.”

  Brown made a little shrug. “Wasn’t anybody else I ever heard him speak of. I’d like to have a little talk with this lawyer, just him and me.”

  “Why?”

  “Something funny there, that’s all.”

  “Why don’t you look him up? I
don’t think he’s going to tell me anymore than he has already, but he might say something to you, since you were a friend of Sam’s. Maybe this person who hired him would be interested in talking to you.”

  Brown pursed his lips and gave a short shake of his head. “I don’t want to talk to no lawyer.”

  “You wouldn’t like him anyway.” Whelan sat back and wondered if there were a simple, painless way to tell the old man that this wasn’t a job for a private detective. He decided to buy a little time.

  “Can you think of anybody who would be nervous if somebody came looking for Sam now?”

  “What you mean?”

  “I got a phone call Friday night that told me a number of things, not the least of which was that I’d get my ass kicked if I came back to the West Side.”

  O.C. Brown looked out the window; his face gave nothing away. After a moment he picked up the dwindling remains of his cigarette, flicked a long column of ash into the ashtray, and took a puff.

  “I don’t know who that would be. What’d he sound like?”

  “I think he was young, that’s all.”

  Brown shook his head.

  “Did you mention any of your suspicions to the police?”

  “They got their own notions about things, sir.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  Brown fixed him with a sardonic expression. “Look here, Mr. Whelan. These po-lice detectives come to my place with their own ideas about what happened, and an old saloonkeeper, a black saloonkeeper, tells them these stories about strange white men looking for Sam. Oh, I told ’em, all right. And that dark-haired one—”

  “Durkin.”

  “Yes, sir. That boy’s trouble. Looked a little crazy to me.”

  “He is.”

  “I wasn’t gonna do no good, talking to him. He thought he was downtown at the drunk tank listenin’ to some ramblin’ old bum. Which is what he thought of Sam, I could tell that, too.” Brown said a “Hmmmph” and shook his head. “Could smell the liquor on him.”

  “Mark Durkin’s a man on the edge of life, Mr. Brown. I’m surprised he’s made it this far. So, how much of this did you tell Durkin and his partner?”