The Maxwell Street Blues

by Michael Raleigh

  “And I think a black man seen running from a blue bus down there one night was one scared New York lawyer. But I know you didn’t kill anybody.”

  Hill kept his poker face, but his eyes were moving as though he were making a decision. Whelan decided to give it a push.

  “And I think Sam Burwell was your father.”

  The lawyer blinked and the color seemed to drain from his face. Hill bought a little time by lighting a cigarette and taking a long drag on it. He blew out smoke and for just a second allowed his face to take on an incredulous expression. Then his body seemed to sag a little, and he nodded.

  “Yes. He was my father. But we never knew each other. I don’t remember him at all because I wasn’t even two when he left. I never really knew about him, because my aunt—you know that she raised me?”

  “Yes.”

  Hill blinked. “You’re better than I thought, Mr. Whelan. Anyway, my aunt raised me to believe that she and her husband, who’d died many years earlier, were my parents. She let a few things slip over the course of many years, and she finally told me when I entered college who my parents really were, that my mother had run out and that my father had left me with her. She told me she didn’t know what had become of him.

  “I became obsessed with my parents, finding out about them. She told me a little about my father but nothing about my mother. She wouldn’t tell me a thing about her, wouldn’t speak her name. I didn’t get very far in my search. My aunt didn’t really want me to succeed. She had lost touch with my father in later years and believed that he was dead. And she made it pretty clear that my mother wasn’t worth finding out about.”

  “So how did you?”

  “When she died I went through her papers and I found a lot of old letters, some of them from my father. And there were a number of later ones from other people, including a couple from Chicago, apparently in response to her trying to locate him. I took all of it with me when I went east. I went to New York to prove to myself that I wasn’t going to waste any more time on the past. But I spent so much time going through it, over and over again, that I decided to come here and take care of business.”

  “The letters are where you came up with the addresses you gave me.”

  “Yes. And I found him, Mr. Whelan. I came here and set up a practice and in my spare time I looked for him. I hit some of the places you did and probably got the same responses you did. I never did find out where he lived. But I found him down on Maxwell Street. Your informant was right: I went down there and watched him. I stood across the street from him and stared at him like a moonstruck little boy.”

  “But you never got the chance to speak to him.”

  “No. What do you say to a parent who left you? I’d spent the past ten years rehearsing what I’d say but when the time came none of my little speeches fit the occasion. I was looking at a man who seemed to be from a different world. He was a shabby-looking man selling junk and other people’s castoffs down in a funky place, and none of that bothered me—but I was afraid he wouldn’t accept me, what I was. After all, the man hadn’t seen any reason to stay around and raise me.” A little of the anger came back into Hill’s face.

  “He left you with someone he trusted with your well-being. He didn’t think he could raise a child by himself, and from what little I know, I think he took some time getting over your mother’s leaving. And a lot of it was his trouble with liquor. Your aunt convinced him to let her raise you.”

  “How would you know that?”

  Whelan waved him off. “I also know”—Whelan hesitated, fumbling for a way to tell what he knew without being patronizing—“he was proud that his son was in college.”

  Hill shook his head. “He didn’t even know I went.”

  “Yeah, he did. He told someone how proud he was to have a son in college. So he knew. Your aunt must have told him before they lost touch for good. He knew about you. He knew he’d left you in good hands and that you’d turned out to be someone he was proud of.”

  David Hill swallowed and looked away, and for a moment Whelan wished he were somewhere else. Then he went on. He told David Hill how his father had died and at whose hands, taking care to give only the sketchiest outline of the story and leaving the most vital part to the end.

  “And I have other information you should know, but I don’t know if this is the time—”

  The lawyer blinked. “You playin’ God now, Whelan? You settin’ yourself up as my guardian angel?”

  The transformation caught Whelan off guard. David Hill had gone from New York lawyer to streetwise homeboy, and he looked as though he were ready to come over the top of the desk.

  “You think you can come in here and stick your white face in my life and then decide how much you gon’ tell me and how much you gon’ hold for later? You gonna sell it to me, Whelan?”

  “You’ve spent enough time playing God with me, Hill. How does it feel?”

  “I hired you because he disappeared. He disappeared, and I was afraid something had happened to him. I made some inquiries but no one seemed to have seen him. I thought a trained investigator might be able to find him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

  “I was embarrassed about my…my situation. But that wasn’t all. I was afraid you wouldn’t take it seriously, looking for a down-at-the-heels black man on the West Side.”

  “Unless you made it a little more grandiose, by creating a mysterious client who had means.”

  Hill nodded. “That’s right. Would you have taken it seriously otherwise?”

  “Yes. You don’t know me, so you wouldn’t know if that’s true, but each case is about a person, not about money. I’ve taken cases where clients couldn’t pay me much, and I’ve taken on a few where I knew I wasn’t going to be paid at all. You should have given me the benefit of the doubt.” He saw Hill’s sardonic smile and nodded. “I know, you couldn’t do that because I was white.”

  “You blame me?”

  “I guess not. So why didn’t you hire a black detective?”

  “If somebody had recommended one, I would have. I asked around for somebody good, especially at finding people. I got you.”

  “So now you know you can trust at least one white private investigator.”

  Hill gave him a slight smile. “I don’t have as much of a problem with white people as you think, Mr. Whelan. I didn’t mention this earlier but…my mother was white. I’ve known that for years.” The smile grew wider and Hill took a last puff from his dying cigarette.

  “Yes, I found that out too. And that brings me to the last piece of information I have, which will complicate your life more than anything else you’ve learned in the last year.”

  And Whelan looked down at the floor and told David Hill that his mother’s name was Tess and that she was alive and well and living in a small apartment on North Broadway. And when he had finished, he left David Hill to his own thoughts.

  Nineteen

  O.C. Brown listened carefully, watching Whelan and saying nothing. When Whelan was finished, O.C. poured him a fresh cup of coffee and came out from behind the bar. He walked over to the jukebox and used a key to open it, pressed some buttons, and closed the front up again. He hit some numbers and came back behind the bar. Whelan heard the scratch of needle on plastic, and a moment later the dark empty little tavern was under the spell of Billie Holiday.

  O.C. ran a rag across the shiny surface of his bar and then set out a pair of coasters and a pair of highball glasses.

  “Have a drink with me there, Whelan?”

  “Sure.”

  “Not too early in the day for you, my man?” There was a faint glimmer of amusement in O.C.’s eyes.

  “Special occasion.”

  “That’s my boy.” O.C. held up a bottle of Crown Royal for approval. Whelan nodded and the old man poured them each a healthy shot. “I don’t use shot glasses.” O.C. studied the whiskey, swirling it around in the glass. “I can’t drink this stuff no more
but just this one time.” He held his glass up to Whelan. “To my boy Sam,” he said.

  Whelan touched his glass to O.C.’s, nodded, and drank.

  A pair of customers came in, younger men, and both gave Whelan a long second look. O.C. greeted them, nodded his head in Whelan’s direction and said, “Friend of mine, good friend. This here is Paul Whelan.”

  One of the men said, “How you feel?” and the other nodded. O.C. left to serve them. When he came back, he picked up the coffeepot again.

  “No, no more for me, O.C. I’ve got to run.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I know me and taverns. I’ve spent days in taverns. Spent eight hours in a saloon once just because it started raining.”

  O.C. chuckled and nodded. “We got to talk about money before you leave.”

  Whelan held up two fingers. “Two hundred.”

  O.C. shook his head. “I asked around. Some folk in your line of work make that in a day.”

  “Not me. Two hundred. And a lifetime tab at the Blue Note.”

  O.C. laughed. “How you gonna make a living like that?”

  “I own the house I live in, and rich lawyers keep sending work my way.”

  O.C. reached into the register and came out with a white envelope. Out of it came a sheaf of bills which he counted and handed over to Whelan. “Two-fifty. Take it, my man.”

  “Cash, huh? All right!”

  O.C. Brown held out his hand. “You’re a good man, Whelan. And a smart man.”

  “A lot of it’s luck. You keep at it and ask enough questions and think about what you’ve learned, and sometimes you come up with answers.”

  O.C. was shaking his head before Whelan was finished. “Naw, man, couldn’t nobody else do it. Only you. Only you, Whelan.”

  “I’ll see you around, O.C.”

  “Gimme a holler sometime. Come in and use that tab.”

  “I will. Maybe we’ll go see the Sox.”

  “All right. Those are my boys. They gonna take it next year.”

  “Yeah. In this town everybody’s gonna take it next year.”

  Whelan waved and left.

  On Tuesday morning he sat in his office and read the paper. The unseasonably warm weather had brought on dozens of shootings, assaults, and armed robberies. Less than a block from his home, an off-duty police officer had been assaulted and robbed. The unidentified cop had been treated for facial injuries at a local hospital.

  Another caption caught his eye: RESTAURATEURS SUE CITY. Somehow he knew what this one would say, but he read it anyway, to make his day. According to the story, the owners of the House of Zeus restaurant, citing what they called “harassment, anti-Iranian behavior, and blackmail,” had brought suit against the authorities. It was, Whelan reflected, what one might call the shotgun approach to litigation: the suit named a Sylvester Janus, said to be a health inspector, as well as the Board of Health, the City of Chicago, the Mayor, and the Governor of Illinois. The attorney for the House of Zeus was apparently a Mr. Reza, who promised that “this suit will bring the whole corrupt system to its feet.” Whelan remembered Mr. Reza, who before law school had worked in the A and W kitchen for his cousins Rashid and Gus. He laughed and rubbed his eyes.

  “Nice going, guys,” he said. “You sent a little business to your cousin.”

  He was paging through the ruminations of local sportswriters who seemed to think the Bears were on the verge of something big, when the phone rang.

  “Hey, sweetie!”

  “Hello, Shel. What’s up?”

  “Seems your clients think you never sleep. You got a call at eight A.M.”

  “Must be a stranger. Nobody who knows me would think I’d be at work that early. What’s the point of being self-employed?”

  “This was a Mr. Hill. Said he’d come by and visit. I told him you struggled in around nine-thirty.”

  “Nicely done, Shel. How’s the milkman?”

  “He thinks his ship came in. Later, baby.”

  At precisely nine-thirty, David Hill came into the outer office.

  “Come on in, counselor. I got your call.”

  Hill held up a white bag. “Brought you coffee.”

  “I can always use a cup of coffee. Sit down.” Whelan busied himself with the coffee and waited for Hill to announce his business.

  “You laid a lot of news on me yesterday, Mr. Whelan, and I don’t think I was in the frame of mind to thank you properly.”

  “You thanked me.”

  “Yeah, but, man, I’m not sure there’s even a way to do it the way it should be done.”

  “Did you see her?”

  David Hill nodded. “Yes. I called her, and then I dropped by in the afternoon.”

  “How did it go?”

  Hill shrugged. “It was very uncomfortable for both of us, and painful, and…I stayed for three hours.” He smiled.

  “I thought you’d work it out.”

  “I have no idea what will happen—”

  “Who does?” Whelan sipped his coffee. “You’re lucky, both of you.”

  “Now I’m going to call Sam’s son, my…” Hill made a nervous gesture with one hand.

  “Your brother,” Whelan finished.

  “Yeah. I have no idea what I’ll say to him.”

  “You’re a lawyer, you’ll think of something.”

  Hill shook his head, looking embarrassed, then glanced around the office.

  “You’ll be staying in Chicago?”

  Hill gave him an incredulous look. “Hell, yes, Whelan. Every other lawyer I’ve met, white, black, or brown, is talking about running for office. Everybody in this town seems to talk about running for office.”

  “It’s either that or play softball. So you’re going to run for office?”

  “No. If all the other lawyers are going to run for office, I’m going to be an attorney. Sounds like I’ll make a whole lot of money. Speaking of which.” He drew an envelope from the inside pocket of his coat and slid it across the desktop.

  “What’s that? We settled already.”

  “Retainer,” Hill said, straight-faced. “I’ll need an investigator sometime, and I don’t want to stand in line behind G. Kenneth Laflin.”

  Whelan pulled the envelope over and nodded. “Deal.”

  He decided to take a walk and was just leaving when the phone rang.

  “Hey, Snoopy.”

  “Bauman. You still on furlough?”

  “No, I’m back at work. I made it.” He spoke with the air of a man who has survived something bleak and harsh. “Listen, you been reading the papers? That’s some neighborhood you live in.”

  “About the cop? Yeah, I saw it.”

  “Hell of a thing. I—uh, I know the cop.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Suddenly he had a feeling about what was coming next.

  “Yeah. So do you. Mark Durkin.”

  “Durkin? Around here? What was he doing around here?”

  “Beats the hell outta me, Whelan. What do you think?”

  “Looking for girls, maybe.”

  “Right. That’s what I was thinkin’. They busted his jaw, did you know that?”

  “No. No, I didn’t know that.” Whelan thought for a moment, and dark notions danced through his imagination. “How would you know?”

  “You know me, Whelan. I know everybody.”

  Whelan thought for a moment. “I bet you know how much they took from him.”

  Bauman snickered into the phone. “Seventy-seven dollars. And his wallet. Got his badge, too. I got a feeling old Mark won’t be prowling around up north no more.”

  “I think you’re a danger to us all, Albert. I feel like finding the guy who did it and saying thank you.”

  “I’ll let him know, Snoops. You can buy him a cocktail sometime.”

  The rest of the day was slow. No other visitors came in to see him, he received no other calls. He finished the paper and wondered what he’d do that night, and he thought of Pat, who had said she’d call him when s
he had it all sorted out with her ex-husband. No call yet, and he was beginning to feel that the call, when it came, would not bring good news.

  He found himself thinking about Ms. Sandra McAuliffe, of the Illinois Department of Public Aid, and wondered if she’d take a dinner invitation seriously. Why the hell not?

  He called her and asked her out for that night.

  There was a pause. “Paul…I think you should know, I’m…in a relationship.”

  Figures, he thought, and he was about to let the conversation end when he found himself pushing on. “Well, so am I. Is yours any better than mine?”

  No, he thought, it’s dog shit or you wouldn’t be talking about it like a psychologist.

  Her laughter took him by surprise. He hadn’t heard her laugh before, and this was a good one, deep and practiced.

  “It’s that obvious, huh?”

  “You could have said ‘I’m spoken for,’ or ‘I have someone,’ or ‘I’m involved with someone,’ or ‘I live with a guy,’ or even the old standby, ‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’ I’ve got a relationship too, and it’s…moribund.”

  “Moribund. A good word.” She was silent for a moment. “So where are we going?”

  More from Michael Raleigh

  Death in Uptown

  A killer terrorizes Chicago’s diverse Uptown neighborhood. Private investigator Paul Whelan’s specialty is tracking down missing persons, but when his good friend is found slain in an alley, Whelan is steered down a path of violence as he searches for answers.

  His investigation is interrupted by the arrival of an attractive young woman, Jean Agee, who is on her own search for her missing brother. But as clues lead Whelan to believe the two cases may be connected, the body count rises quickly, and he finds himself racing to catch a killer before he strikes again.

  A Body in Belmont Harbor

  The body of a small-time drug dealer washes up in Belmont Harbor among the yachts of Chicago's wealthy. Convinced that this murder connects to her husband’s suicide two years prior, wealthy widow Janice Fairs hires private eye Paul Whelan to investigate.