Death in Uptown Read online

  Death in Uptown

  A Paul Whelan Mystery

  Michael Raleigh

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1991 by Michael Raleigh

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition February 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-619-0

  Also by Michael Raleigh

  A Body in Belmont Harbor

  The Maxwell Street Blues

  Killer on Argyle Street

  The Riverview Murders

  To the memory of Barney and Mary Raleigh

  Chicago, 1983

  Prologue

  The dead man in the alley had been small, almost childlike in appearance, with small hands and feet and a thick brush of straw-blond hair shot with gray that hung down over his forehead. The eyes were half open, as though he were struggling to rouse himself, and they were blue, pale blue, like a child’s eyes. The yellow cast to his skin and the discolored whites of his eyes announced the last stages of cirrhosis. There was a gash over one eye and severe bruising across both cheekbones, and a cut on the bridge of the nose, another at the corner of one eye. His lower lip was caked black with clotted blood and the underside of the chin was bloody from where he’d landed on the pavement. The hair was matted dark over his left ear, and as though these injuries hadn’t been damage enough, the tape-covered handle of a knife protruded from his sunken chest.

  The dead man leaned against the wall of a garage, one hand limp across his lap and the other stretched out on the pavement, fingers out, pointing to nothing. Two uniformed officers crouched over the body and both turned at the approach of a car.

  A gray Caprice pulled into the alley and stopped ten feet from them. From the passenger side, a tall thin man in a tan jacket emerged. A moment later a heavy-set man with a brush cut and a loud green plaid jacket got out from the driver’s side. They walked toward the dead man, the heavy-set one hitching up his trousers as he walked. The taller one, an older man, stopped a couple of feet from the corpse and put his hands in his pockets as though no longer interested. His companion approached the body.

  “Dave,” he said, nodding to the older of the two uniforms.

  “Hi, Al.”

  “What you got?”

  “Not ours. Somebody buttonholed the meter maid and she called it in. We just got here. How’d you get here so fast?”

  “We heard the call come in. We were over on Ashland. We got nothing better to do.” He shot a look at his partner, who shook his head slightly and squinted up at the sun. The heavy-set man winked at the other cop, ran his hand across his brush cut and crouched. The dead man wore a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and the heavy-set man pulled the flannel shirt open on one side to look at the emaciated body. Literally a bag of bones: the knees and elbows made hard points in his clothing.

  “Lookit this.” The detective encircled the corpse’s upper arm with his thumb and forefinger. Then he let the arm drop. He looked at the face for a moment and then reached out and put his fingers on the dead man’s cheek. He looked up at the two uniforms and saw that the younger one was frowning.

  “You think I’m weird, right? Your partner thinks I’m weird, Dave. Somebody should always touch a dead man,” he said quietly.

  Emboldened by this direct address, the young cop gave a little shrug. “Why, detective?”

  The detective’s gray eyes held his for a moment and then the face creased in irritation. “ ’Cause they just should, that’s all.” The detective looked up and down the alley. One block away he could make out the steel-and-glass block of Truman College. It was ten o’clock in the morning and summer classes were in session; young people in bright colors were entering and leaving the building. He stared for a moment, then looked at the body again and shook his head.

  “Ain’t this a bitch.”

  “You make it a strong-arm, detective?”

  The man called Al rubbed his brush cut again and looked up at the young officer with amusement. He stood up and looked at the man’s nameplate. Then he looked back at his silent partner.

  “Jones!” He pointed at the plate. “Come look, honest to God. A white guy named Jones.” He put his hands across his eyes and laughed quietly, then pecked out between his fingers at the other uniform.

  “Davey, I tell you, I love this job. It’s always something, ain’t it? I swear. Every day it’s something new. I been a cop for twenty-one years and this is the first time I ever met a white guy named Jones.”

  “That guy in Youth, used to work Shakespeare,” the other detective said.

  “No.” The heavy-set one shook his head. “That wasn’t his real name. He was Armenian or something. His name was…like, Josarrian or some shit like that. No, this here, this is the first one.” He looked back at Jones. “So, Jones. This was a strong-arm robbery, huh? A mugging, eh? Somebody wanted this guy’s gold watch, or what?”

  The young cop went a deep purple, cleared his throat, made a slight wave with one arm, shuffled his feet, opened his mouth and could say nothing.

  “Easy, Jones, easy. What’s your first name?”

  “Wayne.”

  “Okay, Wayne. Look, maybe you don’t know me. Al Bauman’s my name. I got a weird sense of humor. Just jerking your chain, is what I’m doing here. Look, this ain’t a robbery. I’ll tell you that much.”

  Rejuvenated, Jones nodded. “I didn’t mean the victim had…uh, valuables. I meant somebody killed him for, you know, something he had in his possession. A bottle, maybe, or money.”

  Bauman looked at the young man with a grave expression, but the glint in his eye showed that he was suppressing the urge to laugh. He looked away. A fight to the death over a bottle of Richard’s Wild Irish Rose. Vicious old derelicts, scourge of the city. He caught the older cop’s eye, held his breath, but it was no use. He started to snicker again and was able to make a pretense of blowing his nose. By the time he was finished tucking his handkerchief away he was under control again. He looked up the alley for a moment. The cop named Dave, a red-faced Germanic-looking man, stepped in to save some face for his partner.

  “So what do you make of it, Al?”

  “I think somebody didn’t like this guy and killed him.”

  Jones knelt down beside the corpse and nodded. “Somebody really didn’t like him. Beat him half to death, then finished the job with the knife.”

  “No.” Bauman looked at his watch and milked the moment.

  “So what happened, Al?” the older cop asked.

  “He was dead already. When the knife went in.” He looked at Jones. “What would happen if I stuck you there?” He touched the young officer just under the heart.

  “I’d bleed, and—”

  “Yeah, you’d bleed. You’d spout, babe. There’s almost no blood. There’s no blood on the ground except a couple drops. Somebody beat this guy to death.”

  “Why would you beat a guy to death and then stick ’im, Al?” Dave smiled. “Who’s got that kind of energy in this heat?”

  “He stuck the guy to hide the fact that he beat ’im to death. That’s why.”

  “Why would somebody do that?”

  “I didn’t say I understood. I just told you what I tho
ught. He was dead when he got stabbed. And that’s what the M.E. will say. You watch.”

  “Seems pretty complicated to me,” Jones said. “I mean, it’s a lot of trouble to go to over an old wino. Aren’t we gettin’ kind of carried away here?”

  Bauman looked at him. Amazing, the recuperative powers of the young. “So he’s a wino, so what? So it’s okay that somebody whacked him and walked? What, that’s all right with you?”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that—”

  “I knew this guy. He had a name. Name was Shinny. Shinny, that’s what they called him. We useta call him ‘the climber.’ When he was younger, before he got…like this here, all fucked up on the bottle, he used to go through windows that were open six, eight inches. He could go between those wood slats they put on buildings to keep people out, he could go up walls, up drainpipes, he could get in heating vents. A fuckin’ artiste. He was a thief but we used him a couple times to get in places for us.” Bauman looked at the corpse again, noted the thick scabs on the knuckles and a dark hard patch on one ear, marks of earlier injury. “He wasn’t bad people, though.”

  Bauman nodded to Dave and then to Jones and walked back to his car, followed by his partner.

  “You gonna be on this one, Al, or what?” Dave called out.

  “If they let me spin my wheels on a bum. Yeah, I guess. And if nobody gets in my way. Somebody always gets in my way.” He gave his partner a quick look and then shrugged. They got into the Caprice and backed out of the alley. The older cop looked at Jones and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Hey, don’t let him get to you. He likes to dick young cops around. It’s how he gets his jollies.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Jones said, glowering at the departing Caprice.

  “He’s pretty strange, all right. But he’s smart. He’s real good at what he does. And I’d hate to be the guy that got in his way.”

  One

  “You’re in my way.”

  Paul Whelan, a lanky redhead in a Mexican cotton shirt, turned and saw a little man in a winter coat carrying a Jewel bag with what were presumably all his worldly possessions. Squinty and older than Genesis, the little man stared righteously at Whelan and held up one hand. “You are in my way, sir.”

  Whelan stepped aside. “Okay. Now I’m out.”

  The old man looked at him for a moment and then nodded. “Look to your soul, young man.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.” The little man launched into oratory, bellowing out biblical injunctions and citing scripture, and Whelan stepped out into Broadway against the traffic. A Checker cab came within six inches of him and the cabbie leaned on his horn and shouted something profane. The little man yelled that the cabbie was damned and the cabbie gave him the finger and the little man began running after him, and Whelan told himself that he lived in an interesting neighborhood.

  On the other side of the street, a vacant-faced kid was passing out little blue leaflets. He handed one to Whelan without looking at him. The leaflet bore the picture of a woman in her fifties or sixties and proclaimed her to be “your guide to the spirits.”

  Whelan looked at the kid and smiled. “Oh, good. Fraud, my favorite.” The kid looked at him, picked at his ear, examined whatever he found and looked away again. Whelan looked at the brochure.

  It said the woman’s name was “Madame Claire” and told him that she was “the most sought-after and internationally acclaimed clairvoyant and astrologer in the Western Hemisphere,” and went on to give both her education—a degree from Florida Astrological Institute, plus various certificates attesting that Madame Claire was a sort of honor student among seers and clairvoyants—and her pedigree, namely her descent from “Gypsy royalty” of the fifteenth century. Whelan studied her picture: she had blue eyes and blond hair and it was clear that she was descended from the Norwegian branch of the Gypsy race.

  Madame Claire was apparently a virtuoso among spiritualists: she knew the future, could communicate with the dead, even, the brochure claimed, “if they have been dead a long time,” and spoke eleven languages fluently. Her specialty was her remarkable success at helping people pick winning lottery tickets; this success had apparently been limited thus far to the New Jersey lottery, because all her testimonials were from New Jersey residents. The pamphlet was filled with these quotes from happy New Jerseyites claiming to have made the Big Score on predictions from Madame Claire. She offered to tell fortunes, unravel family difficulties, explain life’s mysteries and help people select careers. She accepted Visa and MasterCard and tossed in the time-honored freebie of all fortune-tellers: one free question.

  Whelan looked at the kid. “You know this lady?”

  The kid squinted, scratched his head and nodded. “My aunt.”

  “So you’re a Gypsy too.”

  The kid looked uncomfortable and shuffled from one foot to the other.

  “Hey, don’t be embarrassed. This is America. It’s okay to be a Gypsy. Listen, ask your aunt who she likes in the first race at Arlington. That’s my free question.” He tossed the leaflet in a trash can and walked on.

  A few doors from his office building, just outside the el station, a pack of teenage boys had gathered to watch two kids fight. Just a half mile to the east, more sensible types were already filling up the beach or spreading picnic blankets in Lincoln Park, and a short mile or so to the south they were lining up for tickets to the Cub game, but this was ghetto life, in the multicolored ghetto that was Uptown. The streets were overrun with bored kids who hadn’t landed summer jobs; most of them would be on these corners till Labor Day. A few, he knew, would stay here the rest of their lives.

  One of the young pugilists was small and stocky and looked Mexican. The other was taller, very dark, heavy-lidded and smiling. He looked like Nino Valdez, a flashy Cuban heavyweight of the late fifties. Like most heavyweights of the time, his moment in the sun had passed when he fought Sonny Liston. After Liston stretched him, Valdez claimed he’d been fed a drugged orange before the fight. Valdez faded quickly from the public eye but the orange went on to become famous.

  The two boys traded lefts and Nino wasn’t smiling anymore. Whelan was about to stop it when a squad car rolled around the corner and the whole crowd vanished under the el tracks.

  Sam Carlos came out of his grocery store and sat on a fruit crate in his doorway. He gave Whelan a little salute.

  “Hey, Pablo. How’s the detective business?”

  “I’d rather be in groceries, Sam.” Carlos laughed and surveyed his window. New hand-painted signs decorated the window and his door, and Sam’s store now proclaimed itself a CARNNICERIA though it hadn’t seen fresh meat since Nixon.

  “Hey, you like? You like my signs?”

  “You’ve got too many n’s in carniceria, Sam. There’s only one.”

  Sam turned on his crate to look at the new sign. He grunted and shrugged. “Hey, whaddayou know? You don’ know Spanish.”

  “Yeah, but neither do you,” Whelan said and laughed.

  Sam Carlos was a source of amusement to Whelan. A short fat man who seemed to go out of his way to dress in the filthiest clothes, Sam carried more cash on his person than most people had in banks. He looked and acted broke, and he spent long hours after closing time ringing up false register tapes to feed his equally corrupt accountant, and he lied to everyone about everything. His store was a monument to the melting-pot culture of Uptown: he sold tripe and avocados, rice, garbanzos, catfish, buffalo fish and three kinds of greens; he routinely overcharged, hit the wrong register keys purposely and apologized profusely if caught, and took delight in giving short weight. If you paid for a pound of hamburger, you got thirteen ounces and the weight of Sam’s thumb. Most fascinating of his poses and postures was his continuing role as Puerto Rican businessman. Sam was Armenian.

  “Here. You look like sick man. Like you don’ make no money lately.” He tossed Whelan an apple and laughed. “I buy you breakfast in case you got important case today.”

 
Whelan caught it and shrugged. “I’m not proud.” He waved and walked on, biting into the apple. It was dry and mealy.

  Across the street, the marquee of the Aragon Ballroom was being changed: BOXING: YOUNG JOE LOUIS VS. HERMINIO ESPARRAGOSA PLUS 8 BOUTS was being removed, letter by letter.

  One of the Persians caught his eye and waved to him from the window of the A&W next to the Aragon. It was Rashid. The Iranian smiled, winked, nodded, secure in the knowledge that if he made no other sale today he’d still get Whelan’s money. Whelan seldom had lunch anywhere else. For his part, Whelan was glad to be so predictable. He couldn’t imagine eating anywhere else when there was a place of such unadulterated bizarreness at hand. He was certain that there was no A&W like this one anywhere in the world and possibly no eatery of any kind like it. Two menus, one Persian and Middle Eastern, the other American junk classics. The customer could choose not just between sandwiches but between worlds. A papaburger or shalimar kabob; the cheez dog or a shish kabob; felafel or a taco; chili, pizza, egg rolls, pizza puffs, ribs, chicken, gyros, Polish sausage and Italian beef. And Whelan had tried them all, every item on the menu except for the one that truly frightened him: he’d never had the ham and cheese. He’d never seen anyone order the ham and cheese, knew only that the ham, hard and red like the stones of the pyramids, sat there in a glass case and aged itself.

  He pushed open the heavy door to his office building and noticed the puddle in the corner of the hallway. He held his breath and went quickly up the steps—marble steps, and brass handrails to go with them, reminders of the time long since passed when the building and the entire neighborhood had been prosperous, a refuge for the wealthy from the rest of a dirty, noisy city. Now, it was one more office building holding a lot of empty space and counting the days before it became a parking lot.