Peerless Detective Read online

  “It’s all gonna happen this year. 1977. And if that happens, I know the world’s gonna end. Maybe Carter’ll bomb the Russians. Which will piss them off, and then we’ll have the End Times.”

  Billy shrugged and looked away.

  The old man went on, implacable. “It’s in the Bible. The End Times. You read the Bible, son? Me neither, but they tell me the End Times are coming. ’Course, somebody tells me that every couple years. But I suppose this time it’s true.”

  Now Billy caught something in his voice, the change in tone that said the old man was having fun with him. He looked at the old man and saw the glint of humor in his eyes. Billy smiled.

  “So what is it that’s going to cause all this?”

  “I think the Cubs, those dingbats, are gonna win the World Series. Then I’ll know it’s the End Times. The Apocalypse. You know about the Apocalypse?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither, but it’s supposed to be bad. I think it’ll shut down all the saloons.” The old man cackled now, and Billy laughed and decided to pay for this amusement.

  “How about a beer?” Billy asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Why not?”

  Billy ordered the old man a beer. He watched the old guy drain half his beer, saw the old man studying him. His eyes took in the duffle on the floor.

  “You come in on the bus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where from?”

  Billy started to say Lansing, thought better of it, and said “Kalamazoo.”

  The old man caught the hesitation and said, “You sure, son?” and Billy laughed.

  “More or less. I’ve been knocking around.”

  “I did that too, when I was a young fella. No good can come of it,” he said, and slurped his beer. “What brings you to the Big Town? Probably not family, or you wouldn’t be sitting here talking to old crazies in dark saloons.”

  “I’m looking for somebody,” Billy said.

  The old man squinted. “You sound like a character in a movie.”

  “I know. That sounds a little, what do you call it? Melodramatic. But I am looking for somebody.”

  The man gave him an amused look. Then Billy said, “So which way is the lake?”

  “Why? You gonna throw yourself in it?”

  “No. Not yet, anyways.”

  “Go left when you leave this joint.”

  “So that’s east. Good.”

  The old man nodded. For a while they drank in silence, and then the old man surprised him.

  “You need a room, there’s a YMCA on Wabash, south of here. And there’s one up on Chicago Avenue, north of here.”

  “Is that where you stay? The Y?”

  The old man laughed. “Oh, my current lodgings are more suited to my current financial status. Which is to say, I live on the cheap, son.”

  Billy didn’t know what to say to that. He finished his beer, pushed change toward the bar rail for the bartender, and patted the old man on the back.

  “I got to go,” he said, and nearly added, but I have no idea where.

  “Okay, well, good luck, son, hope you find him, or her, or it. And thanks for the beer.”

  • • •

  He found himself in the heart of downtown Chicago, where word of the Apocalypse had clearly not arrived. There was still daylight, but the sun was setting fast. The air was dense with a smell he’d come to think of as street-grit, the smell of late nights, exhaust hanging in the air, food smells, and tobacco smoke. Street-grit. This, at least, was reassuring to him—he’d experienced this before. Lansing smelled like this, and Detroit smelled like this, and Flint. Someone had once told him that New Orleans had the smell of coffee and pecans, but Billy doubted this. A city couldn’t smell like coffee and pecans, not all of it. Somewhere, if it was an actual city, there would be a part of it that had this peculiar after-smell of all the things people did to get by in the daytime.

  But this was a place with its own smells—he could smell water on the air. He hadn’t realized you would be able to smell the lake. Onions, he smelled onions, and somewhere nearby someone was making popcorn and roasting nuts. And there was noise, traffic and the gush of air as a bus hit its brakes and the raucous noise of a cabbie leaning on his horn, and at the corner three small black boys pounded on identical plastic buckets. They filled the air with untamed percussion, the three of them grinning at one another as they drummed. They searched faces as they pounded away, hoping to coerce donations. Billy walked over and watched them drum for a minute, then dropped a buck in an upturned fourth bucket, earning a grin from the kid closest to him.

  First a beer for an old man in a bar and now a dollar in a kid’s bucket. At this rate, he wondered if his money would last the week.

  A street sign told him he was on Randolph Street. For a moment he stood there, resting the heavy duffel bag on the sidewalk, the sole human being on that street without purpose or destination, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet until he grew self-conscious.

  Every time, every time in a new place, Billy experienced a moment of light-headedness, a quick disorientation that came with a flash of panic. He had been in many new places in the past year, all over the western half of the States. And now he was standing on a corner in Chicago, just standing, aware that he had embarked on a farfetched course and wondering how he’d manage to keep himself alive.

  He stepped out onto the sidewalk, swinging his duffel bag over his shoulder, and people made paths around him on both sides. He wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had called out, “Hey, Rube.” He had enough cash to last perhaps two weeks, and no clear idea what was to come next. He realized how he must look, with all these Chicago people striding purposefully past him.

  It struck him that in a life brief but nonetheless filled with missteps and miscalculations, this was as stupid as anything he’d ever done.

  He began to walk up and down Randolph to get some sort of bearing. His initial impression was immensity, walls of concrete, walls of glass and steel. And movie houses, big ones—the Bismarck to the west, the United Artists to the east. Just a block away, he could make out a huge block of granite that showed on his city map as the combination of City Hall and the County Building, and just beyond that, the dark scaffolding of the elevated train.

  He’d memorized some of these streets, all the major arterial streets, but he’d tried and failed to memorize all of them from the numbered streets on the south to Howard on the north. He knew that this was a vast place unlike any he’d ever lived in. Jo was right, you could drop Lansing and Kalamazoo in this place and they’d be swallowed. Jesus, you could lose Detroit in this place. He knew, as well, that he had no idea how to find a girl who’d come to such a place quite literally to prevent anyone from finding her.

  He had a few bucks in his pocket, his life’s belongings stuffed into a canvas bag, a pool cue, and very little of what anyone might call prospects.

  Talk about traveling light through life.

  Thus, Billy told himself that his first order of business in Chicago would be to manage not to starve or die homeless on the streets.

  A cop car moved slowly in the westbound traffic, and the cop in the passenger seat gave him the look. Billy looked away, pretended to be looking for something, and caught his reflection in the dark glass front of the bus station—a washed-out looking boy, slightly underfed, bushy hair uncombed, jeans and a jean jacket. Clearly out of place.

  He hefted his duffel bag and slung it over one shoulder to show it.

  See? I’ve been in the Army protecting our shores. I’m not a hobo.

  Okay, he thought. A plan—first order of business was not to starve here or die homeless on the streets or get busted. Tall enough order, he told himself. Tall enough.

  Now, to look for things—for a place to stay, for work, for a cheap meal. Though Billy knew all of those things were of critical importance, he did precisely what he knew he’d do as soon as he hit Chicago—he went to a phone booth and dug in
to the phone books. The voice of reason that lived in the back of his head told him she wouldn’t be under her own name, but he rifled through the White Pages quickly, hungrily. He tried her actual name, Rita Bellavia, then her mother’s maiden name, Linderman. The voice told Billy he was goofy, that she wouldn’t be under her mother’s name either, that she was smarter than that. For that matter, she wouldn’t be in a phone book.

  He walked. Head down and leaning to counterbalance the weight of the duffel, he walked, aimlessly at first, taking it all in. Eventually he told himself just to march in one direction until he found a room.

  The room was in a YMCA. He paid for two weeks. The room was small and clean. More importantly, there was a cafeteria with decent food.

  That night, he lay for a time on his bed, listening to the street sounds outside his window and summing up his situation—a room for a week, maybe two, food money for about that long if he stretched it. Time enough to look for something to get him by.

  So. So I’m not gonna die on the street my first week here. It’s a start.

  TWO

  Signs from the Heavens

  “The road don’t give nobody a thing except blisters,” Billy had once heard his father say. If asked to verify this wanderer’s wisdom, Billy would have agreed that the road had given him little—except perhaps a sense of irony. He had developed a dark sense of humor about his situation. Signs frequently amused him—the sign on the bus stop bench, for example, asked, “Earn money in your spare time?” and promised “Three hundred a week from your own home!”

  Billy imagined himself asking the sign’s owner if the deal still held for a guy who might be living in an alley soon.

  A bus rolled to the corner and Billy saw another sign: “Start your own business. Send for our brochure.” The subway stations were full of these promises, as were the trains themselves—“Make $250 per week in your spare time,” “Earn a degree in just fifteen weeks!” “Start a New Career in the Exciting Field of Sales,” “Join the Management Institute of Northern Illinois.”

  If the signs were all true, you could get rich in your own house, get a college degree over the summer, become an engineer in a year or an electrician in six months, direct your own enterprises, and build an empire without getting off the couch. The skies would rain money. What all of them had in common, it seemed to Billy, was that you ponied up your cash first and they did their business on you. This called to mind another saying of the Old Man’s—“Everybody’s got an angle.”

  And that, Billy believed with unshakable conviction, was the gospel truth.

  He watched the bus roll away with its promise of money in his spare time and asked himself, “So, what’s my angle?”

  For, clearly, a guy standing on a corner in a town where he knew no one, a guy down to his last few bucks, this was a fellow without an angle.

  Yeah, Billy would have added, and without a clue.

  He bought a twenty-nine cent notebook and wrote down everything that seemed to have any significance. For two weeks he walked endlessly, first through what a guy at the YMCA desk called “The Loop,” on the premise that the busiest part of the city was the most likely place to start looking for someone. He’d never seen a place so dense with people, nor a town where the tallest buildings made a wall that blocked out the sun. At one point, he walked east as far as he could, past a park and a huge fountain, and found himself staring at the lake for the first time.

  “Jesus H.” he said aloud. It might as well have been an ocean, for there seemed to be no end to it, no far side. He stood staring at it for a time, mesmerized. From here, he made a long circuit of exploration that took him past beaches already populated by kids, sunning, chasing dogs, throwing Frisbees, playing volleyball, being beautiful. It seemed they were all beautiful—the boys were tanned and muscular and went to great lengths to show off their bodies and their athleticism, and the girls all looked like starlets, in brightly-colored bikinis, long hair flying in the breeze. He noted that almost none of them ventured into the water and wondered when it was possible to swim in the huge lake. He cut across the sand and tried on an air of self-possession, a streetwise guy who knew where he was heading, but five yards into the beach his boots slipped so badly he might have been on ice, and he turned back quickly to avoid falling.

  He became self-conscious of his pale skin, his clothes. At one point, a guy chasing a ball ran into him and they both nearly fell onto the walkway.

  “Hey! Watch where you’re going,” the guy said. Then he added, “Fucking hillbilly,” but he was moving away as he said it.

  Hillbilly?

  He looked down at his clothes—tight jeans over scuffed boots, a white t-shirt with his smokes tucked up in one sleeve.

  I look like James Dean’s ghost, he thought, and quickly left the beach, lest they all start pointing him out.

  By his third day in Chicago, the boots had grown heavy and the jeans were hot, and he told himself he had no idea how a person searched an entire city, a strange city, for one human being in three million. He walked endlessly and showed the wrinkled picture everywhere—grocery stores and gas stations, bars and diners, to vendors on the corner selling papers. The more people who frowned or squinted at the photo and shook their heads, the more stupid he felt.

  He walked and asked his questions and tried to get a fix on the city’s streets and landmarks, and wore out the soles of his boots, as well as his own fervor. He was beset by the frequent sense of the ridiculous nature of his search. If there was one thing Billy feared, it was appearing ridiculous.

  • • •

  At the end of his second endless week in Chicago, he stood on the corner of Division and Clark, waiting for a sign. Not from God, necessarily, for he was not yet convinced there was one. Just a sign that this was where he was supposed to be. And if not here, then where? He was beginning to believe the answer to that question might be nowhere. More than once in the past year he’d woken in a strange place, unable to remember for a moment where he was—just one more hot, dark room on a street he didn’t know. Different rooms, but the same smells of sweaty sheets and cigarettes, the same panic squeezing his heart in a cold fist.

  A cop car went by, and the red-faced one riding shotgun gave him the look.

  Yeah, you made me for a drifter.

  What was the word now? A transient. The cop squinted his way and Billy met his eyes. If they spoke, Billy knew exactly how the conversation would play out.

  I’m looking for work, Officer, he’d say.

  But the cop lost interest, bored and hot, and they drove on.

  Up the street he saw a hot dog joint. He’d told himself he wouldn’t eat until he knew where his next buck was going to come from—he was down to just a few dollars—but here was food, hot food, and he could smell the onions and the dogs and the Polish sausages sweating on the grill, and he shook his head. Almost time to stand on corners again. Hardest thing of all, you were either cut out for it or not, the ability to buttonhole strangers and feed them a line of crap—Hey, buddy, help a guy get back on his feet? Hey, man, I’m trying to get to (fill in the blank here but first you needed to know the names of places a guy on foot might be trying to get to). Hey, Miss, I just need to get a sandwich.

  No, I don’t want to do that again, Billy thought. I’ll shovel shit somewhere in this place first.

  Billy looked at the hot dog stand and began moving that way. He was just a few feet from the doorway of the hot dog stand when he saw the man in the suit—a white suit, an ice cream suit, his mother would have said, rumpled but a white suit nonetheless. And then the hat, a porkpie with the brim turned up all the way around, like something out of a gangster movie. A small man, but this man in the white suit moved up Division Street toward Billy in a rolling walk, in what might have been his tough-guy strut, deep in thought. So deep, Billy thought, that he was nearly talking to himself. He could see the man’s jaw moving. The man looked up, seemed for the first time to notice the hot dog stand, and stopped, jingl
ing his change in his pockets in that way that Billy’s father had, as though reminding himself he wasn’t broke yet.

  The man in the suit never saw the two kids step out from a doorway behind him. Two of them, one white and one black, and Billy knew the look and what was about to go down. The white kid bumped the man off balance, and the black one gave him a push, and he went down. The white kid reached down with a practiced move and came up with a wallet. Then they were off. They’d gone only a few steps when a cab driver in a turban came running toward them, a big, brown-skinned man with a black beard. The kids took one look, stopped on a dime, and went back the other way. The man in the suit was still on the sidewalk—he seemed stunned or injured. Then, as the kids ran past him, Billy saw a bony leg shoot out, and the white kid went down, dropping the wallet as he hit the pavement. He scrambled for the wallet, but the man in the white suit was on him like a cat. For a moment they were both reaching for it, even as they grappled with each other, and then Billy saw the wallet go flying off the curb. A passing pickup truck rolled over it. Billy walked over and picked it up. He turned in time to see the kid get to his feet.

  They faced each other, a wiry middle-aged man in a white suit and a tall, thin street kid in a sleeveless t-shirt. If asked, Billy would have said the kid had already made his second mistake—there was no reason to turn this into a fight with witnesses—no, an audience. A few yards up the street, the second thief had stopped at the corner, started to come back, and then had second thoughts. The small street action had drawn a crowd—four or five passersby, three of the cab drivers parked beside the hot dog stand, a woman with a dog. The second kid shook his head in irritation and took off.

  Billy hefted the wallet in his hand and told himself he was probably quick enough to take off without fear of pursuit. He’d have money. As though he’d heard the thought, the man in the white suit looked his way for the briefest moment in time, then turned his attention to the problem at hand.