Peerless Detective Page 4

  The fighters circled in that old minuet of the street, the kid with his hands hung low, they all fought that way now—Muhammad Ali had ruined an entire generation of street fighters who all thought they could box with their hands down around their waists while they bounced and boogied. As Billy watched, the kid began dancing and bobbing and moving his head, and looked startled when the man in the suit cracked him in the mouth with a stiff left. The kid licked his lip, glared, and waded in throwing wild punches. One grazed the small man along the side of his face, but the others caught nothing but the air. The man in the suit moved steadily to his left, and just when the kid adjusted his stance to this movement, the man shifted his feet and began circling to the right. He threw the jab again, and another one, and then the right hand, which caught the kid on the cheek. The kid threw another roundhouse and took a punch in his eye, a perfect straight right, and the eye started swelling immediately. The kid shook his head as though this might make the swelling go away. The man came inside then, moved inside the kid’s reach. The kid threw a half-hearted punch at the air, took a fist in the mouth, and then bolted. A heavy-set bystander gave chase but stopped after a few paces, panting and grinning.

  Billy waited as the short man patted and smoothed his now-abused costume, put the hat back on, and gave it a little pat. He straightened his tie, tucked at his shirt cuffs, brushed dirt from his white trousers. He missed the place where his knee had hit the pavement.

  The turbaned cab driver said, “Are you all right, sir?” and the man in the suit held up a hand and nodded.

  “No problem. And thanks.”

  “You did good,” the cab driver said, and the man shrugged.

  The man in the suit looked around for the wallet—no, he knew exactly where the wallet was. He looked for Billy. Billy held up the wallet and stepped forward.

  “Here you go.”

  The man glanced at his wallet and then looked Billy in the eye. He grinned, but Billy had caught the look that preceded the grin. It had passed in the merest fragment of a second, but Billy knew this one, a measuring look, as though by looking Billy in the eye this man in the unlikely suit could tell if he’d taken anything out of the wallet.

  “Thanks.” He took the wallet and made a show of wiping it off.

  “A truck rolled over it. If you got credit cards in there…”

  “Nah, no plastic for me. I’m a guy that pays cash.” Now he looked in the wallet, held it up. “Doesn’t look like they got anything.”

  “Good,” Billy said and turned to leave.

  “Hey,” the man called to him. “Thanks.”

  He was holding out his hand. Billy shook it, and the man came up with a small vinyl packet from which he extracted a business card.

  “Here, take this. I’m just around the corner on Wells. My, ah, place of business, I mean. I’m Harry Strummer. If I can do anything for you—” He squinted as though to get a better look at Billy. “You looking for work? If you’re looking for work I could make some calls.”

  For the first time Billy Fox was embarrassed.

  To hide his embarrassment he looked at the card. It said “H.A. Strummer, President.” Below this was the name “Peerless Detective Services,” and just below that, as though it explained the name of the firm, the card promised “Discretion, Professionalism, Persistence. Licensed in three states.”

  Billy bit back a sudden impulse to ask which three states. Instead he just nodded and said, “Okay. Thanks. I’ve got a couple things going right now—”

  “Oh, sure, sure. Maybe sometime down the road, you’re looking for something, give me a jingle, I’ll get on the horn. Smart guy like you, there’s a lot out there.”

  Billy heard that note in the voice, that Good-time-Charlie salesman’s note that said he was bullshitting and they both knew it, and the question came out as if of its own volition, “How do you know I’m smart?”

  “Your eyes,” Harry Strummer said, as though this was obvious, and Harry Strummer’s own eyes said he was serious.

  Billy stopped himself from asking what else Harry Strummer could see there.

  “Okay, thanks,” he said, and left. At the next corner, he stopped to wait for the light and shot a quick glance over his shoulder. The short fellow in the ice cream suit was walking toward Wells Street, hands in his pockets, looking at the traffic. But he hadn’t gone very far. He’d stood for a while and watched Billy.

  • • •

  For the next four days, Billy pushed himself as hard as possible to turn a fast buck, and he wasn’t fussy how he did it. He made long, aimless circuits, asked questions in diners and gas stations, found places where work might be available with no questions asked, then walked back and forth like a street-walker showing her wares until someone asked him some variation of, “Hey, you looking for work?”

  And always Billy remembered his time in Denver and the answer was, “Hell, yes.”

  On Jackson, in front of a rooming house, he watched a couple of tired, thin men wrestle with the contents of a moving van until the guy in charge asked him if he wanted to make a couple bucks. He spent the morning unloading and carrying boxes and furniture that might have killed both the winos on the man’s “crew.” The guy gave him twenty bucks. He spent an hour pacing a stretch of Halsted that seemed to be an unending line of Greek restaurants until a harried-looking guy came out of a doorway and asked him if he wanted to earn some money. Billy followed the man into the paved-over yard behind a tavern and helped him carry out a succession of old beer coolers, piles of pipe, hard-used tables, and a rusted-out ice machine. He spent the next day helping the man and his brother gut the old tavern. They paid him cash.

  He found a cheaper room on Wilson Avenue. A sardonic-looking man took his money and said “Welcome to Uptown. New in town?”

  “Uh, yeah. Just got in.”

  “Watch yourself.”

  Here again, in this new part of a strange town, he sought out work—and work there was—day labor, hiring men out of a storefront. He took a forty-five minute trip out to an abandoned warehouse with a dozen other men on a bus that stank of sweat and muscatel-breath, carried out old equipment, and ripped out drywall and rotting wood. For this work, the day labor outfit took a chunk out of Billy’s modest earnings. He kept little money on him and hid the rest in his room, rolled up in an empty Vaseline jar. Another day at this warehouse, then two more days riding the wine-stinking bus out to another place where he and the rest of “the crew” unloaded trucks in the heat. The first day on this job, one of the older men fainted. Billy fetched water for him, then helped the man to a sitting position. The man waved off the idea of an ambulance and the foreman walked away. Billy watched the old guy gulp down water.

  “Help me up. If I can get on my pins, I’ll be fine.”

  Billy held him up, startled at how little the old man weighed. He put an arm around the old man to steady him and could feel his ribs, his spine. He wondered how a man got to this place in life, and he thought of his father. Billy thought it more than likely that the Old Man had ended up like this, living on the far final edge of life. He looked around and was reminded that he was the only member of the crew under fifty. After a couple of days, the old man did not show up for work with the crew. A day or so later the foreman said he heard the old man had died.

  The Wilson Avenue rooming house was a dead-end place just up the street from a school. He told himself this was temporary. It was smelly and crowded and at night the halls were filled with radio noise and snoring, but no one bothered him. One or two of the older men on his floor nodded when they saw him, and the wizened little man at the far end always spoke, said something about the heat, cackled about the street noise. Gradually he came to understand that for some of the men in the building—there were few women—this was probably their last move. They’d stay in this dank, musty place with its ripe-smelling hallways until they died. The first time this thought struck him, it was followed immediately by its logical conclusion—that if he was alre
ady staying in a place like this, there might be no future.

  I won’t stay here, he told himself. I won’t die in a place like this, and I won’t sleep on the street again.

  But for the time being he was here, and he learned to make do with the limitations of the building. The toilets and showers were in a long, narrow room at the end of each floor, and it was here that he frequently passed the other men on the floor. Some of the men had nothing to say to him, while others were friendly. One of them, a tall black man with a shaved head, pointed out that the showers made the difference.

  “A man can’t stay clean, he’s gonna lose his self-respect. You got to be able to shower.”

  The hallway smells told him about his neighbors—they smoked, all of them, and filled the hall with a bluish-gray cloud that seemed to grow denser late at night and in the early morning. One of them—perhaps the guy two rooms down, a young white man with a goatee and tattoos, was a pot-smoker, and added that earthy aroma to the blue cloud. They cooked in their rooms, on hot plates, and a certain burnt-bread odor told him at least one had a toaster. He smelled eggs, bacon, fried onions, and once in a while a very special rancid odor that he recalled from his youth, when his father would fry bologna on a skillet and make rank-smelling sandwiches.

  When he entered the rooming house from the rear stairs, he saw the back windows of the rooms on his side of the floor. The windowsills were crowded with the small pleasures of a solitary life in a rented room. His neighbors lined their windowsills with mustard and catsup bottles and squat jars of mayonnaise and pickles. It seemed the longer a man had lived on his own, the greater his collection of window condiments.

  On his own windowsill Billy kept a mustard jar and a couple of bottles of soda. On the unsteady dresser in his room he kept a loaf of bread, a jar of instant coffee, and a plug-in plastic coffee pot that another old-timer sold him for a dollar.

  He tried not to focus on his room. He understood this was no way to live. And it seemed he wore his worry on his face. A black man whom he’d merely said hello to once or twice looked at him in the hall one morning and said, “Cheer up, babe, you ain’t gonna be here long.”

  The plan was simple—he would establish himself in this town so that he could act and think like a native, make sense of his search, be systematic. Logical. And so he worked and put away his cash and pounded the streets and stood on corners and eyed the crowds. In the back of his head he understood the improbability of finding her like this, yet he was unable to stop.

  When he wasn’t working, Billy walked endlessly, covered half the length and breadth of the vast city, so huge it was beyond his imagining. The lake alone taxed his credulity. There seemed no farther shore to it, and he thought he might someday try to walk all the long way around it, just for the chance to see what lay at the far side, but the beaches stopped him. Sometime in the colder weather, when the beaches were empty, he would try to see what lay across the big lake.

  And the city itself was like nothing he’d yet seen. Several times he lost his bearings, got himself turned around so completely he had to find the sun to determine where the lake was, the lake that anchored all of it to the east. The big diagonal streets trashed the logic of the orderly street grid and confused him greatly. Once, he managed to lose his way so completely that he found himself laughing at the folly of it all, on a corner where all the signs were in Spanish. A cab driver saw his lost look and picked him up, taking him back to the rooming house. In the cab Billy made small-talk. The cabbie was from Ethiopia.

  “I’ve never met anybody from Ethiopia,” Billy said.

  “I never see nobody so lost, boss,” the cabbie said. He grinned into the rearview mirror and showed Billy a mouthful of perfect teeth. They both laughed.

  At the rooming house the cabbie waved off Billy’s offer of money. He frowned at the rooming house.

  “You be careful here, boss. This neighborhood no good. I know. I live here.”

  But he began to learn the streets, figured out the places to avoid, kept pushing, convinced that if he learned enough, got his bearings, he would be able to make hard sense of the place, ask the right questions in the right places, find what he’d come for.

  I can do this, he told himself again and again. If I spend enough time here, I can figure the place out and I’ll find her.

  And then what?

  A recurring scene—he would find her on a packed street and she’d look at him as though he’d grown horns, then she’d turn her back and walk away.

  Those first few nights in Uptown he strolled around, stopped on corners for a smoke, quickly learned which ones were already occupied by men with darker business. Twice he made mistakes, twice people followed him late at night down streets where he shouldn’t have been—first a pair of white guys in t-shirts and bandanas, then three black boys who couldn’t have been sixteen. Both times Billy thought of making a fight of it, but he’d been on the wrong end of enough street fights, and so he ran.

  On his night walks through the neighborhood he saw fights, fender-benders, fast kids being pursued by slow cops. He watched a woman in an African dress loudly berating a dark-haired man who tried unsuccessfully to look menacing in the face of her anger. Once he watched two men rolling around at the edge of the sidewalk. He thought of breaking up the fight but a man nearby shook his head.

  “They’re brothers,” he explained.

  A block from his rooming house was a school called Truman College. Several times he sat outside and smoked and watched the students coming and going, a wondrous mix of Asians, Latinos, whites, blacks, men in dashikis, women in saris, and Muslim girls with faces covered. Billy wondered if there was another place anywhere with such a dazzling mixture of humanity.

  Uptown had its smells, as well. On cooler nights the wind blew in from the lake and he could smell it, a mixture of fish and water plants, the air was heavy with it. Most times the streets smelled of fried food—peppers, grilled onions, meat seared over an open flame or stir-fried in a wok. He found an A&W with two menus—the traditional burgers-and-hot dogs menu and a second one of Persian food. Just up the street there was a storefront grill serving Ethiopian food. He tried it all, the Persian sandwiches with a spicy green sauce and Greek gyros, and he loved it all, though the Ethiopians nearly killed him with the hottest food he’d ever eaten—a wonderful plate of sliced beef and vegetables that went down like ground glass and made him gulp his water and ask for more from a laughing waitress who brought him a pitcher.

  And it seemed that Uptown was never quiet. Billy thought he’d never experienced so much noise—traffic, people shouting, laughing, a drunk haranguing the moon in a voice like a foghorn. Just outside the rooming house a sax player practiced a couple nights a week, occasionally joined by a guitarist and a bass player, and people tossed coins in a hat on the sidewalk for them.

  Just south of the rooming house was the great gray monolith of the ballpark, Wrigley Field. Several times, his walks took him past the ballpark. One of his few childhood memories of his father was a ballgame, a day trip to Detroit to watch the Tigers and the Yankees. Now he stopped outside the park and listened to the crowd noises, the players’ names announced over the loudspeakers.

  Just outside the ballpark, he again encountered young street drummers beating the life out of their plastic buckets. The air shook with the noise. The one in the middle winked at him—the same kids from his first day in town.

  Billy looked from the manic young drummers to a cop nearby.

  “Can they hear this inside the ballpark?”

  “Sure, you can hear it for a mile.” He nodded toward the park. “But the fans don’t mind. The Cubs have lost six in a row, so I think they’re all happy for the diversion.”

  Billy dropped a buck in the kids’ collection bucket and winked back.

  One evening, ranging far from his rented room, he found a pool hall. It bore the unlikely name of St. Paul Billiards, promised pool and sandwiches. A sign on the wall said some famous player had
shot pool there in the ’60s. And though every bell and warning told him the pool hall was a mistake, a pool hall in a strange town for that matter, he went in, found a decent stick, got a table, and started playing just badly enough to draw mild attention. He swore at missed shots, scratched a couple of times, and sent the cue ball flying off the table. A balding man who smelled of wine offered him a game for a quarter a ball. Billy took him on, stepped back when the man belched wine at him, then beat him easily. He looked around, grinning as though he’d done a great thing, and spotted the guy he was looking for. He was a well-dressed man in his twenties, thin, homely, and making up for his looks with his perfect hair and meticulous dress—dark blue shirt, light blue summerweight sport coat, perfectly shined shoes. A careful man of precise movements.

  “Nice game,” the man said.

  “Thanks. Wanna play?”

  “Sure. Five bucks?”

  Billy forced a look of discomfort, hesitated.

  “C’mon, a fin, I’m not that good,” the other man said. “Gentleman’s game.”

  “Okay.”

  They played, and for a time Billy paced himself so that he stayed with his opponent, who forced poor shots until the last couple of balls, then won handily. They played again double or nothing, then a third game, and the blond let him win this one.

  “So we’re even, huh?”

  Billy nodded, played Farmboy, and said, “Takes me a while to get goin’ sometimes.”

  “Hey, you’re not bad. Better than a lot of guys.”

  “Thanks,” Billy said, shuffling from one foot to the other.

  “Make it interesting? Twenty bucks?”

  Billy wet his lips, shrugged, nodded, and tried to look reluctant. They played three more games, two at double or nothing, and he won them all. Eighty bucks the dapper man owed him.

  He paused to get a Coke, looked around. Their game had drawn half a dozen onlookers, and he might have been worried except that the other hustler didn’t seem to know any of them. Billy was mildly concerned about a small man in a baseball cap and sunglasses watching them from across the room, head tilted and looking amused. But no one said anything. They played one more game, and Billy came from three balls down to win this one.