Maxwell Street Blues (3 page)

“When?”

“Four days ago.”

“How?”

“Shot twice.”

She ran into a tiny bathroom that doubled as a cleaning supply closet. After the initial retching gave way to heaving sobs, it occurred to me Snooky may have been banging this young thing. I stepped back into the gallery and waited for her to get her act together. I looked around. Not much to the place except four walls and a couple of closets, although in the back a cinder-block wall protruded about two-thirds into the room. Against one of the walls stood a long, narrow utility table. A black skirt hung from the edge. I guessed she used the space under the table for extra storage. The irreverent pictures on the walls defied the vulnerable figure she now presented. But observing Mother Goose selling her dog to a Chinese restaurant made me wonder why disturbing images should bounce around such a pretty head.

For some reason, it made sense Audrey would like Snooky, a man handsome in a pretty kind of way who loved expensive suits and had delicate features, including the kind of long eyelashes women dreamed of having. It used to annoy me how Dad occasionally stared at Snooky with a puzzled expression. When I finally told him to cut it out, Dad said, “I wonder if he’s queer?” Actually, whenever Snooky took me to any North Side club, younger women like Audrey always gravitated to him. He liked to tell reassuring stories when asked for advice on a career path or when one had reached a romantic crossroad. As the night would wear on, the conversation typically degenerated into hilarious tales of frustrated love or misguided fashion.

Suggestions that he would make a successful gay man infuriated Snooky. He loved women, but the ones he desired most did not sense in him the spicy recklessness required to take him seriously as a potential mate. When he did find companionship, she would be pretty enough for the moment but intellectually inferior. She would find him initially charming, while he focused on the possibility of getting laid regularly—“a short-term novelty that would soon be eclipsed by the emptiness of the rest of the day,” he said.

Audrey emerged from the closet keeping her gaze toward the floor. She smoothed her dress tightly around her legs as she lowered herself into the hydraulic chair. “I’m
sorry,” she said, dabbing a cloth at her mouth. “He was a male character I really liked.”

“That’s a strange way to describe someone.”

“Not if you understood our relationship. We are all just characters in a drama. We both had that view, which is probably why we got along so well.”

“You’re right about that. He was quite the storyteller. When did you last see him? Did he appear stressed?”

“Not stressed. Last Thursday we went through my weekly expenses like we always did. As usual he teased me about not keeping track of receipts, and I gave him grief about his wardrobe. Then we had lunch and chatted.”

“What time did he leave on Thursday?”

“About two-thirty.”

“He was found early Saturday morning. Did he mention anything new? Anything you hadn’t heard before, like a new client he’d taken on or an investment opportunity he was thinking about?”

Audrey sat up and crossed her legs. That she offered me an intimate glimpse along her inner thigh seemed of no consequence. “I can’t think of anything—” She stopped and brought a hand to her mouth and then blinked away a tear.

“Did Snooky ever discuss his clients?”

Audrey thought for a few seconds. “He talked in code about people, and then I would make up stories about them. I didn’t know who they were, but their names came right out of comic books. Big Moe, Panda Puss, Tuna Fish. Then we started making things up together. It was really silly, but he had this absurd way of talking about people that made me laugh.”

“What about context? Were these associates, middlemen? Was he taking care of their money?”

“I don’t know who they were. He would just say, ‘I work with this guy named Fuzzy,’ and then I would talk about how Fuzzy dressed and that his hair was flammable or that he lived in his mother’s basement.”

A young teenager walked through the door, and Audrey excused herself to speak quietly to him. She put her hand on his shoulder and steered him out of the shop. Then she locked the door and flipped over the “Closed” sign.

When she returned to the chair, she crossed her arms and let her head fall forward so her chin rested against her chest. She sighed deeply. Then she lifted her head and said, “Milly. Milly was our newest nickname for one of his clients. She was really nervous, so I called her Milly Mouse.”

“What was she nervous about?”

Audrey frowned. “He didn’t tell me those things. He just imitated the way she talked, and I made up stories and we laughed. She was probably nervous about money. I mean that’s what he did, right? He worked with people’s money?”

“He did,” I said, noting her sudden change of demeanor.

Audrey giggled. “I never understood all the different aspects of his job. He was so cryptic. ‘I help people avoid future negotiations,’ or ‘I’m an obfuscation manager.’ One day I asked him if he worked with crooks, and he said, ‘I have a rule. Every relationship is allowed either one secret or one lie.’ He never explained what he meant, but I didn’t care.”

She sat silently, apparently lost in thought. Before leaving, I put one of my business cards on the arm of the chair and said, “If something comes to mind, I hope you’ll call.”

Audrey didn’t look at me, but I think she nodded.

3

I could see the bottom of my front door as I walked up the staircase to the landing on the second floor. As a murder investigator, I wondered if I should put a piece of tape across the doorjamb. Frownie always said that crap was for movies.

I entered my apartment unprepared for a confrontation with a domestic short-haired cat unhappy I had run out of fresh livers, kidneys, hearts, and gizzards—her usual breakfast. She walked lazy circles around me while yowling and whipping her tail back and forth. A gift of regurgitated kibble on the kitchen table served as a reminder to visit a
carnicería
soon.

Punim had found me not long after I moved in, strolling through the kitchen door that opened onto the porch connected to the back stairway. I assumed she would come and go as she pleased during the warm months, but not until she chose to put down stakes in my apartment did I feel truly honored. I never saw a flyer posted anywhere nearby mourning a lost cat with a black dot of a nose inside a white mask. I officially belonged to her.

I opened the drawer where I kept emergency treats and gave Punim a pile of Kitty Krank, which she ate grudgingly, having become spoiled by raw organs. For myself, I put a slice of raw tofu on toast and topped it with sliced tomatoes, fake mayo, and toasted ground sesame seeds. I ate and thought about Snooky and Audrey. At first the age
difference made it painful to picture them other than as business friends, but after considering the irreverence of Audrey’s artwork, I thought maybe she needed to play out some kind of freaky subconscious daddy complex. I guess anyone is capable of creating disturbing images.

I would have to visit Snooky’s house. I had known this since Dad’s arrival. I probably should have gone there first, but my veneer was not yet calloused enough to look the sentimental beast in the eye, and I knew the cops would never find where he hid his book. I also knew it would serve me well to become tougher. I attached my shoulder holster, dropped in the Colt, and put on a linen sport jacket I had found at a thrift store. The coat looked good with jeans, and I couldn’t deny I felt pretty damn cool carrying a gun.

Snooky had bought his Bucktown bungalow before the Latin and Polish working-class families and their “artist” neighbors had been replaced by the moneyed swarm that would follow. He had ignored my father’s advice not to buy in that “trashy neighborhood,” and watched his investment grow tenfold. I assumed the extra key would still be hidden in the same place, but as it turned out, I didn’t need it.

* * *

A black-and-white had parked in front of the house. The uniform behind the wheel was reading the paper. It looked like the yellow crime scene tape had been tossed down as if nobody gave a damn who crossed it. I had just closed the door to my Civic when I noticed a man sitting on the front stoop watching me. He leaned back on his elbows looking very comfortable. I took my time crossing the grassy parkway to the walk that led to the front door. When I reached the first step, the man said, “Did you know the deceased?”

I recognized Detective Jimmy Kalijero because he had run the sting operation that busted my father’s illegal gambling enterprise. For several months, hidden cameras and undercover agents had observed Dad’s gaming tables. The local media reported tens of thousands of dollars were exchanged nightly, although Dad insisted his house was strictly low stakes—a little fun for regular Joes who couldn’t afford to go to Vegas—and that the police had exaggerated their big score to make themselves look good. Either way, Dad was charged with illegal gambling and received extra time since he had already been caught running a numbers racket, a few years before I was born.

I had grown sick of my peers tiptoeing around my family’s misfortune, so I
decided to embrace the shame as a badge of honor and hung the framed newspaper article on my dorm wall. Kalijero smiled proudly in the accompanying photo as he led my father and several other cuffed suspects to jail. A son of Greek immigrants, Kalijero stood about six feet tall with dark, closely cropped hair and a chest like the front end of a Mack truck. His prominent nose and brown skin gave him a rather heroic look. He wore a tight blue polo shirt with tan slacks. Around his thick neck hung a gold pendant of the Parthenon.

“Charles Snook was like family,” I said.

Kalijero stared at me a few seconds, and as if reading my mind said, “You look older, but you haven’t changed much, either.”

“You know me from somewhere?”

“There are pictures of you and your dad on the wall inside.” Kalijero stepped down and offered his hand. “Nothing personal. I was just doing my job.”

I shook his hand and said, “I would’ve preferred keeping my ten-speed Peugeot.”

Kalijero looked confused and then a lightbulb went off. “That was the Feds. They’d yank a Popsicle out of a kid’s mouth if they thought it was bought with dirty money.”

I nodded as if letting him off the hook, and said, “Are you investigating the murder or just in the habit of hanging around a dead man’s house?”

Kalijero shrugged. “We all go fishing sometimes—just to see what we’ll catch. I saw the pictures on the wall and thought, ‘What the hell. I get paid either way.’ ”

“So you caught me.”

“Downtown they want a half-assed attempt before chalking it up to a mob flunky getting clipped.” Kalijero fished a cigarette out of his breast pocket, lit up, and took a long drag. “I don’t know. This guy was pretty clean. Even our informants are puzzled. You here to get some personal things?”

“I’m here to investigate a murder.”

Kalijero laughed. “So it’s true?”

“What does that mean?”

“Bernie Landau’s kid’s a private eye. C’mon, it sounds
funny
.”

“No, it sounds
ironic
. Anyway, there’s no way in hell Snooky would’ve been stupid enough to steal from the mob. He cleaned their money, that’s all. And you knew that! You guys were kind of like friends.”

“Friends? I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, yeah, he was a likable guy and all. But we were still hoping to get a wire on him one day.”

“Never would’ve happened.”

Kalijero gave me one of those
you don’t know shit
looks, dropped his cigarette,
and rubbed it out with his toe. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Go in there and find something. I need a real lead or Snooky’s case is gonna be shit-canned real soon.”

Kalijero’s cooperative attitude concerned me, and when he didn’t follow me into the house, I became curious. In fact, everything about his being there made me suspicious as hell. I entered the foyer and almost fell into a pile of Snooky’s beloved Scandinavian furniture smashed into kindling and covered with chunks of his cherished Steuben glass animal collection. The air had a sweet antiseptic odor. The scene repeated itself throughout the house, including the kitchen, where chunks of the granite countertop shared the floor with splintered cherry cabinets. Also scattered about was the odd vial or glass pipe, something I had never before seen in the house. I left this pathetic scene for the basement, hoping to find some vestige of my childhood, but even that sacred room had been defiled. The saddest part of this whole mess was that the bastards who had tossed the place weren’t even lukewarm in finding what they wanted. I walked back to the front porch and saw Kalijero looking at me from the walk, smoking another cigarette. He took it out of his mouth and said, “I think someone was looking for something.”

“And you thought I’d get it for you.”

“You want to find a killer?”

“He showed me how to cook
bowls
, not books.”

“Are you sure that’s all he was cooking?” He took a glass pipe out of his pocket to show me.

“My whole life, all I ever saw was pot in his house. Something’s not right.”

Kalijero frowned and flicked his cigarette into a juniper bush. “I’m on your side, Jules. I don’t like seeing civilians blown away for no good reason. If he was skimming or playing around with the wrong money, then we’ll know why he got hit. And if we can follow where the money’s going, it could lead to a lot of bad guys going to prison.”

“Let me ask you something, Jimmy. If your closest friend had information written down somewhere that would send a lot of
bad guys
to prison, would he tell you where it was? Would he put a big fucking target on your forehead?”

Suddenly the Greek god turned into a little boy who got underwear for Christmas. His face darkened and he said, “I didn’t realize you knew everything already. You’re so goddamn smart, you’ve got it all figured out. Do me a favor, private investigator, and pretend I might be as smart as you.” Then Zorba flung one of his business cards at my feet and stomped back to the police car. How presumptuous to assume I would pick it up.