Maxwell Street Blues (2 page)

A year after Dad got busted, Mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died six months later. My father’s associates invited me to move in with them, since Dad already shared a much bigger house with hundreds of guys wearing orange jumpsuits. As a child I had spent many summer afternoons at one or another of these uncles’ houses, learning the art of opening the door without letting someone in unless they answered the right question. I also became proficient at stuffing piles of cash into shoeboxes and stacking them in the hollow space under the stairway. “You’ll grow up to be a good earner,” they liked to say. But I wanted to live with Snooky.

I’d probably be dead or in prison if not for Snooky. He talked me into going to college, even drove me down to Champaign every fall to make sure I got settled in. Snooky wasn’t thrilled I chose investigations as a career, but that didn’t stop him from setting me up with Sid Frownstein, a kind of legendary hard-boiled snoop from the old school who had deftly walked that equivocal line between investigation and manipulation until he retired to a lakefront condo and a hobby of restoring antique cars. It was Frownie who first told me stories of my family’s infamous past. When Frownie became my mentor, Dad wrote me his last letter, the one in which he threatened to break out of prison and beat my ass if I followed in Frownie’s footsteps. From that point on, I had no doubt what my career would be.

“They found his body on a pile of construction debris,” I said, reading from the article. I noticed a small photograph of the heap next to an advertisement for cosmetics. “Three hundred and fifty dollars in his wallet. Credit cards untouched. And what the hell was he doing on Maxwell Street? Snooky had no dealings on the South Side.”

Looking out the window, Dad said, “I thought you never talked business.”

I answered through a lump in my throat. “Payback for setting me up with Frownie? You want to buy my silence for two grand?” I didn’t know if I meant it.

Dad turned and stared at me as if reading the words off my forehead. “I don’t believe my ears. Is this really how you turned out?”

“Snooky liked how I turned out.”

“Snooky was like a son to me—you know that! You think I’d
kill
him? Your father’s a
killer
—that’s what you think?”

I didn’t answer. If Dad killed people, I wouldn’t have minded that much—although his killing Snook would’ve pissed me off.

“Sixteen years later you show up to tell me Snooky’s dead. What else you got?”

Dad sat back down in the recliner and started rubbing his forehead. “I want you to find out who killed him and why.”

Tears spilled out of my eyes. “Suddenly you trust me with this?”

“Snooky was family. You can only trust family with finding the truth. You may hate my guts, you may hate where you came from, but I think you’ll be honest.”

“I never said I hated where I came from—whatever that means.”

“Well, we’ll see. Once you start investigating murders, history has a habit of getting in the way.”

“We were a family of petty criminals. Who gives a shit?”

Dad gave me a savage look. He wanted to address my comment directly but instead said, “Christ, what you don’t know. What you don’t
see
. But like I said, I think you’ll be honest. And if I’m paying you, that’s the least I expect.”

I had always imagined my first murder case would arrive via bereaved widow or suspicious life insurance company. But in that moment, everything seemed appropriate, if not logical.

* * *

The next morning, before heading to Sheridan Road, the passageway into the land of leafy communities dotting Lake Michigan’s beaches, I wasted twenty minutes in the muggy July heat trying to remember where I parked my 1983 Honda Civic. I was a son of the North Shore, but the territory neither held a special place in my heart nor evoked pangs of nostalgia. Having gained entrance through the ill-gotten dividends of my father, I considered myself an ersatz alumnus.

Frownie lived in a five-bedroom penthouse with spectacular views of the
shoreline. After Frownie cut me loose, he said his door would always be open. He had that broad, uneducated Chicago accent straight out of central casting. “Come here, ya little schmuck,” he said when I appeared at his door. He grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me to his chest. His viselike grip defied the appearance of a skinny geezer old enough to remember Prohibition. He power-walked five miles a day up and down the beach—in any crappy Chicago weather. His scrawny arms were made of rebar. “C’mon, I wanna show you somethin’.”

I followed him from his apartment into the underground garage to a row of perfectly restored antique cars. “This is my latest baby,” he said. “Lincoln KB Convertible Coupe, 1933 …”

When he finished describing how he copped his first bare breast in the rumble seat of the same car, I said, “Nice, Frownie. Can we go upstairs and talk?”

You’d think a man whose career earned him the trust of drug dealers, killers, pimps, and police chiefs wouldn’t be so sensitive. “I’m just an old fart, is that it?” Frownie said. “I got nothin’ better to do than bore young pricks like you?”

“I need to talk business.”

Frownie smiled. “I know. Let’s go.”

As we walked to the elevator I thought of our first meeting, how he demanded I explain why a North Shore college boy wanted to become a private investigator. A final exam had never been so mentally exhausting. I would say something like, “I want to help people get peace of mind,” and he would snarl, “Don’t give me that helping people crap! Be a nurse if you want to help people.” This went on for what seemed like hours. Not until I lost my temper and shouted, “I want to be out in the dirty stinking city full of scumbags, and be my own boss, looking for whatever, telling someone to go fuck themselves” did Frownie begin to take me seriously.

Everything in his condo looked gloriously vintage; nothing looked old. The maple draw-leaf dining table, the mahogany console, the Art Deco couch and chair. Even the square wooden “High Fidelity” box looked as if it had just been purchased new. I fingered through the vinyl record collection. The sleeves were hardly worn, the corners barely frayed. Glenn Miller and the like were well dusted and in their prime.

I sank into the leather couch while Frownie stood with his back to me and poured a drink from his custom walnut and granite bar. “You started drinking yet?” Frownie said. When I hesitated, he said, “Ya gotta start drinkin’, Julie. You can’t go into a saloon and order ginger ale. Nobody’s gonna take you seriously.”

“Relax, I’m a drinker,” I lied.

Frownie handed me a tulip-shaped glass half-filled with an amber-colored liquid
and sat across from me in a high-back parlor chair. I watched his nose hover a couple inches from the rim before he carefully swished the fluid around and sipped. I imitated his routine, pleasantly surprised by the warm smoky flavor.

“Ever had single malt?” Frownie said.

“Many times,” I said, and Frownie laughed because we both knew I had lied again. “And another thing, I cuss a lot more than I used to.”

Frownie wasn’t impressed. We sat in silence for a few moments before he said, “You never worked a murder case with me. I didn’t train you for that—and for a reason!” Frownie’s words provoked an unexpected ache of sadness. A quivering lip gave me away. “And it ain’t
ever
a good idea to get all emotional on a case. You spent a few years following me around, asking questions. And you asked the right questions, good questions. That’s how I know you can do this job. But murder is a whole different game.”

“You and Dad are talking now?”

“I still read newspapers. It’s a coincidence you show up a few days after Snooky gets two in the head?” Frownie took another sip. “Too bad. He was a good man.”

“He was a lot more than just a good man to me,” I said.

Frownie shrugged. “You swim with sharks long enough, you know what can happen. He got a lot of cash pushed his way. You give them a reason to suspect something, and you’re finished.”

Snooky may have been a pot-smoking money launderer who learned to play the role of the criminal’s bean counter, but at heart he wasn’t a wise guy who in his spare time hung out at titty bars and played poker with greasy hoods. He started with my dad’s earnings and from there gained a reputation. His bread and butter was always the North Side retailers who didn’t have time to worry about estimated quarterly taxes. Bookstores, dress shops, cafés, comic-book sellers—those were
his
people.

“I’ve been asked to take his case.”

“Investigatin’ murder is a hell of a lot different than lookin’ for lost kittens. Your name—”

“Dad already warned me.”

“Maybe changin’ your name—”

“Forget about it.”

“That’s what I thought.” Frownie took a long sip and gulped hard. “Even if I wanted you to start investigatin’ murders, this ain’t a good one to get your feet wet on.”

“I should wait for a good murder?”

“Don’t give me this good-and-bad shit. Sometimes it’s obvious; it’s cut-and-dried. A guy was screwing his neighbor’s seventeen-year-old daughter, and then one day
his battered body is found propped against a pillar on Lower Wacker Drive. The moral to the story: sniffin’ around the wrong sandbox might get you buried.”

Frownie walked to the bar and poured himself another drink. “Snook handled
money
,” he continued. “Lots of it. There ain’t no bigger sandbox in the world than the one full of cash. That’s one serious goddamn sandbox.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you know—as a favor,” I said. “Gimme a push in the right direction.”

“I don’t know shit, Julie, I’m retired. It doesn’t take a private investigator to know Snook was too nice. He trusted too many people. Why the hell a mild-mannered nice-lookin’ guy like that didn’t just stay legit and settle for a good livin’ is beyond me.”

Silence again. Then I took my largest sip of the single malt, waited for the fumes to finish meandering through my nasal cavities, and said, “He got a thrill from being around sketchy people. I remember being home from school during the summer, and we would hang out in his basement smoking pot. It was nice and cool down there. Snooky would tell me he worked only for interesting people. He had a natural gift with numbers, but it was the personalities that made the job interesting. The fringy ones he liked best. Gaining the trust of thugs turned him on.”

Frownie drained his whiskey, smacked his lips, and gently placed the glass on the coffee table between us. “Walk away from this,” he said, sounding a touch irritated.

“We know for sure who clipped him?”

“If your old man was speaking to me, I’d tell him to nail your ass back to the high chair. Snook handled money. Money puts the single malt in these glasses, but one day you take a sip and realize you just drank poison. Snook knew that.”

“Snooky wasn’t a thief.”

“How do you know? You think a man handlin’ millions of dollars year after year don’t get cocky? It only takes one time, Julie, one time stickin’ your hand where it don’t belong and you’re done. There’s no big mystery here. Snooky fucked up and he paid the price.”

I would receive no blessing from Frownie this day. But after another round of dead air, he said, “You better start carrying, you know.”

“I still have the Colt I found in the trunk of Dad’s car all those years ago.”

Frownie sighed. “That gun’s older than you. Make sure you know how to use it.”

2

My investigation would start with Audrey, who owned a tattoo shop on Armitage called Taudrey Tats, a cozy storefront operation devoted to the cheap and gaudy. On the front door it said, “Sole Proprietor and Mistress of Poor Taste, L. Audrey Moreau.” When I walked in, she was standing in the rear with her arms crossed, staring at sheets of black-and-gray drawings hanging from a rack. A sign that read “The Kitschen” hung from a crossbeam. Photos of her work covered the walls. A well-muscled shoulder adorned with a golden retriever carrying a giant crucifix in its mouth caught my eye, as did a buttock decorated with Jack Frost roasting on a spit operated by a humanized chestnut.

As I approached the work space, she glanced at me and said, “Yes?”

Of medium height and slender like a dancer, Audrey wore her silky black hair in a long ponytail. Her forehead was hidden by bangs that accentuated large black eyes. She exuded loveliness. A sleeveless black dress reaching mid-thigh iced this lovely cake. Even her fancy ballerina slippers were black. She had the wondrous expression of a little girl. I guessed twenty-two, although I would’ve believed sixteen. Across her right shoulder I saw a single tattoo depicting moon phases, beginning with a full black circle and progressing to an almost full waxing gibbous.

“I’m Jules Landau, a private investigator. I’d like to ask you about Charles Snook.”

“You mean Snooky,” she said and giggled before returning her attention to the rack.

“I mean Snooky.”

She removed one of the drawings and placed it on a light box. “Uh-oh, what did he do?” she said.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

She gave me her full attention. “You’re a private investigator?”

I showed her a copy of my license. She mouthed my name. “I’ve never met a private investigator. Do you have neat spy gadgets like a cuff link that takes pictures or something?”

I played along. “No, but I’ve got a pen that can record conversations. And I’ve never met a tattoo artist.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone covered in tattoos. What did
you
expect?”

Audrey thought for a moment. “Definitely not anyone tall and thin like you. Older. Uglier. Heavier. Wearing a hat. You’ve got such a baby face. How long have you been doing this?”

“Eight years. Five as an apprentice, three on my own—but this is my first murder
case.”

That was shockingly unfair. Audrey stared at me, and, if possible, turned paler. She sat down in what looked like an antique hydraulic dentist’s chair.

“When?” she whispered.

“I’m sorry. I should have given you a little warning.”