Maxwell Street Blues (4 page)

4

On the way home I stopped at a Mexican restaurant on Lincoln where I was always welcomed as
Señor Gato
. In the back they ran a small
carnicería
where animal parts gringos never thought of eating were sold. For five bucks I could take home enough carnage to keep a certain domestic short-haired content for a month, along with a bag of tortilla chips right out of the oven. These were bootleg-quality chips, so thick and crunchy they had to have been illegal.

When I returned to my apartment, Punim was sleeping in the recliner. I started dividing her food into daily portions to be frozen and thought about my meeting with Kalijero. In a city with no shortage of murders, he seemed awfully interested in this one. Maybe he saw an opportunity to be a hero. Maybe he saw his picture in the paper for nailing crooks who had signed up for Snooky’s cleaning service. I tossed a chicken heart into Punim’s bowl and lay on the couch.

I awoke a few hours later in the murkiness of early evening. After throwing cold water on my face, I headed my car back to Bucktown. Of the numerous cars parked on Snooky’s street, the one with a human silhouette in the passenger seat caught my eye. I passed the house, drove a few blocks, and then circled back. I parked where the alley met the sidewalk. I turned off the lights, left the car running, and walked down the alley, trying to stay in the shadows. Old bungalow neighborhoods meant window air-conditioning units, each with varying degrees of humming and buzzing. This would work to my advantage. When I reached the backyard of the house next to Snooky’s, I opened the gate in the chain-link fence, stepped into the shadow of the neighbor’s garage, and waited. Within minutes, a figure briefly appeared from the side of Snooky’s house and then retreated back into the darkness. Sloppy. I got the feeling they didn’t want to be there. They hadn’t thought about the streetlamps giving away the guys in the house whenever they moved. I figured two inside, one in front, and one on each side of the house. They probably owed Kalijero favors.

About three feet of lighted yard lay between the garage shadow and the enormous oak tree said to be one of the oldest in Bucktown. It forked about ten feet up where a large hollow had formed. From a distance, you wouldn’t notice the opening because Snooky had glued together chunks of tree fungus to fashion a covering that fit snugly over the hole. The wooden bench next to the tree balanced precariously on twisted roots. I had to be careful. I figured the odds were in my favor that I could jump into the tree’s shadow without being noticed. If Kalijero’s goons saw me, I’d proceed to the front of the house and hope the old lady who lived next to Snooky remembered when he introduced us, and that she appreciated my stopping by to remember her neighbor.

I jumped across and waited. Nothing happened. No quick movements or whispers.
I carefully stepped onto the bench and pushed on the fungus door. It seemed stuck, so I shoved it with the heel of my hand and it popped off, bounced against my forearm, and fell to the ground. I braced for commotion but still nothing. A flame flickered from the side of the house. One of them had lit a cigarette. I’d have to tell Kalijero to stop using short-timer cops dedicated only to padding their pensions. As expected, Snooky’s notebook was double-wrapped in plastic bags. I looked around thinking this had been too easy, that somewhere along the line I would be challenged. But there would be no tests that evening. I stepped off the bench, walked through the gate, and within minutes was on my way home.

5

I flipped the switch that controlled two gooseneck floor lamps, one next to the couch and the other next to the recliner. The warm glow transformed my space into a cozy oasis in a dark city. I was thinking I needed to get some pictures on the walls when the specter of an old man caught the corner of my eye, and in that suspended moment before my heart flipped, I heard the words, “You’re dead!” and stumbled backward onto the couch. “You see how easy it is to get dead?” Dad said.

“Goddamn it!” I wanted to push the son of a bitch through the wall. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Why don’t you have that door rigged?”

“Don’t do that again. How’d you get in?”

“I use this to spread jelly.” Dad showed me a butter knife and then tossed it on the wood coffee table.

“What do you want?”

“What’ve you got?”

“It’s been one day!”

“I’m your client who’s
paying
you. What’s that? You just get back from the library?”

I let my head fall back. I tried to calm down, tossing the notebook on the table and monitoring my heartbeat. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what I’ve got?” I said.

Dad picked up the book and sat next to me. After tossing the plastic bags on the floor, he took out his reading glasses. He turned a few pages, and a smile crept across his
mouth. He mumbled for a few minutes until he looked at me grinning. “I referred a lot of these guys to Snooky.”

I walked into the kitchen and returned with a pen and legal pad. “Write down which names you know and which you don’t. You know anyone called Milly?”

“Don’t know Milly,” Dad said and took the pad and drew a line down the middle of the page. He seemed pleased that I had asked for his help. On one side he started listing the alias “Guidos” he already knew about—J.J., Big A, Jackass.

“Jackass?”

“He worked for Borseti collecting coins from cigarette machines and jukeboxes. He had big pointy ears like a donkey.”

“Borseti owned the North Side machines?”

“Borseti owned bartenders. See this?” Dad pointed at a payment to Pulaski Vending. “This was a small operation. Borseti set up Pulaski as a company that collected for the bartenders. Bartender calls for dirty laundry pickup. Jackass gives bartender his cut and brings the rest to Snooky. Snooky gives Jackass a check to give to Pulaski for his services. Pulaski gives Jackass an envelope full of clean paper laundry.”

Dad licked his index finger and began turning pages. Occasionally, he would stop and write down some names and then resume. At the end of the book, he said, “Snooky had a more complicated system going on with your Milly, and with four other guys called Devil, Chance, Franky, and Butch. I don’t know these guys. The others I remember. Small-time stuff. Most of those guys were pussycats, regular Joes who had cash operations on the side that needed cleaning.”

“Any drug dealers?”

Dad sized me up as if about to tear out my throat.

“Don’t get ticked off. I can’t assume anything.”

From what we could tell, beginning in March, Devil had started giving Snooky two separate monthly payments of fifteen grand, which were then cleaned through Franky. I knew that meant Swanky Franky’s, a hugely successful hot dog joint and a longtime client of Snooky’s. From Franky’s, the money was split between several bank accounts, later to be wired back into Franky’s account before it was paid out to Franky’s “investors,” Milly, Chance, and Butch.

“All these account numbers,” Dad said. “That’s what they’ll want. The book should no longer exist—unless you get an emergency.”

“Tomorrow I’ll go see what Swanky Franky knows,” I said.

Dad appeared lost in thought until he said, “You see the picture of that college president Tate tossing the first shovelful of dirt? It was like he threw it on my coffin.”

I didn’t respond. What do you say to someone mourning the world of his grandfather? Then he said, “I’m sorry for scaring the crap out of you. But for chrissake, you gotta think of these things! If you’re gonna investigate murders, you don’t know what kind of bastards you’ll meet. There’s
nothing
people won’t do for money, Jules.”

Of course, he was right. I had been too cocky about this business. But for some reason, I didn’t care.

6

I awoke the next morning thinking about Audrey. Something about the combination of a beautiful woman and violently disturbing artwork I found hard to resist. And as I watched my oatmeal cook in the microwave, I thought our conversation should be resumed—over lunch, perhaps. But first I had to visit Frank to see what he didn’t know.

On the way to my car, I noticed a black Crown Victoria illegally parked across the street. At ten I arrived at Swanky Franky’s Clark and Halsted location and was surprised to find the door open. A Mexican kid mopping the floor told me in broken English they were not open yet, and I told him in broken Spanish I wanted to see
el jefe
. I sat at a table and watched the steady flow of pedestrian traffic pass Frank’s front door. You couldn’t find a more perfect place to hide fifteen grand each month. A short, pudgy, gray-haired man emerged from the back wiping his hands on a white apron covered in the pastels of fast food. I recognized Frank from his newspaper ads boasting foie gras hot dogs and fries cooked in duck fat. I could tell by his expression he was going to be a lot of fun. About ten feet from me, he shouted, “We open at eleven o’clock.”

I introduced myself and said I wanted to talk about Snooky. “He’s a dead fuck and I’m gonna have a line out the door in an hour. That’s all there is to talk about.”

I guess when you net six figures from liver sandwiches you can talk that way to strangers. “Did you ever examine or question his accounting methods?” Even I knew what a stupid question that was for a guy like Frank.

“Why the fuck would I? That’s what I paid him for.”

“So you had no idea he laundered money through all those dead pigs you sell?”

Frank’s eyes widened, and he looked as if he were choking. “What do you mean?” he whispered.

“I mean he took someone else’s money and blended it with yours so nobody would notice.” Frank sat down, red-faced and panting. I almost felt sorry for him.
“You’re not in trouble, Frank. I’m just trying to find out whose money he was hiding.”

“Did he take my money?”

“He was hiding someone else’s money—to avoid taxes.”

“Who are you again?”

I took out my license and handed it to him. He stared at it and gave it back. “I don’t know shit. Snooky would show up every month, I would give him my financial stuff, and that was it. A few times a year, we went over taxes and profits and payroll and that kind of stuff. But I swear to Christ we never talked about hiding money—he wasn’t stealing from me, was he?”

I thought of all the suffering that went into producing the sandwiches that were making Frank a rich man. I said, “Who can say for sure?” Then I gave him one of my cards and suggested he consult a tax attorney in case the IRS came knocking. Even Swanky Franky had to suffer sometimes.

* * *

July is the season when Chicago’s grime hangs in the air, clogging your pores, rendering antiperspirants useless. I could feel my face morphing into a giant blackhead as I approached Taudrey Tats. Once inside, I saw Audrey drawing a broken heart on the left pectoral of a brawny client lying flat on his back in The Kitschen chair. She wore a black T-shirt and black jeans. A bald-headed kid with a lightning bolt meandering across his skull sat on a bench paging through
Skin & Ink
. On his shoulder was the unfinished face of an owl. Both the owl and the kid looked pissed off.

I watched while sitting in the loveseat that bordered the waiting area and her work space. She was still coloring when she said, “A little busy right now.”

“I’m interested in a tattoo,” I said.

Audrey said nothing and continued working. A few minutes later she told Brawny to take five and motioned for me to follow her. She led me to another closet-sized room that had a small wood table with a tiny lamp on it and a folded-up massage table.

“I can’t just drop everything at a moment’s notice.”

Her anger was unconvincing. “I apologize. I was in the area so I thought I’d stop by and see if we could meet for lunch.”

Audrey stared at me for a moment and said, “If you’re looking for a girlfriend, I doubt I’m your type.”

“I’m looking for a murderer, and you have no idea what type I prefer.”

“Of course,” she said. “The pain over Snooky is still very close to the surface for me, and when I saw you walk in, it bubbled up.”

That sounded rehearsed, but I played along. “I’ve heard the fastest route through pain is straight ahead.” Definitely rehearsed, but I saw the beginnings of a smile. “Just give me one last conversation to wrap things up, and I promise to leave you alone.”

She sighed. “Come back at one,” she said and walked away.

7

When I got home I saw the Crown Vic still illegally parked. I had enough time to clean up, offer a liver to Punim, and check messages. “May I suggest, private investigator, you acquaint yourself with cell phone technology …” Kalijero was checking in, as if we were partners. He had called an hour earlier, wanting to compare notes. He implied he had information. My technological investments consisted of a 26x optical zoom digital camera and a digital pen recorder. Although I did own a cell phone, I had yet to give myself over to it. I had control issues to work out. I erased the message and watched Punim devour a liver. I thought about Kalijero’s attention. It was not flattering. I’d get back to him eventually, but for now I’d play hard to get.

I returned to Taudrey Tats freshly showered and stubble free. Audrey was working on Lightning Bolt’s owl, now remarkably detailed and lifelike. Her ponytail hung over one shoulder, which allowed me to study the curve of her neck. Her T-shirt was short and untucked, offering a landscape of the small of her back. Minutes later, the tattoo machine stopped buzzing.

“There you go,” she said and held a mirror about six inches from Lightning Bolt’s shoulder. He seemed pleased with what he saw, and she escorted him out the front door without taking any money. She adjusted the clock on the “Be Right Back” sign to return in forty minutes then began dragging a heavy blackout drape across the front wall, eclipsing even the front door.

“You pull that across every time you leave?”

“You think all that expensive equipment was just waiting for me when I showed up? No point in tempting any window shoppers with thieving on their minds. Also, I have clients who need to feel secure when I’m working on certain areas of the body.”