Maxwell Street Blues Read online

  “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.”

  “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 stori
es 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 a
bout 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.”