True Detective (23 page)

One of the men, sitting on a step with a Sunday
Tribune
next to him, had his suitcoat off, and his vest, and was wrapping some newspaper around his trunk, and then buttoned his vest over himself and the papers, and then wrapped some more paper around himself and the vest, before climbing back into the suitcoat.

He noticed me watching him, and had a smile left in him and shared it with me. "Keeps ya from freezin', they tell me," he said.

I didn't have a snappy answer. I managed to say, "Bet it does," and he said, "Gotta make sure you keep one over your heart."

"Oh?"

He shrugged. "That's if you plan on waking up."

"Ever see this guy?"

I showed him the picture.

He studied it. Said. "Any dough in it if I have?"

"No," I said.

"I haven't seen him. I wouldn't even've seen him if there
was
dough in it."

"Thanks for your trouble." I said.

"Don't mention it," he said, and spread out the rest of the newspaper and lay down on it. He didn't put any on top of him, like blankets, though: there was just enough wind to make that inadvisable.

I showed the picture to the rest of the squatters on Hamilton's pedestal. None of them had ever seen Jimmy Beame; most of them liked the looks of Mary Ann; some of them seemed past caring about the looks of a Mary Ann, even in an abstract way. I questioned some more men, who sat on benches along the lakefront, looking out at the nearly completed city of tomorrow where a sea of shacks had been, not so long ago. One of the men, a gray-complexioned middle-aged guy in hat and topcoat, both of which had cost some dough, though the topcoat's burtons were mostly gone, hadn't seen Jimmy, either, but suggested I get a copy of the photo made and then he could help me show the picture around, and could turn an honest dollar. I turned him down, without a twinge- like that old guy said. I didn't have enough money to do the job without covering my heart over, and with something tougher than newspaper.

I drove to the Hooverville at Harrison and Canal. It was a vista straight out of Krazy Kat: a surrealistic town of shelters built from tar paper and flattened tin cans, scrap lumber and cardboard boxes, packing crates and old car bodies, chicken wire and flapping tarps, anything the city dumps could provide, with an occasional old stovepipe sticking out at an odd. raffish angle. The hovels were rather neatly arranged in a landscaped setting, with walks carved out of the earth and some trees and bushes planted- barren now, of course, except for a couple of evergreens, one of which had probably served as a Christmas tree; no weeds or rubbish in sight, just a strange little town in the snow, many of its occupants huddling around trash-cans, fires in which burned a vivid orange against the gray-white day. This, and a number of other Hoovervilles near the railroad yards and in vacant lots around town, had been around long enough to have become more than a temporary stop: these people lived here, men and women and children, people who seldom were able to wash themselves or their clothes, but who carried themselves with a quiet dignity that said they would if they could. And from the number of children and pregnant women, life here seemed to be going on.

It was the Hoovervilles like this that were the most promising to me in this search: some of these people had been here well over a year, whereas the hobos of the city and the down-and-outers of Grant and Lincoln Park were transient. If Jimmy Beame had come here by freight, in which case he would just about had to have fallen in temporarily with tramps, he could very likely have come back to a Hooverville to spend the nights during his fruitless search for a desk in Tribune Tower. So it was the permanent residents of the city's Hoovervilles who had the best chance of having seen him.

Nobody at Harrison and Canal had ever seen Jimmy Beame.

I hit three more Hoovervilles, the outlying ones, and called it a Sunday. The next morning I tried the loading platforms on lower Wacker Drive, and none of the men there could identify the picture; neither could the men under the Michigan Avenue bridge. The Hoovervilles near the railroad yards were perhaps the best bet, but I got nowhere. I ended up in Barney's speak about seven Monday night and drank mm till I stopped seeing unshaven faces wearing battered fedoras.

Then I spent two days on the near North Side, going up and down North Clark Street with that goddamn picture in my hand. North Clark Street was not the place to go for a man tired of looking at hobos; it was. in fact, hobohemia. Ramshackle old buildings with halfhearted store fronts catered to the drifters who had been the soul of the street since before hard times, and would be after: peddlers and street hawkers had every corner and many spots in between all sewed up. Just a few blocks from here were the fancy shops of North Michigan Avenue, where wealthy women in furs and jewelry bought more furs and jewelry. But this was North Clark Street: pawnshops, whitetile restaurants, chop-suey joints, chili parlors, poolrooms, sleazy theaters, cigar stores, newsstands, secondhand stores, mission soup kitchens, flophouses; a dingy, shabby street that at night turned into a "little white way" of bright lights and hot jazz, with cabarets and "open" dance halls where lonely men and women from the rooming houses could get acquainted and maybe set up some light housekeeping for a week or a year, as well as tens-cents-a-dance halls, where the hookers plied their trade.

But the hobos shuffling these streets, filling the men's hotels and rooming houses, hadn't seen Jimmy Beame; at least not the ones I talked to. Or on LaSalle, Dearborn, State, or Rush streets; or the cross streets below Chicago Avenue, where dozens of flophouses had a bed- or something like a bed- for a homeless gent… assuming he had a quarter a night or a dollar a week. And a lot of people in Chicago didn't.

Didn't have a quarter, and didn't know who the hell Jimmy Beame was, either. That would seem to sum up the hundreds of unshaven, shabbily dressed men I showed that picture to.

I spent a day trying the flops along South Clark. South State, and West Madison- stopped in at the Dawes Hotel for Men. the skid-row charity hotel the General had founded in memory of his dead son. And got nowhere.

Back to North Clark Street. Between Clark and Dearborn streets, in Washington Square, in front of the Newberry Library, was Bughouse Square. If my father were alive, and down-and-out. he'd be here: at night, crowds of men would stand along its curbstones, listening to the oratory of whoever was atop the several soapboxes, propounding upon the favorite topics: the evils of capitalism, and the nonexistence of God. The more intellectual of the drifters and down-and-outers would tend to find their way here, this focal point for reds and I.W.W. sympathizers, intellectuals and agitators. My father would have been at home here.

During the daytime, the soapboxes stood vacant, mostly, and the benches and curbs were taken up by the same sort of unshaven faces I'd been looking at all day for days now (not to mention in my sleep). The major difference was a number of these shabbily dressed citizens were reading newspapers, not wearing them.

A young man on the down-and-out, disillusioned by his rejection from the great newspapers he so idolized, might well end up in Bughouse Square.

I asked several men and got a negative response; then a pale, younger one with wire-frames and longish brown hair seemed to know the face.

"Yes." he said. "I know who this is."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. It's Mary Ann Beame. She lives in a studio in Tower Town. She's an actress."

Great

"Yeah. Well thanks, kid."

"Isn't that worth something?"

"Not really."

"I'm not begging or anything. I just think since I identified the picture…"

"It's the boy I'm trying to find."

"Oh. Him I don't know. Why don't you look up Mary Ann? Maybe she knows him."

Til try that."

"I could use fifty cents. Or a quarter. I could use some lunch."

"Sorry."

"I'm not a hobo, you understand. I'm an inventor."

"Oh really." I started to move away.

He got up from the bench; he wasn't tall; his eyes were brighter than a puppy's- in terms of shine, anyway.

"I invented a lens," he said, and reached in a corduroy jacket pocket and withdrew a round thick polished piece of glass double the size of a silver dollar.

"That's nice."

"It enables a person to see things a billion times bigger than they really are." He held it up for the sun to bounce off it: the sun was under a cloud.

"No kidding."

"I ground it myself, with emery cloth." He was walking beside me. now; he leaned in and spoke in a hushed tone, touching my arm. "I've been offered a thousand dollars for it. I'm holding out for five thousand."

I removed his hand from my arm. carefully, with a polite smile; I even made some conversation: "How'd you find out that lens was so strong?"

He smiled. Smug. Proud. "I experimented on a bedbug. I put a live bedbug under this glass, and I could see every muscle in its body. I could see its joints and how it worked them. I could see its face; no expression in its eyes, though. Bugs don't have much native intelligence, you know."

"Yeah, I heard that. So long."

He was behind me now. but calling out to me. "You couldn't do that with an ordinary lens!"

No. you couldn't.

I drank too much rum that night, and decided I had to get rid of this fucking case before it turned me into a lush.

In a little over a week I'd be going to Florida; tomorrow. I had to see Mary Ann Beame and tell her I couldn't find her brother.

So the next afternoon I drove north on Michigan Avenue, past the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower and the Medinah Athletic Club and the Allerton Hotel, toward the landmark those skyscrapers now dwarfed: the old water tower, a Gothic churchlike building with its tower thrust in the air like a gray stone finger- perhaps a middle finger, considering the talk circulating of late that the North Side's sole survivor of the Great Fire was to be torn down to speed the flow of Michigan Avenue traffic.

The water tower, at Michigan and Chicago avenues, gave its name to Tower Town. Chicago's Greenwich Village, and was at the district's center- though the exact boundaries of Tower Town were a bit hard to define. It vaguely encroached on the Gold Coast, north of Division Street, but came to an abrupt halt at Grand Avenue, on the south. It sneaked west of Clark Street, and crossed Michigan Avenue to move eastward into Streeterville. an area named after a squatter who lived in a shack (but which now ran to some of the fanciest apartment buildings in the city)- State Street was its main north-south road, and Chicago Avenue bisected it east-west.

That's
where
Tower Town was;
what
it was was streets whose "quaintly" run-down buildings housed tearooms (Ye Black Cat Club), art shops (The Neo Arlimusc), restaurants (The Dill Pickle Club), and bookstalls (The Radical Book Shop). Above the shops were garrets and "studios," as demonstrated by the flower boxes hanging from sills above, and the
Studio for Rent
signs in some of the shop windows. Like most big-city "bohemias," there was an effort, conscious or not, to attract tourists, and shimmers; but on a cold Thursday at dusk, the wind blowing the snow around like a minor dust storm, its streets were empty of anybody but the young artists and students who lived here, and they tended to have hands burrowed in the pockets of their corduroy coats, moving forward without looking, which was what they were good at, after all.

I'd been to the Dill Pickle Club before; it was a landmark like the water tower. But I never expected to be back a second time. I hadn't been impressed by the garish nude paintings on the walls, or the dark, smoky dance floor, or the little theater that seated fewer people in the audience than onstage, or by the stale, paper-thin chicken sandwiches that passed for food.

Now here I was back at the Dill Pickle, sitting at a table, just me and a candle and no tablecloth, waiting for Mary Ann Beame, trying not to listen as at a nearby table three long-haired boys in denim and dark sweaters talked with two short-haired girls in long black skirts and dark sweaters. They were all smoking, all drinking coffee or tea. Each of them seemed to be carrying on his or her own conversation. One of them was discussing the superiority of his poetry to that of a friend's (not present) and went on at length to point out that if
he
were an editor he would have none of that shit in
his
poetry magazine; oh, Harriet Monroe might, but it wasn't good enough for
his
(nonexistent) magazine. One of the girls was discussing a recent showing of "primitive art" at the Neo Arlimusc by a sixty-two-year-old clothing peddler from Maxwell Street who painted Jewish sweatshop scenes on cardboard: "The artist's expression will out! Poverty-stricken, he seizes upon the only medium within his grasp!" A pale frail-looking male was denouncing Kipling and Shakespeare (to name two) but later spoke admiringly of Kreymborg, while another, better-fed male was telling of his landlady throwing him out because she couldn't understand anyone not having beds and chairs in an apartment, and also because he had long hair. The final girl, a
zoftig
brunette with a nice full mouth, pretended to be upset that she was prostituting herself by posing nude as an artist's model (outside Tower Town) for a dollar an hour; actually, she was proud of herself. I was about ready to check my wallet for a spare dollar when Mary Ann Beame floated in.