Windy City Blues (2 page)

Contentment and well-being had not been sensations overly familiar in my life. The farther I drove from Frownie’s condo, the less I held on to the warmth of his words. By the time I stepped into my office building’s lobby, the accustomed pessimism had returned and I realized that the four hundred square feet that made up my new office had become a refuge of sorts—from what, I wasn’t sure.

I settled behind my desk with the newspaper. A half hour or so later, a thin, boyish-looking man on the landing outside my office caught my attention. Early twenties, I guessed. The fact that the door was wide open and I was presently the floor’s only occupant added to the strangeness of his presence. He leaned against the wall next to the unmarked door of the room across the landing. His dapper suit was comically too large, as if he were a child dressed in his father’s clothes. He held his arms tightly against his chest, suggesting I had been the subject of his gaze for some time.

I lowered the paper and said, “Can I help you?”

The stranger’s expression changed to a serious grin. He straightened himself up, walked through the doorway, and extended his hand. Tiny ears held back neatly tapered blond hair. Blue eyes carried resignation and anguish, as if he were destined to carry a heavy burden. I shook his hand.

“You’re Jules Landau, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, and became somewhat annoyed when the stranger didn’t respond with an introduction but walked slowly past to linger behind me. I swiveled my chair around. “Do you mind telling me who you are?”

The man walked back to the front of my desk. “Isadore Himmel,” he said. “Call me Izzy.”

An ill-fitting name to match his ill-fitting suit. “So what do you want, Izzy?”

“What do I want? What does anybody want? The truth, of course.” Izzy’s posture gave him the appearance of leaning backward. His hands resided deep in pockets engulfing half his arms.

“I’m not in the mood for games,” I said. “Are you interested in hiring my services? If not, then take off.”

“Tell me,” Izzy said. “I was ten minutes or more outside your door. Yet it took that much time for you to question my arrival here.”

At some mental level, I’m sure I had been aware of someone loitering outside sooner rather than later, but an article about Asian carp invading Lake Michigan had engrossed me. “The door was open. What were you waiting for?”

“I’m supposed to hire a detective who’s not even curious? Are you sure you’re in the right profession?” His eyes narrowed.

Was this just some nut who had wandered in off the street? “Okay, Izzy. What is it you want to find the truth about?”

The little man strolled around the room, looking my almost bare white walls up and down as if searching for imperfections. He stopped to examine my framed credentials and said, “You heard about that code enforcement officer who was murdered?”

I searched my memory. “I don’t remember a cop being killed. When was this?”

“
Parking
officer,” Izzy said.

I’d never heard of a parking officer being killed. Had it happened in Chicago it would have been big news, if only to satisfy the grouchy multitudes who would revel in the murder of someone who wrote parking tickets. Even the most timid Chicagoan was only too happy to provide a scorching indictment of city parking policies. “You stumped me again, Izzy. When did this happen?”

“A week ago. His name was Jack Gelashvili. Viciously beaten to death near Foster and Western.”

“They got meters in that neighborhood?”

“The meters are innocent; he lived there.”

“So he wasn’t killed on the job?”

“Does that matter?”

“No, but it explains why I didn’t hear about it. You knew the victim?”

“No. But I want you to find his killer.”

I suppressed my instinct to see providential significance in Izzy’s offer of murder investigation number two, on the heels of my conversation with Frownie. “Why? There are hundreds of murders each year. What’s this guy to you?”

Izzy sighed loudly. “It’s sad that I need a reason to care about a fellow human being slaughtered practically in his front yard. But if you must know,
I
also live in the neighborhood, with my three-year-old twins. Noah and Carolin. They saw a crowd and an ambulance and police cars. They sensed something bad had happened and it touched their hearts. They’ll never be the same—I can tell. So you see, it’s my front yard, too, where an innocent man’s blood was spilled.”

“How
innocent
was he?”

Izzy shook his head in disgust. “Blaming the victim now? He was asking for it? I was there when they took his body away. You should’ve seen this young woman, a family member I assume, screaming, crying, beseeching over and over, ‘Why?’ And you ask only about his innocence?”

“I just wondered if you knew something about the guy. Who were his friends? What was he into? That kind of thing. And how did you find out about me, anyway?”

“The Partisan.”

Izzy referred to Ellis Knight’s article detailing how I’d solved Snooky’s murder while exposing rampant police and city hall corruption. The lengthy, purple-prosed feature received both praise and criticism for the writer’s use of omniscient narration to reveal the alleged thoughts and motivations of all major characters.
It’s the substance that matters!
Knight kept saying over and over throughout Snooky’s investigation, maniacally laughing through his giddy twenty-something demeanor. The article gave me an undeserved reputation as a murder investigator, but I saw an increase in finding birth parents and cheating spouses that allowed me to afford a small office on the top floor of a converted vintage four-flat in Old Town. The owner had successfully resisted the forces of change since its 1927 construction, leaving in place the magical qualities of musty air, scratched tiles, poor lighting, and neglected wood finish. The indifference cheered me up for some reason.

“I really don’t have a lot of experience—”

“That case gave you
momentum,
Landau. Exploiting momentum is what drives men like you to find answers. Not everybody has this genius.”

Genius? I understood neither the logic nor the premise of this statement. “It’s been two months. How much momentum could be left?”

“The potential is what matters. And I sense you’re a man with nothing to lose.”

Was he implying recklessness? “Ellis Knight’s article was more creative writing than facts. Maybe it’s Knight who has the momentum—w
hatever that means. No offense, Izzy, but I really have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

Izzy walked to the room’s only window and stared out over North Avenue. “My apologies,” he said. “The Boston Marathon bombing affected me deeply—the randomness of its victims in particular. That neighborhood was home to many. But that case was solved. Now there’s a murder on the block where I live. I need to know why a life was extinguished so close to where my children, my neighbors, and I lay our heads to sleep.”

“Okay, I get it. A corpse shows up on your doorstep. What did the police say?”

“Zilch. Nobody knows nothing. It’s as if bodies showing up in this neighborhood should be viewed as the new normal.”

“Bodies show up everywhere in every city. Usually, it’s only relatives or close friends of the victim who seek out a PI.”

Izzy reached into his breast pocket and took out an envelope. “There are fifty hundred-dollar bills in this envelope,” he said and dropped it on my desk. “There will be fifty more when you’ve found the killer. Is that enough to care more about this murder than my motivation for hiring you?”

I peeked inside the envelope. The nuance of Ben Franklin’s smile had two hundred years of capitalistic influence behind it. What chance did I have against such momentum?

“Yeah?”

Police detective Jimmy Kalijero answered his cell phone as if expecting a timeshare solicitation. Many years ago he ran the sting that nabbed my father for illegal gambling. On my dorm wall at college, I had the framed
Chicago Sun-Times
article with the photo of Kalijero smiling proudly as he led a row of cuffed suspects to jail. That Dad was careless enough to get caught pissed me off, but I had to admit I felt a kind of deviant prestige for having a jailbird father.

“Yeah, right, Kalijero, you don’t recognize my number or my voice.”

No response, then, “Oh, of course, it’s Landau calling. How completely logical because he calls me all the time because we’re such good pals.”

It had been two months since we last worked together, but I was still pretty sure we had spoken a few times since then. “I deserve the guilt trip, Jimmy. I promise to call more often.”

“What do you want, Landau? And no, I still can’t accept a son of the Chicago Landau family as a legitimate private investigator.”

Kalijero referred to my family history, starting with Great-Granddad, who made his fortune among his immigrant brethren of pushcart peddlers working the open-air market of Chicago’s Maxwell Street. From this miserable residue, Great-Granddad guaranteed a dependable stream of extorted money and earned the monikers of iron-fisted boss, political dictator, chieftain—and scoundrel. In addition to ward committeeman, he also held offices with fancifully arcane titles such as city collector and city sealer of weights and measures. Some of my relatives called him the smartest man they ever knew and pointed to his chauffeur-driven limousine on a municipal salary as proof. Others pointed to the same thing and damned him as a gangster. Regardless, those who knew of him understood why Great-Granddad’s scandals inspired passion sixty or more years after the man died penniless in my father’s childhood bed.

“Jack Gelashvili ring a bell?” I asked Kalijero.

“Why should it?”

“Murdered last week near his home in Budlong Woods.”

“So why should I know about this murder out of six hundred or more stiffs we find each year?”

“Gelashvili was a parking officer.”

“Gee, what do you think the motive was?”

“Cold, Jimmy. He worked for the police department, asshole. How about showing a little respect for those that do the cops’ shit work? Would you like to spend your days writing parking tickets? By the way, he was off duty when they bashed his head in.”

I thought I detected a conciliatory grunt.

“You got me, Landau. I should’ve known about this guy. They probably had a special ceremony for him, but I haven’t been paying attention like I used to. I’m very nearly burnt out. I figure about fifteen thousand people have been murdered during my career.”

“You’re still relatively young for a Greek god. You got your pension locked up; why don’t you do something else with your life?”

“I wouldn’t know what to do—and I don’t need advice from you. How’s Frownie doing?”

“I’ve never seen him so carefree,” I said. “He stays in bed most of the day, but his spirits are high and his mind is razor sharp. He’s fighting to the end like it’s a game. ‘I’m not my body,’ he told me the other day. ‘Who needs a goddamn body anyway? I’m just a spark bouncing around my brain.’ ”

Kalijero chuckled and said, “Sure sounds like he’s losing it to me.”

His comment angered me for its small-mindedness. I wanted to like Kalijero, but that would require ignoring his unenlightened condition.

“How about finding out for me who’s on the Gelashvili case?” I asked. “See if I can chat with them a little bit.”

Kalijero sighed. “You think I can just snap my fingers and the whole goddamn department falls at my feet? I’m one of your contacts, is that it? Your man in the CPD…?”

Geez, what nerve had I hit? I let Kalijero rant awhile longer until I found a break and jumped in. “You sure are a surly son of a bitch, Jimmy. And it’s a damn shame you hate your life so much that you feel the need to shit all over someone who just wants to help find a little justice for some poor bastard who got wasted…”

It was my turn to rave, which I did with gusto, reaching deep into that angry bag of frustration we all carry around with us for such occasions. At what point the call dropped, I had no way of knowing.

At home the next morning, I ate breakfast and fired up my new laptop to search the
Republic
archives for Gelashvili. The article I discovered was barely long enough to warrant a byline. “Forty-five-year-old Jack Gelashvili of 2415 West Farragut Avenue, found dead from blunt force trauma near his home. Robbery motive inconclusive, although his apartment was ransacked. No one is in custody and Foster area detectives are investigat
ing.” Unmarried, living with his cousin and mother, Gelashvili, according to neighbors quoted in the article, had a pleasant personality and was an all-around terrific guy. No mention of what he did for a living. A glorified obituary, really.

The reporter’s name was Peter Ross. I called the
Republic,
then endured ten minutes of being transferred around different offices before someone figured out that Ross was a stringer and the Gelashvili article had been his first with the
Republic
. With great reluctance, I called Ellis Knight, my
Partisan
contact and an affluent white kid who had acquired an annoying fondness for ghetto slang.

Knight answered with, “Another exclusive exposé? You got a one-eight-seven? Already, already, already!”

“Calm the hell down. Why don’t you give Ritalin a try?”

“Why else would you call me? We gonna memorize Bible verses together?”

“Do you know a freelance reporter named Peter Ross?”

“Yeah, I know Ross. What do you want with him?”

“I want to ask him a few questions about an article he wrote.”

“What article?”

“How can I get in touch with him?”

“What article?”

“Try to stay calm. A guy got murdered and I’m looking into it.”

As if a dog could ignore a piece of raw meat. Knight exploded into the freaky, uncontrollable behavior that was his trademark, first begging for the story then saying I owed him for helping my career. It might be funny if it wasn’t true. On and on he went until I hung up.

As if on cue, the phone rang seconds later.

“Can you keep a goddamn grip on yourself?” I barked at Ellis. “Do you want to give it a try?”

“Don’t give me any orders, Landau,” Kalijero’s gravelly voice said. “I didn’t have to call you back. In fact, I don’t ever have to talk to you.”

“Sorry, Jimmy, I thought you were someone else. You want to yell at me some more?”

“Baker and Calvo.”

“Baker and Calvo?”

“The two detectives assigned to the Gelashvili case. They’re both a couple months from full pension benefits for a career of half-assed police work. That means they can do shit all day and it don’t matter. It says a lot that these two clowns got the case.”

“Meaning it’s low priority.”

“More like it’s
no
priority. And there was no special ceremony or acknowledgment for Gelashvili. It’s like the guy didn’t exist.”

“Why’d you call me back?”

“I don’t know. It’s not as if I want to be your drinking buddy. But that guy, he deserved better. I mean, he worked for the cops. Someone should try to find out…” Kalijero groped for words.

“What? Just say it.”

“The
way
they killed the guy. They turned his head into a pulp—someb
ody’s way of sending out a sick message.”

“Whose way?”

“That kind of memo usually comes from organized crime. Gangs, Mafia.”

“That’s one memo you’ll be glad not to get.”

Kalijero hung up on me for the second time in two days.