You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) (11 page)

“Need any help?” he said.

“Maybe later,” I told him, “but not while they might be able to link your cab with me.”

We sat around eating cookies and sneezing, swapping stories about the good new days, listening to Narducy’s imitations of Herbert Marshall and Lum Abner. Merle yawned. I said I was tired. Narducy ate cookies and drank a quart of milk. Merle went to bed, and I told Narducy I had to get up early. He said he did too and stayed twenty minutes more, giving me the plot of the last episode of “Lights Out.”

When he left, I flew back into the bed with a grunt and a wheeze.

“Asleep?” I whispered.

“No,” she said. She leaned over in the dark and kissed me. “But I’ve had enough action for the night, on top of a fever. Let’s sleep on our memories.”

I dreamed something, but I don’t know what. When I woke up in the early morning light I held it in the palm of my memory, but it flittered away on dusty moth wings. Merle was still asleep, snoring through a congested nose. The room was full of romance and germs. I got dressed, shaved in the kitchen sink to be quiet, and left a note saying I’d contact her that night. Then I went out in the snow to find a phone. I found one at a lunch counter, where I ate Choco-nuts cereal and had two cups of coffee. It was about nine on Sunday morning, and the place was empty except for me and a guy with a kid he kept patting on the head everytime the kid said anything. Since the kid was only about two, he had a lot to say, but not much of it was clear. I listened for a while and watched. Something like nostalgia or longing started to get to me. I knew I’d have to pull away, or go through some somber hours envying that man with the kid.

Kleinhans wasn’t at the Maxwell Street Station, but he had left a message for me to call him at home. They gave me his home number, and I heard the now familiar but fuzzy voiced Sergeant Chuck Kleinhans.

“What time is it?”

“After nine,” I said. “What have you got for me?”

“A large, heavy chair given to me by my grandfather when he came to this country. There’s still enough strength in these old arms of mine to lift it above my head and bring it down on yours.”

“I’ve offended you,” I said sadly.

He tried to hold back a laugh.

“I’d say you have Peters, and you can ill afford to lose what little patience I have left. When we were in the State Street station a few hundred years ago, you called Indianapolis.”

“Is that a question or a statement?” I said, looking back at the dad and kid who were cutting each other’s waffles.

“It is a warning. Besides owing the City of Chicago a dollar and sixty cents, you played me for a sap.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist it. Cops bring out the trickster in me.”

His yawn was enormous.

“I checked on the Canetta kid. He has a Chicago record three sheets long.”

“You have an address for him?”

“Yeah,” said Kleinhans with a sigh, “and not that old Ainslie junk the Indiana cops had. He’s on probation and living at 4038 West Nineteenth Street. You wanna check him, go ahead. I don’t think he’s connected.”

“What about my little old man?”

“Forget it. You didn’t give me enough to frame a nigger newsman.”

“How about a sheeny grocer?”

“Yeah,” chortled Kleinhans, exhausting his range of over-the-phone emotions, “know one?”

“My old man. Stay in touch, Kraut.”

I hung up, knowing Kleinhans would forgive and forget, or hold it against me for turning his words against him. If he was a normal respectable human being, he’d remember.

The snow was an inch thick outside. I looked into the grey sky and into the coffee shop window at the father-son team. The kid had spilled chocolate milk, and the father was cleaning it up with a proud smile. I felt like shit and wondered why I had missed Christmas.

7

My cash supply was down, and I didn’t have time to call Louis B. or Warren Hoff. There was also a chance that if I did, they’d tell me I was fired. That wouldn’t stop me from what I was doing, but it would cut into my fraying pocket. As long as they didn’t fire me, they owed me for each day I worked.

I got on a streetcar, where a thin conductor with gloves and a blue uniform gave me a transfer and told me to go to the Loop and take a Douglas Park train to Pulaski Road. The ride to the Loop was short, and the straw mat seats of the streetcar cold, but I kept my mind off Chicago’s environment by making entries in my little book of expenses. The book was growing thick with breakfasts, cabs, phone calls, cold tablets, hotel bills, Kleenex, gambling losses, and top coats.

Downtown, I climbed the steps to the El trains at State and Lake and waited for a Douglas Park train. The wait was long and cold. Trains didn’t run very often on Sunday. A Negro woman waited with me and some loud teenage kids with big city bluster. The kids were about thirteen, too old to be cute and too young to smash in the mouth. I tried to get past the fear of pneumonia by remembering the small, soft body and warm mouth of Merle G. It helped.

When the one-car train pulled in, the loud kids pushed ahead and ran to the front. The old woman moved to the back and so did I. There weren’t many people on the train, and the car was cold and noisy as it rattled and teetered around the Loop and headed west on tracks thirty feet above the ground. Out the window on my side I couldn’t see the tracks, just the street below and the houses a few feet away. A nagging worry about the body of Leonard Bistolfi and the possible reasons why he was killed in my hotel room intruded on my fear of falling to my death. Each turn gave me a shiver of panic, and I had to tell myself that these trains had been running in Chicago for more than forty years. My old man had mentioned them once when I was a kid, after he had visited his sister in the Windy City.

Neighborhoods shot by outside the iced window. Churches, old and heavy. Wind went wild down narrow streets, lifting sheets of snow in jerky dances. I shivered through a few dozen stops at wooden platforms. A family got on at someplace called Ashland, sat in front of me, and overlapped around me. The parents—dark, pale and serious—spoke in a European language that wasn’t German, French, Spanish, or anything like them. It was deep and slushy, a language spoken in the back of the mouth and deep in the throat, a language to keep the cold out—Russian or Polish maybe. Three dark, pale kids, two boys, one girl, pushed their noses to the cold windows and chattered in their language and in English. Every once in a while one of them moved near their talking parents, who would touch the child’s face or hair absently and lovingly.

It made me try to remember how my brother’s two kids looked—David and Nate. I couldn’t remember, probably because I hardly ever went to see them. I decided to bring them a present from Chicago when I went back home, but I didn’t know what a Chicago present might be.

The conductor called out “Crawford Avenue, Pulaski Road,” and I got out with the happy family and went down a flight of rusty metal steps to the street. At a newsstand outside the station door, a chunky old man shifted from foot to foot in front of a metal garbage can with a fire going inside it. The Sunday Chicago papers were fat, and I couldn’t carry one, so I just asked him which way Nineteenth Street was. He told me to head north two blocks and there I’d be. I hustled through the snow past a storefront hot dog place named Vic’s, with a cartoon of a guy eating a sandwich on the window. The steamy smell of red hots and onions came through the closed door. I thought of stopping by, but went on past a closed candy store, a cleaning store, a Polish meat market with a sign in the window for blood soup, and a corner tavern called Mac’s.

One place was open on the street—a gas station where a skinny, serious-looking kid wearing a baseball cap and earmuffs was changing a tire. I crossed the street and walked over to him. He paused every few seconds to blow on his cold red fingers.

“Forty thirty-eight Nineteenth,” I said.

He pointed down the street behind the gas station.

“Know a kid named Canetta?” I tried. “Wears an orange jacket?”

He nodded that he knew him.

“What do you know about him?” I said, plunging my hands deep in my pockets and shifting like the newsy from leg to leg.

“Enough not to talk about him to people I don’t know,” said the kid in a surprisingly deep voice as he pulled the tire free from the jacked-up DeSoto.

“I’m not a friend,” I said.

The kid sort of smiled.

“He’s lived around here maybe two months. Brought a car in once with Indiana plates. Goes out of town a lot.”

“Ever see him with anyone?”

The kid lifted a fixed tire and heaved it onto the wheel.

“Yeah,” he said with a grunt as he adjusted the tire. “Kind of big guy was in the car yesterday. Had a hat on, didn’t get out or talk. They just got gas. Nothing else I can give you.”

He tightened the lugs on the wheel, stood up, and warmed his hands under his arms before dropping the car.

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “Aren’t you going to ask why I want to know?”

He shook his head no.

“If I don’t ask, I don’t know when someone else asks. Makes it easier.”

“You got a point,” I said and headed down Nineteenth.

There was an empty lot on the corner of Nineteenth and Komensky. Some kids wearing thin jackets were playing football in the snow. They called each other Al, Irwin, and Melvin and they screamed and laughed. One of the kids had one arm.

Forty thirty-eight was a three-story yellow building across from a wide, three-block long prairie. Cars were parked in the prairie near the street. The wind ran over a field of frozen weeds, hitting the cars and rocking them. The ground around the cars was covered with tire ruts made in the rain and now frozen solid and partly filled with shifting snow. A little kid sat in the recess of a narrow window on one side of the entrance to the building. The recess kept the worst of the wind away. The kid was about six, with a knit green cap over his head and ears. He wore corduroy knickers and a fuzzy jacket too light for the weather. The kid watched the cars and wind and played with a loose tooth in the front of his mouth.

“Hi,” I said pulling my collar around my neck. “My name’s Toby Peters. I’m a detective. What’s your name?”

“Stgsmmm,” he said, with a finger in his mouth.

“Stugum?”

“No,” he said with weary impatience removing his finger, “Stu-ard.”

“You live here?”

“Yuh.”

“Know a guy named Canetta? Wears an orange jacket?”

A sour look crossed Stu-ard’s face. His head went up and down once, showing he knew him.

“Second floor. Over us.”

“He there now?”

“Yuh, another guy too. Maybe two other guys.”

“You know the guys?”

“One’s Morris, comes here sometimes. I don’t know the other guy—a big guy I seen here yesterday.”

“Thanks,” I said, opening the door. “What are you doing out here in the cold?”

“Hit my baby sister and ran away,” he said, going back to his tooth. I gave him my scarf and wrapped it around his neck awkwardly, getting a suspicious look.

“Detectives get scarves free,” I explained.

“Detectives catch rats?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Dirty rats and killers.”

“I mean real rats,” the kid explained. I thought I saw a drop of blood on his gum from the squirming tooth. “We caught one in the phoney fireplace today. My dad’s home.”

I went inside and found Canetta’s name on the mailbox, scrawled in pencil right on the metal. The downstairs door in the hall was open. The hall was clean. I went up squeaky steps covered with clean but tired carpeting and stopped in front of the two doors on the second floor.

Behind the door on the left I could hear the bark of a small dog, and a woman shouting, “Quiet Peanuts.” Then she said something like, “Sheldon will find out about the noise when he gets home.”

I decided that wasn’t my door. The wind sang bass as I tried the handle on the second door and held my other hand on the .38, which lay cool and comfortable in my coat pocket.

The door was locked. I decided to knock and heard something scuttling inside—maybe one of the rats I was looking for. My nose was running again, but I didn’t have time or a free hand. I knocked again and thought I heard the scuttling sound move toward the door. It came slow and as it got closer, it sounded more like the dragging foot of the mummy from some Universal picture.

“Hello,” I said with a heavy Yiddish accent picked up from vague memories of my grandfather, “is here a Mister Canetta? I’m from landlord mitten da pipes.”

Someone fumbled at the lock inside and I stepped back, expecting to face the kid who had tried to steal my suitcase and whose nose I had broken. The door came open a crack and stayed that way.

“Somevone dere?” I asked. No answer.

I took a deep breath, wiped my nose on my sleeve, pulled out the gun and pushed the door open. I jumped inside and was about to go flat on the floor when I saw him. He was about three or four feet from me in a little reception area. His back was against a mirror on the outside of a closet. His knees were slightly buckled and his mouth was open. Blood trickled from his mouth and poured from his belly. He was a good thirty year older than Canetta—a little guy witha balding head gasping for air he couldn’t get. I moved to him, keeping low in the dark apartment. There was a living room behind me with some light coming in from the morning, but it wasn’t much of a morning.