A Time for Secrets (12 page)

I shrugged. “I could go over and look myself.”

“It’s still a crime scene.”

“Yeah, I can see whether a door’s been busted in from the sidewalk.”

“All right, sure, there were no signs of forced entry.”

“So, it’s possible Meek and Taber both knew their killer,” I suggested.

“Yeah, that’s what we figure. No surprise there.”

“Two guys who hadn’t seen each other in twenty-odd years know the same guy who ends up murdering them? You don’t think that’s kind of weird?”

“I don’t know,” Haggerty said. “You tell me. You’ve got the inside scoop on faggots. Clue me in.”

I should have told him about Meek’s journal right then. I was pretty sure the murders had something to do with SR being killed. That would be why Meek wanted me to have the journal, but until I knew for sure what the connection was, and who SR was, I figured I’d keep my mouth shut. Of course, I could still point Haggerty in the right direction.

“Maybe something happened all those years ago, when they knew each other before,” I suggested. “Maybe that’s what this is all about.”

Haggerty flashed me a look. He must have done a records check and found out for himself that Meek and Taber had been arrested together in 1959. Now he knew I knew.

He said, “The thing you learn being a detective is that there are actual coincidences in this world. Things don’t connect as nicely as we’d like.”

“Yeah, I’ve figured that out,” I said, agreeing with him. And I did agree, I just didn’t think this was one of those cases. “Good luck losing those ten pounds.”

§ § § §

Sitting in the back of the periodicals room at the central library, I worked a fiche machine until I was looking at issues of the
Daily Herald
from April 1959. Unlike the more recent issues, which were on flexible pieces of plastic, these were on glass. The librarian scowled at me like I was about to break them when she handed over the box.

Beginning with the twenty-second, I scanned through them. On the twenty-fourth I found a short article at the back of the front section with the headline, “EIGHTEEN ARRESTED IN OLD TOWN VICE RAID.” There was no byline. The article read:

Early in the evening of April 22, police executed a vice raid on the tavern, The Lair, located at 1345 N. Wells. All eighteen men were charged as patrons of a disorderly house. Owner Charles Winchester was charged with the operation of a disorderly house. Two of the men arrested were also charged with deviant sexual conduct.

Then the article gave the names of all of those arrested. I pulled out my spiral notebook and wrote down all the names.

Many of the men arrested carried powder puffs and lipsticks, and some of them wore wigs, according to Sergeant Carl Richards.

I found the word “many” hard to believe. Yeah, I’d seen makeup on Ronald Meek, so he might have been wearing some. But the article made it sound like half the guys in that bar had makeup on. And that didn’t ring true to me. Of course, I don’t know why I was bothered. They could have easily said the place was full of Cubs paraphernalia. It wouldn’t really have made much difference; the CPD would have still found a way to bash us in print. A cocksucker is a cocksucker whether he does it like a lady or a first baseman.

I continued scanning the paper, moving on to the next issue. I was looking for an article about a body being found. Unless the police hid SR’s body so well it was never found. That was a sobering possibility. Was SR buried somewhere around the city? There was nothing in Meek’s account to indicate that. From what he’d written, it seemed like they’d just left the body, but maybe they’d gone back and buried it. Ronald wouldn’t know about that.

I scanned the next few issues until I ran across this headline: “BELOVED TV ACTOR FOUND DEAD UNDER EL TRACKS.” Bingo.

The body of Bill Maker was found beneath the Ravenswood El near Weed Street. Preliminary examinations indicate that the actor may have been beaten to death. So, SR was Bill Maker. That seemed odd. Were all the initials in Ronald’s journal coded? If so, I’d have no real clue as to who any of those people might have been.

I got my answer in the next paragraph.

Maker is best known for his role in WMMQ’s long-running afternoon show Space Ranger. He’s survived by his wife, actress and homemaking expert Veatrice LaShell.

Vee. Vee was Veatrice LaShell, and, of course, SR stood for Space Ranger; Bill Maker. Now I knew who two of the people Ronald wrote about actually were. Vee and SR.

Of course, I remembered
Space Ranger
. When I was a kid, I would come home after grammar school and watch the show from four to four-thirty. I’m surprised I didn’t remember Bill Maker’s name right off. I should have, I’d seen it flashed at the opening credits enough times.

Space Ranger
wore a mask and a very tight jumpsuit with a big SR symbol on the chest. He was sort of a cross between a cowboy and an astronaut. By today’s standard the sets and special effects were horrendous. There was frequent use of cardboard cutouts and obvious miniature spacecrafts flown around on strings. My older brothers had claimed to hate Space Ranger and called him a sissy in long underwear, but more often than not they sat down and watched at least part of the show with me.

The plots generally involved the invasion of earth by one alien or another. I read an article in the
Reader
once that claimed the show was an example of how our fear of communism influenced popular entertainment in the fifties. Maybe that was true for people writing the crap, but I was a seven-year-old. I didn’t know a Commie from a Comanche. I just knew I loved
Space Ranger
, and it didn’t matter to me if the adults involved were making some kind of point. It went over my head and probably still would.

I remember being devastated when
Space Ranger
died. In my by-then eight
-
year-old brain, I had mixed up reality and the show and was sure he was actually murdered by aliens. Of course, Space Ranger didn’t die, just the actor playing him. About six months later, the station tried to start the show up again with another actor playing Space Ranger, but it was never the same and went off the air soon afterward.

Thinking back to Meek’s journal, the comments he recorded now made sense. The officers recognized Bill Maker. The adoration their little boys had for the actor, combined with the defiant attitude Ronald recorded, was reason enough to beat the man to death. The part of me that still loved the Chicago Police Department wanted to think that these police officers had not intended to beat Bill Maker to death when they stopped the car.

But a bigger part of me couldn’t believe that.

§ § § §

The way people lived in Chicago was funny. I grew up in Bridgeport, and, for the first twenty-some years of my life, I almost never left a two-mile area. Everything I did was in a familiar, twenty-block radius: school, friends, relatives, my first couple jobs were all in Bridgeport. Maybe I’d go to the Loop a few times a year to shop; when I was old enough friends would drag me to the Near North to hang out on Rush Street, but that was it. Like most Chicagoans, I clung to my neighborhood.

It was like we lived in these slightly different Chicagos, and we all saw different things. Of course, that was not how I lived now. When I became a police officer I began to see more of the city, and now, though I spent a lot of time in Boystown, my job took me all over the city. I saw Chicago in a way other people didn’t.

Early Saturday evening, after I called it quits at the library and before I went home to get ready for my gig at Paradise Isle, I drove down to Bridgeport. It was on the south side, one of the few white neighborhoods left on that side of town. A lot of city employees lived there, largely because the little brick houses were affordable and came with a little bit of backyard. My parents still had a house in the neighborhood, though they went away for the winters. My Aunt Bev lived a few blocks away.

Beverly Ambersteen née Nowak was probably my favorite aunt, or at least the one I had the most in common with. We were both black sheep. Aunt Bev had married a Jewish guy back in the fifties who’d been nice enough to convert to Catholicism but was still never accepted by my family. Maybe it was his original religion or maybe it was the fact that converting was the last nice thing he did for Aunt Bev. Hard to say.

Back when I still attended family events, there were frequent disagreements over how long it had been since Sid Ambersteen had held a job or exactly which illegal form of gambling he liked best—floating crap games or the horses. He must have had something going for him, though; Aunt Bev doted on him like he was a prize catch.

To add to his other charms, Sid apparently wasn’t much good around the house, because when I drove up that evening Aunt Bev was watering her front lawn with a long red hose.

She watched as I got out of the car and walked up to her. She didn’t bother with hello, she said, “Trying to keep my lawn alive. Seems crazy to wait all winter for something green and then just let it die in the heat.” She shielded her eyes against the last bit of sun. “What can I do for you, Nicky?”

I don’t especially like being called “Nicky.” My family does it when I’m on their good side. I ha
d
n’t heard it in a particularly long time, and it felt better than I wanted it to.

“I need a police report.”

“Our hours are eight-thirty to three-thirty Monday through Friday.” She kept watering her lawn.

“I’m hoping to get it unofficially.”

“Freedom of Information Act. All you gotta do is pay the ten bucks, and the report’s yours. You don’t have ten bucks?”

“And all the information I really want ends up blacked out for privacy reasons,” I said.

“You don’t believe in privacy anymore? How things change.”

Aunt Bev decided it was time to water a different patch of grass. We moved about fifteen feet. The wet from the first patch soaked through my Nikes.

“So, what report do you want?” she asked.

“There was a raid on a bar called The Lair in Old Town. April 22, 1959.”

She chuckled. “Why the hell do you want something like that?”

I trotted out the lie I’d come up with on the drive down. “A friend of mine works for the Gay and Lesbian Midwest Historical Society. He’s doing an article on the bar raids of that period.”

“Bullshit,” she spat. “Your friend wouldn’t need anyone’s name for that.”

“He wants to contact them, get a more personal take on the experience of being raided.”

She looked me up and down for a moment, bent the hose in half to shut off the flow and walked up to the house to turn off the faucet. She turned around to find that I’d followed her, every step.

“Five hundred dollars,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t believe that cockamamie story about your friend. Someone’s paying you to get this for them, and it’s only fair that you pay me.”

Five hundred was more than I made for most jobs and twice the retainer Ronald Meek had given me.

“A hundred,” I offered.

“Five, and it’s not negotiable. I could lose my job.”

I should have walked away right then. It didn’t make any sense to pay her price. The whole thing was none of my business when it came right down to it. The client was dead. I had every reason in the world to give up and go home.

In fact, I was deciding to do that even as I got out my checkbook and wrote out a check to my aunt. I was still thinking I should pack the whole thing in as I agreed to meet her at the French Bakery where Ross and Brian worked. It was also far enough away from the Central Police Station where Aunt Bev worked just south of the Loop to make her feel safe. No one she worked with would coincidentally see her with me. Yeah, it was stupid to give her all that money, but I wanted to see what was on that report. I just had to.

I was about to leave when Aunt Bev said, “I think it’s terrible what your parents have done. You don’t toss a child away like that. You don’t throw a child into the street because he’s not perfect.”

This from a woman who’d just extorted five hundred dollars from her own nephew.

HAPTER THIRTEEN

Sunday morning, while I was still half asleep, Harker whispered into my ear, “I’m taking your car to go to mass with my mother. Did you want to go with us?”

I pushed him away and tried to go back to sleep.

Harker had
his
own car parked in his garage out in Edison Park. Usually, he didn’t feel up to driving, so there wasn’t much point in keeping it nearby, but lately, he’d seemed better. I lay there wondering if we should keep the car closer, or maybe we should get a bigger place. We could move someplace like Wicker Park. It was terrible neighborhood, but the apartments were huge. If we kept expenses down, Harker could keep paying the mortgage on his place in Edison Park. That way his mother wouldn’t have to come and live with us.

It was a nice little fantasy, and it kept me from thinking too much about Harker’s getting better. I was glad he seemed better, but at the same time it scared me. From everything I knew about GRID, it wouldn’t last, and what would happen when he stopped feeling good? I had no idea, or maybe I just wanted to have no idea. I really wanted to believe the improvements in Harker’s health meant the disease was weakening and that people would stop dying or that he hadn’t been very exposed to whatever had caused it, that he’d only gotten a little dose of whatever chemical or condition acted as a catalyst. There was a little bit of logic there, and I clung to it. Maybe he would get better after all? Maybe we would move to Wicker Park some day. I was afraid to hope though, as if hoping might jinx it.

I was still in bed when Harker got home from church. Fortunately, he’d dropped his mother off in Edison Park, so I didn’t have to deal with her scowling at my bed-swept hair and desperate need for coffee so late in the day. Harker crawled into bed with me and slipped his arms around me.

“How was church?” I asked.

“I’m going to hell.”

I shrugged like it was of no importance. “That’s good. You’d be lonely in heaven without me.”