boystown (10 page)

Ross would take the smaller two- and three-story buildings up and down Broadway and check out a couple apartment buildings on Clark behind the bar. We agreed to meet in the lobby of The Shore when we finished.

“Do you think we’ll run into any cops doing the same thing?” Ross asked.

“I doubt it,” I said. I didn’t think anyone on the arson squad would think it worth interrupting their Sunday for a fire in a gay club. They’d start nosing around tomorrow, unless something more important turned up.

We paid our tab and walked back down to Paradise. Chicago is made up of dozens of neighborhoods, most of which have fuzzy, ill-defined boundaries. Paradise Isle was located in a part of town that some people called Lincoln Park and others referred to as New Town.

Generally, the distinction was based on the income bracket you wanted to project. If you cared whether people thought you had money or not, then you called it Lincoln Park. If you didn’t give a crap, you said New Town.

The sky had turned a brilliant blue, and the sun had melted the last of the snow, but the wind was bitter cold, and Ross’s cheeks glowed cherry red. He still wore my wool overcoat, while I had on a hip-length, sheepskin jacket lined with fleece that I’d bought while I was still at the Training Academy. I was nice and toasty, while Ross was freezing his ass off. I wanted to put my arm around him, get him warmed up. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you did on the streets of Chicago. Not unless you wanted to deal with catcalls and assholes jumping you. I kept my arm to myself.

When we got in front of The Shore, with its yellow brick and sculpted cement embellishments, I said “see you later” to Ross and went into the glass lobby. The lobby had been added for security sometime in the seventies and clashed with the much older, more elegant architecture of the rest of the building. I walked over to the buzzer system, which had one buzzer for each apartment lined up in four rows of about twenty-five each. I ran my hand up and down one of the rows until someone buzzed the security door and let me in.

This type of canvass was a lot of what I’d done as a beat cop. Whenever someone got robbed, beaten, or killed, beat cops would start things off by securing the crime scene and keeping witnesses in place. When the detectives showed up, they’d stand around the crime scene coming up with ideas, one of which was always to send the beat cops out to canvass. It was a little like being a door-to-door salesman. Except you weren’t selling anything, so it was a little harder for people to hate you. Not that they didn’t hate you anyway. Sometimes just interrupting a person’s day is enough to get them to condemn you to hell or insult your mother. Canvassing took patience.

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Starting on the west side of the first floor, I was able to talk to three of the tenants in the four apartments that faced Broadway. None of them heard or saw anything before the fire trucks arrived. Still, I took out my pad for each person and took down a couple notes. Mostly notes like

“apartment 106 saw nothing, heard nothing.” I left a business card with each of them.

It was the same deal on floors two, three, and four, except that there were fewer people home. On the fifth floor, I got lucky. In apartment 504, an elderly woman named Ruthie Carter opened the door and smiled at me. Wearing a thin housecoat and a rusty orange cardigan she’d probably knitted herself, she was hunched over by time and had to turn to one side to peek up at me. Her face was deeply creased.

“Good morning, ma’am. I’m Nick Nowak. I’m a private investigator looking into the fire across the street.”

“Private investigator? You mean like
Magnum, PI
?” She asked. Her voice was crisp and sharp.

“I’m not sure what that is, ma’am.”

“You’re not sure? Why, it’s a TV show. It’s on Thursday nights at eight o’clock. Don’t you watch TV?” Her tone suggested she considered television viewing as necessary as breathing.

“I don’t have a television,” I explained. It had moved out with Daniel, and I’d never bothered to replace it.

“What on earth do you do without a TV?”

“I do a lot of things. Can you tell me if you happened to see or hear anything unusual last night?

Between five and five-thirty?”

“Why don’t you come in,” she invited me, and then hobbled away from the front door. It was a studio apartment. In one corner sat a nicely made double bed, in another a recliner with a television balanced on a small table a few feet in front of it. I followed the woman over to a small dining table in front of the window. She sat and looked out the window. She had an excellent view of Paradise Isle.

“Hawaii,” she said abruptly. My stomach sank. I worried she might be half crazy.

“What about Hawaii, ma’am?”

“That’s where Magnum, PI lives. It looks pretty on TV, but I could never leave Chicago. I’ve been here seventy-four years.”

“Did you happen to see anything this morning?”

She nodded. “I have the insomnia.”

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“So you’re up at night a lot of the time.”

“Oh, it’s terrible. If I get two good hours of sleep, well, I consider myself lucky. Very lucky.”

I took a seat across from her. “And this morning you were sitting right here looking out the window.”

“Yes, I was.”

“What did you see?”

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You know that’s where the fancy boys go, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I knew she’d tell me eventually; I just wasn’t sure I had the patience to wait.

“He ran out of there around five-thirty.”

“Who did?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know any fancy boys.”

“Tell me what he looked like.”

“He wasn’t fat. And he wasn’t short.” Ruthie would exasperate the police when they showed up.

The thought made me want to giggle.

“Was he white? Or black?”

She thought about it. “White. I’m pretty sure. He was wearing a hat. And one of those balloon coats.”

“A down coat,” I suggested.

“A what?”

“A coat full of feathers. Like a pillow.”

“It sure looked like a pillow.”

“Was he young or old?”

She thought about it. “Couldn’t have been old. He was running. I haven’t run like that in forty years.”

“Did you see where he went?”

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She nodded solemnly. I waited. “He came into The Shore.”

I looked out the window. It faced Broadway. The entrance to The Shore was on Surf. There wasn’t any way she could have seen him enter the building. I decided not to contradict her. The rest of the information seemed good, what there was of it. I listened to two stories about her daughter who never visited, then said my goodbyes, making sure to give her my card in case she remembered anything else.

On the next few floors, people either weren’t home or had slept well all night long. Which didn’t stop them from wanting to tell me who they suspected, which was usually the Commies or the coloreds. When I got to the fourteenth floor, I got lucky again -- although in a completely different way.

It was 1407, all the way in the back. I didn’t think you could see much this far up, so I was almost ready to call it quits. The guy who answered the door was close to twenty, about five foot six, stood in the doorway wearing nothing but a pair of white bikini briefs, and had a set of abs that looked more like armor than muscles.

“My name is Hector,” he said before I’d even had a chance to introduce myself. He had a slight Spanish accent.

I told him who I was and what I was doing. He didn’t seem to pay much attention. “Come in, please. And could you close the door?”

I’m thirty-two years old, stand six foot three, and weigh two-ten dripping wet. My hair is brown, my eyes are green, and I wear a moustache. I guess you could say I have a kind of brooding good looks; strangers have been known to stop and tell me to smile. There’s a certain kind of guy who takes one look at me and that’s it, they’re hooked. I don’t quite understand it, but I rarely object.

From the way Hector waddled across the room, giving me a good look at his well-formed buttocks, I figured he was one of those guys.

There wasn’t anything in the apartment but a brown leather sofa with about a hundred tufts and an orange and red Chinese rug spread in front of it. Hector curled up on the sofa and said, “I’ve been expecting you.”

“You have?” I asked.

“Yes. My psychic told me a tall, tall man would come into my life, and he would give me a present. Did you bring me a present?”

I almost laughed, but was too taken by his tight, muscular body and the dimples that appeared in his cheeks when he smiled. He dark brown eyes weren’t too bad, either. “I think your psychic must have someone else in mind.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’ll bring me a present later?” He smiled again. I tried not to smile back.

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I took a look out Hector’s window. He couldn’t have seen anything helpful. Not from this height and not from this angle. I decided it would be a good idea to get out of there.

“Well, thank you, I think I should be heading out.”

“Don’t you want to know who burned down Paradise?”

I braced myself. He might be Cuban and about to tell me that Fidel Castro did it. “Sure, who burned it down?”

“The Surfside Neighborhood Association.”

Well, at least that was a new answer. “Okay, tell me about it.”

He frowned. “Not if you’re just going to stand there. Sit down.”

I sat on the far end of the sofa. He slid himself over to me. He wore lemony cologne that made him smell fresh and appetizing.

“What makes you think the neighborhood association burned down the bar?”

“It makes much sense. They hate the bar. They say it is noisy and interrupts the parking in the neighborhood and it brings a bad element right into their backyard. Are you a bad element? I’m a bad element.”

“Where did you hear this? Do you go to their meetings?”

“Oh no! I would not go to their stupid meetings. They made a sheet... a, how do you say... an announcing. That’s wrong. Announce-ment.” He jumped up and ran to his small kitchen. Rifling through the drawers, it took him a moment to come up with a single sheet of paper. “Here it is.

They put one under all doors.”

He handed me a sheet of paper, then sat down next to me. Somehow he managed to get even closer. I tried to focus on the flyer. It was handwritten and then Xeroxed onto marigold-colored paper. It announced the time of a Surfside Neighborhood Association meeting that would take place in a few days. The subject was Paradise Isle and the bad element it brought into the backyard of decent, hardworking families. At the bottom of the sheet it offered more information by contacting John Bradford. It gave his phone number as well as his apartment number, 304. I hadn’t spoken to him. His had been one of the apartments where no one answered.

“Can I keep this?” I asked Hector.

“Yes, you can,” he said. Then he gasped, “Maybe she was wrong. Maybe you will not give me a present. Maybe I will give you one.”

Boystown - 59

It took me a moment, then I realized that he was calling the flyer his present. I folded it and put it in my jacket pocket. “Maybe,” I said.

Hector eyed me a moment, then slipped out of his bikini briefs. His cock was fat and uncut.

Semi-hard, it called a lot of attention to itself lolling there on his hip. “You want to fuck me?” he asked.

“The thought crossed my mind,” I replied honestly.

Hector got up and left the room. Seconds later he was back with a bottle of lotion in one hand. In the middle of the empty rug, he got down on his hands and knees. He spread some lotion on his ass and some more on his dick. He looked over at me and said, “I’m ready.”

Generally, I like a little foreplay. But there was something about the business-like way he approached the whole thing, not to mention the way his ass curved up into the air, that had me ready to go.

I walked over and stood behind him. Unzipping my jeans, I lowered them to my ankles. Then I dropped my boxers. Hector looked over his shoulder and took a look at my swelling prick. He lisped something in Spanish that sounded like, “Eye deoth meoth.” I didn’t have a clue what he meant, and didn’t care.

Getting on my knees behind him, I edged forward until the tip of my cock tickled his wet pucker hole. Holding myself at the base, I slapped my hard dick against Hector’s nice fat ass a couple times. I put my hands on his hips and pulled him back onto me. A moan escaped from his lips, like air being let out of a balloon. He continued to mumble in Spanish. I assumed it had something to do with the way I was pumping his ass. I closed my eyes and fucked him for a good long time. My thighs slapped into his ass over and over, making a clapping noise that echoed in the nearly empty room.

With his warmth surrounding me, I could feel his racing pulse beating on the base of my dick each time I paused to catch my breath. I wondered if our hearts were going to match each other.

But then I stopped thinking altogether and just fucked.

His Spanish got more intense, and I figured that meant he was about to come. I picked up my speed and fucked him all the harder. He rewarded me by clamping down his sphincter muscle while he came. It took another few minutes, but I kept fucking him until I came myself. It felt like untying a knot deep inside me.

When I stood to pull up my pants, I noticed I had a couple of angry red rug burns on my knees.

Hector stood up, cupping one hand in front of him. I realized then that he’d carefully come into his own hand. I wondered if what he’d been saying all along in Spanish was, “Don’t come on my rug.”

Hector went to wash up. I zipped my pants and realized I’d never taken off my sheepskin jacket.

I was sweating, so I went ahead and took it off. That left me in a button-down shirt with my
Boystown - 60

shoulder holster holding my 9mm Sig Sauer firmly under my arm. When Hector came back into the room, he eyed my gun. “I’m glad you did not show me that before. I would come very fast.”

I smiled. “Is there anything else you can think of that might help? With my investigation?”