You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page A

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