Calumet City (19 page)

   I take my first real breath after I’m outside in front of Calder’s flamingo. Two very bad echoes are still with me: "About
him
" and "Missing file." Chief Jesse as a RICO target.
Jesus Christ
. That’s gotta be bullshit.

Doesn’t it?

I’m turning red again, ashamed again, and walk into an army of pigeons without seeing one. They explode; I stand at their center, thinking: Chief Jesse’s somehow in this? It’s not just a coincidence, his connection to Gilbert Court? And "the mayor’s office" too? Even if it were possible, and it isn’t, why tape me up with a wire—I don’t know shit about anything but Calumet City.

That’s the other echo. The "missing file." It can’t be the Calumet City police file; Agent Stone’s card was there on the table when I arrived…he had to have seen everything I saw.
Shiver
. The pigeons settle and it hits me—the "missing file" has to be the foster home file from Calumet City Juvenile Services. Someone has pilfered it.

Jo Ann Merica and the G don’t have it—how fabulous is that? Internal Affairs doesn’t either or we would’ve already covered every sentence that included my name. Who’s got it, then? Could be lost; shit, I left twenty-three years ago and it’s been eighteen since the Black Monday murder. Back then computers were…fruit crates compared to now. It could easily be lost.

Or it could be sitting in a file cabinet. But why?

A shoeshine boy looks at my feet, then me, like he could help gym shoes. Behind him his ghetto blaster is playing Muddy Waters instead of 50 Cent. A bus passes with a movie ad covering the entire right side. Denzel Washington has a pistol pointed at his ear and a briefcase at his feet. He’s standing behind the title,
Shakedown
.

I flash on the most recent margin notes in the Cal City PD file about Jim Bakker’s new radio show in Branson. And for the very first time I see the striking resemblance between Mr. Washington’s situation and Assistant State’s Attorney Richard Rhodes. Whoever made those notes knew where Richard Rhodes spent his childhood.

But if it’s a shakedown, why kill him?

   It’s 4:55—still no call from Little Gwen—my back’s against Sonny’s driver-side fender at the redeveloped corner of 95th and Western. The corner’s busy and has been for the whole hour we’ve been waiting, Sonny inside his car. Truck wakes make the only breeze and keep the noise constant; the exhaust odor too. My fingertips drum Sonny’s fender. This meeting—if Pancake shows—is about the bad guys, guys who want to do to me what they already did to Richard Rhodes, bad guys who can lead me to Little Gwen and her boy if they’re still alive…if I didn’t somehow dream her call.

I’m anxious—about the meeting, about Gwen being a delusion, and about Sonny, but I’m not in jail—city or federal—and I’m big happy about that. So was Sonny when I got here, although he’d already heard that IAD planned on having me back in tomorrow. It was news to me, but not a surprise. IAD sucks, but the FBI will be the final hammer and I’m doing pretty good thinking about Pancake instead of them.

Sonny yells out his window, showing me his watch, "Pushing five o’clock, P. I ain’t waitin’ another hour."

Neither of us knows what to say and that’s the real reason I’m outside leaning against his fender and he’s not. "Afraid you’ll miss
Barney Miller
?"

A rail thin, pasty white man is checking me out from across the street. He’s alone and not walking happy. I wave at him and tell Sonny out of the corner of my mouth, "Be cool, he’ll have cover."

"Duh."

I shove off the fender to jog through the traffic. The guy stops cold. Then looks over his shoulder like he wants to run but doesn’t. I watch his hands, not his face, then look behind him on the 50–50 chance he’s as fucked up as his business partners. He steps behind a parking meter, keeping it between us, and says, "That’s good" when I get to his side of the street.

We’re twenty feet apart. "I’m not contagious, Pancake."

His head swivels, but like a lizard’s, clicking in stutter-frame motion. The railroad cap resting on his sunglasses is a size too big and follows late each time. The threat of Charlie Moth looms between us.

"Cops lie. You’re all contagious."

I can barely hear him and step closer; he backtracks. I try again and his combat boots tangle or he’d be gone. "Be cool, okay? Danny D said you could help me." I open my coat. "Nobody’s on the job."

He’s hiding as much face under the cap as possible and keeps rotating his head sixty degrees either side of mine.

"Danny D said there’s money out on me and you know who and why. Tell me and I owe you one."

"Uh-huh. A whiteboy, from Arizona or Idaho, might be hiring partners." Pancake jerks a look over his shoulder then back and steadies with a hand on the meter. "Torches, maybe others. Payin’ for your work schedule too, phone numbers, home address, friends’ names, everythin’ and anythin’."

Pancake looks behind him again, adds the other hand to the meter and speed to his speech.

"Buyin’ crystal and talking shit about you right after that nigger shoot-out Monday—where and when you work, says he has top dollar to pay."

"What’s his name? How’s he look?"

"How’s he look? How’s he look? Young, white, I never seen him. Idaho Joe."

Involuntary exhale. Can’t be Roland. But since Pancake’s never seen this young whiteboy Idaho Joe, this ID is
at least
secondhand. Add dope and fear and no telling how far off we are. If an SUV hadn’t tried to paste me in the alley by Julie’s I’d be willing to believe Danny D was wrong.

"Let’s say you had stuff to sell about me, how do you find Idaho Joe?"

Pancake scrunches up in his coat and railroad cap, but his sunglasses stay on me and the street beyond. He answers through a hand bleached by chemicals and industrial soap. "Idaho Joe calls a bar. Up in the twenties, just north of the niggers on State…by Twenty-sixth Street, calls it twice a day."

I know the bar, the Cassarane, it’s the first white club north of the Harold Ickes Homes housing project. The bar’s in the urban-renewal DMZ between the worst ghetto in the city and Chinatown.

Pancake starts backing up and adds, "And he’s real interested in your kid. Johnny Somebody…like that farm guy from Indiana."

"What? What’d you say?"

He resets his sunglasses and jumps back another step. "You know, like the singer—Cougar, Johnny Cougar—Idaho Joe’s got a thing for your kid, even more than you. Same money on him for his numbers, addresses…"

What?
I lunge and he’s already running. Fast. We sprint a block, but I can’t catch him. At Ninety-sixth Sonny’s Ford tries to clip him but Pancake leaps a hedge into the packed parking lot of the Evergreen Plaza and disappears. I stop between cars, blinking at the sea of cars, breathing much harder than a one-block sprint.

Sonny pulls up and yells, "C’mon."

"My son," I pant a gasp. "He’s after my son."

"You don’t have a son. Get in the car."

These pieces-of-shit are after my son…

"Yo, Patti. Get in the fucking car. We’ll run the lot."

I don’t get in. Sonny cranes his neck from the driver’s seat. My hand grabs the passenger door for support.
My son. The devil is after my son. They know his name
.

"Get in the damn car, will you?"

And then I’m in it and we’re cruising the lot; cars, trucks, people but no railroad cap, no sprinters. Sonny says, "A kid? Whose kid?"

"Huh? Ah, no, yeah." I’m too stunned to lie. "Mine."

"No way. That’d mean you had a date." He’s laughing because I have to be joking.

"No it doesn’t."

He stares, then slows the car and stops as twenty years of cop kicks in; he knows what "kid and no date" means and says, "For real?"

I look out the window, seeing my son’s face, the face that shares my pillow. Now it’s tied to this sewer instead of the big suburban house and happy family I decided Johnny has, tied to this sewer instead of trees with leaves that don’t fall and pets that don’t die. Now he’s here, with me, and crystal meth, and the Gypsy Vikings MC.

"Patti." Sonny semi-winces as I turn. "Jesus, P, I didn’t know."

My voice is monotone. It fits the prim schoolgirl now sitting in Sonny’s front seat and she speaks before I realize that’s what I’m doing. "Nobody does. It was a rape…years of ’em." I feel Sonny staring at a terrified teenager, numb and alone, looking at the edge of Roland’s attic curtains.
PTL
is over, we’re done in the basement, for tonight.

A ghost tells my ear, "But it’s different now. Pancake said so."

I jerk past Sonny’s stare to see who spoke. I see Chief Jesse and all his years of mentoring. And the ghost says it again and this time it’s a little boy’s voice, my boy and he’s scared, scared and wet and humiliated like I was. Shame crawls up my shoulders to Roland’s hands. A titanic rush of rage slams me back in the seat. My eyes squeeze shut and I blurt,
"One million, 999—"
The rush is Chinatown, the poison that can never ever be allowed out in the light. But I’m not me any longer so I can’t stop it. I’m a killer and don’t want to stop it. This new person doesn’t feel beat shitless and violated; she doesn’t need to count anymore; she feels like…like—

"Patti?" I look up and this time Sonny does wince. "You okay, babe?"

I say, "Fine," but the skin seems too tight around my mouth.

"You don’t look fine."

"We’ll grab my car"—my monotone’s gone and I’m no longer anxious about Sonny’s inconsistencies—"then go by the Cassarane Bar when it opens. When Idaho Joe calls in, we’ll—"

Sonny gets a radio call, answers the dispatch, then me. "I gotta do this. Roll with me, then we’ll do the bar. We gotta talk about this. About you…and your kid."

"Can’t. The Cassarane doesn’t open till seven p.m.; I’ve got stops to make—" I jump out before he can effect a kidnap; he has that look, or some kind of look.

"Where, what stops?"

I lie, "Chief Jesse. Call you after and we’ll hit the bar."

Sonny frowns. "You lying, Patti?"

"Keep what I said between us, okay?"

"Wait a minute. C’mon, we gotta talk—"

"Between us, okay?"

Sonny’s radio squawks. He shows teeth, then surrenders for the second time in one day. "Don’t do nothing stupid."

"Roger that." I kiss my fingers and pat his car, two things I haven’t done before. He guns it south and hits the siren. I’m headed north. To a building in Evanston I visit on my son’s birthday. Until today I never had the courage to go inside, but all that’s different now. So different that I’m not sure I’ve ever met the girl inside my flannel shirt. She’s not the same kind of afraid she was all day, not the same kind of ghost.

An SUV passes and slows.

I palm my Smith and hope the motherfucker stops. Little Gwen’s call wasn’t a delusion. Roland Ganz, the man who killed me, raped me, murdered me as a teenager, wants our son.

He’s always wanted our son. So he can preach to John the way he preached to me.

   For seven miles of city I’ve been wondering, How do you erase a disease?

A monster that was dead and now isn’t; a man who you decided
had to be dead,
so you could go on living. And how twisted is Roland Ganz after eighteen more years to putrefy under his bookkeeper’s suit? How many children since me? Children I did nothing to save.

A picture forms on the inside of my windshield, a picture that until today I only allowed out in Chinatown. Still six feet tall, thick-lipped, and wearing cotton underwear too full in the front. Blotchy-hot skin, his breath wet and musty with dinner, syrup voice, and long, demanding fingers. He’s somewhere close, breathing in Chicago’s coming night, just the TV on, kneading his cotton briefs, reading scripture to Little Gwen’s son—

Roland Ganz did things to me that I can’t describe. He did them so often and so many ways that I stopped fighting and went to the basement or attic on command. I wore what I was told, did and said what I was told, and slowly lost all touch with anything but Roland’s and Annabelle’s wishes. Their home was a violent frozen wasteland, not unlike the river of Old Crow that followed my stumbling, confused escape. The two journeys lasted eight years and neither taught me anything other than how horrible humans can be to one another and that there is no bottom to the bottom.

I two-hand the steering wheel; he’s behind the SUV that missed me near the L7 and the B&E at my duplex. He
did
do Gilbert Court, murdered Annabelle and left her there, and he did beat Richey to death. The fucking monster is back. A shiver shakes me to the seat.

Victims
shiver; you’re a cop with a gun.

And Roland hit the mayor—Bullshit; no way. That takes big-city juice and Roland Ganz is an aging monster, not an Outfit assassin. I focus on Kennedy Expressway traffic. He’s got nothing to do with the assassination attempt, but that fucking monster
is
after our son. I feel that so deep it has to be true. I steer past downtown to Armitage. The exit’s slow, short, and crowded. Once a year, just like today, I take this exit. Seven miles north it will lead to Howard Street, where I make a right, three miles from the front door of Le Bassinet.

Le Bassinet is an adoption agency. I gave them my baby so Annabelle and Roland couldn’t have him. Twenty-three years ago I made them promise Roland couldn’t have my baby. Now they have to tell me who my son is so I can save him. They will not want to do this, nor will they be inclined to believe me. They will, in fact, use all heroic efforts to stop me. It’s their job to protect the new lives from the old, no matter what version of "emergency" they’re told.

Ashland changes to Clark Street at 5900 north. I’m passing through the cheap, bright colors of a Mexican neighborhood flooded with latchkey children and loud music. The storefronts have hand-painted windows—Super Mercado and Taquería. Brown men in T-shirts tote white grocery bags. Pinched car lots offer them $400 cars and promises in Spanish. I’ve driven this street seventeen times and have no memory of it until today. I was always in a trance, edging closer to my son, reliving his most recent year.