Nobody's Angel (26 page)

"But this is the girl you saw?"

I nodded my head.

"Good," they both agreed. Foster slipped the photograph back into the folder.

Hagarty waved Clair over and asked for a check.

"On the house," she said.

"Christ, it's like being back in patrol." Foster smiled.

"What was her name?" I asked after Clair had gone.

"Who?" Hagarty asked.

I pointed to the file folder.

"Oh, Christ, it's another one of those goofball names," he said, and he spelled it out. "Y-o-l-a-n-i-c-a, last name Robinson."

"Did you hear about the lady who wanted to name her baby Latrine?" Foster asked.

"Come on," Hagarty said.

"Swear to god," Foster said. "Nurse I know told me about it. They had a hell of a time talking her out of it."

"Hello," Hagarty said. "I want you to meet my daughter Latrine and these are my sons Privy and John."

"You know how Chinese people name their kids?" Foster asked.

"I may have heard this," Hagarty said.

"As soon as the baby's born," Foster explained, "the father runs into the kitchen and dumps the silverware drawer on the floor. Whatever it sounds like, that's the kid's name."

"Anybody ever tell you guys, you're a couple of assholes?" I asked.

"All the time." Foster said. "All the fucking time."

Hagarty leaned across the table and let me smell his coffee- and cigarette-scented breath. "She was nothing but a whore," he said in a harsh whisper, and heads turned at the table behind him. "And she wasn't going to be around very long, no matter what you did. Streetwalkers have a very limited life expectancy."

"You keep getting in cars with strange men," Foster added, "bad things are bound to happen."

"Just forget you ever saw her," Hagarty suggested as he pushed his chair back.

They both stood up and then each dropped a buck on the table.

"Take care of yourself, Eddie," Hagarty said.

"See you around," Foster said.

The roundtable had filled up. They were all jabbering away. Clair sat down next to me and put her hand on my shoulder. "You must be tired."

"I don't know," I said.

"You're so tense, Eddie," she said. "I can feel it right here." She rubbed my shoulder with one hand for a while then brought her other hand up too.

"Don't stop," I said. "Whatever you do, don't stop." I had my head down, my eyes closed. If she would just keep going maybe it would all go away. Maybe I could forget that I'd let a teenage girl die.

"Eddie?" Clair asked after a while.

"Yeah?"

"Do you have a lady friend somewhere?"

"Sort of," I admitted.

"I figured you would," she said with some amusement, and she rubbed a little harder.

"Oh, like that," I said. "Just like that."

"Because that's what you need," she said. "I can do this all night but what you really need is a woman and a warm bed."

"You ever tried getting laid at four in the morning?"

"I usually wait till nine," she said. That was the time she got home, I knew. She was married with kids.

"I'll be back," she said a minute later. "Your pals want coffee."

"Hey, hero," Alex shouted from the roundtable, "you gonna sit there all by yourself?"

"You too good for us now?" Fat Wally wanted to know.

So I went over and sat down and told the story as best I could. My heart wasn't in it but nobody seemed to notice. They cheered and laughed and swore at the two dumb cops, and then they got into some stories of their own.

After a while Ace moved over next to me. "You look about dead," he said as the stories went on.

I held out my hands. I could barely keep them from shaking. "I'm wired is all," I explained.

"You should take a little vacation," he said. "Go lie on a beach somewhere, listen to the waves."

"Maybe I will," I said. "Maybe I will."

"Get the fuck out of the business," he whispered. "That's what you should really do. Go find yourself a decent job."

I shrugged. "A job's a job."

"No," he said and he shook his head. "You know what I keep thinking? Years ago when they tried to pull my license, I should have let 'em."

"They tried to pull your license?" I was surprised. This was one story I'd never heard.

"Oh, sure," he said. "I was a real bandit when I was a kid. Christ, I was a heartless bastard. I used to work the train stations and the bus depots. The shit-kickers would get in the cab with shopping bags for suitcases and hand me a piece of paper with some address on it. I'd look at it. If it was on the South Side I'd say 'Oh, that's in South Chicago, right?' and nine times out of ten they'd fall for it. 'Yeah, that's right,' they'd say because their relatives told 'em they lived on the South Side of Chicago and the shit-kickers didn't

know any better. So I'd get the rate book out and I'd turn to the suburban pages and show 'em the rate for South Chicago and usually I got the suburban rate. That's one of the reasons this is such a great bandit town. You got a South Chicago, a North Chicago, an East Chicago and a West Chicago.

"But I got in my share of trouble too. And then this one time they were really going after me. So I got a lawyer that somebody knew, a fixer, and he paid off the commissioner or someone. Cost me three hundred dollars, a small fortune back then. But I got to keep my license.

"Now, hardly a day goes by when I don't wonder what would have happened if I'd just let 'em take the fucking thing. Maybe I would have done something with my life."

"Come on, Ace," I said, "you did a lot."

"What?"

"You got married. You raised your kids. You own your own house."

"I been driving around in circles for forty-three years," he said. "That's what I did."

"Ace, I never heard you talk like this."

"Oh, hell," he said. "I ain't complaining. I made my own decisions. I had a lot of good times. I paid my bills. But it's a shit job, always has been, always will. You're still young, Eddie. You still got time to get out. I mean, do you wanna die 'cause some asshole can't shoot craps?"

He stood up and dropped some money on the table. "Fuck this," he said. "I'm gonna check in." Ace didn't like the late-night crazies. He usually quit early on weekends.

I hung around a few minutes longer, then dropped a pile of singles on the table and waved to Clair.

She caught me by the door. "Eddie," she said, and she gave me the nicest hug I'd had in years. "You're a real live hero," she whispered, and I could feel the warmth of her breath. "Now go find your lady and stay in bed as long as you can."

"Me and you," I said, hugging back. God, she was something.

"That'll be the day." She smiled and pushed me out the door.

I spent a few minutes cleaning up the cab then headed west, into the countryside.

All I wanted to do was drive, get out on the highway, with the middle-of-the-night trucks blazing through town and just follow along and see where they go. Drive until the buildings gave way to farms and fields. Until the sun came up and I was somewhere, anywhere, where it could cross the entire sky and set with barely a shadow.

I wanted to drive until the last drop of gas was gone, until I was so tired that I could pull over, right there on the shoulder of the highway, and fall asleep curled up on the front seat, to wake fully rested in a place I'd never been.

I passed the old Stewart-Warner factory, their original plant, red brick with white trim--lord knows how old--now closed and FOR SALE. ONE MILLION SQUARE FEET, the sign read, 11 ACRES - WILL DIVIDE. And all the jobs gone south or to Mexico, or who-the-hell-knows. And a whole batch of soon-to-be cabdrivers sprinkled around the city waiting for their unemployment to run out. They wouldn't find any union manufacturing jobs, that much was certain.

And someday, some developer would come along and convert their old workplace into trendy lofts, or tear it down completely and build highrises or single-family townhouses especially designed for transplanted suburbanites. The mayor would stop by and say what a great thing it was for the city, and he'd break a bottle of champagne or turn a shovel full of dirt. And the lakefront would expand a little further west, and the cabs would follow along, going where the business was.

And the rest of the city, this huge, incredible city, so many times bigger than the lakefront neighborhoods where I now spent most of my nights; the city where I was born and raised, married and divorced; the city where I had forsaken my own daughter, my

only flesh and blood; that city, so sad and true, so real, that city would fall even further behind.

I continued west past the Lathrop Homes, once the pride of Chicago housing projects. There were low-rises and townhouses on the banks of the river, and it wasn't very scary-looking as far as housing projects went. But I never went in there without locking my doors and double-checking to make sure the mace was handy.

There were two guys in Chicago Bulls jackets standing around a bus shelter smoking cigarettes and trying to look tough. They looked more like kids than men. And maybe they were just a couple of basketball fans who'd snuck out after their mammas had fallen asleep. But maybe they were gangbangers with guns hidden beneath the jackets. I was too old and too white to tell the difference.

One of them flagged me, then smiled so I'd know he was just fooling around. He knew I'd never stop. I waved as I passed, and went over the river. When I came to the expressway I continued straight. It looked like I wasn't going to follow those trucks tonight.

There was something peaceful about it. Almost all the stores were closed out this way. Just driving along with no destination in mind, not really looking for a fare.

Diversey wasn't much to look at, tacky storefronts alongside shabby two-flats. FORTUNES TOLD, a sign proclaimed, PALMS READ. A saloon advertised LOTTO, another promised CERVEZA FRIA.

It wasn't the worst neighborhood in town, but it wasn't an area that cabs generally cruised, and just about everybody had gone home. If someone flagged me, maybe I'd stop, but until then I'd just float along on a river of concrete, under sodium vapor stars.

I caught the light at Pulaski, the beginning of a factory and warehouse zone, and it snapped the spell. I'd made it over three miles without stopping.

When the light changed, I turned left, drove the half mile to Fullerton and turned left again.

Three white clowns were pitching quarters out front of a closed saloon. The area was mostly Puerto Rican and Mexican now. But the sign in front of the bar read WALLY'S TAP. It must have been the last white joint around. And the three guys were probably trying to hold on to a neighborhood they'd loved forever. But eventually they'd give up and move further west or out to the suburbs. And then this would be their old neighborhood for life.

It was a city full of old neighborhoods. A city where nobody stayed anywhere for long.

Straight ahead was the first hint of dawn. Betty would be ready for breakfast soon.

At Southport Avenue, a tall blonde waved. What the hell, I decided, and pulled to the side.