Are You Happy Now? (9 page)

O
VER A RESTLESS
afternoon and semisleepless night, Lincoln decides he will go it alone on the battery complaint, without a lawyer, at least for now. Some obsessive surfing of the Internet yields the intelligence that complaints filed by citizens are fairly routine and often amount to little. Hiring a lawyer will almost certainly turn the case into something larger. And what if Duddleston finds out? It’s bad enough that Lincoln abuses writers. He also punches out old black ladies? Besides, Lincoln has enough confidence in his intellectual dexterity to assume he can parry the detective’s questions without giving up anything. And if the discussion turns difficult, Lincoln will simply leave and then hire a lawyer, if necessary. He reminds himself repeatedly: he hasn’t done anything wrong! Well, at least, not legally wrong. On another scale (what would it be—morality, courage, dignity?), he wishes he had a do-over.

The next morning, Lincoln calls Pistakee to say he’ll be late and then walks the fifteen or so blocks to the Twenty-Third District headquarters, a surprisingly attractive Italianate redbrick building with green awnings and a green cornice. Inside, beyond a heavy wood door, Lincoln feels as if he’s seen this place before on any of a hundred cop dramas. A motley assortment of
citizens are milling around a cramped lobby papered with official notices. A high counter separates a crew of bored-looking cops from the bothersome public. A blonde policewoman with a rote manner fields questions from a line of petitioners.

Lincoln gets in line behind an elderly woman whose dog has disappeared and a suited man who insists his car has been towed unjustly. When Lincoln’s turn comes, he gives the policewoman his name and tells her he’s there to see Detective Evinrude.

“What’s this about?” she demands.

“He called me. Something about a complaint.”

She speaks into an intercom, and a minute or so later, a tall, powerfully built black man with graying hair emerges from the back. He nods and beckons Lincoln through a door and leads him on a twisting course deep into the building to a small, plain office with a gray metal desk and several matching chairs. “Have a seat,” says the detective as he takes his place behind the desk. Buried this deep in the station house, Lincoln wonders whether just getting up and walking out would really be that easy. He’s more anxious than he anticipated. (One slip of the tongue and he’s under arrest?) Still, he takes a seat. He’s brought his briefcase—it seemed a good prop, with suggestions of status, purpose, etc.—and he hugs it in his lap.

Detective Evinrude puts on a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and shuffles papers on his desk. “John Lincoln, right?” he confirms, reading from a sheet.

“Yes.”

The detective stops himself and looks up. “Lincoln. Any relation to the president?” he asks.

“No, I’m afraid not. The only name descendant died in the 1920s.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.” The detective nods to himself, as if this were a useful piece of information. He returns to his sheet of paper, and for several minutes he reads silently, apparently unconcerned that Lincoln is sitting with nothing to do but
watch. Finally, he puts the sheet down and takes off his glasses. “So there was an incident on the Brown Line at the Belmont Station. The complainant says you got mad and knocked an elderly woman down.”

Lincoln reminds himself of the rules he’s established for this encounter: be terse; speak in generalities; don’t volunteer a whit more than necessary. “There was a riot on the L that night,” he recounts carefully. “Everybody was in a panic trying to get off the train. There was a story the next day in the
Tribune
. I’ve got it here.” Lincoln has printed a copy from the newspaper’s Web archive, and he pulls it from his briefcase.

Ignoring the story in Lincoln’s hand, the detective says, “The old lady was African American.” He brings this up with no particular inflection, as if it were just another fact to be considered—the time of the incident, the number of witnesses—but Lincoln feels acutely the divide between them. (He thinks: Should I have lied earlier? This is one occasion when it might actually help to be related to the Great Emancipator.) “It says here she was the only black person around,” the detective continues. He stares unblinkingly at Lincoln. The man’s bulk, his stolidity—Lincoln recalls playing ball against guys like that; they’d take a position near the basket and you couldn’t move them. Implacable.

“It was chaos,” Lincoln says. “There was a stampede. Race had nothing to do with it.”

Detective Evinrude nods toward the newspaper story in Lincoln’s hand. “Can I see that?”

Lincoln gives it to him and watches the dark eyes behind the wire rims scan the lines. Doesn’t a Chicago police detective have more important things to investigate—a murder, an armed robbery? “I’m sure there’s a police report on it,” Lincoln suggests.

Again, the glasses come off. “So you say you didn’t knock down the old lady?” the detective says.

“Everybody was pushing and shoving,” Lincoln evades. “It was chaos.”

“And then you just left the scene?”

Lincoln’s heart jumps in red alert. (Is it a crime to be a hit-and-run pedestrian?) “I didn’t think there was a problem,” he responds, then pulls out another tactic he’d planned, turning interrogator himself. “Who is this person who filed the complaint?”

“Can’t tell you, at least not until I’ve looked into it a little more,” the officer says evenly. “We don’t want people settling things on their own.”

“Was the complainant even there?”

Detective Evinrude picks up his glasses and consults the sheet. “One of my colleagues took the report,” he explains, “but he’s been promoted.” After reading for a few seconds, he says, “It appears not.”

“How did my name even come up?”

“You dropped your
New York Times
. Had your name and your company on it.” Said with just a hint of satisfaction, as if the detective has trapped Lincoln with this simple explanation.

Lincoln zips shut his briefcase. Time to flee. Probably past time. But Detective Evinrude has another question. “Pistakee Press. What do they do?”

“A book publisher. I edit books.”

“What sort of books?”

“All sorts.” (Does the cop suspect that I’m a pornographer? Lincoln wonders.) Lincoln does a rapid inventory of his projects, searching for a possible sympathetic connection. “Right now, I’m editing a book on the history of Wrigley Field.”

“I grew up on the South Side. A White Sox fan.”

The black South Side. The white North Side. Why does race have to come into everything in Chicago? “I’m mostly a Bulls fan myself,” says Lincoln, dodging.

And then Detective Evinrude warms by a degree or two. “Maybe you should do a book on Comiskey Park, you know, the old White Sox stadium.”

“Maybe I should!”

“I could tell you some stories.”

“I’ll remember that!” Lincoln takes advantage of the slight détente to get up to leave, but he dreads the thought of walking out into the warm summer morning burdened with uncertainty. So he asks, “On this L train matter—what happens now?”

The temperature drops again. “I’ll look into it. We’ll be in touch.”

For all his planning and preparation, Lincoln can’t help himself. He blurts, “I mean, it just seems like a waste of time. The whole thing was an accident, nothing more.”

The officer waits, letting Lincoln suffer in the silent memory of his outburst. “Sometimes these complaints are just for the record,” Evinrude says finally. “They’re preliminary to the filing of a civil case.”

“A civil case?”

“Do you have homeowner’s insurance?”

“For a condo.”

“Same thing. Sometimes your homeowner’s insurance will cover it.” The detective considers Lincoln, who is hugging his briefcase as if it were the stuffed polar bear he carried around when he was six. “Can you find your way out?” Evinrude asks.

Lincoln assures him that he can.

The detective hands Lincoln his card. “Let me know if you plan to leave town,” he instructs.

9

L
INCOLN LEAVES THE
police station and walks south, too befuddled to go right to work. Why does everything have to be so ambiguous? He’s accused of a crime or he’s not. He’s in good standing at his job or he’s not. He’s married or he’s not. Where are the hard edges? How do you turn a corner when everything around you is curved?

The pedestrians he passes on this stretch of Halsted, the gay neighborhood known as Boystown, move with strong, purposeful strides. Lincoln feels as if his noodly legs can barely hold him up. He’s a thoughtful drinker and hasn’t touched booze before noon since college, but this day he needs a bracer, so when he comes to Leonard’s Lounge, a small, nondescript dive, he enters and sits at the bar. He’s alone with a bartender in a blue Hawaiian shirt and a television tuned to CNN with the sound off. While Lincoln sips a Bloody Mary, waiting for the vodka to stiffen his bones, he watches video of the disgraced ex-Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, who has made another appearance that morning on his media tour to proclaim his innocence. The boyish face, the mop of hair, the sad, pleading eyes—doesn’t he realize that the whole world knows he’s a crook? Yet, he natters on, making his ludicrous case. He has a way of acting hurt, surprised,
victimized, but without rancor—like a wounded soldier who didn’t realize until the moment of impact that the enemy was using real bullets. Sitting at a bar at eleven in the morning, Lincoln envies Blago’s clueless certitude.

By the time he’s finished his second Bloody Mary, Lincoln has vowed to be more
proactive
with his life (yes, he uses that clichéd neologism with himself, even though he has struck it from every manuscript that ever crossed his desk). To start with, he’ll get ahead of the game on a possible civil suit by checking his homeowner’s insurance, as Detective Evinrude advised. But the actual document is in a file cabinet in the condo he bought with Mary. She still lives there, but she’s in Sedona by now. Lincoln can’t even remember who the insurance carrier is, let alone the salesman on their policy. No problem: summoning his new firmness of purpose, Lincoln decides to call Mary and get her to call the superintendent to let him into the apartment.

Sitting at the bar, Lincoln dials her cell. She picks up after six rings, sounding breathless and not pleased to hear from him. Lincoln gets right to the point.

“Why do you need to see
that
?” Mary demands.

“A possible liability issue.”

“What?”

Even with the separation, it stuns Lincoln how easily they slip back to the annoyed skepticism that characterized their conversations toward the end. “It’s nothing. Just call the super for me,” he says impatiently. “He knows I’m not living there, so he’ll get suspicious if I ask him to let me in.”

“Linc, you’ve got the goddamned key. Let yourself in.”

“Oh.” He somehow assumed she’d changed the locks. “OK. Just wanted to check with you.”

“I’ve got to run, Linc.” A pause. “I’m going mountain biking.”

“Wow. Have fun.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

Lincoln orders a third Bloody Mary, trying to recapture his resolve. She’s OK having me paw through the apartment, he thinks. At least she has nothing to hide.

Working off the Bloody Marys, Lincoln walks west along quiet side streets until he comes to Mary’s building, their old building. Taking a calming, deep breath, he unlocks the front door, then climbs the stairway to their apartment. Since that awful afternoon, he’s only been back once, to pick up clothes, and now he wonders whether Mary has changed things, eliminated all markers of life with him. Inside, however, he finds the place almost exactly as he left it. They bought the apartment three years ago, and Mary took the occasion to exercise her decorating taste—sort of country French (reproduction, of course) with accents of Olde Chicago gleaned from the city’s carelessness with its architectural heritage (a section of stained glass recovered from a leveled West Side church, a gargoyle saved at the last moment from the exterior of a doomed Loop building).

Lincoln goes directly to the little-used office in the second bedroom and riffles through a file cabinet until he finds the homeowner’s policy. It’s dense and legalistic—the definitions alone take up several pages. Better just hang onto it for later study. He closes the file drawer and glances around the room. The sleek, white desk is piled high with books, magazines, and bills, just as before. Mary’s laptop is missing, but she probably took it to Sedona. Lincoln’s small collection of workout weights, idle since before his marriage, sits against a wall. The light brown Burberry blanket adds a streak of color draped over the back of the dark blue convertible sofa, just as he remembers.

Emboldened, Lincoln inspects the kitchen (spotless and barren, as if she’s stopped eating), and then he makes a daring tour of the master bedroom. It’s here—and in the connected bathroom—where he’ll find the evidence if Mary has taken a lover. But the graceful wrought-iron bed with its lacy white covering looks innocent. She’s moved the alarm clock from his bed
table to hers, but otherwise the setting is unchanged. He checks the two books stacked on her table:
The Lazarus Project
, the acclaimed new novel by the Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon, and a paperback called
Your Successful Real Estate Career
. He opens the closet and reels for a moment under a wave of air fragrant with Mary’s perfume, Blue Agava by Jo Malone. His old corner of the closet remains unpopulated save for a few jackets and shirts he never bothered to retrieve. OK so far.