Calumet City (25 page)

Tracy licks ghetto air off her lips, thinks about it, and either because she does the right thing or doesn’t want to lose the thread to her Pulitzer, calls the
Herald
and kills the story. She watches me trying to decompress from confrontation to…something less, no idea how close she came to being left here as food, and says, "You owe me."

I turn back toward the storefronts and questions that need to be asked about Roland Ganz and mumble, "Get in line, honey."

   Tracy’s showing the wear of no sleep and constant threat. I’m wrapping tighter and tighter. By 3:30, we’ve put the same description to everyone on two blocks either side of the old tax service offices: "Middle-aged white male; a tax man named Roland with a wife, Annabelle, and a blond daughter, Gwen. The daughter would’ve been eleven when she moved here and sixteen or so when she left."

We ask thirty people in and out of the storefronts. When we get an answer, it’s the same: "Nope." I can keep asking and hearing "Nope," or hole up, grit my teeth, and wait for Tracy’s contacts to turn up Delmont Chukut. And hope it’s before Le Bassinet opens. But I can’t "hole up," I have to do something…I’ll go by Chief Jesse’s hospital—

A block farther south and across the street two men and five women exit a storefront. All wear white shirts and dark pants. The last man out is the African preacher from Ruth Ann’s steps. He hesitates with his flock, then turns and they all walk the other way. The storefront, not him, hooks me…I drive this block every other day, but suddenly we’re back seventeen years ago when I first came on. Back then that storefront was an evangelical mission and clinic I used to avoid. The doors reminded me of the Salvation Mission, and those memories weren’t what I was looking to remember.

Now the storefront houses the Lazarus Temple. The temple has an inch-thick steeple cut out of plywood that’s been repainted every time another denomination of one starts a new church. Out front there’s a lawn table with one empty chair and paper flyers about right-and-wrong and Africa. I’ve arrested at least ten felons on this block but never been inside.

We pass the lawn table and step inside. The low ceiling is white, as are the walls and all the benches. A center aisle separates the benches into two groups aligned in perfect rows. An older woman sweeps a floor that’s already hospital clean. She stands out like she’s on fire, wearing a long African-print robe that stops above narrow ankles and shows her gym shoes. Her head is wrapped up high and colorful like the Jamaican women on the Travel Channel. She watches me approach and I see recognition in her eyes before I can ask about Roland and family.

"My sister, she lives by them boys you kilt. Woulda burned up too and that’s a fact."

"She’s okay, your sister?"

"She fine. She fine. Old woman can’t quit smellin’ that gas-o-line."

I smile and ask about Roland and his family. She sweeps so she doesn’t have to answer, then raises her chin slowly above the broom’s handle, eyes narrowed down a nose broken more than once.

"Somethin’ bad wrong with that mother. A God-fearing woman, but…Finding her in that wall,
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
" her right hand makes the sign of the cross, "scare my sister
right
back to church."

"You
knew
Annabelle Ganz?"

A very small, very stern nod and a glance at Tracy sitting on the nearest bench talking to her cell phone. "But their names wasn’t Ganz. Husband was the church and clinic’s bookkeeper, right here in this room. Never said nothin’ bad to me, but that wife…" The woman shifts the broom and sweeps farther into the aisle, making Tracy scoot. "And the girl," her broom stops and she turns back to me, "prettiest little white girl you ever see. Played with her every day, taught her to sing, I did. Lord, Lord," the woman’s smiling now, teeth no better than gray against her faded skin, "stood her right there, pretending she was a preachin’. Child was a ray a light."

Tracy perks up and starts to stand, waving her phone at me; I gesture for her to wait.

The old woman speaks to the worn linoleum she cleans every day. "Then,
poof,
that ray a light was gone. Off to Idaho or Utah somewheres."

"Idaho or Utah?"
Idaho
can’t be a coincidence.

"Don’t recall. Mormons, I think. Utah. My little white girl and her daddy…had to be with her daddy ’cause her mama still here. In the basement." She raises both wisps of eyebrow and makes the sign of the cross again. "Thought they had the gift, was what it was."

"The gift?"

"Preachin’."

I flash on Roland and our PTL Club…sessions. My knees weaken but hold, I’m getting better at reliving hell. The old woman searches my face like I’m not doing as well as I think.

"Ever hear back from them? Anywhere in Idaho or Utah?"

Slow headshake. "Not a word, an’ that little girl was like mine."

Tracy, still on her phone, walks away to finish.

"Fine-lookin’ red-haired woman. She the PO-lice?"

I fake a smile. "A friend, and thanks for your help."

"Fine-lookin’ woman." She nods to her comment, then points the broom handle at me. "You don’t let them hoodlums shut you down, no how. We know you right. Gots to have heart to be right. You keep on goin’, girl."

It’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in forty-eight hours. I kiss her cheek and she doesn’t flinch.

   Outside, it’s different. The war’s still on, and the folks passing by hold much harsher opinions of me. Mormons? Years ago and only a maybe—it’s a long shot to nowhere. I check my watch, gotta do something—Tracy steps closer but not close, she’s pushing her hair back and the phone into her pocket. Her back’s to the street, something that’s probably acceptable north of the river. "That was my assistant. The Arizona PI is real."

Bingo
. I have to stop my hands from grabbing at her.

"We’re running him now and something called the ’Pentecostal Ranch.’"

"What else?" I grab her.
"That’s it?"

She dodges my hands and backs away, suddenly edgy as hell. "Yeah, well…we just got it. Give me an hour or two at the office, my assistant and I can unpack him. Maybe you could have CPD run him too."

Pause while I try to decipher her tone. "Maybe."

"Good. Good. Then let’s go. Drop me by a cab. I’ll call you."

All of a sudden we’re divorced.

And she’s keeping space between her and me that ten minutes ago she didn’t think she needed.

   In the car Tracy repeated that she’d need two hours to run the Pentecostal Ranch and Delmont Chukut, then made a series of calls that kept her face to the window and her mouth from talking to me. I dropped her at the Herald Building in the Loop and watched her disappear behind twenty of her fellow workers calling it a day, and I wondered.

Wonder and wait. Bullshit, I need to
do something
. I butch up and call Sonny, stammering like I’d been caught shoplifting, asking his voice mail to run Delmont Chukut.

What is happening to me?

My car doesn’t answer and drives me to Chief Jesse’s hospital.

From Twenty-sixth Street, Mercy Hospital is a series of big-windowed cubes stacked all over each other and busy. It dominates a three- and four-story brick neighborhood, parts of which have been there since the Chicago fire. The late afternoon wind is off the lake and smells cold, either more rain or winter’s coming early.

Walking a full parking lot I see uniforms outside who don’t know me and a reporter who does. Him, I beat to the elevator, take it two floors higher than ICU with a silent Hispanic family and their rosaries, then the stairs back down. A nurse who doesn’t squint under the bright lights points me toward ICU if I can follow the signs. My route through the maze is three turns and two sets of double doors. The closer I get to ICU, the less activity that overflows into the shiny linoleum hallway. People are crying in the rooms I pass.

The cluster of cops in ICU’s waiting room is 80 percent street and 20 percent rank, about as high a compliment as could be paid to any major-city superintendent. He should live just to hear this. That, and I can’t imagine my world without him.

Really? Well, the new you better get used to that
. Now I wish I hadn’t come, hadn’t been so selfish. I walk past the waiting room’s opening and look away. Chief Jesse doesn’t need soon-to-be killers as friends.
Soon-to-be?
That’s a lie, isn’t it, if you count Roland’s buddy back in Calumet City? And pretty much God, the FBI, and the State’s Attorney will.

Add Roland fucking Ganz to the charges. Murder One if I can find him before he finds me and John. And then you’ll have become all the things you hate. Full circle. You can’t go home again, because you never leave. I bump a nurse who has to pirouette to stay standing. "Sorry." My hands help at her shoulders. "Sorry."

She regains her balance and says, "Are you all right…miss?"

"Yeah, ah…fine. Fine."

She passes and I exhale and see the double door to ICU. "DO NOT ENTER" is most of the message. I pretend I can’t read, pull my star out around my neck, wedge one of the doors open in the wrong direction, and slide through.

Inside, ICU at its core is a nurse-doctor station surrounded by rooms with darkened picture windows. Behind each one is a life-and-death drama running right at the edge. The visiting rules are no more than two family members at a time, and only when the ICU docs or nurses say okay. They are the Special Forces of the hospital, so even though the death rate in here is second only to the Emergency Room, it’s where you want to be.

I make twenty feet before I’m stopped. She’s mid-thirties, pretty, but serious. "Excuse me. You’re here to see the superintendent?"

It sounds as if he’s no longer here and that stops me. But the waiting room is full. If he were d…they wouldn’t be…"Yeah. The superintendent." I can’t stop the grimace, waiting for the punch to land.

She adjusts slightly. "He’s stable. Still critical but stable." Her palm presses against my shoulder. "You’ll have to wait outside."

"Can I see him, just for a sec?"

"No. Please. Wait outside with the others." She presses harder, polite, but harder.

A youngish black doctor is coming at us from behind her. He has that look they get on TV when the star’s life is in the balance and they’re losing. At and over her shoulder he says, "You’re Patti Black, aren’t you?’

"I am."

"C’mon." He reaches past the nurse, thanks her, and pulls me even with him as we walk. He’s silent, looking into the rooms we pass, each with monitors of red pin lights and green heart beats—
Star Trek
with consequences. At the fifth room we stop and there he is, Chief Jesse, in the dark, alone, with all the wires and tubes and monitors and—

"He’s in a coma, has been. The damage was survivable, but he hasn’t responded well. If he wants to live, he might. Sometimes they can’t make up their minds."

I’m staring at the doctor, who’s staring at Chief Jesse. I’m crying; the glass between Chief Jesse and me is like at the morgue when the family member comes to do the ID. The doctor takes my arm and me into the room and puts my hand on Chief Jesse’s. The warmth is like…like flowers and I’m smiling, a schoolgirl who doesn’t know better. I grab his hand with both of mine and hold it to my face, then lace my fingers between his and beg God for one more favor. Just one more.

"He asked for you."

The words shoot up my arms. At first I thought God said it, a rush I’ve never quite felt before. I swallow the adrenaline and implications and answer, not positive God
didn’t
say it.

"Me?"

"He spiked yesterday. Was conscious for twelve minutes, knew where he was…and asked for you."

I’m too choked up to say anything.

The doctor turns to me after maybe a minute. "I grew up in the Dime."

That’s a surprise. "For real?" The Dime is a GD tag for four of the streets the GD run: Drexel, Ingleside, Maryland, and Ellis. Dell’s—the cop bar where Sonny braced Kit Carson—is on Maryland and Seventy-ninth. Not many doctors have lived in, heard of, or walked by the Dime.

"Had a dog, squad car hit him, and—"

"Elfego Baca." I smile through the tears. "Packy Rodgers hit him on Drexel, broke his back."

"And they were about to shoot him, to put him out. You gathered him up, and me, took us to the hospital with your siren, asked an ER doctor to save his life. Paid for it and the follow-up too. A lot, I imagine, for a uniform cop in 1989." His eyes are proud. "Baca lived another nine years. Got me to medical school. Saw it as magic, what doctors could do." He nods at our surroundings. "And parents in the Dime who thought this and me were possible."

I squeeze Chief Jesse’s hand, hoping he heard that, heard that he and I sowed seeds that bloomed into one of those "little victories." Chief Jesse was a sergeant then and driving the car Elfego Baca bled all over. We both got CR numbers and a day’s suspension from the Watch LT.

The doctor coughs, glances past his shoulder, and his tone drops. "The FBI and whatever you call your Internal Affairs people believe you and the superintendent are involved in the mayor’s assassination attempt."

Huh?
How could this doctor know that?

He reads my face. "They wanted to ask questions. Afraid the superintendent was dying. I allowed it, knowing he couldn’t answer, and stayed in the room during the questioning."

All I can muster is blank surprise and a great deal of curiosity.

"The questions were about you and Calumet City. A foster home there and a 1987 murder. Sounded as if they believe that Assistant State’s Attorney Richard Rhodes, the superintendent, and you are being blackmailed by elements of organized crime, and have been for some time."

"What? That’s a joke." Silence would’ve been smarter.

"Apparently a federal grand jury subpoenaed your personnel records and the superintendent’s. The U.S. Attorney believes he has proof."