Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  On the screen, he saw Jalil in the foreground, talking with some older lady, while the man waited his turn, reading headlines of old newspapers. There was something odd about it, almost as if he were making a show of being calm. But all you had to do was look at those jittery eyes and you knew it was only a show.

  “He give a name?” asked Doug.

  “No,” said Jalil.

  On screen the old lady moved away from the desk and the man approached Jalil. “Okay,” said Jalil, poking one stubby finger toward the screen, “this is where he’s asking me about Mr. Toussaint’s editor and I’m telling him he doesn’t work here anymore, yadda yadda, he comes out of pocket with this DVD, says he has to get it to Mr. Carson, yadda yadda yadda, and then, boom.” Again, he pointed to the screen. Amy had entered the frame, pushing a cart full of Bob Carson’s belongings. “She tells him she’s going over that way and she’d be happy to give Bob the DVD. And he says yeah, but you can kind of tell he doesn’t really want to do it.”

  Doug peered at the screen. You really could tell. The jittery eyes were dancing a buck and wing, the lips pursed in resignation, as the man handed the DVD to Amy.

  “Can you burn copies of that?” Doug asked.

  Jalil nodded. “Sure.”

  “Make three. Cops are going to want one. Give one to Lassiter. And make one for me.”

  “Machine’s slow,” Jalil warned him. “And it can only make one at a time.”

  “Fine,” said Doug, pulling a cellphone out of his front pocket. “Make mine first.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing about this guy,” said Jalil. He was placing a DVD in the open bay of a dubbing machine.

  “What’s that?” Doug was scrolling through the contacts list on his phone, looing for his own office number.

  “He didn’t like me very much.”

  Doug looked up. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean he didn’t like me.”

  “Did the two of you have words?”

  “No,” said Jalil, “it wasn’t a personal thing. It was a race thing. He didn’t like having to deal with a black man.”

  Doug looked down into the young man’s eyes. They were straightforward and clear. “How did you know this? Was there something he said? Something he did?”

  Jalil gave him a little smile and to Doug’s surprise, he read pity in it. “No, sir,” said the security man. “But you can just tell.”

  Doug did not bother to mask his skepticism. “You can tell.”

  Still those straightforward eyes. “Yes, sir. Usually, you can.”

  “Okay,” said Doug, returning to his cellphone directory. “Thanks.”

  He was dubious. In his experience, black people—Malcolm included—often cited race to explain stuff race had nothing to do with. It was a default position for some of them. Even an excuse.

  He called his office, got his secretary, and gave her terse instructions. Get his suit coat and his laptop computer and bring them both to the lobby. Call Amy Landingham’s sister and tell her what had happened and where she was.

  As he spoke, Hector Mendoza and two of his men—one was a woman, actually—came through the turnstiles without a word and strode to the parking garage elevators. Jalil was directing a customer to the classified advertising desk. Doug glanced at the progress bar on the CD burner. Only 65 percent. Jalil was right. The thing really was slow.

  On a whim, Doug opened his phone again. He touched Bob’s name on the screen. Granted, Bob no longer worked here—Doug still couldn’t believe it, even though he had known it would happen—but he still ought to know what was going on. Especially since the guy who slugged Amy had been looking for him. What if he was still after him? Besides, thought Doug, he wouldn’t mind hearing the guy’s voice, just to make sure he was okay.

  “Hello?” said Bob.

  “Bob, hey, it’s Doug Perry. Listen, I thought you ought—”

  “I can’t talk right now.”

  “No, listen, I just need to tell you…Hello? Hello?”

  Doug stared at the phone as if it had done him wrong. Surely the call had just been dropped. Surely, the sonofabitch didn’t just hang up on him.

  Doug touched Bob’s name on the screen again. The call went straight to voicemail. Doug swore softly in disbelief. The sonofabitch had, indeed, hung up on him.

  As he pocketed his phone, his secretary came through the turnstiles with the items he had requested. Peggy Toyama was a thin woman of Japanese heritage with half-moon reading glasses and a matronly dignity. Doug thought she must have been a knockout in her day.

  She held his coat for him as he shrugged into it. “You tell Amy to feel better soon,” she said. Amy and Peggy were great friends.

  “I will,” Doug said. She handed him his briefcase.

  “I can’t believe somebody hurt that sweet little girl,” she said.

  “It’s been a crazy day,” he said, “and it’s not even 1:00 yet. Don’t forget to call her family.”

  The elevator from the garage opened. Lassiter came through. “Police just arrived. Mendoza’s got it covered,” he said. Then he noticed the suit coat and briefcase.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Going to the hospital.”

  “I understand you want to check in on her and that’s fine. But we’ve still got a paper to put out. Heck, we’ve got to get an opinion page together—without an opinion page editor.”

  Doug spoke more sharply than he’d intended. “Yeah, well maybe you and Lydia should have thought of that before you sacked the opinion page editor we had.”

  Lassiter’s eyes widened and Doug knew he’d gone too far, snapping at the executive editor in front of two of his subordinates. He had a moment to calculate the job prospects for a 61-year-old manager in a dying industry. They were not good. After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry, Denis. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just been a hard day. I’m worried about Amy and Malcolm. Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon.” Doug added this last, even though he wasn’t at all sure it was true.

  Still, it had the desired effect. Lassiter gave a short, sharp nod, mollified for the moment. But Doug knew this wasn’t over. He was conscious of all their eyes on him—Doug’s, Peggy’s, even Jalil’s—as he moved to the elevator and stabbed the button, reminding himself again of his uncertain employability. And yes, this did concern him.

  But damn it, something was going on here and he needed to know what it was. For all any of them knew, some lunatic was out there targeting Post employees. At the very least, it might well be news. And, budget cuts aside, that was still the name of this business, wasn’t it?

  The elevator door opened. Doug got on and rode it down to the parking garage. A police detective was using a pencil to lift the Luger by its trigger guard. Doug walked to his car, a little canary-yellow coupe. He threw the briefcase on the front seat, cranked the engine, and drove out into the weak late autumn sunshine.

  About a mile south on Michigan, he saw police barricades going up. It reminded him of what he had almost managed to forget. It was Election Day. They were sealing off streets, rerouting traffic. Tonight, Barack Obama was coming to Grant Park.

  fifteen

  She wore her hair in short, salt-and-pepper dreadlocks now. Her skin was still the color of the sun just as it fell into twilight, her lips still proud as the prow of some sailing ship. Time had piled up in her eyes and left a residue of wisdom there, but those eyes were still the shade of sea foam on some remote island in the tropics. Her breasts were still small and pert and just…right. And her…

  Easy, boy. Easy. Get a grip.

  He was alarmed at how readily it all came back, as if 40 years had somehow instantly been scrubbed away. Without meaning to, he planted a hand on the back of his head, uncomfortably aware that he was a little balder every day.

  And wasn’t that funny? Bob had never been self-conscious about that, never cared much about his hair loss one way or another. Until just this instant.

  “Bob?” Confusion
wrinkled her brow. “That is you, isn’t it?”

  He realized he had not yet answered her. “Uh…yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I’m sorry, Janeka, where are my manners?”

  He stood, awkwardly, embraced her, awkwardly, all thoughts of tactics, all thoughts of maintaining the high ground, all thoughts, period, suddenly gone.

  “Please, sit down,” he managed to say.

  She sat, still smiling, and he took her in. She was stylish in a way she never had been when they were young, wearing a waist-length, reddish brown leather jacket, a high-necked, sand-colored blouse, and a gold necklace with matching earrings. Bob did not remember her ever caring enough about what she wore to coordinate it so deftly. Color coordinating clothes, after all, did nothing to challenge the structures of institutionalized oppression.

  “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said. “As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s been quite the busy day.”

  “Janeka Lattimore,” he said. He was conscious of almost praying her name.

  “Bob Carson,” she said. “How have you been, old friend?”

  “Mostly good,” he said. “Today hasn’t been the best day, but mostly, good.”

  “Oh? What’s wrong with today?”

  He waved it off, sorry he had brought it up. “Don’t even want to talk about it,” he said. “So tell me, how are you? I hope life has been good to you.”

  “Better than I deserve,” she said.

  “Married? Single? Children?” He heard a hopeful note in his voice that made him wince.

  “Married,” she said. “And then divorced. I guess it’s been…11 years now. We had a good run—19 years. Had three wonderful kids. My daughter, Angela, is a doctor in San Diego. My son Eldridge scores movies. He lives in Los Angeles. And my youngest, Bryan, is an Americorps volunteer at a school in some small town in West Virginia. I’m still waiting on grandkids. Getting a little impatient about it, to tell you the truth. How about you?”

  “Never married,” said Bob. “One son, Adam. He’s an actor in New York City. Well, mostly he’s a bartender in New York City, but every once in awhile, he’s an actor.”

  She smiled. “They have to follow their own paths, don’t they?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that they do.”

  “Makes you appreciate what our parents went through with us. I can’t tell you how many times my father gave me the lecture about how you can’t make a living carrying protest signs.”

  “So, what did you end up doing?” he asked, though he already knew some of it.

  She was buttering a piece of the black bread. “Oh, I did a bunch of things, but for the last 20 years, I’ve owned a little public relations firm in San Francisco. Of course, that’s been on hiatus since I started working with the campaign. I’m doing West Coast minority outreach for the senator. Which reminds me: have you voted yet? I’m supposed to ask everybody I meet today.”

  Somewhat to his surprise, Bob realized that he, in fact, had not voted yet. “No,” he said. “I’ll do it this afternoon.”

  “Good,” she said. “Make sure you do. I hope we can count on your support?”

  Bob hesitated. He didn’t know why he did, but she saw it. “Oh, come on, Bob. Please don’t tell me you’re voting for the cranky old man and the naughty librarian.”

  Bob intended, in fact, to vote for Obama. Eight disastrous years under George W. Bush along with nightmares about the two most terrifying words in the English language—“President Palin”—had left him little choice but to gamble on Obama, despite reservations about his lack of experience and the vagueness of his agenda. But even so, something combative rose up in him at Janeka’s airy dismissal of the Republican candidates.

  And then, a second later, he realized: it wasn’t her dismissal of McCain and Palin that raised his ire. It was her dismissal of the idea that he might vote for them, her assumption that she still knew anything at all about him, all these years later.

  Bob drew himself up. “And what if I was?” he said.

  The bread paused, halfway to her mouth. “You’re not,” she told him. Assured him, actually.

  Bob repeated it. “What if I was?”

  “Bob?” She made his name a scandalized shout. It was as if he had suggested they strip to their underwear and dance on top of the table.

  “What if I was?” he insisted. “What would you say?”

  She considered the question for a long moment. Finally she said, “I would say you have changed a great deal. I would say you’re not the boy I used to know.”

  And this, he realized, was the admission he’d wanted from her all along. Except, now that he had it, he wondered why having it had seemed so important.

  He smiled. “It’s been 40 years, Janeka. Lots of things change over that much time.”

  “I see,” she said, and the new note of caution he heard in her voice pleased him. “So are you saying you’ll be voting for the Republicans?”

  “Heck no,” he said. “I mean, I might have if McCain had picked a better veep. Let’s face it: she’s an idiot. But your guy has problems of his own. He’s not exactly the most experienced candidate who ever ran for president.”

  “He has the exact same experience Lincoln had.”

  Bob rolled his eyes. “I wish you Obama folks would stop saying that,” he said. “Your guy is not Lincoln and in any event, Lincoln was 147 years ago. It’s a different world now.”

  “You know what?” She raised her palms. “Uncle. I surrender. You win. I don’t care why we have your support, so long as we have it.”

  He grinned. “If you knew the whole truth, you might not be so happy to have me,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’ve got a losing streak going back 20 years. Bush the elder is the last guy I voted for who actually won.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope.” He squeezed his eyes shut, the better to pluck the names from memory. “Bush in 1992, then Dole, then Gore, then Kerry: my litany of losers. I never seem to find myself in step with what the rest of the country is thinking.”

  “So your voting for Senator Obama is—”

  “—the worst possible omen for your side, yes.”

  Janeka took this in, her expression thoughtful and reflective as she chewed bread. Then she swallowed. “You know,” she said, “sometimes I think Sarah Palin has gotten a raw deal from news media with their snobbish emphasis on reading books and understanding geography.”

  Surprised laughter broke out of him, a sound warm and welcome after all that had happened so far on this bizarre day. She laughed with him and for that moment, the world was a good place.

  “I’ve missed you,” he heard himself say. He spoke softly and he wasn’t sure she heard him over the sound of her own laughter.

  The skinny waiter appeared at their table. “Have we had a chance to study the menu?” he asked.

  “Actually, we haven’t,” said Janeka, still chuckling as she flipped it open. “But I’ll be quick. Go on and order, Bob, if you already know what you want.”

  Bob did. He ordered the seared salmon with the pine nut couscous.

  When it was her turn, Janeka tapped one elegantly manicured fingernail on the page. “This is what I’ll have,” she said. “New York strip steak with mashed potatoes and gravy and fresh, steamed broccoli. That sounds just right.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And how would you like that prepared?”

  “Medium rare,” she said. The waiter nodded, collected their menus and left. She looked at Bob and said, “What?”

  Bob realized he must have been staring. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I just figured…maybe you’d have gone vegan or something by now.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I guess…well, you know, we were both pretty far left of center back in the day.”

  With a glance, she took in the room, which was overseen from above the front door by a steer’s head. The steer did not look particularly happy about it. “If I were a ve
gan,” she said, “I’d be out of luck in this place, wouldn’t I?”

  Bob felt petty and obvious then. “Janeka,” he began, “I didn’t mean to—”

  His cellphone chirped and he was grateful for the interruption, because he’d had no idea how that sentence might end. He lifted the phone from the holster on his hip. Then he saw the caller ID and his mood soured like milk.

  “This will just take a second,” he told Janeka as he pressed the button to accept the call.

  She gave an amiable shrug. “Take your time,” she said.

  “Yeah?” said Bob into the phone.

  “Bob, hey, it’s Doug Perry. Listen, I thought you ought—”

  “I can’t talk right now.” He clicked the phone off without waiting for an answer. Bob knew he had no reason to be angry with Doug Perry, but that didn’t help much. He was angry with all of them.

  Janeka was watching him. “Wow,” she said. “You weren’t kidding.”

  “What?”

  “You said it would take about a second.”

  “My ex-boss,” he said.

  “Ex?”

  A sigh. “You remember I told you it hadn’t been the best day?”

  She nodded.

  “I got axed this morning.”

  “What? Why?”

  The cell chirped again. Bob glanced at it. Doug wasn’t taking the hint. He pressed a button to dismiss the call. “I assume you saw today’s paper,” he said.

  “Picked up a copy at O’Hare, yes.”

  “So you saw that column by Malcolm Toussaint on the front page.”

  “I sure did. I was surprised you guys would run it at all, much less on page one.”

  “We didn’t intend it to run it,” said Bob. “Malcolm was one of my writers. He submitted the column and I rejected it, precisely because of how angry it was. He tried to go over my head, but my bosses all agreed with me. He snuck into the building late last night, just as the early edition was being put to bed. Apparently, he had my computer password—maybe I shared it with him at some point, I don’t know—and he used it to remake the front page and strip his column in there.”