by Jean Heller
I had called Eric at home on Sunday afternoon as soon as I left the ME’s office. He arranged to have my story in its usual place in the paper, the equivalent of an extra column for the week. We actually agreed on how I would handle the story—a rare occurrence. Instead of taking a straightforward news approach, I described what happened and how I felt as the drama in the woods unfolded. It was a little off-point, but this waste of a child’s life gave me a chance to speak out yet again on the appalling toll gang violence was taking on the young and the innocent in Chicago’s poorest areas. There wasn’t much else to add. The police gave me a “no comment,” and I couldn’t reach anyone in the state’s attorney’s office or at DCFS on Sunday.
I was energized, grateful to take a break from the standard fare of government and politics, even if it was for a horrific story.
At our Monday meeting Eric kept asking me questions I had no answers for because it was too early in the investigation. I might know more, I said, after I talked to the police again, prosecutors, and DCFS.
“What are the odds the city will hold a presser and tell the world everything?”
I held out my hands in exasperation. “I don’t know, Eric. There’s nothing we can do about it. It isn’t something we can control. We broke the story. The other media in town will try to catch up. It’s their job to try to catch up. But from what the ME told me, nobody official wants to talk about this thing right now.”
Eric went silent for several moments. They he looked over at me with obvious pain on his face.
“I hope this doesn’t get any bigger,” he said.
I hoped he was right.
I already knew my hope was futile.
My first call was to Sergeant Pete Rizzo, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. Pete had helped me on the Colangelo story, and I trusted him.
“You again,” he said when he picked up the phone. “How many laws you gonna ask me to break for you this time?”
I told him why I was calling. He’d already figured it out.
“I haven’t heard anything beyond what you wrote this mornin’,” he said. “I’ve asked several times. As you might guess, my phone’s been ringing since before dawn. I’ll keep asking around and get back to you if there’s anything we wanna say.”
“Your commander at the scene is Detective Onofrio,” I said. “You know her?”
“Only by reputation. She’s as tough as the Bears’ search for a quarterback.”
“If you can convince her to talk to me, I’d appreciate it.”
“Not likely,” Rizzo said. “If this does prove to be the multiple homicide of children, only the chief’s gonna talk to the media.”
Then I called the state’s attorney, Jun Chiu. Chiu was a native-born American from a traditional Chinese family. In deference to his countrymen, Chiu Americanized his first name. Everyone called him John. He called himself John unless he was conducting official business. I called him Mr. Chiu. My courtesy didn’t help. I couldn’t get any closer to him than his assistant, and she told me there would be no comment from their office.
I had no sooner hung up than Rizzo called me back.
“Sorry, Deuce,” he said. “We don’t know yet what we’re dealin’ with. Until we get a clearer picture, nobody’s sayin’ anything about anything.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “In other murders where children were victims, the chief talked to every microphone in town. What makes this one different?”
Rizzo paused. I heard him sigh. “I don’t know, and that’s God’s truth,” he said. “Can I tell you something off the record? There’s poopy dust all over this, and I don’t have the key to the broom closet.”
“It sounds like you’re saying somebody’s being protected.”
“No, I’m not sayin’ that at all. But if you’re askin’ me does the secrecy seems odd, I’d have to say yes. Off the record.”
So to complete this exercise in futility, I called the Chicago office of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. I reached Winona Jackson, head of the Child Protection Division. She seemed nice and very concerned.
“Your column yesterday was very upsetting,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m still shocked by this sort of thing, tell the truth. Abandoned kids, street kids, kidnapped kids, they wind up dead all the time for all sorts of terrible reasons. When I came to work here twenty years ago, I used to throw up a lot. I got over the sickness part. But not the nightmares. They don’t ever seem to go away.”
“Have you been called in on this case?” I asked.
“Not yet. There might have been notification to the higher-ups, but it hasn’t trickled down to me. It will eventually if the ME says we have a murdered child.”
“Can you think of a reason the police would stay silent?”
“No, honey, they don’t discuss those decisions with me.”
I gave her my phone number in case she heard anything.
She gave me her number and asked that I do the same.
All I had gotten out of the morning was a bigger Contacts file.
5
With nothing new to say about the body in the woods, I wrote a column about a feud between the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois. I basically told both of them to grow up and face several looming financial crises like the adults they were alleged to be. The best I could hope for was to embarrass them by comparing them to petulant toddlers. I had no hope of having any useful influence.
I drove home a little before six o’clock. It had started to snow. The news said it was snowing heavily on the North Side and up into Wisconsin. Also in Chicago’s western suburbs and to the south, in central Illinois and northwest Indiana.
Not so much around my home in Pilsen.
That seemed to happen a lot, as if an invisible wedge-shaped snow deflector had been built somewhere west of me that divided incoming storms, sending half north and half south of my neighborhood.
I appreciated it, but I didn’t understand it.
I found a space on the curb and parked there because it would be easier to unload several bags of groceries I’d collected on the way home. I was filling my arms when a small voice said, “Hi. You new here?”
I turned to find a boy, maybe nine years old, smiling at me. The child was black, with a medium complexion, bright brown eyes, and a smile that could have melted ice cream in February. I feared for the pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy in one of my shopping bags. The boy’s smile ended in two deep dimples. It was the sort of face that grows up to be a movie star or a Chicago soul man like Sam Cooke or Curtis Mayfield or Lou Rawls.
He was dressed in blue jeans, high-top Merrell hiking boots, and a North Face winter parka over a forest green turtleneck sweater.
Maybe he’d grow up to be a model.
“Hi,” I replied. “I’m not really new here. I used to live around the corner. But I’m new to this house. I don’t remember seeing you before. Are you new?”
He laughed. “Naw, I’ve lived around her most of my life. In Bronzeville.”
“That’s not really around here,” I said. “You’re pretty far from home.”
Bronzeville was a neighborhood five miles east of Pilsen and south of McCormick Place, the sprawling meeting and convention center on Lake Michigan. Bronzeville was a historic black community with pre-Civil War landmarks of the Underground Railroad traveled by slaves on their flights to freedom.
It was one of several neighborhoods in Chicago that took politically incorrect names from the racial and ethnic makeup of residents. In addition to Bronzeville, there was Ukrainian Village, Chinatown, and Greektown. One predominantly gay community was nicknamed Boys Town. Nobody objected to these slips in etiquette, and I wasn’t prepared to fight tradition.
“Bronzeville ain’t that far,” the boy said. “I just get on the twenty-one bus.”
“Still, that’s pretty brave. Your parents know?”
“Probably not, since my father disappeared, and my moth
er died.”
I felt a flood of hurt for this gorgeous child.
“Where do you live?” I asked. “I mean, who takes care of you?”
“Me and my brother are in foster care,” he said. “Have been most of our lives.”
“What’s your name?”
“Charles.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Charles. I’m Deuce.”
He laughed. “Deuce? Like in ‘two’? Is that your street name?”
I smiled. “I don’t have a street name. Deuce is the name my parents gave me.”
“That’s weird. Didn’t your mama know that was weird?”
“I suspect my mom thought a lot of stuff about me was weird.”
“And you’re freaky tall.”
Now I laughed. “Okay, Charles. We have now established that I am weird and freaky. Both valid observations. Anything else you want to say?”
He looked at the sidewalk and scuffed his boot on the pavement. “I wasn’t tryin’ to dis you. Just sayin’. Ya know?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t take offense. What you said is true.”
I felt him shiver. And I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
“You want to come in?” I said. “I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”
“Where’s your husband?”
I didn’t want to go into a full explanation of my relationship with Mark. So I said, “He’s away on business for a few days.”
We walked up the sidewalk to the house and Charles asked, “You miss him?”
“Sure, I always miss him when he’s gone.”
“I don’t miss my parents. But I’d miss my brother if he died.”
That shook me. “You think your brother’s going to die? Why?”
He shrugged. “Lotsa kids do.”
The matter-of-fact way he made that pronouncement broke my heart.
I couldn’t help but think of the body in Ryan Woods.
We went up the steps to the front porch, and I led us into the small foyer. Before I had the key out of the lock, Murphy appeared. He and Charles became immediate buddies.
I let Murphy into the back yard and went to the kitchen with Charles.
“Nice house,” the boy said when we settled at the kitchen table with our mugs. “Big kitchen. Where I live it’s old, and the kitchen’s small. But we do okay.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked. “You and your brother?”
“No, it’s mostly kids I don’t know. They come and go. Different all the time. My brother and I don’t live together, but I know where he is, and I look out for him.”
“So why are you in Pilsen?” I said.
He slurped some hot chocolate and told me, “I got friends near here. I come visit ‘em after school sometimes.”
I frowned. There were some neighborhoods west of Pilsen where kids on the street were fair game for gang members. The bangers hung around after school and harvested new members from children walking alone.
“Do you have any trouble here?”
“Me? No. I spend most of my time on this side of Western Avenue, and nobody hassles me.”
We talked for a while longer. I wanted to know more about this kid, but I didn’t want to delay Charles’s trip home. So we finished our drinks, and I told him he’d better head for his bus so he wouldn’t miss dinner.
“Can I come back some time?” he asked. “Play with Murphy?”
“Of course you can,” I said.
He smiled and waved from the sidewalk and disappeared into the night.
6
I didn’t hear from Tony Donato for a week. I called him regularly but never managed to get him on the phone. I left messages he never returned. I went by the office several times and was told he wasn’t in. It didn’t take me long to figure out he was ducking me. I’m a trained investigator, after all.
Tony’s sudden silence, coupled with the anomalies about the way this case was being handled, had my curiosity growing faster than Jack’s beanstalk.
So one day I staked out his building. I knew his truck from our first meeting at Ryan Woods, and I was determined to sit in his parking lot in my old Explorer and wait him out. These tests of stamina were not my favorite part of my job.
For one thing, the weather sucked. The snow predicted for the day Mark went to Rockford left totals of anywhere from the four inches in my yard to a foot or more north, south, and west of me. After the snow went through, it got very cold. A few nights dipped below zero. Right now, the outside sensor on the Explorer said it was seventeen. Even the thought of spring was still eight weeks away, and that was the optimistic estimate.
None of the snowfall had an opportunity to melt in the sub-freezing temperatures. But it did manage to do what all urban snow does eventually, collect enough dirt and grime to form black crusts on plowed drifts. I didn’t know where all that filth came from, but I found it depressing.
Mark was still in Rockford, which was also depressing, though he expected to wrap up the investigation there soon. He would have been home by now, but Rockford got almost eighteen inches of snow, and that made it more difficult to hunt for evidence in the burned-out warehouses. I missed him. Murphy missed him. I think even the cats missed him because they slept on his pillow. Or maybe they were just trying to stay warm.
My eye caught the brass monkey that hung from my rear view mirror. I smiled remembering how Darwin the Second had come into my life. The daydream had just begun when there was a sharp rapping at my window. If my heavy coat hadn’t restrained me, I’d have jumped out of my skin.
One of Chicago’s finest was standing by my door, his breath coming in billows of vapor that steamed up the glass. I thumbed down the window and grimaced as the frigid air swept in and slapped me.
“Show me some ID,” the cop said. His badge identified him as Geary.
“I’m not trying to be hostile,” I said. “Could you tell me why you’re asking?”
“Show me some ID first.”
So I did. My driver’s license and my press card.
“So what’s up?” I said.
“A woman who works inna buildin’ says you been lurkin’ around out here for two hours, and it’s makin’ people nervous.”
“I don’t lurk,” I said. “And if I did, I’d be hiding in the bushes. It might appear that I’m loitering, but I’m not doing that, either. I’m simply waiting for someone.”
“For two hours?” he asked. “I think you been stood up.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time, Officer.”
“You should think about movin’ on.”
“I’d rather not,” I said. “This is private and has to do with my job, and now I’ve got time invested.”
“That don’t impress me.”
“This is public property. And here I am, the public.”
Officer Geary was about to show me how much he didn’t care when my butt was saved by Tony Donato’s black Tahoe pulling into the parking lot.
“Ah,” I said, “there’s my date now.”
“He know you’re waitin’ on-im?”
“No,” I said. “He likes surprises.”
“So you’re stalkin’ him?”
“Most definitely not. But you’re welcome to wait around and make sure he doesn’t seem frightened to death when he sees me. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to close the window, open the door, and get out.”
And I did.
I might not have frightened Tony Donato when I walked up to him, but it was readily apparent my appearance wasn’t the highlight of his day.
“What’s up, Doc?” I asked in my best Bugs Bunny voice.
He didn’t answer. He kept walking. He looked exhausted and anguished.
“Have you thought about going to bed?” I asked him.
He looked at me with dull, red-rimmed eyes. “If that’s an invitation it’s going to have to wait until I sleep for a month. And I should probably ask my wife if it’s okay with her.”
“You’
ve been avoiding me.”
“How perceptive of you.”
“You promised to keep me informed.”
“On my schedule, not yours.”
“Well, fortune is smiling and has brought us together here and now. So, could we have a cup of coffee and make the most of the opportunity?”
Tony held the door for me, which I took as a yes. As I entered I looked around to find Officer Geary and waved goodbye. It seemed only polite.
“Who was that?” Donato asked.
“Officer Friendly. One of the women in your office called the police to report a tall, auburn-haired stranger lurking in your parking lot.”
“Which woman in my office?” Donato said.
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Too bad. I mighta given her a raise.”
“Sit down,” Tony said, waving at a chair in front of his desk.
We both had coffee, which tasted as if it had been brewed around the turn of the century. But it was hot, and I was cold, and that was all that mattered.
Tony sipped and winced. He set his cup down as if it might attack him.
“Deuce,” he said and then paused to gather his thoughts. “If I tell you what’s happening, you have to give me your word you won’t say or write anything until I give you the go. And I’ll be honest with you. I have no idea when that will be. I’ve never worked with you before, but your reputation precedes you, and I’m willing to trust your word.”
“Hard for me to promise when I don’t know what I’m promising,” I said.
“It’s big.”
“Am I the only one promising?” I asked. “Because if I am, and all the other media in town are free to write what they please, it’s a deal-breaker.”
“We’ve had maybe a half dozen calls from your competitors,” he said. “We didn’t tell them anything, and we won’t. Most of my staff doesn’t know anything. Well, except for my crime scene team, and they never talk to anyone. They know I’m very good with a scalpel. And I know how to hide a dead body.”