by Jean Heller
“Ain’t nobody knows who’s buried down there ‘cept the folks who put ‘em there,” he said. “Kids disappear all the time. Where I live, there’s always kids leavin’ and new kids comin’ in. I know some of ‘em run away, and foster care moves some. Don’t know where any of ‘em go or where any of ‘em come from. They don’t say, and I don’t ask.”
“You ever talk to your friends about foster homes, which ones are good, and which ones are bad?”
“Well, yeah, sometimes.”
I got my iPad and shoved the spreadsheet program across the table.
“Look down this column,” I said, pointing at the addresses. “Any of those mean anything to you?”
“I wouldn’t know from addresses,” he said. “Mostly when we talk about ‘em they’re called by the names of the people who run ‘em.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s a different column. Here. Look down this one.”
He used his finger to run down the column. I didn’t watch his finger. I watched his face. The instant I saw a sign of recognition I looked at the tablet. Each line had a number. The first line that got a glimmer of recognition from Charles was thirty-four. Again at fifty-two. And seventy-six. I jotted them down on a napkin.
He got to the end of the list that was still incomplete. I was tempted to show him Winona Jackson’s master list, but I didn’t want to push my luck or trash the promise I’d made to her to keep it to myself.
“Anything you recognize?” I asked.
“Not really,” Charles said.
“How about thirty-four?” I said and scrolled back up to that item.
He looked at it for a couple of seconds. “I hearda them,” he said finally. “I don’t remember ‘xactly what I heard, but it wasn’t good.”
“Same for fifty-two and seventy-six?”
He scrolled to each of them and nodded his head.
“Same thing,” he said. “I hearda them, but nuthin’ special. I can ask around some. But like I said, it ain’t good out there to be messin’ in other people’s bidness.”
“I understand. Thanks.”
On a whim I asked Charles if his foster parents might let him come to my house for dinner one night. I’d get Mark and Murphy to come, too, and one of us would drive him home after we ate.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Would you like to do it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Can you make shrimp? I love shrimp, an’ we never get it where I live cuz they can’t afford it.”
“I can do shrimp,” I said.
“With butter and garlic?”
“That’s one of the best ways.”
“Cool.”
“How about Monday? I know Mark and Murphy will be here Monday.”
“Yeah. What time you get home from work? I don’t wanna wait on the porch. It’s too damned cold to sit out there.”
“I get home about six-thirty. You can come any time after that.”
13
I finished the transfer of Winona Jackson’s data on Sunday. Now I needed someone to show me how to organize it geographically. It made sense to isolate the foster homes and social services facilities nearest Ryan Woods and then work my way out. I assumed the gravedigger would want to dispose of the bodies as close as possible to the place where the children died. Driving any distance and risking an accident or a police pullover with a dead body in the trunk begs for trouble.
The logical person to have helped me with this project was Aubrey Sullivan, my former lover and now the former political editor of the Journal. Like so many print journalists facing the reality of hard economic times for newspapers, Aubrey had accepted a job with the online magazine Politico. It broke my heart to see him leave. But with a wife and twin boys at home he needed the security of a job that wouldn’t disappear out from under him. His future was secure now, but I couldn’t very well go to him for help.
Instead, on Monday morning I asked a friend of mine in the Journal’s IT department for assistance. He had me on track in no time. Once the map was complete, I checked the three places that drew a reaction from Charles. None was adjacent to Ryan Woods, though one was in the Englewood neighborhood northeast of the preserve. Close enough.
I considered whether I should ask Charles after dinner this night if he would look at the rest of the list. I didn’t want to upset him, but I needed the information. He would have to accept that—his quid pro quo for a big shrimp dinner.
By 3 p.m. I had nothing left to do at the office, so I decided to leave early and stop by Whole Foods on the way home for the makings of a great meal.
As I climbed the front steps to my porch, my mind was on my story. It took me a moment to realize the noise I heard when I opened the front door were the steps of several people running down the long hallway that bisected the house.
My mind flashed back to my encounter with a burglar at my condo last year during the Vinnie Colangelo investigation. I didn’t fare well in that mash-up, and I didn’t want a repeat. But someone was in my house, and I felt violated.
I dropped the grocery bags in a living room chair and noticed that most of the electronics in my house had been disassembled and piled up on and around another chair. I took off down the hall after the intruders with a murderous vengeance. I heard the back door slam and thought they’d gotten away until I saw the door of the rear bathroom. It was ajar. It was closed all the way the last time I noticed, and I always noticed.
I was hit by a blast of cold air. It was coming through the back door where a pane of glass had been broken out. Someone reaching through the broken pane could easily have accessed the door lock and gained entry. I saw two kids racing across the thin layer of snow and jumping up and over the back fence.
I turned my attention to the bathroom and lost it. I should have retreated and called the police, but my anger wouldn’t be restrained.
“You goddamned, motherfucking asshole,” I screamed at the door. “I know you’re in there. Either come out on your own, or I’ll kick the door in and drag you out by your balls.”
I got no response, so I did as promised. I kicked the door open.
Our eyes met, and I stood there, my mouth agape, probably looking like a complete doofus. Charles was cowering behind the toilet.
I regained my composure and went after him, grabbing his jacket and hauling him into the hallway. I spun him around and locked my left arm around his neck.
I realized later, with perfect hindsight, this hadn’t been smart. Though I was almost a foot taller than Charles, he was a strong kid. And he’d already told me he carried a knife. He could have done me some considerable damage.
But he didn’t. He didn’t resist. He didn’t fight. And he didn’t argue. He stood still and perfectly silent.
I reached into my pocket for my cell phone and dialed 9-1-1. The operator answered almost immediately.
“What is the nature of your emergency?” he asked.
“Well, it’s not really an emergency,” I said. “I just walked into my house into a burglary in progress. Three people. Two got away, but I caught one, and I’m holding him for you.”
“And you don’t consider that an emergency?” he said. “ Units are already on their way. Will you be okay for a few minutes?”
“I think so,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t hang up,” the operator said firmly. “I’m going to stay on the phone with you until the officers arrive. Is the suspect armed?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Keep him as immobile as you can.”
He barely got the words out when there was a banging at the front door and the sound of people storming in. Good thing I hadn’t relocked the entry.
“Police,” one male voice shouted.
“Down the hall in the back,” I called out to them, and they found us. They assumed custody of Charles.
“He may be carrying a knife,” I told them.
If Charles thought I had betrayed
him, he didn’t show it. He never lifted his eyes from the floor.
“Where are the other two?” one of the three officers asked.
“They went out the back door and over the back fence,” I said.
He asked me to describe them. I did as best I could, and the cops called it in.
“We’re gonna ask this one some questions, if you don’t mind us using your living room for a little while,” said the officer who handcuffed Charles’s wrists behind his back. “And we’ll have some questions for you.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m going to put some groceries away.”
The officer gave me an odd look, and I realized how ridiculous I’d sounded. Why it occurred to me to put groceries away instead of staying and listening to the cops question Charles I didn’t know. I probably didn’t want to accept what he’d done. I know when I transferred the shrimp from the bag to the refrigerator, I wondered who was going to eat them, and it made me sad.
I wandered back into the living room to find Charles sitting on my sofa with two other boys, both younger. Their clothes matched those of the two kids I’d seen running across my back yard.
One of the cops turned to me and cocked his head at the two.
“Picked ‘em up over on Blue Island,” he said. “They was actually standin’ there waitin’ on their buddy here.”
“What happens to them now?” I asked.
“We can’t hold the two younger ones,” he said, “cause we didn’t catch ‘em in the house, and they claim they don’t know nuthin’ about any burglary. The one you grabbed up, he’s goin’ to juvie, assumin’ you’re gonna press charges.”
I looked at the loot on the chair and the floor around it. They had intended to clean me out. Hell, yes, I was going to press charges. And I said so.
The front door opened and Mark walked in with Murphy.
“What the hell?” he said. “I come up the street, see the police cars, and didn’t really think anything of it. I took out my key and started up the walk, and one of the cops on the street says to me, ‘Sir, I think it’s open.’ Scared the shit out of me.”
He came over and embraced me.
“You okay?” he said.
It was all I could do to keep from sobbing into his shoulder.
When the police left with Charles I left for takeout from Bacchanalia, another of our favorite Italian neighborhood restaurants. Mark was cutting and fitting a piece of plywood to temporarily replace the broken pane of glass in the back door. The next day, he said, he would add a bolt where no one could reach it from the outside.
When I turned the corner from my street onto Oakley Avenue headed to Bacchanalia, I saw a black Suburban with two men inside. I knew most of the cars with permits to park on the street, and I’d never seen the Suburban before. I glanced at the windshield and saw no permit there. Then I remembered the Suburban I’d seen parked illegally outside the coffee shop where I’d met Winona Jackson. I couldn’t have sworn to it, but I was reasonably sure the two men in the front seat, one black, one white, were the same two I saw that night. The driver glanced at me then looked away, hiding his face.
Unnerved already by the break-in. I didn’t need this added mystery. When I returned from Bacchanalia, the Suburban had moved. It was farther down my street. I was certain it was the same vehicle because it was parked with the motor running. White exhaust swirled from its tail pipes. The two guys were still inside.
I mentioned the Suburban sightings to Mark.
“That’s weird,” he said. “You know the day I got back from Rockford and was sitting out in my truck with Charles? I was going to park in front of your house, but there was a black Suburban in the space with two guys in it. I put down my window to ask if they were leaving, but either they were deaf and blind, or they were ignoring me.”
“Mixed-race?” I asked.
“Yeah. One black guy, one white or Hispanic.”
I nodded. “Same two I’ve been seeing. I think I’m being followed.”
“Maybe. Whoever they are, they’re pretty sloppy about staying hidden.”
“Or maybe they want me to see them, to scare me.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me to him.
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said. I promised.
We ate Bacchanalia’s famed fried calamari—the best in Chicago—and a superb flatbread pizza while we put my electronics back where they belonged. The police had noted the brand, model, and serial number of every piece of equipment the boys piled up and had taken a lot of photos of my property and the broken back door. They also took fingerprints because if any matched up to the younger boys, they could be charged, too.
We went to bed early. The emotion of the day had taken a toll on my energy.
Mark turned on his side and took my hand.
“You’ve got to cut out this thing you’ve got for coming home to burglaries,” he said. “Though I admit I would have given a lot of money to see you kick in the bathroom door and drag Charles out.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked.
“Well, if you go forward with charges and he’s found guilty, I imagine he’ll do some serious time in juvenile detention.”
“You think I shouldn’t press charges?”
“It’s not my call,” Mark said. “If it happened to me, I sure as hell would.”
“And Charles becomes one more wasted kid,” I said. “He has such promise. What in hell would make him do a thing like this?”
“That’s what these kids do,” he said. “It’s tragic, but peer pressure, boredom, anger, frustration all feed into it. Maybe he was pissed off at you for calling him out about his attitude. Or maybe he never saw you as anything but a target of opportunity, and he was playing you from the first day.”
That last part hurt. I thought I’d meant more to Charles than a target.
Mark’s hand released mine. His fingers drifted across my shoulders and downward, caressing my breasts and my stomach. I shivered.
“I could make you feel better,” he said.
“Yes, please,” I said.
And he did.
Later, after Mark drifted off to sleep, I lay on my back staring at the ceiling and feeling tears track down my face and across my cheeks. I brushed them aside.
I couldn’t kid myself. I knew why events of the afternoon made me feel so miserable. It wasn’t a broken pane of glass. It wasn’t the near loss of more than $16,000 in electronic gear. The truth was I had fallen in love with Charles. I had begun to look forward to bonding with him over hot chocolate and schoolwork, admiring his quick mind and charismatic personality, his sparkling eyes and his drop-dead smile, his bottomless pit of curiosity. I looked forward to a trip with Mark and Charles to the Lincoln Park Zoo and fishing up at Montrose Point in the spring. In a way, I had begun to think of him as my son.
On my way to work one day I had imagined adopting him, and with Mark, becoming a family. It was only a daydream, but now it was a daydream dashed and irreparable. And to make matters worse, Charles had probably wasted his chance to make something good of his life. Chances were he would come out of juvie a hardened criminal, or well on his way.
I ached to think what would befall him next.
14
To say I languished after Charles yanked himself out of my life would be an understatement. I kept telling myself it would have happened sooner or later, that he would have outgrown the need to hang out with a mother figure, the hot chocolate notwithstanding. Or he would have gotten himself into some other sort of trouble that brought him grief with the law. Or, heaven forefend, he would have succumbed to the inevitability of life as a gangbanger and died on a crumbling sidewalk, his blood streaming through the cracks in the concrete and soaking the earth below.
Ashes to ashes and all that.
I needed to snap out of it. My columns were suffering from my lack of interest and initiative. Eric Ryland, my supervisor, asked me at one point if everything was okay in
my life. I wanted to yell, “Hell, no. Nothing’s okay in my whole stinking world.” But I just nodded and mumbled, “Yeah. Fine.”
Mark noticed. He understood and was patient with me. But he knew there was nothing he could do, and he began to spend more time at his condo. It even penetrated Murphy’s brain, which usually was filled to capacity with dreams of chasing squirrels and sniffing out bowls of food. Instead of greeting me with his usual canine effusiveness, he had begun to hold back, to cock his head and watch me for some sign that I was happy to be in his presence and maybe eager to throw a ball for him. When the vibes rang off key, he turned and left.
At one point I called Pete Rizzo, the police department spokesman, and asked if there weren’t some way I could check up on Charles, to make sure he was okay and didn’t need anything.
“I’m not a court official, Deuce, but I know the procedure,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. The boy’s a minor and you aren’t a parent or a legal guardian. You have no rights with him. When you’re notified of a court date, go in, identify him as the burglar you caught in your house, and let the police witnesses do the rest. Then forget about him.”
I toyed with the idea of getting on the witness stand and expressing uncertainty as to whether Charles was the boy in my house.
“I’m sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “It was dark when I pulled him out of the bathroom. I spun him around with his back to me so I could hold onto him. I never got a good look at his face.”
“And, Ms. Mora,” the prosecutor would ask, “what about the hour the police spent questioning him in your living room?”
“I never looked at him. I was in the kitchen putting away groceries.”
“For an hour?”
“I had a lot of bags.”
It would be perjury of the most transparent sort, and the police would contradict it. But if I could raise sufficient reasonable doubt, I might extricate Charles from his predicament and perhaps inspire him to set a new path for his life.