Windy City

by Scott Simon

  “You've got a lot of artsy downtown types moving into her ward. Gay couples adopting children,” Sunny pointed out. “A segment of the electorate FDR never considered.”

  “Homeowners,” stressed Linas. “They want to dump their kids at school without worrying about drugs, guns, Chechen rebels, and festering trash. My people.”

  (Sunny remembered a similar insight from the mayor, who had once hung up on a call with a north side ward committeeman and scowled.

  “What the hell happened to gays?” he asked. “They used to buy abandoned places and fix them up. Brass doorknobs, stained glass, skylights, hang the cost, 'cause they don't have kids. They didn't care if the public school down the street was Sesame Street or San Quentin; they just wanted a farmer's market in the playground every Saturday. Gays used to go to theater, guzzle pomegranate martinis, and gossip. You could talk to them about movies, music, and clothes. Listen to them now, will you?” the mayor asked as he clamped his hands over his ears. “Chattering like married couples at a backyard barbeque. ‘Where do you get diapers? Can you believe what they charge for kids' shoes? Have you met the third-grade teacher? She looks a little slutty.’”)

  “Luis Zamora?” The 31st Ward; a beer distributor.

  “Luis is vitally concerned about improving the Department of Constructions and Permits. He's even kind enough to suggest a couple of people to help.”

  “Hiring laws,” Sunny reminded Linas, who lifted his eyes toward the ceiling and flattened his hands beseechingly before a higher authority in the heavens, or on the fifth floor.

  “As the man upstairs so often said: God helps those who help their friends.”

  The two men sat silently for half a moment, counting and calculating the implications of such wisdom.

  “I play this absolutely down the middle while I'm in the chair,” Sunny finally told Linas. “But if Vera gets to twenty-four—”

  “You could name your price,” Linas finished the sentence. “But there's no prize unless she wins.”

  Sunny hunched in closer over the round table, which prompted Linas to lean in, too.

  “You could name your price right now, Linas. Have you thought about that?” he asked. “Lay back. Let her have it. Say it's to continue the mayor's legacy. You keep the finance committee. The press can extol your statesmanship. Then start running for next year. The real term.”

  “Is this an official tickle?”

  “In no way,” Sunny assured him. “I'm neutral until I vote. But I'm sure I can sell it.”

  Sunny thought that Linas paused longer than was necessary to convince him that he considered the offer fresh, sincere, and valuable. Then he shook his head almost mournfully.

  “It's a little late for me to play statesman,” he finally told Sunny. “Next year? Jesus will jump in, too. You figure Jesus, you've got to plan on Miguelito Torrez.” A state senator from the west side. “Mexicans against Puerto Ricans, against African-Americans against Africans, against Koreans against Cambodians. Like the Irish against Italians against Poles.”

  “Divide and prosper,” Sunny reminded him.

  “Vera knows that, too. She's smart, your lordship. Tell her I said so. I lay back now, she knows how to pile every piece of the furniture against the door to stay there. Four years from now, eight years? I'll be too rich, fat, demented, or bored to be mayor. Or be in jail. I've got a running start now. I have to jump.”

  It was the response that Sunny expected; he didn't try to convince Linas otherwise. In private, politicians almost never disputed each other. They might freely offer advice about romance or marriage, children or restaurants. Sunny had heard politicians argue about baseball, movies, or whether a man's shoe size correlated to the length of his penis. (Wandy Rodriguez, who wore a size fourteen, vehemently supported the proposition. Vernetta Hynes Griffin of the 37th, who had played piano for a roving gospel group, said that axiom was unsupported by her own observations.)

  But politicians couldn't change their minds. They had raised money, won votes, and formed coalitions around fixed positions. Any revision was denounced as hypocrisy and taken as retreat. Changing your mind only made both your supporters and opponents agree: you couldn't be trusted. So Sunny went on.

  “Christ, Linas, this is unbelievable,” he said. They sat for another silent moment, looking at the walls of Sunny's small office, before Linas finally spoke.

  “You know, we got along better than people knew,” he said. “When he brought us up here, you, Arty, and Vera got lectures. I got winks. What was there to fight about? There's only one side of the aisle here. Everybody here is in favor of a woman's right to choose from the age of twelve, and nobody's right to own a gun. We all want to welcome poor immigrants to wash our dishes and diaper our kids. Or your folks, Sunny, to fix our computers and heart valves. Clashes on issues? Some of us think it's fine for gays to get married, we don't care. Just spare us the details and tell us where to send the espresso pot. Some others think the city ought to invite all gay couples to throw out the first pitch at Wrigley Field. That's as much as we get of ideological disagreements.

  “You know what really spills blood here?” Linas asked. “Jobs. Favors. Goodies. Who gets to sprinkle candies into the hands of his friends. That's where the mayor and I fell out. But we were use-full to each other,” said Linas, stressing the word as if it were the name of an ancient religious precept. “Do you think I ever lost a single vote in my part of town because of anything he said about me? Do you think anything I ever said pried any of his supporters away from him?

  “A supporter can be like a lover, Sunny,” Linas said slowly. “They might prefer to see you lose. It keeps you close. The mayor and I didn't have any claims on each other, and we never disappointed each other.”

  Linas sat back and laughed, as if to give Sunny the chance to laugh away what he had said, which Sunny did not. He pushed out a long breath and just repeated: “Christ, this is unbelievable.”

  “I've got to go home,” Linas suddenly announced, standing and smiling.

  “I thought you were performing constituent services tonight. Face to face.”

  “Got to be up early,” he explained as he ran a finger down one of his smooth sleeves, as if about to lick frosting. “I've got a daughter who has a band recital tomorrow and wants me to hear her play ‘The Wolverine March.’ I've got to be at yoga by eight, or the young girls get all the good mats. Then back here. You've got a few eventful days in front of you too, your lordship. Call me—if. If anything.”

  Sunny shook hands and held Linas's grip for a moment.

  “Is there anything?” he asked softly.

  A range of possibilities was implied. But Linas already practically controlled scores of city jobs in his ward and committees. Major corporations already saw the sense of hiring his neighborhood law firm to advise them on property tax. And any promise Sunny might make for Vera to support Linas for state office was flagrantly worthless. Linas knew—he was even proud—that his sharp political charm would sour when uncorked outside the city limits. He held Sunny's hand only long enough to grin and throw the smooth thumb of his left hand over his shoulder toward the hallway being guarded by Sgt. Gallaher.

  “Hey, Mr. Interim Mayor,” he said. “Could you give me a police escort home?”

  As Linas took leave of Sunny and sauntered past Sgt. Gallaher with one of his thick-lidded reptilian winks, the mommy and daddy team questioning Mrs. Bacon sent word to Chief Martinez that they had what promised to be the first break of the case.

  Peter and Jessica were on duty in the 12th District on south Racine when called to City Hall. Mrs. Bacon had discovered the mayor; she was the only non-police person on duty at the time of his death. While she was immediately dismissed from all suspicion, Peter and Jessica muttered to uniformed officers who dusted the desk and lifted fibers that they wanted some ranking officer to quickly extract Mrs. Bacon's phone records, her emails, and her voice messages while they spoke with her in one of the bland beige conference
rooms along the hallway of the mayor's office suite. She had been offered tea, water, coffee—“Hell, Mrs. B, if you wanted a little shot of something, I'm sure we can oblige”—and when she quaffed down a cup of water in half a dozen hurried gulps, Peter chivalrously snapped his fingers for another while Jessica took the first from her clenched fingers and motioned for it to be bagged, so it could be dusted for fingerprints, lip prints, traces of saliva, and droplets of DNA.

  Mrs. Bacon quickly established that nothing had seemed out of place for a late Thursday night. The mayor had returned about 9:30 from an appearance at St. Kevin's Church on 105th, vowing—only comically, she stressed, it was a practiced monologue—to murder Father Walter for making him eat the half-baked fiske jarse prepared by a parishioner.

  “Fish balls, Doris!” he had thundered. “Fish balls! Have Father Walter lined up and shot. No blindfold. If it weren't for the succulent maroon-colored sauce served alongside, I doubt I could have finished. The sauce was faintly grainy. A tang of horseradish was discernible.” He turned to his security guards. “Did you get the name?” They shook their heads, and the mayor grunted. “You're supposed to serve and protect. Call the church. Describe the sauce. Find the old Swedish lady who made it. Name a street for her. Bring Father Walter's head to me in a pastry box and a pint of that nice dark red sauce. And call Quattro's,” he said, before standing up to take down his trousers and watch the late news. “Fiske jarse my arse …”

  Mrs. Bacon had cried again in re-creating those excruciating and sorrowful minutes in which she had found the body of the man she had served so long and loyally, slumped across the sofa. Jessica joined in with her own tears. Peter heard his own voice straining as he tried to get Mrs. Bacon to recall if the physical disposition of the mayor's furniture and artifacts was exactly as it seemed before she left him in care of his pizza; it did. When Peter read the paramedic's report revealing the slogan on the mayor's boxer shorts, he was glad for the respite of laughter.

  “Mercy,” laughed Mrs. Bacon, “but I had never seen those before!”

  “And how often would you see the mayor's undershorts?” asked Jessica, with measured mischievousness, and when Mrs. Bacon answered, “Oh, all the time,” the small room broke up with flabbergasted laughter. It was like hearing a grandmother repeat the punch line of a naughty joke she didn't quite understand.

  “1 mean,” she added quickly, “it's like the theater. I'd be in his office while he changed before speeches, dinners. We'd go on talking while he dressed. He'd dictate letters, tell me to make phone calls. So I'd see his shorts. We all did.”

  “We?” asked Peter.

  “The security detail. Assistants. It's nothing, really. I mean, you work for a man for thirty years, you know so much more about him than undershorts. You see people in their undershorts on billboards.”

  “Now Mrs. B, where would—” Peter had begun to speak before he had quite formulated the question—“or who, or how would those shorts get to him? It must have been a close friend …”

  “I knew all of his friends,” said Mrs. Bacon primly.

  “So—I'm looking at the report now—so, when you said, ‘I'm sure they were a gift….’”—

  “I mean I hardly think the mayor got them for himself. He couldn't buy a stick of gum for himself. People used to kid him because he didn't have a dime in his pockets. But he couldn't go anywhere without being mobbed. That was the reason. Can you imagine having to buy socks and underwear with an audience? A few times a year, he'd call out to me, ‘Doris, I need some socks,’ or, ‘Doris, I need some shoes.’ I'd call someplace to send them over.”

  “Undershorts?” asked Peter.

  “I'm sure.”

  “And you knew his sizes?” Peter looked down at the paramedic's report. “Like, they have the shoes at nine and a half D.”

  “They're written down somewhere,” said Mrs. Bacon, and for the first time, Jessica recognized that they had been told one of those negligible lies, as easy to pass as a penny on the street, that training had taught her to detect. A woman who had been buying the mayor's underwear for thirty years would know his expanding size by heart.

  Peter was about to observe that they didn't want to spend too much more time on the undershorts when he saw that Jessica had brought herself up onto the rim of her chair.

  “So—let me get this straight, now, so we'll know how the office ran—if the mayor couldn't buy something like those shorts for himself, and you didn't pick them up for him, how would they get to him?”

  “People send him things all the time,” said Mrs. Bacon. “He's the most popular man in town,” and for the first time, Jessica could see Peter take a furtive look at the lens of the small camera that the patrolmen had set up on a side table, looking for the small green light.

  “Right,” said Peter. “Cookies, cakes—am I right?”

  Mrs. Bacon smiled.

  “And you'd see those?”

  “Never,” she explained. “Everything gets opened in a warehouse by the Stevenson Expressway. They send the cards and letters over. But cookies, cakes, pies, hats—things people knit for him, you'd be amazed—they all have to be destroyed.”

  “I just wonder,” asked Jessica, with the same slow, studied show of barely middling interest with which she might ask about the wallpaper in a motel lobby. “Why not send stuff to a homeless shelter? A senior citizens home?”

  “You can't take the chance,” Mrs. Bacon explained. “You have no idea what someone might put into a brownie, a pie, a tie, a bunch of flowers. Brownies could contain peanuts. Send those to an orphanage, some poor child has an allergy, and you've got a tragedy.”

  “Courtesy of the mayor's office,” one of the uniformed officers volunteered. Peter thought his interjection was disruptive, but correcting him might alert Mrs. Bacon that the questions had grown more pressing. Peter was relieved when she just picked up her answer.

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “People send T-shirts with funny sayings, baseball hats, needlepoint pillows. But they all have to be incinerated. You can't take a chance. Everyone's scared of white powders.”

  “Anthrax,” the officer inserted himself again, and this time, Jessica leaned forward so that the patrolman might see her curl a pink-topped finger almost teasingly into her long auburn waves, while Peter caught the officer's eyes and burned him with a scowl that, he hoped, could shatter the window on a shark tank.

  “They went over a list with us,” said Mrs. Bacon. “They warned us. Gosh, they scared us. They said the particles can perch on the lip of a coffee cup.”

  Peter rubbed an index finger across the rim of his own cup and wiped it absently on his sleeve.

  “So if someone—an adoring constituent, say, or someone with a peculiar sense of humor—sent those over, you wouldn't see it, right? Over in the warehouse, someone there would see the shorts, Notre Dame gym socks, and Greek Easter cookies, and send everything down the incinerator?”

  “That's how it works,” Mrs. Bacon confirmed.

  Peter flicked his right eye to check the camera's green light once more.

  “You and the mayor go back,” he said finally.

  “Since 1970,” she said. “I walked into his campaign office on Ellis. He was so bold. So funny.”

  “No one else like him,” Jessica said softly. “You were—?” She let the question hang.

  “Just a grad student,” Mrs. Bacon answered. “Modern European History. I never finished. The mayor was a state representative then, and I was already working in the district office on things that seemed more important than Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Descartes. Crime, jobs, and public housing. ‘Doris,’ the mayor used to say, ‘stick with me and we'll make history.’”

  “Mr. Bacon?”

  “Another student. It—we—didn't last long. We were too young for each other, I guess. He went on to teach at Grinnell. We didn't really see each other until our daughter, Amy, got married a couple of years ago. It was—fine. The mayor was so charming with him. The mayor
arranged for the reception in the Cultural Center. He put his arm around Amy in her long, lacy ivory dress—he's known her forever— as they danced in those big bay windows looking over the park. He said, ‘My dear, the great Daniel Burnham had this night in mind when he put these magnificent environs at your feet.’ You can't imagine,” said Mrs. Bacon softly.

  Peter leaned back quietly, to erase himself as much as he could from Mrs. Bacon's view. Her face was almost rosy. Her blue eyes brimmed, but in happy reminiscence. Her arms were folded around her chest, as if she were hugging a small girl from behind. Jessica gently touched the top of Mrs. Bacon's hand with two fingers. She leaned forward, as if she were trying to whisper in that child's ear.

  “Mrs. B,” she said gently. “Those undershorts are being put through every test known to man.”

  When the break came, it seemed to work its way up. Mrs. Bacon's feet fluttered, her knees began to buck, her hands and arms twitched, her shoulders shook, and then her jaw opened like a dropped drawer, just before tears began to spill from her eyes. She struggled, as if trying to get up, and then fell back before rasping, “They were a gift, alright? A little joke between us. What happened between us happened a long time ago. I wasn't always like … like this, you know!”

  Peter and Jessica let Mrs. Bacon take their arms and led her over to a small brown couch in the back of the conference room. They gently laid her down; the small, scratchy cushions crinkled under her shivering bird's weight. One of the patrolmen rushed off and wrung out a towel with a trickle of cool water. Jessica laid it gently against Mrs. Bacon's forehead. They snapped off the lights in the room and left Mrs. Bacon to rest, with only Jessica sitting close by.

  Peter sent word to Chief Martinez over in the mayor's office. The patrolmen had their recording cued up to just a couple of minutes before Mrs. Bacon's teary disclosure. Chief Martinez took off his service cap to get close to the small screen as it played, and Peter explained that while he and Jessica took no personal pleasure in Mrs. Bacon's breakdown, there was inescapable professional satisfaction. They had been charged with getting information from the person most above suspicion in the crime. They discovered, through pointed, intelligent questioning, a potential suspect with classic motivation. The long-spurned love. The daytime spouse who at long last realizes how many years she has devoted to a futile relationship. No one knew the victim better, his appetites, customs, precautions, and routines; no one knew better how and where to hurt him. Peter said they had already isolated calls to the restaurant on her phone logs.