The Fall

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  May laughed. “Guess I’ll jus’ go tell Ms. Rage it’ll be a minute.”

  Nine

  The neighborhood canvass had turned up zilch on Siano’s killer, and the autopsy hadn’t told them anything new. Since nobody’d recognized the generic bad guy in Joanne Lessing’s composite, Minorini turned his lens on her. Maybe, now that she knew that the mob was involved, she had a good reason to not remember what the hit man looked like. Or maybe, now that she knew the Bureau was involved, she wanted out for some other reason.

  He started with the Secretary of State’s Office, Driver Services Department. Lessing had traded a California license for one from Illinois three years earlier; she’d had a clean driving record since. No changes of address, either.

  Using her DOB and social security number, he was able to determine that she had Visa and Discover cards as well as Sears, Kohl’s, and J.C. Penney’s. All had what seemed to him to be unhealthy balances. She was paying a little more than the minimum on each card every month and seemed to be late with a payment on one or another almost every month. Probably par for a single mother with problems collecting child support. He checked on that next. California records showed a Lessing divorce roughly three years earlier, and several filings since to collect back child support. From the looks of it, Howard Lessing never paid until his ex-wife’s lawyer hauled him back into court—four times in three years.

  Lessing claimed to be a professional photographer, so Minorini checked the membership roster on the Professional Photographers of America website. She wasn’t a member, but when he queried Rage Photo, he got a hit. Richard Rage, the owner, was. Just for kicks—and because he didn’t have any hot leads—he ran all the usual checks on both of them. No arrests, no wants or warrants, no bankruptcies, lawsuits or judgements against either, no complaints to the Better Business Bureau—a pair of regular citizens.

  He sat back at his desk and laced his fingers behind his head. There was something about Joanne Lessing that made her stick in his head—the little show of gumption, maybe, when she’d demanded to know what was going on, or maybe the metaphor she’d used—her photographic memory. She wasn’t flashy, but she wasn’t bad looking. He wondered what she’d look like dressed up. Or undressed. On a whim, he got on the phone to the photography section and asked if anybody there had heard of a Joanne Lessing.

  Somebody had. “Check the current Chicago Magazine feature on shoplifting, and the Chicago Tribune Magazine’s April 11th issue on motorcycle gangs.”

  Minorini rang off and called Chicago Magazine. By the time he’d finished talking to the Tribune, his fax was spitting out the shoplifting article. He put his feet on the desk while he studied the photos, which could easily have told the story without a word of text. His estimation of Joanne rose with each picture. Funny, as professional as the feature was, she hadn’t apologized for the amateur quality of the shots she’d taken of the fleeing hit man.

  When the Tribune editor emailed the biker article, Minorini’s puzzlement grew. She’d managed to get close enough to the gang, figuratively speaking, to get candid pictures of the members’ mundane activities—changing a baby’s diaper, mending a tire, waterproofing boots. But more than ordinary human events, the pictures captured emotions—pride, dismay, delight—and demonstrated an awesome mastery of the camera.

  Minorini wasn’t sure what instinct made him hide the articles when he heard Haskel approach.

  “You wanna go grab a bite?” Haskel asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” Minorini shuffled his notes and reports into a neat pile and wrapped a file folder around it. He put the file in a drawer and locked it out of habit.

  “So d’you get to first base with our star witness last night?”

  “Grow up, will you?”

  “Touchy, aren’t we. It’s been how long since you got any?—I saw the way you were looking at her.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “She’s gotta be every man’s dream—a virgin, figuratively speaking.”

  “Virgins are highly overrated. I’m holding out for a woman who can watch my back.”

  Ten

  The murder was the lead in Thursday’s local news. The reporter for the Northbrook Star took two and a half columns to give the paragraph’s worth of information the police were willing to part with. Her coverage added nothing to what Doug Cummings had said in thirty seconds on the radio. The Police Blotter section added that a resident at 1000 Waukegan Road had seen a gray car hit a car parked in the 1800 block of Milton before speeding away. There weren’t any details. The reporter hadn’t, apparently, made the connection between that item and the lead story. And, thank God, no one mentioned her.

  Joanne put the paper down to answer the phone.

  “Jo!” Howie’s voice came whining over the line from La-La Land, like a switch turning on all her old feelings of rage and depression. What had she ever seen in the jerk?

  “What do you want, Howie?” She imagined him lounging next to the pool with the phone, letting the sun worship him.

  He laughed. “You used to be such a nice girl, Joanne.”

  “Girl is the operative word, Howie. I’ve grown up. Now that I’m a woman, I won’t put up with your shit.”

  “Don’t start…”

  “Get to the point.”

  “I want to talk to my son.”

  “He isn’t home. You’ll have to leave a message or call back.”

  There was silence while he considered the alternatives, then he said, “I want Sean to spend the holidays with me.”

  “Fine.

  “Here.” He was beginning to sound irritated.

  “No.

  “He can choose.”

  There was anger in the statement. She could still recognize his patent effort to be cool, to be reasonable, and the implication that she was somehow the cause of whatever disagreement they were having. She wondered if she would ever be able to be indifferent, to feel nothing—no annoyance, no inadequacy or regret. She felt herself slipping into her old way of responding. “You’re right, Howie.” Her irritation with herself made her add, “He’s old enough to tell you where to go himself.”

  Howie had kept her insecure and dependent. When he discovered that he couldn’t snow her family, he’d put them down and moved her to Los Angeles. Isolation had come to seem normal, but it had not been freely chosen.

  “God dammit, Joanne. I pay support. I’ve got rights.”

  Joanne raised the handset overhead but stopped it aloft. Then she carefully replaced it in its cradle and unplugged the phone.

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t enough that she’d paid for the mistake of marrying Howie with all the years of living with him. She was still paying. It wasn’t his fault entirely. He was two thousand miles away and she could always hang up the phone. Why did she still feel so bad? Even now, when she stood up to him and gave as good as she got, she felt depressed.

  Sean had left the mail piled on the counter with the paper. She could see it was all bills. People didn’t have time to write letters anymore, at least the people she knew. Not that she’d have had time to answer if they did. She opened everything and put the envelopes and inserts in the recycling bin. She made a quick estimate of how short her paycheck would be and stuffed the bills into her paperwork drawer. Well, they weren’t due for two weeks and something would come up by then. If not, she could pay a little on each and keep them all off her back till next month.

  Twenty minutes later the swinging door flew open as Sean barged in. He tended to be dramatic at times for no reason that she could see, but it went with the shocking T-shirt slogans and the extreme hair style.

  “Ma! Can we go to McDonalds?”

  “May we go to McDonalds,” she said, quietly.

  “That’s what I said.”

  She lowered her head and raised her eyebrows.

  Sean said, “May we go to McDonald’s?”

  “If you’re buying. I’m broke.”

  “What do you do with all the wads of mo
ney you’re always getting paid?” He punctuated his question with mock hits to her upper arm as if it were a punching bag.

  “Oh, I spend it at the salon…” She held her hand up at eye-level with her wrist bent to show off an imaginary manicure, then fluffed a make-believe hair style. “And the boutique.” She curtsied, holding out an imaginary skirt.

  He giggled. He opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “There’s nothing to eat in the house!”

  “I’m sure that can’t be true. I spent a hundred dollars at the Jewel last time. There must be something left.”

  He fanned the air with the fridge door. “Nah, look. Nothing. Not a cracker or a crumb even.”

  Joanne pulled out the carton of eggs and said, “We could have scrambled eggs.”

  “For dinner?”

  She grabbed a block of cheddar. “We’ll put cheese on them and call it an omelet. And we have potatoes we can bake.”

  “No butter.”

  “We’ll just have to put cheese on the potatoes, too.” She opened the freezer and took out a package of frozen spinach.

  Sean said, “Yech!” He looked in and added, “No ice cream.”

  “Deprivation!” She opened cabinets until she spotted a bag of marshmallows. “We can have crispy treats for dessert.”

  “No Rice Krispies.”

  “Then we’ll have corn flake crispy treats.”

  “You are relentless.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I heard dad tell his lawyer. I looked it up ’cause I thought it was something bad.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as inventive. As in—”

  “I know—Necessity is the mother. Or is it a mother?”

  She gave him a mock frown, then said, “To get back to dinner, where there’s a will there’s a way.”

  “I thought it was an attorney.”

  “What?”

  “Where there’s a will there’s an attorney. Gotcha!” His grin faded suddenly and he seemed wistful as he added, “Too bad dad’s such a dickhead. He’s missing a lot of fun.”

  “Not to mention some really bad puns. Speaking of your dad, he called.”

  “So?”

  “He wants you to come out for Thanksgiving.”

  When he didn’t respond, she said, “How do you feel about that?”

  “It sucks. I don’t want to go.”

  “Well, don’t then.”

  “You mean I have a choice?”

  “Everyone has choices.”

  Eleven

  Veteran’s Day dawned slate gray and lemon yellow before crimson light burst below the overcast like a muzzle-flare fixed by fast film. The red faded. The slate-colored clouds thinned and blued.

  Joanne resisted the urge to grab her camera. She could have run off a roll every morning, but her portfolio contained enough sunrises. And anyway, they were a cliché. Everyone with a camera had a dozen. All beautiful.

  She walked the few blocks to Cherry Lane for the parade that would wind around the shopping center, burrow under the Metra tracks, and peter out somewhere near the Methodist church. Her assignment was to try to find something fresh about the day or the event. Failing that, she was expected to come up with acceptable variations of the stock photos—tears on the cheeks of a crusty Korean War vet, the defiant pose of a man left paraplegic by Vietnam, or the heart-tugging flag-waving of a child, à la John-John Kennedy.

  She hated war. The Civil War. World Wars I and II. Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf. The latest War. War games. War and Peace. All the millions of words—or for that matter, photographs—hadn’t stopped a single bullet.

  The crowd was sparse, few willing—apparently—to stand out in the damp cold. She snapped off a few shots out of habit as the parade drummed past, nothing worth the film. And then she saw an old man—in his sixties or early seventies—arguing with another who appeared to be his son, while the third generation—in the person of a boy ten or eleven—watched in dismay. She grabbed her F1 and began to earn her pay.

  She noticed Special Agent Minorini when she had half a roll left in the camera. She kept track of him while she finished off the parade. It would have been an easy event to satirize, especially since she lost interest in her assignment as soon as she spotted the FBI agent. He’d seen her, she was sure, but he was acting as if he hadn’t. She used her last two shots to catch him as he looked her way.

  She changed the film in the F1 and exchanged the Canon for her Hasselblad. As the spectators straggled away, she adjusted the camera and plotted her course, cutting off the agent’s escape route near the Walgreen’s.

  “Special Agent Minorini!” She snapped his surprised look and added, “What brings you back to our friendly little town?”

  “I was in the area. I figured I’d stop and see if you remembered anything else.”

  Joanne shook her head. “How did you know I was here?”

  “Your son told me. I stopped at your house.”

  “You’ve been spying on me.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt you. Your son said you were working.”

  “I’m finished. I’m on my way home.”

  “Mind if I walk with you? I left my car…”

  She shrugged and shook her head.

  He said, “I hear you’re pretty good. Will you show me your work sometime?”

  “If you’ll let me shoot you.”

  She could see he was surprised, but whether it was because of her request or her choice of the word “shoot” she couldn’t tell. She clicked the shutter, then clicked it again to get his startled response to being photographed.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “You’re very photogenic.” All impervious surface, she thought.

  This time he shrugged. “Why not?”

  She set up the lights and the umbrella reflectors in the living room and let him page through some of her scrapbooks while she walked around and shot him from every angle. The old pictures were a good distraction.

  “How on earth did you get this?” He held up a photo of a school bus with a line of Canada geese apparently waiting at the open door to board. The front bird was stretching its wings, seeming to converse with the bus driver.

  “When I got the assignment, I found out what geese like to eat and started carrying a bucket of it in my car. Whenever I got the chance, I bribed them to cooperate.” She tapped the photo. “These guys were hanging around Wolters Field, in Highland Park, where they park the busses. I just left a trail of bread crumbs—so to speak—for them to follow. The driver was serendipity.”

  He shook his head and held up another photo. “What about this one?” The picture showed a goose perched on top of the green interstate sign, above a highway overpass. “You climb up and put birdseed on the sign?”

  “No. I just noticed the goose up there. The crazy things’ll go anyplace. The only thing surprising about that picture is that the bird waited while I turned the car around and came back.”

  He pointed to the picture of an enraged tiger. “This is great. It’s almost as if you caught the essence. How’d you get close enough?”

  “With a 200-millimeter lens and fast film.” She didn’t bother to add, “and with a week of hanging around the cat house, feeding donuts to the keepers.” Eventually she’d had her chance. The cat was irritated and distracted by a veterinarian’s attempts to tranquilize it. Joanne passed up several chances to shoot while the cat was snarling at the vet. Then the cat turned his head and noticed her and growled. And she had his soul neatly trapped in the Minolta.

  As Lessing was putting her equipment away, Minorini pulled out the picture of a man caught by the camera like a deer transfixed by headlight beams.

  “Who’s this?”

  She laughed. “He was someone I went out with when I was first divorced. He used to call me every night and ask how my day was, but I never felt he was letting me get close or letting me get to know what he was really like. He was always pleasant, never obviously evasive but he’d never let me
take his picture. He said it made him feel uncomfortable.

  “But taking pictures is how I relate to people. Photographs help me work out how I feel, so it was hard not to shoot him. It got to be a challenge—to get him without his knowing. He didn’t like it. Once he even took the lens off my camera and wouldn’t give it back until I promised no more pictures. I eventually gave up on him. I’m still not sure what his problem was, I just knew we’d never work it out.”

  Minorini looked at the photo. It was flattering—like the portrait of a movie star. It could also have been a surveillance photo.

  At that point, Lessing’s son walked through the room. There was obvious pleasure in her face, and Minorini could see that the kid picked up on it.

  He’d never thought about the difficulties of raising a kid alone—or even with help, for that matter. His ex hadn’t been keen on the idea of kids. “You’re not home enough to help with ’em,” she’d said. Lessing seemed to be doing well enough with Sean.

  “Did you ever wish you’d had more kids?” he asked her.

  “Sometimes.”

  Twelve

  “Agent Minorini,” his secretary said. “There’s a package here for you. A messenger dropped it off.”

  Minorini glanced at the Tyvek envelope from Rage Photo but he waited until he was at his desk to open it. It contained the pictures Joanne Lessing had taken the day before. Along with those he knew she’d taken were two surveillance photos. They were very good, sharply in focus and clearly showing that the object of the surveillance was unaware of the camera.

  Her message was clear enough; the pictures made her point exactly. She didn’t like to be stalked and she wanted him to know how it felt.

  The shots she’d taken with the Hasselblad were also in focus, though he hadn’t seen her make any adjustments. He thought the expression she’d captured pretty much summed up what he’d been feeling.

  With one exception the rest of the pictures looked like the pretty-boy stuff you see in men’s clothing ads, flattering, but impersonal. The exception looked like a Calvin Klein commercial.