After Visiting Friends

by Michael Hainey

  A car drives by, no headlights.

  “Lights!” John yells. “Hey, lights! Lights!”

  I yell, too.

  No use. The driver drives on, into the night. Ghost-riding, we called that when I was growing up.

  “Guy’s gonna kill someone,” John says.

  #

  The next morning, I eat breakfast with Detective Clemens, a Chicago Police Department cold-case investigator I’ve made contact with, thinking that I need to check off with him.

  We meet at a diner near my mother’s house. I ask if he can pull the records of that night.

  “Was your old man murdered?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “Then there’s nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a burn. Standard procedure—if it ain’t a homicide, the file is burned after a couple of years. I mean, unless there’s something special about your old man. Is there?”

  “Special?”

  “Yeah.” He stabs his spoon in and out of his oatmeal.

  “No.”

  #

  Later that morning I get an e-mail from Stormy:

  Thanks for my enjoyable, if prolonged, lunch. Hope you were in better shape than James B., my twin brother reportedly at Gene & Georgetti’s. Keep in touch, your friend James B. a.k.a. Stormy.

  It’s an e-mail from a man who is comfortable in dualities. In wanting to be able to pass off out-of-the-norm behavior on his “twin brother.” Maybe I’m a fool to believe I can go back into the past and men will tell me the truth simply because I ask them to. Maybe I’m as naive now as I was at six.

  # # #

  I leave Chicago.

  At O’Hare, sitting at the gate, waiting for the others to board, I look out my window. A dog jumps out of its cage, runs across the tarmac, toward a fence. Two burly men—their orange mesh vests flapping in the wind—chase after it. All too soon, they’re out of view.

  On the flight, I drink bad wine and take stock. I keep thinking, Why didn’t you do any of this when Uncle Dick and Aunt Helen were alive?

  My uncle had a son. My cousin Mark. He was a junior in college, living at home, that spring my father died. Our families grew apart, so I never really knew Mark. I probably haven’t spoken to him in more than thirty years. But I also know that I have to report all the angles.

  A few years earlier, I received a Christmas card from him. He was living near Des Moines. He’d moved there to work on the Register. I remember the Christmas letter had his e-mail address. I dig out the card. Send him an e-mail.

  Mark,

  I know it’s been a long time. I have a favor to ask. I’m working on a story about Bob. Would you have time in the next week or so to talk?

  Best,

  Mike

  A day later:

  Mike,

  Sundays are best.

  Mark

  Crisp blue autumn Sunday in New York. The kind of day that can break your heart, it’s so perfect. The kind of sky and sun you imagine when you imagine moving here.

  I call my cousin. For the next hour, Mark tells me stories about our family. He tells me how our grandfather, C.P., went to McCook in the early days of the twentieth century. Orphaned, he always claimed. Tells me how he worked on the railroad, hustled stray jobs here and there.

  “On weekends, C.P. booked bands for dances in McCook. He bragged about how he managed Lawrence Welk and his Hotsy Totsy Boys when Welk was just some hick out of North Dakota. I have no idea if it’s true. He also told me stories about how he worked in the circus, pitching tents and carnival barking.”

  He tells me how my father was, in the words of Dick, “the best newspaperman of his generation, head and shoulders above everyone else.” Then he asks me, “You know C.P. was a drinker, right?”

  “Yeah, I’d heard that.”

  “Did you ever hear this story?”

  He tells me how C.P. got drunk one night after work and wandered to the switching yard, then crawled into a boxcar and passed out.

  “When he comes to, it’s morning. He stumbles out of the boxcar. Figures he needs to be getting home. Figures he can be home in time for breakfast. But as he starts up the street, he can’t get his bearings. So he says to someone, ‘Hey—which way is Norris Avenue?’ The guy says, ‘Norris Avenue? There’s no Norris Avenue in Denver.’ C.P. stands there blinking and says, ‘What? Where am I?’ The guy says, ‘I told you—Denver.’ C.P. got so loaded he didn’t notice when they hooked up the boxcar and hauled him to Denver.”

  After an hour or so along these lines I say, “My father’s obituaries say he died after visiting friends or after leaving the home of a friend. But I’ve never heard anyone talk about that night. It seems odd that in all these years I’ve never met anyone who was there that night. Or even heard a name. I mean, something doesn’t add up.”

  There’s silence.

  Then: “I always knew this day was going to come, and I always knew it was going to be you. That you were going to figure it out. Even when you were a kid, I could see it in you. When I got your e-mail, after not hearing from you for years, I knew. I debated what I’d say. And I decided that if you asked me, I’d tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s your right to know the truth. Don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Here’s all I can tell you. I’m home that night. In my room. Upstairs. It’s late. Two thirty, maybe. The phone outside my door rings. My folks didn’t have one in their bedroom. Different times, you know? Anyway, my dad answers. And I can hear him giving instructions. Invoking Chicago Today and his title. After maybe fifteen minutes, he hangs up. I open my door. He’s standing there, my mother next to him. He looks at me and says, ‘Bob’s dead.’ Next thing I know he’s left the house.”

  He pauses.

  I’m silent.

  “Bob died in a woman’s apartment. I don’t know the whole story. But I’m pretty sure my father arranged a cover-up. After Bob died, we never talked about that night again.”

  “Is there anyone you think knows who the woman is?”

  “Two people I can think of. Did you ever know Craig Klugman?”

  “No.”

  “He worked with Bob. He and I drove to the funeral in my car. Last I heard he was in Fort Wayne.”

  “Who else?”

  “You probably don’t remember my first wife, Nancy. I was dating her when Bob died. She used to claim that she knew everything that happened that night. She said that my mother had told her.”

  “Do you know where Nancy is now?”

  “No. Her maiden name was Verzano. I don’t know if she’s remarried. But her best friend was Pam Smicklas. A few years ago I saw a wire story that she was the mayor of Santa Monica. Maybe ask her.”

  “I can’t believe all these years, I was right in my gut.”

  “Let me ask you something,” he says. “Was it really the obits?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it,” he says. “The truth was sitting there, in plain sight. It was a sloppy cover-up waiting to be exposed. I knew you’d figure it out.”

  “But how could Dick pull off a cover-up? How did the cops let him do it?”

  “The cops helped him. It was a different time. In some ways, it was the last days of cops and newspapermen being on the same team. Dick carried a lot of weight in Chicago. In the end, it’s just a big brother taking care of his kid brother.”

  “But if Dick covered it up, how did he forget to tell the papers not to print the truth?”

  “Like I say, it was a sloppy cover-up. And if you think about it, the papers didn’t print the truth. They printed clues. That night, what happens, I think, is this: Bob dies in this woman’s apartment. The woman panics, calls an ambulance, calls Dick. Dick gets to the woman’s place and does two things. One, he persuades the cops to let him—not them—break the news to your mother so he can give her the cover story. You know, kind of like, ‘Officer, c’mon—this guy is my brother. He has
two kids and a wife at home. No need for them to know.’ I think the second thing Dick did is call the night editors and tell them to print that Bob died on the street, outside, after visiting friends—and not in any woman’s apartment. It was a bad cover-up, because the detail about ‘friends’ raises more questions than it answers. But I imagine at four or five in the morning, when he’s trying to sweep all of this up, he’s not thinking everything through. He’s racing the clock till your mother wakes up.”

  He pauses.

  “If Dick had enough time, none of the papers would have printed those details about ‘friends.’ Your dad—heck, both of them—Dick and Bob were undone by the thing they loved: solid, 101-reporting. The fundamentals. But you have to understand—Dick did it all to protect you guys. And Bob was his kid brother.”

  “I know. I mean, what are you going to do? Woman calls you in the middle of the night, hysterical.”

  “Exactly. Your brother, dead in her bed. His family asleep at home, waiting for him. The cops, about to knock on the door and break the news to your mother. Dick wanted to keep that pain from your mom. I’m not saying he was right, but.”

  “I wish I would’ve asked him about all this before he died.”

  “I think he was always terrified you were going to.”

  “So you guys talked about it?”

  “Never.”

  #

  I went to a bar. For a long time I stare at my reflection, what I could see of me through the bottles and glass, through the browns and greens. Over and over in my head I think, Now I know I am not crazy.

  Sitting there in the bar, a man of a certain age—in my forties and I’ve outlived him by a good few years now—I get it. Who among us does not know that such temptations exist? He just had the dumb luck to die in her bed. Thirty minutes earlier or later either way, and he truly does die out on the street. Or driving home. Crashing into a light pole. His head, seizured. His secret, safe. His name, clean.

  I look down the bar and part of me expects to see him. I always do. Part of what it means to lose a parent early: You never accept the truth that they are dead. You can’t. You won’t. In your head, you always believe that somewhere, they exist. And someday, you will find them and all your questions will be answered. Most of all: Why did you leave me?

  Like now. There he is, roosting alone at the end of the bar, clad in that beat-up, battered raincoat, the one Clarence said he never shed.

  He sees me. He hoists his rocks glass high—his salute to me from across the room. He winks and says, “Well, kiddo, you found me.”

  “No,” I say, “I found you out.”

  “Did you?”

  “You heard what Mark said today.”

  “What the hell does Mark know?”

  “He knows how you died.”

  “Does he? Think about it, pal. As we say in the newspaper game, you got nothing. You have a dead man and no witnesses. No first-hand sources. They’re all dead. Or missing. Where’s this woman? You got a statement from her? Where’s the police report? You’ve got a story that’s based on a telephone call that someone overheard in the hallway at two in the morning thirty-some years ago. And by the way, what’s Mark’s motivation? Ever think of that? You call yourself a reporter? Face it: You got nothing on me, kid.”

  My father raises his glass again, shakes it at me, and grins. His ice rattles like laughter.

  # # #

  It’s Reporting 101. In the newspaper game, it’s the Five W’s plus one: Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why.

  Who? Robert Charles Hainey.

  What? Died.

  Where? Somewhere on the 3900 block of North Pine Grove Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

  When? April 24, 1970.

  How? Aneurism.

  Why? Why, indeed.

  Surely there must be a why. That’s what they teach you about reporting. There’s always a why. Dig deep enough and you will find it.

  A newspaperman knows the why is the key to the story.

  # # #

  After grad school, I get a part-time job reporting for the Tribune. I cover city-council meetings in the suburbs. I’m what newspapermen call a stringer.

  Because council members work day jobs, the meetings all take place at night. My bureau chief—the editor of the Northwest Suburban desk—calls me during the day and gives me that night’s assignment. Elk Grove Village. Mount Prospect. Schiller Park. Suburbs like that. I sit in the first row of an auditorium in some 1960s-era municipal building, listen to people argue the finer points of opposite-side-of-the-street parking. Or whether residents should be allowed to park on the street overnight. Or if parking meters should be removed in the downtown business district. Every meeting involves debates about parking. And every meeting goes late. Eleven. Midnight. After, I drive my 1972 Chevy Malibu to the bureau—a glass-paneled office tower near O’Hare where the Tribune leases a floor. This is where I file. I have a pass code. Let myself in. Turn on the lights. Walk the carpet of the empty newsroom. A field of cubicles and computers linked to the Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. I have to file a brief on the meeting for the Metro section. Those 250-word squibs they run in your paper. What used to be called Neighborhood News. If the news is big—and it never is—the desk might go long with it. For hours, I sit there, cursor blinking. My notes a mess of names and city ordinance numbers and quotes about nothing. What I wanted and what I was, two different things. Newsman in the night. Me walking the beat, the mean streets of the Northwest suburbs.

  I wanted so much to belong. In my head I saw myself continuing my father’s work. Learning the trade so I could finish what he began. A newsman in the city. In a line with him. And in a line with my uncle. Keeping the line going. Strung together.

  Me.

  The cursor, blinking.

  # # #

  I start with what Mark gave me—I’ll try to find his ex. I Google: Pam Smicklas Mayor Santa Monica. Turns out she’s Pam O’Connor now. I call her office, and she tells me that Nancy remarried some years ago but that she hasn’t talked to her for years. “She married a man named Bonetti,” she says. “She was living in the Bay Area. Hayward? Fremont? We lost touch. I remember when your father died. That was a huge shock. Nancy always talked about it and how shook up the whole family was.”

  She says if I find Nancy, can I say hello for her?

  “Give her my number. It’d be good to get back in touch.”

  #

  I go on ZabaSearch and find a Nancy Bonetti in Denver, North Carolina.

  It’s a strange thing, being the hand that reaches across time. You feel awkward at first in your phone calls. I find myself talking fast, like a teenager calling and asking for a date to the dance. I find myself nervous about losing my opening. Hearing the phone going click! Hi-you-don’t-know-me-but-my-name’s-Michael-Hainey-and-I-think-you-knew-my-father-Bob-Hainey-and-I-hope-this-is-not-a-bad-time-but-I-was-hoping-you-could-help-me.

  A woman answers.

  “Hi-you-don’t-know-me-but-my-name’s-Michael-Hainey-and-I-think-you-knew-my-father-Bob-Hainey-and-I-hope-this-is-not-a-bad-time-but-I-was-hoping-you-could-help-me.”

  “My God! Of course I remember you! How is your mother?”

  “She’s fine, thank you.”

  “Oh, I have the fondest memories of you two boys and your mother. And I always felt so sad for your mother. Please tell her I said hello.”

  “Well, that’s something you could help me with,” I say. “That night my father died. I was wondering if you could tell me what you remember.”

  “Well, Mark called me late that night and told me the news.”

  “This is going to sound strange, but I have to ask you. I was talking to Mark—”

  “Mark? Oh, how is he?”

  “Fine. Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Mark told me you know the truth of that night. He said that you used to claim that you knew the name of the woman.”

  “Mark and I had our troubles, but I never said
that. I hope he’s found some peace in his life. But no, I never knew what happened. Have you asked Dick?”

  “He and Helen are both dead.”

  “They really loved you two boys. I know that.”

  She pauses.

  “Your father’s death was one of those things that was never spoken of. The circumstances just hung there, unspoken. And his presence shrouded that house. It was suffocating. Dick was always invoking Bob. Especially to Mark, when it came to him being a newspaperman. Dick was forever telling Mark, ‘You’ll never be as good as Bob.’ Did your mother ever talk about that night?”

  “No, it was the same in our house,” I say. “I mean, we didn’t know the circumstances of his death. We were told a different story. The one that Dick made up. But his death defined our house, too.”

  “I think that on some level your mother knew there was foul play. On some level, every woman knows. She’s a smart woman. I always remember her as being so elegant and witty. I wanted to be like her. She had so much grace.”

  #

  A few days later, I get an e-mail from Nancy:

  Though it was “out of the blue,” I want you to know that I am happy you contacted me. I hope whatever memories I have of those early years are of use to you in your quest. I sincerely hope it helps you to find the answers you need to move forward in your life. But, keep in mind that you may never get all the answers you want. However, it may just be the beginning of a closer relationship with your cousin, which will tie you and your brother to your past. And that would be a very good thing.

  Regards,

  Nancy

  My brother calls. A catch-up call. I clutch. I don’t want to be the one who destroys his world. What am I becoming but my father? A keeper of secrets. Worse, I am a keeper of his secrets. A co-conspirator. I hear my brother talking about the kids, his week. Then he asks if I’ve talked to Mark yet, and I say yes.

  “You know,” I say, “Mark and I were talking about McCook and I had this thought to go out there.”