Mourn the Living

by Henry Perez

  Chapa turned, expecting to confront one of Jackson’s superiors, but instead saw Nikki walking toward him. If Chapa didn’t know better he might have assumed she belonged there.

  “What is that child doing out here?” Jackson asked everyone and no one in particular.

  “She’s my daughter,” Chapa said, then turned to Nikki. “And she and I are going to have a lot to talk about.”

  “What is this, Chapa? You know better than to bring a child to a crime scene.”

  Nikki mouthed I’m sorry as she moved to her father’s side.

  “I asked her to stay behind the line, Tom. I apologize.”

  Jackson waved off two uniforms who were on their way over to help.

  “It’s just as the initial reports stated, Alex. An explosion due to old wiring gone bad.”

  One of the city workers, a bearded man with a bowler’s physique, tossed a large slab of wall on top of another, making a loud noise that caused Nikki to flinch. Chapa put his arm around her shoulders, and pulled her close against his side.

  “Was there anyone else in the house at the time?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find anything unusual, out of the ordinary?”

  “You mean besides the fact that half the house isn’t there anymore? No.”

  “What about that repairman Laura Simpson saw walking around the house?”

  “No. Wait, what? Who?”

  “Laura Simpson, a neighbor, said she saw a suspicious man dressed in service clothes stalking the house earlier in the day.”

  Jackson signaled to a younger man, mid-twenties, neatly overdressed the way upstarts and wannabes often are. A moment later, Jackson was holding a clipboard with the names and addresses of each of the neighbors.

  “Okay, yeah, she lives at that one,” Jackson said, pointing to a brick ranch across the street and one house down from Chakowski’s. “She probably saw nothing that seemed unusual until after the fact. Happens all the time.”

  Chapa heard a five-man crew of engineers debating how to best secure the ruins and keep the rest of the house from collapsing into an enormous pile of rubbish.

  “She seemed pretty credible to me, Tom.”

  “I’ll talk to her. Now will you get out of here.”

  “And you’ll let me know if she has any new info?”

  “No, I won’t, not after this stunt of yours.”

  “Fine, then I’ll call you,” Chapa said as he took another look around. He was trying to figure out how to sneak a photo when he saw that Nikki was staring at a piece of wall, about six feet in length, at the end of the driveway.

  “She needs to get away from that, Alex, now.”

  Chapa called to Nikki, but she continued to drift toward the jagged slab of plaster. He hadn’t noticed when she wandered off, and now wished that both of them had stayed behind the barrier.

  Nikki was standing over the battered remains from Chakowski’s living room when Chapa reached her. It looked like a piece of wall neatly covered in beige wallpaper, except for the splash of dried blood and organic matter along one side.

  Chapa’s first instinct was to lie to her about what it was. But he realized there was no point in doing that. Nikki knew exactly what she was looking at.

  He wrapped his arms around his daughter and turned her away from the carnage.

  “Sorry about that, Alex,” Jackson said, with a look of honest concern. “The techs didn’t want to clear these pieces away just yet, part of figuring out exactly where the victim was when it happened.”

  “Jim Chakowski.”

  “What?”

  “The victim had a name.”

  “Right, he was one of yours.”

  Chapa felt Nikki hug him tighter as they started to walk back toward the barrier.

  “I’ll call you, Alex.”

  This didn’t bring Chapa as much comfort as it normally would, as it might have a minute ago. With his arm curled snugly around Nikki’s shoulders, as he calmly walked her away from the crime scene, Chapa wondered what would be the right balance between scolding his daughter for first lying, then not listening to him, while also comforting her. This was not how the week was supposed to unfold.

  “What you saw back there—”

  “I know, Dad, it was some sort of an accident that happened to a friend of yours.” She smiled up at him.

  “We’ll talk more, later.”

  “It’s okay, really.”

  Should he say more about it now? Chapa did not know what to do, and didn’t like that feeling. He thought about calling Erin and telling her what happened, but that didn’t seem right, either.

  Then Chapa saw a woman standing in the front yard of the house Jackson had said belonged to Laura Simpson. She was wearing a light blue denim shirt, a pair of jeans, and casually watching the goings on. Her light brown hair, streaked with gray or maybe it was the other way around, was pulled back away from her soft face. She was wearing makeup, but not too much, just enough to tell herself it was okay to go out in public. Chapa recalled Moriarity’s thin description, and decided this woman matched it, more or less.

  Chapa looked back to where Jackson had been a moment earlier, and saw him standing near the house, talking to a man who was wearing a hard hat and a tool belt. Jackson seemed to be listening intently as the guy pointed toward the sagging ceiling.

  “Nikki, I need to talk to this lady over here. Stay with me and don’t say anything.”

  She replied with a nod and a smile, which made Chapa a bit uneasy.

  Chapter 8

  The man goes about the task of surveying the wreckage where a house had been just a day earlier. He’s there on official business. He’s not an engineer, cop, or safety inspector, more of an interested party. Why wouldn’t he be?

  No one stopped him when he casually walked around the police barricade. In fact, he was greeted with respectful nods, and friendly handshakes. The way important men should be treated.

  The damage from the explosion is worse than he’d expected, but its result was exactly what was intended. Still, he gets no joy from seeing the scattered remains of a perfectly fine house or those of its owner. And the man wishes that Jim Chakowski had been able to understand—no, more than understand—appreciate, his work.

  He scans the area, looking for familiar faces, and sees more than a dozen people who know him by his current name, and that makes him feel good. That makes the man feel like a vital member of the community. He’s building something here in this town. And he’s also being more careful about his work. Only one other person knows what actually happened here in this peaceful section of Oakton, and he’s not going to be talking to anybody.

  There’s a new person on the scene, now. Someone whom the man recognizes as Alex Chapa, a reporter from the same newspaper as the deceased. Is he here to pay his respects, or just after the story? The man doesn’t know much about Chapa, they’ve never met.

  But the man does know about Chapa’s reputation for breaking big stories. And he’s heard that Chapa is popular with readers, but less so downtown, or with members of the police department.

  Chapa is talking to that cop Jackson. They don’t appear to agree on much, which means the reporter is here for the story, not for his colleague. The man watches as a child wanders into the area. This is no place for a little girl. She appears to belong to Chapa, but why doesn’t he stop what he’s doing and get her out of here right now?

  The man doesn’t like what he sees. He pretends to go about his business, but keeps an eye on Chapa and the child, watches the little girl wander off, sees her frail body tighten as she approaches the bloodstained piece of wall. The man fights the urge to run over and pull her away. There are certain things no child should ever be exposed to. Every parent should know that. Chapa should know that. There’s something very wrong with Alex Chapa and the way he cares for his child.

  Maybe this was just a lapse in judgment for Chapa. Or maybe it’s something worse. The man closes his eyes, so tightly
that his entire face aches, and drives away his thoughts about Alex Chapa and his daughter.

  There’s no room for that now. He must stay focused on the task at hand. Looking back at the house, the man smiles, knowing that another obstacle is gone, and he can go on with his work. He’s so close now. Just five more days. A few more tracks to cover.

  He sees Chapa and the little girl walking away, heading back to safety. But then Chapa walks over to that woman across the street and starts talking to her. Still on the job. The man decides that Chapa is not just clueless, he’s irresponsible, and probably unfit.

  The man knows how to deal with the unfit. They’re just stick figures pretending to have a mind, a heart, a soul—nothing more. They are less than human. He’ll deal with Chapa, in time, but first he has a more immediate, a more personal goal to achieve. One that he has been chasing for most of his life.

  Chapter 9

  Laura Simpson didn’t add much to what she had already told Moriarity, though it wasn’t for a lack of trying. She’d seen a man in service clothes around Chakowski’s house the morning before the explosion.

  He was tall, no wait, maybe that was just the way he looked because of the shadows. There may have been two of them, but probably not. Must’ve been the same man, but he’d been there for a while so she could’ve assumed there were two. She was sure of that, just about.

  After ten minutes of this, Chapa became certain that given enough time Laura Simpson would’ve eventually identified the man she saw as Sasquatch, the Jersey Devil, and Elvis, maybe.

  “I probably should’ve been more suspicious,” Laura Simpson had said.

  “Why would you have been? It’s a nice neighborhood, doesn’t look like anything bad ever happened around here until now. You couldn’t have known.”

  Chapa had spent two decades interviewing witnesses, and this sort of thing was nothing new to him. People’s recollections are tricky, elusive. They can be easily led astray by their own expectations or that of others. This is especially true when the person does not realize in the moment that they’re witnessing something that could be important later on. But the one thing her general confusion couldn’t override was the fact that someone had been at Chakowski’s house just hours before the place blew.

  Still, Chapa concluded that there was nothing unusual about the man Laura Simpson had seen. If he had not been wearing work clothes, that might’ve been different. But as it stood, the most likely explanation was that the guy was reading a meter, or there on Chakowski’s request. Chapa felt confident the police would reach the same conclusion.

  Chapa was driving over the Mike Ditka Bridge on his way to the part of Oakton where he had grown up, when Nikki started asking questions.

  “So do you do a lot of investigating when you write a story? Do you work with the police? Why do other reporters not like you too much?”

  “Other reporters tend to like me just fine as long as I don’t lie to them. Where did you come up with a term like ‘command center’?”

  “I watch a lot of sci-fi, especially space travel and old alien invasion movies and TV shows. There’s usually a command center.”

  He gently, yet forcefully, scolded her about lying and butting in when he was working.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I just wanted to help. I wanted to be a part of it.”

  “I understand. But the next time you want to help out, check with me first.”

  Downtown Oakton had undergone a transformation over the past four years. The sort of revival that many towns in the Chicago area had spent a decade or more using their resources to achieve. Rundown buildings, empty storefronts, and crumbling streets had given way to new shopping strips and businesses.

  There had been claims of corruption and sweetheart deals as an epidemic of cronyism had swept through the area. But most folks in town didn’t seem to care much about that sort of thing as long as there were places they wanted to go and somewhere to park once they got there.

  As they cruised past various landmarks of Chapa’s youth, he wondered what a drive like this with his own father might’ve been like. Francisco Chapa was just shy of thirty, a dozen years younger than his son was now, when he went missing in Havana.

  Francisco had said he was going for a walk and left their home in the city’s Vedado neighborhood around midnight, having stopped by his young son’s room to kiss the sleeping child on the forehead. Alex would later say he had dreamt that this father had told him to look out for his mother. This was one in a series of unusual details surrounding Francisco’s actions that night, which, over time, had led Chapa to believe his father knew something bad was going down soon.

  But most of Chapa’s recollections and images of his father were second and third hand. The sort of information that, as a veteran reporter, he’d long ago learned to distrust. His own memories were no more reliable. They were as two dimensional and black-and-white as the photos in his mother’s albums. Chapa had tried to color them in from time to time, adding shades and hues to the people and places that filled the four years he spent in Cuba. But Chapa knew he was just guessing. No more certain than an artist who tints a decades-old photo.

  A friend of the family told them that he’d seen Francisco in the company of four official-looking men about two hours after he’d left home. Three days later, a member of Castro’s government, a bony man decked out in military fatigues that were at least two sizes too big, showed up at their house. Chapa remembered hearing the knock and rushing to the door, certain that his father was on the other side. But another thought crossed his mind as he began to open the door—Why didn’t my dad use his key to get in?

  The man who stood in the doorway was wearing the uniform that had become familiar to all Cubans since the communist takeover. As was the norm with Castro’s henchmen, he had a thick beard, and young Alex had been taught what that meant.

  “Alejandro, you see those men standing on the corners with their guns?” Francisco Chapa asked his son one day as they drove back from the market with less than half of what they’d been promised and only a fraction of what they’d need just to get by.

  “You mean the soldiers?”

  “No. Soldiers shoot foreign enemies, not their own people. Those are not soldiers. Soldiers don’t have beards. Whenever you see American war movies, the soldiers never have beards. John Wayne could not have captured Iwo Jima if he’d had a beard.”

  Francisco pointed at a trio of bearded revolutionaries, rifles strapped over their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and harassing a pair of teenaged girls.

  “Those are H-D-Ps.”

  “H-D-Ps?”

  “Yes, and you do not want to grow up to be one.”

  A month later, Alex and his father were on a bus headed for the beach when a revolutionary got on. He was dressed in fatigues that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in weeks, lunch pail in hand, apparently on his way to work.

  The boy stared at the man for a moment, noticing how odd his uniform seemed mixed in with a busload of civilians, then elbowed his father, pointed at the bearded passenger and said, “Look, Dad, it’s an H-D-P!”

  Several folks sitting nearby pivoted to see who had said that. An old man ignored it, as his wife fought to suppress a laugh. Francisco immediately covered his son’s mouth, and turned the boy’s head so that it appeared like he had seen something or someone outside the window.

  Francisco quietly scolded his confused son, who did not yet understand that H-D-P was short for Hijo de Puta, or Son of a Bitch. Alex Chapa had been told that story many times by his mother as well as several other relatives. It was a favorite of his, and at times he believed he actually remembered the event. But he’d never be entirely sure.

  One thing he was certain of. If he’d known at age four what H-D-P meant, he would’ve yelled the insult even louder. Especially if he’d known what it meant.

  Chapa wondered now, as he drove past his old high school and pointed out the place where the engine of his first car had caught fire,
what impact the memories from this week would have on Nikki. He’d seen so little of her over the past year, and feared that the next decade might hold more of the same.

  It was just past five when they pulled into the parking lot of the Chicago Record. Despite its name, the newspaper was headquartered in a quiet suburb, roughly thirty miles west of the city. The Record’s coverage area extended from the Loop and all parts of the city, to its suburbs, some more than fifty miles from Lake Michigan.

  The day staff was still knocking around as Chapa and Nikki made their way through the newsroom. Duane Wormley leaned out of his cubicle, and appeared ready to greet Chapa with one of his half-assed barbs, when his attention was diverted by the sight of a child.

  Wormley was one of the Record’s most widely read writers. Though as far as Chapa was concerned the man had never filed a single hard news story, wouldn’t know how to write one even if his life depended on it.

  “Hey Duane, working on something big, no doubt. Let me guess, a pull-no-punches expose on the seedy side of candle parties?”

  “Is this Take Your Child to Work Day? I don’t think it is. I don’t think it’s Take Your Child to Work Day, Alex.”

  “You know darn well it’s not, Duane. Otherwise you’d be at your mom’s place of employment.”

  “My mother doesn’t work, and that wasn’t very nice, Alex.”

  “Okay, then you’d be with your mom picking up her unemployment check.”

  “Daddy, that was even less nice,” Nikki said with a smile that reminded Chapa of the young face he’d seen in his mother’s photos of himself.

  Matt Sullivan emerged from his office. Sullivan looked as he always did, like he was wearing someone else’s discarded clothes. The bottom of his white shirt had been recently and hastily shoved into his dark brown pants. Sullivan’s worn black leather belt was narrower in those places where his gut had pressed against it, week after week, month after month. Chapa was surprised that he was still wearing his tie, though the shirt collar was open, and the knot was a good four inches below Sullivan’s second chin.