by S. D. Tooley
Maybe if I could see his hand. I wanted to move closer but my feet wouldn't budge. This wasn't like the derelict whose body I had tripped over in an alley several years ago. That body had been frozen stiff. Not like J.R. I was close enough to see the bloat and hear the police say how the body had been in the water at least three days. That was the last time I saw J.R. Three days ago. The seventy-five percent just jumped to ninety.
Crowds were starting to gather. Just like watching a train wreck. Women clutched tightly to their children when they should have been dragging them away. Police were doing a good job of keeping people behind the wooden barricades. I moved closer to a guy about my age leaning against a tree. He was peering through binoculars.
"Hey," I said. "Mind if I take a look?"
He pulled the binoculars away and glared at me. Guess I didn't look like a thief because he said, "Go for it," and handed them to me. "Ever see a dead body before?"
"Only in a casket," I said, preferring not to tell him about the stiff I had tripped over my first year living on the streets.
"They look better after the funeral director finishes with them. If you ask me, that spoils the effect."
Huh? I didn't want to go there. The cop's nose exploded into view. These were some powerful binoculars. J.R.'s left hand was all I was interested in. I didn't want to see blood or bloat or decomposing flesh so I zipped the binoculars low and across the surface of the sand. There was the hand and it WAS missing the little finger. I didn't need to see anything else but for some reason I still wasn't convinced.
"Thanks" was somehow mumbled between my lips as I handed the binoculars back and stumbled away. Had J.R. committed suicide? No, I wouldn't believe that. I met him in a church. Suicide was against his religion. J.R. was clever. Clever enough to have planted his clothes near where a homeless man's body washed ashore. Sure. That had to be it. But there was the missing finger. J.R. always said it served as a reminder not to trust anyone. I was afraid to ask how he lost it.
My scenario was crumbling with each step. I had to force my feet to move. I will never forget the day we met. It was 1985 and I was a fifteen-year-old, gangly runaway in need of a haircut. He was a seventy-something homeless man impeccably dressed for a man of little means. We were fighting over the money in a collection basket at Saint Michael's Church. I was trying to take green bills out of the basket while J.R. was trying to pry them from my fingers.
Later that day, with a stomach just about ready to turn on me, I stole a pizza from a delivery truck rumbling at the curb. Thought I had covered my tracks pretty well but after I wedged my skinny ass into a narrow walkway between two buildings, a voice whispered in my ear, "You gonna share, kid?"
Just about took all fifteen years off my life. "Where did you come from?" I looked over his shoulder but all I saw was darkness.
"Come on."
I felt him tug at my shirt. He dragged me down the walkway, down a flight of stairs, through a door, down several more flights of stairs. Thought we were going straight down to hell. How he found his way in the dark I'd never know. He pushed open a door and led me into a lit room that was furnished and heated. It had a bar and a piano. Tables and chairs dotted the floor and a bunk bed was against one wall.
"What is this place?" Fancy lanterns he called sconces lined the walls. The place looked pretty well lived in which made me wonder how long he had been in hiding.
"It's a speakeasy. Pretty popular in my day. Strictly by invitation only. Piano still works, too, but I don't know how far the sound will carry so I don't use it." He grabbed the pizza and set it on the table. "What are you doing out on the street, kid?" Napkins floated across the table. "Where's your family?"
"In jail. Where's yours?"
"Probably dead."
I scarfed down the first piece of pizza and was ready to grab a second when I realized he wasn't eating. "Don't like sausage?"
"Nah. Just waiting to see if you keel over. If you don't then I figure it's safe to eat."
I must have turned green because the old man burst out laughing.
The next time I saw J.R. he was sitting at a coffee shop on Wabash reading the morning paper. I was reading a history book I had picked up at a street sale.
"Wouldn't it be better just to attend school?" J.R. said.
I had slinked in my chair and looked around to make sure there weren't any cops in the shop. "Can't go. They'd call family services, stick me in juvie or a foster home," I whispered, hoping it gave him a hint to hold down his voice.
Fat chance.
"I started working at age fourteen," he boasted. "Grocery stores or funeral homes. That's the job to have. People gotta eat and everybody dies. You've got a job for life."
All we had exchanged were first names. He never told me what J.R. stood for and I never asked. I figured he was one of those head cases who thought he was the king of England one week and the president of a small island the next. Seemed safe enough to me. All I offered up in response was Ryan. Ryan was actually my middle name. I didn't want to be known as Douglas. I was a junior and my father was serving twenty to life in an Iowa prison. Twenty years for killing his wife. The foster program wasn't for me so I had pounded the pavement, hopped a freight train and headed wherever the train led me. I ended up in Chicago.
J.R. was like living with a prison guard, though. Dragged me to a barber shop to get what he called a proper haircut. Always harping on school which was hard for me to do seeing that I didn't have a parent to vouch for me. So to get J.R. off my back I went to the local library and signed up for GED classes.
"You have kids?" I once asked J.R. He just looked at me for a long minute, then turned his head away.
"Don't have any family left and don't ask about them again."
That settled that. Whatever he had done, he obviously couldn't go home again. I didn't need to be told twice.
J.R. was never without money and I didn't know where he kept finding it or where he kept it hidden. I know he wasn't stealing from the collection baskets because he never let up after my attempt at pilfering from the church. We'd go shopping in the Michigan Avenue stores. Don't get me wrong. He was cheap. Only bought off the clearance racks but the clothes still cost more than any clothes my parents had ever bought for me.
One day he led me down more stairs and into more tunnels. He said there were sixty miles of tunnels forty feet below the streets that you could drive a truck through. One even ran under the Chicago River. Now that made me nervous knowing all that water was above my head. J.R. said years ago they had used the tunnels to run rail and coal supplies to many of the buildings in the city.
He told me that recently some television people were looking for a vault under the old Lexington Hotel on Michigan Avenue. Al Capone, some mob guy, had hidden suitcases of money. The television crew had blasted through a seven-thousand pound concrete wall only to find an empty basement chamber.
There was a wicked smile on J.R.'s face when he told that story. Something tells me J.R. got to the vault years before the television crew.
During one of our tours of the underground tunnels, J.R. pointed out all the weak spots in the ceilings. "Mark my word, kid. One of these days these tunnels are going to flood. Lot of power sources down here and a lot of businesses will be affected. It's gonna be a disaster."
The medical examiner's crew carried the black bag to the station wagon. I inched closer to see if I could find out more information. I had watched the cops dig through the pockets of the clothing but it didn't look like they had found anything except some cash. J.R. never carried identification on him. To my knowledge he didn't have a driver's license or a Social Security card. How would they notify next of kin? Was J.R. lying when he said they were all dead?
The wagon's back door was slammed shut. "What happens to his body now?" I asked a guy who was marking notes in a binder.
"Why do you want to know?"
His look bordered on suspicion. Maybe I shouldn't have asked but I had to know. "What hap
pens if he isn't identified?" I could feel tears welling. Eighteen years old and I was about to start bawling like a baby.
"Just another John Doe buried in the county lot." He set his binder aside and stared me down. "You know who he is?"
This snapped me to attention. "No," I stammered. "Just curious." I backpedaled, hating myself for not telling the police. Then J.R.'s words echoed in my head. Trust no one. Yet I had trusted J.R. It had never occurred to me that J.R. might have been an escaped convict or a suspect on the run. I had never thought my life was in danger. He was just some old guy living in the tunnels who wanted me to make something of myself, to get more than a ninth grade education like he had. For someone who hadn't graduated high school, J.R. had been a voracious reader.
"Keep your nose in a book. Pick up a paper." A morning didn't go by that J.R. didn't walk to the corner newsstand for a paper. We would sit together in the coffee shop reading every word, every column. He'd make sure I did my homework assignments and kept talking about college. He thought Notre Dame was the only place to go. Unless he had found diamonds in Al Capone's vault, I knew I'd never be able to afford Notre Dame.
J.R. would hold up a glass and say, "This is your ticket outta here, kid." It never made sense to me. Why would an empty glass be my ticket out of here?
J.R. claimed to have never smoked or drank. First time I showed up with a pack of cigarettes he took them outside and crushed them in the gutter. "Those damn things will kill ya."
I had wanted to punch his lights out. "You ain't so perfect," I yelled.
"I may have faults, but being wrong ain't one of them."
The meaning still escapes me.
I hunted down the guy with the binoculars. He sounded like someone who might know the answer to my question. "Do you know how long they wait for someone to claim a body?" His eyes narrowed with suspicion, the same as the guy by the wagon. I'm going to have to quit asking questions.
"Not sure. Maybe a couple weeks."
We watched as the wagon pulled away from the beach, escorted by a squad car, red and blue lights flashing. "Why?" he asked.
I shrugged, tried to make it casual but I don't think I was pulling it off. "Just seems like a shame if he doesn't get a proper burial."
He cocked his head and I could almost read "who do you think you are kidding?" etched across his forehead.
"Thanks for the use of the binoculars." I beat it out of there, pledging to check every one of J.R.'s haunts before I would be convinced he was dead.
I took a swipe at my face to make sure tears hadn't leaked out, then headed across Lake Shore Drive. I hoofed it over to the coffee shop on Wabash. Shorty, a fireplug of a man, was sitting on a stack of papers at his newsstand.
"Got your paper for you," Shorty said.
"J.R. didn't pick it up?" I asked.
"J.R.?"
"You know, the old guy I have coffee with every morning."
"Oh yeah. Looks like Bela Lugosi with white hair."
"Who?"
He waved it off and said, "Haven't seen him in a few days."
I studied the customers seated by the window of the coffee shop. That was where we always sat, but I didn't see him. Where next? My mind was reeling. Was he mugged and lying in an alley somewhere? Was he the victim of a hit and run and lying in a hospital? Who would I call ... if I had a phone?
"Phone?" J.R. had laughed. "Where would I plug in a phone down here? These tunnels connect to a lot of stores and restaurants. Some don't even know they have access to the tunnels. I can get in and use a phone any time I want. Who do you think you are going to call?"
He laughed again and I felt stupid. How did he live so long without the conveniences of a phone? The speakeasy still had a working toilet. I suspected J.R. did some rewiring to get the electricity working but you'd think someone in the city's utility department would wonder who was using the water and electricity and why the bills weren't being paid. He used Lake Michigan as his bathtub, except in the winter when we used the showers at the YMCA.
I made my way to the speakeasy cursing myself for leaving him for three days. Why did I let him talk me into taking a train to South Bend, Indiana to talk to Admissions at Notre Dame? I couldn't afford to attend any college, let alone Notre Dame, and I didn't have any scholarships. He said all they had to see were my SAT scores. Who was I kidding? How were they going to call me when I didn't have a phone? The return address I gave them was the coffee shop.
I yelled out his name as I ran through the tunnel and into the speakeasy. He wasn't there. I checked the table for a note.
The bunk bed.
The top of the piano.
Nothing.
Not a note, not a shred of evidence that he had been there recently. Except for the newspaper. I checked the date. It was three days old. I sank onto a chair and let the tears flow.
I don't know how long I sat there. Images of J.R. flooded my memory. Thought I saw him standing behind the bar, lifting that glass and saying, "This is your ticket outta here, kid."
The glass was sitting at the edge of the bar, still empty. Thought there should be something in it. A lottery ticket. An uncut emerald. Something. I stood and slowly walked over, bent down, studied the glass, and then it hit me. He wasn't talking about what was in the glass. He wanted me to see what was on the glass -- fingerprints.
It has been twenty years since J.R.'s body washed ashore. Every year on the anniversary of his death, I visit the beach near the Planetarium to stare out at the water and think back to the surly old man who had changed my life. His gravesite is located in an undisclosed cemetery, known only to a handful of people. I'm not one of them.
The day he died I stared at that glass on the bar for a long time, wondering what to do next. What would J.R. do, I had thought? Search the premises. So I did. That was how I found the letter addressed to me and marked, In the event of my death. All he wrote was Make me proud, kid. Then he gave me instructions on where to find the steel box with the remainder of Al Capone's money. It enabled me to afford a great education at Notre Dame but it wasn't how I was able to open the halfway house for runaways.
The day J.R. died I took a bus to the Tenth Street Police Headquarters where they had their forensics lab. I tap-danced around a lie about wanting a tour of their lab for a high school project and even brought the glass for them to show me how they do their fingerprint analysis.
Logan, a cop in a shiny suit and buzz haircut, said it would probably be awhile before the computer spit out any hits. Their system wasn't as advanced as it is today. So he talked me into accompanying him to the break room where I spun a yarn about how I was going to Notre Dame in the fall and how my parents were lawyers and that's what I was going to be. I invented a house overlooking Lake Michigan in Evanston, even though I had never been to Evanston. J.R. used to talk about Northwestern University and how students spent too much time on art and not enough on economics. He loved economics and politics.
We couldn't have been gone more than twenty minutes but when we returned there were a bunch of suits hovering over the computer. Two men dressed in black suits had pounded through the door with the authority of the Gestapo. I heard one of the cops say they were from the FBI office down the street.
Everyone stared at us as we approached, then backed away as though I had brought them some plague. I hoped the computer hadn't self-destructed or crashed over a simple set of fingerprints. I was just a teen from the corn fields of Iowa. What could they do to me if I broke their computer?
"Have a seat, son," one of the dark suits said.
"Why?"
"Tell us where you got this glass," the second suit said.
That was the start of my expanded fifteen minutes of fame. I ended up with a seven-figure-book deal and television interviews, most that I turned down...the interviews, not the book deal.
J.R. had been right about the tunnels. In 1992 a construction crew pounding pillars into the bottom of the Chicago River, cracked the ceiling of the tunnel, s
ending over two hundred million gallons of water through basements and sub-basements of Chicago Loop businesses. One of the buildings housed the speakeasy.
"Father, it's time to go."
I turned and nodded at my driver. Gerald kept me on schedule. I had a habit of getting lost in thought this time of year. Yes, I'm a priest. Put my education at Notre Dame to good use. As a fifteen-year-old runaway, I hadn't known too much about the man who said his name was J.R. So when the computer spit out the positive fingerprint identification, the cops were more than happy to enlighten me. I only half listened to them because I knew all I needed to know about James Riddle Hoffa.
And now when I conduct mass at Saint Michael's, my eyes scan the crowd as the collection baskets are being passed, looking for any kids pilfering money. Kids who might be looking for a bed and a warm meal at the Riddle Academy.
- End -
Author's Note:
I hope you enjoyed these short stories. All of my titles are listed below, the most recent first. They can be found in hard cover, trade paperback, audio book, and most ebook formats. Visit Amazon or the Kindle Store for any of these titles.
Written as S.D. Tooley
Sam Casey Series
What Lies Within
Echoes from the Grave
Restless Spirit
Nothing Else Matters
When the Dead Speak
Remy and Roadkill Series
(for ages 11 to 111)
The Skull
Written as Lee Driver