Because the Rain (13 page)

In person, he was a skinny guy who smiled like a game show host. A girl in vegan shoes introduced him, reading a pull quote from a review, “Avers thoughtfully resists the pitfalls of nostalgia.” He scratched the die off his goatee, watching the flecks fall upon his book pages like crumbs. He spoke without using a microphone, telling about the night he waited by a highway-side pay phone for a call that didn’t come, and how it took three days before he knew the caller was blown up making a bomb. The people were smiling and nodding as if they’d waited for the same kind of call. Avers paused often for water, and his hands just fit around the bottle, his fingers small for his height. When the Evian emptied, he looked unstrung until he found another bottle, then did a perfect imitation of Johnny Cash.

“I thought I was going to have to drink the runoff from Luther’s boots.”

The people laughed, even the ones who didn’t know what he was talking about. Avers owned the imitation. He’d thought to swallow his words like Cash did, because at Folsom Prison, Cash played nine songs before asking for a drink, but the water was slow in coming, and Cash thought his bass player’s sweaty boots might do. Goetzler knew all about this record because his first sergeant in Germany, a black guy from Toledo, loved Johnny Cash, and eyeballed people who thought it was funny.

Avers took off his glasses. He’d gotten bright in the eyes.

“You learn these things after hiding in people’s basements for thirteen years,” he said. “You should hear my Liza Minnelli. But Cash’s song ‘The Man in Black’ kept me going through it all. Like Johnny said, ‘I couldn’t put a rainbow on my back and pretend that everything’s just fine.’”

There were second acts, but the men who stayed believers were the ones who never lost everything. Neither Goetzler nor Avers were such men. Goetzler figured Avers’s time underground in the white noise of basement bedrooms, having running-without-moving dreams set in penitentiary mess halls, taught him that believers got paid the same as shirkers. He decided that if he could ever walk as himself, he’d write his Ph.D. and get a pension. He’d turn their kids. The academic left, once those string-haired grad students in black berets and leather jackets, figured it owed Avers, and he did, too. After the police department, Goetzler tried doing the same thing at Weber. He fought for capitalism and now the corporations must make a place.

Will Avers would be the little girl running from napalm. Kim Luc Phu,
the girl in the picture,
her arms forever dangling while her burning village boiled paddy water. Goetzler wanted to make Avers understand that he was protecting the little girls from both the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese soldiers, not napalming them. He entertained notions of getting a camcorder and sending the tape to Fox News Chicago. He could even burn CDs and put Avers running naked through an alley on the Internet. But, first, he’d blindfold him with duct tape and then tape a lamented picture of Kim Luc Phu around his neck. He’d send Avers into the traffic on Halsted Street and get the whole thing on camcorder. Yahoo might even file the story under news of the weird because Avers’s backside was sure to be among the whitest ever spotted.

14

Annie stood in the Motel 6 room and looked at the parked cars on Ohio Street, waiting for the date’s knock. She wore a robe over black lingerie for hotel day calls, and wondered why these men spent five hundred dollars for an hour of kissless sex with her. Catholic brunettes from Hoffman Estates got naked for carry-out sushi and
St. Elmo’s Fire
on DVD, and they kissed with their tongues.

But these johns couldn’t score with women who only wanted a date for Christmas Day at their parents’ house.

She believed they were all low-hanging fruit. They came on the hour, some tubby and apologetic, some health-club sleek and lying about themselves. The cop was a better class of john, though maybe a john the same. She’d watch him before deciding, but the rest were mostly from the bottom of the world.

When the knock came, she opened the door, and her date was a crew-cut Italian mix. He’d wrestled in high school, but didn’t have the guts for the Marine Corps, so the haircut remained part of the old fantasy. They were always dreamers.

He looked at Annie and chewed with an open mouth. After he came inside, she pressed his eyes. They were like painted glass.

“I can taste you already,” he said.

Annie’s eyes watered from his Aramis.

He took Velcro restraints from his leather coat and held them out for her with one hand.

“I don’t do that,” she said.

The guy smiled, tossed her restraints, which she let fall, and then threw his patrolman’s star on the bed. She went cold like the windows. He was a tactical cop, a uniform who gets to wear blue jeans and a bulletproof vest and put kids over cruiser hoods for selling joints. He was small, but still a problem. She bent over and picked up the restraints.

“Leave the lingerie on,” he said, “then lay on your stomach.”

She took off her robe and turned for the bed. The spread lay on the floor from the Loyola kid at noon.

“I’ll give you the tip later,” the cop said. “I’ll be sure to tell you to work hard and save your money.”

When she lay down, she put the restraints beside her, then buried her face between the pillows while the Velcro tore. He soon started on her ankles.

*   *   *

The next day, Annie stayed in the apartment. She tried yoga twice, but shook and lost balance doing the plank. She sat in panties and a T-shirt, hallucinating the cotton weighed heavy, and calmed herself by looking at the cop’s blinded window. He wasn’t home.

The agency had been calling all afternoon. She held the phone and watched the
BLOCKED
light, wondering how far she could push Goetzler. Yesterday, she hadn’t seen a cop in that john, and she was getting scared. She liked the tidy arrangement with Goetzler since he wanted absolution for Vietnam and not sex. For love, there was the cop across the street. She’d keep giving Goetzler silence and he’d busy himself by taking it as a challenge.

But she might answer her cell next time. Nick would offer her another five percent, maybe ten for anything over two hours. After it got dark, the cop went running so she turned her phone off. Nick went to pieces if he slept on things. He’d give her fifteen percent by noon tomorrow.

Annie turned from the window, looking for a cat, but they were hiding. When her hands started running across the floorboards, she decided to wear an
ao dai,
and meet the cop after his run. She got dressed inside two minutes, smiling about the white silk on her back, and watched herself in the mirror. She acted shy and nodded, touching her hips with curled fingers.

She went downstairs and stood in the side-street wind and let her cheeks get wet. She’d even turned and checked herself in the door glass, the silk train blowing up and twisting. The cop’s apartment was lit, one lamp by the chair. The rain hit the bell she’d ring.

In Chicago, in this sideways rain, Annie made the wind warm and put herself in Hue’s pine air near the Perfume River where it passed beneath the Thoung Tu Bridge. Her uncle had been killed there in 1968, and every day her father pointed out the stretch of pavement. A nice boy, her father said of him. He liked pears and taught himself French. That woman of his, he told Annie. It was her pussy that turned him into a VC. No hair, he’d say to me. Like a girl’s. Sometimes, Annie would stand alone where her uncle died, shot by U.S. Marines, and try imagining a pear while the cyclos hauled live catfish in barrels off to where Le Loi Street turned into trees.

She’d seen no pictures of pears, but she guessed they looked like mangoes. Sometimes, she’d be eating this pear, but knowing it was a mango, when the schoolgirls started home from the university, their white
ao dais
like all
ao dais,
covering everything and hiding nothing. She forgot the fruit and her dead uncle and decided the white silk allowed those girls to fly like egrets or nightingales, and if she wore it, she’d learn to fly by next week. She was still too young for the
ao dai,
and had even left Vietnam in black cotton pajamas. Her mother always threatened not to make one for her. Keep sleeping with those cats, she’d say. The time will come for your
ao dai
and you’ll still be dressed like a little girl.

Tonight, in this wind-dreamed-warm, Annie wasn’t happy she’d learned the difference between Bosc and Anjou pears. She also hated knowing that an
ao dai
cost only fifty dollars on Argyle Street.

She walked between the cars and crossed the street to the cop’s. The puddles were sleeved by wet leaves. That night, she’d sat with her back to the window, and knew he’d returned from his run when his desk lamp lit in her television screen. She couldn’t look to see if he was home. When she did, even glancing away quickly, she’d see him move across the window. She’d try making him vague, then a shadow against the curb, but her lips had tasted the salt of him, and he’d smelled like he did in her dreams, alkaline and hard soap.

When Annie saw herself in his door glass, her arm was long, and the rain flecked her
ao dai.
The wet silk turned dark, like wiped ashes. She tried drying a mark with her finger, rubbing until the dark color diluted. She touched the bell, using her free hand. The spot wouldn’t fade. She was only pushing the darkness through the fibers.

15

Mike’s first quarters went through the squad-room coffee machine. Then, trying again, the coins stuck, and he hit the return lever. He pushed down hard while Detective Manny “Rim-Job” Ruiz was making Lieutenant Rossi believe that a moper killed Rosen. They stood in the cold light thronged through the squad-room windows, two detectives in altered suits from T.J.Maxx, the dirt from the panes shadowed upon their faces. For Ruiz, the story went like this:

A Willie went away for ten years after getting caught with two kilos, but paid Rosen his last thirty grand to get the sentence reduced to three. Rosen could have pled for five, but took it to trial. They offer half, Willie had said, you know they don’t got any big shit. Willie spent the 1990s talking jailhouse smack about how he would eat Mike the Kike’s fingers like rib tips. But Willie got into a fight with a guard his third week and broke the man’s jaw with a wood-shop hammer. His twenty-fourth day inside had already determined he would not make parole (a hope he carried like Allah through two hearings after becoming Muhammad Kareem Said in a late night conversion). He wound up at a halfway house on the West Side and sat through mandatory Narcotics Anonymous meetings because heroin had softened his incarceration after he burned the Koran in his cell toilet. He got clean and then broke in and shot Rosen in the head.

“You know how Rosen operated,” Ruiz said.

Rossi nodded like a tollbooth worker. Some days, depending on the suit, he looked more thin than fat.

“Your report has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he said. “I like that.”

“I keep my stuff tight,” Ruiz said.

“Sure, Manny,” Rossi said. “You’re tighter than a bus at rush hour.”

“I pride myself, LT.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do everything like Mexico is watching. It’s the same way Sammy Sosa feels about the Dominican Republic. We’re role models for our people.”

“Great,” Rossi said. “Just keep your off-duty guys from wearing their guns into bars. Downtown is going to start suspending without pay.”

Mike Spence drank the machine coffee. He knew Ruiz never worked a case he couldn’t solve without cruising Borders and mindsexing the blond mothers. Rossi also knew and showed it by the way he bent his lips into a smile. Next month, the lieutenant was starting a parks and recreation assignment where he’d announce police league fights at St. Andrews. He was waiting for the Grand Avenue Italian who could beat a West Side black. I’ll see it before I die, he’d say. The guy loved watching teenagers fight and the movie Indians die.

The ballistics report confirmed a .38 bullet killed Rosen. The gun had a short barrel, like the piece from the picture. Nobody spoke about how Rosen was dressed as the dying Viet Cong because Ruiz didn’t understand it and feared being removed from a case. He had his scenario. He claimed any killer’s true motives came to him with his morning cigarette, the day after the murder, though he always used the same story, and substituted Willie for Hector when necessary. Crime Scene was still deciding how the shooter got inside; the entry and exit was clean. Willie would have been madder than this, Mike thought, he would have busted up the lamps before shooting Rosen. But nobody wanted Mike’s opinion, even if they knew how Ruiz’s investigations always went: he’d round up some of Rosen’s recently incarcerated clients, then sweat them, and come up with nothing. Lieutenant Sally Rossi wouldn’t let the investigation stay warm for more than a month—a cold case got filed in the drawer beneath the solved ones. The only people who would miss Rosen were the antique dealers and some gay shoe salesman on Oak Street.

Mike knew the killer was invisible in the city. He was alone, but not by choice, an arrogant man who needed to have ideas of himself, associations with history, dreams of riding the steppes with Cossacks while the wind split the high grass and the slain Ottomans went to the fallen shucks. The picture meant everything. The killer used it to say that he’d been interrupted by Vietnam, and didn’t know it for thirty years. He was angry over sitting too long in tropical heat while other men, his peers, stayed cool in Rush Street jazz lounges, sipping manhattans with redheaded perfume-tester girls from Marshall Fields, while Americans walked on the moon and General Giap told the BBC that the Vietnamese people would offer a million more lives for national liberation.

Mike walked down the hall when Ruiz started with his blond jokes and Lieutenant Rossi looked out the window, his head more bald than last month. Mike only drove the wagon, and if there was no morgue call, they made him set up the no-left-turn signs along Ashland Avenue fifteen minutes before rush hour.