Because the Rain (19 page)

“Will Avers,” Mike said. “He had this picture taped to his chest.”

“How come you have it?”

“I tore it off his chest before he ran into the street and got hit. He was told to mimic the little girl.”

Samson held up his hand and looked away from the picture.

“You tampered with evidence,” Samson said. “They will eat you if I write this up. But honestly, I don’t want the cops mad at me. A Metro reporter needs the cops, so I’m not touching this.”

“There’s more.”

Samson’s cell phone went off in his pocket. He took the call and waved at Mike while he walked out the door. The wind lifted his coattails while he crossed Lincoln Avenue. Mike noticed he’d left his pen on the table. Samson was a sleeper and now the pictures were Mike’s to remember or forget.

*   *   *

Argyle Street was Vietnam on Chicago blacktop. There were four blocks of boat people and their American children,
pho
shops made from old Irish taverns, jade stores selling Lincoln Park blondes green marble, and travel agencies run by former Saigon marines (Chicago to Ho Chi Minh City $969.69), all serviced by the dark-girdered El stop where roosting pigeons were unmoved by the trains.

Mike drove slow and close to the parked cars so the blue city trucks could pass him. The laminated pictures were taped to his dashboard, General Loan and Kim Luc Phu.

If Mike pursued the crime, he’d inherit what the man carried, and he didn’t want to imagine his story anymore. Nobody wanted to remember old wounds, and Vietnam was America’s worst memory. A blue stocking or a lawsuit will get this accidental killer, and Mike knew that thinking anymore about Vietnam would do him no good. But he still wanted to know if the killer was a round-eye from these alleys or the cornfields beyond the city.

Mike looked for connections between the prints and the Vietnamese on the sidewalks, the crew-cut gang boys lighting Kools in doorways, the women who still walked with paddy stoops, searching their eyes for the hysteria of those old moments. But among the barbecued ducks hooked behind windows, the thin people walked their shadows into the sidewalks, carrying gallon jugs of fish sauce. They remained unfazed by Malaysian pirates, Viet Cong extortionists, the guards at Filipino refugee camps, and were happy they could open restaurants and return to Vietnam with ten thousand dollars in twenties, even if the long flight to Ho Chi Minh City reminded them of standing upright in a boat. Annie was correct. In America, the Vietnamese sought repose, not revenge. He decided the man who killed Rosen and set Avers to running with flailing arms had always wished he could have done the same thing.

The killer was a fool who would catch himself. The lone difference between him and Rosen was military service in Southeast Asia, and the killer couldn’t see that. His acting took slow years to prompt, and this revenge with old pictures was the revised work of many daydreamed scenarios. Mike also knew the killing of Rosen was an accident. This man wanted only to avenge humiliation. The first time with Rosen, he must have gotten stage fright and things went wrong.

Mike left Little Saigon by turning south on Broadway. The day was warming fast and smelled like rain. He tore the pictures from the dash without watching and threw them into traffic. Mike knew the killer was an American man, but after a childhood among the silos and stove factories of Watega, Illinois, he wanted nothing more to do with the anger those men taught him.

When he was a child in Watega County, he never heard the word Vietnam when it was said. It was spoken, like hello or turn left, but the constant repeating made the word seem soundless. He’d hear the word, then he wouldn’t hear it.

Men in flannel shirts said Vietnam from bar stools, coffee counters, and diner booths. They spoke the word in the bleachers of high school football games, the Saturday line at hardware stores, hunting trips with their sons and nephews. After they’d told their happy drunk stories, the crazy girls in Melbourne, the boozy smell of the R&R plane, the word made them quietly angry, and many knew they couldn’t begin to say what they felt. The smartest ones, the high school history teachers and the accountants, conjured conspiracy theories about Mao forcing Nixon to sell out the American soldiers if they were to be happy together. But the men like Mike’s Uncle Jack, the welders and the carpenters, only plied their trade and went through a few wives. They bought wooded lots on Illinois rivers and kept captured North Vietnamese army battle flags in their workshops, hanging them beside pictures of the Iwo Jima Memorial. After work, they drank in riverfront taverns and told their sad stories until the stories themselves became soundless like the word Vietnam.

As a boy, Mike watched the men who did not say the word, the high school English teachers and the divorce lawyers, create a society away from veterans like his uncle Jack. He also watched them silently measure themselves against the veterans, seek therapists who didn’t care about controlling the answer, and learn to half believe their created ideas of themselves. But the word ruined them the way it did the veterans. Neither side could admit they’d allowed their fathers to make Vietnam a word. They remained guilty and furious about it, like Isaac refusing to see Abraham’s knife.

Mike drove Western Avenue north for a ride and soon found himself among twenty used car lots. The prices were soaped into the windshields, or sometimes the financing terms, and the old cars were mostly sold by their new paint jobs. At the red light, south of Petersen, he stared at the cars and wished the green would come sooner.

*   *   *

That night, Mike sprinted down Claremont Street and his block was dark save for the shaded light behind the three-flat windows. The streetlights were out. He did not see the rain, but it sounded on the car hoods and bleared the blinking red alarm lights in the drivers’ windows. He’d run Ravenswood to Petersen Avenue and back, along the tracks, never breathing easy, and sliding on the wet asphalt without falling down. His lungs stayed stiff and never sucked with his strides. But he’d made the seven miles, breathing through his nose, always ready to slip from the slick leaves.

In two days, Mike Spence would head for Mexico and the ocean on the Ixtapa-Las Brisas Web site. The water wasn’t clear enough to show the bottom, but it was clean and blue. He’d sea-kayak after patio coffee, the sunlight yellow, the morning wind headlong and damp, and if the waves tipped him, he’d roll the kayak and continue wet. He knew nothing about paddling, save from books, but the roll would come quickly because he understood how to make them fail. Finesse, he read, beats raw strength when attempting to recover a kayak.

In Mexico, he thought, he could find Susan again and tell her that the cloudy water was his perception and nothing else. He might sleep a whole lot better.

That morning, he lay his badge on a urinal mint in the precinct house, then used a supermarket pay phone to resign from the department. He only told Olszewski that he was no lifer, then left the receiver dangling while a Latina checker looked at him without interest. He retained a real estate agent, a pregnant blonde, even if condos outstocked hubcaps in Chicago. You’ll clear a hundred thousand, she claimed. There’s no cash but the interest rates are low.

He ran through the alley puddles while the garage doors turned the rain. When he slowed into the walk-off, his legs remained strong, but inflexible, and he didn’t feel his knees bend. The pain went from his hips to his ankles. He slapped his thighs. He squeezed them.

Mike was looking up when Annie stepped from between the garages. The lights from the used car lot bled on her vinyl raincoat.

“Your windows are dark,” she said.

“Go,” Mike said. He kept walking for the gangway.

“I didn’t have you beaten. That happened.”

“Random like my wife?” he said.

“I watch you hide,” she said. “Every night.”

He stopped and looked at the alley. Foamy water ran from gutter spouts and made the puddles eddy.

“Hiders know hiders,” she said. “And we only admit we hide to people who don’t. We never confess to each other.”

He walked between the garages and she followed him. The rain tapped her coat while it cut through their shadows on the bricks. His footfalls squeezed the puddle water from his shoes. Her shadow then closed with his by taking three steps to his one.

“I know the man isn’t Vietnamese,” she said.

“You told me that,” he said.

“It’s not my guess now,” she said. “He is a john.”

“I know that about you,” he said. Mike stopped before the steps. He’d talked without looking back.

“The killer’s never had sex with me,” she said, “but you have. He also pays.”

“I was with you three times.”

“Did you know my name?”

“I’m not a john.”

“You all marry,” she said, “then become johns. This killer is no different.”

“I know a detective you can call. Manny Ruiz at the Twelfth.”

“We’ll get his money, then I’ll give him to you.”

“You can call the murder hotline and inform anytime.”

Annie waded through the long puddle and he knew she was breaking the reflected house light. He could beat her up the stairs if he thought of running bleacher drills, but the door key was through his shoelace, and she’d catch him when he knelt to undo it.

“You both see my face,” she said, “but not my eyes. That is how johns look at you.”

“I’m not looking at you.”

“You and she would silhouette yourselves in the window. I know how you see me.”

Mike was silent.

“This man had ideas like that,” she said,

“I’m done,” he said.

The rain disappeared into his sweatshirt and bounced off her vinyl jacket. It tapped the puddle while she stirred the dark water with her boots. She wrapped her arms around his elbows, and he felt her face sideways against his wet back. She laughed, shrieks like fighting cats.

Mike watched her fingers touch beneath his chest before he strained his sore thighs and reared back. She stood laughing. He grabbed her wrists and pushed her hands off him, then bucked hard until he felt her fall away. He pulled off his running shoe and sprinted upstairs untying the key.

25

For lunch, Annie picked Wicker Park bistros, restaurants with changing names, and hardly touched her veal entrees. She demanded fifty-year-old port and took one sip, then cappuccino with Frangelico, which turned cold. She ordered paté and crème brûlée and flourless chocolate cake. When they’d leave, an hour exactly, her plates remained full, looking like a buffet, and Goetzler laughed to keep from crying because noontime with Annie now cost him twenty thousand dollars. Last week, she’d written the increase on a napkin,
Lunch = 20K,
then pushed it through the risotto crumbs, telling Goetzler to bring the envelopes taped in French
Vogue.
It has better perfume samples, she’d said. He could last a year like this, before going broke, the condo sold, the Jeep Cherokee classified in the
Sun-Times,
or move to a Northwest Side three-flat with hissing steam heaters, and have nothing in two years.

Tonight, Goetzler sat in the Athenian Room, nursing a chicken pita with fries. Danny Partikis grilled thirty chicken breasts, an order from the firehouse on Halsted, and the flames jumped while he basted them with lemon juice and butter. He was a smiley guy who never talked, so rich and silent that people thought him an idiot savant. Goetzler watched him work the paintbrush against the chicken, the grill fire hissing, then popped the Rolex from his leather cuff, deciding a pawn would get him three grand, but a straight sale might bring six. He’d already waited two hours for the cop, and it was ten-fifteen, forty-five minutes until another punishment took over the wagon. He’d started thinking about other things. Just because the cop would never let a hooker squeeze him, this man who wore his paddy detail like an Iron Cross, didn’t mean Goetzler could watch him eat a gyro and absorb his will.

Partikis made the sandwiches, chicken and pita with lettuce and tomato, then rolled them in foil. He played Greek dance music, mandolins done techno, and bobbed his head while he dropped them into the white bags.

Goetzler brought his tray to the garbage can when Partikis started making French fries. He looked at his hairy wrists, flecked with tomato seeds, and saw no watch. Partikis didn’t even own a Walgreen’s Timex, but Goetzler smiled, knowing a rich Greek loves a deal. He took off his Rolex.

“I got something here,” Goetzler said.

Partikis looked up from the deep fryer. The grease hit his arm but he did not move it.

“Since 9/11,” he said, “I could have your Rolexes on both my wrists and ankles. Two of them.”

Goetzler put the watch in his palm, arranging it as if displayed. He’d taken care.

“Four thousand,” he said.

“You people won’t quit with the watches,” he said. “I could buy two Rolexes a week. Even Cartier.”

“Thirty-five hundred.”

“Why should I buy a watch when I can ask you the time?”

Goetzler listened to the grease. He’d even wondered if Partikis had first heard him over the noise.

“If you people spend big money on watches,” Partikis said, “I figure you must not mind.”

“I could pawn it for three grand.”

“That’s what I tell the other guys to do,” he said.

Partikis emptied the baskets in the tray beneath the heat lamps. He returned to smiling about nothing and salted the French fries. Goetzler put the Rolex in his coat pocket like it was register change, then watched Partikis bury the sound of sizzling grease with the electronic music. The Greek started dancing while standing very still and bagging the fries. Goetzler left and didn’t know it was raining until he got inside his Jeep Cherokee.

*   *   *

In 1982, Uncle Kerm bought a new Cadillac Seville two weeks before colon cancer killed Goetzler’s father. He got it from a Melrose Park Italian he’d let do six months on a weapon’s violation instead of facing second-degree murder charges. This was the last year of the hatched back ends, and Bobby Odo had a champagne color, the leather seats a shade lighter than the body paint. There were five hundred miles on the odometer, and the car smelled of cigar brands that Kerm didn’t smoke.