Nine Fingers (22 page)
Authors: Thom August
At the Airport
Thursday, January 23
It’s O’Hare, and it’s midweek, mid-morning, medium-busy. I park in front of the NO PARKING AT ANY TIME sign, pull the POLICE
BUSINESS card out of the glove box, set it on the dash. I hop out, lock up, walk inside. I go up to an airport rent-a-cop,
flash the tin, ask for the security office. I don’t get out here much, don’t remember where it is.
How do I come to be out here? I get a call. Put out a midlevel alert last night, “Be On the Look-Out,” wanted for questioning,
unarmed suspect, like that. And he walks right into it and damned if some Wally Wackenhut doesn’t see him.
There are some people we are BOLOing for a dozen years. We have pictures of them posted everywhere there’s a space that’ll
fit an eight-by-ten. We run mug shot reviews with everyone from the baggage handlers to the pilots. Do we find them? Not a
trace. This guy? One phone call, a general description, a name, the next morning someone nabs him the first minute he walks
in, middle of the second-busiest airport in the world. Go figure.
Up a flight of stairs to the security office. The door is locked. I press the buzzer, hold the tin up to the little quartz
window. The door opens. A fat rent-a-cop with a flushed face is sitting on a bench by the door. Reading the paper. The
Sun-Times.
“Detective Ridlin?” he says. I nod. He lumbers up off the bench, drops the paper, brushes some powdered sugar off his shirt,
sticks out his hand. We shake. A cop thing.
Like he’s a cop.
“Good to see ya,” he says. “Officer Mumble Mumble” something. I’m not listening for his name. “We’ve got your perp right over
here, in Holding.”
He’s not a perp, but Officer Mumble Mumble is having a moment of cop glory, and I’m not going to spoil it for him. Probably
the dumbest luck ever. Maybe our guy bumps into him and makes him drop his doughnut, and he looks up at him looking for trouble
and, what do you know, it is the guy on the poster. Or maybe he has a girlfriend in the airlines office and our guy shows
up on some flight manifest. Or maybe he trips over him on the way to getting a fresh cup of coffee, goes to apologize, wipes
the coffee off his shirt and wipes his hand right across the BOLO he is keeping there since the shift-change meeting at oh-seven-hundred.
Who knows? I’m being cynical but I am impressed and surprised. A needle in a haystack, and this guy reaches in and pulls it
right out.
“This the one?” he asks. We round a corner and there he is, Landreau. His left hand is cuffed to a metal bench, that funny-looking
case is at his side, the clasps and zippers all undone.
I nod. “He’s the one.” I turn to the cop. “Very nice job, Officer…” I look at the name tag on his chest, “Officer Verdoliak.
Very nice job.”
“We checked out the case, found a trumpet in it, some clothes and shit like that. ID, money, a ticket, but no weapons, no
drugs.”
“No,” I say, playing to him, “he’s too smart to be carrying when he’s on the move like this. You did good.”
The rent-a-cop looks at me, all expectant, a puppy waiting for a treat. I’ve already thrown him a couple of kibbles. “If he
had slipped through our hands…well, there’s no telling what could have happened. Thanks again.”
I’m kind of hinting that he can take the cuffs off now and release him into my custody. He’s still wagging his tail, begging
for more. “Is he dangerous? What’s he wanted for?”
I take him by the left bicep, all fat and soft under my fingers, and wheel him around like I’m getting him out of Landreau’s
hearing, like I’m passing a confidence. I lean up into his face, place my lips close to his ear. “Oh, you have no idea what
this man is capable of, no idea. Of course, I’m not at liberty to divulge the details,” I say, “police business and all, you
know how it is, but you saved a lot of people a lot of trouble here today, a lot of trouble.” I step back, reach my left hand
out, grab him on the right arm. I am holding a folded-up twenty in my palm—that was going to be my move all along, he’s a
rent-a-cop. But it strikes me that if I offer this man money it will ruin it for him. He is having a moment of authentic glory,
here, as far as he knows. Doing his civic duty, living out his childhood dream.
I curl up the twenty in my pocket, fish out a pen and a scrap of paper, and make a point of writing his name down, getting
the spelling right. I’m having trouble reading the name tag because his chest is heaving so much, but I do it, spelling it
out to myself out loud, “V-E-R-D-O-L-I-A-K.” Then I stash the paper and pen back in my pocket, reach out for the big cop handshake
again, and say, “Nice work, Officer Verdoliak. I’ll take it from here.”
He shakes my hand twice. I reach behind me for my own cuffs, snap one end open, clip it on Landreau’s same left wrist, snap
the other end on my own right.
Officer Verdoliak is trying to act like he does this every day. He fumbles the keys out of his pocket—thank God he doesn’t
drop them—and reaches down and unsnaps Landreau from the bench, pulling the cuffs loose as he does so.
I nod to Landreau. He picks up his case with his free hand, straightens back up.
Verdoliak stands back a step, straightens his spine, and damned if he doesn’t rise up into a salute. I’m the cops, I think,
not the marines; we don’t do this, except at parades, and this isn’t some stupid parade—it’s a charade. My right wrist is
cuffed to Landreau, so I bring my left up. Sacrilege. I flip him a condescending-officer one, the old “Carry on.” He snaps
his hand back at me, eyes straight ahead like he’s seen in the movies, nice and crisp.
Touching, really.
There’s a way to walk with a man cuffed to your wrist so it doesn’t look like cop-and-prisoner or like two gay guys holding
hands, and I know how to do it but Landreau doesn’t, so it takes us a while for him to fall into step. Speaks well for his
pedigree: the only way you get good at this is with practice. Lots of practice. He hasn’t had any.
We move through the sparse midday crowd and head to my car. I fumble for my key with my left hand in my right pocket, fish
it out, get the passenger door unlocked awkwardly; these are not usually left-handed activities for me. I hand Landreau into
the car, uncuff myself, and relock the cuff on a bar in the middle of the bench seat. He is passive throughout this. I lock
and close his door, walk around, open my door, slide in. I fasten the seat belt, give him a look, and he reaches up with his
right hand, grabs the metal piece, and brings it down and into the buckle all in one motion. It should be awkward—no one does
it that way, right hand reaching up and to the right and pulling it down and to the left—but he makes it look smooth. Like
this is the only way to do it.
I shouldn’t be surprised that the guy’s got some physical dexterity, but his grace at doing this catches me somehow. I start
the car, stash the sticker, check the traffic and accelerate into the road.
We are silent as I weave through all the drop-offs and pickups and focus on getting us back to the highway.
“So,” I ask, when we get there, “where were you heading?”
“I hear Hawaii is nice this time of year,” he says.
“Your ticket said Rock Island.”
“It’s in the right direction,” he says.
“What’s in Rock Island?”
“Used to be a railroad,” he says. “They wrote a song about it, in the key of G.”
“And now?”
“Just an island. It’s rocky,” he says.
I turn to him. “Right next to Davenport, Iowa, isn’t it?” I say.
He turns to me, raises his eyebrows. “Wow, you caught me,” he says, dry as toast.
“So, you’re doing, what? Heading back to pick up some cash, maybe a new identity, then back into obscurity?”
He doesn’t say anything. He is staring straight ahead.
“Come on, what’s the story?”
“The story?” he asks. “I don’t do stories, I do music.”
“You
do
do music. Got to give you that. Never heard anyone play like you do, ever.”
He stares straight ahead.
“But you also do stories,” I say. “Big whopping stories.”
“Stories?” he says. He shakes his head.
“You gonna deny it?”
“Am I under oath?” he asks.
“With a cop, you’re always under oath, or you should act like it. See, cops…The whole job is stories. Man gets shot?
What’s the story? Burglar makes off with the goods from some locked apartment? What’s the story? I know bars, cop bars, you
could walk in there any time of the day or night and hear a thousand stories. Each one told just so, the details lined up
in a row.”
He’s still staring straight ahead.
“But the thing is, we like
true
stories. We’ll listen to some shit from each other, sure. Cop gets shot two times, before you know it, it’s three times, four.
But from a citizen? No. You get a nose for them, hearing enough bullshit. And the thing is, your story? It’s a bullshit story.”
He pauses, his mouth scrunches up tight. “All right, so maybe I wasn’t going to Hawaii.”
“The least of it,” I say, “where you’re going.”
His forehead wrinkles, just a little.
“Me? I’m more interested in where you’re coming from.”
He pauses, looks out the window.
“I’ve never found it helpful to live in the past,” he says. “It always leads back to the same place. You can’t do anything
about it. The present, or the future, maybe there’s more than one road in front of you. Going back, it’s a one-way street.”
“With you, it’s a one-way street in a cul-de-sac. It’s a dead end,” I say.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’re not Jack Landreau.”
“You’ve seen my ID—driver’s license, Social Security, credit cards…”
“All part of the story. A bullshit story. A good bullshit story, nicely told, but still a bullshit story.”
“Why don’t you take me downtown, run my fingerprints—”
“Already did,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows.
“They took them off the horn, this morning, you being otherwise detained.”
“And?” he says. “What did you find?”
I look at him. “Nothing,” I say.
“Nothing?” he asks.
“Nothing. You don’t exist.”
“You mean I don’t exist in any police files. I don’t have any kind of a record.”
“That’s right.”
“So, who am I?”
I look at him again. “You gonna tell me?”
“I’m Jack Landreau.”
“No, you’re not,” I say. “He’s dead. You’re not dead. Not yet.”
In the Fat Man’s Cab
Thursday, January 23
The ride that took me out to the airport was a quick one, and the other ride that took me right back downtown came almost
immediately. I stayed busy into the midday mini-rush, racking up the miles, watching the meter turn. The temperature had risen
all the way to thirty, the sun was bright in a high blue sky, and I felt as if I might be starting to thaw out a bit myself.
Until I got a fare back toward Hyde Park.
Not that I minded that. I mean, I do live there, and at midday the traffic can be light and the business can be decent, if
you can catch the flow. It can also be lots of students riding their bikes in and out of traffic, lots of fools crossing the
street in the middle of the block, lots of jerks driving their own cars three blocks from their apartment to the store. It
all depends.
The problem wasn’t the fare; she was great—a woman in her mid-thirties, well-dressed, fashionable in a conservative way. As
soon as she got in and gave me the address, she pulled out a book and dove into it. I could have taken her up to Evanston
and back and she wouldn’t have noticed. But I’m not that kind of driver.
The problem was this gray Chevy Cavalier in front of me, maybe twelve years old, a small gray head poking over the top of
the steering wheel.
I was headed south on Michigan Avenue when she pulled out in front of me, without a signal. I slammed on the brakes and stayed
behind her, in no hurry, but she started to slow down erratically as we got down toward the south Twenties, so I pulled out
to pass her, and she started wandering into my lane, almost clipping me. I dropped back, cut the wheel and started to pass
her on the right when she wandered over into the right lane again, no signal, no warning. “Jesus,” I thought, “How many driving
instructors did you have to fuck to be allowed behind the wheel?”
I got into the left lane to weave my way east, put the blinker on and waited. The arrow went green and I had just started
my turn when the gray Chevy came out of nowhere, cut right across me, and turned left from the right-hand lane. Very creative,
I thought. Extra points for degree of difficulty. I slammed on the brakes, and the brunette in the back jerked forward.
“Sorry,” I said. “We seem to have an adventurous driver in front of us.”
She looked up, said, “There’s no hurry,” and went back to her book.
We were now on a two-lane street with nowhere to pass. No sense blowing a decent tip just to feed my pride. I reached for
the switch on the dash and brought the partition up, not for the passenger’s privacy, but for mine. I had a right turn coming
up, so I put my signal on and coasted to the corner. The Chevy got more than halfway into the intersection and jerked her
wheel hard to the right, careening across my path on two wheels.
“How many box tops did you have to save up to get your license?” I wondered. “Was it Cheerios? Or, let me guess, Fruit Loops?”
It was as if she were following me from in front, going where I wanted to go, but not aware of it until almost after each
turn. It was making me just a little bit nuts. “Who gave you these directions? Ray Charles?” I thought.
Chill, I thought, chill the fuck out. The fare’s address was only a few blocks ahead; there was no sense pushing it. I ratcheted
it down a notch, set it at thirty-five, and cruised up to the fare’s building. I lowered the privacy window, put it in park,
and punched the meter to OFF. She reached into her purse, pulled out a twenty, said “Thank you. Keep the change,” and stepped
out into the cold. I tucked the cash into my kit, watched to make sure she was in past the door, pulled out the pipe, gave
a 360° glance around, and fired up, two long hits.
Better. A little better. If a little is good, a little more can be better, so I had a little more.
I thought I’d head down toward 51st Street. There was a shopping center there; maybe I could pick up a grocery shopper, or
a bus rider who was tired of waiting in the wind. Maybe I could pick up some lunch. I checked my watch; it was almost noon.
I pulled back into traffic, headed east, and who was there, straddling both lanes, but the gray Chevy. She was in the middle
of the road and she was backing up. Backing the fuck up!
I hit the brakes, pulled over to the curb next to a hydrant, and stopped to wait her out. “Free entertainment,” I thought.
“Not for the first time, and definitely not the last.”
A city bus came roaring up from behind us and she yanked it into drive. The bus swerved around her, edging into the oncoming
traffic, leaning on his air horn. She jerked it into reverse again, and got diagonal. If she kept this up, she was going to
be broadside to the flow of traffic.
She sat there, not moving, for close to twenty seconds. It was pure dumb luck that not a single car came by. Finally, she
lurched into the oncoming lane, got straightened out, and started twitching back to the right. Not all the way, mind you,
but a little. I pulled out behind her, giving her lots of room. She kept making turns, all at the last minute, with no signal
ever; a right, a left, straight two blocks, a left, a left. “What the fuck is this?” I mused. “Slalom driving?”
Two more blocks and damned if she didn’t turn right into the parking lot of the shopping center I had been heading for, a
strip mall off 51st Street, across Lake Park from the elevated tracks. She wandered down one lane, headed down another the
wrong way, found two spaces open together, and pulled in diagonally across both of them. I had been planning to park next
to her; instead I pulled into a space facing 51st. I got out, closed and locked the door, walked over, and, wearing my best
hundred-watt smile, rapped on her window.
She looked up at me in surprise, then rolled the window down.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking, what the fuck?”
She was looking up at me, her brow wrinkled like I was speaking Martian.
Sometimes you wonder if there’s even a point.
I reached in the window. She jerked backward, her hands curling up in front of her. I smiled, leaned in, and pointed at her
directional lever. I smiled at her, said, “Now, this little stalk here is called a directional signal. You push it to the
right, a little blinky arrow comes on pointing right,” I demonstrated. “You flick it to the left, a little blinky arrow comes
on pointing left.” She sat there, mesmerized by the flashing lights.
“Some drivers use this to let other drivers know where they’re going.”
She was still looking up at me.
“But not you,” I said. A half smile was competing with a look of confusion on her face.
“Well, you won’t be needing this, now will you?” I reached for the base of the lever, got it in a nice tight grip, and yanked
it out by the roots.
It was kind of beautiful, the snap of the plastic as it broke free of the housing, the sight of the wires all red and green
and black as they pulled free, the frozen look of horror on her face, her hands coming up to her open mouth, as I came away
with the stalk in my hand. She looked at it carefully, as if it was the first time she had seen such a thing. Maybe it was.
I held the stalk aloft, examined it in my hand, and turned toward her one more time.
“Have a nice day,” I smiled. “And happy motoring.”
