Playing Dead (24 page)

“Turn Off Your Cell Phone and Pagers, Please,” a sign asked politely. No exclamation point needed. With the help of an ancient docent at the front desk, it didn’t take long to pinpoint my destination: up three flights of sweeping marble stairs.

I moved past a reading area laid out with dozens of current newspapers from all over the world and entered a glass-fronted chamber crammed with rows and rows of scratched-up metal file cabinets.

The room held only one other occupant. A tiny punked-out girl in head-to-toe black with a single skull earring, grad student written all over her, who looked up from her thick book on Sartre and asked in an unexpectedly sweet voice, “Can I help you?”

She led me to the cabinet with the microfiche reels, helped me collect the right dates and publications, walked over to a nearby machine, and provided an efficient lesson in the ancient art of reading and copying microfilm. I wasn’t a novice, I assured her.

I’d done a sweltering summer of research into old microfiche records at mental institutions as an intern for two cantankerous
UT professors who squabbled constantly about whose name would go first on a joint journal article that is still unpublished ten years later.

Punk Girl smiled, offering a glimpse of the innocent still in there, while the skull in her ear leered like the gargoyles. I wanted to ask whether she was buying Sartre’s take on existentialism, if she believed our lives were blank pieces of paper on which we wrote the story with no help at all from God. I wondered if she’d gotten to the concept of
mauvaise foi
, bad faith, the part where we deceive ourselves in order not to take blame.

I figured she would think I was nosy and crazy, which I pretty much was at this point, so I kept my mouth shut. As she walked away I snapped the first roll in place, switched on the light, and whirred past ads and headlines until I found the date I wanted: January 3, 1980.

I could have found this in the
Chicago Tribune
’s online archives, but Lyle said there was nothing like experiencing the stories in real time, as they appeared in print. I could appreciate this. Researching online was a sterile experience. I liked original packaging.

The headline was direct and screaming, in 72-point type:
FAMILY BUTCHERED
.

The accompanying photograph showed cops throwing up in snow-covered bushes in front of an unremarkable saltbox brick house marked off with crime scene tape, the best action shot a newspaper photographer could get on a late-night deadline.

I pressed the button to copy the page, scanning the brief story:

I scrolled ahead. The next day’s front page featured a slightly more sedate 60-point headline:
FBI FAMILY SLAIN BY MOB
. Below were the headshots of the victims, including school pictures of the children: Alyssa, six, and two brothers, Robert, ten, and Joe, four.

They were
babies
. How could anyone look into those innocent faces and pull a trigger?

I peered closely at the main photograph—shuttered windows, empty driveway, anonymous landscaping—the earmarks of a safe house. According to the FBI, the Bennett family had been moved there from their home in an upscale neighborhood in Naperville. The unidentified woman with them was an FBI agent assigned to their protection.

The story unfolded on the front page for five weeks, eventually revealing that Fred Bennett was an undercover FBI agent investigating
the mob. And, finally, swift justice: the plea deal of mob boss Anthony Marchetti, who told the judge in his allocution that he flew into “an uncontrollable rage that I deeply regret” when he discovered Bennett deep inside his organization.

The prosecutor took the death penalty off the table since Marchetti spared the families and the state of Illinois the misery and cost of a trial. It left a horrific killer a shot at parole. There was no mention of evidence of any kind, of how the FBI fingered Marchetti almost instantly for the six deaths.

So far, none of this contradicted Rosalina.

I looked at my watch. Two hours gone. A middle-aged woman in a pink sweat suit and brighter pink Puma running shoes walked past, flashing a shy smile. I made the mistake of smiling back.

“How are you?” she asked, with the emphasis on the “you.”

“Fine, thanks.” I cast my eyes down and silently begged her not to start a conversation. A genealogy chart peeked out of the canvas library bag hanging over her shoulder. There’s no such thing as a short genealogy conversation. Existentialism takes less time to explain.

She instantly picked up on my body cues, and I felt a little guilty. She wandered over to a reading chair in a far corner, where she found her place a third of the way into a weapon-sized paperback copy of
Anna Karenina
, which was farther than I’d ever gotten. She turned the page, the movement of her arm revealing a lump on the right side of her waist. Insulin pump? Heart monitor? Gun?

Somewhere in the back of my mind lurked the fact that Illinois had the toughest restrictions on weapons in the nation. Carrying a concealed weapon was prohibited for civilians.

Keeping a wary eye on the diabetic genealogist in the pink tracksuit, I refocused on the microfiche and snapped in another reel, this one for July of 1981.

WHO CHOPPED OFF LITTLE ADRIANA’S PINKIE?

I swallowed a gasp, startled by the headline even though I’d purposely picked a reel from a Chicago tabloid that gorged itself to the popping point on kidnappings and murder. In the next hour and a half, I discovered at least thirty stories from a dogged reporter named Barbara Thurman who had no ethical problem flaunting unnamed sources and sticking in her own opinion.

Thurman hinted that Rosalina was a drug addict and possibly involved in the disappearance of her daughter. Rosalina claimed that the girl had been torn from her arms in the front yard of her grandmother’s home on the South Side, where she was visiting for the day. But no one else heard Rosalina’s screams or saw two masked men tear off in a black Mercedes. Not the grandmother, not the gang members who skipped school to roam the block, not the old man across the street planting petunias in his postage-stamp yard.

One story delved into gruesome detail about the finger: how it arrived (regular mail, in a plain brown padded envelope, with a small brown bloodstain smudged in the corner); what the ransom note inside said (
Nine left. Chop, chop. You know what to do
.); how Rosalina reacted (she swallowed a bottle of aspirin and tried to stab herself with a steak knife before being transported to the hospital).

Thurman’s final piece, a startlingly blunt opinion column, ran inside on page 3 with a headshot of an adorable brown-eyed baby and the headline:
WHAT ARE THE POLICE HIDING?

On every front, the cops had shut down reporter Barbara Thurman. Only two short months of investigating and the case of the missing Adriana Marchetti was marked unsolved and stuck high on a shelf. For the next twenty minutes, I punched the appropriate buttons to copy each story about Adriana, racking up sixty bucks on my MasterCard and a frustrating headache.

I rubbed my temples. The books crowding the shelves felt like cold strangers, pressing in on me. The library was no longer my refuge.

Pink Lady had disappeared.

She represented good things, I had told my cynical brain the last time my eyes lit on her tapping Puma foot, about an hour ago.

Breast cancer awareness.

Excellent taste in literature.

She was probably the kind of mother who cut the crusts off her child’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a few formative years even though she thought it was silly, like mine did.

And now, as I felt so utterly alone and scared, she was gone.

P
unk Girl was fiddling with her skull earring and doodling a pretty good caricature of Rod Blagojevich in prison stripes when I approached her with my load of paper and film.

“I see you were successful,” she said. “Just leave the film canisters here. I’ll put them back. I need to earn my minimum wage.”

“Good job on his hair,” I replied, pointing to the puffy black mop on her piece of paper.

“I’m doing a paper on corrupt Chicago politicians and their early childhoods. Did you know this dude shined shoes as a kid to pay the family bills? You’d think he’d be a better person.”

You’d think. Or not. Some kids think they deserve more, and others think they deserve nothing. I haven’t figured it out yet.

“Can you direct me to the bathroom?” I asked.

“The bathroom of the day is in Humanities on the seventh floor. There are plumbing problems in several of the closer ones, so it will be worth the walk.”

She pinched her nose to make the point and when she released it I could see a tiny hole where another skull might live sometimes.

“Take the center staircase. Go up four flights. Turn left and head back through the stacks. The bathroom’s in the corner.”

I walked up the four flights slowly. No one followed. I wandered
through the stacks, breathing in a deep whiff of old leather and paper, feeling safer, as if the books were saying,
Calm down, we are still your friends
. In better circumstances, I’d love to bring a sleeping bag and live here for a month. I also said that about Daddy’s barn. My hand ran down a copy of
Ulysses
, which caught my eye, like it always did. Maybe someday I’d read it and a thousand other works of great literature not included in the Ponder High School curriculum.

“Excuse me.” A man appeared suddenly, brushing across my body to reach for a book on the top shelf.

He smelled sexy, like expensive cologne and untamed hormones. He was twentyish, with a slender athletic build. He smiled at me under the brim of a Chicago Cubs hat. I liked the Cubs. Everybody liked the Cubs. Except the White Sox. And the Cardinals.

“How ya doin’, Tommie? I’m Louie.”

Before I could ask how he knew my name, he provided a full frontal view, and I wondered, dizzily, if a villain had leapt out of the dusty pages of a noir novel.

“I’m not so pretty, eh?” A vivid red scar ran from his right eye halfway down his cheek. Whatever unlucky thing had happened, the lucky thing for Louie was that it didn’t happen a millimeter to the left. He would be blind in one eye.

He leaned back, relaxed, against the shelf. “The first thing I tell people in your situation is that this is an old high school football injury. Not everybody believes it. The second thing I tell ’em is that I made the most of it. Ask the bastard who chop-blocked me at the goal line in the game against Hubbard South. Knocked off my helmet. Five guys piled on. I couldn’t see for the blood.” He drew a finger lazily down his scar. “There was a cleat. Stuck in my face. Got it pictured?”

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I felt sure he knew he was breaking library rules, so I kept my mouth shut.

“I held on to the fuckin’ ball, though,” he said, lighting up. “And the jerk-off who hit me … I
own
that asshole. Still. His girlfriend. His money. His life. His face don’t look too good, either.”

A disfigured lunatic hiding out in Modernist literature. Who knew my name. Possibly related to a Bubba I encountered not so long ago in a parking garage.

“I don’t have a gun on me,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Great.” I glanced around uneasily, hoping to catch sight of a motherly woman in pink. Hoping the smoke detector would go off.

“I think you’re gonna do what I want anyways. People usually do.” He slid behind me and draped an arm around my neck like a lover.

I nodded mutely, filled with a powerful desire to pee.

“I know where that cute little niece of yours is. At the skating rink. Wearing purple shorts that say ‘Cheer’ across her butt. Tell me, why do mothers let little girls out of the house in shorts that advertise their butts?” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew it into my face, which wasn’t a problem because I had involuntarily stopped breathing five seconds ago.

“She’s got on a Tweety Bird shirt,” he continued cheerfully. “Her hair’s in a ponytail. My friend thinks she’s a cutie. His type. But I’m pretty sure every little girl’s his type.”