Ann Sather’s Swedish Diner looked like any of the blue-plate restaurants that dot Chicago’s older neighborhoods, the kind of place that always has good meat loaf. It had a pale brick front with full windows facing the sidewalk, offering views of people in booths miming various levels of table etiquette.
I went in. Thirty people, waiting for tables, pressed around a glass case filled with cinnamon buns and loaves of fresh-baked bread, talking loudly to be heard above the clatter of plates and metal silverware. Every few seconds, the window-aisle waitress, who looked like she ate there for free, cut through the throng like Moses parting the waters, balancing plates of omelets and thick-cut potatoes.
I made my way into the long dining room. The back exit wasn’t visible, which meant it was normally accessible only to employees. That, and the window card saying the restaurant was closed Sunday night, ruled out the possibility that the extortionist, posing as a patron, was planning to snatch the money from the Dumpster and come back through the diner to escape out the front.
I went back to the foyer and looked in the glass case. For camouflage, I bought a dozen cinnamon buns in a blue and yellow box, the colors of the Swedish flag. It was necessary that I look like a day shopper, and the expense might be tax deductible. Compelling reasonslike those don’t come along every day. I tucked the receipt in my wallet and took the buns outside.
I walked around back, taking out a cinnamon bun to activate my disguise. The bun was moist, fresh, nothing like the varnished, petrified, pseudo-cinnamon horrors sold at shopping malls and toll road plazas. I ate the bun slowly, a guy killing time, eating a lard pill, waiting for his wife. My favorite cover.
The small blue Dumpster where Stanley would drop the money the next night was just outside the back door of the restaurant. It looked like it would hold ten garbage bags. I took another bite of the cinnamon bun and let the last bit fall from my hand. I bent to pick it up, opened the hinged Dumpster lid, and tossed it in. There was one white plastic bag of garbage inside the Dumpster.
To maintain my cover, I ate another cinnamon bun as I scanned the backs of the buildings lining the main alley. All were classic Chicago four-flats, yellow-brown brick, with latticeworks of graypainted wood stairs hung on their backs like external vertebrae. Any of those buildings would offer a safe, hidden view of the Dumpster the next night.
I walked down the long back alley, turned the corner, and went around to the parallel street behind Belmont, the one fronting the four-flats. I was looking for an apartment for rent, a place I could put down a deposit to get a key, but there were no signs in the windows. At the end of the block I turned left and came back up the alley from the other end, almost full circle. And got saved.
An old woman in a faded beige housedress was hanging clothes on a line in one of the tiny backyards. I stopped at her chain-link gate.
“Do you know of any apartments for rent around here?”
She had four wood clothespins in her mouth. She shook her head.
“How about garages?”
The wet blue towel she was raising to the line went still. The clothespins came out of her mouth.
“Yah,” she said in a heavy Polish accent. “Mine.”
She dropped the towel into her basket and motioned me to come through the gate. She met me at the service door to the garage, pushed it open, and stepped aside.
I went in.
There was just enough light coming from the dirty side window to see. The cement slab was cracked into a dozen pieces, and the wood smelled damp from mildew and rot. I felt the wall along the side door for a light switch.
“No electric,” she said from outside.
I walked across the broken slab to the side window, took a quick casual look, and went on to the overhead door. The big door was swelled shut, probably from the rot I smelled. I jiggled it loose enough to muscle it up, as if I cared that it worked. I’d already seen what I wanted. The side window had an unobstructed view of the Dumpster behind Ann Sather’s.
“How much?”
“Tree hunnert.” Her dentures clicked.
When a neighborhood is in play, when the developers come and start bidding everything up, garage rents are among the first to rise. Forget the faded housedress and fractured English; this babushka had her ear to the ground.
“I just want one stall.”
“Tree hunnert, cash.”
“I’ll give you one seventy-five.”
She shook her head. “Tree hunnert.”
“Two hundred cash.” It was all I was packing.
“Two fifty, plus two fifty security. Five hunnert, up front.”
I pulled down the overhead door and walked across the cracked concrete. The hinges of the service door wiggled in the spongy door jam as I started to close it. “Two hundred cash, no security,” I said as I stepped out.
She nodded, put the clothespins back in her mouth, and extended her hand, palm up.
I gave her four fifties. It was all transacted Chicago style: no lease, no signed receipt. The money disappeared into the pocket of her faded housedress. We were done.
From the Jeep, I called Endora, Leo’s girlfriend, at the Newberry Library. She usually worked Saturdays.
“You still driving that little purple ’94 Grand Am?”
“My lilac-mobile.”
“Can I borrow it tomorrow night?”
“Got a date you want to impress, Dek? Some new lovely you don’t want to bounce around in your Jeep?”
Endora had many interests. Resurrecting my love life was in the middle of her list.
“No. I need your car for surveillance.”
“No problem. Listen, there’s a new lady who’s been coming here, doing research for her dissertation. I think she’d be perfect-”
“Can I just borrow the car?”
“Leo will switch with you tomorrow.”
Leo was a lucky man.
“A stakeout? Isn’t that over your head?” Leo shot the basketball. It arched over the backboard, bounced off the top of a rusty metal upright, and rolled across the crumbled asphalt into the corner of the rusty chain-link fence.
“I should go to the Feds instead?” I called as I ran to get the ball.
“No,” he said as I came huffing back. “You rat out your clients, you’re done working for lawyers.”
“Then what do I do?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just that if you need a car your own clients won’t recognize, you’ve got a problem.”
I’d called Leo after I talked to Endora, to arrange to swap cars and to ask him to make a few phone calls. He suggested a workout late Sunday morning at the outdoor basketball court behind Rivertown High School. We’d been shooting bull and hoops there sincefreshman year, though neither of us had ever learned to drop a basket. A game of horse could run three hours and end scoreless. The workout came from fetching the ball.
I turned around for my over-the-head backward shot. Leo snickered, but I could hear the fear in it. I rarely dropped such a shot, but when I did, it was a marvel to behold. I leaned back and sighted upside down at the backboard behind me. Some poet had spray-painted EAT SHIT in neon green letters on the gray, flaking plywood. I aimed at the space just to the right of EAT, held my breath, and let the ball fly. It hit the underside of the backboard, banged against the fence, and skittered along a rut toward the far end of the blacktop.
“Haven’t lost your touch,” Leo yelled, but it was in relief. He ran to stop the ball before it rolled into a puddle.