“Could have been, but the car was close enough to the Dumpster to keep both in sight. Even so, I didn’t take the chance. I kept my telephoto lens on the Dumpster, ready to take a picture. But nothing approached it. I suppose a pickup man could have come from behind the restaurant then, low, but with all that light from the back door, he took a big risk getting spotted.”
“Did you get the license number of the Ford?”
“No plate, just a sun-bleached temporary tag in the back window. I turned the telephoto lens on it as the car pulled away but couldn’t get it focused in time to snap a picture.”
“Jeez, Dek, if you’re going to do this kind of work, you need to get a rig with an automatic lens.”
“Too expensive right now.”
“It’s cheaper than guilt. Why won’t you let me loan you money?”
I said nothing to that.
“When did you start falling asleep?” he asked after a minute.
“Sometime after two thirty.” I shifted on the bench to look athim. “I’d planned for it, Leo. I brought a chair, sat tilted on the back legs so I would wake up instantly if I dozed and the chair started to move.” I paused, going over it again in my mind.
“And?”
I shrugged. “The night passed. I got the nods, but plenty of times the chair wobbled and woke me. The problem is that I don’t remember checking my watch until after a garbage truck showed up just before six. Since I’d seen nobody approach the Dumpster, I broke my cover and hoofed it across the parking lot to grab the money before they could haul it away as garbage. But when I opened the Dumpster, all I saw was white bags. The black bag wasn’t there. I slipped the back-end man a twenty to let me go through the bags anyway. I ripped every one of them apart. The money was gone.”
Leo looked across the water. “Did you tell Chernek?”
I looked at the water, too.
He turned on the bench. “You’ve got to tell him, Dek.”
“I don’t like him keeping out the cops and the Feds.”
“You don’t like him having money problems, either, but none of that puts him behind the bombs.”
“I don’t like that he’s using someone like me instead of a pro.”
Leo waited for a minute, then spoke softly. “You’ve considered, of course, that you were spotted before the money was picked up?”
“Sure, but that doesn’t explain how he got away with it. My eyes were on that Dumpster all night.”
“Except for lapses.”
I turned to look at him, ever Leo, ever my friend, trying to spin my screwup.
“Is that what I can call falling asleep for three-plus hours? A lapse?”
He shrugged.
“It gets worse, Leo.”
“Worse?”
“It could have been the garbage guys, inadvertently. They mighthave already tossed the top bag from the Dumpster into the truck as I was charging out of the garage. I didn’t think of it at the time.”
“Jeez.”
“Exactly. That money might be landfill now.”
Leo spoke slowly. “Chernek is your client, Dek. He needs to know all this, regardless of your concerns about him. Unless…”
The word dangled. Leo took a slurp of his Coke and picked up another hot dog, but it seemed like a forced move. He didn’t look hungry anymore.
I looked over at him. “Unless what, Leo? Unless I’m worrying about more than the Bohemian? Like about the Tribune?”
Leo didn’t answer. He was too good a friend.
There’s a Guy Clark tune that compares life to taking candy from a gorilla. Grabbing the candy’s not tough when the gorilla’s not around-but get used to the easy grabbing, start taking easy pickings for granted, that’s when the monkey shows up.
I’d gone to a city college in Chicago, majoring in getting out of Rivertown. I hustled for nickels and dimes, busing tables, washing city trucks, cleaning classrooms. And I started a gopher service, mostly for lawyers, picking up take-out dinners, or going for pizzas. They worked late; I worked cheap. It was a perfect marriage, and soon I was getting enough daytime work, running documents between law offices and courthouses, photographing accident scenes, and looking up information in the newspaper morgues, to quit my other part-time jobs.
At graduation, the best my marketing degree got me was an offer to sell toilet components for half of what I’d been making as an undergrad, so I rented a third-floor walk-up office four blocks beyond the fringe of what was respectable real estate in downtown Chicago, got some raised-ink letterhead, and expanded my list of services to include document traces, missing persons location, and a bunch of other things I hoped I could do. It was an odd-job littleresearch business, not all that far removed from the pizza pickups I’d begun with, but by the time I met Amanda, I had three employees, a heavily mortgaged condo overlooking Lake Michigan, a five-year-old Mercedes ragtop I’d bought used, a stainless Rolex, and comfortably diminishing memories of Rivertown. It might not have been much by rich-folk standards, but from my Rivertown-fed point of view, the candy grabbing had been good enough.
But then, two months after Amanda and I married, the monkey showed up.
She came named Evangeline Wilts. She was the mayor of a small suburb just outside of Chicago, and she was on trial for taking kickbacks for steering city funds into a mob-controlled insurance company. Her lawyer hired me to trace canceled checks that he said would prove his client’s innocence. The checks showed the proper endorsements. I testified to that in court, and based on my findings, Mayor Wilts was acquitted.
But I’d been set up. The checks I’d traced were dummies, processed by a bought-off bank vice president with a fancy set of rubber endorsement stamps he’d used to mask the path of the real checks.
A Tribune reporter discovered the scam. There were rearrests and more charges, and a new trial was scheduled, this time sure to convict Ms. Wilts. Because of the egg I’d left dripping on the prosecutor’s face in the first trial, I was charged briefly, as an accomplice. Nobody believed I was involved in the deception, but it was a way for the prosecutor, a Republican appointee, to vent anger-and get a lot of press. For I was, as was pointed out on the front page, the son-in-law of that Democrat powerhouse Wendell Phelps.
I hired a lawyer, who hired experts. The prosecutor dragged out the pretrial period, milking the publicity until the press got weary of it, at which point he dropped the charges against me. I was guilty, though-of being a fool. It didn’t matter that the setup had been professional, virtually undetectable. I was in the accuracy business; all I had to sell was accuracy. Without that, I wasn’t in business.
After the Tribune stories, none of my lawyer clients would risk using me, and my little company blew away like a twig hut in a tornado. The Lake Shore Drive condo, the Benz, the Rolex, and anything else I could sell went for to pay the legal bills and the remaining months of the lease for an office where the phones no longer rang.
So, too, went my ability to function. The sudden loss of my business and my money, my public humiliation, and maybe most of all the shame I’d brought on my new wife left me a zombie, prowling the empty rooms of my bride’s house. Amanda tried as hard as she could, offering to fund a restart of my business, but we’d been a whirlwind thing created by two people from vastly different cultures. She was inherited rich. I was stained Rivertown, with all the resentments that could bring to a suddenly untethered mind. I started drinking and did stupid things like giving away my books and most of my good clothes. I needed to shed everything I used to value, like I was no longer worthy of anything. And, with the perfect clarity of a newly practicing drunk, I started rearranging facts. In a matter of days, I had my downfall blamed on the fact that I’d married a big Democrat’s daughter.