Chicago Noir [Anthology]

—I just on-viewed a traffic accident at 95th and Pulaski.Hold me down over here and dispatch EMS for me, please, squad.

— [Unintelligible] medic [unintelligible] contact the station.

—Ten-four. Let me know if you need any more help over there.

His phone rang, a lovely clapper-and-drum trill. He allowed those awful digital tones neither in his home nor in his shop, where the synthetic tweeting might go on for minutes, unnoticed and unanswered under the din of labor, static, and police dispatcher conversation.

“Hullo?”

“Dent!” It was Jen Colino. In the background, her own scanner, an expensive Radio Shack Pro-96, belched in harmony with the homemade one in Kimball’s kitchen. “Amazing, huh? Amazing! Do you think it will hold up?”

“Dunno,” Kimball said, now wondering if the cops weren'’t right to observe a superstitious moratorium on discussion of the Zero-Zero in progress. “We’ll know in an hour.”

“Wanna come over for the finish? I'’ll open a bottle of champagne at midnight. Like New Year’s.”

Kimball sighed. He didn'’t have a girlfriend, hadn'’t for a long time, and Jen Colino was the only woman availing herself to him currently. They had plenty in common. She was a scannerhead. She was sweet and kind of pretty, maybe a little fleshy around the face and under the arms, but no more than he was. Jen was plenty attractive enough, was his point. But if they became a couple she would be over every night. She would make chicken and they’d track the scanner together but she would want to talk. Constantly. Over the dispatchers. Over the cops. Over the paramedics. Although nearly every one of his friends was, like Jen, a member of the All Chicago Scanner Club, Kimball believed his hobby was a solitary pursuit, and he wasn'’t ready to give up his bachelor benefits for a warm body on the couch just yet. “No, I don’t think so,” he said to Jen now. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

All his life Kimball had chosen paths he could walk by himself. Maybe his parents imprinted that on him when they made him an only child. When he was a boy he loved jigsaw puzzles, and from there it was a small step to taking apart radios and fitting the pieces back together. He liked keeping his own schedule. Answering to no one but his customers, who were in and out of his shop as quickly as it took them to set a television on his counter and get an estimate. The people he felt closest to, the dispatchers he knew by name and the cops he recognized by beat tags, didn'’t even know he existed.

Kimball cupped his right hand at his temple and leaned against the kitchen window, peering down at a refrigerated truck idling at the four-way stop below. With his eyes he could follow Grand Avenue east all the way to downtown but Racine only as far south as the Metra tracks on the other side of Hubbard. The Italian joint across the street was playing host to its Monday night lasagna regulars and a fleet of Caddies and Lincolns were squeezed into the angled parking spaces in the tiny lot. Along with the bakery and butcher and the storefront men’s club down the street, Salerno’s was one of the last landmarks of the old neighborhood. There was still an Italian for every yuppie on this thin sliver between the expressway and the meatpacking district, but you couldn'’t really call it an Italian neighborhood anymore, not like the Polish and Korean blocks up Northwest where hardly anyone spoke English and you had to check with your waiter twice before you put a spoonful of anything in your mouth. There were still a handful of aging or wannabe wiseguys about. A few of them passed the hot days in lawn chairs on the sidewalk in front of the bakery, telling tales of the great Italian migration of the ’50s, from Cabrini Green up Grand all the way to Harlem. But in the condo sales brochures and restaurant listings, this neighborhood was River West now, a name as stripped of ethnicity as the realtors could manage.

“I could come over there,” Jen offered.

“That’s okay,” Kimball said. “I mean, I’m kind of tired.

I’m going to bed right after midnight.” He added, “Or sooner, if somebody gets capped.”

“Oh. Okay.” The disappointed silence was interrupted briefly by a unit responding to an alarm at a Clybourn clothing boutique and then continued for thirty seconds or more, as Kimball lingered with one ear pressed against the phone receiver and the other listening for the dispatcher.

Then, the buzzer rang downstairs.

“Someone’s at the door, Jen. I gotta go.”

“Who would be coming over at this hour?”

Her words were armed with jealousy and Kimball wanted to defuse them. “Could be a customer,” he said.

“You shouldn’t answer. You’ll miss the Zero-Zero.”

“I'’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay. Call me.”

Kimball hung up the phone and walked to the intercom, smudged with greasy fingerprints, next to the apartment door. With some frequency, folks from the neighborhood brought their televisions to Kimball’s apartment after-hours. It most often happened on nights of Bulls playoff games. A desperate basketball fan might arrive at his doorstep, TV set cradled in his arms like a sick baby. Kimball tolerated such visits and even encouraged them. His services might not be needed much anymore in the era of disposable electronics, but they valued his skills when appliance stores were closed for the night.

He pressed the button and talked at the beige box in the wall. “Yeah?”

“Kimball?” a voice replied. “Lemme in.”

“Who is this?”

“Gerry!”

“Gerry.” Kimball repeated.

“It’s me. Genuine. My TV in your shop. You gotta let me in.”

Genuine Gerry was a neighborhood character of indefinite Central Asian origin. Possibly Kyrgyzstan. Turkmenistan. Tajikistan. One of those. It would be a stretch to call him a neighborhood resident, as he didn'’t exactly have an address. To get by, Gerry relied on good weather and the generosity of others, and in Chicago the latter was just marginally more reliable than the former.

Story was he had been a Comiskey Park beer vendor. His nickname was from the Miller Genuine Drafts he once poured from his tray. Allegedly he’d been fired over an aggressive response to a drunken fan’s insult. Since the spring, he parked cars at a new jazz club around the corner on Ogden, spending the hours from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. in an aluminum and glass box the size of two old-fashioned phone booths welded together. His most prized of few possessions was a tiny, eight-inch black-and-white TV, but during the day it wasn'’t safe in the parking lot booth. By long-standing agreement, when he left his shift, Genuine would hide the television on Kimball’s second-story back porch. In the morning, Kimball would retrieve the TV and take it into his shop for safekeeping until 6 o’clock on the nose, right at closing, when Genuine would stop by and retrieve it for the night. Twice Kimball had made minor repairs, once to the antenna and once to the loose knob, without charging Genuine or even mentioning what he had done.

“Yeah, okay,” Kimball said. “I'’ll be right down.”

Kimball slipped back into the kitchen to get a quick bead on news coming over the scanner. Nothing going on, just a trespassing call from the University of Chicago library. Gerry leaned on the buzzer three times in annoying succession and Kimball grabbed his keys, spun out the door, and sprinted down the steps.

Genuine was hopping on the sidewalk, arms rigid at his sides, his long, curly black hair, Ace Frehley hair, you know, from KISS, Jen had called it, bouncing around his head. Kimball had seen him high before, although he was never certain what combination of herbs, inhalants, liquors, powders, or pills got Gerry off.