Chicago Noir [Anthology]

He couldn'’t wait to get sober.

BOBBY KAGAN KNOWS EVERYTHING

BY ADAM LANGER

Albion & Whipple

One morning in the summer of 1978, Mom’s Jim said he couldn'’t take it anymore and moved out on her for the third and last time, with the intention of finding his first wife. Shelah went away for the summer to Camp Chi, where I had contracted something like dysentery two years earlier and my mother wouldn'’t let me go back. So I was stuck with Grandpa and his nurse Hallie at the house on Whipple Street, where Mom said we would stay until she’d saved enough money from her job at Crawford’s Department Store so that we could have our own place again.

My mother had grown up on Whipple with her sister and her folks. Now, Grandpa still slept in his bedroom, I slept in my Aunt Evelyn’s old room, Hallie slept in Mom’s old room, and Mom slept downstairs on the couch. The place hadn'’t been fixed up in years; the pain't on the canopy was peeling, the basement moldy, the linoleum floor warped and cracked. There was an overgrown garden full of weeds and a garage packed with boxes, tires, rusted hoes, broken rakes, and Grandpa’s white Lincoln Continental. No one had driven the car in a decade. The garage was locked, and Grandpa had long since lost the key.

The first I heard of the robberies came from Mr. Klein, a retired contractor who lived with his wife Fran directly across the street from Grandpa’s in a little red-brick house with chartreuse shutters and a lawn jockey out front. It had started at the Bells’s house on Richmond. The thieves hadn'’t gotten much, Mr. Klein said, just a Mixmaster and a color television. They’d fared better at Mrs. Kutler’s on Richmond, scoring not only the TV and radio, but also all her heirloom jewelry. What impressed Mr. Klein most was how professional the burglars were; there was never any sign of a breakin and they always seemed to know exactly what they were looking for. Even though they hadn'’t gotten anything from the Singers’s house on Francisco, somehow they had known that Mr. Singer kept his cash under the bedroom carpet. But nothing like that would happen on Whipple Street, Mr. Klein assured me. All summer long, he would be sitting on his porch, watching.

Inside the house on Whipple Street, when Mom still wasn'’t home from work, and Hallie read Agatha Christie mysteries while my grandfather slept, I'’d wonder when the burglars would hit our house. It was full of antiques and my late grandmother’s jewels. It seemed as if it would only be a matter of time. Who would put up a fight? My grandfather needed help getting in and out of the bathroom. Hallie was sixty-three. My only hope was that the burglars would wait until Mom and I moved into our own place again. I had never liked Mom’s Jim much. When he was out late drinking at Alibi’s, I'’d imagine that he was in my bedroom staring down at me. But whenever I turned on the nightlight, no one would be there. Now I wished he would come back.

Mr. Klein’s tales of burglaries didn'’t impress Jason Rubinstein. He and his uncle, Bobby Kagan, had just moved to Albion Street from Albany Park, where, to hear Jason tell it, the streets were becoming overrun with Korean gangs; every night he fell asleep to the sounds of gunfire.

Jason and I met at Beginners Woodshop at the JCC. Though he and I were in the same grade, he was a year and a half older, more than six inches taller, and probably fifty pounds heavier than me. He claimed to have fingered Robyn Rosen in the nocturnal mammal house at Lincoln Park Zoo and to have lit off firecrackers during the Elton John show at the Chicago Stadium. If you jammed your thumbs into someone’s temples, he said, their heart would stop.

When the JCC canceled Woodshop due to overall lack of interest, Jason and I took the opportunity to start walking our bikes alongside the Chicago River drainage canal on the rubble-strewn site of the old Kiddieland amusement park. Jason showed me what a used condom looked like. He also pointed out an empty Ziploc bag, which he said had probably contained marijuana. Sometimes we’d bike past the Lincoln Avenue motels.

“That’s where the hookers take their johns,” Jason said.

I nodded, needing but not asking for further explanation.

Jason said he’d learned everything he knew from his uncle, Bobby Kagan. Bobby was slim, with a full head of black curls. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward, his hands dangling down in front of him. He wore bracelets, necklaces, and pastel shirts opened at least three buttons. Before he started speaking, something he always did quickly and breathlessly, he’d swipe an index finger across his nostrils, blink his eyes, and swallow hard. He said he worked for the White Sox, but I figured he was lying. One time, he said he was in charge of concessions. Another time he was a scout. Once he said he’d done color commentary for the Sox farm team, the Iowa Oaks.

Still, he managed to get good seats for Jason and me. And not only for Sox games. During the first half of that summer, we saw the Sox three times at Comiskey Park and sat on the third base side during Bat Day. We also got to sit behind the visitors’ dugout for Cubs games at Wrigley Field. Bobby Kagan always drove us to and from the games in his red Cadillac DeVille with whitewall tires. He’d buy our Cokes and hot dogs with one of the hundred-dollar bills that he peeled off a roll he kept in his right front pocket. But he’d leave before batting practice and wouldn'’t return until the ninth inning, when he’d say he’d met an old friend or had some business to take care of. Whenever I spoke, he’d cut me off. I sensed that he never listened to what I was saying.

One night, though, in Bobby’s car, after the White Sox had taken a twi-night doubleheader from the Twins, I said that I was glad we were coming home late because Mr. Klein had told me that the burglars had never struck after 10:00. And for the first time that I could recall, Bobby seemed genuinely interested. What robberies, he wanted to know, what had they taken, who had told me all this, who was this Mr. Klein, what did he do for a living, and which house was his?

I told him what I knew about the robberies. The most recent one had taken place at a retired policeman’s house on Tripp. They had taken his collections of clocks and belt buckles, as well as his framed Colt .45s. Bobby Kagan seemed impressed with my attention to detail.

“You oughta be a cop,” he kept saying.

On this drive from 35th and Shields all the way north to West Rogers Park, I felt more comfortable than I had ever been with Bobby Kagan, and the most comfortable I would ever feel. Before the drive, I don’t recall him ever looking me in the eye. Not long afterward, he started dating my mother.

During the second week of July, the night of my thirteenth birthday party—we had played .500 and had a picnic in Warren Park—Jason and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Shelah’s room. The following morning, when we came downstairs, Bobby was in the kitchen with my mother. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of half-and-half. Two days later, mom handed me a five-dollar bill and told me to buy dinner for myself from Brown’s Chicken because “Bob” was taking her to the Sox game. I started to protest.

“What?” she said. “You think you’re the only one in this house allowed to have fun?”

Jason and I were sharing the five-piece chicken dinner in Chippewa Park when we saw two squad cars speeding west on Touhy. Their blue lights were going, but their sirens were off, which meant, Jason said, that they were trying to break up a crime in progress. Before finishing our drumsticks, we were back on our bikes, following the cops to Maplewood Avenue, where four squad cars had double-parked in front of a bungalow. A white-haired lady in a housedress and slippers was standing on her lawn, while police officers walked toward her with flashlights in their right hands, left hands poised over their holsters. As Jason and I leaned against our bikes and watched, one of the cops asked what we were looking at. Jason just stared straight back at the cop.