Chicago Noir [Anthology]

“I ain’t looking at nothin’,” he said.

When we got to Mr. Klein’s house, Klein inexplicably already knew more than we did; he said he’d heard the news over his police radio. The victim was Mrs. Ruttu. They’d gotten her TV and her hi-fi. The most “brazen” aspect of the crime was that the burglars had taken everything while Mrs. Ruttu slept in her front room, and Klein now had theories about the culprits.

“Probably Arabs or Mexicans,” he said. “Someone new to the neighborhood.”

I listened intently, but Jason kept sniggering as if he doubted either the facts or Mr. Klein’s sanity. Whenever Jason laughed, Mr. Klein would stop for a moment, stare sternly at Jason, then continue. But when Mr. Klein said it was a wonder poor Mrs. Ruttu hadn'’t died of a heart attack and Jason laughed again, Mr. Klein stood up and said he’d tell me the rest of the story when my friend had gone home.

“Fran,” he shouted to his wife, as he opened his screen door, “I’m comin’ in!” And then he slammed the door.

I told Jason it didn'’t seem right to laugh about a woman nearly having a heart attack, but he told me he wasn'’t laughing at that. He was just laughing at the idea of somebody sleeping while someone else carted off a TV. Burglaries didn'’t happen like that. Half of the time when thefts were reported and there was no sign of forced entry, it meant that the victim knew the robber and had planned the crime, hoping to collect insurance. That’s what Bobby had told him, anyway.

“How does he know so much about it?” I asked.

“Bobby knows everything,” he said.

In early August, armed with information provided by Mr. Klein, Jason and I sat down at a back table of the Nortown Library with a Xeroxed map of West Rogers Park, and plotted the robberies, searching for an overall pattern in the dates and times when they had happened, but found nothing. The robberies had taken place during mornings and evenings, in houses and apartments, on Tuesdays, on Thursdays, on weekends. They’d happened on Farwell, on Fairfield, on Granville, Bell, and Washtenaw. Not on Whipple Street, though, Mr. Klein was always quick to point out.

We read the accounts in the Nortown Leader newspaper, in the police blotter and particularly in the front-page story of the Metro section that ran the week of August 3 (“Police Still at a Loss”). With my father’s old army binoculars, a Polaroid camera, and a portable tape recorder, we’d case out houses and apartment buildings on blocks that hadn'’t been hit yet. But after Mr. Isaac Mermelstein approached us wearing an Israeli army jacket and a yellow hardhat and told us to get off his sidewalk, after Mrs. Weinberg called the cops on us, after my mother honked her horn and told us to stop loitering in alleys like a “couple of hoodlums,” we went back to the drainage canal and the Lincoln Village Theater, where we would sneak into movies we had already seen, then go to Jason’s apartment and listen to his Led Zeppelin and Yes tapes.

On the night that Jason tried to get me stoned, we were sitting in his front room, and he was already pretty high from the half a joint he’d smoked. Mom and Bobby were at Park West at a Boz Scaggs concert, and Jason and I were watching Saturday Night Live with the volume turned down and “Roundabout” playing loud. The actors’ lips were moving perfectly in synch with the music, Jason said, handing me a lit joint. I told him I wasn'’t interested, but he gave it to me anyway. It dropped on my shirt, burning a hole by the left shoulder, at which point I panicked, ran to the bathroom, and dumped about a quart of water on myself to make sure the fire was out. When I got back to the front room, Jason was laughing.

“Go get yourself another shirt from the dresser, dork,” he said.

I’m sure he meant his dresser and not Uncle Bobby’s, but both rooms were dark and I couldn'’t figure out which was which. I rummaged through Bobby Kagan’s dresser. While grabbing for an undershirt, I saw a wad of cash, all hundred-dollar bills.

As I lay in bed that night, listening to my grandfather breathing, I considered everything I knew about Bobby Kagan, how he had thousands of dollars in cash, how he lied about his job, how he seemed so interested in what I knew about the robberies, how he always disappeared for hours during ballgames. I thought of what Mr. Klein had said: Someone new to the neighborhood was committing the robberies. Bobby Kagan and Jason had only lived on Albion since May.

I had already made vague plans to try to follow Bobby, but when my mother got home at 2:00 in the morning and I told her of my suspicions, she couldn'’t stop laughing.

The next day, Mom was working and Hallie was taking my grandfather to the hospital for a checkup. I'’d planned to spend the day tailing Bobby Kagan. But when Jason called to ask me what I would be doing, I couldn'’t tell him the truth, so we spent the day biking through Caldwell Woods, where invariably every summer the bodies of two or three teenage runaways would be dumped, and then went to Superdawg and ate cheese fries.

When I got home, there were two squad cars in front of my grandfather’s house. Mr. Klein was standing on his porch, squinting, until his wife came out and said, “You watched enough, Joe. Later you’ll watch more.”

Hallie was talking to two cops on the stoop as my grandfather looked at the ground. I let my bike fall on the front lawn and made my way up the stairs.

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, talking to two male police officers. She was smoking, but when she saw me, she suddenly stood up, put out her cigarette, and grabbed my hands. “I have to tell him what happened,” she told the officers.

She told me not to get upset, that we had been robbed. Then she led me upstairs where all the bedrooms were in complete disarray. Dresser drawers were turned upside down, file cabinets lay on the floor, the carpet in my grandfather’s room was slit open, everywhere were clothes and books and towels. My grandfather’s bedroom didn'’t smell like urine as it usually did. The thief had thrown everything to the floor, and the room was pungent with mouthwash and aftershave.

My mother put her hands on my shoulders, looked me straight in the eye with an uncharacteristically concerned look. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked.

I nodded. Actually, I felt fine. I'’d spent so much time dreading the robbery that when it occurred, my most profound sentiment was relief. I felt comforted by all the police in the house, remembered what it was like to live in an apartment with Shelah and her friends coming in and going out, with mom and Jim laughing and dancing and listening to the radio, instead of just silence and my grandfather’s breaths.

When it was clear I was neither afraid nor upset, my mother changed her tone. “Don’t start telling the cops your theories,” she said, “If they ask you what happened, tell them the truth, and the truth is you don’t know.”

I was about to remind my mother that Jason Rubinstein was the only one to whom I had mentioned that my grandfather would be at the hospital all day. Who else other than Bobby would he have told? But I recognized my mother’s tone. It was the same one she had used when I went with her to the auto insurance appraiser and she’d said, “Remember, don’t tell them what you think happened because you don’t know what happened,” the same one she had when she and Jim had driven up to take me home from Camp Chi and she’d said, “If anyone asks, tell them Jim’s your uncle.” So when Officer Maki asked what I knew about the robbery, I said that I'’d been at Caldwell Woods all day with Jason Rubinstein.

Once the police officers were gone, the house felt emptier than ever. I couldn'’t wait to get to sleep, then wake up the next morning, visit Jason and Bobby Kagan’s apartment, and see if I could find anything new like Grandpa’s cufflinks or any of his paperweights. I lay in bed listening to my mother talking to Bobby on the phone, telling him what had been stolen, then saying that tomorrow night would be great, and yes, she would meet him downtown.