“The first one is a man he's dealt with for a while, the other two are new, I think,” she said, then waited for me to respond with a word of hope.
I wasn't going to lie to her.
“I'll call you as soon as I know anything,” I said, then walked to my car and drove away without looking back.
As soon as I pulled onto the expressway I put a call in to the Chicago branch of the FBI and asked for Special Agent Joseph Andrews.
“I'm telling you right up front, Al, I do not have the time to be doing you any favors right now.”
“Busy, huh?”
“Very.”
“I understand, and you know I would never waste your time.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I just need access to some IPASS records from two days ago,” I said as casually as I could, referring to Illinois' automatic toll system which can make it easy to track a car's movement, as long as the driver is registered for the program, which Emil Constentino was.
“Al, that's a favor.”
“Not really. The driver of the car in question has been missing for two days. His wife believes he was driving into the city from Batavia, which means he would've passed through at least two toll booths.”
I heard him sigh, then silence. I'd been friends with Joe Andrews for more than twenty years, been best man at his wedding, a pallbearer at his father's funeral, so I knew what was coming next.
“Goddamnit, Al,” another sigh, “what's the plate number?”
Half an hour later, I was driving through the tunnel beneath the old Chicago post office when Andrews called me back and confirmed that the Constentino's ten-year-old Chevy Impala had indeed passed through two eastbound toll booths along I-88.
“But that's it, there's no record of a return trip,” he added.
I thanked him, promised to check in later that day, then drove to the first address on the list. It turned out to be a small curio shop on Clark, situated in a corner of an eighty-year-old building, just north of the river.
It had once been a drugstore, complete with a lunch counter and regular customers. The business space next door looked like it had originally been part of a larger whole, and the two still shared a display window. Now one half was a coffee shop catering to twenty-somethings and poseurs, and the other was the store, crammed with a mish-mash of old junk, some of it valuable, most of it not.
I walked past collections of movie memorabilia, baseball pennants, and a dozen stacks of men's magazines, to the middle of the store. A tan, very muscular man in a St. Louis Cardinals cap and faded blue t-shirt was kneeling next to a box of old comics, flipping through them. The guy I needed to talk to was manning the counter.
“Yeah, sure, I'm Sam Preston, who are you?”
Preston was tall and narrow, and he might've been an athlete, but I got the sense he didn't come from that kind of family. Long, thin black hair draped his pale face.
“My name is Alex Chapa, I'm a reporter, and I'm looking for Emil Constentino.”
He reached out to shake my hand, revealing a roughly inked tattoo of a lightning bolt on the inside of his forearm. I filled him in on the details, and he confirmed that Emil had been there two days before.
“Emil's a hell of a guy, comes in every once in a while. He buys shit I'd never be able to sell. I give it to him below cost a lot of the time on account of I like the guy, and he's a good customer.”
“What kind of things does he buy?”
“Junk. But then, it's all junk, isn't it? One person's trash, another man's treasure. Buy a box of cereal, keep it unopened for thirty years, someone will pay five hundred bucks for the toy inside. Crazy world, right?”
He leaned back against a door behind the counter on the common wall between the two businesses. It was covered with Garbage Pail Kids stickers, most of which were faded and pealing.
“Is that the kind of junk he normally buys from you?” I said, pointing to the awful stickers that I vaguely remembered from my youth.
“No, not this shit, exactly, but sort of. Emil never liked the antiquey stuff. He's into collectibles. You know, baseball cards, records, movie posters. Most of those things hold their value, but Emil sometimes buys up stuff no one seems to want any more. You know, like Pokemon cards. Some of those used to go for a few hundred bucks a piece. Now you'd be lucky to get ten bucks for a trunk full. Just couldn't hold their value.”
“Emil bought Pokemon cards?”
Preston shook his head. I waited, unwilling to ask again. He stayed quiet, folding his arms, his lips pressed firmly together. I got the hint and fished out my wallet. All I had was a twenty and a five, and I didn't think he'd make change. I handed him the larger bill.
“Emil accumulated stuff like collections of National Geographic magazine, Michael Jackson memorabilia, and pogs,” he said, his face splitting into a wide grin. “He thought they would become valuable again someday.”
“Pogs?”
“He bought pogs. A whole shitload of them.”
The guy who was hunched over the comic books looked up for a moment. A big pog collector, no doubt.
“And what, exactly, is a pog?”
Preston spent the longest three minutes of my life explaining everything I ever wanted to know about pogs, including the details of their quick rise in popularity, and their even quicker fall. He told me about the many variations, and the important difference between a regular pog and a slammer, even pulled a few out from behind the counter and spread them across the glass top.
When he was finished, I took him down a different track, asking questions about Emil, fleshing out his personality. Old man, forgotten by society, trying to eek out a living by selling items from the past. It was heavy on the schmaltz, and wouldn't get me a Pulitzer, but some readers love that sort of thing.
I gave him my business card and as I turned to leave I saw a large doll in a glass case. Preston noted my interest and launched into his spiel.
“It's a limited edition American Girl piece. It's in mint condition in its original, unopened box.”
He made it sound expensive and more valuable than it probably was, but the doll reminded me of my daughter Nikki, and I knew she'd love it.
“How much?”
“It books at seventy-five, but since you're a friend of Emil's it's yours for forty.”
“Do you take credit cards?”
He pulled out one of those old credit card gadgets, the kind that makes an imprint of the card on a carbon copy, and I handed him my Visa.
After he'd bagged the doll, I thanked him and headed to the next place on the list, a warehouse and factory just west of Old Town. A name had once been painted on the building's brick façade, Jorgensen's, maybe, but that was decades ago. The street that ran along the front of the building was narrow and empty, except for one truly eye-catching set of wheels.
I parked next to a mint new Corvette, spent three seconds admiring the lines, then walked to a door that had one of those cheap tin entrance signs stuck in the middle. The old knob was scuffed, and badly dented, and it complained loudly when I gave it a quick twist. The room on the other side of the metal door was a cramped office that smelled of dried sweat and recycled grease. The paint on the walls may have been beige once, but years of cigarette smoke and stale air had left a mud brown patina.
A small man with spiked hair sat behind a metal desk that was built long before computer monitors were common. He looked up at me as though he'd been waiting for someone, and I wasn't that guy.
“What do you want?” he asked as though that was his default greeting.
I looked beyond him to a partially open door and noticed the shadow of someone on the other side.
“Is that how you greet all your customers?”
“We're closed.”
He tucked something into his hip pocket as he stood. This wasn't a guy you showed your back to. He was short but solid, even his eyebrows had muscles, and his legs could've passed for fire hydrants in blue jeans.