I made a disappointed face. “Not much. Apparently, a chart reveals more when you can compare it to the owner. She did spend a lot of time on it, though, especially tracing the birth date, but all I got was that we’re looking for a screwed-up gay loner who was abused as a child by a mother he hated.”
Gail looked startled, so I quickly covered for her friend. “I admit, I coerced most of that out of her. I got her to say she’d seen the same kind of thing with a gay client of hers. She stressed you couldn’t do that, but I was getting frustrated. To be honest, I think she was as glad to see the back of me as I was to give up on that chart.”
She was obviously disappointed. “Do you still have it?”
Somewhat sheepishly, I pulled a folder out from the bottom of my suitcase and flipped it open. “Yeah. I thought I’d take it with me just in case. Maybe it was done out there.” I located the colorful document and handed it to her.
She looked at it thoughtfully. “It is a stressful chart. You know, she’s been at it a long time. Just because you were pushy doesn’t mean you forced her to say things she didn’t partly believe. Do you have a copy of this?”
“That is a copy. I had Harriet run off several color copies across the street, just in case I had to spread them around. Keep that one if you like.”
“Thanks. Maybe I’ll hit the books while you’re gone. I love doing these things.”
I smiled at her enthusiasm, and at her ability to pull herself out of the blues. I leaned over and kissed her. “Don’t stop reading travel brochures.”
Part Two
16
I never realized how big Lake Michigan was until the plane’s lowering wheels shook me awake. I instinctively glanced out the window. All I could see, clear to the razor-sharp horizon, was water.
The shoreline, when it did come into view, was verdant, well tended, and littered with golf courses-hardly the image I’d harbored of Carl Sandburg’s famed “City of the Big Shoulders,” which a glance out the opposite windows would have revealed stretching out to the south.
All of it quickly vanished, however, replaced by O’Hare’s black-streaked pale runway shooting into view. Now the horizon consisted solely of chain-link fences, parking lots, and commercial buildings with bland fronts. There was no longer a tree in sight, nor an unsullied blade of grass.
The plane’s approach, made over Chicago’s affluent northern suburbs, slipped from me, half-remembered, leaving only wonder and a twinge of homesickness-this was as different from Vermont as I could imagine.
It was hard shrugging off an otherworldly sense as I drove along the interstate toward the center of town. The unusual flatness of my surroundings made the approaching city center, spiraling up toward the distant sky, seem unreal, like some gargantuan glass and metal stalagmite around which everything revolved. The Sears Tower, with its dramatically overbuilt twin antennae, was the aspiring apex, encircled by a fawning group of increasingly stunted attendants, each supported by its slightly shorter neighbor until the outer ring faded into the horizontal landscape. It was an heroic image-bold, thrusting, heaven-bound and new-but at the same time strangely futile, encased as it was by that impassive, impenetrable, dismissively vast blue sky.
The sensation didn’t last. The expressway came within reach and then broke free of downtown’s gravitational pull, continuing south and away, eventually letting me peel off onto the side streets near South State, where the Chicago Police Department had its headquarters.
Here was a different environment entirely. Just beyond the city’s grandiose and gaudy downtown, but several miles outside the reach of the old, abandoned stockyards and the notorious high-rise projects to the south, the police department held sway over a borderline demilitarized zone that appeared neither blighted nor truly viable. Whole buildings stood empty, their windows intact but blank, their smeared brick walls touting hand-painted advertisements of companies thirty years out of business. A rusted elevated railway roared and rattled with the rhythmic passing of commuter trains heading elsewhere. And yet there was some commerce-parking lots, a few small shops, a tired motel here and there-leftovers from what had obviously once been a much more muscular, healthy, but now-forgotten, section of town.
I parked my car on the wide, lightly traveled street and walked up the sidewalk toward my destination. The police headquarters building was a curious reflection of its surroundings. Its street-facing facade was a smooth, almost sleek, pale cement slab, regularly punctured by severe rectangular windows, looking like one of those old computer punch cards standing up on end. The rest of the building-most of its sides and its back-was old white-painted brick, bristling with air conditioners and a rusty fire escape zigzagging down to the parking lot. It was incongruous in appearance-half a face-lift-and made me wonder whether, like the neighborhood, the building was coming or going.
As I stood across the street, waiting for a bus to pass, I was struck not only by the number of assertive-looking, cheaply dressed men who were using the front door but also by the number of parked cars that had that familiar lived-in look about them-paperbacks and windbreakers or hats on the rear seat, styrofoam cups, sunglasses, and mashed cigarette packs littering the dashboards and floors. They looked like what they were: places where people sat for hours on end, observing, waiting, struggling to keep awake, as worn and familiar as the offices I was about to visit. It was like having my own provincial policeman’s experience expanded and multiplied a hundredfold. It reminded me with a jolt just how enormous the contrast was between my own department and Chicago’s, and yet how deep the similarities ran.
The lobby reminded me of the airport-barren, harsh, with signs and arrows, a uniformed officer at an information booth, and to his right, a roped-off area corralling people through two metal detectors. There was an instant feeling of hostility and paranoia in the air.
I went to the patrolman in the booth and introduced myself, mentioning that I was supposed to meet with Chief of Detectives Donahue.
The cop stared at my shield and identity card as if they were poor forgeries, his wrinkled, vein-mapped face impassive. “Donahue, huh?”
“That’s what I was told. My chief made the arrangements.”
Finally, he handed back the ID, grinning. “Okay. Straight to the back, through those double glass doors. Didn’t know they had cops in Vermont. You ski?”
“No,” I lied, “I just shovel the stuff.”
It hadn’t been unfriendly, but it also hadn’t been the fraternal embrace I’d hoped for in my heart. Of course, the man had been an older patrolman, set in his prejudices against detectives, no doubt, and he was part of a police force that had more cops in it than the entire state of Vermont. Still, it was a bit of a dampener, a reminder that a single Brattleboro policeman chasing down a twenty-year-old lead was not going to move anyone here to the edge of their chair.
I paused by the detector, uncertain whether to wait docilely in line or to flash my badge and go through the opening that was obviously reserved for cops.
The man ahead of me was a tourist, camera in hand, asking about public tours of the police department. The uniformed man opposite him, younger and more jovial than the one in the booth, shook his head. “Wouldn’t know nothin’ about it. Talk to PR, but you can’t take the camera in.”
The visitor stared at the camera, a small Instamatic. “Okay. Can I leave it with you while I ask?”
“Uh-uh. Might be a bomb.”