A Time for Secrets (5 page)

I thought that was a little rude.

“Something going on with you?” he asked.

“Harker has it,” I said. “What Earl had. GRID. Harker has it, too.”

“Oh shit, Nick. Fuck.” He came around the bar and put his arms around me. I let him for a minute, but then I pushed him away.

“How long have you known?” he asked.

I couldn’t say anything. Instead, I stumbled out of the bar, and when I got outside, I puked on the back of an orange VW bug. Numbly, I made my way home walking even though I should have taken a cab, trying to think of nothing but putting one foot in front of the other and breathing in and out.

The next morning I felt like a real heel. I also felt like death on toast. If I didn’t know I was sick from drinking I would have rushed to the emergency room. But I figured I deserved it. I was such an asshole. I’d told Harker’s secret. He’d asked me not to tell anyone, and I’d gotten through two whole days. Shit, not even that. I’d made it maybe thirty-six hours. If he found out, he was going to hate me, and he had every right to.

I crawled through Saturday as best I could. Harker gave me suspicious looks every now and then. He had to have known how drunk I’d been. I can imagine what I’d smelled like with all that scotch in me, and he’d slept next to me. But he didn’t say anything. At the end of my shift on Saturday, I went straight home like the good little boy I seldom was.

Sunday morning, I went out and got the newspaper, half a dozen bagels with cream cheese, and two-dozen roses.

“What are the roses for?” Harker asked when I got home.

“I missed our anniversary. I thought we should celebrate it anyway.”

We put the roses into a Tupperware pitcher—I’d forgotten I didn’t actually own a vase, but they looked nice anyway. I set them on the bureau in the bedroom, and we got back into bed to have coffee and bagels with the newspaper.

“You don’t have to feel bad about missing our anniversary,” Harker said. “You found a murderer. That’s why you forgot.”

I nodded, hoping that was why I forgot.

“But thanks for the flowers.” He gave me a sweet kiss. After we finished the bagels and the newspaper we fooled around for a bit, but it didn’t amount to much. Still, it was the nicest morning I’d had in a long time.

By that evening I guess Harker had had enough of me because he said, “You need to pay some attention to your cases.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means I can’t take too much of you staring at me all the time like I’m going to suddenly disappear.”

“I haven’t been doing that.”

“All right, so I’m crazy.”

I didn’t want to fight with him, though I did think he was being a little crazy. Or maybe I was. I didn’t know, and I didn’t much care to figure it out. I got up and went into the bedroom, where I spent the rest of the night trying to read this book I’d found at Unabridged Bookstore about a cat burglar who gets caught robbing an actor called
P.S. Your Cat is Dead
. I was kind of liking it, and it almost managed to distract me.

§ § § §

Monday morning, I was out of the house and looking for my car by nine. Parking in my neighborhood was at a premium, and since I didn’t use the car every day it could sometimes be a challenge remembering where I’d put it. Especially when I’ve had a major drinking binge in between.

I finally found it on Broadway in front of the office they were opening for our alderman’s run for mayor. Of course, the car was easy to find once I was on the right block. It was an electric green 1979 Chevy Nova with black racing stripes. Hard to miss. It took a couple tries to get the engine to turn over, so I let it warm up. As I waited, I read Alderman Finnegan’s campaign slogan a couple dozen times: “Win again with Finnegan.”

The mayoral election was more than a year away, but the way Chicago politics worked, a candidate didn’t actually have to win the election. The Democratic primary was the real contest, and that was only six or seven months away. I’d had a long education in Chicago politics. Growing up it had often been the subject of many dinner conversations. As police officers, my family was affected by whichever way the political winds blew, and seemed to think that expending a lot of hot air on the subject could direct those winds. I’d read in the paper that our lady mayor was vulnerable, running a few poll points behind Richie Daley in a possible match-up. Daley hadn’t announced, though, and it was entirely possible he wouldn’t. This left the door open for other contenders like Finnegan, who’d placed an impressive third in the poll I’d read.

Once the car was fully warmed up, I made the trip up to the Edgewater area. The neighborhood had once been the place to live, but since the sixties it had hit on hard times. The Edgewater Arms was a twenty-story apartment building that bore a striking resemblance to a wedding cake. It sat on the east side of Sheridan with nothing behind it but Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan. There were storefronts along Sheridan, most of them empty, and a grand entrance with brass-lined steps leading up to three sets of brass and glass doors.

Inside was an enormous lobby where there was enough room to park a spare herd of cattle, should the need arise. The floor was marble underneath a now-threadbare rug that had originally cost more than I’ve made in my entire life. I looked around for a manager’s office and finally found a sign that led me out of the lobby, past the mailboxes, and down a long hallway.

Walking into the manager’s office I was immediately confronted by a wall that looked to be a recent addition. It held another door and a large window with frosted glass. Next to the window was a doorbell. The whole setup gave me the impression that management wanted to be well protected from the tenants. And given the state of the neighborhood, I wasn’t sure I could blame them.

I rang the bell.

A minute or two later, a slight young man with tightly cropped dark hair ending in a widow’s peak on his forehead slid open the window. He had large, bourbon-colored eyes and a shy smile. A little bell rang in my head; well, maybe not in my head, but it rang, and I smiled back at him.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

I had a few ideas I didn’t mention. Instead, I said, “My name is Nick Nowak. I’m a private investigator, and I’m looking for one of your previous tenants.”

“Private investigator? You mean, like a bill collector?” he asked.

“No. I’ve been hired by a family member.” Not true, but easier to explain than the truth.

“What’s the tenant’s name?” he asked.

“That’s the thing, I just have the first name. I do know that he lived here in 1959.”

“1959?” he said. “Those records are in the basement. I’m not sure if I can really…” He paused, then he looked at me. Really looked at me. A look that made my cock tingle. “Hold on a second.” He closed the window. I heard him say a few things to someone else in the office, then the door next to the window opened.

“Follow me,” he said.

I had a fleeting thought about how nice it was to mix business with pleasure and then followed him. He wore a pair of navy blue slacks that showed off his ass, and a matching vest—obviously two pieces from the same three-piece suit—a pastel shirt, probably designer, and a bright red tie. It was overkill for a job like his, more appropriate for an up-and-coming banker working in the Loop. It said he was ambitious, that he had somewhere he wanted to go, but had no clue how to get there.

We walked back out toward the lobby, past the mailboxes, and then down another hallway that twisted around until it ended at a service elevator. He pressed the down button.

“My name’s Scotty,” he said, giving me one of his timid smiles.

“Hello, Scotty.”

He giggled a little.

The elevator came and we got in. A minute later we got out in the basement. Although there were exposed pipes above our heads, I had the feeling I was on a city street. In front of us were what looked like shop windows, empty, but still shops. Scotty led me down another hallway.

“We used to have services down here. Shoe repair. Dry cleaners. Tailors even. When the neighborhood changed all that disappeared.”

“Poor people don’t need services?”

“Poor people darn their own socks,” he said as we walked by the gigantic laundry room filled with two rows of coin-operated washers and dryers. We continued down the hallway until we went through another double-wide door. Behind that door it began to look more like a basement. There were storage spaces defined by ancient, stained two-by-fours, chicken wire, and padlocks. They either came with the apartments or could be rented. I didn’t bother to ask which, since I wasn’t planning to move in.

Some of the spaces looked like they hadn’t been cleaned out since Prohibition. The smell of mold permeated the air, and I felt like we’d entered some kind of crypt. We stopped in front of one of the storage cages, Scotty spun the lock a few times, and we were inside. Along the outside wall were several mismatched bookcases. Three tall, four-drawer metal file cabinets lined one side. There were sagging cardboard boxes stacked next to the cabinets. On the opposite side, a couple dozen rejected bamboo chairs were stacked, waiting to someday be called back into service.

Scotty went to the shelves against the wall. “What year did you say?” he asked.

“1959.”

He picked out a ledger and pulled it off the shelf. I hadn’t looked closely, but I noted that the shelves were covered with ledgers, sometimes the same brand, sometimes not. They appeared to be in order by date and went back all the way to the twenties. Scotty flipped through the ledger, stopping on an early page. He held the open book out to me.

“There are three hundred and eighty-four apartments in the Edgewater Arms. When a tenant paid their rent it was recorded in the ledger. It still is, actually.”

I took the book. It looked like there were about six pages of entries for each month. Scotty had opened the book to January. The handwriting was neat and even, though it had obviously been done at different times since the inks didn’t always match. I ran a finger down the list of names looking for a V. I found a Vincent and a Victoria before I found a Vernon on page four. Vernon Taber. Apartment 1012. His rent was fifty-five dollars.

“Do you have anything else?” I asked. “Like an application?”

“Oh, maybe,” he said, then started opening the drawers in the filing cabinets.

While he did that I flipped forward in the ledger. Ronald had said that the party he remembered was in April. The twenty-second. I remembered because that was Earth Day. A silly kind of fake holiday made up back in the seventies when everyone was freaked out about pollution.

I got to the pages for April and quickly scanned them. I found Vernon Taber on the fifth page. He’d paid his rent two days late. I turned a few more pages and looked for Vernon’s name in May. It was a hunch, but it paid off. Vernon’s name wasn’t there. He’d given a party in April and disappeared in May. Had it been a going away party? It seemed Meek would have mentioned that, or had he simply not remembered? George said Vernon might have moved to Los Angeles. Had it happened suddenly at the end of April 1959?

“Found it,” Scotty said. I looked up and he was holding a crumbling legal-sized manila folder open in his hands. It looked to have all the rental applications from 1956 through 1958. He’d opened to Vernon’s. I took the one-page application out of the folder. It was a standard application, the kind you can buy in stationery stores.

“I can’t have this, can I?” I asked.

Scotty frowned. “I’m probably breaking the rules as it is.”

It seemed pretty unlikely anyone else was going to stop by looking for this particular piece of paper any time in the next fifty years or so, but I decided not to mention that. I set the application on the seat of one of the stacked chairs, took out my pocket notebook, and wrote down Vernon’s social security number, his previous address, which was in the less fashionable Uptown, and the names of his two references. The application said he worked at Joie de Vivre, which I already knew. It was made out in July of 1958. He’d lived there for less than a year.

“Do you know if they required leases back then?” I asked Scotty.

“I dunno,” he shrugged. “Probably.”

It was possible Vernon had broken his lease, forfeiting his security deposit and potentially taking a ding on his credit, though I wasn’t so sure Big Brother was as organized back then as they were now. No matter, it wouldn’t have been a good thing, and it suggested his departure from the building had been unplanned.

I figured I’d gotten about as much information as I was going to get, so I tucked my notebook into my jean jacket, pulled Scotty to me, and kissed him, practically lifting him off the ground. He kissed me back but then abruptly pushed me away. I made a grab for his dick, which had sprung to life beneath his slacks. He brushed my hand away and took a step back.

“Um, could we maybe have a drink some time or go to a movie?” he asked.

“Um, no we can’t,” I replied.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m kind of…well, I’ve never had a boyfriend, and I’ve sort of figured out that having sex with strangers isn’t exactly the way to get one.” He giggled nervously.

“I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”

“That’s too bad. You seem nice.”

I had no idea what I’d done to seem nice, other than make a pass at him. We stood there awkwardly for a moment. Both of us hoping the other would change his mind. When we didn’t, I said, “See you around,” and made my way out of the basement of the Edgewater Arms.

CHAPTER SIX

After Scotty’s rejection, I felt like an itch that needed to be scratched. One big, walking itch. I headed toward my car but changed my mind and walked out toward the lake instead. I strolled under Lake Shore Drive and into Lincoln Park. Most people don’t think of it as Lincoln Park up that far, but it is. The whole park, which runs continuously along most of the North Side, is Lincoln Park. Edgewater Beach was nearby, so that’s probably what the locals called the park up there.

It was late morning and the temperature had begun to rise, to say nothing of the humidity. I was wearing jeans, my jean jacket, and a navy-colored work shirt. Part of me wanted to strip it all off and go jump in the lake. You’d think the discomfort would have put me off the idea of sex, but honestly, it just made me hornier.