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But two of my fellow officers knew, one of whom was my older brother, Ruben. At least that’s what the lawyers for Anton’s family are saying. Wrongful death—$8.9 million from the city of Chicago; same from all four of the cops who worked the case, like cops have that kind of money. Hell, my brother didn’t come on the job until the first trial was almost over.

Should the cops who worked the case have known Anton was retarded, possibly innocent? That’s kind of the problem. On TV the hero cop bucks the system—takes on the role of the ASA, the judge, the jury, overrides the Constitution, does the
right thing
, and saves the accused as well as the American justice system from a tragic mistake. America can tuck the kids in, pet the dog, and go to bed knowing our system works—and when it doesn’t, heroes (insert movie-star name here) will fill in the gaps.

Try that shit in Chicago and you’d be fired, your pension toast, followed by a short or long prison term depending on the public mood, and named in a civil suit to take whatever money or valuables your defense lawyers didn’t. Why? Because
someone
would be positive you got it wrong. And some race, creed, or gender constituency would agree. There would be tabloid media and mainstream media, radio shock jocks, preachers, aspiring politicians, and law firms atop proud white horses. Time it just right and there’d be parades.

So cops stay within the system. Or you cheat
carefully
. And when you cheat for what you think are the right reasons, they say you’re the devil. And when you don’t cheat, they say you’re a coward. And you’re both, all the time, for a starting salary of $45K and the chance to die in a dark hallway for people you don’t know.

My pager goes off, and I throw the newspaper aside. Time to go to work, meet friends for a gunfight that has nothing to do with Coleen Brennan’s murder but everything to do with this neighborhood. I spend a last few seconds with her building, her window. So why won’t I shut up about her? Let it go?

Two reasons: First, Coleen was nice to me—it was our secret. Started when we were six. We went to different schools, but our windows faced each other across the alley. She was white and back then I wasn’t, and both mattered a great deal to me. Coleen was also my first real true
and honest friend. Dangerous for us both because the Four Corners had race rules written in blood. Coleen and I weren’t allowed to look at each other, let alone talk, or God forbid, touch, so we conjured a plan.

We’d sit in our windows every afternoon reading each other’s books. She’d leave me one behind her trash can and I’d exchange it with one I’d get from our library on Loomis Street. By sixth grade, we decided we were officially boyfriend-girlfriend. I wrote songs about her. Coleen was the only Irish girl whose hand I ever held. By eighth grade, I was so in love with her and who we would become, that I didn’t stop carrying a picture of us until I was twenty-five. Had it with me, soft in my hand, the day Anton Dupree quit breathing.

Reason number two is the
Chicago Herald
’s exposé: “MONSTER: The Murder of Coleen Brennan.” Part one implies that in the days to come they will prove that my brother Ruben and I were the two boys who actually killed her.

Big grin for my bus stop: population six, a rainbow nation of very diverse hopes and dreams, all waiting for the Division Street Super-Shadow. Thirty seats scented with urine, vomit, summer sweat, and industrial disinfectant—the daily life cycle that cauterizes public transportation and keeps our fares down. Artie, our bus driver, calls us the United Colors of Benetton (I’d go with the Funkadelics) and says we’re his favorite stop. Well, duh.

Six days a week we arrive here packaged from small closets and kitchens, semi-ready to meet another workday in our city, the Second City, the City of Big Shoulders. And just maybe the Olympic City, if the festival banners rehung along Division Street are right this time.

Horn toot
, the 7-0 looms big and silver and pushes a slow-moving Pontiac forward. The bus door pops open and six Funkadelics bound up the steps. Artie smiles. I smile back. Today’s my first day being me again.

It’s not like I haven’t been here before, but first days are always difficult. They’re the final exit from intricate, intensely constructed fantasy back into an all too often blighted reality. Sound strange? It is, like coming down from a ferociously colorful LSD landscape to grayscale, soundless dust bowl; or a massive weekend romance with champagne and room service that leaves you flushed and tingly, but somehow emptier, some part of you lost in the exchange. And here’s the kicker—you make this journey on
purpose
, with every ounce of your being, as often as they’ll let you. And as often as your sanity can take it.

That’s what it’s like to audition, if being an actress is why you’re alive. And 99 percent of the time the payoff is “Thank you for coming.”

To do this well, it helps to be desperate or crazy, or both.

For the two weeks leading up to last Wednesday’s audition, I slowly became Southern belle Blanche DuBois, meticulously purging any sense of “me” with yoga, intense meditation, and finally the deep-core exercises of Lee Strasberg that bring the tears and vomit. I’ve not had children, nor do I live in the third world where those children die young, but the process has similarities—death first, as the original you fades away; then new life, only to see your new identity, your creation, wither and die.

Our driver palms his cap, nodding as he accepts the paper bag I offer. He grins at the baked-apple-and-nutmeg aroma, follows my eyes to the Pontiac I’m watching drive away, then back. “Mighty nice of ya, Arleen. Mighty nice.” His salt-and-pepper stubble hasn’t changed in the two years I’ve been riding the Super-Shadow.

“Show business loves ya, Artie.” No doubt, I’m the only passenger who brings him Belfast crumble muffins. Better his waistline than mine; each one of those nutty little monsters is thirty-seven minutes on the StairMaster. I bake them for luck. Not that they work all that often, but my ma said when you gave crumble muffins away it was buildin’ a foundation in Heaven. She was a waitress, too, but over in Bridgeport.

Actually, I should say I’m “an actress who waits tables.” At “thirty-nine” waitressing is one of the elemental ways you know you’re an actress. The other is to learn every bit of craft and art anyone will teach you, prepare for every opportunity like it’s your last, and, finally, pour
your heart and soul into the auditions that all seem to end with “Thank you for coming,” then do more auditions, then do some more if you can get them. Pay the price; take every part they offer and play it to the walls. And when you’re finally in the running for Blanche DuBois, for a real part that might be the break you’ve earned, and you have a feeling that you might honestly have a chance—the casting director said something or his eyes did, something—then, and only then, do you bake Belfast crumble muffins.

My stop is State Parkway and Division. At the newsstand in front of P. J. Clarke’s, I sneak a
Chicago Tribune
off the stacks surrounding the
Herald
and its tabloid headlines. In a month or two, the
Herald
will likely join America’s newsprint graveyard. Where it belongs. Barney, the blind kid with the change bag says, “Hey, Cincinnati.”

He means
The Cincinnati Kid
, the movie with Steve McQueen and Tuesday Weld. My middle name is Crista but “Cincinnati” has been my nickname since my twenties; a fellow hopeful at the Actors Studio in L.A. thought I resembled Tuesday Weld … if you squinted and it was dark. He’s dead now, an OD after a final “Thank you for coming.”

“We pitchin’, Cincinnati?” Barney flashes a quarter between two black fingertips.

“I never win. Why don’t I just pay double?”

“Could do that. Get me some actin’ classes, too.”

I put a dollar in his palm. “That’s my lunch money, Barn. Trust me, only one of us has to wait tables; you’re Broadway ready.”

Showtime in ten minutes. Apron on, ponytail just right. Chest out, lipstick … 
man
, I can wear some lipstick. Tuesday Weld at “thirty-nine.”

Sniffle. Sniffle.

Suzie. Poor thing; twentysomething, life ruined, and all she has is me. And I don’t know one lullaby for girls already wearing long pants and makeup. In the Four Corners an Irish lass had to harden up a bit by then, hide what troubled her. And I’m not much of a singer anyway—dancer, forget about it, tiptoe you right off the floor—but singer, not so much.

Suzie shrinks deeper into her very attractive shoulders.

I lift. “C’mon, sweetie, let’s get you some eyeliner.”

Suzie continues to sniffle rather than participate in her reconstruction and a lunch rush that starts in eight minutes. She and I are two of nine waitresses at Hugo’s on Rush Street, the North Side’s one block of leafy boulevard de Montmartre. I hug Suzie’s shoulder and lift—

Nope, she’d prefer to sniffle rather than prep her tables. Our manager notices and rolls his eyes—most of us are actors or actresses, so drama is occasionally on sale here, especially when we were sure we had the part. Today I have a right to a bit of drama, given the teaser exposé headline below the fold in today’s
Herald
, but I’m not going there. No one in Hugo’s knows I’m Coleen Brennan’s twin sister. In the two years I’ve been back I haven’t been near the Four Corners; that life happened to someone else.

I
have
spoken to two people who know me. One cop, and now one reporter from the
Herald
. Each time the
Herald
has asked for my cooperation, I’ve refused. And I won’t read the article today, written by strangers about a beautiful girl they didn’t know. Twenty-nine years ago I watched strangers bury Coleen, a part of me lost in the ether but not gone. A year later my ma died, and I ran … from my father and the Four Corners … all the way to Hollywood; was all of fourteen when I arrived. Axl Rose sang about it in “Welcome to the Jungle”—all the drama a scared Irish girl could stand.

I smile “sorry” at my manager, then tell Suzie, “Honey, Kylie Minogue couldn’t wear the back of those pants any better; from the front you’re Miss Teen USA; you’ll work again, even if it’s porn loops.”

Suzie doesn’t laugh, although it’s true. She has talent and looks and youth, and she will work again—here, New York, or L.A. if she doesn’t quit or self-destruct, self-destruction being a prime career hazard that claims as many of us as service revolvers do Chicago policemen. Window check—I know two Chicago policemen, and not in a good way, but like that Pontiac that spooked me this morning, both are part of another story.

“C’mon, we’ll buy you some blow after work, you can saddle up a cowboy or five.”

Suzie smiles perfect pouty lips and forces herself to her feet. She straightens an apron that will make four or five men risk their families
before lunch is over … and sniffles. Suzie will work again. And like one, maybe even two of us in here with stacks of dog-eared scripts in our bedrooms, the kitchen Peg-board of wrap-party photos from the shows we got, and address books full of “contacts” from those shows we didn’t get, lightning will strike—I’ve seen it, been so close I thought it was finally my turn—the stage lights will hit and we’ll be whole.

Whole
because beyond the stage lights and adulation, we’ll be welcomed backstage into a new family, a joyous and dysfunctional troupe of drama queens and crew, for birthdays and doctor days, for new boyfriends and teary breakups, marriages and graduations, all the sinew and gristle that binds hearts to souls forever and ever. But only if we don’t quit. In the actress business, persistence and will are all we have; they take the rest, all of it, and don’t apologize.

The lunch rush starts like it’s supposed to. Our customers act like the well-heeled are supposed to. Brass from Furukawa Industries are in booth 1, accepting heartfelt thanks, basking in their save-the-city limelight. One billion dollars buys a lot of PC/PR in protectionist times. Should allow Americans across the land to wave Old Glory whenever we buy Furukawa’s made-in-America cars, or happily bank in Furukawa-controlled banks, or watch Furukawa flat-screen TVs. I don’t blame Furukawa. It works for McDonald’s. Selling obesity to schoolkids is okay as long as you also fund a clown and his rape crisis center.

Everything’s rocking along like Friday should and: my cell phone rings with my agent’s ringtone.
Shock. Panic
. Sarah calls rarely, almost never—and never, ever, ever when prayed for. And this week I’ve prayed every hour I wasn’t waiting tables. I lit candles at St. Mary’s and watched the sun come up over her steeples.