The Black Hour (18 page)

He looked up, surprised. And laughed.

Good boy.

It was October before I realized I’d never made it back to downtown Chicago. One Saturday morning I slipped out of my room before Kendall was up and took the train to the city.

After a few hours of the wind whipping at my jacket, I ducked into a dirty theater playing old slasher flicks and tried not to pay attention to the company I was keeping. A flier in the lobby led me to a downtown spot where a company ushered tourists onto a bus tour of old crime scenes. I knew it would be embarrassing, but I wanted to see as much as I could. Two guys dressed in striped, double-breasted suits ran the show. They gave the ladies fake red roses and played a recording of machine gun rat-a-tat to signal everyone in the bus to duck. I couldn’t bring myself to play along.

We made a circuit, scooping up bus window views of the old shops in Little Sicily where the big names had smoked cigars and ordered hits. One of them was now a restaurant with a two-hour wait list. We slowed down for a look at the empty lot where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened, and the woman next to me clucked her tongue. “There’s nothing there,” she said. I could have explained to her. Nothing stays the same. But she had other evidence. We’d already passed the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger bled out. They still put on shows at the Biograph.

After the bus dropped us where we’d started, I walked the eight blocks or so back up Michigan Avenue to get a closer look at one of the stops, a church that had been shot up in a mob confrontation. New stone steps covered most of the old damage, but one hole, high in the façade, couldn’t be disguised.

I reached up and stuck my finger into the hole.

I expected to—feel something. Some momentous connection to history and infamy. Some sense of danger.

Hayseed, come to the city to stick his finger in a Capone bullet hole.

I felt only disappointment, but I’d started to get used to that. Things at school had settled into a pattern. Class. Class with Dr. Emmet. Study. Class with the undergrads. More class. Writing papers. Grading papers. Taking questions on assignments from 101 kids who really didn’t care about sociology or want to do their own work. I’d gone for a beer at a bar across town with Cara and the others from our research course and managed not to embarrass myself or bring up Dr. Emmet. My days took on a plodding simplicity. Everything dropped into schedule. Everything settled. Everything except me.

I’d overslept twice the week before, late enough that I’d missed a study group for the introductory class and had to reschedule six pissed-off freshmen. I’d locked myself out of my room more times than I liked to think about.

That night at the Mill with Dr. Emmet, I’d seen my opportunity. If I could get in with Phillip’s group, I’d know everything I ever wanted to know about what happened to Leo, what happened to her. I’d pretend to need their help. I wasn’t sure how much I needed to pretend at this point.

“What gauge did they use, Professor?”

I yanked my finger out of the bullet hole. Of course it was the reporter from that night—Dr. Emmet’s friend, though she didn’t seem to like him. I’d seen him three times since then. Just now, I realized those sightings weren’t a coincidence.

Professor
. Soon enough, and he’d still be doing the obituaries. “Tommy gun. What are you doing here?”

“The
Trib
offices are just down Michigan.”

“Yeah? But don’t you work for the
Willetson Weekly
Thrifty Pages
?”

“Ouch, kid. Yeah, I work for the
Courier
. I had a meeting in the city today.”

“Did you also have a meeting in two other places where I would be this week?” I said.

He nodded. “You’re pretty keen, then. That’s good. Can I be honest with you?”

“My guess is no.”

He shook his head and broke into a grin. “You sociologists are of a cloth, aren’t you?”

I didn’t trust the smile. I knew there were guys who smiled for anything, because their lives had given them nothing but good news. Good-looking guys who let their hair grow a little long, shaved half as often as they should, showed up everywhere expecting to be let in. Rothbert crawled with them.

“I got the feeling you and the good doctor Emmet had some mighty plans,” he said. “I like mighty plans.” He walked to the cathedral stairs and dropped onto a low step. “But Jesus—no offense, Hail Mary—was I wrong. The two of you mope around like all the air’s been sucked out of the atmosphere. What are you doing?”

I glanced back at the hole. He’d seen me doing it. “Seeing the sights?”

“No, I mean what are you doing about this Leonard Lehane thing?”

“Nothing. She told me not to.”

“What is she doing?”

I glanced at my watch. “She’s probably grading quizzes—”

“Dipshit. Keep up here. What is she doing about the Leonard Lehane thing?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“So she’s doing something,” he said.

“No. But if she were, I still wouldn’t tell you.” Who was the dipshit here? Not me.

McDaniel eyed me. “You’re awful protective of your teacher.”

I shrugged. She was my research subject, not his.

He shook his head and gazed across the street. “You hear about the flower shop used to be there?”

“The mob one.” I sat on the top step. “They come to get the flowers for their buddy’s funeral, and the guns open up.”

“Chicago used to be one of those places where you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know what? It still is. Anybody wanted to kill me, and they were looking for a chance, they could roll by right now, reach out with a gun, take me down. You’d be toast, too, a casualty. Still happens.”

“Who’d want to kill you?”

McDaniel leaned back on his elbows. “My ex-wife has some ideas.”

“What’d you do?”

He leaned toward me. “Trade you. Fact for fact.”

“I don’t care that much.” I stood to leave. My next stop was a sports bar that used to be a speakeasy. Burgers, fries, and a secret passageway in the basement for rum running.

“You’re a hard case.”

On the bottom step, I paused. My dad said the same thing. “What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know what makes you tick. Not sure I want to know.” He yanked his head toward the bullet hole. “But I was sure about one thing, and now I’m not sure.”

I waited. He let me. “What?”

“I thought you wanted to help Dr. Emmet.” He stood and dusted himself off. “But I must be wrong.”

“You can’t possibly believe that’s going to work. Just because I don’t study psychology—”

“Then why are you sitting on your pockets here, looking glum as hell?”

He had a point. Classes, studying, the list of articles and books Dr. Emmet had given me to find and read—none of it made any difference. I was miserable. In class, in the library, even the other night, having beers with the other students. All I wanted was to be somewhere else. Not back at my room, not back home. I was itchy, inside and out. When I tried to think of somewhere to go, I imagined standing in the dark under the glowing windows of James Baker’s dorm room.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You tell me. You and Amelia seemed to be hatching something.”

I didn’t like the familiar sound of her name from his mouth. That night I’d interrupted them at the Mill—was that a date? Last week I’d had a weird dream about Dr. Emmet. The kind of dream I couldn’t tell her about or get out of my mind. Now when I saw her—let’s say I got itchy then, too. Sweaty, itchy, and shamed. “That suicide watch—”

“Yeah?” he said.

“They were working with Leo before—you know.”

“They also offered psychological services to anyone on campus who was aggrieved,” he said. “After.”

“Really? Phillip?”

“Your friend Phillip is a trained staff psychiatric professional.”

“I thought he was a student when I first met him.”

“He’d like that. He brings in help when tough news hits, but he runs things. The watch students would have been in the thick of things last year, taking calls like they do. Pixie. Surly. The other one.”

“Pixie? Do you mean Trudie?”

“Trudie.” McDaniel took a notebook out of his jacket pocket and slapped at himself until he found a pen. “Last name?”

“Don’t know. Who’s Surly?”

“My affectionate nickname for one of them.”

“I know which one you mean,” I said. “I wanted to call Phillip the talk show host.”

“Good one. Why didn’t you?”

“He told me his name.”

“See, Nath, I like you. You deal in facts. You’ve got a good memory, too. You might be a born investigator. We could really get some traction here.”

“Traction.” The big back tires of a John Deere tractor came to mind, and I remembered trying to climb the giant treads of one in my grandpa’s barn. Just a kid, feeling like I was climbing a mountainside. The thrilling moment when I slipped and started to fall, someone’s hand at my back. I could imagine my mom letting me take the risk, saying, “Don’t let your dad know we did this.” That trill up the spine returned now. I pushed it down.

“If we could work together,” he said.

“You’re trying to make me your sidekick.”

I had to give him credit. He worked hard to keep his patience. He swallowed a mouthful of what he wanted to say and tried again. “I want to help Dr. Emmet.”

“You want a big headline with your name under it.”

“Nothing wrong with getting what I want at the same time. Helping her and helping myself—those aren’t mutually exclusive. Surely there’s something you want.” His eyes drifted back to the bullet hole. “Is there a way to get what you want and help your teacher at the same time?”

What did I want? I hadn’t been into the drawer with my file in a few days. When I thought of my clippings and notes now, I felt like an idiot. There had been a time when I first arrived at Rothbert that I was sure I stood on the verge of something big. I’d located the epicenter on a map and found a way to get there. I’d launched myself out of my small town, out of Indiana, out of my dad’s judgment and into the confidences of the very person I’d come here to meet. Here I was. What did I want? Only everything, and it had slipped away.

“I can’t do anything.” My voice sounded like someone else’s. McDaniel had the decency to look concerned. “Sorry,” I said.

I turned to catch the train home.
I couldn’t do anything.
How many times had that come to me, loud and clear as if from God. And this was my religion, the one thing I believed: I couldn’t do anything. That was my problem.

When I got back to campus, it was late and I was starving. I’d been living on fistfuls of sugared cereal and my supply of microwave noodles, but I didn’t feel like subsistence living tonight. Smith Hall had late dining hours, I remembered.

Red sauce pasta, chicken breasts that had been under the heat lamp far too long. I wasn’t choosy. Some vegetables for a change. The garlic bread looked good. I piled my plate high with little buttery rounds, grabbed a glass of milk, and turned to choose a place to sit. The tables had long ago emptied. I pulled out a chair and tucked in. Mediocre food, but at least Kendall wasn’t here to tell me that only men living in homeless shelters ate ramen.