Blind Spot

by Tom Kakonis

  Till eventually a uniformed figure appeared in the doorway, filling it, a flattened metal chair tucked under one arm, couple of police report forms in the hand of the other. “I’m Sergeant Glenn Wilcox,” he said by way of identification. “You’re the Marshalls?”

  “Quinn,” said Marshall, rising. “Marshall’s my first name. This is my wife, Lori.”

  He unfolded the chair, examined one of the forms with a myopic squint, said, “Yeah, right, Quinn. Sorry about that.” He stuck out a liver-spotted paw for Marshall to grip, then bent over and offered it to Lori, who, eyes open now but still glassy with shock, touched it gingerly.

  At a nod from Wilcox the two men sat. He laid the forms out on the table, studied them a moment, while Marshall studied him. A big man, fifty or better by Marshall’s estimate, thick-set, substantial gut, baggy seen-it-all face, and an aura of immense weariness about him, almost a lassitude, cheering not at all. Finally he lifted pouchy eyes and said, “Also sorry about what’s happened here,” his voice, in contrast with the charitable words, a growly bass rumble.

  “We appreciate that,” Marshall said, struggling to hold his own voice level but acutely conscious of the tremor in it. “But we’d like to know what’s being done to find our son.”

  “Everything we can. Got his description on the wire, and our people checkin’ all the neighborhoods around the museum.”

  “Any word yet?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Quinn.”

  Marshall cleared his throat, hoping it would steady his speech some, erase the quaver. “Are you the officer, uh, assigned to the investigation? In charge, I mean?” Hoping equally he had the terminology right. What did he know about this angry, fractured world they’d been thrust into, abruptly and without warning? He knew nothing. What he’d seen on television, that’s as much as he knew.

  “No. I work the desk out front.”

  “Who, then?”

  “A detective probably. Be along any minute now.”

  “Will he find Jeff?” It was Lori speaking, a peculiar matter-of-factness to the question, like some mildly interested third party, one of those spectators in the parking lot back there.

  “He’ll sure try, ma’am,” Wilcox said, his ma’am a kind of quaint anomaly of address for this slender, fragile girl, not yet thirty, young enough to be a daughter or a niece. He arched a shaggy brow. Watched her narrowly. “You all right, Mrs. Quinn? Want some coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Doughnut? We got doughnuts.”

  She shook her head slowly, stared at the hands clasped tightly in her lap. The rocking motion had stopped now, but her gaze was empty, lost.

  “Mr. Quinn?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Sure? Been a long day for you folks.”

  “Look,” Marshall said, firm as he could pitch it. “I don’t understand the delay. It’s been—what?—four hours. Closer to five. And nobody’s told us anything, talked to us.”

  “I’m talking to you, Mr. Quinn.”

  “Then for God’s sake tell us something. Tell us what’s happening.”

  Wilcox gathered a fleshy underfold of secondary chin in his fingers. He seemed to consider it necessary to sigh. “See, what you don’t understand is how things work here. Procedures. Like I told you, our people looking for your boy right now. We don’t turn him up tonight—I’m not saying that’s gonna happen, but we don’t—then the detectives outta Four, they’ll step in.”

  “Four?”

  “City’s divided up into five areas. We’re in Four.”

  “This detective you say is coming, he’s in this building?”

  “No, he works outta Area Four headquarters. Over on Harrison.”

  “Then where are we?”

  “You’re in District One precinct station. Right off South State.”

  Precincts, districts, areas—it was like some labyrinthine maze fiendishly constructed to baffle and torment experimental rats. And he got to be the hapless rat. Which was maybe only right and fitting, given what he’d done. “Then this detective,” Marshall asked, all the firm, what there was of it, gone now, replaced by pleading, “he’ll be the one in charge?”

  “Correct,” Wilcox said patiently, tone of a patient tutor instructing a somewhat backward child. “That is, if we got no luck locating your boy tonight. Which could still happen. It don’t, then it’ll be an aggravated kidnapping.”

  A quick little spasm, brief as a palsied twitch, seized Lori’s thin shoulders and was instantly gone. She said not a word, and her eyes never left her lap.

  “What we call a heater case,” a clipped voice at the cubicle’s entrance pronounced. “Right, Glenn?”

  Wilcox turned slightly. “Hey, Palmer. You made it.”

  “Did at that.”

  “ ’Bout time.”

  “Got held up.”

  “These here are the Quinns,” Wilcox said, wagging a thumb in Marshall’s direction. “Palmer Thornton,” wagging it back. “Detective I was telling you about. From over to Four.”

  Marshall stood, extended a hand. The detective reached over and gave it a small squeeze. Lori didn’t look up, didn’t move. “Detective Thornton,” Marshall started to say (he assumed you addressed them by title), “what we’d like to know is—”

  That’s as far as he got. Thornton made a curt dismissive gesture. “Be right with you. Need a word with the sergeant first. Glenn, you wanta step out here minute, bring the paperwork along with you?”

  Wilcox heaved himself up out of the chair and followed the detective into the hallway, the two of them suddenly gone, leaving Marshall standing there stunned, his frustration and anger and fear mounting, equal parts, mouth still moving in desperate wordless twists. Feeling something of a timid milksop. Something of a fool. His skimpy impression of this Thornton, this detective charged with finding their son, was fortifying not in the least: a tall, sturdy man, youngish, this side of forty by an easy five years, maybe more; conspicuously well built under the shortsleeve white shirt and tie, bodybuilder’s exaggerated shoulders and lumpy arms; good-looking in a sleek slick arrogant way, but very studiedly the wised-up street cop, reaching after a cinematic conception of himself, working too hard at it for Marshall’s tastes. Unless he was mistaken. Unless that’s the face, callous and remote, they all of them, Wilcox included, showed an innocent, uninitiated world of cowed and helpless citizens, while behind it lurked a stony resolve to solve the murder, recover the child, see justice done. He hoped it was the latter. To Lori he said weakly, “I’m sure they’ll be right back. Let us know what’s going on.” She made no reply.

  He crept over to the entrance, listened a moment but could hear nothing. Cautiously, he peered around it. They were standing several feet down the hall, speaking animatedly but sotto voce. Thornton glanced up from the forms in his hand, saw him, smiled thinly, beckoned. Marshall approached them. This time he said nothing. Put the burden on them for a change. That’s what they’re paid for.

  But the opening line, delivered by the detective, was about the last thing he expected: “Says here you’re a professor, Mr. Quinn.”

  “That’s right,” Marshall said stiffly.

  “What do you teach?”

  “Sociology.”

  “That’s at that college out in Naperville, right?”

  “Yes. North Central.” Marshall sensed it was neither necessary nor useful to mention the college was small, private, church-affiliated. Not in this company. Anyway, he had no idea where this avenue of chummy talk was leading.

  “I’m workin’ on my master’s,” Thornton said. “Criminal justice.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Nights. Class at a time. Slow goin’.”

  Marshall pulled in a deep breath, released it slowly. Buying an instant of time to collect his words, phrase them properly. “You know,” he said, staring at him steady as he could, “that’s very commendable, your pursuing an advanced degree. But as you might guess, I really don’t give a good goddam r
ight now and—”

  Thornton put up staying palms. “Hey, easy, Mr. Quinn. We’re just chattin’ here.”

  “I’m not interested in any more chatting. I want—no, that’s not it—I insist you tell me what’s being done to find my son.” But he’d lost the momentum of indignant outrage, and he knew it. It was his voice again, rising in shaky whine, perilously close to spineless cheep, gave him away, for all the blustery words. He felt a sharp stinging sensation in his eyes. He looked away. Determined not to weep, not here, not in front of them.

  Sergeant and detective exchanged glances. Thornton arranged his face in an attitude intended perhaps to convey sympathy, but with a certain measure of scorn in it too. “Listen,” he said, “we know how you got to feel. What I understand Sergeant Wilcox here already told you, that’s what we’re doin’. Which is all we can, this point in time.”

  “But what am I—we—supposed to do? There must be something.”

  “Nothin’ you can do here, Mr. Quinn. It’s Glenn’s thought, mine too, you and Mrs. Quinn oughta go on home.”

  “Home?” Marshall repeated, wonderstruck.

  “Yeah, home. We get any news tonight, we’ll ring you right up. We got your number.”

  “She’s lookin’ pretty upset,” Wilcox put in. “Your wife, I mean. Our thinkin’ was you should get her outta this environment.”

  “Maybe get hold your doctor,” Thornton suggested. “Have him give her something, sleep.”

  “You got a family doctor out there, Naperville?” Wilcox asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t want her tweakin’ on you,” Thornton said.

  “Tweaking?”

  “What he means,” Wilcox explained gently, “is, y’know, breakin’ down. Gettin’ hysterical.”

  “Can happen,” Thornton said. “Seen it before.”

  Marshall hesitated. About Lori, they might be right. He’d never seen her like this, never. Ordinarily she was composed, capable, serenely efficient, equal to any small domestic distress, the many facets of her busy life—wife, mother, substitute teacher, homemaker, hobbyist, club member, church volunteer, activist in a variety of worthy causes—all in harmonious balance, all in admirable control. But then there was nothing ordinary about anything that was happening here. So maybe it made a kind of sense, what they were recommending. “I could take her home,” he said, “get some friends to stay with her. Then come back.”

  Wilcox frowned. “Be better you stayed with her. Anyhow, you lookin’ kinda beat up yourself. An’ like the detective said, nothin’ you can do here. Be easier on you both, waitin’ at home.”

  “Any news, you’d call me?”

  “You’re top of our list.”

  “But if you shouldn’t find him tonight? Then what?”

  Wilcox let Thornton field that one. “Be a whole different ball game,” the detective said. “We’ll put a team together, widen the scope of our investigation.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Worry ’bout that, time comes. We don’t get anything tonight, I’ll be out to your place, Naperville there, tomorrow. Tell you all about it.”

  “So what do you think?” Wilcox asked him. “You wanta go get your wife? Get started?”

  “All right,” Marshall said, feeling part desolate, another part curiously relieved, rather like an ailing patient must feel, he supposed, frail and tottery, yielding himself over to the ministrations of wise physicians.

  “You folks got a car?”

  “We took the train.”

  “Could catch a cab over the station,” Thornton suggested.

  “Nah, that’s okay,” Wilcox said. “I’ll get a vehicle, give ’em a lift.”

  Thornton shrugged and sauntered away, not another word to Marshall, who said anxiously, like that cringing patient he’d become, “Where’s he going?”

  “Gonna catch up on where we’re at so far. Whyn’t you bring Mrs. Quinn out front now? Wait for me there.”

  Without comment or protest, Lori agreed to the proposal to return home, presented by Marshall as though it were an integral part of some carefully crafted master plan. And so they waited, as instructed, opposite the counter in the precinct entry, standing against a wall by a bank of phones. She was silent, her features blanched, expressionless, utterly unreadable. Calamity’s trance. And he, wire-strung yet, but overtaken by fatigue and a fuddled sense of dislocation, could summon up nothing to say. Emptied of solace, run out of sustaining words. Bankrupt of will.

  Behind the counter, cops charged back and forth, their voices elevated in permanent fortissimo, enduring howl. All of them had sagging, meaty faces that betrayed too much lingering over sugary pastries and coffee. One slurped noisily from a mug bearing the legend “I don’t give a shit.” Another, responding to a barked query, bawled back, “Already tol’ ya his name’s José, dickeye, an’ he got a brother name a Hose B,” bursting into pleasured smirk at his excellent bon mot. Signs on the walls forbade smoking, advised lawyers they could see prisoners (a couple of whom, surly blacks, were being hustled, handcuffed, through a swinging plywood gate and down a dark corridor) only after they were processed, and warned that an escape alarm system secured all exits. An incongruous tire leaned against a shelf stacked high with report forms. The phones never let up. Altogether, a spectacle of dissonant, sordid ugliness, life’s seedy underside, its cast wearing their seediness and cynicism like body armor, reveling in it, the way souls consigned to the innermost circles of hell must flaunt their hopeless roaring defiance; and watching the unfolding scene, taking it all in, Marshall had to wonder what terrible sin of his own had brought the two of them here to share in the ruin and despair.

  No time to pursue such morbid thoughts, for just then Wilcox stuck his head through the door and in a bellow to match the din called, “All set, Mr. Quinn, let’s roll.” He ushered them into the backseat of a car whose logo, presumably innocent of irony, proclaimed: Chicago Police—We Serve and Protect.

  They rode in silence. Pulled up at the Jackson Street entrance to Union Station. Marshall and Lori climbed out. She stood there dazedly while he stooped to the window, offered his thanks.

  “Nothin’. You folks find your train okay?”

  He said they could and, unable to leave it alone, added, “You’ll phone us if you hear anything? Anything at all?”

  “Well, I’m goin’ off duty, but Detective Thornton, he’ll keep you posted.”

  “Thornton?” he said, unable now to contain the dismay in his voice.

  And Wilcox, catching it, said wearily, “Y’know, Mr. Quinn, thing like this happen, people sometimes feel like they gotta find a villain. Thornton, okay, he can be a hotdog. Pain in the butt sometimes. But he’s good.”

  “I’m sure he is. It’s just that he didn’t seem too, well—” He faltered, searching for the right word, settled finally on the inoffensive “engaged.”

  “You don’t wanta mix us up with the bad guys,” Wilcox advised him. “They’re out here.” The here indicated with a sweep of an arm across the interior windshield.

  “But will you find him?”

  “Do our best.”

  Punctually at nine p.m. Dingo emerged from an elevator on the fifth floor of a crumbling apartment building, glanced about warily and, once satisfied, started down a narrow cinder-block hallway reeking of urine and some ineffective cleansing agent and illuminated scarcely at all by a couple of bare bulbs at either end. He checked the numbers on the doors. From behind them came muffled sounds of televisions, squabbling voices, wailing babies. Midway along the hall he found the number he was looking for. He paused, adjusted the knot in his tie, smoothed the crease in his trousers, patted the butterfly knife—his weapon of choice—tucked into the belt under his suit coat. It was a cautionary habit picked up years ago, Illinois Youth Center Correctional Facility. Doing business, it’s always best to come strapped with something. You never know. Particularly with the wops.

  He drew himself up to his full
height. Knocked. A gravelly voice on the other side demanded, “Yeah, whozit?”

  “Dingo,” he said, the name also acquired at the Facility and stuck like glue over all these years.

  Click of a dead bolt. The door cracked open just enough for a pair of dark foxy eyes to appear in the notch.

  “It’s really me, Sal. You can open up.” Wops loved their little games.

  The door swung back, and Sal motioned him into a small, cluttered room furnished, no doubt, by the Goodwill, castoffs at that, its carpet soiled, scarred plaster walls done a seasick green. Nasty room. Nastier yet was the garlic-heavy odor of some recent dago feast chilling in the galley kitchen to his immediate left, and assaulting him head-on off Sal’s sour breath as he pushed his face up close and said, “You know Vincent?”

  Dingo followed an over-there toss of the head to another man stretched out on a couch behind him, reading a comic book. Big man, filled a couch. Dingo recognized him from some distant transaction. “I believe we met once,” he said.

  Vincent lowered the comic, ran his eyes over him, flicked a greeting finger off a brow, and went back to reading.

  End of amenities. The thing about your wops is they’re always wearing it, always performing. Even these two, couple of third-stringers, not enough island of Sicily in them to be anything other than loosely connected, fated by blood to be forever on the fringe of the heavy action. Which also meant they could be outlawing here. Which made it all the more risky. Two of them, one of him. Step lightly.

  “So, Dingo, you ready do some dealin’?”

  Sal speaking, still in his face, or as near as he could get, given the fact he cleared five feet by no more than an inch or two. It was one of the few things—possibly the only thing—Dingo found to like about him, looking down into those froggy, bulgy eyes, examining the scalp under the oily wisps of soot-colored hair, down being the only way to look at this squat little greaseball. Somewhat mockingly he said, “That’s what I came for, Sal.”

  “Little outta your line, ain’t it?”

  “Whatever sells,” Dingo said and, giving it just a shred of a beat, added, “Of course, I’ll want to see the merchandise first.”