by Tom Kakonis
“Pro’ly not, it bein’ Sunday.”
“I thought possibly, well, you could help.”
Wilcox sucked in a big, weary breath. “What we got here,” he said, and his voice was patient, even, “couple letters off a plate, one of ’em a maybe, pretty slim description of a vehicle…” He paused, seemed to think it over. Lifted his gaze and fixed it on Marshall. Steady gaze, eyes touched with regret, face wearing the dolorous look of a man stuck with the delivery of bad news. “I gotta tell you, Mr. Quinn. It’s not a whole lot to go on.”
“But can’t you run some sort of computer trace? At least isolate the possibilities?”
“Could do that, we had a partial plate ID. Run what y’call a variation scan. But two letters, one, that don’t hardly qualify as partial.”
“I’m pretty certain it was a Z, the second letter. Looked like a Z.”
“Say it’s a Z. You got any idea how many vehicles we’d be lookin’ at? It’s not like we got an exact description. Don’t even know the make for sure, right?”
“I’m positive it was either a Buick or a Mercury,” Marshall said, but his voice was picking up that tremor again, same as before, sounding anything but positive.
“Okay,” Wilcox sighed. “This Buick or Mercury, AZ or AS in the plate, it could be from the city, out state, down state, anywhere. Could be a thousand vehicles come close to your description. More’n that, even. See what we’re up against?”
“But it’s a place to begin. Up to now there’s been nothing. Nothing. Handful of air.”
“That may be all you got here, Mr. Quinn. That air.”
Wilcox was doodling on the yellow pad now, avoiding his eyes. “I don’t understand what you mean,” Marshall said.
“Mean it could be a, well, prank,” he said, seemingly absorbed in the inventive squiggling produced by the ballpoint, independent of his hand. “Y’know, somebody makin’ a little joke.”
“A joke? You’re saying it was all a joke back there on the highway?”
“Not sayin’ it was. Sayin’ it could of been.”
“Nobody’d be that sick.”
“Or that cruel,” Lori put in, her first contribution to the dialogue, offered flat and uninflected, voice of someone in a mild stupor.
Both of them looked at her, Wilcox doubtfully and Marshall embarrassedly, as though irked by the inapt comment of a slightly disturbed child. Sort of comment that arrests a conversation, as it did this one, till Wilcox returned his attention to Marshall and said bluntly, “You don’t wanna bet to it.”
He felt a big pulse of helpless rage throbbing in him, coming up out of some tight, hollow place in his chest. Not so much at this man seated across from him as at the implication of his remark. A joke. Too staggering to get the mind around it. Too vicious. Too evil. “Sergeant,” he said, all pretense of composure, self-possession, all gone now, dismissed by pleading, “we’re talking about my son. Will you do the computer trace, scan, whatever it is? Will you do that for us?”
“What I can do is run it by Thornton. Be his call.”
“But will he do it?”
“Not gonna lie to you, Mr. Quinn. I don’t know. Help if we had more on the vehicle. There anything else you can give me?”
“No, no, there’s nothing more…” Marshall’s head moved slowly, side to side. He tugged his lower lip, ransacked his memory. “Wait a minute. Wait. There was a sticker. Back bumper.”
“What kinda sticker?”
“One of those ‘Buy American’ things. Said ‘Save U.S. Jobs—Buy American.’ Had a flag unfurled. You know the kind I mean?” The image sharpened in his head. He didn’t wait for a reply. “And there was some sort of symbol—couldn’t make it out—in the corner, lower right-hand side.”
“See them stickers on half the bumpers this town, now-days.”
“But that symbol, couldn’t it be a company logo or a union label? Something like that?”
“Might be,” Wilcox said. He scribbled something on his yellow pad, looked up, suppressed another sigh. “That it?”
“That’s all I can remember.”
Wilcox put down the pen and got to his feet, signaling interview’s end. “Well, guess that about covers everything.”
“When will we hear something?”
“I’ll get this over to Detective Thornton. Whyn’t you give him a call, few days?”
“If he agrees to do it, how long would it take?”
“Hard to say, Mr. Quinn. Size job we’re lookin’ at, could be awhile. It’s not like the movies, all that high technology at your instant service. C’mon, I’ll walk you folks to your car.”
The Volvo was parked near the corner of the street outside the station. Marshall got the door for Lori, then turned to Wilcox and mumbled something in the way of thanks. For what, he wasn’t quite sure.
“Your wife, Mr. Quinn. She, uh, okay?”
“She’s on medication,” Marshall said, studying the sidewalk, unable to meet his eyes. “She’s pretty depressed.”
“I’m no doctor, but look to me like she could use some, well, professional help.”
“Appreciate your concern. I’m seeing to it.”
Wilcox glanced into the backseat of the wagon. “Them the leaflets you was tellin’ me about?”
“Yes.”
“She shouldn’t be down here, y’know. You either. This is a badass neighborhood. Ain’t no Naperville.”
“I’ve got to do something,” Marshall snapped, more than a touch of bitterness in it. “Nobody else is.”
Wilcox dropped a cold, heavy glare on him. Squad room glare. “Look,” he said, “you’re a professor, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, we don’t come in your classroom, tell you how to teach. Don’t go tellin’ us how to do our work. We’re doin’ all we can. More’n you think.”
Marshall lifted a hand and balled a fist. But it was an imploring gesture, utterly unthreatening, full of desperation. A squeezing at air. His handful of air. “I know you are. I’m sorry I said that. Sorry.”
“Forget it,” Wilcox said and, softening some, “You find your way back now?”
“I’ll find it.”
“Everybody knows your Snap-on’s top a the line,” Waz was declaring, winding down a long, rambling panegyric to the Snap-on label. “Cadillac a tools. You wanna go on the cheap, you get Craftsman.”
Buck, patiently waiting his turn, playing at gadfly, merely drawled, “Nobody sayin’ Craftsman the better tool. All’s I’m sayin’ is for your average job—not talkin’ out to the plant, talkin’ around the house, workin’ on the car—they do just fine.”
“Fine? You think fine? What happens one of ’em goes out on you, don’t work right? Answer me that one.”
“Run it over to Sears, show ’em your warranty. They’ll stand behind it.”
“Yeah, only it’s you doin’ the runnin’. Something go wrong with a Snap-on, whaddya do?”
Cornered by this irresistible logic, Buck put up an acceding palm. “Okay, you call, they come out.”
Waz jabbed a triumphant finger at him. “There you are! There’s the difference. Along with your basic quality, ’course.”
Where and how the Great Tools Debate began, neither of them, if pressed, could have said. Somewhere back in the wandering, beer-fueled dialogue of the past several hours. They were sprawled in adjacent chairs facing the television, their attention only partly engaged by the game unfolding on its screen. Waz, with the easy intimacy of long-term fellowship, had his shoes off and feet up on a coffee table. Slack-limbed and somewhat bleary-eyed, he appeared to have forgotten whatever it was had been troubling him earlier. He emptied a can of Bud, lit another in a chain of cigarettes, and fired twin jet streams through nostrils from which sprouted an extraordinary thickness of wiry black hair. “Yeah, comes to tools, Snap-On’s your Cadillac line,” he repeated, clearly enamored of the metaphor, speech a trifle slurred.
Buck, not quite willing to let it go, countered
, “If you wanta buy a Cadillac when a Chevy do the same job.”
Over on the couch the wives were chatting animatedly. Norma held a can of Diet Pepsi; Della sipped a gin and tonic, daintily but steadily. They ignored the game but the continuous ebb and flow of the tools debate was impossible to disregard altogether, and finally, rolling her eyes at the ceiling, Della said, “Honestly, sometimes I think those two were born to argue.”
“They do have a good time, though,” Norma allowed tolerantly.
“If ragging at each other’s a good time.”
“You know, I just love your outfit,” Norma said, gently steering the talk in another direction.
Della’s face opened in a gratified smile. “Thanks. Picked it up just last week. Know where?”
“Where?”
“A consignment shop, if you can believe that.”
“Really!” Norma exclaimed dutifully.
“Really. Me and Lorraine—you remember my friend Lorraine?—works at the Hair Port there in Lisle?—we’re out at Fox Valley browsing through this place, and Lorraine sees it and she goes, ‘Dell, look at this, be just perfect for you.’ I says, ‘Oh, no, it’s way too young for me,’ but Lorraine, she makes me try it on anyway, and once I did I just had to have it.”
The perfect outfit (in striking contrast to Norma’s plain cotton slacks and knit, floral print top) consisted of a pair of thigh-clinging pink Spandex shorts peeking out from beneath a puffy miniskirt, also pink, and matching silk blouse cut low to reveal a deep cleft between rubbery breasts that had a tendency to jiggle whenever she spoke excitedly or gestured expansively, as she did now.
“Lorraine was right,” Norma assured her. “It looks great on you.”
Della drained off the last of the gin in her glass. “Waz seems to think so,” she said, hint of a coy leer in it.
Uncertain what to say to that, Norma offered another drink.
“Well, maybe just a splash.”
She took the glass, glided across the room, and picked up the spilling-over ashtray and Waz’s empty can. “Waz?” she asked him. “Another?”
“Always bust a Bud.”
She turned to Buck. “Hon?”
“I’m still good,” he said. “Gettin’ hungry, though. When we gonna eat?”
“Pretty soon now. I want to let Davie sleep just a little while longer.”
Buck nodded agreeably and gave her an affectionate backside pat, and she gave him back a fond smile and disappeared through the door to the kitchen.
Della, never content to be on the fringes of a conversation, called over to the two men, “Who’s winning?”
“You heard it,” Waz said. “I made him own up to Snap-on bein’ best.”
“Talkin’ about the football game, dumdum.”
“Bears kickin’ butt again,” Buck told her.
“They ain’t doin’ that good,” Waz grumbled.
“Face it, Waz. They’re smearin’ ’em.”
“Aah, exhibition games, they don’t mean jack shit.”
“Win’s a win.”
“Know what they oughta do? Tellya what they oughta do. Bring back Ditka.”
“Ditka? Ditka’s a loser.”
“Loser!” Waz thundered. “Mike Ditka a loser? He’s the one brought this team back. Made ’em. Hadn’t been for Ditka they’d be playin’ sandlot ball right now. Even you gotta admit that, Buck.”
“Yeah, well, he did okay,” Buck conceded, but with a qualifying, “at first. Toward the end there he was showboatin’. Doin’ more commercials on the television than coachin’. His prol’um is he forgot what they were payin’ him for.”
“Tell ya who forgot,” Waz said, warming to this new avenue of controversy. “People the city of Chicago, they’re the ones forgot what Mike Ditka done for ’em. Give ya a for instance. There’s this bar up on Ogden, forget the name a the joint, use to serve a Ditkaburger, big special, plate a fries, side a slaw. Remember that place, Dell?”
“Fifty bars this end of Ogden, and I’m suppose to remember one with a hamburger?”
“It’s like a made-over house. Right next to that Ford dealer.”
“Tell the story,” Buck urged him. “You gettin’ bad as Lester.”
“Anyway,” Waz pushed on, voice rising indignantly, “last time I’m up there I looks at the menu, no Ditkaburger. So I asks the waitress where it’s at, and y’know what she says?”
“What’d she say?”
“Says, ‘Ditka? Who’s he?’ Wiseass, y’know, like he’s a nobody now, ain’t good enough for their menu, this dive.”
“You shoulda ordered a Wannstedtburger instead,” Buck suggested, grinning. “Pro’ly taste the same even if it don’t carry the same sound to it.”
“Yeah,” Waz said sourly, “just like he—Wannstedt, I’m sayin’—don’t carry same weight on the field.”
Norma was back in the room now, dispensing drinks. Something happened on the screen, a long breakaway run, and Waz and Buck let out simultaneous whoops. And on the stairs a child appeared, hair tousled, clothes rumpled, clutching a teddy bear in one hand, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the other. Norma rushed over and gathered him up in her arms, crooning, “Davie, you’re up. You have a nice nap? You slept so long! Were you all tired out?”
The boy looked around the room timidly, said nothing. Jeffrey Quinn, in this incarnation, seemed smaller somehow, slighter, drawn in on himself, as though all the boundless energy and frisky curiosity of the child at the museum had seeped out of him. Norma carried him over to the couch and cuddled him in her lap. She smoothed his hair tenderly, and on her face was a look of almost beatific joy.
“Hey, boy,” Buck called, voice full of an awkward fatherly pride, “ ’bout time you woke up.”
Waz grinned weakly, the game forgotten now and all the trouble coming back into his eyes. He shot a worried glance at Della, whose expression was a shifting stew of wonder, perplexity, and a secret certain knowledge. She covered it with a carefully induced smile, and in a shrill soprano said, “Hi, Davie. You remember me?”
“You remember Mrs. Wazinski,” Norma tried to prompt him. “Can you say hi?”
The boy shrank deeper into her arms, hugged the bear tighter. Over his head Norma silently mouthed the words, “He’s still real shy.”
But Della, not to be put off, edged in closer on the couch, said, “What’s your teddy’s name, honey?”
And in a small frightened voice, barely audible, the boy whispered the single word, “Jeffie.”
Another football fan, Glenn Wilcox, got the score of the game late that afternoon and was, in his own quiet way, cheered at the news, seeing he had a double saw riding on the Bears. Made his otherwise routine day: half a dozen muggings, about the same number of boosted vehicles, your usual quota of D & D’s, one rape, one flasher, couple of domestics. Routine except for that visit by the putz professor and his spaced missus, kept nagging him. Not that it was exactly sympathy he felt, or for sure any urgent obligation, not off that loopy, fuzzy story they got to tell. Too many years on the force for that (and only eighteen months and counting till retirement). That long, you learned to maintain a professional distance, never get personally involved. Still was hard to scrub the image of their eager citizen faces, playing at crime fighter, pair of suburb biscuits like that, with their leaflets and their heavy tollway clues. Kind of sad, you thought about it, which all afternoon he’d tried not to do, but for reasons unclear to him, couldn’t get a handle on, it kept coming back to him. Maybe because, twice divorced himself, three kids, two of them boys, none of them give him so much as the time of day, as lost to him forever as the Quinn boy most likely was, all this time gone by—maybe because of that he could understand a little how they felt, some of their desperation. So even though he knew it was pointless, worse than useless, he went ahead anyway and picked up the phone and put in a call to Thornton over at Four, and when, after a lengthy hold, he got him on the line, he said, casual as he could pitch it, “Hey, Palmer. Glenn Wilcox
.”
“Glenn. How’s by you?”
“Same old song. You?”
“Holdin’ course. Loose but holdin’. What’s up? And don’t say what you’re gonna.”
Wilcox forced a chuckle. “Been awhile since that one got up, my age.”
“Not that, what then?”
“You remember them people from out to Naperville, Quinns? Got their kid snatched?”
“Like I’m gonna forget. That weenie been crowdin’ me two months running.”
“Yeah, well, today’s my turn in the barrel.”
“No kiddin’. How’s that?”
“They was in here all stoked over some big lead they turned up.”
“How come you got volunteered?”
“Got lost. Ended up here.”
Thornton snorted. “That gimp would get lost in a phone booth.”
“Don’t I know. Anyway, long as they’re here I figured I’d listen it out. Spare you.”
“Owe you one. I’m up to my ass in backlog. So what’s this serious lead?”
“Pro’ly nothin’.”
“So try me anyhow.”
Wilcox related the tale of the highway encounter, trimming it down, bare bones, since he knew Thornton, never a patient man, had a low flapjaw threshold. Soon as he’s finished, Thornton said curtly, “Somebody jivin’ ’em.”
“That’s what I told him, this professor. ’Course, he wants us run a scan.”
“Off that? One letter, no make on the vehicle? No way. Nothin’ to scan.”
“Told him that too.”
“Fuckin’ amateurs.”
“Well,” Wilcox said, “just thought I’d let you know. He’ll be buggin’ you about it next week.”
“Be Vern’s prol’um. Tonight I’m vanished, evaporated. Two weeks vacation.”
“Hey, good on you. Enjoy.”
“I’ll do that. Talk to ya, Glenn.”
Wilcox put up the phone and poured himself a cup of the vile station house coffee. Burned going down, burned his gut. He drank it anyway. Unaccountably, a memory of his youngest boy came to him. Got to be—what?—fifteen now, last seen over a decade back, lived somewhere out in Utah with his bitch of a mother. Memory was blurry, like a dream memory, like he’d dreamed him into existence, then dreamed him away. Like his whole life gone by, fart in the wind.
