Windy City

by Scott Simon

  “I wonder, Chief, if we should get a lab sample from her daughter?”

  “You think she's involved?”

  “I think maybe the mayor was involved. In her beginnings, if you follow.”

  Chief Martinez's laugh stuck in his throat and came out a snort.

  “The mayor liked boys,” he told Peter, and anyone else close enough to hear. A half-dozen others cut off their conversations and lifted their heads. Peter paused.

  “I never knew.”

  “It was never any of your business,” said the police chief, and when he was quite sure that the assertion had shaken Peter's certainties about the mayor's death, and sex and life generally, he looked over at a patrolman who was going over a gray evidence box of Mrs. Bacon's desk possessions.

  “Daughter?”

  “Amy. She's membership director of a sports club in Oakbrook.” A western suburb.

  “There's your answer,” said the chief flatly. “If she were the mayor's love child, he would have put her in the City Treasurer's office.” The chief tucked his thumbs in at his hips and turned back to the small video screen. “Again,” he ordered quietly, and as it played through, Peter spoke into Chief Martinez's ear.

  “We've let her rest just enough. She's just begun to get the stone off her chest. We'd like to go back right now.” The darkened conference room was on a second small screen, but Chief Martinez could only make out the silhouette of Jessica's knee and shin, resting on a coffee table. He heard soft breaths from Mrs. Bacon emanating from one screen, and the gasps and tears from her replayed through the other.

  “I think you got hold of a nice old lady whose been bursting to tell the biggest secret of her life,” said the chief without moving his head. “Do what you have to,” he told Peter. “But nothing more.”

  Sunny's phone trembled and began to dance in a line like a bug trying to scurry off the table before he could reach it. It was Eldad.

  “Where are you?” asked Sunny. He could hear clatter, clinking, whirring, and the tremolo of “De Nina A Mujer” swallowed in a bustling, tiled room.

  “Out.”

  “Eldad, I'm not your parent.” In fact, it was a tone of voice Eldad had overheard Sunny use only with his daughters.

  “El Comandante's,” he answered quickly. A Mexican restaurant northwest of the Loop. “I just checked messages.” he explained, “I'm not quite dressed for City Hall. I thought I should call …”

  Sunny had been feeling a hole simmer in his stomach.

  “Give me a few minutes,” he told Eldad. “I could use a change of scenery.”

  “Of course,” said Eldad, with reflexive politeness. “I'm with some friends—”

  “I'll need your full attention.”

  “What's happened?” For the first time, Eldad's tone was unguarded. Sunny told him.

  “Ohmigod,” was all he said, and softly. Sunny could hear new whirring, a burst of laughter, and grease flaring from a grill.

  “Not a word, please. We call in the press for six.”

  Eldad looked at the beer clock above the bar. The short red hand had settled onto the upper-thigh of the raven beauty shaking out her hair on the terrace; it was twenty to four. After a pause he said, “I'll have something waiting for you.” Sunny could make out “Despues de Tanto Tiempo” and the sound of cutlery spilling into a gray bin before he clicked off.

  Sgt. Gallaher had returned to Sunny's doorway.

  “I'd like to run out,” he told her. “To meet my assistant, Mr. De-laney To get something to eat, I don't mind saying.”

  She spoke in a low voice into the radio on her shoulder.

  “El Comandante's—did I hear right?” Sunny nodded. “Well, there should be enough cops there to protect you.”

  She kept about three paces ahead of Sunny as they walked to the internal staircase just off the council chamber that emptied onto City Hall's ground floor. Sunny had been in the hall late at night many times over the years, but had never taken those stairs at a time of such consummate silence; he thought he could hear a soft groan from the piling snow beginning to weigh on the iron slats of the fire stairs just outside the large window between the two floors.

  They reached the bottom landing, the toes of their shoes sounding muffled and smooth on the worn bone granite. The lobby lights had been turned on, revealing blue uniforms on folding chairs squishing cigarettes into paper cups as they saw an authority descend from the floors above. Sunny made no mention of their violation of a city ordinance. Officer Mayer was recognizable from behind, blue shoulders and a pale neck. He had brought his cruiser around to the LaSalle Street entrance so that the department's emergency and investigation vehicles could thread into the underground delivery zone below. Wordlessly, he took up a position in front of Sunny, and Sgt. Gallaher fell back alongside.

  “Do I get a nickname?” Sunny asked.

  “Sir?”

  “Don't the people you surround and protect usually get a nickname?” Sunny thought he could detect Sgt. Gallaher's cheeks pinken slightly as they came out of the brass security door Officer Mayer had shouldered open and felt tiny, glassy specks of snow in their eyes and nostrils.

  “People seem to like them,” she said.

  “What was the mayor's?”

  “O and O.”

  “I remember now,” said Sunny as Officer Mayer wrenched open his cruiser's rear door. “One and Only.”

  The car had nosed down LaSalle and turned left onto Wacker Drive before Sgt. Gallaher spoke again.

  “We talked about one for you. When you, Mr. Slavinskas, and the chief were in conference.”

  Sunny had let his mind slip into a kind of free fall for several blocks, counting streetlights through the tinted windows as they drove. Now, he sat forward.

  “And?”

  Sgt. Gallaher slowly squirmed to turn her broad blue shoulders around slightly to look back at Sunny.

  “They said it wasn't worth it for just a few days.”

  Sunny was still smiling slightly as Sgt. Gallaher led their approach into El Comandante's. Bright confetti-colored placemats, Bienvenidos punched across the bottom, were taped onto pipes in the ceiling and fluttered in the wind Sgt. Gallaher had ushered in with her shoulder. There were uniformed cops standing hatless against the wall, perched against the tops of the brown vinyl booths to kill the last few moments of their meal breaks. Sunny heard a few officers—male officers—say, “Hey, Mo,” but the sergeant was on duty; she returned greetings with just a tight, polite smile, and stood with her back to the window.

  Eldad stood up from one of the booths. He wore a tight black T-shirt and black leather jeans, and had changed earrings for the evening. These were steel with a small violet stone, curled like the foil scraped off the neck of a wine bottle. He took Sunny's right hand in both of his before they each sat down, the slick seat of the booth squealing as they settled in. There were small brown bowls of a bright orange sauce and a pea green sauce between them, gleaming like traffic lights, next to a small plastic basket of beige tortilla chips.

  “This is … unbelievable,” Eldad said softly. “Do they know … ?”

  “Nothing.”

  A waitress had appeared above them, and set down a small round red plastic-covered dish.

  “Next round,” she said to Eldad.

  “I got you that stuff you like,” said Eldad. “With green sauce.”

  With her other hand, the waitress produced an oval dish of chi-laquiles, a crispy litter of yesterday's tortilla strips bubbling under a pale jade sauce. Sunny inhaled until the tart steam seemed to reach the back of his throat. Absently, he picked up a soft tortilla from the red dish and held it lightly against his chin before curling it into the sauce.

  “This is unbelievable,” Eldad repeated. “Do they know? Was it personal? Political?”

  Sunny was famished. He shoved a forkful and a half of chilaquiles against the tortilla, then onto his fork, and began to swallow. He shook his head back and forth until he could speak.
r />   “A den of conspirators or a lone assassin with a pizza? They don't know.”

  “Christ, I saw him just two days ago,” said Eldad. “He was fine. He was strong. People loved him. What do you have to say at six?”

  Eldad cast his eye to the beer clock over the bar. The long hand was now crossing luxuriously over the brunette's long foreleg: it was 4:40. Sunny took his voice down even more.

  “Tell people what happened. Present a deputy police commander. Announce a memorial council session tomorrow, another on Monday to choose”—he hesitated over a personal pronoun—“the successor. Say that the police are investigating. The police department,” he revised himself as he went, “which is mounting its largest investigation ever, which it damn well better be after we raised their salaries and had to hold the line with the garbage men.”

  “Shall I sketch out something for you?”

  Like most aldermen, Sunny had to say something somewhere most nights of the week. But the demands on any alderman's oratorical powers were scarcely Churchillian. Aldermen didn't deliver state of the union speeches. They were usually introduced to equivocal applause,told a few gently self-mocking jokes, flattered their audience for their good citizenship, then lauded the mayor for his foresight and statesmanship.

  “I don't think we need Ted Sorensen for this,” Sunny said gently. “I'll just jot a few notes on the back of an envelope.” But Eldad stayed serious.

  “You should call some people.”

  “I don't want to wake up my daughters until just before.”

  “I meant some of our friends,” said Eldad.

  “That would be friendly.”

  “Make three calls,” Eldad suggested, opening the red dish and reaching in to roll a tortilla between his fingers. “I'll make a couple, too.”

  “Peter Mansfield, too,” said Sunny, and Eldad's eyes widened.

  “He wasn't on my list.”

  “I want to keep him informed,” Sunny said simply.

  “Are we … reaching out?” asked Eldad carefully, and Sunny's smile might have come from a laxative ad on the subway—it presented no clue.

  “Don't get talked into or out of anything. A situation like this? You can never tell how tiles get rearranged. Would you be surprised if anything ever broke about Crispus Foster?” The long-time, intricately profane county board president who infamously threw his amphibian arms across the doorways of conference and copying rooms to thwart the exit of any woman whom he wanted to fix with his gnarly smile. “Or if Ray Potash doesn't run again?” The peach-faced state treasurer from Collinsville was being treated for depression.

  “Running statewide?” said Sunny with melodramatic derision. “In southern Illinois, they think Roopini is what you plant next to the squash.”

  “Name recognition helps,” Eldad pointed out, and when the two of them had tucked away their chuckles and shoved aside their plates, Eldad leaned over.

  “Linas must have taken a few inches out of his pants.”

  “He says he has eighteen, first ballot.”

  “Vera?”

  “One more. But he says she can't keep more than fifteen.”

  Eldad smoothed out a napkin between them, with a hand that was already folded around a long black pen from the meat delivery firm run by Brock Lucchesi of the 13th. BROCK'S CHOPS, it read along the barrel. DOWNTOWN CUTS, STOCKYARD PRICES (although the stockyards had long ago moved to lower-taxed precincts in Omaha).

  Eldad wrote down an A, and directly under it a small stroke to represent the indubitable vote of the alderman of the First Ward, Arty Agras, for himself. Further down the space of the napkin, Eldad scratched three strokes for a V, and five more below that, representing rock-solid south side votes for Vera Barrow from Evelyn Washington of the 2nd, Dorothy Fisher of the 3rd, Wanda Jackson of the 4th, Vera herself, and Grace Brown of the 6th ward.

  “The African Queens,” Eldad announced simply. Sunny smiled at the thought of their lemon, raspberry, and lime-colored suits and flower-petal hats sunning in the front row seats of the council chamber. Eldad began on another bunch of five by carefully pulling on an end of the napkin and applying three small strokes under the V for Miles Sparrow of the 7th, John Reginald of the 8th, and Dr. Daryl Lloyd of the 9th.

  “But that's one round only,” said Eldad, tapping the point of his pen over the last stroke.

  “Still,” said Sunny. “Eight? Almost a third there.”

  On the lower third of the napkin, Eldad drew an L, and four quick lines below it: for J. P. Mulroy of the 10th, Alfredo Sandoval of the 11th, Linas himself, and Brock Lucchesi.

  “But if Brock thinks Linas will be stopped …” Eldad's voice trailed off.

  “He'll park with Arty,” Sunny agreed. “On his way to Jesus next year. He's running for a county seat and has the Chinese guys cutting his rump steaks already calling them bifstek.”

  Eldad put another mark down for Vera from Shirley Watson of the 16th, and one for Linas from Evelyn Lee of the 17th. But watching Eldad's casual stroke reminded Sunny how much a single mark could mask. Evelyn was Vera's best friend on the council. They shared jokes behind their hands. On the floor, they looked for each other's reactions. After long council sessions, they would often clip-clop down Randolph Street over to Macy's, chortling as they departed the chamber, “Quorum call in the shoe department!”

  But Evelyn could not cast a first-round vote for Vera. For her, it would be as unthinkable as a politician saying that paroled pederasts deserve a fresh start.

  Evelyn's 17th and Vera's 5th ward were separated by just a few blocks; indeed, their wards shared many of the same south side street names. But their constituents beheld their slices of the city in distinctly different ways. Most of Vera's supporters had been Chicagoans for generations. They had come up from the delta, fields, and marshes to fuel steel mills, auto plants, and packinghouses. They had improvised and polished the jazz, blues, and gospel the city now claimed as heritage. But any grasp that blacks had on the levers that actually turned the city felt fragile. The mayor's great, burly presence was the triumphal force that finally seemed to wring some of the rewards for which they had worked.

  Most of Evelyn's constituents had arrived over the past generation from Korea, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They didn't understand why African Americans complained about being overlooked, because everywhere in Chicago that they looked—the mayor, the council, senators, the city's police, bus drivers, and basketball stars—they saw African Americans exercising power. Evelyn could support Vera once she became mayor, but not while she was a candidate, which Vera understood. Politicians rarely had to explain to each other why they voted as they did. They cast the votes they had to. It was all pressure and expectation. Most votes were as easy to predict as the flow of water down a bowl.

  Eldad's pen hovered over the L for Kevin Corcoran's vote, but Sunny put out his hand before it could bear down on the napkin.

  “That ward is changing. Kevin says he's burying as many Baptists as Catholics now.” He ran his family's funeral home, Corcoran & Sons, on South Kedzie.

  “The dead don't vote,” Eldad reminded Sunny. “Any more.” He went ahead and added a slash under the L.

  Mitya Volkov of the 19th would be for Vera. The mayor had bestrewn city jobs, consultant contracts, festivals, and community centers up and down Western Avenue for Russian immigrants and indeed, so that point would not be lost, had renamed the street Anatoly Sharansky Way between 87th and 90th Streets, just in front of Mitt's ward office. Eldad kept his pen poised above the V but held back for Janet Watanabe of the 20th.

  “She's touchy,” he said. “She thinks the mayor and Vera have been trying to move Janaya Williams into her seat.”

  “Vera needs to tell her it's a terrible misunderstanding,” which Sunny knew it was not.

  “She'll want something more than understanding,” Eldad pointed out. “A new police station on 66th.”

  “Then Vera needs to reach out to her. Before Linas promises to put Strategic Air Co
mmand headquarters in there.”

  Eldad finally put his pen point under V, then another stroke under L for Tommy Mitrovic of the 21st, who had a neighborhood insurance agency.

  “Linas gives out Tommy's business cards,” he said. “He's so far up his ass that Tommy burps Lithuanian zither music.”

  Eldad was just putting a stroke under Arty's A for Jose Flores Suarez when they heard a stutter step of high heels, an unexpected whoosh of silk, and a luxurious whiff of floral notes. The alderman of the 5th Ward stood just behind their booth, softly beaming the half-smile of an indulgent monarch.

  “Doing homework at the table, boys?”

  Eldad stood up in a scramble. “I was just leaving,” he said, as the alderman put her smooth bronze head alongside his cheek and mouthed a kiss next to his earring.

  “I just wanted to sit with my friend here for a few minutes,” she said in a husky voice. She seemed to glide over the slick cushions when she sat, without causing them to squeal. The room seemed to catch a breath. The coral bloom across her lips looked fresh and neat. Her suit jacket looked unruffled and rosy. She sat against the brown vinyl booth as if she were about to play Chopin. A small forelock of her fine, downy dark hair falling across her right brow was the one visible smidgen of a hint that Vera had been awakened for an emergency in the middle of the night.

  Sunny held up his hand before she could clear her throat.

  “I think you should know,” he told her, “that any napkin you use here is going to be framed behind the cash register.”