by Dorien Grey
There was a slight pause, then Brad said, “Interesting! We’ll look into it. Thanks.”
“If you hear anything else, will you let me know?”
“Sure,” Brad said, then, “Here, hold on a second. Cessy wants to talk to you.”
And for the next ten minutes he underwent a cross-examination on everything that had happened in the building that day, why he hadn’t told her about it when he’d called, the state of his health, and everything he’d been doing since they last talked. She asked yet again if he was sure taking care of Bozo for the upcoming two weeks wouldn’t be an imposition, and he reassured her yet again that it would not. It was, as usual, only the immediacy of her getting dinner on the table that finally ended the conversation.
After hanging up, he went into the kitchen to make himself a drink and to put a frozen pizza into the oven. Returning to the den, he deliberately turned his mind off and flipped on the TV. The evening passed.
He made a point of watching the local ten o’clock news; as he expected, there was a segment, complete with reporter standing in front of the building, about the discovery of “human remains” behind a false wall in the basement, and a bit of speculation that it may have been a mobster from Chicago’s gangster days of the twenties and thirties.
When he first went to bed, Elliott attempted yet again to “tune” his mind in to John, with the usual totally negative results, and at last he just stopped trying and drifted off.
It’s not me.
How can you be sure if you don’t know who you are?
I might not know who I am, but I know who I’m not. I’m not him.
That’s what I thought. Do you know who it is?
No.
But you knew he was there.
No.
Then what were you doing there?
I don’t know.
Elliott subconsciously fought off the rising static of incoming dreams.
What about the books?
I like the pictures.
You’ve said that. But all three books are by the same photographer.
I know. I can read.
Again, Elliott was aware of a sense of bemusement.
Sorry. What does that mean to you?
I don’t know.
Have you seen them before?
I don’t know. They’re…familiar.
The photos or the places?
The photos are the places.
What do you feel about them?
I told you. Like I’m not alone.
The static-filled dreams grew stronger.
And then Elliott was looking at the cover of Sand Petals, and the butterfly flew away.
* * *
He drove over to the Sheffield property early Tuesday morning. No police cars, plain or marked, were around, but as he entered the building he could see the tape still blocked the basement door. Though he had a key and could have let himself into the hallway, he rang Capetti’s bell.
“Yes?” a tinny-sounding voice asked from the small speaker set into the brass plate beside the buzzers.
“Mr. Capetti, it’s Elliott Smith. Can we talk a moment?”
The buzz of the lock being released corresponded with a “Sure” from the speaker. Elliott entered the hall and went to Capetti’s apartment. He was about to knock when the door opened.
“Come on in,” Capetti said, and Elliott stepped into a room filled with boxes of various sizes and in various stages of being packed. “Excuse the mess. The movers will be here day after tomorrow, and I’m nowhere near ready. And then to have this…” He paused, moving a large box from a chair to the floor, obviously distressed… “this…yesterday business!”
He motioned Elliott to the chair, then pushed another box aside on the couch to make room for himself to sit.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I wonder if you can tell me anything about the body in the basement.”
Capetti reared his head back as if in amazement. “Good lord, no! That wall’s always been there. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t the original wall. I told the police all that yesterday.”
“So that would mean the wall was put up sometime before…”
“I was born in twenty-nine,” Capetti said, “and as I say, as far as I know it’s always been there. Whoever put it up must have done it while the building was being built. My father bought it the minute it was finished.”
Elliott wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject without possibly insulting the older man, but he felt he had to know.
“The twenties were a pretty wild time for Chicago, what with Prohibition and all the gangland activity going on. I understand your father knew Vittorio Collina, who was involved with the Capone gang. Did your father have any…” he didn’t have a chance to finish his question before Capetti interrupted.
“Mob connections? Just because we’re Italian? That’s nonsense. My father came here from Sicily when he was a boy, and he worked like a dog to support his family. He was as honest as the day is long, and he never had so much as a parking ticket!”
“I’m sorry,” Elliott said. “I didn’t mean to imply that he might. I’d just heard that he and Collina had come over from Sicily together and were good friends.”
“My father knew Vittorio Collina, yes. I’ll wager that most Italian immigrants from that time knew or knew of someone involved in bootlegging. They weren’t proud of it, but it was a fact of life in Chicago. You can’t paint everyone with the same brush.”
“And I certainly didn’t intend to,” Elliott said. “It’s just that bodies don’t generally show up walled into basements. I’m sure your father had nothing to do with it, but since he knew someone like Vittorio Collina, perhaps…”
“I have no idea who the body is or how it got there. I’m positive my father didn’t know either.”
After an awkward pause, Elliott changed the subject to general questions about the building.
* * *
After leaving Capetti, he drove to the appliance warehouse to verify delivery dates on the new washers and driers. He could just as easily have called, but it gave him something to do other than worry over the fact that he was losing another full day of work.
Then, on his way home and on what he first assumed to be a whim but later questioned, he found himself detouring to Unabridged Books on Broadway to see if they might have any of G.J. Hill’s books. They had all three, and he bought them. Even as he did so, he had the very odd feeling that John was present but trying not to be. Elliott had the distinct impression that the fledgling spirit was getting better control of his wings.
Driving back to his condo with his purchases on the seat beside him, he found himself angry, though he wasn’t quite sure at whom. At himself, for increasingly becoming involved in something that could still very well be a creation of his own mind, or if there were truly such things as ghosts and spirits, at John for possibly trying to manipulate him.
This fight between his intuition that John was real and his logic that John was some sort of mental aberration resulting from his accident, had been going on ever since John first “appeared” in the hospital. The more convinced his conscious mind became that John was real, the more strongly his logical nature rebelled, protesting—well, logically—that he was becoming more seriously deluded and delusional.
As he was going from the garage to the elevator, his cell phone rang.
“Yes?” he said, after extricating it from the pouch on his belt.
“Elliott Smith?” a voice he did not recognize asked.
“Yes,” he verified.
“Mr. Smith, this is Sergeant Kreuger of the Chicago Police Department. I just wanted you to know we’ve finished our investigation of your building on Sheffield, and you’re free to resume your work.”
“Thank you,” Elliott said. “May I ask if they have identified the body?”
“Not yet,” Kreuger said. “He’s been in there a very long time. But we will.”
“Well
, thanks for calling,” Elliott said, and heard the click of the receiver at the other end of the line.
When he got to his apartment, he set the three books on the coffee table and, deliberately ignoring the growing sense of John’s anticipatory presence, called Sam, Arnie and Ted in turn and told them to come to work in the morning. He then went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, not allowing himself to even look at the books as he passed.
But even in the kitchen, he knew John was near the books with a certain feeling of impatience.
He poured his coffee and took his time adding the sugar, opening the refrigerator to take out the half and half, pouring and stirring, then replacing the half and half and closing the refrigerator door. By the time he was done, the impatience was almost palpable. But was it John’s, or his?
All right, all right! he thought in exasperation. He still refused to allow himself to speak to John aloud. That would be a concession to John’s existence that his logic, willpower, and concerns for his sanity would not let him make.
He took his coffee into the living room, picked up Sea Dreams and, specifically avoiding the couch, carried it to his favorite chair. He set his coffee cup on a coaster on the chair-side end table, and sat down. Instantly John was there, descending on him like a gigantic, down-filled quilt, the sense of his presence so all-encompassing Elliott couldn’t pinpoint his exact location.
He opened the book, carefully looking for anything that might indicate just who G.J. Hill might be. There was a brief, glowing introduction by another noted photographer, but it addressed the quality of the work without saying anything about the individual who had created it.
When he turned to the first photo, a naked child running along the edge of the waves, he experienced a vague feeling—a gentle surge and ebb of something he could not define, but it struck him as being not unlike a small wave lapping at the shore. This same sensation occurred each time he turned to the next picture.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on what there was about the photos that gave them their power—the lighting, the composition, the suggestion that each was part of a larger, mostly unrecognized story waiting to be told but suspended forever in time.
And exactly what, he asked himself, did all this have to do with John? How did it relate—how could it relate—to some poor guy dying in an emergency room, or to a body walled up in a basement for over half a century? There were the sensations and emotions he attributed to John, but where were the details of what they represented? If John was telling him, somehow, that these things were significant, how could he be incapable of conveying what they were significant of? Why, after all these…clues, if that’s what they were…didn’t John seem to be getting any closer to realizing his identity?
Elliott felt strongly that perhaps the books and the photos might be somehow relevant, but he could not comprehend how, or what the body behind the wall might have to do with anything.
Concluding that there was just too much going on in his head at the moment, when he reached the last photo of Sea Dreams, he closed the book and set it aside, resisting the temptation—whether his or John’s didn’t matter—to move immediately on to the next.
As he went through the “on autopilot” motions of making dinner, he was still mildly irked at himself over the degree to which John had intruded on his life and his own wavering between accepting John as real and getting on with helping him find out who he was, or picking up the phone and either calling his doctor to discuss checking him more closely for neurologic damage, or finding a good psychiatrist.
The evening passed uneventfully, with the usual phone call from Cessy and a call from Rick inviting him to go see a new movie they’d talked about. TV filled the rest of the time between dinner and bed.
I apologize.
For what?
For being such a bother.
Why did you pick me?
I didn’t. You were just there.
Are you the guy from the ER?
I don’t know. I can’t remember anything before I saw you lying in that bed.
Why are you so drawn to those photo books?
I told you. I like the pictures.
But why them?
I don’t know. Why not them?
You said they were familiar to you? Had you seen them before? Did you live around where they were taken?
I don’t know. They make me feel comfortable. And sad.
Do you know who G.J. Hill is?
Yes. His name is on the books.
So you know Hill is a man?
Yes, he’s a man. I’m not sure how I know, but I know.
Do you know him?
I don’t know.
Elliott felt a sense of profound frustration. How much of it was his and how much John’s he couldn’t tell. He suddenly and chillingly thought of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins.
Are you real?
Yes. Aren’t you?
* * *
The next several days Elliott poured himself totally into his work, concentrating entirely on what he could see and touch. He was aware of John frequently, but it was as if John were trying to keep out of his way, and Elliott appreciated it. Even at night, John remained largely silent, though Elliott still dreamt of mountains, and so could not delude himself into thinking that John had gone away.
The basement at the Sheffield building was largely finished. There was now no evidence of the knocked-down wall behind which the body had been found. The space was now occupied by a long table for folding clothes, flanked by two tiers of small lockable storage bins where each tenant could keep laundry supplies. The new washers and driers were waiting to be installed as soon as the laying of the new tile floor was finished. The wall between the laundry and furnace areas needed only painting and the hanging of the door. Work had begun on the storage-area half of the basement.
Details boring to most, but Elliott took from them the comfort of preoccupation.
He’d spoken to Brad a couple of times asking if anything had been found out about the body in the basement. Brad said he wasn’t aware of anything, other than that they had checked with Al Collina about what he might know of his father’s connection to the building. Aside from restating that his father and the elder Capetti had been friends, Collina claimed to know nothing at all, and with Vittorio Collina dead, there wasn’t too much they could do to prove otherwise.
As Elliott thought about it, he tended to believe that Al Collina may not have had any idea about the body being behind the wall. If he had, it’s unlikely he would have even mentioned his father’s association with the building. He could have just relied on the “profit” pitch to try to get Elliott to sell the building to him. He probably figured Elliott, being a “fag,” might buy into the “sentimental value” angle as a ploy, however weak and transparent.
Brad said forensics still had the body and had not yet made their final report, but that they had determined the victim to have been a Caucasian male about 5′7″ tall, approximately forty-five years old, and that he had died as the result of a gunshot wound at the back of the skull. The homicide squad was going back through records from 1926, when the building was built, through 1933, which was Capetti’s first recollection of being in the basement. He’d been adamant that it had never been altered since that time.
Capetti, as it turned out, still had records of everyone who had lived in the building since it opened, and while it wasn’t likely that the victim had been a resident, the police were going over the names of the tenants from those years for a possible lead.
Since it was not at all unusual, during Chicago’s gangster era, for mobsters to routinely disappear, even if Vittorio Collina had been involved in this particular murder, trying to put together the puzzle of exactly who the victim might have been would involve a lot of time. But again, after all these years, time was not a pressing issue and the identification had a rather low level of priority. But Brad was confident they would keep at it until they had the answer.
“Your John Doe from St. Joseph’s being a case in point,” he added.
“Speaking of him, is there anything at all new on him?” Elliott asked.
“Not that I’ve heard. And as I said before, the more time that goes by, the less likely we are to ever identify him. But there’s always hope.”
“You said they’d taken some post-mortem photos,” Elliott said.
“Yeah. As I told you, it’s standard procedure if the body is recognizable—they get the face, plus any tattoos, marks or scars. This particular John Doe didn’t have any distinguishing marks at all. I’ve just seen the head shot—it was circulated to all the detectives just in case someone might have run across him before in relation to a crime.”
Elliott realized Brad would undoubtedly share his own questions as to Elliott’s mental stability if he asked his next question, but he didn’t feel he had a choice.
“Could I see them? Just of this one John Doe, of course?” he asked.
There was a rather obvious pause on Brad’s end of the line before he asked, “Why would you want to do that?”
He did some fast mental tap dancing, then went with a lie he hoped might work. “Well, although I just got a quick glimpse of him in the ER, it’s occurred to me several times since that I might have recognized him from somewhere.”
“Why didn’t you mention this before?” Brad asked, logically.
“Because I wasn’t sure…still aren’t…but I’ve been thinking about it, and….”
Brad didn’t sound totally convinced when he said, “So nobody specific?”
“No, or I’d have mentioned it right away,” Elliott said, “but if I had seen him before, seeing his photo might tell me. I probably don’t know him, but it’s worth a shot.”
Another distinct pause. “Well, I suppose you’re right. I’m sure I can pull a copy, but it’ll probably have to wait until we get back from vacation.”
Elliott felt a wave of relief. “Any time you can will be fine. Thanks, Brad! I appreciate it.”
He had hoped that mentioning the photo might provoke some strong reaction from John, but other than the usual vague sense of his presence, there was nothing. The only thing Elliott could think of as to why there was no response was that John might not still fully acknowledge the fact that he was dead, and therefore was not relating to the idea of a photo of a dead body as being himself. But if he was the John Doe from the ER, then perhaps seeing his picture might not only confirm the fact, but as with some amnesia victims, bring back some degree of knowledge of who he was.
