Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  “Don’t be an asshole. I’d find you.”

  The cabbie sighed with resignation, and Grip went in the front door. The place was half-empty, just a few college-aged heemies spread out among the tables. There was a tangible gloominess to the place, and Grip put it down to Linsky’s death. Grip saw the girl from the previous day, textbook open, drinking a coffee, wearing a white blouse and jeans. Now that he thought about it, everyone there was wearing something white. He walked over to her, sat opposite, his elbows on the table.

  “How are you this morning?”

  She looked at him without any particular expression. She looked exhausted, her eyes sunken and dull.

  “I was wondering if maybe you’d run into one of Ben Linsky’s roommates since we last talked.” He was trying to speak soothingly, but this wasn’t exactly a natural register for him.

  He watched her eyes switch quickly to a man sitting two tables to his left, then back to him, not sure if it was intentional or a reflex.

  “That’s one of them?”

  She hesitated. What was she thinking about? Whether to give away the kid at the other table? Did she think that she hadn’t tipped it with the glance? Or was she thrown off by Grip’s manner this morning, so polite after the previous day’s harsh intimidation? Grip gave her a moment to think.

  “That’s Norman Lane over there.” She nodded toward the kid. Grip turned to look at him, skinny, hair a little long, hanging down in his eyes. He was staring at a book on the table before him, but his eyes were still, as if he weren’t actually reading, just trying not to be noticed.

  Grip gave the girl a tired smile and walked over to Norman Lane’s table. He dropped his badge on the open book and took a seat. Lane looked at the badge without touching it, pursed his lips, looked up at Grip. Grip saw that the kid’s eyes were red, dark patches beneath, his shoulders sagging with exhaustion under a white fisherman’s sweater.

  “I already told you guys everything I’ve got.”

  “That right?”

  “Sure. Come on, man. I was in the station for fourteen hours. I’ve got nothing left.

  Grip smiled at him, watched him scan the room. Grip felt eyes on him; didn’t give a shit. “How about this? How about I tell you something that you didn’t tell the guys at the station? We can talk from there.”

  The kid said nothing, confused.

  “How about I tell you that you found a letter Ben Linsky wrote to the police, a letter that passed on gossip about you and your friends? How’s that?”

  Lane stared with eyes equally mystified and frightened. “Wait. You—”

  Grip spoke softly. “Don’t think about lying to me.”

  Lane shook his head, Grip thinking he was trying to buy some time, figure out what he wanted to say. Grip glanced over at the girl, who was watching them. She looked away immediately.

  “Okay, I found it.”

  Grip nodded.

  “But I—”

  “You gave it to somebody.”

  Lane was confused again, nodding. “Yes…”

  “That makes it easy.” Grip didn’t make Lane as a murderer. He didn’t think that murder had ever crossed this kid’s mind—not even in a situation like this. What would cross his mind would be to give the letter to someone else who might know what to do about it. “Who did you pass it off to?”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “Don’t know? Listen, this isn’t some buddy who stole something, maybe got friendly with the wrong girl, and you’re covering for him. This is a fucking murder. Someone’s going to take the juice for this.”

  “I know that,” Lane said petulantly.

  “So you know that you are very goddamn close to being an accessory. Keeping your mouth shut at the station. Jesus. Probably didn’t even have a lawyer.”

  The kid looked sheepish.

  Grip softened. “Listen, let me help you, try to keep you out of deeper shit. Tell me anything and everything you know about who you passed that note to. Okay?”

  Lane went pale. Grip kept a hard stare on him. The kid had been questioned for hours; he’d be exhausted, mentally spent. The place was silent while Lane thought, just the hiss of rain from outside.

  Lane leaned back in his chair, ran his hand through his hair, gave a quick glance at the girl who was now pretending to read her book. He turned his weary attention back to Grip. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But the thing is, he didn’t do anything to Ben. He was at Will Ebanks’s house that night. A bunch of people were.”

  “Okay, got it. You gave him the note, but he didn’t kill Linsky,” Grip said calmly, keeping his frustration under control. “Who did you give the note to?”

  “To a cat named Andy Macheda.”

  55

  LES FINCH DIDN’T HAVE A REFRIGERATOR, BUT HE KEPT HIS BEER COLD in the tank of his toilet. He asked Frings if he wanted any, and Frings said, “yeah,” not because he wanted the beer but because he wanted to make sure that Finch would drink one. Maybe it would slow him down, relax him a little. At any rate, it couldn’t hurt.

  To Frings’s relief, Finch took the two beer cans to his kitchen sink and rinsed them off, toweled them dry. He handed one to Frings.

  “The tank water’s clean,” he said, smiling without embarrassment. “I just figure it’s nice to rinse them off for guests.”

  Frings nodded, the guns on the wall back in his field of vision as Finch returned to the bed. “You were talking about …”

  “The study, sure. You ever been down in that basement?”

  Frings shook his head.

  “Down in the psych building, that’s where most of the study took place, but they’ve got a part of it sectioned off with a door, at least they used to. You ever done LSD?”

  Frings shook his head.

  “The thing with it is that a little bit really changes how you see things. Like you realize how much things aren’t set, their size, their color. Even time. It really changes how you look at things. But you take a lot and it’s as if the world, this world, isn’t even really there. You’re somewhere different, a world within our world or without our world or something. You see what exists that we usually can’t see ourselves. You feel things, things that are more real, you know, to yourself and to everything else. You don’t understand so much, but you can feel what’s there. You catching this?”

  “It’s a lot to take in,” Frings said.

  Finch nodded, this concession by Frings seeming to validate something for him. “Well, I don’t know what to say about this, because I don’t remember it mostly, and what I do, I don’t know, it’s not like the memories I usually have of things. You just can’t … it’s hard to explain.” Finch had finished his beer, but his eyes were still frantic, even as he sat almost motionless on the bed.

  “Plenty of people have tried to explain it,” Frings said, thinking of Ebanks. “Nobody seems to have found the right words.”

  Frings got a good look at Finch’s expression and saw relief—something more profound than simply being reassured during a conversation. Frings wondered about this guy, sitting in his apartment with all of his guns, trying to make sense of an experience without success. Maybe Frings had even given him some peace of mind—no one seemed to be able to make sense of all of it.

  “Yeah,” Finch said.

  “So, what can you tell me,” Frings asked, quietly.

  Finch shook his head. “It mostly happened in this one room, the room with the light. They brought me in there, I was all alone, the drug really working on me, and they had a really bright light pointed right at me and it’s too bright, painful. I couldn’t see past it, I remember, and I knew there were people on the other side, but I don’t, didn’t know who they were, what they wanted.” He was talking even faster now, hands fidgeting in his lap like he was trying to get something off of them. “There was a guy, though, who spoke from the other side of the light and this is part of what I don’t remember exactly except to tell you that he seemed to know me. And he just took me apart.
” Finch stood up and walked to the window, looking down on the street. It was still raining. Finch tapped his finger rapidly against the window pane.

  “He asked me questions—don’t ask me what, I don’t remember, or, I don’t know, maybe I’m making myself forget—and I’d answer as best I could, but it’s so hard to concentrate on those things when you’ve taken that much, and then you hear the question and you have to figure out what it is that you’re being asked, and what might be an answer and then what is your answer, the one you want to give. See? And the whole time the light’s just blazing—it’s so bright that even if you close your eyes it’s still there, and you know that there are people behind the light and you don’t know … what they want. So I’d answer, or I’d think I answered, and he’d just destroy me, not just what I said, but the whole reason why I came up with that answer, the things I thought about the world, I guess, and how things work. And I don’t know how to explain this to you, but when you’re on the drug, it’s got more impact than you’d think. It undermines you, man. It undermines the most important things you believe, and there’s nothing you can do to get perspective. Does this make sense to you? Do you understand?”

  Frings nodded, leaning forward in his chair, his mind humming with intensity. “What was the point? Why were they doing this?”

  Finch crossed the room to the door, put his ear against it, holding up one finger for a moment of quiet. Satisfied there was nothing to hear, he said, “I don’t know. I think about this all the time. All the time. But what could it be? What could be the reason for subjecting someone to that kind of hell?”

  They sat in silence, Frings giving Finch a moment to compose himself. He was again acutely aware of the guns.

  “Did you finish at the Tech? Did you graduate?”

  Finch laughed brightly, jarringly. “I failed every class that semester and dropped out. Did you hear what I was just telling you? You don’t recover from something like that. You don’t come back to where you were, living the life you always had. It makes you realize you don’t know anything, don’t even know how to think about things. How do you continue?”

  Frings thought about Conroy’s list: suicides, failures. “Did you know Sol Elia?”

  “Sure. He was part of the study, too.”

  “Did you ever talk with anybody else who was part of the study? You know, compare notes or something like that?”

  Finch rubbed his eyes, his posture slumping. “No, Mr. Frings. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to forget—still want to forget. The only thing that keeps me together is thinking that maybe I’m remembering this wrong, that this is some trick my mind is playing on me. If someone confirmed to me what happened, I … I don’t know what I’d do.”

  • • •

  FROM Alienation and the Modern City by Francis Frings (1958)

  Among the insidious consequences of a “major business zone”—or Capital Zone, as it is marketed in the New City Project literature—is how it creates an impossible situation that arises for the types of businesses necessary to serve the needs of the “major businesses.” The problems inherent to this arrangement are numerous, and the distance between services and clients, the advantages of large service corporations over small service businesses, and many other, similar, topics will be addressed later. But before we examine those in-depth, let’s take a look at an example that provides at once a simple and wide-ranging picture of this type of situation.

  The economics of restaurants necessitates 1. the ability to serve at least two meals and to have a constant minimal number of patrons during the course of business hours. These factors are a consequence of a constraint—that of square footage on occupancy—and on a desired goal—maximizing the number of meals served per day by having people come and go at a rate that varies but whose peaks are not undermined by economically catastrophic valleys.

  Now let’s look at the situation for restaurant owners and, by definition, the working-class people who are employed by these owners. In the “major business zone,” corporate workers show up to work in the morning, generally after having breakfast in their sub-urban home, and leave the office in the evening to have dinner at their home, as well. The vast, vast majority of meals consumed at restaurants by these corporate workers are lunches. Hypothetically, we would expect the distribution of meals purchased to be something like 10 percent breakfasts, 85 percent lunches, and 5 percent dinners. A graph of this distribution would look something like a bell curve with small curls at each end.

  It is apparent that the vast majority of restaurants would be required to make nearly all their sales during the lunch hour, which is largely the same among corporations, leading to a “customer surge” between 11:30 and 1:00 and then near silence during the hours outside of this time. Survival for restaurants in this environment requires employing a large number of people for a small number of hours each day to service this “customer surge.” The service workers, then, who are paid hourly, are left working 3–4 hour days during the week. The weekend would, of course, constitute another dead time for these restaurants.

  Now think about the effect of, say, six theaters in the district. These theaters, with their evening-oriented shows, would provide the restaurants with a dinner clientele and even an after-show drinks crowd. Suddenly, restaurants that competed for the tiny 5 percent of dinner business would have an entirely new population to serve and at a time when the corporate workers were not potential customers. More restaurants would be able to survive. Restaurant workers would work through two meals and thus enough hours to earn enough for a dignified existence. Additionally, the theaters would drive both lunch and dinner crowds on the weekend, providing still further opportunities for service workers.

  This is, of course, a simplified model, but consider the effect of multiple-use zones on the fates of restaurant employees and extrapolate that to low-wage service employees in all manner of industries and you will see why a single-use “major business zone” is inherently anti-worker.

  56

  A CRIME REPORTER AT THE NEWS-GAZETTE GAVE FRINGS THE ADDRESS for Crippen’s, along with a funny look.

  “It’s hard to think of a guy and a bar more badly matched.”

  Frings had smiled, said he’d heard great things about the women there, which had cracked up the reporter.

  Now, stepping into the bar, Frings felt the nervous energy. The place was as grim as he’d imagined, but smaller and lit well enough to see the filthy floor, the stained walls. As it was, the customers were nearly as dingy as the room, mostly older ginks—crew cuts and work shirts, fading tattoos, angry eyes. Frings felt those eyes on him as he moved slowly between the tables, his cane tapping on the linoleum floor. From the back room, a storm of static obscured the tinny voice of some radio host on a diatribe that Frings couldn’t make out.

  A waiter brushed past Frings from behind, and Frings caught his attention. “Ed Wayne here?”

  The waiter, another old gink, looked at Frings with something like contempt, and Frings realized that he’d probably been recognized.

  “Ed Wayne,” he repeated.

  The old waiter kept his eyes on Frings, nodded at a corner table. Frings saw specks of white spit in the corners of the man’s mouth.

  Two men sat at the corner table: a small guy, fit, sitting military-straight, and an odd-looking guy, pale skin, a head that seemed to seep into his body, no neck or chin of note. He wore a terrible wig, red hair that didn’t fit at all well on his head, almost comically askew. Frings walked over to the table, the guy with the wig watching him through slitted eyes. At the table he realized, to his unease, that this odd man with the wig was Ed Wayne—something about his eyes or maybe his posture. When had Frings last seen him? Ten years ago? A dozen? Before he’d been kicked off the Force. What the hell had happened to him since then? They’d been on opposite sides of a dispute over a Negro community almost fifteen years ago. Frings had worked to help save it; Wayne had wanted to burn it to the ground.


  “Ed Wayne.”

  “You aren’t welcome to sit here.” Wayne was leaning back in his chair, a half-grin on his face. His friend, the little guy, was trying, unsuccessfully, to bore a hole through Frings with his stare.

  “I’m not here to chat, Ed. I’m looking for Torsten Grip.”

  Wayne barked a phlegmy laugh. “You and everybody else.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Wayne didn’t answer, just fixed him with a smug grin.

  “Tell you what, Ed. I’m going to leave a card with you. You run into Grip, you give it to him. He’s better off seeing me before he sees anyone else.” Frings tossed a card on the table.

  Wayne kept his eyes on Frings. “Why don’t you get the fuck on out of here while I’ve still got my pleasant demeanor.”

  Frings frowned. “I’d love to catch up, Ed, but my knitting circle’s about to start. Give that card to Grip if you see him.”

  Wayne finally looked down at the card. While Frings watched, Wayne picked the card up, put it in the breast pocket of his shirt. “Satisfied?” Wayne turned his head, hacked, and spit a thumb-sized ball of phlegm onto the floor.

  57

  THE SECURITY GUYS AT THE IDAHO AVENUE SITE WERE ALBANIANS, THREE of whom didn’t seem to have any English at all, while the fourth had enough to act as a translator, though an improbably incompetent one. Insua, the foreman, was back tonight after going home for dinner, and his presence vouched for Dorman as far as the Albanians were concerned. As for the people who would come later, they’d been told that Dorman would be here. He wanted to be sure there were no surprises. Things would be complicated enough without them.

  It was well below freezing. Dorman held a steaming cup of coffee with both hands as he and Insua waited in tense silence.

  Dorman heard a honk at the gate, and the security guards hustled over to open the padlock, pull off the chain. A white panel truck pulled onto the site, stopped by a storage container. Two men got out of the cab, the first talking to the English-speaking Albanian, the second walking over to Dorman and Insua.