Start Shooting

by Charlie Newton

  The lunch rush starts like it’s supposed to. Our customers act like the well-heeled are supposed to. Brass from Furukawa Industries are in booth 1, accepting heartfelt thanks, basking in their save-the-city limelight. One billion dollars buys a lot of PC/PR in protectionist times. Should allow Americans across the land to wave Old Glory whenever we buy Furukawa’s made-in-America cars, or happily bank in Furukawa-controlled banks, or watch Furukawa flat-screen TVs. I don’t blame Furukawa. It works for McDonald’s. Selling obesity to schoolkids is okay as long as you also fund a clown and his rape crisis center.

  Everything’s rocking along like Friday should and: my cell phone rings with my agent’s ringtone. Shock. Panic. Sarah calls rarely, almost never—and never, ever, ever when prayed for. And this week I’ve prayed every hour I wasn’t waiting tables. I lit candles at St. Mary’s and watched the sun come up over her steeples.

  I flash on my ma’s Belfast crumble muffins and flip the phone open, pushing it between shoulder and ear and the strawberry blond hair the real me reinvigorates twice a month. I dread hearing the “Thank you for coming” or just “Sorry,” but I’m weak and blindly full of hope and acting is a soul addiction that kills you a lot of different ways. I’m already reaching under the hot lights for my order, telling the cheeseburgers and my agent: “Hi, Sarah!”

  Pause … endless seconds … the “Sorry” from my agent’s assistant about to begin my long dark descent into the well where Blanche DuBois and I will say goodbye to her life and my dreams. Both eyes close to hide the death from my friends and fellow aspirants, the reality that yet again, after all the investment and risk, the Shubert Theater Company doesn’t want Arleen Brennan as part of their family.

  Sarah says: “Grab something, Arleen … The river parted, you got the callback.”

  I drop both cheeseburgers—$12.00 each, medium rare, no tomatoes. “For Streetcar?” The stainless-steel counter saves the burgers and most of the hand-cut fries. My other hand rescues the phone. “Me? The Shubert wants me?”

  “Just spoke with the director. They’re down to two for Blanche, you and—”

  “Oh my God …”

  It’s almost too much … after two decades as Arleen the Also Appearing. Oh my God, the big time; lightning has struck. A hip bumps me sideways. Suzie has gently hip-checked me out of the way and grabs her order. “Sarah, this isn’t a joke, right? Don’t do that, not after … For real, I’m half the callback?”

  “Yes and yes. Sunday, eleven AM at the theater. The director, producer, casting director, and Jude Law’s agent. You’ll read with Jude. I’ll have the pages sent by the restaurant.”

  Oh my God. Finally.

  Vivien Leigh was my age—way past her prime, they said—when she played Blanche DuBois. She showed ’em, won the Academy Award for best actress. Vivien was English, playing a Mississippi Southern belle. I’m Belfast–Four Corners–Irish; it’s perfect.

  “Sarah, don’t worry; I know all the parts by heart.” Oh my God … finally. “You’re sure it’s me?”

  She laughs. “I’m sure.”

  Happy feet! Float on air. Waitressing at Hugo’s is … brilliant. “Wait. Who’s the other actress?”

  “I’m sending the pages anyway. Worry about Tennessee Williams, not her.”

  “Is she big?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. Just that she’s flying in from L.A. tomorrow night.”

  “Sarah, I am Blanche DuBois. This is it. My turn. Has to be.”

  “I never promise clients, you know that, but no actress deserves this part more.”

  I deliver the cheeseburgers without touching the floor and kiss both recipients. Tinker Bell has touched me; I can fly. The most glorious lunch rush in history begins to slow. My cheeks have more lipstick than my lips. Tommy, the manager, is showing me where my picture will go—

  A man steps into the bar window: Homicide Detective Ruben Vargas.

  No. No. Not now; not here. I crane into the window, wide-eye for the Pontiac that was in front of my bus this morning. Please, God, no Koreans; they can’t ever know my real name, where I work—The window fills. Two stunning models from Elite take turns kissing Ruben’s cheek. He gently pats their bare shoulders, shakes their agent’s hand, and sans partner, Ruben Vargas steps in off Rush Street. No square-faced Korean mafia gangsters follow.

  My heart starts beating again. Ruben winks at Charlene, our fresh-faced maître d’ assistant. She beams, hugs him with both arms, cranes for me on the floor, then the bar, and jubilantly waves me over like Ruben brought us the fall line from Prada.

  Charlene’s lost what limited poise she’s acquired at Northwestern because whether you’re a college girl, café society, or made gangster, Ruben Vargas is a street legend in Chicago. The man, don’cha know. Five foot seven, same as me, forty pounds heavier, all of it sinewy muscle, but tailored into a mint-green linen blazer and expensive jeans. His jet-black hair is cut perfect and combed straight back. A hint of cologne on smooth cocoa skin. The only mar is a razor-thin scar from mouth to ear. A fine doorway full of man, the Dublin girls would say.

  I knew who Ruben was when I was little. He was grown and we never spoke. Ten months ago we were reintroduced at a theater party. An actress there described him as “coarse brown sugar.” I didn’t take the sample I was offered, but she had, and licked her lips when she said it.

  My mistake, one of many, was dealing with Ruben with his clothes on. When I get to Ruben he smiles and turns us away from Charlene. “Lose your phone?”

  “No, I—”

  “We gotta get set up, baby.” Ruben scans Hugo’s patrons. “Finish that thing for me like you promised.”

  “Ruben, I can’t, I have to prep. I made the callback for Streetcar. Sunday; can you believe it! The lead opposite Jude Law.”

  Ruben lingers on the Furukawa table and their corporate glow, then cuts back to me, grinning like a proud papa. “No need to thank me for openin’ their eyes. Congratulations.”

  “Finally. I’m so—”

  “So we gotta get this done tonight or you’re missing Sunday.”

  Blink. Half the brilliant sunlight fades. “What?”

  “You heard me. And no more losing your phone.”

  My back straightens. “In some other life, I’m missing my callback.”

  Ruben squares up. “Princesa, you forgettin’ your responsibilities? What the fuck we’re into?”

  “Not we, Ruben. You. I’m an actress.”

  “I delivered your audition. Remember? And now you got the callback. And these are bad men who we gotta stop, whether you still believe it or not.”

  Ruben hooked me up with an impossible-to-get final-round audition for Streetcar. In exchange, I’d participate in a police sting operation. CPD needed a serious actress who’d accept serious risk for a good cause, a cause he knew would hook me, one I have very personal reasons to champion anyway. I got the audition. And the “bad men” are every ounce of that. But everything else Ruben fed me was a lie.

  “Actress or waitress, what you are, princesa, is in too deep to be doing anything but what I say until we straighten this problem out.”

  The fading sunlight dies to dark; Tinker Bell flies away, replaced by years of aprons and promises and dreams that always seem to slip out of reach. I lean in at a dangerous cop who knows too much about me, about mistakes I’ve made—his mistakes in his sting, not CPD’s—mistakes he and his crooked cop partner, Robbie Steffen, have set up to be mine if things go bad. And they have. The smart response, the survival response is shut up, say nothing.

  But not today. Today I got the callback; today my sister and I are the winners. Coleen and I stare straight at Ruben’s eyes. “Whatever you and Steffen are really into with the Koreans came this close to getting Robbie killed.” My finger and thumb pinch together. “I don’t know why you picked me for this disaster, but I signed up on a lie and I’m not dying for it. So fuck you, Ruben. And fuck Robbie Steffen. And fuck your psycho problems in Koreatown. How’s that
?”

  Detective Ruben Vargas eases a toothpick into a smile that can mean anything from good wishes to cemetery. “Hope it plays in Koreatown, ’cause we both know they’ll kill you if it don’t. And we both know you’re goin’ back.”

  Some urban nightmares begin as graffiti on a dirty brick wall. Was 13-year-old Coleen Brennan’s murder a reprisal for racist policing? Or was she raped to death as part of a gang initiation, an act so calculatedly savage that we refuse to believe it possible in our city? Maybe. Or was Coleen’s murder the early work of a growing young sociopath, another Gacy or Speck, watching and waiting in the tenements where life and death are cheap and plentiful?

  —“MONSTER,” by Tracy Moens; © 2011 Chicago Herald

  OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS

  FRIDAY, 3:00 PM

  Foghorns boom across the Laflin Maritime work yard.

  Three nervous gang cops stare at me in the diesel-fouled air. Behind us and the four-story stacks of dented containers, Chicago’s Sanitary and Ship Canal feeds the city her raw materials, the berthing docks loud with the shriek of barge cranes and stevedore shouts. Noise is good. Noise is cover from on the record.

  Put cops under, or near, the spotlight of a big-city newspaper fighting to stay in circulation, and to a man, we’ll all be nervous. Every cop has sins, some greater than others. And every cop has bosses, some you can trust, some you can’t. Our boss was promoted to district commander three weeks ago while still up on the far North Side, arrived down here at midnight on the same night, and brought two non-sworn personnel with her. All we know about her is she has a law degree from Northwestern, rumored judicial aspirations, and very little street experience. Not the choice downtown would make to stop a gang war.

  Everyone in the 12th District who’s awake believes our new commander’s arrival is directly related to the $44.5 million federal lawsuit filed by Anton Dupree’s family for his “wrongful execution by the state of Illinois.” Those depositions begin in three days. Should one cop or several in this district need to burn to save the city money or embarrassment in the Olympic era, our new commander has no allegiances here, past or present. Shitty, but that’s how the job works. And we’ve been waiting to see how the city and the department play it.

  Then today’s Herald lands with the opening installment of “MONSTER,” naming police officers Ruben and Bobby Vargas as complicit in the murder that killed Coleen Brennan, executed the aforementioned Anton Dupree, and could cost the city $44.5 million.

  Me and half of Gang Team 1269 are standing on this oily gravel because we don’t believe the timing of the exposé and depositions is coincidental, and that means the plaintiff’s lawyers and the tabloid are working together. Worse, we believe the department and our new commander knew the Herald’s exposé was coming. So as of today, we know how the department’s gonna play it.

  Should the other installments of the Herald’s exposé “deliver” on part one’s promise, the city will settle with the Duprees out of court and the Vargas brothers are gone. Period, end of story. Then every cop Ruben and I have worked with will be thrown under the lights, then the bus if the investigation shows they’ve scuffed their shoes once or twice during their careers.

  And that includes three-hundred-pound Walter “Jewboy” Mesrow, the gentlest giant ever to come out of Eastern European fairy tales. Walter removes a Texas Jewboys cap, wiping sweat with a leg-of-lamb forearm. His thick black hair remains in the shape of the cap and the wide-set eyes search mine for reassurance I wish I had.

  “Yeah, Walter.” I pat his size 56 vest and the neon cowboy shirt underneath. “Hasn’t been a good day.”

  Officer Mesrow is one of my “sins,” a work in progress, and always will be, not that we’d tell him that. He was nineteen when I met him, a big overripe Serbian immigrant kid surrounded by a gang of teenagers who’d spilled his four bags of groceries and punched him around a little. Walter was on his knees, blood on his lips, chasing oranges as my fellow Americans taunted him for his clothes and accent. Their girls laughed. I took offense, earned one of my hundred and sixteen CR numbers, and Walter Mesrow, like Little Paul is now, became one of “Bobby’s projects.”

  Walter decided he wanted to become a cop. Had to take the test four times. Some have said that maybe I helped with his grade, then after he graduated had him ride with me as his training officer until he could survive on his own. And because of his repeated street mistakes, I took a gangster bullet, as did a bystander, then lied under oath to protect Walter’s job. Our sergeant, Buff Anderson, now watches over Walter. Like I said, all cops have sins.

  Walter’s sin is his weekly Kinky Friedman/Texas Jewboys karaoke habit (hence the nickname), a practice that I’ve sadly participated in more than once. All in all, as every guy on this team would tell you, Jewboy’s loopy grin is one of the day’s little victories. And in this job, little victories are all you get.

  His giant hand hikes a handful of brown Sansabelt pants, the other extends a rolled copy of today’s Herald at our sergeant’s chest. “Out of the sky, the paper decides Bobby’s a child molester? Three days before the Dupree depositions? Nope, not for this copper.”

  My name and child molester … of a beautiful girl who meant more to me than breathing. In a few days the Herald will likely print that I take off Coleen’s death day every year, that I’m the mystery man who leaves the flowers at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.

  Buff brushes the paper aside. He and my team won’t fold on me, but Buff is not a happy sergeant. “What the fuck, Vargas? Library books?”

  “I’m thirteen, for chrissake. I’m supposed to know library books make me a murder suspect? I’m still too young to buy cigarettes.”

  Buff looks away—thirty-two years on the job, balls like cantaloupes—then back, a move that says we’re good. “But still, you should’ve—”

  “Should’ve what? The Homicide dicks don’t ask me, why would I say something? I’m thirteen; they’re Irish, lynch-mob mad, hunting someone who murdered one of their teenage girls.”

  Jewboy’s giant arm loops my shoulder. Buff smoothes arctic white hair, piercing blue eyes leveled on mine. Buff has three children of his own, one with muscular dystrophy, and works a second job six days a week to pay her medical bills. “Shoulda said about the books.”

  “Books.” Jewboy stabs his rolled-up Herald into his heart and the body armor covering it. “Always got me, too. What’s your brother say?”

  “Ruben told Tracy Moens to fuck off six months back when the Duprees filed the lawsuit. I heard she braced him an hour ago at Area 4, wanted his reaction to ‘MONSTER’; had a cameraman and that ex-cop/investigator from Texas with her acting like he’s some kind of avenging angel.”

  My partner, Jason Cowin, rests one meaty forearm on his automatic, turning to movement in the containers while he speaks. “Ruben Vargas ain’t someone I’d accuse in person of anything this ugly. Even IAD would’ve called first.”

  Buff frowns. Then spits to his side. “IAD called you yet?”

  “Woke up this morning to: ‘Hello, Officer Vargas, you have an appointment with the Internal Affairs Division Monday morning at 0800.’ ”

  Jewboy’s hand mauls the Herald. “Nope. Still don’t see it. Three days before depositions and the newspaper has to call Bobby a child molester?”

  “Stop saying that, okay?”

  “Makes no sense, you’re not that Kennedy guy.”

  Buff squints, not following Jewboy’s logic. Nor am I.

  Jewboy shakes his head at stupid. “Kennedy’s cousin? Michael Skakel? The neighbor; he’s fifteen jacking off in the tree.” Jewboy uses his free hand to show us how.

  Jason turns back from the containers, laughing. “Can you imagine your alibi is you’re in a tree with your dick out? Fuck the Herald’s ex-cop from Texas; we get us Mark Fuhrman; he busted Skakel thirty years after the murder when no one else could, or would.” Jason adds gangsta. “ ’Cause Skakel a playah, he a Kennedy.”

  Jewboy blinks twice, then grins
big. “I got it. We’ll chip in, hire Fuhrman to Rodney King the Herald … and their goons.” He nods at Buff to agree, problem solved.

  Buff slowly rubs his temples. “Fuhrman worked O.J., not Rodney King.”

  “Fuckin’ Kennedys,” says Jason. “Bunch of no-drivin’ Chappaquiddick motherfuckers.” Jason sticks his chest out, throws me and Jewboy a Latin Kings sign. “Black and gold, never fold.”

  I don’t laugh. “Coleen Brennan was as nice as any person knows how to be and two shitheads took turns murdering her. Nothing, not a goddamn thing about that’s funny.”

  Jason and Buff lean back from my tone. Jason says, “Don’t go off on us, Bobby, gotta be the police … like in thirty minutes.” Three Crown Vics arrive in tandem followed by a red, beat-to-death Toyota. The cars park facing the container stacks and the river beyond. The car engines die. This is the rest of our team.

  For today’s first adventure we have ten instead of eight; Jewboy is back from vacation plus two new kids whose first day with us is today, chicks from uniform we heard about three days ago. Rumor has it, the mayor and his Olympians are prepping a version of LAPD’s Operation Hammer, when Chief Gates marshaled a thousand anti-gang cops into South Central and made 1,500 arrests in one weekend.

  Two girls get out of the second Crown Vic; the larger one is Hispanic and butched up a bit beyond what I’d recommend for making friends today. I haven’t met her, but her name is Officer Lopez. The other one is Officer Hahn, a five-foot-six blonde who I’ve heard hasn’t said boo since she arrived at 12 the day she was reassigned. She closes her door, leans the back pockets of her jeans against the front fender, and thumbs at her nails. Officer Hahn has bruises on her face that have been there awhile and color on her knuckles that matches—gotta be deep South Side; probably a cop father or brother or both. The T-shirt under her vest covers half her bicep and none of a taut, veined forearm.