Nine Fingers

by Thom August

  I turn and walk over to the band. There are three of them sitting on the front edge of the bandstand, a big furry bear of a guy, a tiny Asian female, and a sweaty Irish American male. The trumpet player, a tall African American male about thirty-two, is standing right in front of the window, his horn at the ready, snowflakes beginning to coat his short Afro. There is another guy off to the side of the bandstand, by some equipment over there, a wiry guy with dark hair and a beard. We take down names and addresses first. Then it is all the same questions, questions so standard I can recite them by heart.

  Their answers come across all snotty. Maybe they all watch too many cop shows on the TV. Maybe it’s what they call a distancing mechanism, a defensive thing. Then one of them chuckles. I can go with the black humor, trust me, but we are standing here and there is blood on the floor, and that deserves some respect. I give him a look. He shuts up.

  We go around and around and finally, the trumpet player jumps in, bypassing the other detectives and talking straight to me. Is it this obvious, that I am the one?

  “Officer, we’re all going to tell you the same thing. The man walked in here a few minutes before nine o’clock, as we were about to start the first set. He seemed to be a professional man of some sort, conservatively dressed. He had one drink at the bar, and sipped it very slowly. He listened to the first set very attentively. At nine forty-five, during the break, he came up and asked if he could sit in on piano, just one or two tunes. He said he used to play when he was in school in New York. He mentioned a couple of people in the business, not top rank but recognizable, and said that if we didn’t like his playing he’d sit his ass right back down. He looked like a very sober sort of guy. I checked with Vinnie,” he cocks his long neck toward the guy by the equipment, “and he agreed. He played fine on the first tune, so we let him play another. We had just started in on that, and were in the middle of the second chorus when there was this noise. Then there was glass and blood everywhere and he was dead. None of us knew him at all. I don’t think he had ever been here before. At least, not when we were here.”

  There are people who will tell you that this detecting thing is like filling in a puzzle. Don’t believe them. It’s not like that at all. With a puzzle, you already know what the picture is—it’s right on the box. So you work from the outside in, from the background to the foreground. With this, you have no idea what the picture is supposed to look like. And you start with the central figure, because he is dead, and you work your way outward, toward the context.

  Somebody tells you, “Hey, I saw the dead guy alive around eight forty-five, on the street out front, having a fight with another guy,” and you ask what the other guy looks like. Someone else says, “Hey, Roger Tremblay? I met him at the convention and he said some guy was threatening him,” and you ask about that. It’s not like you have a pattern and you have to find the pieces that bring it to life. It’s like you only have this one piece, and you try to find another piece that connects to it, then other pieces that connect to them. So you see if there’s another piece that leads you somewhere, and another one that fits that one, and it may cover one little corner of the picture and it may wander all across the frame, and it may go straight to the piece with a picture of the killer standing in the snow with a gun. (It happens, sometimes.) And you can’t just look at all the pieces and see what fits where, because the pieces aren’t there, you have to find them, one by one. All you can see is what you already know, and when you really look at it it’s not much, a few pieces here and there. And outside of that is everything you don’t know, and that’s most of it. Most of that you’ll never know—what the vic was like with his wife, whether he was good at his job, what he did on the weekends, what he did to get to sleep at night. Most of that is part of a larger puzzle anyway. So it’s like you’re crawling around in the dark, feeling for one or two pieces that can maybe connect you to one or two more, until all of a sudden one piece locks into place and a pattern emerges, and there you are.

  Or it never does, and you never know, and you file it away with the cold cases and you move on.

  And as I am thinking about this, another cop is doing it, and chimes in:“Detective, this lady says she thinks she saw someone outside walking past, staring in the window a few minutes before the shooting, headed…”

  I traffic-cop my hand to him, turn to her, lean in.

  “What did you see, ma’am? What did he look like?”

  The woman volunteering this information is tall but shy about it, like a lot of tall women are, hunching her shoulders forward, slumping down. I squat down to get to her level. They teach you to do this, to make it a peer thing, not an authority thing.

  Her eyes flick across mine. “It wasn’t a he, it was a she,” she says. “She looked like, like a…a bag lady.”

  And just like that, a piece clicks into place, maybe a big piece, maybe half a puzzle all by itself. I feel a sudden heat on the back of my neck, instant sweat in the hollows of my armpits, a tightening around the edge of my scalp. A bag lady?

  “Heading which way, ma’am?”

  She points.

  I turn, single out three uniforms who are busy taking up space. “Heading south,” I tell them. “Use caution—he’s armed. And don’t mess up the footprints.” They reach for their weapons and step gingerly outside, looking left and right.

  I turn back to the woman, squat down to her level. “A bag lady? Stocky build? Scarf on her head? Rolled-down stockings?” The woman nods to each of these, surprised, except the last one, saying “I couldn’t see her legs,” but can’t add anything else. “Does it mean anything?”

  “Did you get a look at…the face?”

  She lowers her head. Her hair is longish and a little matted, and it cascades in hanks over her eyes. I read that as a “No.”

  Two of the other detectives give each other a look, ask the room in general, “Did anyone else see this bag lady?” No one says anything.

  I look around the room, and the skinny guy is still squatting over in the corner. He has headphones on his head, and is staring at the floor. At all the electronic equipment.

  Equipment like a tape recorder.

  CHAPTER 4

  Vinnie Amatucci

  Inside the 1812 Club

  Thursday, January 9

  The cops herded us together and kept asking the same questions, over and over and over. We muttered and mumbled and said what we could. Paul ended up doing most of the talking; he’s good at that.

  A pack of cops broke off from the herd and tiptoed out. They left in a rush and came back at a crawl.

  I started to feel cold, the wind whipping in harder off the lake and whistling in the broken window. When the cop with the used face got around to me, I told him the basics: Vince Amatucci, I live in Hyde Park, I have a taxi license, I play piano with the band. I’m also sort of the manager; I book all the gigs and tape all the sets. I had my headphones on and was trying to get the balance right and had my head down. Didn’t see a thing. Did I tape the shot? I don’t know, I must have…

  I crab-walked over to the Uher, rewound, pressed PLAY, focused in. I heard it, a burst like a loud cough, then stopped, rewound the tape a few turns, held out the headphones. The guy with the long face, the detective in charge, slipped them on, looked at me, nodded. I hit PLAY. I could see him following it. With what must have been the gunshot he blinked.

  I touched REWIND, let it run a bit. I hit PLAY. After he blinked again, he said, “Rewind it one more time. No, don’t play it. Just stop there, right before the shot.”

  He leaned back and turned to one of the uniforms. “Bag this tape and give this man a receipt. Maybe the lab can turn something up. And maybe all we’ll find out is how good a piano player the vic really was.”

  I started to protest, but realized he was going to let me keep the Uher, when he could have taken the whole system. Besides, there was something in his eyes that I couldn’t identify, something lurking at the edges. I popped the tape out and held
it in my hand. A cop in a uniform came over with a plastic bag and opened it. I dropped the tape inside. He sealed it, took out a Sharpie, wrote something on it, then asked me for my name and address or a card so they could get it back to me. The detective with the sagging face said, “Already got it. It’s noted.”

  Then he took me by the elbow and wheeled me around to a small table. He motioned for me to sit. I did. He flipped open a notepad, steno size. “Mr. Amatucci, we’ve run your name on the computer—you’re clean, aside from some…‘vehicular incidents.’ ” He paused, his left eyebrow arched. “Can you think of anyone who would have a reason to shoot you?”

  “I hear you,” I said, “I’ve seen the movie—Truffaut, wasn’t it?” He stared at me. The guy wasn’t playing along at all; he was making me do all the work.

  “I can’t think of anybody. I’ve had some angry customers, sure, but murder? Assassination?”

  He looked at me. “Your choice of words…What makes you say ‘assassination’?”

  I turned around, stared at Roger Something. I turned back to the cop. “Look at him.”

  He did, and soon turned back toward me. He was wearing an expression I couldn’t read, either that he was impatient to get on with it, or that he had all the time in the world. It was like he was excited, and also bored. And it wasn’t like two opposite expressions flickering back and forth, but more like wearing both on his face at once.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he said. The other cops were wrapping it up as well. He stood up and slowly pushed his chair back in.

  Louie, who manages the club, didn’t seem to know what to do, and kept looking at the cops, trying to make eye contact with one of them. The tall cop saw him and stepped over.

  “Looks like you’d better call it a night. You got insurance, right? I was you, I’d get some plywood and some nails and at least close it up temporarily until you can get a glazier in in the morning. Doubt you can reach one this time of night.”

  “A…a…glacier?” Louie knows how to pour a decent drink and how to count the house, but he’s not exactly Mensa material.

  “A glazier, a glass guy. There’s a place down off Sixteenth Street if you need a reference.”

  “No, I got the number of the guy who installed it last time. I can call them.”

  “Don’t leave anything in the register or behind the bar. This is a safe neighborhood, but…” The guy wasn’t looking at Louie; his eyes seemed to be scanning the long rows of bottles behind the bar, almost as if he were cataloging them.

  “I’ll stay here myself tonight,” Louie said. “I got protection.” He nodded toward the bar.

  “That’s nice for you,” the cop said. “You have a permit to go along with it?”

  Louie raised his eyebrows, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out a wallet the size of a campaign chest, brimming with layers of mysterious papers and cards of many colors. He located a particular piece of detritus, pulled it out, smoothed it flat against his considerable stomach, handed it over.

  The cop looked at it. Louie reached out his hand, but the cop pulled it back a bit. “This expires next week. You’ll want to get that taken care of while you’re getting the window fixed.”

  “Sure, officer. Right away.”

  The cop handed him the permit. Louie stuffed it back into the wallet, and somehow managed to wedge it back into his hip pocket. When he looked up, the cop was holding out his card, so Louie went through the whole routine again to feed it back into the jaws of all that chaos.

  And then, just like that, it was over. People were starting to straggle out, hanging on to each other. Some were quiet, others had gotten all excited and were jabbering away.

  I looked at my watch. Shit. Almost 10:30. I was supposed to take an eleven-to-seven shift in the Fat Man’s cab and I was going to have to hustle to get there in time to pick it up, especially in this weather. The Fat Man hated anybody being late, and some guy getting shot wasn’t going to get me a hall pass, especially since it wasn’t me who got shot. I closed up the sound system, packed it under my arm, nodded at the guys, told Paul “Duty calls,” and booked out to my car. The snow was starting to get serious, coming down sideways in big fat flakes.

  Not your average night.

  After fishtailing down Lincoln and sliding down Michigan I got to the cabstand at 10:58. I gathered up all my stuff, locked up my car, walked over to the cab, found the clicker for the cab, flicked the doors open, started her up, got behind the wheel, wipered off the snow, and eased into traffic, heading back downtown. I didn’t get two blocks when some guy flagged me over, hopped in, said “Airport,” and we were off.

  Great, I thought. O’Hare Airport, land of the fifty-dollar fare.

  “Midway Airport,” he said.

  Shit, I thought, Midway Airport, land of the long and pointless wait.

  First it’s one thing, and then it’s another.

  CHAPTER 5

  Vinnie Amatucci

  Waiting at Midway

  Thursday, January 9 / Friday, January 10

  I was drifting through the vastness of space, slowly spinning in a weightless void. I could tell it was a dream—there was a languor in my limbs and a rattle to my breathing—but I just stayed quiet, watching it flow through me. There was no joy, no sadness, no feeling at all, just a smooth alpha state, bathing me in warmth, as I slowly sidestroked through the emptiness of deepest darkest space, my head back, my neck loose, letting it all flow in. But in my dream, space was reversed: the black vastness was a dull white, the stars, random dots of burnished black. My breath came deep and slow. The cold silence embraced me.

  Then there was a honk. A honk? In the middle of the vastness of space? I jerked awake.

  I tried to focus my eyes—the white space and black stars came clear to me: I was sitting in cab number 691, staring at the ceiling—little black holes in white leatherette.

  The honking seemed to be coming from behind me. I looked around; the windows were an opaque white. I leaned forward and tapped the wipers. The cab was covered with snow, but as the windshield cleared, I saw I was in the cab lot at Midway Airport, and the cabdriver behind me was trying to get me to move up. I had fallen half asleep, zoned out.

  And I was cold. Freezing fucking cold.

  I cranked up the engine and set the heat to Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. I reached down below the right-hand seat on the front, pushed aside the detritus that had collected there and found the scraper—gotcha! I popped open the door and got hit with a gust in my face.

  I hauled out and started scraping the windows. There were about six empty spaces ahead of me, and the line in front of that was only four or five rows from the front.

  The way the cabstands work in Chicago—both Midway and O’Hare—is that you drop off your incoming passenger at departures, circle around, and enter the cab lot. Each lot is eight to ten columns wide, ten to thirty rows deep (O—Hare’s is bigger by far, for obvious reasons). You pick a column (I’ve always been a Bernoulli’s theorem kind of guy; I head for the edges), pull up, and wait. A row at a time gets called up to the terminal, in single file, and as you pull out you get a ticket from the cabstand master, which he or she time-stamps. This is so cabbies don’t “poach,” drive in off the street and cut in line, which—I’m shocked, shocked!—has been known to happen. At the airports, in a rare exhibition of egalitarianism, you have to wait your turn. Once you get to whatever terminal has called you up, you pull up at the curb and wait in line again. Eventually, the starter whistles up a handful of cabs at a time, until it’s your turn. You get no choice in passengers, they get no choice in drivers. Finally, the fare gets in, tells you the address, the starter takes your ticket, and you’re on your way.

  The cab business in this town lives on trips to the airport. Ninety percent of the time it’s O’Hare, and that can run thirty-five to sixty-five bucks, not counting the ever-important tip, depending on the traffic and the weather and the time of day. Any gratuity less than a ten is egregious pe
nury. It can also take from thirty minutes to an hour and a half to get out there, depending again on traffic and weather and the time of day, so when you do get out there, it usually makes sense to get a fare back. Double your money, double your fun. One of my optimal flow patterns for the day starts with a fare to O’Hare, and then a quick fare back downtown, starting the day by tucking a C-note’s worth of confidence into my pocket before breakfast.

  The catch is that there are times when you can wait for an hour or three to get a fare back to town. This is true of O’Hare, which is huge, and also of Midway, which is slow. In the summer you’ll bake, in the winter you’ll freeze. So it’s a gamble—you get there, appraise the situation, and make your bet. Should I stay? Should I deadhead back to town? The weather, the flight schedules, the other cabs in front of you all get factored in.

  They do have a great feature here they don’t have everywhere, which changes the equation significantly: a short-trip ticket. Say you’re at O’Hare and you wait for two hours and get some joker going to DesPlaines, five minutes away. Shit! That’s a five-dollar fare, instead of the real money you’d be getting to go downtown. Get two or three of those in a row and you’re losing your ass. So they have an irregular radius drawn on a map. Any address inside that radius and you get a short-trip ticket. It’s time-stamped, and if you can get to where you’re going and zip back to the lot in thirty minutes, you get to go to the head of the line. Before they had this, cabbies would refuse fares and would get into fights: “You go to fucking Downer’s Grove. I’ve been waiting here all goddamn day.”

  To me, a short trip is actually a good deal. I look forward to them. Plus, at the edges of the radius, it can be a challenge. Keeps it interesting.

  I had finished giving the windows a wipe, and jumped back inside to recalibrate myself.

  My first fare after the shooting, at eleven, the guy got in and said, “Midway Airport.” At night. In the snow. Great.

  With him snoozing in the back and me fighting the snow in the front, we slid down the Eisenhower past the pluming smokestacks out to Cermak Road, then waddled south about fifteen blocks, from the high Fifties to the low Forties. It’s desolate out here, semi-industrial all the way out, and near the airport it’s strip malls with check cashing on every other block, which ought to give you a hint. This airport used to be close to dead, but then they revived it, because O’Hare was growing to roughly the size of Mesopotamia, and nowhere else wanted to give up their tacky suburban homes for a new runway. But bringing Midway back did not bring the neighborhood back. The middle-class folks getting ready to move out of the heart of the city hopped right over the West Side and out to the new suburbs around I-294. And Midway was left just about as it had always been, except for more traffic and more noise.