Even forty miles out, Ogden is not a beautiful street. Every town along its route had decided this was the place for car dealerships, for fast-food joints, for gas stations and junkyards. Once the street crosses the city limits, it goes from tacky to grim, finishing its life near the Cabrini Green housing project. A number of Cabrini’s towers have been torn down as the Gold Coast oozes west, but those that remain, with their broken windows and bullet-pocked playgrounds, still present an ominous face to the city.
As we drove in, a fair amount of traffic already filled the road-early commuters pulling into the endless strip malls for the day’s first coffee, people coming off the night shift stopping for a burger. At one point I dozed off again at a traffic light. The hydraulic honk from the truck behind me scared me awake-I thought I’d heard another shot, I thought we were surrounded. The adrenaline from that kept me alert for the rest of the route.
The Jaguar engine was quiet as a feather dropping on a leaf, and the power inside made me itch to swoop in and out of lanes, or go sixty on roads posted for forty. On an impulse, waiting for a light at Austin, just before crossing the border into Chicago, I called Murray Ryerson on my cell phone. He was grumpy about being woken up, but became alert, even aggressive, when I told him I’d met sheriff’s deputies out at Larchmont.
“They were going nuts, thinking they had some Arab terrorist in their sights. They shot someone. I didn’t feel like hanging around-they were being mean to me-but I have a queasy feeling about the shooting.”
“What about killing a terrorist makes you queasy?” he demanded.
“I don’t think that’s who they shot. I think they may have hit a member of the Bayard family. Perhaps even Calvin Bayard’s granddaughter. And if that’s the case, they will try to keep it very, very quiet.”
“You actually see the body? Is that the basis of your feeling?” Murray was truculent-he’s known me too many years.
“I was there in the early evening, looking for clues about Marcus Whitby in the Larchmont mansion pond. I found his pocket organizer, by the way” That seemed like an unconnected time and place to where I was now. “Anyway, two of the Bayards came by then, and from their conversation I had a feeling they might be back. That’s all.”
“That’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Tell me about Whitby’s gizmo. Was there anything suggestive in it?”
“Yeah-four days of pond scum. I’m taking it to a forensic lab so they can dry it out and take it apart.”
Another honk goosed me into remembering I was driving. I hung up hastily on Murray’s indignant squawk. I turned off my phone-if Murray wanted to call back, the ringer would wake Benjamin. Besides, I didn’t want to tell Murray anything else right now: I just wanted to make sure Lieutenant Schorr couldn’t sit on it if he’d shot Catherine.
At Western Avenue, Ogden turns northeast, angling past the juvenile detention center. “You are not going there, my friend, if I can help it,” I said to the sleeping boy. He muttered something guttural, probably in Arabic, and shifted in his seat.
I turned north onto Western and drove four miles through the drab hindquarters of the city’s industrial zone. The lights from factories and trucks made it hard to tell whether the night sky was starting to lighten; the air was gray and gritty both day and night around here.
We were also close to the criminal courts and Cook County jail, so there was a heavy squad car presence. I tried to keep my mind on the traffic, not on the possibility that someone might be looking for a borrowed Jaguar’s plates. I breathed easier when I’d moved out of the area.
At North Avenue, I was only two blocks from my office, but I turned west again, into Humboldt Park, where gentrification hasn’t yet touched the Hispanic neighborhoods. If someone was hunting me, they’d have my
office staked out, but I didn’t think anyone would look for me in a Mexican church. I parked on a small side street behind.
It was a job to rouse Benjamin, and a bigger job to make him come with me to a Christian church. “I know what priests doing with boys in church. I know they hurting boys, doing bad things with boys.”
“Not in this church,” I said, pulling him up the walk like a recalcitrant mule. “This is the one building in Chicago that I know where you can be warm, where you can get something to eat and where you can be safe. This priest is a boxer-” I let go of him long enough to mime boxing-“this priest has harbored fugitives. He will look out for you.”
“He will try to turn me from my believing, my-my-” he hunted for a word-“from the truth.”
“No. He won’t do that. He believes in his truth as much as you believe in yours, but he will not disrespect your belief. He doesn’t disrespect my beliefs, which are different again from both yours and his.”
“And Catterine, she cannot see me here, and how can I know she is not shotted? Shot?”