“I did. All want to be your clients?”
“Probably,” I said. “I figure their sons are missing, and they want me to find them. Never thought there’d be so many.” I shook my head, remembering that first conversation with Schmitty about it being common for kids from the Northside to just disappear. As an aside I said, “They probably can’t pay me anything.”
A sadness came through me, and sadness seemed to wash over Emma, too. She went someplace far away in her mind, perhaps remembering all the people in her country who were “lost” during the years of civil war.
Then she came back to the present. Her face hardened. “What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe just get rid of them?”
Emma shook her head. “Disrespectful to get rid of them without even a short talk.” She looked me up and down, assessing. “Especially when you are running for Congress.” She looked around the coffee shop. “And you cannot hide all day like a little rabbit, either.”
“Hiding actually seems like a pretty good option.” I smiled, but she didn’t smile back. Maybe passive-aggressiveness wasn’t as valued in Bosnia as it was in the Midwest.
She folded her arms across her chest. “Do you have a computer?”
I nodded.
“Just give me your office key. I’ll handle them.” She held out her hand for the key.
I reached into my pocket, found my key ring, and removed my office key. “What are you going to do?”
“Do you care?” Emma took the key, turned, and started walking toward the door without waiting for my answer.
As Emma left the shop, she stopped at the door and turned back to look at me. “You pay twenty dollars per hour, cash, every week. That’s the deal.”
Emma was somebody I couldn’t afford, but I’d figure that out later. Maybe I’d do an advance on a credit card or something.
With her taking over the office, I got in my car for some privacy and called Schmitty.
When he answered, I asked, “Is there a reason that you’re sending these people to me? Punishment? Revenge? Spite?”
Schmitty laughed. “I’m not sending anybody to you. Heard you’ve got a crowd, though. They want you. I’d have thought you’d be happy.”
“Why would I be happy to have a bunch of people who don’t have any legal claims? They don’t even have money to pay me to tell them that there’s nothing that I can do.”
“Politics, my friend.” He waited a beat. “This is great press for you and your campaign.” Schmitty had obviously read the article about me and my purported intention to carry on my father’s legacy in DC. I thought about who could be the unnamed source. I didn’t think it was Buster, since he now worked for Lincoln, which really only left my father. Even though he said that he’d give me time, the old man knew how to pull the levers.
Schmitty continued. “Got it on good authority that there’s going to be another front-page story in tomorrow’s newspaper about you. Profile piece. Big picture of that line of people standing outside your door right now. A headline, something like, JUSTIN GLASS: FINDER OF LOST BOYS.”
“Schmitty,” I said, “I don’t have any intention of running for Congress.”
“That’s what they all say.” Schmitty laughed. “I note, my friend, that you did not unequivocally rule it out. You stated that you do not presently have any intention of running for Congress. Tomorrow, however, is another day with possibly different intentions.”
I closed my eyes. “That’s crazy.”
“Of course it’s crazy,” Schmitty said. “The world is crazy.”
“But it buys you some time. That’s why you’re happy about it.” I thought about the angles that Schmitty and the politicians were playing. “Using me to get these mothers and grandmothers out of your hair.”
“That could be an added benefit, like a bonus,” Schmitty said. “But the truth is these folks won’t talk to us. They don’t trust the police, but they trust you. You’re a Glass. You can help.”
“So a few weeks ago, your colleagues in blue beat the crap out of me, and now you want me to do your investigation for free.”
The anger that I had felt weeks earlier rushed back. I was expected to play along. They had minimized and dismissed me just as they’d been minimizing and dismissing concerns about their relationship with the community for years. Neighborhood beat cops transformed into a militarized force.
“It’s not like that, exactly.” Schmitty started to get defensive, but knew he couldn’t lose my cooperation. He stopped himself, allowing me to correct him.
“It’s exactly like that,” I said. “You’ve got about nine black kids—kids that have been missing for a long time—and you weren’t out there looking for them. You’ve done nothing.”
“We didn’t know about them.”
“You knew about Devon Walker,” I said. “His sister filed the report, remember?”
Schmitty wasn’t going to get sucked into the argument, because he knew that he wasn’t going to win. “Let’s be practical. The world is the way it is. Neither you nor I can change it overnight, but we do have to get this case figured out. We need the families. The families have the information, but even when we try, they don’t let us get anywhere. That’s why we need you. They’re choosing you.”
There was silence in the conversation as everything sunk in. Just like I wanted to walk away when Tanisha first came into my office, I wanted to tell Schmitty that I wasn’t going to work on an investigation that they should’ve been doing from the beginning. And, just like when Tanisha first came into my office, I couldn’t say no.
I asked, “Have you at least got the rest of the bodies identified?”
“Getting closer,” Schmitty said, and I wasn’t sure whether he was lying. “I can get you a list of possibles, if you keep it confidential. See if any of their parents show up at your door.”
“What about Devon Walker?”
“Nothing much more that you don’t already know.”
I rolled down my window, trying to get some fresh air, maybe catch a breeze. I decided to push him again. “Are you sure you don’t have anything else for me?”
“Well.” Schmitty hesitated, then continued. “All these kids got records.”
“So you think we got kids in gangs killing other kids in gangs?”
“No,” Schmitty said, pausing. “Maybe we should meet and talk. I don’t like doing this over the phone.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The dog park was a relatively recent development in the evolution of Lucas Park. In the 1980s and 1990s, the only dogs in the park were strays, and the only people in the park were homeless, looking for a quiet place to satisfy various physical urges.
Now the small park, nestled behind the Saint Louis Public Library, had been miraculously transformed into a space where the downtown condo owners and yuppies took their dogs to go to the bathroom. It’s what the politicians called progress.