A Picture of Guilt Read Free Page A

HAPTER T HREE
    Rachel was right, I am terrified of flying. I always have been, even before September 11. Going home, I put up a brave front, but by the time we landed at O’Hare, having bounced around one thunderstorm and flown through another, I was a quivering, quaking mass of Jell-o. And that was an improvement over the flight out.
    I tripped over Rachel’s bag as I came through the front door—she was already on the phone, her newest CD blasting. I lugged our bags in the house, for once not minding the stains in the carpet, the nicks on the wall, and all the other imperfections and flaws. A modest three-bedroom on the North Shore of Chicago, I managed to hang onto it after the divorce, and it looks like I’ll be there forever; I can’t afford to move. Tonight I was grateful.
    I dumped our dirty laundry in the basement and went upstairs to my office. It used to be the guest room, but I appropriated it when Barry moved out. My computer, scanner, and printer fill most of the space, but I’d invested in an ergonomic chair last year, and I happily swiveled from side to side as I downloaded my e-mail. There was something reassuring about the clicks, bells, and blue bars that accompanied the unspooling of my messages. All was right in my little corner of cyberspace. It hadn’t always been.
    After I trashed the usual spam, only a few messages remained, none of them urgent, so I decided to unpack. As I was digging through the canvas bag that doubles as my briefcase and overnighter, I came across yesterday’s Trib . It was folded to the page with Johnnie Santoro’s picture. I studied it again and felt the same sense of familiarity.
    I entered Santoro’s name on a news database, and after a few seconds, more than a dozen articles popped up. I started scanning them. Santoro had been indicted for the murder of Mary Jo Bosanick, a young woman in her twenties. Mary Jo went to the Lakeside Inn, a tavern on the Southeast Side, to meet Santoro after a night-school class, but Santoro didn’t show up until two hours later. A fierce argument erupted, and they both stormed out.
    Mary Jo’s body was found the next morning a few feet from Santoro’s Chevy at the boat launch in Calumet Park. She’d been viciously beaten and shot twice in the head. Apparently, she tried to put up a fight; scrapings of Santoro’s skin were found under her fingernails. The next day the cops arrested Santoro at the docks where he worked as a longshoreman.
    I leaned back in my chair. There isn’t much left of the dock life in Chicago—at least not on the same scale as Newark, Houston, or New Orleans. Back during the Fifties and Sixties, countless ships plied the Great Lakes, but traffic has since dried up. Competition from rail and trucks is one reason. The construction of larger, more efficient freighters is another. Weather also plays a part. Though they did dredge a terminal that operates year round, there’s still only a nine-month season along the St. Lawrence Seaway linking Chicago to the Atlantic.
    What little shipping remains, mostly steel and steel products, is centered on Calumet Harbor, not far from the park of the same name. On the rare day a ship does tie up, longshoremen queue up at waterfront warehouses for day jobs, like they’ve been doing for forty years. Most of the men are well past their prime, forced by meager pensions to take whatever work is available, but a few youngsters hang out there, too. That’s where the cops found Santoro, stamping his feet in the morning chill, hoping for a few hours’ work.
    I looked through the window at the locust tree in my front yard. Its lattice of leaves, silvered by the moonlight, danced gently in the night breeze. Somewhere in the distance I heard the plaintive honk of a goose. Santoro might be a dock rat, but that didn’t tell me how I knew him. I shut down the computer and went into my room.
    Rachel had gone to bed, but I was still wired. I turned on the TV. The end of Ingmar Bergman’s