Warshawski 09 - Hard Time Read Free Page A

Skimming pension funds or buying off the state legislature are not. Get the picture, Murray?
    What I’d somehow forgotten was how much of a survivor Murray was. No one was more surprised than me to get one of those prized tickets to Global’s postlaunch party—and maybe no one was more surprised to read on it that we were celebrating Murray’s debut as Chicago’s “Behind Scenes” reporter. What Murray had done to land the job I preferred not to contemplate. He certainly wasn’t going to tell me that—or anything else. When I called to ask, I spoke to an assistant who politely assured me she would give him my messages, but he hadn’t come to the phone himself.
    I knew Murray had put out discreet feelers for reporting work around the country. But he was a couple of years older than me, and in your forties companies start looking at you as a liability. You need too much money, and you’re moving into an age bracket where you’re likely to start using your health insurance. Also against him was the same thing that made it hard for me to operate outside the city: all his insider knowledge was in Chicago. So he had looked long and hard at reality, and when reality stared back he blinked first. Was that a crime?
    At two on a weeknight, traffic on the drive was sparse. To my right, sky and lake merged in a long smear of black. Except for the streetlights, coating the park with a silvery patina, we seemed alone on the edge of the world. I was glad for Mary Louise’s presence, even her monologue on what the sitter would charge for looking after Emily’s young brothers, on how much she had to do before summer session started—she was going to law school part time besides her part–time work for me—was soothing. Her grumbling kept me from thinking how close to the edge of the world my own life was, which fueled my hostility to Murray’s decision to sell himself on the air.
    Even so, I pushed the car to seventy, as if I could outrun my irritability. Mary Louise, cop instincts still strong, raised a protest when we floated off the crest of the hill at Montrose. I braked obediently and slowed for our exit. The Trans Am was ten, with the dents and glitches to prove it, but it still hugged corners like a python. It was only at the traffic lights on Foster that you could hear a wheeze in the engine.
    As we headed west into Uptown, the loneliness of the night lifted: beer cans and drunks emerged from the shadows. The city changes character every few blocks around here, from the enclave of quiet family streets where Mary Louise lives, to an immigrant landing stage where Russian Jews and Hindus improbably mix, to a refuse heap for some of Chicago’s most forlorn; closest to the lake is where Uptown is rawest. At Broadway we passed a man urinating behind the same Dumpsters where a couple was having sex.
    Mary Louise glanced over her shoulder to make sure Emily was still asleep. “Go up to Balmoral and over; it’s quieter.”
    At the intersection a shadow of a man was holding a grimy sign begging for food. He wove an uncertain thread through the oncoming headlights. I slowed to a crawl until I was safely past him.
    Away from Broadway most of the streetlights were gone, shot out or just not replaced. I didn’t see the body in the road until I was almost on top of it. As I stood on the brakes, steering hard to the left, Mary Louise screamed and grabbed my arm. The Trans Am spun across the street and landed against a fire hydrant.
    “Vic, I’m sorry. Are—are you okay? It’s a person, I thought you were going to run over him. And Emily, my God—” She unbuckled her seat belt with shaking fingers.
    “I saw him,” I said in a strangled voice. “I was stopping. What could yanking my arm do to help with that?”
    “Mary Lou, what’s wrong?” Emily was awake in the backseat, her voice squeaky with fear.
    Mary Louise had leapt out of the car into the back with Emily while I still was fumbling with my own seat belt. Emily