Windy City Read online

  An amazing number signed their threatening letters with addresses or imparted some other bit of information (a place of work or worship, the name of a friend or neighborhood) that assisted police in finding them. Two plainclothes officers, a man and a woman (a mommy and daddy, as the teams became known) would ring their bells shortly after ten at night. (Psychologists had counseled that anyone who sent a menacing message to the mayor would almost certainly stoke their revulsion by watching the late-night news.) The mommy and daddy would introduce themselves as Citizen Satisfaction Officers, eager to hear complaints.

  The mommies and daddies often noticed the same signature artifacts in the suspect's apartment: browning newspapers, forsaken coffee cups, a permanently unfurled sofa bed, discarded wrappers, and an uncombed cat snoozing on piles of soiled clothes. Daddy would play with the cat— this was considered unexpected and disarming—while Mommy kept up an unthreatening line of conversation as both officers scanned the apartment for signs of weapons, explosives, or some kind of plotting.

  The mommy was encouraged to suggest to the suspect that she make tea (in fact mommies soon learned to carry their own teabags—any the suspects had were usually musty and untrustworthy). While Mommy boiled water, rattled the suspect's two cheap pans, and unrolled the kitchen and bathroom drawers, Daddy turned off the television, hefted stacks of newspapers from the couch to the floor, and told the suspect in the most concerned and solicitous way that their letter, call, or e-mail had certainly captured their attention downtown.

  The suspect was usually flattered. Then, they acted contrite. They blushed, stuttered, and professed to only half-remember whatever they had written. The mommies and daddies would return smiles benignly, and then Daddy would deliver a trim speech that the department's psychologists called pre-emptive counseling.

  “We are watching you,” he would say, affably but firmly. “Call a lawyer, call a priest, call your alderman, it doesn't matter. Threatening a public official is a crime. If we ever see you within a mile of the mayor, we will pick you up, put you in the back of a cruiser, and take you to the last place you will ever see. No phone calls, no court dates. We are the Chicago Police Department, okay? Not social workers,” and here the mommy would put down her cup of tea, and the daddy would let his blue jacket slide back just far enough on his white shirt for the suspect to get a discreet glimpse of shiny black holster leather. “We don't give a damn if you grew up poor, if your father hit you, if your uncle diddled you, if your mama loved your dog more. We're the police. We get rid of problems. If anyone even notices that you're gone, the department will say, ‘You know, sometimes people just disappear.’ Your neighbors will say—you know this, too—‘I'm not surprised. He was strange.’ Call the FBI, call the ACLU, call Oprah. But really, who's going to believe you? Who's going to care?”

  As a group, Chief Martinez noted that the 102 people who had received preemptive counseling from Citizen Satisfaction Officers seemed thereafter to be a very law-abiding group indeed.

  The chief could remember when 1,476 case files would fill at least fifteen long brown file boxes. Now the contents were all purportedly encoded onto a single shimmering piece of plastic, which he balanced delicately between his fingers so he could inspect his unshaven 2:00 a.m. reflection.

  “One thousand, four-hundred, and seventy-fucking six files,” he said sharply to no one in particular, spinning the disc slowly on an index finger. “What the hell are we supposed to do with this Christmas ornament?”

  Stuart Cohn hovered near the chief's elbow.

  “Copy it for the FBI,” he suggested. “They cross-check what they have. We can use their databases, their labs.”

  The chief signaled Walter Green, the commander who was his principal lieutenant, to step closer.

  “Wake up what's-his-name,” he told him. “The Mormon—”

  “Christian Scientist,” Green corrected him. They were speaking of the head of the local FBI office.

  “He must live in the western suburbs.” Green, a tall, slow-smiling, middle-aged black officer, was already pressing the keys on his phone as Chief Martinez turned back to Cohn.

  “We need permission to enlist the feds?” he asked.

  “We have cause already,” said the counsel. “The perpetrators could already be in Indiana or Wisconsin.”

  “Draw up something anyway,” said the chief. “Now. I don't want to have some guy holed up in a motel near Midway, only to be told we can't storm the place because we got his name off a federal watch list. Mr. Roopini should sign it?” Cohn nodded. “Can we get it in five minutes?”

  “Two,” said the lawyer, reaching into his coat pocket. “I only need a piece of paper.” He already had a gold ballpoint pen that an old client had given him, unsheathed and poised. Chief Martinez nodded tightly and turned around to face the mayor's desk, now covered in some sort of ash-white downy spray laid down by the investigators.

  “Jesus, this is unbelievable,” he said softly. Commander Green had made his call, and approached the chief quietly.

  “I know he was your friend,” said Green.

  “Well, I hope he had better than me. How many teams of mommies and daddies?” he asked.

  “On all shifts?” said Commander Green. “Should be a dozen.” Cohn had returned to their circle with one simple sentence written in inch-high block letters on a plain white sheet of blue-marked City of Chicago stationery. He had drawn a line about three inches long on the right side of the page, and written in smaller letters below: Sundaran Roopini, Interim Mayor.

  “Take it downstairs,” the chief directed. “Roust everyone—chefs, servers, customers, bartenders, toilet cleaners—at that restaurant. And wake up the mommies and daddies.”

  “I'll have to ask you to stand back from that window,” said Sgt. Galla-her.

  Sunny stepped back from the cool glass of his single office window as he watched the first soft flakes of an overnight snow hover and fatten slightly in the moon glow of the streetlights. He turned dutifully around from the window to sit carefully on the rounded edge of a radiator cover. At this after-midnight hour, it felt cold under his slacks.

  His aldermanic office amounted to two small, bright, boxy rooms on the fourth floor of City Hall behind a simple lettered sign saying SUNDARAN ROOPINI 48 in characters about as tall as a headline reporting the score of a high school basketball game. The flimsy plum-painted wooden door opened directly onto a reception desk that held small schoolroom flags: the stars and stripes of the United States, the state flag of Illinois, the city flag of Chicago, and the six-striped rainbow flag of the gay liberation movement.

  The first office turned a corner to lead into a second small room that Sunny shared with his aldermanic secretary, Eldad Delaney: a gray steel desk for Eldad, a small round conference table for Sunny. On one wall, there were framed portraits of Yitzhak Rabin, Mahatma Gandhi, and Cesar Chavez (unsigned, owing to the deaths of the subjects some years before), and signed photographs from the mayor, the state's senators, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

  Sunny had humbled himself to get the reverend to hold a pose beside him when the two were trapped in the same grim offstage passage at a 3rd Ward rally. The reverend held back for a moment. He seemed to recognize Sunny. But he had to rummage his mind. Did they meet in India? Davos? Devon Avenue? Was Sunny the commerce minister of Sri Lanka? The ambassador from Nepal? A cab driver? A cab driver who used to be the commerce minister of Sri Lanka? Sunny thought he saw an expression of imprecise distaste cross Reverend Jackson's face, as if it had suddenly struck him: I could be posing with Heidi Klum. But in a flash, the reverend gripped Sunny's hand with a great joshing guffaw, clapped his arms around his shoulders, and said “How you doing, buddy?” A ward functionary had time enough for a single, unsteady snap. Sunny sent a print over to the reverend's office for dedication; it was back later that day, efficiently if impersonally inscribed, “Keep Hope Alive! Jesse.”

  The adjoining wall had the spattered look of a patchwork quilt
. There were cheaply framed citations of thanks to Sunny for sundry gestures of support from the Swedish American Museum, the Korean American Women's Association, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the Clubes de Oriundos. There were vanilla-colored certificates, listing slightly from vibrations of passing elevated trains, that attested to the gratitude of various holy assemblies for Sunny's appearance before them, from Saints Gertrude, Gregory, Henry, Ignatius, and Ita, to the Bong Boolsa Korean Buddhist Temple, the Bait-ul-Salam Masjid mosque, and Anshe Sholom (Orthodox), Anshe Emet (Conservative), Temple Sholom (Reform), and the Or Chadash Congregation for Lesbians and Gays (also Reform).

  During rush hour, when three and four elevated trains passed through the Wells and Washington station, the scores of plastic frames on Sunny's wall rattled tappa-tappa-tappa against the plaster like a chorus of applauding beetles.

  “Quite an explosion,” was all Sgt. Gallaher said after Sunny had snapped on the overhead light.

  “You can't put up one without putting up all,” he told her.

  “I don't think the mayor puts up any,” said Sgt. Gallaher.

  Sunny knew that the mayor displayed only a few refined canvases sent over on loan from the Art Institute. Sunny recalled one late night when the mayor had swept his arm past a Grant Wood prairie landscape, a Homer Winslow seascape, and a Hopper still life of a quiet night in a Chinatown restaurant.

  “Americans are safest,” he once told Sunny. “Some ties to Chicago, if possible. An undisputed master helps. No new pieces by any dissident Chinese, Burmese, Chechen, or Turk, or next you know, folks expect me to help get them out of the guuu-lag. Nothing too interesting. Nothing explicit. Nothing abstract—people will think they're nudes. And, no nudes. An occasional old communist painter is okay, as long as they're foreign. It makes me look cosmopolitan. Diego Rivera? Perfect—a dead foreign communist. I also believe he was an adulterer. Some people think that a portrait of Lincoln is safe. I think it just invites comparisons. I once saw Lincoln up on a wall in Bangui. The president-for-life there had a gold-plated swimming pool where he fed his opponents to hippopotami. He told me, ‘Oh, Lincoln is my hero, Mr. Mayor. He knew what to do with rebels.’”

  The mayor let a curl of cigar smoke enfold his small gray moustache as he smiled.

  “The hippos?” asked Sunny.

  “Naturally, I inquired,” the mayor replied, drawing out a long, slow puff. “But the zoo here said that a diet of aldermen would be insalubrious. I know I find Linas Slavinskas and Felix Kowalski indigestible, too.”

  Stuart Cohn had stepped tentatively around the corner, holding out the sheet of paper.

  “An ounce of prevention, sir,” he explained, as Sunny was already moving Cohn's gold pen from left to right above his name, and Stuart Cohn was already turning back to the door. Sunny sat back against the wall, the radiator cover groaning.

  “That's the first time I've seen my new, momentary title spelled out. A few hours ago, my signature on a credit card slip maybe could have bought a new refrigerator. Now, I think I just signed something that will get people out of bed and cost a lot of money.”

  Sgt. Gallaher raised a hank of her dark hair behind her head, and looked pointedly somber.

  “You're going to declare war on Indiana?” she asked.

  Sunny smiled as he stepped down and finally brought himself to sit at his round white table.

  “They'd better watch their step.”

  There was a heavy old black phone, several models behind the most current, sitting on Sunny's table. Taped to the faceplate, old numbers of people he no longer needed to reach were fading into light blue scratches. He punched in the mobile number for his assistant; it rang off into voice mail. Sunny heard a recording of Eldad's maladroit imitation of the mayor's growly voice, intoning, “El-dad is not home right now. He is working for the betterment of the city of Chicago against all of the antediluvian forces that threaten her. You can leave your message after the beep.”

  “Eldad, I need you,” Sunny said quietly into the phone. “I'm at the Hall. Call when you get this. Or just come down immediately, please. And Eldad,” he added more gently. “You might want to change your phone message.”

  Sunny put down the handset and looked across to Sgt. Gallaher. She had kept her black topcoat on—Sunny thought that its long cut conferred a kind of elegant sweep to her tall stride—and when it fell open as she hiked her leg onto a chair, he pointed to the black brick of a radio on her belt.

  “Chief Martinez said fifteen minutes, didn't he?”

  “Half an hour ago,” said the sergeant as she turned her wrist to look at her round steel watch. Sunny noticed that she was wearing nail polish, but it was clear; he wondered if that was a department regulation.

  “Almost forty minutes ago,” she amended.

  “I wonder how long he'll be.”

  “I suppose you can tell him you'd like to see him now, Mr. Roo-pini,” she suggested. “You are the interim, momentary, temporary, Acting Whatever, after all.”

  Sunny stood up from his table and stepped back to his single window, staying within a measured and respectful step of the unseen boundary that Sgt. Gallaher had set. He could see snow beginning to glaze slickly onto the cold stone ledge outside.

  “Let's give him a few more minutes,” said Sunny, and Sgt. Gallaher stood up and slipped off her long black coat, giving it a single, proficient shake to tuck it over the back of the chair.

  In the mayor's office three floors above Sunny, a balding young toxi-cologist whom Rush Medical School had sent over informed Chief Martinez that the mayor had died of heart arrest, leading to a nonreactive coma with mixed hypokalaemic acidosis and central hypothermia, induced by a plasma nicotine concentration of 3.7.

  Chief Martinez was speechless; then his vocabulary contracted to a single word.

  “Nicotine?” he exclaimed. “Nicotine! Fucking nicotine?”Or two. “Nicotine! Nicotine! Fucking nicotine!”

  “Cigarettes kill,” remarked Stuart Cohn, as if reaching the conclusion of a Bible lesson.

  “The mayor didn't smoke cigarettes,” Chief Martinez pointed out. “A cigar now and then. Every day. But he talked too much to inhale.”

  “He couldn't absorb this amount of nicotine through smoking,” the toxicologist informed them. “In fact—not to encourage anybody— flammable heat dissipates nicotine. At those levels, he had to ingest it directly.”

  “Ohmigod,” said Walter Green. “You mean that the mayor ate cigarettes?”

  After an astonished silence, the men let out their breaths, as if putting down chairs they had carried over their heads.

  “But I saw him eat raw corn once,” Chief Martinez recalled. “Coming back from a conference in McHenry County. He saw a farm stand, shucked two ears, and ate them raw, right in the backseat. Had corn silk dangling from his mouth for the rest of the ride.”

  “Those levels of nicotine seem to have been delivered by a distillate, probably sprinkled over the top of the mayor's pizza,” said the toxicol-ogist.

  “Wouldn't he have tasted something funny?” Commander Green asked.

  “Maybe some bitterness.” The toxicologist tugged on the small end of his tie and nodded his head from side to side. “But among all those onions? That's why nicotine is used in some insecticides. It's bland. The insects don't get bait shy.”

  “The mayor was the least bait shy man I've ever known,” Chief Martinez said with a mild smile.

  The toxicologist had a small stack of X-rays and slick-surfaced facsimile pages that he struggled to keep orderly as he sat on a worn green velvet wing chair. But every few questions, something slid off; the young man would lurch onto his knees to retrieve it. It had the effect of making him look like the chief's constant supplicant.

  He explained that there were two factories within a few hours drive that used nicotine in the manufacture of insecticides. But sufficient toxicity he explained, was probably contained in two standard packages of nicotine patches—“No-Smokems, Smoke-No-
Mo, whatever,” he said. “They call it ‘therapeutic nicotine.’”

  “Some therapy,” said Chief Martinez. “And what—they boil the stuff down? A lethal tea?”

  “Trap the steam into drops. All you need is a burner and some tubing. Like a still,” said the toxicologist. “Freshmen in high school— teenagers serving ten to twenty for armed robbery—figure it out.”

  Chief Martinez stood and rubbed the back of his neck. His elbow pumped back and forth as if he were trying to take off by flapping of a single arm.

  “There must be half-a-dozen drug stores that sell those patches within two blocks of the restaurant,” he said. “Hundreds in the city.”

  “And liquor stores,” Walter Green suggested. “Gas stations sell them, too, right next to the salami sticks and puke-pine deodorizers.”

  The commander turned away and began to tattoo a sequence of numbers into his phone.

  “But whatever the mayor ingested tonight wouldn't be enough,” the toxicologist advised. “The nicotine would take two to three applications to kill—to affect—even insects, much less an average human being.”

  Chief Martinez and Commander Green exchanged embarrassed smiles as Green folded his phone back into his hand.

  “Two to three. What about eight?” the commander asked. “On a man who weighed three hundred thirty pounds and who exercised by unrolling a burrito to check for extra cheese?”

  “Applications?”

  “Servingsss,” he said, emphasizing the plural with his long, dark fingers. “Slicesss.”

  “Eight slices of deep dish pizza with extra … stuff?” The toxicolo-gist's eyes widened, as if he'd just heard about an especially lopsided football score. “At one sitting?”

  “Every man and woman on that detail is all over those pizzas,” the police chief called out as he began to move slowly toward the door. “Get them tested.”

  “Of course,” replied Walter Green, then paused, raised his eyebrows, and kept a large hand folded over the keys of his phone. “Immediately?”