spitting every few seconds. Cisco and Sonny would shit a mountain.
And pictures,
8 x 10s—bullshit—posters. I’ll borrow a uniform. I’ll throw out the first pitch, like the mayor does—
"Okay, we hang with Alfonso first, then we’ll talk. Off the record."
Tracy moves the hair side to side, doing the VO5 Shampoo commercial. "Sorry. We have to talk now, tonight."
"Why?"
"Why?"
Tracy fouls her perfect features. "They’re about to put you in the blocks."
"Who’s they?"
Kerry Wood throws a strike and Wrigley goes World Series. It’s the first pitch of the first inning. You have to be a Cub fan or a horseplayer to understand—"enjoy it early" is the theory.
Tracy hasn’t looked at the field since Alfonso left for work. "Patti, you don’t want to be the lightning rod for this election. Way too much at stake;
lots
of casualties before it’s over."
Casualties
is a stopper, even after Wood throws his second strike in a row. "Casualties? Like dead people?"
She leans back. "Could be."
Tracy is All-Everything, but she’s out of her league if we’re talking about a string of murders to be, especially if they start with the mayor. I lean sideways and stare. We occasionally eye one another like this on the rugby field when the other’s play may have caused personal discomfort. The term is
hospital pass
and it’s used when the ball is passed poorly resulting in the receiver taking an unnecessary beating. There are rumors that she and I are vindictive enough to have done this on purpose.
"Bit of advice, Trace. If you know something, call the cops. Now, before the Cubs bat."
"Oh, god, Patti. ’Casualties’ means political death, a metaphor. I’m a journalist."
"You’re a pageant winner."
Tracy smiles because she is. "I meant ’political’ casualties and we both know it. Talk to me about you and the mayor, and I’ll leave you and your friend the superintendent out."
Wood throws strike three from somewhere out in Waveland Avenue and Wrigley goes apeshit. That helps me not hit her, that and she’d be a handful to fight fair. When the cheering dies to human levels she stares at me too long and adds,
"After the game we’ll need to talk about the body in the wall too."
WEDNESDAY
Chapter 5
WEDNESDAY, DAY 3: 12:02 A.M.
The Cubs won. I should’ve been too happy to breathe.
As it was I don’t remember much after Tracy and I left our seats, after she said the magic words: "Annabelle Ganz" and "Calumet City." I shouldered out hard, past the boxes and Andy Frain ushers. She caught me outside the gates, under the huge Wrigley Field sign they always show on TV. The crowd celebrated past me but Tracy stayed in my face.
"Last night Area 2 Homicide identified the body you found as Annabelle Ganz. Two hours ago—in a dazzling feat of police work—the late Mrs. Ganz was ID’d as the same Annabelle Ganz involved in a 1987 Calumet City murder—an adult male in a foster home she co-parented. A very strange one—the murder and the home."
I try to sidestep her and the words but Tracy and the crowd won’t let me.
"
The Black Monday Murder
. Fairly famous at the time: October 19, 1987, biggest stock market crash in history. The victim was a business associate of the late Mrs. Ganz and her husband, Roland. Roland disappeared, everybody knows that, and—"
Roland Ganz
repeats in my head; a picture flashes with it. Then filmstrips of pictures, 8mm grainy awful—
Roland Ganz
—a name I never think and never say out loud.
Roland Ganz
booms up and down Addison Street and sucks the life out of my chest. Tracy’s still telling me things I already know intimately when I bolt. Full out, sprinting through headlights and horns and men cursing; sprinting through couples and dogs and piles of leaves; over curbs and across gardens, across streets and more streets, and alleys…until I can’t breathe, until an old red-brick wall overhung with oak and elm branches blocks me. The gate
Angus Watson
Phil Kurthausen
Paige Toon
Madeleine E. Robins
Amy McAuley
Robert J. Sawyer, Stefan Bolz, Ann Christy, Samuel Peralta, Rysa Walker, Lucas Bale, Anthony Vicino, Ernie Lindsey, Carol Davis, Tracy Banghart, Michael Holden, Daniel Arthur Smith, Ernie Luis, Erik Wecks
S.K. Epperson
Kate Bridges
Margaret Peterson Haddix
Donna White Glaser