Читать книгу Mourn The Living - Henry Perez - Страница 14

Laura Simpson didn’t add much to what she had already told Moriarity, though it wasn’t for a lack of trying. She’d seen a man in service clothes around Chakowski’s house the morning before the explosion.

He was tall, no wait, maybe that was just the way he looked because of the shadows. There may have been two of them, but probably not. Must’ve been the same man, but he’d been there for a while so she could’ve assumed there were two. She was sure of that, just about.

After ten minutes of this, Chapa became certain that given enough time Laura Simpson would’ve eventually identified the man she saw as Sasquatch, the Jersey Devil, and Elvis, maybe.

“I probably should’ve been more suspicious,” Laura Simpson had said.

“Why would you have been? It’s a nice neighborhood, doesn’t look like anything bad ever happened around here until now. You couldn’t have known.”

Chapa had spent two decades interviewing witnesses, and this sort of thing was nothing new to him. People’s recollections are tricky, elusive. They can be easily led astray by their own expectations or that of others. This is especially true when the person does not realize in the moment that they’re witnessing something that could be important later on. But the one thing her general confusion couldn’t override was the fact that someone had been at Chakowski’s house just hours before the place blew.

Still, Chapa concluded that there was nothing unusual about the man Laura Simpson had seen. If he had not been wearing work clothes, that might’ve been different. But as it stood, the most likely explanation was that the guy was reading a meter, or there on Chakowski’s request. Chapa felt confident the police would reach the same conclusion.

Chapa was driving over the Mike Ditka Bridge on his way to the part of Oakton where he had grown up, when Nikki started asking questions.

“So do you do a lot of investigating when you write a story? Do you work with the police? Why do other reporters not like you too much?”

“Other reporters tend to like me just fine as long as I don’t lie to them. Where did you come up with a term like ‘command center’?”

“I watch a lot of sci-fi, especially space travel and old alien invasion movies and TV shows. There’s usually a command center.”

He gently, yet forcefully, scolded her about lying and butting in when he was working.

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I just wanted to help. I wanted to be a part of it.”

“I understand. But the next time you want to help out, check with me first.”

Downtown Oakton had undergone a transformation over the past four years. The sort of revival that many towns in the Chicago area had spent a decade or more using their resources to achieve. Rundown buildings, empty storefronts, and crumbling streets had given way to new shopping strips and businesses.

There had been claims of corruption and sweetheart deals as an epidemic of cronyism had swept through the area. But most folks in town didn’t seem to care much about that sort of thing as long as there were places they wanted to go and somewhere to park once they got there.

As they cruised past various landmarks of Chapa’s youth, he wondered what a drive like this with his own father might’ve been like. Francisco Chapa was just shy of thirty, a dozen years younger than his son was now, when he went missing in Havana.

Francisco had said he was going for a walk and left their home in the city’s Vedado neighborhood around midnight, having stopped by his young son’s room to kiss the sleeping child on the forehead. Alex would later say he had dreamt that this father had told him to look out for his mother. This was one in a series of unusual details surrounding Francisco’s actions that night, which, over time, had led Chapa to believe his father knew something bad was going down soon.

But most of Chapa’s recollections and images of his father were second and third hand. The sort of information that, as a veteran reporter, he’d long ago learned to distrust. His own memories were no more reliable. They were as two dimensional and black-and-white as the photos in his mother’s albums. Chapa had tried to color them in from time to time, adding shades and hues to the people and places that filled the four years he spent in Cuba. But Chapa knew he was just guessing. No more certain than an artist who tints a decades-old photo.

A friend of the family told them that he’d seen Francisco in the company of four official-looking men about two hours after he’d left home. Three days later, a member of Castro’s government, a bony man decked out in military fatigues that were at least two sizes too big, showed up at their house. Chapa remembered hearing the knock and rushing to the door, certain that his father was on the other side. But another thought crossed his mind as he began to open the door—Why didn’t my dad use his key to get in?

The man who stood in the doorway was wearing the uniform that had become familiar to all Cubans since the communist takeover. As was the norm with Castro’s henchmen, he had a thick beard, and young Alex had been taught what that meant.

“Alejandro, you see those men standing on the corners with their guns?” Francisco Chapa asked his son one day as they drove back from the market with less than half of what they’d been promised and only a fraction of what they’d need just to get by.

“You mean the soldiers?”

“No. Soldiers shoot foreign enemies, not their own people. Those are not soldiers. Soldiers don’t have beards. Whenever you see American war movies, the soldiers never have beards. John Wayne could not have captured Iwo Jima if he’d had a beard.”

Francisco pointed at a trio of bearded revolutionaries, rifles strapped over their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and harassing a pair of teenaged girls.

“Those are H-D-Ps.”

“H-D-Ps?”

“Yes, and you do not want to grow up to be one.”

A month later, Alex and his father were on a bus headed for the beach when a revolutionary got on. He was dressed in fatigues that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in weeks, lunch pail in hand, apparently on his way to work.

The boy stared at the man for a moment, noticing how odd his uniform seemed mixed in with a busload of civilians, then elbowed his father, pointed at the bearded passenger and said, “Look, Dad, it’s an H-D-P!”

Several folks sitting nearby pivoted to see who had said that. An old man ignored it, as his wife fought to suppress a laugh. Francisco immediately covered his son’s mouth, and turned the boy’s head so that it appeared like he had seen something or someone outside the window.

Francisco quietly scolded his confused son, who did not yet understand that H-D-P was short for Hijo de Puta, or Son of a Bitch. Alex Chapa had been told that story many times by his mother as well as several other relatives. It was a favorite of his, and at times he believed he actually remembered the event. But he’d never be entirely sure.

One thing he was certain of. If he’d known at age four what H-D-P meant, he would’ve yelled the insult even louder. Especially if he’d known what it meant.

Chapa wondered now, as he drove past his old high school and pointed out the place where the engine of his first car had caught fire, what impact the memories from this week would have on Nikki. He’d seen so little of her over the past year, and feared that the next decade might hold more of the same.

It was just past five when they pulled into the parking lot of the Chicago Record. Despite its name, the newspaper was headquartered in a quiet suburb, roughly thirty miles west of the city. The Record’s coverage area extended from the Loop and all parts of the city, to its suburbs, some more than fifty miles from Lake Michigan.

The day staff was still knocking around as Chapa and Nikki made their way through the newsroom. Duane Wormley leaned out of his cubicle, and appeared ready to greet Chapa with one of his half-assed barbs, when his attention was diverted by the sight of a child.

Wormley was one of the Record’s most widely read writers. Though as far as Chapa was concerned the man had never filed a single hard news story, wouldn’t know how to write one even if his life depended on it.

“Hey Duane, working on something big, no doubt. Let me guess, a pull-no-punches expose on the seedy side of candle parties?”

“Is this Take Your Child to Work Day? I don’t think it is. I don’t think it’s Take Your Child to Work Day, Alex.”

“You know darn well it’s not, Duane. Otherwise you’d be at your mom’s place of employment.”

“My mother doesn’t work, and that wasn’t very nice, Alex.”

“Okay, then you’d be with your mom picking up her unemployment check.”

“Daddy, that was even less nice,” Nikki said with a smile that reminded Chapa of the young face he’d seen in his mother’s photos of himself.

Matt Sullivan emerged from his office. Sullivan looked as he always did, like he was wearing someone else’s discarded clothes. The bottom of his white shirt had been recently and hastily shoved into his dark brown pants. Sullivan’s worn black leather belt was narrower in those places where his gut had pressed against it, week after week, month after month. Chapa was surprised that he was still wearing his tie, though the shirt collar was open, and the knot was a good four inches below Sullivan’s second chin.

“Alex, I’m glad you’re here. We gotta—” he stopped and pointed at Nikki. “Um, what—”

“She is what we call a child, Matt. This one happens to be my daughter.”

He could almost see the light go on in his editor’s head as Sullivan remembered that Chapa had plans before he got the phone call. Sullivan’s demeanor changed in an instant as he introduced himself and explained to Nikki that her father was a very important reporter.

“I know,” she said, no hesitation. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Sullivan smiled. “Yeah, she’s your kid all right. We need to talk, Alex.”

“Give me a second,” Chapa said, and led Nikki over to a cubicle where a man in his early twenties wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt under a plaid long sleeve button-up was pounding away at a keyboard.

“This is Zach, he’s an intern, but we don’t hold that against him.”

The young man swiveled around to face them. If the T-shirt didn’t already constitute a clear dress code violation, the Kane County Cougars cap he was wearing backwards sealed the deal.

“Alex Chapa, journalistic rock star,” Zach said.

Four cubicles away, Duane Wormley chortled loudly enough for everyone to hear.

“Zach is a good guy, a terrific writer, and best of all, he plays cool computer games when no one is looking.”

Zach smiled and offered Nikki a fist bump.

“Are you going to be a famous journalist too?” Nikki asked.

“No,” Zach said, then clicked on an icon and a colorful game filled the screen. “I’m destined to be the newspaper industry’s last intern.”