Max Collins - Ask Not

A fairly short walk away, my car was parked across from the Stock Yard Inn on South Halsted. Short walk or not, I was well aware that this was the South Side, an area tougher than a nickel steak, not that the Saddle and Sirloin Club had served up any nickel steaks lately.

The nearby stockyards consumed a sprawling area between Pershing Road on the north, Halsted on the east, Forty-seventh on the South, and Ashland Avenue on the west — close to five hundred acres. Still, you could neither hear nor smell those thousands of doomed cattle, unless you counted the fragrant aroma wafting from the Saddle and Sirloin.

“You want me to get that napkin framed up for you?” I asked Sam.

“You won’t lose it or anything, will you?”

“No. I can be trusted with evidence.”

“That would be fab.”

Engines starting up, mechanical coughs in the night, indicated the teenagers were finally exiting the amphitheater for their rides. The wide street was still largely empty, though, as we jaywalked across, making no effort at speed.

We paused mid-street for a car to go by in either direction. Across from us, my dark-blue Jaguar X waited patiently, with its hubcaps and everything — not bad for this part of town.

“I’ll just hold on to it for now,” he said, meaning the napkin. It was still in his hands like the biggest, luckiest four-leaf clover any kid ever found.

He would be seventeen later this month, but I had that same surge of feeling for him I’d first experienced holding him in my arms at the hospital. I was studying him, trying to memorize the moment, slipping an arm around his shoulders, and he tightened, hearing the engine before I did.

It came roaring up from our left, where somebody had been parked on the Stock Yard Inn side, a light-blue Pontiac Bonneville, screaming down the street like those girls at the amphitheater. The vehicle, even at this stupid speed, was no danger to us, but we began to move a little quicker across our lane.

“Dad!”

Headlights were bearing down on us. The Pontiac had swerved — not swerved, swung into our lane, as if we were its targets.

Maybe we were.

The damn beast was right on us and it clipped me a little but it would have been much worse if Sam hadn’t tackled me and shoved me out of harm’s way. I glimpsed a blur of a dark-complected face in the window of the Pontiac as it whipped by, dark eyes glaring at me as if I were the one who’d hit him. Well, I had, a little.

Sam and I both landed hard on the pavement, and I had taken some impact, a glancing blow but still painful, on my left hip.

I was on my other side and Sam was hovering, saying, “Dad, Dad” over and over, as I managed to sit up, pointing.

“Son! Get that license number! Can you see it?”

I was too dazed — all I could see were red halos around taillights.

But Sam was nodding. He stared after the receding vehicle. It had disappeared by the time he got a pencil out of somewhere and jotted the number down on the back of his precious cocktail napkin, which was already rumpled and wadded from when he’d clutched his fists and tackled me to safety.

He had tears in his eyes. I’ll never know if it was out of fear for himself or concern for me or sorrow over his ruined Beatlemania artifact.

But I’d lay odds on the latter.

He helped me up and drunk-walked me the few steps to the Jag. Another car went by, slow, the driver giving us a dirty look. We were just a couple of lushes lurching across the street.

Nobody had seen the incident, at least nobody who bothered to come help or anything. I told Sam to drive, fishing out the keys for him, and he helped me into the rider’s side. Now the stream of amphitheater traffic was picking up, slowed by traffic cops. Like they say, where was a cop when you needed one?

“I’m going to get you to a hospital,” Sam said over the purr of the Jag. “What one should I go to? I don’t know this part of town.”

“Just get us back to Old Town. I didn’t get hit that bad.”

“Dad, no!”

“Son, I’ll be bruised up, and my chiropractor will make a small windfall out of me. But I’m fine. Drive.”

We’d gone about half a block when he said, “Shouldn’t we call the cops? We should go back to that Stock Yard hotel and call the cops.”

“No.”

“What was wrong with that guy? Was he drunk?”

“Don’t know.”

“It was almost like he was trying to hit us!”

More likely me. Sam hadn’t been on the planet long enough to make my kind of enemy.

We stopped at an all-night drugstore to pick up some Anacin, four pills of which I popped, chasing them with a Coke. Despite all that caffeine, I was asleep when Sam pulled behind my brick three-story on Eugenie Street, one block north of North Avenue. I woke up just as he was pulling the Jag into my stable-turned-garage. The main building, par for this side street, was narrow and deep with not much of a backyard.

I lived on the upper two floors, the ground level a furnished apartment the A-1 used for visiting clients and as a safe house. Sam was still helping me walk as we entered in back through the kitchen and across the dining room into the living room, an open space with off-white wall-to-wall carpet and a wrought-iron spiral staircase. The plaster walls, painted a rust orange, had select framed modern artwork, and one wall was a bookcase with as many LPs as books. Furnishings ran to overstuffed couches and chairs, some brown, some green.

I settled into my brown-leather recliner and used the phone on the table where the TV Guide and remote control also lived.

“You know, old married people like me,” my longtime partner Lou Sapperstein said gruffly, “aren’t necessarily up at this hour.”

“It’s not even midnight. You still got friends in Motor Vehicles?”

“I have friends everywhere, Nate. Even in Old Town.”

“Do you have friends in Motor Vehicles who work night shift?”

“Are you okay? You sound funny.”

“Yeah, I’m a riot. Rowan and Martin got nothing on me. I’m going to give you a license plate to have your friend run. And I want to know right now. Not tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Lou said, no more kidding around. “I got a pencil. Go.”

I gave him the number.

Twenty minutes and two glasses of rum later, I picked the phone up on first ring.

“Pontiac Bonneville,” Lou said. “’61. Light blue.”

“That’s the one.”

“Stolen earlier this evening.”

“Big surprise.”

“Found abandoned within the last half hour on the South Side.”

“Within, say, half a mile of the International Amphitheater?”

“You are a true detective, Nathan Heller. What’s this about?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe something.”

I’d already gotten the nine millimeter from the front closet and rested it on the TV Guide.

Lou was saying, “If there are any prints on that vehicle, we’ll know tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“I have friends who work Sundays. I have all sorts of friends.”

“This is where I came in,” I said, thanked him, and hung up.

Sam was sitting on the nearby couch, leaning forward, hands clasped. He looked worried. A little afraid. He’d watched me go to the shelf to fetch the Browning automatic and its presence in the room, near my reach, was palpable.

“What’s this about, Dad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe a joyrider. Or a drunk. Or a husband who didn’t like the art-study photos I took of him for his wife.”

Sam was well aware of what I did for a living, though we both knew it had been a long, long time since I had shot pictures through motel windows. Although my agents still did.