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Lincoln gets in line behind an elderly woman whose dog has disappeared and a suited man who insists his car has been towed unjustly. When Lincoln’s turn comes, he gives the policewoman his name and tells her he’s there to see Detective Evinrude.
“What’s this about?” she demands.
“He called me. Something about a complaint.”
She speaks into an intercom, and a minute or so later, a tall, powerfully built black man with graying hair emerges from the back. He nods and beckons Lincoln through a door and leads him on a twisting course deep into the building to a small, plain office with a gray metal desk and several matching chairs. “Have a seat,” says the detective as he takes his place behind the desk. Buried this deep in the station house, Lincoln wonders whether just getting up and walking out would really be that easy. He’s more anxious than he anticipated. (One slip of the tongue and
he’s under arrest?) Still, he takes a seat. He’s brought his briefcase—it seemed a good prop, with suggestions of status, purpose, etc.—and he hugs it in his lap.
Detective Evinrude puts on a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and shuffles papers on his desk. “John Lincoln, right?” he confirms, reading from a sheet.
“Yes.”
The detective stops himself and looks up. “Lincoln. Any relation to the president?” he asks.
“No, I’m afraid not. The only name descendant died in the 1920s.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.” The detective nods to himself, as if this were a useful piece of information. He returns to his sheet of paper, and for several minutes he reads silently, apparently unconcerned that Lincoln is sitting with nothing to do but watch. Finally, he puts the sheet down and takes off his glasses. “So there was an incident on the Brown Line at the Belmont Station. The complainant says you got mad and knocked an elderly woman down.”
Lincoln reminds himself of the rules he’s established for this encounter: be terse; speak in generalities; don’t volunteer a whit more than necessary. “There was a riot on the L that night,” he recounts carefully. “Everybody was in a panic trying to get off the train. There was a story the next day in the Tribune. I’ve got it here.” Lincoln has printed a copy from the newspaper’s Web archive, and he pulls it from his briefcase.
Ignoring the story in Lincoln’s hand, the detective says, “The old lady was African American.” He brings this up with no particular inflection, as if it were just another fact to be considered—the time of the incident, the number of witnesses—but Lincoln feels acutely the divide between them. (He thinks: Should I have lied earlier? This is one occasion when it might actually help to be related to the Great Emancipator.) “It says here she was the only black person around,” the detective continues. He stares unblinkingly at Lincoln. The man’s bulk, his stolidity—Lincoln recalls playing ball against guys like that; they’d take a position near the basket and you couldn’t move them. Implacable.
“It was chaos,” Lincoln says. “There was a stampede. Race had nothing to do with it.”
Detective Evinrude nods toward the newspaper story in Lincoln’s hand. “Can I see that?”
Lincoln gives it to him and watches the dark eyes behind the wire rims scan the lines. Doesn’t a Chicago police detective have more important things to investigate—a murder, an armed robbery? “I’m sure there’s a police report on it,” Lincoln suggests.
Again, the glasses come off. “So you say you didn’t knock down the old lady?” the detective says.
“Everybody was pushing and shoving,” Lincoln evades. “It was chaos.”
“And then you just left the scene?”
Lincoln’s heart jumps in red alert. (Is it a crime to be a hit-and-run pedestrian?) “I didn’t think there was a problem,” he responds, then pulls out another tactic he’d planned, turning interrogator himself. “Who is this person who filed the complaint?”
“Can’t tell you, at least not until I’ve looked into it a little more,” the officer says evenly. “We don’t want people settling things on their own.”
“Was the complainant even there?”
Detective Evinrude picks up his glasses and consults the sheet. “One of my colleagues took the report,” he explains, “but he’s been promoted.” After reading for a few seconds, he says, “It appears not.”
“How did my name even come up?”
“You dropped your New York Times. Had your name and your company on it.” Said with just a hint of satisfaction, as if the detective has trapped Lincoln with this simple explanation.
Lincoln zips shut his briefcase. Time to flee. Probably past time. But Detective Evinrude has another question. “Pistakee Press. What do they do?”
“A book publisher. I edit books.”
“What sort of books?”
“All sorts.” (Does the cop suspect that I’m a pornographer? Lincoln wonders.) Lincoln does a rapid inventory of his projects, searching for a possible sympathetic connection. “Right now, I’m editing a book on the history of Wrigley Field.”
“I grew up on the South Side. A White Sox fan.”
The black South Side. The white North Side. Why does race have to come into everything in Chicago? “I’m mostly a Bulls fan myself,” says Lincoln, dodging.
