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And then Detective Evinrude warms by a degree or two. “Maybe you should do a book on Comiskey Park, you know, the old White Sox stadium.”
“Maybe I should!”
“I could tell you some stories.”
“I’ll remember that!” Lincoln takes advantage of the slight détente to get up to leave, but he dreads the thought of walking out into the warm summer morning burdened with uncertainty. So he asks, “On this L train matter—what happens now?”
The temperature drops again. “I’ll look into it. We’ll be in touch.”
For all his planning and preparation, Lincoln can’t help himself. He blurts, “I mean, it just seems like a waste of time. The whole thing was an accident, nothing more.”
The officer waits, letting Lincoln suffer in the silent memory of his outburst. “Sometimes these complaints are just for the record,” Evinrude says finally. “They’re preliminary to the filing of a civil case.”
“A civil case?”
“Do you have homeowner’s insurance?”
“For a condo.”
“Same thing. Sometimes your homeowner’s insurance will cover it.” The detective considers Lincoln, who is hugging his briefcase as if it were the stuffed polar bear he carried around when he was six. “Can you find your way out?” Evinrude asks.
Lincoln assures him that he can.
The detective hands Lincoln his card. “Let me know if you plan to leave town,” he instructs.
9
LINCOLN LEAVES THE police station and walks south, too befuddled to go right to work. Why does everything have to be so ambiguous? He’s accused of a crime or he’s not. He’s in good standing at his job or he’s not. He’s married or he’s not. Where are the hard edges? How do you turn a corner when everything around you is curved?
The pedestrians he passes on this stretch of Halsted, the gay neighborhood known as Boystown, move with strong, purposeful strides. Lincoln feels as if his noodly legs can barely hold him up. He’s a thoughtful drinker and hasn’t touched booze before noon since college, but this day he needs a bracer, so when he comes to Leonard’s Lounge, a small, nondescript dive, he enters and sits at the bar. He’s alone with a bartender in a blue Hawaiian shirt and a television tuned to CNN with the sound off. While Lincoln sips a Bloody Mary, waiting for the vodka to stiffen his bones, he watches video of the disgraced ex-Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, who has made another appearance that morning on his media tour to proclaim his innocence. The boyish face, the mop of hair, the sad, pleading eyes—doesn’t he realize that the whole world knows he’s a crook? Yet, he natters on, making his ludicrous case. He has a way of acting hurt, surprised, victimized, but without rancor—like a wounded soldier who didn’t realize until the moment of impact that the enemy was using real bullets. Sitting at a bar at eleven in the morning, Lincoln envies Blago’s clueless certitude.
By the time he’s finished his second Bloody Mary, Lincoln has vowed to be more proactive with his life (yes, he uses that clichéd neologism with himself, even though he has struck it from every manuscript that ever crossed his desk). To start with, he’ll get ahead of the game on a possible civil suit by checking his homeowner’s insurance, as Detective Evinrude advised. But the actual document is in a file cabinet in the condo he bought with Mary. She still lives there, but she’s in Sedona by now. Lincoln can’t even remember who the insurance carrier is, let alone the salesman on their policy. No problem: summoning his new firmness of purpose, Lincoln decides to call Mary and get her to call the superintendent to let him into the apartment.
Sitting at the bar, Lincoln dials her cell. She picks up after six rings, sounding breathless and not pleased to hear from him. Lincoln gets right to the point.
“Why do you need to see that?” Mary demands.
“A possible liability issue.”
“What?”
Even with the separation, it stuns Lincoln how easily they slip back to the annoyed skepticism that characterized their conversations toward the end. “It’s nothing. Just call the super for me,” he says impatiently. “He knows I’m not living there, so he’ll get suspicious if I ask him to let me in.”
“Linc, you’ve got the goddamned key. Let yourself in.”
“Oh.” He somehow assumed she’d changed the locks. “OK. Just wanted to check with you.”
“I’ve got to run, Linc.” A pause. “I’m going mountain biking.”
“Wow. Have fun.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Lincoln orders a third Bloody Mary, trying to recapture his resolve. She’s OK having me paw through the apartment, he thinks. At least she has nothing to hide.
Working off the Bloody Marys, Lincoln walks west along quiet side streets until he comes to Mary’s building, their old building. Taking a calming, deep breath, he unlocks the front door, then climbs the stairway to their apartment. Since that awful afternoon, he’s only been back once, to pick up clothes, and now he wonders whether Mary has changed things, eliminated all markers of life with him. Inside, however, he finds the place almost exactly as he left it. They bought the apartment three years ago, and Mary took the occasion to exercise her decorating taste—sort of country French (reproduction, of course) with accents of Olde Chicago gleaned from the city’s carelessness with its architectural heritage (a section of stained glass recovered from a leveled West Side church, a gargoyle saved at the last moment from the exterior of a doomed Loop building).
