The Sixth Investigation

The coat came back from Ruby's shop with a hole in the left sleeve that hadn't been there before, and I knew it wasn't a mistake because Ruby didn't make mistakes. She was a tailor's daughter and tailors don't make mistakes—they make decisions. You decide this thread matches. You decide this button holds. You decide this person doesn't need another coat.

I was waiting in her shop on a Friday evening when the neon sign across the street was flickering between "OPEN" and "CLOSED" and neither word was quite true. The shop was small—three rooms, a counter with a cash drawer that only had four dollars in it, a rack of half-finished alterations, and a sewing machine that sat on a table by the window like it was keeping watch. Ruby was at the machine, not sewing, just running her hands over the metal like she was reading braille.

I sat on the stool by the counter and watched the street. South Side Chicago in the winter was a study in greys—grey buildings, grey sky, grey asphalt with grey salt sprinkled on it to keep people from sliding into traffic. The traffic itself was grey: black cars and white trucks and the occasional yellow cab that looked like it had been yellow once and had since been bleached by years of other people's decisions.

Ruby came over with the coat and held it out to me. I put it on. The left sleeve was too short by half an inch. I looked at her. She looked at the floor.

"You fixed it," I said.

She looked up. She hadn't spoken to me since I'd brought the coat in, which was three weeks ago, and I figured I'd let her decide when she wanted to talk. Tailors control the timing. That's part of the job.

She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She handed it to me. It was in Italian—she'd written it in Italian because I'd told her once, a long time ago, that my grandfather had been from Abruzzo and that I knew a few words.

The paper said: "The man who pays you to find things—does he tell you what he's looking for, or does he tell you what he wants you to find?"

I read it twice. Then I looked at her and said, "Who are you looking for, Ruby?"

She didn't answer. She just took the coat from me—she'd already taken my money—and went back to her machine.

O'Brien called me into his office on a Thursday morning. I'd been to O'Brien's office before—not as a cop, because I'd been off the force for three years by then, and not as a civilian who belonged there, but as the guy O'Brien called when he needed something done that wasn't in any manual. I'd found a missing wife for a politician in '44 and a missing body for a union rep in '45, and O'Brien had been paying me in favors ever since.

He was sitting behind his desk with his feet up on it, which he only did when he was trying to look relaxed and wasn't succeeding. His desk was a mess of paperwork and empty coffee cups and the kind of clutter that says a man who has been here for twenty years has stopped pretending the office is anything other than a room with a desk.

"Keene," he said. "Sit."

I sat. I kept my hands on my knees. I didn't cross my arms or lean back or do anything that could be interpreted as attitude. Attitude gets you killed in O'Brien's office because O'Brien is the kind of man who interprets everything as attitude, and then attitude gets you somewhere you can't walk out of.

"I need you to do something for me," he said. "Not police work. Just—something. You're good at things."

"I'm good at a lot of things," I said. "Most of them don't pay."

"This one would." He leaned forward and took his feet off the desk and folded his hands on it. "A businessman—a friend of mine—he's got a problem. His wife thinks he's having an affair. She hired you, right?"

I nodded. Mrs. Callahan had hired me in November. Her husband was meeting women at the Sherman Hotel, and she wanted to know if it was just sex or if it was something worse. I'd followed him for three days. He was meeting a woman named Lorna, and it was sex, and it was nothing worse. Mrs. Callahan cried when I told her, and then she paid me.

"Anyway," O'Brien said, "this businessman is friends with a guy who owes money to the wrong people. And the wrong people are connected to some cops. I need to know how deep it goes."

"You want me to investigate police corruption," I said. It wasn't a question.

"I want you to investigate a businessman," he said. "The police stuff is just—context. You'll see."

"What businessman?"

"Someone on the South Side. Italian family. Small operation. But the books—they're interesting. I need someone who can read between the lines."

I thought about Ruby. I thought about the note she'd given me. I thought about the fact that I had three dollars in my pocket and a coat that didn't fit anymore.

"What's the pay?" I asked.

O'Brien named a figure. It was enough to pay the rent for six months and buy new tires for my pickup and eat real food—meat and vegetables, not beans and bread—for the same six months.

"Who's the businessman?" I asked again.

"Frank Marino," he said. "You'll find him on the South Side. He runs a bookmaking operation out of a pool hall. Small stuff. But the numbers—he's got numbers he shouldn't have."

I stood up. "I'll look into it."

"Good man," O'Brien said. And for a second, just a second, his expression changed—like a man who knows he's asked you to do something that's going to get you killed, and he's going to let you do it anyway because the alternative is asking someone who wouldn't say yes.

The sixth time I followed Frank Marino's ledger, I found Ruby at her shop. It was a Saturday evening, and the shop was closed, and she was sitting on the floor behind the counter, her back against the wall, her knees drawn up. She was crying. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just quietly, with her eyes closed and her hands on her knees, and the kind of crying that says you've been holding it in so long that your body has forgotten how to let go.

I stood in the doorway for a long time. I could have left. I could have come back tomorrow or next week or never. That's what detectives do—we come back when the timing is right. We don't show up too early. We don't show up too late.

I walked over and sat down next to her. She didn't open her eyes.

"I know who you are," I said. "And I know what your brother does. And I know that O'Brien asked me to investigate him."

Ruby opened her eyes. She looked at me for a long time. Then she spoke.

It was the first time she'd spoken to me in four weeks, and when she did, her English was perfect—clear, measured, with no accent and no hesitation. She sounded like someone who had practiced speaking in front of a mirror, not because she needed to learn the language, but because she needed to know what she would say if someone ever asked her to choose a side.

"You want to know where to stand, Tommy?" she said. "The thing is, the ground moves. It's always moving. You think you're standing on solid earth, and then you look down and the dirt is shifting under your feet, and you're not on solid ground anymore. You never were."

"What do you want me to do?"

She looked at me with those eyes—dark, patient, the kind of eyes that see things before they happen and then decide not to tell you because some truths are a kind of cruelty.

"I want you to do what you've always done," she said. "Choose. And then live with it."

Three months later, I sat in a bar on South Side State Street and drank a bourbon that tasted like it had been aged in a barrel that had previously held something else—something that wasn't whiskey. The bar was half-full. A couple in the corner was fighting about money, the way couples fight about money when they have none. An old man at the end of the bar was staring at his glass the way men stare at things they can't fix.

My detective agency had closed. I'd put a sign on the door: "Permanently Closed," and I'd taken it down two days later because permanently sounded like forever and forever was a word I didn't believe in anymore. O'Brien had been transferred to the 12th precinct—"promoted," which in Chicago police terms means moved to a building where nobody knows your name and nobody asks you why you asked a private eye to investigate a bookie's ledger.

Frank Marino was gone. He hadn't been arrested or killed or dragged out of his house in handcuffs. He had simply stopped existing. One day he was a man with a ledger and a pool hall and a sister who wrote notes in Italian. The next day he was a gap in the city's underground—a space where something used to be and now wasn't.

Ruby's shop was still open. I walked past it three times that night and didn't go in. I wanted to. I didn't. That was the difference between who I used to be and who I was now—I could want something and not do it. I could see something and walk past it.

I put my hand on my left leg. The leg had been gone for three years, but it still ached. Not the stump—the place where the leg used to be. The space where the leg had been. The hole in the world where my leg used to be.

The bartender poured me another whiskey. I drank it. I paid. I walked out into the Chicago snow.