Brian kept his telephone on a stand in the front room. In the bottom of the stand was a Chicago Greater Metropolitan Phonebook. I went into the living room, ignoring the beeps and bings and bangs coming from the TV, and looked up Melody Oddy. Of course, I expected to not find her number there. Her name was different from her family so her phone might be listed under a husband’s name. Or if she was single it might not be listed at all. As I ran a finger down the O’s I expected to find her in the ’burbs, if at all. I assumed she lived out near Park Ridge, like her parents. But there she was. On Wellington.
I dialed the number and after four rings a woman answered.
“Hi, is this Melody?”
“No. She’s at work. Who’s this?”
“This is Nick Nowak. I’m an investigator working on her sister’s trial.”
“Oh,” the woman said with great disappointment. “Isn’t that over?”
“Almost. Can you tell me where she works?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I don’t know who you are.” Then she asked, “Are you in an arcade or someplace?”
I could have asked Terry to turn down the TV or explained, but instead just said, “No. I’m not. Look, I can call back tomorrow, but things are little time sensitive. The sentencing is in two weeks.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have time to talk to her anyway. They just opened a few weeks ago.”
“Who just opened?”
She hesitated. “I suppose it’s okay. She works at a place called Crawdaddy. Seafood. You won’t even be able to get in. It’s that busy.”
It was a Monday. I didn’t think it could be that busy. Besides, I was beginning to get hungry. I thanked the girl, who I assumed was Melody’s roommate, and hung up. I stood there thinking about what to do with Terry. He was sixteen so he didn’t need a babysitter. But he also wasn’t the kind of kid I liked leaving alone. His behavior for the last two months had been basically good, except for a couple of isolated incidents. One of which included his answering a personals ad from the back of the
Reader
resulting in a very unhappy twenty-six–year-old man showing up at Brian’s door who nearly got a punch in the nose from me.
“Hey,” I said, trying to get his attention. “Hey, Terry, listen up.” Finally, he deigned to look at me. “I’m going out for dinner. You want to come?”
He said no in a way that managed to convey the sheer stupidity of my question.
“Is there something here for you to eat?” I asked.
“I dunno.”
My first thought was that I should just leave and call him in an hour to see how he was doing. But that posed several problems. First, he might not answer the phone and then I’d be freaked out about whatever he was doing. Second, I knew there was food in the house, Brian wouldn’t go out and let the kid starve. But the food was probably healthy which meant Terry might not want anything to do with it. He had a generous allowance so he could easily order in. Which led to the third problem. He was a good-looking boy, well, young man. In fact, at first glance he looked to be about twenty-two. He was well on his way to being as tall as I was, had dishwater blond hair, and his skin was clear and peachy. He had a way of looking around a room with his light brown eyes that said he was available for all sorts of mischief. If he ordered in, there was a good chance he’d attempt to seduce the deliveryman. Failing that, we had a couple of attractive neighbors, there were good-looking guys walking by on Aldine about every twenty minutes, and there were three gay bars within walking distance that might mistakenly serve the boy. I told him he was coming to dinner with me.
He answered with a contemptuous sigh.
* * * *
Crawdaddy’s was on Rush just above Hubbard. The neighborhood had once housed small factories that made things like shirts and sprockets. Now the old four-story brick buildings with large windows and open floor plans housed trendy restaurants and dance companies. The main change they’d made to the outside of the building, aside from simply cleaning it, was attaching a large pink neon sign, which scrawled Crawdaddy’s in messy cursive across the second floor.
Terry and I walked in through the double doors of the main entrance. The kid wore his usual uniform of jeans, jean jacket, dangerously small Izod polo shirt, and a pair of red Crayons he’d found in the back of Brian’s closet. Before we left the apartment he’d moussed his hair into a mushroom cloud. I’d learned not to react to whatever he did to himself for fear if I said anything it would just get worse.
Inside, the restaurant was a strange mix of glamour and New England seafood shanty. The lighting was low, reflecting off the freshly varnished wood-paneling on the walls and in the built-cabinets; the floor was done in two dark colors of shiny linoleum squares. Immediately in front of us stood a hostess stand with an attractive young woman behind it who probably modeled when she wasn’t seating people. Several couples huddled anxiously around the podium, and it looked like Melody’s roommate was right. It might be difficult to get a table. Terry, though, didn’t seem to mind. He was less diffident than he had been in the cab, probably because he could see several attractive waiters scooting around the dining room.
When it was my turn, I was told there was a forty-five minute wait for a table.
“Would it be possible to have Melody wait on us?” I asked, hoping that it didn’t increase the wait to two hours.
“Oh, Melody is working in the Blue Oyster Cafe.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s our casual dining room. Just go right through that door and they may be able to seat you,” she said, pointing at an arch that seemed to lead to a dead end.
But when I stepped into the arch I saw there were openings to either side. Terry and I went to our left and found ourselves standing in a large room dominated by an oyster bar. Mounds of crushed ice filled with dirty looking oysters seemed to spill off the bar. Booths lined the outer wall, while tall tables filled the floor space not occupied by the oyster bar. Both the booths and the tables were barstool height. Jazz played underneath the chatter of diners. It wasn’t half bad. I think I recognized some Chick Corea followed by Miles Davis.
Another pretty hostess, more casually dressed than the first, approached us. I told her we wanted a table for two in Melody’s section. She looked from me to Terry and then back again. Given the fact that it was a high-end restaurant, I figured most of the waiters in the main dining room were gay, which meant the hostess could probably figure out what Terry and I were. Well, Terry, at least. I wasn’t wearing red shoes. In this girl’s eyes, we were a man and his gay son or a gay man and his much younger lover. Either way there wasn’t much connection to Melody. After all that flashed across her face, the girl led us to one of the raised booths by the windows.
While we were looking at the menu, which was extensive, I asked Terry one of a teenagers’ most dreaded questions, “How’s school?”
“Sucks.”
“Are you passing all your classes?”
“I guess.”
“Then it doesn’t suck.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I went to an all-boys Catholic high school. I have some idea what school is like for you.”
Terry scowled. He didn’t like being reminded that Brian and I understood what he’d been through, that we’d been through similar things. Since we’d become his unofficial parents, well Brian more than me, he’d transferred the thinly veiled contempt he had for his real parents to us. Or maybe like most teenagers he was half psychopath.
“You only have a little more than two years and you’re done.”
“Fuck. Two whole years.”
I almost told him a year wasn’t very long, but I remembered the way time was different for kids; remembered summers that seemed to last forever, and the disappointment when they didn’t. A waitress came over. She was well past thirty, thin, wore too much make-up, and had faded eyes that sunk into her skull. Her uniform was a tuxedo shirt and a blue jean mini-skirt. She wore her blond hair long, pulling it back into a ponytail with a ball of curls in the front. The hairstyle was pretty similar to the one her sister had worn to trial.
She gave us an over-animated smile and said, “Hi! I’m Melody. Cathy says you asked for me? Was I recommended?”
“In a way,” I said. Which might have been mean. “I’m working for your sister’s attorney. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Um...I’m at work.”
“I’m also hungry. Thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.”
“Can I get you something from the bar,” she asked, obviously trying to wrest control of the situation away from me.
“I’ll have a Bacardi and Coke,” Terry said.
“He’ll have a Coke,” I corrected. “I’ll have a Johnnie Walker Red with soda, and I’d like to know why your parents are refusing to testify on your sister’s behalf during sentencing.”
“They loved Wes. More than Maddy, if you ask her.”
“You didn’t love Wes?” I asked before she could slip away.
“He was a fake. I knew that before she married him. He was the kind of guy who knew what people wanted to hear and managed to say it at just the right time.”
“What about your brother? He won’t testify either.”
“He does what he’s told.” There was a bitterness in her voice that slowed my next question enough for her to say, “Let me get your drinks,” and walk away.
“She thinks you’re an asshole,” Terry said. The kid was more observant than I thought.
“I’ll leave her a big tip.” I took out my cigarettes and shook one out of the box. Terry snatched one for himself before I had a chance to say anything. I wouldn’t have said anything, though. Brian didn’t like him smoking, didn’t like him swearing for that matter, but I decided to let the minor infractions go and focus on the big stuff. If we kept him alive and out of prison until he was eighteen then we could tackle the small stuff.
“How’s your love life?” I asked.
“What love life? You keep ruining it.”
That was the answer I was hoping for. I even hoped it was true.
“What about the boys at school? At least a couple of them must be gay.”
“So you’re saying I can have sex with kids but not grownups?” The way he exhaled his cigarette smoke made it look like he was trying to put out a fire. “That’s perverted.”
“I’m not saying you can have sex with anyone.” I tried to remember if it was actually legal for kids to have sex with each other. I suspected it wasn’t. It was just one of those things that happened so often there was no way to arrest and prosecute the guilty. And beyond that, which kid would you prosecute? Or would you send both to prison? I shook those thoughts off and said, “I’m trying to say that if you liked a boy at school and wanted to hang out with him in his parents’ cellar or someplace, then Brian and I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
“Brian would. He’d want me to use a fucking condom.”
That was an unavoidable truth. Brian had read a brochure some guys in New York had put together that suggested fucking with condoms. It seemed kind of pointless to me but Brian was gung ho, even going so far as to bother Howard Brown about putting out a similar brochure. They hadn’t succumbed yet, but knowing Brian they would eventually.
Melody came back with our drinks.
I stubbed out my cigarette and asked, “Did you know about your brother-in-law’s affair?”
“No one knew.”
“Do you think your sister’s lying about that?”
“No. I know my sister. She’d never tell a lie that didn’t make her look good.”
“So if she was lying what would she say?”
“I don’t know. Like he beat her, I guess. Something that really made her look like a victim.”
“Did he beat her?”
“No. He wasn’t that kind of asshole.”
“What kind of asshole was he?”
“The loser kind. He almost never had a job, and when he did he spent all the money on himself. He was a selfish prick and my sister should have dumped him a long time ago. Are you ready to order?”
“Um, yeah, sure. Terry do you know what you want?”
“I’ll have a cheeseburger.”
“It’s a seafood restaurant. Try some kind of fish.”
“Fish is gross.”
I gave up. “I’ll have the fried shrimp.” Which wasn’t any healthier than a cheeseburger but I couldn’t get it at a thousand other restaurants in Chicago.
Melody grabbed the menus and walked away as quickly as she could.
I looked at Terry a moment and then asked, “Have you been staying away from the personals?”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Treat me like someone you’re investigating.”
Apparently my interrogation skills left a little to be desired.
“Are you happy you’re not testifying in the DeCarlo trial?” The week before an ASA had called to tell Terry he wouldn’t be testifying. DeCarlo had traded sex for better grades with a number of boys in Terry’s class, boys who were more visibly upset by it than Terry.
“That’s still a question,” he pointed out.
“Questions are a normal part of conversation. How am I going to know how you are unless I ask questions?” He didn’t respond so I continued, “You don’t want to testify. It’s not very much fun.”
“You had to testify?”
“Couple of times when I was a police officer. Domestic abuse cases mostly.”
“I don’t hate him. That’s why they don’t want me to testify.”
That was absolutely true. I didn’t know what to say. We’d skirted around this before. I knew that Owen, his attorney, had explained what consent meant legally and that what Deacon DeCarlo had done was wrong, no matter whether the boys agreed or not. But still, he had some trouble with the concept—which is probably why it’s a good idea that sixteen-year-olds can’t legally have sex. Of course, all of this was complicated by his being an emancipated minor, meaning that he was an adult and could consent to just about anything except the one thing he really wanted to get busy consenting to.
Finally, I said, “You don’t have to hate anybody you don’t want to.”