Authors: John Ellsworth
I
deposited
my five-hundred-thousand-dollar home equity check in my personal account, and I wrote a check for ninety-thousand dollars to Sue Ellen. Sue Ellen sends Eddie to pick it up. She says they're both delirious with joy, and she's on the way to the pharmacy to pick up the first round of injectables. It will be expensive, but my money gives them a shot at a new life with a new baby. So be it.
Eddie comes into my office looking hangdog and embarrassed and thanks to my new face and scars I can relate. So I know I can't have that. I decide to welcome him into the fold, try to make him comfortable while he's with me.
"Eddie, thanks for coming. Let me show you what I need Sue Ellen to sign," I say, and extend my hand with the paperwork. He glances over it. "This is a happy occasion, and I'm glad to be a part of it, you and Sue Ellen launching down this new road together."
His tan reddens. He is blushing and I wish he weren't.
"I'm amazed you're even talking to her after she left you high and dry, Michael."
I brush away his words. "We had both been unhappy for a long time. It was a good decision on her part, and I harbor zero animosity. In fact, I'm glad she found you. You seem to make her very happy."
He beams. "Well, hey, man, that's really cool of you. There's another thing, too. I was wondering how interested you might be in investing in an excellent business opportunity."
I should have known better. It's always something. My recently-found faith in humanity is quickly unraveling. But I plunge ahead.
"What opportunity might that be, Eddie?"
"It's actually a house washing service. I can get a franchise for twenty-five thousand."
This really throws me. House washing? Seriously?
"So what does house washing—what exactly is it?"
"Well, after a long, hard winter all the houses in Chicago are dirty. There's mud, soot, road salt, cinders—all the stuff that makes winter winter. So I come along with my van, and it's equipped with a five hundred gallon high-pressure water system that forces compressed water and soap up as high as three stories. I blow the dirt away and leave you with a sparkling house. If you're up for it, I'd even do you free for the next ten years."
"That's hard to turn down, Eddie. The franchise is twenty-five thousand?"
"Yes. Plus another twenty for the van. Forty-five total."
"And how much of this are you looking for me to invest?
"All of it. Forty-five grand."
"Wow, I don't know. I was thinking of putting my money into a SEP-IRA with Fidelity. Something to help me retire."
"You know, Michael, have you thought that in a way you're going to be related to my baby? I mean, Sue Ellen being the mother and all?"
"How exactly am I related? I mean it's a beautiful theory, but legally—"
"I'm thinking more like a godfather. Someone who will come to the christening and make a promise to be there for the baby if something happens to me and Susie."
"Susie." Good for him; he's learning. "Well, that's a real honor. Have you discussed it with Sue Ellen? Me being the godfather?"
"Sure, it was her idea. She's still got a soft spot for you, Michael. She still loves you in a way. My own feelings for you are growing that way, too. You're all but family."
"All but family. I'm not sure what that makes me, exactly, but okay, I'll be the godfather to your baby. It would be an honor."
He leans back and strokes his chin. Eddie has the thin waist and wide shoulders of a top-flight swimmer—damn him. Not really. He is wearing half-laced Nikes, navy shorts, and a sleeveless shirt that says, "Where's the Beach!" He repeatedly spins a rabbit's foot keychain around and around his index finger and, with the free hand, strokes his chin as if expecting new growth at any moment. In a way, he's endearing himself to me. But in another way, I want to leap across my desk and choke him to death for stealing Sue Ellen. She was my cheerleader first, damn it, I want to scream at him.
But I don't.
"You're certain house-washing is where it's at for you?" I ask him.
"Being my own boss. That's what I'm after. I can make enough to take care of Sue Ellen and my baby. And even pay you back."
"Even pay me back? How much would you be paying?"
"I'm thinking a grand a month. Possibly. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Until I get rolling, anyway. Then I would double down on it. Amortize the hell out of it."
"Amortizing debt is good. Good for you, Eddie. Tell you what."
"What?"
"I'm in. It sounds like an excellent opportunity for you and Sue Ellen."
He leaps to his feet, leans over my desk and begins pumping my hand. He is quite strong, and his shoulders knot up under the sleeveless shirt as he thanks me. I can see why Sue Ellen would throw me over for the guy. He's hard all over, and I am soft. He has perfect, berry-brown skin and I am scarred and road-weary. What's the old saying, he was rode hard and put away wet? That's me.
"I'll send you a check, Eddie. For the full forty-five thousand. There will be an IOU with it. Just sign that and send it back. Okay?"
"Absolutely, Michael. Oh, my God! I'm gonna be self-employed!"
"And don't forget this." I pass him the envelope containing Sue Ellen's ninety thousand dollar check. "Tell Sue Ellen to sign the consent agreement and I'll get the judge to enter it. It will release me from all further alimony obligations. Make sure to remind her, okay?"
"Okay, okay, okay!"
He slips the envelope into his front pocket and begins backing out of my office. At the door, he raps the wall with his knuckles, points at me with a smile, pumps his fist, and he's gone.
Mrs. Lingscheit replaces him in my office.
"What was all that? That young man was walking on air when he left!"
"I just paid off my alimony, Mrs. Lingscheit."
"That was it?"
"And I just paid my child support, too. In the grand scheme of things."
"You don't have kids. How can you owe child support?"
I think of all the times Sue Ellen begged me for a child. I remember how often I said no.
"Trust me. I owed."
I
am sipping
coffee and ruminating about Sue Ellen and her baby. I sincerely hope it works for her. If there's anything else I can do to help, I will. Which is when my phone rings, when the angels in the air know I'm in a helping mood.
"Yes, this is Michael?"
"Mr. Gresham?"
I know the voice. It can't be.
"This is James Lamb. I need you to come down and get me outta jail."
"What is it this time, James?"
"They're hasslin me, man. The cops won't let me alone. Just get me outta jail and I'm leaving town. You can tell them that."
"What are you arrested for?"
"They say I sold drugs to an undercover narc."
"Did you?"
There's a long silence.
"Dude, don't be asking that kind of shit over the phone. This is bugged, dude."
"Sorry, James. This time, I'm out. Call someone else."
I hang up and feel like I've come out the other end of a fire pit. Putting that kind of evil out of my life is good. He's someone else's problem now, and he's probably going away for a long time, according to what it sounds like. Sold drugs to a narc? Please take a ticket and go away for twenty years. I know the prosecutors won't cut him a deal. Not after the Pennington case. Good. I'll never have to deal with his ugly face and gold teeth again. For a moment I am nauseous. Just talking to him makes me sick anymore. Good riddance and goodbye, James.
I
've done
some looking into and here's what I've been able to piece together about James Joseph Lamb.
Bottom line, Lamb is a nobody. His name, his character, carry no weight among the denizens that freely roam South Chicago. When he is around, he's in someone's face and is out of control and frightening. Then he is a somebody.
South Chicago is a shooting gallery. Guns and gangbangers have turned that free-fire zone into the place in America where you are most likely to be murdered with a gun if you are black, under the age of twenty-five, and walking along a street. Why walking? Because the trademark assassination in South Chicago is the drive-by. Lamb and his fellow Crips have a year-round open season on all citizens. They shoot at will just for notches.
This is Lamb's modus operandi:
A pimped out low-rider careening around the corner at the other end of the block and you are walking along with your head down, hands in pockets, minding your own business. Riding shotgun in that lowrider is James Lamb, a street punk of twenty-five years with a rap sheet that completely fills a computer screen of the fifteen-inch variety, two-columns. He is angry—always—and mean. He is the kid who loved to torture cats and dogs with matches and pliers. He is the kid who at the old age of fourteen was raping nine-year-old girls whose mothers had left them alone in the projects. No boundaries restrain him—not ethical, financial, relational, or social; there are no rules that he won't break and no allegiances strong enough to keep him loyal to anything for very long. And tonight he is drawing a bead on you from the operator's end of an AR-15 assault rifle as you are walking along after a night at the school library.
It is ten p.m. And you wish you hadn't stayed so late. But your Black Studies paper is due tomorrow at the community college, and you need an "A" if you really do plan to go to law school.
Driving the car in which Lamb is riding is Johnny Rouse, a black kid all of nineteen years who has spent the last nine in juvenile prison in Kewanee Youth Center, the place where they send kids with severe mental health issues, kids who commit violent crimes, and sex offenders. Johnny Rouse is all three of these, so he fit right in during his stay there.
As you walk along, the Rouse car pulls abreast and slows to keep pace. You speed up; it speeds up. You slow down; it slows down. All the while, James Lamb is keeping you within the sights of his assault rifle, studying you. If you're a Crip, they will pull away and leave you alone. But if you're a Blood, brother, you won't be making it home tonight. And if you're neither, if you're a freshman at your local community college trying to study your way out of the projects—you're fair game. You're the young, six-point buck the deer hunters hotly pursue to mount on their wall.
He thinks he might just fire off one round into your lower body just to hear you scream. He does, and the bullet strikes you in your upper left thigh. It passes through the soft tissue there, impacts the thigh bone, and ricochets forward, ripping through your testicles and crumpling you to the ground. As you lie there, screaming and pleading, the car comes to a complete stop. Lamb throws open the door and walks up to you.
"Quit that fuckin cryin," he orders. "Yo, fool, take it like a man."
You are afraid to look up at him, afraid to make eye contact, but you are able to restrain your cries. Now the only sound is a low moan deep in your chest, and you try to shut that off too but find you're unable, that that sound is a bodily process you cannot control any more than you can control the rate of blood pouring from the wound in your scrotum.
“Stop that," says Lamb, and he lifts the assault rifle to his shoulder and takes careful aim at your head.
"Please," you say, and lift a trembling arm up to him, "I just wanna—"
But you don't get to finish because Lamb has just executed you.
He riffles through your pockets, finds a five and some change, and kicks you in the head in disgust.
"Fool," he sniffs, then spits.
Sirens can be heard a few blocks over on Dorchester and so Lamb sidles back to the car driven by Johnny Rouse and slides inside. He takes the assault rifle and works it down to the floor between his seat and the door. Out of sight to any cop who might look inside from the driver's side of the car.
He bumps fists with Rouse, who punches the gas and the lowrider surges ahead into the night.
He is everything you and I loathe.
Loathe and wish dead.
I
t is midnight
, and I have just gotten off the phone with—are you ready for this?—Judge Francis Pennington Jr. We have talked about James Lamb. The judge called me; I didn't call him. Ever the lawyer and ready to settle disputes, I accepted the call, and we talked. While I am enraged at the guy and really want nothing to do with him and don't trust him any more than I trust boneless fish, I talk. Evidently the Instagram pictures that Lamb posted online have found their way to the Chicago Police Department. An investigation took place, and it was confirmed; the pictures were original. Only someone at the murder scene could have taken those. That someone, the consensus is, is James Lamb. But as we all know, the judge says, Lamb is immune from prosecution.
So Judge Pennington asks me for help.
Have you ever cared for a sick animal that later you had to put down? The criminal justice system in Chicago is like that: you take care of your own and begin to develop a kind of proprietary feeling toward the defendants who cross through the courtroom. Some you like, some you hate, some need to be put down. James Lamb has become one of the latter. No matter how much the system—and all participants in the system—try, Lamb isn't going to get better. It is time to act.
Pennington and I meet the next morning early, six o'clock, at a Denny's on the north side. We don't shake hands; we hardly look at each other. He hates me, and I am up to here with him. Marcel, who has violently opposed my meeting the judge, has driven me today. He wants to accompany me to the meet, but I refuse. I am armed under my windbreaker; the silver Colt is riding shotgun. By now, I’ve fired it enough that I’ve become quite good. I feel like I can defend myself.
We talk. While the judge hates me, it is a mutual hate, and it will continue. But for now, we are forced to work together. He outlines what he needs from me. It means I will have to gain Lamb’s trust—at least for a short time. Frankly, I'm so sick of Lamb that it is almost easy for me to agree to help.
The plan is agreed to, and we shake.
Then we each enjoy a Grand Slam Slugger breakfast.
All eating, no talking.
Still only $7.99.
Marcel stands beside our booth on the other side of the window, ready to draw down on Pennington for the slightest wrong move.
What a friend.
And what an enemy.