We read the accounts in the Nortown Leader newspaper, in the police blotter and particularly in the front-page story of the Metro section that ran the week of August 3 (“Police Still at a Loss”). With my father’s old army binoculars, a Polaroid camera, and a portable tape recorder, we’d case out houses and apartment buildings on blocks that hadn’t been hit yet. But after Mr. Isaac Mermelstein approached us wearing an Israeli army jacket and a yellow hardhat and told us to get off his sidewalk, after Mrs. Weinberg called the cops on us, after my mother honked her horn and told us to stop loitering in alleys like a “couple of hoodlums,” we went back to the drainage canal and the Lincoln Village Theater, where we would sneak into movies we had already seen, then go to Jason’s apartment and listen to his Led Zeppelin and Yes tapes.
On the night that Jason tried to get me stoned, we were sitting in his front room, and he was already pretty high from the half a joint he’d smoked. Mom and Bobby were at Park West at a Boz Scaggs concert, and Jason and I were watching Saturday Night Live with the volume turned down and “Roundabout” playing loud. The actors’ lips were moving perfectly in synch with the music, Jason said, handing me a lit joint. I told him I wasn’t interested, but he gave it to me anyway. It dropped on my shirt, burning a hole by the left shoulder, at which point I panicked, ran to the bathroom, and dumped about a quart of water on myself to make sure the fire was out. When I got back to the front room, Jason was laughing.
“Go get yourself another shirt from the dresser, dork,” he said.
I’m sure he meant his dresser and not Uncle Bobby’s, but both rooms were dark and I couldn’t figure out which was which. I rummaged through Bobby Kagan’s dresser. While grabbing for an undershirt, I saw a wad of cash, all hundred-dollar bills. As I lay in bed that night, listening to my grandfather breathing, I considered everything I knew about Bobby Kagan, how he had thousands of dollars in cash, how he lied about his job, how he seemed so interested in what I knew about the robberies, how he always disappeared for hours during ballgames. I thought of what Mr. Klein had said: Someone new to the neighborhood was committing the robberies. Bobby Kagan and Jason had only lived on Albion since May.
I had already made vague plans to try to follow Bobby, but when my mother got home at 2:00 in the morning and I told her of my suspicions, she couldn’t stop laughing.
The next day, Mom was working and Hallie was taking my grandfather to the hospital for a checkup. I’d planned to spend the day tailing Bobby Kagan. But when Jason called to ask me what I would be doing, I couldn’t tell him the truth, so we spent the day biking through Caldwell Woods, where invariably every summer the bodies of two or three teenage runaways would be dumped, and then went to Superdawg and ate cheese fries.
When I got home, there were two squad cars in front of my grandfather’s house. Mr. Klein was standing on his porch, squinting, until his wife came out and said, “You watched enough, Joe. Later you’ll watch more.”
Hallie was talking to two cops on the stoop as my grandfather looked at the ground. I let my bike fall on the front lawn and made my way up the stairs.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, talking to two male police officers. She was smoking, but when she saw me, she suddenly stood up, put out her cigarette, and grabbed my hands. “I have to tell him what happened,” she told the officers.
She told me not to get upset, that we had been robbed. Then she led me upstairs where all the bedrooms were in complete disarray. Dresser drawers were turned upside down, file cabinets lay on the floor, the carpet in my grandfather’s room was slit open, everywhere were clothes and books and towels. My grandfather’s bedroom didn’t smell like urine as it usually did. The thief had thrown everything to the floor, and the room was pungent with mouthwash and aftershave.
My mother put her hands on my shoulders, looked me straight in the eye with an uncharacteristically concerned look. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked.
I nodded. Actually, I felt fine. I’d spent so much time dreading the robbery that when it occurred, my most profound sentiment was relief. I felt comforted by all the police in the house, remembered what it was like to live in an apartment with Shelah and her friends coming in and going out, with mom and Jim laughing and dancing and listening to the radio, instead of just silence and my grandfather’s breaths.
When it was clear I was neither afraid nor upset, my mother changed her tone. “Don’t start telling the cops your theories,” she said, “If they ask you what happened, tell them the truth, and the truth is you don’t know.”
I was about to remind my mother that Jason Rubinstein was the only one to whom I had mentioned that my grandfather would be at the hospital all day. Who else other than Bobby would he have told? But I recognized my mother’s tone. It was the same one she had used when I went with her to the auto insurance appraiser and she’d said, “Remember, don’t tell them what you think happened because you don’t know what happened,” the same one she had when she and Jim had driven up to take me home from Camp Chi and she’d said, “If anyone asks, tell them Jim’s your uncle.” So when Officer Maki asked what I knew about the robbery, I said that I’d been at Caldwell Woods all day with Jason Rubinstein.
Once the police officers were gone, the house felt emptier than ever. I couldn’t wait to get to sleep, then wake up the next morning, visit Jason and Bobby Kagan’s apartment, and see if I could find anything new like Grandpa’s cufflinks or any of his paperweights. I lay in bed listening to my mother talking to Bobby on the phone, telling him what had been stolen, then saying that tomorrow night would be great, and yes, she would meet him downtown.
The next morning, I noticed Mr. Klein across the street. He wasn’t watching the neighborhood, he was doing the Sun Times crossword. When I asked if he knew that our house had been hit, he said that he’d been sitting outside all yesterday. He’d seen my mother drive to work with her Crawford’s bags, had seen the ambulance pick up Hallie and my grandfather, had seen the ambulance return later that afternoon, then my mother coming home, and then the squad cars. He didn’t know how he could have missed it.
I asked Mr. Klein if he’d seen a red Cadillac DeVille.
“Not even that,” he said.
“It’s enough, Joe,” I heard his wife Fran say.
During the night, I concocted a plan that would allow me to search through the apartment on Albion Street without arousing Jason’s suspicions. I would suggest a game of hide-and-seek. I feared that Jason might find the idea babyish, yet I couldn’t think of another way to be alone in Bobby’s room. But when I reached the apartment, Bobby Kagan was there. He was wearing a white headband, white tube socks with red stripes on them, no shirt. Now that he was dating my mother, he had invented nicknames for me.
“Benny,” he said, “Benito, what’s happening?”
There were more than a dozen questions I wanted to ask Bobby Kagan. Why hadn’t he been able to pick up my mother the previous night? Where had he been between 5:00 and 7:00? Where did all that money in his dresser come from? But he was the one asking questions before I could pose any of my own. Was I hungry for pancakes? Did I want to see the ballgame tonight? The Sox were playing the Angels. Though he had some business to take care of, he could drop me and Jason off and give us money for a taxi home.