Bob turned it off then. Enough. And shortly thereafter Washington called, at the end of the duty day, saying yeah, he knew what was going on, but he did have these notebooks for Bob, if Bob wanted them. Bob wanted them.
So Bob sat there, trying to make this or that out of the notes. Each guy or gal had his own scheme, his own method, his own set of abbreviations, so it wasn’t easy going, and a lot of it was guesswork or inference. Eventually, he got to know the two simplest styles of penmanship, so he could read those books easily enough, even if some of the initials remained mysterious, and another guy had gone back over his notes with a red pencil, starring each entry that he thought might lead to further inquiries.
Essentially what he found confirmed his own investigations. In the past few months or so, both Jack and Mitzi had been morose, uncommunicative, seemingly depressed. Friends wondered about the health of the marriage or the long-term depression the rejection of Jack’s book might cause. A perhaps too bitchy interviewee made the point that it had been so important to him to have a big New York publisher take it, but nobody would, and that had been a devastating blow to Jack’s dream of literary glory and a return to centrality. Plus, he now owed the publisher the money he’d been living on for five years.
But then everyone agreed that there’d been a miraculous recovery. Suddenly the old Jack, the old Mitzi were back: they always had a swagger to them, a charisma, and a happiness, an ebullience. Most people seemed to put this as happening somewhere early in September; it was as if that ship, which seemed to have vanished, had arrived at long last.
What could have happened? Bob wondered.
He wished he could get back into the house, maybe look more carefully at appointment books or calendars for that time period. Once he’d penetrated the safe, that’s all he’d cared about and he’d concentrated on it at the expense of everything else.
Fool! Idiot! Making mistakes! Sloppy, old, stupid, eyes not working, brain asleep.
He tried to think what to do with the information. He could go over the information from the safe again, for the fiftieth time; he could go over the notebooks again, thinking perhaps he’d missed something; he could log on to the Internet and call up newspapers from the first week in September on the possibility that it was something out there, in the real world, that had left a mark that he could understand and link to them for a clearer picture; he could go through the biography a journalist had written about them and check to see if something in their past happened around the first and they were celebrating-but that one was dumbest.
He was so tired. It was time to go to bed. His mind was blurring; he was getting nowhere.
But he couldn’t tear himself away. Silly as it seemed, he had to run it out. He got out his laptop, logged on to Google. He thought he’d just Google randomly for a bit, Jack Strong/Mitzi Reilly/September, and see what he’d get. He got nonsense. Nothing, crazy, insane, lots of refrains of some song or pieces of doggerel poetry like “Try to remember, it was the kind of September, when we were mellllllowwww,” whatever that was. He jumped through the listings, and then something caught his eye on about the seventh screen under the listing O. Z. Harris, an obituary, from the Chicago Tribune, page D15, with the lines blackened “… and was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzy Reilly, a 1997 biography.”
He called it up.
The headline read Radical journalist O. Z. Harris, 81.
He read,
Oscar Zebulon Harris, a Pultizer Prize-winning journalist who challenged the system and earned renown for his integrity and intrepidity, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, died Wednesday after a long illness.
Harris, 81, better known as “O. Z. Harris” and “Ozzie” to the many young writers who admired and loved him, covered the American left over many years and worked for, among others, The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and finally his own newsletter, called Ozzie’s Oz, a famous muckraking journal that took on the powers that be.
Frequently called an agitator and, in a different age, an activist, Ozzie was as prickly to his enemies-usually the Justice Department, four Republican administrations, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Army-as he was loving to his friends, which included a generation of progressive journalists and activists.
His reporting on war crimes in Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and he was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, a 1997 biography.
He died September 3.
According to his own wishes, no services will be held and his body was cremated. Donations on his behalf may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Cook County Department of Public Administration warehouse was west of the city, even beyond Oak Park, in a town near O’Hare called Franklin Park, full of tidy bungalows and Italian, Mexican, and Korean restaurants, tracing the demographic tides that had flowed outward from the big town. It was flat, out here, and so far gone the skyscrapers that contributed to America’s second-greatest skyline were unseen. Trees filled the little crosshatched streets off the main drags, but the drags themselves were the usual run of strip malls, chain restaurants, the odd old free-standing restaurant, even a racetrack with an imposing stadium abutting it.
Washington and Swagger found the nondescript old factory building on Mannheim Road, in an area zoned for light manufacturing, each building separated from the others by cyclone fences with barbed wire discouragement up top. They turned off the busy Mannheim, pulled through a gate, earning admittance on the power of Washington’s police ID, found parking, and went through a green door to a grimy office with a counter.
What brought them there was Bob’s call to Dennis Washington, Washington’s to the coroner’s office to learn the hospital in which Harris had died, followed by Washington’s visit to that establishment. The hospital kept careful records, and it became clear that over the last months of his life, Ozzie Harris was regularly visited by his friends and comrades Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly and nobody else. Washington did some quick, casual interviews, found a few people who remembered and all agreed that the old radical really came to rely on Jack and Mitzi, who in turn had treated him with respect and love. He remained “Mr. Harris” to them, never “Ozzie,” as everyone else called him.
The clerk eventually noticed Bob and the imposing Washington and ambled over with a melancholy weight to his movements. It wasn’t much fun, Bob thought, working among the aisles and aisles of unclaimed property of the dead; most of it, according to statute, would remain in escrow against claims by long-lost relatives for six months; then it was auctioned, and what remained went to the burner.
Washington flashed ID, laid the death certificate out, and the clerk toddled away, returning with a key attached to a necklace that wore a metal disk upon which H-1498 was stamped.
“Go on in, Detective. It’s pretty self-explanatory; you just follow the rows to H, then go down the shelves till you get to unit 1498. The key opens the padlock. I’d take a mask; it’s pretty dusty in there.”