Windy City Blues Read Online Free Page A

“Peter Ross?” I asked. He sat on a bench at the park near Diversey Harbor.
    “That’s me,” he said through whatever he was chewing.
    He was skinny and well tanned in a brown, worn-out, leathery kind of way. His face reflected a lifetime of missed deadlines and spiked stories. Every few seconds he turned his head and spit out sunflower seed shells. Gross. I sat at the other end of the bench. “So what do you know about Gelashvili’s murder?”
    Ross finished the seed he was working on and ejected it. “Well, I know the cops weren’t eager to figure it out. Considering Gelashvili was one of their own, I thought that was really crummy.”
    “I gotta believe your original article was a lot longer than what got published.”
    “Hell, yes, it was. I had a whole feature on his family. Georgian immigrants. A real powerful, tragic human interest story. The death of the American dream. But the
Republic
hacked it down to an impotent piece of shit.”
    I waited for Ross to expand on the emasculation of his piece, but he offered only more violent evacuations of black shells.
    “What did the city editor say about it?” I asked.
    Ross spit in disgust and faced me for the first time. “That useless bastard? He’s got his nut sack hiding so far up, he has to spend all his money on a stud service for his wife. At first, he was psyched up, thought we had a real scoop. And then bang! Somebody says ‘boo’ and he shits himself. I asked him what was going on and all he can say is he got a call from the big boss, Konigson.”
    “What about the cops? Did they tell you anything?”
    “They got a couple of Laurel and Hardys pretending they give a damn. Every time I asked them a question, they’d look at each other and smile. Then one of the morons would give me the ‘it’s an ongoing investigation’ bull crap and laugh.”
    His defeatist tone intrigued me. “So you’re just going to roll over? Don’t you want to know why the Gelashvili investigation is being shut down?”
    Ross gave me a poisonous look. “You want truth? Is that it? I should be Zola and Gelashvili my Dreyfus? His head reduced to rubble and nobody cares. That’s the only truth that matters anymore. Fuck your truth!”
    I liked getting people fired up. “Why did you agree to meet me?”
    “Knight’s paying me a hundred bucks. He’s using me to rope you in so you have to give him the inside story. If you showed up, that means you signed his contract.”
    “Why didn’t Knight just ask you himself?” A kid on a skateboard flew past us, failed at executing a kick-flip, but still landed on his feet while the board went off the sidewalk.
    “Because I hate that little fuck. But I’ll take his money.”
    “You’re a true friend.”
    “He’s a punk with a rich daddy. Truth or no truth, he’ll never have to worry about making a living.”
    “Why does that piss you off?” I knew why, but I couldn’t resist.
    “Damn it! I just said why. Truth! You have any idea how I’ve had to compromise myself just to make a buck? You think I want to write meaningless articles about guys no one cares about getting beaten to death? But I gotta make money. I’ve wasted a lot of time. In fact, I’ve wasted my life.”
    His dejection was palpable and entirely uninteresting. I placed my business card on the bench and walked away.

7
    As a kid, we always had the
Sun-Times
in the house. The
Republic,
I later learned, was the conservative paper while the
Sun-Times
leaned toward the progressive side. My great-granddad was part of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson’s political machine during Prohibition. Both the
Sun-Times
and the
Republic
existed in one form or another back then. And both accused Great-Granddad of terrorism. He once shared a headline with Al Capone. I wondered which paper Great-Granddad read.
    Despite Republic Tower’s landmark status as a quintessential example of neo-Gothic architecture, I saw only a skeletal monolith of spikes, spires, pointed arches,