Cast Of Shadows

– 19 -

Big Rob’s office was so tiny he couldn’t clear the space between either side of his desk and the wall without sliding through hip-first. Sally Barwick sat in a foam-padded aluminum chair with torn vinyl upholstery. If she stretched a muscled leg out in front of her, her red shoe would have hit Big Rob’s metal desk before it straightened. She could tilt her head back on her long brown neck and knock on the wall behind her, and Big Rob, from his chair, could do the same to the opposite wall. Phil Canella’s lanky body was wedged between a filing cabinet and the wall, the only other human-sized space in the room. Philly, like Big Rob a former cop turned private investigator, had driven down from the northern suburbs on a case. Just dropped in to say hi.

Barwick held up a three-sided section of sandwich from the Ogden Avenue Deli, one flight down. The thick, striated layers of meat and lettuce and tomato and toast made it difficult to bite no matter how many angles she tried.

“It’s not him,” she said after managing a mouthful of bread with some mayo and turkey.

“How do you know?” Big Rob asked.

“The Finn kid has a birthmark. Eric Lundquist did not.”

“So what does that prove?”

“They’re clones, Biggie. Genetic duplicates.”

“What do you know about clones, Barwick? I mean really. You some kind of expert all of a sudden?”

“It’s common knowledge. Read Time magazine. Go hire a doctor, an expert or whatever, and ask him if you want.”

“I’m not hiring a doctor, Barwick. The Finns are already paid up. I’m not going back to them to get money for an opinion, and I’m not paying some doc out of my pocket.”

“Take my word for it, then.”

His cheeks filled with corned beef, Big Rob waved an inch-thick red folder over his head. “I don’t need your word for it. I got eight months of diligence here that says Lundquist’s the guy, and I’m not going back to the Finns and telling them that it’s suddenly a whodunit.”

“Okay. So what do you want?”

“I want you to give me the discs and sign off on your interview with the old lady. Based on the work we’ve done just following the paper (solid detective work, by the way – congratulations), the Finns already think Eric Lundquist’s their guy, and if we hand over the interview they’ll get exactly what they want: a biography of their son’s cell donor.”

“Except Eric Lundquist’s not their son’s cell donor.”

“Says you. These people are chasing a phantom, anyway. This Lundquist fellow, the clone donor or whatever, no matter what, he ain’t the same person as their kid. You got your nature, and then you got your nurture, and so forth. So what if you’re right? Whatever curiosity they got, you’ve got the stuff that can satisfy them.”

Sally said, “If Lundquist’s not the donor, don’t you want to know who is? Something stinks here, Biggie. We might be on to a huge scandal here. Woodward and Bernstein shit. Don’t you want to know why all the paperwork, all the medical records, point to Lundquist as the cell donor, but the two kids don’t look alike? Why the Finn kid has a birthmark that Eric Lundquist never had?”

“I want to know everything my customer wants to know. No more. Right, Philly?” His friend nodded. “The customer wants to know about Eric Lundquist.”

Barwick took a pair of audio discs from her bag and slid them across Big Rob’s immaculate desk. “I’ve already transcribed the relevant sections.”

Big Rob tagged Canella with a frustrated look. “Let me tell you something, Sals,” Philly said. “We’re in the business of providing answers, not truth. When a woman hires us to follow her no-good husband, we follow him and take pictures. If her man’s got a good reason for being with his personal assistant at a Lincoln Avenue motel, that’s not our say-so.”

Biggie added, “In the Finn case, we followed the evidence and we did good work. The client will be happy. We should be happy.”

Barwick stuffed the check in the pocket of her denim shirt. “You’ll call me with the next job?”

“Yeah, Sally. Next week. I got a rich geezer on the Gold Coast maybe messing with his grandson’s babysitter. Evening surveillance. Real sick stuff. You’ll like it.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t get down on yourself. You’re just starting out, but you did terrific work here. That ‘oral history’ thing is classic. And crap, how many times do we get a chance to make a client happy? Most of our jobs end in divorce or a lawsuit.”

“You’re a wide man, Biggie.”

“You mean wise man, hon.” But he knew what she meant.

Home in Andersonville, north of Wrigley, by the lake, Barwick cooled off by rinsing her shallow Afro in the sink and read the same page of a paperback novel six times before going to bed. Asleep, she dreamed she was sitting on the beach at Lynde Lake with Justin Finn, grown to a man of eighteen or so. His face looked like Eric Lundquist’s. On his back was the kettle-shaped birthmark. He took her hand and let her slide it up and down the sides of his hairless, powerful legs.

“No worries,” Justin said. “You’ve got a job. But I’ve got a job, too.”

“Can I help?” Sally asked him.

“Shhh,” Justin said, and then they were off the beach and in the front room of Mrs. Lundquist’s house with the knickknacks and the M amp;M’s. Justin touched her cheek, and he walked out the door into the snow.