Chicago Noir

Bobby Kagan knows everything by Adam Langer

Albion & Whipple

One morning in the summer of 1978, Mom’s Jim said he couldn’t take it anymore and moved out on her for the third and last time, with the intention of finding his first wife. Shelah went away for the summer to Camp Chi, where I had contracted something like dysentery two years earlier and my mother wouldn’t let me go back. So I was stuck with Grandpa and his nurse Hallie at the house on Whipple Street, where Mom said we would stay until she’d saved enough money from her job at Crawford’s Department Store so that we could have our own place again.

My mother had grown up on Whipple with her sister and her folks. Now, Grandpa still slept in his bedroom, I slept in my Aunt Evelyn’s old room, Hallie slept in Mom’s old room, and Mom slept downstairs on the couch. The place hadn’t been fixed up in years; the paint on the canopy was peeling, the basement moldy, the linoleum floor warped and cracked. There was an overgrown garden full of weeds and a garage packed with boxes, tires, rusted hoes, broken rakes, and Grandpa’s white Lincoln Continental. No one had driven the car in a decade. The garage was locked, and Grandpa had long since lost the key.

The first I heard of the robberies came from Mr. Klein, a retired contractor who lived with his wife Fran directly across the street from Grandpa’s in a little red-brick house with chartreuse shutters and a lawn jockey out front. It had started at the Bells’s house on Richmond. The thieves hadn’t gotten much, Mr. Klein said, just a Mixmaster and a color television. They’d fared better at Mrs. Kutler’s on Richmond, scoring not only the TV and radio, but also all her heirloom jewelry. What impressed Mr. Klein most was how professional the burglars were; there was never any sign of a break-in and they always seemed to know exactly what they were looking for. Even though they hadn’t gotten anything from the Singers’s house on Francisco, somehow they had known that Mr. Singer kept his cash under the bedroom carpet. But nothing like that would happen on Whipple Street, Mr. Klein assured me. All summer long, he would be sitting on his porch, watching.

Inside the house on Whipple Street, when Mom still wasn’t home from work, and Hallie read Agatha Christie mysteries while my grandfather slept, I’d wonder when the burglars would hit our house. It was full of antiques and my late grandmother’s jewels. It seemed as if it would only be a matter of time. Who would put up a fight? My grandfather needed help getting in and out of the bathroom. Hallie was sixty-three. My only hope was that the burglars would wait until Mom and I moved into our own place again. I had never liked Mom’s Jim much. When he was out late drinking at Alibi’s, I’d imagine that he was in my bedroom staring down at me. But whenever I turned on the nightlight, no one would be there. Now I wished he would come back.

Mr. Klein’s tales of burglaries didn’t impress Jason Rubinstein. He and his uncle, Bobby Kagan, had just moved to Albion Street from Albany Park, where, to hear Jason tell it, the streets were becoming overrun with Korean gangs; every night he fell asleep to the sounds of gunfire.

Jason and I met at Beginners Woodshop at the JCC. Though he and I were in the same grade, he was a year and a half older, more than six inches taller, and probably fifty pounds heavier than me. He claimed to have fingered Robyn Rosen in the nocturnal mammal house at Lincoln Park Zoo and to have lit off firecrackers during the Elton John show at the Chicago Stadium. If you jammed your thumbs into someone’s temples, he said, their heart would stop.

When the JCC canceled Woodshop due to overall lack of interest, Jason and I took the opportunity to start walking our bikes alongside the Chicago River drainage canal on the rubble-strewn site of the old Kiddieland amusement park. Jason showed me what a used condom looked like. He also pointed out an empty Ziploc bag, which he said had probably contained marijuana. Sometimes we’d bike past the Lincoln Avenue motels.

“That’s where the hookers take their johns,” Jason said.

I nodded, needing but not asking for further explanation.

Jason said he’d learned everything he knew from his uncle, Bobby Kagan. Bobby was slim, with a full head of black curls. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward, his hands dangling down in front of him. He wore bracelets, necklaces, and pastel shirts opened at least three buttons. Before he started speaking, something he always did quickly and breathlessly, he’d swipe an index finger across his nostrils, blink his eyes, and swallow hard. He said he worked for the White Sox, but I figured he was lying. One time, he said he was in charge of concessions. Another time he was a scout. Once he said he’d done color commentary for the Sox farm team, the Iowa Oaks.

Still, he managed to get good seats for Jason and me. And not only for Sox games. During the first half of that summer, we saw the Sox three times at Comiskey Park and sat on the third base side during Bat Day. We also got to sit behind the visitors’ dugout for Cubs games at Wrigley Field. Bobby Kagan always drove us to and from the games in his red Cadillac DeVille with whitewall tires. He’d buy our Cokes and hot dogs with one of the hundred-dollar bills that he peeled off a roll he kept in his right front pocket. But he’d leave before batting practice and wouldn’t return until the ninth inning, when he’d say he’d met an old friend or had some business to take care of. Whenever I spoke, he’d cut me off. I sensed that he never listened to what I was saying.

One night, though, in Bobby’s car, after the White Sox had taken a twi-night doubleheader from the Twins, I said that I was glad we were coming home late because Mr. Klein had told me that the burglars had never struck after 10:00. And for the first time that I could recall, Bobby seemed genuinely interested. What robberies, he wanted to know, what had they taken, who had told me all this, who was this Mr. Klein, what did he do for a living, and which house was his?

I told him what I knew about the robberies. The most recent one had taken place at a retired policeman’s house on Tripp. They had taken his collections of clocks and belt buckles, as well as his framed Colt .45s. Bobby Kagan seemed impressed with my attention to detail.

“You oughta be a cop,” he kept saying.

On this drive from 35th and Shields all the way north to West Rogers Park, I felt more comfortable than I had ever been with Bobby Kagan, and the most comfortable I would ever feel. Before the drive, I don’t recall him ever looking me in the eye. Not long afterward, he started dating my mother.

During the second week of July, the night of my thirteenth birthday party — we had played.500 and had a picnic in Warren Park — Jason and I slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Shelah’s room. The following morning, when we came downstairs, Bobby was in the kitchen with my mother. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of half-and-half. Two days later, mom handed me a five-dollar bill and told me to buy dinner for myself from Brown’s Chicken because “Bob” was taking her to the Sox game. I started to protest.

“What?” she said. “You think you’re the only one in this house allowed to have fun?”

Jason and I were sharing the five-piece chicken dinner in Chippewa Park when we saw two squad cars speeding west on Touhy. Their blue lights were going, but their sirens were off, which meant, Jason said, that they were trying to break up a crime in progress. Before finishing our drumsticks, we were back on our bikes, following the cops to Maplewood Avenue, where four squad cars had double-parked in front of a bungalow. A white-haired lady in a housedress and slippers was standing on her lawn, while police officers walked toward her with flashlights in their right hands, left hands poised over their holsters. As Jason and I leaned against our bikes and watched, one of the cops asked what we were looking at. Jason just stared straight back at the cop.

“I ain’t looking at nothin’,” he said.

When we got to Mr. Klein’s house, Klein inexplicably already knew more than we did; he said he’d heard the news over his police radio. The victim was Mrs. Ruttu. They’d gotten her TV and her hi-fi. The most “brazen” aspect of the crime was that the burglars had taken everything while Mrs. Ruttu slept in her front room, and Klein now had theories about the culprits.

“Probably Arabs or Mexicans,” he said. “Someone new to the neighborhood.”

I listened intently, but Jason kept sniggering as if he doubted either the facts or Mr. Klein’s sanity. Whenever Jason laughed, Mr. Klein would stop for a moment, stare sternly at Jason, then continue. But when Mr. Klein said it was a wonder poor Mrs. Ruttu hadn’t died of a heart attack and Jason laughed again, Mr. Klein stood up and said he’d tell me the rest of the story when my friend had gone home.

“Fran,” he shouted to his wife, as he opened his screen door, “I’m comin’ in!” And then he slammed the door.

I told Jason it didn’t seem right to laugh about a woman nearly having a heart attack, but he told me he wasn’t laughing at that. He was just laughing at the idea of somebody sleeping while someone else carted off a TV. Burglaries didn’t happen like that. Half of the time when thefts were reported and there was no sign of forced entry, it meant that the victim knew the robber and had planned the crime, hoping to collect insurance. That’s what Bobby had told him, anyway.

“How does he know so much about it?” I asked.

“Bobby knows everything,” he said.

In early August, armed with information provided by Mr. Klein, Jason and I sat down at a back table of the Nortown Library with a Xeroxed map of West Rogers Park, and plotted the robberies, searching for an overall pattern in the dates and times when they had happened, but found nothing. The robberies had taken place during mornings and evenings, in houses and apartments, on Tuesdays, on Thursdays, on weekends. They’d happened on Farwell, on Fairfield, on Granville, Bell, and Washtenaw. Not on Whipple Street, though, Mr. Klein was always quick to point out.

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.

“How do you get such good seats?” I asked.

“I work for the Sox, Benski,” he said.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“Public relations, Benovich. I thought I told you that already.”

Midway through the game that night, with the Sox down 7–0, I sensed that Jason had grown bored with me. He disappeared for the fifth inning and when he returned and I asked where he’d been, he said he was talking to some girls. I thought he was lying, but during the seventh-inning stretch he left again, then came back to ask if I wanted to join him and the girls in the upper deck. I asked why he couldn’t bring them back to our seats; we had the better view.

“Because no one’s in the upper deck,” he said. “And if no one’s in the upper deck, no one can bust you for spitting on people in the boxes.”

In the front row of the empty right-field upper deck of Comiskey Park, Judy Petak and Brenda Lawton, two gumchewing girls with Le Sportsac bags slung over their shoulders, had ditched their parents and were crouched down in front of the green seats. Then, suddenly, they would spring up, spit as far as they could, and duck back down. I don’t know if the girls heard Jason when he introduced me, but my name made no impression.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and when I returned, Jason was making out with Judy Petak, and Brenda Lawton was spitting her half-chewed gum down. I had the twenty-dollar bill that Bobby Kagan had given us and I figured I could find a taxi in front of Comiskey and Jason wouldn’t mind at all if I disappeared. But once I’d made it out the main gates and had searched vainly for a cab, wondering if I would survive a bus or train ride through the city at night, I heard Jason calling after me.

“What the fuck’s your problem, man?” he said.

I told him that I hadn’t expected him to follow me. He was welcome to stay.

“How am I supposed to do that when you have all the money?” he said.

We took the El back north; Jason had grabbed the twenty-dollar bill from me and said that he wouldn’t spend that money on something as stupid as a cab ride. I said that it was probably dangerous to be riding the El so late, but he just laughed.

“If anyone wants to mug me, I’ll just give them you as collateral,” he said.

We sat next to each other on the train, but we didn’t talk much. Every so often, Jason would just say how “goddamn stupid” I was, while I spent most of the ride staring out the windows, hoping no one would pull a knife on me then get pissed because I didn’t have money. But when we got to Argyle Street, I grew exasperated with Jason telling me how goddamn stupid I was.

“Maybe I’m stupid,” I said, “but at least I’m not so stupid that I don’t even know what my uncle does for a living.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Jason asked and snorted. “I knew you were dumb. Are you crazy now, too?”

“If I’m so dumb, what does he do?” I asked. “Sometimes he’s a scout, sometimes he’s in public relations, which is it? Do you know?”

“Yeah,” he said, “he just doesn’t like me to talk about it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s illegal.”

I couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact he was. I asked him why he wasn’t more upset about it. What would happen when Bobby got caught, what would happen to Jason? Where would he live? What would happen if someone caught Bobby in the act and shot him dead?

Jason Rubinstein regarded me with a seemingly indelible sneer. When I was through, he exhaled with a sharp, sardonic laugh. “You’re pretty hopeless,” he said. “Bobby doesn’t rob people.”

“Then what do you call what he does?” I asked.

“He’s a ticket scalper, you freak.”

As the El curved along the tracks, streaking toward Loyola, I stammered, but couldn’t get out another word. We were supposed to get off at Morse, then take the Lunt bus home, but Jason got out early. When I tried to follow him, he froze me with a stare.

“Fuck you, asshole,” he said.

In the past, no matter where I’d been, I’d always feel dejected when I saw the house on Whipple, could feel my world constricting around me until I could barely breathe. I’d smell the urine and the disinfectant, hear the breaths and the voices. This night, I didn’t mind so much.

As I walked in, Hallie was seated at the kitchen table.

In her right hand she clutched a paperback Agatha Christie book: Elephants Can Remember. But her hand was trembling and her eyes weren’t moving over the page.

“She’s in the garage,” Hallie said when she saw me.

I walked through the den, onto the porch, out the back door, and through the yard, navigating a path of dead tomato plants, weeds, and wildflowers. There was a dim light in the garage. Bobby Kagan’s Cadillac was parked in the alley.

Cupping my hands over the garage window, I could see Bobby in an open leather vest, blue jeans, and boots. With one hand, he was roughly grabbing my mother’s hand, leading her around, while with the other hand, he ripped open boxes and reached into Crawford’s shopping bags, every so often pulling something out — a necklace, a handful of cufflinks, a roll of hundred-dollar bills — and gesturing with it in front of my mother’s face before shoving it into his pockets.

Her cheeks were red and her eyes were huge. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or afraid. I ran into the house, then back outside with my Pat Kelly baseball bat, not paying attention when Hallie told me to stop.

I quietly slipped out the back gate and into the alley and walked a few paces north. I stepped into the light spilling out of the garage, walked around the red Cadillac toward the garage door, which was open three-quarters of the way. Bobby Kagan stood with his back to me, his hand still gripping my mother’s arm hard as she leaned against the hood of my grandfather’s dusty old Lincoln. There were streaks of gray soot on her pale-blue dress. Boxes and bags were scattered around the Lincoln. I could see the TV from my grandfather’s living room, I could see the necklaces, the rings, the paperweights, the bracelets. My palms were slippery as I gripped the bat in my hands and my mother’s eyes shifted from Bobby onto me.

“Get away!” my mother shouted at me. “Just get away.”

She squirmed out of Bobby Kagan’s hold and then pulled down the garage door. I dropped my bat and ran down the alley.

All night, I just sat on the front stoop with a rubber ball, bouncing it up and down, waiting for a police car to drive by with its flashers on and its siren off. At dawn, I heard Bobby Kagan’s Cadillac rumble away down the alley, then the sound of the back door to the house open and shut. In the morning, I was still there as my mother walked down the steps. She was dressed for work and there were two Crawford’s bags in her hand.

“I know,” I told her, “I didn’t see a thing.”

I kept waiting for Mr. Klein to appear on his porch. I wondered what he’d seen and what he knew. But his shades were down, and Mr. Klein didn’t come out all day.