few pet obsessions—litter, animals, and apparently this homeless piano player. He’s also got a temper, but he hasn’t done anything that merited an arrest. So far.”
“He have a name?” I asked. “If it’s the guy I’m thinking of, the people around him call him ‘Coop,’ but he must have a last name.”
The sergeant spoke into her lapel mike, listened for a moment, but shook her head. “The patrol team only knows him as Coop. They also know his dog, Bear, who apparently is the better-behaved member of the pair. Anyway, Coop told my patrol unit that the homeless woman was screaming for help; he went to protect her.
“Fouchard’s not that big and ordinarily I’d take that claim with a grain of salt. Two grains. But one of my guys says she tried to fight with them when they took her to the patrol car, and she landed a pretty good shin kick. She could have been charged with assaulting an officer, but this is an older, more laid-back team. Fouchard had a friend with her; my guys let her ride with them.”
The sergeant led me to the holding cells. The station was new; the cells were small but clean. Bernie was sharing space with two other women. One was snoring loudly, the other was snarling curses. Bernie was staring at her shoes, hunched over in a ball of misery.
Despite telling Angela not to involve me, her face lit up when she saw me with the sergeant. “Vic! Vic, I’m so sorry, I thought I was doing the right thing but I should have listened to you and to Angela. Are they going to put me in jail? Will I be thrown out of school? Oh, Mama and Papa will be so angry, so disappointed.” She burst into tears.
When she learned she wasn’t going to be charged with a crime, she flung her arms around Pizzello and made extravagant promises of good behavior.
The sergeant extricated herself. “Don’t go roaring into situations where you don’t know the players, Ms. Fouchard. And in particular, stay away from the Forty-seventh Street viaduct, or you’ll find yourself facing an order of protection.”
5
Story Hour
I didn’t remember the drive home, or putting Bernie and Angela into a Lyft car. I went to bed without undressing and woke some five hours later. Peter had taken off, leaving a note in glyph-like letters that read “Happy Day After Birthday.” He’d also made an artwork breakfast plate: a croissant with a chunk of robiola, one of my favorite cheeses, surrounded by orange segments. I was seriously thinking of falling in love.
I looked at the city news feed while I ate. Bernie’s skirmish with Coop hadn’t sounded interesting enough to local journalists of any stripe—print, broadcast, vlog, or blog—to make it from the police blotter to Twitter. That was a relief: it meant that Murray hadn’t noticed Bernie’s name on any of the data streams he followed, which meant Lydia Zamir—if it was Zamir—might be able to remain at the underpass dealing with her own demons. It also meant that Northwestern wouldn’t find out about Bernie’s skirmish with the law—which could jeopardize not only her hockey scholarship but her university career.
The person I wondered about most in this story wasn’t Zamir, or even Bernie, but Coop. Since he operated on the shortest of tempers, he could easily hurt Bernie if they clashed again. He’d shown up so pat at Zamir’s side when Bernie and Angela were there that he might pop up if I appeared.
It was after ten, later than I usually like to swim under a midsummer sun, but I leashed up my two dogs and drove to Forty-seventh Street, leaving the car in the lot where I’d parked yesterday. I took the dogs across the footbridge over Lake Shore Drive to the lake itself.
The shoreline here is rocky and not very inviting, but if you’re willing to pick your way down the boulders, you come to some of the best swimming in Chicago. The lake floor is granite, so the water is clear, and unless the city installs the beach described at yesterday’s SLICK meeting, the rocks limit the number of people who can deposit Pampers, condoms, and broken bottles. The bike and running paths were full, even in the middle of a workday, but once we climbed down to the lake, the three of us were on our own.
The temperature was in the low nineties, which in Chicago translates as miserably humid, but the water was cold. The