Neal Pollack

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.