FRIDAY______________________________________
“Don’t tell her I told you but I wish that my wife could bake like you do, Rose!”
She grins wide as he leaves her. I stand up, following Tom Mulroe outside where he is removing his suit jacket against the intense heat of the day. 
the end of the story
Outside, I move across the parking lot swallowing down the last of Rose’s chocolate cupcake. Sam’s Lexus is parked alongside my BMW. He and Don Martin are gone already, on their way to the Optimists’ Club. Inside my suit jacket my cell phone rings. It is my wife, reminding me about the fundraiser we have tonight.
“It’s Black Tie, Tom,” she reminds me.
I have a two o’clock tuxedo fitting, haircut right after Rotary Club. 
“Don’t be late for the fitting, Tom,” she warns.“I’m serious, Tom!”
“I’m leaving for a Rotary Lunch right now,” I tell her. “My haircut at the Oak Park Arms is right after that, then the fitting.”
She is quiet, because of the haircut. My wife would prefer I get my haircut somewhere else. I have been going to the Oak Park Arms for twenty years.
“Don’t be late.”
I tell her that I won’t, sliding the phone back into an interior breast pocket of my suit jacket as I walk across the parking lot.
One of the residents from the Y who I hired for custodial work stops me. These type of chance encounters always happen in the parking lot as I am leaving the Y. Leon reaches to shake my hand.
“Can’t thank you enough for the job, Mr. Mulroe!” he grins. “Makes a world of difference. Me back in town because of my son, I can’t say enough to thank you!”
“I’m glad it’s working out, Leon,” I tell him, holding my suit jacket by the collar now. 
”It’s more than working out, Mr. Mulroe!” Leon beams. “It’s saving my life right now is what that job is doing for me!”
“Good to hear,” I say.
“Now I have to find a place to stay where I can do some cooking so I don’t have to eat out all the time,” he nods.
“Stop by my office,” I say to him. “Not today–I’m out the rest of the afternoon. I have a list of places in the area you might want to try.”
“Thank you, Mr. Mulroe!” Leon says, looking over my shoulder. “I’m gonna’ let you go. Looks like you have some people waitin’ on you.”
I look behind me now toward my car where a couple stand as if they are waiting for me. 
The man wears a baseball cap low on his head so it conceals his face. As I approach them I sense something familiar about the woman.
“Mr. Mulroe…” the man says.
“May I help you?”
He shoves something hard into my groin.
“What the…”
It is a gun!
“Don’t do anything to cause any attenton to yourself, Mr. Mulroe!” the man with the gun in my crotch tells me.
I am about to be relieved of the bulge of wallet in my back suit pocket against my right buttock. Shit!
“Don’t make a mistake here…” I say. “You want my wallet, put the gun away…”
“The mistsake was missing your run this morning, Mr. Mulroe!” he tells me.
“What the hell is this?”
“Get into the Party Wagon, Mr. Mulroe!” he says, nodding toward a white utility van with the windows painted that is parked near my BMW. 
“Kidnapped?” I ask, an incredulous tone. “I’m being kidnapped?”
“Just do what you’re told, Mr. Mulroe…” the woman says to me now in an anxious tone.
“You have the wrong guy…” I tell them.
“Get into the van, Mr. Mulroe!”
The worst thing that I can do is get into the van where I might be taken to a second location, more isolated. I glance around the parking lot for possible help. Leon is too far away. Shit! He might hear me if I call out.
“Leon…” I yell. “Le…MMMMMMMMPPPPHHHH!!!”
The man has his hand over my mouth now, the gun pushed against the side of my head.
“Big mistake, Mr. Mulroe!”
I twist in his grip. The knot of my tie chokes me as I manage to pull my face away from his hand.
“LEON…”
My tie, freed from the tie clip my wife and kids gave me last weekend for Father’s Day, bounces up and down upon my heaving chest like some sort of crazily dancing pale blue snake.
“Use the tsar…” the man tells the woman. “Tsar him!”
She uses the tsar on me. I drop to the ground in sudden convulsions. The pointed toes of the black tasseled loafers my wife paid too much money for scrape the pavement of the parking lot as I am dragged toward the white utility van. Nearby, on the gorund where I dropped it, I can hear my cell phone ringing from inside my suit jacket. She uses the tsar on me a second time. Everything goes black.
On his back now in the dark heat of the van, with his tie splattered across his white shirtfront, he resembles a rag doll tossed aside by an angry child. Some really pissed off kid. For a fifty-year-old man he gave more of a fight than I anticipated. None of that strain and struggle is evident in him now. 
He is so still–dead?
What the fuck have we done? We’ve killed this man! 
He is alive! We did not kill him! 
I pull loose the knot of the tie, yanking it from the buttoned collar of his shirt with a loud SWOOSH sound, If the man has to be tied and gagged I can at least take off his dress shirt, I think suddenly. It’s hot as hell in the back of this van. I sweat like a pig. Body odor is starting to mix with Tom Mulroe’s fresh deodorant and an expensive cologne that smells like cucumbers. No need for Mr. Mulroe to be wearing a dress shirt. He won’t need one where he is going I think as I pull the wrinkled tails of his shirt out of his suit pants.
sy to carry. Staggering, we dump the man into the trunk of the Chevy. I slam the trunk closed on Tom Mulroe’s silent gagged face. 
Before we even rented the boathouse we parked nearby, walking along the water each morning. Other people walking or jogging smiled at us. Before long we exchanged a good morning. Old men with dogs stopped to chat about the weather. Women seated on porches would wave. We had become fixtures along the water weeks before we rented the boathouse.
There were signs–warnings of the thing that was going to happen to me. 
I ignored them, passing by too quickly in life the way that a motorist speeds past traffic signals cautioning the dangers ahead. Small alarms went off. I was busy, racing toward inevitable collision. There were signs that I should have been seeing. 
A voice nearby pull me from the twilight of forced slumber, where I am indulged in a safe complacancy of streetlamps at dusk and lit windows of homes glowing onto snow covered lawns. Grogginess has set up camp all around me. Something is not right. This is not my bed, rather a cold floor. The stench of ether still lingers in my nostrils. Memory begins to register now. It all comes back to me the way clustering leaves that settle upon the surfaces of pools signal the end of September to make gateway for the bare branches and stiff air of November. I am being kidnapped! 
With great effort I begin to roll over, still heavy with ether used to overcome me. It is not my best choice, a mistake I realize quick. Panic swells in my chest. It is the feeling that a person has during a power failure, when everything has gone dark.
“What the hell…” I manage to mutter.
“Relax, Mr. Mulroe! Don’t try to sit up too soon. Give yourself a little time to process what is happening to you!”
I recoil from these words a bit, still caught up in the embers of my ether dreams. This man has kidnapped me. Ether and a tsar were used to get me here. I am being kidnapped! It is an incredulous thought.
My voice wants to come out again but now it holds onto a reluctance. If I do not speak again none of this is real. It is all a dream, a terrible nightmare that will find me twisted in the covers alongside my wife somewhere in the very center of the night. I am still down in the depths of a deep pool beneath the surface where all is quiet and calm, before the noise of splashing and voices can resonate above the edge of the water.
But the quest for air urges me toward the discomfort of full consciousness. I have to breathe!
“We’re going to sit you up slow, Mr. Mulroe,” the male voice tells me.
“You have to be kept tied, Mr. Mulroe,” the woman says. “Sorry about that. We have to keep you tied while you’re here.”
These people have kidnapped me! I am their prisoner.
“Who the hell are you?” I ask, rolling onto my side.
“What do you want with me?”
“Sit up, Mr. Mulroe. Sit up first, then get on your knees,” the man says to me. “Put your arms behind your back so that they can be tied.”
The woman holds a gun on me now.
“Sit up, Please!” she says to me.
I am still on my back. 
“Sit up now, Mr. Mulroe!” the man tells me.
”He’s still groggy from the ether,” the woman says to him in a softer tone. “Give him a minute more.”
With heavy reluctance I do as I am told. I am on my knees now. 
“Put your arms behind your back so they can be tied, Mr. Mulroe! Do it now, Please!”
I put my arms behind my back. 
My arms are tied behind my back. The catastrophe happening to me is complete.
If my youth had been different there might have been someone to advise me, while I was still impressionable, against returning to the scene of the crime. I might not hold the scorn or judgments that occupy the deep recesses of my heart had my early life known an individual like that, who would have been able to warn me against returning to Oak Park. It is a place I left when I was in my twenties, still a boy really. Now, nearly fifty, I have returned because there was nobody in my past to warn or advise me against it. When I left Oak Park last it looked different. All of the leaves had been torn from the branches of the trees. The grass was not so green. Even the air was not the same, cold and mean with late autumn the last time I stood in this very spot that is green and sunny today on the corners of Lake Street and Oak Park Avenue looking onto Scoville Park. She answers the door. Of course it would be her who opens it for me I think as I step into the house. Seeing her I think of the wife. A woman named Claire who has occupied nearly twenty years of marriage with me. Even though it is too early for a real crime investigation people are already gathered around the woman who I have come to see. She is a woman whom I have seen for years from faraway. Sometimes I have seen her in the newspaper because she was hosting some type of big wig charity thing. Photos of her and her husband have crossed my path through the media over the years. I have come to see that woman about a possible crime. It is Dianne, whose family tried to have me run out of Oak Park thirty years ago, ushering me into the house.
Dianne looks tired. We are surrounded by old ghosts that leave me in the spirit of holiday decorations left hanging for far too long into the winter. Nobody cares to see them anymore. They are cruel reminders of what happiness was or could have been.
A web of memories embraces us as we stand in the large foyer of the house. I can feel her eyes on me as she surveys the damage the years have left. Gerry is still thin but with a pot belly, she is probably thinking. He’s lost hair, only short gray stubs left in a tuft on a balding head showing far too much of the large forehead he always had. We stand like this for a long few moments, with Dianne’s eyes all over me as I take her in.
Over the years I have heard about her. Dianne lives alone with her cats and dogs, working a low paying job at the library—the type given to teenagers ordinarily. This is what dating me did to her.
I step into the home on duty, because Tom Mulroe has gone missing. He ‘disappeared’ yesterday morning I have been told. Tom and I were tight years ago. That threatens to cloud my judgment but I remain clear. He would not be the first man to leave his wife and kids. I move past the woman whose family hates me. They tried just about everything they could to get me away from Dianne, didn’t care how they tampered with my life. In the end I joined the Navy. That separated us. Now I am a detective facing Dianne again because her brother-in-law, Tom, is missing.
Across tables in diners we sat together hot summer nights praying for rain because the construction job I hated would not keep us apart if it rained the next morning. I could roll over in bed alongside Dianne. That bed in the room I rented on the second floor in the back of the rooming house. A woman we called crazy because she lived alone with all her cats occupied the apartment that was the entire first floor of the house. I have heard that Dianne lives with too many cats now—like a crazy woman.
I am married with teenage sons all these years later. This thought fills me as Dianne lets me into her sister’s house. The wife and I have three sons. Somehow my life has moved on but Dianne has managed to stay still, trapped in the place we once were. She lives with her pets and works at the library in a job that I know be far beneath her. She is overqualified for it, I reason. It has taken several years of therapy to get her to where she is I have heard. A lone woman living in an apartment her parents pay for, working part-time at the Oak Park Public Library. Cats and dogs are her only real companions.
The excitement that came out of her mouth in a whispered voice promising passion that always found me eager to lean into it is gone. She wears the sad lonely face of an older woman now who is no longer lovely. Dianne holds little promise these days I can see. This is what dating Gerry Nielson has done to her.
Upstairs we are in a closet the size of a room. A housekeeper named Helen tells us it is Tom’s. There are at least twenty pair of expensive looking dress shoes but my eyes are drawn to the running shoes, worn PUMAS. They are the Tom Mulroe I knew. Not one other thing in this closet or house seems to belong to the Tom Mulroe who I once knew. This sits heavy in me now. His wife is polite as she begins to go through an inventory, as if she does this every single day of her life. Nothing she or her family do surprises me.
The suits catch my attention because the majority of them are Kilton Suits. Helen pull several of them from the closet for me, fanning them onto the bed. I am familiar with Kilton Suits from a case that I worked in Lake Forest last year. The wife and I joked about Kilton Suits when I worked the case in Lake Forest. The two suits I own are from Target, a low priced retailer. My wife found them on clearance, red tag sales she called it because several red tags were stuck over the original price. She matched the pants to the jackets. Working for the Oak Park YMCA does not give Tom Mulroe this life, I observe. Real estate has afforded TomMulroe this lifestyle. The properties that he owns all over Oak Park have crossed my path over the years I recall as I paw through his dozens of expensive watches, cufflinks and tie bars.
I leave Tom Mulroe’s house thinking about suits. The suits I wore when I lived with Tom in the rooming house were the best money could buy. Vintage suits I bought from used clothing stores. Dianne and I would find them together. I wore them with white shirts and very skinny ties. Each night we listened to Hank Williams on the old stereo we found at a secondhand shop in Evanston. I gave away my old vintage suits long ago–the way I did Dianne.
An old injury speaks to me loud as pain shoots across my lower spine. I twisted my back while I was on the roof cleaning the gutters last spring. It has given me mild irritation from time to time since then. Swimming all summer helped the way the chiropractor I see for it said that it would. The slight pain I have learned to live with all these months torments me now because of the way that I am tied.
“Stop trying to talk your way out of what is happening to you through that gag in your mouth, Mr. Mulroe!”
“It’s really better you do not speak, you won’t have water for a long while,” the woman says standing behind me now. “Stop struggling against the chains padlocked around your arms. Save your energy, Mr. Mulroe. You’re going to need it.”
I tug at my arms again. My voice is a loud grunt behind the necktie forced between my lips. This is not the first time I have been in a tough situation with these two people.
I did not recognize Lenny Saxon right away, even though it has not been that long a time since I have seen him. His wife, Nina, is the woman behind me warning me about the chains. They both have gotten heavier. I did not recognize them.
Lenny Saxon’s father was abusive Nina told me when I first met them. She was trying to explain her husband’s abrupt behavior. Nina had called me that afternoon last fall. I was in a meeting in my office. 
Lenny’s wife had just had a baby. She told me that she was afraid of Lenny. He was angry, stressed out over their problems. The last time he’d been this angry Lenny had broken the glass out of a door int he apartment building where they lived. Nina called me because she was afraid for the kids she said, the baby and their two young sons. I left my office at the Y, driving over to their apartment a few blocks away. 
“Who did this?” I asked, noticing the bruises on the baby shortly after I arrived. “Her shoulder looks dislocated. What happened?”
“Lenny did!” Nina told me, crying. “He always puts her down before he gets too mad but today…”
I had a sick feeling suddenly. Their sons, both under five, were in the apartment with us. They were hiding in their room.
“Shut the fuck up!” Lenny told Nina. “Why the hell did you call him?
“Mr. Mulroe can help us, Lenny!” she cried.
I knew Lenny from the YMCA, had given him a job once working a fundraiser because he played the guitar.
“You did this, Lenny?” I asked him.
He turned away from me.
“People smack their kids around!” Lenny Saxon told me. “It doesn’t have to be a big fucking deal! My father smacked us around all of the fucking time!”
“Lenny–this is abuse!” I said, reaching for my cell phone in my suit jacket. “You need help!”
“Put the phone down, Mr. Mulroe!” he begged me. “Just leave!”
“I can’t just leave, Lenny!” I told him. “I have to report this. I’m mandated. You need help”
“Don’t give me that Youth Director crap! Walk a mile in my fucking shoes! You’re calling the cops to help me?” he screamed. “Fuck you! Fuck your help!”
I turned away from Lenny, handing the baby to Nina as I held the phone. Lenny
Saxon lunged at me, grabbing me by the tie. He held a gun in his hand now. Nina began to cry hard.
“I told you to leave, Mr. Mulroe! Just leave–but you couldn’t do that!”
“Lenny, stop!” Nina cried.
“Put the gun down, Lenny…” I said in a calm tone.
”Shut the fuck up, Mr. Mulroe!” he told me. “Nina, put the baby down! Find something we can use to tie Mr. Mulroe. Get me something for his mouth!”
“Lenny, don’t do this…” I said to him.
Nina put the baby down, leaving the room. She returned with a roll of silver-gray duct tape. 
My mouth was taped. Nina taped my arms behind my back, the way Lenny instructed her to. The tape over my mouth prevented me from reasoning to them. Anything I said was just noise behind the gag.
“This is crazy, Lenny!” Nina said, the baby in her arms.
Lenny Saxon ushered me through the apartment at gunpoint.
“We can’t let him call the cops!” he yelled. “You never should have fucking called him, Nina!”
“I thought he could help…”
Lenny’s eye resembled a cornered animal’s.
“Fuck his kind of help!” he sai.
“What are we going to do with him?
“I don’t known, Nina!” I don’t fucking know!” Lenny Saxon screamed, kicking his foot at a nearby chair.
He was a big man, pacing the apartment the way a tiger in a cage might. Nina sat huddled with the baby on the sofa. Her black hair hung into her round worried face. I began to rub my gagged face on the corner of wall, starting to peel away some of the tape over my mouth.
“What the fuck are you doing, Mr. Mulroe?” Lenny demanded, grabbing me as he shoved the gun into the small of my spine through the slit in the back of my suit jacket.
“Lenny, what are you going to do?” Nina cried, getting up from the sofa with the baby in her arms.
He did not respond. My wingtips were loud against the worn wooden flooring of the apartment as he shoved me across the room.
”Get on the floor, Mr. Mulroe!” he yelled. “On the floor now! Get ont he fucking floor!”
I twisted in his grip as he pushed me tot he flo0r.
”Find something I can hog-tie him with, Nina!”
Nina did not move. He turned on her, grabbing the baby as he shoved her over the sofa.
“She fucking cries and vomits all the time!” Lenny said, holding the baby who was screaming now. “Nothing makes her stop!”
I was attempting to get to my feet.
“We can’t all be the perfect Dad like you, Mr. Mulroe!” Lenny yelled.
Nina came at him then, for the baby. With a loud scream he threw the baby across the room, away from her. A loud THUD sound echoed in my ears as the baby hit the wall. Nina collapsed to her knees, screaming and rocking. Lenny Saxon stood silent for a long moment before he fled the apartment with the gun. He left the door opened. An older woman, a neighbor, appeared in the doorway. She gasped seeing me taped, then the baby. By the time the police arrived Lenny Saxon was gone. Their daughter was dead.
I have been in a tough situation with these two people before. Tied, chained and gagged in the boathouse now I remind myself ot this. If they do not get their sons back from social services I am going to be the one who ends up dead this time.
The BMW smells like Tom. The way that I imagine Tom Mulroe smells these days. His expensive cologne. I recognize it from his house. A suit jacket was found on the ground near the car. In the glove compartment, an old term for it I like the way I liked vintage clothing for the forties when I was younger, there was a tie. A spare tie, I think. Maybe the tie Tom was wearing. If the black and white striped tie is the one he was wearing it means Tom had time at the car to take his tie off. My eyes move from the car to the street, then an apartment building on the corners of Marion Street and Randolph. A man was taken against his will. Someone must have seen something.
An older man introduces himself to me as Sam Randle. He tells me that it appears bad, about Tom’s car being found in the parking lot of the Y with his suit jacket near it.
“It does appear bad but things aren’t always what they appear,” I say to him.
“It is what it is, Detective!” Sam Randle says to me. “Those animals must surprised Tom and taken him. God knows what they have done to him!”
I nod.
“One of our employees talked to Tom,” he says. “You should talk to Leon James!”
“I will. Nobody seems to have seen much,” I say to him. “Security footage from the YMCA will be a help. There is a woman who lives in the neighborhood—she phoned the police but seems reluctant to get involved.”
I glance toward the apartment building across the street again now.
“There’s a funny thing, getting involved,” Sam Randle tells me. “A year or two ago my wife and I have the grandkids for the weekend.”
I nod, distracted.
“Nice, I hear—grandkids.”
“Expecting some?”
“I hope not, my boys aren’t there yet.”
It had taken me a long while to get to a place where parenting was normal. I think about Dianne, how bad things went with her.
“Sometimes having the grandkids isn’t as nice as it seems, but we had them with us that weekend,” he says. “We’re driving on the expressway when we come upon this accident. An SUV with a mother and father, a daughter about ten. The other vehicle was a mini-van. You know my background with the Y—I get out of the car to walk over to the mini-van because nobody seems to be in it.”
He looks at me.
“I’m just talking to talk…” he says, a heavy sigh from his large body. “When I walk over to the car I see a woman in her fifties or sixties. Her head is back, she mouths to me that she can’t breathe. Now you know my training, I can do anything but I didn’t. I was afraid, Detective! Damned afraid suddenly to do anything! I’m thinking lawyers and being sued, even thought about my million dollar liability policy—amazing what goes through your mind in such a little space of time. But I didn’t do anything because I was afraid of the law, thought she might have broken her neck.”
Sam Randle shakes his head.
“It shouldn’t be like that,” he says. “But I was afraid so I called 911. Next morning I hear on the news she died. I think she was already gone when I walked back to the car after calling it in.”
His face goes solid for a moment, then lighter again.
“I’m only telling you this because I know you aren’t a lawyer,” he smiles so I give a small laugh, then the heavy lines of his sagging face return. “She was gone. With my training I could have done something. That sat hard with me a long while. I understand now when people don’t want to get involved.”
A silence forms between us.
“Their demands…” I start to say.
“Out of the question!” Sam Randle says. “If it was just money I’d pay it, any ransom they would want to have Tom back alive. But they want children in exchange for him!”
“Their children,” I say to him.
“People who can take a man the way that they have do not deserve children!” Sam Randle tells me. “Tom would agree to that.”
I think suddenly of never seeing Tom Mulroe again, even though we have not been tight for a long while. The man reads me.
“You knew him from college?” Sam Randle asks.
“The rooming house,” I say to him. “We lived in the rooming house together. I never went to college, Sir.”
“That place filled with degenerates!” he grunts. “I told Tom to get rid of it, but he said it meant something to him because he lived there during college.”
Sam Randle looks at me.
“Because of a girl I figured,” he says.
Suddenly I wonder if he might mean Dianne. Tom Mulroe slept with Dianne in the rooming house when we lived there together, just fell into bed with her he told me. It didn’t mean anything. I hated him for a short while then but couldn’t for long. Tom Mulroe saved my life after that. Another old saying I heard years ago returns to me suddenly. A gentleman’s love. There is a bond between Sam Randle and myself now because I loved the Tom Mulroe I knew at the rooming house and this man, I can tell, loves the man Tom Mulroe is now.
My eyes move to the apartment building across the street. Someonemust have seens omething. The woman who phoned the police lives in that building. I do not want to go into that building. Just seeing it reminds me of the last time I was in Oak Park. It was November, cold with the leaves gone from the trees. So different then.
When I left Oak Park I left that building. Dianne and I lived together in that building.
