Trip Wire_ A Cook County Mystery - Charlotte Carter [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Chicago, 1968
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Charlotte Carter
Copyright Page
for Bonnie (Neysa) Pessin
and for Carol Brice, Tor Faegre,
Phyllis Forsbeck, Karen Kamarat,
Saundra Pittman, Mark Riegel, and Stan Zuni
CHICAGO, 1968
They say hell is other people.
But what do they know?
Call me a reformed loner. After a lifetime of singleness, I am now living with a group of people almost any one of whom I would cut off an arm for.
We live in a tumbledown apartment that vibrates with the comings and goings of eight reasonably healthy young people living in their time. We study for exams, work shitty-paying gigs selling blue jeans or repairing bicycles, we talk about movies, bake bread, listen to records, and throw our hearts and bodies into the antiwar effort.
The demonstration at the Van Buren Street draft office today turned ugly, and thanks to the shiny billy clubs of Chicago’s finest, one of the sweeter residents in our urban commune, Cliff Tobin, has a fat lip. The rest of us proudly wear our assorted bruises. But we are all okay. We have made it back home.
Music is playing now, loud and defiant. One of our number is rolling enough good dope to cool out the state of Oklahoma. At the secondhand kitchen table, we will have a magnificent soup with root vegetables newly out of the earth, bum cigarettes, drink from one another’s cups. Later in the night each of us will be somewhere in the city lying with a lover. Even me.
Even me, freckle-faced not-so-good-looking little black girl from the South Side, a happy recruit in the rock ’n’ roll army of my generation, acid-dropping, yes to love, no to authority, eating life with a spoon, and whatever I was like last year, it’s all different now.
Yes, I know: The world has been around a long time, doing just fine without us. We probably think way too much of ourselves. I don’t care.
And anyway, it’s almost Christmas.
CHAPTER ONE
MONDAY
1
“Hey, Cassandra,” Wilton said in that sleepy voice of his.
“Huh?” I said.
“How much you bet me?”
“About what?”
“I bet you and me are the onliest niggers in Chicago know every song on the Creedence Clearwater album.”
“No bet. I know we are.”
We fell out laughing.
Truth to tell, I had nothing against Creedence and neither did Wilton. But our friend and roommate Dan Zuni, a beautiful Pueblo Indian kid with a mane of coal-black hair and the slim-hipped build of a female fashion model, had a psychotic thing for them. Night and day he had Creedence on the record player in his bedroom. Once in a while I had to beg for mercy. He was always nice enough to give it a rest when I complained, but a couple of hours later “Suzie Q” would be blasting again.
Wilton had me laughing so hard my ribs ached. But that wasn’t such a tough assignment. I was stoned—we both were—and just about everything was funny.
We lay side by side on the floor of my room, only a couple of feet away from the new space heater my uncle Woody had paid for. Winter in Chicago is nothing to trifle with. You might think you know about our winters because of that record Lou Rawls had where he referred to the wind whipping off Lake Michigan as the Hawk. Don’t kid yourself. You don’t know. At night my room was like the north face of Everest. But I was low on cash, so Woody sprang for the heater, despite his being none too pleased with me these days.
Uncle Woody loved me, no question. But I had recently left home, moved out of the spacious high-rise apartment in Hyde Park where I had lived with him and my aunt Ivy since I was eleven years old. They were pretty pissed about it.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been such an affront if I’d taken a nice studio apartment in a respectable South Side development like Lake Meadows. Maybe they’d have been able to write it off as an understandable step toward independence. That’s not what I did, though, when I left home.
I moved all the way up to the North Side,