minute of the day. Which put me back at my desk, alone with my documents.
If I had to spend seventy hours a week somewhere, my office was a pleasant
enough place. I had a leather chair, a buffed walnut desk, and wide windows with
a southeastern view. I could look out over the hodgepodge of the business district
and see the white-capped waves of Lake Michigan, which in summertime were
dotted with bright sailboats. If I angled myself a certain way, I could trace the
coastline and glimpse a narrow seam of the South Side with its low-rise rooftops
and intermittent stands of trees. From where I sat, the neighborhoods appeared
placid and almost toylike, but the reality was in many cases far different. Parts of
the South Side had become desolate as businesses shut down and families
continued to move out. The steel mills that had once provided stability were
cutting thousands of jobs. The crack epidemic, which had ravaged African
American communities in places like Detroit and New York, was only just
reaching Chicago, but its course was no less destructive. Gangs battled for market
share, recruiting young boys to run their street-corner operations, which, while
dangerous, was far more lucrative than going to school. The city’s murder rate
was starting to tick upward—a sign of even more trouble to come.
I made good money at Sidley but was pragmatic enough to take a bird in the
hand when it came to housing. Since finishing law school, I’d been living back in
my old South Shore neighborhood, which was still relatively untouched by gangs
and drugs. My parents had moved downstairs into Robbie and Terry’s old space,
and at their invitation I’d taken over the upstairs apartment, where we’d lived
when I was a kid, sprucing it up with a crisp white couch and framed batik prints
on the walls. I wrote my parents an occasional check that loosely covered my
share of the utilities. It hardly counted as paying rent, but they insisted it was
plenty. Though my apartment had a private entrance, I most often tromped
through the downstairs kitchen as I came and went from work—in part because
my parents’ back door opened directly to the garage and in part because I was still
and always would be a Robinson. Even if I now fancied myself the sort of suit-
wearing, Saab-driving independent young professional I’d always dreamed of
being, I didn’t much like being alone. I fortified myself with daily check-ins with
my mom and dad. I’d hugged them that very morning, in fact, before dashing out
the door and driving through a heavy rainstorm to get to work. To get to work, I
might add, on time.
I looked at my watch.
“Any sign of this guy?” I called to Lorraine.