“They have good taste. Even the New York Times says the Thunderbolt is the best roller coaster in the country.”
“Mikey was so proud when he saw that. He said he and Steve knew that before anyone.”
“Both of them ran away?”
“No,” she said with an angry sob. “They didn’t. I swear it. Honest. Something happened to ‘em. Something bad. I know it.”
“Seems odd that two boys would disappear a year apart, don’t you think?” Sam asked.
“You think because one ran away, the other ran away, too, don’t ya? Just like all dem other coppers. But I knows they didn’t. If theys was going to run off, why not do it together, at the same time? Why waits a year? It makes no sense.”
“It does seem a little unusual, but we get a lot of runaways, especially from lower income neighborhoods.”
“Well, that ain’t no lie. The Berger boy ran off earlier this year. And the Janowski boy, too. But my boys wouldn’t just run off like that. They were good boys.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
Her sobbing became heavier now, “I just wanna know what happened to ‘em. That’s all.”
An idea began to form in Sam’s mind. An idea about how he could use these runaway boys as cover to investigate the murder of Chief Ballant. If Ballant had been on the take and LaRocca was involved, Sam needed to tread very carefully. He could ask to investigate the case of these runaways. Paulson would let him do it just to keep him out of his hair. Maybe he could figure out where they ran off in the meanwhile, but he doubted it. They were probably living on skid row in some other major city at this point doing God knows what just to get a little food to eat. These kids knew what poverty was, but they didn’t know what it meant to be truly without anything.
“What is your name, ma’am?”
“My name is Elsa Borjan.”
“The boys’ names are Steven and Michael Borjan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And can you give me the names of these other boys who you say ran away,” Sam asked. The more names he had to present to Paulson the better.
“The Berger’s boy was Bobby, I think. I’m not sure of the Janowski’s boy’s name. His dad was Brian. He got laid off a few months ago and his boy went missing a couple weeks after that. He ended up jumping into the Mon and drowning hisself. They says that he got drunk and stumbled into the Mon, but that was just for the piddly amount of insurance money Jackie got. He did it to hisself. He thought him losin’ his job was why the boy took off. Brian doted on that boy. What was his name? I can’t member. Poor Jackie. Lose your boy and your husband all in a month. Some men just don’t gets it. Cowardly thing to do.”
“I suppose so,” Sam said. “Sometimes a man just can’t bear it though.”
“Men are so sensitive. My husband ran off simply because I told him he was a bum, which he was. Stupid bum. Couldn’t keep a damn job. Boy, I miss him.”
“Do you have contact with him?”
“Contact with him? Ha! I don’t even know where he is.”
“Maybe your sons ran off to be with your husband.”
“They didn’t know where he was either.”
“Maybe he got in touch with them without you knowing.”
“If he wanted, he could have taken the boys with him when he left, and he never did. More likely he’s dead, too.”
“You think your boys are dead?”
“Of course, they’re dead. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be missin’. I thought I made that pretty plain. I want you to find the rat bastard who did it.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She walked back down to the end of the bar where Gary had left her another glass full of beer. Gary made his way back to him. He had a grim look on his face.
“Sorry about that. She’s had it pretty rough. What are the chances you can find her boys?”
“She doesn’t want me to find them. She thinks they’re dead.”
“Do you?”
“No. They have a drunk as a mother. A father who left them alone with their drunk mother. Maybe they’re with him. That would be the best-case scenario. Worst case, they are living on the streets of New York or Chicago doing whatever they can to make a little money for dope.”
“She wasn’t always a drunk,” Gary said.
“No one was born a drunk,” Sam said.
“Sure, they were,” he said. “But she wasn’t. She was made one. She didn’t start drinking until after her first boy disappeared.”
“Disappeared? That is an interesting choice of words.”
“Well, if you’re not sure what happened to them, it is the best word I can come up with. She says murdered, you say ran away. I say disappeared.”
“Into thin air?”
“No one ever disappeared in plain sight.”
“You’d be surprised,” Sam said. “I remember a little girl who did just that.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to that little girl?”
“Yeah.” Sam cringed at the memory.
Sam finished his beer in one gulp and walked around South Side for a little while. LaRocca? Jack Ballant on the take? Could it be? The thought of it seemed absurd. He had worked under Jack for a long time. There had never been even a whisper of that kind of talk and that kind of talk swirled around almost everyone at some point. How to tackle LaRocca on that was the question. He couldn’t just walk in and ask him, or could he? What was LaRocca going to do? He wouldn’t kill him. He would just laugh in his face and send him on his way, but Sam would know. Even if he couldn’t get them to say it right out in a nice little statement, Sam always knew. That’s why he and Jimmy worked so well together. Sam always knew and Jimmy always got it on paper. Duke and Pain is what they used to call them back in the day. Sam was Duke and Jimmy was Pain. God, how he hated that moniker. Why was he thinking of Jimmy Dugan anyway after all these years? He had spent a lot of time trying to forget he even existed.
Sam couldn’t face a showdown with LaRocca tonight. He would need to think about how to handle that conversation better than just going in and asking him if Ballant had been in his employ. He thought about the woman in the bar and the runaway kids of South Side. He drove back over to the squad room and scoured through some records.
He found the missing persons’ reports on Bobby Berger, Steven and Michael Borjan and the Janowski boy, whose name turned out to be Billy. The conclusions were the same on all of them, runaways. There had been notes left by the boys in all the cases. It seemed pretty cut and dry, but something was making Sam’s radar go up. Something just didn’t feel right. Sam’s intuition was always his greatest tool, but maybe it was being colored by the sadness in the eyes of the woman who thought her two boys were dead. Maybe he could find them and at least give her the comfort that they were alive.
Steven Borjan ran away on August 2, 1973. The father, Sven Borjan, had run out on the family a couple months prior after Elsa caught him with another woman. The police had at least learned that he was living upstate in Sandy Lake where he was working as a farmhand. The boys could have taken off to live with the father and he was just not telling his wife. Maybe they were living a very good life working on a farm with their father. It would be worth checking out.