I picked it up and turned my back to him so I could read it. The text box above the fold was outlined in thick black.
In the heavens, dying stars burn with a fierce heat before becoming black holes. What about Chicago’s human stars from yesteryear? Did they burn out or simply fade away?
In the Herald-Star’s riveting new series, Pulitzer Prize winner Murray Ryerson looks at the lives of people who used to be household names in this city. Some, like Brett Craven, burned like meteor showers and disappeared behind bars, while others, like Lee Swann, disappeared into bars. Some are living out their days peacefully in neighborhoods or small towns across the country. Perhaps the most dramatic and the saddest is Lydia Zamir, whom Murray discovered living under a railway viaduct.
Below the fold were two pictures of Lydia. The first had been shot during a performance at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre. She was wearing a simple white tunic over black trousers. The photographer had caught her with hands on the keys, her eyes half shut, her expression intent as she concentrated on the place inside her where the music lived.
The second picture showed her under the viaduct. Like the concert shot, it had been taken without Zamir’s knowledge, with a wide-angle lens that showed her sitting amid her soiled blankets, pounding furiously on the toy piano. As in the concert photo, her eyes were half closed, her attention focused inward. A thread of saliva hung from the corner of her mouth.
My stomach turned. what happened to this brilliant musician? the subhead ran, but before I could read the article, Coop had snatched the paper from me.
“Well?” he demanded. “You going to deny you made this happen?”
“I didn’t make it happen,” I said. “But it was because—”
“Goddamn you!” He wadded up the paper and flung it on the ground. “When I specifically told you—warned you—”
“I told you the last time I saw you that I don’t respond to threats. Mitch! Peppy! Let’s go.”
I walked past him, but he grabbed my shoulder as I was unlocking the front door. “No!” I snapped. I ducked under his arm and shoved an elbow into his rib cage.
I turned and braced myself against the door, ready to kick if he came at me again, but the blow to his ribs acted like a cold shower. He put his arms down and backed up a few steps. His color subsided from umber to ordinary tan.
All three dogs had been letting out short urgent barks—danger!—but had been unsure whether to intervene: What should they do when two good dog people went to war? They stopped barking when Coop backed away, but they kept circling us, panting anxiously.
The noise had roused Mr. Contreras. He surged from the building in his magenta pajamas, waving a hammer. “What’s going on here? Who’s this creep? I saw him grab hold of you, Cookie—you need me to knock some sense into him?”
Coop said, “I don’t know who you are, but your Cookie here is the creep: she sicced some slimeball on a fragile woman.”
“What the heck are you trying to say, young man?” Mr. Contreras demanded.
“Murray,” I said before my neighbor moved into a higher gear. “He wrote a story about a woman who’s living under a viaduct. It turns out she used to be an important songwriter. Murray decided that would sell papers, or make the Star’s advertisers happy.”
Mr. Contreras took a moment to absorb that: he’s over ninety, still alert and reasonably fit, but he needs extra time these days. After a pause, he asked me, “You send Ryerson down to bother this woman?”
“No,” I said at the same time Coop said, “Yes.”
“I ain’t talking to you,” Mr. Contreras said to Coop. “What happened?”
I told him the part of Lydia’s history I knew. “Her music was distinctive, back when she was performing—she mixed the classics with rhythms that she picked up from indigenous people in the Americas. This guy here, Coop, he calls himself—”
“Because it’s my goddamn name,” Coop growled.
“Watch your language around ladies, young man,” Mr. Contreras snapped.
Coop opened and shut his mouth a couple of times but didn’t speak—an effect Mr. Contreras often has on younger men.
“Anyway, he’s super protective of Lydia, warned Bernie and me off her. I told Peter Sansen and Sal about her on my birthday, and Murray was there. He thought it would be interesting to run a series. I’d forgotten that, because of the excitement over Bernie’s arrest—which Coop also instigated.”
I glared at him, but he was already back at full boil. “So it was your fault,” Coop shouted. “We had TV crews down there this morning. I protect her identity because she doesn’t want people bothering her, but thanks to you and your friend Murray, she almost got hit by a train. She ran up the stairs to get away from the cameras and was on the tracks.”
“Was she hurt?” I cried. “Did she get medical attention?”
“Commuters pulled her off the track in time.”
“Has she seen a doctor?” I demanded. “Where is she?”
“Why would I tell you where to find her? So you can sic another reporter on her? The damned story brought the city in, cops, and Streets and Sanitation. They took everything—everything—and dumped it somewhere. I can’t find the piano, I don’t know where her sleeping bag is—you goddamn bitch!”
“No call to talk like that, young man. You need to learn some manners,” Mr. Contreras said.
“I’ll talk however I goddamn well please. And you, Cookie, you leave Lydia the hell alone.” He called Bear to heel and headed back down the walk.
His departure seemed anticlimactic. His rage had propelled him to the North Side, but he hadn’t known what he wanted to accomplish when he found me. Maybe just to scream abuse because of a situation he was powerless to control.
6
Murray Signs Up
Mr. Contreras stayed out front for several minutes: he wanted to relive his arrival on the scene with his hammer—“Saved your skin this time, Cookie, didn’t I?” he exulted.
I assured him he was right: I could have fought Coop off, but Mr. Contreras had startled the younger man into subsiding without a drop of blood being shed. He had earned some bragging time. I finally reminded him that he was wearing nightclothes in public. He turned a red that matched his pajama shirt and hurried inside.
Upstairs in my own space, I took a shower, pulled an espresso, looked at the box scores, and finally felt calm enough to deal with Murray’s story. I started at the end, namely this morning’s news feeds from the train station.
A number of crews were there both from cable and the local networks, but they all behaved the same: mikes thrust at Lydia under a barrage of questions. She’d been momentarily frozen and then had grabbed her piano and fled up the stairs.
Global’s team had been the most nimble, chasing up to the train platform after her. They’d gotten some dramatic footage of two men and a woman lifting Lydia out of the path of an oncoming train. She apparently hadn’t been able to hold on to the piano, since I didn’t see it in subsequent frames. There were the requisite interviews with the three commuters who’d saved Lydia, and a shot of the ambulance carrying Lydia to a hospital. I didn’t see Coop or Bear in any of the videos.