I held the phone to my ear and listened to the man with the accent breathe. Behind him I could hear a television and the faint sound of a woman crying. “Mrs. Kowalski, we do not wish to hurt anybody,” he said. “We wish to talk about your husband. Please come to Chicago. Bring the notebook.” I said I would come. Then I covered the phone with my palm, turned to Bill Haney, and whispered, “Do you know a policeman?” He nodded. He had a brother in law with the Milwaukee Police Department, in the fraud unit, and he was already reaching for his phone.
We drove down Interstate 94 in Bill Buick, Gary in the back seat, with the notebook in my pocketbook and the envelope on my knee. A detective named Sandra Wojcik, a stocky woman with a gray ponytail, met us at a diner in Gurnee. She listened for twenty minutes without interrupting and ate a whole plate of pierogi. Then she wiped her hands. “Mrs. Kowalski, your husband testified in 1997 against a man named Jerzy Nowak,” she said. “Nowak ran a loan sharking ring out of Mitchell Street. He was sentenced to twenty years. He was released in 2017, and he passed last winter.”
My heart gave a lurch. “Then who has Tina?” I asked. The detective turned her coffee cup around. “His son, Marek Nowak, runs what is left of the family,” she said. “He thinks your husband stole something. We believe the notebook is a record of the payments, nothing more. But Marek has not seen it. He wants the notebook because he believes it contains a ledger of his father debts. If you give him the copy, he will let Tina go. If you give him the original, he will not need her anymore.” She looked at me. “I would not give him the original.”
A voice on a phone in Chicago, a dry cleaning shop, and a widow who knew what her husband notebook was really worth.
We made a plan at that diner table. Bill Haney took the original notebook into a copy shop on the north side and made a clean photocopy, page by page, while the detective arranged for a team in unmarked cars. I would carry the copy to the address in Chicago, a dry cleaning shop on Milwaukee Avenue, and I would keep the original safe in the Buick. Gary wanted to go in with me. I told him no. “Gary, your father was a bus driver for thirty years,” I said. “He knew how to go into a bad neighborhood and come out again. So do I.”
I walked into the dry cleaner in my good wool coat, with my pocketbook over my arm, at four in the afternoon. The shop smelled of steam and starch. A heavy man in a leather jacket stood behind the counter, and behind him, in a chair near the pressing machine, sat Tina, pale, with her phone in her lap and a pair of handcuff marks on her wrist. She looked up at me and began to cry. “Mom, I am so sorry,” she said. “I did not know who they were.” I said I knew. I put the photocopy on the counter.
The man in the leather jacket was Marek Nowak. He opened the notebook and flipped through it with his thick fingers, page after page of dates and fifty dollar bills. His expression changed. He had expected names, accounts, a map to hidden money. He found only the careful printing of a bus driver who had been paid a tip for his silence and had written down every cent. “This is nothing,” Marek said. “This is a joke.” I said it was the truth, and that my husband was an honest man. Then I said, “Detective,” in a clear, carrying voice, and the door of the shop opened.
It was over in two minutes. Six officers came in with their weapons low and their badges up, and Marek Nowak put his hands flat on the counter and said a word in Polish I will not repeat. They took him away with two of his men. Tina walked into my arms. Gary came running in from the Buick and wrapped both of us up like a quilt. I stood there in the middle of a dry cleaning shop in Chicago, holding my son and my daughter in law, and I thought that Chester would have given a month of Thursdays to see it.
Tina did not go to prison. The prosecutor, who had read the notebook, accepted that she had been duped by a man who promised her a treasure, and she pleaded to a misdemeanor and paid back a part of the money she had taken from the box. She and Gary moved out of my house in January and rented a small apartment near the brewery. They come on Sundays now, with groceries, and Tina washes my dishes without being asked. We never speak of the Mickey Mantle. I think she has learned what a rookie card is worth, and what it is not.
Bill Haney drove back up from Ohio in the spring with the Mantle card in a protective case, and a check. He had refused to keep the card when he heard the story. “Mrs. Kowalski, a man collects baseball cards for love,” he said, “and I would not love it if I stole it.” I thanked him and gave him a plate of pierogi. We sold the card at auction for a hundred and forty thousand dollars. I put half of it into a scholarship at the Milwaukee Area Technical College, in Chester name, for bus drivers who want to learn a second trade.
Last Thursday I rode Route 15 downtown, just to see it. The bus was clean and nearly empty, and the driver, a young man with a gold tooth, asked if I needed help with the step. I said no thank you, and I sat in the seat by the window where a Polish man once sat with a black bag. The bus rolled down Mitchell Street in the winter light. I took Chester notebook out of my pocketbook and held it in my lap. “Chet,” I said quietly, “you were never alone on this route. I was always at the end of it.”
