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I nodded judicially, as if Sturlese had made a credible argument and I believed him. “Sebastian Mesaline has been missing for over a week. Is Mr. Nabiyev here now? I’d like to know the last time he saw Mr. Mesaline.”

“He isn’t here, but I’ll definitely tell him you were asking.”

I thanked Sturlese, as if he were doing me a favor, instead of helping me paint a bigger target on my head so that Nabiyev wouldn’t have any trouble spotting me when he came after me.

“If that’s all, we’re running a plant here and everyone needs to get back to work,” Sturlese said.

I bade him a polite farewell, but stopped outside the office, back against the wall, to hear what he had to say next. It was a sharp question to Mavis about what else I had said and what she had told me.

“Honest, Mr. Sturlese, she came in all huffy and puffy, wanting to know about Sebastian Mesaline, but I couldn’t tell her anything because I don’t know anything.”

“Has Nabby been around today?” Sturlese asked.

“I—he came in for a cash advance about an hour ago, but I think maybe he took off again?”

Sturlese grunted. I trotted back to the stairwell and managed to get down to the landing before he came out to the hall. Once outside, I slowed down: jogging only made my head feel worse. I trudged to my car, wondering what I’d accomplished—besides waving my arms like a demented matador in the face of a rogue bull. When I’d left Sturlese and was on Harlem Avenue, I pulled over, leaning back in the seat, pinching my nose to stop the bleeding.

The revving of a heavy engine made me look up. The driver of the silver SRT was honking at the inbound chain of cement trucks, and then gunning the engine to dart around them. A Subaru is no match for a muscle car, but I followed it down Harlem Avenue as best I could, helped by the thick traffic and stoplights—although the SRT was essentially ignoring both. I got hung up in traffic at Foster, about a mile south of the plant, and lost him.

This stretch of Harlem is one long mall. I ended up driving more than a mile before I came to an east-west through street. I was craving sleep, driving with the windows open, hoping the cold air would keep me alert, when it started to rain. I knew what Luke would have to say if I let the Subaru’s upholstery get damp so I rolled up the windows and tried singing in an effort to stay awake.

It was only a fluke that made me look to my left as I passed the Firestone outlet near Wilson. The SRT was pulling up in front of an “all you can eat” Thai buffet in a nearby strip mall.

I forgot my wounds and drove to the next mall, where I parked in the middle of a cluster of cars. One of the many items I’d lost in my Mustang’s dismemberment was a set of Bushnell night-vision binoculars. And an umbrella. Fortunately I was outside a gigantic drugstore. Even more fortunately, they had umbrellas up front, by the cash registers, so that I didn’t have to go into the neon wilderness beyond. I picked up a Kane County Cougars baseball cap to hide my black eye and red nose and plodded through the parking lot, shivering. The umbrella wasn’t much protection against the driving rain; my pantlegs were soaked by the time I reached the Thai restaurant.

The SRT was still there. I looked through the restaurant windows. Like every place in mall-land, it was enormous, with the buffet stretching beyond my sight range.

I went inside for a quick look. The place was filling up with shift workers picking up cheap, filling food on their way home. Brightly painted statuettes of deities and demons were hanging from the ceiling. I suppose it was an attempt to make the place look less cavernous, but the plastic figures looked as beaten down as the clientele. The food, colored as luridly as the figurines, took away my appetite. I pretended to study it, and finally glimpsed Sturlese at a table toward the back. He was twisting a drink around, looking expectantly toward the entrance.

I ducked my head to my chest, and shuffled to the exit. Keeping my head low, I mumbled to the bored hostess that I’d forgotten my wallet and went back into the cold. I kept the bill of the Cougars cap pulled over my forehead and the umbrella at an angle to shield my face.

After half an hour, in which I got thoroughly wet and cold, an Infiniti SUV pulled up next to the SRT. The paint was a gunmetal gray, but next to Boris Nabiyev’s face, the color seemed warm, vibrant.

I couldn’t think of any way to get close enough to Nabiyev and Sturlese to eavesdrop. Besides, I was sneezing so loudly I’d drown out their conversation. I pulled my wet jacket collar around my neck and stumbled back to the Subaru.

FAMILY TIES

It took me the better
part of an hour to drive across town to my apartment, snuffling and sneezing the whole way. I’d have to have a decontamination specialist clean the Subaru before I gave it back.

I wanted a hot bath, a hot drink and bed, but Mr. Contreras saw me dragging my way up the sidewalk and came to the door, clucking over my wet clothes, my rheumy eyes, my snuffles. “Bernie’s fine, doll. You go change into something dry.”

Bernie was alarmingly fine—post-traumatic stress was taking the form of a ramped-up belligerence. She wanted to drive down to South Chicago, hunt down Insane Dragons—
We will know them by their tattoos, Vic, didn’t you see last night? All those boys had dragons on their arms, the biggest one, he had a dragon on his face!

“It was on his neck,” I said dryly. “Bernie, your dad is coming to collect you. The police will shake the names of the guys who jumped us out of the one who’s in the hospital. When they’ve made an arrest, I will testify at any legal proceedings.”

“And until then, what will you do?” Her small vivid face flooded with color. “You will make out with Jake and murmur, oh, law and order will prevail if we wait a thousand years or two.”

I couldn’t help laughing, which turned into a wheezy cough. “Bernie, the people who we’re up against are so much bigger than we are—not just a bunch of street thugs, but someone from the Uzbeki Mob. Law and order may prevail at a snail’s pace, but me letting you get killed isn’t going to speed the process.”

“Those people you took me to see last night, the lawyers, the insurance man and so on, are they involved with this Uzbeki Mob?”

“I don’t know.” Peppy came over to me, rubbing against my damp jeans, but Mitch stayed close to Bernie. “After I’ve had a bath and warmed up I’m going to see if I can dig up who owns whom.”

“We need to go to South Chicago ourselves, to confront these Dragons and also this mother who murdered her child. It’s what you would have done with Uncle Boom-Boom when you were my age. Or have you gotten too old to take risks anymore?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Dr. Lotty and Jake say I take too many risks. Anyway, although your uncle and I had some hair-raising adventures, none of them involved the Mafia or large street gangs.”

I looked at Mr. Contreras. “Will you please chain her to a radiator while I take a bath?”

Mr. Contreras followed me to the hall. “She needs something to do, doll. She slept until noon and I took her over to see the doc, like you asked, but she’s bouncing off the walls.”

“Yeah, I can tell. Think you can hold her for another hour or two? The Stanley Cup playoffs start tonight—that should keep her settled while I rest—I feel like original sin right now.”

The climb up the stairs to my own place seemed as hard a journey as the drive across the city. When I got there I sank into the tub, pouring in eucalyptus oil for my aching eyes and nose. Maybe Bernie was right, maybe I was getting too old to take the risks I needed as a private eye. Surely I could compensate by getting craftier, but when I thought of Jerry Fugher’s death, suffocating in the pet coke, I felt only scared, not crafty.

“The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken,” I sang as I finally emptied the tub. I made myself a toddy, whisky with lemon, honey and hot water, and curled up in my big armchair in the fluffy gold robe Jake had given me for my last birthday. I logged into LexisNexis and started doing ownership searches, for Scanlon, for Nina Quarles’s firm, for Sturlese Cement. I ordered family records through Genealogy Plus. I ordered personal records on Brian Sturlese and Nina Quarles, along with Fugher, Sebastian Mesaline, his sister, Viola, the Guzzo family. Even the Reverend Umberto Cardenal.

I found a container of lentil soup in the freezer and thawed it to eat with another hot toddy, got dressed, sat at the dining room table with my printouts.

Sturlese Cement was family owned, third generation with three brothers in charge: Darius, Lorenzo and the one I’d met, Brian, the youngest. Looking at the P&L statements, I could see the brothers had gotten in over their heads: right before the collapse in the construction industry, they’d put $150 million into a building going up near Navy Pier.

Ajax Insurance had supplied the surety bonds on the project, but Sturlese had been left holding the bag when the bottom fell out of the market. The cement company seemed on their way to Chapter 11 when someone—angel or devil—bailed them out.

None of my reports could tell me who’d bought a controlling share in Sturlese—it was privately held, so they didn’t need SEC filings. Obviously Nabiyev played a role, but he looked like an enforcer, not a money man. The Uzbeki Mob is an amorphous entity, not one whose profit-and-loss statements will show up in LexisNexis, so if the Mob now owned Sturlese, it was through a shell company, but no shells were washing up on the beaches where I was looking.

Between my injuries, my cold and the second toddy, my brain was getting sluggish. I was putting all Sturlese papers away when I did a double take on the address where Sturlese’s consortium had planned to build. After that project folded, it had been replaced by Virejas Tower. And one of the investors in Virejas was Illinois House Speaker Connor “Spike” Hurlihey.

Hurlihey might not be connected to the Uzbeki Mob, but he ran the Illinois legislature as if he were a Mafia boss. That didn’t mean he hired people like Nabiyev to snuff out people like Jerry Fugher, mostly because he wielded so much power no one ever tested how far he’d go to win.

He had a right to invest in a building if he wanted to, as long as there wasn’t a conflict of interest with bills he’d put through committee. I went back to LexisNexis to look up any special legislation that affected Virejas Tower.

Two years ago, right before the public announcement of the project, the legislature voted to grant Virejas an exception to performing an environmental assessment, on the grounds that the previous project proposed for the site—the one that nearly bankrupted Sturlese Cement—had been approved by the city. However, as I discovered going slowly through the paperwork, the zoning permission had been granted “pending an environmental assessment,” which never took place.

This was a problem, because all that land on the west side of Lake Shore Drive, across from the big Navy Pier Ferris Wheel, had been a dumping ground for thorium-based gas lanterns a century earlier. Getting an environmental exception meant the Virejas consortium didn’t have to check thorium levels in the soil or take precautions against aerating them during excavation for the tower’s foundation.

That was slimy, but it also seemed to be a way of shooting the project in the foot: anyone buying or leasing at Virejas could look up the same information I had and order an environmental study before plunking down money. Virejas was going to be a mixed-use, residential and business building. Maybe a family wouldn’t think about an environmental report before buying a condo, but most corporations would. Even so, I sent Murray an e-mail with the file about the legislation attached—maybe he’d be able to do a story. Assuming his corporate masters didn’t cave in to pressure from Spike Hurlihey to keep the environmental hazards under wraps.

Rory Scanlon’s insurance agency and Vince Bagby’s trucking firms were also family owned, closely held companies, without a lot of information available. Scanlon, in his seventies now, had inherited an agency started by his grandfather during the Depression, when people used to put aside a few pennies a week for their funerals. He lived modestly, not flaunting wealth with exotic cars or multiple homes. He’d never married, but an unmarried sister lived with him. Three other sisters, who’d all left the neighborhood, had children and grandchildren. No one had ever accused him of sexual misconduct, or any other kind—which didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

As Conrad and Bobby and Father Cardenal kept insisting, everything in Scanlon’s life seemed to revolve around the South Side—he was a frequent sponsor at fund-raisers for St. Eloy’s, for the widows and orphans of the police and fire departments, for Boys and Girls Clubs, and a slew of other civic-based charities. He also was a steady contributor to local political campaigns. I couldn’t find any records of giving to presidential or senatorial candidates, but he did his part as a Tenth Ward committeeman to keep the alderman, the state reps and the mayor well oiled.

Vince Bagby’s profile was similar—hard to get access to company reports, but lots of public good deeds in the community. No wonder both Conrad Rawlings and Father Cardenal wanted me to stop looking for dirt under either guy’s nails. In an area with 40 percent unemployment, a pair like them kept a lot of machinery oiled.