Burn Marks (4 page)

5

Royal Suite

I worked for the county for five years after passing the bar. During my summers in law school I interned at the Loop’s giant firms, and I’d held a lot of weird jobs to finance my college education. The worst was selling books by phone for Time-Life from five to nine in the evening. You call people at dinner and they scream at you. Eight or nine times I phoned homes of dead people—once the woman had died only the day before. I extricated myself from her sobbing daughter swiftly and gracelessly.

So I know working for myself beats a whole roster of other employers I can list. Still, being a private investigator is not the romance of the loner knight that Marlowe and Spenser like to pretend—half the time you’re doing some kind of tedious surveillance or spending your day in the Daley Center checking backgrounds. And a good chunk of the rest of the time goes to selling people on hiring your services. Often not successfully.

Cartwright & Wheeler, insurance brokers, listened closely to my presentation on the perils and possibilities of filing false claims. They asked a lot of questions, but the nine people in the room didn’t feel able to make a decision on hiring me without consulting senior staff. I exuded warmth, professionalism, and a positive mental attitude while trying to force a commitment, but the best I could get was a promise to discuss it at Monday’s management meeting.

I went back to my office to stow my five hundred dollars’ worth of transparencies in a filing cabinet. Usually I don’t get too upset by a lukewarm response, but I was feeling edgy enough about Elena that I slammed drawers and tore up mail to vent my irritation. Larry Bowa liked to destroy toilets after a bad game. We all have our little immature quirks.

When I’d calmed down some I checked in with my answering service. Marissa Duncan had left a message. I called back and spoke with her secretary. Marissa had found a room for Elena in a residential hotel on Ken-more between Wilson and Lawrence. They wanted ninety a month for it. I hesitated a moment. I hated to turn it down—Marissa would be peeved and she had enough connections that I was better off with her feeling good about me. Even worse, what if Elena showed up again at three in the morning?

“She can’t move in right away,” I said at last. “But I’ll stop by and pay for the room on my way home.”

“Cash,” the secretary said briefly. “And no pets or children.”

“Fine.” I double-checked the address and hung up. For the first time in my life I found myself wondering what Elena had done for birth control all those years. And I suddenly realized why Gabriella had been so accepting the time she showed up at our house thirty years ago. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what had been said, but Elena had been pregnant. Gabriella helped her find some kind of underground abortion and Elena got drunk.

I sat at my desk, my shoulder slumped, watching the pigeons fight for space on the windowsill. Finally I stretched out a hand to switch on the desk lamp and called Michael Furey at the Central District. He didn’t sound enthusiastic at hearing from me, but he said he’d checked the morgue and some of the area hospitals—no gray-haired drunk women had been hauled in since yesterday afternoon.

“Gotta go, Vic, we’re hard at it. See you Sunday….”

Normally I would have chafed him about being hard at a poker game, but I hung up without saying anything—I wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

I’d noticed too late that one of the pieces of mail I was shredding was from an old client. I rummaged through the scraps on the floor and reconstructed enough of it to see that it was a request for a simple background check. It would keep until Monday—I wasn’t in the humor to do that tonight, either. The rest of the paper I scooped up and put into the trash.

Embarrassed by my earlier outburst, I soberly filed the papers remaining on my desk, then went to the ladies’ room on the seventh floor for some water to scrub down the surface. That looked so good that I finished by washing the windowsills and filing cabinets too. Clean now in thought, word, and deed, I locked up the office.

En route to the garage I stopped at a cash machine to get the ninety dollars, then joined the slow procession out of the Loop. Everyone leaves work early on Friday in order to maximize the amount of time spent sitting in traffic before starting the weekend.

It was a little before five when I reached the Windsor Arms on Kenmore. The building had gone up when the Duke was in his heyday, enjoying Goering’s hospitality and lending his name to residential hotels that hoped to reflect his royal splendor. The Duke of Windsor was dead now, but the hotel hadn’t been so lucky. If the facade had been washed since George VI’s ascension, it didn’t show. Not much more attention had been paid to basic repairs— a number of windows had pieces of cardboard filling in for missing panes.

The inside smelled faintly of boiled cabbage, despite a large poster over the desk that stated emphatically, “Absolutely No Cooking in Rooms.” Next to the sign Alderman Helen Schiller’s face smiled beatifically out at her voters.

No one was behind the desk, but a handful of residents sat in a small lounge watching Vanna White on a tiny TV chained high on the wall. I walked over and asked if anyone knew where the manager was. A middle-aged woman in a sleeveless housedress looked at me suspiciously—people in business suits and nylons who come to residential hotels are usually city inspectors or lawyers threatening action on behalf of the family of a dead resident.

I gave my most trustworthy smile. “I understand you have a room here. For Elena Warshawski.”

“What about it?” The woman had the heavy flat drawl of the Irish South side.

“I’m her niece. She’ll be by in a couple of days to move in, but I wanted to pay for a month in advance to hold the room for her.”

The woman looked me up and down, her watery gray eyes tight and ungiving. At last she decided my sanctimonious honesty was the real thing. She turned back to the set, waited for a commercial, then heaved herself ponderously out of the vinyl-coated armchair. I followed her out to the desk and behind it into a cubbyhole whose outstanding feature was a large lockbox.

The chatelaine counted my tens twice, wrote out a receipt in a labored hand, then put the money in a sealed envelope and slid it through a slot in the side of the box.

“I don’t know how to get into that sucker, so don’t think your boyfriend can come around and hold a gun on me to get your money back for you. They come and empty it out twice a week.”

“No, ma’am,” I agreed helplessly.

“Now I’ll show you the room. When your aunt’s ready to move in she can come on over. Make sure she brings the receipt with her.”

We walked up three flights of stairs, slowly, to accommodate my guide’s short, panting breaths, and down an uncarpeted corridor. Empty glass fixtures over the doors were a reminder of the Windsor Arms’s grander days—the hall was lighted now by two naked bulbs. The desk clerk stopped at the second door from the end of the left side and unlocked it.

Whoever owned the building apparently owed Marissa Duncan a favor. Either that or hoped Marissa would provide a friendly push up the local political ladder. The window held all four panes, the floor was clean, and the narrow bed made up tidily. A white plastic chest of drawers stood in the corner. A deal table under the window completed the furnishings.

“Bathroom’s down the hall. She can lock her stuff in a chest under the bed if she’s afraid of junkies. Key comes to me when she’s not in the room. And absolutely no cooking in here. The wiring’s old. Don’t want the place going up in smoke around us.”

I agreed soberly and followed her back down the stairs. She returned to Wheel of Fortune without another look at me. Once outside I gulped in the air in great mouthfuls.

I never seem to make enough money to put more than a thousand or so into a Keogh plan every year. What was I going to live on when I got too old to hustle clients any longer? The thought of being sixty-six, alone, living in a little room with three plastic drawers to hold my clothes— a shudder swept through me, almost knocking me off balance. A woman with three children in tow yanked them past me-I was just a falling-down drunk for her children to stare at on their way home. I climbed heavily into the Chevy and headed south.

The mixture of guilt and fear the Windsor Arms stirred in me took the edge off my pleasure in the weekend. I went to the grocery Saturday morning and got fruit and yogurt for the week ahead. But when I picked out supplies for a pasta salad I was taking to an impromptu picnic that afternoon I bypassed my usual olive oil for a cheap brand— how could I spend eleven dollars on a pint of olive oil when I couldn’t scrape together enough for a third-quarter deposit into my Keogh? I even bought domestic Parmesan. Gabriella would have upbraided me sharply—but then she wouldn’t have approved of my buying pasta in a store to begin with.

I got all three morning papers and read them carefully before going over to the park. So far nobody had found any unidentified older women in the river or roaming dementedly about the streets. I had to trust that Furey, or Bobby Mallory himself, would call me if Elena had been arrested. There didn’t seem to be anything else for me to do except join my pals at Montrose Harbor and take my aggressions out on a Softball.

I couldn’t quite shake off my depression, but a game-saving catch I made in the sixth inning cheered me—I hadn’t known I could still dive for a ball and come up with it the way I did at twenty. Over Soave and grilled chicken afterwards, I couldn’t quite get into the ribald spirits of my friends. I left while the party was still in progress so as to catch the ten o’clock news.

Elena still hadn’t surfaced in a dramatic way. I finally decided she was hanging out someplace with Annie Green-sleeves and went to bed, torn between disgust with her and irritation with myself.

I’d half been hoping that the gods would blight Boots’s party with violent thundershowers, but Sunday dawned with more of the bright, merciless sunshine we’d suffered from all summer. With September drawing to a close, the days were merely warm instead of sweltering, but the Midwest was still suffering from its worst drought in fifty years.

All around the city sidewalks and roadbeds had buckled and collapsed. During the height of the heat wave sparks from the trains had ignited beams holding up the L platforms so that various stations were now closed more or less permanently. Given Chicago’s perennial cash shortfall, I didn’t expect to see those stops reopen in my lifetime.

I ran Peppy to Belmont Harbor and back, then made my way through the Sunday papers. The Sun-Times was the hardest—I’ve never figured out their organizational scheme and I had to read a lot more than I wanted about home decorating and fall festivals in Wisconsin before stumbling on the metropolitan news.

When I’d finished the Herald-Star without finding any word on Elena, it was time to shower and dress for my two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar barbecue. I knew Marissa would probably show up in silk lounging pajamas or something equally exotic, but unless Rosalyn Fuentes had changed dramatically, she would probably wear jeans. It seemed to me good fund-raising etiquette dictated not to upstage the guest of honor. Besides, I didn’t want to worry about dry-clean-only clothes at a giant picnic. I put on khaki slacks and a loose-fitting olive shirt. Neat—would camouflage food spills and above all be comfortable for an afternoon in the sun.

Michael arrived a little before three, his black hair and dark eyes set off vividly by a navy blazer and pale blue polo shirt. His normal good spirits had spilled over into exuberance—he liked big parties, he liked getting together with his pals, and he had enough old-fashioned Dem in him to look forward to an afternoon hobnobbing with patty bigwigs.

I made a great show of salaams at his elegance. “You sure you want to arrive at Boots’s with me? It’s really going to tone down your image.”

He gave me a mock tap to the nose. “You make me look good, Warshawski. That’s why I want you to stay close this afternoon.”

“The slum next to the suburb? That’s kind of how I feel about the whole affair.” Somehow his effervescence made me feel like being disagreeable.

“Aw, come on, Warshawski. Do you really like living in the trash and graffiti? Secretly, down deep, wouldn’t you live in the clean open spaces if you could afford it?”

“You stay in Norwood Park,” I reminded him.

“Only because those of us who serve and protect you from the graffiti artists have to live in the city. And Chicago crime is more interesting to be around than the stuff in Streamwood.”

“Well, that’s what I think too. That’s why I can’t see myself out there.” I took my billfold from my handbag and stuffed it in a pants pocket along with my invitation to the party—I didn’t want to lug a purse around the picnic all afternoon.

“But you do a lot of investigations in the suburbs,” Michael objected as we left my apartment.

“That’s why I like city crime better.” I turned the double locks. “Someone bonks you on the head and steals your purse. They don’t sit in board rooms raving on about the niggers in Chicago while they’re sliding a million or two off the top from the company.”

“I could introduce you to some muggers,” Michael offered when we reached the street. “They need some PR—maybe you’re just the gal for them.” He sketched a billboard with his hands. “I can kind of see it—clean, honest crime like your granddaddy used to commit.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Okay, okay. Muggers are scum. I just have a chip on my shoulder about the suburbs, that’s all. Anyway, I can’t afford them. I wouldn’t mind knowing what Boots did to finance a move from Division and Central to Streamwood.”

Michael framed my face with his hands and kissed me. “Do me a favor, Vic—just don’t ask him this afternoon.”

I disengaged myself and got into the Chevy. “Don’t worry—my mama brought me up to know how to act in public. See you at the ball.”

He hopped into the Corvette, flashed his lights at me a few times, and took off toward Belmont with a great screeching of rubber.

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