Windy City Blues (20 page)

His monstrous size and the horrible angle at which his bald head was tilted made me gag. I forced it down and walked through a pile of stale clothes to the bed. Lifting an arm the size of a tree trunk, I felt for a pulse. Nothing moved in the heavy arm, but the skin, while clammy, was firm. I couldn’t bring myself to touch any more of him but stumbled around the perimeter to peer at him from several angles. I didn’t see
any obvious wounds. Let the medical examiner hunt out the obscure ones.

By the time I was back in the stairwell I was close to fainting. Only the thought of falling into someone else’s urine or vomit kept me on my feet. On the way down I tripped in earnest over the rheumy-eyed woman’s coat. Sprawled on the floor at the bottom, I couldn’t keep from throwing up myself. It didn’t make me feel any better.

I dug a water bottle out of the detritus in my trunk and sponged myself off before calling the police. They asked me to stay near the body. I thought the front seat of my car on Winthrop would be close enough.

While I waited for a meat wagon I wondered about my client. Could Brigitte have come here after leaving me, killed him and taken off while I was phoning around checking up on her? If she had, the rheumy-eyed woman in the stairwell would have seen her. Would the bond forged by my tripping over her and vomiting in the hall be enough to get her to talk to me?

I got out of the car, but before I could get back to the entrance the police arrived. When we pushed open the rickety door my friend had evaporated. I didn’t bother mentioning her to the boys—and girl—in blue: her description wouldn’t stand out in Uptown, and even if they could find her she wouldn’t be likely to say much.

We plodded up the stairs in silence. There were
four of them. The woman and the youngest of the three men seemed in good shape. The two older men were running sadly to flab. I didn’t think they’d be able to budge my client’s ex-husband’s right leg, let alone his mammoth redwood torso.

“I got a feeling about this,” the oldest officer muttered, more to himself than the rest of us. “I got a feeling.”

When we got to 3E and he looked across at the mass on the bed he shook his head a couple of times. “Yup. I kind of knew as soon as I heard the call.”

“Knew what, Tom?” the woman demanded sharply.

“Jade Pierce,” he said. “Knew he lived around here. Been a lot of complaints about him. Thought it might be him when I heard we was due to visit a real big guy.”

The woman stopped her brisk march to the bed. The rest of us looked at the behemoth in shared sorrow. Jade. Not James or Jake but Jade. Once the most famous down lineman the Bears had ever fielded. Now … I shuddered.

When he played for Alabama some reporter said his bald head was as smooth and cold as a piece of jade, and went on to spin some tiresome simile relating it to his play. When he signed with the Bears, I was as happy as any other Chicago fan, even though his reputation for off-field violence was pretty unappetizing. No wonder Brigitte LeBlanc hadn’t stayed with him,
but why hadn’t she wanted to tell me who he really was? I wrestled with that while Tom called for reinforcements over his lapel mike.

“So what were you doing here?” he asked me.

“His ex-wife hired me to check up on him.” I don’t usually tell the cops my clients’ business, but I didn’t feel like protecting Brigitte. “She wanted to talk to him and he wasn’t answering his phone or his door.”

“She wanted to check up on him?” the fit younger officer, a man with high cheekbones and a well-tended mustache, echoed me derisively. “What I hear, that split up was the biggest fight Jade was ever in. Only big fight he ever lost, too.”

I smiled. “She’s doing well, he isn’t. Wasn’t. Maybe her conscience pricked her. Or maybe she wanted to rub his nose in it hard. You’d have to ask her. All I can say is she asked me to try to get in, I did, and I called you guys.”

While Tom mulled this over I pulled out a card and handed it to him. “You can find me at this number if you want to talk to me.”

He called out after me but I went on down the hall, my footsteps echoing hollowly off the bare walls and ceiling.

Brigitte LeBlanc was with a client and couldn’t be interrupted. The news that her ex-husband had died couldn’t pry her loose. Not even the idea that the cops would be around before long could move her. After a combination of cajoling and heckling, the receptionist leaned across her blond desk and whispered at me confidentially: “The Vice President of the United States had come in for some private media coaching.” Brigitte had said no interruptions unless it was the President or the pope—two people I wouldn’t even leave a dental appointment to see.

When they made me unwelcome on the forty-third floor I rode downstairs and hung around the lobby. At five-thirty a bevy of Secret Service agents swept me out to the street with the other loiterers. Fifteen minutes later the Vice President came out, his boyish face set in purposeful lines. Even though this was a private visit the vigilant television crews were waiting for him. He grinned and waved but didn’t say anything before climbing into his limo. Brigitte must be really good if she’d persuaded him to shut up.

At seven I went back to the forty-third floor. The double glass doors were locked and the lights turned off. I found a key in my collection that worked the lock, but when I’d prowled through the miles of thick gray plush, explored the secured studios, looked in all the offices, I had to realize my client was smarter than me. She’d left by some back exit.

I gave a high-pitched snarl. I didn’t lock the door behind me. Let someone come in and steal all the video equipment. I didn’t care.

I swung by Brigitte’s three-story brownstone on Belden. She wasn’t in. The housekeeper didn’t know when to expect her. She was eating out and had said not to wait up for her.

“How about Corinne?” I asked, sure that the woman would say “Corinne who?”

“She’s not here, either.”

I slipped inside before she could shut the door on me. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. Brigitte hired me to find her sister, said she’d run off to Jade. I went to his apartment. Corinne wasn’t there and Jade was dead. I’ve been trying to talk to Brigitte ever since but she’s avoiding me. I want to know a few things, like if Corinne really exists, and did she really run away, and could either she or Brigitte have killed Jade.”

The housekeeper stared at me for a few minutes, then made a sour face. “You got some I.D.?”

I showed her my P.I. license and the contract signed by Brigitte. Her sour look deepened but she gave me a few spare details. Corinne was a fat, unhappy teenager who didn’t know how good she had it. Brigitte gave her everything, taught her how to dress, sent her to St. Scholastica, even tried to get her to special diet clinics, but she was never satisfied, always whining about her friends back home in Mobile, trashy friends to whom she shouldn’t be giving
the time of day. And yes, she had run away, three days ago now, and she, the housekeeper, said good riddance, but Brigitte felt responsible. And she was sorry that Jade was dead, but he was a violent man, Corinne had overidealized him, she didn’t realize what a monster he really was.

“They can’t turn it off when they come off the field, you know. As for who killed him, he probably killed himself, drinking too much. I always said it would happen that way. Corinne couldn’t have done it, she doesn’t have enough oomph to her. And Brigitte doesn’t have any call to—she already got him beat six ways from Sunday.”

“Maybe she thought he’d molested her sister.”

“She’d have taken him to court and enjoyed seeing him humiliated all over again.”

What a lovely cast of characters; it filled me with satisfaction to think I’d allied myself to their fates. I persuaded the housekeeper to give me a picture of Corinne before going home. She was indeed an overweight, unhappy-looking child. It must be hard having a picture-perfect older sister trying to turn her into a junior deb. I also got the housekeeper to give me Brigitte’s unlisted home phone number by telling her if she didn’t, I’d be back every hour all night long ringing the bell.

I didn’t turn on the radio going home. I didn’t want to hear the ghoulish excitement lying behind the unctuousness the reporters would bring to discussing
Jade Pierce’s catastrophic fall from grace. A rehashing of his nine seasons with the Bears, from the glory years to the last two where nagging knee and back injuries grew too great even for the painkillers. And then to his harsh retirement, putting seventy or eighty pounds of fat over his playing weight of 310, the barroom fights, the guns fired at other drivers from the front seat of his Ferrari Daytona, then the sale of the Ferrari to pay his legal bills, and finally the three-ring circus that was his divorce. Ending on a Murphy bed in a squalid Uptown apartment.

I shut the Trans Am’s door with a viciousness it didn’t deserve and stomped up the three flights to my apartment. Fatigue mixed with bitterness dulled the sixth sense that usually warns me of danger. The man had me pinned against my front door with a gun at my throat before I knew he was there.

I held my shoulder bag out to him. “Be my guest. Then leave. I’ve had a long day and I don’t want to spend too much of it with you.”

He spat. “I don’t want your stupid little wallet.”

“You’re not going to rape me, so you might as well take my stupid little wallet.”

“I’m not interested in your body. Open your apartment. I want to search it.”

“Go to hell.” I kneed him in the stomach and swept my right arm up to knock his gun hand away. He gagged and bent over. I used my handbag as a
clumsy bolas and whacked him on the back of the head. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.

I grabbed the gun from his flaccid hand. Feeling gingerly inside his coat, I found a wallet. His driver’s license identified him as Joel Sirop, living at a pricey address on Dearborn Parkway. He sported a high-end assortment of credit cards—Bonwit, Neiman Marcus, an American Express platinum—and a card that said he was a member in good standing of the Feline Breeders Association of North America. I slid the papers back into his billfold and returned it to his breast pocket.

He groaned and opened his eyes. After a few diffuse seconds he focused on me in outrage. “My head. You’ve broken my head. I’ll sue you.”

“Go ahead. I’ll hang on to your pistol for use in evidence at the trial. I’ve got your name and address, so if I see you near my place again I’ll know where to send the cops. Now leave.”

“Not until I’ve searched your apartment.” He was unarmed and sickly but stubborn.

I leaned against my door, out of reach but poised to stomp on him if he got cute. “What are you looking for, Mr. Sirop?”

“It was on the news, how you found Jade. If the cat was there, you must have taken it.”

“Rest your soul, there were no cats in that apartment when I got there. Had he stolen yours?”

He shut his eyes, apparently to commune with
himself. When he opened them again he said he had no choice but to trust me. I smiled brightly and told him he could always leave so I could have dinner, but he insisted on confiding in me.

“Do you know cats, Ms. Warshawski?”

“Only in a manner of speaking. I have a dog and she knows cats.”

He scowled. “This is not a laughing matter. Have you heard of the Maltese?”

“Cat? I guess I’ve heard of them. They’re the ones without tails, right?”

He shuddered. “No. You are thinking of the Manx. The Maltese—they are usually a bluish gray. Very rarely will you see one that is almost blue. Brigitte LeBlanc has—or had—such a cat. Lady Iva of Cairo.”

“Great. I presume she got it to match her eyes.”

He waved aside my comment as another frivolity. “Her motives do not matter. What matters is that the cat has been very difficult to breed. She has now come into season for only the third time in her four-year life. Brigitte agreed to let me try to mate Lady Iva with my sire, Casper of Valletta. It is imperative that she be sent to stay with him, and soon. But she has disappeared.”

It was my turn to look disgusted. “I took a step down from my usual practice to look for a runaway teenager today. I’m damned if I’m going to hunt a
missing cat through the streets of Chicago. Your sire will find her faster than I will. Matter of fact, that’s my advice. Drive around listening for the yowling of mighty sires and eventually you’ll find your Maltese.”

“This runaway teenager, this Corinne, it is probable that she took Lady Iva with her. The kittens, if they are born, if they are purebred, could fetch a thousand or more each. She is not ignorant of that fact. But if Lady Iva is out on the streets and some other sire finds her first, they would be half-breeds, not worth the price of their veterinary care.”

He spoke with the intense passion I usually reserve for discussing Cubs or Bears trades. Keeping myself turned toward him, I unlocked my front door. He flung himself at the opening with a ferocity that proved his long years with felines had rubbed off on him. I grabbed his jacket as he hurtled past me but he tore himself free.

“I am not leaving until I have searched your premises,” he panted.

I rubbed my head tiredly. “Go ahead, then.”

I could have called the cops while he hunted around for Lady Iva. Instead I poured myself a whiskey and watched him crawl on his hands and knees, making little whistling sounds—perhaps the mating call of the Maltese. He went through my cupboards, my stove, the refrigerator, even insisted, his eyes wide with fear, that I open the safe in my bedroom closet. I
removed the Smith & Wesson I keep there before letting him look.

When he’d inspected the back landing he had to agree that no cats were on the premises. He tried to argue me into going downtown to check my office. At that point my patience ran out.

“I could have you arrested for attempted assault and criminal trespass. So get out now while the going’s good. Take your guy down to my office. If she’s in there and in heat, he’ll start carrying on and you can call the cops. Just don’t bother me.” I hustled him out the front door, ignoring his protests.

I carefully did up all the locks. I didn’t want some other deranged cat breeder sneaking up on me in the middle of the night.