Brush Back (25 page)

“So you’re going to let them get away with attacking him?”

“I didn’t say that, Bernie. The attack is a smokescreen. And I have to ask myself whether it’s the best use of time and energy, my two scarcest resources, to figure it out.”

“You mean you’ve given up trying to prove this diary
c’est de la scrape.
” She waved her hands around, trying to think of the English word. “Phony.”

“Right now, Stella is the only person who admits to seeing the diary—her son and his wife both say they never had a look at it. The TV stations only had a typed transcript that the lawyer gave them; no one has seen the actual diary. It is pretty hard to hunt for something if it doesn’t actually exist.”

“Did you ask the priest? I thought you said she gave it to the priest.”

“
If
the diary exists, she
might
have given it to him. The first time I talked to him, he said she didn’t trust him because he was Mexican, but now he’s eyeing me with suspicion—that’s the only thing that makes me think it’s possible that he has it, or at least he’s seen it.”

“Then go in and look for it!” Bernie urged. “I know you can, Papa has told me how you are like a cat burglar when you want to be. Or have you gotten old and slow and stodgy?”

“You nailed it. I am old and slow and stodgy.”

“So you’ll go to work for this woman Viola, who seems like the dreariest person in Chicago, instead of looking after Uncle Boom-Boom?”

So much for avoiding a barrage. “No,
cara
, but I work for a living. I’m not one of those amateur detectives who can live off my bond interest while I dabble in investigations. So don’t ride me, okay? What are you up to tonight?”

She muttered that she was going out with some of the kids she’d met at the coffee shop. And yes, she huffed: she had my cell phone if anything went awry, yes, she’d be home by midnight, but would I be here to check?

“No, but your uncle Sal will. And he won’t go to bed until you’re in; he worries about you. And if he’s worried he’ll call me and then I’ll come after you with long rakes and red bats.”

Bernie’s vivid face puckered into a grimace, but she wasn’t sullen by nature; she let me give her a farewell hug, and promised to remember her curfew. And to call if she got stuck someplace where she needed a ride home. What made me uneasy were the little mischief lights dancing in her eyes when I said good-bye.

Jake’s student’s group played a modern repertoire well, finishing with a Ned Rorem requiem that was particularly effective. We had a good meal afterward on Chicago’s Restaurant Row, but I was still uneasy about Bernie and cut the evening short to make sure she came home.

“Never figured you for a helicopter aunt, V.I.,” Jake said.

“Now you know two new things about me,” I said. “Alligator wrestling and helicoptering. Bernie’s pushing on me to break into the church. Pierre—her dad—has fed her stories about Boom-Boom’s exploits, and some of mine, her whole life. I wouldn’t put it past her to think she could show me up by going to Saint Eloy’s and doing it herself.”

Bernie arrived a few minutes after that, though, and I decided I’d been imagining the mischief in her eyes. Even so, I spent the night in my own place, but she was still asleep in the living room when I got up the next morning.

I ran the dogs, dropped Bernie at her coffee bar and drove down to my own office, where I went resolutely to work. I’d been behaving lately like one of those independently wealthy dilettantes who detected as a hobby. I finished three reports, and made a security study for a bookstore whose inventory was evaporating.

I sent out bills, including one to Frank Guzzo, amounting to $1,567.18 including expenses. I sent it, with a copy of the contract Frank had signed, to my lawyer and asked that it be delivered to Frank Guzzo—I couldn’t mail it myself because of the order of protection. I didn’t expect to collect, but it wouldn’t do for him to imagine I hadn’t been keeping track.

It wasn’t until I broke for lunch that I had time to read the day’s news. The buzz about Boom-Boom’s putative bio had vanished, mercifully, but Mr. Villard, who’d supplied the photos I’d seen last week, had a little paragraph—there’d been a break-in at his Evanston mansion last night when he was having dinner with friends in the city.

The rest of the paper was the usual round of mudslides, children murdered in civil wars in Africa and Syria, children murdered in gang wars in Chicago and Detroit. Disease, famine, the whole Apocalypse was there. I put away the news and listened to a concert through my earphones.

Around the middle of the afternoon, Viola Mesaline appeared. I was surprised—I hadn’t really expected to see her again. She was shaking and her eyes were red, grief or maybe lack of sleep.

“I’m scared,” she announced. “Someone’s been in Sebastian’s and my apartment.”

I took her into the cubicle set aside for clients. It’s kind of like a psychiatrist’s office—couch, box of tissues, water cooler in the corner, a discreet recording device in case the client later disputes what she or he told me.

“At work today, everyone was talking about Uncle Jerry. I mean, his death was all over the news, and people were talking like it was a horror movie, not someone’s life. I couldn’t take it because I couldn’t say, shut up, you’re talking about my uncle, you know? So I told my boss I was really sick and needed to go home, and she could tell I looked bad, so she signed me out. And when I got home, someone had been in there. They’d pulled open drawers. It was so scary and—and disgusting. I found one of my bras on the floor, and then Sebastian’s room, it was a mess, they’d pulled out all his DVDs and hadn’t put them back.”

“Did you call the police?”

“And have them all over me about Sebastian and Uncle Jerry? Why do you want to get me in trouble? Why aren’t you on my side?”

“I’m not on anybody’s side,” I said. “I’m trying to understand what happened. Could it have been ordinary burglars—I mean, did they take any of the obvious stuff?”

“Like computers?” She paused. “I’m not sure. Sebastian’s laptop wasn’t there, but I hadn’t looked before. He could have taken it with him when he left.”

She got an
A
for that observation—more objectivity than I’d expected from her. “Anything else?”

“The TV is old, so a burglar wouldn’t take that anyway. And I don’t have a computer, I just have my tablet and my phone and I had those with me.”

“If it wasn’t burglars, what would they have been looking for?”

“Stuff about Uncle Jerry, don’t you see? What Sebastian was doing for him!”

“And you still say you have no idea what that was?”

She shook her head, tears forming on the red-crusted rims of her eyes. “Won’t you please start looking for him?”

I went back to my desk and printed out a copy of my standard contract. “Read it before you sign it: it makes a number of financial demands on you, and it is binding in court.”

She read it, she argued about the expenses and the advance, she reminded me she didn’t have any family or anyone but her brother to fall back on.

“I still think the police are a better option for you than me,” I said, taking the contract back from her.

That made her pull out her wallet and give me her bank card. The card went through without a whimper, despite my hope for a message saying “insufficient funds.”

HIGH AND OUTSIDE

I went early
to the Virejas Tower site. This was the project that Sebastian had been working on at the time he disappeared, Viola had told me. I wore my heavy boots and my parka: the construction site was near Navy Pier, just off Lake Shore Drive, and the wind blowing across Lake Michigan would be cold up on the exposed deck.

Even though I got to the main gate before seven, a crew was already on-site. I put on my hard hat and asked the guard at the gate to direct me to the project manager.

Viola had tried to argue me out of going to the job site, out of a free-flowing fear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t parse for me. My second client in a month who’d persuaded me to go to work based on the flimsiest of incomprehensible stories. I was beginning to wonder if I had “sucker” embroidered on my forehead, or maybe in my brain.

Viola had tapped into one of my wells of grief, but I hadn’t realized it until talking about her last night with Jake. She’d mentioned casually that her mother died when she and Sebastian were sixteen.

“Not to play Dr. Freud with you, V.I.,” Jake drawled, “but isn’t that how old you were when Gabriella died?”

“Just call me ‘Dora,’” I’d agreed ruefully.

At least in Viola’s case, Sebastian was actually missing and someone really had been searching their apartment—I’d gone there yesterday after Viola signed my contract.

She and Sebastian lived in a frugal way on the poorer fringe of Ukrainian Village on Chicago’s West Side, the edge where rehabbed buildings bleed into Vice Lord territory. Despite the cracks in the stairwell walls, and the sour smell in the hallway, the twins kept the apartment clean and neat—or had done before their intruder trashed the place.

Both beds had been pulled apart, the closets ransacked, but when Viola started picking up clothes, there wasn’t an underlying layer of junk the way there would have been in my apartment.

The intruders had come in through the kitchen door, with a crowbar, not a slick set of picklocks. While Viola was calling the twenty-four-hour board-up service I contract with, I canvassed the neighbors. A woman on the floor below thought she’d seen a stranger going up the back stairs, but her baby had been fussing and she hadn’t really paid attention.

White, black, male, female, she couldn’t say, although she was pretty sure it was a man. Wearing? Jeans, maybe a gray hoodie, so she didn’t see the hair. No one had been home in the other three apartments on Viola’s landing.

“What were they looking for?” Viola was sobbing again when I got back.

“That’s the question I get to ask you. Did Uncle Jerry leave a will, or give you any documents to look after? He was murdered two days ago; someone may be looking for something they thought you had.”

She made a helpless gesture. “We hardly ever saw him, I told you. He didn’t really
like
us, he just used us for money. If he even had a will I’m sure we’re not in it.”

“The Fughers, the people who adopted him, where is their house?”

“They died a long time ago,” Viola said. “They lived somewhere on the South Side, I mean, Uncle Jerry, he grew up at 103rd and Avenue O, and they didn’t have any other family. That’s why we thought Uncle Jerry would be glad when we got in touch with him. Only he wasn’t.”

The drawers from the cardboard filing cabinet where the twins kept their bills and receipts had also been dumped onto the floor. Buried in the middle of them was the loan document Sebastian had signed. The money came through Sleep-EZ, one of the payday loan companies. I’d seen their ads on TV:
Debts keeping you awake? Come to Sleep-EZ. We’ll get you the money you need and you can sleep-ez at night again.

The only difference between Mob-run juice loans and the payday business was that payday loans are legal. Interest tops out at 355 percent a year under current laws halfheartedly designed to curb usury. Eight years back, when Sebastian had signed this paper, there hadn’t been an upper limit.

The twins’ copy of the loan agreement was barely legible after years of handling. I squinted at it under the light from my flash. Uncle Jerry had cosigned it, since Sebastian had been underage when he got the loan. The twins paid Uncle Jerry directly. Since he presumably had long since paid back Sleep-EZ, he was pocketing a handsome bundle of change. Which reinforced the idea that Viola and Sebastian were the best candidates to have killed him.

“What about your brother’s room—was there anything in there they might want, anything that would show what he was doing for your uncle?”

“It could have been on his computer, only that’s gone, like I told you already.”

It was all unsatisfactory and frustrating, made more so by her resistance to my suggestions for action. “Viola, all this reluctance to talk to the cops points in a bad direction. Are you sure Sebastian didn’t kill your uncle?”

That opened the sluice gates completely. How could I say such a thing? She was worried sick, she didn’t want to go to the police because they would think like me, but if I wasn’t going to look for Sebastian, she’d do it herself.

I wondered if I was exuding some subliminal hormone that made all my clients hysterical. “Then you have to let me know where your brother has been working. If you don’t tell me anything, there’s no point in your signing an agreement with me.”

She capitulated, not happily. Which took me to the Virejas Tower early the next morning.

Presumably the city would supply a road to the building when it was completed, but right now the only access was a gravel track that I found by following the dump trucks rattling along Illinois Street toward the lake. I bumped my long-suffering Mustang behind them and parked outside the gate. The guard inspected my ID, made sure I had a hard hat—my silver number with “V. I. Warshawski Investigations” on it in red—and decided I could talk to the project manager.