Regarding Anna (14 page)

“Yes, but he was gone right after.”

“You don’t think he did it, do you?”

“Caused her death? Oh, that thought crossed my mind even though based on what Anna told me about him, I couldn’t imagine him having anything to do with it.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing specific.” He hesitated a few seconds. “Maybe it was just the way she talked about him. I got the impression she cared very much for him.”

“I wonder if the police talked to the boarders.”

“That I don’t know. But I do know they didn’t talk to Henry Sikes, because he told me as much.”

“I don’t suppose my aunt ever mentioned anyone else in her life—relatives, friends...enemies?”

“No. Well, she had a girlfriend who lived nearby. Don’t remember her name though.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me about her? Anything that would help me figure out what happened to her?”

He had a faraway look in his eyes. “I liked Anna. She was always good to me. Oh, you probably already know this, but she was raised by her aunt and uncle in Mexico.”

“Oh, yes, I had heard that, but I never knew what happened to her parents.”

“She never talked about them. At least not to me.”

“Tymon, do you know exactly how she died?”

His face turned ashen, and he spoke just above a whisper. “They never said in the paper how she died, but there was blood...” He didn’t finish his thought. His whole body shifted downward, like the life had been sucked right out of it.

“Blood?”

“I was asked by the bank to get the house ready for sale, and I found some traces of blood.” He paused. “Do you think we should check on Minnie?”

We walked to the kitchen only to find Minnie seated at the table... face down in a plate of peach cobbler.

“Do you want me to help with her?”

“No, I’ll manage.”

“Then I’ll be going.”

I knew I couldn’t keep him there any longer. “Let me walk you to the door.”

Tymon opened the door, turned to me, and reached for my hand, which he held for a rather long moment.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” I told him. “And I can’t thank you enough for the light you have shed on Anna.”

“The pleasure was mine.”

I watched him walk away, not knowing what to think of the man.

* * *

The next morning I met with Veronica Van Zandt, but my mind was somewhere else. Tymon was hiding something, of that I was sure, and I would have bet anything it had to do with Anna’s baby.

Mrs. Van Zandt handed me the phone bills I’d requested. She had hired me to prove or disprove that her husband Victor was being unfaithful. I called the case the Three Vs. During our initial meeting, when I had asked her if there had been any changes in her husband’s personal behavior, she had rattled off all the classic signs of a cheating husband: paid less attention to her and more attention to himself, joined a men’s club, wanted her to cook more healthy meals, had less sex, and often worked late. She also told me about some non-textbook behavior that I found interesting. He had been a martini drinker for as long as she’d known him and had recently changed to red wine. And he had come home from a business trip the week before with an unusually neatly packed suitcase.

She told me she’d gone through his wallet while he was taking a bath that morning and was surprised to find a Diners Club card. I wasn’t surprised—cheating husbands often spent money on their mistresses using a secret charge card.

After she left, the first thing I did was look for suspicious phone numbers on their phone bills, and it didn’t take me long to find one that had been called periodically at very early hours of the morning. My wonderful contact at Illinois Bell gave me the name and address associated with the number—Susan Averill. Mrs. Van Zandt had told me her husband had been going to his men’s club on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Today was Tuesday, so I knew what I would be doing after dinner. My guess was that when I tailed Mr. Van Zandt this evening, we wouldn’t end up at any men’s club.

After lunch, I delivered several subpoenas, all of which were record subpoenas that could be quickly served to the named companies. At City Hall, I completed a handful of public records checks, one of which was for a troubling case: my twenty-year-old client, Nora Edgar, had found out she was adopted at birth after a hospital worker found her in a storage room. She wanted to find out who her birth mother was. I called it my Storage Room case.

I kept looking at the Green Teen file folder and feeling guilty about not being able to do more. The girl’s mother Louise and her sister Flora were at that moment in Detroit looking for Erma, and I was surprised not to have heard from them by now. A previous visit a couple of weeks earlier had proved unproductive for them. But after I was able to locate Erma’s father, who was in a small-town jail outside of Detroit, Louise and Flora had insisted on paying him a visit. I had tried to discourage them from meeting with him given his criminal history, but they were determined.

Before I left for the day, I stuck my head in Elmer’s door to tell him I was leaving for the day and casually mentioned I was thinking about giving up being a process server because of the potential danger involved.

“Why would you do that? It’s good solid work for in between cases. You’d be foolish to give that up.”

“But there have been incidents—”

“So bring Danny along on all of them just to be safe.”

I told him I’d give it some more thought but that if I did continue, I was going to raise my prices. After I gave Danny his cut, it hardly seemed worth the effort with what I currently charged.

Elmer’s sudden interest in what I was doing puzzled me—he never had been before.

* * *

In the office the next morning, I spent an hour writing my Three Vs report for Mrs. Van Zandt. Based on my surveillance, Mr. Van Zandt was either not very bright or wanted to get caught. Why else would he have gone into a popular local bar, sat in the window with a voluptuous blonde, escorted her under bright streetlights to his car, and driven with her to a little run-down motel on the outskirts of town? He couldn’t have made it any easier for me if he had tried.

Naomi told me Elmer had her busy doing something personal for him and she hadn’t had much time to work on the Mexican caper. That was disappointing, but I had no legitimate complaint, as he was still paying the bulk of her salary.

Louise called me from a Detroit hotel room to tell me she and Flora had connected with Erma’s father.

“Apparently, Erma located my jailbird ex-husband, probably under a rock somewhere, and he didn’t even bother to contact me. Said he didn’t have my number.”

“When was this?” I asked her.

“A week ago, before he got arrested for public indecency. Erma told him she didn’t like my rules, and that’s why she left. Wanted to know if she could come live with him.”

“What did he tell her?”

“Hell, no!”

“Nice.”

“Oh, he’s a real gem, but I’m just happy he said no.”

“So what happened then?”

“He said he gave her forty dollars, enough for a bus ticket home and then some.”

“At least he did that.”

“Mm-hm.”

“It’s probably a little too long after the fact, but you could go to the bus terminal, show her picture to the agents, and ask if they remember seeing her.”

“We were thinking that too.”

“Call me with any news, okay?”

We ended the call, and after spending a long afternoon at City Hall, I grabbed a quick sandwich for dinner. Only one lead had panned out at City Hall, but it was the one I had hoped for. My Storage Room client had given me the wrong hospital name. It wasn’t Presbyterian Hospital, it was St. Luke’s. A clerk in the records department had told me people got those two hospitals mixed up all the time, since they later merged into one—Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Hospital. My plan was to pay them a visit the next day in the hope that they kept old records.

THIRTEEN

He Pulled Into Where?

Two days after my encounter with Tymon, Minnie called me. I had tried to talk to her the following day, but she was so hung over she hadn’t wanted to talk.

“Got a minute?”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine. How do you think I’m feeling?”

“I was just—”

“Do you want to hear what I have to say or not?”

“Of course I do.”

“Tymon called me this morning asking me the same dumb question. Anyway, we got to talking more about the mystery man, Al, and he finally said he suspected he was Anna’s lover.”

“Really.”

“And he said that Anna confided to him right before she died that she was certain this guy had a wife.”

“No kidding.”

“I’m having lunch with him tomorrow, at Jake’s. I’ll do some more snooping.”

I wanted to tell her to please not drink, but knowing her likely response to that, I didn’t.

“Minnie?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful?”

“Gracie?”

“Yes.”

“You worry too much.”

* * *

I imagined telling a stranger a little about myself.

Hello. My name is Grace Lindroth, but maybe not. It could be Celina Vargas. The woman I think was my mother fled from Mexico when it became too dangerous for her to live with her uncle, who it appears was involved in some dicey business dealings. She ended up in Chicago, where she bought a boardinghouse and then had an affair with one of the boarders, whose last name I don’t know and who was married to another woman at the time. I was born, or at least I think I was, and seven months later, she was murdered. Who raised me? Well, it appears it may have been the people who killed my mother.

I’d seen soap operas with less drama.

I kept replaying in my head what Tymon had said. That Anna had questioned whether Mark Smith had been the boarder’s real name lent support to the fact that I couldn’t find anything on the man—no birth certificate, death certificate, voter registration, Social Security number, business license, census data...nothing. But Minnie had been able to give me the date he died, so all I had to do was tie him to one of the names on the list of men who died in Cook County on that day. I hoped it was a short list.

I couldn’t be too surprised that Anna’s house had been picked clean immediately after she died. Tymon’s understanding was that the medical examiner initially considered her death to be by natural causes until he examined her body in his laboratory and declared it a homicide, so the police wouldn’t have treated her apartment as a crime scene at first, so who knows who came and went?

But who would have taken all the furniture, including everything in the baby’s room—my room? Had the same person who stole everything stolen me as well?

As much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t discount the idea that it was possible my parents had had something to do with her death and my kidnapping. The evidence was there, so as preposterous as that seemed to me, I couldn’t rule it out.

One of the most valuable pieces of information Tymon had divulged was that Henry Sikes—the busybody—was still around. I was willing to bet he was a jackpot of information. Unfortunately, I was unable to find residential information on him. My hope was that Minnie would be more successful.

What Minnie had said to me one day about being part of my life and feeling useful again resonated with me. On the way to City Hall to look at death records, I tried to think of something nice I could do for her. Something she would never expect, and something she would truly appreciate.

I had to wait in line at the County Clerk’s Office, and when it was my turn, I asked to speak with Flora. When she came out, I told her what I was searching for, and instead of having to jump through the normal hoops, she led me directly into the archives room and showed me where the indices were for the death certificates. She cleared off a desk where I could work.

It didn’t take me long to compile a list of Cook County men who died on June 6, 1943. Mark Smith was not among the seventy-three names.

It seemed to me that seventy-three was an awfully big number even for a major city like Chicago, so I asked Flora about it. She disappeared for a few minutes, and when she returned, she explained that soldiers from Cook County who had died in the war were included on the list. There was no way around it—I would need to see the actual death certificate for each man in order to exclude him.