The Widow's Mate (20 page)

“Why here?” she had asked Frank.

“What do you mean?”

“Why would the body be jammed into a cement mixer owned by his father? It looks like a message.”

Frank just shook his head, saying how awful it was.

She had heard about Luke Flanagan reading the riot act to Robertson because the Pianones had expressed interest in investing in Flanagan Concrete. Now she asked Frank if that was true.

“It's not going to happen.”

“Were they interested?”

“We talked, sure, but nothing came of it.”

“Who is we?”

“They came to me.”

“Who's they?”

“Marco Pianone.”

Maybe if you knew enough, everything in the universe was connected with everything else, all pieces of a huge puzzle that only seemed unrelated. She could jump from one fact about Marco to another, but where did she jump from there?

*   *   *

At the Flanagan house, she pulled into the driveway and parked. A four-bay garage! Well, it went with the house, which looked like a mansion to Agnes. She got out of the car. The site was still ribboned off, and Wimple was on duty, her hips fighting with her uniform skirt for supremacy. She was smiling and moving about. Agnes saw the cord of the earphones crawling up Wimple's bosom. Even with an iPod this was pretty boring duty. Wimple came toward her, removing the plugs from her ears. “Am I relieved?”

“To see me?”

Wimple's shoulders slumped. “Oh well, only a couple hours left in my shift.”

“Anyone been nosing around?”

“Only some woman and Tuttle, the lawyer.”

“Did you get her name?”

“I recognized Tuttle.”

“What did he want?”

“Just wanted to go into the garage.”

“What for?”

“The garage isn't part of the site.”

“How long were they here?”

Wimple shrugged, her badge lifting and falling. “Fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour.”

A side door of the house opened, and Luke Flanagan and Maud Lynn emerged. Agnes went up to them. They were both smiling like a couple of kids. Geez. Melissa Flanagan was standing in the still-open door, and Luke called to her to open the garage door. “If you don't mind, we have to bail out, Agnes. I'm taking Maud to the airport.”

They went into the garage, car doors slammed, and soon he was backing out. It was a little tight, with her patrol car there, but he made it. Melissa waved good-bye.

“Leave the garage door open, will you?” Agnes asked.

Inside the garage, Agnes looked around, wondering what Tuttle and the unnamed woman had been doing here. She used her flashlight at first, before finding the lights. Only one car was parked here now, in the fourth bay, farthest from the house. There was a workbench with all kinds of tools. Had the wrench come from here? If so, whoever had used it would have had to enter the garage to get it. The sound the garage door made going up should have let Greg Packer know he had company.

“I'm going up,” she told Wimple when she came out.

“Want me to shut that door?”

“Leave it up for now.”

Agnes lifted the yellow tape and went around to the back of the garage. There was a tag on the door. That was another thing: There had been no prints on the handle of this door, nor on the one upstairs. Both Packer and whoever killed him might have been ghosts.

She turned on the stair light and mounted slowly, studying each step for anything that might have been overlooked. Nothing. Then she was in the apartment. She went through it systematically, room by room. In the bedroom, the bed was made, neat and tight. Were bachelors such good housekeepers? In the kitchen, she looked at the sink—the gloves were at the lab, of course, not that they had told them anything—and then once more at the neat stacks of dishes in the cupboard. She pushed open the door to the pantry, realizing that she had previously written it off as unimportant. She turned on the light and went in. The main smell was faint: coffee. The shelves held some canned goods. It was when she turned to leave that her shoe caught, and she looked down.

She stepped out of the pantry and knelt in the doorway, studying the floor. There seemed to be a rectangular inset in the floor, like the piece of a puzzle that just fit. Did it lift? There seemed nothing to catch hold of. Then she noticed the button attached to the bottom of one of the shelves. She pressed it.

The inset panel gave a little jerk and then began slowly to lift. Agnes was outside the pantry now, with her flashlight on, watching the panel rise to a right angle with the floor. When she trained her light on the opening, she saw aluminum. The quiet whirring sound clicked on, and then the aluminum moved. Agnes watched it drop and unfold and become a ladder to the garage below.

Going down it was like climbing a rope in reverse because the sections of the ladder were not rigidly linked. She found herself standing to the right of the workbench. She looked for and found the twin of the button in the pantry. When she pressed it, the ladder folded into itself and lifted. When it was stored, the panel in the ceiling of the garage lifted into place.

“I thought you went upstairs,” Wimple said when she came out of the garage.

Agnes just hurried past Wimple to her car and the radio. Wait until Cy heard about that ladder.

18

It was the doorman, Ferret, who had put her onto the rental in her old building. Sandra had stopped to greet him when she was out for her run, and he seemed genuinely glad to see her after so many years. Where was she staying? The Whitehall. That was where he sent her the notice of the apartment available for two months. Furnished, of course. Did she want to return to the building she had left long ago with such hopes of a new life? It turned out she did.

She was closer to her father's retirement home than she had ever been, and she began to drop by every other day or so, not that he gave a damn. Sandra was his wayward daughter, the one who had let him down. Her sister had been twenty years older and was now gone to God. Her father had been alone so long that Sandra wondered if he even remembered living with his family. She had rescued him from the pits so far as retirement homes went, a one-story L-shaped building that smelled of urine. The occupants had to sit in the hall outside their rooms most of the day, so they could be watched, apparently. None of the staff spoke Polish.

Her father had sat with his mouth and his fly open, staring across the narrow corridor in which he sat. He needed a shave; he needed a bath. When she rolled him out of there she expected him to cast blessings left and right, like Salieri in the film.

So she set him up in the high-rise retirement home run by the Franciscans. There was a chapel right in the building and a chaplain always on duty. Throughout all this, her father was passive, registering what was happening, not commenting. When she got him settled in his apartment, nice view both north and east, there was an awkward moment as daughter faced father.

“Isn't this better, Dad?”

“I don't know anyone here.”

“You will.”

“How about you?”

“I'll be back.” She put a hand on his arm. She would have liked to lean over and kiss the hairless head, to do something to erase the long years when she hadn't even thought of him, let alone seen him. “I'll be back.”

“What if I want a drink?”

“There's beer in the refrigerator.”

How long had it been since he'd even had a beer? The place from which she had sprung him had boasted its smoke-free and alcohol-free status. She had put a six-pack in the fridge. That became the excuse for her visits, to make sure he had beer in his refrigerator. He liked the place, particularly the shower. He seemed always to be getting out of it when she visited, going naked to his clothes, using the wheelchair as a support. What would the world be like if everyone went around nude? Even her father improved when he was dressed.

He had no curiosity about where she had been all these years, which was fine with Sandra. He lived in the present, and that was that. If he had had memories, he had discarded them all. Life was today's game, what was on the menu, and, lately, the friends he had made who took him up the street to a bar.

Luke Flanagan! She recognized him from the wake, where he'd sat in the front row of folding chairs with the woman that was with him now.

“We're lifers, too,” Maud said.

They cracked one another up, Luke and Maud. Her father just followed their banter as if it were an interruption. What would Luke think if he knew she was the woman his son had planned to run away with to California?

It was Tuttle who told her the name of the woman Wally had run off with. Sylvia Beach.

“How did you find that out?”

He adjusted his tweed hat. “The police are cooperating with me.”

Had she ever had any illusions about Tuttle? No, doubts and hopes, but no illusions.

“She's living in the same building you are.”

“She is?”

Tuttle nodded. Any comment he might have made would have been the wrong one; seeming to sense that, he remained silent.

“Where did they go?”

“I'm still working on that.”

What did it matter? She might have asked him to send her his bill—he had done what she asked him to do—but she was curious to learn where Wally had gone. Curious? That made it sound like a neutral piece of information, one that didn't tear her apart when she thought about it. Since returning to Chicago, the thought of herself waiting in vain in San Diego for Wally to join her filled her with rage all over again. Her life there had evolved; there had been Greg, and there had been Oxnard and all the healing years, or so they had seemed. But in memory she was right back there in San Diego, a dum-dum waiting for the man who said they would begin a new life together. Tuttle's information removed once and for all the speculation that something had happened to Wally, some injury, something, that prevented him from letting her know why he wasn't coming. Yes, she did want to know where he had gone with Sylvia Beach.

“A bimbo,” Ferret whispered when she asked about the woman with the blond crew cut.

“Is her name Sylvia Beach?”

“That isn't the name she's using.”

How often do you see people who live in the same building you do? The first time she saw Sylvia, alerted by Ferret, Sandra was in her running costume—dark glasses, the bill of her baseball cap curved over her face—so she stood as if recovering from her run, looking at the other woman. She had been at Greg's wake! The suggestion of a connection with her former husband as well as with Wally was too much. Sandra approached the woman. “Hi. I'm Sandy.”

“Hello.”

“You live here, too, don't you?”

“I just moved in.”

“I lived here years and years ago. Now I'm back.”

The conversation didn't go anywhere—how could it?—but it gave Sandra a chance to study the woman who had lured Wally from her. Had she and this woman been competitors back then, auditioning for the role? Hating a stranger was a new experience.

“Hasta la vista,” she said and turned to the elevator.

“Ciao.”

Later that day, Ferret told her that the bimbo had been asking about her.

“Don't call her that.”

“What did you call her?”

“Sylvia Beach.”

“Okay. She wanted to know all about you. First time she ever talked to me.”

The next time they ran into one another, Sandra had the sense that it wasn't an accident. Sylvia was sitting in the lobby when Sandra came in from her run, and she got up and stopped her on the way to the elevator.

“What a day to be running,” Sylvia said.

“Did you ever try it?”

“With every kind of exercise machine right here in the building?”

“I got the habit in California.”

“California.”

“It's a long story.”

“Most stories are.”

They ought to have lunch sometime, or a drink. Sandra said that would be nice. Sylvia telephoned later that day, asking if she was free.

“Where should we go?”

“How about my place?”

“Better.”

Ferret's description of Sylvia had not prepared Sandra for the apartment. It was wonderful, the furniture, the pictures, the appointments. She had expected an illicit bower, but Sylvia's apartment was more tasteful than the one Sandra occupied. California provided the opening gambit, and Sandra told her all about her life in Oxnard.

“A financial advisor!”

“It's a living.”

“I knew a financial advisor.”

“I hope you have one.”

“Let's say I had one.”

Sylvia couldn't believe that anyone from California would want to move to Chicago.

“I had one earthquake too many.”

“We have tornadoes.”

Getting to know Sylvia made it difficult to hate her. It was insane to think that sooner or later they would be able to talk about Wally. Sandra would give anything to know what had gone wrong with the plans she and Wally had made. She just could not believe that he had been deceiving her. It would have helped to think of Sylvia as a bimbo, the dyed crew cut and flamboyant makeup certainly suggested that, but they seemed a disguise rather than what she really was.

“I came here from Minnesota,” Sylvia said, the second time they got together, for lunch in a restaurant on the Magnificent Mile.

“Minnesota!”

“I know, I know. Way up in the North Woods in a town you've never heard of.”

“International Falls?”

“How in the world did you know of it?”

“It's mentioned in weather reports. The coldest spot in the country.”

“We were south of there. Garrison.”

“We?”

“My financial advisor and I.”

“Your husband was a financial advisor?”

“He had been. He had made a pile and only wanted to fish and read and look out at the lake.”