I turned the hot water on in the shower and steamed myself for a few minutes. When I emerged, clean, and, thankfully, dressed in my own clothes, my neighbor had produced a large mug of tea with lemon and honey. Unlike Geraldine Graham’s gilt eggshells, mine were real mugs, thick, clunkyand cheap.
“When I heard the news, them saying you’d been brought in to DuPage County for questioning about this dead man, I thought maybe you’d been arrested. You been fighting? You got some case that’s gonna kill you and you ain’t said nothing to me?” His brown eyes were bright with hurt. “Nothing like that.”
When I’d croaked out enough explanation to satisfy him, he suddenly remembered Darraugh’s letter. The blistering prose raised welts on my fingers.
I have been trying to reach you all day to find out why you sent the police to my mother without informing me first. Since you aren’t answering your phone or e-mail I am sending this by hand. Call immediately on receipt of this message.
How nice to be the man in charge and bulldoze your way through people as if they were construction sites. I checked in with my answering service. Christie Weddington, the operator I’ve known longest, answered. “Is that really you, Vic? Just to be safe I’d better do our security check. What was your mother’s maiden name?” When I’d spelled “Sestieri” she added severely, “When you’re going to hole up, can you let us know? Now that Mary Louise has left your company, you don’t have any backup person to call for emergencies. We got like eleven calls from Darraugh Graham’s office, and five from Murray Ryerson.”
Darraugh, or his PA, Caroline, had started in at ten and kept it up every half hour. Geraldine Graham had phoned four times herself, the first time at a quarter of ten. So the DuPage sheriff had been to see her by nine. At least they were taking it seriously. Murray had called early, before eight, presumably when he’d looked at the morning wires. I got back to him first, in case he knew something that would help me in my conversation with Darraugh. Murray was indignant that I hadn’t called him when the blood was fresh enough to lick.
“Have they ID’d the guy yet?” I croaked into his barrage of questions. “You sound like a frog in a cheese grater, Warshawski. So far the DuPage sheriff is clueless. I gather they’re running your John Doe’s prints through AFIS. And they’ve put his picture on the wires.”
“They have a cause of death?” I wheezed.
“He drowned. What were you doing, Warshawski, turning up so pat minutes after the guy plunged to his watery death?”
“You should write for the Enquirer, with prose like that. You drive out to Larchmont? No one could plunge to a watery death in five feet of water. Either he did like me, tripped and fell, or-” A coughing fit interrupted me. Mr. Contreras leaped up to pour me more tea, and to mutter that Murray was an inconsiderate jerk, keeping me talking when I was sick.
– or he went in on purpose or he was put there,” Murray finished for me. “What’s your theory? Did it look as though he’d struggled?”
I shut my eyes, trying to remember the body as I’d found it. “I only had my flashlight to augment the moon, so I can’t say whether he had unusual bruises or scratches. But his clothes were tidy-no undone buttons, and his tie was still neatly knotted. I undid it when I was trying CPR.”
“Cross your heart, you never saw him before?” Murray demanded. “Hope to die,” I coughed.
“So you didn’t go out there to meet him?”
“No!” I was getting impatient. “He’s what Professor Wright used to call a `stochastic excursion’ in my physics class.”
“Then what about the `Warshawski excursion’?” Murray asked. “What were you doing in the land of hope and glory?”
“Catching the cold of a lifetime.” I hung up as a cough started racking me again.
“You oughta go back to bed, cookie,” Mr. Contreras fussed over me. “You can’t talk, you won’t have any voice at all you keep at it. That Ryerson, he just uses you.”
“Street runs both ways,” I choked. “I have to call Darraugh.”
Darraugh interrupted a meeting on the fate of his Georgia paper division to take my call. “Mother had the police with her this morning.” “That must have pleased her,” I said.
“Excuse me?” The frost in his voice turned the phone to dry ice against my ear.
“She likes people to attend to her. You don’t visit her enough, the cops didn’t respond when she told them about intruders in your boyhood home. Now she’s gotten the attention she thinks is her due.”
“You should have reported to me at once when you found a dead man at the house. I don’t pay you to leave me in the dark.”
“Darraugh, you’re right.” My words came out with annoying slowness, the way they do when you don’t have a throat. “Hear how I sound? I got this way falling into your pool. After hauling out a dead man, futilely trying CPR, spending two hours with the sheriff’s deputies in Wheaton, it was three-thirty. A.M. I could have called you at home then, but I went to bed instead. Where I regret that I slept through ringing phones, sirens, doorbells and atom bombs. I wish I weren’t so human, but there you have it.” “Who was that man and what was he doing at the house?” Darraugh barked after a moment’s silence-he wasn’t going to agree that I had mitigating circumstances on my side, but he wasn’t going to go for my jugular any more right now, either-from him a concession.
I repeated what little information Murray had given me, then said, “Why didn’t you tell me Larchmont was your boyhood home?” Darraugh paused another moment, before saying abruptly he was in an important meeting, but he wanted me to report to him at once if I learned who had died in the pool, and why he’d been there.
“You want me to investigate?” I asked.
“Give it a few hours. Not until your voice is better: no one’s going to take you seriously when you sound like this.”
“Thanks, Darraugh: chicken soup for the PI’s soul,” I said, but he’d already hung up. Just as well. He has plenty of options among the big security companies that handle most of his heavy-muscle jobs. He stays with me not because he likes to support small businesses, but because he knows there will be no leaks out of my tiny operation-I get the jobs that he wants total confidentiality for, but, if he got fed up enough, he’d take the work elsewhere.
When Mr. Contreras finally left with the dogs, I lay down on the couch. I didn’t go back to sleep-I actually felt better after being on my feet for a bit. I put on an old LP of Leontyne Price singing Mozart and watched the shadows change on the ceiling.
I had one little bit of information that no one else did: the teenage girl. It wasn’t only a wish to keep a hole card, although of course I wanted one, but that her spunk and ardor reminded me of my own youth; I felt protective of her the way you do of your childhood. I wanted to find her on my own before deciding whether the cops or reporters ought to have a crack at her.
I assumed she lived in one of the Coverdale Lane estates. I tried to imagine a strategy for going door-to-door looking for her. I was her scoutmaster coming to collect her Girl Scout cookie sales money. I was looking for my lost Borzoi. I’d found emerald earrings when I was jogging and wanted to restore them to the owner.
Perhaps I could check the area high school, although who knows where people in mansions like those in New Solway send their children. Not only that, I’d only seen the girl briefly, by moonlight. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her again, let alone be able to describe her.
I shut my eyes and tried to conjure her face, but all I remembered was her long braid and the soft cheeks of youth, the planes or lines that might show character not yet formed. Had she said anything that might lead me to her? I was a pig, she’d bet with some of the other kids, she knew someone was in the attic. What had I said that got her so mad she’d run away? Something about not taking responsibility for And then I remembered the little thing that had come loose in my hand when she jerked free. I had stuffed it into my jeans pocket. And my jeans were in the garbage bag the sheriff’s deputy had given me.