I sat up at that. “I met with Ms. Graham yesterday afternoon. She didn’t strike me as delusional at all. I know she’s old, but if she says she’s seeing lights in that house she is. What about the man in the pool? If nothing else, him being there proves someone was using that abandoned estate for something.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Graham makes things up,” Yosano agreed, “but she doesn’t listen to advice. We, for instance, advised her to move away from New Solway when she sold, but her ties to the community are very deep, of course.”
I had a picture of the hapless dot-com millionaire, fending off Geraldine Graham’s efforts to help him run Larchmont the way her mother had done. The young state’s attorney seemed to feel the interview was slipping away; she demanded to know my relationship to the dead man.
“We kissed once, very deeply…” I waited until one of the deputies had eagerly written this down before adding, “… when I was doing CPR on him. His mouth was full of the crud in the pool and I had to clean that out first… Did you get that? Need me to spell any of the words?”
“So you don’t admit to knowing him?” Vanna Landau said.
“The verb `admit’ makes it sound like you think knowing him is a crime.” I sneezed again. “Does that mean you know who he is? Some DuPage County career criminal whom it would be dangerous to admit knowing?”
“Black guy on the land, what else was he but a criminal?” one of the deputies snickered to his fellow.
I reached across the table and ripped a sheet from the state’s attorney’s
legal pad. “Let me just write this last comment down word for word to make sure I have the quote exactly right when I call the Herald-Star tomorrow. `Black guy on the land, what else was he but a criminaclass="underline" Right?”
“Barney, why don’t you and Teddy go get us some coffee while we wrap this up,” Schorr said to his deputies. When they had left, he pulled the paper away from me and balled it up. “It’s late, we’re all pretty tired and not using our best minds on this problem. Let’s just go over a few last questions and let you get back to Chicago where you belong. Do you, or do you not, know who the dead man is?”
“I never saw him until tonight. I can’t add anything to this discussion. You have any prelimary report from the ME?” I could feel a sore throat rising up my tonsils.
Schorr and the ASA exchanged looks. She pursed her lips but picked up the phone at her end of the table. She had a brisk conversation with one of the ME techs and shook her head. Even under the cold light of the DuPage County morgue, no one had found any clues I’d overlooked.
“You’ll run a photo in the papers and on the news, right?” I said to the ASA. “And a full autopsy, including dental impressions?”
“We know our job out here,” she said stiffly.
“Just asking. I wouldn’t want to think that because he was a black man, you wouldn’t put your best effort into cause of death and so on.”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Schorr said, the fake good humor in his voice not masking the anger in his face. “You go on home and leave this investigation to us.”
When I told him where I’d left my car, he gave an exaggerated sigh and said he supposed one of the deputies could drive me, but I’d have to wait in the front hall.
My hamstrings had stiffened while we sat. I stumbled on my way out of the room. Larry Yosano, the young lawyer, caught my arm to keep me from falling. When I thanked him, I wondered why he’d joined our happy band tonight.
He yawned. “I’m the junior on call for difficult problems this week. We handle affairs for most of the estates in New Solway; we have keys, so if the lieutenant had wanted to get into the house I could have let him in. In fact, when they called me, I drove over to Larchmont, but your group had already left for here. I took some time to check the alarm; it hadn’t been set off, and it’s still functioning. I had a quick look around the ground floor, but there wasn’t any sign of an intruder.”
He yawned more widely. “I wish Lyons Trust-they’re the titleholders-would find a buyer. It’s not good to have a place like that standing empty. We advised hiring a caretaker, but the bank didn’t want to spend the money”
Deputy Protheroe, the woman who’d given me my dry clothes, appeared: she’d been elected to drive me. Yosano walked out with us. Before climbing into his BMW, he gave me a card. I squinted at it through my swollen eyes: he was an associate with Lebold, Arnoff, offices in Oak Brook and LaSalle Street. I’d never heard of them, but I don’t often have to deal with the property issues of the superrich.
“Give Geraldine Graham my number the next time she calls,” Yosano said. “I’ll try to talk her out of more private surveillance at Larchmont.” My cards were gummed together in my wallet. I wrote my office number on a scrap of paper for him.
“You awake enough to get that car of yours home?” Protheroe asked when we reached the Mustang. “I don’t want to be called out in half an hour to scrape your body off the tollway. There’s a Motel 6 up the road. Maybe you’d better check in for what’s left of the night.”
I knew I was tired enough to be at risk behind the wheel, but I was feeling so rotten that I wanted my own bed. I summoned a travesty of bravado, sketching a two-fingered salute and a smile. The dashboard clock read three-fifteen when I pointed my little Mustang toward the city.
CHAPTER 5
I was in a cave, looking for Morrell. Someone had handed me a wailing infant; I was hunched over, trying to get out of the way of massive roots that pushed down through the rocks. The air was so bad I couldn’t breathe; the rocks themselves were squeezing the air out of me. The infant howled more loudly. Next to me lay the body of a black man in a brown weave suit, dead from the bad air. A buzzing in the distance meant an air-raid warning. From far away I could hear planes whining overhead.
The howling of the planes, the wailing of the infant, finally forced me awake. The phone and downstairs doorbell were ringing simultaneously, but my head cold left me too groggy to bestir myself. I didn’t even stick out a hand for the phone but rolled over onto my side, hoping to relieve the pressure in my sinuses.
I was startled to see the clock read two-forty: I’d slept the whole day away. I tried to raise a sense of urgency about the man I’d found last night, or about the girl I’d tackled, but I couldn’t manage it.
I was just drifting back to sleep when someone pushed the buzzer right outside my third-floor door. Three insistent hoots, and then I heard a key in the lock. That meant one thing: Mr. Contreras, who has keys to my
place, with strict orders to save them for emergencies-which he and I
define very differently. I couldn’t deal with him while flat on my back. By the time his heavy tread sounded in my hall, I’d pulled on a sweatshirt and the pants I’d borrowed from DuPage County last night.
He started talking before he got to the bedroom door. “Doll, you okay? Your car’s out front and you ain’t been out all day, but Mr. Graham, he just sent over a messenger with a letter for you. When you didn’t even come to the door, I got kinda worried.”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” My voice sounded like Poe’s raven after a night mainlining chloroform.
“You sick, doll? What happened to you? It was on the news, you being out in wherever diving into a pond after a dead guy. You have pneumonia or what?”
The dogs pelted down the hall and circled around me with delighted yips. All was forgiven in the three days since I’d last force-marched them down Lake Michigan to the Loop-they were ready for action. I fondled their ears.
“Just a cold. I didn’t get home until four this morning-been sleeping. ‘Scuse minute.” I snuffled down to the bathroom, blenching at the sight of my face in the mirror. I looked worse than I sounded. My eyes were puffy. I had a bruise across my cheekbone and more on my arms and legs. I hadn’t noticed banging myself up so badly when I was hefting bodies around the Larchmont estate last night.