I turned around and looked uncertain. “Well, if you’re sure… It’s Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro.”
Whitey got up and ambled over to a row of filing cabinets. He asked me to spell the names, letter by painful letter. Moving his lips as he read the names on old voter registration forms, he finally brightened.
“Here we are-1985 was the last year Pankowski was registered, ’83 for Ferraro. Why don’t you bring their drafts in here? We can get them cashed through Art’s agency and see that the boys get their money. We should get ’em to reregister and it’d save you another trip down here.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said earnestly. “Trouble is, I have to get them to personally sign a release.” I thought for a minute and smiled. “Tell you what-give me their addresses and I’ll go see them this afternoon, make sure they still live down here. Then next month when the claim drafts are issued I can just mail them both to you here.”
They thought it over slowly. They finally agreed, again silently, that there was nothing wrong with the idea. Whitey wrote Pankowski’s and Ferraro’s addresses down in a large, round hand. I thanked him graciously and headed for the door again.
Just as I was opening it a young man came in, hesitantly, as if unsure of his welcome. He had curly auburn hair and wore a navy wool suit that enhanced the staggering beauty of his pale face. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a man with such perfect good looks-he might have posed for Michelangelo’s David. When he gave a diffident smile it made him look vaguely familiar.
“Hiya, Art,” Baldy said. “Your old man’s downtown.”
Young Art Jurshak. Big Art had never looked this good, but the smile must have made the kid resemble his old man’s campaign posters.
He flushed. “That’s okay. I just wanted to look at some ward files. You don’t mind, do you?”
Baldy hunched an impatient shoulder. “You’re a partner in the old man’s firm. You do what you want, Art. Think I’m going for a bite, anyway. Coming, Fred?”
The white-haired man and the newspaper reader both got up. Food sounded like a swell idea to me. Even a detective looking at a meager fee has to eat some of the time. The four of us left young Art alone in the middle of the room.
Fratesi’s Restaurant was still where I remembered it, on the corner of Ninety-seventh and Ewing. Gabriella had disapproved of them because they cooked southern Italian instead of her familiar dishes of the Piedmont, but the food was good and it used to be a place to go for special occasions.
Today there wasn’t much of a lunchtime crowd. The decorations around the fountain in the middle of the floor, which used to enchant me as a child, had been allowed to decay. I recognized old Mrs. Fratesi behind the counter, but felt the place had grown too sad for me to identify myself to her. I ate a salad made of iceberg lettuce and an old tomato and a frittata that was surprisingly light and carefully seasoned.
In the little ladies’ room at the back I got the most noticeable chunks of dirt off my skirt. I didn’t look fabulous, but maybe that suited the neighborhood better. I paid the tab, a modest four dollars, and left. I didn’t know you could get bread and butter in Chicago for under four dollars anymore.
All during lunch I’d turned over various approaches to Pankowski and Ferraro in my mind. If they were married, wives at home, children, they wouldn’t want to hear about Louisa Djiak. Or maybe they would. Maybe it would bring back the happy days of yore. I finally decided I’d have to play it by ear.
Steve Ferraro’s home was nearer to the restaurant, so I went there first. It was another of the endless array of East Side bungalows, but a little seedier than most of its neighbors. The porch hadn’t been swept recently, my critical housekeeping eye noted, and the glass on the storm door could have done with a washing.
A long interval passed after I rang the bell. I pushed it again and was about to leave when I heard the inner door being unlocked. An old woman stood there, short, wispy-haired, and menacing.
“Yes,” she said in one harsh, heavily accented syllable.
“Scusi,” I said. “Cerco il signor Ferraro.”
Her face lightened marginally and she answered in Italian. What did I want him for? An old lawsuit that might finally be going to pay out? To him only, or to his heirs?
“To him only,” I said firmly in Italian, but my heart sank. Her next words confirmed my misgivings: il signor Ferraro was her son, her only child, and he had died in 1984. No, he had never married. He had talked once about a girl in the place where he worked, but madre de dio, the girl already had a baby; she was relieved when nothing came of it.
I gave her my card, with a request to call me if she thought of anything else, and set out for Green Bay Avenue without any high expectations.
Again a woman answered the door, a younger one this time, perhaps even my age, but too heavy and worn out for me to be certain. She gave me the cold fish eye reserved for life insurance salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses and prepared to shut the door on me.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said quickly. “I’m looking for Joey Pankowski.”
“Some lawyer,” she said contemptuously. “You’d better ask in Queen of Angels Cemetery-that’s where he’s spent the last two years. At least, that’s his story. Knowing that bastard, he probably pretended to die so he could go off with his latest little chickadee.”
I blinked a little under her fire. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pankowski. It’s an old case that’s been settled rather slowly. A matter of some twenty-five hundred dollars, not really worth bothering you about.”
Her blue eyes almost disappeared into her cheeks. “Not so fast, lady. You got twenty-five hundred, I deserve that money. I suffered enough with that bastard, God knows. And then when he died there wasn’t even any insurance.”
“I don’t know,” I said fussily. “His oldest child-”
“Little Joey,” she said promptly. “Born August 1963. In the Army now. I could hold it for him till he gets home next January.”
“I was told there was another child. A girl born in 1962. Know anything about her?”
“That bastard!” she screamed. “That lying, cheating bastard. He screwed me when he was alive and now he’s dead he’s screwing me still!”
“So you know about the girl?” I asked, startled at the thought that my search might be over so easily.
She shook her head. “I know Joey, though. He could of had a dozen kids before he got me pregnant with little Joey. If this girl thinks she’s the first, all I can say is you better run an ad in the Little Calumet Times.”
I took a twenty from my purse and held it casually. “We could probably advance something from the settlement. Do you know anyone who could tell me for certain if he had any children before little Joey? A brother, maybe? Or his priest?”
“Priest?” she cackled. “I had to pay extra just to get his bones into Queen of Angels.”
She was thinking hard, though, trying not to look directly at the money. At last she said, “You know who might know? Doc at the plant. He talked to them every spring, took their blood, their histories. Knew more about them than God, Joey once said.”
She couldn’t tell me his name; if Joey ever mentioned it, she couldn’t be expected to remember it after all this time, could she? But she took the money with dignity and told me to come back if I was in the neighborhood.
“I don’t expect to see any more of it,” she added with unexpected cheerfulness. “Not from what I know of that bastard. If my old man hadn’t made him, he wouldn’t of married me. And between you and me, I’d of been better off.”
8
Louisa and Caroline were returning from the dialysis center when I stopped by. I helped Caroline maneuver Louisa into a wheelchair for the short ride up the front walk. Getting her up the five steep steps took ten minutes of patient labor while she leaned heavily on my shoulder to hoist herself up each rise, then rested until she had enough wind for the next one.