By the time we had her settled in her bed, her breathing had turned to shallow, stertorous gasps. I panicked a little at the sound and at the purplish tinge beneath her waxy green skin, but Caroline treated her with cheerful efficiency, giving her oxygen and massaging her bony shoulders until she could breathe on her own again. However much Caroline might irritate me, I could only admire her unflagging goodwill in looking after her mother.
She left me alone with Louisa while she went off to make herself a snack. Louisa was drifting into sleep, but she remembered the Xerxes doctor with a hoarse little chuckle: Chigwell. They called him Chigwell the Chigger because he was always sucking their blood. I waited until she was sleeping soundly before releasing my hand from the grasp of her bony fingers.
Caroline was hovering in the dining room, her little body vibrating with anxiety. “I’ve wanted to call you every day, but I’ve forced myself not to. Especially last week when Ma told me you’d been by and she’d ordered you not to look for him.” She was eating a peanut-butter sandwich and the words came through thickly. “Have you found out anything?”
I shook my head. “I tracked down the two guys she remembers best, but they’re both dead. It’s possible one of them might have been your father, but I don’t have any real way of knowing. My only hope is the company doctor. He apparently used to compile copious records on the employees, and people tell their doctor things they might not say to anyone else. There’s also a clerk who worked at the corner grocery twenty-five years ago, but Connie couldn’t remember his name.”
She caught my doubtful tone. “You don’t think any of these guys might have been the one?”
I pursed my lips, trying to put my doubts into words. Steve Ferraro had wanted to marry Louisa, baby and all. That sounded as though he knew her after Caroline’s birth, not before. Joey Pankowski did seem like the kind of person who could have gotten Louisa pregnant and gone off unconcerned. Which would fit. That repressive household, Connie’s and her total ignorance of sex-she might well have turned to some happy-go-lucky type. But in that case why be so upset about it now? Unless she’d absorbed so much of the Djiak’s fundamental fear of sex that the very memory of it terrified her. But that didn’t fit my memories of Louisa as a young woman.
“I don’t know,” I finally said helplessly. “It just has the wrong kind of feel to it.”
I debated with myself a minute, then added, “I think you need to prepare yourself for failure. My failure, I mean. If I can’t learn anything from the doctor or track down this clerk, I’m going to have to throw it in.”
She scowled fiercely. “I’m counting on you, Vic.”
“Let’s not play that record again right now, Caroline. I’m beat. I’ll call you in a day or two and we’ll take it from there.”
It was almost four, time for the evening rush hour to congeal the traffic. It was close to five-thirty before I’d oozed the twenty-some miles home. When I got there Mr. Contreras stopped me to ask about the burrs I’d allowed the sacred dog to collect in her golden tail. The dog herself came out and expressed herself ready for a run. I listened to both with such patience as I could muster, but after five minutes of his nonstop flow I left abruptly in mid-sentence and headed for my place on the third floor.
I took off my suit and left it on the entryway floor where I’d be sure to remember it for the cleaners in the morning. I didn’t know what to do about the shoe, so I left it with the suit-maybe the cleaners would know a place that could resurrect it.
While I ran a bath I pulled my stack of city and suburban directories from the floor under the piano. No Chigwell was listed in the metropolitan area. Naturally. He’d probably died himself Or retired to Majorca.
I poured an inch of whiskey and stomped into the bathroom. While lying half submerged in the old-fashioned tub, it occurred to me that he might be in the medical directories. I hoisted myself out of the tub and went into the bedroom to call Lotty Herschel. She was just getting ready to leave the clinic she runs near the corner of Irving Park and Damen.
“Can’t it wait until the morning, Victoria?”
“Yeah, it can wait. I just want to get this monster out of my life as fast as possible.” I sketched Caroline and Louisa’s story as quickly as I could. “If I can run this Chigwell down, I only have one other lead I need to look into and then I can get back to the real world.”
“Wherever that is,” she said dryly. “You don’t know this man’s first name or his speciality, do you? Of course not. Industrial medicine probably, hmm?”
I could hear her rustling through the pages of a book. “Chan, Chessick, Childress. No Chigwell. I don’t have a complete directory, though. Max probably does-why don’t you give him a call? And why do you let this Caroline run you through hoops? You are manipulated by people only when you allow yourself to be, my dear.”
On that cheering note she hung up. I tried Max Loewenthal, who was executive director of Beth Israel Hospital, but he had gone home for the day. As any rational person would have. Only Lotty stayed at her clinic until six, and of course a detective’s work is never done. Even if you’re only willingly responding to the manipulations of an old neighbor.
I poured the rest of the whiskey down the sink and changed into my sweats. When I’m in a febrile mood the best thing to do is exercise. I picked up Peppy from Mr. Contreras-neither he nor the dog was capable of harboring a grievance. By the time Peppy and I returned home, panting, I’d run the discontent out of my system. The old man fried some pork chops for me and we sat drinking his foul grappa and talking until eleven.
I reached Max easily in the morning. He listened with his usual courteous urbanity to my saga, put me on hold for five minutes, and came back with the news that Chigwell was retired but living in suburban Hinsdale. Max even had his address and his first name, which was Curtis.
“He’s seventy-nine, V.I. If he doesn’t talk willingly, go easy on him,” he finished, only half joking.
“Thanks a whole bunch, Max. I’ll try to restrain my more animal impulses, but old men and children generally bring out the worst in me.”
He laughed and hung up.
Hinsdale is an old town about twenty miles west of the Loop whose tall oaks and gracious homes were gradually being accreted by urban sprawl. It’s not Chicagoland’s trendiest address, but there’s an aura of established self-assurance about the place. Hoping to fit into its genteel atmosphere, I put on a black dress with a full skirt and gold buttons. A leather portfolio completed the ensemble. I looked at my navy suit on the entryway floor as I left, but decided it would keep another day.
When you go from the city to the north or west suburbs, the first thing you notice is the quiet cleanness. After a day in South Chicago I felt I’d stepped into paradise. Even though the trees were barren of leaves and the grass matted and brown, everything was raked and tidied for spring. I had total faith that the brown mats would turn to green, but couldn’t imagine what it would take to create life in the sludge around the Xerxes plant.
Chigwell lived on an older street near the center of town. The house was a two-story neo-Georgian structure whose wood siding gleamed white in the dull day. Its well-kept yellow shutters and a sprinkling of old trees and bushes created an air of stately harmony. A screened porch faced the street. I followed flagstones through the shrubs around the side to the entrance and rang the bell.
After a few minutes the door opened. That’s the second thing you notice in the burbs-when you ring the bell people open the doors, they don’t peer through peepholes and undo bolts.