“The lab worked overtime last night. I didn’t think they did that for your average dead citizen.”
Bobby refused to let me ride him. “There’s also a little bit I don’t know, but it’s the part that counts. I don’t have any idea who wanted her to die. But I understand you two grew up together and used to be pretty good friends.”
“And you want me to find her murderer? I would have thought you guys had the machinery to do that easier than me.”
His look would have made an academy recruit faint. “I want you to tell me.
” “I don’t know.”
“That’s not what I hear.” He glared at a point somewhere over my head.
I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, then the messages I’d left for Nancy at SCRAP and with her mother came back to me. Those seemed like mighty small straws to build a house from.
“Let me guess,” I said brightly. “It’s not even business hours and you’ve already rounded up everyone at SCRAP and talked to them.”
McGonnigal shifted uneasily and looked at Mallory. The lieutenant nodded briefly. McGonnigal said, “I talked with a Ms. Caroline Djiak late last night. She said you advised Cleghorn on how to investigate a problem they were having with a zoning permit for a recycling plant. She said you would know who the deceased spoke to about it.”
I stared at him speechlessly. Finally I choked out, “Are those her exact words?”
McGonnigal fished in his breast pocket for a notebook. He flipped through the pages, squinting at his notes. “I didn’t take it down word for word, but that’s pretty much it,” he said at last.
“I wouldn’t call Caroline Djiak a pathological liar,” I remarked conversationally. “Just a manipulative little squirt. But even though I’m mad enough at her to go down and personally break in the back of her head, it doesn’t cheer me any you coming at me this way. I mean, we go through this every time you think I’m involved in a crime, don’t we, Lieutenant? You make a frontal assault that takes my guilty knowledge for granted.
“You could’ve started by telling me about Caroline’s never-never-land remarks and asking me if they were true. Then I would’ve told you everything that happened, which was about five minutes of conversation in Caroline’s dining room, and you could have taken off with one loose end tied up.”
I got up from the floor and headed for the kitchen. Bobby came in as I was poking around the refrigerator to see if there was anything edible I might use for breakfast. The yogurt had changed to mold and sour milk. There wasn’t any fruit, and the only bread I had left was hard enough to use for ammo.
Bobby unconsciously wrinkled his nose at the dirty dishes, but heroically refrained from commenting on them. Instead he said, “Seeing you near a murder always gets me in the gut. You know that.”
It was as close as he was going to get to an apology. “I’m not near this one,” I said impatiently. “I don’t know why Caroline wants me there. She dragged me down to South Chicago last week to a basketball-team reunion. Then she manipulated me into helping her with a personal problem. Then she called to tell me to bug out of her life. Now she wants me back. Or maybe she’s just trying to punish me.”
I dug some crackers out of a cupboard and spread them with peanut butter. “While we were eating fried chicken Nancy Cleghorn came by to talk about a zoning problem. This would have been just a week ago. Caroline thought Jurshak-the alderman down there-was blocking the permit. She asked me what I’d do if I were investigating. I said the easiest thing to do was talk to a friend on Jurshak’s staff if she or Nancy had one. Nancy left. The total of my involvement.”
I poured some more coffee, angry enough that my hand shook and I spilled it across the stove. “Despite your little dig, we hadn’t seen each other for more than ten years. I didn’t know who her friends or enemies were. Now Caroline makes it sound as though Jurshak killed Nancy, for which there isn’t an atom of evidence. And she wants to make out that I egged him on to do it. Hell!”
Bobby flinched. “Don’t talk dirty, Vicki. It doesn’t help anything. What are you working on for the Djiak girl?”
“Woman,” I said automatically through a mouthful of peanut butter. “Or maybe brat. I’ll tell you for nothing, even though it’s none of your business. Her mother was one of Gabriella’s charities. Now she’s dying. Very unpleasantly. Caroline wanted me to find some people her mother used to work with in the hopes they’d come see her. But as she probably told you, she fired me two days ago.”
Bobby’s blue eyes narrowed to slits in his ruddy face. “There’s some truth there. I just wish I knew how much.”
“I should have known better than to speak frankly with you,” I said bitterly. “Especially when you opened the conversation with an accusation.”
“Oh, keep your shirt on, Vicki,” Bobby said. He blushed suddenly as the image hit home with him. “And clean up your kitchen more than once a year. Place looks like the projects.”
When he had stomped away with McGonnigal I went to my bedroom to change. As I scrambled back into the black dress I looked out the window-the water was forming little rivers on the walk below. I put on running shoes and carried a pair of black pumps in my bag.
Even with an extra-wide umbrella my legs and feet got soaked on my dash to the car. Most Februaries, though, this would be snow a foot or two deep, so I tried not to complain too bitterly.
The little Chevy’s defroster couldn’t make much headway on the fogged windshield, but at least the car hadn’t died, the fate of a number of others I passed. The storm and the stalls made for a slow trek south; it was close to ten by the time I turned from Route 41 onto Ninety-second Street. By the time I found a parking space near the corner of Commercial, the rain was finally lifting-it was clear enough for me to change into my pumps.
SCRAP’S offices were in the second story of a block of little shops. I trotted around the corner to the business entrance-my dentist used to have his office here and the opening on Commercial remained an indelible memory.
I stopped at the top of the uncarpeted stairs, reading the wall directory while combing my hair and straightening my skirt. Dr. Zdunek wasn’t there anymore. Neither were a lot of the other tenants; I passed half a dozen or so empty offices on my way down the hall.
At the far end I walked into a room that had the unmistakable air of a poor not-for-profit agency. The scarred metal furniture and newspaper articles taped to the walls wavered under a badly winking fluorescent bulb. Papers and phone books were stacked on the floor and the electric typewriters were models IBM had abandoned when I was still in college.
A young black woman was typing while talking on the phone. She smiled at me, but held up a finger to ask me to wait. I could hear voices from an open conference room; ignoring the receptionist’s urgent hissing, I went to the door to look in.
A group of five, four women and a man, sat at a rickety deal table. Caroline was in the middle, talking heatedly. When she saw me at the door she broke off and flushed to the roots of her coppery hair.
“Vic! I’m in a meeting. Can’t you wait?”
“All day, if it’s for you, my sweet. We need a tête-à-tête about John McGonnigal-he visited me first thing this morning.”
“John McGonnigal?” Her little nose wrinkled questioningly.
“Sergeant McGonnigal. Chicago Police,” I said helpfully.
She turned even redder. “Oh. Him. Maybe we’d better talk now. Will you all excuse me?”
She got up and took me to a cubbyhole next to the conference room. The chaos there, compounded of books, papers, graphs, old newspapers, and candy wrappers, made my office look like a convent cell. Caroline dumped a phone directory from a folding chair for me and seated herself in the rickety swivel chair behind her desk. She gripped her hands together in front of her, but stared at me defiantly.