“That’s what I’ve got for you,” I said slowly. “Twenty questions. No answers. Curtis Chigwell knows something that he doesn’t want to tell. Twenty-four hours ago I didn’t think it had the remotest possible connection to Nancy. But I got a threatening phone call tonight telling me to bug out of South Chicago.”
“From Chigwell?” I could almost feel Murray’s breath through the phone line.
“No. I thought it had to come from Jurshak or Dresberg. Only thing, a couple of hours later I heard the same thing from someone who knows me only through the Xerxes side -the plant that Chigwell used to work for.”
I explained the discrepancies I’d gotten between Manheim and Humboldt’s version of Pankowski and Ferraro’s suit-without telling him about hearing it from Gustav Humboldt himself “Chigwell knows what the truth is and why. He just doesn’t want to say. And if the Xerxes people are threatening me, he’ll know why.”
Murray tried a thousand different ways to get me to tell him more about it. I just couldn’t give him Caroline and Louisa-Louisa didn’t deserve to have her unhappy past spinning around the streets of Chicago. And I didn’t know anything else. Anything about what possible connection there could be between Nancy’s death and Joey Pankowski.
Murray finally said, “You’re not trying to help me, you’re getting me to do your legwork. I can feel it. But it’s not a bad story-I’ll send someone out to talk to the guy.”
When he hung up I managed to sleep a little, but I woke again for good around six-thirty. It was another gray February day. Sharp cold with snow would have been preferable to this unending misty chill. I pulled on my sweats, did my stretches, and ruthlessly roused Mr. Contreras by knocking on his door until the dog barked him awake. I took her to the lake and back, stopping now and then to tie my shoes, to blow my nose, to throw her a stick-gestures that let me subtly check my rear. I didn’t think anyone was on it.
After depositing the dog I went to the comer diner for pancakes. Back home to change, I’d just about made up my mind to visit Louisa, see if she could shed any light on Caroline’s panic, when Ellen Cleghorn called. She was most upset: she’d gone over to Nancy’s house in South Chicago to collect her financial records and found the place ransacked.
“Ransacked?” I repeated foolishly. “How do you know?”
“The way you always do, Victoria-the place had been ripped to shreds. Nancy didn’t have much and she’d only been able to fix up a couple of rooms. The furniture was pulled apart and her papers strewn all over the place.”
I shuddered involuntarily. “Sounds like housebreakers gone mad. Could you tell if anything was missing?”
“I didn’t try to see.” Her voice caught a little on a nervous sob. “I looked at her bedroom and ran out of there as fast as I could. I-I was hoping you might come down and go through the house with me. I can’t bear to be alone there with this-this ravaging of Nancy.”
I promised to meet her in front of her house within the hour. I’d wanted to go directly to Nancy’s, but Mrs. Cleghorn was too nervous about the intruders to hang around her daughter’s house, even outside. I finished pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt, and then, not too happily, went to the little wall safe I’d built into the bedroom closet and took out the Smith & Wesson.
I don’t make a habit of carrying a gun-if you do, you get dependent on them and your wits slow down. But I’d been jumpy enough already between Nancy’s murder and the threat to send me into the swamp after her. Now this housebreaking. I supposed it could have been local punks casing the place and seeing that no one was home. But tearing the furniture apart. It could have been a druggie coked so far out of his mind that he’d torn the furniture apart looking for money. But it could also have been her killers looking for something she had that might incriminate them. So I stuck a second clip into my handbag and pushed the loaded gun into my jeans waistband; my wits were not fast enough to stop a speeding bullet.
The Cleghorn house looked remote and bedraggled in the gray mist. Even the turret that had been Nancy’s bedroom seemed to be drooping a little. Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting for me on the front walk, her normally pleasant, round face gaunt and strained. She gave a tremulous smile and climbed into my car.
“I’ll ride with you if you don’t mind. I’m shaking so badly I don’t even know how I got home.”
“You can just give me her house keys,” I said. “You don’t need to come along if you’d be happier staying here.”
She shook her head. “If you went by yourself, I’d only spend the time worrying that someone was waiting in ambush for you.”
While I followed her directions for the quickest way up, along South Chicago to Yates, I asked if she’d called the police.
“I thought I’d wait. Wait until you saw what happened. Then”-she gave a twisted little smile-“maybe you could do it for me. I think I’ve done all the talking to police that I can stand. Not just for now, but forever.”
I reached across the gearshift to pat her hand. “It’s okay. Happy to be of service.”
Nancy’s house was up on Crandon, near Seventy-third Street. I could see why Mrs. Cleghorn called it a white elephant-a big wooden monster, its three full stories filled an outsize lot. But I could also see why Nancy had bought it-the little cupolas at the comers, the stained-glass windows, the carved wooden banister on the stairwell inside, all evoked the comfort and order of Alcott or Thackeray.
It wasn’t immediately obvious that someone had been in the house. Nancy had apparently put everything she had into buying it, so the front hallway had no furniture. It wasn’t until I went up the oak stairs and found the main bedroom that I saw the damage. I sympathized fully with Mrs. Cleghorn’s decision to wait for me in the entryway.
Nancy had apparently made the main bedroom her first rehab project. The floor was finished, the walls plastered and painted, and a working fireplace, with a tiled mantel and gleaming brass fittings, was set in the wall opposite the bed. The effect would have been charming, except that the furniture and bedding had been thrown about the room.
I tiptoed gingerly through the rubble. I was violating all possible police rules-not calling to report the destruction, walking through it and disturbing the evidence, adding my detritus to that of the vandals. But it’s only in rule books that every crime gets detailed lab inspection. In real life I didn’t think they’d pay too close attention, even though the homeowner had been murdered.
Whatever the vandals had been looking for didn’t take up much space. Not only had they ripped the mattress cover away and slashed through the stuffing, but they had taken up the grate in the fireplace and removed several bricks. Either money, if I stayed with the coked-out-addict theory. Or papers. Some kind of evidence Nancy had of something so hideous, people were willing to kill to keep it a secret.
I went back downstairs, my own hands shaking a little. The destruction of a house is such a personal violation. If you can’t be safe within your home base, you feel you have no security anywhere.
Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting at the bottom. She put a motherly arm around my waist-seeing me upset helped her gain some composure.
“The dining room is the only other room Nancy really had fixed up. She was using the built-in cupboards as a little home office until she had the time and the money to fix up the study.”
I suggested that Mrs. Cleghorn continue to stay in the hall. If the marauders hadn’t found what they were looking for upstairs, I had an unwilling vision of what the cupboards might look like.
The reality was far worse than anything I had brought myself to imagine. Plates and tableware lay scattered on the floor. The seats had been ripped from the chairs. All the shelves in the walnut cupboards that formed the far wall of the room were splintered. And the papers that made up Nancy’s personal life were strewn about like ticker tape the day after a big parade.