I compressed my lips tightly, trying to hold my feelings in while I picked through the rubble. By and by Mrs. Cleghorn called to me from the doorway: I’d been away so long she’d gotten worried and braced herself to face the destruction. Together we culled bank statements, picked an address book from the heap, and took anything relating to mortgage or insurance for Mrs. Cleghorn to go through later.
Before leaving I poked around in the other rooms. Here and there a loose floorboard had been pried up. The fireplaces-there were six altogether-were missing their grates. The old-fashioned kitchen had come in for its share of damage. It probably hadn’t looked too good to begin with, its fixtures dating from the twenties, old sink, old icebox, and badly peeling walls. In typical vandal style the intruders had dumped flour and sugar on the floor and pulled all the food from the refrigerator. If the police ever caught up with them, I’d recommend a year spent fixing up the house as the first part of their sentence.
They’d come in through the back door. The lock had been jimmied and they hadn’t bothered to shut it properly behind them. The backyard was so overgrown, no one passing in the alley would be able to see that the place was open. Mrs. Cleghorn dug a hammer and nails out of the workshop Nancy had set up next to the pantry; I hammered a board across the back door to keep it shut. There seemed to be nothing further we could do to restore wholeness to the place. We left wordlessly.
Back at the house on Muskegon, I called Bobby to tell him what happened. He grunted and said he’d refer the matter to the Third District, but for me to stand by in case they wanted to ask me anything.
“Yeah, sure,” I muttered. “I’ll stick by the phone for the rest of the week if it’ll keep the police happy.” Perhaps it was just as well that Bobby had already hung up.
Mrs. Cleghorn busied herself with coffee. She brought it to me in the dining room, with leftover cake and salad.
“What were they looking for, Victoria?” she finally asked after her second cup.
I picked moodily at some spice cake. “Something small. Flat. Papers of some kind, I suppose. I don’t think they can have found them, or they wouldn’t have been prying up the bricks in the other fireplaces. So where else would Nancy have left something? You’re sure she didn’t drop anything off here?”
Mrs. Cleghorn shook her head. “She might have come in while I was at work. But-I don’t know. Do you want to look at her old bedroom?”
She sent me alone up the attic stairs to the old turret where Nancy and I had waited for Sister Anne or battled pirates. It was an unbearably sad room, the remains of childhood sitting forlornly on the worn furniture. I turned over teddy bears and trophies and a worn poster of the early Beatles with studied indifference, but found nothing.
The police arrived when I got back downstairs and we spent an hour or so talking to them. We told them I’d gone over with Mrs. Cleghorn to help her find Nancy’s papers-that she didn’t want to go alone and I was an old friend and that we’d found the chaos and called them. We talked to a couple of junior grade detectives who wrote everything down in slow longhand but didn’t seem any more concerned about this break-in than that of any other South Side householder. They left eventually without giving us any special instructions or admonitions.
I got up to leave shortly after they did. “I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s possible that the people who were looking at Nancy’s place will come here. You should consider going to stay with one of your sons, however much you may dislike it.”
Mrs. Cleghorn nodded reluctantly; the only one of her sons who didn’t have children lived in a trailer with his girlfriend. Not the ideal guesthouse.
“I suppose I should get Nancy’s car put away safely too. Who knows where these insane creatures will strike next?”
“Her car?” I stopped in my tracks. “Where is her car?”
“Out front. She’d left it by the SCRAP offices and one of the women who works there brought it over for me after the funeral. I had a spare set of car keys, so they must…” Her voice trailed off as she caught my expression. “Of course. We ought to look in the car, oughtn’t we? If Nancy really did have something a-a killer wanted. Although I can’t imagine what it could be.”
She’d said the same thing earlier and I repeated my own meaningless reassurances: that Nancy probably didn’t know she had something someone else wanted so badly. I went out to Nancy’s sky-blue Honda with Mrs. Cleghorn and pulled the heap of papers from the backseat. Nancy had dumped her briefcase there along with a stack of files too big to fit into the case.
“Why don’t you just take them, dear?” Mrs. Cleghorn smiled tremulously. “If you can look after them, get her work papers back to SCRAP, it would be a big help to me.”
I hoisted the heap under my left arm and put my right arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, sure. Call me if anything else happens, or if you need help with the cops.” It was more work than I wanted, but it seemed the least I could do under the circumstances.
21
I sat in my car with the heater on, flipping through Nancy’s files. Anything that had to do with routine SCRAP business I put to one side. I wanted to drop the lot at the office on Commercial before leaving South Chicago.
I was looking for something that would tell me why Alderman Jurshak was opposing the SCRAP recycling plant. That was what Nancy had been trying to find the last time I talked to her. If she’d been killed because of something hot she knew on the South Side, I assumed it was in connection with the plant.
In the end I did find a document with the Jurshak name on it, but it had nothing to do with the recycling proposal-or any other environmental issue. It was a photocopy of a letter, dated back in 1963, to the Mariners Rest Life Assurance Company, explaining that Jurshak & Parma were now fiduciaries for Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant. Attached to it was an actuarial study showing that Xerxes losses were in line with those of other comparable companies in the area and asking for the same rate consideration.
I read the report through three times. It made no sense to me. That is, it made no sense as being the document that could have gotten Nancy killed. Life and health insurance are not my specialty, but this looked like perfectly ordinary, straightforward insurance stuff. It wouldn’t even have seemed out of place to me except that it was so old and so unconnected to anything Nancy worked on.
There was one person who could explain the significance to me. Well, more than one, but I didn’t feel like going to Big Art with it. Where did you find this, young lady? Oh, blowing around the street, you know how these things happen.
But young Art might tell me. Even though he was clearly on the periphery of his father’s life, he might know enough about the insurance side to explain the document. Or, if Nancy had found it and it had meant something to her, she might have told him. In fact, she must have: that was why he was so nervous. He knew why she’d been killed and he didn’t want to let on.
That seemed like a good theory. How to get Art to reveal what he knew was another question altogether. I contorted my face in an effort to concentrate. When that didn’t produce results I tried relaxing all my muscles and hoped that an idea would float to the top of my mind. Instead I found myself thinking about Nancy and our childhood together. The first time I’d gone to her house for dinner, in fourth grade, when her mother had served canned spaghetti. I’d been afraid to tell Gabriella what we’d eaten-I thought she wouldn’t let me go back to a house where they didn’t make their own pasta.