It was Nancy who got me to try out for the junior high basketball team. I’d always been good at sports, but softball was my game. When I made the team my dad tacked a hoop to the side of the house and played with Nancy and me. He used to come to all our games in high school, and after our last game in college, the one against Lake Forest, he’d taken us to the Empire Room for drinks and dancing. He’d taught us how to fade, how to fake the pass then turn and dunk, and I’d won the game in the last seconds with just that move. The fake and the dunk.
I sat up. Nancy and I had worked it so many times in the past, why not now? I didn’t have any proof, but let young Art think I did.
I pulled Nancy’s most recent diary from the stack on the seat next to me. She had entered three phone numbers for him in her crabbed handwriting. I made my best guess at deciphering them and went to the public phone outside the beach house.
The first number turned out to be the ward office, where Mrs. May’s syrupy tones denied knowledge of young Art’s whereabouts while trying to probe me for who I was and what I wanted. She even offered me to Art, Sr., before I could end the conversation.
I dialed the second number and got the Jurshak, Parma insurance offices. There a nasal-toned receptionist told me at length that she hadn’t seen young Art since Friday and she’d like to know since when she’d been hired to baby-sit for him. The cops had been around this morning looking for him and she was supposed to get a contract typed by noon and how could she possibly do it if-
“Don’t let me keep you,” I said shortly, and hung up on her.
I dug in my pockets for change but I’d used my last two quarters. Nancy had penciled an address next to the third number, down on Avenue G. That had to be Art’s home. Anyway, if I got the kid on the phone, he’d probably hang up. Better to confront him in person.
I got back in the car and drove back down to East Side, to 115th and Avenue G. The house was halfway up the block, a new brick place with a high fence around it and an electronic lock on the gate. I rang the bell and waited. I was just about to ring again when a woman’s voice came uncertainly through the squawk box.
“I’m here to see young Art,” I bellowed. “My name is Warshawski.”
There was a long silence and then the lock clicked. I pushed the gate open and moved into the estate. At least it looked more like an estate than it did your typical East Side bungalow. If this really was Art’s home, I presumed it was because he still lived with his parents.
However modestly Big Art kept his office, he hadn’t stinted on his home comforts. The lot to the right had been annexed and converted into a beautifully landscaped yard. At one end stood a glass building that might have housed an indoor swimming pool. Since a forest preserve ran along the back of the property, one had the sensation of being out in the country while only half a mile from some of the world’s busiest manufacturing sites.
I trotted up the flagstone walk to the entrance, a porticoed porch whose columns looked a little incongruous against the modem brick. A faded blond woman stood in the doorway. The setting had some claim to grandeur but she was pure South Side in her crisply ironed print dress and the starched apron covering it.
She greeted me nervously, without trying to invite me in. “Who-who did you say you were?”
I pulled a card from my bag and handed it to her. “I’m a friend of young Art’s. I wouldn’t be bothering him at home but they haven’t seen him at the ward offices and it’s pretty important that I get in touch with him.”
She shook her head blindly, a movement that gave her a fleeting resemblance to her son. “He-he’s not home.”
“I don’t think he’d mind talking to me. Honestly, Mrs. Jurshak. I know the police are trying to get in touch with him, but I’m on his side, not theirs. Or his father’s,” I added with a flash of inspiration,
“He really isn’t home,” She looked at me wretchedly. “When Sergeant McGonnigal came around asking for him Mr. Jurshak got really angry, but I don’t know where he is, Miss-uh. I haven’t seen him since breakfast yesterday morning.”
I tried to digest that. Maybe young Art hadn’t been fit to drive last night after all. But if he’d been in an accident, his mother would have been the first to know. I shook away an unwelcome vision of Dead Stick Pond.
“Can you give me the names of any of his friends? Anyone he trusts enough to spend the night with uninvited?”
“Sergeant McGonnigal asked me the same thing. But-but he never had any friends. I mean, I liked him to stay here at night. I didn’t want him running around the way so many boys do these days, getting involved in drugs and gangs, and he’s my only child, it’s not like there are others if you lose one. That’s why I’m so worried now. He knows how upset I get if I don’t hear from him and yet here he is, gone all night.”
I didn’t know what to say, since none of the comments I wanted to make would have kept her speaking to me. I finally asked if it was the first time he’d ever stayed away from home.
“Oh, no,” she said simply. “Sometimes he has to work all night. On important presentations to clients or something. He’s been doing a lot of those in the last few months. But never without calling me.”
I grinned a little to myself: the kid was more enterprising than I would have suspected. I thought a minute, then said carefully, “I’m involved in one of those important cases, Mrs. Jurshak. The client’s name is Nancy Cleghorn. Art is looking for some papers from her. Will you tell him that I have them?”
The name didn’t seem to mean anything to her. At least she didn’t turn pale and faint or cower back in alarm. Instead she asked me if I could write it down since she had a terrible memory, and she was so worried about Art she didn’t think she’d get the names straight if she had to. I scribbled Nancy’s name and a brief message about having her files on the back of my card.
“If something comes up, Mrs. Jurshak, you can leave a message for me at that number. Anytime, day or night.”
When I got to the gate she was still standing in the doorway, her hands wrapped in her apron.
I wished I’d been more persistent with young Art last night. He was scared. He knew whatever it was that Nancy knew. So either my coming had been the last turn of the screw-he’d fled to avoid her fate. Or he’d met her fate. I should go to McGonnigal, tell him what I knew, or rather what I suspected. But. But. I really didn’t have anything concrete. Maybe I’d give the kid twenty-four hours to show up. If he was already dead, it wouldn’t matter. But if he was still alive, I should tell McGonnigal so he could help keep him that way. Round and round I went with it.
In the end I postponed a decision by driving back down to South Chicago, first to drop Nancy’s files at SCRAP, then to visit Louisa. She was delighted to see me, using the remote-control button to turn off the tube, then gripping my hand with her brittle fingers.
When I edged the conversation around to Pankowski and Ferraro and their unsuccessful suit, she seemed genuinely surprised.
“I didn’t know them two was so sick,” she said in her raspy voice. “I saw ’em both off and on before they died and they never said word one about it. Didn’t know they was suing Xerxes. Company’s been real good to me-maybe the boys got themselves in some kind of trouble. Could see it with Joey-he was always a problem for someone. Usually a girl who didn’t have her head screwed on right. But old Steve, he was your original straight arrow, if you know what I mean. Hard to see why he wouldn’t get his benefits.”
I told her what I knew about their illnesses and death and about the harried life that Mrs. Pankowski led. That brought her cough-racked laugh.
“Yeah, I could’ve told her a thing or two about Joey. We girls on the night shift all could of, come to that. I didn’t even know he was married the first year I was working there. When I found that out you’d better believe I gave him his walking papers. None of that being the other woman for me. Course there was others who wasn’t as picky, and he could make you laugh. Awful to think of him going through what I’m doing these days.”