Mr. Contreras was standing there. “I don’t mean to be butting in, cookie,” he said apologetically, “but this young fella’s been ringing the lobby bell for the last couple of minutes and you two was so wrapped up, I thought maybe you couldn’t hear him.”
Young Art trailed in behind Mr. Contreras. His square, chiseled face was flushed and his auburn hair disheveled. He was biting his lips, clenching and unclenching his hands, in so much turmoil that his usual beauty was obscured. The family resemblance I saw in his distraught face staggered me so much that it muffled my surprise at seeing him.
I finally said weakly, “What are you doing here? Where have you been? Did your mother send you?”
He cleared his throat, trying to speak, but he couldn’t seem to get any words out.
Mr. Contreras, his promise not to breathe down my neck still present in his mind, didn’t linger to issue his usual unsubtle threats against my male visitors. Or maybe he’d summed up Art and figured he didn’t need to worry.
When the old man had left Art finally spoke. “I need to talk to you. It-things are worse than I thought.” His voice came out in a squawky little whisper.
Caroline came to the living-room door to see what the uproar was about. I turned to her and said as gently as I could, “This is young Art Jurshak, Caroline. I don’t know if you’ve ever met, but he’s the alderman’s son. He’s got something confidential he needs to tell me. Can you call some of your pals at SCRAP, see if any of them know anything about this report Nancy was carrying around with her?”
I was afraid she was going to argue with me, but my stunned mood got across to her. She asked if I was all right, if it was okay to leave me with young Art. When I reassured her she went back to the living room for her coat.
She stopped briefly at the door on her way out and said in a small voice, “I didn’t mean all those things I was saying. I came here to get back on good terms with you, not to shout like that,”
I rubbed her shoulders gently. “It’s okay, fireball-it goes with the territory. I said some stupid things myself Let’s forget it.”
She gave me a quick hug and took off.
32
I took Art into the living room and poured him a glass of the Barolo. He gulped it down. Water would probably have been just as good under the circumstances.
“Where have you been hiding? Do you know every beat cop in Chicago is carrying your description? Or that your mother’s going crazy?” They weren’t the questions I really wanted to ask, but I couldn’t figure out how to frame those.
His lips stretched in a nervous parody of his usual beautiful smile. “I was at Nancy’s. I figured no one would look there.”
“Hn-unh.” I shook my head. “You’ve been gone since Monday night and I was at Nancy’s on Tuesday with Mrs. Cleghorn.”
“I spent Monday night in my car. Then I figured no one would be bothering with Nancy’s house. I-I could see it had been torn up pretty good. It’s been kind of spooky, but I knew I’d be safe there since they’d already searched it.”
“Who’s ’they’?”
“The people who killed Nancy.”
“And who are they?” I felt as though I was interrogating a jug of molasses.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, looking away.
“But you can guess,” I prodded. “Tell me about the insurance your father manages for Xerxes. What was Nancy’s interest in it?”
“How did you get those papers?” he whispered. “I called my mother this morning, I knew she’d be worried, and she said you had been by. My-my old man-Big Art had found the card you left and really blown sky high, she said. He was screaming that-that if he got his hands on me, he’d see I remembered never to betray him again. That’s why I came here. To see what you know. See if you can help me.”
I looked at him sourly. “I’ve been trying to get you to tell me a few things for the last two weeks and you’ve been acting as though English was your second language and you weren’t too fluent in it.”
He scrunched up his face in misery. “I know. But when Nancy died I was so afraid. Afraid my old man had something to do with it.”
“Why didn’t you run away then? Why wait until I talked to you?”
He flushed an even deeper red. “I thought maybe no one would know-know the connection. But if you saw it, anyone could.”
“Like the police, you mean? Or Big Art?” When he didn’t answer I said with what patience I could muster, “Okay. Why did you come here today?”
“I called my mother this morning. I knew my old man would be at a meeting, that I could count on him not being home. The slate-makers, you know.” He smiled unhappily. “With Washington dead, they were all getting together this morning to plan for the election. Dad-Art-might miss a Council meeting, but he wouldn’t stay away from that.
“Anyway, Mother told me about you. About how you’d been around but then you’d almost ended up the same-the same way as Nancy. I couldn’t stay in her place forever, there was hardly any food anyway and I was scared to turn on the lights at night in case someone saw and came into inspect. And if they were going to go after anyone who knew about Nancy and the insurance, I figured I’d better get help or I’d be dead.”
I curbed my impatience as best I could. It was going to be a long afternoon, getting information from him. The questions that were really burning my tongue-about his family -would have to wait until I could pry his story from him.
The first thing I wanted to clear up was his relationship with Nancy. Since he had let himself into her house he couldn’t very well keep denying they’d been lovers. And the story came out, sweet, sad, and stupid.
He and Nancy had met a year before on a community project. She was representing SCRAP, he the alderman’s office. She’d attracted him immediately-he’d always liked older women who had her kind of looks and warmth and he’d wanted to go out with her right away. But she’d put him off with one excuse or another until a few months ago. Then they’d started dating and had rapidly moved to a full-blown affair. He’d been deliriously happy. She was warm, loving-on and on.
“So why didn’t anyone know about it if you were both so happy?” I asked. I could just see it, barely. When he wasn’t shredding himself with misery his incredible beauty made you want to touch him. Maybe it was enough for Nancy, maybe she thought the aesthetics of it compensated for his immaturity. She might have been cold-blooded enough to want him as a conduit to the alderman’s office, but I didn’t think so.
He shifted uncomfortably. “My dad always raved on so much against SCRAP, I knew he’d hate it if I was dating someone who worked there. He felt they were trying to take over the ward from him, you know, always criticizing things like the broken sidewalks in South Chicago and the unemployment and stuff. It’s not his fault, you know, but when Washington got in charge, you didn’t see a penny going to the white ethnic neighborhoods.”
I opened my mouth to argue the point, then shut it again. South Chicago had begun its demise under the late great Mayor Daley and had been assiduously ignored by Bilandic and Byrne alike. And Art, Sr., had been alderman all that time. But fighting such a war wasn’t going to do me any good this afternoon.
“So you didn’t want him to know. And Nancy didn’t want her friends to know about you, either. Same reason?”
He squirmed again. “I don’t think so. I think-she was a little bit older than me, you know. Only ten years. Well, almost eleven. But I think she was afraid people would laugh at her if they knew she was seeing someone so young.”
“Okay. So it was a big secret. Then she came to you three weeks ago to see if Art was opposed to the recycling plant. What happened then?”