“Where can we go to talk?” I asked briskly, taking his hand in a firm grasp in case he decided to chance the indignity.
He smiled unhappily. “Upstairs, I guess. I-I have an office. A small office.”
I followed him up the linoleum-covered stairs to a suite with his father’s name on it. A middle-aged woman, her brown hair neatly coiffed above a well-cut dress, was sitting in the outer office. Her desk was a little jungle of potted plants twined around family photographs. Behind her were doors to the inner offices, one with Art, Sr.’s, name repeated on it, the other blank.
“Your dad isn’t here, Art,” she said in a motherly way. “He’s been at a Council meeting all day. I really don’t expect him until Wednesday.”
He flushed miserably. “Thanks, Mrs. May. I just need to use my office for a few minutes.”
“Of course, Art. You don’t need my permission to do that.” She continued to stare at me, hoping to force me to introduce myself It seemed to me it would be a small but important victory for Art if she didn’t know whom he was seeing. I smiled at her without speaking, but I’d underestimated her tenacity.
“I’m Ida Maiercyk, but everyone calls me Mrs. May,” she said as I passed her desk.
“How do you do?” I continued to smile and went on by to where Art was standing miserably in front of his office. I hoped she was scowling impotently, but didn’t turn around to check.
Art flipped on a wall switch and illuminated one of the most barren cubicles I’d seen outside a monastery. It held a plain pressed-wood desk and two metal folding chairs. Nothing else. Not even a filing cabinet to give the pretense of work. A wise alderman knows better than to live above the community that’s supporting him, especially when half that community is out of work, but this was downright insulting. Even the secretary had more lavish appointments.
“Why do you put up with this?” I demanded.
“With what?” he said, flushing again.
“You know-with that loathsome woman out there treating you like a submoronic two-year-old. With those ward heelers waiting to bait you like a carp. Why don’t you go get a position in someone else’s agency?”
He shook his head. “These things aren’t as easy as they look to you. I just graduated two years ago. If-if I can prove to my dad that I can handle some of his workload…” His voice trailed away.
“If you’re hanging around hoping for his approval, you’ll be here the rest of your life,” I said brutally. “If he doesn’t want to give it to you, there’s nothing you can do to make him. You’re better off stopping the effort, because you’re only making yourself miserable and you’re not impressing him.”
He gave an unhappy little smile that made me want to take him by the scruff of the neck and shake him. “You don’t know him and you don’t know me, so you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just-I’ve always been-just too big a disappointment. But it’s nothing to do with you. If you’ve come around to talk to me about Nancy Cleghorn, I can’t help you any more than I could this morning.”
“You and she were lovers, weren’t you?” I wondered if his chiseled good looks could possibly have compensated Nancy for his youth and insecurity.
He shook his head without speaking.
“Nancy had a lover here that she didn’t want any of her friends to know about. It doesn’t seem too likely that it was Moe, Curly, or Larry downstairs. Or even Mrs. May-Nancy had better taste than that. And anyway, why else would you go to her funeral?”
“Maybe I just respected the work she was doing here in the community,” he muttered.
Mrs. May opened the door without knocking. “You two need anything? If you don’t, I’m going to take off now. You want to leave any message for your father about your meeting, Art?”
He looked helplessly at me for a second, then just shook his head again without speaking.
“Thanks, Mrs. May,” I said genially. “It was good to meet you.”
She shot me a look of venom and snapped the door to. I could see her shadow outlined against the glass upper half of the door as she hesitated over a possible retaliatory strike, then her silhouette faded as she marched off toward home.
“If you don’t want to talk about your relations with Nancy, maybe you can just give me the same information you gave her about Big Art’s interest in SCRAP’S recycling plant.”
He gripped the front of the pressed-wood desk and looked at me imploringly. “I didn’t tell her anything. I hardly knew her. And I don’t know what my dad is doing about their recycling plant. Now can you please go away? I’d be as happy as-as anybody if you found her killer, but you must see I don’t know anything about her.”
I scowled in frustration. He was upset, but it sure wasn’t because of me. He had to have been Nancy’s lover. Had to. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been in church this morning. But I couldn’t think of any way to get him to trust me enough to talk about it.
“Yeah, I guess I’ll go. One last question. How well do you know Leon Haas?”
He looked at me blankly. “I never heard of him.”
“Steve Dresberg?”
His face went totally white and he fainted on me.
19
By the time I got home it was past dark. I had stayed in South Chicago long enough to make sure young Art was fit to drive. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to turn him over to the ward heelers for comfort, but my display of charity didn’t make him any more willing to talk. Frustrated, I finally left him at the door of the ward office.
The drive north brought me no solace. I walked wearily up the front walk, dropped my keys as I fumbled with the inner lobby door, then dropped them again as I was going upstairs. Bone-tired, I turned back down the stairs to retrieve them. Behind Mr. Contreras’s door, Peppy gave a welcoming bark. As I headed back up I heard his locks scraping back behind me. I stiffened, waiting for the flow.
“That you, doll? You just getting back? Your friend’s funeral was today, huh? You haven’t been out drinking, have you? People think it’s a way to drown their sorrows, but believe me, it only causes you more grief than you started with. I should know-I tried it more than once. But then when Clara died I took one drink and remembered how it used to get her down, me coming home from a funeral with a good one tied on. I said I wouldn’t do it, not for her, not after all the times she told me how stupid I was, crying over some friend when I was too drunk to get his name out straight.”
“No,” I said, forcing a smile, holding my hand out for the dog to lick. “I haven’t been drinking. I had to see a whole bunch of people. Not a lot of fun.”
“Well, you go on upstairs and take a hot bath, doll. By the time you’ve done that and had a chance to rest, I’ll have some dinner ready. I have me a nice steak I’ve been saving for sometime special, and that’s what you need when you’re feeling this low. A little red meat, get your blood flowing again, and life’ll look a whole lot better to you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s very good of you, but I really don’t-”
“Nope. You think you want to be alone, but believe me, cookie, that’s the worst thing for you when you’re feeling like this. Her royal highness and I’ll get you fed, and then if you’re ready to be on your own again, you say the word and we’ll be back down here on the double.”
I just couldn’t bring myself to bring the cloud of hurt to his faded brown eyes by insisting on being alone. Cursing myself for my soft heart, I trudged up the stairs to my apartment. Despite my neighbor’s dire words, I headed straight for the Black Label bottle, kicking off my pumps and pulling off my panty hose while I unscrewed the cap. I drank from the bottle, a long swallow that sent a glow of warmth to my weary shoulders.