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.
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.