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.”
We talked until Louisa fell into her gasping sleep. She clearly knew nothing of Caroline’s worries. I had to hand it to the little brat-she did protect her mother.
22
Mr. Contreras was waiting anxiously on the front walk when I came home. The dog, picking up his worried state, yawned nervously at his feet. When they saw me each expressed his joy: the dog leapt around me in little circles while the old man scolded me for not leaving him my day’s route.
I put an arm around him. “You aren’t going to start breathing down my neck, are you? Repeat twenty times a day-she’s a big girl, she can fall on her butt if she wants to.”
“Don’t joke about it, cookie. You know I shouldn’t say this, I shouldn’t even think it, but you’re more family to me than my own family. Every time I look at Ruthie it beats me how Clara and I coulda had a kid like that. When I see you it’s like looking at my own flesh and blood. I mean that, doll. You gotta look after yourself For me and her royal highness here.”
I gave a wry smile. “I guess I take after you, then-I’m real hardheaded and stubborn.”
He thought it over a minute. “Okay, doll,” he agreed reluctantly. “You gotta do things your way. I don’t like it but I understand.”
When I went in the front door I heard him saying to the dog, “Takes after me. You hear that, princess? She gets it from me.”
Despite my bravado with him, I’d been watching my back off and on all day. I also checked my apartment carefully before sitting down with my mail, but no one had tried getting past the reinforced steel in the front door or the sliding bars on the back.
I couldn’t face another evening of whiskey and peanut butter. Nor did I want my downstairs neighbor feeling he had the right to hover over me. Carefully locking up once more, I headed over to the Treasure Island on Broadway to stock up.
I was sautéeing chicken thighs with garlic and olives when Max Loewenthal phoned. My first thought on hearing from him out of the blue was that something had happened to Lotty.
“No, no, she’s fine, Victoria. But this doctor you asked me about two weeks ago, this Curtis Chigwell-he tried to kill himself You didn’t know that?”
“No.” I smelled burning olive oil and reached my left hand the length of the cord to turn off the stove. “What happened? How do you know?”