“Right. Now get out and let me get dressed.”
When I’d pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, Bernie was waiting outside my bedroom door, anxious about my visitor. I was in that groggy state you get from heavy sleep in the middle of the day. I shook my head at her and went into the kitchen to make an espresso. While the machine heated, I ran cold water from the kitchen tap over my head.
Bernie followed me in. “What if she is another policeman? Or a killer? You should come see her now.”
“Don’t let strangers into the building, Bernie, in case they are police or killers. What did she say that made you let her in?”
Bernie shifted uncomfortably. “When I was unlocking the front door, coming back from work, she appeared next to me. She asked for you, asked if I knew you, and when I said, yes, of course, because I am living with you, she followed me.”
I let out a moan. “Bernie—after I get rid of her, we’ll have a little class on how to respond when people accost you. For now, go down the back stairs to your uncle Sal, in case she’s an ax murderer.”
When I’d scooted her out the kitchen door, I pulled two double shots. The first I drank in one breath, the second I carried with me—I could fling it in my visitor’s face if she turned violent.
Far from threatening violence, she was hovering in the hallway, looking nervously around as if fearing an ambush herself. Her honey-colored hair was swept back from her face as it had been when I saw, or claimed I saw her at St. Eloy’s two weeks earlier.
“You—you’re a detective, right?” she said.
“I am. And you are Jerry Fugher’s niece?”
“I—are we alone? Who was that girl?”
“The young woman you talked into letting you into the apartment lives here, she has a right to be here, so forget about her and focus on who you are and what you want.” I moved past her into the front room and sat cross-legged in my armchair, rubbing my calves, sore from this morning’s hike.
She perched on the edge of the piano bench. “How did you know he was my uncle?”
“I don’t, actually. I heard you call him that in church, the day I gave you my card. But Jerry Fugher didn’t have any siblings, so tell me who you are, and why you’re here.”
“He did have siblings.”
I was having trouble following her, even with the aid of espresso. “Have the police talked to you?”
“No! They don’t know about me, they can’t know about me.”
Murray would buy me dinner at Filigree for a month if he knew I had Fugher’s niece with me.
“Okay. Let’s go back to your uncle. Why did he keep his siblings a secret?”
“He didn’t do it on purpose, he never knew about us. My mother, she was his sister, but their mom, my grandma, she gave him away to this other family when he was born, so they adopted him. Then when my brother and I were sixteen, she was dying, our mother, I mean, and she told us about him, so we looked him up. He wasn’t very friendly, he wouldn’t even come to Mom’s funeral, but we didn’t have any other family, so we tried to stay in touch, sort of.”
She was winding a tissue around her fingers.
“And your name is?”
“You have to promise not to tell anyone, anyone at all, not the police or reporters or anyone!”
I looked at her curiously. “If you’ve committed a crime, I’m not going to hide you from the police.”
“I haven’t committed any crimes, but look what happened to Uncle Jerry!”
“I won’t tell anyone your name, but I can’t go on with this conversation until you reveal it.”
She looked around again. “Viola. Viola Mesaline. Where did you see Uncle Jerry? Is he really dead?”
“He’s in the morgue but the police showed me photos taken of him in the coal dust at the Guisar dock. If you want to see his body, or claim him for burial, you’ll have to talk to the police, let them know you’re his next of kin.”
Viola sprang from the piano bench. “I can’t! I—please! You mustn’t tell them about me.”
“Ms. Mesaline, please. If you want to talk to me, sit down, talk to me, but if you can’t trust me, then leave.” I finished my second coffee, wishing it was doing a better job of clearing my wits.
Viola sat again, about an inch of her body touching the bench. She’d made up her mind to talk to me when she decided to look me up, but the story was slow in starting. She stopped frequently to demand my silence while she listened to footsteps on the stairs.
She’d come about her brother, her twin brother, Sebastian.
“Mom, she was an LPN, a practical nurse, but she was always taking these night school classes to improve herself. She was taking a Shakespeare class when she got pregnant with us, so she named us like that, after Shakespeare. Of course, no one in our school knew about Shakespeare, or they would have made fun of us for being stuck-up, but even so I got called ‘violin,’ or even ‘violence,’ all the time.”
She edged farther onto the bench. “Mom always wanted us to go to college, and I started at DePaul, but Sebastian, he made good grades and he got himself a scholarship to IIT to study engineering.”
“What kind? Electrical?” I wondered if that was where Uncle Jerry picked up his wiring skills.
“Electrical? Why would you think that? He’s in construction engineering, but he hasn’t been able to find a full-time job. He does contract work with Brentback.”
Brentback was one of those contractors whose name always pops up on the siding around the city’s big construction sites. “Sounds as though your brother has his foot in a good door,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose. But he’s disappeared, that’s the problem, and Uncle Jerry, I’m sure he knows, knew, what happened, but he won’t say. Wouldn’t say.”
I sucked in a breath. “How long has Sebastian been gone?”
“Almost a week now.”
“And why did Uncle Jerry know about it?”
“When Sebastian was in school, we didn’t have any money.” Viola spoke to the floor in a whisper. “He worked in the bursar’s office and—and he borrowed money from the accounts to pay his bills.”
“Was he expelled?” I asked when she came to a complete halt.
“They found out right away. I guess Sebastian didn’t really know what he was doing, so he didn’t know how to cover his trail.”
“Embezzling is hard to conceal,” I agreed, “especially for a beginner.”
“It wasn’t embezzling,” she said reproachfully. “It was borrowing. He was going to pay them back, only they found out about it too soon.”
“How was he going to pay them back?” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “By borrowing from someone else?”
“No, he thought—he knew someone who’d made a huge amount of money playing online poker and Sebastian got him to show him the system he used. Only he lost, it was like thirty thousand dollars in twenty minutes. I was watching, it was terrifying—he kept thinking he’d start winning. He only stopped because I turned off his computer. We didn’t know what to do, so I went to Uncle Jerry.”
“Jerry had money?”
“He said he could get the money but we’d have to pay him back and of course we agreed, but we didn’t know—it was so expensive! The interest, we could barely keep up, even with us both working. I can’t really date anyone, seriously, I mean—if some guy gets interested in me I break it off so I won’t have to explain about the money. I can’t even take a real vacation: all our money goes to Uncle Jerry!”
I wondered if she had any idea how good a motive for murder she was giving herself, but I didn’t suggest it. “How long has this been going on?”
“Seven years now. It’s like—the thirty thousand Sebastian lost, plus the twelve thousand he borrowed from the school accounts, we’ve paid that much three times already but we still keep owing Uncle Jerry.”
So Jerry had juice connections. “Your brother got to graduate from IIT?”
“Yes, thank goodness, at least the school let him pay back what he borrowed. He was on probation for his last two years, but they didn’t put anything bad on his transcript. Only that’s how the money to Uncle Jerry got so huge, because we could only make small payments when Sebastian was still in school and Uncle Jerry said the interest was like really expensive because none of us could get credit from a regular bank. I started working full-time as soon as I saw how much it was. I take classes at night, like my mom, but I’ve never been able to finish my degree. As soon as Sebastian gets full-time work, I’ll quit my job and go back to school, but construction these days, it’s hard.”