I was very tired. The pain had come back in my shoulder, perhaps from sitting so long in one position. I walked as rapidly as I could across Belmont to Halsted. Lincoln Avenue cuts in at an angle there, and a large triangle on the south side of the street is a scraggy vacant lot. I held my keys clenched between my fingers, watching shadows in the bushes. At the front door to my building I kept a weather eye out for anything unusual. I didn’t want to be the fourth victim of this extremely efficient murderer.
Three dePaul students share the second-floor apartment. As I walked up the stairs, one of them stuck her head out the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She came all the way out, followed by her two roommates, one male and one female. In an excited trio they told me someone had tried to break into my apartment about an hour before. A man had rung their doorbell. When they buzzed him in, he’d gone past their door to the third floor.
“We told him you weren’t home,” one of the women said, “but he went on up anyway. After a while we heard him kind of chiseling away at the door. So we got the bread knife and went up after him.”
“My God,” I said. “He could have killed you. Why didn’t you call the police?”
The first speaker shrugged thin shoulders in a Blue Demon T-shirt. “There were three of us and one of him. Besides, you know what the police are like-they’d never come in time in this neighborhood.”
I asked if they could describe the intruder. He was thin and seemed wiry. He had a ski mask on, which frightened them more than the incident itself. When he saw them coming up the stairs, he dropped the chisel, pushed past them, and ran down the steps and up Halsted. They hadn’t tried to chase him, for which I was grateful-I didn’t need injuries to them on my conscience, too.
They gave me the chisel, an expensive Sorby tool. I thanked them profusely and invited all three up to my apartment for a nightcap. They were curious about me and came eagerly. I served them Martell in my mother’s red Venetian glasses and answered their enthusiastic questions about my life as a private investigator. It seemed a small price to pay for saving my apartment, and perhaps me, from a late night intruder.
23 A House of Mourning
I woke up early the next morning. My would-be intruder convinced me that I didn’t have much time before another accident would overtake me. My anger with Bobby continued: I didn’t report the incident. After all, the police would just treat it as another routine break and entry. I would solve the crimes myself; then they’d be sorry they hadn’t listened to me.
I felt decidedly unheroic as I ran slowly over to Belmont Harbor and back. I only did two miles instead of my normal five, and that left me sweating, the ache returning to my left shoulder. I took a long shower and rubbed some ligament oil into the sore muscles.
I checked the Omega over with extra care. Everything seemed to be working all right, and no one had tied a stick of dynamite to the battery cable. Even taking time for exercise and a proper breakfast, I was on the road by nine o’clock. I whistled Fauré’s “Après un rêve” under my breath as I headed for the Loop. My first stop was the Title Office at City Hall. I found an empty parking meter on Madison Street and put in a quarter. Half an hour should be enough time for what I wanted to do.
The Title Office is where you go to register ownership of buildings in Chicago. Maybe all of Cook County. Like other city offices, this was filled with patronage workers. Henry Ford could study a city office and learn something about the ultimate in division of labor. One person gave me a form to fill out. I completed it, copying Paige Carrington’s Astor Street address out of Boom Boom’s address book. The filled-in form went to a second clerk, who date-stamped it and gave it to a heavy black man sitting behind a cage. He, in turn, assigned the form to one of the numerous pages whose job it was to fetch out the title books and carry them to the waiting taxpayers.
I stood behind a scarred wooden counter with other title searchers, waiting for a page to bring me the relevant volume. The man who finally filled my order turned out to be surprisingly helpful-city workers usually seem to be in a secret contest for who can harass the public the most. He found the entry for me in the heavy book and showed me how to read it.
Paige occupied a floor in a converted apartment building, an old five-flat built in 1923. The entries showed that there was some kind of dwelling on that site as far back as 1854. The Harris Bank had owned the current building until 1978 when it was converted to condominiums. Jay Feldspar, a well-known Chicago land developer, had acquired it then and done the conversion. Paige’s unit, number 2, was held as a trust by the Fort Dearborn Trust. Number 1123785-G.
Curiouser and curiouser. Either Paige owned the thing herself as part of a trust, or someone owned it for her. I looked at my watch. I’d already been here forty minutes; might as well take a little more time and risk a parking ticket. I wrote the trust number down on a piece of paper in my shoulder bag, thanked the attendant for his help, and went out to find a pay phone. I’d been to law school with a woman who was now an attorney on the Fort Dearborn’s staff. She and I had never been friends-our aspirations were too different. We’d never been enemies, either, though. I thought I’d call her and give a tug on the old school tie.
It took more than a tug-trust documents were confidential, she could be disbarred, let alone thrown out of the bank. I finally persuaded her that I’d get the Herald-Star to come in and suborn the clerical staff if she didn’t find the name of the person behind the trust number for me.
“You really haven’t changed a bit, Vic. I remember how you bullied everyone during moot court in our senior year.”
I laughed.
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment,” she said crossly, but she agreed to call me at home that night with the information.
While I was wasting dimes and adding to the risk of a ticket, I checked in with my answering service. Both Ryerson and Pierre Bouchard had called.
I tried Murray first. “Vic, if you’d lived two hundred years ago they would have burned you at the stake.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That Arroyo hiking boot. Mattingly was wearing them when he died, and we’re pretty sure they’re a match for the footprint the police found in Boom Boom’s place. We’ll have the story on the front page of the early editions. Got any other hot tips?”
“No. I was hoping you might have something for me. Talk to you later.”
Bouchard wanted to tell me that he had checked around with Mattingly’s cronies on the team. He didn’t think Howard knew how to dive. Oh, and Elsie had given birth to a nine-pound boy two days ago. She was calling him Howard after the worthless snake. The members of the team were pitching in to make a donation to her since Howard had died without a pension and left very little life insurance. Would I give something from Boom Boom? Pierre knew my cousin would want to be included.
Certainly, I told him, and thanked him for his diligence.
“Are you making any progress?”
“Well, Mattingly’s dead. The guy who I’m sure pushed Boom Boom in the water was killed Sunday. Another few weeks like this and the only person left alive will be his murderer. I guess that’s progress.”
He laughed. “I know you will have success. Boom Boom told me many times how clever you are. But if you need some muscle, let me know. I’m a good man for a fight.”