This was just great. Not only was I out of commission but the backlog waiting for me would be growing to Himalayan proportions again. I called my answering service to tell them to handle the phone during normal business hours, and then I started phoning my clients to see what business I could subcontract out and what could wait a few more days for me to get to it personally.
Some people had already moved their inquiries to bigger firms with more detectives. Prudent. If your lead investigator is singed, go where you know there’s backup. I thought of my bills and tried not to panic. I thought of George Dornick’s Mountain Hawk Security and his offer to hire “Tony’s daughter.” I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
And I worried, too, about my cousin. Something wasn’t right with her story about why she’d shown up at the Freedom Center the night I’d gone back there. It was flattering to think she wanted to emulate me, but I was having a hard time believing it. And the smoke bomb at my old home on Houston… Señora Andarra had told the cops she saw the woman who grew up in the house watching from across the street. Conrad thought that had to be me because he associated only me with growing up in the house. But Señora Andarra probably thought of Petra and me as a family unit… It had been Petra who spoke to her in Spanish.
Although Petra had sworn angrily she hadn’t been playing detective in South Chicago, she hadn’t categorically denied being there last Sunday night. But why would she have been down there? I couldn’t begin to imagine a reason.
I finally put the idea aside and called the management company that handled the Freedom Center building, hoping they could tell me who had sent over a demolition team to gut Sister Frankie’s apartment and prepare it for the builders. They couldn’t or they wouldn’t tell me.
I left a message on Sister Carolyn’s cellphone to see if she could get any information out of the contractors. She was in a meeting with an INS attorney, but she called back several hours later to say she’d talked to someone from both the wrecking crew and the builder. Both contractors insisted they didn’t know who hired them. They had been promised cash, almost double their usual fees, if they would drop everything and take care of the building.
“They didn’t want to tell me even that much, I guess because they were afraid I might report them to the IRS, but I put on my costume and assured them that all I wanted was information.”
Her costume. Oh, the veil, right. I asked who had given them the money, but she said they claimed it was a middle-aged white man, someone they had never seen before.
“Don’t tell me,” I said drily. “He was wearing a trench coat and a felt fedora.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Would it make a difference?”
“Yeah. It would be a giveaway that they were lying instead of just a probability.”
“You think they really know who sent them?”
I was sitting at Lotty’s kitchen table, my frustration at my inaction just about at the boiling point. “I don’t know, of course, but my best guess is that they owe someone important a favor or they’re gofers for someone important. Maybe they’re a minority-contracting front, I don’t know. But to drop everything like that, they have to have a pretty good idea who sent them. And then your place being under surveillance, and that police seal on Sister Frankie’s door, didn’t stop them for five seconds.”
When we hung up, I called the detectives from the Bomb and Arson squad who had been over to interrogate me. The Latino cop was in.
“You know your crime scene doesn’t exist anymore?” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I just got off the phone with one of the nuns who lives there. A building crew showed up, not anyone the sisters hired, and took down the door, stripped the room. I hope you secured any samples you took. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to keep that fire from being investigated.”
He didn’t exactly thank me. It was more of a snarl, a demand for Sister Carolyn’s phone number, and a warning that I’d better not be behind any destruction of evidence.
I missed Amy Blount badly. I could have sicced her on the contractors, gotten her to track down the ownership trail. I wondered if I could turn it over to my cousin, see how she would handle a routine search through incorporation records. If she failed, I was no worse off than I was when I started.
I tried Petra on her cellphone. She was at the campaign office, and we were interrupted several times by people who came by to see her. Each time, she announced that she was on the phone with “my cousin, you know, the one who got burned in that fire last week? So I’ll get back to you right away, but she needs my help.”
When I finally got her full attention, she was enthusiastic and bubbled over with questions. I gave her the URLs of a couple of websites I subscribe to, and told her I’d e-mail her the passwords so she didn’t have to try to write them down in midconversation.
“If the subcontractors haven’t made it into the database, you’ll have to go to the State of Illinois Building to check their incorporation filings.”
“But what if they incorporated in some other state? Don’t they usually do it in Delaware?”
“If they’re big enough to incorporate in Delaware, you should find them online, but good catch. If you find them, please, little cousin, do not go tracking them down by yourself. Contractors have short fuses and big hammers.”
“Oh, Vic, so do meatpackers. I grew up around them. I know how to talk to people without getting their undies in a bundle. Anyway, I can outrun a guy who’s weighed down by a big hammer. You’ll see.”
I would see. I frowned at the phone, wishing I understood what was really on Petra’s mind, and hoping I hadn’t started her on a quest where she’d get in over her head.
Lotty took the afternoon off to drive me around, first to the hospital, where her presence let me jump to the front of the line.
From the hospital, we drove to the bank. Until I got all my plastic replaced, I didn’t have a way of getting cash, so I brought my passport and cashed a check for a thousand dollars, hoping that would see me through until a new ATM card arrived.
Our last stop was my hairdresser’s, so I could get my weird clumps of hair shorn to a uniform length. Something between baldness and a Marine buzz cut was how it looked at the end, but certainly way more attractive than the Mangy Dog’d do I’d been sporting.
It was a pleasant day, a sort of mini-vacation after the trauma of the past ten days, and we finished it by eating supper with Max at a little bistro on Damen. He and Lotty drove me to my apartment, where Mr. Contreras and the dogs tumbled out to greet me. The dogs showed such ecstasy that the medical resident across the hall threatened to call the cops if Mr. Contreras and I didn’t silence them at once. Even that didn’t dampen my pleasure at coming back to my own home. Lotty gave me a long hug and relinquished me to Mr. Contreras, who insisted on carrying my bag up the stairs.
My pleasure died as soon as I opened the door. I was so shocked that I couldn’t take it in at first. My home had been ripped to shreds. Books lay on the floor, my stereo was dismantled, music had been dumped so the inside of the piano could be inspected, my trunk stood in the living room with my mother’s evening gown wadded up on the floor next to it.
My first reaction was a kind of despair, a desire to get on a plane for Milan and spend the rest of my life in the little hill town where my mother grew up. My second response was fury with my cousin.
“Come on, Vic,” my neighbor protested. “Cut the kid some slack. How could she be behind this?”
“There are no signs of forced entry,” I said. “You let her in with my keys, right? She’s been obsessed with this baseball I found with my dad’s stuff, and this has all the earmarks of a spoiled kid wanting what she wants when she wants it.”