I made sure the gun was still clean-I hadn’t been to the range for several months-and checked the clip. I didn’t know for sure that I was in someone else’s sights, but it made me feel a little better when I snapped my tuck holster over my belt loops.
I went door-to-door, in the best detective tradition, to find out if anyone had seen the person who’d gone into my apartment. And how they’d made it past all my locks without forcing them. Of course, some people were out at work, but the older Norwegian woman, who’s lived on the second floor for a decade, had been home, as had the grandmother of the Korean family. Neither of them had seen or heard anything unusual.
Jake Thibaut came blear-eyed to the door in a T-shirt and shorts. I’d woken him, but I couldn’t help it. And how was I to know what time he got in at night? He didn’t recognize me at first.
“It’s the hair,” he finally decided. “You cut off all your curls.”
I ran my fingers through the buzz cut and winced as I touched the bruises. I kept forgetting about my hair when I don’t look in the mirror.
“Did you hear anything in my apartment two nights ago? Someone came through with something like a forklift and knocked the place apart.”
“Two nights ago?” He rubbed his eyes. “I was playing out in Elgin. I didn’t get home until two or so, but maybe I saw your forklifters leaving. I was getting my bass out of the back of my car when I saw two strange men coming down the walk.”
I sucked in a breath. “Black? White? Young?”
He shook his head. “I thought maybe they were clients of yours, paying a secret visit, so I didn’t get close.They had that kind of Edward G. Robinson look that makes you think that you should keep your distance.”
“Were they driving or on foot?”
“I’m pretty sure they got into a big dark SUV up the street, but I’m not good with cars. I can’t tell you what the make was.”
“You didn’t see a tall woman with spiky hair lurking about, did you?”
He laughed. “You mean that girl who comes to visit you-what, your cousin, is she? No, she came around a few times while you were away, visiting the old guy, but she wasn’t part of that team. These guys were bulky, not skinny and spiky.”
I left with a measure of both relief and worry: relief at the reassurance that Petra hadn’t been involved in this break-in and worry about who had sent people to search my apartment.
I picked up my car from the alley, where Mr. Contreras had put it when he rescued it. I’d left my briefcase in the trunk some million or so years ago when I’d gone to visit Sister Frankie. When I opened it to stick in a new set of papers for some meetings I’d scheduled that afternoon, the first thing I saw was the Nellie Fox baseball. I’d completely forgotten about stashing it in there.
I laughed softly to myself. Poor Petra. She could have boosted the ball without my knowing the difference if she’d only thought to look in the trunk. I held it up to the sun, squinting at it through my dark glasses. It was stained and worn. Someone had played with it, maybe Grandpa Warshawski. He died when I was little, but he’d been a Sox fan.
The ball also had holes in it, and that was mystifying. A couple of them went all the way through the ball, so I wondered if my dad and his brother Bernie had run fishing line through it to hang it up for batting practice. I tucked the ball back into my briefcase and drove to my office.
Until she sank under the weight of my media calls, Marilyn Klimpton had done a good job of sorting files and papers. Even though messages had built up, and some incoming documents needed sorting, the office looked in pretty good shape, especially compared to the mounds of papers I’d found on my return from Italy.
I booted up my computer and looked at the message page from my answering service. Among the nuisance calls from media outlets were a pointless threat not to tamper with evidence from the Emergency Management woman and some client queries. There also was a message from Greg Yeoman, Johnny Merton’s lawyer. I was on the list of confirmed visitors to Stateville for tomorrow afternoon, could I please call to confirm.
I suddenly felt so tired, I went to the cot in my back room to lie down. I’d forgotten about putting in the call to Yeoman. I had done it after I saw Miss Claudia at Lionsgate Manor, I remembered now. The murder of Sister Frances, my own injuries, the invasion of my apartment had all pushed Ella Gadsden and her sister completely out of my mind. I lay there in the dark for close to an hour. I finally got back on my feet and called Greg Yeoman to confirm that I would make the drive out to Stateville the following afternoon.
Thinking about Sister Frances reminded me that I wanted some background on the demolition and building contractors who were taking care of her apartment. Petra was going to find out about them for me, but she couldn’t do it. And it really wasn’t that big of a job.
Sister Carolyn had given me the contractors’ names: Little Big-Man Wreckers and Rebound Construction. Both were owned by a man named Ernie Rodenko, at 300 West Roscoe. His seemed to be a midsize company, doing about ten million in business every year, and specializing in fire and flood rehab. The address would put him at the intersection of Roscoe and Lake Shore Drive, which wasn’t zoned for business, so his office must be in his home. Which meant I might drop in on him, in the evening, when I could go out without all my unguents and hats and so on.
I entered the address in my PDA and continued working through my messages. In the afternoon, an appointment took me to a building in the east Loop, across a wide plaza from the skyscraper where Krumas for Illinois had its headquarters. After my meeting, I wondered if I should drop in on Petra, to see if she might tell me something face-to-face that she couldn’t say over the phone.
It could be, of course, that she’d been chewed out by her boss for too many personal calls. Maybe her old boss didn’t care much about in-office discipline, but Petra was on Les Strangwell’s staff now. From what I knew of Strangwell, you belonged to him body and soul. You didn’t fritter away time on your cousin’s projects when you had to get Brian Krumas into the Senate. In case Strangwell was keeping a close watch on my cousin, I decided to leave her alone.
Before returning to the hot summer afternoon, I turned into the coffee bar in my client’s building lobby for an iced cappuccino. As I waited for them to make my drink, I stared idly around the way one does and caught sight of a familiar face at one of the spindly tables tucked into the corner of the bar. The thinning dark hair combed sharply back from a jowly red face, I’d seen him, two weeks ago in Lake Catherine.
What had brought Larry Alito into downtown Chicago on a hot July day and into a coffee bar instead of a beer joint? I was going to slide back into the shadows when I realized my outsize hat, dark glasses, and gloves made a pretty good disguise. I collected my drink and went to sit on one of the high stools by the window near Alito’s table.
The man he was talking to looked like many other middle-aged middle managers with spreading middles. He had fine sandy hair that had receded to the middle of his head, which he wisely had trimmed short instead of trying for a comb-over. With his turned-up nose and pursed mouth, he had the expression of a perpetually surprised baby. Only his small gray eyes, cold and shrewd, made it clear that it was he, not Alito, who was running the meeting.
I couldn’t hear any of their conversation because the coffee bar had a sound track with a loud bass thumping. The two men were going over a set of papers in a manila folder, and the man running the meeting was tapping the papers with his thumb. He wasn’t happy with the work Alito had given him. I pulled out my cellphone and took a quick shot of the two of them while pretending to be texting. When they got up, I waited until they were almost to the building lobby before I followed them.