Whoever had come in through the back hadn’t bothered with the finesse of picklocks; they’d simply crowbarred the hinges out of the doorjamb and then propped the door up when they left.
What had they taken? The computer? My cousin at gunpoint? I moved the door and went down the back stairs. There were cigarette butts on one landing, but they looked old, the residue of a smoker sent outside to indulge, not a recent watcher. The stairs ended in an asphalt areaway that was separated from the alley by a high fence and a gate. I opened the gate. Its lock was still in place. But a row of parking spaces lay behind the gate, and the intruder could have waited out there for someone to park and simply followed that person in.
I propped the gate open and walked the length of the alley. My cousin’s shiny Pathfinder was sitting there, all locked up. I opened it and looked through the receipts and empty drink containers. I got down on my knees and looked under the seats, in the glove compartment, in the spare-tire compartment, under the hood, under the fenders. I detected that Petra drank a lot of smoothies and bottled water, didn’t go in for soft drinks, ate at El Gato Loco, and wasn’t careful with her credit-card chits. After searching the alley, the only other clue I found was that a lot of people drink at night and can’t be bothered to find a trash can for their empties.
I returned to Petra’s place through the back. I needed to do something about the broken kitchen door. On my way out through the front, I saw the building-management company name on a plaque. I called them to report the broken door. And called Bobby Mallory to tell him that someone had broken into Petra’s apartment.
“That ‘someone’ wasn’t you, was it, Vicki?”
“They broke the back door getting in. I was there just now, trying to see what was missing, and I’m wondering if they stole her computer. Or maybe forced her at gunpoint to go into my office.”
Bobby catechized me on what my aunt and uncle were up to. When I told them they were meeting with the FBI this morning, he was skep tical. The Bureau was stretched too thin with terror watching, he claimed. He didn’t think they could find Petra even if she’d been kidnapped.
Bobby’s comments only increased my own high level of terror. I wished I knew whether my next step was a waste of time or not. Fear paralyzes you, makes it hard to act creatively.
It wasn’t until I’d driven three blocks that I realized I had company. After the fire bombs, after the trashing of my home and office, after Petra’s disappearance, I should be taking triple precautions, making sure no one had planted bugs or bombs in my car before climbing into it, riding around the block two or three times to make sure I was clean before I went anywhere. It was only this sixth sense I’d gotten from all my years in the business that made me note that the bike messenger, the same one who’d been riding behind me on my way over to Petra’s, was in my side mirror again.
A bike was a great way to do a tail within the city. Any maneuver I made, he could react faster to than a car. Of course, he couldn’t follow me onto Lake Shore Drive. But anyone smart enough to use a messenger as a tail had a car or two as backup.
I pretended I hadn’t noticed him and got onto the drive. I didn’t bother to check for tails. If they wanted me to know, they’d reveal themselves. If they didn’t, my best strategy was not to try to flush them out now.
I pulled off at the first downtown exit, and stopped at the second hotel I came to. I turned my car over to the valet, explained I was going to a meeting and that I wasn’t a guest, and went inside.
There’s a network of underground passages that connect the hotels and high-rises on the east side of the Loop. I took the lobby escalator down, slipped behind a pillar, and knelt down. I didn’t see anyone behind me, but I still took off my Scarlett O’Hara hat and left it behind a potted palm. It just made me too damned easy to track.
I waited until a group of women all came down together, laughing and talking, and moved just in front of them so that we all seemed to be walking along the underground corridor together. They peeled off at one of the subterranean take-out joints.
I darted into a neighboring gift shop, where I bought a Cubs cap. Going up and down escalators, buying a frozen yogurt, I didn’t see the same face twice. I bought a red CHICAGO sweatshirt at another gift shop and pulled it on over my linen jacket. Although the weight of the sweatshirt on a hot day made me feel as though I were encased in a burka, I wasn’t instantly recognizable.
Still underground, I finally headed to my original destination: the Illinois Central station. There was a twenty-minute wait for the next train to South Chicago. I bought a ticket and stood near the door leading to the tracks. When they called my train, I waited until the last possible moment before sliding through the doors and down the stairs. I thought I was clean, but you never know.
The slow ride to South Chicago was like a backward journey through my life, the ride I’d taken with my mother so many times as a child, past the University of Chicago, where my mother had wanted me to study. “The best, Victoria. You need to have the best,” she would say when the train stopped there to let off students.
Ninety-first Street. End of the line. A certain desolation attached to the conductor’s announcement. Life ends here. I walked the four blocks from the station to my old home.
At least Señora Andarra’s grandson and his friends weren’t visible this morning, but a couple of helpless-looking men were sitting on a curb with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Somewhere, a car stereo was pouring out a bass so loudly that the air was vibrating from it.
At my old home, I saw the boarded-over window that had been broken to throw in the smoke bomb. The prisms across the top were splintered, too. I concentrated instead on the decorative-glass fanlight over the front door, which was still intact.
I rang the bell. After a few minutes, when I wondered if she’d gone out, Señora Andarra opened it the length of its stubby chain. “Esta ventana,” I stumbled in my bad Spanish, pointing at the fan. “Mi madre amó esta ventana también.”
The fact that my mother also loved that window didn’t make Señora Andarra smile, but it did keep her from slamming the door in my face. Using painful pidgin Spanish interlaced with English and Italian, I tried to explain that I was a detective, that I had photographs. Could she look at them, let me know if any of the people in them had been at her house when the bomb came through the window?
The whole time I spoke, she stared at me through the crack in the door, her dark eyes frowning in her nut-colored face. When I finally stumbled to an end of my story, she took the folder from me. As I’d feared, she singled Petra out with no trouble.
“¿Su hija?” she asked.
I was tired of everyone thinking Petra was my daughter, so I dutifully explained she was my cousin. “Mi prima. ¿Y los hombres?”
I thought she lingered on the shot of Alito with Strangwell, but I couldn’t be sure. She finally shook her head, and said she didn’t know any of them, hadn’t seen any of them. I walked back to the station and waited for the northbound train to whisk me back to civilization, or whatever it was.
34
ON THE TRAIN NORTH, I CALLED CONRAD RAWLINGS AT the Fourth District. Of course, I should have gone to see him before visiting Señora Andarra, but I didn’t feel I had spare time for getting police permission to talk to people in my cousin’s orbit.
Conrad was predictably annoyed, but he’d seen the news about Petra; he was more interested in finding out why she’d been at a crime scene in his bailiwick than yainching at me for not calling him first.