The desk sergeant frowned as he read my business card. “Records researching what?”
Records researcher is a vague title. Illinois government, rarely picky about much at all, ethics-wise, is uncharacteristically careful about licensing private detectives. A law school degree or law enforcement experience is required. I have neither. So I avoid even the inference of working as a private investigator. Records researcher does well enough as a job title, and it sounds harmless.
“The insurance file on the clown that went off the roof at the Rettinger building,” I said.
“You trying to make him a jumper so your company won’t have to pay?”
“Nothing like that.” I gave him one of my winning grins. “Is the officer in charge in?”
“Later this afternoon,” he snapped.
“You’ll give him my card?”
“Even if it’s with my dying breath.”
Walking out, I looked back. He was leaning over, to drop my card in a wastebasket.
There was a Plan B. The Bohemian’s office was less than a mile away.
The Bohemian’s name is never in the papers. Anton Chernek values secrecy the way Midas valued gold, except with more fervor.
He is an attorney, a CPA, and a certified financial manager, but his degrees suggest only that he manages high-dollar investment portfolios for high-dollar clients. His real responsibilities reach much further. For those whose net worth transcends tens of millions, he can be a facilitator, a fixer, an overseer of entire lives-the go-to guy when trouble erupts. An errant child, a sticky business partnership, an even stickier personal partnership; those are Chernek’s real domains. He resolves difficulties quietly, compassionately, and almost always fairly. He is first-generation American, old-world courtly, and very quietly essential to the well-being of many of Chicago’s most prominent people.
I first met him at the conference my ex-wife’s lawyers called to work out the details of our divorce. He’d come with Amanda’s lawyers, sat in the background, said nothing. I came alone. He liked that I didn’t want anything from her. I think he also liked that my first name, always unused, is Vlodek. It is a solid Bohemian name, like his own.
His are the only offices on the top floor of a yellow brick former bicycle factory. The elevator let me off into his reception area, a dark expanse of money-green leather furniture, burgundy carpeting, and blue-suited financial fund brokers, hoping to see the Bohemian but willing to settle for one of his staff.
His personal secretary didn’t keep me waiting. She’s a formidable, helmet-haired woman with a British accent and a Transylvanian demeanor. Her name is Buffy, and that is the only laugh she offers the world. She smiled an eighth of an inch to express her ecstasy at seeing me again and led me back to his office.
“Vlodek,” the Bohemian called out, exaggerating the syllables-Vuh-lo-dek-on his tongue. “What a pleasant surprise.”
He is sixtyish, six-four like me but thirty pounds thicker, tanned almost to mahogany, and always better dressed. That day, he wore a peach-colored dress shirt with a white collar, a deeper-colored peach tie, and midnight blue suit trousers. The matching suit coat was hung on an antique mahogany rack next to his mahogany credenza. The Bohemian wears mahogany like he wears money, very well.
I sat down on leather taken from a burgundy cow.
“How is the lovely Amanda?” It is always his leadoff question, and it is never idle or social. My ex-wife is the daughter of one of his most prominent clients, the tycoon Wendell Phelps.
“Very busy.”
“I understand she is doing a marvelous job.”
Amanda had recently joined her father’s electric utility, directing its charitable endeavors. It left her little time for teaching at the Art Institute, or working on one of the art history books she occasionally authored. Or me.
“That’s good to know,” I said.
“It will settle down, Vlodek.”
“Of course,” I said.
He smiled. “Anything I can help you with?” He knew I would not drop in merely to chat.
“I’d like a phone call from the officer who’s in charge of investigating the death of that clown two weeks ago.”
“The poor man who fell off the roof?”
“Yes.”
“Not much press on that. Just a few words in the paper, as I recall.”
I nodded.
He didn’t ask why I wanted to know, and I offered no explanation. It was like that between the Bohemian and me. He just smiled, and I smiled, and not a confidence was broken.
CHAPTER 4.
Leo called, saving me from an edgy afternoon of waiting for the phone to ring.
“Busy today?” he asked.
“Waiting for a phone call.”
“A potential client?”
“A real client, flashing cash.”
He whistled. “Happy times are here again. You can tell me about it when I pick you up. I need your brawn.”
“It comes with brains.”
“Rarely necessary. Your tools would be nice, though.”
“Which tools?”
“Anything to cut metal tubing. Plus a power screwdriver to attach things to ceilings and floors. You can ride with me to the hardware store?”
I told him that would be fine.
An hour later, a motor sounded outside. It wasn’t the strong, full-throated Porsche I was expecting. This engine was tinny and weak. I looked out one of the slit windows. A light blue pickup truck, accented with irregular splats of rust and fitted with a rack to haul lumber, was idling at my curb. I’d never seen the truck. Inside it, though, were familiar flashes of outrageous color-this day, a yellow Hawaiian shirt and lime green trousers, obnoxiously bright even through the double filters of the truck and turret windows. It was Leo, in bloom. I went out, set my toolbox in the truck bed, and got in.
“Where the hell are we going?” I asked, by way of a greeting.
His thick, bushy eyebrows cavorted on his narrow bald head like overcaffeinated caterpillars. “I’ve had a flash of genius. We’re off to get fitness equipment, for Ma.”
He is five foot six and weighs the same one-forty he did in high school. Also like in high school, he lives with his mother in her brown brick bungalow in Rivertown because she won’t consider living anywhere else.
His expertise is in establishing provenance. The big auction houses in Chicago and on both coasts pay him in excess of a half-million dollars a year to establish the lineage of the pieces they offer to their bidders. For Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and the others, he wears Armani suits selected by his girlfriend, Endora, an exotic onetime model and current researcher at the Newberry Library. For me and his other friends, he selects duds from the back rack at the Discount Den, Rivertown’s retailer of odd lots of hardware, appliances, canned goods, and occasionally clothing that no one but Leo wants.
As he headed toward Thompson Avenue, Rivertown’s seedy adult playground, I studied the day’s ensemble. Regrettably, I’d seen the lime green pants before, as I had the black-and-white saddle shoes. The shirt, however, was new. It was no ordinary tropic yellow. It was covered-or perhaps more accurately, infested-with multilegged insects, the color of blood. Like all of his casual shirts, he’d purchased it in double extra large. He won’t admit it, but I believe he buys them wretchedly oversized so he can crawl into them without unbuttoning them first.
“Fitness equipment, for Ma?” I asked.
“You’ve got a client?”
It wasn’t like Leo to dodge any question, but I went along. “A security guy came by in a limousine yesterday. He hired me to look into the death of the clown that went off the Rettinger building.”
He looked over. “It wasn’t an accident, like the paper said?”