Two days after first seeing Rozier, George saw Dana Rozier. Harvey had a tasteful '94 Lexus. She had a red Mazda sports car. From a distance she looked younger than her husband. Up close, when he checked her out when she went out shopping, she looked tight, blond, maybe a little too skinny, at least for George's taste, but sending out signals of money. Just the jewelry she wore for an afternoon out would have been enough to keep George in food, rent, paint, and nights in the local bars for half a year, even if he got only a nickel on the dollar.
The Roziers had no kids and no live-in maid. A couple of black women-looked like mother and daughter-came to the house Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Stayed all day. Left at five on the dot. Had their own key. George was sure they'd be the number-one suspects the night he cleaned the place out.
One night when he was watching the Roziers, a Tuesday, Harvey came out to the Lincoln dressed like Fred Astaire and his wife like Ginger. Tux, gown, the works. George followed them downtown, where they let a valet park them in front of the Bismarck. George considered making it back to their house in Saginaw and doing it fast, but he had learned to be careful. Two times downtime for felony made a thief careful. Maybe they were just picking someone up, having a few drinks, and then having a party at home. Maybe a hell of a lot of things. George wasn't the valet parking kind, but he didn't want to lose the Roziers.
He pulled into a loading zone and jumped out as the couple moved slowly into the hotel. It would probably mean a ticket, but it might not if he was fast. A ticket might make George think twice. What if he became a suspect and they found he had been parked in front of the hotel where the burglary victims were on the same night? What if? What if? What if? If he had a ticket when he came out, George would cross off the Rozier house.
George wasn't dressed for a downtown hotel but he didn't look bad either. He was shaved, wore black denim slacks and a button-down pale gray shirt with a low-key black leather zippered jacket The lobby was full of men in tuxes and women with gowns and jewels whose addresses George would have loved to have.
George asked a kid bellhop what was going on.
"Chamber series," he said.
"Music?"
"I guess," said the kid, looking impatient.
"You said series?"
"Every Tuesday this month, next month. There's a program in front of the door," the kid said. "All I know."
George had checked. A black-and-white photograph of a Chinese or Korean or something girl with long hair and a cello between her legs was stuck to the tripod in front of the door through which couples were hurrying.
They were being nodded in by a tall, no-nonsense woman in her fifties whose black-with-white streaked hair was pulled back tight and topped by a tiara worth no more than a few hundred dollars, tops.
"Single tickets?" George had asked innocently.
"Series only," the woman said, nodding more people in, though most of them didn't pause for her approval.
George nodded and checked the schedule on the tripod. There were none being distributed.
It was perfect. Every Tuesday. No holidays hi the way. Concert went from eight to eleven. George didn't have a ticket when he went out to his car.
It looked perfect. Still, George was taking no chances. He was in the lobby of the Bismarck the following week. The Roziers showed up just before eight with another couple, older, maybe in their sixties, dignified. The man was tall, neatly trimmed white hah- and mustache, and the woman a little on the thin side but good looking for her age. For most pros this would have been enough, but not for George. He checked them on the following Tuesday. The Roziers and the old couple were there, and George noted that the woman with the tight hair greeted them by name. He stayed far from the door so she didn't see him, but he could hear her confident voice syruping across the lobby. Someone called her Mrs. Gabriel. It was enough.
Time. George tore up the scrap of paper with the number of the Bismarck concert room phone and flushed it down the toilet. His mother had turned off the television more than two hours earlier and had screamed down to George that she was going to sleep and if he got hungry there was a noodle pudding in the fridge he could stick hi the microwave.
George looked around his room, checked his watch. Blanket roDed down on the bed, paintings stacked against the walls, green chair that had been his father's near the window, battered dresser needing glue for loose drawers. Not much, but it beat a cell.
George didn't hide his tools anymore and he didn't use traditional burglary gear. He carried everything in a padded toolbox, only things a decent mechanic, plumber, or handyman might carry: tubing cutter, glass cutter, and minicutter, rib-joint pliers, adjustable-end wrench, a pair of screwdrivers, an Allen wrench, a close-quarters hacksaw, a curved-claw hammer, a wood chisel, a utility knife, and a rasp. Handyman. That was his cover. Hard to shake, even with the two neatly folded linen laundry bags at the bottom of the toolbox. Ex-con trying to make it as handyman, claiming that all of his work was small and for cash if he got caught. Always an angle. Call a guy down the street from where you were breaking. Ask if you could come over and give him a no-obligation estimate on fixing his front steps or loose-shingled roof. Bluebots pick you up and you claim you're at the wrong house. Walked right in after you knocked. The door was open. Way beyond suspicious but hard to prove, even if they nailed you inside, providing you weren't carrying goods. Criminal trespass was the worst he figured he could get, He looked in the bathroom mirror.
Thin guy in the mirror looked OK. Clean shaven, jaw a little weak, blue-gray eyes, clean but not-so-even teeth, a full head of brown-gray hair. Work clothes. Not black, to blend in and wind up looking suspicious, but faded jeans, red-and-black flannel shirt. Shoes, three-year-old faded Rockports. Sneakers might make someone suspicious.
Checked the watch again, not one he'd stolen. One he had paid twenty-five bucks and change for, about what your not-successful ex-con handyman trying to make a living might wear.
Satisfied, George picked up his toolbox and saw something on the canvas resting on the easel near the window. The left eye of the woman at the bar was too large. He would have to correct that or at least check to see if the morning light gave him a better perspective. George went out the door and into the cool spring night He had a private entrance to his mother's house. After George's father had died, Wanda Eupatniaks had married her husband's best friend, Laslo Skutnik, a widower with a pension from the slaughterhouse, a Swift and Company employee for almost forty years. Wanda and Laslo had vegetated together in front of the television till Laslo died a year and a day after George's father, leaving Wanda a new name and a comfortable, mortgage-paid house.
When he first got out, George had rented a small apartment in the house of the Vivlachkis, a few blocks away off of Diversey. The Vivlachkis were a nice old couple who knew George's mother. They called him Gregor. They went to sleep early and didn't hear too well. They liked Gregor. He painted a portrait of then- dead son, Stanley, from an old photograph. It hung over the mantelpiece right next to Jesus Christ Almighty his own self. But money had gotten a little tight. A few jobs had to be canceled. Too many risks. And old man Vivlachki started to get too curious about George's sources of income and late nights out. It was easier to move in with his mother, who couldn't make it down the stairs to his rooms and who watched television most of the day, went to bed early, slept like a mountain, and snored like a volcano.
George shivered with the chill. Couldn't have been more than forty-five degrees. Fine for a Chicago spring. Sky dark, looking like it couldn't make up its mind to piss or snow. If the temperature dropped and it snowed while he was on the way to the job, George would turn around and go home or maybe head for Unikle's bar, maybe get lucky and run into Mary Ann Zdrubecki, whose husband, Cinch, was doing four short ones for holding up a 7-Eleven.