I felt much the same way. “So these guys have a low-rent office. Big deal.”
“Jack—when you die, are you going to hand your estate to a lawyer working out of a cardboard box? Assuming you’ve accumulated a couple hundred million by then and when you’ve already got one of the most prestigious law firms in Chicago on retainer?”
“Neither seems likely. And are you sure your interest amounts to more than an attempt to resist a drop in your personal stock once the old guy was dead?”
“Fuck you, Jack.”
“Gary, just tell me what you got me here to say.”
He pointed across the intersection, toward the other side of the street on the next block north.
I turned and saw a run of battered buildings. A tattered banner hanging from a lamppost said we were in the Belltown area. On the corner was a café, two people who looked like exhausted muggers sitting outside. Next to that was something purporting to be a secondhand bookstore, but which looked more like somewhere you’d head for porn and/or a tip on where to buy drugs.
And then a boarded-up window in a dilapidated dirty-brown building. It was wider than its neighbors, could once have held a small department store. Above the window on ground level was a peeling hand-painted sign, white on black, saying THE HUMAN BEAN. To the left of the long window was an anonymous door in gunmetal gray. I pulled out Fisher’s envelope, took out the first photograph. I didn’t need to hold it up to know that’s where Amy had been standing when it was taken.
For a moment it was as if I could even see her standing there, head slightly turned as if she were gazing back at me, though she did not look like any person I knew.
chapter
TWENTY
I walked across the street, barely noticing a truck that whistled past behind me. When I got to the far sidewalk, I turned, looked south toward downtown. I checked it against the second photograph and saw enough congruence to know that this was the view it showed.
“Yes,” Fisher said as he stepped up the curb to stand next to me. “I was standing up at the next corner.”
I walked up to the storefront. Tried to look through the window, but whoever nailed it over had done a good job. Went to the doorway and pushed my hand against it. No movement. It was a big, heavy door, decorated by rivets on all sides, and fitted tightly. Layer after layer of gray paint made it appear impregnable. I stooped to look at the handle and saw that the slot for the key showed flecks of bright metal. It had been unlocked recently.
I stepped back a few paces and looked up and down the street again. The entrance to the building was exposed, visible to anyone in a fifty yard radius. It had the brutally monumental quality favored by turn-of-the-century boosters, a promise to stand profitably forever. It still stood, but it was not making anyone any money anymore. There were three big windows on each story. On the second and third floors, several panes of glass were broken, and the holes had been boarded up. On the next floor up, the glass looked complete, but the cloud reflections suggested that there was no light on behind. Clumps of grass and a very small tree were growing out of broken guttering right at the very top.
When I pulled my gaze back down, I noticed that the two guys hanging outside the corner café were taking an interest. I walked over to them, and Fisher followed.
Both men wore drab hoodies and stained blue jeans and Nikes that could barely have been five minutes out of the box. Apart from minor details of facial organization, they presented as functionally identical. There was nothing on the battered metal table between them. One smiled lazily at the other as I approached.
“I smell something,” he said. “You smell something?”
The other nodded. “Makes me think of barbecue.”
“That one’s pretty old,” I said. “I mean, like, fucking medieval. And you’re probably just smelling each other. I can, from here. Next time it rains, you might want to stay outdoors.”
The first one stopped smiling. “What you want?”
“That building I was standing at. You know anything about it? Seen anyone going in or out?”
They shook their heads slowly, as if being operated by the same lazy string.
“Right,” I said. “You know shit about this corner. Probably new to the area. Just flew in from Paris on a student exchange program. Strolled down for a croissant and a café crème between classes. Am I getting warm?”
Both were staring sullenly at me now. I smiled in a flat, communicative way and broke eye contact first. I took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and wrote my cell-phone number on it.
“Call me. There’s money on it.”
I nodded at two pairs of pink, dull eyes and walked back up the street to the building. I wondered if there was any way in around the back.
“You find that works?” Fisher asked when he caught up with me. He sounded relieved to have moved away from the café. “The openly confrontational approach?”
“Yes,” I said, panning my eyes around the street level of the building. “And you’re next, if you don’t just go ahead and tell me what—”
I stopped talking and walked over to the doorway again. The entry system was a stained and rusted metal oblong with a grille at the top and a series of wide buttons. I pressed them one at a time and received no sense that anything was happening anywhere, that any connection remained to be made.
Then I looked at the remaining button but didn’t press it. The rust wasn’t as thick, and the patina was different. It appeared, as Fisher had said, as though it might have been used from time to time. It was the second from the top. I wondered if I’d discovered the meaning of the last of the text messages Amy had sent.
The one that said “Bell 9.”
Around the rear of the building was a parking lot. The back of the structure was peeling and missing large patches of plaster. The street door was heavily locked. The windows on the floors above were boarded, and the fire escape was falling apart. I looked at this for a while, then walked away. A few streets back toward downtown, we walked past a bar. I stopped, turned, and went in.
The interior was dark, the counter running along one side. The lighting was dim. The walls were wood-paneled in a way that was not a recent design decision but an indication that the paneling had been in place since such decor was still in fashion. Many of the patrons probably remembered the way it was even before that.
The barman was skinny as a nail and looked like he knew how to get hold of things. He shot me just a brief glance and started to apologize for matters I had no knowledge of and cared about even less.
“Look, I’m not a fucking cop,” I said. “We just want a beer. That going to be possible?”
I walked to the corner table and sat down. Fisher got a couple of drinks and brought them over. I sat in silence for a few minutes, smoking.
“Okay,” I said. “So now tell me the rest. And really make it quick.”
“After I got back to Chicago, this thing started eating at me,” Fisher said. “I knew Joe pretty well by the end. It wasn’t like he didn’t get along with his kids. Clan Cranfield was tight—vacations together at the compounds, a photo of the bloodline on the Christmas cards. If you work in my field, you know a lot of families like that. Once in a while, it gets complicated when the old goat leaves the farm to a stripper no one knew about, but the patriarch never razes everything to the ground.”