Her smile faded.
“Sure,” she said.
“We’ll be watching over you,” said Pappas as Lew and Franco went through the door. It closed behind them. The night had come. The air had gone cool and the wind whistled by. The box in Lew’s hand was warm.
There was a car about twenty yards behind the tow truck, a black Lexus, and there were two people inside.
“I don’t like this, Lewis,” Franco said when they were in the truck with the doors closed. He took the gun out of his pocket and placed it in a panel slot in front of him.
“I know,” Lew said, who sat with the box on his lap as Franco made a leisurely U-turn and looked down at the car with the two men as he drove toward the Eisenhower.
“Nice people,” said Franco. “I mean the Pappases. That John’s a little… you know?”
“Very nice people,” Lew said. “Pappas lied. Catherine didn’t have any case going against anyone named Andrej Posnitki. She would have told me.”
“They’re following,” said Franco. “Well, the old lady was nice.”
“ Her I remember,” said Lew. “Not Catherine’s case, Peter Michaels’s case. Milt Holiger did the legwork. Bernice Alexander Pappas. Five or six years ago. She got off. Lack of evidence. Witnesses disappeared.”
“What’d she do?” asked Franco, pulling onto the Eisenhower and heading toward downtown.
“Killed her husband and her husband’s cousin with a very sharp baking knife.”
“Maybe she…”
“Stabbed them about a dozen times each in the neck and face,” said Lew, removing the string from the box.
The fresh-baked scent penetrated the smell of grease.
“Shit,” Franco said, reaching for the box and putting his hand inside. He came up with a cookie. “You never know.”
“You never know,” Lew agreed.
“But she can bake. And you gotta admit, Pappas may be a phony, but he’s a good son.”
“He was an assassin for hire, probably still is,” said Lew. “Suspect in at least fourteen murders.”
“With this Posno guy?”
“Maybe.”
Franco bit, chewed and went silent for a beat and then, “So Catherine never helped them?”
“No. Why would she?”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What do we do now?”
“Go home.”
“Don’t think so,” said Franco. “That Lexus is right behind us. Want me to lose them?”
Lew reached for the car phone, punched in Angela’s home number, and when she came on he asked her a question and when she answered, he asked her for a favor. Lew hung up and told Franco what to do.
Less than half an hour later they were back in Little Italy, driving slowly. They pulled into a one-car driveway and got out of the truck. The outside houselights were on and the lights beyond the windows sent out orange-white beams.
“They parked across the street,” Franco whispered.
The front door was open. They went in. Franco locked the door behind him.
“Now?” he asked.
Lew turned out the living-room lights so they couldn’t be seen from the street. Timing could have been better but it wasn’t bad. No one got out of the Lexus, whose lights and engine were turned off.
When Lew had called Angie from the truck he had asked her if she had an unoccupied house for sale in the neighborhood. She did. He asked her to go there, take the FOR SALE sign down, turn on the lights and leave the door open. She had. If they didn’t already know, Lew didn’t want to lead whomever was in the Lexus to his sister’s house.
Franco had called one of his cop friends from the truck.
“I’ve got a joke, Lewis,” he said.
“Yes?”
Five minutes later a Chicago P.D. patrol car glided down the street and pulled next to the Lexus. Two uniformed street cops got out, one on each side of the car, hands on their weapons. They had left their headlights on. White light surrounded the Lexus. Lew opened the front door a few inches.
“Please get out of the car,” said the beefy officer who had been driving.
Two men, one man in his forties, wearing a suit and tie, and the other, a man about thirty, wearing a sports jacket, white shirt, no tie, his hair tied back, slowly got out of the car, careful to keep their hands in sight.
The man in the suit, who had been the passenger in the Lexus, looked at the partly open door beyond which Lew stood.
“Hands on the roof, spread your legs,” said the cop.
They knew the drill. The younger cop moved forward and patted them down. He didn’t miss a space. Found nothing.
“Identification,” said the beefy cop. “Slow, so slow I can almost swear you’re not moving.”
The two men exchanged looks and reached into their jacket pockets, pulling out their wallets. The younger cop took the wallets and brought them to the beefy cop.
“Santoro,” the beefy cop said, looking up from the open wallet.
Santoro, the passenger, didn’t respond. He kept looking at the door as if he could see Lew in the darkness.
“And Cruz.”
“Aponte-Cruz,” said the man with the tied-back hair.
The beefy cop handed the wallets to his partner who knew what to do, call in their identification. He moved back to the police car.
Franco and Lew left the house, moved to the tow truck and climbed in.
“What are you doing here?” the beefy cop asked Santoro.
“Here?” asked Santoro, watching Lew. “We just parked for a few minutes, talk a little before we get something to eat. Here’s as good as any place.”
“You’re loitering,” said the beefy cop.
Santoro looked down at the hood of the Lexus and shook his head with a smile.
Franco backed the tow truck into the street. Franco and Lew looked down at the men named Santoro and Aponte-Cruz. Santoro met Lew’s eyes and smiled. Lew couldn’t read the smile.
3
Dinner, rigatoni with shrimp, had reminded him of his grandmother’s cooking, Sundays at her house. She hadn’t learned any of her recipes in Sicily. She had learned them from cookbooks, mostly written by second- or third-generation American recipe gatherers, most of them Jewish. Her food was good. Lew’s mother had not carried on the tradition, but Angela had picked it up like a loose football and run with it. Franco had been a lean Massaccio when they were married.
Franco’s friend Manny Lowen, the beefy cop, still in uniform, had come by. He had a bowl of rigatoni with grated Parmesan and told them that the two men in the Lexus were Claude Santoro and Bernard Aponte-Cruz and that Santoro owned the car.
“Santoro’s a lawyer,” said Manny, working on a coffee and one of the last of the Greek deserts Angie had put out on a plate. “No criminal record. Lots of money. Lots of friends. Office up high on LaSalle Street. You want to find him, he won’t be hard to find. He’s in the phone book. The other guy, Aponte-Cruz, another story. He’s a leg breaker for rent. Did four years downstate for breaking up a restaurant owner on Elston Avenue in front of witnesses. Owner came out on the other side with a limp, a twitch and a tendency to look over his shoulder a lot.”
When Manny had left, Angie said, “You need my car tomorrow?”
