someone else’s missing husband, wife, mother or child. He wasn’t losing himself in someone else’s loss. This Chicago pain was all his.
Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved, reasonably ironed blue shirt with a collar that could have used a couple of stays, Lew tucked his Cubs cap on his head, put on his white socks and sneakers, checked for the first signs of daily stubble on his cheeks and neck and looked at himself in Teresa’s mirror.
Catherine said that he looked particularly good in blue shirts. She seemed to mean it. He didn’t think he had looked particularly good when she had said it and he certainly didn’t think so this morning.
Lew put on his denim jacket.
Franco was sitting in his overstuffed chair in the living room. The chair had been sat into exhaustion by three generations of Massaccio and Fonesca men. Franco was drinking coffee from a white mug with a black-and-white photograph on it of the DiMaggio brothers-Joe, Vince and Dominick-in uniform, arms around one another’s necks, grinning the toothy DiMaggio grin.
“Hey, Lewis,” he said, getting up. “Angie had a client coming into the office early. Coffee’s on. Want some eggs, something? How about I put some butter in a pan and fry you up some spaghetti and meatballs?”
Lew checked the wooden clock on the wall, Roman numerals. It was a little after seven. Lots of time. The imagined smell of a recooked dinner jolted him with the memory of his standing over a black iron skillet and preparing almost the same breakfast Franco had just offered.
“That breakfast I smell?” Catherine had asked, wandering in, still in a blue-and-white-striped nightshirt.
She stood behind him at the stove, kissing his cheek and looking down at the sizzling skillet.
“Smells good,” she said.
This was a few weeks before his wife had been killed.
Something about the way she spoke, the lack of a morning hug, the surface-only kiss, came back to him. Was he imagining it? Should he have said something?
In his mind’s eye Lew looked over his shoulder at Catherine who, cup of black coffee in front of her, sat at the tiny kitchen table. She drank slowly, looking out the window at the morning traffic. The morning was overcast. Normally, the downtown Chicago skyline was a panorama in front of them. Not that morning. She ran her fingers through her disheveled hair. Normally, she turned on the television on the counter to watch the morning news. She did not turn on the television set. That morning had been forgotten until now.
“No, thanks,” Lew said to Franco. “Just coffee.”
“Want the last of Norman Bates’s mom’s pastries? We saved it for you.”
“Sure.”
An hour and a half later Franco and Lew were at the law offices of Glicken, Santoro and Turnbull. The offices were on LaSalle Street in the heart of the Loop, fifteenth floor. Franco had parked the tow truck in a four-story garage two blocks away where the hourly rate was eight dollars an hour for off-the-street and six dollars an hour for daily customers. Franco would be charged neither. He knew the night manager and the day manager who steered breakdown calls his way and got a finder’s fee.
Lew tucked his blue Cubs cap into his pocket.
The large, gray-carpeted reception area had six black leather armchairs and a reception desk with a telephone, computer, pad of lined yellow paper and three pens ready for the day. On the wall were large side-by- side color photographs of the partners smiling confidently. Glicken was dark, curly-haired and definitely Jewish. Turnbull was Black. Claude Santoro was either Hispanic or Italian.
Lew never found out.
Santoro’s name was on the door on their right in the small waiting area. His door was slightly open. The lights were on. No voices.
Lew knocked and then knocked again. Franco reached past him and pushed the door all the way open. Santoro was seated behind the desk in front of them. His eyes were open. He seemed lost in thought. There was a black hole over his right eye, another in his neck and a third just above his mouth. All were ringed by blood.
“He’s fucking dead,” said Franco.
Lew said nothing. Blood had oozed out of the bullet holes and dried up.
Franco reached for the phone on the desk in front of the dead man.
“No,” Lew said.
Franco jerked his hand back.
“Hey, Lewie, come on. We’ve got to call the cops.”
“Don’t touch anything.”
“Okay.”
Lew sat across the desk from Santoro.
“We call the police right?” Franco said.
Santoro’s eyes were open, fixed on Lew’s face. They were staring each other down. Santoro would win. He was dead.
“Lewie, you all right?”
“Yes.”
“We call the police, right?” he said.
Lew didn’t move.
“Or we get the hell out of here fast. Lewis, come on. Lewie, what’s going on here?”
What was going on was that there was no way of getting around the truth. If Santoro’s death was not connected to Catherine’s, Lew faced a very large coincidence.
He got up and moved around the desk behind Santoro.
“You can wait outside,” he said, looking at the top of the desk.
“You think I want out because of the dead guy?” Franco asked, shaking his head. “I’ve seen dead guys, kids on the roads like roadkill. I’m a tow-truck driver, remember?”
“I remember,” Lew said.
“You want help?” he asked, looking at the closed door to Santoro’s office.
“No,” Lew said.
There was a fresh, lined, yellow legal pad with a pen next to it. The top page was blank. There was an empty in box, an aluminum football with a clock imbedded in it, facing Santoro. Next to it was a fresh box of Kleenex with a red wood cover. At the right was a flat, black cell phone holder-charger. There was no phone. Franco mumbled something to himself. Lew took a small stack of tissues.
“You know what your sister’ll do to me if we get arrested?”
“No.”
“I don’t either,” said Franco, clearly frustrated. “But I won’t like it. I know that.”
Franco’s near panic had been transformed into quiet resignation. He would not be surprised if the killer burst through the door, guns in both hands, firing away. He wouldn’t have been happy either, but he wouldn’t be surprised.
There were four desk drawers. Lew opened and went through them, flipping papers with the tissues. Then he went through Santoro’s pockets the same way. A little more than four hundred dollars in his wallet. Lew put the wallet back.
He wanted to touch Santoro’s shoulder. Then he paused and looked down at the dead man.
“Lewis, you okay?”
“Yes, let’s go.”
“I can live with that,” Franco said, moving ahead of Lew to the door. “You find anything?”
Lew reached past him, opened the door with the tissues and wiped down the knob. Then he realized that while he was erasing their fingerprints, he might well be removing those of the person who had killed Santoro.
They walked past the reception area, into the hallway outside and then to their right, back toward the elevator.
“Find anything on him?”
It wasn’t what Lew had found, but what he hadn’t found. Santoro’s phone was gone. He had no appointment or notebook in his pockets. Whoever had killed him had taken any phone and notebook he might have had.
“No,” Lew said.
“Stairs?”
