Mr. Contreras took to frying up French toast and bacon when I came in from my runs, and finally bullied me into going to Lotty Herschel for a complete physical. Lotty said I was fine physically, just suffering as so many were from exhaustion of the spirit.
Whatever name you gave it, I only had half a mind for my work these days. I specialize in financial and industrial crime. It used to be that I spent a lot of time on foot, going to government buildings to look at records, doing physical surveillance and so on. But in the days of the Internet, you traipse from website to website. You need to be able to concentrate in front of a computer for long hours, and concentration wasn’t something I was good at right now.
Which is why I was wandering around Larchmont Hall in the dark. When my most important client asked me to look for intruders who might be breaking in there at night, I was so eager to do something physical that I would even have scrubbed the crumbling stone benches around the house’s ornamental pond.
Darraugh Graham has been with me almost since the day I opened my agency. The New York office of his company, Continental United, had lost three people in the Trade Center disaster. Darraugh had taken it hard, but he was flinty, chalklike in grief, more moving than the bluster we were hearing from too many mouths these days. He wouldn’t dwell on his loss or the aftermath but took me to his conference room, where he unrolled a detail map of the western suburbs.
“I asked you here for personal reasons, not business.” He snapped his middle finger onto a green splodge northwest of Naperville, in unincorporated New Solway. “All this is private land. Big mansions belonging to old families out here, you know, the Ebbersleys, Felittis, and so on. They’ve been able to keep the land intact-like a private forest preserve. This brown finger is where Taverner sold ten acres to a developer back in ‘seventy-two. There was an uproar at the time, but he was within his rights. He had to meet his legal fees, I think.” I followed Darraugh’s long index finger as he traced a brown patch that cut into the green like a carrot.
“East is a golf course. South, the complex where my mother lives.” At the best of times, Darraugh is a wintry, distant man. It was hard to picture him in normal situations, like being born.
“Mother’s ninety-one. She manages on her own with help, and, anyway, I don’t want-she doesn’t want to live with me. She lives in a development here-Anodyne Park. Town houses, apartments, little shopping center, nursing home if she needs medical help. She seems to like it. She’s gregarious. Like my son-sociability skips generations in my family.” His bleak smile appeared briefly. “Ridiculous name for a development, Anodyne Park, offensive when you think about the Alzheimer’s wing at the nursing home-Mother tells me the word means something like `soothing’ or `healing.
“Her condo overlooks the grounds of Larchmont Hall. One of the grand mansions, big grounds. It’s been empty for a year-the original owners were the Drummond family. The heirs sold the place three years ago,
but the new buyers went bankrupt. Felitti was talking about buying, so he could keep more developers out of the area, but so far that’s fallen through.” He stopped. I waited for him to get to the point, which he is never shy about, but when a minute went by I said, “You want me to find a plutocrat to buy the place so it doesn’t get divided up for the merely affluent?” He scowled. “I didn’t call you in for ridicule. Mother thinks she sees people going in and out of the place at night.”
“She doesn’t want to call the police?”
“The police came out a couple of times, but found no one. The agent that manages the place for the holding company has a security system in place. It hasn’t been breached.”
“Any of the neighbors seen anything?”
“Point of the area, Vic: neighbors don’t see each other. Here are the houses, and all this is hundred years’ worth of trees, gardens, so forth. You could talk to the neighbors, of course.” He snapped his finger on the map again, showing me the distances, but his tone was uncertain-most unlike him.
“What’s your interest in this, Darraugh? Are you thinking of buying the place yourself?”
“Good God, no.”
He didn’t say anything else, but walked to the windows to look down at the construction on Wacker Drive. I stared in bewilderment. Even when he’d asked me to help his son beat a drug rap several years ago, he hadn’t danced around the floor like this.
“Mother’s always been a law unto herself,” he muttered to the window. “Of course people in her-in our-milieu always get better attention from the law than people like-well, than others. But she’s affronted that the police aren’t taking her seriously. Of course, it’s possible that she might be imagining-she’s over ninety, after all-but she’s taken to calling me every day to complain about lack of police attention.”
“I’ll see if I can uncover something the police aren’t seeing,” I said gently.
His shoulders relaxed and he turned back to me. “Your usual fee, Vic. See Caroline about your contract. She’ll give you Mother’s details as well.”
He took me out to his personal assistant, who told him his conference call with Kuala Lumpur was waiting.
We’d talked on a Friday afternoon, the dreary first day of March. On Saturday morning, I made the first of what turned into many long treks to New Solway. Before driving out, I stopped in my office for my ordnance maps of the western suburbs. I looked at my computer and then resolutely turned my back to it: I’d already logged on three times since ten last night without word from Morrell. I felt like an alcoholic with the bottle in reach, but I locked my office without checking my e-mail and began the fortyfive-mile haul to the land of the rich and powerful.
That westward drive always makes me feel like I’m following the ascent into heaven, at least into capitalist heaven. It starts along Chicago’s smoky industrial corridor, passing old bluecollar neighborhoods that resemble the one where I grew up-tiny bungalows where women look old at forty and men work and eat themselves to early heart attacks. You move past them to the hardscrabble towns on the city’s edge-Cicero, Berwyn, places where you can still get pretty well beat up for a dollar. Then the air begins to clear and the affluence rises. By the time I reached New Solway, I was practically hydroplaning on waves of stock certificates.
I pulled off at the tollway exit to examine my maps. Coverdale Lane was the main road that meandered through New Solway. It started at the northwest corner of the township and made a giant kind of quarter circle, opening on Dirksen Road at the southeast end. At Dirksen, you could go south to Powell Road, which divided New Solway from Anodyne Park, where Geraldine Graham was living. I followed the route to the northwest entrance, since that looked like the main one on the map.
I hadn’t traveled fifty feet down Coverdale Lane before getting Darraugh’s point: neighbors couldn’t spy on each other here. Horses grazed in paddocks; orchards held a few desiccated apples from last fall. With the trees bare, a few mansions were visible from the road, but most were set far behind imposing carriageways. Poorer folk might actually see each other’s driveways from their side windows, but most of the houses sat on substantial property, perhaps ten or twelve acres. And most were old. No new money here. No McMansions, flashing their thirty thousand square feet on tiny lots.
After going south about a mile and a half, Coverdale Lane bent into a hook that pointed east. I followed the hook almost to its end before a discreet sign on a stone pillar announced Larchmont Hall.
I drove on past the gates to Dirksen Road at the east end of Coverdale and made a loop south and west so I could look at the complex where Darraugh’s mother was living. I wanted to know if she really could see into the Larchmont estate. A hedge blocked any view into the New Solway mansions from street level, but Ms. Graham was on the fourth floor of a small apartment building. From that vantage, she might be able to see into the property.
I returned to Coverdale Lane and drove up a winding carriageway to Larchmont Hall. Leaving the car where anyone could see it if they came onto the land, I armed myself with that most perfect disguise: a hard hat and a clipboard. A hard hat makes people assume you’re doing something with the air-conditioning or the foundations. They’re used to service in places like this; they don’t ask for credentials. I hoped.
As I got my bearings, I whistled under my breath: the original owners had done things on a grand scale. Besides the mansion itself, the property held a garage, stables, greenhouse, even a cottage, which I assumed was for the staff who tended the grounds-or would tend the grounds if someone could afford to have the work done. The estate agent wasn’t putting much into maintenance-an ornamental pond, which lay between the mansion and the outbuildings, was clogged with leaves and dead lilies. I even saw a carp floating belly-up in the middle. A series of formal gardens was overgrown with weeds, while no one had mowed the meadows for some time.
The neglect, and the number of buildings, was oppressive. If you were grandiose enough to buy such a place, how could you possibly take care of it? Circling each building, trying to see if there were holes in foundations or
