hadn’t kept up with Boom Boom. I knew he was depressed but I hadn’t kept in touch. If only I’d left my Peoria number with my answering service. Was he sick with despair? Maybe he’d thought love would cure him and it hadn’t. Or maybe it was the talk on the docks that he’d stolen some papers-he thought I could help him combat it, like the thousand other battles we’d fought together. Only I wasn’t there.
With his death, I’d lost my whole family. It’s true my mother had an aunt in Melrose Park. But I’d rarely met her, and neither she nor her fat, self-important son seemed like real relations to me. But Boom Boom and I had played, fought, protected each other. If we hadn’t spent much time together in the last ten years, we’d always counted on the other being around to help us out. And I hadn’t helped him out.
As we neared the I-90/94 interchange rain started spattering the windshield, breaking into my fruitless reverie. I realized Paige was glancing at me speculatively. I turned to face her, eyebrows raised.
“You’re Boom Boom’s executor, aren’t you?”
I assented. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Boom Boom and I-never got to the stage of exchanging keys.” She gave me a quick, embarrassed smile. “I’d like to go to his place and get some things I left there.”
“Sure. I was planning on being there tomorrow afternoon for a preliminary look at his papers. Want to meet me there at two?”
“Thanks. You’re sweet… Do you mind if I call you Vic? Boom Boom talked about you so much I feel as though I know you.”
We were going under the post office, where six lanes had been carved out the building’s foundations, Paige gave a satisfied nod. “And you must call me Paige.” She changed lanes, nosed the Audi around a garbage truck, and turned left on Wabash. She dropped me at my office-the Pulteney Building on the corner of Wabash and Monroe.
Overhead an el train thundered. “Good-bye,” I yelled above the din. “See you tomorrow at two.”
2 Love’s Labors Lost
The Hawks had paid Boom Boom a lot of money to play hockey. He’d spent a fair amount of it on a condo in a slick glass building on Lake Shore Drive north of Chestnut Street. Since he bought it five years ago I’d been there a number of times, often with a crowd of drunken friendly hockey players.
Gerald Simonds, Boom Boom’s lawyer, gave me the building keys, along with those to my cousin’s Jaguar. We spent the morning going over Boom Boom’s will, a document likely to raise more uproar with the aunts-my cousin left the bulk of his estate to various charities and to the Hockey Widows Pension Fund; no aunts were mentioned. He left me some money with a request not to spend it all on Black Label. Simonds frowned disapprovingly as I laughed. He explained that he had tried to keep his client from inserting that particular clause, but Mr. Warshawski had been adamant.
It was about noon when we finished. There were a couple of things I could have done in the financial district for one of my clients but I just didn’t feel like working. I didn’t have any interesting cases going at the moment-just a couple of processes to serve. I was also trying to track down a man who had disappeared with half the assets in a partnership, including a forty-foot cabin cruiser. They could all wait. I retrieved my car, a green Mercury Lynx, from the Fort Dearborn Trust’s parking lot and headed over to the Gold Coast.
Like most posh places, Boom Boom’s building had a doorman. A pudgy, middle-aged white man, he was helping an old lady out of her Seville when I got there, and didn’t pay much attention to me. I fumbled with the keys, trying to find the one that opened the inner door.
Inside the lobby, a woman got off the elevator with a tiny poodle, its fluffy white hair tied in blue ribbons. She opened the outer door, and I went inside, giving the dog a commiserating look. The dog lurched at its rhinestone- studded leash to smell my leg. “Now, Fifi,” the woman said, pulling the poodle back to her side. Dogs like that aren’t supposed to sniff at things or do anything else to remind their owners they’re animals.
The inner lobby wasn’t big. It held a few potted trees, two off-white couches where residents could chat, and a large hanging. You see these hangings all over the place, at least in this kind of building: they’re woven, usually with large knots of wool sticking out here and there and a few long strands trailing down the middle. While I waited for an elevator I studied this one without enthusiasm. It covered the west wall and was made from different shades of green and mustard. I was just as glad I lived in a tired three-flat with no neighbors like Fifi’s owner to decide what should hang in the lobby.
The elevator opened quietly behind me. A woman my age came out dressed for running, followed by two older women on their way to Saks, debating whether to eat lunch at Water Tower on the way over. I looked at my watch: twelve forty-five. Why weren’t they at work on a Tuesday? Perhaps like me they were all private investigators taking time off to handle a relative’s estate. I pressed 22 and the elevator carried me up swiftly and noiselessly.
Each floor of the thirty-story condo had four units. Boom Boom had paid over a quarter of a million to get one in the northeast corner. It contained just about fifteen hundred square feet-three bedrooms, three baths, including one with a sunken tub off the master bedroom-and a magnificent view of the lake from the north and east sides.
I opened the door to 22C and went through the hallway to the living room, my feet soundless in the deep pile of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Blue print drapes were pulled away from the glass forming the room’s east wall. The panoramic view drew me-lake and sky forming one giant gray-green ball. I let the vastness absorb me until I felt a sense of peace. I stood so a long moment, then realized with a start of resentment that I wasn’t alone in the apartment. I wasn’t sure what alerted me; I concentrated hard for several minutes, then heard a slight rasping noise. Paper rustling.
I moved back to the entryway. This led to a hall on the right where the three bedrooms and the master bath were. The dining room and kitchen were off a second, smaller hallway to the left. The rustling had come from the right, the bedroom side.
I’d worn a suit and heels to see Simonds, clothing totally unsuitable for handling an intruder. I quietly opened the outside door to provide an escape route, slipped off my shoes, and left the handbag next to a magazine rack in the entryway.
I went back into the living room, listening hard, looking for a potential weapon. A bronze trophy on the mantelpiece, a tribute to Boom Boom as most valuable player in a Stanley Cup victory. I picked it up quietly and moved cautiously down the hallway toward the bedrooms.
All the doors were open. I tiptoed to the nearest room, which Boom Boom had used as a study. Flattening myself against the wall, bracing my right arm with the heavy trophy, I stuck my head slowly into the open doorway.
Her back to me, Paige Carrington sat at Boom Boom’s desk sorting through some papers. I felt both foolish and angry. I retreated up the hall, put the trophy down on the magazine table, and slipped into my shoes. I walked to the study.
“Early, aren’t you? How did you get in?”
She jumped in the chair and dropped the papers she was holding. Crimson suffused her face from the neck of her open shirt to the roots of her dark hair. “Oh! I wasn’t expecting you until two.”
“Me either. I thought you didn’t have a key.”
“Please don’t get so angry, Vic. We had an extra rehearsal called for two o’clock, and I really wanted to find my letters. So I persuaded Hinckley-he’s the doorman-I persuaded him to come up and let me in.” For a minute I thought I saw tears in the honey-colored eyes, but she flicked the back of her hand across them and smiled guiltily. “I hoped I’d be gone before you showed up. These letters are terribly, terribly personal and I couldn’t bear for anyone, even you, to see them.” She held out her right hand beseechingly.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Find anything?”
She shrugged. “He may just not have kept them.” She bent over to pick up the papers she’d scattered at my entrance. I knelt to help her. It looked like a stack of business letters-I caught Myron Fackley’s name a couple of times. He’d been Boom Boom’s agent.
“I’ve only been through two drawers, and there are six others with papers in them. He saved everything, I think-one drawer is stuffed full of fan letters.”
