murders and rapes and stuff to keep you happy. She’ll turn up in due course, drunk and repentant, and in the meantime I don’t think she needs all this city money lavished on her.”
“The only reason we’re doing it is because Uncle Bobby wanted to save you the embarrassment of bailing her out of women’s court,” he said stiffly. “If I had any say in the matter, I wouldn’t be wasting time looking for her.”
“Then I’ll call Bobby and tell him I don’t care.” I caught sight of the clock and suddenly remembered my time lines.
“Sorry, Michael-I’ve got to run.”
“Wait, Vic,” he said urgently. “Don’t tell the lieutenant. He’d take a stripe off my butt if he knew I’d been complaining to you.”
“Okay,” I agreed, irritated, “but in that case, stop riding me. The second I see her or hear from her I’ll let you know. Good-bye.”
I slammed down the receiver and ran into my bedroom. As I was zipping my jeans the phone rang again. I let it go at first, thinking it was probably Furey, then gave in to the pressure of the bell.
“I want Victoria Warshawski.” The accented voice belonged to the man I’d spoken to yesterday at Alma Mejicana.
He pronounced it “Warchassy.” After saying it correctly I asked who wanted her.
“This is Luis Schmidt, Warchassy. A little bird told me you been prying into my work crew down at the Ryan. I’m calling to tell you to mind your own business.”
“I think you have the wrong number.” I took the phone from my ear while I pulled a yellow cotton sweater over my head. “There’s no one here named Warchassy.”
“This ain’t Victoria Warchassy? The private dick?” he demanded angrily.
“I’m a private investigator, but my last name is ‘Warshawski.’” I kept my tone affable.
“That’s what I been saying, bitch. I’m talking to you. If you know what’s good for you, keep your damned nose out of other people’s business.”
“Oh, Looey, Looey, you just said the magic word. I purely hate it when strange men call me a bitch. You just bought yourself a whole lot of interest in what Alma Mejicana is doing down at the Ryan.”
“I’m warning you, Warchassy, to butt out of what don’t concern you. Or you could be very, very sorry.” The phone slammed in my ear.
I tied my running shoes and took the stairs two at a time. Behind Mr. Contreras’s door I could hear Peppy whining. She recognized my step and wanted to come with me. It wasn’t fair to make her hang out with Mr. Contreras all day-he couldn’t run her properly. But I just couldn’t stop for her.
I felt close to screaming at the pressure of all the demands on me. The dog. Furey. Elena herself. Graham. My other clients. And now my bravado to Luis Schmidt. Well, damn him anyway for calling up with stupid threats.
If only I could get a few bucks ahead of the game, I’d take some time off, just get clean out of this town for six months. I ground my teeth at the futility of the idea and savagely jerked the Chevy into gear.
By three o’clock I had finished an exhaustive search into the life and loves of Graham’s prospective marketing vice president. In the report I included the fact that the guy had a steady girlfriend along with his wife and infant son-not that Graham would care. It would make me run ten miles in the opposite direction, but Graham didn’t think what happened below the belt had any bearing on job performance.
Not until I had typed up the report and sent it across the Loop by messenger did I break for lunch. By then hunger had given me a nagging headache, although I felt better mentally for being able to cross a major task off my time chart.
I went to a vegetarian cafe around the corner for soup and a bowl of yogurt. That took care of the hunger, but my headache grew more intense. I tried ignoring it, tried to make myself think about Luis Schmidt and his anger at my visit to the Ryan construction site. My head hurt too much for logic. When I retrieved the Chevy from the underground garage, I wanted just to drive home and go back to bed, but all the time I’d wasted lately was still haunting me. I slogged north to Saul Seligman’s house.
He wasn’t happy to see me. Nor did he want to let me have pictures of his children. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep being gentle and persuasive through the blinding pain thudding in front of my eyes.
“In your place I’d be angry too. You have a right to expect service for the premiums you pay. Unfortunately, there are just too many dishonest people out there and the good guys get stuck as a result.”
We went on like that for forty-five minutes. Finally Seligman made an angry gesture. He moved to a massive secretary in one corner and opened its rollaway top. A pile of papers cascaded to the floor. He ignored those and pawed through a drawer behind the remaining papers until he found a couple of photos.
“I suppose you’d stay here until dawn if I didn’t give you these. I want a receipt. Then go, leave me alone. Don’t come back unless you’re telling me you’ve cleared my name.”
The pictures were both group shots, taken at some kind of family party. His daughters stood in the middle, on either side of his wife, while Rita Donnelly and two other young women flanked them. Those two were presumably her daughters, but I didn’t much care at this point-I was having too much trouble seeing.
I pulled a small memo pad from my bag to write out the date and a description of the pictures for Seligman. The letters danced around the page as I wrote; I wasn’t sure my note made sense. Seligman stuck it in the secretary, rolled the top back down, and hustled me out the door.
I drove home more by luck than skill. By the time I got there I was shivering and sweating. I managed somehow to make it upstairs to my bathroom before being sick. I felt a little better after that, but crept off to bed, putting on a heavy sweatshirt and socks before crawling under the blankets. As I got warm my tense neck and arm muscles relaxed and I drifted into a deep, drugged sleep.
The ringing phone brought me slowly back to life. I was buried so far down in sleep that it took some time to connect the noise with something outside me. After a long spell of weaving the ringing in with my dreams, my mind finally swam lazily back to consciousness. I felt newly born, the way you do when an intense pain has been washed out of your system, but the insistent bell wouldn’t let me enjoy it. Finally I stuck out an arm and picked up the receiver.
“H’lo?” My voice was thick and slurred.
“Vicki? Vicki, is that you?”
It was Elena, crying extravagantly. I looked at the clock readout in resignation: one-ten. Only Elena would rouse me at this godawful time.
“Yes, Auntie, it’s me. Calm down, stop crying, and tell me what the trouble is.”
“I-oh, Vicki, I need you, you’ve got to come and help me.”
She was well and truly panicked. I sat up and started pulling on the jeans I’d left on the foot of the bed. “Tell me where you are and what kind of trouble you’ve got.”
“I-oh…” She started sobbing heavily, then her voice disappeared.
For a moment I thought I’d lost the connection, but then I realized she was covering up the mouthpiece. Or someone else had covered it. She’d been running away and her pursuers had caught up with her? I waited in an agony of indecision, thinking I should hang up and summon Furey, not wanting to hang up until I was sure I’d lost her. Since I had no idea where to send police resources I waited, and after a couple of heart-wrenching minutes she came back.
“I ran away,” she sniffed dolefully. “Poor little Elena got scared and ran.”
So she hadn’t been in mortal terror, just rehearsing her act. I kept my voice light with an effort. “I know you ran away, Auntie. But where did you run to?”
“I’ve been living in one of the old buildings near the Indiana Arms, it’s been abandoned for months but some of the rooms are still in real good shape, you can sleep here and no one will see you. But now they’ve found me. Vicki, they’ll kill me, you’ve got to come help me.”
“Are you in the building now?”
“There’s a phone at the corner,” she hiccoughed. “They’ll kill me if they see me. I couldn’t go outside in the daylight. You’ve got to
“Who will kill you, Elena?” I wished I could see her face instead of just hearing her-it was impossible to sort out how much truth she was spouting along with the rest of it.
