from such dismal surroundings.
If someone wanted to shoot me, this was the perfect opportunity. I thought about racing for the stairwell and fetching help, but Tom Czarnik, the building super, was waiting for a chance to prove me an unfit tenant. And getting the cops would take so much time that my visitor would probably be long gone before they got there.
And the real truth, V.I., is that you can’t stand asking people for help. This cold thought came to me even as I was trotting down the hall, moving from side to side and hunching my shoulders to minimize my size. When I came up to the shadow figure I gave a little gasp of laughter, release from my fears-Zerlina Ramsay was waiting for me.
“I didn’t know if you was ever coming in here, girl. I’ve been here since eight this morning.” It was a comment more than a complaint.
“I’ve been under the weather,” I said, wrestling clumsily with the keys in my gloves hands. When I finally turned the right one in the lock the door opened slowly-a week’s accumulation of mail was blocking it. I scooped it up and held the door open for Mrs. Ramsay.
“You could have called me at home if you needed me- I’d have been happy to go see you.”
Under my office lights her skin color looked healthier than when she’d been in the hospital. Her dour hostess apparently was looking after her well.
“Didn’t want to do that. I didn’t know who you lived with, whether they’d let you talk to me.” She lowered herself carefully into my utilitarian guest chair. “Anyway, I didn’t want Maisie to hear me on the phone to you.”
I dumped the mail on my desk and swiveled in the desk chair to face her. My desk faces the window with the guest chairs behind it so that a steel barrier won’t intimidate visitors.
“I heard on the news you’d been hurt in that fire last week. Across from the Indiana Arms, wasn’t it?” She nodded to herself and I waited patiently for her to continue. “Maisie says leave you to yourself-you got Cerise in trouble, leastways your aunt did, let you get yourself out by yourself.”
I didn’t feel responsible for Cerise’s death, but I also didn’t see what purpose arguing about it with her would serve. Anyway, she could well be right about Elena, at least partially right.
“it seemed to me the two of them had some scheme going,” I ventured. “I thought maybe they wanted to pretend Katterina had died so they could collect a big award from the insurance company.”
“You could be right.” She sighed unhappily. “You could be right. Blaming you doesn’t take away the pain of having a child like that, one that uses heroin and crack and God knows what-all else, and steals and lies. It’s just easier to blame you than lie in bed asking myself what I should of done different.”
“Elena’s no prize, either,” I offered. “But my dad was her brother and they didn’t make ?em any better than him.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t bring her up. If I hadn’t a had to work so hard, be gone all the time-” She broke herself off. “No use talking about it now. It’s not why I came up here. Took me three buses too.”
After a brooding silence in which her full lips disappeared into a narrow slit in her face, she said, “It’s no news to you that that aunt of yours, that Elena, likes to tell a story or two.”
She waited for my agreement before continuing. “So she claims she saw someone talking to Jim Tancredi a few weeks before the fire, and then she came over to my room the night the place burned down telling me he’d been there again.”
She smiled in embarrassment. “You gotta understand, the kind of life we lead, any new face is excitement. Maybe you wouldn’t of been interested, but I was. And that was when she saw I had my little granddaughter with me, Cerise and Otis dropped her off, you know, and she gets real righteous about how no children can be in the building and she’ll talk to Tancredi about it, so I give her the price of a bottle and she goes off, but I figure I’d better get our little princess over to Maisie. With an alkie like Elena you can’t trust her to keep her mouth shut just because she
When she looked at me defensively I grunted agreement-knew that chapter and verse on Elena too well to argue the point. “What did she say about the man she’d seen? Black, white, young, old?”
She shook her head regretfully. “He was white, I’m pretty sure of that, even though she didn’t say it in so many words. But she said he had the most gorgeous eyes, that was her expression, and I can’t see her using it about a black man.”
That was really helpful-Elena thought every man under eighty-five had the most gorgeous eyes. Still, she’d used it in my hearing. The night of the fire. Vinnie the banker, he came to chew me out and she told me not to upset a boy with such gorgeous eyes.
That memory brought the elusive face in the crowd at the Prairie Shores to the forefront of my mind. Vinnie. Vinnie, who shouldn’t have been within fifteen miles of the Near South Side. I’d opened my eyes as the paramedics were carrying me through the crowd and seen him looking down at me. It was a slide shown so briefly on my retina that I only now remembered opening my eyes for that brief flash.
I came slowly back to the room. At first I thought I’d have to revise my agenda for the day and go racing off to see him. But as the rushing in my head subsided and reason returned, I remembered I didn’t know which bank he worked for.
“You okay?” Zerlina asked anxiously.
“I’m fine. I think it’s just possible I may know who she was talking about.” Although would Elena have hidden the fact that she’d seen Vinnie before? Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with her to issue sly hints? There hadn’t been time, though-we’d been fighting about whether she could stay. That could have driven Vinnie from her mind. And then that night she and Cerise showed up together, they started with a story about Katterina, but after they were in bed together Elena suggested blackmailing Vinnie as a better idea. At that point of course she wouldn’t say anything about him to me.
“Elena’s disappeared again,” I said abruptly. “Took off from her hospital bed Saturday morning. She’d taken a pretty good blow to the head and shouldn’t have been walking, let alone running.”
“They didn’t say nothing about her on TV, just you on account of you being a detective. And that you’d rescued your aunt, which I was pretty sure had to be Elena. I didn’t come here today because of her, but I’m sorry for her. She’s not an evil person, you know, nor Cerise wasn’t, either. Just weak, both of them.”
She brooded over it in silence for a bit. When it was clear there wasn’t anything else she wanted to say, I asked if I could give her a lift.
“Um-unh. I show up in some white girl’s car everyone on the street’s going to be up telling Maisie about it. No, I’ll just go back the way I came. It doesn’t matter, taking three buses, you know-I don’t have anything else to do with my time these days.”
The rush of excitement I’d felt over remembering seeing Vinnie at the fire died away after Zerlina left, and with it much of my earlier euphoria. It was hard to think about her life and that of Elena and maintain a great flow of good cheer. Then, too, the more I considered Vinnie as an arsonist the less sense it made. Maybe he was a pyromaniac sociopath, but it seemed too incredible a coincidence that he would move in below me and then turn out to be torching my aunt’s building. Of course even sociopaths have to live someplace, and he couldn’t have known that my aunt lived in one of his target buildings. And that might explain his being awake and irritable so soon after the fire.
My mind kept churning futilely. Finally I willed myself to turn it off. I flipped quickly through the mail. Two checks, goodie, and a handful of get-well cards from corporate clients. The obvious junk mail I pitched. The bills could certainly wait, but the incoming money would defray my expenses this afternoon.
I stopped at a cash machine to deposit the money and withdraw a couple of hundred. Armed with that I walked west on Van Buren, hunting for a place that carried work clothes. The systematic mowing down of the Loop to make room for glitzy high rises has driven most of the low-rent business away. Van Buren used to be jammed with army surplus outlets, hardware shops, and the like, but only the peep shows and liquor stores have kept a tenacious hold on the area. They would probably go last.
I had to walk the better part of a mile before I found what I was looking for, I bought a hard hat and a heavy set of coveralls and work gloves. At five-eight I’m tall for a woman, but I still fit easily into a man’s small.
Everything looked too new to convince anyone I was a seasoned construction worker. Back in my office I laid the coveralls on the floor and scooted across them in my desk chair several times. Now they looked new but covered with grease.
I keep a set of tools in my filing cabinet to work on the women’s toilet, which goes out an average of twice a month. Since Tom Czarnik would like to get rid of all women tenants, not just me, I’ve learned to do plumbing
