“It ain’t me, though. I’ve never laid eyes on you. You might be ugly.”
“Good-bye, Jack.”
It was after six when Elizabeth finished going through the supplemental reports from the Gary police, the Cook County sheriff and the Chicago Fire Department, and then pulling the files on Salcone and Ficcio. There was no question from the rap sheets that Salcone had worked for the Cambria family most of his life, and if Ficcio was carrying an identical weapon and entered the shop with him, then he must have too. But no matter how she put it all together, it still didn’t tell her exactly what had happened. She put away the papers and prepared to go home.
Now that she was alone in the office, without the unnerving sensation that somebody could overhear her thoughts by looking at her, she allowed herself to admit the truth. If she set aside the ugliness of what had happened, and thought of it as an event in the Butcher’s Boy’s personal history, the last two reports were promising. Whatever he was trying to do, he was getting himself into deeper trouble. Now he was being hunted by the Mob in Gary, and more ominously in Chicago, the territory of the huge, powerful Castiglione syndicate. He would understand better than she did what this meant. He was still alive, but the chance of his seeing the end of the month was virtually nonexistent. As long as he survived, each day it became more difficult for him to move freely, and eventually he would realize that he couldn’t do it anymore. Years ago she had spent months looking at windows he might have touched, or carpets he might have walked on, talking to people who might have seen him, always arriving after he had left, never getting closer than a few hours behind him. But pretty soon now he was going to have to walk into a police station somewhere. He would have to come to her, if only he could stay alive long enough to realize it.
She almost forgot to take the leather folder with her when she left the office. At home she was going to hold the paper up to the light and try to read the water mark to see if she could find some store that sold that kind of paper. Lana’s inquiry to the delivery service had yielded an order number that helped them to locate a copy of a receipt that said only “Cash” and Elizabeth’s name and office address.
It wasn’t as though she had a lot of friends who might suddenly send her an expensive present. She corrected herself. When she had begun making tactful inquiries this afternoon, she had run through six of them. Then she had forced herself to call Don Yeter, who had been one of Jim’s friends in the old days. Since a few weeks after Jim had died, Don had shown an interest in her that made her nervous and a little queasy, and she was relieved when she realized that he had no idea what she was talking about.
She had left the present in the white box and even retrieved the paper wrapping from the wastebasket, because either might help. Ten minutes after it arrived she had begun wishing the gift hadn’t found its way to her, and now she was beginning to resent the giver. She spent enough of her life trying to decipher puzzles, and the best she could hope for at the end of this one was to get an address for a thank-you note.
When she reached her car it was already looking lonely in this part of the lot. As she unlocked the door, she remembered that it was Thursday and that she still hadn’t taken it to the garage for its rejuvenation treatment. She felt guilty, and as she settled herself in the driver’s seat the feeling escalated to regret. But when the engine started she forgot about it; all that was important now was to get home to the kids.
Wolf watched the woman pull the little green car out of the parking lot and into position for a right turn onto the street. Even though there was nobody behind her, and nobody across from her, and anyone coming down the road could see that her only choices were to turn right or rise into the air like a dirigible, she had her turn signal blinking. She was E.V. Waring, without a doubt. There was no particular reason to switch the signal on, but no particular reason not to, and it made more sense to use up one ten-thousandth of the life of a forty-cent bulb than to surprise a pedestrian she hadn’t seen. The engraving should have said, “E. V. Waring, No Fool.”
As he pulled out after her, he wondered if she had fallen for the stationery after all. It could be a trap. She could lead him out into some spot in rural Maryland where forty FBI agents were waiting to drop on him like an avalanche. He had made sure the gift was something engraved with the name so that E. V. Waring couldn’t give it to his secretary, but he hadn’t considered the sophistication of logic that E. V. Waring might command; suppose she had figured out why he had sent it. But Waring—Miss or Mrs. Waring—was careful and methodical. If it was a setup, there would be at least one car behind him. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror as he drove, but no car stayed long enough to worry him. He concentrated on keeping one vehicle between her car and his so that she couldn’t get a clear view of him for long.
He followed her to a quiet street in Alexandria. There were tall trees and a lot of two-story houses built in the fifties by upscale couples with identical taste. He could have called hers the white one, except that he could have said the same about most of the houses on the street. All of them had some form of brick facing. When she pulled into the driveway, he considered lingering to get a closer look at her. But a glance up the street revealed cars in all the driveways and lights on in the front windows, so there was too much chance of being noticed. He drifted past.
Wolf turned at the next corner and cruised up the street behind hers. The houses there were almost the same. He tried to assess what he had gained from the time he had spent locating E. V. Waring. Well, for one thing, he had stayed out of sight and given the old men some time to think about the value of peace of mind. For another, he had probably forced the FBI to use up a lot of the money it was allocating to pay its grunts overtime to watch airport departure gates. But E. V. Waring herself was going to take more thought. Miss Waring wouldn’t pay the freight to live in a neighborhood like this, in one of these four-bedroom houses, but Mrs. Something would. Also, the car she had been driving had been Japanese, so it couldn’t have been issued by the United States government without starting a riot in Detroit. That meant it was registered in another name, probably her husband’s. Suddenly it occurred to him that he had fallen about as far as he was likely to go. He was probably going to be reduced to popping a suburban housewife with a deer rifle some morning when she opened the front door to pick up her paper in a pair of fuzzy slippers and a housecoat. The Sport of Kings.
Two days later Elizabeth gave up on the stationery. The paper was made by one of the largest manufacturers in the country, and the engraving, the manager of one of the stores told her, could have been done by anybody in the business, on the premises, in about an hour. The leather folder was impressive to his professional eye, but since it was stamped with a famous French trademark, it could hardly be traced without a great deal of difficulty. Elizabeth felt guilty using the folder, but since she had gone to so much trouble, she decided she had earned it.
On that same day she learned that she had a new neighbor. There was something annoying about having Maria be the one to tell her because a few months earlier she had told Elizabeth that the Bakers were having loud arguments. “They’re going to get the divorce,” she had pronounced with the air of a gypsy fortune-teller. Elizabeth had said she didn’t think so. Then, when the divorce was still in the stage where the opposing lawyers were bluffing each other about assets, Maria had said, “She’s going to take the house.” Elizabeth was more wary this time, and merely asked, “How do you know?” and Maria had answered, “The house is important to a woman,” as though her employer had just arrived from Jupiter. Sure enough, a few weeks later Brad Baker’s car was gone and Ellen was planting tulips in the front yard. Then, only a few days ago, Maria had announced that Ellen Baker would move out soon. “She was a fool and took the house,” she said. “The money was what she needed. Money doesn’t make you weep when you see it.”
Elizabeth never saw the rental sign go up, and never saw it go down. All she saw was the man. He wasn’t anybody she would have noticed except that he was living across the street from her, and therefore couldn’t be ignored. He was of average height and build, about five feet ten or eleven, in his late thirties or early forties, and he had light brown hair that she decided had probably been blond when he was a child. When she looked at him across the distance provided by the width of the street and their two little front lawns, she had to admit that he seemed unremarkable enough to share the general characteristics of a whole physical subgroup of men she’d known, including—there was no way to keep this thought from emerging—her own dead husband, Jim. He wore sport coats that seemed to fit him and ties with subdued patterns, didn’t carry his keys on his belt, have a wallet with a chain attached to it or wear shoes with noticeable heels, so he was probably all right. She was secretly pleased that he left for work every morning when she did because it meant that she didn’t have to rely on Maria for a description. She waited a few days for Maria to tell her he was taking drugs or bringing prostitutes into Ellen Baker’s house during his lunch hour, but he hadn’t stimulated Maria’s interest, and Elizabeth forgot about him.
* * *
Alexandria wasn’t a bad place to be while he waited for things to sort themselves out. It was important to stay away from the parts of the Washington area that were likely to be full of people who worked for Jerry Vico.
