I wrenched the Buick into a clumsy U–turn and followed at a discreet distance. Once we got onto a main road I let a few cars get in between me and Abigail. To my relief she drove past all the entrances to the Oak Brook shopping mall—I couldn’t imagine trying to engineer a meeting with her in there. We’d gone south a couple of miles when the Mercedes turned at a sign announcing the Leafy Vale Stables. It looked as though I could get my wish for a horse after all.
Fortunately, the leafy vale lay on the far side of the stables and house; I could see the Mercedes clearly from the road. I parked on the verge and watched as the little girl from the Baladine pool jumped out of the passenger seat. Abigail Trant climbed out and escorted her toward one of the buildings. The child was wearing riding clothes, but the mother had on knee–length shorts and a body–hugging top. Mother seemed to be giving directions to a woman who cocked her head deferentially. Abigail Trant kissed her daughter and climbed back into her sports utility tank. I drove a little further and backed the Rustmobile onto the verge where I could turn in either direction. The Mercedes turned toward Oak Brook.
My heart sank when she headed into the mall. It’s one thing to strike up a conversation over the produce counter, quite another in the middle of the couture salon at Neiman Marcus. I followed her gamely, parking a few cars beyond the Mercedes on the east side of the mall, and trailed behind her to the Parruca Salon. Parruca had a grand set of double doors. They were lined on the inside with red leather. I was able to detect that when a doorman opened them and greeted Abigail Trant by name. The doors closed as she asked after him with the graciousness of the true grande dame.
Short of pretending to be the new shampooer, I could hardly follow her while she had her weekly hair appointment. I wondered how long beautification took. At least long enough for me to wander into the maze of shops in search of a bathroom and a tall iced tea.
After half an hour I came back outside and waited with my newspaper. There wasn’t anyplace to sit, since you’re not supposed to be outside a mall—you’re supposed to be inside buying. As the sun rose toward the middle of the sky, the shade cast by the buildings became a thin wedge. I pushed my shoulders against the stone wall separating Parruca from the sportswear shop to its south and tried to pay attention to the problems besetting Kosovo.
Teenagers swarmed past me, chattering about hair, clothes, boys, girls. Solitary shoppers strode past, their faces set in grim lines, as though buying were an onerous duty. Every now and then the doorman opened Parruca’s red leather doors to decant a client or admit a new one. Finally, when my shirt was so soaked with sweat that I thought I’d have to slip into the sportswear shop to get a fresh one, Abigail Trant came out.
“We’ll see you next week, Mrs. Trant,” the doorman said, gracefully pocketing her tip.
I unglued my shoulders from the wall. Her honey–streaked hair was carefully combed into the right suggestion of windblown disorder, her makeup painted on with a subtle hand, her nails a gleaming pearl. To approach her in my sweaty sunburned state seemed almost sacrilegious, but I did it anyway.
She was startled but didn’t run shrieking for a security guard. Yes, her pleasant face showing no disdain, she certainly remembered my visit to Eleanor Baladine’s pool two days ago. But it was all she could do to keep track of her own daughter’s nanny—she certainly didn’t know anything about Eleanor’s.
“And you know, Teddy and I didn’t move back to the Chicago area until eighteen months ago, so that girl who was killed the other day wasn’t even around then. I’m afraid I can’t answer any questions about her.”
“Can you take ten minutes for a cup of coffee and answer a few other questions?”
A dimple appeared briefly at the corner of her mouth. “I’ve never been interrogated by a detective—maybe it will help me understand how to respond to the girls I’m sponsoring for the You Can Do It Foundation. Many of them seem to have been arrested before reaching high school, although usually for shoplifting.” She looked at her wrist. “I have just about fifteen minutes before my next engagement.”
The coffee bar was so mobbed we didn’t bother waiting for drinks but perched at the high counter. Mrs. Trant readily stepped me through a few basics—she had grown up not too far from here, gone to school with Jennifer Poilevy, had been thrilled when Global sent her and her husband back from Los Angeles to the Midwest.
“L.A. is a difficult place to raise a child. Everyone is on perpetual display, and the kids get sucked into that precocious environment far too young. Out here Rhiannon can simply be a child.”
With her swimming exercises, her horse, and all those other accoutrements of the simple life. But I wanted help, so I kept my sardonic observations to myself.
“It doesn’t seem as though Eleanor Baladine’s children have that same freedom,” I said. “Although I guess the girls are following her swimming regimen pretty enthusiastically.”
“I admire Eleanor, I really do. She’s lucky to have a gift that absorbs her so completely. And she’s wonderful to take Rhiannon under her wing, especially since Rhiannon’s started to outperform Madison. But I think it’s a mistake to push children too hard. When they get to adolescence that can come back to haunt you, you know.”
I grunted noncommittally. “You said that you grew up with Jennifer Poilevy. Was Eleanor Baladine part of your childhood as well?”
Looking briefly at her watch, Abigail Trant explained she’d gotten to know Eleanor before they moved to Oak Brook when their husbands started doing business together four years ago. “BB was solving a lot of Global’s security problems, and the two of them seemed to hit it off. And of course, Jean–Claude Poilevy has been incredibly helpful to us since we moved out here.”
I could imagine how helpful the Illinois Speaker could be to someone with money to fling in his direction—zoning regulations bent, tax breaks for Global, a special deal on the mansion in Thornfield Demesne. “I know the prison notified Baladine as soon as Nicola Aguinaldo got away, so Eleanor knew all about her death before I showed up. Do you have any hunches about why she was so rattled?”
Abigail shrugged. “It’s hard when violence comes close to your children, and the girl had been her children’s nanny.”
I smiled in a way I hoped invited bad–girl chat. “But really—I know she’s your friend and you’ve known her for years—watching her with her son, she doesn’t strike me as the warmly concerned mother.”
Abigail smiled back but refused to play. “BB is such an athletic man, and his naval service was the most important part of his life. It’s understandable he wants his only son to follow his path, and that may blind him and Eleanor to how hard they are on him. And it’s a tough world for a boy these days, it would be better if he could develop the ability to compete in it. If that’s all you need to know, I have to get going. We have twenty people coming to dinner and the caterer is going to need directions from me.”
She slid from her stool; I followed and said, “BB called me out to his office last night to threaten to put me out of business for asking questions about how his kid’s old nanny died. Do you have any idea why?”
She paused next to her stool. A teenager demanded to know whether we could make up our minds—were we going or staying—other people are waiting for seats, you know. The rudeness made Abigail Trant lean a hand on her stool and say we’d be through in a minute. The teenager gave an exasperated sigh and swung around, deliberately hitting Trant with her bag.
“Mall brats,” Abigail Trant said. “Why Rhiannon is not allowed to hang out here—I don’t want her acquiring these manners. Tell me a little about your business. I gather you’re not as big as Carnifice.”
Thank heaven for mall brats—Trant would be in her Mercedes by now if she hadn’t wanted to stomp on the kid. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of the difference between Warshawski Investigations and Carnifice Security. Something about it piqued a genuine interest from her—she forgot about the time and asked me how I’d gotten into detectio
n, what special training I’d needed, how long I’d been doing it.
“Do you enjoy having your own business? Doing all the work yourself, do you ever have time for a private life?”
I admitted a private life was hard for me to maintain. “Since I have to work for a living, I’m happier working for myself than I would be in a big outfit like Carnifice. Anyway, I like knowing that it’s my work that’s solved a problem.”
“Do you think BB could put you out of business?”
I hunched an impatient shoulder. “I don’t know. But I’m curious to know why my asking questions about his kid’s old nanny makes him want to.”
She tapped the wooden counter with one pearl–colored nail. “I don’t think there’s any special mystery about the dead girl. I think it has to do with BB’s personality. You came to his house, you interrogated his wife and his son, and it makes him feel that you proved he was vulnerable. He’s threatening you so he can feel better about the fact that a private detective with a very small company could penetrate his security systems.” She looked at her watch and gave a little gasp. “The time! I really have to run now.”
She threaded her way expertly through the crowds of shoppers. Everything about Abigail Trant depressed me—her polished good looks and manners, the fact that she had stiffed me half a dozen times with perfect good manners, and the possibility she could be right about Nicola Aguinaldo. She was only thirty–five, but she could dance rings about me—no wonder she was entertaining important guests in Oak Brook and I was taking my sweaty body back to my un–air–conditioned car.
14 Crumbs from the Table
When I got back to the city I was too worn out by the heat to go to my office. I’d been planning on buckling down on my project for Continental United, but I went home and showered and lay down.
As I dozed through the midday heat my conversation with Abigail Trant kept coming into my dreams. In some of them she was sweetly commiserating because my work interfered with my social life. In others she was standing on the sidelines as BB Baladine threatened me. I woke for good from a nightmare in which Baladine was choking me while Abigail Trant said, “I told you he didn’t like to be threatened.”
“But I wasn’t threatening him,” I said aloud. “It was the other way around.” And what was I supposed to do, back away from Baladine because he interpreted any approach as aggression? Anyway, maybe Abigail Trant was right about Baladine’s character, but I thought there was more to the story than that—some issue about Nicola Aguinaldo, either her life or her death. Perhaps when she escaped from prison she approached Baladine and he interpreted that as a threat, knocked her out, then ran over her. As he got back into his car the emblem came off his loafer. My research said he was a Porsche man. I wondered if his Carrera had been in a body shop lately.
It was all a load of speculative nonsense. Except for the fact that Nicola Aguinaldo was dead. I wished I could talk to her mother. Why had Abuelita Mercedes disappeared so suddenly just at the time her daughter died? Maybe if I went back to Aguinaldo’s neighborhood I could find the mysterious Mr. Morrell, the man asking questions about people who escaped from jail. I made myself an espresso to cut through the dopiness I felt from dozing in the heat, and got dressed again.
I dumped my sweaty jeans in the hamper and chose my outfit carefully—Abigail Trant had made me feel like a grubby hulk. I laughed at myself, a little shamefaced, but still put on clean linen slacks with a big white shirt, even dabbing on lipstick and powder. The result didn’t approach Ms. Trant’s perfection: a polished appearance is like any other skill—you have to work at it a lot to be good. Maybe weekly visits to Parruca’s would help, too.
Saturday is errand day in Uptown just as in Oak Brook, but the girls here were doing chores, not taking riding lessons. When I rang Mrs. Attar’s bell, a sullen Mina, huffy at having to dust, came to the door. The girls had mentioned someone named Aisha; it was Aisha’s father Morrell was talking to. After some grumbling, Mina directed me to the other girl’s apartment, two doors up the street.
Aisha’s father was home, looking after a small boy who was wearing only a diaper. The man greeted me with unsmiling reserve and didn’t move out of the doorway. In stilted but passable English he demanded to know what business of mine it was whether he had a daughter named Aisha? When I explained my errand, the man shook his head. He was afraid the neighborhood girls liked to tease strangers. He didn’t know anyone named Morrell. His wife might have known a woman named—what was it? Abuelita Mercedes?—but she was at the market; the name meant nothing to him. And now if I would excuse him he was very busy. I handed him a card, with a request to call me if he ever heard from Mr. Morrell. It fluttered to the floor in front of him, where I left it.
It was humiliating to be mistaken for an INS officer. Or an agent of a foreign secret–police force. I didn’t know which would be worse.
There might have been something more profitable I could have done with the rest of the afternoon, but I went home and worked on personal projects, matting some prints I’d picked up at a flea market. One of the pictures showed a young woman about Aguinaldo’s age. She was partly dressed, in a kind of camisole, and was staring at a window; what I liked about the picture was the reflection of her face in the glass.
I started wondering about the shirtdress Aguinaldo had been wearing. The lab’s report had explained only how they’d tested the outside of the fabric for automobile traces. Maybe the inside of the shirt could tell me something about how Nicola Aguinaldo had died.
I was actually feeling edgy enough to try the lab. Of course no one was answering on a Saturday afternoon. I worked my way through the voice menu and left a message in the mailbox of the guy who had signed the report on the Trans Am.
Sunday morning I went out with the dogs for another early swim, keeping an eye open for Lemour. Back home I told Mr. Contreras I would take Peppy to the office with me for company. I assured him I’d be back by four: he and the dogs and I were joining Mary Louise and her foster sons for a picnic. Mary Louise and I get together once a week to go over work; this week we’d decided to combine it with a family outing.
“Okay, doll, okay. You got a water dish down there? It’s too hot for the princess to go all day without drinking.”
I bit back a sharp retort. “Her comfort is my main object in life. And my office is air–conditioned. I hope no animal–rights people are out throwing yellow paint on her today, because she just won’t give up that big old fur coat, not even in June, will you, girl?”
Peppy grinned in happy agreement and clattered down the stairs with me, her tail waving a pointed put–down at Mitch, left at home with my neighbor. At my office she ran first to Tessa Reynolds’s studio. Tessa is a sculptor. These days she was working with marble; the dust made her short dreadlocks glitter under her bright lights. She waved a muscular forearm at me, gave the dog a quick scratch, but was too deep in her work to take a break.
If Tessa wouldn’t stop to talk I had no choice but to go to work myself. While my computer came up I pulled out my phone books and started calling everyone in the metropolitan area named Morrell. I didn’t try anything smart—just the unvarnished truth: V. I. Warshawski, private investigator, looking for the man asking questions of immigrants in Uptown. Of course half the people weren’t home, but those who were either didn’t know what I was talking about or affected not to.
“Enough, Warshawski, get to the stuff you know you need to do,” I muttered, inserting a CD–ROM with a cross–directory for Georgia phones and addresses. Checking phone numbers was mindless work; my thoughts kept creeping back to Aguinaldo. Baladine said she’d faked an illness to get sent to the hospital. Mary Louise said the prison had reported an ovarian cyst. Did Baladine know that was faked? Or that the report was a fake?
When I was with the public defender, my clients found it impossible to get medical care. One man with lymphoma had a tumor constricting his diaphragm and died in solitary for causing a disturbance when he tried to
summon help. It was hard to believe that Coolis was so tender of their charges that Aguinaldo could have faked an illness. And once she’d fled the hospital, how had she gotten to Chicago so fast?
I put down my notes on Georgia and went to the cupboard to pull my Illinois county maps. Peppy, lying under a table, half–sat up to see whether I was leaving. She lay down again when I returned to my desk.
The hospital in Coolis sat on the northwest end of the town, the prison side, where growth was fastest. If Aguinaldo had left in a supply or laundry truck, they would have gone out the service road, which followed Smallpox Creek. I squinted through my magnifying glass to bring up the details. Assuming she’d hopped off the truck before it reached the town center, she had limited choices—she could follow Smallpox Creek on foot north to Lake Galena or try to hitch a ride on Route 113, which led from the hospital past the prison as well as northeast away from the town.
There was only one crossroads between the hospital and the prison, Hollow Glen Road, which intersected again with 113 a mile north and another state road a mile south. It might be worthwhile to see if someone picked her up—assuming Robert Baladine hadn’t been waiting at Hollow Glen Road in his Porsche. Those queries were ones that only the police or state marshals had the resources to undertake. I put the map down in frustration.
I went back to my paying client’s work and forced myself to stay with it, copying numbers into a file, then laying them across a blowup of the area where Continental United’s trucks were coming to grief. I was hard at it when Tessa popped her head around my door.
“Your friend Murray is outside—he rang my bell by mistake. Shall I let him in? He’s brought some talent with him.”
Hard Time Page 11