After lunch, I delivered several subpoenas, all of which were record subpoenas that could be quickly served to the named companies. At City Hall, I completed a handful of public records checks, one of which was for a troubling case: my twenty-year-old client, Nora Edgar, had found out she was adopted at birth after a hospital worker found her in a storage room. She wanted to find out who her birth mother was. I called it my Storage Room case.
I kept looking at the Green Teen file folder and feeling guilty about not being able to do more. The girl’s mother Louise and her sister Flora were at that moment in Detroit looking for Erma, and I was surprised not to have heard from them by now. A previous visit a couple of weeks earlier had proved unproductive for them. But after I was able to locate Erma’s father, who was in a small-town jail outside of Detroit, Louise and Flora had insisted on paying him a visit. I had tried to discourage them from meeting with him given his criminal history, but they were determined.
Before I left for the day, I stuck my head in Elmer’s door to tell him I was leaving for the day and casually mentioned I was thinking about giving up being a process server because of the potential danger involved.
“Why would you do that? It’s good solid work for in between cases. You’d be foolish to give that up.”
“But there have been incidents—”
“So bring Danny along on all of them just to be safe.”
I told him I’d give it some more thought but that if I did continue, I was going to raise my prices. After I gave Danny his cut, it hardly seemed worth the effort with what I currently charged.
Elmer’s sudden interest in what I was doing puzzled me—he never had been before.
* * *
In the office the next morning, I spent an hour writing my Three Vs report for Mrs. Van Zandt. Based on my surveillance, Mr. Van Zandt was either not very bright or wanted to get caught. Why else would he have gone into a popular local bar, sat in the window with a voluptuous blonde, escorted her under bright streetlights to his car, and driven with her to a little run-down motel on the outskirts of town? He couldn’t have made it any easier for me if he had tried.
Naomi told me Elmer had her busy doing something personal for him and she hadn’t had much time to work on the Mexican caper. That was disappointing, but I had no legitimate complaint, as he was still paying the bulk of her salary.
Louise called me from a Detroit hotel room to tell me she and Flora had connected with Erma’s father.
“Apparently, Erma located my jailbird ex-husband, probably under a rock somewhere, and he didn’t even bother to contact me. Said he didn’t have my number.”
“When was this?” I asked her.
“A week ago, before he got arrested for public indecency. Erma told him she didn’t like my rules, and that’s why she left. Wanted to know if she could come live with him.”
“What did he tell her?”
“Hell, no!”
“Nice.”
“Oh, he’s a real gem, but I’m just happy he said no.”
“So what happened then?”
“He said he gave her forty dollars, enough for a bus ticket home and then some.”
“At least he did that.”
“Mm-hm.”
“It’s probably a little too long after the fact, but you could go to the bus terminal, show her picture to the agents, and ask if they remember seeing her.”
“We were thinking that too.”
“Call me with any news, okay?”
We ended the call, and after spending a long afternoon at City Hall, I grabbed a quick sandwich for dinner. Only one lead had panned out at City Hall, but it was the one I had hoped for. My Storage Room client had given me the wrong hospital name. It wasn’t Presbyterian Hospital, it was St. Luke’s. A clerk in the records department had told me people got those two hospitals mixed up all the time, since they later merged into one—Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Hospital. My plan was to pay them a visit the next day in the hope that they kept old records.
THIRTEEN
He Pulled Into Where?
Two days after my encounter with Tymon, Minnie called me. I had tried to talk to her the following day, but she was so hung over she hadn’t wanted to talk.
“Got a minute?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. How do you think I’m feeling?”
“I was just—”
“Do you want to hear what I have to say or not?”
“Of course I do.”
“Tymon called me this morning asking me the same dumb question. Anyway, we got to talking more about the mystery man, Al, and he finally said he suspected he was Anna’s lover.”
“Really.”
“And he said that Anna confided to him right before she died that she was certain this guy had a wife.”
“No kidding.”
“I’m having lunch with him tomorrow, at Jake’s. I’ll do some more snooping.”
I wanted to tell her to please not drink, but knowing her likely response to that, I didn’t.
“Minnie?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful?”
“Gracie?”
“Yes.”
“You worry too much.”
* * *
I imagined telling a stranger a little about myself.
Hello. My name is Grace Lindroth, but maybe not. It could be Celina Vargas. The woman I think was my mother fled from Mexico when it became too dangerous for her to live with her uncle, who it appears was involved in some dicey business dealings. She ended up in Chicago, where she bought a boardinghouse and then had an affair with one of the boarders, whose last name I don’t know and who was married to another woman at the time. I was born, or at least I think I was, and seven months later, she was murdered. Who raised me? Well, it appears it may have been the people who killed my mother.
I’d seen soap operas with less drama.
I kept replaying in my head what Tymon had said. That Anna had questioned whether Mark Smith had been the boarder’s real name lent support to the fact that I couldn’t find anything on the man—no birth certificate, death certificate, voter registration, Social Security number, business license, census data...nothing. But Minnie had been able to give me the date he died, so all I had to do was tie him to one of the names on the list of men who died in Cook County on that day. I hoped it was a short list.
I couldn’t be too surprised that Anna’s house had been picked clean immediately after she died. Tymon’s understanding was that the medical examiner initially considered her death to be by natural causes until he examined her body in his laboratory and declared it a homicide, so the police wouldn’t have treated her apartment as a crime scene at first, so who knows who came and went?
But who would have taken all the furniture, including everything in the baby’s room—my room? Had the same person who stole everything stolen me as well?
As much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t discount the idea that it was possible my parents had had something to do with her death and my kidnapping. The evidence was there, so as preposterous as that seemed to me, I couldn’t rule it out.
One of the most valuable pieces of information Tymon had divulged was that Henry Sikes—the busybody—was still around. I was willing to bet he was a jackpot of information. Unfortunately, I was unable to find residential information on him. My hope was that Minnie would be more successful.
What Minnie had said to me one day about being part of my life and feeling useful again resonated with me. On the way to City Hall to look at death records, I tried to think of something nice I could do for her. Something she would never expect, and something she would truly appreciate.
I had to wait in line at the County Clerk’s Office, and when it was my turn, I asked to speak with Flora. When she came out, I told her what I was searching for, and instead of having to jump through the normal hoops, she led me directly into the archives room and showed me where the indices were for the death certifi
cates. She cleared off a desk where I could work.
It didn’t take me long to compile a list of Cook County men who died on June 6, 1943. Mark Smith was not among the seventy-three names.
It seemed to me that seventy-three was an awfully big number even for a major city like Chicago, so I asked Flora about it. She disappeared for a few minutes, and when she returned, she explained that soldiers from Cook County who had died in the war were included on the list. There was no way around it—I would need to see the actual death certificate for each man in order to exclude him.
Flora assigned a junior clerk to pull the records for me, ten at a time. It was an arduous task for him but not for me. I was looking for a particular address, for the place of death, something I could determine in seconds.
Two hours into the project, I found it. Marcus O’Gowan had died at the boardinghouse address on June 6, 1943. Cause of death: heart attack. So Anna’s hunch had been right—he hadn’t given her his real name. But why?
It was disappointing that many of the fields on the death certificate that could have contained helpful information were left blank. What was even more disheartening was that it said he was born in Dublin, Ireland, and was not a U.S. citizen, which limited any other information I would be able to dig up on him. His middle initial was T; his birthday was July 20, 1909; and his cremated remains were buried in Cook County Cemetery. I had to accept the fact that was probably all I would ever know about him.
I drove by my old house on the way home and, being in a sentimental mood, parked a few houses down from it. It seemed so much longer than four and a half years since I’d lived here.
I stared at the front door, a door we had seldom used. A rolled-up newspaper lay on the walk leading to it. When I was young, that had been my job—bringing in the mail and newspapers.
Beyond that door was the living room. We’d seldom used that either. Thinking back, I realized the three of us had usually been in separate rooms, doing our own things.
I watched an approaching car slow down in front of the house. Elmer’s turquoise Buick was unmistakable. I wasn’t too surprised to see him since he had said he lived in the neighborhood. Not wanting to run into him, I quickly slumped down in my seat.
The next thing I knew, he was pulling into my old driveway!
FOURTEEN
The Ninety-Pound Wuss
I remained slouched down behind my steering wheel, peering over the dashboard, as Elmer’s car disappeared behind the row of thick evergreens that lined the side of the driveway.
I wracked my brain trying to remember that conversation in December when I told him about the neighbor boy who’d dropped by the office to see him. I was pretty sure he’d said he lived in the next block, but he’d acted real funny during that conversation, like he hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Why would he have lied about where he lived? That is, if he did live there.
A car door slammed. Elmer emerged from behind the evergreens, walked to the front of the house, picked up the newspaper, and returned to the back. I waited another minute, but nothing happened. Not wanting to risk him recognizing my car, I headed for home.
* * *
Well before work the next morning, I drove by my old house again. Elmer’s car was in the same spot in the driveway. Either he lived there, or he was close to someone who did.
Later, at the office, Naomi came over to tell me that the name Ignacio Ramirez was so common in Mexico, and Anna’s uncle’s involvement with Pemex had been so long ago, that she hadn’t been able to come up with anything. She appeared as though she was about to say something else but then stopped herself and walked out of the room. She’d been acting a little strange lately—fidgety or something. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Fearful it might have something to do with the work I was giving to her, I made a mental note to talk to her about it after Elmer left for the day.
Disappointed with Naomi’s findings, I went to work on the Storage Room case. Finding birth parents was usually difficult. If an adoption went through an agency, the agency kept tight control of the records. Same thing if it went through an attorney. And if the adoption was illegal, it was even harder to unearth any information about it.
There was another case on my desk that I had recently acquired—I called it my Midnighter case. Flora Walsh from the County Clerk’s office had retained me, but a dozen or so of her neighbors were sharing in the cost. For the past three months, she and her neighbors had had a variety of things stolen in the middle of the night from their patios, garages, sheds, and yards. Nothing expensive. In fact, that was one of the puzzling aspects of the case—I was told the burglar had sometimes taken trivial things and ignored valuable items placed right next to them. Stolen items included clothing, food, small tools, toys, bedding, and books.
Flora explained that the police had little interest in these penny-ante thefts, so she and her neighbors had taken it upon themselves to catch the thief on their own. After each neighbor had taken a turn standing watch through the night to no avail, they’d hired me.
I had a little breathing room in the afternoon, and so I went into the back room and combed through all the Attic Finds evidence to see if any bells went off given the new information I had.
I couldn’t stop staring at the photo of Anna holding me in the rocking chair. She was looking down at me so lovingly. All you could see was her profile, but even so, you could tell she was smiling. I had never paid that much attention to the picture hanging on the wall behind us, and when I studied it more closely, it looked familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen it before. It was a landscape—mountains in the background, a stream on the left, some animals grazing on the right. I couldn’t tell what kind of animals, could have been deer. Maybe it was just a print of some famous painting—available in any department store.
I hadn’t noticed before either that Anna was wearing a necklace in the photo—a small pendant dangling from a thin chain. Could have been heart-shaped, hard to tell. I thought how nice it would have been to have something so personal of hers, something I could keep near me all the time, something by which to remember her.
A knock on the door interrupted my melancholy. Naomi asked me if she could talk to me after Elmer left for the day. Looked like we were on the same wavelength. Two minutes later, there was another knock on the door. It was Naomi again. Minnie was on hold.
I tried to absorb everything Minnie was telling me, but she was talking so fast, all I got were bits and pieces—something about talking to Henry, who said the police had got it all wrong and his cousin could get in trouble. Finally, I asked her if I could come over later to hear it in person, and she agreed.
The afternoon moved at a snail’s pace because I was so anxious to hear what both Naomi and Minnie had to tell me. And then it occurred to me that I had planned to go to Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Hospital to look for birth information on Nora Edwards. That would likely take longer than Naomi would be willing to stay, and even if she was willing to stay late, I wanted to get to Minnie’s as soon as possible. Nora would just have to wait until tomorrow. I felt a little guilty about delaying a case involving finding someone else’s birth parent in favor of my own self-interest, but I figured one more day wouldn’t make any difference.
When Elmer finally left, I went out to the reception area to talk with Naomi.
“I hope this doesn’t come back to hurt me in the end, but I feel I have to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“Elmer has been paying Danny to keep an eye on you and feed back to him what you’re doing.”
“What? What makes you think that?”
“I have eyes and ears.”
“I’m not surprised to hear he pays Danny for helping him—the same as I do—but why do you think it’s to watch me?”
“I’ve heard Danny tell him where you are, where you’re going to be, what cases you’re working on.”
I had told Danny when I hired him that what I worked on was confidentia
l and not to be discussed with anyone but me. I thanked her for that tidbit of information and returned to my office to tidy up.
Naomi poked her head in my door.
“Good night, Miss Lindroth. I hope I didn’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. If I did, I apologize.”
“Don’t worry about it. I appreciate the information.”
“If what I said gets back to Mr. Berghorn, I’m sure he’ll fire me.”
“You have nothing to worry about with me.”
I wasn’t sure what I thought about what Naomi had told me. First of all, she had made the assumption that the money Elmer gave to Danny was compensation for watching me when it could have been for something else. Why would Elmer care where I was and what I was doing anyway? Just to be safe, I decided not to use Danny anymore. I would just have to be more selective about the process-server jobs I accepted.
I finished up and headed out to Minnie’s. Upon opening her door, she greeted me with a toothy smile and ushered me into the living room. She poured us each a glass of Scotch.
“So, Detective Lawless, what have you got for me?”
“Don’t you get saucy with me.”
Saucy? “I was complimenting you!”
“Never you mind.”
I laughed to myself—that had been an expression my mother had often used.
“Anyway, like I started to tell you on the phone, Tymon and I met for lunch at Jake’s, and all I did was schmooze him because I didn’t want him to catch on to the real reason I wanted to be with him. So we talked about stupid stuff while we ate. I told him more about my Clarence, and he told me about how he had cared for his mother until she died. Stuff like that. So afterward, he went his way and I went mine, but as soon as he was out of sight, I went back into Jake’s, sat myself down at the bar, and ordered a beer.”
Regarding Anna Page 10