And I was okay, sort of. I’d been out of control since ringing Todd Pichea’s doorbell last night. Why worry about losing it further at Cook County Hospital?
It was noon when I finally pulled myself together and started the car. I was on the South Side already, two blocks from Damen; a few more miles south and I could start checking the bars near Mitch Kruger’s old home. I just didn’t have the stomach for any more broken-down lives today.
Instead I turned toward Lake Michigan and drove north, past the city to the tony suburbs, where private grounds hid the lake from view, and finally to the open land beyond them. Although the day was clear and the water blue and calm, it was still much too cold for swimming. Clumps of picnickers dotted the lakefront, but I was able to find a stretch of deserted beach where I could take off my clothes and go into the water in my underwear. Within a few minutes my feet and my ears were aching with cold, but I kept pushing myself until I felt a roaring in my head and the world turned black around me. I stumbled to the shore and lay panting on the sand.
When I woke up the sun was low in the sky. I’d made a fine spectacle for passing voyeurs all afternoon, but no one had bothered me. I put my jeans and shirt back on and headed back to town.
Depression over my failure with Mrs. Frizell made me sleep heavily that night, too heavily, so that I woke late on Sunday feeling thick and unrefreshed. The air outside had turned unexpectedly thick and heavy, too, not good for jogging. Ninety degrees and muggy in early June? Did this mean that the dread greenhouse effect was kicking in and I should trade in my high-performance car for a bicycle? I didn’t think I could worry about Mrs. Frizell, Mitch Kruger, and the environment all on the same weekend.
I drank a cup of coffee and drove my high-performance car over to a Y where I sometimes swim. Sunday is family day: the pool was about equal parts chlorine and screaming children. I retreated to the weight room to spend a dull half hour on the machines. Working on machines is monotonous, and people in weight rooms too often seem to share the look of private self-satisfaction you get when you preen in front of a mirror—Gosh, I’m so beautiful, with such fabulous muscle development, I think I’ve fallen in love.
I stood it as long as I could, then wandered into the gym to find a pickup basketball game. I was in luck. Someone was just leaving to get her kids out of the pool. We could only keep the court for another twenty minutes, but by the time the men arrived to take over I was wet with sweat and the feeling of heaviness had gone from my head.
When I went in to shower I realized I’d left my gym bag in the weight room. Returning to pick it up I was surprised to see Chrissie Pichea on the lat machine I’d been using. Not surprised to see her working on her trapezius, just that she was at the Y. I’d figured her for a high-end Lincoln Park or Loop gym. She turned red when she recognized me.
“Since you and Todd took care of Mrs. Frizell’s dogs, I have time to build up my pecs,” I said heartily, picking up my bag.
Her face tightened in anger. “Why don’t you just mind your own business!”
“I’m like you—I like to help the neighbors. Or when you go barging in on Mrs. Tertz and Mrs. Frizell, is that just your own business you’re minding?”
She released the weights so fast, they crashed loudly as they landed. “Just who died and left you God?”
I smiled at her. “Old, tired line, Chrissie. Don’t let the weights go so fast—it’s a good way to tear a muscle.” I sauntered from the room, whistling under my breath. Gosh, Vic, you’re so witty, I think I’m falling in love.
Back home I felt alert enough to phone Mrs. Frizell’s son in San Francisco. He answered on the eighth ring, when I’d begun to think he must be away for the weekend. I reminded him that we’d spoken last Monday after I found his mother in her bathroom.
“Yes?”
I explained what had happened to the dogs. “I went to see her yesterday. She’s not in good shape. It might kill her to learn her dogs have been put to sleep. The nursing staff want to talk to you first—they don’t want to run that kind of risk without her family knowing.… I gather you’re her only family?”
“It’s possible my father’s still alive, in whatever Shangri-la he fled to before I was born. Since they never got divorced he’s technically still her closest family member, but I don’t suppose he’d care much more now than he has anytime in the last sixty years. Anyway, I authorized a lawyer who lives near her to serve as her guardian. Why don’t you talk it over with him?” His voice was bitter, six decades of grievance giving it an edge.
“There’s a bit of a problem with that: he’s the one who got the county to put her dogs to sleep. He doesn’t much care about the effect that has on your mother—he only wanted to be appointed guardian so he could get rid of the dogs.”
“I expect you’re exaggerating that,” he said. “What’s your own interest in my mother?”
Just a concerned neighbor? A busybody who can’t keep her nose out of other people’s lives? “She’s a client of mine. I can’t abandon her just because her mind is wandering.”
“A client? What kind of—I go over Mother’s bills once a quarter, after the bank has paid them. I don’t recall your name—Sharansky, did you say?”
“No, I keep saying ‘Warshawski.’ You wouldn’t find a bill—I’ve been doing pro bono work for her.”
“Yes, but what are you doing for her? There are plenty of people around preying on the elderly. You’d better spell your name for me. I’d like Pichea to look into this.”
“How do you know he isn’t one of those people preying on the elderly?” I asked. “Who did you get to investigate him? Are you going to continue examining your mother’s bills now that you’ve given him carte blanche to run her life?”
“He gave me the name of his law firm. I called and they assured me of his credentials and his disinterestedness. Now, if you’ll spell your name for me—”
“But he’s not disinterested,” I squawked. “He wants your mother out of this neighborhood. He wanted the dogs put to sleep; he’s probably hoping she’ll die in the hospital so he can sell the house to some yuppie like himself—”
Byron interrupted me in turn. “My mother is a very difficult person. Very difficult. I haven’t been to Chicago to see her for four years now, but she was acting senile even then. Of course, she’s been acting senile as long as I’ve known her, but at least she used to keep up the property. Well, four years ago I saw she was letting that house go to rack and ruin.” He repeated the phrase as though he’d invented it and liked to hear it rolling around his tongue.
“If it hadn’t been for me the whole place would have collapsed around her ears from the water damage. She couldn’t be bothered to call roofers. She can’t pick up the refuse people dump in the yard. I bet she hasn’t used a vacuum cleaner in eighty years. I think it’s time she went into a nursing home or some other facility where she’d be looked after.”
He was gasping for breath. I didn’t think this was the time to tell him most people hadn’t owned vacuum cleaners eighty years ago.
“And it doesn’t break my heart to hear those damned dogs are dead, either,” he went on. “She was always the same. When I was a boy I couldn’t bring anyone over to the house because of all the animals she had roaming around the place. It was more like living in a zoo than in a home, just because her dream was to be a vet and she had to work in a box factory instead.
“Well, we all have to give up our dreams—I wanted to be an architect but there wasn’t money for that kind of education so I became an accountant instead. I don’t go around filling my house with blueprints. I adjusted. Mother never learned that. She always thought rules applied to other people, never herself, and now she’s going to have to learn the hard way that it just isn’t so.”
I’d always wanted to play in the majors but had ended up in law school instead. And I won scholarships and worked nights and summers to make it happen. It was hard for me to snivel over Byron’s lost dreams, but I felt sad f
or Mrs. Frizell.
“Vet schools are hard to get into,” I said aloud, “and I bet sixty-five years ago it was nearly impossible for women.”
“And I don’t need some damned lecture on women’s rights either. Until women can look after their children properly, they don’t deserve any other rights. I can just imagine what she did to my father to drive him away. Who the hell are you, anyway, to come around lecturing me? What kind of work have you been doing for Mother? Bringing her veterinary medicine manuals?” he jeered savagely. “What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer. And a private investigator.”
“If you’re a lawyer, what are you doing for Mother?”
“Trying to protect her assets, mister. She’s worried about them.”
“I haven’t seen—oh, yes. You claim to be doing pro bono work. Well, I’ll talk to Pichea about you and see what he has to say, Ms. Warinski.”
“It’s Warshawski,” I snapped. “And why don’t you take my number too. Put it side by side with his so that the next time an attack of filial piety overwhelms you, you can reach me.”
He hung up before I’d got the first three digits out.
I sat on the living room floor, looking at the phone. My mother died when I was fifteen; there are still nights I wake up missing her so much that a physical pain sucks at my diaphragm. But I’d rather have that pain every night of the year than get to be sixty and still be swallowing an undigested lump of anger.
My stomach interrupted my morose thoughts. My stomach was probably making me more morose than the situation warranted—I hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was long past lunchtime. The kitchen didn’t hold anything more appetizing than it had earlier in the week. I changed into lightweight cotton pants and a T-shirt, stopped at the Belmont Diner for a BLT with fries, and drove south.
14
Luther Revisited
Mitch’s old address on Thirty-fifth Street proved to be another rooming house, but it was quite a step up from Mrs. Polter’s. The house, a shabby white-painted frame, was scrupulously clean, from the well-scrubbed stoop to the living room where Ms. Coriolano talked to me. A woman of perhaps fifty, she explained that she managed the place for her mother, who had started renting rooms when her husband died falling from a scaffolding twenty years ago.
“It was hard to live on Social Security then—now it’s impossible and Mama has arthritis, she can’t walk, can’t get up the stairs no more.”
I clucked sympathetically and brought the conversation around to Mitch. Ms. Coriolano threw up her hands. He had lived with them for three years, brought in by one of the other boarders, Jake Sokolowski. Such a responsible, reliable man, of course they were happy to take in his friend, but Mr. Kruger never paid his rent on time. Not once. And stumbling in drunk late at night, waking Mama, who had trouble sleeping—what could she do? She gave him warning on warning, extension on extension, but finally had to throw him out.
“He set fire to the bedding in his sleep when he was drunk. We were lucky it was one of Mama’s sleepless nights. She smelled smoke—she screamed—I woke up and put the fire out myself. Otherwise we would all be sleeping on benches in Grant Park right now.”
She hadn’t seen Mitch since the morning after the fire, when she’d made him leave, but she was happy for me to talk to Sokolowski. He was sitting in the minuscule backyard, sleeping with the Sunday Herald-Star. I had met him three years earlier when he joined Kruger and Mr. Contreras in trying to defend Lotty’s clinic. When I woke him it was clear he didn’t recognize me, but like Mitch he enthusiastically remembered the fight.
Mitch being missing didn’t worry Sokolowski much. “Probably sleeping off a bender someplace. It’s not like Sal to worry over a guy like Mitch. He must be drinking too much of that swill he calls grappa.”
When pressed, he thought back to the last time he’d seen Mitch. After much internal debate he decided it had been last Monday afternoon. Mitch had stopped by to persuade Jake to join him in a drink. “But I know what those drinks with Mitch are like. The next thing you know he’s had ten and you either have to carry him home or pay to repair a window.”
As Tessie had suggested, Mitch had a regular bar near the Coriolano house, Paul’s Place at the corner of 36th and Seely. Jake was sure that’s where Mitch would have gone on Monday. He resettled himself under the sports pages as I headed back into the house.
I thanked Ms. Coriolano for her help and walked over to Paul’s Place. It was a sparely furnished storefront, more Spartan than Tessie’s, with a half-dozen men watching the Sox on a small color set high on the wall behind the bar. The bartender, a bald man in his sixties with big forearms and a tidy round potbelly, chewed on a toothpick. He leaned against the wall at the end of the bar, watching the game, bringing refills to his regulars but not paying any attention to me.
I waited respectfully until Ozzie Guillen turned a perfect double play, and then brought out my threadbare inquiries. In a place where people knew Mitch well I didn’t try to pass myself off as a niece, but explained that I was a friend of Mr. Contreras. None of them knew him, but they all knew Mitch, as did the bartender.
“I know Tonia finally threw him out,” he offered, moving the toothpick to the corner of his mouth. “He was around here trying to cadge a room. None of us would bite: we know the guy too well.”
“When did you see him last?”
They debated it, but the Sox came to bat before they reached a conclusion. It wasn’t Jack Morris’s lucky day: the Sox sent seven men to the plate and scored four runs on a series of errors and Sammy Sosa’s double. The half-inning went on so long that the group had forgotten me and Mitch Kruger. I brought them back to the question of when they’d seen him last.
“It had to be Monday,” the bartender finally said. “He bought drinks for everyone. Mitch is a generous guy when he’s flush, so we ask him did he win big at Hawthorne. He says no, but he’s going to be a rich guy before long and he isn’t one to forget his friends.”
None of them could add to that, although they murmured agreement—Mitch was generous when he had money. After a week had passed they couldn’t remember where he’d been heading when he left, or if he’d said anything else about what was going to make him rich. I stayed long enough to see the Tigers go down in order in the sixth before driving northeast to the Loop.
Ever since phoning Dick on Friday night I’d been wondering what I could do about Todd Pichea. After all, I’d told Dick I was on Pichea’s case. I could hardly admit it was just bluster. Besides, I really did want to do something about the little flea. But between agitation and humiliation I hadn’t been able to think of anything until I saw Jake Sokolowski dozing under the Herald-Star.
The South Loop hasn’t yet attracted the kind of chichi shops that stay open on Sunday afternoons. I didn’t have any trouble parking in front of the Pulteney building. We don’t have a doorman or a security guard to keep it open all weekend. The crusty super, Tom Czarnik, locks the front door at noon on Saturday and reopens it at seven on Monday morning. Occasionally he even arranges for someone to run a mop around the lobby floor. I hunted among my keys for the wide brass one that worked the front door dead bolt and wrestled with the stiff lock. Every time I make a Sunday visit I vow to bring a can of graphite with me to loosen the lock, but I do it so seldom that I forget between trips.
Czarnik had shut down the elevator power and locked the fire door at the bottom of the stairs. He doesn’t do this because he’s safety conscious, but from a bitter enmity against all the tenants. I’d long since managed to make keys for both the elevator and the stairwell, but I took the stairs; the elevator’s too chancy and I didn’t want to spend the next seventeen hours stuck in it.
Up in my office I tried Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star. He wasn’t at work or at home. I left messages at both places and pulled the cover from my mother’s old Olivetti, the obsolete machine I use for bills and correspondence. It was one of my few tangible legacies from her; its presence comfo
rted me through my six years at the University of Chicago. Even now I can’t bear to turn it in for a computer, let alone an electric typewriter. Besides, using it keeps my gun wrist strong.
I thought carefully before I started to type.
Why was Todd Pichea of Crawford, Mead, Wilton, and Dunwhittie, so anxious to take over the legal affairs of Harriet Frizell that he rushed a probate court representative to her Cook County Hospital bedside? Why was his first action on becoming her legal guardian to put her dogs to sleep? Was his sole aim in making her his ward the power to kill her dogs? Or does he have designs on her property as well? Does the firm of Crawford, Mead support Pichea’s action? And if so, why? Enquiring minds want to know.
I signed my name and made five copies—my concession to modernity is a desktop copier. My own copy I stuck in a folder labeled FRIZELL, which I placed in my client files. I put another in an envelope to Murray. The other four I planned to deliver in person: three at Dick’s firm—one to Dick himself, one to Todd, and a third to Leigh Wilton, one of the senior partners whom I knew. The original was addressed to the Chicago Lawyer.
I drove over to the new building on LaSalle where Crawford, Mead had moved their offices last year. It was one of my favorites in the West Loop, with a curved amber facade that reflected the profile of the skyline at sunset. I wouldn’t have minded an office there. It was second on my list of purchases, after a new pair of Nikes.
The guard in the lobby was watching the last of the Sox game; he motioned me toward the sign-in sheet, but didn’t care much what I did as long as I didn’t interrupt the final out. Only one elevator was turned on, its interior upholstered in pale orange to match the building’s amber glass. It sucked me up to the thirtieth floor, where it decanted me in about twenty seconds.
Crawford, Mead had moved the carved wooden doors from their old headquarters. As soon as you saw those massive doors, inlaid into gray worsted walls, you knew you’d be paying three hundred dollars an hour for the privilege of whispering guilty secrets to the high priests beyond.
Guardian Angel Page 10