The ward offices were still in the tidy brick two-flat on Avenue M. A variety of errands may take you to your committeeman’s office, from help with parking tickets to ways of getting on the city payroll. The local cops are in and out a lot what with one thing and another, and even though my dad’s beat had been North Milwaukee Avenue, I’d come here with him more than once. The sign proclaiming Art Jurshak alderman and Freddy Parma ward committeeman, which covered all of the building’s exposed north wall, hadn’t changed. And the storefront next door still housed the insurance agency that had given Art his toehold in the community.
I knocked most of the sludge from my right shoe and put my pumps back on. Brushing my skirt as best I could with a Kleenex, I went into the building. I didn’t recognize any of the men lounging in the first-floor office, but judging from their age and their air of being as one with the furnishings, I thought they probably went back to my childhood.
There were three of them. One, a graying man smoking the fat little cigar that used to be a Democratic pol’s badge of office, was huddled in the sports pages. The other two, one bald-headed, the other with a white Tip O’Neill-style mop, were talking earnestly. Despite their differing hairdos, they looked remarkably alike, their shaved faces red and jowly, their forty extra pounds hanging casually over the belts of their shiny pants.
They glanced sidelong at me when I came in but didn’t say anything: I was a woman and a stranger. If I was from the mayor’s office, it would do me good to cool my heels. If I was anyone else, I couldn’t do anything for them.
The two speakers were going over the rival merits of their pickup trucks, Chevy versus Ford. No one down here buys foreign-bad form with three quarters of the steel industry unemployed.
“Hi,” I said loudly.
They looked up reluctantly. The newspaper reader didn’t stir, but I saw him move the pages expectantly.
I pulled up a rollaway chair. “I’m a lawyer,” I said, taking a business card from my purse. “I’m looking for two men who used to live down here, maybe twenty years ago.”
“You oughta try the police, cookie-this isn’t the lost-and-found,” the bald-headed one said.
The newspaper rattled appreciatively.
I slapped my forehead. “Damn! You’re so right. When I lived down here Art used to like to help out the community. Shows you how times have changed, I guess.”
“Yeah, ain’t nothing like it used to be.” Baldy seemed to be the designated spokesman.
“Except the money it takes to run a campaign,” I said mournfully. “That’s still pretty expensive, what I hear.”
Baldy and Whitey exchanged wary glances: Was I trying to do the honorable thing and slip them a little cash, or was I part of the latest round of federal entrapment artists hoping to catch Jurshak putting the squeeze on the citizenry? Whitey nodded fractionally.
Baldy spoke. “Why you looking for these guys?”
I shrugged. “The usual. Old car accident they were in in ’80. Finally settled. It’s not a lot of money, twenty-five hundred each is all. Not worth a lot of effort to hunt them down, and if they’re retired, they’ve got pensions anyway.”
I stood up, but I could see the little calculators moving in their brains; the newspaper reader had let Michael Jordan’s exploits drop to his knees to join in the telepathic exercise. If they arranged a meeting, how much could they reasonably skim? Make it six hundred and that’d be two apiece.
The other two nodded and Baldy spoke again. “What did you say their names were?”
“I didn’t. And you’re probably right-I should have taken this to the cops to begin with.” I started slowly for the door.
“Hey, just a minute, sister. Can’t you take a little kidding?”
I turned around and looked uncertain. “Well, if you’re sure… It’s Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro.”
Whitey got up and ambled over to a row of filing cabinets. He asked me to spell the names, letter by painful letter. Moving his lips as he read the names on old voter registration forms, he finally brightened.
“Here we are-1985 was the last year Pankowski was registered, ’83 for Ferraro. Why don’t you bring their drafts in here? We can get them cashed through Art’s agency and see that the boys get their money. We should get ’em to reregister and it’d save you another trip down here.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said earnestly. “Trouble is, I have to get them to personally sign a release.” I thought for a minute and smiled. “Tell you what-give me their addresses and I’ll go see them this afternoon, make sure they still live down here. Then next month when the claim drafts are issued I can just mail them both to you here.”
They thought it over slowly. They finally agreed, again silently, that there was nothing wrong with the idea. Whitey wrote Pankowski’s and Ferraro’s addresses down in a large, round hand. I thanked him graciously and headed for the door again.
Just as I was opening it a young man came in, hesitantly, as if unsure of his welcome. He had curly auburn hair and wore a navy wool suit that enhanced the staggering beauty of his pale face. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a man with such perfect good looks-he might have posed for Michelangelo’s David. When he gave a diffident smile it made him look vaguely familiar.
“Hiya, Art,” Baldy said. “Your old man’s downtown.”
Young Art Jurshak. Big Art had never looked this good, but the smile must have made the kid resemble his old man’s campaign posters.
He flushed. “That’s okay. I just wanted to look at some ward files. You don’t mind, do you?”
Baldy hunched an impatient shoulder. “You’re a partner in the old man’s firm. You do what you want, Art. Think I’m going for a bite, anyway. Coming, Fred?”
The white-haired man and the newspaper reader both got up. Food sounded like a swell idea to me. Even a detective looking at a meager fee has to eat some of the time. The four of us left young Art alone in the middle of the room.
Fratesi’s Restaurant was still where I remembered it, on the corner of Ninety-seventh and Ewing. Gabriella had disapproved of them because they cooked southern Italian instead of her familiar dishes of the Piedmont, but the food was good and it used to be a place to go for special occasions.
Today there wasn’t much of a lunchtime crowd. The decorations around the fountain in the middle of the floor, which used to enchant me as a child, had been allowed to decay. I recognized old Mrs. Fratesi behind the counter, but felt the place had grown too sad for me to identify myself to her. I ate a salad made of iceberg lettuce and an old tomato and a frittata that was surprisingly light and carefully seasoned.
In the little ladies’ room at the back I got the most noticeable chunks of dirt off my skirt. I didn’t look fabulous, but maybe that suited the neighborhood better. I paid the tab, a modest four dollars, and left. I didn’t know you could get bread and butter in Chicago for under four dollars anymore.
All during lunch I’d turned over various approaches to Pankowski and Ferraro in my mind. If they were married, wives at home, children, they wouldn’t want to hear about Louisa Djiak. Or maybe they would. Maybe it would bring back the happy days of yore. I finally decided I’d have to play it by ear.
Steve Ferraro’s home was nearer to the restaurant, so I went there first. It was another of the endless array of East Side bungalows, but a little seedier than most of its neighbors. The porch hadn’t been swept recently, my critical housekeeping eye noted, and the glass on the storm door could have done with a washing.
A long interval passed after I rang the bell. I pushed it again and was about to leave when I heard the inner door being unlocked. An old woman stood there, short, wispy-haired, and menacing.
“Yes,” she said in one harsh, heavily accented syllable.
“Scusi,” I said. “Cerco il signor Ferraro.”
Her face lightened marginally and she answered in Italian. What did I want him for? An old lawsuit that might finally be going to pay out? To him only, or to his heirs?
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“To him only,” I said firmly in Italian, but my heart sank. Her next words confirmed my misgivings: il signor Ferraro was her son, her only child, and he had died in 1984. No, he had never married. He had talked once about a girl in the place where he worked, but madre de dio, the girl already had a baby; she was relieved when nothing came of it.
I gave her my card, with a request to call me if she thought of anything else, and set out for Green Bay Avenue without any high expectations.
Again a woman answered the door, a younger one this time, perhaps even my age, but too heavy and worn out for me to be certain. She gave me the cold fish eye reserved for life insurance salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses and prepared to shut the door on me.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said quickly. “I’m looking for Joey Pankowski.”
“Some lawyer,” she said contemptuously. “You’d better ask in Queen of Angels Cemetery-that’s where he’s spent the last two years. At least, that’s his story. Knowing that bastard, he probably pretended to die so he could go off with his latest little chickadee.”
I blinked a little under her fire. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pankowski. It’s an old case that’s been settled rather slowly. A matter of some twenty-five hundred dollars, not really worth bothering you about.”
Her blue eyes almost disappeared into her cheeks. “Not so fast, lady. You got twenty-five hundred, I deserve that money. I suffered enough with that bastard, God knows. And then when he died there wasn’t even any insurance.”
“I don’t know,” I said fussily. “His oldest child-”
“Little Joey,” she said promptly. “Born August 1963. In the Army now. I could hold it for him till he gets home next January.”
“I was told there was another child. A girl born in 1962. Know anything about her?”
“That bastard!” she screamed. “That lying, cheating bastard. He screwed me when he was alive and now he’s dead he’s screwing me still!”
“So you know about the girl?” I asked, startled at the thought that my search might be over so easily.
She shook her head. “I know Joey, though. He could of had a dozen kids before he got me pregnant with little Joey. If this girl thinks she’s the first, all I can say is you better run an ad in the Little Calumet Times.”
I took a twenty from my purse and held it casually. “We could probably advance something from the settlement. Do you know anyone who could tell me for certain if he had any children before little Joey? A brother, maybe? Or his priest?”
“Priest?” she cackled. “I had to pay extra just to get his bones into Queen of Angels.”
She was thinking hard, though, trying not to look directly at the money. At last she said, “You know who might know? Doc at the plant. He talked to them every spring, took their blood, their histories. Knew more about them than God, Joey once said.”
She couldn’t tell me his name; if Joey ever mentioned it, she couldn’t be expected to remember it after all this time, could she? But she took the money with dignity and told me to come back if I was in the neighborhood.
“I don’t expect to see any more of it,” she added with unexpected cheerfulness. “Not from what I know of that bastard. If my old man hadn’t made him, he wouldn’t of married me. And between you and me, I’d of been better off.”
8
The Good Doctor
Louisa and Caroline were returning from the dialysis center when I stopped by. I helped Caroline maneuver Louisa into a wheelchair for the short ride up the front walk. Getting her up the five steep steps took ten minutes of patient labor while she leaned heavily on my shoulder to hoist herself up each rise, then rested until she had enough wind for the next one.
By the time we had her settled in her bed, her breathing had turned to shallow, stertorous gasps. I panicked a little at the sound and at the purplish tinge beneath her waxy green skin, but Caroline treated her with cheerful efficiency, giving her oxygen and massaging her bony shoulders until she could breathe on her own again. However much Caroline might irritate me, I could only admire her unflagging goodwill in looking after her mother.
She left me alone with Louisa while she went off to make herself a snack. Louisa was drifting into sleep, but she remembered the Xerxes doctor with a hoarse little chuckle: Chigwell. They called him Chigwell the Chigger because he was always sucking their blood. I waited until she was sleeping soundly before releasing my hand from the grasp of her bony fingers.
Caroline was hovering in the dining room, her little body vibrating with anxiety. “I’ve wanted to call you every day, but I’ve forced myself not to. Especially last week when Ma told me you’d been by and she’d ordered you not to look for him.” She was eating a peanut-butter sandwich and the words came through thickly. “Have you found out anything?”
I shook my head. “I tracked down the two guys she remembers best, but they’re both dead. It’s possible one of them might have been your father, but I don’t have any real way of knowing. My only hope is the company doctor. He apparently used to compile copious records on the employees, and people tell their doctor things they might not say to anyone else. There’s also a clerk who worked at the corner grocery twenty-five years ago, but Connie couldn’t remember his name.”
She caught my doubtful tone. “You don’t think any of these guys might have been the one?”
I pursed my lips, trying to put my doubts into words. Steve Ferraro had wanted to marry Louisa, baby and all. That sounded as though he knew her after Caroline’s birth, not before. Joey Pankowski did seem like the kind of person who could have gotten Louisa pregnant and gone off unconcerned. Which would fit. That repressive household, Connie’s and her total ignorance of sex-she might well have turned to some happy-go-lucky type. But in that case why be so upset about it now? Unless she’d absorbed so much of the Djiak’s fundamental fear of sex that the very memory of it terrified her. But that didn’t fit my memories of Louisa as a young woman.
“I don’t know,” I finally said helplessly. “It just has the wrong kind of feel to it.”
I debated with myself a minute, then added, “I think you need to prepare yourself for failure. My failure, I mean. If I can’t learn anything from the doctor or track down this clerk, I’m going to have to throw it in.”
She scowled fiercely. “I’m counting on you, Vic.”
“Let’s not play that record again right now, Caroline. I’m beat. I’ll call you in a day or two and we’ll take it from there.”
It was almost four, time for the evening rush hour to congeal the traffic. It was close to five-thirty before I’d oozed the twenty-some miles home. When I got there Mr. Contreras stopped me to ask about the burrs I’d allowed the sacred dog to collect in her golden tail. The dog herself came out and expressed herself ready for a run. I listened to both with such patience as I could muster, but after five minutes of his nonstop flow I left abruptly in mid-sentence and headed for my place on the third floor.
I took off my suit and left it on the entryway floor where I’d be sure to remember it for the cleaners in the morning. I didn’t know what to do about the shoe, so I left it with the suit-maybe the cleaners would know a place that could resurrect it.
While I ran a bath I pulled my stack of city and suburban directories from the floor under the piano. No Chigwell was listed in the metropolitan area. Naturally. He’d probably died himself Or retired to Majorca.
I poured an inch of whiskey and stomped into the bathroom. While lying half submerged in the old-fashioned tub, it occurred to me that he might be in the medical directories. I hoisted myself out of the tub and went into the bedroom to call Lotty Herschel. She was just getting ready to leave the clinic she runs near the corner of Irving Park and Damen.
“Can’t it wait until the morning, Victoria?”
“Yeah, it can wait. I just want to get this monster out of my life as fast as possible.” I sketched Caroline and Louisa’s story as quickly as I could. “If I can run this Chigwell down, I only have one other
lead I need to look into and then I can get back to the real world.”
“Wherever that is,” she said dryly. “You don’t know this man’s first name or his speciality, do you? Of course not. Industrial medicine probably, hmm?”
I could hear her rustling through the pages of a book. “Chan, Chessick, Childress. No Chigwell. I don’t have a complete directory, though. Max probably does-why don’t you give him a call? And why do you let this Caroline run you through hoops? You are manipulated by people only when you allow yourself to be, my dear.”
On that cheering note she hung up. I tried Max Loewenthal, who was executive director of Beth Israel Hospital, but he had gone home for the day. As any rational person would have. Only Lotty stayed at her clinic until six, and of course a detective’s work is never done. Even if you’re only willingly responding to the manipulations of an old neighbor.
I poured the rest of the whiskey down the sink and changed into my sweats. When I’m in a febrile mood the best thing to do is exercise. I picked up Peppy from Mr. Contreras-neither he nor the dog was capable of harboring a grievance. By the time Peppy and I returned home, panting, I’d run the discontent out of my system. The old man fried some pork chops for me and we sat drinking his foul grappa and talking until eleven.
I reached Max easily in the morning. He listened with his usual courteous urbanity to my saga, put me on hold for five minutes, and came back with the news that Chigwell was retired but living in suburban Hinsdale. Max even had his address and his first name, which was Curtis.
“He’s seventy-nine, V.I. If he doesn’t talk willingly, go easy on him,” he finished, only half joking.
“Thanks a whole bunch, Max. I’ll try to restrain my more animal impulses, but old men and children generally bring out the worst in me.”
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