“You don’t. You haven’t asked. I’m exactly what I said I was on Sunday: a private investigator. I used to be a lawyer, a public defender. I don’t know whose account of me you would trust, but I can refer you to a reporter at the Herald-Star, or someone on the Chicago police force. Or better still, Darraugh Graham. I do a lot of work for him. You do know him, right, hanging around his boyhood home the way you do?”
She bit her lip but didn’t say anything.
“It would be an excellent plan for you to call one of these people and ask if they know me. You shouldn’t trust a stranger who comes up to you on the street. But we’re still going to talk, because if we don’t, I’m giving your name and phone number to the DuPage County sheriff. Right now I’m the only person who knows you were at the crime scene Sunday night, but as soon as the sheriff learns about you, he will be here with as much force as he can use on the granddaughter of a powerful taxpayer.” Of
course he’d also be on my butt like a horsefly for concealing her presence, but I hoped she was too inexperienced to think of that.
“What are you talking about? You think Rick Salvi is going to care that I was trespassing?”
“It’s nice, you knowing the sheriff by his first name and all, but we’re not talking about trespassing here. And even if he dandled you on his knee when you were a baby, he’s going to want to know what you’re up to at Larchmont.”
“I can’t help being born into a rich family, but that doesn’t mean I think I have a right to special treatment,” she burst out, her eyes bright. “I know if you have a special position you have special obligations.”
I nodded. “You don’t look much like your grandfather, but you sure sound like him. Your yearbook statement said you hoped to go into the publishing company. Do you do much around there now?”
“I was an intern last summer. I got to work with Haile Talbot, I mean I just brought him coffee-” She broke off, remembering we were enemies, and refused to speak again until we turned the corner onto Banks Street.
I was glad I hadn’t tried to talk my way in: her family’s town home was in a five-story building, hidden from the street by a high stone wall and a wrought-iron door with opaque safety glass filling the curlicues. A microphone was set into a recess beside the door, where I could have bent over and tried to persuade someone inside to buzz me in.
Catherine unlocked the door and led me across a flagged courtyard. A little garden with a couple of fruit trees and an old stone bench lay on the east side of the building, continuing, as far as I could tell, around to the back. We walked up gray flagstones to the front entrance, also locked, and took an elevator to the fourth floor. No doorman. Catherine could come and go with no one seeing her.
The elevator opened onto what was essentially the apartment’s entryway, an area so big I could have set up my office there and no one would have tripped over me for at least a month. We went on through an arched doorway into the body of the apartment.
A middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform came out from some back room. “Oh, it is you, Miss Katerina. And your friend?”
“A business acquaintance, Elsbetta. We’ll be in my room.”
“You want me to bring tea? Coffee? Juice?” Her English was precise, but her voice was soft and heavily accented, the “esses” slurred the way my father’s mother’s used to.
“We’re fine without anything,” Catherine said firmly: I was not a guest, I didn’t get refreshments.
“Were you here last night?” I asked Elsbetta. “Here? Yes, I sleep here.”
Catherine looked daggers at me, but she said, “This woman wants to know if I was here also.”
“What do you mean, was you-were you-here? Yes, of course you were here. You ate with friends, you came home, at ten-thirty you went to bed, so I also, I then went to bed.” Elsbetta turned to me. “When Mrs. Renee is not here, I stay awake until Miss Katerina is in bed.”
Catherine gave a tight, triumphant smile and led me to her room. It was decorated in bold colors, and furnished in a way that would remind you every time you came in that you had been born to special obligations-the Bang & Olufsen TV-stereo for starters, and then the antique armoire and desk, Navajo rugs worn enough to show they dated to the pre-Machine Epoch of Indian work. These lay on a hardwood floor so polished it reflected our legs as we walked across it. Another few were draped across a pair of ottomans in front of the working fireplace.
The room overlooked the back garden. I opened the French doors and looked out on a small balcony. You wouldn’t have to be a great athlete, only reasonably confident, to move from the balcony to a fire escape screwed into the brickwork about a yard away.
“So you went to bed at ten-thirty, you waited until Elsbetta’s light went out, then you climbed down, went out the back gate and headed for the western suburbs. You have a driver’s license, or anyway access to a car. You did your business out at the Larchmont estate, and retraced your steps. Only you were so worn out that you overslept and missed your algebra class this morning.”
She scowled ferociously. “What are you trying to prove, that you can stalk me? You know that’s against the law in Illinois.”