He didn’t say anything else, but walked to the windows to look down at the construction on Wacker Drive. I stared in bewilderment. Even when he’d asked me to help his son beat a drug rap several years ago, he hadn’t danced around the floor like this.
“Mother’s always been a law unto herself,” he muttered to the window. “Of course people in her-in our-milieu always get better attention from the law than people like-well, than others. But she’s affronted that the police aren’t taking her seriously. Of course, it’s possible that she might be imagining-she’s over ninety, after all-but she’s taken to calling me every day to complain about lack of police attention.”
“I’ll see if I can uncover something the police aren’t seeing,” I said gently.
His shoulders relaxed and he turned back to me. “Your usual fee, Vic. See Caroline about your contract. She’ll give you Mother’s details as well.”
He took me out to his personal assistant, who told him his conference call with Kuala Lumpur was waiting.
We’d talked on a Friday afternoon, the dreary first day of March. On Saturday morning, I made the first of what turned into many long treks to New Solway. Before driving out, I stopped in my office for my ordnance maps of the western suburbs. I looked at my computer and then resolutely turned my back to it: I’d already logged on three times since ten last night without word from Morrell. I felt like an alcoholic with the bottle in reach, but I locked my office without checking my e-mail and began the fortyfive-mile haul to the land of the rich and powerful.
That westward drive always makes me feel like I’m following the ascent into heaven, at least into capitalist heaven. It starts along Chicago’s smoky industrial corridor, passing old bluecollar neighborhoods that resemble the one where I grew up-tiny bungalows where women look old at forty and men work and eat themselves to early heart attacks. You move past them to the hardscrabble towns on the city’s edge-Cicero, Berwyn, places where you can still get pretty well beat up for a dollar. Then the air begins to clear and the affluence rises. By the time I reached New Solway, I was practically hydroplaning on waves of stock certificates.
I pulled off at the tollway exit to examine my maps. Coverdale Lane was the main road that meandered through New Solway. It started at the northwest corner of the township and made a giant kind of quarter circle, opening on Dirksen Road at the southeast end. At Dirksen, you could go south to Powell Road, which divided New Solway from Anodyne Park, where Geraldine Graham was living. I followed the route to the northwest entrance, since that looked like the main one on the map.
I hadn’t traveled fifty feet down Coverdale Lane before getting Darraugh’s point: neighbors couldn’t spy on each other here. Horses grazed in paddocks; orchards held a few desiccated apples from last fall. With the trees bare, a few mansions were visible from the road, but most were set far behind imposing carriageways. Poorer folk might actually see each other’s driveways from their side windows, but most of the houses sat on substantial property, perhaps ten or twelve acres. And most were old. No new money here. No McMansions, flashing their thirty thousand square feet on tiny lots.
After going south about a mile and a half, Coverdale Lane bent into a hook that pointed east. I followed the hook almost to its end before a discreet sign on a stone pillar announced Larchmont Hall.
I drove on past the gates to Dirksen Road at the east end of Coverdale and made a loop south and west so I could look at the complex where Darraugh’s mother was living. I wanted to know if she really could see into the Larchmont estate. A hedge blocked any view into the New Solway mansions from street level, but Ms. Graham was on the fourth floor of a small apartment building. From that vantage, she might be able to see into the property.
I returned to Coverdale Lane and drove up a winding carriageway to Larchmont Hall. Leaving the car where anyone could see it if they came onto the land, I armed myself with that most perfect disguise: a hard hat and a clipboard. A hard hat makes people assume you’re doing something with the air-conditioning or the foundations. They’re used to service in places like this; they don’t ask for credentials. I hoped.