“Didn’t I make it clear that you were not to trouble my mother any further? You have thirty seconds to explain why you’ve so blatantly disregarded my orders.”
I stiffened. “Darraugh, you are not a marine colonel and I am not one of your recruits. I owed your mother the courtesy of a visit to explain what I’d done and why I wouldn’t be further involved in her problems. And I won’t apologize for seeing her.”
“It was unconscionable of you to upset her. That wasn’t a courtesy visit, it was an interrogation.”
“She called you to complain? Oh, no. Lisa called to complain. Your mother was upset by learning how ill Calvin Bayard was, not by anything I asked her. I think it’s permissible for a woman to weep over the decay of an old friend.”
“Talking to my mother can have nothing to do with your murder investigation. I warned you about that earlier. If you wish to continue in my employment, I am ordering you to stay away from my mother.”
“I’ll think about it, Darraugh. About my wishes, I mean. Good night.” I hung up before my anger rode me into an outright declaration o? quitting. His thousand-a-month retainer-one could pay too high a price for money sometimes.
CHAPTER 22
But Where Are the Pieces of the Jigsaw?
When I got to Lebold, Arnoff’s offices in Oak Brook Tower, Larry Yosano took me in to meet Julius Arnoff it was better that the senior partner know who was involving herself in the affairs of the firm’s most important clients. Better for Yosano, anyway.
By the time I arrived-late-at the meeting, I had already had a long day. I’d woken early, from feverish dreams: I’d been hunting for Morrell through the caves of Kandahar, when the caves turned into the culvert under the road in Anodyne Park. It was miles long, the soil rank with rotted fish and rat droppings. I was no longer hunting Morrell, but fleeing from the man who’d butted me in the stomach. I ran as fast as I could, but my feet in my Bruno Magh pumps were sinking into the fetid ground, and the man was driving a golf cart. When I finally turned in a desperate effort to confront him, Marc Whitby was at the wheel.
I woke panting and sweating. It was only five o’clock. I tried to go back to sleep, but I was in that gritty state where it was impossible to slide away from my conscious brain. Finally, when the late winter sky was starting to streak red, I got up and took the dogs for a run.
I wanted to go as far as I could as fast as I could. I wanted to get away from myself and my tired gray mind, but at the end of three miles, Mitch
and Peppy both balked: they planted themselves in the bike path and refused to move, despite both commands and bribes.
I finally turned around and took them home at a pace slow enough to please them, but one that left me prey to the uneasy images from my dreams. I couldn’t shake the images, nor the feeling that something beyond mere unpleasantness lay in them.
Back home, I showered and made breakfast-eggs, in the hopes that protein would overcome my gray mood and give me the energy to organize my day. Work felt beyond me this morning, but I didn’t have the income or the upbringing to indulge only myself.
Behind my bleak thoughts, I could see my mother at the kitchen table, mending socks. It was three in the morning; my dad hadn’t returned from his shift and the West Side was an inferno of riots and looting. I had heard her, or felt her anxiety, I don’t know which, and crept down from my bed under the attic dormer. She held me close for a time, then made me a cup of cambric tea, and showed me how to darn a heel.
“We don’t give into our worries, cara,” she said. “That is for grand ladies, who can fancy themselves ill when their lover hasn’t written or the new dress is commonplace. We aren’t like that, self-indulgent. We do some job, like this, we do it well, we make the worries leave us alone.”
My father had come in around five, to find us both asleep at the kitchen table, our faces in his socks. A cop’s daughter, a reporter’s lover, that gave you plenty of practice in showing you weren’t a grand lady, or self-indulgent. I hadn’t darned a sock since I was fifteen, but I had plenty of other chores I could be doing.
I started with a phone call to Luke Edwards, the lugubrious mechanic who’s looked after my cars for years. Car locks are tricky; I didn’t want to tackle Whitby’s with my picklocks, where I might not only jam the lock, but get arrested if some cop saw me using a tool of questionable legality.
Whenever I talk to Luke, I have to endure a long lecture on everything I’ve done wrong to my current machine before he’ll work on it, but he’s kind of like the Car Talk brothers in what he knows about engines. When he heard I wanted to get into a locked Saturn, he made me sit through five minutes on the inadequate safety features of modern American cars,