Ms. Chigwell was in the garage painting her dinghy. She greeted me with her usual abrupt gruffness, but since she invited me in for tea I presumed she was glad to see me.
She had no idea why they had started doing the blood work down at the Xerxes plant. “I just remember that Curtis was in a flurry about it because they had to send all those specimens to some lab and then keep separate records of them, giving the employees numbers and so on. That’s why he kept his own notebooks, so he could follow them by name and not have to worry about the numbering scheme.”
I sat in the chintz armchair for over an hour, eating a large pile of cookies, while she discussed what she would do if she couldn’t find her brother.
“I always wanted to go to Florence,” she said. “But I’m too old now, I guess. I’ve never been able to get Curtis to agree to travel outside the country. He always suspects he’ll get some terrible disease from the food or the water, or that foreigners will cheat him.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Florence, too—my mother came from a little town in southeastern Tuscany. My excuse is, I never have enough money together to pay for the airfare.” I leaned forward and added persuasively, “You gave your brother most of your life. You don’t have to spend the rest of it waiting at the window with a candle burning. If I was seventy-nine and in good health and had some money, I’d be at O’Hare with a suitcase and a passport in time for tonight’s flight.”
“You probably would,” she agreed. “You’re a brave girl.”
I left soon after and headed back to Chicago, my shoulders aching again. Talking to Ms. Chigwell had been a long shot. I could’ve done it by phone if I didn’t enjoy seeing her, but the fruitless errand at the end of a long week left me worn out. Maybe it was time to give the police what I had. I tried imagining how I’d tell Bobby my story:
“You see, they’d been doing all these blood tests on their employees and now they’re afraid someone will find out and sue them for suppressing evidence of how toxic Xerxine really was.”
And Bobby smiling indulgently and saying, “I know you took a liking to the old lady, but it’s obvious she had a grudge against her brother all these years. I wouldn’t take her reports at face value. How do you even know those notebooks were his? She has some medical training—she might have faked them just to get him in hot water. Then he disappears and she wants to unload them. Hell”—no, Bobby wouldn’t use bad language in front of me—“Heck, Vicki, maybe they had one fight too many and she popped him on the head and then panicked and buried his body in Salt Creek. Then she calls you to say he’s disappeared. You’re high on the lady; you’ll believe the story the way she wants to tell it.”
And who was to say it hadn’t happened that way? At any rate I was pretty sure that Bobby would look at it like that before he’d go after someone as important in Chicago as Gustav Humboldt. I could give Murray the whole story, but far from sharing Bobby’s reluctance to go after Humboldt, Murray would leave a swath like General Sherman’s through the lives of the people involved. I just didn’t want to give him anything that would make him go after Louisa.
I stopped at my own apartment to cheer Mr. Contreras up over the loss of young Art and to see the dog. It was too dark for me to feel comfortable about going out with her, but she was clearly developing the restlessness an active animal feels when she doesn’t get enough exercise. Another reason to get Humboldt off my back—so I could run the dog.
Once more I checked the roads around me, but my tail still seemed clear. In a way this made me less cheerful rather than more. Maybe my pals were just waiting for Troy and Wally to make bail. But maybe they’d decided that an ordinary hit wouldn’t do and were looking for something more decisively spectacular, like a bomb in my car or at Lotty’s apartment. Just in case, I parked some distance from her building and rode the bus back down Irving Park.
I made a frittata for dinner, a greater success than the chicken, since it wasn’t scorched, but whether it had any taste I couldn’t have said. I told Lotty my various dilemmas, about how to bring matters home to Jurshak and Humboldt, and about whether to tell Caroline I’d found her father.
She pursed her lips. “I can’t advise you about Mr. Humboldt. You will have to think of a plan. But about Caroline’s father, I must tell you that in my experience it is always better for people to know. You say it is horrible news, and it is. But she is not a weakling. And you cannot decide for her what she can know, what she is better off not learning. For one thing, she may discover it in a more terrible way from someone else. And for another, she can easily imagine things that seem more hideous to her. So in your place I would tell her.”