“Nancy bought herself a place in South Shore. One of those huge old mansions that’s falling to bits. She’s fixing it up on her own. Kind of a big place for a single woman, but she likes it.” She gave me the number and hung up with repeated dinner invitations.
Nancy wasn’t home. I gave it up. If she wanted me that badly, she’d call again.
I looked at the dirt on the front of my dress. My suit was still in the car. If I drove home now, I could change into jeans, dump the lot at the cleaners, and spend the rest of the afternoon on myself
It was close to five—as I was happily working my way through the syncope of “In dem Schatten meiner Locken,” without Kathleen Battle’s voice—when the phone rang. I left the piano unwillingly, and was even sorrier as soon as I picked up the receiver: it was Caroline.
“Vic, I need to talk to you.”
“Talk away,” I said resignedly.
“In person, I mean.” Her husky voice was urgent, but it always was.
“You want to drive up to Lake View, be my guest. But I ain’t trekking down to South Chicago this afternoon.”
“Oh, fuck you, Vic. Can you ever talk to me without being a total snot?”
“Can it, Caroline. You want to talk to me, speak. Otherwise I’m going back to what I was doing when you interrupted.”
There was a pause during which I could picture her gentian eyes smoldering. Then she said, so quickly I almost didn’t understand, “I want you to stop.”
I was confused for a minute. “Caroline, if you ever realized how upsetting I find it to have you spin me around in circles, you might understand why I sound like a snot to you.”
“Not that,” she said impatiently. “Stop trying to find my father, I mean.”
“What!” I shouted. “Two days ago you were batting your baby blues and telling me pathetically you counted on me.”
“That was then. I didn’t see then—I didn’t know—anyway, that’s why I need to see you in person. You can’t possibly understand over the phone if you’re going to get so honked off. Just don’t do any more looking until I can talk to you in person, for God’s sake.”
There was no denying the thread of panic in her voice. I pulled a string from the fringe where my left knee was poking through the denim. She knew about Pankowski and the plant sabotage. I pulled another. She didn’t know.
“You’re too late, babe,” I finally said.
“You mean you’ve found him?”
“Nope. I mean the investigation is beyond your power to stop.”
“Vic, I hired you. I can fire you,” she said with terrifying ferocity.
“Nope,” I repeated steadily. “You could have last week. But the investigation has moved into a new phase. You can’t fire me. I don’t mean that. You can fire me, of course. You just have. What I mean is, you may choose not to pay me but you can’t stop my inquiries now. And the top one, first on the list, is why you didn’t tell me about Ferraro and Pankowski.”
“I don’t even know who they are!” she shouted. “Ma never talks about her old lovers to me. She’s like you—she thinks I’m a fucking baby.”
“Not about their being her lovers. About the sabotage and their getting fired. And the lawsuit.”
“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, V. I. Know-it-all Warshawski, and I don’t have to listen to it. As far as I’m concerned, V.I. stands for vicious insect, which I would use Raid on if I had any.” She slammed the phone in my ear.
It was the childish insult she ended on that convinced me she really didn’t know about the two men. I also realized suddenly that I had no idea why she was firing me. I scowled and rang up SCRAP, but she refused to come to the phone.
“Ah, screw you, you little brat,” I muttered, slamming down the phone myself
I tried returning to Hugo Wolf, but my enthusiasm was gone. I wandered to the living-room window and watched the nine-to-fivers returning home. Suppose my speculations this morning hadn’t been so far out after all. Suppose Louisa Djiak had been involved in the plant sabotage and Humboldt was protecting her. Maybe he’d called Caroline and pushed her into firing me. Although Caroline was not the kind that pushed easily. If someone Humboldt’s size came for her, she’d be more inclined to sink her teeth into his calf and hang on until he got sick of the pain.
It occurred to me that whatever Nancy wanted to talk to me about might shed some light on the general problem. I tried her number again, but she still didn’t answer.
“Come on, Cleghorn,” I muttered. “You wanted me bad enough to leave two messages. You get run over by a train or something?”
I finally got fed up with my futile churning and called Lotty Herschel. She was free for dinner and glad to have company. We went to the Gypsy and shared a roast duck, then back to her place, where she beat me five times in a row at gin.
11