“Something came back to me,” I said limpidly.
“Better make it good, Warshawski.”
“Curtis Chigwell,” I said. “He’s a doctor who lives in Hinsdale. Used to work at a plant down in South Chicago.”
“He killed Nancy Cleghorn?”
“As far as I know he never met Nancy Cleghorn.”
I felt rather than heard Murray sputter. “It’s been a tough day, V.I. Don’t make me play Twenty Questions with you.”
I reached down next to the bed for a T-shirt. Somehow the night was making me feel too exposed in my nakedness. As I leaned over the lamplight highlighted dust in the corner of the bedroom. If I lived past next week, I’d vacuum.
“That’s what I’ve got for you,” I said slowly. “Twenty questions. No answers. Curtis Chigwell knows something that he doesn’t want to tell. Twenty-four hours ago I didn’t think it had the remotest possible connection to Nancy. But I got a threatening phone call tonight telling me to bug out of South Chicago.”
“From Chigwell?” I could almost feel Murray’s breath through the phone line.
“No. I thought it had to come from Jurshak or Dresberg. Only thing, a couple of hours later I heard the same thing from someone who knows me only through the Xerxes side —the plant that Chigwell used to work for.”
I explained the discrepancies I’d gotten between Manheim and Humboldt’s version of Pankowski and Ferraro’s suit—without telling him about hearing it from Gustav Humboldt himself “Chigwell knows what the truth is and why. He just doesn’t want to say. And if the Xerxes people are threatening me, he’ll know why.”
Murray tried a thousand different ways to get me to tell him more about it. I just couldn’t give him Caroline and Louisa—Louisa didn’t deserve to have her unhappy past spinning around the streets of Chicago. And I didn’t know anything else. Anything about what possible connection there could be between Nancy’s death and Joey Pankowski.
Murray finally said, “You’re not trying to help me, you’re getting me to do your legwork. I can feel it. But it’s not a bad story—I’ll send someone out to talk to the guy.”
When he hung up I managed to sleep a little, but I woke again for good around six-thirty. It was another gray February day. Sharp cold with snow would have been preferable to this unending misty chill. I pulled on my sweats, did my stretches, and ruthlessly roused Mr. Contreras by knocking on his door until the dog barked him awake. I took her to the lake and back, stopping now and then to tie my shoes, to blow my nose, to throw her a stick—gestures that let me subtly check my rear. I didn’t think anyone was on it.
After depositing the dog I went to the comer diner for pancakes. Back home to change, I’d just about made up my mind to visit Louisa, see if she could shed any light on Caroline’s panic, when Ellen Cleghorn called. She was most upset: she’d gone over to Nancy’s house in South Chicago to collect her financial records and found the place ransacked.
“Ransacked?” I repeated foolishly. “How do you know?”
“The way you always do, Victoria—the place had been ripped to shreds. Nancy didn’t have much and she’d only been able to fix up a couple of rooms. The furniture was pulled apart and her papers strewn all over the place.”
I shuddered involuntarily. “Sounds like housebreakers gone mad. Could you tell if anything was missing?”
“I didn’t try to see.” Her voice caught a little on a nervous sob. “I looked at her bedroom and ran out of there as fast as I could. I—I was hoping you might come down and go through the house with me. I can’t bear to be alone there with this—this ravaging of Nancy.”
I promised to meet her in front of her house within the hour. I’d wanted to go directly to Nancy’s, but Mrs. Cleghorn was too nervous about the intruders to hang around her daughter’s house, even outside. I finished pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt, and then, not too happily, went to the little wall safe I’d built into the bedroom closet and took out the Smith & Wesson.