After a few blocks, the grandmother stopped and seemed to be forcing Ernest to decide where to go. He turned right, and she shook her head. He waved his arms and shouted, loudly enough that I caught the echo down in my own car, but finally he turned around and headed west.
Lotty’s hospital, Beth Israel, runs a rehab place down here, one of the ten or fifteen health-care centers that fill up Chicago’s near South Side. I figured my quarry was heading there. I drove past them and found street parking where I could keep an eye on the entrance. Sure enough, in another few minutes Ernest and his grandmother turned up the walk and went through the revolving doors.
I followed them in, not sure what I was hoping to accomplish. Women with infants, women with boyfriends on crutches or in wheelchairs, women looking after aging parents, old women like Se?ora Guaman taking care of grandchildren, filled the lobby. One television was blaring in Spanish, another in English. Children were crying, mothers stared ahead in stolid resignation.
Ernest and his grandmother were standing in line to check in. The grandmother had found someone she knew sitting nearby; the two women were talking in Spanish. I bent over, pretending to pick up something from the floor, and held out the flyer with the puppy’s picture to Ernest.
“Did you drop this?”
He looked at me, not understanding what I was saying, but then his eye fell on the picture of the puppy, and he snatched it from me.
“My dog! Nana, my dog!”
His grandmother turned. She sighed with fatigue when she saw the picture, and I felt ashamed for exciting him—looking after her grandson must be a hard enough job without a private eye rousing him.
“Your dog, Ernest?” she said. “You don’t have a dog. This is a picture of a dog.” Her English was fluent but heavily accented.
“I’m sorry,” I smiled at her. “I found this next to him on the floor and thought maybe he’d dropped it.”
“He wants a dog, and maybe we should get him one, but I don’t want to care for a dog as well as for Ernest. Anyway, his sister is allergic.”
“He’s here for therapy?” I asked.
“I don’t know how much they can do for him, but we come two times every week. After all, if you give up hope, you have nothing left.”
“It’s hard,” I said. “One of my cousins was shot in the head. He can still walk and talk, but he’s lost his impulse control. He behaves so wildly in public we don’t know if he can ever live on his own again.”
Lies. The detective’s stock-in-trade was really making me squirm today.
“With Ernie, it was a motorcycle,” she said. “We kept him out of the gangs. He was a good boy, always, but not a scholar like his sisters, They all are brilliant students. Were brilliant students.” Her face creased in sorrow. “Two of them are dead now.”
“I’m so sorry! Was it in the same accident where he was injured?”
It seemed disrespectful to talk about Ernest as if he wasn’t there, but, in a way, he wasn’t. He was crooning over the picture of the puppy. My guilt mounted.
“The oldest, she died in Iraq. These two were close. Her death hit him in the heart. I think that’s why he was careless with his motorcycle. Six months after Allie’s death, he ran off the expressway. Somehow, the motorcycle climbed over the railing. I don’t understand how, I wasn’t here. And my son couldn’t explain it to me.”
“Allie!” Ernest heard his sister’s name and dropped the picture. “Allie is a dove. She flies around with Jesus! Now Nadia is a dove. Men are shooting my sisters. They’ll get Clara next! Bam, bam! Poor Clara.”
“What, Allie was shot in battle?” I asked the grandmother.
“They shot Allie, bam, bam!”
“No, Ernesto, poor Allie was killed by a bomb.”
“They shot her, Nana, bam, bam! They shot Nadia, bam! Next, Clara, bam, bam!”
He was getting more and more agitated. I picked up the picture of the puppy.
“The puppy will kiss Clara and make her all better,” I suggested, holding it out to him.
“Yes! Nana, we need to get Clara a puppy. No one can shoot her if she has a puppy.”
In another minute, he was crooning happily over the picture again. I apologized to his grandmother for stirring him up.
“How could you know?” she said. “The death of his sister, he still can’t understand what really happened to her. And his mother, she won’t allow us to mention Alexandra’s name. So he never has a chance to talk. Maybe one day his poor brain will clear, and he will understand what happened to her.”
“The third sister isn’t really in danger, is she?”
The grandmother’s eyes clouded. “I pray night and day for her safety. When you have lost two—three, really”—she nodded toward her grandson—“you are frightened all the time.”
The clerk called her by name. “Daydreaming, Mrs. Guaman? It’s your turn! Ernie, your friends are waiting for you.”
I slipped away as the grandmother began to chat in Spanish with the clerk and drove to my office in a sober mood.
26
A Show in the Dark