“Great. I have a few minutes right now.”
“It will be better if you come to my home.”
“If you’re concerned about the Malina Foundation, I can’t advise you. And it can surely wait until tomorrow: I have an opening in my schedule at—”
“I understand you’re related to Petra Warshawski, who’s working with some Malina book groups. I need to discuss what the girls were doing last night.” She gave me an address on Schiller Street and hung up on my abortive protest that I was busy.
I looked at my watch. Ten to four. Jake and I were due at Lotty’s at six-thirty, and I wanted to make sure I was home in time to ride over with him. I hate the assumption of the rich and powerful that when they say “jump,” the rest of us salute and say, “Ma’am, yes, ma’am!” But Julia Salanter’s reference to Petra worried me—if she was going to hold my cousin responsible for the girls’ extracurricular behavior, I’d have to hire every law firm in town to protect her, and even then I probably wouldn’t succeed. Which meant that I saluted and said, “Yes, ma’am,” and walked over to Belmont and Sheffield to pick up the L.
8.
MOTHERLY ADVICE
SCHILLER STREET, WHERE JULIA SALANTER LIVED, WAS BOUNDED on the east by Chicago’s most popular beach and on the west by the city’s hottest bar scene. At four-thirty on a sticky July Sunday, every inch of sidewalk was filled with sunburnt young people heading from beach to bar, or vice versa. If I’d driven I’d never have found parking: the traffic was bumper to bumper along both Clark and Division Streets.
I muscled my way through people texting, people carrying coolers, kids drumming on overturned buckets, mango vendors, ice cream carts. Car stereos cranked to the max shook the sidewalks, and the honking, drumming, screeching horde made me feel that my own street near Wrigley Field was a rural oasis.
Salanter’s house, which was shielded from the street by a forest of arbor vitae, was reached through a wrought-iron fence whose graceful curlicues concealed security eyes. I called on a phone embedded in the front gate. As I waited to be buzzed through, I saw a nice collection of empty bottles and food bags cached in the shrubbery.
Once I was inside the grounds, a houseman greeted me with an easy courtesy, but kept me waiting outside the front door until Julia Salanter arrived.
She was a small woman, with curly dark hair cut close to her head. She was probably attractive in a gamine kind of way, but this afternoon, tension was pulling her skin tight across her face. She looked at my PI license, and then at me, and invited me inside, but it wasn’t until I told her I knew Lotty Herschel that she actually smiled.
“I wanted to see you in person rather than talk on the phone because I’m hoping to persuade you to be as discreet as possible about last night. And also because I—because Sophy Durango and I—want to get a better idea of what happened than what the girls are saying.”
All the way down to the Gold Coast, I’d been imagining my conversation with Salanter, scenarios that started with her arrogance, my anger. Her statement took me so by surprise that I could only murmur something disjoint. She took that as a sign that she’d offended me, but I interrupted her apology.
“You can count on my discretion as long as you’re not asking me to conceal a crime, Ms. Salanter, or go against the interest of a client, but I really can tell you very little.”
“Come into the back with me, where we can talk in comfort. Physical comfort, at any rate.” Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “And I’m one of those tiresome women who cares about her floors more than her guests; we ask people to take off their shoes.”
She gestured at a kind of bench made out of welded bits of scrap metal. “From my dad’s first scrap yard. He has a sentimental attachment to the car parts that started him on his road to success in America.”
I unbuckled my sandals while the houseman shut the front door. The street noise disappeared instantly. I stood, and the marble of the foyer felt cool and caressing against my toes. If I’d known I’d be barefoot in paradise, I would have washed my feet, which were as dirty as my shoes after traipsing through the cemetery. Maybe I’d even have removed the chipped nail polish.
The houseman, a tall bald man of about forty, asked Salanter if she needed his help with our meeting. I was interested to note that he called her by her first name.
“No, thanks, Gabe: Sophy and I have our script prepared.”