“And Boom-Boom? How did he react, to you or your sister?”
“I don’t know! I couldn’t bear to be near him! I didn’t want his fucking sympathy—Chicago’s golden boy, can’t you understand that? He wanted to drive me home, go out for a beer in that damned ’Vette he was hotdogging in at the time. I couldn’t fucking bear it.
“Bagby’s had the car waiting to take all us losers home, but I didn’t want to be with them, either. I snuck off to the L and got myself back to the South Side. Back to the slime where I belonged.”
“Sounds like a day in hell, Frank. Sorry to make you revisit it . . . On a completely different subject, I’d like to play a recording for you. Tell me if you know either of these voices.”
While he ate his way through three thousand calories, I took out my cell phone and downloaded the recording from the Cloud.
“God, who is that scuzzball?” Frank said at the end. “Who’s he trying to threaten?”
“I don’t know. I hoped you would recognize one of the voices.”
“Wish I could help you, Tori, because then maybe you’d let go of that goddam bill your lawyer put through my mailbox.”
I was feeling sorry for Frank, but not sorry enough to say I’d forgive the bill. I jumped down from the cab and walked back to the Subaru.
STICKBALL
I drove north in a melancholy mood. Nothing in my so-called life, Frank had said. Nothing worked out the way he wanted it to.
That might be true, but how much else of what he said could I believe? His forgetting that Annie had been at the ballpark for the open tryouts, that sounded credible. He’d needed support and sympathy, but he didn’t want them from Boom-Boom, and his sister was so wrapped up in her own affairs that she didn’t have room for her brother.
Growing up, like so many only children I’d fantasized about siblings, someone to confide in, play with. Boom-Boom had been a kind of surrogate brother, but we saw each other only once or twice a week. It seemed painful that Frank and Annie had squandered their relationship in the short time they’d had together, but perhaps that had been the inevitable outcome of growing up with a mother as turbulent as Stella.
While I waited at the long light at Damen and Milwaukee, I dictated a summary of the conversation for my files. As an afterthought, I sent a copy to Freeman.
Sorry to violate the r-o, but I had to ask him about the pix.
You did not have to ask him about the pix, Freeman typed back sharply. You don’t need to know about the damned pictures. Unless you want to spend 30 days in County, you will respect the order.
I made a face: he was right, but I was tired of having to admit everyone around me was right.
The grease from Frank’s lunch had gotten in my hair and skin; I could wash off under Tessa’s shower and start on a project for Darraugh Graham. Like Frank, sometimes nothing in my life worked as planned: when I reached my office, Viola Mesaline appeared in the doorway of Tessa’s studio.
“What happened to you?” she wailed. “As soon as I heard that recording, I told my supervisor I was sick and ran over to see you, but you’d disappeared. I went to your apartment and they didn’t know where you were, so I came back here.”
I was losing my grip: I’d forgotten that I’d been on the phone to her about her brother’s recording. “You hung up on me. If you’d let me know you were coming, I’d have waited for you.”
“They’re going to fire me, I can’t keep running away from work pretending to be sick. Why did you call me and then disappear?” She was going to blame me for her troubles no matter what.
Tessa appeared in the doorway behind Viola and beckoned to me, leading me to the cubbyhole where she handled the business end of her work. “She’s scared of her own shadow. I couldn’t leave her out on the street, but I didn’t know what to do with her—you weren’t answering your phone.”
I’d turned off the ringer when I was talking to Frank and had forgotten to turn it back on; I looked down at the screen and saw I’d missed nine calls, most from clients. One from Vince Bagby. Great way to run a detective agency.
“And what did you do to your hair?” Tessa wrinkled her nose. “Can’t say I like your new shampoo.”
“It’s called Grasso de Sud-Chicago and only Yuppie snobs are put off by it,” I said with dignity. “I was planning to wash it, but I guess I’d better deal with this poor little kitten. I sprang a thunderbolt on her this morning.”
I ushered Viola into my own office, moving the bouquet Vince Bagby had sent me so I could watch her face. She looked genuinely distressed as she rehashed her fears. I made her sit still, take some deep breaths, drink a glass of water.
“Viola, who was that on the recording? Your brother?”
“No, no, it was Uncle Jerry, it must have been what he wanted Sebastian to do, but—”
“Which one was Uncle Jerry?”