“While we wait for the police, I need some answers.” I pushed past him into his apartment, Mr. Contreras on my heels.
The space was unexpectedly clean and tidy, its severe white walls hung with what looked like important art. An antique cabinet clock chimed the quarter hour as we came in. A grand piano stood in a corner.
I pulled the stool out and sat down. “You’ll never guess where I was between one and four this morning.”
Joel swayed on his bare feet. “I’ve always hated playing games with the wiseasses of the planet, and I’m not going to play yours.”
I pulled a photograph from my bag, Annie at the mouth of the tunnel, and held it out. “I spent a chunk of time right inside this tunnel.”
Joel’s skin changed from putty to ash. “Where did you get this?”
“From a man who used to work with the Cubs. Annie hid something in this tunnel, but she’d been so clever, she had to brag about it to someone. Maybe she told Boom-Boom, but I’m betting not. I’m betting she chose you, the person in the office who was in love with her, the one who could appreciate her cleverness. When did you go to Wrigley to take the pages out of the album? Before or after she was killed?”
Joel grabbed the edge of the piano. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He looked around, from me to Mr. Contreras, from me to the door. He couldn’t flee, not in his pajamas and no shoes.
“Before,” I said with certainty. “Annie was crowing at the end of that day in the park, ‘No one can touch me now, no one can touch me now.’ She told you where she’d stashed the book, and you were itching with curiosity. You had to know what she’d hidden at the ballpark.”
Joel didn’t say anything, but his shoulders slumped farther.
“Must have taken a certain amount of courage to go into that tunnel, broad daylight,” I said.
“Don’t patronize me,” he panted. “I’m not the man Ira was, I’m afraid of my own shadow, you can’t believe I could actually go to Wrigley Field and sneak into a tunnel the way you did, or—or Annie.”
Mr. Contreras cleared his throat, but I shook my head at him: waiting was the only useful strategy here. I tried not to listen to the ticking of the clock. Tick, Bernie, tock, grievous bodily—no.
“All right, I was in love with her,” Joel burst out. “Who wouldn’t be, such a beautiful bright girl. And then I heard she was hanging around with Warshawski. I knew I didn’t have a prayer. They laughed at me, Spike and his buddies, telling me she’d been seen with him. ‘Why would she care about an overweight nerd like you? And one who usually likes boys better than girls, anyway.’ Spike. That was his line, but all the others copied him.”
His lips were flecked with white and his breath stank.
“Get him a glass of water,” I said to Mr. Contreras, keeping my eyes on Joel.
“I don’t want water. Get me the hair of the dog. You’ll see it easily enough,” Joel said.
“So you went up to Wrigley,” I prodded.
“Yes, I went up there, she’d told me where she’d put it, inside some loose asbestos tape around one of the pipes, and I found it.”
“What was it?” I asked sharply.
“A photo album that she’d stored papers in. I couldn’t make sense of them: canceled checks, an accounting statement for the Scanlon Agency, a statement for the law firm and also one for Scanlon’s youth club—his obnoxious Say, Yes! program that everyone who worked at Mandel & McClelland had to donate to.”
“What did you do with the documents?” I asked.
“I was flipping through the pages, so bewildered I didn’t leave the damned tunnel, and then I heard somebody coming in, so I taped the book back up against the pipe, only I was so rattled all the pages fell out onto the muddy floor. Ira or Spike or Sol Mandel, any of them could tell you that’s my normative state.”
“Never mind that. Did you take them with you?”
“I was trying to pick them up when this maintenance man came in, wanting to know what the fuck I was doing in there. I said I got lost looking for the men’s room and he marched me out. I only managed to save part of a bank statement. When I got home, I saw another page had stuck to it—someone had torn it in two and taped it back together and the tape stuck to the bank statement.”
He licked his dry lips. “Where’s the old man with my drink?”
Mr. Contreras came out with a glass of water. “You don’t need alcohol to get you through the day, young man. You drink this and start pulling yourself together.”
Joel knocked Mr. Contreras’s hand away. “What, are you another goddam friend of Ira and Eunice’s sent to make me take the pledge?”
Joel left the room. I got up to follow him but collapsed as a wave of dizziness swept through me. I half fell onto the piano. By the time I’d steadied myself, Joel had returned with a half gallon of Grey Goose and a glass.
“The papers,” I said sharply. “What about the torn-up note?”