He pulled me closer. “I was afraid if I took time to call the cops, the truck would disappear. I didn’t have any phone numbers, anyway, just nine-one-one, which I called while I was driving.” He’d been frantic, trying to keep an eye on the Bagby truck, trying to explain what was happening to the emergency dispatcher.
“I hung up—I couldn’t talk and follow you, but I thought of Max. He knows everyone. He told me he’d locate your police pals. He tracked down Frank Guzzo, too, and got him to explain the likely places Bagby or Scanlon would take you. Max talked me through the route. He was way better than any GPS.” Jake gave a laugh that bordered on the hysterical.
He helped me back to my feet, waited out another coughing attack.
“So you got to the Bagby office?” I asked. “Where were you?”
“They’d left a window open. I stood under that and recorded it all, but it was agony, listening to—never mind that. I—I wasn’t brave enough to go in after you. Forgive me, Vic, but I just couldn’t do it.”
It was my turn to squeeze his shoulder reassuringly. “You made the right choice. If you’d gone in, you’d have been a hostage; we’d both be dead.”
Conrad roared up just then, six squad cars flashing in his wake.
“Five men in a truck,” Jake said to Conrad when he bounded over, roaring commands through a loudspeaker. “Two first chairs and three pit members. I stood under a window at the Bagby office and recorded their words.”
“Scanlon,” I coughed at Conrad, spitting out a mouthful of coke. “Scanlon and Bagby.”
Conrad sent his squads out to find them. He tried to question me, there on the Guisar slip, under the searchlights he’d turned on, but I couldn’t speak. Wouldn’t speak. Too many questions, too many blows. No more.
“I’m taking the lady home, Rawlings. I’ll e-mail you the recording from my smartphone.”
Jake guided me off the Guisar slip, drove me to Lotty, who’d been warned by Max that I might need reconstructing. She tucked me into her own guest bed. Over the next few days, her doorman and a private nurse kept cops and reporters at bay, even Murray, who thought he was entitled to a front-row seat.
Jake stayed close by. Even later, when I was back on my feet, resuming my workload, there were times when he thought I might have disappeared on him and he’d race to my office to check on me. He started practicing in my big workroom. The acoustics were good, so good that his High Plainsong group began rehearsing there.
“Remember I told you I’d pull you out of the tar pits if you got stuck in them?” he said the day he drove me home from Lotty’s.
“You said you’d use your bass strings,” I reminded him.
“From now on I’ll keep a spare set in the glove compartment,” he promised.
Eventually, of course, I did talk to the cops. According to Conrad’s off-the-record report, Spike had been using his many connections in Chicago to short-circuit any indictments, but the media storm for once was bigger than the Speaker’s power. The state’s attorney wasn’t able to indict Rory or Vince for Jerry Fugher’s murder, but he had enough from Jake’s recording and my own testimony to charge them not just with attempting to kill me, but framing Stella Guzzo for Annie’s murder.
When the SA subpoenaed the diary extracts that Murray had posted online, I handed them over without a murmur. Even if a lab decided they were forgeries, there wasn’t any way to trace them: they had indeed come to me in the mail, with no return address, postmarked from the Loop postal station that saw so much traffic no one could remember one manila envelope. And I had never claimed they were Annie’s, simply that I had them and was willing to submit them to tests.
The diary Frank had helped Scanlon or Bagby or Spike plant in Stella’s house was also subpoenaed. It turned out as Bernie had been insisting—Stella had given it to Father Cardenal. Having to guard Stella’s secret was probably why Cardenal’s attitude toward me underwent such a major shift.
When I finally got to see the document, I felt a certain satisfaction: Scanlon hadn’t made any effort to get old paper or to disguise the handwriting; the diary was declared fraudulent.
Kenji Aroyawa was ecstatic when two labs—my private one and the State of Illinois’s crime lab—decided my pages were authentic. He and I shared a bottle of champagne while Rafe Zukos sulked downstairs in front of his geese-in-flight painting. Zukos had bitterly opposed Ken “prostituting his art” to help anyone in South Chicago, but Ken had loved creating Annie’s diary.
“It’s an art project, Rafe, it’s what art students do—they copy the masters to learn their craft. It takes me back to my own sensei’s studio, copying someone else’s calligraphy—not that poor little Annie’s handwriting would have been allowed in Sensei Yamamoto’s atelier.”