“No quarrel here,” I agreed. “Hopefully, finding her brother won’t mean tangling with the Mob.”
“You turn it over to Captain Mallory,” Mr. Contreras said. “This is police business.”
“What’s police business?” Jake came in through the open front door. “V.I., have you been mud wrestling, and you didn’t get me a ticket?”
“I’m going to make my filthy clothes an art installation,” I announced. “People will fill out a survey on what the clothes mean to them and I’ll guess their age, sex and sexual fantasies. Like, who thinks mud wrestling first instead of, I don’t know—”
“Alligator wrestling,” Jake suggested.
“Way sexier,” I agreed.
“Can you be ready to leave in twenty minutes? In something not covered with mud or alligator skin?”
One of Jake’s students was playing a concert in a small venue off the Loop. Bernie, back from escorting Viola, followed me into my bedroom while I changed into going-out clothes. Living with a teenager means kissing any privacy farewell.
“What have you found out about this Stella woman’s attack on Uncle Boom-Boom?”
I was pulling a silver top over my head, which gave me time to organize my thoughts: I didn’t want to expose myself to a barrage of Bernie’s urgent questions by saying I’d gotten bogged down in all the family relations involved and couldn’t make sense of any of them.
“I think the diary is a cover-up for something else,” I said, when I’d adjusted the sleeves and draped a scarf across my shoulders. “What I don’t understand is why the Guzzos tried to drag me into their drama in the first place.”
“So you’re going to let them get away with attacking him?”
“I didn’t say that, Bernie. The attack is a smokescreen. And I have to ask myself whether it’s the best use of time and energy, my two scarcest resources, to figure it out.”
“You mean you’ve given up trying to prove this diary c’est de la scrape.” She waved her hands around, trying to think of the English word. “Phony.”
“Right now, Stella is the only person who admits to seeing the diary—her son and his wife both say they never had a look at it. The TV stations only had a typed transcript that the lawyer gave them; no one has seen the actual diary. It is pretty hard to hunt for something if it doesn’t actually exist.”
“Did you ask the priest? I thought you said she gave it to the priest.”
“If the diary exists, she might have given it to him. The first time I talked to him, he said she didn’t trust him because he was Mexican, but now he’s eyeing me with suspicion—that’s the only thing that makes me think it’s possible that he has it, or at least he’s seen it.”
“Then go in and look for it!” Bernie urged. “I know you can, Papa has told me how you are like a cat burglar when you want to be. Or have you gotten old and slow and stodgy?”
“You nailed it. I am old and slow and stodgy.”
“So you’ll go to work for this woman Viola, who seems like the dreariest person in Chicago, instead of looking after Uncle Boom-Boom?”
So much for avoiding a barrage. “No, cara, but I work for a living. I’m not one of those amateur detectives who can live off my bond interest while I dabble in investigations. So don’t ride me, okay? What are you up to tonight?”
She muttered that she was going out with some of the kids she’d met at the coffee shop. And yes, she huffed: she had my cell phone if anything went awry, yes, she’d be home by midnight, but would I be here to check?
“No, but your uncle Sal will. And he won’t go to bed until you’re in; he worries about you. And if he’s worried he’ll call me and then I’ll come after you with long rakes and red bats.”
Bernie’s vivid face puckered into a grimace, but she wasn’t sullen by nature; she let me give her a farewell hug, and promised to remember her curfew. And to call if she got stuck someplace where she needed a ride home. What made me uneasy were the little mischief lights dancing in her eyes when I said good-bye.
Jake’s student’s group played a modern repertoire well, finishing with a Ned Rorem requiem that was particularly effective. We had a good meal afterward on Chicago’s Restaurant Row, but I was still uneasy about Bernie and cut the evening short to make sure she came home.
“Never figured you for a helicopter aunt, V.I.,” Jake said.
“Now you know two new things about me,” I said. “Alligator wrestling and helicoptering. Bernie’s pushing on me to break into the church. Pierre—her dad—has fed her stories about Boom-Boom’s exploits, and some of mine, her whole life. I wouldn’t put it past her to think she could show me up by going to Saint Eloy’s and doing it herself.”