Bernie arrived a few minutes after that, though, and I decided I’d been imagining the mischief in her eyes. Even so, I spent the night in my own place, but she was still asleep in the living room when I got up the next morning.
I ran the dogs, dropped Bernie at her coffee bar and drove down to my own office, where I went resolutely to work. I’d been behaving lately like one of those independently wealthy dilettantes who detected as a hobby. I finished three reports, and made a security study for a bookstore whose inventory was evaporating.
I sent out bills, including one to Frank Guzzo, amounting to $1,567.18 including expenses. I sent it, with a copy of the contract Frank had signed, to my lawyer and asked that it be delivered to Frank Guzzo—I couldn’t mail it myself because of the order of protection. I didn’t expect to collect, but it wouldn’t do for him to imagine I hadn’t been keeping track.
It wasn’t until I broke for lunch that I had time to read the day’s news. The buzz about Boom-Boom’s putative bio had vanished, mercifully, but Mr. Villard, who’d supplied the photos I’d seen last week, had a little paragraph—there’d been a break-in at his Evanston mansion last night when he was having dinner with friends in the city.
The rest of the paper was the usual round of mudslides, children murdered in civil wars in Africa and Syria, children murdered in gang wars in Chicago and Detroit. Disease, famine, the whole Apocalypse was there. I put away the news and listened to a concert through my earphones.
Around the middle of the afternoon, Viola Mesaline appeared. I was surprised—I hadn’t really expected to see her again. She was shaking and her eyes were red, grief or maybe lack of sleep.
“I’m scared,” she announced. “Someone’s been in Sebastian’s and my apartment.”
I took her into the cubicle set aside for clients. It’s kind of like a psychiatrist’s office—couch, box of tissues, water cooler in the corner, a discreet recording device in case the client later disputes what she or he told me.
“At work today, everyone was talking about Uncle Jerry. I mean, his death was all over the news, and people were talking like it was a horror movie, not someone’s life. I couldn’t take it because I couldn’t say, shut up, you’re talking about my uncle, you know? So I told my boss I was really sick and needed to go home, and she could tell I looked bad, so she signed me out. And when I got home, someone had been in there. They’d pulled open drawers. It was so scary and—and disgusting. I found one of my bras on the floor, and then Sebastian’s room, it was a mess, they’d pulled out all his DVDs and hadn’t put them back.”
“Did you call the police?”
“And have them all over me about Sebastian and Uncle Jerry? Why do you want to get me in trouble? Why aren’t you on my side?”
“I’m not on anybody’s side,” I said. “I’m trying to understand what happened. Could it have been ordinary burglars—I mean, did they take any of the obvious stuff?”
“Like computers?” She paused. “I’m not sure. Sebastian’s laptop wasn’t there, but I hadn’t looked before. He could have taken it with him when he left.”
She got an A for that observation—more objectivity than I’d expected from her. “Anything else?”
“The TV is old, so a burglar wouldn’t take that anyway. And I don’t have a computer, I just have my tablet and my phone and I had those with me.”
“If it wasn’t burglars, what would they have been looking for?”
“Stuff about Uncle Jerry, don’t you see? What Sebastian was doing for him!”
“And you still say you have no idea what that was?”
She shook her head, tears forming on the red-crusted rims of her eyes. “Won’t you please start looking for him?”
I went back to my desk and printed out a copy of my standard contract. “Read it before you sign it: it makes a number of financial demands on you, and it is binding in court.”
She read it, she argued about the expenses and the advance, she reminded me she didn’t have any family or anyone but her brother to fall back on.
“I still think the police are a better option for you than me,” I said, taking the contract back from her.
That made her pull out her wallet and give me her bank card. The card went through without a whimper, despite my hope for a message saying “insufficient funds.”
HIGH AND OUTSIDE
I went early to the Virejas Tower site. This was the project that Sebastian had been working on at the time he disappeared, Viola had told me. I wore my heavy boots and my parka: the construction site was near Navy Pier, just off Lake Shore Drive, and the wind blowing across Lake Michigan would be cold up on the exposed deck.