Even though I got to the main gate before seven, a crew was already on-site. I put on my hard hat and asked the guard at the gate to direct me to the project manager.
Viola had tried to argue me out of going to the job site, out of a free-flowing fear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t parse for me. My second client in a month who’d persuaded me to go to work based on the flimsiest of incomprehensible stories. I was beginning to wonder if I had “sucker” embroidered on my forehead, or maybe in my brain.
Viola had tapped into one of my wells of grief, but I hadn’t realized it until talking about her last night with Jake. She’d mentioned casually that her mother died when she and Sebastian were sixteen.
“Not to play Dr. Freud with you, V.I.,” Jake drawled, “but isn’t that how old you were when Gabriella died?”
“Just call me ‘Dora,’” I’d agreed ruefully.
At least in Viola’s case, Sebastian was actually missing and someone really had been searching their apartment—I’d gone there yesterday after Viola signed my contract.
She and Sebastian lived in a frugal way on the poorer fringe of Ukrainian Village on Chicago’s West Side, the edge where rehabbed buildings bleed into Vice Lord territory. Despite the cracks in the stairwell walls, and the sour smell in the hallway, the twins kept the apartment clean and neat—or had done before their intruder trashed the place.
Both beds had been pulled apart, the closets ransacked, but when Viola started picking up clothes, there wasn’t an underlying layer of junk the way there would have been in my apartment.
The intruders had come in through the kitchen door, with a crowbar, not a slick set of picklocks. While Viola was calling the twenty-four-hour board-up service I contract with, I canvassed the neighbors. A woman on the floor below thought she’d seen a stranger going up the back stairs, but her baby had been fussing and she hadn’t really paid attention.
White, black, male, female, she couldn’t say, although she was pretty sure it was a man. Wearing? Jeans, maybe a gray hoodie, so she didn’t see the hair. No one had been home in the other three apartments on Viola’s landing.
“What were they looking for?” Viola was sobbing again when I got back.
“That’s the question I get to ask you. Did Uncle Jerry leave a will, or give you any documents to look after? He was murdered two days ago; someone may be looking for something they thought you had.”
She made a helpless gesture. “We hardly ever saw him, I told you. He didn’t really like us, he just used us for money. If he even had a will I’m sure we’re not in it.”
“The Fughers, the people who adopted him, where is their house?”
“They died a long time ago,” Viola said. “They lived somewhere on the South Side, I mean, Uncle Jerry, he grew up at 103rd and Avenue O, and they didn’t have any other family. That’s why we thought Uncle Jerry would be glad when we got in touch with him. Only he wasn’t.”
The drawers from the cardboard filing cabinet where the twins kept their bills and receipts had also been dumped onto the floor. Buried in the middle of them was the loan document Sebastian had signed. The money came through Sleep-EZ, one of the payday loan companies. I’d seen their ads on TV: Debts keeping you awake? Come to Sleep-EZ. We’ll get you the money you need and you can sleep-ez at night again.
The only difference between Mob-run juice loans and the payday business was that payday loans are legal. Interest tops out at 355 percent a year under current laws halfheartedly designed to curb usury. Eight years back, when Sebastian had signed this paper, there hadn’t been an upper limit.
The twins’ copy of the loan agreement was barely legible after years of handling. I squinted at it under the light from my flash. Uncle Jerry had cosigned it, since Sebastian had been underage when he got the loan. The twins paid Uncle Jerry directly. Since he presumably had long since paid back Sleep-EZ, he was pocketing a handsome bundle of change. Which reinforced the idea that Viola and Sebastian were the best candidates to have killed him.
“What about your brother’s room—was there anything in there they might want, anything that would show what he was doing for your uncle?”
“It could have been on his computer, only that’s gone, like I told you already.”
It was all unsatisfactory and frustrating, made more so by her resistance to my suggestions for action. “Viola, all this reluctance to talk to the cops points in a bad direction. Are you sure Sebastian didn’t kill your uncle?”
That opened the sluice gates completely. How could I say such a thing? She was worried sick, she didn’t want to go to the police because they would think like me, but if I wasn’t going to look for Sebastian, she’d do it herself.
I wondered if I was exuding some subliminal hormone that made all my clients hysterical. “Then you have to let me know where your brother has been working. If you don’t tell me anything, there’s no point in your signing an agreement with me.”