I put the magnifier over the notebook, but it didn’t tell me anything. Dark leather or vinyl, could be brown or black, or really any dark color. No lettering, no embossed letters proclaiming Annie Guzzo, Her Private Thoughts on Boom-Boom Warshawski and Sol Mandel.
I went back to piecing together the rest of the collection. There were several shots whose place in the order I couldn’t figure out, but in the one where Annie’s white shirt was dirty, she no longer had the book. I studied her face for a long minute, saw the streak of dirt on her forehead and along her right forearm. Her expression was a mix of guilt and glee—she’d done something she shouldn’t have and gotten away with it.
Whatever that book was, she’d left it somewhere in the bowels of the ballpark. What was in it that she couldn’t keep at home, but thought she could retrieve if she left it at Wrigley? She didn’t know anyone there, unless she was taking for granted that Frank would get the nod from the Cubs that he so desperately wanted.
Boom-Boom couldn’t be bothered with things like journals and diaries; there wasn’t a hope that he’d written about the day, even if Annie’s behavior had meant something special to him. And I doubted he would have paid much attention to the book, not unless it was his, and she was teasing him by running off with it.
I looked at it again, wondering if it might be something else, not the diary that Stella had hammered into my head. A dossier, perhaps? I put the magnifying glass down in frustration—it was impossible to make out any detail. All I could say was that it wasn’t a conventionally shaped diary or book, which was why I’d thought at first it was a clutch purse.
That break-in at Villard’s house. My head was so thick today that I only just put that incident together with Annie.
Thieves had taken some valuable baseball memorabilia, but they’d also stolen photographs. And they’d done it after the story appeared about my bogus biography project. Maybe it was coincidence—maybe the story told random thieves that Villard had valuable Cubs memorabilia in his home. But maybe whoever was pulling the strings in South Chicago knew Annie had taken something to the park that they wanted to make sure stayed buried there.
I felt cold suddenly, and found a sweatshirt on a hook behind my door to wrap around my neck. “Boom-Boom, what were you involved in?” I whispered, shivering. I thought I knew him inside and out, but there was a piece of his life about which I knew nothing.
“You didn’t kill Annie Guzzo, I know that much,” I said to his face on the table. “But what secrets died with you?”
I pulled the pictures together and laid them between sheets of acid-free tissue paper for protection until I had time to scan them. I placed them in the wall safe in my storeroom, looked longingly at my cot, but reminded myself that duty was the stern daughter of something or other. Anyway, Murray was a good investigator, and I was definitely at a point where an extra head would be useful. For the first time in a long time, I was looking forward to seeing him, working with him.
SUICIDE SQUEEZE
I was shutting down my system, stowing one backup drive in the safe, the other in my briefcase, when the building front bell rang. I looked at the monitor: Conrad Rawlings, with an acolyte. I took my time, closed my safe, walked deliberately down the hall to the front door, trying to gather my energy: it is not easy to be at your witty and alert best, which you need in a police encounter, with a broken nose and a head cold.
“Good evening, Lieutenant,” I said formally, stepping into the street and closing the door behind me.
“I need to talk to you,” Conrad said. “Can we do it inside?”
“Can I have a hint?” I asked. “Is this the kind of visit where you hurl abuse at me and threaten to cuff me, or is it information gathering?”
It was hard to read Conrad’s expression in the fading light, but he told his companion to wait for him in the car. I typed in my door code and led him back to my office.
“Wagner got you good, didn’t he,” Conrad said, inspecting my face.
“Wagner?” I repeated.
“How many fights you been in lately? Look in the mirror in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Is Wagner the Dragon’s name? He hadn’t been ID’d when Bernadine Fouchard and I made our statements.”
Conrad thumbed through his iPad. “That’s right. We didn’t know him then, but we printed him this morning when he came out of surgery. He’d been arrested a good few times and did a nickel in Joliet for assault. I need to know if you were anywhere near him today.”
I backed away, astonished. “Any special reason you’re asking?”
Conrad took my shoulders in his hands so he could look directly at my face. “Can you prove where you spent the day?” He spoke with an unsettling urgency.
“What is going on?”
“Arturo Wagner is dead.”
I sat down hard. Not that I would shed a bucket of tears over him, but it’s hard news to handle, the news you’ve killed another person. “They told me his jaw was broken and he was concussed, but no one suggested his life was in danger.”