“So tell me what happened,” I invited.
When Vinnie didn’t show any inclination to answer, Rick spoke for him. “This was a week ago tomorrow night, right? We were asleep—” He broke off to look at me guardedly, to see if I was going to scream and yell at this revelation. When he saw I wasn’t reacting he went on.
“The dog was barking her head off—that woke us up. The bedroom is next to the hall, you know.”
In my place it was on the outside and the kitchen was next to the hall, but they were reversed on the first floor because of the way the back stairs came down—I knew from all the times I’d been in Mr. Contrera’s kitchen picking up the dog.
“We got up and saw you leaving. And Vinnie said it was the last time you’d wake him up in the middle of the night. He said you did something illegal and had the cops paid off but he was going to track you down, catch you in the act, and go to the police with hard evidence that would make them arrest you.” He cocked his head on one side. “Just out of curiosity, what is it you do? You don’t look like a dealer or a hooker.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “I’m a private investigator, but that doesn’t have anything to do with why I’ve been waking him up. Actually it’s an aunt of mine—she got burned out of her home and came to me for late-night assistance a few times. But Vinnie reacted so violently I couldn’t bring myself to confide in him. So what did you do when you saw me leave?”
“We got in the Mazda and followed you.”
Rick had a cool poise that made me wonder what he saw in Vinnie. Still, it wasn’t the first ill-matched couple I’d ever met. I thought back to my cautious approach down Indiana to the Prairie Shores. I didn’t think I’d been followed.
“We waited on Cermak,” Rick explained. Neither of us was paying any attention to Vinnie, who sat hunched inside his Dead T-shirt. “If you were really meeting a drug dealer, I didn’t want to be caught in the middle. And that was the eeriest street I’ve ever seen. We drove up and down Cermak a few times; we saw you come down Indiana and disappear behind that building, the one that burned. So we turned up the street and watched and after about twenty minutes we saw the place start up in flames and some guy running off. That really freaked us, but we thought we’d better call 911. Is it true that they tape the calls?”
I nodded abstractedly. Of course this could be a romance cooked up to appease me, but it had the ring of truth to it. Vinnie looked too sulky, for one thing, and the bit about not wanting to leave Cermak Road sounded authentic.
“Could you describe the man you saw running away from the building?”
Rick shook his head. “It was dark and he was dressed in dark clothes. I think he had a leather jacket on, but I was too nervous to pay much attention. I’m pretty sure he was white; I think I saw the lamplight reflect off his cheekbones, but I’m not sure if I really remember that.”
“Then you stayed around to see if someone came to put out the fire?”
He looked a little ashamed. “I know we should have rushed into the burning building to save you, but we didn’t know what you’d been up to—whether you’d set the fire yourself, maybe you’d gotten out however you came in. And the fire got going fast.”
“Because of the accelerant,” I said absently. “But Elena told Mrs.—told someone that she’d seen the man who torched the Indiana Arms and that he had the most gorgeous eyes. And that’s what she said when she saw Vinnie the first night she woke him up. So I thought maybe she’d recognized him and had been blackmailing him,”
My voice trailed off as Rick began to laugh. “This is pure Restoration, Vinnie. Come on, lighten up! You think she’s running a crack house upstairs all the time she’s tracking you down as a pyromaniac. I want you two to shake hands and have a drink together.”
Vinnie didn’t want to and I wasn’t much in the humor for it, either, but Rick went off to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Georges Goulet. It seemed churlish not to have a least one glass. In the end Rick and I drank that bottle and part of another one while Vinnie stomped angrily off to bed.
36
Treasure Hunt