“You gotta wait five more minutes,” I told her. She wasn’t buying it. Usually the most docile of dogs, she snarled at me now and I had to wrap her leash around the seat divider to keep her in the car. She stood on the passenger seat barking at me furiously.
My legs had cramped up from tensing them so hard while I drove. When I stood up I almost fell over. I steadied myself against the car door.
“Neither of us is in good shape, are we?” I murmured to the Chevy. “I promise I won’t sell you for scrap if you’ll do the same for me.”
Cars were moving around me now that they saw I was stalled, but the ones farther back kept up their honking. I was too tired to react to the insistent blare. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the doorframe, I tried pushing the car to the curb. Too much strain in the last few days had left my shoulders so weak that I couldn’t urge the extra force into them to muscle the car forward.
I leaned my forehead against the roof. Someone across the street was adding to the cacophony on Racine. I ignored him along with the rest until finally over the din of the traffic I heard my name.
“Vic! Vic! You need some help?”
It was Rick York, Vinnie’s friend, at the wheel of a VW. I darted across the traffic to explain my plight to him. Vinnie was sitting in the passenger seat with his head pointedly turned away—he clearly didn’t think Rick should have tried so hard to get my attention.
“Do you think you could push me up the street. If I can get it back to our place, I can leave it for a tow in the morning.”
“Sure, just let me turn around,” Rick said, in the same breath that Vinnie announced they were going to be late if they waited around any longer.
“Aw, don’t be a turdhead, Vinnie, This’ll take us five minutes.”
I sprinted back to the Chevy, feeling refreshed just by an offer of help, and waited for Rick to come up behind me. Peppy didn’t like this new development at all. She left off barking to leap into the backseat and whimper, then plunged back into the front seat. I undid her collar to keep her from choking, but she jumped around so much that I had a hard time keeping an eye on traffic at the intersections.
I coasted into an empty patch across from my building. Rick honked twice and took off without waiting for my thanks. In the morning I’d find out where he lived and order a bottle of champagne for him. His kindness took the edge off my fatigue, enough so that I was able to give Peppy her due and walk her over to the inner harbor and back.
When I finally returned her to Mr. Contreras it was past eight. He was beside himself: “Let alone I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, I don’t even know where you’ve gone to come bail you out. And don’t tell me you don’t need my help. Where would you of been last year if I hadn’t known where to come hunting for you? Even if you don’t want me, you might spare a little thought for the princess here. And then people come calling on you what am I supposed to tell them?”
I ignored the bulk of his diatribe. “Just say I’m a secretive bitch who doesn’t give you a printout of my agenda every day. Who came calling?”
“Couple of guys. They didn’t leave their names—just said they’d be back later.”
His disclaimers to the contrary, my neighbor could identify any man who’d come to visit me in the past three years. If he didn’t know these guys, they were strangers.
“Probably Jehovah’s Witnesses. How’d you come to let them in? They ring your bell?”
“Yeah, they said they got the floor wrong.”
“And the side of the building?” I asked affably. “Did they leave or are they still upstairs?”
His tirade changed rapidly to remorse. “My God, doll, no wonder you don’t want to trust me with any of your secrets. Here I am falling for the oldest game in the world. They left, but what if someone else let them back in, that Vinnie guy across the hall or Miss Gabrielsen upstairs?”
Berit Gabrielsen, who lived across the hall from me, was still at the cottage in northern Michigan where she spent her summers. Mr. Contreras refused to listen to this idea but insisted on bustling me into his living room while he went up with the dog to check out my apartment. He wanted my keys but I resisted.
“You’ll be able to tell if the locks have been tampered with. They’re more likely waiting outside the door if they’re there at all. And if they are, I don’t want you waltzing into their arms—I don’t have the energy to carry you to the hospital. Besides, my car is broken.”
He was too agitated to pay any attention to me. If I’d thought there was really any danger I would have gone with him, but if my visitors had been sent by Ralph MacDonald they wouldn’t come back when they knew they’d be ID’d. I let Mr. Contreras usher me into his badly sprung mustard armchair.