I leaned back in the soft musty cushions, my mind drifting on the verge of sleep. My neighbor’s living room wasn’t that different from Saul Seligman’s—the same soft, overstuffed furniture, the same relics of their dead wives filling every available inch. And except for Seligman’s fire irons, the relics were also remarkably similar, down to the studio photos of their weddings.
I felt a tender kind of pity for the two of them, each struggling in his own way to maintain the intimacy their wives’ deaths had stripped them of. Seligman had accused me of being like everyone else, wanting him to sell his heart for a dollar, but I—
I sat up in the mustard chair. But I hadn’t been paying proper attention to him. That was my problem. Someone had been trying to get him to sell the building. I hadn’t heard that; I’d just been letting his plaints flow over me. Mrs. Donnelly knew, though, because it was Farmworks that wanted to buy it.
Her daughter worked there. To help boost her career she’d let them know the building might be for sale? Or she’d given them access to Mr. Seligman? At any rate, something about the sale, or at least about the fire, had brought that little smirk to her face because it reminded her of some special benefit to her daughter Star. But when she went to the man (woman?) she knew at Farmworks, worried because I had a picture of Star, he (she?) had killed Mrs. Donnelly and torn up the place to find any documents relating to their sale offer.
I got up and started pacing around the room, knocking my shins into a shrouded birdcage. Swearing briefly, I ran into the curio case Mr. Contreras kept in the middle of the room under an old bedspread.
Saul Seligman didn’t have anything to do with the property management company anymore. He told people he went in most afternoons, but he didn’t really leave his home to do much of anything. I’d never seen him with shoes on, only his worn bedroom slippers. Still, he hadn’t given Mrs. Donnelly a powder of attorney or anything. She would have needed his agreement to sell.
Whoever killed her had left him alone because everyone knew he wouldn’t be able to make the necessary connections. He didn’t have any documents—those had all gone to Rita Donnelly. She might even have portrayed him as mentally incompetent to her principals.
But why had they wanted the Indiana Arms? What was it about that building that someone cared so much about? I was just a derelict property in the decayed triangle between McCormick Plance and the Ryan. Of course that was where MacDonald and Meagher wanted to put their stadium; if they got the bid, the value of any property there would skyrocket.
I came to a stop in front of the birdcage before I could bang into it again. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I could have been so dense for so long.
Old MacDonald had a farm. Of course. He had damned near every other piece of land in Chicago, why not a farm too? He’d have a little holding company that could do deals on the side without drawing the public scrutiny that MacDonald Development inevitably attracted. And why not call it Farmworks? Just the name for someone with a macabre sense of humor. And if the Indiana Arms was the last, or one of the last, bits of property standing in the way of his development, then just burn that sucker down.
Wunsch and Grasso, they did a lot of business for the county. Ernie’s daddy had grown up in Norwood Park alongside Boots and the two of them had just naturally kept in touch. Ernie and Ron had started out doing favors for the Dems-in Chicago that could mean anything from hustling votes to breaking legs of tavern owners who didn’t pay off the right people. So when they took over Ernie’s daddy’s business it expanded along with Boots’s career. So if Boots and his pal Ralph wanted them to supply Alma Mejicana with trucks and compressors and manpower for the Ryan project, they’d be happy to help out.
“What’s wrong with you, doll?” Mr. Contreras’s severe voice behind me made me jump. “You know I ain’t had a bird in there in ten years. I only keep it because Clara loved canaries. You thinking of getting a bird, don’t. You may not think they need a lot of looking after, like the princess here, but you can’t be gone all the time and have any kind of animal.”
“I wasn’t planning on a canary,” I said meekly. “Anybody upstairs?”
“We went up outside your kitchen besides going up inside here, in case you wondered what kept us. Nobody there. Seemed to me someone might have been trying to get past those locks of yours, but they held okay. Maybe you should spend the night down here, though. I’m not going to be real happy wondering what’s happening to you.”
“I’ll be fine upstairs,” I assured him. “They know you saw them. They won’t come back. Even if they could field a different crew, they’d be too worried that the cops would trace them through you. I’ll lock all the bolts and tie a rope across the upstairs landing, okay?”