“Cash,” the secretary said briefly. “And no pets or children.”
“Fine.” I double-checked the address and hung up. For the first time in my life I found myself wondering what Elena had done for birth control all those years. And I suddenly realized why Gabriella had been so accepting the time she showed up at our house thirty years ago. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what had been said, but Elena had been pregnant. Gabriella helped her find some kind of underground abortion and Elena got drunk.
I sat at my desk, my shoulder slumped, watching the pigeons fight for space on the windowsill. Finally I stretched out a hand to switch on the desk lamp and called Michael Furey at the Central District. He didn’t sound enthusiastic at hearing from me, but he said he’d checked the morgue and some of the area hospitals—no gray-haired drunk women had been hauled in since yesterday afternoon.
“Gotta go, Vic, we’re hard at it. See you Sunday….”
Normally I would have chafed him about being hard at a poker game, but I hung up without saying anything—I wasn’t in the mood for jokes.
I’d noticed too late that one of the pieces of mail I was shredding was from an old client. I rummaged through the scraps on the floor and reconstructed enough of it to see that it was a request for a simple background check. It would keep until Monday—I wasn’t in the humor to do that tonight, either. The rest of the paper I scooped up and put into the trash.
Embarrassed by my earlier outburst, I soberly filed the papers remaining on my desk, then went to the ladies’ room on the seventh floor for some water to scrub down the surface. That looked so good that I finished by washing the windowsills and filing cabinets too. Clean now in thought, word, and deed, I locked up the office.
En route to the garage I stopped at a cash machine to get the ninety dollars, then joined the slow procession out of the Loop. Everyone leaves work early on Friday in order to maximize the amount of time spent sitting in traffic before starting the weekend.
It was a little before five when I reached the Windsor Arms on Kenmore. The building had gone up when the Duke was in his heyday, enjoying Goering’s hospitality and lending his name to residential hotels that hoped to reflect his royal splendor. The Duke of Windsor was dead now, but the hotel hadn’t been so lucky. If the facade had been washed since George VI’s ascension, it didn’t show. Not much more attention had been paid to basic repairs— a number of windows had pieces of cardboard filling in for missing panes.
The inside smelled faintly of boiled cabbage, despite a large poster over the desk that stated emphatically, “Absolutely No Cooking in Rooms.” Next to the sign Alderman Helen Schiller’s face smiled beatifically out at her voters.
No one was behind the desk, but a handful of residents sat in a small lounge watching Vanna White on a tiny TV chained high on the wall. I walked over and asked if anyone knew where the manager was. A middle-aged woman in a sleeveless housedress looked at me suspiciously—people in business suits and nylons who come to residential hotels are usually city inspectors or lawyers threatening action on behalf of the family of a dead resident.
I gave my most trustworthy smile. “I understand you have a room here. For Elena Warshawski.”
“What about it?” The woman had the heavy flat drawl of the Irish South side.
“I’m her niece. She’ll be by in a couple of days to move in, but I wanted to pay for a month in advance to hold the room for her.”
The woman looked me up and down, her watery gray eyes tight and ungiving. At last she decided my sanctimonious honesty was the real thing. She turned back to the set, waited for a commercial, then heaved herself ponderously out of the vinyl-coated armchair. I followed her out to the desk and behind it into a cubbyhole whose outstanding feature was a large lockbox.
The chatelaine counted my tens twice, wrote out a receipt in a labored hand, then put the money in a sealed envelope and slid it through a slot in the side of the box.
“I don’t know how to get into that sucker, so don’t think your boyfriend can come around and hold a gun on me to get your money back for you. They come and empty it out twice a week.”
“No, ma’am,” I agreed helplessly.
“Now I’ll show you the room. When your aunt’s ready to move in she can come on over. Make sure she brings the receipt with her.”