I shook my head. “She looks like a couple of different women I’ve met briefly. What did she have that made you think I knew her?”
He compressed his lips again—he wanted to yell at me but he belongs to a generation that doesn’t swear at women. “Don’t play games with me, Vicki. If you know who it is, tell us so we can get moving on tracking down her associates.”
“How did she die?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet; they won’t do a postmortem until Friday. Probably a heroin overdose. That help you distinguish her from the others?” Bobby’s sarcasm is always heavy.
“What do you care, anyway? Dead junkies must be a dime a dozen around here. And here are three crack guys from the Violent Crimes Unit only three hours after she was found.”
Bobby’s eyes glittered. “You ain’t running the department, Vicki. I don’t account to you how I decide to spend my time.”
The intensity of his anger surprised me; it also spelled in large block letters that he hadn’t chosen to be here. I stared at Cerise thoughtfully. What about her life or death could bring heat from the top down to the Central Division in such a short stretch?
“Where was she found?” I asked abruptly.
“On the big construction project going up near Navy Pier.” That was McGonnigal. “Watchman found her in the elevator shaft when he was making his rounds, called us. She hadn’t been dead too long when the squad car got there.”
“Rapelec Towers, right? What made him look down the shaft?”
McGonnigal shook his head. “One of those things. Why she was on the site we’ll probably never know, either. Nice secluded place at night if you want to shoot up in peace, but awfully far from where you’d expect to find her.”
“So what did she have that made you think of me?”
Bobby nodded at Furey, who produced a transparent evidence bag. Inside was a plastic square. My photograph was glued in the left corner, looking just as demented as the one I’d had taken this morning.
“Hmm,” I said after I’d looked at it. “Looks like my driver’s license.”
Bobby smiled savagely. “This isn’t Second City, Victoria, and nobody’s rolling in the aisles. You know this girl or not?”
I nodded reluctantly. Like Bobby, I hate giving information across police barricades. “Cerise Ramsay.”
“How’d she get that license?”
“She stole it from me yesterday morning.” I crossed my arms in front of me.
“Did you report it? Report the theft?”
I shook my head without answering.
Bobby slammed his hand against the side of the cart hard enough that the metal rattled. “Why the hell not?”
He really was pissed. I looked at him squarely. “I thought Elena might have taken it.”
“Oh.” The fire went out of his face. He jerked his head at Furey and McGonnigal. “Why don’t you boys wait for me in the car?”
When they’d left he said in quiet, fatherly tones, “Okay, Vicki, let’s have the whole story. And not just the sections you think I’ll find out anyway. You know Tony would say the same thing if he was here.”
Indeed I did. It’s just that I was too old to do things because my daddy told me to. I didn’t have a client to protect, though. There wasn’t any reason not to tell him the pathetic little I knew about Cerise, just as long as we didn’t do it surrounded by cold bodies.
Bobby got the attendant to show us to a tiny cubicle where the ME’s drink coffee or whiskey or something in between dissections. And I told him everything I knew about Cerise, including Katterina and Zerlina. “I can sign the papers if you want. Her mother’s got a bad heart— I don’t think it would do her any good to come down here.”
Bobby nodded. “We’ll see about that. What were you doing at Eleventh Street that rattled Roland Montgomery’s cage so bad?”
The shift in topic was casual and expert, but it didn’t make me jump. “Nothing,” I said earnestly. “I don’t understand it myself.”
“He came to see me with a full head of steam and demanded I run you in if you showed up anywhere near the Indiana Arms.”
Bobby’s tone was neutral—he wasn’t criticizing, just offering me information, telling me he couldn’t protect me if I got powerful people mad at me. At the same time he’d make a stab at it if I gave him the inside track on why the Indiana Arms was a hot topic. Unfortunately I couldn’t help, and in the end he got angry—he couldn’t see that I wasn’t being obstructive, that I was well and truly ignorant. He thinks I take on clients and cases just to thumb my nose at him, that I’m having a late-life adolescent fit. He’s waiting for me to grow out of it the way his six children all did.