“It really would be better if you minded your own business this time around,” Hinton said in a toneless voice more ominous than a shout.
MacDonald shook his head. “She’s not going to listen to threats, Clarence—her whole history makes that clear…. Look, Vic—Roz needs Boots’s support if she’s going to win her first county-wide contest. But Boots needs her too—the Hispanic wards pretty much vote the way she tells them to.”
That wasn’t news to me so I didn’t say anything.
“Roz committed a major indiscretion in her youth. She confessed it all to Boots when they were talking over the slate and his opinion was that it wouldn’t hurt her if it came out in five years, when she had a big base, but that it could be pretty damaging to her home support if they learned about it now. So someone said something to her at the barbecue that made her think you were probing and she was trying to assure herself that you weren’t.”
“And what was that youthful indiscretion?”
MacDonald shook his head. “Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you—Boots is an old political hand and he doesn’t share secrets with people who don’t need to know them.”
“Well, you know my reputation-I don’t care if she was screwing the village goat, but I don’t sign on for fraud.”
MacDonald laughed. “You see, Vic, everyone has a different notion of morality. There are plenty more people in Humboldt Park who would care about the goat than any money she’d siphoned off a public works project. So don’t set up your own standards to run the county by, okay?”
I smiled sweetly. “Just as long as no one is making me the goat. That’s probably what I most care about.”
He came over and helped me to my feet. “It would take a smarter crew than us to do that. Let’s go back to the party—I want some of those little salmon things before the ignorant mob gets them all.”
When we returned to the drawing room Marissa caught Ralph’s eye anxiously. He nodded fractionally to telegraph all’s well, that I’d been convinced. But of what?
21
Auntie’s Turning Tricks Again
When I got home the sun had just set and the air was still softly lit. I went slowly upstairs to my living room and stood at the window looking out. Vinnie the banker emerged from our building and climbed into his car, a late-model Mazda. A gaggle of teenage boys headed south, yelling raucous slogans and dumping their potato-chip bags onto the sidewalk.
I let the curtain fall and went to sit in my armchair. I didn’t want to learn something awful about Roz. I really didn’t. I wanted strong women in public office and she was better than most. So why did she keep rubbing my face in it?
I hadn’t turned on any lamps. In the twilight the room seemed ghostly, a place where no living creatures moved. The image of Cerise’s dead face came into my mind and I felt an unbearable sadness for the waste that had been her life. And again, unwanted, came the nagging question about what Bobby was doing at the site within hours of her body being discovered. And what was he doing coming to see me yesterday? Off and on all day I’d worried over it like a sore tooth, but couldn’t put it to rest.
I had one client, Ajax, to look into one issue—had Saul Seligman burned down his own building. As a host of people from Bobby Mallory to Velma Riter and Ralph MacDonald kept reminding me, neither Cerise nor Roz was any of my business. Of course the cops thought the Indiana Arms wasn’t any of my business, either.
By and by I got stiffly to my feet and went down to Mr. Contreras’s apartment to borrow the dog. Sometimes he has enough sensitivity to spare me an intrusive barrage. Tonight, mercifully, was such a time. He handed Peppy over to me with a stern adjuration not to feed her cheese or anything else dangerous to her delicate GI tract and returned to the tube.
I walked Peppy around the block before returning to my own apartment. She thought that was a pretty miserable excuse for a workout, but when I fixed her a plate of spaghettini with dried tomatoes and mushrooms to go with my own, she cheered up. She wolfed it down and came to lie on my feet while I turned to the phone.
Murray Ryerson was Chicago’s leading crime reporter. He’d been with the Herald-Star for almost eleven years, moving from covering the city wire stories to nickel-and-dime stabbings to now where he was a leading authority on the frequent intersection of crime and politics in town.
He didn’t show any particular enthusiasm at hearing from me. At times we’ve been friendly enough to be lovers, but both of us covering the same scene and having strong personalities make it hard to avoid conflict. After the latest clash between our jobs Murray had been furious. He still hadn’t warmed up. He believed I’d held back significant chunks of a story until it was too late to use them. Actually I’d held back significant chunks that he never even knew about, so he probably had a right to a grievance.