“So why did it bother her that you gave me the picture?”
“I don’t know.” It was a sudden, frustrated explosion. “She came by, we talked, I told her you’d been around, hounding me, still not letting me have my money, but you wanted a picture of Barbara and Connie. Then, when I told her I let you have the one taken at our fortieth anniversary, Fanny’s and mine, she got all excited. She wanted to know which picture it was. Of course I only gave you one I had a copy of, I don’t expect someone like you to return something sentimental, that’s why I picked that one. I told her all that and she started carrying on about how I was desecrating Fanny’s memory letting you have something from such a personal time.”
By the time he finished his orangey cheeks were spotted with red and he was panting. “Now are you happy? Can you leave me in peace?”
“I think so. Probably. When is the service for Mrs. Donnelly? Tuesday afternoon?”
“Don’t you go barging in destroying her funeral. I still think it’s all because of those questions of yours she’s dead.”
I met his angry glare sadly. I had an uneasy feeling he was right. I got to my feet, wadding the discarded gauze from my left hand into a tight ball.
“I’ll give you back your picture, Mr. Seligman, but it won’t be for a few more days. I won’t come back here again, but I would like to get into your office. Can you arrange that for me?”
“You want the keys? Or you want to just break in like those hoodlums that killed Rita?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I didn’t read about a break-in. I thought the door was open for normal business and they walked in.”
“Well, it’s locked now and you can’t have the keys. You’ll just have to do your grave robbing someplace else.”
Fatigue was starting to hit me. I didn’t have any more energy to give to arguing with him. I stuffed the wadded gauze into my jeans pocket and turned without speaking.
Mrs. Feldman bustled me down the hall. “I hope you can leave him alone now. I shouldn’t have let you in in the first place, but he’s never listened to me. If my sister’d been here-she looks just like Mother. Don’t come back again. Not unless you have his check for the Indiana Arms. It’s just a fire to you, but it meant something special to him.”
I started to say something about my own warm and wonderful character but broke it off—she wouldn’t care. I’d barely stepped across the threshold when she began snapping the locks shut.
32
A Leap in the Dark
I didn’t feel like an overstuffed goose anymore, that was one good thing. At the same time, my bravado had cost me the dressing to my left hand. I tested it gingerly against the steering wheel. The blisters rolled and squished a bit.
I got out and opened the trunk and pulled out the towel I’d stuck in my equipment belt. I wrapped it around my left hand, using my teeth to hold it in place while I tucked the ends inside. It made a slippery glove, but I could manage driving now.
As I drove across Touhy to the Edens, I was so tired and depressed that I wondered if I should abandon my project at Alma Mejicana. Often when I feel like quitting I hear my mother’s voice in my head, exhorting me. Her fierce energy was tireless—the worst thing I could ever do in her eyes was to give up. Tonight, though, I heard no echoes in my head. I was alone in the dark city with my sore palms and bruised shoulders.
If you’re going to sink into self-pity, go home to bed, I scolded myself. Otherwise, your mission is bound to fail. For acrobatic derring-do you need to be at the peak of self-confidence, not down in a well.
I didn’t want to dwell on the scene in Seligman’s musty kitchen, but I forced myself at least to think about what he’d told me. Rita Donnelly had been sitting on something. I should have probed her harder about her daughters at the time, but it had seemed so purely personal. If it wasn’t their paternity she’d been hiding, what was it about them she didn’t want people to know?
The light at McCormick stayed red so long I was only roused from my musings by the violent honking behind me. Startled, I leapt forward through the intersection, barely clearing it on the yellow and getting a finger from an irate driver accelerating past me.
Going sixty on the Edens, I found managing the steering so difficult with my towel-wrapped hand that I couldn’t think about anything except the car and the traffic. I moved into the right-hand lane and slowed to fifty. As I maneuvered past the construction zone at Roosevelt, the damned engine started grinding again. I had to slow to forty before the noise subsided.