That was really helpful—Elena thought every man under eighty-five had the most gorgeous eyes. Still, she’d used it in my hearing. The night of the fire. Vinnie the banker, he came to chew me out and she told me not to upset a boy with such gorgeous eyes.
That memory brought the elusive face in the crowd at the Prairie Shores to the forefront of my mind. Vinnie. Vinnie, who shouldn’t have been within fifteen miles of the Near South Side. I’d opened my eyes as the paramedics were carrying me through the crowd and seen him looking down at me. It was a slide shown so briefly on my retina that I only now remembered opening my eyes for that brief flash.
I came slowly back to the room. At first I thought I’d have to revise my agenda for the day and go racing off to see him. But as the rushing in my head subsided and reason returned, I remembered I didn’t know which bank he worked for.
“You okay?” Zerlina asked anxiously.
“I’m fine. I think it’s just possible I may know who she was talking about.” Although would Elena have hidden the fact that she’d seen Vinnie before? Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with her to issue sly hints? There hadn’t been time, though—we’d been fighting about whether she could stay. That could have driven Vinnie from her mind. And then that night she and Cerise showed up together, they started with a story about Katterina, but after they were in bed together Elena suggested blackmailing Vinnie as a better idea. At that point of course she wouldn’t say anything about him to me.
“Elena’s disappeared again,” I said abruptly. “Took off from her hospital bed Saturday morning. She’d taken a pretty good blow to the head and shouldn’t have been walking, let alone running.”
“They didn’t say nothing about her on TV, just you on account of you being a detective. And that you’d rescued your aunt, which I was pretty sure had to be Elena. I didn’t come here today because of her, but I’m sorry for her. She’s not an evil person, you know, nor Cerise wasn’t, either. Just weak, both of them.”
She brooded over it in silence for a bit. When it was clear there wasn’t anything else she wanted to say, I asked if I could give her a lift.
“Um-unh. I show up in some white girl’s car everyone on the street’s going to be up telling Maisie about it. No, I’ll just go back the way I came. It doesn’t matter, taking three buses, you know—I don’t have anything else to do with my time these days.”
The rush of excitement I’d felt over remembering seeing Vinnie at the fire died away after Zerlina left, and with it much of my earlier euphoria. It was hard to think about her life and that of Elena and maintain a great flow of good cheer. Then, too, the more I considered Vinnie as an arsonist the less sense it made. Maybe he was a pyromaniac sociopath, but it seemed too incredible a coincidence that he would move in below me and then turn out to be torching my aunt’s building. Of course even sociopaths have to live someplace, and he couldn’t have known that my aunt lived in one of his target buildings. And that might explain his being awake and irritable so soon after the fire.
My mind kept churning futilely. Finally I willed myself to turn it off. I flipped quickly through the mail. Two checks, goodie, and a handful of get-well cards from corporate clients. The obvious junk mail I pitched. The bills could certainly wait, but the incoming money would defray my expenses this afternoon.
I stopped at a cash machine to deposit the money and withdraw a couple of hundred. Armed with that I walked west on Van Buren, hunting for a place that carried work clothes. The systematic mowing down of the Loop to make room for glitzy high rises has driven most of the low-rent business away. Van Buren used to be jammed with army surplus outlets, hardware shops, and the like, but only the peep shows and liquor stores have kept a tenacious hold on the area. They would probably go last.
I had to walk the better part of a mile before I found what I was looking for, I bought a hard hat and a heavy set of coveralls and work gloves. At five-eight I’m tall for a woman, but I still fit easily into a man’s small.
Everything looked too new to convince anyone I was a seasoned construction worker. Back in my office I laid the coveralls on the floor and scooted across them in my desk chair several times. Now they looked new but covered with grease.