She drove a silver Audi 5000. Either the Windy City Balletworks paid better than the average struggling theater or the Lake Bluff connection supplied money for shantung suits and foreign sports cars.
Paige drove with the quick, precise grace that characterized her dancing. Since neither of us knew the area, she made a few wrong turns in the rows of identical houses before finding an access ramp to the Eisenhower.
She didn’t say much on the ride back to town. I was quiet too, thinking about my cousin and feeling melancholy—and guilty. That was why I’d had a temper tantrum with those stupid, hulking cousins, I realized. I hadn’t kept up with Boom Boom. I knew he was depressed but I hadn’t kept in touch. If only I’d left my Peoria number with my answering service. Was he sick with despair? Maybe he’d thought love would cure him and it hadn’t. Or maybe it was the talk on the docks that he’d stolen some papers—he thought I could help him combat it, like the thousand other battles we’d fought together. Only I wasn’t there.
With his death, I’d lost my whole family. It’s true my mother had an aunt in Melrose Park. But I’d rarely met her, and neither she nor her fat, self-important son seemed like real relations to me. But Boom Boom and I had played, fought, protected each other. If we hadn’t spent much time together in the last ten years, we’d always counted on the other being around to help us out. And I hadn’t helped him out.
As we neared the I-90/94 interchange rain started spattering the windshield, breaking into my fruitless reverie. I realized Paige was glancing at me speculatively. I turned to face her, eyebrows raised.
“You’re Boom Boom’s executor, aren’t you?”
I assented. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Boom Boom and I—never got to the stage of exchanging keys.” She gave me a quick, embarrassed smile. “I’d like to go to his place and get some things I left there.”
“Sure. I was planning on being there tomorrow afternoon for a preliminary look at his papers. Want to meet me there at two?”
“Thanks. You’re sweet … Do you mind if I call you Vic? Boom Boom talked about you so much I feel as though I know you.”
We were going under the post office, where six lanes had been carved out the building’s foundations, Paige gave a satisfied nod. “And you must call me Paige.” She changed lanes, nosed the Audi around a garbage truck, and turned left on Wabash. She dropped me at my office—the Pulteney Building on the corner of Wabash and Monroe.
Overhead an el train thundered. “Good-bye,” I yelled above the din. “See you tomorrow at two.”
2
Love’s Labors Lost
The Hawks had paid Boom Boom a lot of money to play hockey. He’d spent a fair amount of it on a condo in a slick glass building on Lake Shore Drive north of Chestnut Street. Since he bought it five years ago I’d been there a number of times, often with a crowd of drunken friendly hockey players.
Gerald Simonds, Boom Boom’s lawyer, gave me the building keys, along with those to my cousin’s Jaguar. We spent the morning going over Boom Boom’s will, a document likely to raise more uproar with the aunts—my cousin left the bulk of his estate to various charities and to the Hockey Widows Pension Fund; no aunts were mentioned. He left me some money with a request not to spend it all on Black Label. Simonds frowned disapprovingly as I laughed. He explained that he had tried to keep his client from inserting that particular clause, but Mr. Warshawski had been adamant.
It was about noon when we finished. There were a couple of things I could have done in the financial district for one of my clients but I just didn’t feel like working. I didn’t have any interesting cases going at the moment—just a couple of processes to serve. I was also trying to track down a man who had disappeared with half the assets in a partnership, including a forty-foot cabin cruiser. They could all wait. I retrieved my car, a green Mercury Lynx, from the Fort Dearborn Trust’s parking lot and headed over to the Gold Coast.
Like most posh places, Boom Boom’s building had a doorman. A pudgy, middle-aged white man, he was helping an old lady out of her Seville when I got there, and didn’t pay much attention to me. I fumbled with the keys, trying to find the one that opened the inner door.