“Now, you’ve had a rough time lately, Vicki. Your cousin died and you almost got killed yourself in a bad accident. You go away for a few weeks, go someplace warm and lie in the sun for a while. You need to give yourself a chance to recover from all this.”
After that, naturally, I didn’t tell him about Boom Boom’s documents or about Mattingly flying in from the Soo on Bledsoe’s plane. McGonnigal offered to take me home, but in a continuing spirit of perverseness I told him I could find the way myself. I got up stiffly—we’d been talking for over two hours. It was close to ten when I boarded the northbound subway at Roosevelt Road. I took it as far as Clark and Division, then transferred to a number 22 bus, getting off at Belmont and Broadway. I could walk the last half mile or so home.
I was very tired. The pain had come back in my shoulder, perhaps from sitting so long in one position. I walked as rapidly as I could across Belmont to Halsted. Lincoln Avenue cuts in at an angle there, and a large triangle on the south side of the street is a scraggy vacant lot. I held my keys clenched between my fingers, watching shadows in the bushes. At the front door to my building I kept a weather eye out for anything unusual. I didn’t want to be the fourth victim of this extremely efficient murderer.
Three dePaul students share the second-floor apartment. As I walked up the stairs, one of them stuck her head out the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She came all the way out, followed by her two roommates, one male and one female. In an excited trio they told me someone had tried to break into my apartment about an hour before. A man had rung their doorbell. When they buzzed him in, he’d gone past their door to the third floor.
“We told him you weren’t home,” one of the women said, “but he went on up anyway. After a while we heard him kind of chiseling away at the door. So we got the bread knife and went up after him.”
“My God,” I said. “He could have killed you. Why didn’t you call the police?”
The first speaker shrugged thin shoulders in a Blue Demon T-shirt. “There were three of us and one of him. Besides, you know what the police are like—they’d never come in time in this neighborhood.”
I asked if they could describe the intruder. He was thin and seemed wiry. He had a ski mask on, which frightened them more than the incident itself. When he saw them coming up the stairs, he dropped the chisel, pushed past them, and ran down the steps and up Halsted. They hadn’t tried to chase him, for which I was grateful—I didn’t need injuries to them on my conscience, too.
They gave me the chisel, an expensive Sorby tool. I thanked them profusely and invited all three up to my apartment for a nightcap. They were curious about me and came eagerly. I served them Martell in my mother’s red Venetian glasses and answered their enthusiastic questions about my life as a private investigator. It seemed a small price to pay for saving my apartment, and perhaps me, from a late night intruder.
23
A House of Mourning
I woke up early the next morning. My would-be intruder convinced me that I didn’t have much time before another accident would overtake me. My anger with Bobby continued: I didn’t report the incident. After all, the police would just treat it as another routine break and entry. I would solve the crimes myself; then they’d be sorry they hadn’t listened to me.
I felt decidedly unheroic as I ran slowly over to Belmont Harbor and back. I only did two miles instead of my normal five, and that left me sweating, the ache returning to my left shoulder. I took a long shower and rubbed some ligament oil into the sore muscles.
I checked the Omega over with extra care. Everything seemed to be working all right, and no one had tied a stick of dynamite to the battery cable. Even taking time for exercise and a proper breakfast, I was on the road by nine o’clock. I whistled Fauré’s “Après un rêve” under my breath as I headed for the Loop. My first stop was the Title Office at City Hall. I found an empty parking meter on Madison Street and put in a quarter. Half an hour should be enough time for what I wanted to do.
The Title Office is where you go to register ownership of buildings in Chicago. Maybe all of Cook County. Like other city offices, this was filled with patronage workers. Henry Ford could study a city office and learn something about the ultimate in division of labor. One person gave me a form to fill out. I completed it, copying Paige Carrington’s Astor Street address out of Boom Boom’s address book. The filled-in form went to a second clerk, who date-stamped it and gave it to a heavy black man sitting behind a cage. He, in turn, assigned the form to one of the numerous pages whose job it was to fetch out the title books and carry them to the waiting taxpayers.