The wind was blowing more steadily from the northeast as the sun went down, but the cold air felt cleansing after the heated emotions in the Czernin house. I held my head up so the air could blow right through me.
It was only a little after three when I got to my car. Pat Grobian should still be at his station at the warehouse. Maybe he’d tell me what document he’d given Bron that proved the company would pay April’s medical bills. I drove across Lake Calumet and turned south to 103rd and the By-Smart warehouse.
When I’d come here the first time, I’d needed to prove to a guard that I had permission to be on the property. And when I’d reached the warehouse, another guard had catechized me. I didn’t think Grobian would welcome me with open arms, so I bypassed the whole process, parking on Crandon and crossing to the back of the vast complex, my hard hat under my arm.
Razor wire enclosed the whole area. I stumbled around the perimeter: the leather half boots I was wearing were not ideal for cross-country hiking. Eventually, I came on a secondary drive, a narrow track that was probably used for service crews if they had to get to the power plant behind the warehouse. The gate was padlocked, but the rutted road left a gap plenty wide enough for me to slide under.
I was now behind both the warehouse and the employee parking lot. I put my hard hat on, and tried to remember the geography of the place from my first visit, but I still made a couple of wrong turns before I found the open door where smokers were huddling in the cold. They barely looked at me as I sidled past them and went up the corridor to Grobian’s office.
A number of truckers were standing in the corridor waiting to see Grobian, whose door was shut. One had a handlebar mustache that seemed almost repulsive, so full and luxurious was the hair. Nolan, the man in the Harley jacket who’d been here on my previous visit, was here; he clearly remembered me, too.
“Hope the other guy looks as bad as you do, sis,” he said with a grin.
I answered in kind, but when I looked at my trousers I saw to my annoyance that I’d torn them sliding under the back gate. For a month that wasn’t generating much income, I was sure racking up a lot of overhead.
“You knew Bron Czernin, didn’t you?” I changed the subject, not very skillfully, but I wanted to get in a talk before Grobian came out. “I’m afraid I’m the person who found him yesterday morning.”
“Hell of a thing,” the handlebar mustache said, “although Bron shaved close to the skin. I’m kind of surprised no one went after him before.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I heard that English woman was with him, the one he was driving around town with.”
I nodded assent. I shouldn’t have felt surprised that the men knew about Marcena—theirs was a small community in its own way. If Bron had been showing Marcena his routes and showing her off to his accounts, everyone who knew him would know about her. I could picture them alone in their cabs needing to pass the time, calling each other and spreading all the gossip.
“About fifteen husbands down here coulda taken him out anytime over the last ten years—the English broad wasn’t the only piece of ta—well, you know, friend, he kept tucked in that cab of his. Against the law, of course, and against company policy, but—” He shrugged expressively.
“Was he seeing anyone else? Marcena doesn’t have an angry husband who’d go after Romeo—Bron, I mean.” I thought uneasily about Morrell, but that was ridiculous—even if I could picture him mad enough to beat up a man over a woman, even if I could picture him doing it over Marcena, I couldn’t picture him doing it with his bad leg.
The men made a few suggestive comments about some of their acquaintances, but they agreed in the end that Marcena was Romeo’s first fling in almost a year. “His girl was getting upset, all the harassing the kids in school gave her. Finally, he promised the missus he’d stop, but, what I hear, this English pus—English lady, she was so classy and so exotic, he couldn’t resist.”
I remembered young Mr. William’s eagerness to find out who was squiring Marcena around the South Side. “Did Grobian know about her?”
“Probably not,” put in the handlebar mustache. “Bron wouldn’t’ve still been driving if Pat knew.”
“Figured that was what that Mexican punk was talking to Bron about,” the Harley jacket said.
My heart skipped a beat. “What Mexican punk?”
“Don’t know his name. He’s always hanging around jobsites down here, seeing what he can steal or get away with. My son, he goes to Bertha Palmer, he pointed them out to me, Bron and the Mexican. Last week, week before, I don’t remember, I was picking my boy up after a game—see, he plays football at the high school—and there was this punk in the parking lot, and there was Bron and the English lady. Punk probably figured Bron would slip him a few bucks not to tell the company he had the lady in his cab with him.”