“Oh, yes.” Jacqui rolled her eyes. “Rich Christians in the Age of Hunger. Billy read us so many passages at dinner I had to become anorexic—no decent person could keep eating, according to him, with children dying all over the place. Did you pick up any papers, thinking they might be a stock portfolio?”
I looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Rose Dorrado told me you’d gone through her books, even shaking her Bible so that all her page markers fell out. What did Billy run off with?”
“Nothing that I know of,” William said, looking with annoyance at his sister-in-law. “We were hoping he might have left some kind of clue about his plans. He’d given away his cell phone and his car, which makes him hard to trace. If you know anything about him, Ms.—uh—you would do well to tell me.”
“I know,” I said, bored. “Or I’ll never eat lunch in this town again.”
“Don’t treat it like a joke,” he warned me. “My family has a lot of power in Chicago.”
“And Congress and everywhere else,” I agreed.
He glared at me, but strode down the corridor without answering. Jacqui clicked along next to him in her high heels, her bias-cut skirt swirling around her knees in a very feminine way. I felt acutely aware of my torn trousers and dirty parka.
35
Why, Freddy, What a Surprise!
The truckers didn’t take long with Grobian. When they came back out, the Harley driver gave me a wink and a thumbs-up, which sent me in to see the manager with a lighter heart. Is it such a bad thing to depend on the kindness of strangers?
Grobian was talking on the phone while signing papers. His buzz cut was still at a military length—to keep it like that he had to get it mowed every couple of days, although it was hard to know how the manager of a domain like his found time to fit it in. He was in his shirtsleeves, and I couldn’t help noticing how big his forearms were: a tattoo with the marine logo covered about four hairy inches.
He didn’t really look at me, just waved me to a folding chair while he finished his conversation. My hard hat and torn trousers weren’t as feminine as Jacqui’s fluttering skirt, but they did help me blend in. As I sat, I noticed mud caked on my leather half boots. Not surprising, considering how I had crawled under the fence to get into the warehouse, but annoying all the same.
When Grobian hung up, it was clear I wasn’t who he was expecting, but equally clear that he didn’t remember me.
“V. I. Warshawski,” I said heartily. “I was here two weeks ago, with young Billy.”
His lips tightened: he would have shown me the door, not a chair, if he’d looked at me when I came in. “Oh. The do-gooder. Whatever Billy may tell you, the company doesn’t care about your school day care program.”
“Basketball.”
“What?”
“It’s basketball, not day care, which shows you haven’t really studied the proposal. I’ll send you a new set of numbers.” I clasped my hands on his desk with the saintly smile of a confirmed do-gooder.
“Whatever it is, we’re not supporting it.” He looked at his watch. “You don’t have an appointment. In fact, how did you get in? No one at the front gate phoned—”
“I know. It must be hard for you to stay on top of your schedule with Billy gone. Why did he run away, anyway? He came down here, after—” I suddenly remembered the conversation I’d had with Billy after church on Sunday.
“Oh, of course. You squealed on him to his dad—you reported seeing him with Josie Dorrado, and Billy came here to confront you. You said a few minutes ago that you didn’t see Billy on Monday, so did he confront you on Sunday? You come into the office on Sunday afternoons? Have you told Mr. William about that?”
Grobian shifted in his chair. “I don’t see what that has to do with you.”
“Besides being a do-gooding basketball coach, I’m one of the detectives the family hired to look for Billy. If your conversation with him was the immediate cause of his disappearance, then the family will want to know about it.”
He looked at me narrowly: I might have Mr. William’s ear, or even Buffalo Bill’s—or I might be a con artist. Before he could challenge me, I added, “Mr. William and I just had a little conversation in the hall right now. I’m the detective who found Billy’s Miata the other night, where it had burrowed into the shrubbery underneath the Skyway.”
“Yeah, but Billy wasn’t at the wheel when it went off the road.”
“Is that a fact, Mr. Grobian.” I leaned back in the chair so I could see his face better. “Just how do you know that?”
“Cops told me.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’ll call Commander Rawlings at the Fourth District to check, but when I saw him yesterday they didn’t know who was driving it.”
“Must have been chatter on the floor, then.” His pale eyes shifted to the door and back. “The truckers all gossip about each other. Would have been better if they’d talked to me about Czernin before he died instead of after.”
“Meaning?”