His dark eyes were worried. “I have no idea, Missus Detective.”
He shut his eyes and started to pray, softly, under his breath. The women at the door eyed him with sympathy and a certain awe and began humming softly, a hymn to provide him support and company. After three or four minutes, Andrés sat up. His old authority sat on his shoulders again. He announced to the group that their most important task was to find Billy the Kid and Josie Dorrado.
“Maybe they are hiding in a building, a garage, renting an apartment under a false name. You need to ask everyone, talk to everyone, find these children. And when you do, you tell me at once. And if you cannot find me, then you tell this coach-detective.”
41
Punk, Cornered Like a Rat
I walked slowly back to my car. One thing I had to do without delay was to call Conrad Rawlings at the Fourth District and report Freddy’s role in the fire at Fly the Flag. I’d been keeping my cell phone off today. I’d checked in with Amy a couple of times, but I’d used the phone in the faculty lounge at Bertha Palmer when I’d had to call my clients. But now it didn’t matter if someone was tracking me, and saw I was in South Chicago. In fact, if they were paying enough attention to me to listen in on my cell phone calls, me reporting what I knew to the police would keep them from bothering me further.
To my surprise, it was only seven-thirty. The emotions and exertions I’d just gone through made me think a whole evening had passed. I called down to the Fourth District, determined to hand Freddy over to the cops—Conrad would see what a good, cooperative PI I was. When I found I’d just missed him, I felt deflated.
The operator at the Fourth District didn’t seem excited by my report of news about the arson at Fly the Flag. I finally got her to transfer me to a detective, a junior officer who went through the motions of taking my name and Freddy’s name, but his assurance that they’d look into it sounded like one of those three common lies in the English language—he didn’t even ask how to spell my name, which he couldn’t pronounce, and he only took my phone number because I insisted on giving it to him.
When we’d finished, I hesitated a moment, then hit Conrad’s home number—through all my changes and upgrades in mobile phones, I’d kept it on my speed dial, position four, following my office, my answering service, and Lotty. He wasn’t in, but I left a detailed message on his machine. He might be annoyed with me for jumping ahead of him on the investigation, but I was sure he’d act on the information.
I flexed my shoulders, sore from the tensions of the afternoon. I was still tired, too, from Monday night’s jaunt. So many of my brother and sister PIs seem to get beaten up, thrown in the slammer, or hungover, without needing to rest afterward. I looked at my face in the rearview mirror; true, the light was bad, but I looked pale.
I called Mary Ann, to tell her I would be there in about an hour if that wasn’t too late for her. Someone answered the phone but didn’t speak, which alarmed me, but eventually her deep, gruff voice came over the ether to me.
“It’s all right, Victoria, I’m fine, just a little tired. Maybe you don’t need to stop here tonight.”
“Mary Ann, are you alone? Did someone answer the phone for you?”
“My neighbor’s here, Victoria; she picked up the phone while I was in the bathroom, but I guess she didn’t say anything. I’m going back to bed now.”
There was something in her voice that was making me uneasy. “I need to stop to see April Czernin; I’ll be heading north in about forty-five minutes. I’d like to drop in just for a minute, leave you some groceries and maybe see you if you’re still up—I won’t wake you if you’re asleep. You did give me keys, you know.”
“Oh, Victoria, you always were an obstinate, persistent pest. If you must come, I guess I can stand it, but if you’re going to be later than forty-five minutes call so that I don’t stay up for you.”
“You guess you can stand it?” I repeated, hurt both by the words and her exasperated tone. “I thought—”
I broke off midsentence, remembering that she was ill, that pain made people react in uncharacteristic ways. My own mother, who had waited up nights for my father, occupying both herself and me with music, cooking, books—we read Giovanni Verga’s plays aloud together in Italian—and she never complained about the wait, the worry. Then one night, in the hospital, she suddenly started screaming that he didn’t love her, had never loved her, terrifying herself almost as much as she did me and my dad.