I fought off a yawn. “You have so many resources, you don’t need my help. Look at how easily you tracked me down. My phone’s unlisted; I have all my bills sent to my office so my home address doesn’t show up on Lexis, but here you are. Someone on your payroll knows someone in the phone company, or in the Secretary of State’s office, who’s willing to violate the law to help you out. Get them to find out who Billy’s dating.”
“But he knows you, he trusts you, you’re at home down there. I send one of our own security people down to look for him, he’ll know they came from me, and then he’ll, well, it’ll upset him. Whatever terms William agreed to with you, I’ll match them.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bysen. I told your son I was quitting, I explained the reason, I sent him a certified letter spelling it out. I promised Billy I’d lay off, and I’m laying off.”
Bysen stood again, leaning on his walking stick. “You’re making a serious mistake, young woman. I offered you a fair arrangement, very fair, William’s terms sight unseen, no bargaining.
“You don’t want to help me, I can make life difficult for you, very difficult. You think I don’t know how much your mortgage is worth? What would you do if I got all your clients to leave you for a different investigator, hnnh? What if I made things so difficult for you, you had to come crawling to me, begging me to hire you on any terms, hnnh?”
Mr. Contreras sprang to his feet, and Mitch, alarmed by the tone in Bysen’s voice, began to growl, low and deep in the throat, the one dogs make when they’re serious. I jumped up to put a hand on his collar.
“Don’t you go threatening her,” Mr. Contreras cried. “She said she don’t want to work for you, take it like a man. It ain’t the end of the world. You don’t need to own her along with everything else in creation.”
“But he does, he does. It’s the only thing that keeps him going, gobbling all of us up like so many shrimps on the buffet table.” The image made me laugh with genuine amusement, but I looked wonderingly at Bysen. “What is it like to have an appetite like that, so ravenous that nothing will satiate it? Do your sons share it? Will William have the same naked neediness to make your empire grow when you’re dead and gone?”
“William!” Bysen spat out his son’s name. “Whiny old woman. Why, that sharp little operator Jacqui would do a better—”
Once again, Mildred cut him off, with a deferential murmur in his ear, adding to me, “Mrs. Bysen is sick with worry over Billy. She’s eighty-two; she doesn’t need this. If you know where Billy is and won’t tell us, it might kill her. We might even be able to charge you as an accessory in kidnapping him.”
“Oh, go home,” I said. “You’re used to people needing you so desperately that they’ll put up with anything to stay on your good side, whatever that might be. When you meet someone who doesn’t need or want your business, you don’t know how to act: should you cajole me, tell me his granny’s heart is breaking, or threaten to have me up on federal charges? Go back to the suburbs and think of a serious approach before you talk to me again.”
I didn’t wait for a reaction from my visitors, but pulled on Mitch’s collar to get him to turn around. Calling to Peppy, I led them through my apartment to the kitchen and sent them down the back stairs to the yard to relieve themselves.
I leaned on the porch railing, eyes shut, trying to relax the tension in my neck and shoulders. My wound was throbbing, but Lotty’s work had lowered the level of pain to something I could live with. The dogs clambered up the stairs to me, making sure I was okay after Bysen’s threats. I ran my fingers through their fur, but stayed on the porch, listening to the faint sounds of the city around me: the rumbling of the El a few blocks away, a distant siren, laughter from a neighboring apartment—my own lullaby.
By and by, Morrell hobbled out to join me. I leaned against his chest and pulled his arms around me. “Are they gone?”
He laughed softly. “Your neighbor got into a fight with Buffalo Bill. I think Contreras was so guilt stricken about letting them in, he had to take it out on Bysen. Mildred kept trying to break it up, but when Contreras said Bysen was a coward, picking on a lone young woman like you, Bysen got furious and trotted out his war record, and Contreras had to top it off with his Anzio reminiscences, so I figured the time had come to move everyone out.”
“Even Mr. Contreras?”
“He wanted to stay to make sure you weren’t still mad at him, but I promised him you weren’t, only tired, and that you’d talk to him in the morning.”
“Yessir,” I said meekly.
We turned and went back inside. As I was undressing, I found the frog-shaped soap dish in my coat pocket. I took it out and looked at it again. “Who are you? What were you doing down there?” I demanded of it.
Morrell came over to see what it was. He hummed a line or two from Doctor Dolittle, “She walks with the animals, talks with the animals,” but when I explained what it was, and where I’d found it, he suggested I put it in a baggie.