“But he’s not disinterested,” I squawked. “He wants your mother out of this neighborhood. He wanted the dogs put to sleep; he’s probably hoping she’ll die in the hospital so he can sell the house to some yuppie like himself—”
Byron interrupted me in turn. “My mother is a very difficult person. Very difficult. I haven’t been to Chicago to see her for four years now, but she was acting senile even then. Of course, she’s been acting senile as long as I’ve known her, but at least she used to keep up the property. Well, four years ago I saw she was letting that house go to rack and ruin.” He repeated the phrase as though he’d invented it and liked to hear it rolling around his tongue.
“If it hadn’t been for me the whole place would have collapsed around her ears from the water damage. She couldn’t be bothered to call roofers. She can’t pick up the refuse people dump in the yard. I bet she hasn’t used a vacuum cleaner in eighty years. I think it’s time she went into a nursing home or some other facility where she’d be looked after.”
He was gasping for breath. I didn’t think this was the time to tell him most people hadn’t owned vacuum cleaners eighty years ago.
“And it doesn’t break my heart to hear those damned dogs are dead, either,” he went on. “She was always the same. When I was a boy I couldn’t bring anyone over to the house because of all the animals she had roaming around the place. It was more like living in a zoo than in a home, just because her dream was to be a vet and she had to work in a box factory instead.
“Well, we all have to give up our dreams—I wanted to be an architect but there wasn’t money for that kind of education so I became an accountant instead. I don’t go around filling my house with blueprints. I adjusted. Mother never learned that. She always thought rules applied to other people, never herself, and now she’s going to have to learn the hard way that it just isn’t so.”
I’d always wanted to play in the majors but had ended up in law school instead. And I won scholarships and worked nights and summers to make it happen. It was hard for me to snivel over Byron’s lost dreams, but I felt sad for Mrs. Frizell.
“Vet schools are hard to get into,” I said aloud, “and I bet sixty-five years ago it was nearly impossible for women.”
“And I don’t need some damned lecture on women’s rights either. Until women can look after their children properly, they don’t deserve any other rights. I can just imagine what she did to my father to drive him away. Who the hell are you, anyway, to come around lecturing me? What kind of work have you been doing for Mother? Bringing her veterinary medicine manuals?” he jeered savagely. “What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer. And a private investigator.”
“If you’re a lawyer, what are you doing for Mother?”
“Trying to protect her assets, mister. She’s worried about them.”
“I haven’t seen—oh, yes. You claim to be doing pro bono work. Well, I’ll talk to Pichea about you and see what he has to say, Ms. Warinski.”
“It’s Warshawski,” I snapped. “And why don’t you take my number too. Put it side by side with his so that the next time an attack of filial piety overwhelms you, you can reach me.”
He hung up before I’d got the first three digits out.
I sat on the living room floor, looking at the phone. My mother died when I was fifteen; there are still nights I wake up missing her so much that a physical pain sucks at my diaphragm. But I’d rather have that pain every night of the year than get to be sixty and still be swallowing an undigested lump of anger.
My stomach interrupted my morose thoughts. My stomach was probably making me more morose than the situation warranted—I hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was long past lunchtime. The kitchen didn’t hold anything more appetizing than it had earlier in the week. I changed into lightweight cotton pants and a T-shirt, stopped at the Belmont Diner for a BLT with fries, and drove south.
Chapter 14 - Luther Revisited
Mitch’s old address on Thirty-fifth Street proved to be another rooming house, but it was quite a step up from Mrs. Polter’s. The house, a shabby white-painted frame, was scrupulously clean, from the well-scrubbed stoop to the living room where Ms. Coriolano talked to me. A woman of perhaps fifty, she explained that she managed the place for her mother, who had started renting rooms when her husband died falling from a scaffolding twenty years ago.
“It was hard to live on social security then—now it’s impossible and Mama has arthritis, she can’t walk, can’t get up the stairs no more.”