Like the rest of the house, the porch was immaculate and beautifully furnished. The deck chairs were made of dark, polished wood covered in thick, flowered cushions. The occasional tables, unlike the glass or cast iron of most porch furniture, were constructed of the same wood with bright tile inlays. Blooming plants in Chinese pots stood on ledges around the perimeter.
A brake of dawn redwoods screened the porch from the house to the south; the front of the other house lay further back. Although shrieks from neighborhood children drifted up, we couldn’t see anyone.
Lotty arrived a few minutes later and the conversation turned to music, and Or’s and Michael’s summer schedules. Or‘ was conducting at Tanglewood, he touring in the Far East. They would join up again in the fall for a tour in Eastern Europe, although both were worried by the anti-Semitic violence in that part of the world. Lotty seemed to have put her anger over Carol to one side, greeting me with a kiss and taking enthusiastic part in the conversation.
At seven-thirty I got up to go. They were moving on to a restaurant for dinner, but I’d had too long a day. I just wanted to get to bed.
Michael stood up with me. “We’re flying back to London tomorrow. I’ll go downstairs with you to say good-bye, Vic.”
I thanked Max for his hospitality. “Good-bye, Or‘. Good to meet you—and to hear your music.”
The composer swung her arm in a farewell, as if signaling an orchestra. She didn’t move from her chair. As Michael shut the screen door to the hall behind him I heard her commenting on the Cellini Quintet, which Max and Lotty knew well.
Michael held the door to the Trans Am for me. I shook his hand through the open window.
“Have a safe journey to London. I hope you didn’t mind playing for those musical cretins last week?”
He flashed a grin. “At the time, I was ready to break my cello over their heads. The only thing that stopped me was its age. Now I can shrug them off with good grace. Or‘ and I will play her concerto at the Albert Hall this winter. She should get the response she deserves then. We raised a good-sized amount for Chicago Settlement; I keep reminding myself that that’s the only reason we did it anyway.”
“If I’d known my ex-husband was going to be filling the place with lawyers and tycoons, I could have warned you what the audience would be like. At least I can promise you he won’t be in London.”
He laughed and waited by the edge of the drive until I’d backed into the street. He didn’t look much like Max, but he’d inherited his father’s beautiful manners.
I honked at a maroon Honda that had suddenly decided to turn into traffic from a driveway. I turned the radio back on in time to hear Ellen Coleman’s nausea again over finding the bloated body in the Sanitary Canal. I suddenly remembered Mitch Kruger. With the emotion I’d packed into worrying about Harriet Frizell I hadn’t had a thought to spare today for the missing machinist.
Stickney. That was miles west of Kruger’s hangouts around Damen. It couldn’t possibly be he. But the old man could have fallen into the water, wandering around drunk and disoriented. I didn’t know if the canal had a current. How far could a body travel in it in the course of the week since Kruger had last been seen?
I made the turn from Sheridan onto Lake Shore Drive. The traffic around me quickly speeded up to sixty, a good fifteen miles over the limit, but I dawdled along in the right-hand lane, trying to calculate how far away Stickney was and how fast the water would be moving to get a body down there. It wasn’t a straight run, though. A corpse might get caught in the pilings going round a bend and be hung up for a few days.
I realized I didn’t have the data to make any kind of analysis. Checking the traffic, I moved the Trans Am into a higher gear. A Honda hovered a sedate two lengths behind me on the left; everyone else was zooming past at a good clip. I watched the Honda for a second to make sure it wasn’t gaining on me, flashed my signal, and gave the car some gas.
It’s stupid to buy a car whose cruising speed is one-twenty when the limit in your area is fifty-five or under. Stupider still to nose it toward its maximum without checking for blue-and-whites. One of them brought me down a few blocks north of Belmont. I pulled over to the verge and got out my license and bond card.
I squinted at his name badge. Officer Karwal, not a name I knew. He was“ in his fifties, with deep lines around his eyes and the usual slow moves of the traffic detail. He frowned over my license, then looked at me intently.
“Warshawski? Any relation to Tony Warshawski?”
“He was my father. Did you know him?” Tony had been dead thirteen years now, but there were still plenty of men on the force who’d worked with him.
It turned out Officer Karwal was one of the many rookies who’d trained with Tony during the four years my dad spent at the police academy. Karwal spent a good ten minutes remniscing about my dad with me, patting my arm as he told me how sorry he was Tony had died.