“Your press presentation is your best route,” Morrell said patiently. “Bringing that much publicity not just to his Coolis operation but to his use of a Chicago police officer to plant drugs in your office will force Baladine to stop harassing you. Probably force his board to make him quit, too.”
“Abigail Trant told me that he can’t stand the notion of being bested. I saw it—or heard it—yesterday: he was furious when Alex got the tape from him. He hurt her to get it back: it wasn’t a game to him. There’s no telling what he might do.”
“Think about it overnight,” Father Lou suggested. “Offer a special intention at mass in the morning. Do some manual labor in the crypt. Nothing like hard work to clear the mind.”
So Morrell and I spent the rest of the morning in the chamber underneath the altar, shifting old boxes of hymnals that Father Lou had decided the church would never use again, digging out the costumes the children wore in their Christmas pageant, and uncovering an actual reliquary that the Italians who built the church a hundred years ago had brought with them. This caused an explosion of nervous ribaldry from the boys working with us.
I hadn’t resolved matters by three, when Father Lou called a halt to our work so that the boys could attend the parish picnic. Nor did a nap while Morrell joined them in a baseball game in Humboldt Park bring any special vision. I still wanted to call Baladine and tell him I had his videotapes: something like a childhood taunt—come catch me if you can.
The problem remained where I would be when I issued the taunt. At the church I endangered Father Lou and his schoolchildren. In my own home there were Mr. Contreras and the other tenants. Tessa’s studio ruled out using my office. And he might be so berserk that he’d go after someone like Lotty out of sheer terrorism, even if I wasn’t near her.
All evening long, as Morrell and I worked on my presentation—preparing the photographs in order, figuring out what video sequences to show of Lemour in action against me, where to put Trant and Frenada with Baladine at his pool, discussing whether to use any of the Aguinaldo footage, typing up camera–ready copy in St. Remigio’s school computer lab—Morrell and I debated the question. At midnight, when Morrell left with the material—he was taking it to the Unblinking Eye in the morning for production—I was no nearer a solution.
I went to bed and fell into a restless sleep. It was only an hour later when Father Lou shook me awake. “Old man’s at the door with a kid and some dogs. Says he’s your neighbor.”
“My neighbor?” I pulled on my jeans and jammed my feet into my running shoes and sprinted down the hall, Father Lou following on his rolling boxer’s gait.
I looked through the peephole at the figures on the doorstep. Mr. Contreras. With Mitch, Peppy, and Robbie Baladine. My heart sank, but I told Father Lou it was, in fact, my neighbor.
“With the kid whose father had me arrested the last time he ran away to me.”
Father Lou unscraped the dead bolts and let them in. Mr. Contreras started speaking as the door opened. All I caught was, “Sorry, doll, but I didn’t want to use the phone in case they was tapping my line,” before the dogs overwhelmed me with their ecstatic greeting and Robbie, painfully thin and grubby, started apologizing: “I know you said to wait until I heard from you, but BB called.”
Father Lou shut the door. “Okay. Into the kitchen for tea, and let’s sort this out one voice at a time. These dogs housebroken?”
“Where’s the car?” I asked, before Father Lou pushed the dead bolts home.
“Sorry, doll, sorry, it’s out front, you want me to move it?”
“It needs to go away from here. It’s very identifiable, and if Baladine is scouring the city for me, he’ll find it.”
“Rectory garage,” Father Lou said. “Filled with old junk but room for the car. I’ll show—what’s your name?—Contreras the garage. You take the boy into the kitchen. Put on the kettle.”
Robbie and the dogs bounded down the hall with me to the kitchen. Robbie was trying hard not to flinch from Mitch, which seemed more heartbreaking than anything else about him.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Warshawski,” he whispered, “but they figured out you weren’t Aunt Claudia. They were going to lock me in the punishment barracks. I didn’t know when I’d ever get out. And I thought if BB did something else bad to you because you came to see me, I’d have to kill myself. So I ran away. But now I see he can put you in prison no matter what I do.”
“Sh, sh, poverino. It’s okay. You’re here, let’s deal with that. Tell me the story when Father Lou and Mr. Contreras get back; that way we’ll all get the same version and you’ll only have to tell it once.”