“Don’t play the naive fool with me. I have you pretty well pegged by now. Come on, Felicity. Are you waiting for the Second Coming?”
“Poor Felicity,” I said. “If her mama knew she’d be working for you, Sandy, maybe she would have named her Anxiety instead.”
“And you know damned well that regardless of what my mama called me, my name is Alex—Vicki.” On that shot Alex threw herself into the car, Felicity handed the doorman a dollar, and the two of them took off.
I stood in the drive, watching the street long after the cab’s taillights had disappeared. I know I’m not right about everything, but she’d made it sound like something specific. Was it the same as the egg Murray was going to smear all over my smug face?
I was too tired and too sore to figure it out this evening. The doorman who’d taken in my letter to Lacey was urging me out of the drive and into a cab. I followed him meekly, although it was the fifth driver he whistled up who agreed to take me—when the first four heard the address I wanted, they shook their heads, willing to lose their place in line to avoid Humboldt Park. I didn’t blame them, exactly, but I could understand why people on the West Side get so frustrated at being denied service. The guy who finally took me to my car barely waited for my feet to touch the street before screeching into a U–turn and heading back to the Gold Coast.
The Rustmobile fit into the neighborhood so perfectly that no one had removed the tires in the two days I’d left it there. The roar from the exhaust blended in with the vibrating low–riders. Definitely a better car for me than a Jaguar convertible or some other high–rent import. No one looked at me as I went back down Grand. I stopped in front of Special–T’s front door. No lights shone tonight, but I wasn’t going in for another look—I wasn’t in shape to escape a second trap.
I parked several blocks from my apartment. Now that Alex could tell Lemour I’d surfaced, I needed to watch out for ambushes. No one was lying in wait so far; I stopped to chat with Mr. Contreras and the dogs. My neighbor had received the LifeStory report on Lucian Frenada that I’d mailed Saturday afternoon. I’d forgotten to tell him about it, but I explained its importance to him now.
“You want me to keep it for you, doll, I’ll be glad to.”
“Remember how you got shot a couple of years ago when you were helping me out? I don’t want to involve you like that again. Anyway, I need to make a bunch of copies so I can get it into the public arena as fast as possible.”
He protested his willingness to take on any punk his size or bigger, but I took the report upstairs with me. I wished there was someone I could talk to—about the LifeStory report, or the putative connection between Baladine and Officer Lemour, or even the story Murray was running on Frenada. I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d grown on Murray over the years. This was the first major investigation I’d taken on that I couldn’t discuss with him, or tap into his vast knowledge of local corruption. And I badly needed help. This wasn’t even an investigation. It was some kind of demon’s cauldron I’d fallen into. I was bobbing around with the newts’ eyes and bats’ wings, and I wasn’t going to have too much more time to figure out the brew before I drowned in it.
I suddenly thought of Morrell. He didn’t have Murray’s local connections in politics, but he had an entree into Nicola Aguinaldo’s world. Vishnikov vouched for him. And I didn’t think anyone knew I’d been talking to him.
I looked up his home number on my Palm Pilot, but as I was dialing I remembered his own nervousness about talking on the phone. If BB Baladine was really riding my ass, he could have a tap on my line or even a remote device to pick up anything I said in my building. That might explain why I hadn’t seen any obvious surveillance on the street: if they knew they could track me at home, they could jump me on my way out, without having to leave a man in place twenty–four hours a day.
I don’t like having to be paranoid about everything I say and do, but I switched on a Mozart CD on my stereo and the Cubs on television and sat between them with my cell phone. It was hard for Morrell to understand me over the interference, but once he did he readily agreed to meet me for a drink.
If I was right about Baladine not doing on–site surveillance, then I could probably leave again as long as I was quiet about it. I waited until the roar from Wrigley Field rose to a fever pitch, both on the streets behind me and on the set in front of me, and slipped out my door in bare feet, carrying my sandals to avoid making noise on the upper landing. An hour later I was back at Drummers, in Edgewater.
When I described my exit to Morrell, making a comic story of it, he didn’t laugh. “That’s the trouble with living in fear of the cops: you don’t know if you’re being a fool or taking sensible precautions.”