I had called Lotty from a pay phone on my way home to tell her I was still alive and to ask her to phone me with only the most innocuous questions. She wasn’t best pleased at being awakened—it was past eleven—and took in my request with a terse wish for me to stop being so melodramatic. Melodramatic and foolhardy. Those were hard words to take to bed.
When I left Mr. Contreras, he sent Peppy up with me for comfort. I hoped she brought enough that I could keep at bay my nervous fantasies about someone scaling the side of the building to break into my bedroom.
As I switched off the light the phone rang. I sucked in a breath, wondering what new threat might lie at the other end of the line, but I answered. “Warshawski’s twenty–four–hour detective service.”
“Miss Warshawski?”
It was a child’s voice, high–pitched with its own nervousness. “Yes, this is V. I. Warshawski. What is it, Robbie?”
“I’ve been calling you and calling you tonight. I thought you’d never answer. First I was just going to tell you about BB’s shoes—you know, you asked if any of them had horseshoe buckles or something, and I don’t think so—but this is worse, it’s about that man, that man they showed on the news. He was—” I heard a click and the line went dead.
I squinted at my caller–ID pad and dialed the number on it. It rang fifteen times without an answer. I hung up and tried again, making sure I’d entered the right numbers. After twenty rings I gave up.
One of his parents must have heard him talking to me and cut off the phone. I pictured the mad swimming Eleanor standing over the phone, listening to it ring when I called back. Or they turned off the sound and watched a light flashing red until I hung up, while Robbie protested, crying, his father mocking him for his tears and making him cry harder.
A week ago I might have driven out to the Baladine home, middle of the night or not. But only someone who had daring without judgment would do that. Or someone whose hamstrings weren’t so sore that she couldn’t run if she had to. Anyway, before leaping into action I should find out what man Robbie had seen on the news. There wasn’t any local television coverage this time of night, but if it was important—or grisly—the radio would carry the story.
“It’s midnight and hazy in Chicago, seventy–nine at O’Hare, eighty–one at the lakefront, going down to a low of seventy, with another muggy scorcher in store for us tomorrow. Sammy Sosa capped a sparkling June with his twentieth home run, the most in a month in major league history, but the Cubs dropped another one at Wrigley today, going two and eight over their last ten games.”
I drummed my fingers impatiently through another update of the Starr chamber’s slow grind; through the pious hypocrisies of the House Speaker and the President’s sincere bombast, through more mass murders in ex–Yugoslavia and riots in Indonesia.
“In local news, the drowning victim found late yesterday at Belmont Harbor has been identified as local Hispanic entrepreneur Lucian Frenada. It is not known when or how Frenada came to be in the water; the sister with whom he lived had reported him missing Saturday morning. Mrs. Celia Caliente says she does not know what would have taken her brother to Belmont Harbor, but that he was unable to swim. In other local news, accused killer—”
I snapped off the set. Lucian Frenada was dead. That’s why he hadn’t been answering his phone. I wondered how you got a man who didn’t know how to swim into the lake. I wondered how long it would be before I joined him.
I pulled on a shirt and tiptoed into the living room. If Baladine had one of those fancy listening devices tuned on my building, could it pick up the faint tap of Peppy’s toenails as she followed me? I slipped a finger between two slats of the blind and squinted at the street.
This part of Racine is close to the trendy bars of Wrigleyville, which means we get a lot of people trying to find parking. Even late on a Monday night, occasional knots of young men, made loudly cheerful by beer, swayed up the street. I stood for twenty minutes but didn’t see the same people pass twice.
If I boldly went out the front door, collected my car, and drove to Oak Brook, would I be followed? And more to the point, what would I do when I got there? Climb the security fence on my quivering legs, get arrested for trespassing, try to claim I was responding to an SOS from a twelve–year–old boy whom his successful and beautiful parents would paint as emotionally unstable. Prone to self–dramatization. And maybe they were right. Maybe it was only my animus to Eleanor and BB that made me take their child seriously.
I tried the Baladine mansion one more time, but the phone still rang unanswered. I climbed back into bed, lying rigidly, waiting for the sounds of traffic, of crickets, of drinkers laughing their way up the street, to resolve themselves into menace. There is no worse feeling than not knowing if you are truly alone in your own home. To my surprise, when Peppy pawed at my arm to rouse me, it was eight–thirty.