I waited until a group of women all came down together, laughing and talking, and moved just in front of them so that we all seemed to be walking along the underground corridor together. They peeled off at one of the subterranean take-out joints.
I darted into a neighboring gift shop, where I bought a Cubs cap. Going up and down escalators, buying a frozen yogurt, I didn’t see the same face twice. I bought a red CHICAGO sweatshirt at another gift shop and pulled it on over my linen jacket. Although the weight of the sweatshirt on a hot day made me feel as though I were encased in a burka, I wasn’t instantly recognizable.
Still underground, I finally headed to my original destination: the Illinois Central station. There was a twenty-minute wait for the next train to South Chicago. I bought a ticket and stood near the door leading to the tracks. When they called my train, I waited until the last possible moment before sliding through the doors and down the stairs. I thought I was clean, but you never know.
The slow ride to South Chicago was like a backward journey through my life, the ride I’d taken with my mother so many times as a child, past the University of Chicago, where my mother had wanted me to study. “The best, Victoria. You need to have the best,” she would say when the train stopped there to let off students.
Ninety-first Street. End of the line. A certain desolation attached to the conductor’s announcement. Life ends here. I walked the four blocks from the station to my old home.
At least Se?ora Andarra’s grandson and his friends weren’t visible this morning, but a couple of helpless-looking men were sitting on a curb with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Somewhere, a car stereo was pouring out a bass so loudly that the air was vibrating from it.
At my old home, I saw the boarded-over window that had been broken to throw in the smoke bomb. The prisms across the top were splintered, too. I concentrated instead on the decorative-glass fanlight over the front door, which was still intact.
I rang the bell. After a few minutes, when I wondered if she’d gone out, Se?ora Andarra opened it the length of its stubby chain. “Esta ventana, ” I stumbled in my bad Spanish, pointing at the fan. “Mi madre amó esta ventana también.”
The fact that my mother also loved that window didn’t make Se?ora Andarra smile, but it did keep her from slamming the door in my face. Using painful pidgin Spanish interlaced with English and Italian, I tried to explain that I was a detective, that I had photographs. Could she look at them, let me know if any of the people in them had been at her house when the bomb came through the window?
The whole time I spoke, she stared at me through the crack in the door, her dark eyes frowning in her nut-colored face. When I finally stumbled to an end of my story, she took the folder from me. As I’d feared, she singled Petra out with no trouble.
“?Su hija?” she asked.
I was tired of everyone thinking Petra was my daughter, so I dutifully explained she was my cousin. “Mi prima. ?Y los hombres?”
I thought she lingered on the shot of Alito with Strangwell, but I couldn’t be sure. She finally shook her head, and said she didn’t know any of them, hadn’t seen any of them. I walked back to the station and waited for the northbound train to whisk me back to civilization, or whatever it was.
34
THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROOM
ON THE TRAIN NORTH, I CALLED CONRAD RAWLINGS AT the Fourth District. Of course, I should have gone to see him before visiting Se?ora Andarra, but I didn’t feel I had spare time for getting police permission to talk to people in my cousin’s orbit.
Conrad was predictably annoyed, but he’d seen the news about Petra; he was more interested in finding out why she’d been at a crime scene in his bailiwick than yainching at me for not calling him first.
“Is there anyone else you can place at the crime scene that you might care to mention? Not that we cops can compel testimony. The laws keep us from getting answers to questions that might help solve crimes. But if you’re in the mood . . .”
I ignored the savagery in his tone. “I showed Ms. Andarra a shot of Larry Alito with Les Strangwell, but they didn’t look familiar to her.”
“Spell the names.”
I could hear him tapping at his computer.
“Any special reason you think a cop and a politico—a big Gorgon zola politico, from what Google is telling me—would be involved in a two-bit home invasion?”
“Alito’s an ex-cop, and he’s sniffing around this story somewhere, somehow. Strangwell is my cousin’s boss at the Krumas campaign.”
“And that’s reason enough to suspect he’s a villain, because anyone who tries to boss the Warshawski women around must be a criminal?”
“I can’t talk about this now. Not with you hostile and me out of my head with worry.” I pressed the OFF button.