It was eight in the morning, long past time for me to get going. My lease-mate has a shower at the back of her studio because she welds big pieces of steel and polishes them with caustic substances and needs to be able to wash off in a hurry. I stood under a cold spray of water, trying to wake myself up, and returned, shivering, to my own office to put my clothes back on.
I picked up the list I’d made in the middle of the night of the things that Petra seemed to be trying to track and took it with me to the coffee shop across the street. While I waited in line for my espresso, I saw Elton Grainger out front hawking Streetwise and accepting donations with his usual unsteady bow and flourish. I took my drink, along with a bag of fruit, yogurt, juice, and some rolls, and went out to the street.
“Elton! I’ve been hoping for a word with you.” I held out the bag. “Help yourself. Juice? Muffin?”
“Hey, Vic.” His bloodshot blue eyes shifted uneasily from me to the sidewalk. “I’m okay. Don’t need no food today.”
“You always need food, Elton. You know what the doc said at the VA when you passed out in June: you have to stop drinking and start eating so it doesn’t happen again.”
“You leave me to sort that out. I don’t need you hovering over me.”
“Okay. No hovering. You know my place was seriously busted two days ago. I wonder if you saw who went in?”
“Vic, I told you before, I ain’t your doorman.”
I pulled a twenty from my wallet. “Early Christmas tip for the non-doorman. My cousin was there. I want to know if you can ID the two people she was with. They were all wearing coats, even though it was September and hot.”
He eyed the twenty but shook his head. “Don’t know any cousin of yours, and that’s a fact.”
“My cousin, Elton—the tall, cute blonde—you met her with me a couple of times, right after you got out of the hospital. Petra.”
“Sorry, Vic. I know you saved my life and all, but I never heard of her.” He turned away from me to greet a couple who were heading into the shop. “Streetwise. New edition today. Streetwise.”
I couldn’t get him to look at me again. Finally, I pushed the twenty into his hand, along with a blueberry muffin, and walked up the street toward Armitage.
I was fuming. Someone had gotten to Elton, scared him into silence. I should have swung by my office yesterday before starting my journey to South Chicago, should have talked to Elton then. If me saving his life, let alone the twenty—the price of a bed for a night or a week in the tank—couldn’t budge him, someone was putting heavy pressure on him.
Strangwell wouldn’t shake down a homeless guy personally, that was way beneath him. But he knew people who would. Larry Alito, for one. I’d seen him with Les Strangwell the day before Petra disappeared. Strangwell gave him an assignment: “I know what Les wants,” he’d snapped at someone who called to check up on him. Could it have been Dornick?
I turned around and went back to my office, where I once again called up the images from my video camera. It was impossible to tell who was who. If not for my aunt Rachel’s insistence, I wouldn’t have known the figure in the middle was Petra. Today, magnifying details as much as I could, it seemed to me that the man on her left was gripping her arm. His cap was pulled low over his face, his coat collar was pulled high around his chin, but the general shape could have been Alito’s.
I tried to imagine what it would take to get him to tell me the truth about whether he’d been there. Certainly not my girlish charm. Would a threat that the FBI was involved worry him? Not if it came from me. He would have too many contacts from his years in the force to worry about veiled and vague threats from me. Only the possibility that Strangwell and his pals would leave him to take the fall might persuade Alito to start talking.
I looked up his phone number and called the house up in Lake Catherine. When Hazel answered, I asked for her husband.
“Larry doesn’t want to talk to you,” she said in her gravelly South Side voice.
“I don’t want to talk to him, either,” I said, “but there’s something he needs to know. I figure I owe him a tiny favor, since he used to work with my dad. He’s been identified as one of the men who forced my cousin Petra to break into my office two days ago.”
She was silent.
“I’m going to call Bobby Mallory, but I’ll wait four hours before I do. You be sure to let Larry know, okay, Ms. Alito? Larry is one of the guys who—”
“I heard you the first time!”
The connection went, and I stared at the phone. I’d promised to wait four hours to call Bobby, but I hadn’t mentioned the press. I called Murray Ryerson’s cellphone and gave him the same message. Unlike Hazel Alito, Murray had a bucketful of questions, starting with who had made the identification.
“Murray, there’s a good possibility that every call I make is monitored, either by Homeland Security’s Chicago office or by Mountain Hawk Security, or both, so I’m not giving away confidential information over the airwaves. Anyway, it’s not a rock-solid ID. I’d double-check with Les Strangwell at the Krumas campaign—”