Bobby wanted to see me. He had gone to the clinic in person, hadn’t sent a minion. He knows Lotty, knows that the sight of a police badge stirs such terrible memories in her that even the best cop in the world receives a hostile reception, but, even so, for a routine inquiry he would have sent Terry Finchley. So he needed me badly and he needed me privately.
But Miss Claudia was slipping out of this life. She might have died while I was weeping in Millennium Park. I finished the tea and carefully washed the mug. Morrell would be quite cross if he came home from Afghanistan to find it dirty in his sink.
I looked wistfully at the phone. The trouble with the Age of Fear is that you don’t know who is listening in on your conversations. You don’t know if you can talk safely or not. Probably I could talk to Karen Lennon without anyone else catching the call, but the possibility that I’d jeopardize my safe house meant I couldn’t work on probabilities.
It was too late in the day to expect to find Karen at Lionsgate Manor. I drove down to Howard Street, the honky-tonk dividing line between Chicago’s Mexican-Pakistani-Russian north border and the very much more staid Evanston, and found a pay phone at the El stop there. Even more amazing, the phone’s cord and handset were both attached, and the phone asked me to deposit a dollar when I listened to it. I put my battery in my cellphone just long enough to look up Karen Lennon’s contact information, then called her cell from the pay phone.
“Vic, thank goodness! I’ve been trying to reach you since last night. I finally called Max this morning, and he told me you’re having to stay underground, so thank you for coming up for air and getting back to me. I’m sorry about your cousin, but Miss Claudia’s been asking for you. I’ve been afraid she’d pass while you were hiding.”
“If I go to Lionsgate Manor now, will I be able to see her?”
“If I’m with you, it should be okay. I’m home, but I can be there in twenty-five minutes. I’ll meet you at the main entrance, okay?”
“Not okay. I don’t know how long I can stay undercover, but I can’t have anyone know where I am. I’ll meet you outside Miss Claudia’s room.”
Karen wanted to know how I’d get into the building; you had to go past the guard station at night. I told her not to worry about that, just to give me the room number. She started to object, but I cut her off.
“Please, I don’t have enough time to do the things I have to do. Let’s not waste the last hours of Miss Claudia’s life arguing about this.”
I drove along Howard until I came to a shop that sold uniforms and business apparel. There are several ways to be invisible in a large institution. The best, in a nursing home, is to be a janitor. If you show up in a nurse’s uniform, all the other nurses think they know you and study your face too closely. A janitor, however, at the low end of the food chain, gets only a cursory look. I found a jumpsuit in gray, which I put on over my jeans, and a square-cut cap. I bought a big mop to complete the outfit. I stuck my gun into a side pocket—not the safest way to carry a firearm, but I wanted it close to hand.
When I reached Lionsgate, I parked on a side street so I could get away fast if I had to. Mop in hand, cap low on my forehead, I walked down the ramp at the manor’s parking garage and entered the building using one of those elevators. On the ground floor, I had to pass the guard station to get to the main elevators. The massive woman behind the counter, wearing a Lionsgate pale blue security blazer, was watching television. But she looked up as I passed and called out to me: Who was I? Where was my security ID?
My Polish is limited to a few stilted phrases garnered unwillingly as a child from Boom-Boom’s mother. Tonight, I didn’t stop walking but shouted over my shoulder in Polish instead that dinner was ready, it was getting cold, come to the table at once, something I’d heard Aunt Marie say four or five hundred times. The guard shook her head with the kind of annoyed incredulity accorded ignorant immigrants, but she returned to the small TV on the counter in front of her.
I rode up in an elevator with a real member of the cleaning crew. She was collecting dirty laundry and rolled her cart off at the eighth floor. When I reached Miss Claudia’s room, Miss Ella was sitting with her sister on the room’s one chair. Karen was on the lookout for me. She hurried over and greeted me in a low voice, taking my arm and escorting me to Miss Claudia’s bed.
Another woman lay in an adjacent bed, her breath coming in short, puffy bursts, a machine next to her beeping every now and then. I pulled a curtain between the two women to create the illusion of privacy.
My client frowned at me. “Our affairs haven’t been very important to you, have they? You took our money, but you didn’t find Lamont. And it seems you’ve stopped looking for him the last month.”
“I think your sister wants to see me,” I said as gently as I could. “How is she?”
“Maybe a little stronger,” Karen said. “She ate some ice cream, Miss Ella says.”