“Did someone really identify him going into your building?”
I shook my head. “It was a hunch, and apparently an accurate one, since it must have sent him scrambling to Dornick, or even Strangwell.”
I repeated Murray’s description of the murder. “It must have been Dornick . . . I can’t see Strangwell embracing Alito, either . . . But his old partner? The man who gave him odd jobs to help him run his boat and his little retirement bungalow on the water? Yes, Alito would feel he had to trust him.”
“Maybe you did set in motion the events that got him murdered today. But you can’t be greedy over guilt, you know. If he hadn’t been the kind of person who would break into your office, your phone call wouldn’t have made any difference in his life.” Karen looked at me earnestly, her round young face flushed.
“ ‘ Greedy over guilt.’ I like that. I have been greedily guilty all day.” My distress over my father swept through me again, a wave that made me shut my eyes in pain.
I changed the subject. We ended up drinking the whole bottle of wine and laughing over family stories, like the one about her grandmother whose father wouldn’t let her learn to drive so she took the family car and drove it into the horse pond and then calmly went in the house, packed a suitcase, and took off for Chicago.
It was close to midnight when I finally helped my hostess pull the sofa apart and turn it into a guest bed. For the first time in a week, I slept eight hours. Like a tranquil baby.
45
THE GOOD BOOK . . . AND THE BAD BALL
KAREN HAD ALREADY LEFT FOR HER EARLY MEETING WHEN I woke up. She’d made coffee and put a note next to the carafe, asking me to call her on her cellphone before I took off. “Someone needs to know where you are. I’m your pastor. They can’t compel my testimony.”
I smiled a little at the thought of Karen as my personal pastor. She didn’t get a morning paper, so I took a cup of coffee back to the sofa bed to watch the television news. After the daily economic horror story, Alito’s death dominated the morning shows.
Only Beth Blacksin, on Global Entertainment’s Channel 13, suggested a sinister falling-out among friends as the motive behind his murder. And while she didn’t name any names, she did say that Alito had been doing freelance security work for an important Illinois political campaign. I blew Murray a silent kiss. He must have talked to Beth, since the Star was also owned by Global.
Beth’s story would force Dornick and Les Strangwell to spend some energy on damage control, which would take a little heat away from their searches for me and Petra. On the other hand, two of the networks mentioned the “Chicago private eye, whom police badly want to question, after hearing of threats she made against the dead man.” One of them even had put my photograph on the screen, fortunately an old one copied from a newspaper. It had been taken when I had a head full of curls, not my current Marine cut.
“And I want to question you, too, Bobby,” I muttered. “Who are you covering for? How much did you know back in 1967? You, too, were in Marquette Park during those riots.”
I got dressed, in my jeans and Karen’s T-shirt. I’d rinsed my underwear out in her bathroom last night, but my socks were kind of funky. I decided to borrow some from Karen, although I felt a few qualms going through her chest of drawers looking for a pair. Her underwear was severely utilitarian, but her socks were fanciful, almost kiddish. I skipped Hello Kitty and some bright red devils and angels and settled on a pair showing Lisa Simpson jumping rope.
I hoped I wasn’t pushing my luck, assuming that my pastor’s landline was open. After all, she was connected to some of the Freedom Center’s programs and might be getting the same federal scrutiny the nuns got. But I called my answering service, anyway, and found it had been deluged again with media calls, everyone wanting to interview the private eye whom the police badly wanted to question.
My clients were more squeamish. I spent almost an hour persuading two law firms to stay with me. A third wouldn’t return my calls, and I didn’t blame them. Until I could come out of hiding, I was a pretty sorry excuse for an investigator.
Bernardo, the big orange cat, appeared and decided I was better than no company at all. He began following me, winding in between my legs, so that I had to be careful not to trip over him. He jumped up onto the table next to the sofa bed while I was stripping the sheets off it and converting it back to a sofa and started sniffing my Smith & Wesson.
When I snatched the gun out of the way, he began exploring Miss Claudia’s Bible. My attention was on the gun, checking the safety and putting it in my tuck holster, so I didn’t see his leap, just Miss Claudia’s Bible flying off the table.