Rush hour was over. People were beginning to fill up the restaurants that lined the streets. I felt overwhelmed with envy for the diners I could see through the windows, eating and laughing together. This was what it was like to be Elton, trudging back each night from his station outside the coffee bar on my street, a Vietnam veteran with no home and only the price of a bottle or a sandwich in his pocket.
On leaden feet, I walked under the expressway and turned east and then north again. The railway embankment was surrounded by razor wire, but there was a gap hidden by the Kennedy’s shadow. I slipped through it and crawled up the embankment. Decades of Chicagoans had tossed their garbage from their cars, and, in places along the embankment, it was waist high. I could see the path Elton had carved through the refuse and followed it up to the tracks and down the other side, where the embankment ended at the river’s edge.
I didn’t spot Elton’s shack at first, and wondered if in his paranoia he had misdirected me. However, a faint trail led through the underbrush and refuse, and I followed it to the river. The water here was a thick brownish green. Ducks bobbed in it, along with plastic bottles and sticks. There wasn’t a visible current, and mosquitoes rose in clouds from the thicket of shrubs that lined the bank.
From the river’s edge, I looked back and finally saw the shack, almost invisible against the underbrush and discarded tires. It had a faded logo from the C&NW railroad on it; I suppose they’d once used it for storage. As I got closer, I saw Elton had put a rain barrel on the roof and fixed up a showerhead. There weren’t any windows in the shack, and the boards it was built with were gray-black with damp, but he had covered any holes with a variety of metal, Styrofoam, and plastic sheeting.
I clambered up the embankment and made my way around to the side where the door was. “Elton? You home? It’s V. I. Warshawski. We need to talk.”
I rapped smartly on the panel and heard a movement from inside the shack, an intake of a sob. I pulled open the ramshackle door. My cousin Petra blinked at me from a nest of sleeping bags.
“Vic! How did you know? Who told you? Who’s with you?”
I couldn’t speak. I was so overcome with relief at the sight of Petra that I just stood there, shaking my head in wonder.
47
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
I WAS ON THE FLOOR, HOLDING PETRA, WHILE SHE SOBBED against my shoulder. “Vic, I’m so scared, it’s so awful, don’t yell at me. I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t want—”
“I’m not going to yell at you, little cousin,” I said softly, stroking her dirty hair, “when it’s my hot temper that made you too scared to trust me.”
“They told me if I talked to anyone, they’d shoot Mom and the girls and Daddy would go to prison, I didn’t know what to do. They said you wanted Daddy to go to prison, you were just using me, and if I didn’t help them, if I talked to you about what I was doing, you’d punish me and him and Mom and everyone.”
“Who are they? Les Strangwell? Dornick?”
She swallowed a sob and nodded.
Mosquitoes were swarming into the shack, biting us through our clothes. I had to close the door, although there wasn’t much air in the small space. With the door shut, it smelled of damp river mud and stale sweat. The only light came from a couple of makeshift skylights Elton had created by cutting squares in the roof and filling them with discarded windowpanes. Outside, the sun was starting to set. I could just make out my cousin’s bleached, frightened face.
“It started with the Nellie Fox baseball, didn’t it?” I said. “The day you found it in my trunk, you talked about it in the office.”
“Me and my ultra-big mouth! It was only partly the ball. Everything started at the fundraiser when I talked about Johnny Merton in front of that creepy Judge Coleman. I heard him tell Uncle Harvey that you’d better not be screwing around in the Harmony case, which at first I thought was funny. I thought he was saying something about you and music, or your mom, or something. And Uncle Harvey said they’d nailed the Anacondas for that, and he didn’t want this to be some snake coming back to life after its head got chopped off. And then, the day after the fundraiser, when Mr. Strangwell brought me in to work for him, he told me it was top secret because you wanted to sabotage Brian’s campaign.”
“I see. So he told you I had some kind of evidence that would destroy the campaign and you had to find it?”
A train thundered overhead, shaking the shack. We had to wait for it to pass before we could talk. When the noise finally died away, we could hear the ordinary sweet sounds of a summer’s evening, the birds’ last songs, the little insects chirruping.
“The evidence?” I prodded my cousin when she remained silent.