Jolenta Krumas, glancing from Petra to the row of polished medals on Mr. Contreras’s suit, gave a wry smile. “You are doing a splendid job, darling. I’ll make sure Harvey tells your papa the next time they talk. And so, Salvatore, is Petra exhausting you? Come, sit down, rest! Brian will be along in a while. He’s in back with some of Harvey’s friends. Now that he’s running for office, I’m lucky if I see him at Mass on Sunday mornings. This fundraiser is our first meal together in months!”
Petra turned around and saw me behind her. She made a grimace of mock contrition. “Oh, Aunt Jolenta, I’m sorry, I forgot to introduce my real cousin, Vic, Victoria. She’s Uncle Sal’s upstairs neighbor. She’s a detective. Vic, this is the senator’s mom.”
“Senator-to-be, dear, senator-to-be, we all hope. The election’s a long way off. Let’s not jinx it, okay?”
She patted Petra’s hand, then indicated a chair near her for Mr. Contreras. Everyone swarming nearby stared at him, trying to figure out what he’d done to get a seat near power. I picked up a glass of wine from the Krumas table. As I moved toward an exit, I heard a woman say to her partner, “Oh, that’s Brian’s grandfather. The guy behind me just told me that.” I laughed a little. So stories start.
I moved away from the building and walked to the east edge of the pier, remote from the pounding loudspeakers and the endless preening conversations. See and be seen, see and be seen.
I stared down at the ripples that gleamed on the black water. The pier was awash with money tonight, with everyone hoping some would drift their way. Or at least some glamour or a tiny snippet of power.
Like my old boss. I hadn’t thought about Arnie Coleman for a long time, but he was the main reason I’d left the criminal courts. If you had a high-profile case that State’s Attorney Karl Swevel wanted to ram through, you were supposed to put on the brakes when it came to questioning the cops or finding witnesses who might support your client. I’d ignored the directive once, and Coleman told me then that if it happened again I’d be on report to the state bar’s ethics committee.
My dad had died six months earlier. My husband had just left me for Terry Felliti. I felt unbearably alone and scared. I could lose my license to practice law and then what would I do? The next morning I handed in my resignation. I went around to the private criminal defense lawyers and starting doing odd jobs for them. And one thing led to another, and I became a PI.
I started to feel cold in my backless dress. When I returned to the melee, the band was playing a martial medley. The candidate and his inner circle had appeared. Krumas was working his way through a wildly cheering crowd, shaking hands here, kissing a woman there—always choosing a woman hovering on the fringes of a group, never the most striking in the knot he was passing through.
He was, as Petra said, extraordinarily beautiful in person. You wanted to lean over and stroke that thick head of hair. And, even at a distance, his smile seemed to say, You and I, we have a rendezvous with destiny.
I craned my head to see if Mr. Contreras had been allowed to stay at Table 1. I finally saw him, looking a little forlorn, squeezed between Brian’s sister, or maybe sister-in-law, and a stocky young man who was talking across my neighbor to another man on Mr. Contreras’s left. I threaded my way to his side, prepared to rescue him, if that’s what he wanted, or to stay on the sidelines until he was ready to leave.
Harvey Krumas appeared from some place in the crowd and stood behind his wife, with a small fist of cronies in attendance. I recognized the head of the Fort Dearborn Trust but none of the others, although a stocky Asian man was probably head of a Singapore company in which Krumas had a large stake.
The candidate’s father was in his late sixties, with a thick head of curly gray hair and a square face that was starting to give way to jowls. When he saw me near Mr. Contreras, he bent to ask his wife about me. His heavy face eased into a smile, and he beckoned to me. It was only when I crossed to his side of the table that I realized Arnie Coleman was part of the group around him.
“Little Petra’s talked about you—her big cousin, Vic, the detective. You’re Tony’s girl, right? Tony Warshawski was the staid and steady guy on the street,” he explained to his friends. “Bailed me and Peter out more than once, back when we were wilder than we can afford to be these days. Bet you don’t know that old Gage Park neighborhood, do you, Vic? Not much to detect there these days, except a boatload of poverty and crime a pretty gal like you shouldn’t touch.”
“Warshawski used to work for me in the PD’s Office, Harvey,” Arnie Coleman said. “She was always getting her hands dirty up to her nose.”
Krumas was surprised to have Coleman turn his party chitchat into something so venomous, and I was astonished, too. Who knew his animosity ran as deep as that after all this time?
“We had a pretty rough crew as clients, Mr. Krumas,” I said. “People like Johnny ‘the Hammer’ Merton. I don’t know if you remember him from the roaring sixties, but I guess he was quite a figure on the South Side in his day.”