“If they’re big enough to incorporate in Delaware, you should find them online, but good catch. If you find them, please, little cousin, do not go tracking them down by yourself. Contractors have short fuses and big hammers.”
“Oh, Vic, so do meatpackers. I grew up around them. I know how to talk to people without getting their undies in a bundle. Anyway, I can outrun a guy who’s weighed down by a big hammer. You’ll see.”
I would see. I frowned at the phone, wishing I understood what was really on Petra’s mind, and hoping I hadn’t started her on a quest where she’d get in over her head.
Lotty took the afternoon off to drive me around, first to the hospital, where her presence let me jump to the front of the line.
From the hospital, we drove to the bank. Until I got all my plastic replaced, I didn’t have a way of getting cash, so I brought my passport and cashed a check for a thousand dollars, hoping that would see me through until a new ATM card arrived.
Our last stop was my hairdresser’s, so I could get my weird clumps of hair shorn to a uniform length. Something between baldness and a Marine buzz cut was how it looked at the end, but certainly way more attractive than the Mangy Dog’d do I’d been sporting.
It was a pleasant day, a sort of mini-vacation after the trauma of the past ten days, and we finished it by eating supper with Max at a little bistro on Damen. He and Lotty drove me to my apartment, where Mr. Contreras and the dogs tumbled out to greet me. The dogs showed such ecstasy that the medical resident across the hall threatened to call the cops if Mr. Contreras and I didn’t silence them at once. Even that didn’t dampen my pleasure at coming back to my own home. Lotty gave me a long hug and relinquished me to Mr. Contreras, who insisted on carrying my bag up the stairs.
My pleasure died as soon as I opened the door. I was so shocked that I couldn’t take it in at first. My home had been ripped to shreds. Books lay on the floor, my stereo was dismantled, music had been dumped so the inside of the piano could be inspected, my trunk stood in the living room with my mother’s evening gown wadded up on the floor next to it.
My first reaction was a kind of despair, a desire to get on a plane for Milan and spend the rest of my life in the little hill town where my mother grew up. My second response was fury with my cousin.
“Come on, Vic,” my neighbor protested. “Cut the kid some slack. How could she be behind this?”
“There are no signs of forced entry,” I said. “You let her in with my keys, right? She’s been obsessed with this baseball I found with my dad’s stuff, and this has all the earmarks of a spoiled kid wanting what she wants when she wants it.”
“I let her in, yeah, but that was two days ago when she stopped in for your phone charger. She didn’t stay long enough to do this kind of damage. And, anyway, you got her all wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, cookie, but it’s like you’re jealous of her for being young and pretty and lively. I thought you was better than that. Really, doll, I thought you was.”
“How can you talk like that when my apartment has been trashed! Look at this!” I held up my mother’s gown. “She knows how much this matters to me and she just wads it up and dumps it like it’s an old dish towel.”
“I’m just saying, Petra couldn’t a done this no matter what you think. And I didn’t let anyone else in, so this was a professional, someone who could bypass all your locks and gates and stuff and get in anyway. They had to’ve done this late at night, when me and the dogs was sound asleep. Your cousin wasn’t here in the middle of the night.”
I called Petra’s cellphone, but there wasn’t any answer. I left a message telling her to call me the instant she picked up her voice mail. With the dogs and Mr. Contreras accompanying me, I walked through my apartment, looking at wreckage. The old man was right: Petra wouldn’t have been so wanton. But neither would a professional. Unless it was a professional deliberately trying to terrify me. In which case, they had done a great job.
“But what could they be looking for?” I asked Mr. Contreras. “Except for that Nellie Fox ball, there’s nothing here that anyone would want. Besides, as I keep saying, there’s no sign of forced entry.”
“Maybe Petra forgot to lock up behind her,” my neighbor suggested.
“Then why was it locked when we came up the stairs just now?” I was teetering on the brink of meltdown and kept hysteria out of my voice by effort of will alone.
Mr. Contreras wanted me to call the police, but I’d had my fill of the law. Although the more chaos I saw, the less I thought my cousin had caused it, I didn’t want a crime unit to find some trace of Petra there. If she’d done this, I’d tackle her myself.