I heard the dogs whining and scratching at the back door and went to let them in. I knelt to talk to them. “I’ll take you guys for a good walk tonight after the sun goes down, but this is it for now.”
I dressed carefully, in a high-necked T-shirt and loose-fitting linen trousers and jacket that covered my arms and chest. I put on the white cotton gloves I needed to protect my hands and found a wide-brimmed straw hat that I sometimes wore at the beach. When I was finished, I looked like Scarlett O’Hara protecting her fragile skin, but it couldn’t be helped.
To complete my protective gear, I went to the safe in the back of my bedroom closet. My intruders had shaken out my wardrobe, but they’d missed the safe, which is built in behind my shoe bag. Occasionally, I have a document so sensitive, I don’t want to leave it in my office overnight. Otherwise, all that I keep in it is my mother’s diamond drop earrings and pendant and my Smith & Wesson.
I made sure the gun was still clean—I hadn’t been to the range for several months—and checked the clip. I didn’t know for sure that I was in someone else’s sights, but it made me feel a little better when I snapped my tuck holster over my belt loops.
I went door-to-door, in the best detective tradition, to find out if anyone had seen the person who’d gone into my apartment. And how they’d made it past all my locks without forcing them. Of course, some people were out at work, but the older Norwegian woman, who’s lived on the second floor for a decade, had been home, as had the grandmother of the Korean family. Neither of them had seen or heard anything unusual.
Jake Thibaut came blear-eyed to the door in a T-shirt and shorts. I’d woken him, but I couldn’t help it. And how was I to know what time he got in at night? He didn’t recognize me at first.
“It’s the hair,” he finally decided. “You cut off all your curls.”
I ran my fingers through the buzz cut and winced as I touched the bruises. I kept forgetting about my hair when I don’t look in the mirror.
“Did you hear anything in my apartment two nights ago? Someone came through with something like a forklift and knocked the place apart.”
“Two nights ago?” He rubbed his eyes. “I was playing out in Elgin. I didn’t get home until two or so, but maybe I saw your forklifters leaving. I was getting my bass out of the back of my car when I saw two strange men coming down the walk.”
I sucked in a breath. “Black? White? Young?”
He shook his head. “I thought maybe they were clients of yours, paying a secret visit, so I didn’t get close.They had that kind of Edward G. Robinson look that makes you think that you should keep your distance.”
“Were they driving or on foot?”
“I’m pretty sure they got into a big dark SUV up the street, but I’m not good with cars. I can’t tell you what the make was.”
“You didn’t see a tall woman with spiky hair lurking about, did you?”
He laughed. “You mean that girl who comes to visit you—what, your cousin, is she? No, she came around a few times while you were away, visiting the old guy, but she wasn’t part of that team. These guys were bulky, not skinny and spiky.”
I left with a measure of both relief and worry: relief at the reassurance that Petra hadn’t been involved in this break-in and worry about who had sent people to search my apartment.
I picked up my car from the alley, where Mr. Contreras had put it when he rescued it. I’d left my briefcase in the trunk some million or so years ago when I’d gone to visit Sister Frankie. When I opened it to stick in a new set of papers for some meetings I’d scheduled that afternoon, the first thing I saw was the Nellie Fox baseball. I’d completely forgotten about stashing it in there.
I laughed softly to myself. Poor Petra. She could have boosted the ball without my knowing the difference if she’d only thought to look in the trunk. I held it up to the sun, squinting at it through my dark glasses. It was stained and worn. Someone had played with it, maybe Grandpa Warshawski. He died when I was little, but he’d been a Sox fan.
The ball also had holes in it, and that was mystifying. A couple of them went all the way through the ball, so I wondered if my dad and his brother Bernie had run fishing line through it to hang it up for batting practice. I tucked the ball back into my briefcase and drove to my office.
Until she sank under the weight of my media calls, Marilyn Klimpton had done a good job of sorting files and papers. Even though messages had built up, and some incoming documents needed sorting, the office looked in pretty good shape, especially compared to the mounds of papers I’d found on my return from Italy.