Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

“I was afraid you’d take this the wrong way,” Michael said plaintively. “Ernie doesn’t care. He knows because he and his old man have done a certain amount of work for the county over the years. So of course he gets asked to all the fund-raisers. You know how it is in Chicago, Vic-if you do business with the city or the county, you gotta engage in a little reciprocity.”

I knew how it was.

“So of course they got an advance look at the program. And Ernie knows you and I are-well, friends. So he mentioned it. Not something you really need to get hot about.”

“No,” I agreed meekly. “It just takes me by surprise when two unconnected parts of my life suddenly hook up.”

“Know the feeling,” he agreed. “I just was wondering if I could go with you. I might attend anyway, since the boys are roping in as many victims as they can. If you’re going to be there…”

“Let me think about it,” I said, after a pause too long to be really polite. “Although-look, I wonder if you could do something for me.” I told him about Elena. “I don’t know much about her-what her hangouts are. And even though I don’t want her living with me, I’m a little worried. I’d kind of like to know she’s okay, wherever she is.”

“Christ, Vic, you don’t want much, do you? You know damned well there’s no way I can go to the CTA without a good reason. If I start checking routes and talking to drivers, their union’ll be at Uncle Bobby’s door within the hour screaming for my butt.”

“Maybe I should call Bobby in the morning, talk it over with him.” Besides being Michael’s godfather, Bobby Mallory had been my own father’s protégé and his best friend on the force. He might check up on Elena for Tony’s sake-I wouldn’t expect him to do it for mine.

“No, don’t do that,” Michael said hastily. “Tell you what-I’ll pass it on to the uniforms on Madison and the Near South Side, ask them to keep an eye out for her and call me if they see her.”

“I don’t want her being hassled,” I warned him.

“Cool your jets, Vic. Discretion is my middle name.”

“Yeah, right, and I’m the Queen of Sheba.”

He laughed. “So if I look into it, you’ll go to Boots’s with me on Sunday?”

“Something like that,” I admitted, blushing in spite of myself.

“I ought to run you in for trying to bribe a cop.” It was a grumble, but the tone was good-natured; he promised to call me tomorrow if he turned anything up. He arranged to meet me at three on Sunday; since he knew the way he offered to drive. I said I’d follow him in my own car-I didn’t want to hang around Boots Meagher’s farm until midnight while Michael caught up with his old precinct pals.

By the time we hung up my chop had gotten cold and the glazed wine sauce was congealed. I was too tired to heat it up again tonight. Sticking the plate in the refrigerator, I fell into bed and spent the night in uneasy dreams in which I chased Elena across Chicago, always just missing her as she boarded the eastbound Diversey bus.

Royal Suite

I worked for the county for five years after passing the bar. During my summers in law school I interned at the Loop’s giant firms, and I’d held a lot of weird jobs to finance my college education. The worst was selling books by phone for Time-Life from five to nine in the evening. You call people at dinner and they scream at you. Eight or nine times I phoned homes of dead people-once the woman had died only the day before. I extricated myself from her sobbing daughter swiftly and gracelessly.

So I know working for myself beats a whole roster of other employers I can list. Still, being a private investigator is not the romance of the loner knight that Marlowe and Spenser like to pretend-half the time you’re doing some kind of tedious surveillance or spending your day in the Daley Center checking backgrounds. And a good chunk of the rest of the time goes to selling people on hiring your services. Often not successfully.

Cartwright & Wheeler, insurance brokers, listened closely to my presentation on the perils and possibilities of filing false claims. They asked a lot of questions, but the nine people in the room didn’t feel able to make a decision on hiring me without consulting senior staff. I exuded warmth, professionalism, and a positive mental attitude while trying to force a commitment, but the best I could get was a promise to discuss it at Monday’s management meeting.

I went back to my office to stow my five hundred dollars’ worth of transparencies in a filing cabinet. Usually I don’t get too upset by a lukewarm response, but I was feeling edgy enough about Elena that I slammed drawers and tore up mail to vent my irritation. Larry Bowa liked to destroy toilets after a bad game. We all have our little immature quirks.

When I’d calmed down some I checked in with my answering service. Marissa Duncan had left a message. I called back and spoke with her secretary. Marissa had found a room for Elena in a residential hotel on Ken-more between Wilson and Lawrence. They wanted ninety a month for it. I hesitated a moment. I hated to turn it down-Marissa would be peeved and she had enough connections that I was better off with her feeling good about me. Even worse, what if Elena showed up again at three in the morning?

“She can’t move in right away,” I said at last. “But I’ll stop by and pay for the room on my way home.”

“Cash,” the secretary said briefly. “And no pets or children.”

“Fine.” I double-checked the address and hung up. For the first time in my life I found myself wondering what Elena had done for birth control all those years. And I suddenly realized why Gabriella had been so accepting the time she showed up at our house thirty years ago. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what had been said, but Elena had been pregnant. Gabriella helped her find some kind of underground abortion and Elena got drunk.

I sat at my desk, my shoulder slumped, watching the pigeons fight for space on the windowsill. Finally I stretched out a hand to switch on the desk lamp and called Michael Furey at the Central District. He didn’t sound enthusiastic at hearing from me, but he said he’d checked the morgue and some of the area hospitals-no gray-haired drunk women had been hauled in since yesterday afternoon.

“Gotta go, Vic, we’re hard at it. See you Sunday…”

Normally I would have chafed him about being hard at a poker game, but I hung up without saying anything-I wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

I’d noticed too late that one of the pieces of mail I was shredding was from an old client. I rummaged through the scraps on the floor and reconstructed enough of it to see that it was a request for a simple background check. It would keep until Monday-I wasn’t in the humor to do that tonight, either. The rest of the paper I scooped up and put into the trash.

Embarrassed by my earlier outburst, I soberly filed the papers remaining on my desk, then went to the ladies’ room on the seventh floor for some water to scrub down the surface. That looked so good that I finished by washing the windowsills and filing cabinets too. Clean now in thought, word, and deed, I locked up the office.

En route to the garage I stopped at a cash machine to get the ninety dollars, then joined the slow procession out of the Loop. Everyone leaves work early on Friday in order to maximize the amount of time spent sitting in traffic before starting the weekend.

It was a little before five when I reached the Windsor Arms on Kenmore. The building had gone up when the Duke was in his heyday, enjoying Goering’s hospitality and lending his name to residential hotels that hoped to reflect his royal splendor. The Duke of Windsor was dead now, but the hotel hadn’t been so lucky. If the facade had been washed since George VI’s ascension, it didn’t show. Not much more attention had been paid to basic repairs- a number of windows had pieces of cardboard filling in for missing panes.