Burn Marks

42

Mourning Becomes Electra

I walked slowly up State Street. Anger dragged at my steps, anger and depression both. Someone laid a bomb in my engine and no one in the police department had tried to get a word from Mr. Contreras about the men he’d seen. Instead, Roland Montgomery assaulted me physically while Bobby did it mentally. Break every bone in my body. Oh, yeah. That’s how you get people to stop asking questions and do as you say, you break every bone in their bodies.

I was angry with myself too-I hadn’t meant to talk to Bobby about Furey until I had some proof. Of course Bobby wouldn’t listen to me spreading stories about his fair-haired boy. It would be hard enough to get him to listen when I could really back them up. And even though I was furious right now with Bobby, I didn’t look forward to bringing him that much pain.

Maybe I’d feel better for food. It had been six hours since I’d eaten and I’d thrown that up. I wandered into the first coffee shop I came to. They had a variety of salads on the menu but I ordered a b.l.t. with fries. Grease is so much more comforting than greens. Anyway, my weight was still down-I needed to pack a few carbs to build myself back up.

Because I’d come during off-hours they made up the fries fresh just for me. I ate them first, while they were still hot and crisp. Halfway through the fries I remembered I was supposed to check in with my answering service every hour to see if the Streeter Brothers could fit me into their schedule soon. I carried the last handful of potatoes to the pay phone at the front of the coffee shop.

I got Tim Streeter this time. “We can start for you first thing in the morning, Vic, but we’ll need you to brief the boys, give them a description, and maybe show them the kind of place your aunt would likely pick.”

My stomach fell. Morning seemed an awfully long time away just now. I couldn’t protest, though-they were doing me a mighty big favor. I told Tim I’d meet him at the corner of Indiana and Cermak at eight and hung up.

Maybe it would still be light enough for me to do some hunting on my own tonight. I could stop at August Cray’s office and then head home to pick up the Tempo. I called my neighborhood car rental. They closed at six but said they’d leave the Tempo out front for me with the keys taped underneath the front bumper. If someone stole it before I got there they weren’t going to be out much.

I paid my bill-under ten dollars, even though I was perilously close to the upscale part of the South Loop- and took the sandwich to eat on my way to Cray’s office.

The address Freeman Carter had given me for Farm-works was on north LaSalle. I took a bus up to Van Buren and then got on the Dan Ryan L-it would take me around the Loop faster than any taxi this time of day. It was just on four-thirty when I got off at Clark and walked the three blocks to Cray’s building. I hoped someone was still in the office, even if Cray himself wasn’t.

I was going against the tide of homebound workers. Inside the lobby I had to move to the wall and scoot crablike around the outgoing throng to the elevators. I rode in splendid isolation to the twenty-eighty floor and made my way on soft gray carpeting to Suite 2839. Its solid wood door was labeled simply “Property Management.” They probably ran so many different little firms out of there that they couldn’t list all their names on the door.

The knob didn’t turn under my hand so I tried a buzzer discreetly imbedded to the right of the panel. After a long pause a tinny voice asked who was there.

“I’m interested in investing in Farmworks,” I said. “I’d like to talk to August Cray.”

The door clicked. I walked into a narrow reception area, a holding pen really, with a couple of stiff chairs but no table or magazines-or even a window for waiting customers to gaze through.

A sliding glass window in the left wall allowed the inmates to look at visitors without exposing their whole bodies. This was shut when I came in. I looked around and saw a little television camera in a corner of the ceiling. I smiled at it and waved and a few seconds later Star Wentzel opened a door next to the glass panel. Her blond hair was combed back and gathered into a jeweled white clip. She wore a long narrow skirt that highlighted her gaunt pelvic bones. She looked like a high school student from the fifties, not a participant in a development scam.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

I smiled. “I might ask you the same question. I came here to find August Cray-Farmworks’s agent of record. And here you are, mourning your mother, but putting a brave front on it by coming into the office.”

“I can’t bring Mother back to life by staying home,” she said pettishly. “I don’t need you to tell me how to behave.”

“Of course you don’t, Star. Can we go inside? I’d still like to talk to August Cray.”

“He’s not here. Why don’t you tell me what you want?”

This was clearly a rote line-she rattled it off without the hostility of her earlier remarks. I smiled.

“I came to invest in Farmworks. It’s such an up-and-coming company. I hear they’re going to get a huge piece of the new stadium project-I want to be a millionaire just like Boots and Ralph.”

She smoothed a hand over a jutting hipbone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then I’ll explain it to you. Let’s go sit down-this will take awhile-your feet are going to start hurting in those spiky heels if we talk out here.”

I opened the door and shepherded Star into the inner office. It was a small room with a blond wood desk about the color of her hair. A couple of portables covered the top-one seemed identical to the Apollo I’d noticed in the Alma Mejicana offices on Sunday. Wood filing cabinets filled the windowless walls and spilled over into the narrow hallway. It was a working person’s office all right.

I dumped a stack of prospectuses from a chair in the hall and moved it into the office while Star sat in her padded swivel chair behind the desk. Her mouth was set in a mulish line. I expect I looked about the same.

She lifted a thin wrist to examine a weighty gold timepiece. “I don’t have much time, so make your spiel and let me get home. My sister and I have to entertain some of Mother’s church friends tonight.”

“It’s partly about your mother that I came to see you,” I said.

“You claimed to be a friend of hers but no one at the church had ever heard of you,” she said sharply.

“That’s because I only knew her in the narrow context of her work at Seligman. Since the fire at the Indiana Arms-I’m sure you know about that, don’t you?-I’d been talking to her, hoping to get some idea about who might have set it. She obviously was sitting on some kind of secret. And that secret had to do with you or your sister. After I talked to you at the funeral home on Monday, I was pretty sure that you working here was what she was so pleased about-and so eager to withhold. And that’s what I want you to tell me-why she couldn’t tell people where you worked.”

A ghost of her mother’s smug look flitted across her face. “That’s none of your business, is it?”

She said it in a saucy little singsong, the way young children do. It got under my skin, goading me to act like a child myself. I put both hands on the desk and leaned forward between the two computers. “Star, sugar, I want you to be real brave about this, but you should know your boss killed your mother.”

Little red spots burned in her cheeks. “That’s a lie! Mother was killed by some awful mugger who thought the office was empty and-”

“And broke in and stole only the documents relating to Farmworks’s offer to buy the Indiana Arms,” I cut in. “Come off it, Star. Ralph and Boots are spinning you a line. Your mother learned I’d gotten hold of a picture of you and she was afraid you’d get linked to the fire when I started showing it around. She went to Ralph and told him she was going to have to tell me all about his offer to purchase-she didn’t want you taking the fall in case someone could connect you with that arson. And he killed her. Or he got someone to kill her. How bad do you want to protect those cretins? Bad enough to let them get away with your mama’s death?”

“You’re making this up! Ralph and Gus told me you might be around to harass me. He told me what you might insinuate. You think you’re so smart, but he’s smarter than you.”

“Gus?” I started to ask, then realized she must mean August. “One thing’s for damn sure-he’s smarter than you! Don’t you realize that I didn’t know MacDonald was involved in Farmworks until you told me just now? It was a guess, but it sure was right on target. Shall I guess everything else that happened and you let me know if I’m right or wrong? Or do you want to tell me yourself?”

She pulled herself up in her swivel chair. “You’d better get out of here before I call the police. You’re harassing me in a private office and that’s against the law.”

“Let me make another guess.” I pulled her Rolodex toward me and started flipping through it. “You’ll call Roland Montgomery’s private number and he’ll send some uniforms hopping to drag me away. And Star! What a coincidence! Here it is.”

“I… uh…” She started a sentence several times but didn’t finish it. “You don’t have any proof.”

“No,” I had to admit. “It’s just another guess. But he- or at least Farmworks-is at the center of a whole lot of different action that he’d just as soon the FBI didn’t see. They’re going to, though, Star, because the Herald’s going to print the whole story. And then the feds will come subpoena your files and they’ll charge you with conspiring to commit fraud and arson and murder. And then you won’t just be a poor little orphan, you’ll be a poor little orphan in jail. Only if a jury hears how you let your own mother take the fall for you, they’re not going to treat you like a helpless waif.”

“Just because my employer tried to buy a building belonging to Mother’s employer does not mean he killed her.” Her voice was scornful.

“Ralph and Boots really wanted the Indiana Arms, didn’t they? Really badly. I know about their stadium bid-that’s not a secret. And it won’t take too much work to do a proper title search for the stuff back there, so you might as well tell me.”

She thought it over carefully, then finally conceded that Farmworks had been buying up property in the triangle behind McCormick Place and the Dan Ryan for several years now, positioning themselves for a bid on the stadium. The Indiana Arms was one of the few occupied buildings they hadn’t been able to acquire. Star had been keeping Seligman’s books for him at the time-she was a CPA. She thought he was foolish not to sell and tried to pressure him.

“He acted like that place meant more to him than his own children,” Star said resentfully. “You’d think he’d of been glad to get what they were offering-it would have been so much better for Barbara and Connie than inheriting that run-down junk heap. Even after-after things started going really wrong, like when the elevators broke down and no one would come fix them, he couldn’t see it was a losing proposition.”

“It had some sentimental meaning for him. So what happened next? You went to August Cray and Ralph and said if they’d hire you, you’d keep up the pressure on Seligman through your mom?”

She tossed her golden hair scornfully. “They made me an offer. They could see I was good, that I was wasted in that nickel-and-dime place.”

“What were you supposed to do? Forge a title transfer? Were you good enough to do that? Or just get your mother to keep the heat on the old man to sell?”

She smiled at me coldly. “You’ll never know, will you?”

“But then Rita learned that Mr. Seligman had given me a photo that had you and Shannon in it along with his own daughters. And she came to you, panicked. She was afraid if I started showing it to someone who had lived or worked at the Indiana Arms that they would recognize you. What had you been doing down there? Sabotaging the elevators yourself? Or just guaranteeing that no repair company would come fix them? So you told Ralph your mom was getting cold feet and he did the only decent thing-he got someone to kill her.”

She sucked on her lower lip, but she didn’t shake that easily. “You’re in here with guesses and stories. If that’s your idea of fun, I’m not going to stop you.”

“Yeah, they’re guesses and stories, but they’re pretty volatile. A more innocent woman might be hollering for cops or lawyers or witnesses or something. But you’re taking it all in to see how much I know, aren’t you? Well, Boots may have the local cops in his hip pocket, but I don’t think he owns the FBI yet.”

I got up to go. Star had a strange little smile on her face. “Of course you have to talk to them first, don’t you? And even if Boots doesn’t have much influence with the FBI, he can make sure they don’t listen to you.”

My stomach jolted a bit but I said calmly, “Oh, did Ralph and Boots tell you about their joke on my ignition? I found it and I’ll be extra careful looking for others. I remember LeAnn Wunsch telling me what a kidder Boots was. I’m only just beginning to really appreciate it.”

She barely waited for me to leave before she picked up her phone. I didn’t shut the door all the way and stood with my ear against it. She asked for Ralph and said it was urgent and that she’d wait at her desk until he called back. I guess her mother’s church friends weren’t that important.