High Chicago

CHAPTER 30

Once I was checked into my room, I called Jenn and gave her the rundown on my day.

"You think Birk's ears are burning yet?" she asked.

"I'd bet on it. If the site manager didn't call him, Peter Stemko probably did."

"I'm sorry I missed your act," Jenn said. "You being careful?"

"I'm watching my back while hoping he tries something," I said. "Because so far we've got nothing to hang him with. But there is something you could check."

"What?"

"You have good contacts in the art world?"

"I'm gay, Jonah. I can't go to a party without bumping into four gallery owners."

"Good. Simon Birk's house was looted two years ago."

"I remember. It was in the package I put together for you."

I told her what Jericho Hale had said about the convenient timing of the robbery, and his suspicion that Birk might have engineered it himself.

"Jesus. Is there nothing he won't stoop to?"

"For a change," I said, "there's no proof."

"So what can I do?"

"I'm emailing you an article that lists the main items taken. Find out what they would have been worth on the black market. Ask if any have surfaced. I'll speak to the insurance company and see if they had any doubts."

"I'm on it," she said. "So… your friend Avi help you at all?"

"He said he'd make some calls," I said. "I'm going there for dinner tonight, so maybe he'll have something for me."

"It's good you have a friend there."

"Yes."

"What's he like?"

"Very different than he was in Israel-much more corporate-but I guess I'm different too."

"But some things never change," she said. "I'm sure you have more in common than you think."

"We'll see."

"Anything else?"

"That's it for now. Except…"

"Except what?"

"Maybe you ought to work from home while I'm away."

"Why? You think more goons might come around?"

"It's possible."

"And you think I can't take care of myself?"

"Don't take it the wrong way."

"I'm not supposed to worry about you but you can worry about me? Of all the sexist crap."

"It has nothing to do with sex, Jenn."

"Then what?"

I was struggling to find the right way to express what I was feeling-how much she meant to me as a friend and partner-when I heard a loud snort and a peal of laughter and realized I'd been had. "Gotcha," she giggled.

"You witch," I said.

"Guilty," she said.

"A guy tries to show concern…"

"I'm touched, Jonah."

"In the head, you're touched."

"I'm also at home."

"What?"

"I felt creeped out at the office after what happened. So I forwarded the phones to home and I've been working here all day. In my jammies."

"And still you give me shit."

"I was a little bored here."

"You're toast when I get back," I said. "You know that, don't you?"

"So get back in one piece," she said. "Then you can give me all the shit you want." I hailed a cab in front of the hotel, the interior ripe with the smell of curry, and told the Sikh driver I wanted to go to West Montana Street-via the Gold Coast.

I could see his face light up in his mirror at the thought of the higher fare a roundabout trip would bring. "Of course," he said.

I gave him the address of Birk's old house on North Astor Street. He took Lake Shore north along Lake Michigan until Division, where he turned left and drove past North Astor to State. "Astor's a one-way south so I must go around this way," the driver explained. The houses grew grander in size and more grandiose in design, hundred-year-old mansions in all the styles popular at the turn of the century: Queen Anne, Georgian, Romanesque. The people who built these houses once ran the city: the publisher of the Tribune, the Wrigleys, the mayor, the guys who made money in steel, lumber, real estate and beer. Not many were family homes anymore. Like the mansions that lined the streets of the Annex back home, they were apartments or condos now, or museums or clubs. The biggest of all was the red sandstone home of the Archdiocese of Chicago; the second biggest, the old Playboy mansion.

When we got to the former Birk residence, I asked the driver to wait.

"Take all the time you need, sir," he said.

The house was spectacular. A four-storey Georgian master-piece built of grey stone, with arched windows on the ground floor and Juliet balconies along the top. Footlights bathed the stone in a soft pink light. There were security cameras at either end of the front gate, one aimed at the front door, one at the street. They weren't new-their black casings showed frills of rust along their edges-and had surely been there in Birk's time. The north side of the house was built up against its neighbour, barely a foot between them, and that gap was well covered by old-growth ivy that was dying against a trellis, dry brown twigs and leaves curling into themselves. On the south side, a driveway went halfway to the back of the house, ending at a side door covered by a small white portico. A camera there too. I assumed there were cameras at the back of the house as well.

I got back into the cab wondering how the thieves had pulled off their robbery without being caught on tape.