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catkittens · 10 months

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Sara Paretsky

The Maltese Cat

HER VOICE ON the phone had been soft and husky, with just a whiff of the South laid across it like a rare perfume. “I’d rather come to your office; I don’t want people in mine to know I’ve hired a detective.”

I’d offered to see her at her home in the evening-my Spartan office doesn’t invite client confidences. But she didn’t want to wait until tonight, she wanted to come today, almost at once, and no, she wouldn’t meet me in a restaurant. Far too hard to talk, and this was extremely personal.

“You know my specialty is financial crime, don’t you?” I asked sharply.

“Yes, that’s how I got your name. One o’clock, fourth floor of the Pulteney, right?” And she’d hung up without telling me who she was.

An errand at the County building took me longer than I’d expected; it was close to one-thirty by the time I got back to the Pulteney. My caller’s problem apparently was urgent: she was waiting outside my office door, tapping one high heel impatiently on the floor as I trudged down the hall in my running shoes.

“Ms. Warshawski! I thought you were standing me up.”

“No such luck,” I grunted, opening my office door for her.

In the dimly lit hall she’d just been a slender silhouette. Under the office lights the set of the shoulders and signature buttons told me her suit had come from the hands of someone at Chanel. Its blue enhanced the cobalt of her eyes. Soft makeup hid her natural skin tones-I couldn’t tell if that dark red hair was natural, or merely expertly painted.

She scanned the spare furnishings and picked the cleaner of my two visitor chairs. “My time is valuable, Ms. Warshawski. If I’d known you were going to keep me waiting without a place to sit I would have finished some phone calls before walking over here.”

I’d dressed in jeans and a work shirt for a day at the Recorder of Deeds office. Feeling dirty and outclassed made me grumpy. “You hung up without giving me your name or number, so there wasn’t much I could do to let you know you’d have to stand around in your pointy little shoes. My time’s valuable, too. Why don’t you tell me where the fire is so I can start putting it out.”

She flushed. When I turn red I look blotchy, but in her it only enhanced her makeup. “It’s my sister.” The whiff of Southern increased. “Corinne. She’s run off to Ja-my ex-husband, and I need someone to tell her to come back.”

I made a disgusted face. “I can’t believe I raced back from the County building to listen to this. It’s not 1890, you know. She may be making a mistake but presumably she can sort it out for herself.”

Her flush darkened. “I’m not being very clear. I’m sorry. I’m not used to having to ask for things. My sister-Corinne-she’s only fourteen. She’s my ward. I’m sixteen years older than she is. Our parents died three years ago and she’s been living with me since then. It’s not easy, not easy for either of us. Moving from Mobile to here was just the beginning. When she got here she wanted to run around, do all the things you can’t do in Mobile.”

She waved a hand to indicate what kinds of things those might be. “She thinks I’m a tough bitch and that I was too hard on my ex-husband. She’s known him since she was three and he was a big hero. She couldn’t see he’d changed. Or not changed, just not had the chance to be heroic anymore in public. So when she took off two days ago I assumed she went there. He’s not answering his phone or the doorbell. I don’t know if they’ve left town or he’s just playing possum or what. I need someone who knows how to get people to open their doors and knows how to talk to people. At least if I could see Corinne I might-I don’t know.”

She broke off with a helpless gesture that didn’t match her sophisticated looks. Nothing like responsibility for a minor to deflate even the most urbane.

I grimaced more ferociously. “Why don’t we start with your name, and your husband’s name and address, and then move on to her friends.”

“Her friends?” The deep blue eyes widened. “I’d just as soon this didn’t get around. People talk, and even though it’s not 1890, it could be hard on her when she gets back to school.”

I suppressed a howl. “You can’t come around demanding my expertise and then tell me what or what not to do. What if she’s not with your husband? What if I can’t get in touch with you when I’ve found that out and she’s in terrible trouble and her life depends on my turning up some new leads? If you can’t bring yourself to divulge a few names-starting with your own-you’d better go find yourself a more pliant detective. I can recommend a couple who have waiting rooms.”

She set her lips tightly: whatever she did she was in command-people didn’t talk to her that way and get away with it. For a few seconds it looked as though I might be free to get back to the Recorder of Deeds that afternoon, but then she shook her head and forced a smile to her lips.

“I was told not to mind your abrasiveness because you were the best. I’m Brigitte LeBlanc. My sister’s name is Corinne, also LeBlanc. And my ex-husband is Charles Pierce.” She scooted her chair up to the desk so she could scribble his address on a sheet of paper torn from a memo pad in her bag. She scrawled busily for several minutes, then handed me a list that included Corinne’s three closest school friends, along with Pierce’s address.

“I’m late for a meeting. I’ll call you tonight to see if you’ve made any progress.” She got up.

“Not so fast,” I said. “I get a retainer. You have to sign a contract. And I need a number where I can reach you.”

“I really am late.”

“And I’m really too busy to hunt for your sister. If you have a sister. You can’t be that worried if your meeting is more important than she is.”

Her scowl would have terrified me if I’d been alone with her in an alley after dark. “I do have a sister. And I spent two days trying to get into my ex-husband’s place, and then in tracking down people who could recommend a private detective to me. I can’t do anything else to help her except go earn the money to pay your fee.”

I pulled a contract from my desk drawer and stuck it in the manual Olivetti that had belonged to my mother-a typewriter so old that I had to order special ribbons for it from Italy. A word processor would be cheaper and more impressive but the wrist action keeps my forearms strong. I got Ms. LeBlanc to give me her address, to sign on the dotted line for $400 a day plus expenses, to write in the name of a guaranteeing financial institution and to hand over a check for two hundred.

When she’d left I wrestled with my office windows, hoping to let some air in to blow her pricey perfume away. Carbon flakes from the el would be better than the lingering scent, but the windows, painted over several hundred times, wouldn’t budge. I turned on a desktop fan and frowned sourly at her bold black signature.

What was her ex-husband’s real name? She’d bitten off “Ja-” Could be James or Jake, but it sure wasn’t Charles. Did she really have a sister? Was this just a ploy to get back at a guy late on his alimony? Although Pierce’s address on North Winthrop didn’t sound like the place for a man who could afford alimony. Maybe everything went to keep her in Chanel suits while he lived on Skid Row.

She wasn’t in the phone book, so I couldn’t check her own address on Belden. The operator told me the number was unlisted. I called a friend at the Ft. Dearborn Trust, the bank Brigitte had drawn her check on, and was assured that there was plenty more where that came from. My friend told me Brigitte had parlayed the proceeds of a high-priced modeling career into a successful media consulting firm.

“And if you ever read the fashion pages you’d know these things. Get your nose out of the sports section from time to time, Vic-it’ll help with your career.”

“Thanks, Eva.” I hung up with a snap. At least my client wouldn’t turn out to be named something else, always a good beginning to a tawdry case.

I looked in the little mirror perched over my filing cabinet. A dust smudge on my right cheek instead of peach blush was the only distinction between me and Ms. LeBlanc. Since I was dressed appropriately for North Winthrop, I shut up my office and went to retrieve my car.

Charles Pierce lived in a dismal ten-flat built flush onto the Uptown sidewalk. Ragged sheets made haphazard curtains in those windows that weren’t boarded over. Empty bottles lined the entryway, but the smell of stale Ripple couldn’t begin to mask the stench of fresh urine. If Corinne LeBlanc had run away to this place, life with Brigitte must be unmitigated hell.

My client’s ex-husband lived in 3E. I knew that because she’d told me. Those few mailboxes whose doors still shut wisely didn’t trumpet their owners’ identities. The filthy brass nameplate next to the doorbells was empty and the doorbells didn’t work. Pushing open the rickety door to the hall, I wondered again about my client’s truthfulness: she told me Ja-hadn’t answered his phone or his bell.

A rheumy-eyed woman was sprawled across the bottom of the stairs, sucking at a half-pint. She stared at me malevolently when I asked her to move, but she didn’t actively try to trip me when I stepped over her. It was only my foot catching in the folds of her overcoat.

The original building probably held two apartments per floor. At least, on the third floor only two doors at either end looked as though they went back to the massive, elegant construction of the building’s beginnings. The other seven were flimsy newcomers that had been hastily installed when an apartment was subdivided. Peering in the dark I found one labeled B and counted off three more to the right to get to E. After knocking on the peeling veneer several times I noticed a button imbedded in the grime on the jamb. When I pushed it I heard a buzz resonate inside. No one came to the door. With my ear against the filthy panel I could hear the faint hum of a television.

I held the buzzer down for five minutes. It’s hard on the finger but harder on the ear. If someone was really in there he should have come boiling to the door by now.

I could go away and come back, but if Pierce was lying doggo to avoid Brigitte, that wouldn’t buy me anything. She said she’d tried off and on for two days. The television might be running as a decoy, or-I pushed more lurid ideas from my mind and took out a collection of skeleton keys. The second worked easily in the insubstantial lock. In two minutes I was inside the apartment, looking at an illustration from House Beautiful in Hell.

It was a single room with a countertop kitchen on the left side. A tidy person could pull a corrugated screen to shield the room from signs of cooking, but Pierce wasn’t tidy. Ten or fifteen stacked pots, festooned with rotting food and roaches, trembled precariously when I shut the door.

Dominating the place was a Murphy bed with a grotesquely fat man sprawled in at an ominous angle. He’d been watching TV when he died. He was wearing frayed, shiny pants with the fly lying carelessly open and a lumberjack shirt that didn’t quite cover his enormous belly.

His monstrous size and the horrible angle at which his bald head was tilted made me gag. I forced it down and walked through a pile of stale clothes to the bed. Lifting an arm the size of a tree trunk, I felt for a pulse. Nothing moved in the heavy arm, but the skin, while clammy, was firm. I couldn’t bring myself to touch any more of him but stumbled around the perimeter to peer at him from several angles. I didn’t see any obvious wounds. Let the medical examiner hunt out the obscure ones.

By the time I was back in the stairwell I was close to fainting. Only the thought of falling into someone else’s urine or vomit kept me on my feet. On the way down I tripped in earnest over the rheumy-eyed woman’s coat. Sprawled on the floor at the bottom, I couldn’t keep from throwing up myself. It didn’t make me feel any better.

I dug a water bottle out of the detritus in my trunk and sponged myself off before calling the police. They asked me to stay near the body. I thought the front seat of my car on Winthrop would be close enough.

While I waited for a meat wagon I wondered about my client. Could Brigitte have come here after leaving me, killed him and taken off while I was phoning around checking up on her? If she had, the rheumy-eyed woman in the stairwell would have seen her. Would the bond forged by my tripping over her and vomiting in the hall be enough to get her to talk to me?

I got out of the car, but before I could get back to the entrance the police arrived. When we pushed open the rickety door my friend had evaporated. I didn’t bother mentioning her to the boys-and girl-in blue: her description wouldn’t stand out in Uptown, and even if they could find her she wouldn’t be likely to say much.

We plodded up the stairs in silence. There were four of them. The woman and the youngest of the three men seemed in good shape. The two older men were running sadly to flab. I didn’t think they’d be able to budge my client’s ex-husband’s right leg, let alone his mammoth redwood torso.

“I got a feeling about this,” the oldest officer muttered, more to himself than the rest of us. “I got a feeling.”

When we got to 3E and he looked across at the mass on the bed he shook his head a couple of times. “Yup. I kind of knew as soon as I heard the call.”

“Knew what, Tom?” the woman demanded sharply.

“Jade Pierce,” he said. “Knew he lived around here. Been a lot of complaints about him. Thought it might be him when I heard we was due to visit a real big guy.”

The woman stopped her brisk march to the bed. The rest of us looked at the behemoth in shared sorrow. Jade. Not James or Jake but Jade. Once the most famous down lineman the Bears had ever fielded. Now… I shuddered.

When he played for Alabama some reporter said his bald head was as smooth and cold as a piece of jade, and went on to spin some tiresome simile relating it to his play. When he signed with the Bears, I was as happy as any other Chicago fan, even though his reputation for off-field violence was pretty unappetizing. No wonder Brigitte LeBlanc hadn’t stayed with him, but why hadn’t she wanted to tell me who he really was? I wrestled with that while Tom called for reinforcements over his lapel mike.

“So what were you doing here?” he asked me.

“His ex-wife hired me to check up on him.” I don’t usually tell the cops my clients’ business, but I didn’t feel like protecting Brigitte. “She wanted to talk to him and he wasn’t answering his phone or his door.”

“She wanted to check up on him?” the fit younger officer, a man with high cheekbones and a well-tended mustache, echoed me derisively. “What I hear, that split up was the biggest fight Jade was ever in. Only big fight he ever lost, too.”

I smiled. “She’s doing well, he isn’t. Wasn’t. Maybe her conscience pricked her. Or maybe she wanted to rub his nose in it hard. You’d have to ask her. All I can say is she asked me to try to get in, I did, and I called you guys.”

While Tom mulled this over I pulled out a card and handed it to him. “You can find me at this number if you want to talk to me.”

He called out after me but I went on down the hall, my footsteps echoing hollowly off the bare walls and ceiling.

III

Brigitte LeBlanc was with a client and couldn’t be interrupted. The news that her ex-husband had died couldn’t pry her loose. Not even the idea that the cops would be around before long could move her. After a combination of cajoling and heckling, the receptionist leaned across her blond desk and whispered at me confidentially: “The Vice President of the United States had come in for some private media coaching.” Brigitte had said no interruptions unless it was the President or the pope-two people I wouldn’t even leave a dental appointment to see.

When they made me unwelcome on the forty-third floor I rode downstairs and hung around the lobby. At five-thirty a bevy of Secret Service agents swept me out to the street with the other loiterers. Fifteen minutes later the Vice President came out, his boyish face set in purposeful lines. Even though this was a private visit the vigilant television crews were waiting for him. He grinned and waved but didn’t say anything before climbing into his limo. Brigitte must be really good if she’d persuaded him to shut up.

At seven I went back to the forty-third floor. The double glass doors were locked and the lights turned off. I found a key in my collection that worked the lock, but when I’d prowled through the miles of thick gray plush, explored the secured studios, looked in all the offices, I had to realize my client was smarter than me. She’d left by some back exit.

I gave a high-pitched snarl. I didn’t lock the door behind me. Let someone come in and steal all the video equipment. I didn’t care.

I swung by Brigitte’s three-story brownstone on Belden. She wasn’t in. The housekeeper didn’t know when to expect her. She was eating out and had said not to wait up for her.

“How about Corinne?” I asked, sure that the woman would say “Corinne who?”

“She’s not here, either.”

I slipped inside before she could shut the door on me. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. Brigitte hired me to find her sister, said she’d run off to Jade. I went to his apartment. Corinne wasn’t there and Jade was dead. I’ve been trying to talk to Brigitte ever since but she’s avoiding me. I want to know a few things, like if Corinne really exists, and did she really run away, and could either she or Brigitte have killed Jade.”

The housekeeper stared at me for a few minutes, then made a sour face. “You got some I.D.?”

I showed her my P.I. license and the contract signed by Brigitte. Her sour look deepened but she gave me a few spare details. Corinne was a fat, unhappy teenager who didn’t know how good she had it. Brigitte gave her everything, taught her how to dress, sent her to St. Scholastica, even tried to get her to special diet clinics, but she was never satisfied, always whining about her friends back home in Mobile, trashy friends to whom she shouldn’t be giving the time of day. And yes, she had run away, three days ago now, and she, the housekeeper, said good riddance, but Brigitte felt responsible. And she was sorry that Jade was dead, but he was a violent man, Corinne had overidealized him, she didn’t realize what a monster he really was.

“They can’t turn it off when they come off the field, you know. As for who killed him, he probably killed himself, drinking too much. I always said it would happen that way. Corinne couldn’t have done it, she doesn’t have enough oomph to her. And Brigitte doesn’t have any call to-she already got him beat six ways from Sunday.”

“Maybe she thought he’d molested her sister.”

“She’d have taken him to court and enjoyed seeing him humiliated all over again.”

What a lovely cast of characters; it filled me with satisfaction to think I’d allied myself to their fates. I persuaded the housekeeper to give me a picture of Corinne before going home. She was indeed an overweight, unhappy-looking child. It must be hard having a picture-perfect older sister trying to turn her into a junior deb. I also got the housekeeper to give me Brigitte’s unlisted home phone number by telling her if she didn’t, I’d be back every hour all night long ringing the bell.

I didn’t turn on the radio going home. I didn’t want to hear the ghoulish excitement lying behind the unctuousness the reporters would bring to discussing Jade Pierce’s catastrophic fall from grace. A rehashing of his nine seasons with the Bears, from the glory years to the last two where nagging knee and back injuries grew too great even for the painkillers. And then to his harsh retirement, putting seventy or eighty pounds of fat over his playing weight of 310, the barroom fights, the guns fired at other drivers from the front seat of his Ferrari Daytona, then the sale of the Ferrari to pay his legal bills, and finally the three-ring circus that was his divorce. Ending on a Murphy bed in a squalid Uptown apartment.

I shut the Trans Am’s door with a viciousness it didn’t deserve and stomped up the three flights to my apartment. Fatigue mixed with bitterness dulled the sixth sense that usually warns me of danger. The man had me pinned against my front door with a gun at my throat before I knew he was there.

I held my shoulder bag out to him. “Be my guest. Then leave. I’ve had a long day and I don’t want to spend too much of it with you.”

He spat. “I don’t want your stupid little wallet.”

“You’re not going to rape me, so you might as well take my stupid little wallet.”

“I’m not interested in your body. Open your apartment. I want to search it.”

“Go to hell.” I kneed him in the stomach and swept my right arm up to knock his gun hand away. He gagged and bent over. I used my handbag as a clumsy bolas and whacked him on the back of the head. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.

I grabbed the gun from his flaccid hand. Feeling gingerly inside his coat, I found a wallet. His driver’s license identified him as Joel Sirop, living at a pricey address on Dearborn Parkway. He sported a high-end assortment of credit cards-Bonwit, Neiman Marcus, an American Express platinum-and a card that said he was a member in good standing of the Feline Breeders Association of North America. I slid the papers back into his billfold and returned it to his breast pocket.

He groaned and opened his eyes. After a few diffuse seconds he focused on me in outrage. “My head. You’ve broken my head. I’ll sue you.”

“Go ahead. I’ll hang on to your pistol for use in evidence at the trial. I’ve got your name and address, so if I see you near my place again I’ll know where to send the cops. Now leave.”

“Not until I’ve searched your apartment.” He was unarmed and sickly but stubborn.

I leaned against my door, out of reach but poised to stomp on him if he got cute. “What are you looking for, Mr. Sirop?”

“It was on the news, how you found Jade. If the cat was there, you must have taken it.”

“Rest your soul, there were no cats in that apartment when I got there. Had he stolen yours?”

He shut his eyes, apparently to commune with himself. When he opened them again he said he had no choice but to trust me. I smiled brightly and told him he could always leave so I could have dinner, but he insisted on confiding in me.

“Do you know cats, Ms. Warshawski?”

“Only in a manner of speaking. I have a dog and she knows cats.”

He scowled. “This is not a laughing matter. Have you heard of the Maltese?”

“Cat? I guess I’ve heard of them. They’re the ones without tails, right?”

He shuddered. “No. You are thinking of the Manx. The Maltese-they are usually a bluish gray. Very rarely will you see one that is almost blue. Brigitte LeBlanc has-or had-such a cat. Lady Iva of Cairo.”

“Great. I presume she got it to match her eyes.”

He waved aside my comment as another frivolity. “Her motives do not matter. What matters is that the cat has been very difficult to breed. She has now come into season for only the third time in her four-year life. Brigitte agreed to let me try to mate Lady Iva with my sire, Casper of Valletta. It is imperative that she be sent to stay with him, and soon. But she has disappeared.”

It was my turn to look disgusted. “I took a step down from my usual practice to look for a runaway teenager today. I’m damned if I’m going to hunt a missing cat through the streets of Chicago. Your sire will find her faster than I will. Matter of fact, that’s my advice. Drive around listening for the yowling of mighty sires and eventually you’ll find your Maltese.”

“This runaway teenager, this Corinne, it is probable that she took Lady Iva with her. The kittens, if they are born, if they are purebred, could fetch a thousand or more each. She is not ignorant of that fact. But if Lady Iva is out on the streets and some other sire finds her first, they would be half-breeds, not worth the price of their veterinary care.”

He spoke with the intense passion I usually reserve for discussing Cubs or Bears trades. Keeping myself turned toward him, I unlocked my front door. He flung himself at the opening with a ferocity that proved his long years with felines had rubbed off on him. I grabbed his jacket as he hurtled past me but he tore himself free.

“I am not leaving until I have searched your premises,” he panted.

I rubbed my head tiredly. “Go ahead, then.”

I could have called the cops while he hunted around for Lady Iva. Instead I poured myself a whiskey and watched him crawl on his hands and knees, making little whistling sounds-perhaps the mating call of the Maltese. He went through my cupboards, my stove, the refrigerator, even insisted, his eyes wide with fear, that I open the safe in my bedroom closet. I removed the Smith & Wesson I keep there before letting him look.

When he’d inspected the back landing he had to agree that no cats were on the premises. He tried to argue me into going downtown to check my office. At that point my patience ran out.

“I could have you arrested for attempted assault and criminal trespass. So get out now while the going’s good. Take your guy down to my office. If she’s in there and in heat, he’ll start carrying on and you can call the cops. Just don’t bother me.” I hustled him out the front door, ignoring his protests.

I carefully did up all the locks. I didn’t want some other deranged cat breeder sneaking up on me in the middle of the night.

It was after midnight when I finally reached Brigitte. Yes, she’d gotten my message about Jade. She was terribly sorry, but since she couldn’t do anything to help him now that he was dead, she hadn’t bothered to try to reach me.

“We’re about to part company, Brigitte. If you didn’t know the guy was dead when you sent me up to Winthrop, you’re going to have to prove it. Not to me, but to the cops. I’m talking to Lieutenant Mallory at the Central District in the morning to tell him the rigmarole you spun me. They’ll also be able to figure out if you were more interested in finding Corinne or your cat.”

There was a long silence at the other end. When she finally spoke, the hint of Southern was pronounced. “Can we talk in the morning before you call the police? Maybe I haven’t been as frank as I should have. I’d like you to hear the whole story before you do anything rash.”

Just say no, just say no, I chanted to myself. “You be at the Belmont Diner at eight, Brigitte. You can lay it out for me but I’m not making any promises.”

I got up at seven, ran the dog over to Belmont Harbor and back and took a long shower. I figured even if I put a half hour into grooming myself I wasn’t going to look as good as Brigitte, so I just scrambled into jeans and a cotton sweater.

It was almost ten minutes after eight when I got to the diner, but Brigitte hadn’t arrived yet. I picked up a Herald-Star from the counter and took it over to a booth to read with a cup of coffee. The headline shook me to the bottom of my stomach.

FOOTBALL HERO SURVIVES FATE

WORSE THAN DEATH

Charles “Jade” Pierce, once the smoothest man on the Bears’ fearsome defense, eluded offensive blockers once again. This time the stakes were higher than a touchdown, though: the offensive lineman was Death.

I thought Jeremy Logan was overdoing it by a wide margin but I read the story to the end. The standard procedure with a body is to take it to a hospital for a death certificate before it goes to the morgue. The patrol team hauled Jade to Beth Israel for a perfunctory exam. There the intern, noticing a slight sweat on Jade’s neck and hands, dug deeper for a pulse than I’d been willing to go. She’d found faint but unmistakable signs of life buried deep in the mountain of flesh and had brought him back to consciousness.

Jade, who’s had substance abuse problems since leaving the Bears, had mainlined a potent mixture of ether and hydrochloric acid before drinking a quart of bourbon. When he came to his first words were characteristic: “Get the f- out of my face.”

Logan then concluded with the obligatory rundown on Jade’s career and its demise, with a pious sniff about the use and abuse of sports heroes left to die in the gutter when they could no longer please the crowd. I read it through twice, including the fulsome last line, before Brigitte arrived.

“You see, Jade’s still alive, so I couldn’t have killed him,” she announced, sweeping into the booth in a cloud of Chanel.

“Did you know he was in a coma when you came to see me yesterday?”

She raised plucked eyebrows in hauteur. “Are you questioning my word?”

One of the waitresses chugged over to take our order. “You want your fruit and yogurt, right, Vic? And what else?”

“Green pepper and cheese omelet with rye toast. Thanks, Barbara. What’ll yours be, Brigitte?” Dry toast and black coffee, no doubt.

“Is your fruit really fresh?” she demanded.

Barbara rolled her eyes. “Honey, the melon pinched me so hard I’m black-and-blue. Better not take a chance if you’re sensitive.”

Brigitte set her shoulder-covered today in green broadcloth with black piping-and got ready to do battle. I cut her off before the first “How dare you” rolled to its ugly conclusion.

“This isn’t the kind of place where the maître d’ wilts at your frown and races over to make sure madam is happy. They don’t care if you come back or not. In fact, about now they’d be happier if you’d leave. You can check out my fruit when it comes and order some if it tastes right to you.”

“I’ll just have wheat toast and black coffee,” she said icily. “And make sure they don’t put any butter on it.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “Wheat toast, margarine instead of butter. Just kidding, hon,” she added as Brigitte started to tear into her again. “You gotta learn to take it if you want to dish it out.”

“Did you bring me here to be insulted?” Brigitte demanded when Barbara had left.

“I brought you here to talk. It didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t know diner etiquette. We can fight if you want to. Or you can tell me about Jade and Corinne. And your cat. I had a visit from Joel Sirop last night.”

She swallowed some coffee and made a face. “They should rinse the pots with vinegar.”

“Well, keep it to yourself. They won’t pay you a consulting fee for telling them about it. Joel tell you he’d come around hunting Lady Iva?”

She frowned at me over the rim of the coffee cup, then nodded fractionally.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the damned cat when you were in my office yesterday?”

Her poise deserted her for a moment; she looked briefly ashamed. “I thought you’d look for Corinne. I didn’t think I could persuade you to hunt down my cat. Anyway, Corinne must have taken Iva with her, so I thought if you found her you’d find the cat, too.”

“Which one do you really want back?”

She started to bristle again, then suddenly laughed. It took ten years from her face. “You wouldn’t ask that if you’d ever lived with a teenager. And Corinne’s always been a stranger to me. She was eighteen months old when I left for college and I only saw her a week or two at a time on vacations. She used to worship me. When she moved in with me I thought it would be a piece of cake: I’d get her fixed up with the right crowd and the right school, she’d do her best to be like me, and the system would run itself. Instead, she put on a lot of weight, won’t listen to me about her eating, slouches around with the kids in the neighborhood when my back is turned, the whole nine yards. Jade’s influence. It creeps through every now and then when I’m not thinking.”

She looked at my blueberries. I offered them to her and she helped herself to a generous spoonful.

“And that was the other thing. Jade. We got together when I was an Alabama cheerleader and he was the biggest hero in town. I thought I’d really caught me a prize, my yes, a big prize. But the first, last, and only thing in a marriage with a football player is football. And him, of course, how many sacks he made, how many yards he allowed, all that boring crap. And if he has to sit out a game, or he gives up a touchdown, or he doesn’t get the glory, watch out. Jade was mean. He was mean on the field, he was mean off it. He broke my arm once.”

Her voice was level but her hand shook a little as she lifted the coffee cup to her mouth. “I got me a gun and shot him in the leg the next time he came at me. They put it down as a hunting accident in the papers, but he never tried anything on me after that-not physical, I mean. Until his career ended. Then he got real, real ugly. The papers crucified me for abandoning him when his career was over. They never had to live with him.”

She was panting with emotion by the time she finished. “And Corinne shared the papers’ views?” I asked gently.

She nodded. “We had a bad fight on Sunday. She wanted to go to a sleepover at one of the girls’ in the neighborhood. I don’t like that girl and I said no. We had a gale-force battle after that. When I got home from work on Monday she’d taken off. First I figured she’d gone to this girl’s place. They hadn’t seen her, though, and she hadn’t shown up at school. So I figured she’d run off to Jade. Now… I don’t know. I would truly appreciate it if you’d keep looking, though.”

Just say no, Vic, I chanted to myself. “I’ll need a thousand up front. And more names and addresses of friends, including people in Mobile. I’ll check in with Jade at the hospital. She might have gone to him, you know, and he sent her on someplace else.”

“I topped by there this morning. They said no visitors.”

I grinned. “I’ve got friends in high places.” I signaled Barbara for the check. “Speaking of which, how was the Vice President?”

She looked as though she were going to give me one of her stiff rebuttals, but then she curled her lip and drawled, “Just like every other good old boy, honey, just like every other good old boy.”

Lotty Herschel, an obstetrician associated with Beth Israel, arranged for me to see Jade Pierce. “They tell me he’s been difficult. Don’t stand next to the bed unless you’re wearing a padded jacket.”

“You want him, you can have him,” the floor head told me. “He’s going home tomorrow morning. Frankly, since he won’t let anyone near him, they ought to release him right now.”

My palms felt sweaty when I pushed open the door to Jade’s room. He didn’t throw anything when I came in, didn’t even turn his head to stare through the restraining rails surrounding the bed. His mountain of flesh poured through them, ebbing away from a rounded summit in the middle. The back of his head, smooth and shiny as a piece of polished jade, reflected the ceiling light into my eyes.

“I don’t need any goddamned ministering angels, so get the fuck out of here,” he growled to the window.

“That’s a relief. My angel act never really got going.”

He turned his head at that. His black eyes were mean, narrow slits. If I were a quarterback I’d hand him the ball and head for the showers.

“What are you, the goddamned social worker?”

“Nope. I’m the goddamned detective who found you yesterday before you slipped off to the great huddle in the sky.”

“Come on over then, so I can kiss your ass,” he spat venomously.

I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. “I didn’t mean to save your life: I tried getting them to send you to the morgue. The meat wagon crew double-crossed me.”

The mountain shook and rumbled. It took me a few seconds to realize he was laughing. “You’re right, detective: you ain’t no angel. So what do you want? True confessions on why I was such a bad boy? The name of the guy who got me the stuff?”

“As long as you’re not hurting anyone but yourself I don’t care what you do or where you get your shit. I’m here because Brigitte hired me to find Corinne.”

His face set in ugly lines again. “Get out.”

I didn’t move.

“I said get out!” He raised his voice to a bellow.

“Just because I mentioned Brigitte’s name?”

“Just because if you’re pally with that broad, you’re a snake by definition.”

“I’m not pally with her. I met her yesterday. She’s paying me to find her sister.” It took an effort not to yell back at him.

“Corinne’s better off without her,” he growled, turning the back of his head to me again.

I didn’t say anything, just stood there. Five minutes passed. Finally he jeered, without looking at me. “Did the sweet little martyr tell you I broke her arm?”

“She mentioned it, yes.”

“She tell you how that happened?”

“Please don’t tell me how badly she misunderstood you. I don’t want to throw up my breakfast.”

At that he swung his gigantic face around toward me again. “Com’ere.”

When I didn’t move, he sighed and patted the bed rail. “I’m not going to slug you, honest. If we’re going to talk, you gotta get close enough for me to see your face.”

I went over to the bed and straddled the chair, resting my arms on its back. Jade studied me in silence, then grunted as if to say I’d passed some minimal test.

“I won’t tell you Brigitte didn’t understand me. Broad had my number from day one. I didn’t break her arm, though: that was B. B. Wilder. Old Gunshot. Thought he was my best friend on the club, but it turned out he was Brigitte’s. And then, when I come home early from a hunting trip and found her in bed with him, we all got carried away. She loved the excitement of big men fighting. It’s what made her a football groupie to begin with down in Alabama.”

I tried to imagine ice-cold Brigitte flushed with excitement while the Bears’ right tackle and defensive end fought over her. It didn’t seem impossible.

“So B. B. broke her arm but I agreed to take the rap. Her little old modeling career was just getting off the ground and she didn’t want her good name sullied. And besides that, she kept hoping for a reconciliation with her folks, at least with their wad, and they’d never fork over if she got herself some ugly publicity committing violent adultery. And me, I was just the baddest boy the Bears ever fielded; one more mark didn’t make that much difference to me.” The jeering note returned to his voice.

“She told me it was when you retired that things deteriorated between you.”

“Things deteriorated-what a way to put it. Look, detective what did you say your name was? V. I., that’s a hell of a name for a girl. What did your mamma call you?”

“Victoria,” I said grudgingly. “And no one calls me Vicki, so don’t even think about it.” I prefer not to be called a girl, either, much less a broad, but Jade didn’t seem like the person to discuss that particular issue with.

“Victoria, huh? Things deteriorated, yeah, like they was a picnic starting out. I was born dumb and I didn’t get smarter for making five hundred big ones a year. But I wouldn’t hit a broad, even one like Brigitte who could get me going just looking at me. I broke a lot of furniture, though, and that got on her nerves.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, I can see that. It’d bother me, too.”

He gave a grudging smile. “See, the trouble is, I grew up poor. I mean, dirt poor. I used to go to the projects here with some of the black guys on the squad, you know, Christmas appearances, shit like that. Those kids live in squalor, but I didn’t own a pair of shorts to cover my ass until the county social worker come ’round to see why I wasn’t in school.”

“So you broke furniture because you grew up without it and didn’t know what else to do with it?”

“Don’t be a wiseass, Victoria. I’m sure your mamma wouldn’t like it.”

I made a face-he was right about that.

“You know the LeBlancs, right? Oh, you’re a Yankee, Yankees don’t know shit if they haven’t stepped in it themselves. LeBlanc Gas, they’re one of the biggest names on the Gulf Coast. They’re a long, long way from the Pierces of Florette.

“I muscled my way into college, played football for Old Bear Bryant, met Brigitte. She liked raw meat, and mine was just about the rawest in the South, so she latched on to me. When she decided to marry me she took me down to Mobile for Christmas. There I was, the Hulk, in Miz Effie’s lace and crystal palace. They hated me, knew I was trash, told Brigitte they’d cut her out of everything if she married me. She figured she could sweet-talk her daddy into anything. We got married and it didn’t work, not even when I was a national superstar. To them I was still the dirt I used to wipe my ass with.”

“So she divorced you to get back in their will?”

He shrugged, a movement that set a tidal wave going down the mountain. “Oh, that had something to do with it, sure, it had something. But I was a wreck and I was hell to live with. Even if she’d been halfway normal to begin with, it would have gone bust, ’cause I didn’t know how to live with losing football. I just didn’t care about anyone or anything.”

“Not even the Daytona,” I couldn’t help saying.

His black eyes disappeared into tiny dots. “Don’t you go lecturing me just when we’re starting to get on. I’m not asking you to cry over my sad jock story. I’m just trying to give you a little different look at sweet, beautiful Brigitte.”

“Sorry. It’s just… I’ll never do anything to be able to afford a Ferrari Daytona. It pisses me to see someone throw one away.”

He snorted. “If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you. Too late now. Anyway, Brigitte waited too long to jump ship. She was still in negotiations with old man LeBlanc when he and Miz Effie dropped into the Gulf of Mexico with the remains of their little Cessna. Everything that wasn’t tied down went to Corinne. Brigitte, being her guardian, gets a chunk for looking after her, but you ask me, if Corinne’s gone missing it’s the best thing she could do. I’ll bet you… well, I don’t have anything left to bet. I’ll hack off my big toe and give it to you if Brigitte’s after anything but the money.”

He thought for a minute. “No. She probably likes Corinne some. Or would like her if she’d lose thirty pounds, dress like a Mobile debutante and hang around with a crowd of snot-noses. I’ll hack off my toe if the money ain’t number one in her heart, that’s all.”

I eyed him steadily, wondering how much of his story to believe. It’s why I stay away from domestic crime: everyone has a story, and it wears you out trying to match all the different pieces together. I could check the LeBlancs’ will to see if they’d left their fortune the way Jade reported it. Or if they had a fortune at all. Maybe he was making it all up.

“Did Corinne talk to you before she took off on Monday?”

His black eyes darted around the room. “I haven’t laid eyes on her in months. She used to come around, but Brigitte got a peace bond on me, I get arrested if I’m within thirty feet of Corinne.”

“I believe you, Jade,” I said steadily. “I believe you haven’t seen her. But did she talk to you? Like on the phone, maybe.”

The ugly look returned to his face, then the mountain shook again as he laughed. “You don’t miss many signals, do you, Victoria? You oughta run a training camp. Yeah, Corinne calls me Monday morning. ‘Why don’t you have your cute little ass in school?’ I says. ‘Even with all your family dough that’s the only way to get ahead-they’ll ream you six ways from Sunday if you don’t get your education so you can check out what all your advisers are up to.’”

He shook his head broodingly. “I know what I’m talking about, believe me. The lawyers and agents and financial advisers, they all made out like hogs at feeding time when I was in the money, but come trouble, it wasn’t them, it was me hung out like a slab of pork belly to dry on my own.”

“So what did Corinne say to your good advice?” I prompted him, trying not to sound impatient: I could well be the first sober person to listen to him in a decade.

“Oh, she’s crying, she can’t stand it, why can’t she just run home to Mobile? And I tell her ’cause she’s underage and rich, the cops will all be looking for her and just haul her butt back to Chicago. And when she keeps talking wilder and wilder I tell her they’ll be bound to blame me if something happens to her and does she really need to run away so bad that I go to jail or something. So I thought that calmed her down. ‘Think of it like rookie camp,’ I told her. ‘They put you through the worst shit but if you survive it you own them.’ I thought she figured it out and was staying.”

He shut his eyes. “I’m tired, detective. I can’t tell you nothing else. You go away and detect.”

“If she went back to Mobile who would she stay with?”

“Wouldn’t nobody down there keep her without calling Brigitte. Too many of them owe their jobs to LeBlanc Gas.” He didn’t open his eyes.

“And up here?”

He shrugged, a movement like an earthquake that rattled the bed rails. “You might try the neighbors. Seems to me Corinne mentioned a Miz Hellman who had a bit of a soft spot for her.” He opened his eyes. “Maybe Corinne’ll talk to you. You got a good ear.”

“Thanks.” I got up. “What about this famous Maltese cat?”

“What about it?”

“It went missing along with Corinne. Think she’d hurt it to get back at Brigitte?”

“How the hell should I know? Those LeBlancs would do anything to anyone. Even Corinne. Now get the fuck out so I can get my beauty rest.” He shut his eyes again.

“Yeah, you’re beautiful all right, Jade. Why don’t you use some of your old connections and get yourself going at something? It’s really pathetic seeing you like this.”

“You wanna save me along with the Daytona?” The ugly jeer returned to his voice. “Don’t go all do-gooder on me now, Victoria. My daddy died at forty from too much moonshine. They tell me I’m his spitting image. I know where I’m going.”

“It’s trite, Jade. Lots of people have done it. They’ll make a movie about you and little kids will cry over your sad story. But if they make it honest they’ll show that you’re just plain selfish.”

I wanted to slam the door but the hydraulic stop took the impact out of the gesture. “Goddamned motherfucking waste,” I snapped as I stomped down the corridor.

The floor head heard me. “Jade Pierce? You’re right about that.”

The Hellmans lived in an apartment above the TV repair shop they ran on Halsted. Mrs. Hellman greeted me with some relief.

“I promised Corinne I wouldn’t tell her sister as long as she stayed here instead of trying to hitchhike back to Mobile. But I’ve been pretty worried. It’s just that… to Brigitte LeBlanc I don’t exist. My daughter Lily is trash that she doesn’t want Corinne associated with, so it never even occurred to her that Corinne might be here.”

She took me through the back of the shop and up the stairs to the apartment. “It’s only five rooms, but we’re glad to have her as long as she wants to stay. I’m more worried about the cat: she doesn’t like being cooped up in here. She got out Tuesday night and we had a terrible time hunting her down.”

I grinned to myself: So much for the thoroughbred descendants pined for by Joel Sirop.

Mrs. Hellman took me into the living room where they had a sofa bed that Corinne was using. “This here is a detective, Corinne. I think you’d better talk to her.”

Corinne was hunched in front of the television, an outsize console model far too large for the tiny room. In her man’s white shirt and tattered blue jeans she didn’t look at all like her svelte sister. Her complexion was a muddy color that matched her lank, straight hair. She clutched Lady Iva of Cairo close in her arms. Both of them looked at me angrily.

“If you think you can make me go back to that cold-assed bitch, you’d better think again.”

Mrs. Hellman tried to protest her language.

“It’s okay,” I said. “She learned it from Jade. But Jade lost every fight he ever was in with Brigitte, Corinne. Maybe you ought to try a different method.”

“Brigitte hated Jade. She hates anyone who doesn’t do stuff just the way she wants it. So if you’re working for Brigitte you don’t know shit about anything.”

I responded to the first part of her comments. “Is that why you took the cat? So you could keep her from having purebred kittens like Brigitte wants her to?”

A ghost of a smile twitched around her unhappy mouth. All she said was “They wouldn’t let me bring my dogs or my horse up north. Iva’s kind of a snoot but she’s better than nothing.”

“Jade thinks Brigitte’s jealous because you got the LeBlanc fortune and she didn’t.”

She made a disgusted noise. “Jade worries too much about all that shit. Yeah, Daddy left me a big fat wad. But the company went to Daddy’s cousin Miles. You can’t inherit LeBlanc Gas if you’re a girl and Brigitte knew that, same as me. I mean, they told both of us growing up so we wouldn’t have our hearts set on it. The money they left me, Brigitte makes that amount every year in her business. She doesn’t care about the money.”

“And you? Does it bother you that the company went to your cousin?”

She gave a long ugly sniff-no doubt another of Jade’s expressions. “Who wants a company that doesn’t do anything but pollute the Gulf and ream the people who work for them?

I considered that. At fourteen it was probably genuine bravado. “So what do you care about?”

She looked at me with sulky dark eyes. For a minute I thought she was going to tell me to mind my own goddamned business and go to hell, but she suddenly blurted out, “It’s my horse. They left the house to Miles along with my horse. They didn’t think about it, just said the house and all the stuff that wasn’t left special to someone else went to him and they didn’t even think to leave me my own horse.”

The last sentence came out as a wail and her angry young face dissolved into sobs. I didn’t think she’d welcome a friendly pat on the shoulder. I just let the tears run their course. She finally wiped her nose on a frayed cuff and shot me a fierce look to see if I cared.

“If I could persuade Brigitte to buy your horse from Miles and stable him up here, would you be willing to go back to her until you’re of age?”

“You never would. Nobody ever could make that bitch change her mind.”

“But if I could?”

Her lower lip was hanging out. “Maybe. If I could have my horse and go to school with Lily instead of fucking St. Scholastica.”

“I’ll do my best.” I got to my feet. “In return maybe you could work on Jade to stop drugging himself to death. It isn’t romantic, you know: it’s horrible, painful, about the ugliest thing in the world.”

She only glowered at me. It’s hard work being an angel. No one takes at all kindly to it.

VII

Brigitte was furious. Her cheeks flamed with natural color and her cobalt eyes glittered. I couldn’t help wondering if this was how she looked when Jade and B. B. Wilder were fighting over her.

“So he knew all along where she was! I ought to have him sent over for that. Can’t I charge him with contributing to her delinquency?”

“Not if you’re planning on using me as a witness you can’t,” I snapped.

She ignored me. “And her, too. Taking Lady Iva off like that. Mating her with some alley cat.”

As if on cue, Casper of Valletta squawked loudly and started clawing the deep silver plush covering Brigitte’s living room floor. Joel Sirop picked up the torn and spoke soothingly to him.

“It is bad, Brigitte, very bad. Maybe you should let the girl go back to Mobile if she wants to so badly. After three days, you know, it’s too late to give Lady Iva a shot. And Corinne is so wild, so uncontrollable-what would stop her the next time Lady Iva comes into season?”

Brigitte’s nostrils flared. “I should send her to reform school. Show her what discipline is really like.”

“Why in hell do you even want custody over Corinne if all you can think about is revenge?” I interrupted.

She stopped swirling around her living room and turned to frown at me. “Why, I love her, of course. She is my sister, you know.”

“Concentrate on that. Keep saying it to yourself. She’s not a cat that you can breed and mold to suit your fancy.”

“I just want her to be happy when she’s older. She won’t be if she can’t learn to control herself. Look at what happened when she started hanging around trash like that Lily Hellman. She would never have let Lady Iva breed with an alley cat if she hadn’t made that kind of friend.”

I ground my teeth. “Just because Lily lives in five rooms over a store doesn’t make her trash. Look, Brigitte. You wanted to lead your own life. I expect your parents tried keeping you on a short leash. Hell, maybe they even threatened you with reform school. So you started fucking every hulk you could get your hands on. Are you so angry about that that you have to treat Corinne the same way?”

She gaped at me. Her jaw worked but she couldn’t find any words. Finally she went over to a burled oak cabinet that concealed a bar. She pulled out a chilled bottle of Sancerre and poured herself a glass. When she’d gulped it down she sat at her desk.

“Is it that obvious? Why I went after Jade and B. B. and all those boys?”

I hunched a shoulder. “It was just a guess, Brigitte. A guess based on what I’ve learned about you and your sister and Jade the last two days. He’s not such an awful guy, you know, but he clearly was an awful guy for you. And Corinne’s lonely and miserable and needs someone to love her. She figures her horse for the job.”

“And me?” Her cobalt eyes glittered again. “What do I need? The embraces of my cat?”

“To shed some of those porcupine quills so someone can love you, too. You could’ve offered me a glass of wine, for example.”

She started an ugly retort, then went over to the liquor cabinet and got out a glass for me. “So I bring Flitcraft up to Chicago and stable her. I put Corinne into the filthy public high school. And then we’ll all live happily ever after.”

“She might graduate.” I swallowed some of the wine. It was cold and crisp and eased some of the tension the LeBlancs and Pierces were putting into my throat. “And in another year she won’t run away to Lily’s, but she’ll go off to Mobile or hit the streets. Now’s your chance.”

“Oh, all right,” she snapped. “You’re some kind of saint, I know, who never said a bad word to anyone. You can tell Corinne I’ll cut a deal with her. But if it goes wrong you can be the one to stay up at night worrying about her.”

I rubbed my head. “Send her back to Mobile, Brigitte. There must be a grandmother or aunt or nanny or someone who really cares about her. With your attitude, life with Corinne is just going to be a bomb waiting for the fuse to blow.”

“You can say that again, detective.” It was Jade, his bulk filling the double doors to the living room.

Behind him we could hear the housekeeper without being able to see her. “I tried to keep him out, Brigitte, but Corinne let him in. You want me to call the cops, get them to exercise that peace bond?”

“I have a right to ask whoever I want into my own house,” came Corinne’s muffled shriek.

Squawking and yowling, Casper broke from Joel Sirop’s hold. He hurtled himself at the doorway and stuffed his body through the gap between Jade’s feet. On the other side of the barricade we could hear Lady Iva’s answering yodel and a scream from Corinne-presumably she’d been clawed.

“Why don’t you move, Jade, so we can see the action?” I suggested.

He lumbered into the living room and perched his bulk on the edge of a pale gray sofa. Corinne stumbled in behind him and sat next to him. Her muddy skin and lank hair looked worse against the sleek modern lines of Brigitte’s furniture than they had in Mrs. Hellman’s crowded sitting room.

Brigitte watched the blood drip from Corinne’s right hand to the rug and jerked her head at the housekeeper hovering in the doorway. “Can you clean that up for me, Grace?”

When the housekeeper left, she turned to her sister. “Next time you’re that angry at me take it out on me, not the cat. Did you really have to let her breed in a back alley?”

“It’s all one to Iva,” Corinne muttered sulkily. “Just as long as she’s getting some she don’t care who’s giving it to her. Just like you.”

Brigitte marched to the couch. Jade caught her hand as she Was preparing to smack Corinne.

“Now look here, Brigitte,” he said. “You two girls don’t belong together. You know that as well as I do. Maybe you think you owe it to your public image to be a mamma to Corinne, but you’re not the mamma type. Never have been. Why should you try now?”

Brigitte glared at him. “And you’re Mister Wonderful who can sit in judgment on everyone else?”

He shook his massive jade dome. “Nope. I won’t claim that. But maybe Corinne here would like to come live with me.” He held up a massive palm as Brigitte started to protest. “Not in Uptown. I can get me a place close to here. Corinne can have her horse and see you when you feel calm enough. And when your pure little old cat has her half-breed kittens they can come live with us.”

“On Corinne’s money,” Brigitte spat.

Jade nodded. “She’d have to put up the stake. But I know some guys who’d back me to get started in somethin’. Commodities, somethin’ like that.”

“You’d be drunk or doped up all the time. And then you’d rape her-” She broke off as he did his ugly-black-slit number with his eyes.

“You’d better not say anything else, Brigitte Le-Blanc. Damned well better not say anything. You want me to get up in the congregation and yell that I never touched a piece of ass that shoved itself in my nose, I ain’t going to. But you know better’n anyone that I never in my life laid hands on a girl to hurt her. As for the rest…” His eyes returned to normal and he put a redwood branch around Corinne’s shoulders. “First time I’m drunk or shooting somethin’ Corinne comes right back here. We can try it for six months, Brigitte. Just a trial. Rookie camp, you know how it goes.”

The football analogy brought her own mean look to Brigitte’s face. Before she could say anything Joel bleated in the background, “It sounds like a good idea to me, Brigitte. Really. You ought to give it a try. Lady Iva’s nerves will never be stable with the fighting that goes on around her when Corinne is here.”

“No one asked you,” Brigitte snapped.

“And no one asked me, either,” Corinne said. “If you don’t agree, I-I’m going to take Lady Iva and run away to New York. And send you pictures of her with litter after litter of alley cats.”

The threat, uttered with all the venom she could muster, made me choke with laughter. I swallowed some Sancerre to try to control myself, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Jade’s mountain rumbled and shook as he joined in. Joel gasped in horror. Only the two LeBlanc women remained unmoved, glaring at each other.

“What I ought to do, I ought to send you to reform school, Corinne Alton LeBlanc.”

“What you ought to do is cool out,” I advised, putting my glass down on a chrome table. “It’s a good offer. Take it. If you don’t, she’ll only run away.”

Brigitte tightened her mouth in a narrow line. “I didn’t hire you to have you turn on me, you know.”

“Yeah, well, you hired me. You didn’t buy me. My job is to help you resolve a difficult problem. And this looks like the best solution you’re going to be offered.”

“Oh, very well,” she snapped pettishly, pouring herself another drink. “For six months. And if her grades start slipping, or I hear she’s drinking or doping or anything like that, she comes back here.”

I got up to go. Corinne followed me to the door.

“I’m sorry I was rude to you over at Lily’s,” she muttered shyly. “When the kittens are born you can have the one you like best.”

I gulped and tried to smile. “That’s very generous of you, Corinne. But I don’t think my dog would take too well to a kitten.”

“Don’t you like cats?” The big brown eyes stared at me poignantly. “Really, cats and dogs get along very well unless their owners expect them not to.”

“Like LeBlancs and Pierces, huh?”

She bit her lip and turned her head, then said in a startled voice, “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

“Just teasing you, Corinne. You take it easy. Things are going to work out for you. And if they don’t, give me a call before you do anything too rash, okay?”

“And you will take a kitten?”

Just say no, Vic, just say no, I chanted to myself. “Let me think about it. I’ve got to run now.” I fled the house before she could break my resolve any further.

Colleagues agreed they’d seen Servino arrive around a quarter of eight, as he usually did. They’d seen the notice and assumed he’d left when everyone else was tied up with appointments. No one thought any more about it.

Penelope had learned of her lover’s death from the police, who picked her up as she was leaving a realtor’s office where she’d been discussing shop leases. Two of the doctors with offices near Servino’s had mentioned seeing a dark-haired woman in a long fur coat near his consulting room.

Penelope’s dark eyes were drenched with tears. “It’s not enough that Paul is dead, that I learn of it in such an unspeakable way. They think I killed him-because I have dark hair and wear a fur coat. They don’t know what killed him-some dreary blunt instrument-it sounds stupid and banal, like an old Agatha Christie. They’ve pawed through my luggage looking for it.”

They’d questioned her for three hours while they searched and finally, reluctantly, let her go, with a warning not to leave Chicago. She’d called Lotty at the clinic and then come over to find me.

I went into the dining room for some whiskey. She shook her head at the bottle. I poured myself an extra slug to make up for missing my bath. “And?”

“And I want you to find who killed him. The police aren’t looking very hard because they think it’s me.”

“Do they have a reason for this?”

She blushed unexpectedly. “They think he was refusing to marry me.”

“Not much motive in these times, one would have thought. And you with a successful career to boot. Was he refusing?”

“No. It was the other way around, actually. I felt-felt unsettled about what I wanted to do-come to Chicago to stay, you know. I have-friends in Montreal, too, you know. And I’ve always thought marriage meant monogamy.”

“I see.” My focus on the affair between Penelope and Paul shifted slightly. “You didn’t kill him, did you-perhaps for some other reason?”

She forced a smile. “Because he didn’t agree with Lotty about responsibility? No. And for no other reason. Are you going to ask Lotty if she killed him?”

“Lotty would have mangled him Sunday night with whatever was lying on the dining room table-she wouldn’t wait to sneak into his office with a club.” I eyed her thoughtfully. “Just out of vulgar curiosity, what were you doing around eight this morning?”

Her black eyes scorched me. “I came to you because I thought you would be sympathetic. Not to get the same damned questions I had all afternoon from the police!”

“And what were you doing at eight this morning?”

She swept across the room to the door, then thought better of it and affected to study a Nell Blaine poster on the nearby wall. With her back to me she said curtly, “I was having a second cup of coffee. And no, there are no witnesses. As you know, by that time of day Lotty is long gone. Perhaps someone saw me leave the building at eight-thirty-I asked the detectives to question the neighbors, but they didn’t seem much interested in doing so.”

“Don’t sell them short. If you’re not under arrest, they’re still asking questions.”

“But you could ask questions to clear me. They’re just trying to implicate me.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the dull ache behind my eyes. “You do realize the likeliest person to have killed him is an angry patient, don’t you? Despite your fears the police have probably been questioning them all day.”

Nothing I said could convince her that she wasn’t in imminent danger of a speedy trial before a kangaroo court, with execution probable by the next morning. She stayed until past midnight, alternating pleas to hide her with commands to join the police in hunting down Paul’s killer. She wouldn’t call Lotty to tell her she was with me because she was afraid Lotty’s home phone had been tapped.

“Look, Penelope,” I finally said, exasperated. “I can’t hide you. If the police really suspect you, you were tailed here. Even if I could figure out a way to smuggle you out and conceal you someplace, I wouldn’t do it-I’d lose my license on obstruction charges and I’d deserve to.”

I tried explaining how hard it was to get a court order for a wiretap and finally gave up. I was about ready to start screaming with frustration when Lotty herself called, devastated by Servino’s death and worried about Penelope. The police had been by with a search warrant and had taken away an array of household objects, including her umbrella. Such an intrusion would normally have made her spitting mad, but she was too upset to give it her full emotional attention. I turned the phone over to Penelope. Whatever Lotty said to her stained her cheeks red, but did make her agree to let me drive her home.

When I got back to my place, exhausted enough to sleep round the clock, I found John McGonnigal waiting for me in a blue-and-white outside my building. He came up the walk behind me and opened the door with a flourish.

I looked at him sourly. “Thanks, Sergeant. It’s been a long day-I’m glad to have a doorman at the end of it.”

“It’s kind of cold down here for talking, Vic. How about inviting me up for coffee?”

“Because I want to go to bed. If you’ve got something you want to say, or even ask, spit it out down here.”

I was just ventilating and I knew it-if a police sergeant wanted to talk to me at one in the morning, we’d talk. Mr. Contreras’s coming out in a magenta bathrobe to see what the trouble was merely speeded my decision to cooperate.

While I assembled cheese sandwiches, McGonnigal asked me what I’d learned from Penelope.

“She didn’t throw her arms around me and howl, ‘Vic, I killed him, you’ve got to help me.’” I put the sandwiches in a skillet with a little olive oil. “What’ve you guys got on her?”

The receptionist and two of the other analysts who’d been in the hall had seen a small, dark-haired woman hovering in the alcove near Servino’s office around twenty of eight. Neither of them had paid too much attention to her; when they saw Penelope they agreed it might have been she, but they couldn’t be certain. If they’d made a positive I.D., she’d already have been arrested, even though they couldn’t find the weapon.

“They had a shouting match at the Filigree last night. The maître d’ was quite upset. Servino was a regular and he didn’t want to offend him, but a number of diners complained. The Herschel girl”-McGonnigal eyed me warily-“woman, I mean, stormed off on her own and spent the night with her aunt. One of the neighbors saw her leave around seven the next morning, not at eight-thirty as she says.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I asked him about the cause of death.

“Someone gave him a good crack across the side of the neck, close enough to the back to fracture a cervical vertebra and sever one of the main arteries. It would have killed him pretty fast. And as you know, Servino wasn’t very tall-the Herschel woman could easily have done it.”

“With what?” I demanded.

That was the stumbling block. It could have been anything from a baseball bat to a steel pipe. The forensic pathologist who’d looked at the body favored the latter, since the skin had been broken in places. They’d taken away anything in Lotty’s apartment and Penelope’s luggage that might have done the job and were having them examined for traces of blood and skin.

I snorted. “If you searched Lotty’s place, you must have come away with quite an earful.”

McGonnigal grimaced. “She spoke her mind, yes… Any ideas? On what the weapon might have been?”

I shook my head, too nauseated by the thought of Paul’s death to muster intellectual curiosity over the choice of weapon. When McGonnigal left around two-thirty, I lay in bed staring at the dark, unable to sleep despite my fatigue. I didn’t know Penelope all that well. Just because she was Lotty’s niece didn’t mean she was incapable of murder. To be honest, I hadn’t been totally convinced by her histrionics tonight. Who but a lover could get close enough to you to snap your neck? I thrashed around for hours, finally dropping into an uneasy sleep around six.

Chaim’s cleaning woman found him close to death the morning Penelope’s trial started. Lotty, Max, and I had spent the day in court with Lotty’s brother Hugo and his wife. We didn’t get any of Greta’s frantic messages until Lotty checked in at the clinic before dinner.

Chaim had gone to an Aeolus rehearsal the night before, his first appearance at the group in some weeks. He had bought a new clarinet, thinking perhaps the problem lay with the old one. Wind instruments aren’t like violins-they deteriorate over time, and an active clarinetist has to buy a new one every ten years or so. Despite the new instrument, a Buffet he had flown to Toronto to buy, the rehearsal had gone badly.

He left early, going home to turn on the gas in the kitchen stove. He left a note which simply said: “I have destroyed my music.” The cleaning woman knew enough about their life to call Greta at Rudolph’s apartment. Since Greta had been at the rehearsal-waiting for the oboist-she knew how badly Chaim had played.

“I’m not surprised,” she told Lotty over the phone. “His music was all he had after I left him. With both of us gone from his life he must have felt he had no reason to live. Thank God I learned so much from Paul about why we aren’t responsible for our actions, or I would feel terribly guilty now.”

Lotty called the attending physician at the University of Chicago Hospital and came away with the news that Chaim would live, but he’d ruined his lungs-he could hardly talk and would probably never be able to play again.

She reported her conversation with Greta with a blazing rage while we waited for dinner in her brother’s suite at the Drake. “The wrong person’s career is over,” she said furiously. “It’s the one thing I could never understand about Chaim-why he felt so much passion for that self-centered whore!”

Marcella Herschel gave a grimace of distaste-she didn’t deal well with Lotty at the best of times and could barely tolerate her when she was angry. Penelope, pale and drawn from the day’s ordeal, summoned a smile and patted Lotty’s shoulder soothingly while Max tried to persuade her to drink a little wine.

Freeman Carter stopped by after dinner to discuss strategy for the next day’s session. The evening broke up soon after, all of us too tired and depressed to want even a pretense of conversation.

The trial lasted four days. Freeman did a brilliant job with the state’s sketchy evidence; the jury was out for only two hours before returning a “not guilty” verdict. Penelope left for Montreal with Hugo and Marcella the next morning. Lotty, much shaken by the winter’s events, found a locum for her clinic and took off with Max for two weeks in Portugal.

I went to Michigan for a long weekend with the dog, but didn’t have time or money for more vacation than that. Monday night, when I got home, I found Hugo Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch still open on the piano from January’s dinner party with Chaim and Paul. Between Paul’s murder and preparing for Penelope’s trial I hadn’t sung since then. I tried picking out “In dem Schatten meiner Locken,” but Greta was right: the piano needed tuning badly.

I called Mr. Fortieri the next morning to see if he could come by to look at it. He was an old man who repaired instruments for groups like the Aeolus Quintet and their ilk; he also tuned pianos for them. He only helped me because he’d known my mother and admired her singing.

He arranged to come the next afternoon. I was surprised-usually you had to wait four to six weeks for time on his schedule-but quickly reshuffled my own Tuesday appointments to accommodate him. When he arrived, I realized that he had come so soon because Chaim’s suicide attempt had shaken him. I didn’t have much stomach for rehashing it, but I could see the old man was troubled and needed someone to talk to.

“What bothers me, Victoria, is what I should do with his clarinet. I’ve been able to repair it, but they tell me he’ll never play again-surely it would be too cruel to return it to him, even if I didn’t submit a bill.”

“His clarinet?” I asked blankly. “When did he give it to you?”

“After that disastrous West Coast tour. He said he had dropped it in some mud-I still don’t understand how that happened, why he was carrying it outside without the case. But he said it was clogged with mud and he’d tried cleaning it, only he’d bent the keys and it didn’t play properly. It was a wonderful instrument, only a few years old, and costing perhaps six thousand dollars, so I agreed to work on it. He’d had to use his old one in California and I always thought that was why the tour went so badly. That and Paul’s death weighing on him, of course.”

“So you repaired it and got it thoroughly clean,” I said foolishly.

“Oh, yes. Of course, the sound will never be as good as it was originally, but it would still be a fine instrument for informal use. Only-I hate having to give him a clarinet he can no longer play.”

“Leave it with me,” I said gently. “I’ll take care of it.”

Mr. Fortieri seemed relieved to pass the responsibility on to me. He went to work on the piano and tuned it back to perfection without any of his usual criticisms on my failure to keep to my mother’s high musical standard.

As soon as he’d gone, I drove down to the University of Chicago Hospital. Chaim was being kept in the psychiatric wing for observation, but he was allowed visitors. I found him sitting in the lounge, staring into space while People’s Court blared meaninglessly on the screen overhead.

He gave his sad sweet smile when he saw me and croaked out my name in the hoarse parody of a voice.

“Can we go to your room, Chaim? I want to talk to you privately.”

He flicked a glance at the vacant faces around us but got up obediently and led me down the hall to a Spartan room with bars on the window.

“Mr. Fortieri was by this afternoon to tune my piano. He told me about your clarinet.”

Chaim said nothing, but he seemed to relax a little.

“How did you do it, Chaim? I mean, you left for California Monday morning. What did you do-come back on the red-eye?”

“Red-eye?” he croaked hoarsely.

Even in the small space I had to lean forward to hear him. “The night flight.”

“Oh. The red-eye. Yes. Yes, I got to O’Hare at six, came to Paul’s office on the el, and was back at the airport in time for the ten o’clock flight. No one even knew I’d left L.A. -we had a rehearsal at two and I was there easily.”

His voice was so strained it made my throat ache to listen to him.

“I thought I hated Paul. You know, all those remarks of his about responsibility. I thought he’d encouraged Greta to leave me.” He stopped to catch his breath. After a few gasping minutes he went on.

“I blamed him for her idea that she didn’t have to feel any obligation to our marriage. Then, after I got back, I saw Lotty had been right. Greta was just totally involved in herself. She should have been named Narcissus. She used Paul’s words without understanding them.”

“But Penelope,” I said. “Would you really have let Penelope go to jail for you?”

He gave a twisted smile. “I didn’t mean them to arrest Penelope. I just thought-I’ve always had trouble with cold weather, with Chicago winters. I’ve worn a long fur for years. Because I’m so small people often think I’m a woman when I’m wrapped up in it. I just thought, if anyone saw me they would think it was a woman. I never meant them to arrest Penelope.”

He sat panting for a few minutes. “What are you going to do now, Vic? Send for the police?”

I shook my head sadly. “You’ll never play again-you’d have been happier doing life in Joliet than you will now that you can’t play. I want you to write it all down, though, the name you used on your night flight and everything. I have the clarinet; even though Mr. Fortieri cleaned it, a good lab might still find blood traces. The clarinet and your statement will go to the papers after you die. Penelope deserves that much-to have the cloud of suspicion taken away from her. And I’ll have to tell her and Lotty.”

His eyes were shiny. “You don’t know how awful it’s been, Vic. I was so mad with rage that it was like nothing to break Paul’s neck. But then, after that, I couldn’t play anymore. So you are wrong: even if I had gone to Joliet I would still never have played.”

I couldn’t bear the naked anguish in his face. I left without saying anything, but it was weeks before I slept without seeing his black eyes weeping onto me.

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