“I’m V. I. Warshawski, Mrs. Bysen. I’m sorry, but I don’t know where Billy is. The Dorrado family lives here; one of the girls is on my basketball team. They’re in considerable distress right now because the factory where the mother worked burned down last week and she has five children to support. They’ve got a lot more than Billy on their minds, I’m afraid.”
“Billy doesn’t have good sense,” Bysen growled. “If they’re giving him a sob story he’ll fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.”
“Billy is a good boy,” his wife reproved him. “If he is helping people in distress, he’s a good Christian, and I’m proud of him.”
“Oh, enough of this nonsense. I’m going up to see this girl for myself. If she needs to be bought off, well-”
“We will not be blackmailed by any welfare cheats,” Mr. William interrupted his father. “Billy needs to learn a few things about life. If he has to learn them the hard way, the lessons will stick with him longer.”
“That’s a good paternal attitude,” I applauded him. “No wonder both your kids ran away from home.”
Jacqui laughed again, delighted with the rancor. Buffalo Bill snatched his cane from me and stomped up the broken walk to the front door. His wife squeezed my hand before following him, with Mr. William taking her arm again. The chauffeur opened the apartment door for them, then leaned against the building to smoke a cigarette.
I climbed into the middle row of seats, behind Jacqui. “So you called Patrick Grobian at the warehouse to track down the Dorrados? How does he know them?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but you ought to realize that anyone who wants to move ahead in the Bysen operation has to keep track of what’s important to the big buffalo. Pat saw the girl having a Coke with Billy in September; he knew the old man would want that information. He made it his business to find out who she was. So of course he knows where she lives.”
“No one can expect to move too far up the By-Smart ladder if they’re not part of the family,” I said.
“You don’t need to be the CEO to have a lot of power and make a lot of money in a company this big. Pat knows that, and he’s a go-getter. If he was a Bysen, he’d be leading the pack. As it is, when the old man goes, he’s likely to get a good position at the home office.”
“If you’re in charge,” her husband said from the back of the Caddy. “But, my dear Jacqueline, you won’t be. William will be, and he doesn’t like you.”
“This isn’t medieval England,” Jacqui said. “Just because he’s the oldest doesn’t mean Willie gets the throne, although he’s like poor Prince Charles, isn’t he, waiting around for his mum to die, except in this case Willie is waiting for Daddy to die. I’m surprised sometimes he doesn’t-”
“Jacqui.” Gary ’s voice sounded a warning. “Not everyone has your sense of humor. If you want to keep doing the work you’re doing, you need to learn to get along with William, that’s all I’m going to say.”
Jacqui turned around in the front seat and fluttered improbably long eyelashes. “Darling, I am doing everything I can to help William. Everything. Just ask him how much he owes me these days and you’ll be surprised by his change in attitude. He finally sees how incredibly useful I can be.”
“Maybe,” Gary muttered. “Maybe.”
I looked over at the apartment, thinking I should go up to give Rose a helping hand. She didn’t have the resources to face the Bysens alone. Before I got to the front door, though, the trio reappeared.
“Did they know anything about Billy?” I asked Mrs. Bysen.
She shook her head unhappily. “I can’t be sure. I appealed to the woman as a mother and a grandmother-I can see how much she loves those children, and how hard she works to give them a decent life-but she said she only ever sees him at Mount Ararat, and the girls said the same thing. Do you think they’re telling the truth?”
“People like that don’t know truth from lies, Mother,” Mr. William said. “It’s easy to see where Billy got his gullibility.”
“You don’t talk to your mother that way while I’m alive, Willie. If Billy got your mother’s sweet disposition, that isn’t a bad thing. The rest of you pack of hyenas, you’re all waiting for me to die so you can eat the company I built.” He glowered at me. “If I find you know where my boy is and you’re not telling me-”
“I know,” I said wearily. “You’ll break me in your soup like crackers.”
I stomped across the street again and turned my car around to head for home.
24 Yet Another Missing Child
In the morning, I went to my office early and put the metal frog into a box, messengering it out to Cheviot, the forensics engineering lab I use. I told Sanford Rieff, the engineer I usually work with, I didn’t know what I was looking for, so asked him to do a full report on the dish-who made it, whose prints were on it, any chemical residues, anything. When he phoned to ask how big a rush I was in, I hesitated, looking at my month’s accounts. No one was paying me; I didn’t even know if the dish was connected to the fire. It was what I’d said to Billy yesterday-my only clue, so I was being enthusiastic about it.
“Not a rush job-I can’t afford it.”
I spent most of the rest of the morning doing work for people who paid me to ask questions for them, but I did take some time to see what information I could get on the Bysen family. I already knew they were rich, but my eyes widened as I went through their history on my law enforcement database. I didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the zeroes in their holdings. Of course, a lot of it was tied up in various trusts. There was a foundation, which supported a wide array of evangelical programs, gave heavily to antiabortion groups and evangelical missions, but also supported libraries and museums.
Three of Buffalo Bill’s four sons and one of the daughters lived with him in a gated estate in Barrington Hills. They had separate houses, but all in the same happy patriarchal enclave. The second daughter was living in Santiago with her husband, who headed South American operations; the fourth son was in Singapore managing the Far East. So no one had run away from Papa. That seemed significant, although I didn’t know of what.
Gary and Jacqui didn’t have any children of their own, but the other five had produced a total of sixteen. The Bysens’ commitment to traditional family values certainly carried through in their distribution of assets: as nearly as I could make out, each of the sons and grandsons had trusts worth about three times what the girls in the family got.
I wondered if this was what had Billy wondering about his family, although I sort of doubted it. No one cares too much about women’s issues these days, not even young women; I had a feeling that his sister losing out in the will was something Billy would accept unquestioningly. Jacqui was the one family member I’d met who might feel differently-but she was married to one of the men, one of the jackpot hitters, and I didn’t picture her caring about anyone else’s inheritance as long as she got hers.
Billy’s sister, Candace, was twenty-one now. Whatever she’d done that caused the family to ship her to Korea, she was still in the will, so they were fair up to that point. I searched for more specific news about Candace, but couldn’t find anything. I printed out some of the more interesting reports, then closed up my office: I wanted to stop at the hospital on my way down to Bertha Palmer High. I figured the team would like an update on April Czernin.
When I got to the hospital, though, I found April had been discharged early this morning. I called Sandra Czernin from my car, but she treated me like a porcupine treats a dog, shooting quills into its mouth.
She reiterated her accusations that April’s collapse was my fault. “You’ve been waiting all these years to get even with me for Boom-Boom, so you brought that English bitch down to meet him. If not for you, he’d’ve been home where he belonged.”