8

THAT NIGHT, OVER DINNER AT LOTTY’S, I DESCRIBED MY frustrating day. After listening to my description of Pastor Hebert, Lotty said it sounded as though he had Parkinson’s disease. “The fixed staring, trouble talking, those you often see in an advanced stage of the illness. He must be ninety, wouldn’t you guess? We don’t know enough about how to manage the disease, and these symptoms are hard to control, especially in a man who’s that old.”

“Presumably he has other problems or his daughter wouldn’t be afraid of him,” I said. “She’s sixtyish, he’s dependent on her, but she lets him run her around as if she were a robot.”

“Yes, brainwashing also leaves symptoms that are hard to manage.” Lotty gave a wry smile. “I saw Karen Lennon at a staff meeting this afternoon. She’s worried that she might have made a mistake in introducing you to her patient-her ‘client,’ I suppose I should say.”

“It’s a little late for Karen to be second-guessing herself, not when I’ve spent a day stirring the pot and getting the phone tree shaking among all the women at Pastor Hebert’s church.”

Lotty laughed. “I think that’s what has her worried. Karen’s very young. She doesn’t know how much excitement a detective can bring to a closed community.”

“She should call me, not try to get you to do it for her. But I’ll talk to her in the morning,” I grumbled.

“Don’t take her head off as well as mine,” Lotty said. “If you worked with other people all day long instead of in a hole by yourself, you’d understand how natural it was for her to talk to me during a meeting.”

“After spending a day with people who twitch when they see me coming, I’d be happier in a hole by myself. As long as it had a cappuccino machine.”

“Yes, we’ll decorate it and make it gemütlich, a cozy hole. I’ll send a courier in every day with a fresh bottle of milk and a basket of fruit and cheese.” She squeezed my hand. “You’re still in mourning for Morrell, aren’t you?”

“Not mourning, exactly.” I fiddled with the heavy silver. “More questioning myself, to be my age and not able to keep a stable relationship going. In the back of my mind, I always imagined a child, a family, at this point in my life.”

Lotty raised her brows. “I’m not criticizing you, Victoria-God knows, I have no right-but you haven’t lived like someone who wanted a child.”

“No, I’ve lived like the pepperpot my father always called me, throwing dust up the nose of any man who came close to me… Is that what you mean?”

“No, my dear. So you’re irascible, well, so am I, so are many people. But you put the community ahead of yourself. It’s a different form of the female disease, the one you just lamented in Rose Hebert. Your clients need you, the women at the shelter need you, even I need you. Men can put the community first and come home to domestic life, but women, we’re still like nuns in a way: if we have a strong vocation, it’s hard to meet our private needs.”

Her words made me feel unbearably lonely. “So I’m a noncelibate nun.” I tried to turn it into a joke, but my voice cracked. “You’ve worked things out without Max, though.”

She smiled sadly. “After many years as lonely as yours, my dear.”

The curved windows reflected the candles on her dining-room table. I watched the multiple flames the glass created. Some of the tension of the day eased out of my shoulders.

We moved the conversation to lighter topics: our planned picnic to Ravinia to hear Denyce Graves sing, Lotty’s new perinatology fellow who had cried out that she loved Jane Austen. “She was the one who went to Africa to study the monkeys, right?” Around nine, Lotty sent me home since she had an early call. She doesn’t do much surgery anymore, but she still goes early to the hospital to monitor her fellows’ work.

I checked my messages on my way home. Karen Lennon had called to say she’d stopped at the VA and given Elton Grainger the name and address of an SRO, which had rooms for homeless vets. She was a conscientious young pastor, no doubt about it.

When I got home, Mr. Contreras erupted from his apartment. “There you are, doll. I couldn’t remember your cellphone number, and you never gave it to your cousin, so we been sitting here, hoping you’d get home before midnight.”

“Vic!” Petra bounced out behind him, Mitch wrapping himself around her legs. “I feel like such an idiot, but I lost my keys and didn’t know what to do. So I thought maybe you could put me up for the night, but Uncle Sal said you could probably get into the building, that you knew how to open anything that isn’t electronic. So here I am!”

Her cellphone rang in the middle of her hearty peal of laughter. She looked at the screen, then answered it with a breathless account of her life to date, or at least her lost keys, her visit to Uncle Sal and me, and where she planned to meet everybody once she got back into her own home.

“You ever hear of a locksmith, either of you?” I bent to stroke Peppy, who was whining for attention.

“Yes, but they wanted, like, hundreds of dollars to come after hours, and I don’t have hundreds of dollars. They hardly pay me anything at the campaign, you know.” Her phone rang again, and she repeated her story.

“I thought your dad had the odd dollar lying around,” I objected when she’d hung up. “Not that you aren’t welcome to sleep on my couch tonight.”

“If Daddy finds out I’ve been this stupid, he’ll never stop lecturing me on how I’m too immature to be alone in the big bad city.”

“Didn’t Peter get you the job on Brian Krumas’s campaign?”

“Oh, he did, he did. But he expected me to live, like, in a convent, or at least share an apartment. He pulled a Vesuvius when he found out I’d rented my own place.”

She answered another call. At that point, I decided it would be easier to get her back into her own home than listen to her phone all night long. Mr. Contreras, Mitch, and Peppy announced they’d all like to see where Petra lived, too. I bundled the dogs into the Mustang. The old man was delighted to accept Petra’s invitation to ride with her in her Pathfinder.

Petra’s place was in a loft building at the tony end of Bucktown, about ten blocks from my office. Parking was at a premium, and I had to cover part of a yellow hydrant line and hope for the best.

Petra held a flashlight on her front door for me. As I knelt on the sidewalk, wiggling my picklocks inside the lock, she answered another phone call. “My cousin is, like, this detective, and she’s breaking into my building,” she shouted to anyone on Wolcott Street who might be listening. “No, really, she’s, like, NCIS or Saving Grace or something. She solves murders, she has a gun… everything!”

I took the phone from her and stuffed it into my back pocket. “Petra, darling, not while I’m out here doing something highly illegal. Any cop who’s cruising around can listen in on your frequency. And, anyway, you’re talking loudly enough for everyone on the block to hear you.”

She pouted, an exaggerated, self-spoof of a crybaby, but she held the flashlight steady until the tumblers clicked back. We climbed three flights to her place where I repeated the maneuver. In my hip pocket, her phone rang two more times before I got her front door opened. Her keys were on the floor just inside.

She gave another husky laugh. “Look at that! I dropped them on my way out. I was so late, I guess I grabbed them with my coffee and my phone and didn’t see they weren’t in my hand when I left. Oh, Vic, you are a genius. Thank you, thank you, thank you. What can I do for you? Would you like a free invite to our fundraiser out on Navy Pier? It’s twenty-five hundred a head. Brian’s going to be there. Wouldn’t you love to meet him? The president may stop in, although we’ve been told not to count on it. We’ve rented the whole east end of the pier, it’ll be so cool. And, Uncle Sal, you should come, too.”