XLV Heard on the Street
The doorman at Lotty’s building had seen me a number of times, but he and Gerry, the building super, still insisted on proof of my identity before Gerry took me up to the eighteenth floor. The precaution, which would normally have made me impatient, gave me some reassurance about Lotty’s safety.
When we got to her apartment, Gerry rang the bell several times before undoing her locks. He went with me through the rooms, but there was no sign of Lotty, and no sign that any violent struggle had taken place.
While Gerry watched in mounting disapproval, I looked through the drawers in the side room that Lotty uses as a home office, and then in Lotty’s bedroom, for Ulrich’s journals. Gerry followed me from room to room while I imagined the places that people conceal things-behind clothes, under rugs and mattresses, inside kitchen cabinets, behind pictures on the wall, slipped in among the books on her own shelves.
“You don’t have a right to be doing that, miss,” he said when I was poking through Lotty’s underwear drawer.
“You married, Gerry? Kids? You know if your wife or one of your daughters was having a dangerous pregnancy who everyone would tell you she should see? Dr. Herschel. Who takes her duties so seriously she never even calls in sick unless she’s running a fever that she thinks would affect her judgment. Now she’s suddenly vanished. I’m hoping for any sign that would tell me whether she left voluntarily or not, whether she packed a bag, anything.”
He wasn’t sure he believed me, but he didn’t make further efforts to stop me. Of Ulrich’s journals there wasn’t a sign, so she must have taken them with her. She had left under her own steam. She must have.
“Is her car in the garage?” I asked.
He called down to the doorman on his walkie-talkie; Jason said he’d go out to look. That’s how an intruder could infiltrate: wait until the doorman goes to the garage, then follow another tenant inside.
When we got downstairs, Jason was back at his station. Dr. Herschel’s car was here-he once again abandoned his station to take me out to look. It was locked, and I didn’t want to show off my parlor tricks by opening it in front of him, so I peered through the tinted windshield. Unlike me, Lotty doesn’t leave her car strewn with papers, old towels, and stinking T-shirts. There wasn’t anything on the seats.
I gave each of them my card and asked Jason to question people as they came home about whether anyone had seen her leave. “That way we can keep it casual,” I said when he started to object. “Otherwise I’ll have to bring the police in, which I’m very reluctant to do.”
The two men exchanged glances: the building management would be annoyed if the cops came around to question the tenants. They pocketed their tens with suitable dignity and agreed not to let anyone up to Dr. Herschel’s apartment unless Max or I was here.
“And you do keep an eye on the lobby, even when you’re running another errand?” I persisted.
“We don’t leave the lobby unattended, ma’am.” Jason was annoyed. “I can always see it on the TV monitor in the garage. And when I go on break, Gerry stays here to cover for me.”
I knew it wasn’t a foolproof system, but I’d lose their cooperation if I criticized it any further. I sat in the Mustang for a bit, massaging the back of my neck. What had happened to her? That Lotty had a life of which I knew nothing had become abundantly clear in the last ten days. Just because she’d hugged her secrets to herself, did that mean I had to respect this secrecy? But conversely, did my friendship, my love, my concern, any of those give me the right to invade a privacy she’d gone to such lengths to protect? I thought it over. Probably not. As long as those damned books of Ulrich’s weren’t going to put her at risk. But they might. If only I could find someone who could interpret them for me. Maybe they would mean something to Bertrand Rossy.
I slowly put the car into gear and made the difficult drive to the South Side. Every week it gets harder to cross the heart of Chicago. Too many people like me, sitting one to a car. At the entrance to the expressway at North Avenue, I stopped for gas. Price was still going up. I know we pay less than half what they do in Europe, but when you’re used to cheap fuel a thirty-dollar fill-up is a jolt. I crawled down the Ryan to Eighty-seventh, the exit nearest Gertrude Sommers’s.
At her building, nothing seemed to have changed from two weeks ago, from the derelict Chevy out front to the despairing wail of the baby within. Mrs. Sommers herself was still rigidly erect in a dark, heavily ironed dress, her expression as forbidding as before.
“I told that other girl she might as well go,” she said when I asked if Mary Louise was still there. “I don’t like to talk to the police about my family. Even though she says she’s private, not with the police anymore, she looks and talks like police.”
She gave the word a heavy first-syllable stress. I made an effort to put Lotty out of my mind, to concentrate on what Gertrude Sommers had decided to tell me.
She waved me to a chair at the pressed-wood table along the far wall, then seated herself, with the sighing sound of stiff fabric against stocking. Her back was rigidly upright, her hands folded in her lap, her expression so forbidding that it was hard for me to meet her gaze.
“At Bible study on Wednesday night the reverend spoke to me. About my nephew. Not my nephew Isaiah, the other one. Colby. Do you think if his father had named him for a prophet, like Mr. Sommers’s other brother named Isaiah, Colby would be an upright man, as well? Or would other temptations have always proved too strong for him?”
Whether this was a rhetorical question or not, I knew better than to try to answer. She was going to need time to come to the point. I would have to let her get there on her own. I slipped a hand into my pocket to turn off my cell phone: I didn’t want its ringing to interrupt her.
“I’ve been worried about Isaiah since Mr. Sommers passed. He found money for the funeral out of his own pocket. He took it on himself to hire you, with money out of his own pocket, to find out what happened to Mr. Sommers’s life-insurance money. Now, for acting like that good Samaritan, the police are hounding him, with that wife of his gnawing on him from behind. That’s a good job he has at the engineering works, a fine job. She’s lucky to have a man who’s a hardworking churchgoer, like Mr. Sommers was before him. But she’s like a baby, wanting what she can’t have.”
She looked at me sternly. “In my heart I’ve been blaming you for Isaiah’s troubles. Even though Isaiah kept saying you were trying to end them, not foment them. So when the reverend spoke to me about my nephew Colby, I didn’t want to hear, but the reverend reminded me, ‘Ears they have and hear not, eyes they have and see not.’ So I knew the time had come for me to listen. Um-hmm.”
She nodded, as if she were lecturing herself in that little grunt. “So I listened to the reverend telling me that Colby was flashing money around the neighborhood, and I thought, What are you trying to tell me-that Colby has my husband’s insurance money? But the reverend said, nothing like that. Colby got paid for helping do a job.
“‘A job,’ I said. ‘If my nephew Colby is getting money for working, then I’m on my knees to praise Jesus.’ But the reverend told me, not that kind of job. The reverend said, ‘He’s been hanging out with some of those Empower Youth men.’ And I said, ‘The alderman does a lot of good in this neighborhood, I won’t believe any ill of him.’ And the reverend said, ‘I hear you, Sister Sommers, and I don’t believe ill of him, either. I know what he did for your son when he was a boy, what he did for you and Mr. Sommers when your boy was afflicted with the scourge of muscular dystrophy. But a man doesn’t always know what the left hand of his left hand is doing. And some of the alderman’s left hands are finding their way into people’s pocketbooks and cash registers.’”