Windy City Blues

by Sara Paretsky

  “You work? Your long lost cousin Vico comes to Chicago for the first time and you cannot kiss off your boss?” He blew across his fingers expressively.

  “I work for myself.” I could hear the brusqueness creep into my voice-his exigency was taking away some of his charm. “And I have one job that won’t wait past tomorrow morning.”

  “What kind of work is it you do that cannot be deferred?”

  “Detective. Private investigator. And I have to be on a-a-”-I couldn’t think of the Italian, so I used English-“shipping dock in four hours.”

  “Ah, a detective.” He pursed his lips. “I see now why this Murray was warning me about you. You and he are lovers? Or is that a shocking question to ask an American woman?”

  “ Murray ’s a reporter. His path crosses mine from time to time.” I went to the phone and summoned a cab.

  “And, Cousin, I may take this handwritten score with me? To study more leisurely?”

  “If you return it.”

  “I will be here with it tomorrow afternoon-when you return from your detecting.”

  I went to the kitchen for some newspaper to wrap it in, wondering about Vico. He didn’t seem to have much musical knowledge. Perhaps he was ashamed to tell me he couldn’t read music and was going to take it to some third party who could give him a stylistic comparison between this score and something of our grandmother’s.

  The cab honked under the window a few minutes later. I sent him off on his own with a chaste cousinly kiss. He took my retreat from passion with the same mockery that had made me squirm earlier.

  V

  All during the next day, as I huddled behind a truck taking pictures of a handoff between the vice president of an electronics firm and a driver, as I tailed the driver south to Kankakee and photographed another handoff to a man in a sports car, traced the car to its owner in Libertyville and reported back to the electronics firm in Naperville, I wondered about Vico and the score. What was he really looking for?

  Last night I hadn’t questioned his story too closely-the late night and pleasure in my new cousin had both muted my suspicions. Today the bleak air chilled my euphoria. A quest for a great-grandmother’s music might bring one pleasure, but surely not inspire such avidity as Vico displayed. He’d grown up in poverty in Milan without knowing who his father, or even his grandfather were. Maybe it was a quest for roots that was driving my cousin so passionately.

  I wondered, too, what item of value my mother had refused to sell thirty summers ago. What wasn’t hers to sell, that she would stubbornly sacrifice better medical care for it? I realized I felt hurt: I thought I was so dear to her she told me everything. The idea that she’d kept a secret from me made it hard for me to think clearly.

  When my dad died, I’d gone through everything in the little house on Houston before selling it. I’d never found anything that seemed worth that much agony, so either she did sell it in the end-or my dad had done so-or she had given it to someone else. Of course, she might have buried it deep in the house. The only place I could imagine her hiding something was in her piano, and if that was the case I was out of luck: the piano had been lost in the fire that destroyed my apartment ten years ago.

  But if it-whatever it was-was the same thing Vico was looking for, some old piece of music-Gabriella would have consulted Mr. Fortieri. If she hadn’t gone to him, he might know who else she would have turned to. While I waited in a Naperville mall for my prints to be developed I tried phoning him. He was eighty now, but still actively working, so I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer the phone.

  I snoozed in the president’s antechamber until he could finally snatch ten minutes for my report. When I finished, a little after five, I stopped in his secretary’s office to try Mr. Fortieri again. Still no answer.

  With only three hours sleep, my skin was twitching as though I’d put it on inside out. Since seven this morning I’d logged a hundred and ninety miles. I wanted nothing now more than my bed. Instead I rode the packed expressway all the way northwest to the O’Hare cutoff.

  Mr. Fortieri lived in the Italian enclave along north Harlem Avenue. It used to be a day’s excursion to go there with Gabriella: we would ride the Number Six bus to the Loop, transfer to the Douglas line of the el, and at its end take yet another bus west to Harlem. After lunch in one of the storefront restaurants, my mother stopped at Mr. Fortieri’s to sing or talk while I was given an old clarinet to take apart to keep me amused. On our way back to the bus we bought polenta and olive oil in Frescobaldi’s Deli. Old Mrs. Frescobaldi would let me run my hands through the bags of cardamom, the voluptuous scent making me stomp around the store in an exaggerated imitation of the drunks along Commercial Avenue. Gabriella would hiss embarrassed invectives at me, and threaten to withhold my gelato if I didn’t behave.

  The street today has lost much of its charm. Some of the old stores remain, but the chains have set out tendrils here as elsewhere. Mrs. Frescobaldi couldn’t stand up to Jewel, and Vespucci’s, where Gabriella bought all her shoes, was swallowed by the nearby mall.

  Mr. Fortieri’s shop, on the ground floor of his dark-shuttered house, looked forlorn now, as though it missed the lively commerce of the street. I rang the bell without much hope: no lights shone from either story.

  “I don’t think he’s home,” a woman called from the neighboring walk.

  She was just setting out with a laundry-laden shopping cart. I asked her if she’d seen Mr. Fortieri at all today. She’d noticed his bedroom light when she was getting ready for work-he was an early riser, just like her, and this time of year she always noticed his bedroom light. In fact, she’d just been thinking it was strange she didn’t see his kitchen light on-he was usually preparing his supper about now, but maybe he’d gone off to see his married daughter in Wilmette.

  I remembered Barbara Fortieri’s wedding. Gabriella had been too sick to attend, and had sent me by myself. The music had been sensational, but I had been angry and uncomfortable and hadn’t paid much attention to anything-including the groom. I asked the woman if she knew Barbara’s married name-I might try to call her father there.

  “Oh, you know her?”

  “My mother was a friend of Mr. Fortieri’s-Gabriella Sestieri-Warshawski, I mean.” Talking to my cousin had sunk me too deep in my mother’s past.

  “Sorry, honey, never met her. She married a boy she met at college, I can’t think of his name, just about the time my husband and I moved in here, and they went off to those lakefront suburbs together.”

  She made it sound like as daring a trip as any her ancestors had undertaken braving the Atlantic. Fatigue made it sound funny to me and I found myself doubling over to keep the woman from seeing me shake with wild laughter. The thought of Gabriella telling me “No gelato if you do not behave this minute” only made it seem funnier and I had to bend over, clutching my side.

  “You okay there, honey?” The woman hesitated, not wanting to be involved with a stranger.

  “Long day,” I gasped. “Sudden-cramp-in my side.”

  I waved her on, unable to speak further. Losing my balance, I reeled against the door. It swung open behind me and I fell hard into the open shop, banging my elbow against a chair.

  The fall sobered me. I rubbed my elbow, crooning slightly from pain. Bracing against the chair I hoisted myself to my feet. It was only then that it dawned on me that the chair was overturned-alarming in any shop, but especially that of someone as fastidious as Mr. Fortieri.

  Without stopping to reason I backed out the door, closing it by wrapping my hand in my jacket before touching the knob. The woman with the laundry cart had gone on down the street. I hunted in my glove compartment for my flashlight, then ran back up the walk and into the shop.

  I found the old man in the back, in the middle of his workshop. He lay amid his tools, the stem of an oboe still in his left hand. I fumbled for his pulse. Maybe it was the nervous beating of my own heart, but I thought I felt a faint trace of life. I found the
phone on the far side of room, buried under a heap of books that had been taken from the shelves and left where they landed.

  VI

  “Damn it, Warshawski, what were you doing here anyway?” Sergeant John McGonnigal and I were talking in the back room of Mr. Fortieri’s shop while evidence technicians ravaged the front.

  I was as surprised to see him as he was me: I’d worked with him, or around him, anyway, for years downtown at the Central District. No one down there had told me he’d transferred-kind of surprising, because he’d been the right-hand man of my dad’s oldest friend on the force, Bobby Mallory. Bobby was nearing retirement now; I was guessing McGonnigal had moved out to Montclare to establish a power base independent of his protector. Bobby doesn’t like me messing with murder, and McGonnigal sometimes apes his boss, or used to.

  Even at his most irritable, when he’s inhaling Bobby’s frustration, McGonnigal realizes he can trust me, if not to tell the whole truth, at least not to lead him astray or blow a police operation. Tonight he was exasperated simply by the coincidence of mine being the voice that summoned him to a crime scene-the nature of their work makes most cops a little superstitious. He wasn’t willing to believe I’d come out to the Montclare neighborhood just to ask about music. As a sop, I threw in my long-lost cousin who was trying to track down a really obscure score.

  “And what is that?”

  “Sonatas by Claudia Fortezza Verazi.” Okay, maybe I sometimes led him a little bit astray.

  “Someone tore this place up pretty good for a while before the old guy showed up. It looks as though he surprised the intruder and thought he could defend himself with-what did you say he was holding? an oboe? You think your cousin did that? Because the old guy didn’t have any Claudia whoever whoever sonatas?”

  I tried not to jump at the question. “I don’t think so.” My voice came from far away, in a small thread, but at least it didn’t quaver.

  I was worrying about Vico myself. I hadn’t told him about Mr. Fortieri, I was sure of that. But maybe he’d found the letter Fortieri wrote Gabriella, the one I’d tucked into the score of Don Giovanni. And then came out here, looking for-whatever he was really hunting-and found it, so he stabbed Mr. Fortieri to hide his-Had he come to Chicago to make a fool of me in his search for something valuable? And how had McGonnigal leaped on that so neatly? I must be tired beyond measure to have revealed my fears.

  “Let’s get this cousin’s name… Damn it, Vic, you can’t sit on that. I move to this district three months ago. The first serious assault I bag who should be here but little Miss Muppet right under my tuffet. You’d have to be on drugs to put a knife into the guy, but you know something or you wouldn’t be here minutes after it happened.”

  “Is that the timing? Minutes before my arrival?”

  McGonnigal hunched his shoulders impatiently. “The medics didn’t stop to figure out that kind of stuff-his blood pressure was too low. Take it as read that the old man’d be dead if you hadn’t shown so pat-you’ll get your citizen’s citation the next time the mayor’s handing out medals. Maybe Fortieri’d been bleeding half an hour, but no more. So, I want to talk to your cousin. And then I’ll talk to someone else, and someone else and someone after that. You know how a police investigation runs.”

  “Yes, I know how they run.” I felt unbearably tired as I gave him Vico’s name, letter by slow letter, to relay to a patrolman. “Did your guys track down Mr. Fortieri’s daughter?”

  “She’s with him at the hospital. And what does she know that you’re not sharing with me?”

  “She knew my mother. I should go see her. It’s hard to wait in a hospital while people you don’t know cut on your folks.”

  He studied me narrowly, then said roughly that he’d seen a lot of that himself, lately, his sister had just lost a kidney to lupus, and I should get some sleep instead of hanging around a hospital waiting room all night.

  I longed to follow his advice, but beneath the rolling waves of fatigue that crashed against my brain was a sense of urgency. If Vico had been here, had found what he was looking for, he might be on his way to Italy right now.

  The phone rang. McGonnigal stuck an arm around the corner and took it from the patrolman who answered it. After a few grunts he hung up.

  “Your cousin hasn’t checked out of the Garibaldi, but he’s not in his room. As far as the hall staff know he hasn’t been there since breakfast this morning, but of course guests don’t sign in and out as they go. You got a picture of him?”

  “I met him yesterday for the first time. We didn’t exchange high school yearbooks. He’s in his mid-thirties, maybe an inch or two taller than me, slim, reddish-brown hair that’s a little long on the sides and combed forward in front, and eyes almost the same color.”

  I swayed and almost fell as I walked to the door. In the outer room the chaos was greater than when I’d arrived. On top of the tumbled books and instruments lay gray print powder and yellow crime-scene tape. I skirted the mess as best I could, but when I climbed into the Trans Am I left a streak of gray powder on the floor mats.

  VII

  Although her thick hair now held more gray than black, I knew Barbara Fortieri as soon as I stepped into the surgical waiting room (now Barbara Carmichael, now fifty-two, summoned away from flute lessons to her father’s bedside). She didn’t recognize me at first: I’d been a teenager when she last saw me, and twenty-seven years had passed.

  After the usual exclamations of surprise, of worry, she told me her father had briefly opened his eyes at the hospital, just before they began running the anesthetic, and had uttered Gabriella’s name.

  “Why was he thinking about your mother? Had you been to see him recently? He talks about you sometimes. And about her.”

  I shook my head. “I wanted to see him, to find out if Gabriella had consulted him about selling something valuable the summer she got sick, the summer of 1965.”

  Of course Barbara didn’t know a thing about the matter. She’d been in her twenties then, engaged to be married, doing her masters in performance at Northwestern in flute and piano, with no attention to spare for the women who were in and out of her father’s shop.

  I recoiled from her tone as much as her words, the sense of Gabriella as one of an adoring harem. I uttered a stiff sentence of regret over her father’s attack and turned to leave.

  She put a hand on my arm. “Forgive me, Victoria: I liked your mother. All the same, it used to bug me, all the time he spent with her. I thought he was being disloyal to the memory of my own mother… anyway, my husband is out of town. The thought of staying here alone, waiting on news…”

  So I stayed with her. We talked emptily, to fill the time, of her classes, the recitals she and her husband gave together, the fact that I wasn’t married, and, no, I didn’t keep up with my music. Around nine one of the surgeons came in to say that Mr. Fortieri had made it through surgery. The knife had pierced his lung and he had lost a lot of blood. To make sure he didn’t suffer heart damage they were putting him on a ventilator, in a drug-induced coma, for a few days. If we were his daughters we could go see him, but it would be a shock and he wanted us to be prepared.

  We both grimaced at the assumption that we were sisters. I left Barbara at the door of the intensive care waiting room and dragged myself to the Trans Am. A fine mist was falling, outlining street lamps with a gauzy halo. I tilted the rearview mirror so that I could see my face in the silver light. Those angular cheekbones were surely Slavic, and my eyes Tony’s clear deep gray. Surely. I was surely Tony Warshawski’s daughter.

  The streets were slippery. I drove with extreme care, frightened of my own fatigue. Safe at home the desire for sleep consumed me like a ravening appetite. My fingers trembled on the keys with my longing for my bed.

  Mr. Contreras surged into the hall when he heard me open the stairwell door. “Oh, there you are, doll. I found your cousin hanging around the entrance waiting for you, least, I didn’t know he was your cousin, but he explain
ed it all, and I thought you wouldn’t want him standing out there, not knowing how long it was gonna be before you came home.”

  “Ah, cara cugina!” Vico appeared behind my neighbor, but before he could launch into his recitative the chorus of dogs drowned him, barking and squeaking as they barreled past him to greet me.

  I stared at him, speechless.

  “How are you? Your working it was good?”

  “My working was difficult. I’m tired.”

  “So, maybe I take you to dinner, to the dancing, you are lively.” He was speaking English in deference to Mr. Contreras, whose only word of Italian is “grappa.”

  “Dinner and dancing and I’ll feel like a corpse. Why don’t you go back to your hotel and let me get some sleep.”

  “Naturally, naturally. You are working hard all the day and I am playing. I have your-your partitura-”

  “Score.”

  “Buono. Score. I have her. I will take her upstairs and put her away very neat for you and leave you to your resting.”

  “I’ll take it with me.” I held out my hand.

  “No, no. We are leaving one big mess last night, I know that, and I am greedy last night, making you stay up when today you work. So I come with you, clean-il disordine-disorderliness?, then you rest without worry. You smell flowers while I work.”

  Before I could protest further he ducked back into Mr. Contreras’s living room and popped out with a large portmanteau. With a flourish he extracted a bouquet of spring flowers, and the score, wrapped this time in a cream envelope, and put his arm around me to shepherd me up the stairs. The dogs and the old man followed him, all four making so much racket that the medical resident who’d moved in across the hall from Mr. Contreras came out.

  “Please! I just got off a thirty-six-hour shift and I’m trying to sleep. If you can’t control those damned dogs I’m going to issue a complaint to the city.”