Windy City Blues

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 ru

“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 gri

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 Cori

“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. Cori

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. Cori

“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. Cori

“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 Cori

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.