Windy City Blues

Penelope gave a strained smile. She loved both Lotty and Servino and didn’t want either of them to make fools of themselves. Max, on the other hand, watched Lotty affectionately-he liked to see her passionate. Chaim was staring into space, his lips moving. I assumed he was reading a score in his head.

“I would say that,” Servino snapped, his own Italian accent strong. “And don’t look at me as though I were Joseph Goebbels. Chaim and I are ten years younger than you and Max, but we share your story in great extent. I do not condone or excuse the horrors our families suffered, or our own dispossession. But I can look at Himmler, or Mussolini, or even Hitler and say, they behaved in such and such a way because of weaknesses accentuated in them by history, by their parents, by their culture. You could as easily say the French were responsible, the French because their need for-for-rappresaglia-what am I trying to say, Victoria?”

“Reprisal,” I supplied.

“Now you see, Lotty, now I, too, am angry: I forget my English… But if they and the English had not stretched Germany with reparations, the situation might have been different. So how can you claim responsibility-for one person, or one nation? You just have to do the best you can with what is going on around you.”

Lotty’s face was set. “Yes, Paul. I know what you are saying. Yes, the French created a situation. And the English wished to accommodate Hitler. And the Americans would not take in the Jews. All these things are true. But the Germans chose, nonetheless. They could have acted differently. I will not take them off the hook just because other people should have acted differently.”

I took her hand and squeezed it. “At the risk of being the Neville Chamberlain in the case, could I suggest some appeasement? Chaim brought his clarinet and Max his violin. Paul, if you’ll play the piano, Penelope and I will sing.”

Chaim smiled, relaxing the sadness in his thin face. He loved making music, whether with friends or professionals. “Gladly, Vic. But only a few songs. It’s late and we go to California for a two-week tour tomorrow.”

The atmosphere lightened. We went into the living room, where Chaim flipped through my music, pulling out Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch. In the end, he and Max stayed with Lotty, playing and talking until three in the morning, long after Servino and Penelope’s departure.

II

The detective business is not as much fun in January as at other times of the year. I spent the next two days forcing my little Chevy through unplowed side streets trying to find a missing witness who was the key to an eighteen-million-dollar fraud case. I finally succeeded Tuesday evening a little before five. By the time I’d convinced the terrified woman, who was hiding with a niece at Sixty-seventh and Honore, that no one would shoot her if she testified, gotten her to the state’s attorney, and seen her safely home again, it was close to ten o’clock.

I fumbled with the outer locks on the apartment building with my mind fixed on a hot bath, lots of whiskey, and a toasted cheese sandwich. When the ground-floor door opened and Mr. Contreras popped out to meet me, I ground my teeth. He’s a retired machinist with more energy than Navratilova. I didn’t have the stamina to deal with him tonight.

I mumbled a greeting and headed for the stairs.

“There you are, doll.” The relief in his voice was marked. I stopped wearily. Some crisis with the dog. Something involving lugging a sixty-pound retriever to the vet through snow-packed streets.

“I thought I ought to let her in, you know. I told her there was no saying when you’d be home, sometimes you’re gone all night on a case”-a delicate reference to my love life-“but she was all set she had to wait and she’d’a been sitting on the stairs all this time. She won’t say what the problem is, but you’d probably better talk to her. You wa

Not the dog, then. “Uh, who is it?”

“Aren’t I trying to tell you? That beautiful girl. You know, the doc’s niece.”

“Penelope?” I echoed foolishly.

She came out into the hall just then, ducking under the old man’s gesticulating arms. “Vic! Thank God you’re back. I’ve got to talk to you. Before the police do anything stupid.”

She was huddled in an ankle-length silver fur. Ordinarily elegant, with exquisite makeup and jewelry and the most modern of hairstyles, she didn’t much resemble her aunt. But shock had stripped the sophistication from her, making her dark eyes the focus of her face; she looked so much like Lotty that I went to her instinctively.

“Come on up with me and tell me what’s wrong.” I put an arm around her.

Mr. Contreras closed his door in disappointment as we disappeared up the stairs. Penelope waited until we were inside my place before saying anything else. I slung my jacket and down vest on the hooks in the hallway and went into the living room to undo my heavy walking shoes.

Penelope kept her fur wrapped around her. Her high-heeled kid boots were not meant for street wear: they were rimmed with salt stains. She shivered slightly despite the coat.

“Have-have you heard anything?”

I shook my head, rubbing my right foot, stiff from driving all day.

“It’s Paul. He’s dead.”

“But-he’s not that old. And I thought he was very healthy.” Because of his sedentary job, Servino always ran the two miles from his Loop office to his apartment in the evening.

Penelope gave a little gulp of hysterical laughter. “Oh, he was very fit. But not healthy enough to overcome a blew to the head.”

“Could you tell the story from the begi

As I’d hoped, my rudeness got her angry enough to overcome her incipient hysteria. After flashing me a Lotty-like look of royal disdain, she told me what she knew.

Paul’s office was in a building where a number of analysts had their practices. A sign posted on his door this morning baldly a

Colleagues agreed they’d seen Servino arrive around a quarter of eight, as he usually did. They’d seen the notice and assumed he’d left when everyone else was tied up with appointments. No one thought any more about it.

Penelope had learned of her lover’s death from the police, who picked her up as she was leaving a realtor’s office where she’d been discussing shop leases. Two of the doctors with offices near Servino’s had mentioned seeing a dark-haired woman in a long fur coat near his consulting room.

Penelope’s dark eyes were drenched with tears. “It’s not enough that Paul is dead, that I learn of it in such an unspeakable way. They think I killed him-because I have dark hair and wear a fur coat. They don’t know what killed him-some dreary blunt instrument-it sounds stupid and banal, like an old Agatha Christie. They’ve pawed through my luggage looking for it.”

They’d questioned her for three hours while they searched and finally, reluctantly, let her go, with a warning not to leave Chicago. She’d called Lotty at the clinic and then come over to find me.

I went into the dining room for some whiskey. She shook her head at the bottle. I poured myself an extra slug to make up for missing my bath. “And?”

“And I want you to find who killed him. The police aren’t looking very hard because they think it’s me.”

“Do they have a reason for this?”

She blushed unexpectedly. “They think he was refusing to marry me.”

“Not much motive in these times, one would have thought. And you with a successful career to boot. Was he refusing?”

“No. It was the other way around, actually. I felt-felt unsettled about what I wanted to do-come to Chicago to stay, you know. I have-friends in Montreal, too, you know. And I’ve always thought marriage meant monogamy.”