“Maybe it’s a present,” said Lana.
“Is there a card?” asked Richardson.
“There’s an envelope for one, but nothing inside. See?”
“What a shame,” said Lana. “It’s beautiful.”
Richardson said his version of the same thing. “It cost a lot of money. English glove leather, engraved vellum. It adds up quick.”
“What am I going to do?” asked Elizabeth.
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody sends you an expensive present for no reason at all, and you don’t have any idea who did it …”
She noticed that Lana was at her desk talking into the telephone. Of course. The messenger. He would know who had paid for the delivery, or at least the name of the store. There must be paperwork because Lana had signed for it. At least her brain was working, even if Elizabeth’s wasn’t.
The phone on her desk rang and she snatched it up. “Waring.”
“Hi, Elizabeth.”
“Jack, I’ve been trying to call you about—”
“About the fire in the motel. I just heard all about it on the police radio.”
“Police radio? Where are you?”
“Gary. I’ve been talking to the cops at the copying store. I figured you might be looking for me and thought I’d better call you.”
Elizabeth’s mind strained in two directions at once. First things first. Find out what Jack knows. “Good. We’ve been trying to work it out. There’s something missing, so it still doesn’t make sense. This Sergeant Lempert—”
“He’s what I’m calling about,” said Hamp. “What I’m about to tell you doesn’t get written down on paper. It’s an impression, a kind of instinct. I don’t want to have to fly to Washington and try to prove it, okay?”
“If you say so.”
“Lempert was dirty. Watching the cops going over the scene a little while ago. I got the feeling they didn’t think much of him. It’s just a feeling, and I don’t have time to go into it real deep, but he was dirty.”
Elizabeth groaned.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just that it so obviously fits, and it’s the one thing that never crossed my mind. I mean it did, but I kept pushing it out because it didn’t lead anywhere. It didn’t take me to the next step. Except that what I was doing was assuming I was the one who got to say what the next step was. That’s stupid.” There was a pause, and now her voice betrayed annoyance. “If the police knew, why didn’t they tell anybody?”
“It’s hard to say what they knew or when they found out. But they’re ashamed, which means that they’re sure. No matter how you look at it, they don’t get anything out of telling somebody like me.”
Elizabeth was already exploring this new terrain. “If the sergeant was taking money from somebody, it wouldn’t have been our friend. There’s nothing we know about him that would lead us to the conclusion that he’d have a corrupt policeman on the payroll. So who would? The local Mafia. And that explains why we have three bodies lying in a copying store: They were all on the same side. The only one that’s missing is the winner. Though I’d love to know what he won.”
“Another wake-up, and that’s about all. The next morning he’s in a motel outside Chicago and they tried to kill him there too.”
“So what did he want in Gary in the first place?”
“I know what I’d want if I were in his place. I’d want a way out. Maybe he thought Lempert could do it for him. People who can be bought once can be bought again, and cops meet a lot of people who can do a lot of things.”
“And Lempert arranged an ambush?”
“That sounds about right.”
“Where are you going next, back to Chicago?”
“Yeah, he’s long gone but I thought I’d go rake through the ashes like everybody else. If we’re lucky, I might be able to talk to somebody who knows something.”
“Jack?”
“What?”
“This is kind of … embarrassing, but did you send anything to me at the office?”
“No. What’s embarrassing about that?”
“Well, it’s a present. It just came, and the card got lost, and … you see what I mean.”
“You didn’t open it, did you?”
“Sure, why?”
“Forget it. I was going to tell you to call the bomb squad, but if it hasn’t exploded yet, I guess it must be from a secret admirer.”
“I guess so.”
“It ain’t me, though. I’ve never laid eyes on you. You might be ugly.”
“Good-bye, Jack.”
It was after six when Elizabeth finished going through the supplemental reports from the Gary police, the Cook County sheriff and the Chicago Fire Department, and then pulling the files on Salcone and Ficcio. There was no question from the rap sheets that Salcone had worked for the Cambria family most of his life, and if Ficcio was carrying an identical weapon and entered the shop with him, then he must have too. But no matter how she put it all together, it still didn’t tell her exactly what had happened. She put away the papers and prepared to go home.
Now that she was alone in the office, without the unnerving sensation that somebody could overhear her thoughts by looking at her, she allowed herself to admit the truth. If she set aside the ugliness of what had happened, and thought of it as an event in the Butcher’s Boy’s personal history, the last two reports were promising. Whatever he was trying to do, he was getting himself into deeper trouble. Now he was being hunted by the Mob in Gary, and more ominously in Chicago, the territory of the huge, powerful Castiglione syndicate. He would understand better than she did what this meant. He was still alive, but the chance of his seeing the end of the month was virtually nonexistent. As long as he survived, each day it became more difficult for him to move freely, and eventually he would realize that he couldn’t do it anymore. Years ago she had spent months looking at windows he might have touched, or carpets he might have walked on, talking to people who might have seen him, always arriving after he had left, never getting closer than a few hours behind him. But pretty soon now he was going to have to walk into a police station somewhere. He would have to come to her, if only he could stay alive long enough to realize it.
She almost forgot to take the leather folder with her when she left the office. At home she was going to hold the paper up to the light and try to read the water mark to see if she could find some store that sold that kind of paper. Lana’s inquiry to the delivery service had yielded an order number that helped them to locate a copy of a receipt that said only “Cash” and Elizabeth’s name and office address.
It wasn’t as though she had a lot of friends who might suddenly send her an expensive present. She corrected herself. When she had begun making tactful inquiries this afternoon, she had run through six of them. Then she had forced herself to call Don Yeter, who had been one of Jim’s friends in the old days. Since a few weeks after Jim had died, Don had shown an interest in her that made her nervous and a little queasy, and she was relieved when she realized that he had no idea what she was talking about.
She had left the present in the white box and even retrieved the paper wrapping from the wastebasket, because either might help. Ten minutes after it arrived she had begun wishing the gift hadn’t found its way to her, and now she was beginning to resent the giver. She spent enough of her life trying to decipher puzzles, and the best she could hope for at the end of this one was to get an address for a thank-you note.
When she reached her car it was already looking lonely in this part of the lot. As she unlocked the door, she remembered that it was Thursday and that she still hadn’t taken it to the garage for its rejuvenation treatment. She felt guilty, and as she settled herself in the driver’s seat the feeling escalated to regret. But when the engine started she forgot about it; all that was important now was to get home to the kids.