“What for? You give SCRAP’s money to the church Lenten fund and now you want me to find it for you again?”
“Goddamn you, Vic! Could you stop acting like I’m still five years old and treat me seriously for a minute?”
“If you wanted to hire me, why couldn’t you have said something about it on the phone?” I asked. “Your step-by-step approach to me isn’t exactly designed to make me feel serious about you.”
“I wanted you to see Ma before I talked to you about it,” she muttered, looking at her graph. “I thought if you saw how bad off she is, you’d think it was more important.”
I sat at the end of the table. “Caroline, lay it out for me. I promise I’ll listen as seriously to you as to any other potential client. But tell me the whole story, front, middle, and end. Then we can decide if you really need a detective, if it should be me, and so on.”
She took a breath and said quickly, “I want you to find my father for me.”
I was quiet for a minute.
“Isn’t that a job for a detective?” she demanded.
“Do you know who he is?” I asked gently.
“No, that’s partly what I need you to find out for me. You see how bad Ma is, Vic. She’s going to die soon.” She tried to keep her voice matter-of-fact, but it quavered a little. “Her folks always treated me like—I don’t know—not the same way they are to my cousins. Second-class, I guess. When she dies I’d like to have some kind of family. I mean, maybe my old man will turn out to be an asshole jerk. The kind of guy who lets a girl go through what Ma did when she was pregnant might be. But maybe he’d have folks who’d like me. And if he didn’t, at least I’d know.”
“What does Louisa say? Have you asked her?”
“She practically killed me. Practically killed herself—she got so upset she almost choked to death. Screaming how I was ungrateful, she’d worked herself to the bone for me, I never wanted for anything, why’d I have to go nosing around in something that wasn’t any of my damned business. So I knew I couldn’t go on about it with her. But I have to find out. I know you could do it for me.”
“Caroline, maybe you’re better off not knowing. Even if I knew how to go about it—missing persons aren’t a big part of my business—if it’s that painful to Louisa, you might prefer not to find out.”
“You know who he is, don’t you!” she cried.
I shook my head. “I have no idea, honestly. Why did you think I do?”
She looked down. “I’m sure she told Gabriella. I thought maybe Gabriella told you.”
I moved over to sit down next to her. “Maybe Louisa told my mother, but if so, it wasn’t the kind of thing Gabriella thought I ought to know about. As God is my witness, I don’t know.”
She gave a little smile at that. “So will you find him for me?”
If I hadn’t known her all her life, it would have been easier to say no. I specialize in financial crime. Missing persons takes a certain kind of skill, and certain kinds of contacts I’ve never bothered cultivating. And this guy’d been gone more than a quarter of a century.
But in addition to whining and teasing and tagging along when I didn’t want her, Caroline used to adore me. When I went off to college she’d race to meet my train if I came home for the weekend, copper pigtails flying around her head, plump legs pumping as hard as they could. She even went out for basketball because I did. She almost drowned following me into Lake Michigan when she was four. The memories were endless. Her blue eyes still looked at me with total trust. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t keep from responding.
“You got any idea where to start this search?”
“Well, you know. It had to be someone who lived in East Side. She never went anyplace else. I mean, she’d never even been to the Loop until your mother took us there to look at the Christmas decorations when I was three.”
East Side was an all-white neighborhood to the east of South Chicago. It was cut off from the city by the Calumet River, and its residents tended to lead parochial, inbred lives. Louisa’s parents still lived there in the house she’d grown up in.
“That’s helpful,” I said encouragingly. “What do you figure the population was in 1960? Twenty thousand? And only half of them were men. And many of those were children. You got any other ideas?”
“No,” she said doggedly. “That’s why I need a detective.”
Before I could say anything else the doorbell rang, Caroline looked at her watch. “That might be Aunt Connie. She sometimes comes this late. Be back in a minute.”
She trotted out to the entryway. While she dealt with the caller I flipped through a magazine devoted to the solid-waste-disposal industry, wondering if I was really insane enough to look for Caroline’s father. I was staring at a picture of a giant incinerator when she came back into the room. Nancy Cleghorn, my old basketball pal who now worked for SCRAP, was trailing behind her.