It was 10:30 when I eased my Chevy Monza onto the Belmont entrance to Lake Shore Drive. The sky was already bleached out, and the waves reflected back a coppery sheen. Housewives, children, and detectives were the only people out this time of day; I coasted to Hyde Park in twenty-three minutes and parked on the Midway.
I hadn’t been on campus in ten years, but the place hadn’t changed much, not as much as I had. I’d read somewhere that the dirty, poverty-stricken collegiate appearance was giving way to the clean-cut look of the fifties. That movement had definitely passed Chicago by. Young people of indeterminate sex strolled by hand-in-hand or in groups, hair sticking out, sporting tattered cutoffs and torn work shirts—probably the closest contact any of them had with work. Supposedly a fifth of the student body came from homes with an annual income of fifty thousand dollars or more, but I’d hate to use looks to decide which fifth.
I walked out of the glare into cool stone halls and stopped at a campus phone to call the registrar. “ I’m trying to locate one of your students, a Miss Anita Hill.” The voice on the other end, old and creaky, told me to wait. Papers rustled in the background. “Could you spell that name?” I obliged. More rustling. The creaky voice told me they had no student by that name. Did that mean she wasn’t registered for the summer quarter? It meant they had no student by that name. I asked for Peter Thayer and was a little surprised when she gave me the Harper address—if Anita didn’t exist, why should the boy?
“I’m sorry to be so much trouble, but I’m his aunt. Can you tell me what classes he might be in today? He’s not home and I’m only in Hyde Park for the day.” I must have sounded benevolent, for Ms. Creaky condescended to tell me that Peter was not registered this summer, but that the Political Science Department in the college might be able to help me find him. I thanked her benevolently and signed off.
I frowned at the phone and contemplated my next move. If there was no Anita Hill, how could I find her? And if there was no Anita Hill, how come someone was asking me to find her? And why had he told me the two were students at the university, when the registrar showed no record of the girl? Although maybe he was mistaken about her being at the University of Chicago—she might go to Roosevelt and live in Hyde Park. I thought I should go to the apartment and see if anyone was home.
I went back to my car. It was stifling inside and the steering wheel burned my fingers. Among the papers on the backseat was a towel I’d taken to the beach a few weeks ago. I rummaged for it and covered the steering wheel with it. It had been so long since I’d been in the neighborhood that I got confused in the one-way streets, but I eventually made it to Harper. 5462 was a three-story building that had once been yellow brick. The entryway smelled like an el station-musty, with a trace of urine in the air. A bag labeled “Harold’s Chicken Shack” had been crumpled and thrown in a corner, and a few picked bones lay near it. The inner door hung loosely in its frame. It probably hadn’t had a lock for some time. Its paint, once brown, had chipped and peeled badly. I wrinkled my nose. I couldn’t blame the Thayers too much if they didn’t like the place their son lived in.
The names on the bell panel had been hand-printed on index cards and taped to the wall. Thayer, Berne, Steiner, McGraw, and Harata occupied a third-floor apartment. That must be the disgusting commune that had angered my client. No Hill. I wondered if he’d gotten Anita’s last name wrong, or if she was using an assumed name. I rang the bell and waited. No response. I rang again. Still no answer.
It was noon now and I decided to take a break. The Wimpy’s I remembered in the nearby shopping center had been replaced by a cool, attractive, quasi-Greek restaurant. I had an excellent crabmeat salad and a glass of Chablis and walked back to the apartment. The kids probably had summer jobs and wouldn’t be home until five, but I didn’t have anything else to do that afternoon besides trying to find my welching printer.
There was still no answer, but a scruffy-looking young man came out as I was ringing. “Do you know if anyone in the Thayer-Berne apartment is home?” I asked. He looked at me in a glazed way and mumbled that he hadn’t seen any of them for several days. I pulled Anita’s picture from my pocket and told him I was trying to track down my niece. “She should be home right now, but I’m wondering if I have the right address,” I added.
He gave me a bored look. “Yeah, I think she lives here. I don’t know her name.”
“Anita,” I said, but he’d already shuffled outside. I leaned against the wall and thought for a few minutes. I could wait until tonight to see who showed up. On the other hand, if I went in now, I might find out more on my own than I could by asking questions.