Like most Illinoisans, I expected the sleaze of our politics to ooze on as placidly as always that October. Though our most recent ex-governor was in prison, his predecessor had been paroled and was available to advise the newest crop of looters making runs for state office. Available to counsel, too, was the usual number of congressmen facing certain indictment but whom, nonetheless, were considered shoo-ins for re-election.
All this was viewed as especially acceptable where I live. My turret is in Rivertown, the greasiest of the Cook County suburbs, stuck foul and festering to the west side of Chicago. Crookedness wasn’t going to change there, just as it wasn’t going to change elsewhere in the county or even in the whole corrupt state. It’s too long-standing, too ingrained. So, like most in Rivertown, I paid no attention to politicians that October. I focused instead on heat.
My turret was the only part of a castle my lunatic bootlegger grandfather got built before he died. I’d moved in a few years earlier – a broke, recovering drunk felled by scandal, thinking to convert the five-floor limestone tube into a saleable residence. I evicted the pigeons, power-washed away the mounds and splatters they’d left behind and began restoring the place, and myself. I sanded, stained and sealed the wide planks of the first three floors, and caulked and painted the slit windows. I built new kitchen cabinets, though as yet I had no appliances other than a leaky microwave oven and a rusting, avocado-colored refrigerator. I built a closet on the third floor, in case I got a wardrobe.
It was comfortable, cool work in summers. But in winters, I froze. There was no furnace, just monstrous fireplaces on all five floors that required more wood than I could ever afford. I kept warm with sweatshirts, a blazer and a pea coat, often all at once.
At last, that was about to change. Earlier that summer, one of the insurance company clients I’d lost during my notoriety offered me two months’ work investigating a backlog of false accident claims. Enough money blew in to dream of warm winters. In August I bought tinwork and began building a central duct to carry heat to all five floors of the turret. Now, just days before Halloween, I was about to take delivery of a furnace.
I was on the first floor, readying the base of the main duct, when the woman called. ‘You trace people?’ Her voice was crisp and hoarse, like she’d had nails for breakfast.
‘Actually, I’m doing that for another client right now.’ I was shooting for crisp, too, but the sugar high from my breakfast of Ding Dongs had begun to sag.
‘Speak up!’ she shouted.
My hand was crisscrossed with painful, shallow lacerations, the result of working with sheet metal that had cut me more than I’d cut it. I could only use my left thumb and ring finger to pincer my phone, as one might hold a rodent by the tail.
‘I trace people, yes!’ I yelled, to bridge the distance between hand and mouth.
‘I’ll see you at one o’clock,’ she barked.
‘Let me check my calendar.’ It was a charade and I didn’t bother to set down the phone. My stint with the insurance company had ended and I now had only one client, a sorority alumni club from Northwestern University that hired me, cheap, to update their membership directory. It should have been a simple Internet tracing job, something the ladies could have done themselves if they’d been less rich and less fond of liquored lunches, but the project had become a nightmare. The former coeds had been serious drinkers, even in college, and had simply called each other Bipsie instead of struggling to remember given names. That caused problems now. I was chasing the whereabouts of over a hundred women known to each other mostly as Bipsie. There was a Bipsie from Rockford, a Bipsie from Wilmette, two Bipsies with Zits, several Bipsies with Big Boobs and even more Bipsies Without. It was brutal work.
I levered the phone closer to my mouth. ‘I’m available,’ I said after a pause long enough to have checked a calendar. ‘Ms, ah?’
‘One o’clock.’ She gave me an address.
‘Your name?’ I asked again.
She took too many seconds to answer. ‘Reynolds,’ she finally said. ‘Rosamund Reynolds.’
Likely enough, she’d needed the pause to make up a phony name. Still, what she’d come up with offered relief. I couldn’t have stood it if she’d chosen to call herself Bipsie.