There were over thirty Halvorsons listed in the online white pages for Chicago. The woman who answered the phone at the seventeenth number said, ‘Try Tucson,’ before hanging up. Her address was just east of O’Hare Airport. I drove over.
‘You the one who called an hour ago?’ the woman demanded through the glass louvers on the front door. The house was about forty years old, made of gray bricks and was jammed tight on a twenty-five-foot wide lot. She looked ten years older than the house but just as solid, and her hair was just as gray. She wore a pale blue cleaning company shirt and dark blue slacks and rubbed red eyes like I’d just woken her from a nap.
‘The very same,’ I said, beaming like I was proud of it. ‘I just have a couple of questions about your brother.’
‘This look like Tucson to you?’
‘I only need a minute.’
‘Gary is my brother-in-law, not my brother, and I ain’t seen him in years,’ she said, starting to close the door.
I leaned against the wrought-iron railing like I was prepared to wait.
She held the door half open. ‘Is Gary in trouble?’
‘I thought everyone called him Red.’
‘Everyone called my husband Red, too. Same color hair.’
I gave her a card. ‘An insurance matter,’ I said. It was always such a handy lie.
‘Can’t help you. Like I said, I ain’t seen him in years.’
‘How about your husband?’
‘My husband is dead. Heart attack, six years ago.’
‘They were close?’
‘They never saw each other, but that doesn’t excuse Gary from moving out of state without telling us. Upset my husband no end. A Christmas card was the first we heard.’
‘From Tucson.’
‘You’re sure this is really about insurance and not some old political campaign?’
‘Why do you ask about a campaign?’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences. A very rude woman called the week before last, saying she was an old friend of his from a congressional campaign twenty years ago and needed to get in touch. She didn’t sound like she’d ever been a friend to anybody. She said he angered a lot of people because he quit the campaign right before the election and asked if I knew why he quit that sudden. I told her what I just told you, that we didn’t know he’d even moved to Tucson until we got a Christmas card from him in December.’ Her face tightened. ‘He never called, he never wrote a letter. He just sent us a card, printed with just his name and a computer addressed label on the envelope, like you insurance people use.’
‘Did you try to contact him?’
‘The second and third Christmases, I sent a card with a note to his return address, also on a printed label, but Gary never once replied. Just kept sending the same old printed card, year after year. I still get one, addressed to the Halvorsons, every Christmas. After five or six years I quit bothering to send him one back.’
‘Did you try calling?’
‘Directory assistance said no phone.’
‘You mean his number was unlisted?’
‘I mean no phone period. Maybe he has a cell phone by now.’
‘Are there other relatives he might have stayed in closer touch with?’ I asked, trying to sound casual. ‘Blood kin? A cousin or an uncle?’
She shook her head. ‘Gary’s the last of the line, unless he has kids.’
And there went any hope of identifying the reddish-brown scrapings from the Tucson house as Gary Halvorson’s blood spill, though certainly something bad must have happened there for the landlord to have used so much bleach to clean the place up.
I thanked her, started down the steps, stopped and turned with a new thought. ‘Did you send him a note when your husband died?’ Surely Red Halvorson would have responded to that.
‘Yeah. The jerk never replied.’
‘Yet you still get a card every Christmas?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Addressed to the Halvorsons, like always?’ Meaning both of them.
She understood. ‘He didn’t bother to change his computer program, even knowing his brother was dead.’
I started for the Jeep.
‘Don’t bother to call if you learn anything,’ she called after me.
I nodded without turning around. By now, I didn’t think I was going to learn anything she’d want to hear.