The only thing worse than going on camera after four and a half hours of sleep and a pre-breakfast consisting of two cups of black coffee, two jelly doughnuts, and a Slim Jim is doing all that and then having to interview Elvita Dawes Hart. Ms. Hart was the spokesperson for the WBC reality series Naked Housewives of Wilmette. I guess you’d say she was the Barbara Walters of the show, though, at roughly eight-seventeen in the a.m., thankfully more or less clothed.
In her fifties, with hair the unnatural color of pitch; a face that bore the traces of Botox, a tanning parlor, and some nipping and tucking; and a body that had probably gone from voluptuous to overflowing without her noticing, Ms. Hart was not exactly the best advertisement for her show. Which may be why she’d brought along Lurleen Applegate, a petite platinum blonde wearing a thong and what looked to me like a Day-Glo tether reining in her surprisingly robust chest.
“Alas, Lurleen is about as naked as this network allows,” Ms. Hart said, “but during our stage performances we really let the dogs out, so to speak.”
“Good to know,” I said. “Maybe you could tell our viewers some of the other differences between the TV and stage shows.”
“Oh, it’s like apples and grapefruit, Billy,” Lurleen said, moving closer until her bare thigh brushed against me. “Here’s the thing. We’re not nudists. But we believe that a certain amount of nudity releases us from our inhibitions.”
“That’s right,” Ms. Hart added. “When we and our guests discuss a topic—like our country’s dependency on oil from the Middle East—we get a much freer-flowing conversation if we’re down to thongs and pasties. Or, in the case of the guests, who are all male, by the way, jockeys or briefs.”
“I bet we have a sling just your size,” Lurleen said. She smelled of vetiver oil.
I stayed game, finished up the interview, bid the housewives a forever farewell, and departed for the tent I was using as a dressing room/office. Kiki was seated at a makeshift desk. She was not alone. J. B. Kazynski, lady private eye, was occupying a campaign chair, talking on her phone.
She was dressed in what I assumed to be her working outfit, a dark gray suede jacket over an antique Cubs T-shirt, tight denims, and leather boots. She stood and held up her free hand with index finger raised, an indication, I assumed, that she would be only a minute.
I didn’t care if she took ten.
“What’s next on my schedule?” I asked Kiki.
“You’ve a meeting at eleven with Lieutenant Oswald, who’s supposed to have some new information on the monster’s murder.”
“That ‘monster’ stuff may be a little harsh, now that the man’s deceased,” I said.
“Po-ta-toes, po-tot-oes,” she said. “Here’s where you’ll find the lieutenant.”
She handed me a yellow note, which I stuck in my pocket.
“Stay as sweet as you are,” I said, and headed out.
“Hold it!” J.B. yelled, fumbling her phone shut. “We’ve gotta talk.”
“About what?”
“A shooting last night.”
“A shooting?” Kiki asked. “Who got shot?”
J.B. was staring at me. She raised her eyebrows in an “It’s your call” gesture.
“C’mon,” I told her. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“Damn it, Billy, who got shot?” Kiki yelled after us.
The restaurant I’d picked was called Heaven on Seven. There are other Heaven on Sevens in and around the city, but this is the original, located on the seventh floor of the Garland Building on Wabash, offering breakfasts and lunches strongly influenced by chef/owner Jimmy Bannos’s tour of duty in the kitchens of such New Orleans legends as Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Jimmy had been on our morning show several times, demonstrating his specialties of the season.
The last time I’d been in Chicago, the place had been closed for kitchen renovation, so it was one of the pleasures I’d promised myself this trip. I hoped J.B.’s presence wouldn’t interfere.
Sitting under a George Rodrigue Blue Dog painting, she gave me a bored look and said, “I already had breakfast with my landlord, Mr. Kazanachas.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Mr. Kazanachas is a retired elderly gentleman, wise beyond even his advanced years, who watches over you as if you were his daughter.”
“You know him?”
“No, but it seems quite a few of you hard-boiled gal gumshoes have father-figure landlords.”
“Yeah? Well, it makes sense. Our lives are lonely enough. It’s good to have somebody we can rely on and talk to.”
“And it helps the exposition,” I said. “Well, if you’ve already had breakfast …” I signaled to the waitress.
When she arrived, I said, “The lady will have … what? A cup of coffee?”
“Well, yeah. But I also want an order of bananas Foster French toast. No, make that pecan French toast.” She stared at me defiantly. “If that’s all right.”
“Fine,” I said, and ordered poached eggs on crab cakes with creole sauce.
“I have a very active metabolism,” J.B. said, when the waitress had gone. “Mr. Kazanachas’s breakfasts are pretty basic.”
“I think your metabolism will love the French toast here,” I said. “Okay, you called this meeting.”
“I’d like to know about what happened last night after that dog-and-pony TV show.”
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“Last night you and the blond boopsie actress almost caught your lunch on the way to Derek Webber’s mini-mansion. Am I right?”
I kept my face professionally blank.
“I wouldn’t call Derek’s mansion mini,” I said.
“C’mon, Billy, give. What’s going on? How does the joke go? Getting involved in one murder could be bad luck. Getting involved in two murders is just plain careless.”
I thought she was referencing not a joke but Oscar Wilde’s famous quote, “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” But I didn’t think it was my job to enlighten her. Nor would she have appreciated it.
“What two murders?” I asked.
“Well, three, if we count Pat Patton,” she said. “But that would be something of a stretch. I mean, Patton and Larry Kelsto seem to have been killed by the same guy, but you more or less discovered Kelsto’s body and you weren’t that connected to Patton. Or were you?”
“Patton is becoming the Kevin Bacon of corpses,” I said. “Everybody’s connected to him, including you. So if we don’t count him, who’s the other murder victim?”
“Amos Alanz.”
“Who he?”
She gave me a look of profound disappointment. “Is this the way it’s gonna be? Alanz is the dirtbag hit man who shot up a section of Schiller last night in an apparent effort to put bullet holes in you and the Sands woman. And then, in the early morning hours, he turned up dead in an empty lot on the South Side with his head twisted around farther than the kid in The Exorcist.”
“What makes you think Carrie and I were involved?”
“He tried to shoot you, but you got away. You went to Webber’s, where the actress is staying.”
“This is common knowledge?”
She gave me another disappointed look. “Of course not. The media reported the shooting on Schiller and the fact that Alanz’s body was found. But as far as I can tell, the cops are clueless. They don’t know about you and the actress. And they haven’t tied the shooting on Schiller to Alanz.”
“How’d you find out?” I asked.
“It’s what I do, Billy.”
“And you’re interested because …?”
She didn’t immediately answer. Eventually, she said, “If Alanz was trying to kill the boopsie, then it’s part of something I’ve been hired to investigate.”
“Tell me about that,” I said.
“Maybe later,” she said.
And our food arrived.
The eggs and crab cakes were exceptional, almost to the point where I was able to enjoy them without wondering what the hell J.B. was up to. To look at her, she was just a young woman attacking French toast with a dedication beyond mere hunger.
“That … was … fantastic,” she said, when she’d worked her way through the carbo and syrup mound down to empty plate.
“It’s supposed to be,” I said.
She gave me a long look. “I’m hoping you can do more than give good breakfast.”
“Depends on what you’re after.”
We both waited while the waitress refilled our coffees and removed the dishes. Then: “How well do you know the Onion City guys?” she asked.
“About as well as I know you.”
“Yeah?” she said, as if she didn’t quite believe me. “Well, here’s the situation. My nephew, Louie Zielinski, was one of the original computer geniuses Derek Webber hired for Instapicks. A couple years ago, he got married. His wife, Vicky, was an ASA, an assistant state’s attorney, for Cook County. A real shrew, you ask me. Louie’s this sweet guy, who melts into a puddle at the first hint of confrontation. A year ago, he let Vicky browbeat him into quitting and cashing in his Instapicks stock. That gave them the financial independence to do something she wanted to do: teach.”
“You faulting her for that?” I asked.
“Let me finish. She got jobs for both of them at the University of Wisconsin—she’s at the law school, he’s teaching advanced classes in computer science—and everything has been copacetic … until several months ago, when the never satisfied little Vicky began getting on Louie’s case again.”
I sipped my coffee and wondered what Cousin Louie’s situation had to do with Onion City or me.
“The thing is,” J.B. said, “Vicky may be a shrew, but she’s a shrew with an uncompromising honesty. And she’s worried about their nest egg.”
“She saw Pat Patton’s blog about Onion City being financed by the Outfit,” I said.
“Close enough. She saw a reference to it in the school newspaper. Then she looked up the blog. She began quizzing Louie about Instapicks. Now, I can tell you this about my cousin: Joey Doves Aiuppa and Wings Carlisi could’ve been cooking garlic pasta sauce in the next office at Instapicks and he’d never have smelled a thing.”
“I’m still trying—”
“If the Instapicks cash is black money, Vicky wants my cousin to give back the fortune he’d made legitimately from selling his shares in the company.”
“Wow. She shouldn’t be teaching, she should be running the FBI.”
“She’s honest, but not to a fault,” J.B. said. “She digs their present way of life. So she convinced Louie to part with some of that possibly tainted cash to put me to work checking out Patton’s claim. And that’s how I’ve been spending my time.”
“What have you found out?”
“That Patton was a loudmouthed, vindictive old coot who was not adverse to stretching the truth when it came to people he disliked. And he disliked a lot of people.”
“Derek Webber?”
“You tell me,” she said. “You have any idea why Patton would have disliked Webber enough to make up a lie about him?”
“As I said, I barely know Webber. What about attacking the problem from the other end? You’ve been on this for a while. You find anything to substantiate Patton’s claim?”
She shook her head. “Just the opposite. Webber’s start-up money came from a relatively small inheritance, when his father died. He and his buddy Alan Luchek worked on Instapicks in his garage.”
“No family connection to organized crime?”
“None I could find.”
“What about Luchek’s parents?”
“Salt of the earth.”
“So if you haven’t uncovered any basis for the claim of a reputed liar, and your client would no doubt be happy to hear the money is legit, why not close the case?”
“Because neither me nor my biographer roll that way.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You told me you read all my books,” she said.
Did I tell her that? Bad me.
“If you had,” she continued, “you’d know that I always start out trying to help my friends or relatives with a specific problem that eventually broadens into an investigation of something very big, something that has international repercussions. In Deadly Mission, for example, the mugging of my cousin, who happens to be a nun, led to my uncovering a bogus Catholic mission in Bogotá that was illegally importing cartel drugs and exporting American currency. In Fatal Courtship, the youngest sister of my best friend at Oriole Park Elementary disappeared from a tennis court two days before her wedding. At first I figured she’d had second thoughts about marriage and done a fade. But then I started getting death threats, and some guy wearing a Dr. Phil mask worked me over using a baseball bat—”
“A baseball bat? Really?”
“Well, in the book, it was a baseball bat. In reality, he was just a bald-headed asshole with a ’stache who slapped me in the face once or twice after I kneed him in the sweetbreads. But my point is this: I started out looking for a missing girl, and before it was all over, I had to take on the sex slave trade operating from this country to Bangkok.”
“In the book, you did this,” I said.
“Well, in real life, too. Kind of. I mean, the missing girl wasn’t in Bangkok. She was working at a gentlemen’s club in Joliet. But Stacy Lynne, who’s like my biographer, said we had artistic license to change it to Bangkok, which is way hotter.”
“Of course it is, but the average temperature of Bangkok compared to Chicago aside,” I said, “where do you or Stacy Lynne see your Onion City investigation taking you?”
“To something funky going down on the Internet. Maybe involving Net neutrality. Or an evil genius like the late Osama getting a hacker to take over a social network to rile up people in some Middle Eastern country so he can install his man as their leader.”
“That sounds like another winner,” I said, waving my credit card at the waitress.
“You’re not leaving?”
“Too many things to do, too little time …,” I said to her, mentally adding for my own benefit, to waste on bullshit like this.
“But I’ve a lot more to ask you.”
Watching the waitress take the card to the cashier, I said, “You got all I have. Picked me clean.”
“What about Alanz? Was he trying to kill you or the actress?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “I was too busy trying to hide. And what does that have to do with your investigation?”
“Kinda hard to hear anybody say anything over the gunfire!”
“Why didn’t he kill you?”
The waitress had returned in time to hear J.B.’s question. She looked a little apprehensive as she handed me the credit slip to sign. I gave her a full 25 percent tip, and she scurried off.
“You didn’t answer the question,” J.B. said.
“I honestly don’t know.” I stood and headed for the elevator. She was at my heels.
“Maybe he wasn’t really trying to kill either of you.”
“Maybe.” It was a possibility I’d been considering.
The elevator arrived just as we did.
“Any reason why somebody would send you a scare message that strong?” she asked as we descended.
I shook my head.
“Could it be Sands he was trying to scare?”
“I don’t have a clue. And I think we’ve just about covered the subject.”
“We’ve just started,” she said.
We stepped from the Garland Building. There was the smell of ironworks on the air, harsh and near toxic. I saw a taxi cruising toward us on Wabash and waved him down.
“You have a car?” I asked J.B.
“Over by the park. Need a lift somewhere?”
“No,” I said, and got into the cab, pulling the door shut behind me. “Just wanted to make sure you won’t be following me. Have a nice day.”
The driver wanted to know my destination. I suggested he head out and I’d tell him on the way.
As we departed, I looked back at J.B. She was pointing her phone in our direction. Taking a picture of the taxi. She’d be checking the driver’s schedule to see where he’d dropped me.
I wondered what she really was investigating and why she was spending so much time and effort on poor, innocent little me.