Chapter 17
I crawled into bed but didn’t sleep. There was too much to think about, none of which I could make sense of. When the sun came up, I was still lying there staring at the ceiling, my head as heavy as lead. My place was at the hospital, but Ben’s family didn’t need me there. They wanted me out on the street, looking for Ben’s attacker. That meant butting heads again with Tanaka and Marcus, which I had no desire to do. Ben had never told me he’d left his badge and gone after Farraday. I had had no idea about his feelings, either. I hoped Carole had read him wrong. I considered Ben a part of my family, the one I’d cobbled together when the real one collapsed beneath me. If he felt differently, wouldn’t he have said so? I think he would have. We’ve never had a problem communicating, but feelings were different, weren’t they? Feelings were messy, always delicate. They could mean anything, everything or nothing. I needed to talk to Ben.
Until then I had to get moving. I got up, showered, dressed, and hit the office, tearing into Allen’s life for whatever or whomever she was hiding. I pulled up everything I could find on the woman, no matter how small or absurd the item was, keeping an eye out for anything that could be the fuel behind someone’s hate. The anonymous caller, the one Kendrick had transferred to Chandler, had said he knew Allen almost thirty years ago. That’d put her at about college age. I couldn’t track down everyone she’d known back then, of course; all I could do was cast a wide net, go back as far as seemed prudent, and see if I hit on anything. My odds of success weren’t great: there was too much ground to cover.
Break it up, Cass. Pick a starting point. Work your way back.
Allen’s magazine. I stacked the issues I had on top of my desk and started in on each one. There was no one in the mastheads named Eric. What about the two young writers who’d bailed after her first year? They’d likely been in the same position Kendrick was in now, underpaid, overworked. Despite what Chandler had said, that had to have led to hard feelings. Maybe one or both were resentful enough to do something about it now? Worth checking.
I found nothing on Loudon in the usual searches. Maybe she had married and wasn’t using her maiden name? I had better luck with Adkins, or bad luck, as it turned out. I found a short, cryptic obituary in the paper. He’d died at the age of twenty-two, the victim of a violent hit-and-run. I saved the obit, searched the paper for the news story on the accident, but got only a little more than what I had. No mention of the driver having been found. Adkins was survived by his grandparents. That was all. A life summed up in less than twenty lines of newspaper copy. It was possible Chandler didn’t know about the accident, but how likely was it? Would I find that Reesa Loudon had met a bad end, too? And while I was looking at obituaries, I looked for one for Allen’s mother but came up empty. Allen’s memoir said she’d died when Allen was still in college, that she’d missed out on her success. Maybe she’d died somewhere else? I’d have to come back to that.
I scribbled down names, dates, and particulars on a notepad, not knowing what might be important. Allen had attended Northwestern University for a year before transferring to the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, from which she eventually graduated. Nothing jumped out from either place. Why the change in schools?
I stuck to it until my eyes began to cross, digging deep until finally I stumbled upon a reference to a write-up on Allen titled “The Magazine Wars” in a women’s magazine. It took a while to find the original piece, but I did. It detailed a contentious tug of war between Allen’s publication, Strive, and a competing magazine called Veritas, published by a father-son team, Deton and Henry Peets. The Peetses had accused Allen of stealing their concept, siphoning off readers, and bleeding them dry, and neither had been shy about hurling insults. The father, Deton, had called Allen a Jezebel, a thief in the night. The article was over four years old, and I couldn’t find a follow-up article or anything else on the feud.
I printed the story out, stuck it into a file folder, then glanced at my phone, hoping for news from the hospital, but there was nothing from Carole. I stuffed my notes into my bag, grabbed my jacket, and headed out. Dontell Adkins, the mudslinging Peetses, and Allen’s university switch were threads I could follow. If I kept busy enough, I might even be able to ignore the sinking feeling in my gut that my world was about to come crashing down on me . . . again.
The UIC campus was a sprawling, fast-moving melting pot of nationalities and academic concentrations, minus a lot of the rah-rah, quad-lounging fervor of its sister campus downstate in Champaign. UIC offered higher education on the down and dirty for those who didn’t have a lot of time or money to Jung Byson their way toward a diploma on frat parties, football games, and navel-gazing Proust fests in the back of dusty on-campus bars.
I wanted a look at the alumni lists, hoping to find Allen on them. I parked in the lot across from Hull House and trotted across busy Halsted, dodging heavy traffic, the rumble of the trains running along the CTA Blue Line drowning out the honking horns. I could smell the sausages cooking on Taylor Street from here, and across the bridge in Greektown, lamb roasting on the spit. I’d thought to try my luck in the administration building, where maybe I’d find a staffer I could convince to let me take a look, but I switched gears halfway through the concrete quad and took off for the library instead.
“You’re looking for old school papers?” the pudgy boy behind the counter asked. Maybe he was eighteen or nineteen, grungy, beady rat eyes. “How old?”
“Let’s start with those between nineteen eighty-seven and ninety.”
He blinked. “Seriously? That’s, like, a hundred years ago.”
I was stressed, scared, pressed for time. “Do you have them or not?”
“Everything’s digital now. I’d have to put you in a room and cue up the reader,” he said, as though it was an impossible ask, as though the “putting me in a room” part should be enough to get me to reconsider my request.
“Okay,” I answered flatly.
We stood there for a time in silence. I didn’t know if he didn’t think I could handle the reader or if he thought I thought I couldn’t handle the reader. In either case, it didn’t appear that he was planning on putting me next to one anytime soon.
“The papers,” I snapped. “It’s important.”
He pointed over my left shoulder. “The rooms are over there. I’ll come around and get you started, I guess.”
I had no trouble handling the reader. I scrolled through the digitized papers, looking for Allen’s name, a photo, or any mention of her. I started at the year she transferred in, and made my way slowly through to the end of the year, not finding a thing. I did the same for the next year and got the same result. It wasn’t until what would have been her junior year that I spotted a grainy black-and-white photo of her taken at a student rally. In it she was standing at a podium, her fist raised defiantly. The caption was a revelation—BLACK STUDENT UNION PRESIDENT BENITA RAMSEY PROTESTS INEQUITIES IN EDUCATION FOR MINORITY STUDENTS.
Benita Ramsey? I zoomed in closer on the face. It was definitely Allen, minus the wealth and the air of pretention. I’d never heard the name before. It wasn’t in her bio or her memoir. Why? The photo proved to be just the tip of the iceberg. There were other photos, many of them. Vonda-Benita’s junior year apparently was the year she flew out of the gate to make her mark. There were awards and academic honors; she was named student ambassador and student liaison. She campaigned for editor of the paper and got it. She won a prestigious scholarship worth fifty thousand dollars. I stopped at a photo of her looking chummy with a trio of twentysomethings. The caption identified them as staff writers on the paper—Patsy O’Keefe, Angela Dotson, Dennis Seymour. They all looked happy, even Allen. Did she actually at one time have friends?
“I need to see your student and alumni directories.” I was back at the counter, but the boy wasn’t thrilled to see me again. “I’ll take student directories for the same year range, and any alumni listings you have for the years right after.”
He didn’t ask any questions, just went to get them, glancing back at me like he expected me to jump over the counter and tackle him. I met his look, matched it, and idled at the counter till he came back. I took the short stack of directories back to the small room, then looked for names, addresses, telephone numbers for the three kids in the photograph. When I’d found them in the older directories, I checked the newer ones to see if they were still listed. They were. Score one for me. I jotted down the information and then returned everything to the counter. I then asked for a computer to use and was directed to a room of communal desktops for rent by the half hour.
Ramsey, not Allen. That was likely why I hadn’t been able to find an obituary for her mother. I tried again, typing in Ramsey and the date range that worked, and found not only a short obituary but also a news story about a shooting death, the victim one Louise Culvert Ramsey, age forty-four. She’d been the manager of a neighborhood dry cleaners when she was shot and killed while walking to her car after her shift. One round to the head. Her valuables taken.
As I walked back through the campus, the enormity of my task suddenly hit me. I had only two legs, two hands, one brain. Allen’s mother’s death disturbed me. It would have been a devastating loss for Allen to have experienced, losing her mother in such a tragic way. One shot to the head. A random robbery. Did it mean anything that the death of Allen’s mother was similar to the deaths of Hewitt and Sewell? If it did, what was the connection? And what, if anything, did any of it have to do with the man who’d shown up at the bookstore?
I stopped, took a seat on a stone bench, and tried calling each of Allen’s writer friends but got only voice mail. I left detailed messages for each, then tried Deton and Henry Peets but got the same result at the Veritas office. Their automated message said I’d missed them by half an hour, but I could try again when they opened the following morning at ten. It was just past 5:00 PM now.
It was then I noticed the message light blinking on my phone. It was a text from Carole. I held my breath. Ben had a fever they couldn’t control, the text read, which hinted at an infection. People whizzed past me; the train rumbled; the traffic sped by. For a moment I wasn’t sure which way I needed to go. I should be at the hospital in case . . . but I wasn’t needed there. I couldn’t get my bearings. I couldn’t think straight. Carole and Ben’s family were expecting too much. Infection.
I stood, eyed the lot with my car in it, turned to glance down the street toward Greektown across the bridge, fully aware that I was standing at a crossroads. My feet started walking toward the bridge before I even made the decision to go that way. I dialed Tanaka’s number. She picked up on the second ring.
“We need to talk,” I said. “Can you meet me?”