Checking out Glet’s cryptic tip needn’t be more than waltzing his reporter’s nose out for a new whiff of old times. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have the time to waste. He had nothing planned except a sandwich before heading home to a weak Scotch, a new stare at his wall of old file boxes, and whatever sleep he could snatch before the black cage came for him.
He drove east, but turned south well before Midway Airport and the cab lot beyond it. Pictures of the Graves house had run online and in the papers, and it was easy to recognize. It was in the middle of the block, a narrow two-story frame cottage, three windows up, two windows and the front door down, rectangular and ordinary and no different than its poor neighbors. Every window was lit, that night. He didn’t imagine any of those still surviving in the house – the divorced mother, a daughter in her late teens and two sons younger than the murdered girls – had gotten much sleep since the sisters went missing on December 28, and perhaps for months before that. Another daughter, the family’s firstborn child, had died of illness just the year before.
He parked across the street. The Brighton Theater was west of there. He’d walk that same route, beginning at the Graves block.
It was an old Chicago neighborhood, looking as it must have for fifty years. The sidewalks were wide and cracked and fronted a mix of stubbornly surviving retail – a dry cleaner, a shoe and leather repair shop, a small fruit and vegetable peddler, a bicycle shop – all places that Amazon had not yet figured out how to annihilate. All were closed for the evening, but most had left their display-window lights on against crime and maybe against the future. Combined with the brighter street lamps at the corners, there was enough light to make a night-time walk home safe for two girls, even at 11:30 p.m., when the second showing of the movie let out.
The night the girls disappeared, December 28, had been cold, faint rain turning to faint snow. He moved at the fast pace he thought two shivering, giggling Star Wars fans would have used on such a slushy night. It took less than fifteen minutes, which fit with what Mrs Graves had told police. Her daughters left at 7:15 to attend a 7:30 show. Leaving the theater at 11:30, they should have been home at 11:45 or midnight at the latest.
Just past Pulaski, the Brighton Theater loomed bright in the night. It was one of the fine old movie houses, built a decade before the Great Depression of the 1930s slammed the lid on grand architectural ornamentation. The bulk of the Brighton was stolid, red-brown brick, but its facade was dominated by a tall, two-story, white terracotta arch, framed by rectangular pillars of more ornate terracotta. A men’s clothier was on the near side. A large furniture store was on the other.
The marquee looked to be lit with a thousand bulbs, bright enough for the several witnesses who claimed to have seen the Graves girls being approached by at least two carloads of young men as they left the theater. The news reports made the encounters sound ominous, but that could have been overly aggressive newsmongering. It had been a Christmas vacation night for school kids. The approaches could have been the innocent, normal jabberings of cruising teenaged boys.
He turned around and walked back to his car. The impression he’d formed heading to the theater held on the way back. The sidewalks were wide and the lights were bright. Beatrice and Priscilla Graves should have been safe all the way home.
He drove to Cicero Avenue, turned past the airport and pulled into the cab lot, four blocks south. Two drivers were leaning against one of the hacks, smoking.
‘I’m looking for Rocco Enrice,’ Rigg said.
‘I’m just as good, just as cheap and better looking,’ the taller of them said. The other cabbie laughed.
Rigg offered a laugh, too. ‘Sorry, it’s got to be Rocco this trip.’
‘Rocco ain’t here,’ the taller man said. ‘I’ll call dispatch.’ He reached into his cab for his radio handset, spoke into it, listened and said to Rigg, ‘You’re in luck. Rocco’s on his way. He’ll be here in five minutes.’
Right at five minutes, a cab cruised up and a grizzled, unshaven face leaned to look out of the front passenger window. ‘You looking for Enrice?’ he asked.
‘For a little conversation.’ Rigg passed through a ten-dollar bill.
The driver’s eyes got narrower and he didn’t grab the bill. ‘About what?’
‘A tip you phoned in about the Graves girls.’
‘You with the sheriff’s?’
‘Reporter,’ Rigg said.
‘I tipped the sheriff’s, yeah,’ Enrice said, taking the ten. ‘They said they’d look into it, but ain’t nobody been calling me.’
‘When?’
‘When did I see them girls, or when did I tip the sheriff?’
‘Both.’
‘I saw them girls early this month. I tipped the sheriff’s later.’
‘How much later?’
‘Last week. You packing more than the ten, pal?’
‘Depends.’
‘Get in.’
Rigg got in the back seat and they headed out of the lot.
‘Where we going?’ Rigg asked.
‘Forty more will tell you,’ Enrice said, reaching back with one hand, palm up.
Fifty total was too much to bet on a lark. Rigg handed forward another ten. ‘Twenty more if you impress me.’
The ten disappeared into the cabbie’s shirt pocket. ‘I picked up them two sisters, early January.’
‘From where?’
‘From someplace, but the location comes only with the twenty you’re holding back.’
‘You recognized their pictures from the newspapers, right?’ Rigg slumped back in the seat. By now, a thousand supposed sightings of the Graves girls must have been reported by people chasing bucks like Enrice. What Rigg couldn’t figure was why Glet had fluttered this one at him.
‘They was drunk, the both of them girls.’
‘They were twelve and fifteen.’
‘Don’t matter; drunk is drunk. They was with two guys.’
The cabbie kept driving, heading north on Cicero Avenue, and then turned east, then north, and then east again, into the city. ‘You’re gonna be impressed.’
‘Where are we going?’ Rigg asked.
‘You’re thinking I’m taking you for a ride?’ Enrice, a wit, asked into his rear-view mirror.
‘In every sense of the word.’
‘People where I picked up them girls will vouch for my story.’
‘You’re sure they saw the girls?’
‘They called the sheriff’s, too. Plus, somebody where I dropped them girls might vouch, too.’
‘All sorts of people are saying they saw the girls.’
‘This is straight dope. I drove them girls.’
They turned on to Madison Street, the old Skid Row. The neighborhood was gentrifying, buildings were being razed. But it was slow-going. Plenty of the decrepitude of the old blocks remained. Street drinkers – some wobbling upright; some sitting, despite the snow on the sidewalks – were braced against the wire-gated pawnshops, gin mills and flops that lined the remnant of Chicago’s sleaziest street. Madison Street was still clinging to its past as a portal to hell.
Enrice pulled to the curb, turned around and offered a grin, spotted here and there with teeth. ‘Time to part with that double sawbuck.’
‘What’s to keep you from pulling away when I get out?’
‘You want the whole shebang, right? Beginning with where I picked them up?’
‘The twenty comes when your stop checks out.’
Enrice shrugged and gave it up. He drove up two more blocks and stopped in front of a diner. ‘Gus is behind the grill window. He does the hash. Lucille’s the wife. She waits the tables, collects the cash.’
The diner had no name, just a narrow door to the right of a grease-clouded window that reminded Rigg of Benten’s nicotine-fogged office window.
‘Your twenty buys you exactly ten minutes of me waiting,’ Enrice said, looking straight ahead. ‘If you’re not out by then, I’m gone.’
Rigg handed up the twenty and got out. ‘I’ll find you if you take off.’
‘Ten minutes,’ Enrice said.