The Undertaker

“I suppose I could blame it on my photography business,” she shrugged. “I had just put new ads in the phone book and I would have had to buy all new business cards. They don't come cheap, especially when I'm not making much money to begin with, but the truth is I couldn't deal with it, with any of it.”

“Yeah, I know what that's like. I was frozen for months after Terri died. I couldn't even open her dresser drawers or look on her side of the closet, much less box up any of it up. I couldn't even touch her stuff.” I looked over and saw her staring at me with large, wondering eyes as if she was a kid on a field trip to the zoo and I was some strange specimen she found sitting in the back of a cage. “It took five months before I finally let a couple of her friends come over and clean everything out for me. All of it. If they hadn't, I'd still be sitting there in that house in California. I couldn't let her go.”

She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked over at me. “Why do I think you've never talked to anyone about this before? I'm right, aren't I?”

I shrugged as I walked away. “I don't know. I can't explain it.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“I'm not, it's just that you kept asking, and… maybe it's easier with a stranger.”

She caught up and gave me that puzzled look again. “You are a really strange guy, Peter Talbott,” she said, but this time the defensive wall and the hostility weren't there. She opened her mouth as if she was going to say more, then thought better of it and stopped.

When we reached Clark, I paused to look up and down her street. “Why don't we take the long way around,” I told her.

“You think they're watching?” she said as she dropped her big sunglasses down over her eyes. “Then I shall go incognito.”

Instead of the route we took that morning, we swung west two blocks, then north as far as Schiller, approaching Clark from the far end of her block. It was a nice walk, until we looked around the corner and saw a white sedan parked near her building with two men inside. Sandy's mouth dropped open as that reality sank home. We slipped back around the corner and backtracked a block. There was a narrow walkway that brought us back to the alley behind her building. Peeking around a fence, we saw the rear end of another government car.

“Still think I'm paranoid?” I asked.

“I don't believe this. Maybe I could sneak past them and go upstairs?”

“That's too risky. We can wait them out. When I don't show and you don't either, Tinkerton will pull them off.” We walked back down the narrow passageway crossed the next street, and several others, and turned south again.

“Do you know some place we can hide for a while?” I asked.

“We? You mean “we” as in the-two-of-us-we?”

“A couple of hours, that's all. Until they give up. A friend's? Maybe someone with a computer I can use, and a printer?”

She stopped and studied me through those dark sunglasses. She was hard to read, but I could tell she was deciding about a lot more than just a place to hide.

“I'm not making those cars up, am I?” I asked. “Or the goon with the gold cuff links and bad manners. You saw what was on that computer disk, Sandy: the spreadsheets, the books, the payoff lists, the Swiss bank accounts, all of that stuff. If we can print it out, we can blow this thing wide-open and get both of us off the hook.”

“A rocket scientist, huh? And you know all about computers?” She shook her head, still skeptical. “I know I'm gonna hate myself in the morning, Talbott, and that won't be the first time, but okay. I'll trade you. My Aunt Penny has a condo over at Marina Towers. She's out of town, I have a key, and she has a computer. So, I'll take you over there for a while. You can take a look at the disks, then you're going to teach me that computer stuff.”

“That computer stuff? I don't know how much time you've got, but it's a deal.”

“One thing, though,” she looked me over again. “That cowboy costume has got to go. Me and plaid do not get along.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Billy Rae Bob sings in black-and-white…

Marina Towers wasn't far away, on State Street where it crosses the Chicago River. They were two round, contemporary residential towers that stood on the riverbank. They call them “salt and pepper,” and they were trendy and expensive. The lower floors were a circular parking garage and I remembered an action flick where a car flew out of one of the towers and took a nosedive into the Chicago River. Her aunt's apartment was on the 10th floor. It was small, but nicely furnished and it had a great view. From the balcony, you could look out across downtown, the lakefront, and half the city.

“I take it your aunt isn't a Kasmarek.”

“Oh, God, no, she's my aunt, a DePiero.”

“Is she coming back soon?” I asked.

“She's in Spain for another month. She's single and I'm her favorite niece, so she lets me use it anytime I want. After the business with Eddie, I really needed to get away. This is where I came to hide.”