Regarding Anna (2 page)

I was embarrassed and offended by his remarks, but that didn’t keep me from getting on the bus. I had gone on this mission totally unprepared and forgetful of just about everything I had been taught—like the importance of traveling with a partner and dressing appropriately for the mission. Criminals can spot parole officers, process servers, undercover cops, and PIs a mile away.

Being a PI isn’t what most people think it is. Forget about images of Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe sitting back in their brown-leather high-back chairs in dimly lit offices talking to a steady stream of clients with intriguing cases who waltz through their doors. That rarely happens in real life—even to seasoned PIs. Your average PI collects information much like a garbage man collects trash but without the perks. When garbage men find treasures among the trash, it’s finders keepers. But when PIs find treasures, they belong to someone else.

I so wanted to help Mrs. Fincutter find her daughter—she was relying on me. After she had reported Erma missing to the police, they had called the hospitals, checked with her friends, gone to places where runaways tend to congregate, and called a few other precincts to see if anything had turned up, but that had been about it. Unfortunately, when no crime has been committed, the police tend to treat these types of cases as low priority.

I never wanted to be a private investigator. After high school, I’d had aspirations of becoming an interior decorator and had even enrolled in classes at Morton Community College. But when my parents died from carbon monoxide poisoning in their home three months before my eighteenth birthday, with no relatives to take me in, I was left to fend for myself. And that was when everything changed.

As soon as I got off the bus, I walked home and dragged out the ironing board. Ironing relieved stress for me. If I didn’t have any clothes or bed sheets that needed it, I’d iron anything—underwear, towels, the bedspread. I even ironed a package of cheesecloth once—the kind you use to cook a turkey.

If I’d had a car to take to that South Side neighborhood, I wouldn’t have run into Mr. Scarface nor would I have felt the need to iron a pair of sweatpants, three pairs of socks, two dishrags, a ski hat that I hadn’t worn in years, and the white apron from the Raggedy Ann doll I’d cherished since I was three.

And if my parents hadn’t died in March of 1960, I wouldn’t have found what I did in their attic leading me to believe a woman named Anna Thalia Vargas was my real mother—and that she was murdered, and I was kidnapped, when I was seven months old.

TWO

The Back Room

In the office the next day, I got a call from the circuit court asking me to serve a subpoena to someone in Englewood. Fortunately, I had managed to get appointed by Cook County to be a licensed process-server, and the measly ten-dollar fee I got for each person I served was, in fact, making a difference. Unfortunately, the witnesses being served often resided in the worst neighborhoods, and no matter where they lived, they typically didn’t want to be served, making this the least favorite part of my job.

“Do you know anyone large and intimidating who can go with me to serve subpoenas?” I asked Elmer after I finished the call. “Someone cheap.”

Elmer was the attorney from whom I was renting office space. I had met him when I’d answered the ad he posted for someone to share eight hundred square feet of leased office space on West Irving Park Road. The building was located near Six Corners, the largest shopping district in Chicago outside of downtown. More important to me was the fact that it was less than a mile from the apartment on Belle Plaine Avenue where Anna Vargas died, making it convenient for me to work on my own case, the one I called Attic Finds.

“Sure, I know some people,” he said as he put out his cigarette.

Elmer reminded me a little of Gregory Peck, but not as handsome. He was middle-aged, tall, thin-faced, with a full head of dark hair. I was surprised on my first day at the office to catch him checking me out when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. I’d never exactly dazzled anyone with my looks—I’m twenty-two years old, five-foot-six, weigh 125 pounds, and have plain-Jane brown hair and eyes—so I don’t know why he was eying me that way.

“Would you be interested in subleasing the apartment upstairs?” he asked in his usual monotone. “I could give it to you pretty cheap. My last tenant just moved out…without notice and without paying me this month’s rent.”

I hadn’t realized there
was
an apartment above our office, which was a tiny brick storefront building in a row of buildings all so uniform that I always had to check the street number over the door to make sure I was entering the right one. Closer to Six Corners the buildings had matching awnings with the names of the businesses on them. Here there were no awnings and every third storefront was vacant.

To say I could have afforded an apartment would have been a lie—I couldn’t even afford my basic living expenses. I had duct tape on the sole of one of my shoes, cut my own hair, and still wore clothes from high school.

“Maybe. What’s it like?” I asked him.

“Want to see it?”

Elmer led me outside to a door not more than fifteen feet from our office that I had never noticed before—some PI I was. He led the way up a dingy, narrow staircase that smelled like dirty socks. When we reached the top of the stairs, I followed him into the apartment.

While I didn’t see any actual rotting garbage, inside it smelled like maybe there had been some there recently. I tried not to breathe in too deeply.

“He didn’t keep it very clean,” he said.

No kidding.

The entire apartment was visible from where I was standing. The furniture—which appeared to have come from a thrift store, garage sale, or someone’s curb—included a flowered sofa that had three bricks serving as one of its legs and two shapeless cushions, one of which had a nice, neat cigarette burn right in its center. Two mismatched armless side chairs complemented the sofa along with a coffee table that I wouldn’t have trusted to hold anything weighing over a pound. A TV stand and a three-fixture pole lamp that was missing one of its cone-shaped plastic shades completed the décor. All the comforts of home.

I walked over to the only window in the room and gave the yellowed paper shade a gentle tug. When it came crashing to the floor, I looked at Elmer.

“It comes ‘as is.’”

The view out the window left a lot to be desired: a rusted streetlight in the foreground, and in the background an even row of unsightly rooftops belonging to the time-worn brick buildings across the street, one of which had been completely boarded up.

“Where’s the bed?”

He pointed to the sofa. “It converts.”

I peeked into the filthy bathroom to confirm the existence of a toilet, sink, and bathtub.

“You’d have it cleaned before I moved in, right?”

“I’ll split the cost with you.”

“Elmer…”

“I’ll have it cleaned.”

“How much?”

“It comes furnished.”

Like that made a difference.

“I’ll give it to you for sixty-five a month. Plus another sixty-five security deposit.”

“Sixty-five! I’ll give you fifty, and that shade has to be fixed. I’ll throw in a free skip search to find your last tenant.” My father had taught me the fine art of negotiating when we went to the Maxwell Street flea markets.

“Fifty-five, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

“First month’s rent not due for thirty days, and you’ve got
yourself
a deal.”

We shook on it and retreated to our respective offices. Despite the deplorable condition of the place, I was grateful to have it. It was time to leave the Millers’ house, even if it meant a steady diet of ramen noodles for dinner for a while. I’d been living with the family of my best friend, Beth Miller, ever since my parents had died.

The Millers had allowed me to stay with them even though early on I’d made some bad choices by dropping out of community college and taking a waitress job at a crummy diner outside of town. There I met some older kids and got into my share of trouble. I tried cigarettes in order to fit in with them and had my first taste of alcohol followed by my first hangover—the kind where you wake up the next morning fearing you’re going to throw up and then a while later fearing you won’t. Then they introduced me to marijuana, and one late night after getting high we all got a terrible case of the munchies and went to a nearby pizza parlor. After we devoured three large pizzas and a couple of pitchers of beer, one of them started talking about “dine and dash,” a term unfamiliar to me. Before I knew it, they were gone, and I was left sitting there like an idiot. The restaurant manager said he would call the police if I didn’t pay the bill. Mr. Miller came to my rescue. It took three paychecks to pay him back.

With some unsolicited but much-needed guidance from the Millers, I came to my senses, quit that waitress job for one in a more respectable restaurant and part of town, and re-enrolled in college.

I was feeling down from the previous day’s failed attempt at finding the missing teen, nervous about the deal I had just struck with Elmer, and hungry. I pulled out a box of Cheez-Its from my desk drawer and popped a few in my mouth—not as satisfying as one of those thick ham-and-cheese sandwiches on soft rye bread from the deli down the street but better than nothing.

A small stack of bills beckoned me from atop the secondhand filing cabinet I had purchased at a garage sale, but instead my eyes rested above them on a cheap print of Navy Pier that had been my father’s. That and my private investigator license were the only things hanging on my office walls. A Parker mother-of-pearl pen-and-pencil set I had picked up at a pawn shop for almost nothing and a brass nameplate GRACE THALIA LINDROTH that the Millers had given me were the only things on my desk.

I had been in business for three months and had just one client, Louise Fincutter, the mother of the missing teen, and I wasn’t even sure if she could pay me. I hadn’t had the heart to ask her for a retainer, which went against my common sense and everything I had learned in school, but I felt sorry for her. I needed to stop doing that—I had logged nearly twenty hours trying to find her daughter and had no income to show for it.

Elmer didn’t appear to be doing much better. He had hardly any clients, at least not ones who came to his office. He didn’t leave the office much, which made me think he didn’t spend much time in court. He spent a lot of time on the phone, usually with the door closed as he chain-smoked, leaving me to keep an eye out for walk-ins. He groused about how much things cost all the time and how he was going to have to cut back on this or that. He never cracked a smile, and he never mentioned having any family.

Still, I couldn’t be too critical of Elmer. He’d been nice to me and had said he’d throw me work when he had it—finding people, gathering evidence—stuff like that. And he didn’t charge me much for rent.

The layout of the office worked pretty well. Inside the front door, there was a reception desk with a free-standing wall behind it. Berghorn & Associates had been the only signage on the wall until my name was put under it—smaller than his. If someone had actually sat at the reception desk, people walking in the door wouldn’t have been able to see much of my sign at all, but what could I expect for only seventy-five dollars a month in rent?

After much thought, I had decided to name my agency NSU Investigative Services—professional sounding, short and sweet. NSU stood for No Stone Unturned. Maybe a little corny, but I thought it worked.

We each had two rooms—a front office on either side of the reception desk that faced the street and a small room in the back. Behind the reception desk was a bathroom with two doors¬—one on my side and one on his.

I used the back room strictly for my Attic Finds case. Spread out on a large table was everything I had collected from my parents’ home that I believed could possibly provide clues to Anna Vargas’s life and death. The most promising pieces of evidence had come from my parents’ attic—a place in our home that had been off limits for me my entire life, a place I had trepidatiously explored after they were gone.