I should have pressed Mona harder on Simon’s document. Mona claimed that Leo had reacted to an old paper that Simon had mixed in with current pages. At the meeting, though, Simon had said it was a preliminary report. Mona didn’t seem like a subtle person, but she’d managed to push my attention away from the document onto Coop. Maybe I was putting too much emphasis on the episode—after all, Mona was right—it was seeing Coop that made Leo flee the room.
I finished my taco and lay down on the ledge. Humidity was low, the sky was a clear blue with a few wispy clouds. A perfect day for hooky. I drowsed for some minutes until I felt a sharp nip on my fingers. I sat up with a squawk: a sparrow, emboldened by my immobility, had tried pecking at the crumbs on my fingers—a signal that there is no rest for the detective.
On my way north I stopped at the Second District. Sergeant Pizzello was not overcome with joy when she saw me. And she definitely wasn’t impressed with my suggestions about exploring the SLICK trio.
“That organization does a lot of good on the South Side, especially with getting kids out on the water. A kid who’s trying to keep a sailboard upright isn’t going to be hanging with a gang and holding people up at gunpoint. I have no interest in finding out what papers Simon Whatsis dropped at the last meeting, so, no, I won’t try to get a search warrant for SLICK’s storage cupboard at the old bank. I have no interest in going at cross-purposes with Parks Super Taggett, for that matter.”
“Chief of detectives golfs with him?” I said.
Pizzello gave me a dirty look, but muttered, “Boats. They’re on the same Mackinac crew.”
Hence the Second District’s enthusiasm for water sports. “What about the gavel?” I asked. “Highly polished object—could it be the murder weapon?”
Pizzello was about to utter a blistering no, but she pulled herself up. “It’s possible, I suppose. But then how did it get into that bit of park?”
“If Leo had arranged to meet Curtis—”
“No. Get over it, Warshawski. Must be nice to be a private eye, spend your life making up ridiculous theories for the police to investigate, but I have real work to do.”
I forbore saying that investigating Leo’s murder was real work. I don’t know why I’d stopped to talk to her in the first place. Maybe because I was feeling whipsawed and was hoping for a case discussion with someone I could trust. And odd as it sounds, I did trust Pizzello, despite her judgment lapse in strip-searching Bernie in the park after Leo’s death.
Leo wanted to do something about a foyer, Bernie said. But he went to his computer, not to a building. Of course, he might have been looking at architectural plans online, but—
“Foyer,” I said out loud.
As soon as I got to my office, I called Bernie. “You said Leo wanted to do something with a foyer. Could he have said FOIA?”
“Yes, that is what he said, what I told you, foyer.”
To her Quebec ear, the two apparently sounded indistinguishable.
“There’s a law that lets citizens demand documents from the government. It’s an acronym: Freedom of Information Act, F-O-I-A. Was this about the document he saw at the meeting? Did he say if he was submitting a FOIA? Or was he looking at a document Simon got in response to a FOIA of his own?” Either way, no wonder the SLICK leadership was worried about an outsider seeing it.
“I barely understand one word you are saying,” Bernie cried. “I cannot tell you what he knew, what he did not know, or where he was wanting this foyer to go. I only know that when we reached his apartment, he is going straight to his computer and writing an email before he is even kissing me!”
Sergeant Pizzello had made me feel a bit stupid for thinking that the SLICK documents had anything to do with Leo’s being in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor when he was killed. But if he saw something really out of line—if the Park District, or Simon himself, were fiddling with maps or money and knew Leo suspected it—that might be an ample motive for murder.
“I want to look at Leo’s computer,” I said. “What was his address?”
“Me, I don’t have a key,” Bernie said. “We were not together so very long, you know.”
“I’ll worry about that—just give me the address.”
Leo’s apartment was on South Ingleside, walking distance from the University of Chicago campus as well as the old bank building on Forty-seventh Street where SLICK met. The building was one of those ramshackle warrens where students could afford rent—a six-flat cut into pieces to turn it into a twelve-flat.
For an old-school solo op like me, it was a good apartment: the front door had a feeble lock that responded to my picks, not something modern like an iris scanner. As it turned out, it could have required voice recognition and the name of the person’s great-grandmother, because the door opened when I turned the knob.
I tensed, but at first I didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary, just the typical chaos of a student apartment: papers on the floor, on the chairs, books open facedown and faceup.
I put on some latex gloves to lift the books, looking for a laptop. That was when I became worried. There was no sign of the computer, a flash drive, a backup drive. A printer lay on the floor under the table. The cartridge had come free; I saw it lying next to the wall. Someone had hurled the printer onto the floor hard enough to shatter the plastic case.
Did this chaos predate Leo’s death? Someone had come specifically for the computer, Leo had interrupted them, and then had been lured to the park. No, that didn’t make sense. But—what, then?
I texted Bernie: Did Leo have roommates.
He lived alone. Why?
I sent her a photo of the disarray and the broken printer. I wondered if Leo had done this himself.
Not Leo! He is always neat, everything put away. Someone broke in. I am on my way.
We had a few more exchanges, all having to do with Bernie thinking she needed to get to Leo’s apartment immediately to get on the trail of whoever had broken in. I finally hung up on her.
I went on to explore the rest of the apartment. Nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the bathroom, nothing in the bedroom. A sky-blue backpack turned inside out, the pockets slit.
I debated the matter, but called Sergeant Pizzello.
“We serve and protect, Warshawski. What kind of service do you need now? Or is it protection?”
“I’m at Leo Prinz’s apartment. Did your tech crew come through?”
“Why on earth would they? We’re swamped, Warshawski. We don’t act like CSI or NCIS on every random mugging in the park.”
“I wondered if you’d collected his electronics, so you could see what he’d been up to.”
“You’re trying to tell me they’re missing. And you think something fancy happened to them, such as Mona Borsa sneaking in to filch them. I run into her from time to time when we’re policing boating events. She’s well-meaning, even if she’s bossy, but she is not mentally organized enough to put together some super plot. You PIs are all alike—you want some big drama that will get you headlines, but crime isn’t like that, especially not crime in Chicago.”
As she’d intended, her remarks made me feel foolish. She asked for Leo’s address—not with the intention of stopping by, but to reenforce her message.