Page 35 of Fade Out
She looked around. I had a feeling this wasn’t information she shared at work.
“I wouldn’t know about your job either way,” I said. “It’s not up to me to decide.”
“Of course not. It’s never really up to anyone and yet these things get decided, don’t they?”
Chapter Nine
I foundmyself standing across the street from Marina City trying to figure out how I’d get into the building. I’d already checked out the garage. There were a couple of valets standing around. It seemed like they were always there. Apparently, if you lived there you never had to park your own car—which sounded like heaven.
Even though I hadn’t found the front entrance I was sure there’d be a doorman. Even if I walked in confidently and tried to breeze past him—as I often did in office buildings—there would be locked doors to deal with.
Wait. Rita had been living at Andrew Happ’s Lincoln Park home just the week before. Yes, I’d left her without a place to live, but would she have been able to insinuate herself at Marina City so easily? Was this the best choice on the list of dormant accounts? And who exactly was the tall guy who’d made the withdrawal from Winslow Porter’s account?
There were a few things I knew for sure. Rita had had the list of dormant accounts for more than six months. Andrew Happ died in early May and Rita passed herself off as his niece about a month later. How did she know it was safe to move into his house? And where had she been before that? If I could figure out her pattern, I might know what she was doing.
If she was researching the list as I had, she’d have figured out which accounts were worth investigating further. Just like me, she’d have searched for obituaries. Those were people with families who were deconstructing a person’s life. They hadn’t found the dormant account, but they would have sold their relative’s home or moved in themselves. Yes, there was still time to access the account, but she needed information and a fake ID. That took time and she couldn’t risk the family finding the account before she got to it.
No, she’d have focused on the dormant accounts owned by people who were isolated somehow. They could be senile or so estranged from their family that the family didn’t even know they’d died. Or, like Andrew Happ, they could be a John Doe in the morgue.
So, what had she been doing? Had she created ‘safe houses’ for herself all over Chicago? And was there one on the thirty-fifth floor in the tower looming over me?
I found the residential lobby back toward the office building next door. It was a bland room with a big, circular desk and a couple of square brown leather chairs. There was a locked metal door leading to the elevators on the other side of the room.
Behind the desk was a youngish white guy with a half-dead stare. I went up to him and said, “My name’s Nick Nowak. I’m a private detective. I’d like to ask you a few questions about a tenant.”
I got my card out of my wallet; one of the small stack onto which I’d carefully written my beeper number on the flip side.
The doorman had a name tag that said, “Wally.” He placed my business card onto the desk in front of him as though I’d just given him something of great value.
“Unit 3535, Winslow Porter,” I said. “Do you know who I’m talking about?”
“There’s like 450 units.”
“That’s a lot of people.”
Wally laughed.
“But you know some of the people who live here?”
“They know me. They say hi I say hi back.”
“Can you call Mr. Porter for me and see if he’s at home?”
“Oh, um, okay.” He opened a plastic notebook. Inside were pages upon pages of phone numbers belonging to the 450 units. Wally flipped through. The names were alphabetical. I watched as he flipped all the way through and began looking through the W’s.”
“P,” I said. “Porter. His name last is Porter.”
“Oh, okay.”
He flipped back and missed the P’s a couple of times. I was about to recite the alphabet for him when he stumbled upon the P’s; possibly by accident. Starting at the beginning, he ran a finger down the columns. Finally, he found the phone number and dialed. He listened for about thirty seconds and then hung up.
“Mr. Porter is in Paris.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“Um, he didn’t say.”
“You got an answering machine, right?”
