Chapter 4 - The Inquiry
The rain had stopped by Wednesday morning, leaving the streets of Chicago scoured clean by an arctic wind that blew down off Lake Michigan with the force of a freight train. The puddles were frozen into thin, jagged sheets of gray ice that shattered under the heels of pedestrians hurrying toward the Loop.
Vincent Moretti sat behind the massive walnut desk in his office above the import-export warehouse on Archer Avenue. The room was warm—too warm, thanks to an old radiator that hissed and clanked like an engine coming apart at the seams—but Vincent still wore his wool vest over a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms.
On the blotter before him lay a single sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a spiral notebook. Written on it in shaky, block-printed handwriting was a name and an address:
Sophie Miller 412 West 18th Street, Apt 3B The Royal Diner (Employee)
Bruno stood near the door, his arms crossed over his chest, his gaze fixed on the Persian rug near Vincent’s desk as if he expected a bomb to crawl out from under the fringe.
"I still don't like it, boss," Bruno said, breaking the silence that had lasted since they cleared the breakfast coffee. "You start looking into people like that—asking around the diners, pulling addresses off the tax rolls—you draw a line straight from our doorstep to theirs. Marcone’s got guys watching this building. If they see us sniffing around a tenement on 18th Street, they’re going to wonder why Moretti’s interested in a kid who returns lost property."
"I'm not asking around," Vincent said without looking up from the paper. "I sent a boy from the docks. Dropped off an envelope with the landlord. Said it was a municipal credit for the winter heating subsidy."
Bruno snorted. "A heating subsidy from the Outfit. That's a new one. Did the landlord buy it?"
"The landlord doesn't care where the check comes from as long as the back rent is cleared for November and December," Vincent said. He picked up a heavy silver fountain pen, turned it over twice in his fingers, and set it back down in the exact center of the blotter. "What else?"
"The mother's name is Claire Miller," Bruno said, reciting the details from memory like a trooper giving a report to a lieutenant. "Husband walked out three years ago down to Gary for a steel mill job that didn't exist anymore and never came back. She works double shifts at the diner—six to two, then four to midnight on the weekends. Kid goes to St. Jude’s parish school down on Racine. Nuns say she’s quiet. Always has her homework done. Doesn't talk much."
Vincent listened without moving a muscle in his face. "St. Jude's."
"Yeah. Tuition's forty bucks a month. She’s behind three months. The sister told the neighborhood priest last week they might have to pull her out after Christmas."
The office went quiet again, save for the rhythmic clank-hiss of the radiator in the corner. Vincent leaned back in his leather chair, the leather groaning under his weight. He looked out the high, barred window at the gray expanse of the Chicago sky, where the smoke from the rail yards was mixing with the low-hanging morning clouds.
"Forty dollars a month," Vincent murmured.
"That's how it is for people down there, boss," Bruno said, his tone softening just a fraction—not out of sympathy, but out of the weary familiarity of men who grew up three blocks from the stockyards and knew the exact price of a pair of winter boots. "You pay the rent, you skip the meat. You buy the shoes, you fall behind on the parish fee. It's a treadmill without an off switch."
Vincent stood up, smoothing the front of his vest with both palms. He walked over to the window, his reflection ghostly and indistinct in the double-paned glass against the blinding white glare of the sun reflecting off the frozen roofs across the street.
"Get the car," Vincent said.
May you like
Bruno didn't move for a second. "Boss, we got a meeting with the committee from the dockworkers at two. If you miss that, the crane operators' local is going to start looking for a new partner—"
"The dockworkers can wait twenty minutes," Vincent said, turning his head just enough to let Bruno see the flat, unyielding line of his jaw. "We're going for a drive."
