Who Has Wilma Lathrop? (6 page)

A freight hog snorted and puffed on the track nearest the high wire fence separating the street from the yards. Farther out in the yards, there was a constant grind of wheels on steel and an occasional concentric series of crashes, as some brakeman cut a car loose and it rolled over and down the hump to form a part of a train making up.

The house at 6019 Mercer Street was even shabbier than its neighbours. Three sagging wooden steps led up to a sagging wooden porch. At one time the faded sign hanging over the door had read, “Rooms.”

Lathrop parked his car across from the house. The upper floor was dark, but the lower floor, at least the front room, was lighted by the metallic glare of a television set.

Lathrop crossed the street and rapped on the door. When no one answered, he rapped again. He thought he heard movement in the hall. Then the door opened and an old man, holding a tin pail of beer in one hand and an enormous sandwich in the other, competed in Polish with the blare pouring from the television set in the room just off the hall.

“Mr. Stanislawow?” Lathrop asked. He tried to make himself understood by pointing to the old man’s grimestained undershirt. “Wilno Stanislawow?”

The old man nodded.

“I’m looking for a girl named Wilma,” Lathrop said.

The old man stared at him, then called something in Polish. The sound coming from the television set diminished and a youth in his early or middle twenties appeared in the doorway of the front room.

Lathrop was struck on sight by his resemblance to the man described by Mrs. Metz. The knot of the youth’s tie was too large. The points of his collar were too long. The waist of his coat fitted too snugly. The drape was a trifle too perfect. He wore his blond hair long and combed into an unmistakable duck tail.

“Yeah? Wadda ya want?” he asked. “The old man don’t speak English and he’s deaf besides.” He stepped in front of the old man and blocked the doorway. “Who are you? What’s the idea of banging the door this time of — ” The youth stopped in the middle of his sentence and ran a muscular hand over his hair. “Well, I’ll be damned. If it ain’t the stuffed shirt Wilma married, the guy who made her so ashamed of us I had to sneak in the back door to see my own sister.”

Lathrop felt an unreasonable surge of relief. This one thing was off his mind. The man who had called on the flat once or twice a week was her brother. Now, looking at him more closely, he saw that the resemblance was very marked.

The youth stopped fingering his hair and his hand fastened on Lathrop’s coat lapel. “Am I glad to see you!” He yanked Lathrop into the hall. “Come in. What’s this I read in to-night’s paper about Wilma walking out on you? What did you do to her, huh?”

THE HALL
smelled of coal gas and steamed cabbage. The plaster was chipped in a dozen places. The paint, originally a bilious blue, was peeling from the walls.

Lathrop brushed the youth’s hand from his coat lapel. “Take your hand off me.”

“Who says so?”

“I do.”

The youth chose the best part of discretion. He flexed his fists but made no further attempt to manhandle Lathrop. “A tough guy, huh?”

“When I have to be. What’s your name?”

“Vladimir.” The youth grinned crookedly. “But seeing as we’re related, you can call me Val.”

“You’re Wilma’s brother?”

“That’s right.”

“Did she come here?’

“Why should she come here? She walked out on us years ago.

The old man said something in Polish. Vladimir answered him in kind and, beaming, the old man laid his sandwich on a dusty table, wiped his hand on his dirty undershirt, then offered it to Lathrop.

Vladimir translated. “He says he’s glad to meet you. But I ain’t so sure I am.” He resisted the old man’s effort to urge Lathrop into the lighted front room. “Just a minute, Pa! I asked the guy a question.” He looked back at Lathrop. “What did you do to Wilma to make her leave you, beat her up or something?”

“No,” Lathrop said. “No. Everything was fine when we went to sleep.”

“Then there must have been more than what got into the paper.”

“There was.”

“This I want to hear.” The youth stopped resisting his father’s efforts to urge Lathrop into the front room. “Like the spider said to the fly, come in.”

The front room wasn’t much better than the hall. The only furnishings were a television set, two raddled easy chairs and an antique black leather sofa. Fluttering around Lathrop like a bantam rooster, the old man insisted Lathrop sit in one of the two chairs, then disappeared.

“He’s gone for a jug,” Vladimir confided to Lathrop. “If someone gets married or dies, or just drops in to call, his only solution is a jug. It’s been that way since we’ve been Kids. That’s why we’ve always lived in the dumps we have.”

Lathrop sat holding his hat on his knees. “You’re certain Wilma didn’t come here?”

“I’m positive.”

“Or phone?”

Vladimir played with the knot of his tie. “No. I haven’t heard from her for a week. Last Tuesday, I think it was. In your flat, over on Palmer Square.”

Vladimir’s fingers trembled slightly as he fingered his tie. Lathrop wondered why. He could know more than he was telling or intended to tell. Lathrop considered trying to beat the truth out of him but doubted it would get him very far. He imagined that under his “sharpie” exterior his newly-met-brother-in-law was a tough cookie. Still, his sense of relief persisted. Whatever had happened last night, Wilma hadn’t been two-timing him with a lover.

“Where did you get this address?” the youth asked. “One thing’s for sure. Wilma didn’t leave it around the flat.”

Lathrop shook his head. “No. I got it from the circulation files of the
Dziennik Chicagoski
.”

Vladimir nodded his approval. “Now who’d have thought of that? That was smart.”

Stanislawow senior returned with a gallon glass jug and three clouded water glasses. He set the glasses on the cabinet of the television set and filled them three quarters full of an equally clouded liquid, meanwhile smiling at Lathrop and ducking his head as he spoke in his own tongue.

Vladimir translated. “He says he is very happy that Wilma married an educated man, that in the old country teachers rank right next to the mayor and he is proud to have you call on him.”

“He doesn’t know Wilma is missing?”

“No. He doesn’t read English.”

“The police haven’t been here?”

A note of amusement injected itself into Vladimir’s obvious tension. “The police aren’t as smart as you are.”

Lathrop accepted one of the glasses from Wilma’s father. There was a smear of lipstick on the glass. He hoped the whisky wasn’t as raw as it smelled.

His wrinkled face wreathed in a smile, Stanislawow senior touched his glass to Lathrop’s. “How.”

Vladimir was even more amused. “That’s the one word in English he knows. He would.”

Lathrop clinked glasses with the old man. “How.”

The whisky was surprisingly smooth and mellow. “It’s prune whisky,” Vladimir explained. He grinned over the edge of his glass. “Now we’re all pals, huh? But take it from me, fellow. Nurse what you have in your glass. The old man will keep pouring all night if you let him.”

“I intend,” Lathrop said, “to nurse what I have in my glass.”

There was an unreal quality to the scene. He felt as he had that morning when he’d walked through the empty flat in search of Wilma. Things like this didn’t happen to people like him. There was a lot in what Lieutenant Jezierna had said. When a man bought a new car he insisted on knowing all about it. But he’d married a girl he’d fallen in love with at a near-north side studio party. A girl with a police record — and this was her family.

Across the street in the make-up yard a loaded freight train rumbled by and the vibration shook the aged frame building until the soundless picture on the television set quivered. Lathrop wished Vladimir would either turn up the set or turn it off. Watching the actor’s lips move with no sound issuing from them made him nervous. It was as if the picture and the metallic glare of the screen were a part of the emotional quagmire through which he’d been wading for hours.

“To get back to Wilma,” Vladimir said. He seemed more at ease than he had been. “What happened that didn’t get in the papers?”

“Are you certain you don’t know?” Lathrop asked him.

“I wouldn’t be asking if I did.”

Lathrop told him of the scene in the parking lot.

“That’s funny,” Vladimir said.

“What’s funny?”

“Who the two guys could be. The way I heard the story Contini got himself killed right after that bum rap they tried to hang on Wilma. Just before she came back to Chicago and checked into the Devonshire. In fact some months before you and her were married.”

“You know then that she has a police record?”

Vladimir shrugged. “So the kid made a couple of slips. This is a tough world to get by in, Mister. Or hasn’t anyone told you?”

“I know all about that,” Lathrop said.

“Sure. You with a cushy job and a three-flat your parents left you. So she had a little trouble before she married you. Wilma made you a good wife, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” Lathrop admitted. “She did. But it’s her present whereabouts I’m interested in.”

Vladimir sipped his drink. “So I gather.”

Lathrop resented his resemblance to Wilma. I ought to knock that smirk off his face, he thought. Aloud, he said, “You’re not holding out on me now? You don’t know where she is?”

Vladimir spread his hands. “So why should I hold out on you? I’ve got no axe to grind. Wilma was a good kid. She used to slip me a few bucks every time I dropped around.”

“There’s just you and Wilma and your father?”

“That’s all. Ma died when we were young, all under ten years old.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Not long. Maybe a year. We used to live farther north.”

“Where Wilma went to Schurz High School?”

“That’s right. Anyway for a year. Then things got so tough, what with the old man drinking up his pay every week, she had to get out and hustle.” Vladimir added quickly.“And don’t take that wrong. She never put out for money no matter how broke she was. What I mean is, she gota job as a B-girl in a tavern and eventually worked up until she was running the dice-game.”

“I take it you’re older than Wilma.”

“Quite a few years.”

“And you don’t know where she could have gone?”

“I wish you’d stop playing that record.”

The conversation was becoming pointless but Lathrop couldn’t bring himself to leave. This fantastic household he had blundered into was the only possible contact he had with Wilma. He asked, “Do you know any of Wilma’s former addresses?”

“I can give you the names of a few hotels but with the exception of the Devonshire all of them are three or four years old. She’s lived quite a few places since she quit school to go to work. Why you so anxious to find her?”

Lathrop told him. “If she didn’t leave of her own free will, she may be in trouble.”

“Meaning the two guys in the parking lot, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“You make ‘em?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean the cops showed you some pictures?”

“Yes. But I wasn’t able to identify either of the men.” Lathrop picked up his glass and found the elder Stanislawow had refilled it. He considered spilling the drink on the floor and sipped at it instead. He wasn’t going to teach school in the morning. It didn’t matter how drunk he got. Alcohol was a form of shock treatment. If he could numb himself sufficiently, perhaps he could stop worrying about Wilma, perhaps it would break his cycle of thinking.

“They threatened her through you, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“They gave you five grand in big bills to give to her and told you to tell her to meet them at Louie’s, or the lumps they’d given you were just a sample?”

“That was the gist of it.”

Vladimir lighted a cigarette. “That doesn’t sound so good. From where I sit it sounds like she had the loot from that New York job tucked away and they wanted in on the take. It could be they were in on the job. Or maybe they’re just pals of the late Contini. You know, chiselling in, after the kid thought she’d made a clean break. From what I read in the newspapers none of the stuff Contini got in that last job he pulled was ever recovered.”

“But why would Wilma keep the jewels?”

Vladimir hooted. “Who wouldn’t hang on to two hundred grand if they could? I’d walk from here to there on my knees, no matter how hot the stuff was. And unset diamonds are never very hot.”

Lathrop had an uneasy feeling that someone was watching him. It wasn’t Stanislawow senior. His duties as a host completed, the old man was slumped in his chair, his lips moving silently as he watched the soundless television screen. Lathrop turned in his chair and looked at the hall door.

“What’s the matter?” Vladimir asked him.

Lathrop told him. “I’ve a feeling I’m being watched.”

Vladimir laughed. “It’s the prune whisky.” He sobered. “Look. It’s your business, Lathrop. But could I give you some advice?”

“About what?”

“About Wilma.”

“Go ahead.”

“If I were you I wouldn’t let the fact the kid has a minor police record or this thing that happened last night throw me for a loop. I know. And this is straight from the feed bag. Wilma’s never been happier than she’s been these last few months. And she’s never loved any guy like she loves you. She told me that herself. To her, you were that guy, what’s his name, Sir Galahad, that she’s been waiting for all her life.”

“Then if she is in trouble, why didn’t she confide in me?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

There was a clink of glass meeting glass as Stanislawow senior attempted to refill Lathrop’s glass. Lathrop covered his glass with his hand. “No thank you. I’ve had plenty.”

There was a faint sound in the doorway and he turned, wondering if he hadn’t had too much. Either he was drunk, drunker than he’d ever been in his life, or Wilma or her twin was standing in the doorway, barefoot, wearing a cheap cotton dress that outlined every lovely curve of her body.

Behind him, Stanislawow senior swore in his native tongue and Vladimir shouted in English, “I told you to stay in your room.”

Ignoring them both, the girl in the hall doorway smiled, secretively, furtively, at Lathrop. Then, reaching down, she caught the hem of her dress in both hands, still smiling at Lathrop.

Stanislawow senior continued to swear in his native tongue. “Go to your room,” Vladimir shouted.

The expectant smile left the girl’s face. Her lips quivered as if she was about to cry, and she disappeared from the doorway.

Lathrop tried to follow her and Vladimir blocked his way. Lathrop, too, was shouting now. “You lied to me. You said Wilma wasn’t here. What’s the matter with her? Is she crazy, drunk, or doped?”

Vladimir pushed him away from the doorway and stood with his fists clenched. “Don’t be a damn fool. I didn’t lie to you. That isn’t Wilma. That’s her kid sister, Vilna. She’s two years younger than Wilma. And she’s really not like that. She can’t help it. She’s sick.”

“But you said all there was to the family was you and Wilma and the old man.”

“All right. So I lied.”

“Why should you?”

“Would you be proud of having a sister like that? She’s not quite right in her mind.”

“I don’t believe you. That was Wilma.”

Vladimir looked at Lathrop for a long moment. “O.K.,” he said finally. “You have your troubles, I have mine. Come on. Ill prove she isn’t Wilma. You can look but don’t try to touch her. If you do, so help me, God, I’ll kill you.”

Vladimir walked down the blue-printed hall to an untidy kitchen. Lathrop followed close at his heels, weaving slightly from the prune whisky he’d consumed. He muttered, “A man should know his own wife.”

Vladimir looked at him over his shoulder. “I wonder,” the younger man said.

There was a bedroom opening off the kitchen. It was as sparsely furnished as the front room. There was a bed, a dresser, a chair, a picture of Saint Jude and a crucifix. The blonde girl Lathrop had seen in the doorway was sitting on the edge of the bed. When she saw him she stopped pouting, pulled her dress over her head, then lay back on the bed making faint mewing sounds in her throat.

Lathrop made the back door just in time and was sick over the porch rail. When he returned to the bedroom, Vladimir had covered the girl with a sheet.

“It gets you, don’t it?” the blond youth asked. “We have to watch her all the time, to see that nobody gets to her. She was born that way.”

Lathrop studied the girl’s face. Her hair was the same golden yellow as Wilma’s. Her eyes were the same grey with the same greenish cast. She had the same nose, the same wide mouth, the same high Slavic cheek bones. But there was a distorted quality to her face, an indefinable something. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I was certain she was Wilma.”