Part 5 (1/2)
”So why are you out here?” he demanded.
I made a face to myself. ”Ms. Aguinaldo escaped from prison last week. Before she could-”
”She did?” His face brightened. ”Cool! How did she do it? Or do you think I'm hiding her?”
On the last question he turned sullen. Before I could answer him, a girl came running from the garage side of the house, yelling ”Robbie” at the top of her lungs. She was seven or eight, with water plastering her hair and bathing suit to her body. Where her brother was chunky and blond, she had dark hair and was slim as a greyhound.
My companion stiffened and stared straight ahead. The girl saw the car and ran over to us.
”Robbie! You know Mom will have a fit if she sees you in there.” To me she added, ”He's supposed to walk instead of riding. You can see he has a weight problem. Are you the Chicago cop? You're supposed to go around back; Mom's waiting for you there. She sent me to tell Rosario to open the gate when you got here, but I suppose Robbie already let you in.”
Robbie left the car while she was piping out her report. The girl was young enough to parrot adult comments without editing; the Baladines must have reported Robbie's weight problem to strangers so often that it seemed natural to her to tell me about it. I wanted to say something rea.s.suring to him, but he had slipped around the other side of the house.
”You know, there are worse things in life than being overweight,” I pointed out as I followed the girl past the garage.
”Yes, like stealing and getting sent to jail. That's what Nicola did, so we had to get Rosario instead. I was only six when they arrested Nicola, so it was still all right for me to cry. I cried when Fluffy got hit by a car, too.”
”You are sensitive, aren't you,” I said in admiration.
”No, that's for crybabies. I don't do it anymore, but Robbie cried over Nicola and he was almost eleven. He even cried when Fluffy killed a bird. That's only nature. Mom! She's here! She gave Robbie a ride from the gate to the house!”
We had arrived on the far side of the garage, where a fourlane twentyfivemeter pool and a tennis court offered the Baladines a chance to unwind after whatever rigors a day might hold for them. The pool and court were fringed with trees that created pleasing shade against the heat.
Two women were leaning back on padded chaises, eyes s.h.i.+elded by outsize sungla.s.ses. Their swimsuits showed off bodies made perfect by total devotion to their care. They looked up when the girl and I appeared, but continued a desultory conversation with each other.
A third woman, also showing the kind of body that wealth and leisure afford, stood in the shallow end of the pool. She was coaching two little girls who were splas.h.i.+ng along the lane next to her. Twin boys were jumping into the water at the deep end, chasing each other with plastic weapons. Several had been dropped at the edge of the pool. s.p.a.ce Berets action figures. I'd seen them at Mary Louise's-both her boys collected them.
”Not so much motion with your kicks, Utah,” the woman in the pool commanded.
”Rhiannon, don't lift your arms so high coming out of the water. One more length, both of you, with less wave action. Jason and Parnell”- here she raised her voice to a shout, ”if you don't stop making so much commotion you're getting out until we're done here.”
She stood with her back to me while Utah and Rhiannon did another twentyfive meters, working hard to keep their splas.h.i.+ng to a minimum. My guide watched critically.
”Utah's my sister. She can do better than me when I was her age, but my form is improving. I'm definitely better than Rhiannon. Want to see?”
”Not today,” I said. ”If Utah's your sister, are you Wyoming or Nevada?”
The girl ignored me and dived into the pool, so smoothly that she barely caused a ripple. She surfaced a third of the way down her lane. Her form was definitely better than mine.
The woman boosted Utah out of the pool, then hoisted herself out with one smooth push from her upper arm. A fourth woman, dark and round as a Gauguin portrait, came out of the shadows and wrapped a towel around the smaller girl. She silently handed another towel to the mother, then walked off with Utah.
”I'm Eleanor Baladine. I hope this is important, because you're interrupting my training program.”
”The Sydney Olympics?” I asked.
”I know you think you're being funny,” she said coldly. ”Robert and I don't know how good our girls may get, but they could have a shot at a team in ten years.
Especially Utah-although Madison is looking better all the time. And Rhiannon Trant is shaping up fast, even though she only started last summer.”
Rhiannon Trant? Daughter of Edmund, Murray's new owner? That explained the Global plate out front-I'd thought it stood for Baladine's plans for world domination. ”That's good. It would be a shame if they only swam for fun.”
”No one swims for fun. You either compete or you aren't motivated enough to get in the water. I missed an Olympic spot by sixtenths of a second. I don't want my girls to lose out like that.”
She broke off to call out an instruction to Madison. One of the women in the chaise lounges, feeling Rhiannon was being neglected, sat up to call encouragement to her. If she was Edmund Trant's wife, no wonder gossip columnists like Regine Mauger were s...o...b..ring over her. It wasn't just her gold hair and tan, but the way she moved, even in a beach chair, and the little twitch of humor at her mouth, as if laughing at herself for caring about her daughter's ability to compete in a neighborhood pool. She made me feel as wide and clumsy as young Robbie.
”I'm V. I. Warshawski.” I approached the pair in the chaise lounges. ”I'm a detective who has some questions for Ms. Baladine about Nicola Aguinaldo.”
Eleanor Baladine rushed over. ”My children's old nanny, you know, the one we had to send to Coolis for robbery-”
”Burglary, wasn't it?” I interrupted. ”Or did she break in and use a weapon?”
”Excuse me, Detective.” Baladine poured rich sarcasm over her words. ”Not being used to the criminal element, I don't understand these distinctions.”
”How did you hire Ms. Aguinaldo to begin with?” I asked.
”Through an agency. We all use it-Help Across Borders-they're usually utterly reliable. They a.s.sured me Nicola's immigration status was in order and vouched for her references. She was very good with the children, which I suppose wasn't surprising since she had one of her own-”
”I thought it was two,” I interrupted.
”Maybe you're right. This was several years ago; the details are vague to me now. Madison! Work with the kickboard and concentrate on your hips! You're using way too much leg motion. You're a seal with little flippers: let's see them move.”
”She lived here? With her children?”
”Certainly not. I'm not running a daycare center, and the person who works here has to concentrate on that: work.”
”So how often did she see her own family? And how did she get to them?”
”I always gave her Sundays off, even though it was often inconvenient for us.
Except when we traveled, when I had to have her along. Do you have children, Detective? Then you don't know how hard it is to travel with three little ones.
The girls are always getting into something, and my son tends to be secretive and wander off where no one can find him. In an effort to avoid anything approaching exercise.” Her eyes stayed on the pool; she was moving her hands up and down like little seal flippers, as if trying to get Madison to move properly.
The other two women threw in their own murmured complaints about how hard it is to manage children on the road. ”They need their own little routines and friends,” one explained.
And pools and ski slopes and who knows what else. ”And to see her children every Sunday, someone drove her to the train?”
Mrs. Baladine took her eyes from her daughter long enough to stare at me in some hauteur. ”Since the robbery for which Nicola was arrested was over two years ago I can't imagine what bearing her transport has on the situation.”
”I'd like to know who could have picked her up when she fled Coolis. She can't have walked all the way to Chicago from there. Did some man fetch her on her days off? Or a woman friend? Or did you or Mr. Baladine drive her to the train?”
”We couldn't take that kind of time. Sometimes Robert gave her a lift if he was going into Oak Brook for a meeting, but she usually picked up the Metra bus at the bottom of Gateway Terrace. Once or twice he drove her all the way home, when he had to be in the city. I knew it was a long trip for her, so I let her spend the night in town and took on getting the kids ready for school myself Monday mornings.”
”That was quite a sacrifice on your part.” I tried to conceal my contempt, since I wanted information from her, but she wasn't stupid, and she bristled at my words.
I continued hastily. ”She'd never stolen anything before she took that necklace, is that right? Did you ever get any sense of what drove her to do that?”