Chapter 4 - The House of the Dead
The office on Grand Avenue was not a corporate tower. It was an old three-story brick building with a stone facade that said Vitali Import & Export Co. above the arched entrance.
When Ellie arrived at eleven, the rain had cleared, leaving the city cold and bright under a sharp November sky.
She was shown upstairs by a young man in an ill-fitting suit who didn't speak a single word from the front doors to the third-floor library.
Nico Vitali was sitting behind a large, scarred oak desk that had belonged to his father. He was wearing a dark blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, revealing thick, dark hair and a pale scar that ran from his wrist to his elbow.
On the desk before him were three thick leather ledger books, their covers rotted with age and mold.
"Sit down, Miss Kelly," Nico said, not looking up from the page he was reading.
Ellie didn't sit. She stood near the door, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets, her eyes scanning the room. The walls were lined with old books, maps of the Chicago river basin, and black-and-white photographs of men in wool caps standing on coal barges.
"I don't have time for game playing, Mr. Vitali," Ellie said. "My mother has dialysis at two."
Nico looked up then. His hazel eyes were remarkably clear—not angry, not cruel, but heavy with an intelligence that seemed to measure everything in the room down to the last ounce of weight.
"This isn't a game," Nico said. He tapped the open ledger with a gold pen. "This is your father’s handwriting, isn't it?"
Ellie stepped forward despite herself. She looked down at the ledger.
The page was dated August 14, 1995. The handwriting was neat, slanted to the right, written in blue ink that had faded to a dull lavender.
Entry #402: 1,200 tons structural steel, pier 4. Inspected by D. Kelly. Discrepancy noted in weight certificate #B-88. Signature withheld.
"He refused to sign," Ellie whispered.
"He refused three times," Nico said. "And every time he refused, someone else forged his mark on the secondary vouchers. Look at the bottom of the page."
Ellie looked. Below her father’s neat, refused entry was a crude, shaky signature—Daniel Kelly—written in dark black ink.
"That isn't his," Ellie said, her voice rising with sudden heat. "My father had beautiful handwriting! He went to Saint Patrick's! The brothers taught him penmanship!"
"I know it isn't his," Nico said calmly. "It’s Eleanor Vance’s handwriting. She was right-handed, but she tried to use her left hand to make it look like an uneducated crane operator wrote it."
Ellie raised her eyes to Nico’s. "You’ve known this?"
"I’ve known the signature was bad for five years," Nico said. "I didn't know whose hand held the pen until last night when I heard Vanessa Sinclair speak your name in that room."
He leaned back in his leather chair, folding his big hands over his chest.
"Vanessa believes those ledgers were destroyed when my father’s car went into the river," Nico continued. "She thinks she’s the only person alive who holds the secondary papers her mother kept in their vault in Lake Forest. She spent six months getting close to me, letting my capos think she was a safe, respectable choice for a wife, so she could get into this house and find the original union releases."
"Why?" Ellie asked. "What does it give her?"
"Protection," Nico said. "Her father, Senator Sinclair, is dying of prostate cancer. When he goes, his estate will be audited by the state revenue board. If the Local 419 pension money is found in his private foundation accounts, the Sinclair name becomes dirt, and Vanessa loses every dollar she has to federal forfeiture."
He picked up a key from the desk—a heavy, brass skeleton key—and slid it across the wood toward Ellie.
"Unless she can prove that Lorenzo Vitali stole the money and passed it to a dead crane operator named Dan Kelly," Nico concluded.
Ellie looked at the heavy brass key. "Why are you showing me this?"
"Because Vanessa is looking for these ledgers right now," Nico said softly. "She thinks I’m at the docks in Gary until four o'clock. She’s in the Oak Park house, using a duplicate set of keys she stole from my nightstand, trying to open the wall safe in the library."
He stood up, his tall frame blocking the cold light from the window behind him.
"I want you to go to the house, Miss Kelly," Nico said.
May you like
Ellie blinked. "What?"
"I want you to enter through the kitchen entrance with Arthur," Nico said, his voice dropping into that dark, quiet register that made her blood run cold. "I want you to stand in the doorway of that library while she has her hands on those papers. And I want her to see the face of the girl she tied up with florist's rope while she realizes her marriage is a trap."
