Murder at Wrigley Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

definitive news could also be bad news. I preferred to believe that if I just kept checking the papers, someday his name would reappear.
    After skimming the newsprint and all the thinking, my head needed a douse of cold water as much as my legs needed to soak in hot. Prodded by a pang in my knee, I went to prepare the bath.
    I cracked open the hot water tap above the tub. Nothing came out. I spun the faucet all the way open. Not a drip, not a belch. I tried the cold tap and a torrent gushed forth. Okay, there’s water. So why not hot water?
    Before renting this cottage, I’d always lived in apartments or boarding houses, so home maintenance wasn’t my strong suit. I did remember, though, that in the cellar were some pipes and plumbing fixtures.
    I went through the kitchen, out the back door, and stepped into the narrow alley that ran behind my house.
    The cellar entrance was next to the back steps. I lifted the flimsy sheet of wood that covered it, climbed down three rickety steps, and pulled the string of an electric light. The bulb struggled to produce a dim glow.
    My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. After they dilated, I saw that the cellar was almost bare, pretty much the way I remembered it. A few empty wood packing crates, a small pile of bricks, and a coal shovel were its only contents.
    I started to explore, walking hunched over to avoid bumping my head. The light wasn’t bright enough for me to see the cobwebs that tickled my ears as I made my way to a location under the bathroom.
    By following the pipes running under the floor joists, it took only a minute to discover the problem: the hot water tank was gone. Where it had been was a small puddle of water on the concrete floor. I ran my thumb over the end of one of the pipes that dangled above the puddle. It had been sawed through.
    Relying on my apartment dweller instincts, it took only another minute to figure out what to do: call my landlord.
    Back upstairs, I did just that, and asked him if he’d had the tank removed for some reason. He insisted he hadn’t, which I believed since he wouldn’t have cut the pipes to disconnect it. He also insisted that I now owed him fifteen dollars for a new one, which I argued about until he hung up on me.
    I went out back again and looked around. There wasn’t much to see. The dirt alley, with the back doors of Wolfram Street homes on one side and those of the larger George Street homes on the other, wasn’t wide enough to allow automobile traffic; it served primarily as a community back porch, a storage place for brooms and carpet beaters and a place for neighbors to gossip. No such neighbors were out now, no one to ask if they’d seen anything.
    Lake View—which really didn’t provide a view of Lake Michigan—was a good neighborhood. It was a peaceful area, mostly residential with single and two-story homes, not a part of the city where crime was a problem. But then, what kind of neighborhood does have a problem with stolen hot water tanks?
    From the street in front of my house, I heard a familiar blustery voice call, “You kids beat it now! Scram!”
    Leaving the alley, I squeezed my way between the side of my house and that of my next-door neighbor and emerged on Wolfram Street. The red brick homes on the block were essentially all the same. They were a step up from row houses in that there was a good foot and a half of space between each one.
    This was “Gasless Sunday,” so the street was as devoid of traffic as the alley. A herd of children had taken advantage of the empty street to play crack-the-whip. They were hand-in-hand, strung out across the width of the road. Yelling at them from the sidewalk was Mike the Cop, a large pudgy man with damp crescents under the arms of his blue uniform. It was Mike’s personal mission to keep the neighborhood free of noisy children; and since there’s no other kind, he routinely chased away anyone under the age of sixteen.
    “Go on! Get! Ya