The logical place to start was Dominick’s mother’s house. The address was in in Beverly, south of downtown. Rachel took an Uber home while I drove down.
The street was quiet and lined with trees starting to turn toward their fall colors. The house had two stories, with windows peeking out of the attic on top. I mounted the front steps and rang the doorbell.
A woman in her 70s, silver hair, blue dress, opened the door and peered through the screen. “Hello?”
“Hi.” I tried to look friendly and nonthreatening. “I’m looking for Dominick Slipko. This is his mother’s house, isn’t it?”
“It’s mine now.” She crossed her arms. “What do you want with him?”
“Do you know him?”
“I’m his aunt. Anne Budd. Aunt Annie. Who are you?” She looked like she wanted to add a little profanity to the question but was holding back.
“Tom Jurgen.” I showed her my card through the screen. “I’d like to talk to Dominick for a case I’m working on.”
“What case?”
This is where it got tricky. “I’m not really at liberty to tell you who my client is, or what it’s about. Sorry. If you could help me or get a message to him—”
“It’s about that A.J. Garcia, isn’t it?” She scowled.
That made it even trickier. “Why do you say that?”
The woman smirked. “I know my nephew.” She pushed the screen door. “Come on in.”
The living room was small and neat. A few books, a medium-sized TV, an empty coffee cup next to a small green houseplant on an end table. But Annie Budd didn’t invite me to sit down. She pointed to a staircase. “Up there.”
She followed me up the steps, then pointed again to a door at the end of the hall. “I suppose I shouldn’t let you go through his drawers or closets. Just look at the room.”
I walked down the hall and opened the door.
The bedroom was a shrine to A.J. Garcia. Her face covered every wall, and even looked down on me from the ceiling. Posters, magazine covers, images from the internet, drawings, AI-rendered pics, and a dozen autographed photos in silver frames sat on the single dresser. Opposite the bed. She was singing, dancing, walking down the street, getting a tattoo, being interviewed, eating lunch, lying on the beach, sometimes posing, often oblivious to being observed and photographed. A few snapshots were taped around a mirror. The bed was neatly made, as if Dominick hadn’t slept there in a while.
“So he’s president of her fan club?” I said, looking at the bookshelves filled with CDs and DVD cases.
Annie was right behind me. “He’s the whole club. I mean, I used to have a thing for Don Johnson in the 80s, you know, Miami Vice? But this is—out of control.”
“How far out of control?”
She reached around me to pull the door shut. “What’s this about?”
I’d thought my response through while climbing the stairs. “It does involve A.J. Garcia. But I can’t tell you more. I just need to talk to Dominick.”
“He’s probably stalking her again.” She shook her head.
“Again?”
“He’s obsessed on that girl for years. Going to every bar she was playing at, every concert when she started to get famous, writing her letters and emails and gluing himself to her social media—he got banned from most of her sites, made up fake names and new email addresses and got banned again. Security guards knew to watch out for him. But he never quit.” She sighed. “His mother couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t try.”
“So he’s not living here now?”
“I haven’t seen him in weeks. I don’t know where he sleeps. He’s a grownup, he doesn’t have to check in with me. I can’t kick him out, because—it’s the one thing left I can do for my sister. She left me this house.” She shrugged. “I can’t turn her son away.”
“Do you know where Dominick hangs out? His friends?” We started back down the stairway.
“North side, mostly. That’s where all the music clubs are. There was a guy named Dylan. Or maybe it was a girl?” We got to the bottom and she turned to me. “No, it was a guy, that was his last name. Gary Dillon. Like Matt Dillon, you know?”
“The man from Gunsmoke or the kid in Drugstore Cowboy?”
Annie laughed. “You’re good. Either one, but it’s spelled that way, not like Bob Dylan. Or Dylan Thomas. I only know because he wrote it down to get something delivered and he didn’t want them sending it here. Somewhere on Halsted.”
“What was it?”
She shrugged. “How would I know? It was six months or so ago. I just heard him on the phone.” She looked from me to the front door. “Is that it? Any more questions, Mr. Private Eye?”
I smiled. “You’ve been a big help.”
Annie sighed. “I just wish . . . well anyway, if you find him, tell him he can always come home here. What’s that saying? ‘When you have to go there, they have to take you in.’”
“Robert Frost.” I nodded. “I’ll tell him. Have a good day.”
I found a phone number and address for Gary Dillon pretty easily, usually some mostly legal databases. I called first but he didn’t pick up. I didn’t leave any message. I wanted to talk to him face to face, if possible. I’d leave a voicemail if not.
Dillon’s apartment was just off Halsted near Belmont. He wasn’t home when I rang the buzzer downstairs, but a woman who came out told me he worked down the street at a shipping store.
A man and a woman were behind the counter wearing blue aprons with the store’s logo on them, and the woman was helping one customer while the man grinned at videos on his phone. He put the phone down as I walked up. “Help you?”
The nametag on his apron said “Gary.” “Gary Dillon?”
He blinked. “Yeah?”
“Tom Jurgen.” I handed him a card. “I’m trying to locate Dominick Slipko.”
He took the card. “What for?”
“I’m not really free to disclose my client. It’s not a criminal matter.” I wasn’t strictly sure that was true, but I went past that quickly. “Just some questions.”
“About what? I know.” He waved a hand. “You can’t say. It’s just, Dominick’s a friend. I don’t want to get him in any trouble.”
“Close friend?”
He snorted. “Not that close. I mean—” He glanced at his co-worker, who’d finished with her customer and was trying not to look like she was listening in on us. “Give me a minute, okay, Gretchen?” He led me to a corner of the store, next to a wall of locked mailboxes.
Dillon leaned back. “Look, me and Dominick, I’ve known him a couple years. We used to work together at a bar over in Old Town, a club with music. We both liked the hot—I mean, the same singers and stuff. You know?”
“Yeah. Have you been in touch recently?”
He squinted, thinking. “Not in a while. Maybe six months? Or more. Sometimes he has stuff sent here.” He rapped his knuckles on a mailbox.
‘What kind of stuff?”
“Books. Electronic stuff. Drugs. Not, like, illegal drugs. More like supplements and stuff. He’s into some weird shit. Eastern philosophy, stuff like that. I don’t know. I guess he didn’t want his aunt seeing it. But I don’t know all of it. He keeps a lot of secrets.”
“About what?”
He looked at me closely, trying to guess what—or who—I meant. “I don’t know. But I’m not sure I’d tell you either way. I already told you more than—more than he’d like, I think.”
“So you have no idea where he is now?”
“Like I said, I haven’t seen him in months.” The front door opened and two people walked in carrying packages to send. “I gotta get back to work, okay?”
“Do you know anybody who might know?”
“Just—” He stopped, as if he’d answered without thinking. But Gretchen was glaring at him. “Julie. Julie Springer. Not exactly his girlfriend, but—Yeah, I’m coming!” He darted around the counter. “Hello, how can I help you today?”
“Where can I find her?” I asked.
“She teaches art—Longview Academy—yes, ma’am, sorry, let me weigh that for you.” He took a package from the customer and set it on a scale, avoiding my eyes. Gretchen switched her glare over to me, so I left before she could kick me out.
Longview Academy was a private school in the Logan Square neighborhood. It was close to 3 p.m., so I figured I had a shot at seeing Julie Springer at work without barging into a class. I went through a metal detector while a security guard glowered at me, and in the office I asked for Julie Springer.
“Are you a parent?” the secretary asked, a black woman in glasses thick enough to stop bullets.
“Just a concerned citizen,” I said. She rolled her eyes but picked up a phone. After speaking too low for me to hear for a few moments, she hung up. “Room 223.” She pointed a pencil toward the ceiling. “Upstairs.”
The door to room 223 was half-open. I knocked. “Julie Springer?”
She was twentysomething and tall, with a streak of purple through her blond hair, and she wore slacks and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. “Yes?” She sat on a window ledge, a laptop perched on her knees, the late afternoon sun streaming in over her shoulders.
I introduced myself and showed her my card. When she heard Dominick’s name, she flinched. “Him.”
“Are you friends?”
“We used to date, yeah.” She closed her laptop. “About a year. We broke up about six months ago. It wasn’t a big breakup or anything, we just kind of faded away. Stopped calling, stopped making plans. I get busy during the school year, and he gets these obsessions that take over everything.”
“What kind of obsessions?”
She peered at me as if I was a student who hadn’t turned in his homework. “What’s this all about?”
“I—we—my client only wants to talk to him. But I can’t tell you who that is.”
Julie grimaced. “Right. I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him in at least a couple of months.”
“Do you have any idea where I might find him?”
She blinked, as if I’d asked the stupidest question she’d heard today. “You might try his apartment.”
His apartment? First I’d heard of it. “Where is that?”
Julie slid off the ledge and sauntered to her desk. “You don’t know anything about Dominick, do you?”
“I’ve talked to his aunt,” I said, a little defensive. “His friend Gary. But, well—no, not really.”
She laughed and sat behind her desk. “I could tell you things. But I’m at work, even though it’s after school, so all I’m telling you right now is that Dominick is—he’s not like you or me. Or most people. He might be bipolar, I don’t know. I teach art, I’m not a shrink.”
“My wife is a shrink,” I told her.
“Then maybe ask her. The thing with Dominick is he’s really smart—I mean, he’s maybe the smartest person I’ve ever known, and when he wants something he gets so focused on it that he doesn’t let anything stop him. Which is fun sometimes. Sometimes.”
“What does he get obsessed about?”
She sat back, looking up at the ceiling lights. “Oh, Eastern philosophy, Northern Italian cooking, comic books, music—”
“Any particular kind of music?”
Julie’s eyes came back down, zeroing in on me. “A.J. Garcia, for one.”
“Just her?”
She nodded. “Pretty much. For weeks that was all he listened to, all he’d watch. Bootleg CDs, concert videos, interviews, in the car, eating, having sex—” She stopped suddenly and glanced at the door to make sure no one was standing outside. “Oops. It’s a private school, but I still have to be at least a little careful.”
“So he was obsessed with A.J. Garcia,” I said.
Julie nodded. “That’s not why we broke up or anything. Like I said, we just drifted apart. He might still be listening to her. Or he might be into pottery now. You never know with Dominick.”
She looked down at the floor, making up her mind. Finally she reached for a pad of Post-its. “Here. It’s not under his name, so don’t tell him how you found it.”
I took the note. It read Jay Sylvester, with an address on Ashland Avenue. “Thank you.”
Julie stood up. “Don’t let him suck you in. He can be pretty compelling when he wants.”
I nodded. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
No comments:
Post a Comment