Chapter 3 - The Summons to Aster Street
By sunrise, the apartment on Thirty-First Street was freezing.
The building’s central boiler had sputtered out at four in the morning, leaving the iron radiators knocking like hollow pipes. Toby sat at the small formica table, wrapped in two faded flannel shirts, his fingers blue at the tips as he carefully sharpened a 4B pencil over a chipped mug.
“You didn’t sleep,” Toby said without looking up from his drafting pad. His voice was light, sixteen years old, carrying the slight rasp from the childhood pneumonia that had permanently scarred his lungs. “And you’ve got gray dust on the shoulders of that big black coat.”
Willa leaned against the sink, holding a tin cup of instant coffee she couldn’t afford to sweeten.
“I had errands,” she said softly.
“Errands don’t put mortar dust on fine wool, Will.” Toby laid his pencil down and pointed the tip toward the corner of the room. “And normal people don’t leave cars with tinted glass sitting outside our front stoop since four-thirty in the morning.”
Willa’s stomach dropped. She moved to the edge of the window curtain, barely pulling back the yellowed lace.
Parked between a rusted Chevrolet and the snowbank was not the dark Lincoln that had followed her down Clark Street.
It was the black Mercedes from the previous afternoon.
Standing beside the rear bumper, blowing warm air into leather gloves, was the tall, broad-shouldered man August Sartori had called Leo. He wasn’t hiding. He wasn’t watching the windows with binoculars. He simply stood there with the patient, terrifying calm of a man who knew the people inside had nowhere else on earth to go.
Before Willa could speak, the intercom buzzer on the kitchen wall let out its long, angry rattle.
Toby looked at her. “Willa?”
“Stay here,” she whispered. “Lock the deadbolt behind me. Don’t open it for Gordon Pike, don’t open it for the police, and don’t open it for anyone from the restaurant group.”
“Willa, who does that coat belong to?” Toby’s voice finally cracked with genuine fear. “I saw the lining when you hung it up. That’s bespoke Italian cashmere. That’s not something a banquet manager wears.”
“I’ll be back before noon, Toby. Lock the door.”
When Willa pushed open the street door of the brownstone, the wind off the expressway stung her eyes. Leo stepped forward immediately, opening the rear passenger door of the sedan with smooth, practiced efficiency.
“Miss Doyle,” he said, his tone neither hostile nor welcoming. “Mrs. Sartori has requested your company for breakfast.”
“I didn’t accept an invitation,” Willa replied, her feet planted on the icy concrete.
“It wasn’t framed as an invitation,” Leo answered, holding the door steady. “And August said to tell you that if you’re carrying a phone with video files recorded after midnight, you should probably keep it inside your pocket until you’re sitting in a room where nobody can tap the cellular towers.”
Willa stared at him. The chill in her blood had nothing to do with the wind.
She got in.
The house on Aster Street was not a home; it was a fortress disguised as a Gold Coast mansion from the Gilded Age. Limestone lintels, ten-foot wrought-iron gates that opened with hydraulic hums, and frosted windows set so deep into the masonry they looked designed to stop artillery.
Leo escorted her through an oak-paneled vestibule, up a wide marble staircase that smelled of lemon wax and beeswax polish, and into a sunroom overlooking a private walled garden.
The room was warm—almost suffocatingly warm.
Rosalyn Sartori sat in an emerald velvet armchair beside a roaring hearth. Her silver-gray hair was swept back with tortoiseshell combs, and though her left wrist was bound in a black compression wrap, her posture was as rigid and imperial as a portrait of a Habsburg queen.
Across the low mahogany table from her sat August.
He was wearing an iron-gray suit without a tie, the collar of his white shirt open. He was not looking at files. He was peeling an orange with a small silver pocketknife, taking off the rind in one continuous, perfect ribbon.
When Willa entered, August did not stand. But his eyes rose, dark and unblinking, tracking her face, her arm, and the slight hunch of her shoulders against the lingering cold.
“Sit down, girl,” Rosalyn commanded. Her voice was deeper than one would expect, dried by years of cigarette smoke and command. “You look like an alley cat that survived a fall into an icehouse. Leo, get her hot broth. Not tea. Broth.”
“I don’t need broth, Mrs. Sartori,” Willa said, standing her ground three paces from the table.
“You need whatever I tell you to have,” the old woman snapped, though the corner of her thin mouth twitched with something resembling respect. “You hauled sixty-five kilos of old Italian woman across eight yards of polished marble while half a ton of German glass tried to slice us into lunchmeat. You have the right to speak your mind, but you do not have the right to faint on my Persian carpet.”
Willa slowly sat in the straight-backed chair opposite August.
August laid the silver knife down. He slid the peeled orange onto a small china saucer and pushed it across the table toward her, exactly as he had pushed the check the day before.
“You went back,” August said.
It was not a question.
“You knew they were going to do it,” Willa countered, her voice hard. “You knew Gordon Pike wasn’t acting alone.”
“Pike doesn’t act at all,” August said, his tone perfectly flat. “Pike takes twelve thousand dollars a year in cash envelopes from an entity called the Lakeview Development Syndicate. The Syndicate owns the banquet hall, three adjacent office buildings, and sixty percent of the commercial frontage on North Clark. The syndicate is fronted by an alderman named Thomas Vance.”
August reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small, cream-colored business card. He laid it beside the orange.
“Thomas Vance sits on the city’s architectural preservation committee,” August continued. “His brother-in-law owns the foundry in Gary that poured the replacement anchor cup you photographed at one-fifteen this morning.”
Willa narrowed her eyes. “How did you know I was there?”
“Because the three men you watched on the scaffolding were supposed to be dead before they reached the expressway,” Rosalyn interrupted, her cold blue eyes fixing Willa with absolute clarity. “August had four cars waiting on Clark Street to pull them into an alley and take their tools. Then you walked through the service door like an indignant schoolteacher, dropped a tray of dishes, and scrambled the whole damn board.”
August didn't flinch at his mother’s bluntness. He simply watched Willa.
“You have the footage,” August said. “If you upload it to the city inspectors, it will be deleted before the noon news. If you give it to the newspapers, Vance’s lawyers will file an emergency injunction claiming you broke into a condemned disaster zone to plant evidence for a personal injury claim. You will be in Cook County jail by dinner, and your brother Toby will be sitting alone in that cold-water flat when the building’s gas line mysteriously develops a fatal leak.”
The name *Toby* hit Willa like a slap across the face.
She leaned forward, her knuckles whitening against the arms of the chair. “If you touch my brother—”
May you like
“I am not the one who knows Toby draws airplanes, Miss Doyle,” August said, his voice dropping into a register so cold it silenced the room. “Thomas Vance knows. Because Vance’s men followed you from the hall to your stoop, while my men were following them.”
***
