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“You don’t have it?” It was a logical question. I had been one of the primary sources on a book he wrote, after all.
“Apparently, he’s moved.”
A large, brown leather tote sat next to her. She dug into it and pulled out her thick black Day Runner. A little more than three months into the year, and it was already bursting with sticky notes and beginning to fray. She flipped to the section that held her addresses.
“What phone number do you have?” she asked.
I rattled it off by rote.
“That’s the old one,” she said. Pulling out one of her business cards, she flipped it over and wrote his number on the back. Then she added his address. “He’s in the valley now. If you go to his apartment, you’ll need to ring Winchell.”
“He’s changed his name?”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The guy who’d written about the Chicago Outfit, who’d written about me, was living under an assumed name. That couldn’t be good.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Lydia said. “Winchell is the name of the previous tenant. He just hasn’t changed his bell.”
“But he’s had trouble, after the book?”
Our waitress, Cindy, who was tall and linear, came by and refilled our coffees.
“How is everything?”
“Great,” I said, though my breakfast had gotten cold while we talked. Cindy finished filling our cups and took off.
“Tell me how you did it, how did you become Dom Reilly?” Lydia said.
I put more ketchup on my breakfast to make up for its being chilled. I took a bite to put off answering her.
“You gave me your driver’s license for the I-9 when I hired you. It looked real.”
“That’s because I got it at the DMV.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I found a guy in Reno. For five thousand, he sold me a birth certificate, a social security number and a Michigan driver’s license with my picture on it.”
“So, Dominick Reilly is a completely made-up person?”
I shook my head. “The real Dom Reilly disappeared in eighty-two.”
It didn’t take her long to figure out what that probably meant. “Aren’t you afraid someone will try to find him?
“No. Anyone who liked him knows better than to try and find him. Anyone who didn’t like him knows where he is, which is probably the bottom of Lake Erie.”
She raised an eyebrow at me.
“I was told he was peripheral to the Detroit Partnership and crossed the wrong person.”
Lydia’s hobby was organized crime, so I didn’t have to explain the Detroit Partnership. Or what it meant to cross the wrong person. And yes, I did fly into Detroit for a long weekend once to nose around. I was right. No one was looking for the real Dominick Reilly.
“Still, I try to keep off the grid. I don’t have a bank account. I use Ronnie’s credit cards.”
Ronnie Chen was my boyfriend and the person who’d introduced me to Lydia. He’d sold her a cute little house on Orizaba. He was a good real estate agent and I wished that was why she’d hired him.
“But you and Ronnie own two houses.”
“Ronnie owns two houses.”
