Blood Shot (20 page)

29

Night Crawlers

I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I got into my car. The pain in my shoulders returned in a wave that swept me back limply in the front seat. Little tears of hurt and self-pity pricked my eyelids. Quitters never win and winners never quit, I quoted my old basketball coach grimly. Play through the pain, not against it.

I rolled the car window down, my sore arm moving slowly to the commands of my brain. I sat for a while, watching the Chigwell house and the surrounding street, dozing a bit, finally deciding the indomitable old lady wasn’t under surveillance before putting the car into gear and heading for home.

The Eisenhower is never really clear of traffic—trucks thunder into the city throughout the night, some people are getting off late-night shifts, others heading for the action that begins only after dark. I joined the sweep of anonymous vehicles at Hillside. The steady stream of lights, red from the cars, orange on the sides of the trucks, the rows of street-lamps stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see, made me feel isolated and alone. A little speck in the great universe of lights, an atom of dust who could merge with the mud of Dead Stick Pond without leaving a trace behind.

My fragmented mood stayed with me as I drove slowly along Belmont to my apartment on Racine. I was hoping with the bottom half of my mind that Mr. Contreras and Peppy would be up to greet me—the top half sternly said I didn’t want the old man breathing down my neck all the time.

That secret yearning may have saved my life. I had paused outside Mr. Contreras’s ground-floor apartment, putting down the diaries to tie my shoes, seeing if my presence might rouse the dog so that I’d have a little companionship before going to bed.

The silence on the other side of the door told me the apartment was empty. Peppy certainly would have made herself known when she heard me, and the old man would never leave her outside alone this late at night. I looked up the stairs, foolishly wondering if they might be waiting for me at the top.

My unconscious mind realized something was wrong. I forced myself to stand motionless, pushed my tired brain to thought. The upper stairwell lay in darkness. One landing light might burn out, but both in the same evening stretched coincidence too far. Since the well of the lobby was lighted, anyone coming up the steps to the second or third floor would stand well framed in a pool of light.

From the topmost landing came a faint murmuring, not the sound of Mr. Contreras talking to Peppy. Picking up the notebooks, I eased my way to the lobby floor. I tucked the stack under one arm, pulled the gun out, flipped the safety off. Turned to face the street. Crouching low, I opened the outer door and slid into the night.

No one shot at me. The only person on the street was a moody-looking young man who lived down the block. He didn’t even glance at me as I hurried by him toward Belmont. I didn’t want to take my car—if someone was waiting for me outside the apartment, they might be keeping an eye on my Chevy: let them think I was still hanging around. If someone was waiting. Maybe fear and fatigue were making me jump at fantastic interpretations of light and street sounds.

At Belmont I tucked the Smith & Wesson back into my jeans and flagged a cab to Lotty’s apartment. It was only a mile or so away, but I was in no condition to walk that far tonight. I asked the cabby to wait until I knew whether anyone was going to let me in. In the helpful style of today’s drivers, he snarled at me.

“You don’t own me. I give you ride, not my service for life.”

“Splendid.” I pulled back the five I’d been about to hand him. “Then I’ll pay you after I know whether I’m spending the night here.”

He started shouting at me, but I ignored him and opened the passenger door. That prompted him to get physical; he turned full around in the seat and swung at me. I slammed the stack of journals down on his arm with all the force of the pent-up frustrations from the last few days.

“Bitch!” he snarled. “You leave. You get from my cab. I don’t need your money.”

I slid from the backseat, keeping a wary eye on him until he drove off with a great squealing of rubber. All I needed now was for Lotty to be away at an emergency or sleeping too soundly to hear the bell. But the gods had not ordained me to have a total season of disaster this evening. After a few minutes, while my nervous irritation grew, her voice twanged at me through the intercom.

“It’s me, Vic. Can I come up?”

She met me at the door to her apartment wrapped in a bright red dressing gown, looking like a little Mandarin with her dark eyes blinking away sleep.

“I’m sorry, Lotty—sorry to wake you. I had to go out this evening. When I got home I thought there might be a reception committee waiting for me.”

“If you want me to come with you to blaze away at a few muggers, the answer is emphatically no,” she said sardonically. “But I am glad to see you had a little more care for your skin than to go after them by yourself.”

I couldn’t respond to her breezy mood. “I want to call the police. And I don’t want to go back over to Racine until they’ve had a chance to check the place out.”

“Very good indeed,” Lotty said, amazed. “I begin even to think you might live to be forty.”

“Thanks a bunch,” I muttered at her, going to the phone. I didn’t like turning tail, handing my problems over to someone else to solve. But refusing to get help just because Lotty was being sarcastic seemed stupid.

Bobby Mallory was home. Like Lotty, he was inclined to taunt me a little over going to him for help, but once he’d absorbed the facts his professional persona took over. He asked me a few crisp questions, then assured me he’d have a squad car there without lights before he left his house. Before hanging up, though, he couldn’t keep from rubbing my nose in it.

“You just stay put now, Vicki. I can’t believe you’re letting the police handle police business, but remember—the last thing we want is for you to come bounding up and get in between us and a couple of hoods.”

“Right,” I said sourly. “I’ll look at the morning papers to see how things turn out.”

The line went dead in my ear. I spent the next hour or so moving restlessly around Lotty’s sitting room. She tried at first to talk me into going to sleep in her spare bed, preparing hot milk with brandy for me, but she finally left me to myself

“I need my sleep even if you don’t, Victoria. I’m not going to lecture you on rest after your physical ordeal—if by now you don’t know you should, no words of mine will have any effect. Just remember—your body is an aging organism. It will repair itself more and more slowly as time goes by, and the less help you give it, the less you will be able to rely on it.”

I knew by the tone as much as the words that Lotty was truly angry, but I was too fragmented still to make any kind of response. She loves me; she was afraid I would put myself at such risk I would die and abandon her. I understood that; I just couldn’t fix it tonight.

It was only when she’d shut her door with an angry snap that I remembered the Chigwell notebooks. Not the time to knock at her bedroom and ask for help in deciphering his medical shorthand. I drank some of the milk and lay down on the daybed with my boots off, but I couldn’t relax. All I could think was that I had run scared from my problems, had turned to the police, and now I was waiting like some good old-fashioned damsel in distress for rescue.

It was too much. A little after midnight I pulled my boots back on. Leaving a note on the kitchen table for Lotty, I crept out of the apartment, quietly closing the door behind me. I started walking south, keeping to the main streets, hoping to find a cab. My restless energy held my fatigue at bay; when I got to Belmont I stopped looking for taxis and covered the last half mile at a brisk walk.

I’d been imagining the street filled with flashing blue-and-whites and uniformed men racing around. By the time I got home, however, any police activity had disappeared without a trace. I went cautiously into the lobby, crouching a little, hugging the walls out of range of the stairwell.

The upper-landing lights were on again. As I climbed the first half flight, going sideways with my back sliding along the wall, Mr. Contreras’s apartment door opened. Peppy bounded out, followed by the old man.

When he saw me tears started streaming down his cheeks. “Oh, doll, thank God you’re all right. The cops was here, they wouldn’t tell me nothing, wouldn’t let me into your place or tell me if they knew where you was. What happened to you? Where you been?”

After a few disjointed minutes we got our stories out. Around ten-thirty someone had called him, telling him I was down in my office and in bad shape. It didn’t occur to him to summon help or ask himself who the strange phone caller was. Instead he bundled Peppy up, bullied a passing cab into taking both of them, and hurled himself downtown. He’d never been to my office, so he’d wasted some time finding the place. When he saw that the door was locked and the lights out, he’d been too impatient to find the night watchman: he’d used his trusty pipe wrench to break the lock.

“I’m sorry, doll,” he said dolefully. “I’ll fix it for you in the morning. If I’d been using my head, I guess I would’ve known it was someone trying to get me and the dog out of the way.”

I nodded abstractedly. Someone was keeping close enough tabs on me to know that my downstairs neighbor would be watching if they set up an ambush. Ron Kappelman. Who else had seen Mr. Contreras at such close quarters?

“Did the police find anyone here?” I asked abruptly.

“They took a couple of guys away in a paddy wagon, but I didn’t get any kind of look at them. I couldn’t even do that for you. They came gunning for you and they got me out of the way with a cheap trick that wouldn’t of fooled a six-year-old. And then me not knowing where’d you’d gone off to or nothing. I knew it couldn’t be your aunt, not after what you told me about her and your ma, but I just didn’t have any idea where you could be.”

It took me awhile to get him calmed down enough that he would let me spend the night alone. After a few more rehearsals of worry and self-reproach, he finally saw me up the stairs to my apartment. Someone had tried breaking into my apartment, but the steel-lined door I’d had installed after my last home invasion had held. They couldn’t cut through it, and they hadn’t been able to get by my third dead bolt. Even so, I made a thorough tour of the premises with Mr. Contreras and the dog. He left her with me, waiting outside until he heard the last bolt slide home before going downstairs to his own bed.

I tried calling Bobby at the Central District, but he’d disappeared—or didn’t want to take my call. None of the other officers I knew were in and the ones I didn’t know wouldn’t tell me anything about the men they’d picked up at my place. I had to give it a rest until morning.

30

Fence Mending

I was being buried alive. An executioner wearing a black plastic hood was pouring dirt on me. “Just tell us the time, girlie,” he said. Lotty and Max Loewenthal sat nearby eating asparagus and drinking cognac, ignoring my helpless screams. I woke from the dream sweating and panting, but every time I went back to sleep the nightmare returned.

When I finally got up for good it was late morning. I was stiff and sore, my head filled with the cotton wool an uneasy night always leaves behind. I moved on thick, ungainly legs to the bathroom. With Peppy watching anxiously from the doorway, I soaked in the tub for a long while.

It had to be Kappelman who’d arranged for last night’s ambush. He was the only one who knew I was leaving my apartment, the only one who knew the anxious care Mr. Contreras lavished on me. But try as I might, I couldn’t think why he’d do it.

It wasn’t beyond belief to think he might have murdered Nancy. Love affairs gone awry bring at least one person a day to Twenty-sixth and California. But a crime of passion had nothing to do with me. All my machinations about Humboldt, about why Pankowski and Ferraro had sued the company, about Chigwell, didn’t seem to connect with Ron Kappelman. Unless he knew something he was desperate to keep hidden about Jurshak’s insurance file. But what could his involvement have been with them?

It was easier to think that Art Jurshak had staged last night’s aborted attack. After all, he could have drawn the old man off without knowing I wasn’t at home, then decided to lie in wait until I got back. My mind churned fruitlessly. The water grew cold, but I didn’t stir until the telephone began to ring. It was Bobby, brighter and more alert than I could tolerate in my febrile state.

“Dr. Herschel says you left her in the middle of the night. I thought I told you to stay away from your apartment until we gave you the all-clear.”

“I didn’t want to wait for the Second Coming of Christ. Who did you find at my place last night?”

“Watch your language around me, young lady,” Bobby said automatically—he doesn’t think nice girls should talk like hard-boiled dicks. And even though he knows half the reason I do it is to ride him, he can’t resist rising to the bait. Before I could put in my two cents about not being a subaltern he could order about—there are baits I also can’t resist —he hurried on.

“We picked up two guys hanging around your door. They say they’d just come upstairs for a smoke, but they both had picklocks and guns. The state’s attorney got us twenty-four hours with them on concealed and unregistered felony weapons. We want you to come down to a lineup—see if you can identify either of these gents as being involved in Wednesday’s attack on you.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said unenthusiastically. “They had black slickers on, the kind with hoods that cover a lot of the face. I’m not sure I’d ever recognize them again.”

“Great.” Bobby ignored my lack of ardor. “I’ll have a uniformed man pick you up in half an hour—unless that’s too early for you.”

“Like Justice, I never sleep,” I said politely, and hung up.

Murray phoned next. They’d put the morning edition to bed before word of an arrest outside my place had come in from one of his police snitches. His boss, knowing of our relationship, had woken him with the news. Murray pumped away with tireless energy for several minutes. Finally I cut him off crossly:

“I’m going down to look at a lineup. If either Art Jurshak or Dr. Chigwell’s sister is there, I’ll give you a call back. Which reminds me—the good doctor has gone off with the kind of guys who like to break into other people’s houses.”

I hung up on his squawk. The phone rang again as I was stomping into the bedroom to get dressed. I chose to ignore it—let Murray get his news from public radio or something. As I was brushing my hair with surly ill will, Mr. Contreras brought breakfast to the door. My last night’s desire for his companionship had worn off. I drank a cup of coffee ungraciously and told him I didn’t have time to eat. When he started fussing over me I lost my temper and snapped at him.

A hurt look came into his faded brown eyes. He collected the dog with quiet dignity and left. I immediately felt ashamed of myself and ran after him. He’d already reached the lobby, though, and I didn’t have my keys with me. I headed back up the stairs.

While I was gathering my keys and my handbag, sticking the Smith & Wesson into my jeans, the uniformed man arrived to take me down to the lineup. I carefully locked the dead bolt behind me—some days I don’t bother with it-and ran down the stairs. Soonest started, soonest ended, or whatever it was Lady Macbeth said.

The uniformed man turned out to be a woman, Patrol Officer Mary Louise Neely. She was quiet and serious, holding herself ramrod straight in her fiercely pressed navy serge, calling me “ma’am” in a way that made me acutely aware of the twelve or more years between us. She opened the door for me with military crispness and ushered me down the walk to the waiting patrol car.

Mr. Contreras was out in front with Peppy. I wanted to make some gesture of reconciliation, but Officer Neely’s stern presence robbed me of any words. I held out a hand, but he nodded stiffly to me, calling the dog sharply as she headed down the walk behind me.

I tried asking the patrolwoman insightful questions about her work and whether the Cubs or the Sox could worsen their abysmal performance of last season. She snubbed me completely, though, keeping her stem gaze on malefactors on Lake Shore Drive, murmuring periodically into her lapel transmitter.

We covered the six miles to the Central District at a good clip. She pulled smartly into the police lot about fifteen minutes after leaving my apartment. Okay, it was Saturday, not much traffic, but it was still an impressive performance.

Neely whisked me through the labyrinth of the old building, exchanging unsmiling greetings with fellow officers, and brought me to an observation room. Bobby was there, with Sergeant McGonnigal and Detective Finchley. Neely saluted them so sharply, I thought she might keel over backward.

“Thanks, Officer.” Bobby dismissed her genially. “We’ll carry on from here.”

I found my palms sweating slightly, my heart beating a little faster. I didn’t want to see the men who’d bundled me into that blanket on Wednesday. That was why I’d fled my place last night. They had me well and truly spooked. And now I was to perform like an obedient dog under the watchful eyes of the police?

“You got names on the two you picked up?” I asked, keeping my tone cool, trying to shade it with a little arrogance.

“Yeah,” Bobby grunted. “Joe Jones and Fred Smith. They’re almost as funny to deal with as you are. And yes, we’ve requested a print check, but these things never happen as fast as you hope they will. We can make a case on the loitering in a private building and carrying concealed unregistered weapons. But you know and I know they’ll be on the street Monday unless we can back it up with attempted murder. So you’re to tell me if they’re your pals who sent you swimming on Wednesday.”

He nodded to Finchley, a black plainclothesman I’d known when he started on patrol. The detective went to a door across the room and gave orders to unseen people beyond to start the lineup.

Eyewitness identification is not the great revelation they make of it in courtroom dramas. Under stress the memory plays tricks on you—you’re sure you saw a tall black man in blue jeans and it was really a fat white man in a business suit. Stuff like that. Probably a third of my presentations as a public defender had been based on reciting remarkable instances of mistaken identity. On the other hand, stress can bum some indelible memories—a gesture, a birthmark—that come back when you see the person again. It never hurts to try.

Keeping my hands in my pockets so as to hide their tremor, I walked with Bobby to the one-way observation window. McGonnigal turned out the lights on our side and the little room beyond sprang into relief

“We’ve got two sets for you,” Bobby murmured in my ear. “You know the routine—take your time, ask for any of them to turn around or whatever.”

Six men walked in with self-conscious pugnacity. They all looked alike to me—white, burly, somewhere around forty. I tried to imagine them with black hoods, the executioner of my nightmare this morning.

“Ask them to talk,” I said abruptly. “Ask them to say ‘Just tell us the time, girlie’ and then ‘Dump her here, Troy. X marks the spot.’”

Finchley conveyed the request to the unseen officers running the show. One by one the men obediently mumbled their lines. I kept watching the second guy from the left. He had a kind of secretive smile—he knew they’d never make a serious charge stick. His eyes. Could I remember the eyes of the man who’d come up to me at the edge of the lagoon? Cold, flat, calculating his words to find my weaknesses.

But when this man spoke I didn’t recognize the voice. It was husky, with the twang of the South Side, not the emotionless tones I remembered.

I shook my head. “I think it’s the second guy from the left. But I don’t recognize the voice and I can’t be absolutely certain.”

Bobby nodded fractionally and Finchley gave orders to dismiss the lineup.

“Well?” I demanded. “Is he the one?”

The lieutenant smiled reluctantly. “I thought it was a long shot, but he’s the guy we picked up outside your front door last night. I don’t know if your ID is strong enough for the state’s attorney. But maybe we can find out who puts up bond for him.”

They brought in the second lineup, a parade of black men. I’d seen only one of my attackers close up. Even though I presumed Troy was one of the men in front of me, I couldn’t pick him out, even with a voice check.

Bobby was in high good humor with my ID of the first man. He ran me genially through the paperwork and got Officer Neely to take me home, sending me off with a pat on the arm and a promise of telling me when the first court date would be.

My own mood wasn’t nearly as pleasant. When Neely had dropped me at my apartment I went up to change into running shoes. I wasn’t up for a run yet, but I needed a long walk to clear my brain before seeing little Caroline this afternoon.

First, though, I had to mend a few fences. Mr. Contreras received me coolly, trying to mask his hurt feelings under a veneer of formality. But subtlety wasn’t really part of his makeup. He unbent after a few minutes, told me he would never come up to my apartment again without phoning first, and fried up some eggs and bacon for lunch. I sat talking with him afterward, curbing my impatience at the long flow of irrelevant reminiscence. Anyway, the longer he talked the longer I could put off facing a tougher conversation. At two, though, I figured I’d avoided Lotty long enough and set off for Sheffield.

Lotty wasn’t as easy to kiss and make up with. She was home in between her morning clinic hours and an afternoon concert with Max. We talked in the kitchen while she whipped tiny stitches into the hem of a black skirt. At least she didn’t slam the door on me.

“I don’t know how many times I have patched you up in the last ten years, Victoria. Many. And almost every time a life-threatening situation. Why do you value yourself so little?”

I stared at the floor. “I don’t want anyone solving my problems for me.”

“But you came here last night. You involved me in your problems, and then you disappeared without a word. That isn’t independence—that is thoughtless cruelty. You must make up your mind about what you want with me. If it is just to be your doctor—the person who patches you up when you’ve decided to run your head in front of a bullet—fine. We will go to such cold encounters. But if you want to be friends, you cannot behave with such careless disregard for my feelings for you. Can you understand that?”

I rubbed my head tiredly. Finally I looked at her. “Lotty, I’m scared. I’ve never been this frightened, not since the day my dad told me Gabriella was dying and nothing could be done for her. I knew then that it was a terrible mistake to depend on someone else to solve my problems for me. Now I seem to be too terrorized to solve them for myself and I’m thrashing around. But when I ask for help it just drives me wild. I know it’s hard on you. I’m sorry for that. But I can’t get enough distance right now to do anything about it.”

Lotty finished pulling the thread through her hem and put the skirt down. She gave a wry little smile. “Yes. It is not an easy thing to lose one’s mother, is it? Could we make a little compromise, my dear? I won’t demand of you responses you can’t make. But when you find yourself in this state, will you tell me, so that I am not making myself so angry with you?”

I nodded a few times, my throat too tight for me to speak. She came over to me and held me close to her. “You are the daughter of my heart, Victoria. I know it’s not the same as having Gabriella, but the love is there.”

I smiled shakily. “In your fierceness you’re two of a kind.”

After that I told her about the notebooks I’d left behind. She promised to look at them on Sunday, to see if she could make anything of them.

“And now I must dress, my dear. But why not come spend the night here? Maybe we’ll both feel a little better.”