Burn Marks (19 page)

He was near roe someplace, I knew that, but I couldn’t quite find him. On and on I skated, calling his name, opening every door but not seeing him. I got to a window and stared through it at a metal platform. I thought Boom-Boom was behind me, but when I turned he was gone. When I looked back at the window all I found was my own reflection. Beyond the glass lay a fire escape.

I struggled with the window but it was painted shut, I looked around the room for a tool, but it was completely bare. I lifted my trembling right leg and kicked as hard as I could. The ancient glass shivered and cracked, I kicked again and the whole bottom pane gave way.

I looked down. Below me the building was burning steadily and fire was licking upward. We’d come up three stories and we’d better get back down them fast. The fire escape was at the back. Whatever firepower belonged to the distant engines was around the other side of the building.

I lurched back down the miles of corridors I’d traveled until I came to Elena, still snorting away under the dumbwaiter. I pulled her pallet from the box and got her settled on it again. At some point my body must surely give out, no longer respond to the senseless commands of an imperial brain. I flogged myself onward, a good warhorse, old and near collapse but responding to one last call to arms.

Back at the fire escape I wrapped my sweatshirt around my right arm and knocked out the remaining shards. Then I slid Elena to the floor, moved her pallet to the fire escape, and lifted her again, my hamstrings and back shrieking in dismay, and laid her out on the mattress.

“You’ll have to wait here for me, Auntie. I’ll be back, just breathe deeply and don’t be afraid. I’ve got to get help, I can’t carry you on my own.”

Slowly, each leg weighing a thousand pounds, I dragged myself down the stairs, down through the cloud of smoke, past the point of feeling, to the place where breath and sight were collapsed into one solid pinpoint of agony, finding the end of the escape, swinging down, feeling the bottom flight fall loose and my feet dragging on the ground.

I rolled through the smoke and staggered around the side of the building. A multitude was there. Firemen, onlookers, cops, and a man in uniform who came to me and told me sternly the building was dangerous, no one was allowed beyond the police barricades.

“My aunt,” I gasped. “She’s up on the fire escape around the side. We were in the basement when the fire started. You’ve got to get her.”

He didn’t understand me and I turned to a fireman helping guide a heavy hose. I tugged on his sleeve until he turned in annoyance. I pointed and gasped until someone understood and a little troop jogged off into the smoke.

26

Doctor’s Orders

“What are you doing with your clothes on?” Lotty Herschel was sharp to the point of unfriendliness.

“I’m going home.” Getting dressed with both hands taped in gauze had been a chore. “You know I hate hospitals— it’s where they send people to die.”

“Someone should have burned those,” Lotty said coldly. “They smell so bad, I can hardly stand to be in the same room with you.”

“It’s the blood and the smoke,” I explained. “And I guess stale sweat—I worked up a pretty good meltdown hoisting myself up those ropes.”

Lotty’s nostrils curled in distaste. “All the more reason to remove them. Dr. Homerin cannot possibly examine you with that stench coming from you.”

I’d noticed a slender middle-aged man standing patiently behind Lotty and assumed he was another resident seeking education at my feet. At my head, actually.

“I don’t need another goddamn examination. Twenty-four hours here and I feel like a pot roast every housewife in Chicago has taken a poke at.”

“Mez Homerin is a neurologist. You got a nasty blow to the head. I want to make sure that that thick Polish skull of yours hasn’t taken any irremediable harm.”

“I’m fine,” I said fiercely. “I don’t have double vision, I can tie my shoes with my eyes closed, even with these baseball mitts covering my fingers, and if he sticks pins in my feet, I’ll know about it.”

Lotty came over to stand next to me, her black eyes blazing. “Victoria, I don’t even know why I bother. This is the third time you’ve been hit hard enough to knock you out. I don’t wish to spend my old age treating you for Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s—which is exactly where you’re heading with your know-it-all reckless attitude. If you don’t get your clothes back off this minute—this instant—you may be sure of one thing—I will never treat you again. Do you understand?”

Her anger was so intense it made my knees wobble. I sat back on the bed. I was pretty angry myself, enough that my bead started pounding savagely as I spoke.

“Did I send for you? This is Michael Reese, not Beth Israel-you came barging in without so much as a by-your-leave, at least not a by-my-leave. Someone tried to murder both ray aunt and me. Getting out of that building was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life and you scream at me about my clothes and Alzheimer’s disease. It that’s your attitude, leave with my blessing—I don’t need your kind of medical care.”

Dr. Homerin coughed. “Miss Warshawski. I can understand your being upset—it’s a natural side effect of concussion and the other experiences you went through last night. But as long as I’m here, I think I might as well examine you. And it would be easier to do if you could take your clothes off and put on your hospital gown.”

I glowered at him. He turned to Lotty and said apologetically, “Dr. Herschel?”

“Oh, very well,” she snapped. She whirled on her heel with the precision of a figure skater and swept out of the room.

Dr. Homerin pulled the curtain around my bed. “I’ll wait out here—give me a call when you’re ready.”

I could go ahead and leave, but it would make me feel incredibly stupid. Angrily I kicked my running shoes off. With thick clumsy fingers I unfastened the buttons of my shirt and unzipped my jeans. I took as much time as I possibly could before sullenly calling out that I was ready.

Dr. Homerin sat on the chair next to the bed. “Tell me a little about your injury—what happened?”

“I was hit on the head,” I muttered churlishly.

He refused to acknowledge my ill humor. “Do you know who hit you or what was used?”

I shook my head and saw black circles swirl around. “No. He was hiding in the room. I was looking at my aunt, who was drunk.” I frowned. “No. I thought she was drunk, but it turned out she had been coshed. That’s right, I realized someone had hit her and that he might still be there and as I was jumping up to protect myself I got hit from behind.”

He nodded, like a professor at a promising pupil. “It’s very good that you have so much recall—very often the memory immediately before such an incident is blocked out by what we call protective amnesia.”

I rubbed the tender spot on the back of my head. “What I don’t remember is what happened afterwards. I know I was climbing a rope in an elevator shaft but I can’t remember how I got Elena up with me. And then we came out. The fire fighters had to bring my aunt, but I think I got out on my own….”

My voice trailed off as I tried to focus the blur of memory. Mallory had shown up along with Furey when I was in the emergency room, but someone had been in the crowd around the fire who didn’t belong there. I remembered a faint inflection of surprise mixed in with a sense of my imminent death as the paramedics carried me through the barricades. The face swam on the edge of my consciousness. Tears of frustration pricked my eyelids when my aching head refused to concentrate.

“I can’t remember,” I said helplessly.

“Do you have any idea of why this happened?”

His gray eves looked harmlessly genial behind their thick lenses but I stiffened at once. “Did Bobby—Lieutenant Mallory—tell you to ask that?”

There’d been quite a scene in the emergency room, with Bobby roaring at me like a bull elephant on a rampage. Dominic Assuevo and Roland Montgomery from the Bomb and Arson Squad had joined him, but it was only because I kept passing out that the resident on call finally threw them out of the examining area.

Homerin shook his head. “The police haven’t spoken to me at all. I’m just checking your ability to answer logical questions.”

In the intervals between sleeping and tossing in pain I’d been testing that skill myself, without any happy answer. Maybe someone arriving to torch the building had seen Elena come out. He followed her, heard her phone me, then when she went back inside he knocked her out and waited to get me, too, before setting the place on fire. It could have happened that way, but it seemed awfully elaborate: Why not just torch the place while she was out of the way? Maybe she’d seen him clearly enough to recognize him again, so he felt she had to die. But then why go for me too? My head was starting to disintegrate. I couldn’t figure it all out. I wanted to go home and I was starting to feel too helpless even to get out of bed again.

Seeing my fatigue and frustration, Homerin switched to a general interrogation—did I know who the President was, the mayor, people like that? I wished I didn’t but rattled off the names. After that we went through the pins-in-the-feet routine and he banged on my knees and elbows and felt my head—all the usual medical stuff that lets the doctor know all your pieces are still attached to your aching body.

When he finished looking at my eyes and rotating my head around a few times, he sat back in the visitor’s chair. “I know you want to leave, Miss Warshawski, but it would be better if you stayed another day.”

“I don’t want to.” I was close to breaking down and sobbing.

“You live alone, don’t you? I just don’t think you’re up to looking after yourself right now. There’s nothing wrong with you that I can see, barring the side effects of concussion. They did a CAT scan of your head in the emergency room Wednesday morning and nothing alarming showed up. But you’ll manage better if you let us look after you another day.”

“I hate being looked after, I can’t stand it.” I didn’t want to be like Tony, reduced to such helplessness he couldn’t even breathe on his own at the end. The sound of his harsh wheezing breathing cut through my brain and against my will I found myself crying.

Homerin waited patiently for me to dry my eyes and blow my nose. He asked if there was something specific I wanted to talk about, but the memories of my dying parents were too painful to mention to a stranger.

Instead I blurted out, “Is Lotty right? Am I going to get Alzheimer’s disease?”

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “She’s worried about you-that’s why she dragged me down here and got the house staff to agree to let me see you. I’m not a prophet, but three blows in seven years—it’s more than you need, but you’re not taking the regular pounding that a boxer does. I’d worry more about feeling better now. And give me a call if you have any unusual symptoms.”

He fished a card from his wallet and handed it to me: Mez Homerin, boy neurologist, with an address on north Michigan and another in Edgewater. “What kind of symptoms?” I asked suspiciously.

“Oh, blurred vision, trouble with your memory, any tingling in your fingers or toes. Don’t lie around worrying about them—I’ll be startled if you have any. Concentrate on getting your strength back. But please call me if you want to talk about any concerns.”

He put a gentle stress on “any” and I stupidly felt like crying again. “There is my aunt,” I said as assertively as I could. “Do you know how she’s doing?”

“Your aunt? Oh, the woman you rescued…. She’d been hit on the head, right? Do you know if she’s here?”

I didn’t, but he said he’d find out and get a progress report for me. I’d been planning on getting up and dressing as soon as he left, but my crying bout had put the finishing touches to my fatigue. I was asleep almost before his hospital coat disappeared behind the curtain.

27

We Serve and Protect

It was Saturday before the pounding in my head receded completely. I’d gone home on Friday, admitting— only to myself—that Mez Homerin had been right: I was better off for the extra day of people waiting on me. As it was, Friday involved so many difficult encounters that by the time I went to bed I was wishing I’d stayed in the hospital. The worst was with the police—Homerin had shielded me from Roland Montgomery of the Bomb and Arson Squad.

Of course the cops were most anxious to speak with me. Montgomery had been in the emergency room with Mallory and Furey early Wednesday morning and he’d sent a subordinate to Reese both Wednesday and Thursday. Since I’d slept through most of Wednesday I only learned about the subordinate’s visit on Thursday. When Mez left me he encountered the detective in the hall. Their altercation led to a big red notice on my chart proclaiming “No visitors” and a lot of excitement among the orderlies and nurses who reported the episode to me in dramatic detail later.

I took a cab from the hospital to my car, which started with a reproachful groan that it kept up all the way to my apartment. Mr. Contreras saw me pull up a bit after noon. While I was sponging myself off as best I could without soaking my gauze mitts, he came to the door laden down with food.

“You shoulda let me know when you was coming home, doll. I could’ve come and got you-you shouldn’t be driving with your hands all wrapped up like that.”

“I just wanted to be by myself for a while. In the hospital you’re a twenty-four-hour-a-day freak show for every medical student in the city.”

“You shouldn’t try to do so much on your own, cookie. No shame in asking for help every now and then. And I know darn well you wouldn’t eat nothing this afternoon if I didn’t bring it to you, so you want to be alone, you say the word and the princess here and I’ll go, but not till we see you eat something.”

I gave up trying to hint him away, but made him wait in the living room while I finished washing and changing. Peppy, feeling no inhibitions, stayed next to me until I was done.

Lotty’d been right about one thing—my clothes stank so badly I could scarcely stand being in the same room with them, let alone the same body. I didn’t even want to wash them. Although it was my newest pair of jeans I stuffed them into a bag and put it outside my back door to cart down to the garbage.

Finally clean from my bra to my socks, I joined the old man. He’d prepared a special feast, much more food than I could deal with in my sickly state, but he was miffed that he’d had to hear all my news secondhand.

“If you was going off into danger like that, you might of notified me,” he grumbled. “‘Stead the first thing I know about it is the morning paper. That oversize teenager Ryerson putting in a story about ‘Chicago’s most troublesome private eye’ and I start reading and of course there you are, rescuing bodies from burning buildings, hit on the head, and not even a phone call to me from the hospital. I says to the princess here, I says, ‘You could be an orphan and you’d be the last to know.’”

Peppy thumped her tail to corroborate his story. Her liquid amber eyes gazed at me with unwavering intensity as I slowly chewed a piece of steak.

“Ever since my aunt came prancing into my life two weeks ago you’ve been riding me for getting you up in the middle of the night. I figured if I woke you up to tell you where I was going, I’d just get another lecture.”

“That’s not fair.” He was hurt and astonished that I could think such a thing. On top of that he was pretty darned tired of me leaving him standing on the sidelines while I went out and had all kinds of fabulous life-threatening adventures.

“It’s not the first time, doll. You forget how I helped you and Dr. Lotty out that time her clinic was attacked. You don’t remember how I took on them guys trying to break into your place. I may be seventy-seven but I’m in good shape, I’m still a good man in a fight.”

It was precisely because I had remembered his assistance that I tried never to involve him in the livelier aspects of my work. If I told him that, though, it would be just too painful for him. I skated around it, saying Elena was so prone to drunken fables, I hadn’t taken her claims of endangerment seriously. By the time I finished he was nodding portentously.

“I know just what you mean, doll. I used to work with a guy like that. Of course he was a danger to the whole shop, showing up drunk most days, and the ones he arrived sober he didn’t stay like that past lunchtime. There was the day he didn’t turn off the surface grinder, and Jake—you remember Jake—lost most of the little finger on his left hand, but Crenshaw—Crenshaw was the drunk— he claimed it was me using the machine when I wasn’t supposed to …”

His good humor restored, Mr. Contreras went on in this vein at some length. The happy drone of his voice, the weight of the meat in my stomach, the warm pleasure I felt at being back in my own home, sent me drowsing in my armchair. I held my hand down and let the dog lick my fingers while I nodded sleepily in tune to the old man’s speech.

The shrill burr of the phone startled me awake. I stretched an arm out to the piano and picked up the receiver.

“Tried to write your obit for you, Warshawski, but you made it through one more time. How many lives you got left, anyway? Three?”

It was Murray, with more vibrant energy than my head could handle. “I hear you called me the most troublesome detective in Chicago.”

“Private eye,” he corrected. “Nothing libelous in that—I checked with the legal department. You can sue me only if it’s not true. What I want to know is, who did it? Did it come out of Roz Fuentes’s camp or your dead junkie, Cerise?”

“Ask the cops—the city pays them to investigate arson and attempted murder.”

“And you’re just going to stay home and watch TV while they sort it out?” He guffawed. “Between us ace investigators, what were you doing down there?”

Black spots were starting to dance in front of me from the resonance of his voice. I moved the earpiece away from my head. “Performing feats of derring-do. I understand it was in all the papers.”

“C’mon, Warshawski,” he said, trying to wheedle. “I do lots of stuff for you. Just a few little words.”

He was right—if I wanted help from him, I had to throw him the occasional quote. I told him everything from the moment Elena called me to my drop from the fire escape.

“Now it’s your turn—what was the fire department doing there so pat?”

Mr. Contreras looked at me as intently as the dog, miffed I was telling my tale to Murray but wanting all the juice. I took the phone over to the couch where I’d dumped my bag and pulled out my memo pad. “Anonymous phone call,” I scribbled on it for Mr. Contreras as Murray boomed the news at me. Someone had called 911 from a pay phone at the corner of Cermak and Michigan. The police didn’t have a clue as to who phoned, except for its having been a man.

“So you think it was someone after your aunt?” Murray asked. “How is she, by the way?”

“I don’t think anything right now. My head hurts like all the cement trucks on the Ryan just ran over it. And my aunt, who has the system of a goat, sat up and took nourishment yesterday. She refused to talk to me, though, when I started asking her pointed questions, and is acting sick enough that the docs are stonewalling the cops for her. You can call Reese and see if the medicine men will let her talk to you, but don’t set your hopes too high. Now you know everything I do. I’m going to bed. Good-bye.”

I hung up before he could say anything else and ignored the phone when it started ringing again. Mr. Contreras solicitously offered to fix me up with pillows and a blanket on the couch, to leave me the dog, to make me tea, to do a thousand things that made the black spots grow into giant spirals.

“I need to be alone in my own bed. I can’t take any more people now. I know you mean well, I know you’re helping like mad, but I’m going to faint or scream or both if you don’t take the dog and leave.”

He was a little hurt but he’d seen concussion cases before, he knew it took time before you really felt yourself, and in the meantime the smallest things got you down—sure, doll, sure, he’d leave me alone, sleep was the best thing for me right now. He gathered up the dishes, clicking over the small amount of steak I’d eaten—gotta get your strength back up, doll, you look like you lost ten pounds the last few days—finally collecting the dog and heading down the stairs. I locked the triple dead bolts and stumbled to my bedroom.

The spirals receded back to spots as I thrashed around in an uneasy doze. The image of Elena, her face sunk into deep canyons, drips in her malnourished arms, kept swarming into my half sleep. She was a pain in the ass but someone had tried to kill her; I couldn’t just abandon her at this point.

I’d tried talking to her before I left this morning but she’d pretended to sleep. “It’s no good playing possum, Auntie—you’re going to have to talk to me sometime,” I’d warned her.

Mez Homerin interrupted my lecture to her, taking me by the arm and hustling me from the room.

“She’s had a severe shock to a system that wasn’t in the best shape to begin with. She needs to be completely free from any kind of stress or harassment if she’s to recover. I’ve forbidden the police to question her. Do you want me to bar you from the room too? She needs your support, not your abuse.”

“Bar me from her life,” I’d snapped at him. “Keep her from calling to demand that I help her one last time— write it on her hospital forms. Make sure she doesn’t put my address in as her own or list me as the guarantor of her bill. Do all those things and you can keep me out of her room with all the righteousness you want.”

Homerin looked at me steadily during my outburst and then said in a gentle voice that he thought I ought to consider bringing her home to convalesce when she was a little stronger. That was when I’d left the hospital—before I gave in to my urge to take his stethoscope and strangle him with it.

Now, though, tossing restlessly, I was tormented wondering how much I owed my aunt. Would my uncle Peter thrash in guilt for saying no? Of course not. I hadn’t even called to ask him—my tired brain wasn’t up to rebutting his smugness. Did I have a duty to Elena that overrode all considerations of myself, my work, my own longing for wholeness?

I’d held glasses of water for Gabriella when her arms were too weak to lift them herself, emptied wheelchair pots for Tony when he could no longer move from chair to toilet. I’ve done enough, I kept repeating, I’ve done enough. But I couldn’t quite convince myself.

Such unquiet sleep as I achieved was broken up for good at four when the police came, represented by Roland Montgomery and Terry Finchley. Montgomery kept a finger on the bell until I couldn’t ignore it, and then said through the intercom that if I didn’t let them up to talk, they’d get a warrant and take me downtown. It was Montgomery who did all the bullying. Terry Finchley, sent by Bobby to represent Violent Crimes, was clearly unhappy with Montgomery’s approach but was too junior to protest very forcefully.

I shuffled into the living room with a blanket wrapped around me. I’d been sweating heavily in my uneasy dozing and felt a chill run through me when I got out of bed. The black spots had gone away but my head was thick, as though someone had stuffed it with wool. I sat on the couch with my legs curled up underneath me.

“Let’s have the whole story, Warshawski. What were you doing in that building? How did it come to catch fire while you were there?”

“The force of my fiery personality,” I mumbled, my tongue thick.

“What was that?” Montgomery demanded angrily. Finchley shook his head slightly, trying to warn me without the arson expert seeing.

“I called Furey,” I said, suddenly remembering. “He wanted to know where my aunt was and I left a message with the night man saying where I was going. Did he get it? Is that why he and Bobby were at the fire?”

“I’m asking the questions,” Montgomery snapped. “Why did you call the station?”

“Get the chip off your shoulder, Lieutenant, and listen to me. I just explained why I called the station. Did Detective Furey get my message?”

Finchley spoke swiftly, before Montgomery could bellow at me. “Furey was at a poker game; he left his beeper in his coat pocket and didn’t get the message until he went over to get a cigar and found the thing vibrating away. Then he called the station, got your message, and went roaring down to the Near South Side. By that time, though, someone had already reported the fire. Lieutenant Mallory gave the night operator a pretty good going-over for not notifying someone else in the unit, but you hadn’t said anything about an emergency.”

“So Furey and Bobby stormed the hospital. How come you’re here now?”

“Miss Warshawski,” Montgomery interrupted frostily, “Detective Finchley is here to help with an investigation. Why the department sent him is none of your business.”

I wanted to make a grandiose statement about how the police worked for the citizens and how I was one, and therefore one of Montgomery’s bosses, but I felt too sick to fight. I just wrapped the blanket closer about me and continued to shiver. And when Montgomery asked me I went back through all the tired old details. About Elena disappearing, about Furey coming around hunting for her, her early morning phone call, and on and on.

“So why did someone want to leave the two of you there to die?” Montgomery asked.

“You’re the bomb-and-arson whiz, Lieutenant. You tell me. All I know is, she called up scared, I found her on a pallet in the basement barely breathing, got knocked out myself, and am lucky to be here enjoying this scintillating conversation with some shred of my wits intact.”

Finchley started a sentence, then changed his mind and made an industrious note in his pocket diary. In the dim lamplight his closely cut hair merged with the black smoothness of his face.

Montgomery scowled at me but only said, “The Prairie Shores Hotel is across the street from that fire you were so excited about last week.”

I gave the thread of a smile. “Amazing.”

“I’m wondering if you set the fire yourself, to try to get the department to respond to your demands for an investigation into the Indiana Arms.”