Burn Marks (22 page)

32

A Leap in the Dark

I didn’t feel like an overstuffed goose anymore, that was one good thing. At the same time, my bravado had cost me the dressing to my left hand. I tested it gingerly against the steering wheel. The blisters rolled and squished a bit.

I got out and opened the trunk and pulled out the towel I’d stuck in my equipment belt. I wrapped it around my left hand, using my teeth to hold it in place while I tucked the ends inside. It made a slippery glove, but I could manage driving now.

As I drove across Touhy to the Edens, I was so tired and depressed that I wondered if I should abandon my project at Alma Mejicana. Often when I feel like quitting I hear my mother’s voice in my head, exhorting me. Her fierce energy was tireless—the worst thing I could ever do in her eyes was to give up. Tonight, though, I heard no echoes in my head. I was alone in the dark city with my sore palms and bruised shoulders.

If you’re going to sink into self-pity, go home to bed, I scolded myself. Otherwise, your mission is bound to fail. For acrobatic derring-do you need to be at the peak of self-confidence, not down in a well.

I didn’t want to dwell on the scene in Seligman’s musty kitchen, but I forced myself at least to think about what he’d told me. Rita Donnelly had been sitting on something. I should have probed her harder about her daughters at the time, but it had seemed so purely personal. If it wasn’t their paternity she’d been hiding, what was it about them she didn’t want people to know?

The light at McCormick stayed red so long I was only roused from my musings by the violent honking behind me. Startled, I leapt forward through the intersection, barely clearing it on the yellow and getting a finger from an irate driver accelerating past me.

Going sixty on the Edens, I found managing the steering so difficult with my towel-wrapped hand that I couldn’t think about anything except the car and the traffic. I moved into the right-hand lane and slowed to fifty. As I maneuvered past the construction zone at Roosevelt, the damned engine started grinding again. I had to slow to forty before the noise subsided.

I drove straight to Ashland without mishap and once more circled the Alma Mejicana building through the alley. No lights showed. This time I parked on Forty-fifth near the mouth of the alley in case I needed to get to my car quickly.

I tied Eileen’s scarf around my head and pulled the equipment belt from the trunk to strap around my waist. With the weight I’d lost recently it hung a little low; the flashlight and hammer banged unpleasantly into my thighs when I walked. I hugged the footstool close to my chest. It was an unpleasant sign of my weakened state that a weight I would normally find negligible slowed me down tonight.

Even though the night air was pleasantly cool the streets were empty. Most of the buildings on the east side of the alley were commercial; the residents behind the fence on the west side probably hung out on the street behind.

It was just after nine-thirty when I reached the telephone pole down the alley from Alma Mejicana. I looked up at it dubiously in the starlight. Behind their wrappings my palms tingled. I undid the towel on my left hand and stuck it in my waistband at the small of my back. On the footstool my outstretched fingertips were just shy of the first set of spikes. I planted my feet firmly on the stool, bent my knees, and jumped.

The first time I was too scared about slicing open my left palm and didn’t hang on. The clatter I made knocking the footstool across the alley woke the neighborhood dogs. I lay in the shadow of the fence, rubbing my thigh where the hammer had dug in when I crashed, waiting for angry householders to appear.

When no one came I picked up the rolling stair and carried it back to the pole. The dogs were thoroughly roused now; I could hear various shouts at them to shut up. Their unified chorus apparently made the owners think they were barking at each other.

Back on top of my stool I took some diaphragm breaths, leaning my head against the pole. The pole is an extension of my arms. It welcomes me as a sister. It will not fight me as an intruder.

I repeated this litany a few times, bent my knees, and jumped without waiting to think it out. This time I grabbed hold of the spikes and wrapped my thighs around the pole, ignoring the sharp bite of the hammer and the twinge in my shoulder blades. I moved fast, still not thinking about my hands, shinnying up the rough wood until I could reach the second row of spikes and hoist myself up standing.

Once I’d done that it was easy to climb the remaining ten feet so I was level with the building top. When I stepped onto the roof I felt exhilarated with my achievement, so much so that pain and fatigue lay shielded behind a wall in my head. I ran lightly across the rooftop, judged the three-foot gap, and jumped it easily. The next break was wider, and upward, but confidence was now carrying me in an easy tide. I turned off my mind and made the jump, my left foot scraping the side of the wall but the right landing clear on the asphalt.

I went to the edge facing the alley and cautiously shone my flash. My garage marker lay in front of the next building; Alma Mejicana was the one beyond that. The jump this time was the five-footer, but downward. The building where I landed was close enough to my target that they almost shared a common wall.

I stepped across and explored the surface. Sure enough, a trapdoor lay behind the vent pipes. I pried at it gently with the claw end of the hammer. As I’d hoped, they didn’t bother locking it; it came up heavily, I laid my towel on the asphalt behind it and hoisted it slowly open, my shoulders sending out little white-hot sparks of pain that I tried to ignore. I had to strain to get the door to a balance point and then drop it softly on the towel beneath.

I lay down next to it, catching my breath and making sure no alarms sounded. The moon was in its dark phase. The stars were chips of cold glass in the black sky. Despite my exertions and my long underwear, I shivered.

Before the night demons could approach me I sat up and shone my flashlight into the building. Opening the trap had released a set of hanging stairs. I climbed softly down in my black high-tops. I was in a small attic where the heating and cooling apparatus was set up. Some rough stairs, wide enough to handle equipment, led to the main part of the building.

Even though the streets were empty I didn’t want to risk rousing someone by turning on the building lights. Stuffing the scarf in my back pocket I started exploring the interior. A frugal use of my flashlight showed that the two floors of the building had been divided into a series of offices. For the most part they were bare of furniture. One was set up with a metal desk and an Apollo computer.

On the ground floor Schmidt and Martinez had separate offices equipped with a certain degree of luxury. Schmidt liked the sleek Milan style while Martinez favored a heavier baroque Spanish look. Because the ground-floor rooms were windowless, I could turn on their office lights and explore to my heart’s content.

I whistled a little under my breath as I opened and shut desk drawers and filing cabinets. I didn’t have time to go through all their papers. I just wanted some obvious clue left out on a desktop, something like “Kill V. I. Warshawski and her aunt Elena tonight by torching the Prairie Shores Hotel.”

Someplace they should have a big chart showing all of Alma Mejicana’s projects. Even after going through the premises twice I didn’t find any obvious sign of work in progress. It could be that it was all stored on the Apollo, but that meant any time someone wanted to check their commitments to see if they could bid on a new job, they’d have to crank up the machine and get a printout.

Maybe they were such a small operation they could work on only one project at a time. If that was so, how had they been able to get part of the Ryan contract? Even if they were leasing equipment from Wunsch and Grasso, they couldn’t get involved in projects that size without substantial resources.

I made a face and started hunting for ledgers. Maybe all the bookkeeping was done on the computer upstairs, but they still had to have some kind of hard copy of their transactions. Anyway, I didn’t believe they used that machine: the room it was in was completely empty except for the metal desk it sat on—it held none of the papers and manuals you expect to find around a machine in active use.

It was midnight when I finally located the books in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. By then my eyelids had started to swell with fatigue. One thing I hadn’t thought to bring was a flask of coffee, but I found an electric machine and a can of Mexican coffee in the storeroom and recklessly helped myself to a pot. I carried the ledgers into Luis’s office and sat at his glossy black desk with my coffee. It was the heat more than the caffeine that kept me going.

The books were perfectly straightforward. Payments were received from various project owners, such as the U.S. government in the case of the Dan Ryan, and payments were made for heat, cement, and other necessities of contracting life. But the biggest consistent payees were not suppliers. They were Wunsch and Grasso and Farm-works, Inc.

I shut my swollen eyes, trying to remember why I knew that name. When I woke up it was three o’clock. My neck was stiff from where I’d slumped over in Luis’s chair and my heart raced uncomfortably—I could have slept until morning and been surprised in here by the Alma Mejicana employees.

When I glanced back down at the ledgers, though, I remembered Farmworks, Inc. perfectly—-that was the bizarre name I’d seen on the time sheets at the Rapelec site the night Cerise was found dead there. I rifled through Luis’s desk drawers for a pad of paper. Not finding any, I ripped a blank sheet from the back of the ledger and jotted some of the numbers down. I had an inkling of what they meant, but with morning near I didn’t have time to think, just to copy and get going.

I put the ledgers back in the drawer where I’d found them, cleaned the coffeepot, and tiptoed back upstairs to shut the trapdoor to the roof, pulling my towel in first. The front door could be unlocked from the inside. I wouldn’t be able to lock it again, but they would just think they’d forgotten to shut it properly on Friday night. Even if they suspected a break-in, I hadn’t left any personal signs behind. Anyway, I was far too beat to go back the way I’d come.

I undid the bolts and stepped out onto Ashland. I was about ten feet from the door when the alarms went. I’d been going to circle through the alley for my footstool, but this seemed like a good time to buy a new one. I moved up the street at a brisk walk—never let anyone see you running when an alarm sounds.

A car heading up Ashland to Forty-fifth slowed. I fished in my back pocket for the scarf—I should have put it on before I left the building. It wasn’t there. I dug in my jacket pockets, my waistband, my belt, but somewhere in the recesses of Alma Mejicana I’d lost it.

My hands trembled and my legs turned rubbery. I made myself walk naturally. If the police or Luis Schmidt found it, who was going to know it was mine? Bobby Mallory probably didn’t keep track of the presents his wife handed out and it was most unlikely he’d ever be shown this evidence.

Reciting this high-level logic didn’t calm me, but it occupied enough of the front of my mind to keep me from total panic. It helped that the passing driver, while still going slowly, didn’t stop. For all I knew he wasn’t concerned about the alarm but was debating whether to try to assault a woman carrying as much weaponry as I had strapped to me. I kept facing straight ahead, trying to make him invisible. When I turned left at the corner he continued north.

My control broke; I jogged the remaining half block to my car and headed for the Ryan without waiting to see if anyone responded to the alarm.

33

Dressing for Work

“For she’s a jolly good sister, Though her hands are a giant blister,” I sang in the bath. It was eleven Monday morning; I had risen from a sleep as sound as if I were one of the just, instead of a moderately successful burglar.

The morning papers contained no news of my break-in. Of course they’d probably been at the printer as I was driving home, but I didn’t think an alarm at a small business on the South Side would get a mention when they couldn’t find any signs of damage. My late-night panic had vanished. I’d left a piece of evidence behind, it was true, but that scarf was sold by the dozen at various Irish import shops around the city each week. It was only my own guilty fears that had made me think it could be traced to me. The one thing I should not do was call Furey or Finchley or any of my other police pals to inquire about Alma Mejicana.

I’d unwrapped my right hand before climbing into the tub. The blisters on the left had broken and reshut with a lot of oozing. They stung sharply when I cautiously put my hand in the water. The right, protected behind its gauze shielding, was starting to look like real skin. Nothing makes you heal faster than good genes. Good work, V.I., good choice of parental chromosomes.

Even though my shoulders were stiff and my neck sore, I felt pretty happy. “Music is the voice of love,” I crooned, soaping my armpits.

I didn’t know what Farmworks, Inc. was. I hadn’t found proof that Luis Schmidt had tried to murder me. I wasn’t any closer to knowing whether Cerise had been killed, or why Elena had run scared, but my successful burglary proved better than a tonic.

I bounded out of the bath, did a more vigorous exercise routine than I’d managed yesterday, and put on my jeans and a shirt to borrow the dog from the old man. Peppy had set up a barking when I came in last night, but neither Mr. Contreras nor Vinnie the banker had popped out to see me so I’d hoped I’d gotten home free.

Mr. Contreras’s suspicious scrutiny when he answered my knock made me wonder, but I didn’t volunteer anything—when I was a public defender I was always having to caution my clients against boasting out of euphoria. The easiest way to get caught is to pull off a slick job, then feel so full of yourself that you have to brag about it. Then one of your pals gets pissed at you and squeals, and there you are at Twenty-sixth and California talking to the PD.

“You musta been tired, cookie, to sleep this late,” Mr. Contreras said severely.

“Yeah, but I’m much better this morning. I’m going to take her royal heinie out for a walk.” I showed him my healing palms and got grudging consent to take the dog. It would have been cruel to turn me down, considering that she was practically wriggling out of her skin in her eagerness.

I wasn’t up to running her, but I drove her over to the lake and threw sticks into the water for her. A pair of winter gloves seemed to provide enough protection for my hands. Since golden retrievers are born knowing the backstroke, my only difficulty came in persuading Peppy to get back into the car when my shoulders grew too sore to throw anymore.

I parked the car illegally by the hydrant in front of our apartment and ran in to drop her off with Mr. Contreras. He refuses to believe that lake water won’t ruin her delicate constitution, but before he could get well into the body of his complaints I smiled and said good-bye.

“You’ll be able to remember it all to tell me later,” I assured him as he glared at me in the doorway.

I ran upstairs to my own place and dug my hiking boots out of the hall closet. I pulled my gun from the belt where I’d draped it on a chair early this morning and stuck it in my waistband. The phone began ringing as I was shutting the front door but I let it go. Despite my sense of urgency, I took the time to lock all three dead bolts—someone had wanted to kill me, after all, and there was no reason to invite an ambush.

I pulled my gloves back on and headed for Lake Shore Drive. Although the grass in the lakefront parks was brown and sere, the soft air and sparkling water eased the memory of the harsh summer. As I drove south I sang “We’re on the way to Grandma’s farm” and other selections from childhood.

The underground garages were full, but even having to park in one of the pricey Wabash Avenue lots didn’t seriously dampen my spirits. I whistled under my breath as I took the feeble Pulteney elevator to the fourth floor.

Our building management doesn’t believe in such unnecessary expenses as hallway lights. Only the emergency bulbs at either end of the corridors provide a faint illumination, enough to fumble your keys into your lock. As I got off the elevator I could see a dim shape outlined against the wall across from my office. I don’t get much walk-in business—most of my corporate clients prefer that I come to them. It’s one of the reasons I can run my business from such dismal surroundings.

If someone wanted to shoot me, this was the perfect opportunity. I thought about racing for the stairwell and fetching help, but Tom Czarnik, the building super, was waiting for a chance to prove me an unfit tenant. And getting the cops would take so much time that my visitor would probably be long gone before they got there.

And the real truth, V.I., is that you can’t stand asking people for help. This cold thought came to me even as I was trotting down the hall, moving from side to side and hunching my shoulders to minimize my size. When I came up to the shadow figure I gave a little gasp of laughter, release from my fears—Zerlina Ramsay was waiting for me.

“I didn’t know if you was ever coming in here, girl. I’ve been here since eight this morning.” It was a comment more than a complaint.

“I’ve been under the weather,” I said, wrestling clumsily with the keys in my gloves hands. When I finally turned the right one in the lock the door opened slowly—a week’s accumulation of mail was blocking it. I scooped it up and held the door open for Mrs. Ramsay.

“You could have called me at home if you needed me— I’d have been happy to go see you.”

Under my office lights her skin color looked healthier than when she’d been in the hospital. Her dour hostess apparently was looking after her well.

“Didn’t want to do that. I didn’t know who you lived with, whether they’d let you talk to me.” She lowered herself carefully into my utilitarian guest chair. “Anyway, I didn’t want Maisie to hear me on the phone to you.”

I dumped the mail on my desk and swiveled in the desk chair to face her. My desk faces the window with the guest chairs behind it so that a steel barrier won’t intimidate visitors.

“I heard on the news you’d been hurt in that fire last week. Across from the Indiana Arms, wasn’t it?” She nodded to herself and I waited patiently for her to continue. “Maisie says leave you to yourself—you got Cerise in trouble, leastways your aunt did, let you get yourself out by yourself.”

I didn’t feel responsible for Cerise’s death, but I also didn’t see what purpose arguing about it with her would serve. Anyway, she could well be right about Elena, at least partially right.

“it seemed to me the two of them had some scheme going,” I ventured. “I thought maybe they wanted to pretend Katterina had died so they could collect a big award from the insurance company.”

“You could be right.” She sighed unhappily. “You could be right. Blaming you doesn’t take away the pain of having a child like that, one that uses heroin and crack and God knows what-all else, and steals and lies. It’s just easier to blame you than lie in bed asking myself what I should of done different.”

“Elena’s no prize, either,” I offered. “But my dad was her brother and they didn’t make ′em any better than him.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t bring her up. If I hadn’t a had to work so hard, be gone all the time—” She broke herself off. “No use talking about it now. It’s not why I came up here. Took me three buses too.”

After a brooding silence in which her full lips disappeared into a narrow slit in her face, she said, “It’s no news to you that that aunt of yours, that Elena, likes to tell a story or two.”

She waited for my agreement before continuing. “So she claims she saw someone talking to Jim Tancredi a few weeks before the fire, and then she came over to my room the night the place burned down telling me he’d been there again.”

She smiled in embarrassment. “You gotta understand, the kind of life we lead, any new face is excitement. Maybe you wouldn’t of been interested, but I was. And that was when she saw I had my little granddaughter with me, Cerise and Otis dropped her off, you know, and she gets real righteous about how no children can be in the building and she’ll talk to Tancredi about it, so I give her the price of a bottle and she goes off, but I figure I’d better get our little princess over to Maisie. With an alkie like Elena you can’t trust her to keep her mouth shut just because she says she will.”

When she looked at me defensively I grunted agreement—knew that chapter and verse on Elena too well to argue the point. “What did she say about the man she’d seen? Black, white, young, old?”

She shook her head regretfully. “He was white, I’m pretty sure of that, even though she didn’t say it in so many words. But she said he had the most gorgeous eyes, that was her expression, and I can’t see her using it about a black man.”

That was really helpful—Elena thought every man under eighty-five had the most gorgeous eyes. Still, she’d used it in my hearing. The night of the fire. Vinnie the banker, he came to chew me out and she told me not to upset a boy with such gorgeous eyes.

That memory brought the elusive face in the crowd at the Prairie Shores to the forefront of my mind. Vinnie. Vinnie, who shouldn’t have been within fifteen miles of the Near South Side. I’d opened my eyes as the paramedics were carrying me through the crowd and seen him looking down at me. It was a slide shown so briefly on my retina that I only now remembered opening my eyes for that brief flash.

I came slowly back to the room. At first I thought I’d have to revise my agenda for the day and go racing off to see him. But as the rushing in my head subsided and reason returned, I remembered I didn’t know which bank he worked for.

“You okay?” Zerlina asked anxiously.

“I’m fine. I think it’s just possible I may know who she was talking about.” Although would Elena have hidden the fact that she’d seen Vinnie before? Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with her to issue sly hints? There hadn’t been time, though—we’d been fighting about whether she could stay. That could have driven Vinnie from her mind. And then that night she and Cerise showed up together, they started with a story about Katterina, but after they were in bed together Elena suggested blackmailing Vinnie as a better idea. At that point of course she wouldn’t say anything about him to me.

“Elena’s disappeared again,” I said abruptly. “Took off from her hospital bed Saturday morning. She’d taken a pretty good blow to the head and shouldn’t have been walking, let alone running.”

“They didn’t say nothing about her on TV, just you on account of you being a detective. And that you’d rescued your aunt, which I was pretty sure had to be Elena. I didn’t come here today because of her, but I’m sorry for her. She’s not an evil person, you know, nor Cerise wasn’t, either. Just weak, both of them.”

She brooded over it in silence for a bit. When it was clear there wasn’t anything else she wanted to say, I asked if I could give her a lift.

“Um-unh. I show up in some white girl’s car everyone on the street’s going to be up telling Maisie about it. No, I’ll just go back the way I came. It doesn’t matter, taking three buses, you know—I don’t have anything else to do with my time these days.”

The rush of excitement I’d felt over remembering seeing Vinnie at the fire died away after Zerlina left, and with it much of my earlier euphoria. It was hard to think about her life and that of Elena and maintain a great flow of good cheer. Then, too, the more I considered Vinnie as an arsonist the less sense it made. Maybe he was a pyromaniac sociopath, but it seemed too incredible a coincidence that he would move in below me and then turn out to be torching my aunt’s building. Of course even sociopaths have to live someplace, and he couldn’t have known that my aunt lived in one of his target buildings. And that might explain his being awake and irritable so soon after the fire.

My mind kept churning futilely. Finally I willed myself to turn it off. I flipped quickly through the mail. Two checks, goodie, and a handful of get-well cards from corporate clients. The obvious junk mail I pitched. The bills could certainly wait, but the incoming money would defray my expenses this afternoon.

I stopped at a cash machine to deposit the money and withdraw a couple of hundred. Armed with that I walked west on Van Buren, hunting for a place that carried work clothes. The systematic mowing down of the Loop to make room for glitzy high rises has driven most of the low-rent business away. Van Buren used to be jammed with army surplus outlets, hardware shops, and the like, but only the peep shows and liquor stores have kept a tenacious hold on the area. They would probably go last.

I had to walk the better part of a mile before I found what I was looking for, I bought a hard hat and a heavy set of coveralls and work gloves. At five-eight I’m tall for a woman, but I still fit easily into a man’s small.

Everything looked too new to convince anyone I was a seasoned construction worker. Back in my office I laid the coveralls on the floor and scooted across them in my desk chair several times. Now they looked new but covered with grease.

I keep a set of tools in my filing cabinet to work on the women’s toilet, which goes out an average of twice a month. Since Tom Czarnik would like to get rid of all women tenants, not just me, I’ve learned to do plumbing basics over the years. I took out the wrench and pounded my hard hat a few times. It still looked too new, but I was able to add a few artistic dents and scratches to it. It would have to do.

I pulled the coveralls on over my jeans, moving the gun to one of the deep side pockets, and added my small supply of office tools to the others. Useless on the Ryan, but I thought they gave me a touch of authenticity. I emptied the contents of my handbag into various other pockets and shut off the office lights. I’d left my hiking boots in the car. I wouldn’t put them on until I got to the Ryan—they were too hard to drive in. Tucking the hard hat under my arm, I took off again. This time it was my office phone that I ignored as I locked the dead bolt.