Fire Sale (13 page)

“I don’t suppose he flew out of Wattisham, either.”

“It was Nacton, but Buffalo Bill won’t remember after all these years what one airfield or another looked like. I mean—he thinks I’m old enough to have a father who flew in the war!”

“And the photographs of your father, I suppose, will get lost in the mail. Sad, really, because they were taken before digital photography, and now they can’t be replaced.”

She gave a loud shout of laughter that made several people stare at us. “Something like that, Vic, something very like that, hnnh, hnnh.”

13

Hired Gun

T
hursday started early, with a call from my answering service. I was luxuriating in a private morning with Morrell—I hadn’t seen Marcena since dropping her off after yesterday’s prayer service. I’d gotten up to turn on Morrell’s fancy espresso machine. I was turning pirouettes in the hall, happy to be able to prance around naked, when I heard my cell phone ringing in my briefcase.

I don’t know why I didn’t just let it go—that Pavlovian response to the bell, I suppose. Christie Weddington, the operator with my answering service who’s known me longest, felt entitled to be severe.

“It’s someone from the Bysen family, Vic: he’s already called three times.”

I stopped dancing. “It’s seven fifty-eight, Christie. Which one of the great men?”

It was William Bysen, whom I thought of as “Mama Bear,” sandwiched between Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid. I resented the interruption, but I hoped it might mean good news: Ms. Warshawski, your fearless disposition and your brilliant proposal have caused us to shred one of our billions into forty thousand small pieces for the Bertha Palmer school.

Christie gave me William’s office number. His secretary was, of course, already at her post: when the big gun starts firing early, the subalterns are there ready to load.

“Is this Ms. Warshawski? It is? Do you normally make people wait this long before you get back to them?”

That didn’t sound exactly like the harbinger of glad tidings. “Actually, Mr. Bysen, I’m usually too busy to return calls this fast. What’s up?”

“My son didn’t come home last night.”

Heart-stopping—kid was nineteen, after all, but I gave a noncommittal “oh” and waited.

“I want to know where he is.”

“Do you want to hire me to find him? If so, I’ll fax a contract for your signature, after which I’ll need to ask a bunch of questions, which will have to be done over the phone, since I have a full calendar today and tomorrow.”

He sputtered, taken aback, then asked where Billy was.

I was getting cold, standing naked in the living room. I picked the afghan up from Morrell’s couch and draped it over my shoulders. “I don’t know, Mr. Bysen. If that’s all, I’m in the middle of a meeting.”

“Is he with the preacher?”

“Mr. Bysen, if you want me to look for him I’ll fax you a contract and call you later with a list of questions. If you want to know whether he’s with Pastor Andrés, then I suggest you call the pastor.”

He hemmed and hawed, and finally demanded my rates.

“One-twenty-five an hour, with a four-hour minimum, plus expenses.”

“If you want to do business with By-Smart, you’d better rethink that rate structure.”

“Am I talking to a canned recording? The worried father wants me to negotiate my fee?” I burst out laughing, then suddenly thought maybe he was making me a subtle offer. “Are you saying that By-Smart will fund my basketball program if I’ll lower my fee for asking about your kid?”

“It’s possible that if you can locate Billy, we’ll discuss your proposal.”

“Not good enough, Mr. Bysen. Give me your fax number; I’ll send you a copy of the contract; when I get back a signed copy, we’ll talk.”

He wasn’t sure he was ready to go that far. I hung up and went into the kitchen to flip on the espresso machine. My cell phone started ringing as I was going back up the hall: my answering service, with Bysen’s fax number. Hey-ho. I stopped in the small bedroom Morrell uses as a home office and sent through a contract. This time, I turned my phone off before going back to bed.

“Who was that so early? You spent a lot of time with him—should I be worried?” Morrell demanded, pulling me down next to him.

“Yep. I’ve met his papa and his kid already—I’ve never even laid eyes on your family and we’ve been knowing each other for almost three years now.”

He bit my earlobe. “Oh, yes, my kid, a little something I’ve been meaning to tell you about. Anyway, you get to meet my friends. Have you met this guy’s friends?”

“Don’t think he has any, at least, not any as cool as Marcena.”

When I finally got to my office, a little before ten, I had a fax from William waiting for me: he had signed the contract, but had exed out several provisions, including the four-hour minimum, and the paragraph on expenses.

Whistling between my teeth, I sent an e-mail: I regret not being able to do business with you but will be glad to talk to you in the future about your needs for an investigator. Not that I never negotiate my fees—but never with a company that has annual sales of over two hundred billion.

While I was online, I checked By-Smart’s stock. It had dropped ten points by the end of the trading day yesterday and was down another point this morning. The question about whether By-Smart was going to open its doors to unions had made CNN’s breaking news banner on my home page. No wonder they were gnashing their teeth over Billy up in Rolling Meadows.

By eleven, Mama Bear had decided he could meet my terms. He then wanted me to drop everything to dash out to Rolling Meadows. By-Smart was so used to a parade of vendors, offering everything, including their firstborn off-spring, for the chance to do business with the Behemoth, that young Mr. William actually couldn’t grasp that someone might not want to jump through his hoops. In the end, after a time-wasting argument, when I’d hung up once and threatened to twice more, he answered my questions.

They hadn’t seen Billy since he left the meeting yesterday. According to Grobian, Billy had gone to the warehouse, put in eight hours, and then disappeared. He usually returned to the Bysen complex in Barrington Hills by seven at the latest, but last night he hadn’t shown up, hadn’t answered his cell phone, hadn’t called his mother. When they got up at six, they found he’d never returned. That was when Mama Bear had made his first call to me. Thank goodness, I had left my own phone in the living room.

“He’s nineteen, Mr. Bysen. Most kids that age are in college, if they’re not working, and even if they live at home they have their own lives, their own friends. Their own girlfriends.”

“Billy isn’t that kind of boy,” his father said. “He’s part of True Love Waits, and his mother gave him her own Bible and engagement ring to seal his vows. He would never go out with a girl if he didn’t intend to marry her.”

I forbore to mention that teens who take pledges of chastity have the same rate of sexually transmitted diseases as nonpledgers. Instead, I asked if Billy had ever spent a night away from home in the past.

“Of course, when he’s gone to camp or to visit his aunt in California or—”

“No, Mr. Bysen, I mean, like this, without telling you. Or his mother.”

“No, of course not. Billy is very responsible. But we’re concerned that he’s too much under the thumb of that Mexican preacher who came up here yesterday, and since you spend a lot of time down in South Chicago we decided you were the best person to make inquiries for us.”

“‘We,’” I repeated. “Is that you and your wife? You and your brothers? You and your dad?”

“I—you ask too many questions. I want you to get to work finding him.”

“I’ll want to talk to your wife,” I said, “so I need her phone number, home, office, cell, I don’t care which.”

This caused more spluttering: I was working for him, his wife was worried enough.

“You don’t need me, you need a tame cop,” I snapped. “You must have fifty or sixty of ’em scattered around the city and suburbs. I’ll tear up the contract and messenger it out to you.”

He gave me his home phone number and told me to report back by noon.

“I have other clients, Mr. Bysen, who’ve been waiting a lot longer than you have for help. If you think your son’s life is in imminent danger, then you need the FBI or the police. Otherwise, I’ll report when I know something.” I really, really hate working for the powerful: they think they’re the boss of the whole world, as we used to say in South Chicago, and that includes being the boss of you.

While I was on the phone with Bysen, Morrell had made me a cappuccino and a pita with hummus and olives. I sat at his desk, eating, while I talked to Bysen’s wife. In a quiet, almost little-girl voice, Annie Lisa Bysen told me nothing: oh, yes, Billy had friends, they were all in the church youth group together, they sometimes went camping together, but never without him talking to her first. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend; she repeated his participation in True Love Waits, and how proud they were of Billy after their experience with their daughter. No, she didn’t know why he hadn’t come home, he hadn’t talked to her, but “my husband” was sure he was with that preacher in South Chicago. They had asked their own pastor, Pastor Larch-mont, to call down to the South Side church, but Larch-mont hadn’t been able to reach anyone yet.

“It was probably a mistake, that exchange program with the inner-city churches, they have so many bad kids who can influence Billy. He’s so impressionable, so idealistic, but Daddy Bysen wanted Billy to go work in the warehouse. It was where he started his business, and all the men in the family have to go. I tried to tell William we should just let Billy go to college, like he wanted, but you might as well talk to Niagara Falls as get Daddy Bysen to change his mind, so William didn’t even try, just sent Billy down there, and ever since it’s been Pastor Andrés, Pastor Andrés, as if Billy was quoting the Bible itself.”

“What about your daughter, Billy’s sister—does she know where he is?”

A long pause at the other end. “Candace—Candace is in Korea. Even if it wasn’t so hard to get to her, Billy wouldn’t do that; he knows how much William—how much we—would hate it.”

I wished I did have time to drive up to South Barrington to the Bysen enclave. There’s so much that you get from body language that you can’t see over the phone. Did she really believe her son would avoid his sister on his parents’ say-so—especially if he was running away from home? Did Annie Lisa do everything Daddy Bysen said? Or did she resist passively?

I tried to get Candace’s e-mail address, or a phone number, but Annie Lisa refused even to acknowledge the question. “What about your sister-in-law, Jacqui Bysen. Did Billy talk to her at the warehouse yesterday?”

“Jacqui?” Annie Lisa repeated the name doubtfully, as if it were in a strange language, maybe Albanian, that she’d never heard of. “I guess it never occurred to me to ask her.”

“I’ll do that, Ms. Bysen.” I took the names of the two youths she thought her son might be closest to, but I expected the Bysens were right: Papa and Mama Bear had insulted a man Billy looked up to, and Baby Bear had probably fled to him for cover. If he hadn’t, I suppose I could begin the unenviable job of trying to find Candace Bysen. I would also check area hospitals, because you never know—accidents happen even to the children of America’s richest men. I scribbled all this down in a set of notes, since I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t keep track of so many details in my head.

I had business in the Loop for a couple of significant clients, but I finished before one and drove early to the South Side. I stopped by the warehouse to talk to Patrick Grobian first. He and Aunt Jacqui were deep in a discussion of linens; neither had seen Billy today.

“If he wasn’t a Bysen, he’d be out on his can, believe me,” Grobian snapped. “No one who wants a job with By-Smart comes and goes as they please.”

Aunt Jacqui stretched, catlike, with the same look of mischief around her mouth I’d seen yesterday during the uproar at the prayer meeting. “Billy is a saint. You’ll probably find him eating honey and locusts in a cave someplace, maybe even under the boxes in the basement—he’s always preaching to Pat and me about work conditions here.”

“Why?” I widened my eyes, innocence personified. “Is there something wrong with work conditions here?”

“It’s a warehouse,” Grobian said, “not a convent. Billy can’t tell the difference. Our work conditions comply with every OSHA standard ever written.”

I let that lay. “Would he go to his sister, do you think?”

“To Candace?” Jacqui’s carefully waxed brows rose to her hairline. “No one would go to Candace for anything except a trick or a nickel bag.”

I left while she and Grobian enjoyed a complicit laugh over that witticism. I had to be at the school for basketball practice at three, which is when Rose’s shift also ended. I couldn’t keep the girls waiting for me, so that meant if I wanted to talk to Rose I had to go back to the factory.

14

(Re)Tired Gun

T
he yard in the middle of the afternoon looked different than at six in the morning. A half-dozen cars were parked on the weedy verge, a panel truck stood in the drive, partly blocking my way, while several men were hauling fabric, shouting to each other in Spanish. I drove the Mustang onto the weeds, next to a late-model Saturn.

The factory’s front doors stood open, but I went down to the loading bay, where a second truck was docked, motor running. I went over next to it and pulled myself up onto the lip of the dock, hoping to avoid both the foreman and Zamar. I sketched a grin and a wave at the men, who had stopped to stare at me. They had driven a forklift up to the back of the truck and were loading boxes, which they hurriedly covered with a tarp when they saw me watching. I pursed my lips, wondering what they were hiding. Maybe they were even smuggling some kind of contraband. Maybe this somehow lay behind the sabotage attempts, but they were staring at me with so much hostility that I went on in to the main part of the factory.

On one side of the floor, a team of women were folding banners into packing crates. As luck had it, Larry Ballatra, the foreman, was right in front of me, barking orders to the crew. I passed him without pausing, going straight to the iron stairs. He glanced at me but didn’t seem to really notice me, and I ran up to the work floor.

Rose was at her station, working this time on an American flag, outsize, like the one hanging over the shop floor. The soft fabric was falling from her machine into a wooden box: the U.S. flag must not touch the ground. I squatted next to her so that she could see my face.

She gasped and turned pale. “You, what are you doing here?”

“I’m worried, Rose. Worried about you, and about Josie. She said you had to take a second job, and you left her in charge of the boys and the baby.”

“Someone has to help out. You think Julia can do it? She won’t.”

“You said you want Josie to go to college. It’s too much responsibility for her, at fifteen, and, besides, it makes it hard for her to study.”

Her lips tightened in anger. “You think you mean well, but you know nothing about life down here. And don’t tell me a story about growing up here, because you still know nothing, anyway.”

“Maybe not, Rose, but I know something about what it takes to leave here to go to college. If you can’t be with Josie, making sure she gets her homework done, what’s she going to do? If she gets frustrated with the responsibility, she could start cruising the streets, she could come home with another baby for you to look after. What job is important enough for that?”

Anger and anguish chased each other across her face. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t have a mother’s heart? I have to take this other job. I have to. And if Mr. Zamar, if he sees you here, he will fire me anyway from this job, then I have nothing for my children, so leave before you destroy my whole life.”

“Rose, what changed overnight? Monday, you needed me to find the plant saboteurs; today, you’re scared of me.”

Her face was contracted in torment, but her hands kept steadily feeding fabric through the machine. “Go, now! Or I will yell for help.”

I didn’t have any choice except to leave. Back in my car, I didn’t go anywhere for a while. What had changed in three days? Me offending her wouldn’t have caused this agonized outburst. It had to be something else, some threat Zamar or the foreman had used against her.

What were they making her do? I couldn’t imagine, or I could imagine lurid things, but not likely things—you know, prostitution rings, that kind of misery. But what hold could they have on Rose Dorrado? Her need to keep working, I suppose. Perhaps there was some connection to the boxes going into the panel truck, but the truck had left while I was in the plant, and I had no idea how to track it.

Finally, I put the car into gear and drove slowly down the avenue to Mt. Ararat Church of Holiness, at Ninety-first and Houston—just a block south of the house where I grew up. I came at the church from Ninety-first—I didn’t want to see the wrecked tree in my mother’s front garden again.

In a neighborhood where twenty people with Bibles and an empty storefront constitute a church, I hadn’t known what to expect, but Mt. Ararat was big enough to have an actual building, with a steeple and a few stained-glass windows. The church was locked, but a sign on the door listed the hours for services (Wednesday choir practice, Thursday evening Bible study, Friday AA meetings, and on Sundays, Sunday school and church) along with Pastor Robert Andrés’s phone numbers.

The first number turned out to be his home, where I got an answering machine. The second number, to my surprise, connected me to a construction company. I asked for Andrés, somewhat uncertainly, and was told he was out on a job.

“A funeral, you mean?”

“A construction job. He works for us three days a week. If you need to reach him, I can give the foreman your phone number.”

The woman wouldn’t direct me to the jobsite, so I gave her my cell phone number. A few minutes later, Andrés called back. Construction noise at his end made conversation difficult; he had trouble understanding who I was or what I wanted, but “Billy the Kid,” “Josie Dorrado,” and “girls’ basketball” seemed to get through, and he gave me the address where he was working, over at Eighty-ninth and Buffalo.

Four town houses were going up in the middle of a long, empty block. The little boxes, rising out of the rubble of the neighborhood, had a kind of gallant optimism about them, splashes of hope against the general gray of the area.

One house seemed close to completion: someone was painting trim, a couple of guys were on the roof. I took a hard hat from my trunk—I keep one handy because of all the industrial sites I visit—and walked over to the trim painter. He didn’t look up from his work until I called out to him; when I asked for Robert Andrés, he pointed his brush at the next building over and went back to work without speaking.

No one was outside the second house, but I could hear a power saw and loud shouting from within. I picked my way around rusted pipe and wedges of concrete, the crumbling remains of whatever had stood here before, and climbed over the ledge through the open hole where the front door would be.

A stairwell rose in front of me, the risers fresh sawn, the nailheads new and shiny. I could hear desultory hammering from the room beyond me, but I followed the sound of shouting up the stairs. All around me were open joists, the skeleton of the house. In front of me, three men were about to lift a piece of drywall into place. They bent and chanted a countdown in unison in Spanish. On
“cero”
they started lifting and walking the wallboard into place. It was heavy work; I could see trapeziuses quivering even on this muscular crew. As soon as the wallboard was up, two more men jumped to either end and began hammering it home. Only then did I step forward to ask for Pastor Andrés.

“Roberto,” one of the guys bellowed, “lady here asking for you.”

Andrés stepped through the open area that would eventually be another wall. I wouldn’t have known him in his hard hat and equipment apron, but he apparently recognized me from our encounter on Tuesday outside Fly the Flag—as soon as he saw me, he turned and went back to the other room. At first, I thought he was running away from me, but apparently he was merely telling the foreman that he’d be taking a break, because he came back a minute later without the apron and gestured to me to go back down the stairs.

Buffalo Avenue was relatively quiet in the middle of the afternoon. A woman with a pair of toddlers was heading toward us, pushing a shopping cart full of laundry, and on the far corner two men were having a heated exchange. They were listing so precariously I didn’t think they’d be able to connect if they came to blows. The real action in South Chicago heats up as the sun goes down.

“You are the detective, I think, but I’ve forgotten your name.” One on one, Andrés’s voice was soft, his accent barely noticeable.

“V. I. Warshawski. Do you do counseling at jobsites in the neighborhood, Pastor?”

He shrugged. “A small church like mine, it cannot pay my full wage as a pastor, so I do a little electrical work to make ends meet. Jesus was a carpenter; I am content in His footsteps.”

“I was at By-Smart yesterday morning and attended the service. Your sermon certainly electrified the congregation. Were you trying to give Billy’s grandfather a lecture on unions?”

Andrés smiled. “If I start preaching about unions, the next thing I know I’ve invited pickets to jobsites like this one. But I know that’s what the old one believes, and that poor Billy, who wants only to do good in the world, had a fight with his family because of what I said. I tried to call the grandfather, but he wouldn’t speak to me.”

“What were you preaching about, then?” I asked.

He spread his hands. “Only what I said—the need for all people to be treated with respect. I thought that was a safe and simple message for such men, but apparently it was not. This neighborhood is in pain, Sister Warshawski; it is like the valley of dry bones. We need the Spirit to rain down on us and clothe our bones with flesh and animate them with spirit, but the sons of men must do their part.”

The words were spoken in a conversational tone; this wasn’t prayer or preaching or public show, just the facts as he saw them.

“Agreed. What concrete things should the sons and daughters of women and men do?”

He pursed his lips, considering. “Provide jobs for those who need work. Treat workers with respect. Pay them a living wage. It is a simple thing, really. Is that why you came to find me today? Because Billy’s father and grandfather are searching for hidden meanings? I am not educated enough to speak in codes or riddles.”

“Billy was very upset yesterday morning because of the way his father and grandfather reacted to you. He chose not to go home last night. His father wanted to know if Billy is staying with you.”

“So you are working for the family now, for the Bysen family?”

I started to deny it, reflexively, and then realized that, of course, yes, I was working for the Bysen family. Why should that make me feel ashamed? If things kept on at the current rate, the whole country would be working for By-Smart within the decade.

“I told Billy’s father I’d try to locate him down here, yes.”

Andrés shook his head. “I think if Billy does not want to talk to his father right now, that is his right. He is trying to grow up, to think of himself as a man, not a boy. It will do his parents no harm if he stays away from home for a few nights.”

“Is he staying with you?” I asked bluntly.

When Andrés turned as if to walk back into the house, I quickly added, “I won’t tell the family, if he really doesn’t want them to know, but I’d like to hear it from him in person first. The other thing is, they think he has come to you. Whether I tell them I can’t find him, or that he’s safe but wants to be left alone, they have the resources to make your life difficult.”

He looked over his shoulder at me. “Jesus did not count any difficulties as a reason to turn back from the way to the Cross, and I pledged myself long ago to follow in His steps.”

“That’s admirable, but if they send the Chicago police, or the FBI, or a private security firm, to break down your door, will that be the best thing for Billy, or for the members of your church, who count on you?”

That made him turn back to me, with a glimmer of a smile. “Sister Warshawski, you are a good debater, you make a good point. Perhaps I do know now where is Billy, but perhaps I do not, and if I do know I can’t tell someone who works for his father because my duty is to Billy. But—by five o’clock, if the FBI breaks down my door, they will find only my cat Lazarus.”

“I’m certainly plenty busy between now and five; I won’t have time to call the family before then.”

He bowed his head in a courtly fashion and started back to the house. I walked with him. “Before you go back inside, can you tell me anything about Fly the Flag? Did Frank Zamar explain to you why he wouldn’t call the police about the sabotage in his plant?”

Andrés shook his head again. “It will be a good thing for you to work with the girls on their basketball, instead of all these other matters.”

It was a pretty stinging slap in the face. “All these other matters are directly connected to the girls and their basketball, Pastor. Rose Dorrado is a member of your church, so you must know how worried she is about losing her job. Her kid Josie plays on my team—she took me home to her mother, who asked me to investigate the sabotage. It really is a simple story, Pastor.”

“South Chicago is full of simple stories, isn’t it, each beginning in poverty and ending in death.”

This time he sounded pompous, not poetic or natural; I ignored the comment. “And now something has gone even more amiss. Rose has taken a second job, one that keeps her away from her children in the evening. It’s not just that her children need her, but I have the feeling she was coerced into taking this job, whatever it is. You’re her pastor; can’t you find out what the problem is?”

“I cannot force anyone to confide in me against their wishes. And she has two daughters who are old enough to look after the house. I know in the ideal world that you live in, girls of fifteen and sixteen should have a mother’s supervision, but down here girls that age are considered grown up.”

I was getting extremely tired of people acting like South Chicago was a different planet, one that I couldn’t possibly comprehend. “Girls of fifteen should not become mothers, whether they are in South Chicago or Barrington Hills. Do you know that every baby a teenage girl has chops her lifetime earning potential by fifty percent? Julia already has a baby. I don’t think it will help her or Rose or even Josie, if Josie starts running around the streets and has one of her own.”

“It is necessary for these girls to put their trust in Jesus, and to keep their lives pure for their husbands.”

“It would be lovely if they did, but they don’t. And since you know that as well as I do, it would be really great if you stopped telling them not to use contraceptives.”