Fire Sale (37 page)

“But, Ma, is he—will he—”

“April, start breathing. He’s not going to hurt her, and, anyway, the cops will be here soon.”

I hustled April down the sidewalk and into my car. I got the passenger seat back as far as it would go, to ease the pressure on her lungs. I took the door key off my ring, turned on the engine, and set the heater going full blast.

“You lock the doors when I get out. You don’t open them for anyone. I’m going around to the back to try to help your mom, okay?”

Her lips trembled and she was gasping for air, but she nodded a little.

“And keep breathing. It’s the most important thing you can do right now. Breathe in, count four, breathe out, count four. Got it?”

“Y-yes, Coach,” she whispered.

I looked at my watch: it had been over ten minutes since Sandra called the cops. On my way around the house, I called 911 again on my cell, which didn’t automatically register on the emergency room screen. I explained where I was and said we had called over ten minutes ago. The dispatcher spent several agonizing minutes looking for Sandra’s call. She finally found it and said they were sending someone.

“When?” I said. “Now or with the Messiah? I have a kid going into cardiac arrest. Get an ambulance here on the double!”

“You don’t have the only emergency in this city, ma’am.”

“Look, you and I both know the story of the far South Side. I have a home invasion, I have the invader here and a very sick child. Pretend this is Lincoln Park and get me a team NOW!”

The dispatcher said huffily that every emergency was treated alike and she couldn’t manufacture an ambulance for me.

“I probably could build one in the time I’ve been waiting. If this kid dies, it will be front-page news, and tapes of these calls will be played coast to coast. Your kids and grandkids will know them by heart.” I snapped my phone shut and ran around to the back of the house.

Light streamed through the broken window leading into Bron’s workshop, but the back door had been opened and slammed shut with a lot of violence—it hung unevenly in the frame now. I had my gun out, and grabbed a lid from a garbage can to use as a shield. At the door, I squatted down on my haunches, using the lid to pull the door all the way open. No sound. I duckwalked into the kitchen, caricature of a cop. My feet skidded on ball bearings that Freddy had dumped onto the floor, and I fell onto my knees. The noise brought a muffled scream from the room beyond.

I stood upright and hurried into the dining room. Sandra wasn’t there or in the living room. I looked in the bedroom and saw the dresser had been knocked over to block the closet door. I yanked it out of the way. Sandra was lying on the floor, huddled in a little ball, whimpering.

I knelt next to her. “Are you hurt, Sandra? Did he cut you?”

She didn’t say anything, just lay crying like a hurt dog, little squeaks of misery. I felt for her throat, but didn’t find blood, and I couldn’t see any on the floor under her. Freddy had dumped all the bedding onto the floor; I grabbed a blanket and wrapped her up.

In the few minutes I’d been outside with April, Freddy had gone through the house like locusts through Egypt. He’d dumped out the drawers in the bedroom and the medicine cabinet; he’d run upstairs to April’s dormer, overturned her bureau, and pulled the mattress from her bed. And then he’d kicked open the back door and fled. Probably Diego had been waiting in the alley in the pickup.

I went slowly back downstairs to Sandra. “I have April safe outside in my car. If the ambulance doesn’t get here soon, do you want me to drive her to the hospital?”

Her teeth were chattering, but she clenched them together and hissed, “You don’t take my girl away from me, Tori.”

“No, Sandra, I won’t. You can ride along. What made that punk break your house up like that?”

“He s—s-said—he wanted the rec-c-c-cording,” she burst out. “L-l-like I was—was—a radio st-st-station. Give me the rec-c-cording, he k-kept saying.”

“The recording?” I echoed. “What recording?”

She was shaking and miserable; she didn’t want to answer stupid questions from me. I got her to the couch, put on water for tea, and went out to my car. To my relief, when I unlocked the door April was still breathing. I was just explaining the situation to her when the blue-and-whites finally came screaming around the corner.

42

The Hiding Place

T
otal confusion followed the arrival of the squad cars.

Men ran through the alley and took up positions around the house, all the time squawking importantly through their walkie-talkies. I kept April in my car—it would be a tragic irony if she survived her heart failure and Freddy’s assault only to get shot by one of these Lone Rangers. It took forever to get the men (and the one woman in the group) to understand that there had been a home invasion, that the perp had fled, and that April and her mother needed medical help.

They finally got an ambulance to come. Even though April was breathing on her own, her pallor was bad, and I was relieved to have professionals take over her care. Sandra was still shaking too badly to make it down the walk on her own, but the crew carried her to the ambulance with a kind of impersonal briskness that seemed to brace her and make her function better.

“Can I call someone to go wait with you and bring you home?” I asked Sandra as they helped her into the back of the ambulance.

“Just leave me alone, Tori Warshawski. Every time you come near me, someone in my family gets hurt.” She spat this out reflexively, because, a second later, she told me to call her folks, who lived over in Pullman. “They only have a pullout bed in the front room, but April and me, we can stay with them for a few days. My dad’s old local, they’ll send someone around to fix the house up for me.”

It was a relief to know she wasn’t completely on her own, but her departure left me to try to explain to the police what had been going on. I decided a bare-bones story would work best: I was the interim basketball coach; April was sick, her father had just died, I was dropping something off for her when a scumbag broke in through the back. He’d grabbed Sandra and threatened her; I took the kid out to my car to try to keep her out of danger. We waited for the posse—which, by the way, only arrived some thirty minutes after Sandra’s first call.

The bare-bones story got bogged down when they saw my Smith & Wesson. I had a gun, yes, I had a license, yes, I was a private investigator, yes, but I wasn’t here as a detective. I told them my history, my connection to the Czernins because April was on the Bertha Palmer basketball team and I was subbing for the coach, blah, blah. They didn’t like it: I was here with a gun, the house was a wreck, they only had my word that Freddy had ever been on the premises.

I was trying hard not to lose my temper—that was a sure recipe for spending the night in a holding cell at the division—when Conrad called me on my cell phone: he’d gotten home, he’d gotten my message, and what the hell was I doing interrogating suspects?

“It took your damned squad twenty minutes by the clock to respond to a 911 call about a home invasion,” I snarled. “Don’t give me word one about staying out of your turf, leaving police business to the Fourth District, giving tea parties, or whatever it was you said last week.”

“Home invasion? What are you talking about, Warshawski? You didn’t say anything about that in the message you left.”

“It hadn’t happened then,” I snapped, “but Freddy Pacheco, the guy I called you about, was breaking into the Czernin house less than an hour later. I did report my encounter with him to one of your detectives, but he wouldn’t work up a sweat over it. Now your boys want to arrest me for saving Sandra and April Czernin.”

“You’re so wound up, I can’t make head nor tail of what you’re saying,” Conrad complained. “Let me talk to the officer in charge.”

I grinned savagely and handed the phone to my chief interrogator. “It’s Conrad Rawlings, your Fourth District commander.”

The officer frowned, thinking I was yanking his chain, but when he heard Conrad on the other end of the line he changed comically, sitting up at attention, giving an abbreviated account of their arrival. Judging from the officer’s broken sentences, Conrad kept interrupting with demands to know why it had taken them so long to get to the Czernins’, and what they had found when they searched the house. The officer got up to confer with another man, and reported that the house was empty.

I heard Conrad’s voice scratchily through the mouthpiece; the officer said to me, “He wants to know what you know about the perp.”

“Not much: he hangs out at a bar called Cocodrilo on Ninety-first Street, but I don’t know where he lives. He rides with a cousin whose first name is Diego.” I described Freddy’s sullen, pretty-boy looks.

The officer relayed this information, listened some more to Conrad, then asked if I knew why Pacheco had broken in.

I shrugged elaborately. “He’s a punk—the pastor at Mount Ararat calls him a
chavo banda
who does petty crime for a fee. In fact, the pastor may know where he lives.”

I wasn’t going to go through all the stuff about the frog, the fire at Fly the Flag, and Freddy’s demand for a recording, not through an interpreter. Finally, Conrad and the officer finished, and the officer turned me back over to his commander.

“So take me through it, Ms. W. This
chavo
of yours, how do you know he set the fire?”

“He confessed it. In my hearing, while I had him cornered here—before Sandra Czernin acted like a horse’s patootie and got between him and me. Whereupon he seized her and held her as a hostage. But I don’t know what he wanted in her house. Bron Czernin made a device that Freddy used in setting the fire—Freddy had drawn a picture of it for him, and the picture was here in the house. He looked at the picture, but that wasn’t what he wanted—it’s still here.” True, it was in my pocket, but Conrad didn’t need to know that.

“While I was getting the kid out of the house, Freddy tore the house apart. I don’t think he found what he was looking for. He drives around with his cousin in a Dodge pickup. The first letters on the plate are ‘VBC’—I didn’t catch the rest of it. That is my whole story. Can I go home now?”

“Yeah, and try to stay there. Even if we don’t respond as fast as citizens want, we do get there—”

“In time to collect the corpses,” I cut in nastily. “Which is what you’d have found if I hadn’t been here. I coach a basketball team down here. April Czernin is one of my players, as is Josie Dorrado, who is still missing, despite the incredible energy your team is putting into looking for her, so I have to be down here whether you like it or not.”

“All right!” he shouted. “Now you know my secret. I don’t have enough money and enough bodies to do everything that has to happen to keep South Chicago safe. Send a note to the mayor, tell the super, but get off my back.”

So his turf battle with me came partly out of pride: he didn’t want me to know he couldn’t look after the community. “Oh, Conrad, the mess down here is so big that seven cops with seven mops couldn’t get it clear. I’m really, truly not trying to undercut you, but to give you some support.”

“God save me from that, Ms. W.,” he said, trying to recover his temper. “Go on home, go to bed—oh, hang on. I knew there was something else. That car, that Miata you found under the Skyway on Ewing, it was gone when we got there Tuesday afternoon. We called the Bysens, or their lawyers: the car belongs to Billy, they didn’t want ugly cops pawing through it. They took it to a body shop, where it had been thoroughly dismantled and cleaned by yesterday morning. Thought you’d like to know. Try to stay out of trouble, Ms. W.”

I was thankful to hang up while he was feeling more charitable and left the Czernin house while the going was possible. The officers searching the street and alley held me up while they checked to make sure I wasn’t a fleeing suspect, but I finally was able to take off. When I was out of their range, I pulled over to the curb.

I reclined my seat until I could almost lie flat. I turned the CD of David Schrader and Bach back on and tried to think. I could go to Pastor Andrés to try to find out where Freddy lived, but I wasn’t much interested in the
chavo
anymore. The police would track him down fast enough, and I didn’t think he had anything helpful to tell me now. It was the recording I wanted to know about.

With my eyes shut, I let Bach float my mind away. Recordings. Sandra said Freddy had demanded recordings. When I was young, that meant 45s. That was why Sandra had said Freddy was talking to her as if she were a radio station. I had a brief memory of secretly listening to WVON when I was in high school—it was a black station, where the coolest music was played, and in those civil rights battle days, white girls who listened to WVON could get beaten up by their enlightened peers.

But a recording, that could also be a record of a conversation. I saw Marcena Love’s wolfish smile as she held her fountain-pen recorder out to catch people’s comments during the By-Smart prayer meeting we’d gone to. She recorded everything. Her little gizmo held up to eight hours of conversation; she could download its digital brain into her computer. So someone had taken her computer to destroy those records. But they didn’t have the device, that red recording pen. If she had dropped it when she was in the Miata, it might still be back under the Skyway. Someone had searched the Miata pretty thoroughly, so if she’d dropped it in the car the people who searched it would have it—and they wouldn’t have hired Freddy to look for it here. It could have fallen out when Marcena was dragged from the Miata—if that had happened under the Skyway, the pen might still be there.

I didn’t relish a return to the underpass at this time of night. In the morning, I could bring Amy Blount down to help me look, if I didn’t have any appointments. I pulled my Palm from my bag and saw the time: I’d told Mary Ann I’d call her at nine if I was going to be late and it was a quarter of ten now.

I tapped the screen with my pen. I should stop at her apartment on my way home—her manner had been so odd when we talked that I wanted to make sure she was really all right. I could leave the groceries in the kitchen for her, and maybe take the little dachshund out for a quick breath of air.

I looked at my Friday appointments. Nothing until one o’clock. I’d have the morning free, a welcome breather—I could sleep in, I could go to the Belmont Diner for corned beef hash and eggs. The thought almost made me drool, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since grabbing that bowl of chicken noodle soup nine hours ago. I went to the trunk and broke off a piece of the goat feta I’d bought for Mary Ann. The tangy-sweet cheese was so delicious I ate another chunk. Before I knew it, I’d finished the whole piece. Oh, well—I’d get her some more next week.

As I started back up Route 41, I wondered if Marcena had left her pen at Morrell’s. Carnifice, or whoever it was, had searched his place, but maybe they didn’t know what device they were looking for. I called Morrell.

“Hippolyte! How’s Your Majesty tonight?”

“Not very majestic, I’m afraid—I couldn’t even slay an ordinary street punk, so I don’t think I’m ready to take on a real warrior.”

I told him about my encounters with Freddy. “He’s looking for Marcena’s recorder, and I think that’s what they were hunting for up at your place, if that’s any consolation. I know I’m too late for dinner, but I might still come back up tonight if you’re going to be up for a while.”

“I should drive down to South Chicago and carry you home on your shield after all you’ve been through. Since I can’t, I think you should go to your own place—it’s a shorter drive, and I don’t like you on the roads when you’re this beat. Don and I will have a look around—I’ll call you if I find anything. And you call me when you get home.” When I didn’t answer, he said sharply, “Okay, Warshawski?”

My own untidy home with my dogs—I realized uneasily they sounded more comforting than Morrell’s scrupulously clean condo. Maybe that was just because Don was visiting—I’d be filled with longing for Morrell as soon as I could see him alone.

It was only when I’d hung up that I remembered Carnifice or someone might be monitoring my phone, or Morrell’s. I tried to remember the whole conversation. Not that I wanted strangers to hear my insecurities, but what I shouldn’t have been talking about was the recorder. I called Morrell back, just to warn him. He was predictably annoyed at the idea that someone was listening in on his phone, but he agreed not to open the door without triple-checking a visitor’s credentials.

“Anyway, Don is still smoking like a fiend. Anyone comes in, he can give them lung cancer while we wait for you and your gun.”

I laughed more naturally. I’d been doing the irresponsible thing of talking while driving; I was at Mary Ann’s now, so I told him I’d call him from home and hung up again.

It wasn’t all that late: lights shone from most of the windows—I thought there was one on even in Mary Ann’s—maybe she was reading in bed. I sat in the car, harvesting the remnants of my energy, before moving on stiff legs up the walk into her entryway. In case she was asleep, I didn’t ring her bell but let myself into the building. I moved almost stealthily up the stairs, trying to disguise my tread so that Scurry wouldn’t recognize it and start barking. With the same stealth, I undid the locks to her door and slipped inside.

The dog came skittering down the hall to meet me, but I put the groceries down and picked him up before he could make a noise. He licked my face with delight but wriggled free and ran back toward the kitchen. I picked up the bag and followed him. Mary Ann’s bedroom door was shut, but a light was on in the back. I slipped past her room to the kitchen.

Fumbling with the locks to the back door, their faces tight with terror, were Josie Dorrado and Billy the Kid.