Fire Sale (38 page)

43

The Fugitives

I
was so stunned that I stood for a moment, unable to speak or even think. Mary Ann’s strange manner—her reluctance to see me, her insistence I be very precise in letting her know when I’d be coming—and the person who’d answered her phone without speaking—I’d never imagined she’d be harboring the fugitives.

Billy was shielding Josie from me as if I were going to wreak retribution on them. He swallowed nervously. “What are you going to do now?”

“Now? I’m going to unpack Mary Ann’s groceries, make myself some coffee, and get you guys to tell me just what you’re up to.”

“You know what I mean,” Billy said. “What are you going to do about—well, seeing us here?”

“That depends on what you tell me about why you’re hiding out.”

When I put the perishables into the refrigerator, I saw the kids had bought themselves Cokes and pizzas. I thought longingly of the bottle of Armagnac in my liquor closet, but I put on water for coffee and made myself toast.

“I don’t have to tell you anything.” In his truculence, Billy sounded much younger than his nineteen years.

“You don’t have to,” I agreed, “but you can’t stay at Coach McFarlane’s forever. If you tell me what you know, and who you’re hiding from, I might be able to sort it out for you, or run interference, or, if you’re in serious danger of your life, get you to a safe place.”

“We’re safe here,” Josie said. “Coach doesn’t let anyone see us.”

“Josie, use your brain. If someone in your building had two strangers staying with them, how long would it be before you heard about it?”

She flushed and hung her head.

“People talk. They like to have news to report. Billy’s family has hired the biggest detective agency in the world, certainly in Chicagoland, to find him. Eventually one of the investigators will talk to someone who knows Mary Ann, and they’ll hear about the strange young couple who sometimes take her dog out for her, or pick up pizza and Coke at the Jewel, or hide in the kitchen when the visiting nurse comes. And if they come for Billy, they might hurt you, or Mary Ann.”

“So we need to find another place,” Billy said bleakly.

I poured out coffee for myself and offered the pot to them. Josie went to the refrigerator for a soda, but Billy accepted a cup. I watched, fascinated, as he stirred about a quarter of a cup of sugar into it.

“And what about your mother, Josie? She’s sick with worry over you. She keeps thinking you’re lying dead in the landfill where we found April’s dad. Were you going to let her go on indefinitely imagining she’d lost you?”

Billy said, “They were in the landfill? Who put them in the landfill?” while Josie muttered something about her mother not liking her to be with Billy.

“How rotten of her. You’re fifteen, smart and savvy enough for boys to be spending the night in your own bedroom, or to be sleeping together—where—on Coach McFarlane’s pullout bed? You’re going to have to go home sooner or later. Let’s make it sooner.”

“But, Coach, it’s quiet here. There’s no baby. I don’t have my sister taking my stuff, or the boys sleeping under the dining room table. There’s no roaches in the kitchen—it’s so peaceful here. I don’t want to go back!” Her dark eyes blazed with passion, and a kind of longing. “And Coach McFarlane likes having me here, she said so. She makes me work on my studies, and I help look after her, I do stuff like I did for my grandma when she was sick, I don’t mind it.”

“That’s a separate matter,” I said, calming down—I’d been in that apartment on Escanaba too many times not to respond to her yearning for quiet. “Let’s sit down and figure out what to do about Billy’s problems.”

I pulled the chairs out from under Mary Ann’s old enamel table. Billy’s chin was still sticking out pugnaciously, but the fact that he sat down at my command meant he was ready to answer my questions.

“Billy, I just came from April’s house. While I was there, Freddy Pacheco broke in. He tore the place apart. At first, I thought he was looking for the drawing he’d made for Bron—” I pulled out the paper, now very worn, with a tear along one crease.

“You have that?” Billy cried out. “How did you get it?”

“It was near where your car was wrecked Monday night. What do you know about it?”

“My car was wrecked? How did it happen? Where was it?”

I eyed him narrowly. “At 100th and Ewing. Who was driving it? Marcena?”

“No, because they’d put her—” He clapped a hand over his mouth.

In the silence that followed, I could hear the kitchen clock ticking and a drip from the bathroom sink. I thought irrelevantly that I’d have to remember to tighten the faucet before I left.

“Who put her where, Billy?”

He didn’t speak, and I remembered Rose Dorrado, earlier tonight, telling Julia not to make telling the truth like a trip to the dentist. “All this decay will have to come out, Billy, before I can fix it and make it whole again. Start with your car. You gave it to Bron, right?”

He nodded. “I told Bron he could use it until I needed it again. I even wrote a slip out for him to carry, in case a cop or—or someone accused him of stealing it. But I wanted to go to the warehouse first and get my books, and a few things I’d left in the locker. I didn’t want to work for Grobian anymore, because he had insulted Josie, and he had insulted me by spying on her. That was before I saw he—well, anyway, I told Bron I’d give him the car when I finished all that.”

“You went to see Pat Grobian Sunday afternoon after church? He was at work, then?”

“No, but he lives down in Olympia Fields. I drove down after I talked to you. Pat was still in his underwear, watching football on TV, can you believe that? And he had the nerve to call Josie a—well, a name, I won’t repeat it. We had a fight, an argument, I mean; I don’t hit people. I was already worrying about stuff, and I told him I’d have to take some time off.”

“The stuff you were worrying about—you’d seen it in a fax from Nicaragua? That’s what your aunt Jacqui says.”

“She told you about it? When?” His eyes were wide with disbelief.

“I was out at your grandmother’s house last night. Jacqui didn’t say much, just that you’d misinterpreted something about the Matagalpa plant, but she—”

“She said that?” Billy was almost shouting in anger. “She told that lie right in front of my grandmother? Do you know anything about what’s going on down here?”

“Very little,” I said meekly. “I know Pastor Andrés glued shut Fly the Flag to harass Frank Zamar over using sweatshop labor, but that Zamar went ahead and used it anyway. I know that Freddy—”

“You don’t know about Matagalpa,” Billy cut me off. “I found out—I saw this one fax to Aunt Jacqui, actually, it was the day you came to the warehouse to ask about money for the basketball program. They make jeans for By-Smart in Matagalpa, see, our house brand, Red River, and Aunt Jacqui, she wanted to see how fast they could set up to mass-produce sheets and linens and, you know, all that line. So I saw all the wage and hour figures and it was shocking, and I talked to her about it. She spends, like, two or three thousand dollars on every outfit she wears, I know because Uncle Gary keeps yelling about it.

“When I saw that Nicaragua fax, I did the arithmetic. The workers at the Red River plant work forty-four hundred hours a year, and they get not even eight hundred dollars, a
year,
I mean. So they’d have to work fourteen thousand
hours
to pay for one of her dresses, only, of course, they couldn’t because they have to feed their children. I told her this, why can’t she pay them something decent?, and she laughed, that way she has, and said their needs were simpler than hers. Simpler! Because she’s depriving them!”

His face was red and he was panting. I could picture the scene, Billy flushed as he was now with righteous rage, Aunt Jacqui smiling maliciously as she always did when one of the Bysens was upset.

“So that’s why you wanted to stay away from your family?”

“Sort of.” He stirred the sugary sludge in his cup round and round. “I talked to them all, Grandpa, Grandma. Of course, Father is hopeless, but Grandpa, he just treated me like I was retarded, they all think I’m retarded, he said it would make sense to me when I knew the business better. So when Pastor Andrés went out to our headquarters, that day you were there, to lead the service, he tried to preach about it, and, well, you saw what happened then!”

Josie put a hand on his, with a sidelong look at me to see if I would try to stop her touching him. He patted her absently, but he was brooding over his family.

“You threatened to call the shareholders. What was that about?”

“Oh, that.” He hunched an impatient shoulder. “That’s so old now. I told my—my father, and Uncle Roger, I’d support a union bid in Nicaragua, that I’d go to the shareholders and tell them I was going to send money to the guys who the Red River manager is locking out in Matagalpa so they could afford to take their case to the World Court. Of course, that has Father and all my uncles freaked. I didn’t really plan on hurting the family, not then, but now, oh, Jesus, now—!”

He broke off, real anguish in his face and voice, and dropped his head in his hands. This time, it was I who leaned over and patted him consolingly.

“What happened? Something about Zamar?”

“Everything was about Zamar.” His hands muffled his voice. “They—Aunt Jacqui and Grobian, I mean—were threatening Zamar, see, threatening to destroy his plant, that was the business with the rats, because he was saying he’d have to break the contract. Pat, Pat Grobian, he and Father said no one could break a By-Smart contract. If Frank Zamar did, then everyone would think they could walk away if they didn’t like the terms. Everyone wants to do business with us because we’re so big, and then we make people agree to prices they can’t afford…”

He stopped.

“So?” I prodded.

“I’ve gotten pretty good at Spanish,” he said, looking up briefly. “I studied it in high school, but because of the warehouse, and worshiping at Mt. Ararat, I understand it really well. So this fax came in from the Matagalpa manager, in Spanish. He was sending Pat the name of one of the local
jefes
, chiefs, you know, who get bad jobs for illegals and pocket half their pay, and, you know—”

I nodded.

“So the guy in Matagalpa, he was saying they should send Frank Zamar to this one guy, this local
jefe
here in South Chicago, and he’d see Frank got a stream of Central American illegals desperate for work. And Pat Grobian kind of told Frank, do it or else.”

“But Frank started to run that sweatshop,” I objected. “Josie’s mother was working there. That was two days before the plant burned down.”

“Yeah, but, see, Frank was so bitter and ashamed he didn’t tell Aunt Jacqui or my father that he’d started making these things. He was taking the finished ones to his own home, waiting until he had a full load. Then he was going to deliver it, but he didn’t want to talk about it.” Billy looked at me with his wide, guileless eyes. “If he’d told them! But they thought he was still holding out, so they wanted more sabotage.”

I remembered the cartons I’d seen being loaded into a panel truck the last time I was at the plant before the fire. That must have been the partial load Zamar was taking home.

“Your family sent in Freddy,” I supplied. “How did Bron get involved?”

“Oh, you don’t know anything!” he cried out. “Bron was the person doing it! Only he hired Freddy to do the actual dirty work. They’d just tell Bron, do something to the plant, they wouldn’t spell it out, and he’d get Freddy Pacheco to collect all those dead rats, or—or take that frog dish and put it on the wires.”

My phone rang. Morrell, saying they’d had a look around and hadn’t found anything, meaning Marcena’s recording pen, and he was going to bed.

“Mary Ann okay?”

“I think so,” I said; I remembered in time not to blurt out the news that Billy and Josie were there, just said there were a few things that I needed to take care of since I hadn’t been here for a week.

I turned back to Billy. “How long have you known about the frog? Why didn’t you go to the cops?”

“I couldn’t.” The words came out in a whisper. He was staring fixedly at the tabletop, as if trying to fall into it and disappear, and I had to prod him for some minutes before the rest of the story emerged.

On Monday, he said he’d drive Bron to the warehouse in time for Bron to pick up his rig. Billy was planning to clean out his locker, and he’d leave the Miata in the employee parking area for Bron to drive home at the end of his shift. Bron, in turn, would drop Billy at the South Chicago commuter train station before going to his first delivery point.

On their way to the warehouse, Billy asked Bron what his plan was for getting the money for April’s heart surgery, and Bron said he had an extra insurance policy that Grobian had signed up for, and he showed Billy the frog picture, the same one I’d been carrying around. Billy asked what it was, and Bron said part of his policy, Billy didn’t have to know more than that, he was too nice a kid.

“I get tired of that, all the time being told I’m too innocent, or too nice, or too retarded, or whatever it is, to know what’s going on,” Billy flashed. “Like believing in Jesus, and wanting to do good in the world, automatically makes you an idiot. So—just to show you I’m not all that nice, I decided to find out what Bron was up to with Pat. There’s a closet in Pat’s room that connects to the next room—it used to be a big office suite or something, with a john or something in between the two rooms, but, anyway, I went in there, in the closet, and I heard the whole thing, Bron saying he needed a hundred grand for April, Pat laughing in this nasty way, ‘You been hanging around the Kid too much if you think his family will part with one red cent for your brat.’

“Then I guess Bron showed him the frog picture, and Pat said, that proved jack shit—” Billy turned crimson as he repeated the phrase; he looked at me fleetingly to see whether I was shocked. “And Bron said, oh, he had a recording of it all, on account of Marcena Love had been with him when Pat asked him to do the dirty work, and she had everything on tape, she recorded everybody’s conversations so she’d have an accurate record. So then Pat told him to wait outside for a minute. And he made a phone call and repeated the conversation, and then he called Bron back in and said, okay, he thought he could help him out after all. He said Bron should bring the truck over to Fly the Flag after he made his Crown Point drop-off—that he wanted to inspect that first load of sheets Zamar had made to see if they could be salvaged, and someone from the family would be there with a check, that it couldn’t be, like, out in public, because the family didn’t want to be involved. So I decided to go to Fly the Flag and see who showed up from the family.”