Slow Burn (16 page)

Another shudder. Tiny blue veins in her hand swelled as she gripped the edge of the table. A few more drips of sweat hit the puddle on the table beneath her nose. “I told you that I want a lawyer. I’ve got a right to a lawyer.”

“A woman who knows her rights. I’m impressed.”

I couldn’t see it, but I could feel her looking at me from behind the hair in front of her face. “I don’t give a damn how impressed you are. I don’t give a damn about your questions, either. I just want my lawyer, and I want him now.”

I kept pushing. “What were you doing in Jack’s apartment, Rachel?”

“It’s not just his apartment. It’s my apartment, too.”

“Your name’s not on the lease. That makes it Jack’s apartment, and Jack’s alone.” I gave her a smile. “I’m not looking to give you a hard time over this, kid. Just tell me what you were doing there. Tell me why you were crying on the kitchen floor like that?”

“What do you care? Is it illegal now to cry in my own apartment?”

“But it’s not your—”

Rachel banged the table with her left hand. The matron came off the wall and clamped a thick hand on her thin shoulder.

Rachel shook. Not shiver like before, but really shook. Like something bottled up inside was coming to the surface. I hadn’t gotten to her yet, but I was damned close.

I couldn’t let up now. “What’s going on, Rachel? Why were you crying? Was it because of what happened to Jack? Is that it?”

Her shaking got worse. The matron looked at me, worried, but I ignored her.

Rachel said, “I want my lawyer.”

“I don’t blame you.” I took out Jack’s notebook and laid it on the table next to me so she could see it. “Nope, can’t say I blame you at all.”

Her shaking stopped as soon as she saw the notebook. “That’s… that’s Jack’s notebook. Where did you get it? You’re not supposed to read his things.”

“This?” I drummed my fingers on the cover of the notebook. “How do you know what this is? It could be mine, couldn’t it? All notebooks kind of look alike, don’t they?”

No answer.

“You’ve seen this notebook before, haven’t you, Rachel?”

Her head was tilted in the direction of the book and she was very still. I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. I tried prodding her some more. “There something in here you don’t want me to read, isn’t there, Rachel? Something about Jack. About what happened to him.” I leaned in closer. “About your plan. Isn’t there, Rachel?”

Rachel tried to lunge at me, but the matron jerked her back down in the seat. Hard. Her shaking got worse and I thought she might be on the verge of a fit. The matron looked worried, too, but I was too close to stop now.

“Quit stalling and tell me what happened, Rachel. Things are going to keep getting worse until you come clean. Why were you in Jack’s apartment? Why were you crying on the kitchen floor? What happened?”

She threw her head up and her black hair went back as she screamed, “I’m pregnant, you stupid son of a bitch! I’m pregnant and I don’t know if I’m ever going to see Jack again!”

I looked at the two-way mirror, at O’Hara, Loomis and Hauser. My own surprised reflection gawked back at me.

The matron looked as surprised as I felt. She asked, “How far along are you?”

“What do you care?” Rachel sank back in her chair and her hair fell in front of her face again in thick, wet strands. “What difference does it make?”

The matron jerked her shoulder. “Damn it, how far along?”

“A month,” Rachel shrugged. “Maybe two… I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” the matron said. “Haven’t you been to see a doctor yet?”

Rachel gave something between a shrug and a nod as she dropped her head into her left hand. Whatever feeble dam she’d built in her mind finally broke and her tears came in full force.

I lowered my voice and spoke to the matron. “Hauser said he’s already got a doctor on the way to look at her. Why don’t you see if you can’t find out where he is?”

The matron left the room and closed the door behind her. I found my key and undid Rachel’s cuff myself.

She sat back in the chair and pulled her hair back behind her ears. Her sunken red eyes looked like they were probably blue. She had thin, almost delicate features and looked younger than I’d first thought. She was eighteen. Maybe twenty on the outside.

“Is that why you were crying in the apartment?” I asked her. “Because you’re pregnant.” She wiped the tears away from her cheeks with both hands. I would’ve given her a handkerchief if I’d had a dry one.

“My aunt’s some kind of a nursemaid,” Rachel said, “or at least she was back in the old country. I went to her when I realized I was… late.”

She looked embarrassed, so I said, “My wife and I have two daughters. I know how it goes.”

She went on, “The old bitch was supposed to keep her mouth shut, but she told my mother instead. My mother went hysterical and chased me out of the house. I didn’t really have anywhere else to go, so I went over to the apartment. I turned on the radio and that’s when I heard… what happened to him. I guess… I guess I just kind of broke down after that.”

I felt myself wincing as she spoke. “You got the best and worst news of your life all in one morning. I’d probably cry on my kitchen floor myself.”

She sniffed back more tears. “My mother must’ve told my brother about the baby. He probably came over to the apartment looking to beat up Jack for getting me pregnant. He must’ve thought you were Jack.”

“Your brother’s fine, by the way,” I told her. “He’s in the next room being questioned by my partner.”

Rachel shrugged. “Him and his bullshit bourgeois sensibility. He could use a good beating now and then. Knock some sense into him.”

“We could all use that every once in a while.” I tapped the notebook. “Talk to me about some of the stuff I read in here.”

She looked at the notebook, then at me. “That’s Jack’s private notebook. He was always writing in it, but he never let me see what was in it.”

“The last time he wrote in this book was a couple of weeks ago. And he wrote about you, and him. And his sister, Jessica. And Philadelphia, too.”

Whatever color that had returned to her face disappeared again. “That… that… was nothing.”

“It sounded like something to me,” I said. “In fact, it sounded exactly like the way the kidnappers took Jack. Right down to having Jessica drop off the ransom money.” I saved the worst for last. “Which is probably what got her killed.”

Rachel’s eyes grew wider than I’d thought possible. “She’s dead? Jessica’s… dead?”

I’d been lied to enough in my life to know the truth when I saw it. I was seeing it now, but I had to be sure. “Guess you weren’t counting on that, were you?”

The shaking started again, only harder this time. “Counting? Counting on what?”

She started to gag and I looked for a wastebasket in case she vomited, but there was nothing in the room. Department regulations. She pitched to one side and got sick on the floor. I went to hold her head up, to keep her from choking, but there was no need. It wound up being dry-heaves more than anything.

Rachel sat back in the chair and looked even worse than before, if that was possible.

Loomis slipped into the room with a glass of water. I took it from him and blocked his way inside. He didn’t belong in there. He got the hint and backed outside.

I handed Rachel the water and took my seat back on the table. Rachel’s hands shook as she drank from the glass with both hands. Water spilled all over the front of her shirt and onto the blanket.

When she was done, I took the glass from her before she dropped it. “Oh God,” she whispered. “Oh God. How did this happen? What the hell is going on?”

I didn’t see any reason to soft-sell it to her. She was in a hell of a mess and she deserved to know it. “Jessica’s dead and Jack’s missing. His family wants answers, and by what I read in Jack’s notebook, the only one who can give them answers is you.”

Rachel dry-heaved again, but it was mostly water. I knew she was pregnant and I knew she was scared, but I couldn’t let up. “The quicker you tell me what’s going on here, Rachel, the better for all of us. You included.”

I thought she was about to get sick again, but she didn’t. She took a deep breath and started in. “Jack isn’t the man you probably think he is.”

“Few people are. Tell me what you mean.”

“He doesn’t want anything to do with his family or the business or anything they stand for. Jack wants to live a fair and just life where he helps people instead of exploiting them like his father and grandfather did. He loves people, not profits, and he wants to be free from all the rottenness that capitalism causes.”

Images of the books I’d seen in Jack’s apartment flashed back to me. Marx. Lenin. Just the right kind of nonsense a spoiled, lazy brat like Jack Van Dorn could buy into. Hook, line and sinker. After the war, I’d lived through the trouble that kind of thinking could stir up. People were out of work back then, too. Looking for answers and looking for people to blame their troubles on. The Reds banged the war drum loud and people listened. Workers and women of the world, unite! Fight the capitalist oppressors! Rebel!

Most of it was just empty rhetoric. Commie catcalls. Socialist slogans and Bolshevik bullshit. Pissed off kids who woke up one day and realized that life wasn’t fair. But some people did more than just attend rallies and chant slogans. They called for violence and revolution. They called for an overthrow of the government.

The Feds responded with the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. They rounded up Reds wholesale and threw away the key. That just made things worse. The riots and the protests and the bombings started soon after.

I just hoped to Christ that Jack’s kidnapping wasn’t tied to politics. Because if it was, this tunnel I was in was about to get a whole lot longer. I put all my past history and current worries aside for a second. “So Jack fell for the Commie line.”

“It wasn’t about party lines,” she said. “We wanted to live our lives our way. We didn’t care how. Anything would be better than having the Van Dorn’s blood money in our pockets. We wanted to take his family’s money and go some place where we could do some good with it.”

The last part caught my attention. “What do Communists need money for?”

“Unfortunately, you can’t do much in this society without money,” she said. “We knew his father would cut him off before he’d let him marry me, maybe even send him off to Europe so we couldn’t be together. That’s when we knew we’d have to run away. His father had always kept him on a strict allowance — credit, mostly, at his family’s clubs and their favorite restaurants. We knew we needed cash to make a break for it.” Rachel’s hands trembled again as she picked at a hangnail. “S…so, that’s when Jack came up with the plan.”

B
ACK IN
the squad room, Hauser and the others listened while I told them everything Rachel had told me about the plan.

O’Hara stroked his moustache, deep in thought. Loomis was still sulking over me kicking him out of the room. I told them about Rachel, how she was Jack’s lover and was pregnant with his kid. None of that fazed them. They’d all heard sad stories before. It was the plan to elope that got them, just like I knew it would.

Loomis forgot all about sulking when I dropped that tidbit. “They were going to do what?”