Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (24 page)

He picked up the statue of the Madonna and twisted it around, smoothing the taffeta cape over her hips. I sat still. He’d speak when he was ready, but if I prodded him he might turn pugnacious again.

“So—he still came to mass. When he started his shop, Special–T, he could have gone someplace farther away, a safer neighborhood, but he liked to stay close to the church. Felt his life had been saved here. He went from being a lookout for the Lions, selling nickel bags, to citywide lightweight champ. Then my old school, Loyola, working nights at a downtown hotel to put himself through college, but he left those Lions and drugs behind for good when he boxed for me. I make it clear to all the boys: they can’t get in the ring with Jesus and drugs at the same time.”

There wasn’t any hearty piety in his voice, just the facts. No one looking at those forearms, or the stern set to his jaw, could doubt Father Lou’s ability to stand up to a gangbanger.

“Anyway, I’m thinking it was Tuesday, but maybe it was Wednesday, I can’t be sure. But we had a cup of coffee and a donut after the service.”

“Was he worried then?”

“Of course he was worried, all this—this crap about him and drugs!” the old man shouted, smacking the table hard enough to make the Virgin wobble. “And what’s it to you, anyway?”

“If it’s any comfort, I think someone was setting him up with the drugs.” Once again I went through the long story of Nicola Aguinaldo, of Alex Fisher and the studio asking me to look into Frenada’s finances, and the two very different reports on them.

“It’s disgusting,” Father Lou said, “disgusting that you could go pry into the boy’s private business like that.”

My cheeks grew hot. I didn’t try to defend myself—I know it’s a breach of privacy, and I wasn’t going to give that pathetic adolescent bleat that everyone did it.

Father Lou glared at me, his jaw working, then said, “Still, I suppose it’s a good thing you saw the accounts the way they really were. How could it happen, the report being changed like that, so that you get one version, that reporter friend of yours another?”

“I’ve thought a lot about that,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons I came to see you. You read from time to time about hackers trying to move money from a bank into their accounts; the security stops them when they try to take it out. I don’t think it would be so hard for someone with a lot of sophisticated resources to break into a system and make more money appear than was really there. But what will happen if the user tries to withdraw it? If Lucian Frenada’s sister is his heir, can you get her to try to take the money out? That will prove whether it’s really there or just a shadow.”

He thought it over. He didn’t react quickly, but he was thorough, asking a series of questions designed to make sure Frenada’s sister wouldn’t be in any danger if she tried to get the money.

“Okay. I won’t say yes or no tonight, but I’ll talk to Celia in the morning. I want you to promise me you won’t bother her. Are you a Catholic? Do you have a pledge that you honor?”

I shifted uncomfortably on the hard chair; my mother, fleeing Fascist Italy because of religion, didn’t want that to define her daughter’s life in the New World. “I’ll pledge you my word. When I give it I do my utmost to keep it.”

He grunted. “I guess that’ll have to do. And the other thing you wanted from me?”

I took a breath and said in a rush, “Lacey Dowell. She knows something about Frenada, about his shirts, why he made those Mad Virgin T–shirts and then pretended he hadn’t. She won’t talk to me.”

“Magdalena. I never can think of her by that silly stage name. You think I can make her give up her story?” His full mouth twisted, whether in amusement or scorn I couldn’t tell. “Maybe. Maybe. You being a detective and all, I suppose you know what fancy hotel she’s staying in while she’s in town. She sure avoids the old neighborhood, unless she’s got a team of cameras following after her.”

30 The Mad Virgin’s Story

Father Lou was gone about twenty minutes. When he came back he said if I could wait he was pretty sure Magdalena would be along to the church sometime this evening.

I suddenly remembered Morrell, waiting for me at a restaurant on Damen, and asked for a phone. Father Lou took me into his study, a shabby but far more comfortable room than the parlor we’d been using. Boxing trophies were scattered about shelves stuffed with old papers. The desk, with a simple wood crucifix over it, was stacked with financial reports and old sermons. He didn’t have many books; I noticed a collection of Frank O’Connor short stories and, to my surprise, one by Sandra Cisneros—trying to keep up with parishioners, he explained when he saw me looking at it.

He had an old black rotary phone, heavy and clunky to hands used to plastic Touch–Tones. He listened in unashamedly as I made my call—I suppose to make sure I wasn’t going to set a mob heavy on Frenada’s sister—but when he heard me ask the maître d’ for Morrell he brightened.

“So you know Morrell,” he said when I hung up. “You should have told me that sooner. I didn’t know he was back in town.”

“He got thrown out of Guatemala,” I said. “I don’t know him well.”

Father Lou had met him during the Reagan years, when American churches sometimes gave sanctuary to El Salvadoran refugees. St. Remigio’s had sheltered a family that fled to Humboldt Park, and Morrell had come to do a story on them.

“Does a lot of good, Morrell. Not surprised he got thrown out of Guatemala. He’s always covering underdogs of one kind or another. If you were meeting him for a meal I suppose you must be hungry.”

He took me down a long unlit corridor to his kitchen, a cavern of a room, with a stove even older than the rotary phone. He didn’t ask me what I wanted, or even what I wouldn’t eat, but fried up a pan full of eggs with an expert hand. He ate three to my two, but I kept even with him on the toast.

When Lacey still hadn’t arrived at nine, we watched Murray’s show on a set in the parish hall. It was so old that Murray’s face danced around in a wavy line of reds and greens. The report was subdued and lacked Murray’s usual punch: he’d apparently been rattled by my information, however angrily he’d tossed me out this morning. Most of the report focused on the Mexico–Chicago drug route, with only ninety seconds on Lucian Frenada, “an up–and–coming entrepreneur whose untimely death means a lot of questions with no answers. Was he the point man for a drug ring, as the five kilos of coke found in his shop last week suggest? Was he murdered by associates he’d run afoul of? Or was he the innocent bystander his sister and other friends claim?”

Murray segued from that to footage of the shop, footage of the coke inside a bolt of T–shirting, and some old footage of Lacey and Frenada in front of the very church where I was sitting. “Father Lou Corrigan, who trained Lucian Frenada as the city champion lightweight boxer in this building, wouldn’t talk to Channel Thirteen, either about Frenada or his other prizewinning student, Lacey Dowell.”

He went on with details of Lacey’s life, showed footage of his two–week–old interview with her, and closed with a summary that seemed lame to me. Father Lou was furious, but I thought it was a much more muted report than Murray would have made without my input. Of course, the priest had known Frenada for thirty years. It was a personal story to him.

We were back in his study, still thrashing it out over a second pot of tea, when the doorbell rang, a harsh, loud buzzing that fitted the priest’s own voice. He pushed back from the chair and moved out to the hall on his light dancing step. I followed: if Lacey was bait in a Global trap I didn’t want to be sitting under a crucifix waiting for it.

The star was alone, her cloud of red curls tucked inside a motorcycle helmet. No one would have known her in her nondescript jeans and jacket.

She put an arm around the priest. “I’m so sorry, Father Lou. Sorry about everything.”

“Oh? And what do you have to be sorry for, miss? Something that you and I should talk about privately in a confessional?”

Her head jerked up and she squinted over his shoulder down the hall. When she saw me she moved away from Father Lou, and away from her sad drooping. “Who is that?”

“That’s a detective, Magdalena,” the priest said. “She’s private, but she’s got some questions about Lucy you would do well to answer.”

Lacey turned toward the door, but Father Lou grabbed her left wrist in a businesslike grip and pulled her forward. “Your old playmate, and I have to call you to get you to come talk to me about him. That tells its own tale, Magdalena.”

“Isn’t this rather melodramatic?” Lacey said. “Midnight meetings in the church?”

“Why not?” I put in. “The whole of the last two weeks has been B–grade garbage. Did you talk to Alex Fisher about coming here? Is hers going to be the next knock on the door?”

“Alex doesn’t know I’m here. She’s making me nervous these days.”

“This something that came on you suddenly after you saw the news about Frenada?” I demanded.

“Girls—ladies, I mean. Let’s go sit down. More light, less heat.”

Father Lou put a muscular arm around each of us and propelled us back to his study. He came up to about my nose, but I wouldn’t like to test the strength in those arms. He poured cold tea into three cups and set the pot down with a firm smack on the tray.

“Now, Magdalena, you’d better tell me everything you know about Lucy’s death.” He spoke with an old authority over her.

“I don’t know anything about his death. But—oh, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m so confused.”

She blinked tears away from her large blue eyes, but I didn’t feel moved to pity, and Father Lou apparently didn’t either. He fixed her with a hard stare and told her to save her dramatics for her movies. She flushed and bit her lip.

“What about the cocaine,” Father Lou said. “Do you know anything about the drugs that were planted in his shop?”

“Planted? That isn’t what happened.” She shook her head. “I was shocked. I’d talked to Lucy at my hotel, oh, weeks ago, and he never breathed a word about it. Of course he wouldn’t necessarily, but—but—it was unexpected, anyway.”

“How do you know they weren’t planted?” I asked. “Is that what Alex told you? After I wrote you that Global was doing the broadcast tonight?”

“How do you know—she didn’t—” Lacey stammered.

“Alex?” Father Lou said. “Oh, the girl from Hollywood. Don’t lie about this, Magdalena. If she talked to you about it, I want to know.”

Lacey’s wide mouth contracted into a sulky pout. “When I read this Warshawski woman’s note, I called Alex. Don’t bite me: I know her, and I don’t know Warshawski from a pit bull. Someone like me gets a million people a day saying they have special news or they can protect me from some weird shit or other. I thought Warshawski wanted to scare me into hiring her detective services.”

“That isn’t implausible,” I said. “But it doesn’t explain why it rattled you so badly you had to call Alex about it. I wrote Ms. Dowell that Global was going to smear Frenada on television,” I added to the priest. “I wanted to talk to Ms. Dowell about it. Since I couldn’t get a phone call in to her, I wrote her and waited in the lobby in case she wanted to talk to me. Half an hour later Global’s Doberman showed up, very agitated.”

“What did she tell you, Magdalena?” Father Lou demanded.

“She—Alex—she came to the Trianon and told me it was true, she even showed me a photograph they had of a kilo of cocaine inside a fabric bolt Lucy brought in from Mexico.” Lacey looked pleadingly at the priest. “If you think I wouldn’t come here because I’m coldhearted, you’re so wrong. I didn’t want to have to talk about Lucy with you if he was dealing drugs. You never could hear one bad word about Lucy. Not even when he was a lookout for the Lions when he was eleven. If you want to believe it was a plant, go ahead, but Alex warned me, warned me that Warshawski would try to get me caught in a smear campaign. And she warned me not to talk about it. It’s one thing for Hugh Grant or some other male star to get in trouble with sex and drugs, but when a woman does it, especially one getting to be my age, she looks like slime. Alex said it could kill me if it got around.” Lacey looked at me. “I suppose you were hiding behind the potted palm in the lobby.”

“You took her word for it without asking anyone else?” Father Lou said. “Your old comrade, who saved you from getting beat up, and you didn’t even question what a television show was going to say about him? Did you see what they did to him tonight, that boy who worked day and night to keep a roof over his sister’s head after her husband was killed?”

“Alex had a photo,” Lacey said, but she looked at her hands.

“That’s true, Ms. Dowell,” I said. “That’s very true.”

Lacey flushed. “She had a photo; I saw the cocaine in a photo.”

“They set him up,” I said. “You live in a world of doctored images; you know how easy it is to make a picture look like the truth. And how did you know the kilo in the bolt of cloth was even in Frenada’s shop? But it’s not the coke per se I care about. What I’m trying to understand is why they needed to shut him up. Was it something to do with the T–shirts? Why did he have a Mad Virgin T–shirt in his office?”

“It can’t be anything about the T–shirts,” she said. “That’s not a story at all. Here’s what happened. Lucy and I didn’t stay close, but we keep—kept in touch. He sent me that story that ran in the
Herald–Star
about him two years ago, how he was the model of the up–and–coming minority entrepreneur. Then when we decided to shoot
Virgin Six
here, of course it was a big story. Lucy saw it. He wrote and asked if I would get the studio to give him a contract for some of the Mad Virgin T–shirts, a Chicago commemorative or something. So I told him I’d talk to Teddy Trant, which I did, and Teddy gave me a sarcastic brush off. And I let it drop.”

“You were never a shuffler, Magdalena. You didn’t care about Lucy enough to stand up for him?” The priest looked at her over the rim of his teacup.

“We were in the middle of a difficult contract cycle. I know—I should have thought more of Lucy, but I’m thirty–seven; in another few years unless I’m really lucky I won’t be able to be a star. And anyway, Father Lou, I moved away more than twenty years ago.” She held out her hands, the gesture she often made to her old lover halfway through the Virgin movies.

“But he made some shirts on spec?” I said.

“I guess he must have. Suddenly, the day before I was flying out, Teddy called me and asked for Lucy’s number. He wanted to look at the factory or something.”

“Then at Murray’s party at the Golden Glow two weeks ago, why did you get so angry with Frenada?”

“Were you there?” she said. “Behind another potted palm or something? Teddy said he looked at Lucy’s stuff. He said it wasn’t up to Global standard. But Lucy claimed Teddy stole one of his shirts. I said that was nuts, we—the studio—manufacture zillions of them, why would Teddy steal one? Lucy threatened to make a scene right there, and I hate being humiliated in public that way. I had him thrown out. And then I felt terrible. I did, Father Lou, I really did. I called him and apologized and invited him up to my hotel for lunch. We talked and talked and he said one of the shirts he’d made really was missing. I couldn’t get him to let it drop, so I told him I’d mention it to Alex, but really I thought one of his workers must have stolen it; it’s the kind of thing people take.”

“Yes, that is possible,” Father Lou said. “What did you say to this woman Alex or to your boss?”

She knit her fingers. “I didn’t see how I could say anything to Teddy. He’d already assured me he didn’t have the shirt. He said something horrible about Lucy, anyway, and I had to remind him that I’m Mexican, too. But I told Alex and she said to stop fussing about it, if Lucy was missing a shirt she’d send him one. But of course that wasn’t the point.”

“What was so special about his shirts?” I asked. “The fabric? The picture?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” she said, spreading her hands again. “I think Lucy was upset because Global didn’t give him the contract, and it distorted his judgment.”

“Where does Global make its spin–offs—shirts and dolls and whatnot?” I asked.

“I’ve never asked. All over, I suppose.”

“Third World countries? America?”

She shook her head impatiently. “I don’t know.”

“You collect the royalties, but you don’t ask for fear of what they’ll tell you?” I said.

“I’ve sat here long enough with you thinking I’m a cockroach in the sink.” She uncoiled her legs and sprang out of the chair. “I’m out of here.”

Father Lou reached the door ahead of her and barred her way. “You can leave in a minute, Magdalena. I’m glad you came tonight. I think you’ll sleep better, having told the truth, as I’m sure you’ve done.

“We’re having the funeral mass tomorrow,” he added, when she didn’t say anything. “I expect you to be there. It will be at eleven. Lucy left his sister’s children provided for—he had a life–insurance policy—but they could use another bit of cash to pay their school fees. And it would be a graceful gesture if you gave a scholarship to the school in his memory.”

Her face was stormy, but after staring at the priest for a long minute she muttered agreement. He let her go. A few minutes later we heard a motor roar into life. Her motorcycle. I’d have to ask young Emily what kind of bike Lacey Dowell rode around town. I was betting on a hog.

Twenty thousand dollars to St. Remigio’s instead of three Hail Marys? That’s what it sounded like to me.

“I’m tired; I’d like to go to bed,” he said. “Did she tell you what you need to know?”

I wasn’t sure—I still didn’t understand why the shirt Frenada made was so important. And I wasn’t as sure as Father Lou that I’d heard the truth. When I left the rectory I wondered how much time I had before I joined Lucian Frenada in a pine box. Maybe Father Lou would offer a funeral mass for me, heathen that I was.