Blood Shot (15 page)

19

You Can’t Go Home Again

By the time I got home it was past dark. I had stayed in South Chicago long enough to make sure young Art was fit to drive. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to turn him over to the ward heelers for comfort, but my display of charity didn’t make him any more willing to talk. Frustrated, I finally left him at the door of the ward office.

The drive north brought me no solace. I walked wearily up the front walk, dropped my keys as I fumbled with the inner lobby door, then dropped them again as I was going upstairs. Bone-tired, I turned back down the stairs to retrieve them. Behind Mr. Contreras’s door, Peppy gave a welcoming bark. As I headed back up I heard his locks scraping back behind me. I stiffened, waiting for the flow.

“That you, doll? You just getting back? Your friend’s funeral was today, huh? You haven’t been out drinking, have you? People think it’s a way to drown their sorrows, but believe me, it only causes you more grief than you started with. I should know—I tried it more than once. But then when Clara died I took one drink and remembered how it used to get her down, me coming home from a funeral with a good one tied on. I said I wouldn’t do it, not for her, not after all the times she told me how stupid I was, crying over some friend when I was too drunk to get his name out straight.”

“No,” I said, forcing a smile, holding my hand out for the dog to lick. “I haven’t been drinking. I had to see a whole bunch of people. Not a lot of fun.”

“Well, you go on upstairs and take a hot bath, doll. By the time you’ve done that and had a chance to rest, I’ll have some dinner ready. I have me a nice steak I’ve been saving for sometime special, and that’s what you need when you’re feeling this low. A little red meat, get your blood flowing again, and life’ll look a whole lot better to you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s very good of you, but I really don’t—”

“Nope. You think you want to be alone, but believe me, cookie, that’s the worst thing for you when you’re feeling like this. Her royal highness and I’ll get you fed, and then if you’re ready to be on your own again, you say the word and we’ll be back down here on the double.”

I just couldn’t bring myself to bring the cloud of hurt to his faded brown eyes by insisting on being alone. Cursing myself for my soft heart, I trudged up the stairs to my apartment. Despite my neighbor’s dire words, I headed straight for the Black Label bottle, kicking off my pumps and pulling off my panty hose while I unscrewed the cap. I drank from the bottle, a long swallow that sent a glow of warmth to my weary shoulders.

Filling a glass, I took it into the bathroom with me. I dumped my funeral suit on the floor and climbed into the tub. By the time Mr. Contreras showed up with the steak, I was a little drunk and much more relaxed than I’d have thought possible a half hour before.

He had already had dinner; he brought his grappa bottle to keep me company while I ate. After a few bites I grudgingly admitted—only to myself—that he’d been right about the food: life did start to look better. The steak was done to a turn, crisply brown on the outside, red within. He’d cooked up some pan fries with garlic and brought his conscientious nod to my diet, a plate of lettuce. He was a good plain cook, self-taught as a hobby during his widowhood—he’d never done more in the kitchen than fetch beer when his wife was still alive.

I was finishing off the fries with the rest of the meat juice when the phone rang. I handed Peppy the bone she’d been eyeing—not begging for, just keeping an eye on in case someone broke in and tried to steal it—and went over to the piano, where I’d left the living-room extension.

“Warshawski?” It was a man’s voice, cold and harsh. Not one I knew.

“Yes.”

“Maybe it’s time you butted out of South Chicago, Warshawski. You don’t live there anymore, you don’t have any business there.”

I wished I hadn’t had the third whiskey and desperately tried assembling my scrambled brain. “And you do?” I asked insolently.

He ignored me. “I hear you can swim pretty good, Warshawski. But the swimmer hasn’t been born that can float through a swamp.”

“You calling on Art Jurshak’s behalf? Or Steve Dresberg’s?”

“It doesn’t matter to you, Warshawski. Because if you’re smart, you’re butting out, and if you’re not, you won’t be around to worry about it.”

He hung up. My knees felt slightly weak. I sat on the piano bench to steady myself

“Bad news, cookie?”

Mr. Contreras’s weather-beaten face showed kindly concern. On second thought, it wasn’t such a bad idea to have him with me tonight.

“Just an old-style thug. Reminding me that Chicago’s the world float-fish capital.” I tried keeping my tone airy, but the words came out heavier than I wanted.

“He threaten you?”

“Sort of.” I tried to grin, but to my annoyance my lips were trembling. The image of the rank marsh grasses, the mud, the shapeless fishing couple and their wild red-eyed dog made me shiver uncontrollably.

Mr. Contreras hovered over me solicitously; Shouldn’t I get out my Smith & Wesson? Call the police? Barricade the doors? Check into a hotel under an assumed name? When I turned down those offers he suggested I call Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star—an act of true nobility because he had a fierce jealousy of Murray. Peppy, sensing his tension, dropped her bone and came over with a little bark.

“It’s okay, guys,” I assured them. “It’s just talk. No one’s going to shoot me. At least not tonight.”

Mr. Contreras, unable to do anything else, offered me his grappa bottle. I waved it aside. The threat had cleared out my brain; I didn’t see any point in fogging it up again with my neighbor’s repellent booze.

On the other hand, I wasn’t quite ready to be on my own again. Amid the stack of old notebooks and school papers in the back closet I dug out a worn checker set my dad and Bobby Mallory used to linger over.

We played four or five games, the dog contentedly returning to her bone in the comer behind the piano. Mr. Contreras was just getting reluctantly to his feet when the doorbell rang. The dog let out a deep bark. The old man became extremely excited, urging me to get out my gun, to let him go downstairs, telling me to go down the back way and summon help.

“Oh, nonsense,” I said. “No one’s going to shoot me in my own home two hours after a phone call—they’ll at least wait until morning to see if I’ve listened to them.”

I went to the intercom by the front door.

“Vic! Let me in! I need to see you.” It was Caroline Djiak.

I pressed the button releasing the lobby door and went out to wait in the upper hallway for her. Peppy stood next to me, her golden tail lowered and moving gently to show she was on the alert. Caroline ran up the stairs, her feet clattering on the uncarpeted risers like an ancient el rounding the curve at Thirty-fifth Street.

“Vic!” she shrieked when she saw me. “What are you doing? I thought I told you to stop looking for my father. Why can’t you just once do what I ask you to!”

Peppy, taking exception to her ferocity, began to bark. One of the second-floor tenants came to his door and yelled up at us to shut up. “Some people have to work, you know!”

Before Mr. Contreras could leap to my defense, I took Caroline firmly by the arm and dragged her into my apartment. Mr. Contreras looked at her critically. Deciding she wasn’t dangerous—at least not an immediate physical threat —he stuck a calloused hand at her and introduced himself

Caroline was in no mood for ordinary civility. “Vic, I’m begging you. I came all this way since you wouldn’t listen to me on the phone. You’ve got to leave my affairs alone.”

“Caroline Djiak,” I informed Mr. Contreras. “She’s pretty upset. Maybe you should leave me to talk to her.”

He started getting the dinner dishes together. I pulled Caroline to the couch.

“What is going on with you, Caroline? What is frightening you so much?”

“I’m not frightened,” she yelled. “I’m angry. Angry with you for not leaving me alone when I asked you to.”

“Look, kiddo, I’m not a television you turn on and off. I could overlook my conversation with your grandparents—they’re so sick nothing I could do would make any difference to them anyway. But everyone at Humboldt Chemical is lying to me about the men your mother used to work with, the ones who had the best chance of being your father. I just can’t let that go. And it’s not trivial, what they’re saying—they’re completely reinventing the last years of these guys’ lives.”

“Vic, you don’t understand.” She grabbed my right hand in her intensity, squeezing it hard. “You can’t keep crossing these people. They’re totally ruthless. You don’t know what they might do.”

“Such as what?”

She looked wildly around the room, seeking inspiration. “They might kill you, Vic. They might see you end up in the swamp the way Nancy did, or in the river!”

Mr. Contreras had stopped all pretense of getting ready to leave. I removed my hand from Caroline’s grasp and stared at her coldly.

“Okay. I want the truth now. Not your embellished version. What do you know about the people who killed Nancy?”

“Nothing, Vic. Nothing. Honestly. You have to believe me. It’s just … just …”

“Just what?” I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Who threatened Nancy? You’ve been saying for the last week that it was Art Jurshak because he didn’t want her starting the recycling plant. Now you want it to be the people down at Xerxes because I’m hunting for your old man there? Goddamnit, Caroline, can’t you see how important this is? Can’t you see that this is life and death?”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you, Vic!” She shouted so loudly that the dog started barking again. “That’s why I’m telling you to mind your own business!”

“Caroline!” I felt my voice go into an upper register and tried to get a grip on myself before I broke her neck. I moved to the easy chair next to the sofa.

“Caroline. Who called you? Dr. Chigwell? Art Jurshak? Steve Dresberg? Gustav Humboldt himself?”

“No one, Vic.” The gentian eyes were awash with tears. “No one. You just don’t understand anything about life in South Chicago anymore, you’ve been away so long. Can’t you just take my word for it, take my word that you should quit already?”

I ignored her. “Ron Kappelman? Did he call you this afternoon?”

“People talk to me,” she said. “You know how it is down there. At least you would if—”

“If I hadn’t been a chicken shit and run away,” I finished for her. “You’ve been hearing little rumblings around the office that someone—you don’t know who—has it in for me, and you’re here to save my butt. Thanks a bundle. You’re scared out of your little mind, Caroline. I want to know who’s been frightening you, and don’t tell me it’s some street snitch with tales of drowning me, because I just won’t buy it. You wouldn’t be beside yourself if it was just that. Lay it out for me. Now.”

Caroline jerked herself to her feet. “What do I have to do to get you to listen to me?” she screamed. “Someone called me today from the Xerxes plant and said they were sorry I’d gone to all the expense of hiring you. They said that they had proof that Joey Pankowski was my father. They told me to get you to believe me and get off the case.”

“And did they offer to show you this remarkable evidence?”

“I didn’t need to see it! I’m not as untrusting as you are.”

I put a restraining hand on Peppy, who was starting to growl. “And did they threaten you with mayhem if you didn’t force me to withdraw?”

“I wouldn’t care what anyone threatened me with. Can’t you believe that?”

I looked at her as calmly as I could. She was wild, manipulative, unscrupulous in getting her own way. But I would never in my remotest imagination think of her as a coward.

“I can believe it,” I said slowly. “But I want to hear the truth. Did they really tell you they’d hurt me if I didn’t stop looking?”

The gentian eyes turned away. “Yes,” she muttered.

“Not good enough, Caroline.”

“Believe what you want to. If they kill you, don’t expect me to show up at your funeral, because I won’t care.” She burst into tears and stormed out of the apartment.

20

White Elephant

Mr. Contreras finally left around one. I slept fitfully, my mind thrashing over Caroline’s visit. Caroline didn’t fear anything. That’s why she confidently followed me into Lake Michigan’s pounding surf when she was four years old. Even a near-drowning hadn’t scared her—she’d been ready to go right back again when I’d gotten her lungs cleaned out. If someone had told her my life was on the line, it might’ve made her mad, but it wouldn’t terrify her.

Someone had called to tell her Joey Pankowski was her father. She couldn’t have pulled that out of the blue. But had they added a rider about hurting me, or was that an inspired guess? I hadn’t seen her for a decade, but you don’t forget the mannerisms of the people you grow up with: that sidelong glance when I asked her directly made me think she was lying.

The only reason I believed her at all—about the threat, that is—was because I’d gotten my own call. Until Caroline showed up I’d been assuming my threat came from Art Jurshak because I’d accosted his son. Or because I’d talked to Ron Kappelman. But what if it came from Humboldt?

When the orange clock readout glowed three-fifteen I turned on the light and sat up in bed to use the phone. Murray Ryerson had left the paper forty-five minutes earlier. He wasn’t home yet. On the chance, I tried the Golden Glow—Sal shuts down at four. Third time lucky.

“Vic! I’m overwhelmed. You had insomnia and you thought of me. I can see the headline now—‘Girl Detective Can’t Sleep for Love.’”

“And I thought it was the onions I had for dinner. Must’ve been what was wrong with me the day I agreed to marry Dick. You know our little conversation yesterday?”

“What little conversation?” he snorted. “I told you stuff about Nancy Cleghorn and you sat with Velcro on your mouth.”

“Something came back to me,” I said limpidly.

“Better make it good, Warshawski.”

“Curtis Chigwell,” I said. “He’s a doctor who lives in Hinsdale. Used to work at a plant down in South Chicago.”

“He killed Nancy Cleghorn?”

“As far as I know he never met Nancy Cleghorn.”

I felt rather than heard Murray sputter. “It’s been a tough day, V.I. Don’t make me play Twenty Questions with you.”

I reached down next to the bed for a T-shirt. Somehow the night was making me feel too exposed in my nakedness. As I leaned over the lamplight highlighted dust in the corner of the bedroom. If I lived past next week, I’d vacuum.

“That’s what I’ve got for you,” I said slowly. “Twenty questions. No answers. Curtis Chigwell knows something that he doesn’t want to tell. Twenty-four hours ago I didn’t think it had the remotest possible connection to Nancy. But I got a threatening phone call tonight telling me to bug out of South Chicago.”

“From Chigwell?” I could almost feel Murray’s breath through the phone line.

“No. I thought it had to come from Jurshak or Dresberg. Only thing, a couple of hours later I heard the same thing from someone who knows me only through the Xerxes side —the plant that Chigwell used to work for.”

I explained the discrepancies I’d gotten between Manheim and Humboldt’s version of Pankowski and Ferraro’s suit—without telling him about hearing it from Gustav Humboldt himself “Chigwell knows what the truth is and why. He just doesn’t want to say. And if the Xerxes people are threatening me, he’ll know why.”

Murray tried a thousand different ways to get me to tell him more about it. I just couldn’t give him Caroline and Louisa—Louisa didn’t deserve to have her unhappy past spinning around the streets of Chicago. And I didn’t know anything else. Anything about what possible connection there could be between Nancy’s death and Joey Pankowski.

Murray finally said, “You’re not trying to help me, you’re getting me to do your legwork. I can feel it. But it’s not a bad story—I’ll send someone out to talk to the guy.”

When he hung up I managed to sleep a little, but I woke again for good around six-thirty. It was another gray February day. Sharp cold with snow would have been preferable to this unending misty chill. I pulled on my sweats, did my stretches, and ruthlessly roused Mr. Contreras by knocking on his door until the dog barked him awake. I took her to the lake and back, stopping now and then to tie my shoes, to blow my nose, to throw her a stick—gestures that let me subtly check my rear. I didn’t think anyone was on it.

After depositing the dog I went to the comer diner for pancakes. Back home to change, I’d just about made up my mind to visit Louisa, see if she could shed any light on Caroline’s panic, when Ellen Cleghorn called. She was most upset: she’d gone over to Nancy’s house in South Chicago to collect her financial records and found the place ransacked.

“Ransacked?” I repeated foolishly. “How do you know?”

“The way you always do, Victoria—the place had been ripped to shreds. Nancy didn’t have much and she’d only been able to fix up a couple of rooms. The furniture was pulled apart and her papers strewn all over the place.”

I shuddered involuntarily. “Sounds like housebreakers gone mad. Could you tell if anything was missing?”

“I didn’t try to see.” Her voice caught a little on a nervous sob. “I looked at her bedroom and ran out of there as fast as I could. I—I was hoping you might come down and go through the house with me. I can’t bear to be alone there with this—this ravaging of Nancy.”

I promised to meet her in front of her house within the hour. I’d wanted to go directly to Nancy’s, but Mrs. Cleghorn was too nervous about the intruders to hang around her daughter’s house, even outside. I finished pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt, and then, not too happily, went to the little wall safe I’d built into the bedroom closet and took out the Smith & Wesson.

I don’t make a habit of carrying a gun—if you do, you get dependent on them and your wits slow down. But I’d been jumpy enough already between Nancy’s murder and the threat to send me into the swamp after her. Now this housebreaking. I supposed it could have been local punks casing the place and seeing that no one was home. But tearing the furniture apart. It could have been a druggie coked so far out of his mind that he’d torn the furniture apart looking for money. But it could also have been her killers looking for something she had that might incriminate them. So I stuck a second clip into my handbag and pushed the loaded gun into my jeans waistband; my wits were not fast enough to stop a speeding bullet.

The Cleghorn house looked remote and bedraggled in the gray mist. Even the turret that had been Nancy’s bedroom seemed to be drooping a little. Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting for me on the front walk, her normally pleasant, round face gaunt and strained. She gave a tremulous smile and climbed into my car.

“I’ll ride with you if you don’t mind. I’m shaking so badly I don’t even know how I got home.”

“You can just give me her house keys,” I said. “You don’t need to come along if you’d be happier staying here.”

She shook her head. “If you went by yourself, I’d only spend the time worrying that someone was waiting in ambush for you.”

While I followed her directions for the quickest way up, along South Chicago to Yates, I asked if she’d called the police.

“I thought I’d wait. Wait until you saw what happened. Then”—she gave a twisted little smile—“maybe you could do it for me. I think I’ve done all the talking to police that I can stand. Not just for now, but forever.”

I reached across the gearshift to pat her hand. “It’s okay. Happy to be of service.”

Nancy’s house was up on Crandon, near Seventy-third Street. I could see why Mrs. Cleghorn called it a white elephant—a big wooden monster, its three full stories filled an outsize lot. But I could also see why Nancy had bought it—the little cupolas at the comers, the stained-glass windows, the carved wooden banister on the stairwell inside, all evoked the comfort and order of Alcott or Thackeray.

It wasn’t immediately obvious that someone had been in the house. Nancy had apparently put everything she had into buying it, so the front hallway had no furniture. It wasn’t until I went up the oak stairs and found the main bedroom that I saw the damage. I sympathized fully with Mrs. Cleghorn’s decision to wait for me in the entryway.

Nancy had apparently made the main bedroom her first rehab project. The floor was finished, the walls plastered and painted, and a working fireplace, with a tiled mantel and gleaming brass fittings, was set in the wall opposite the bed. The effect would have been charming, except that the furniture and bedding had been thrown about the room.

I tiptoed gingerly through the rubble. I was violating all possible police rules—not calling to report the destruction, walking through it and disturbing the evidence, adding my detritus to that of the vandals. But it’s only in rule books that every crime gets detailed lab inspection. In real life I didn’t think they’d pay too close attention, even though the homeowner had been murdered.

Whatever the vandals had been looking for didn’t take up much space. Not only had they ripped the mattress cover away and slashed through the stuffing, but they had taken up the grate in the fireplace and removed several bricks. Either money, if I stayed with the coked-out-addict theory. Or papers. Some kind of evidence Nancy had of something so hideous, people were willing to kill to keep it a secret.

I went back downstairs, my own hands shaking a little. The destruction of a house is such a personal violation. If you can’t be safe within your home base, you feel you have no security anywhere.

Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting at the bottom. She put a motherly arm around my waist—seeing me upset helped her gain some composure.

“The dining room is the only other room Nancy really had fixed up. She was using the built-in cupboards as a little home office until she had the time and the money to fix up the study.”

I suggested that Mrs. Cleghorn continue to stay in the hall. If the marauders hadn’t found what they were looking for upstairs, I had an unwilling vision of what the cupboards might look like.

The reality was far worse than anything I had brought myself to imagine. Plates and tableware lay scattered on the floor. The seats had been ripped from the chairs. All the shelves in the walnut cupboards that formed the far wall of the room were splintered. And the papers that made up Nancy’s personal life were strewn about like ticker tape the day after a big parade.

I compressed my lips tightly, trying to hold my feelings in while I picked through the rubble. By and by Mrs. Cleghorn called to me from the doorway: I’d been away so long she’d gotten worried and braced herself to face the destruction. Together we culled bank statements, picked an address book from the heap, and took anything relating to mortgage or insurance for Mrs. Cleghorn to go through later.

Before leaving I poked around in the other rooms. Here and there a loose floorboard had been pried up. The fireplaces—there were six altogether—were missing their grates. The old-fashioned kitchen had come in for its share of damage. It probably hadn’t looked too good to begin with, its fixtures dating from the twenties, old sink, old icebox, and badly peeling walls. In typical vandal style the intruders had dumped flour and sugar on the floor and pulled all the food from the refrigerator. If the police ever caught up with them, I’d recommend a year spent fixing up the house as the first part of their sentence.

They’d come in through the back door. The lock had been jimmied and they hadn’t bothered to shut it properly behind them. The backyard was so overgrown, no one passing in the alley would be able to see that the place was open. Mrs. Cleghorn dug a hammer and nails out of the workshop Nancy had set up next to the pantry; I hammered a board across the back door to keep it shut. There seemed to be nothing further we could do to restore wholeness to the place. We left wordlessly.

Back at the house on Muskegon, I called Bobby to tell him what happened. He grunted and said he’d refer the matter to the Third District, but for me to stand by in case they wanted to ask me anything.

“Yeah, sure,” I muttered. “I’ll stick by the phone for the rest of the week if it’ll keep the police happy.” Perhaps it was just as well that Bobby had already hung up.

Mrs. Cleghorn busied herself with coffee. She brought it to me in the dining room, with leftover cake and salad.

“What were they looking for, Victoria?” she finally asked after her second cup.

I picked moodily at some spice cake. “Something small. Flat. Papers of some kind, I suppose. I don’t think they can have found them, or they wouldn’t have been prying up the bricks in the other fireplaces. So where else would Nancy have left something? You’re sure she didn’t drop anything off here?”

Mrs. Cleghorn shook her head. “She might have come in while I was at work. But—I don’t know. Do you want to look at her old bedroom?”

She sent me alone up the attic stairs to the old turret where Nancy and I had waited for Sister Anne or battled pirates. It was an unbearably sad room, the remains of childhood sitting forlornly on the worn furniture. I turned over teddy bears and trophies and a worn poster of the early Beatles with studied indifference, but found nothing.

The police arrived when I got back downstairs and we spent an hour or so talking to them. We told them I’d gone over with Mrs. Cleghorn to help her find Nancy’s papers—that she didn’t want to go alone and I was an old friend and that we’d found the chaos and called them. We talked to a couple of junior grade detectives who wrote everything down in slow longhand but didn’t seem any more concerned about this break-in than that of any other South Side householder. They left eventually without giving us any special instructions or admonitions.

I got up to leave shortly after they did. “I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s possible that the people who were looking at Nancy’s place will come here. You should consider going to stay with one of your sons, however much you may dislike it.”

Mrs. Cleghorn nodded reluctantly; the only one of her sons who didn’t have children lived in a trailer with his girlfriend. Not the ideal guesthouse.

“I suppose I should get Nancy’s car put away safely too. Who knows where these insane creatures will strike next?”