Fire Sale (26 page)

A lot of lines ran through Rose Dorrado and Billy the Kid. Rose had taken a second job, which upset Josie; the night the plant blew up, the Kid had come to stay at the Dorrados’, running away from his family. Because they objected to Josie? Because of something they were doing themselves? Then there was Billy’s car, but it had Morrell’s flask in it. Somehow, Billy had gotten involved with Bron or Marcena, or both. And Bron had had Billy’s phone in his pocket.

I remembered Josie telling me that Billy had given his phone to someone. To Bron? But why? And then had he given the Miata to Bron so that detectives couldn’t find him through his car? Had Bron been killed by someone who mistook him for Billy? Had Billy really been running away from danger, danger whose seriousness he was too naive to recognize?

The cell phone. What had I done with it. I had a vague memory of the clean-shaven man from Scarface demanding it from me, but I couldn’t remember whether he’d gotten it.

I’d dropped my dirty clothes just inside my door. Billy’s cell phone was still in the jacket pocket. As was Morrell’s thermos, or the thermos that looked like his. I’d handled it so much by now that I doubted it had much forensic value, but I still put it in a plastic bag, and went back down the stairs on slow, stiff legs. It used to be that I could have gone running after twenty-four hours of rest, but these legs were not going running anytime soon that I could imagine.

30

Comrades in Arms

W
hen I returned to Mr. Contreras’s kitchen, I found Conrad had arrived. He was sitting next to Morrell at the chipped enamel table while Mr. Contreras finished flipping a stack of fresh flapjacks for him.

“How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity,” I said.

Conrad grinned at me, his gold tooth glinting. “Don’t think of this as a macho meeting, Ms. W.; you are definitely the star attraction. Tell me, what led you to that pit yesterday?”

“The dog,” I said promptly, adding, as the good nature faded from his face, “no, really: ask Mr. Contreras.”

I explained what had happened, from Rose Dorrado’s call to finding Billy’s Miata under the Skyway, and Mitch’s reappearance west of the river on 100th Street. “Billy knows April Czernin because he knows Josie. And he knows—knew—Bron because Bron drove for the Bysen warehouse on 103rd and Billy knew all the truckers. So I’m wondering if Billy gave Bron his phone, and then his car.”

Conrad nodded. “It could be. Ms. Czernin—she’s one tormented, twisted-up lady. Her girl is sick, I understand, and now she doesn’t know which end is up. I didn’t ask her about the phone, because I didn’t know about it, but she might not have, either: by what she was saying, he didn’t tell her much.”

He took out his cell phone and called down to his charge sergeant to send someone over to the underpass for whatever might be left of the Miata. “And get a really good tracking team to scour the area between Ewing and the river at 100th Street. A PI’s dog picked up the Love woman’s scent down there someplace: it may be where they were attacked.”

When he’d hung up, I produced the thermos. “This was in the front seat, spilling out bourbon.”

“You took that?” Conrad was annoyed. “What the hell you think you’re doing, removing evidence from a crime scene?”

“It looked like the thermos I gave Morrell,” I said. “I didn’t want the bottom-feeders who were taking the car apart to walk off with it.”

Morrell limped over to look at it. “I think it is mine; that’s where the
i
came off when I was shot at. I told Marcena she could borrow it while she was doing her late-night jaunts—I assumed, somehow, for coffee, not bourbon. Are you impounding it, Rawlings? I want it back.”

“Then you shouldn’t have let her take it to begin with,” I said, and then I remembered her lying in a coma, a quarter of her skin missing, and felt immediately ashamed.

“We’ve been in so many war zones together,” Morrell said. “She’s my comrade-in-arms; you share your stuff with your comrades, Vic. Like it or lump it.”

Conrad looked at me, as if daring me to push one more relationship to the limit. I shook my head and changed the subject, asking who the guy at the helicopter had been.

“Colleague of yours, broadly speaking,” Conrad said.

My forehead wrinkled while I figured it out. “A private eye, you mean?”

“Yep, with Carnifice Security. That was their chopper.”

Not Scarface. Carnifice. The biggest player in the international private security business. They do everything, from kidnap protection in Colombia and Iraq to running private prisons, which is where I first met them—I almost died in their custody a couple of years back.

According to Conrad, someone in the Bysen operation had figured out the same thing I’d told Billy last week—that his cell phone contained a global tracking signal. “The kid’s father got fed up with old Mr. Bysen butting in, going down to that church, whatever it was he did. So the father decided to hire Carnifice to use their tracking equipment to find his kid’s phone, which they traced to the pit. When the gumshoe didn’t find Billy, he wanted to take off again—they hadn’t been hired to save extraneous lives.”

“Thank you, Conrad,” I said awkwardly. “Thank you for showing up, and saving my life, and saving Marcena, too.”

He gave a twisted smile. “We serve and protect, Ms. W., even the undeserving.”

He took out a tape recorder. “Now, the part I need on the record. What was the Love woman doing down on my turf?”

Morrell and I exchanged uneasy glances, but Morrell said, “She was working on a series for an English newspaper. She met Czernin when he came to pick his daughter up from basketball practice. I don’t know what she was doing specifically—she said he was showing her the neighborhood, things behind the scenes she wouldn’t have had access to without him.”

“Such as what?” Conrad demanded.

“I don’t know. She only talked in generalities, about the poverty and housing problems she was learning about.”

“She’s staying with you, right, Morrell? How often was she meeting Czernin?”

“She made a lot of contacts in Chicago—including you, Rawlings—she said you were going to take her on a ride-along this week. She would take off for a day, sometimes more, and I never knew if it was with Czernin or you or some of the other people she was meeting. I didn’t make her sign in and out when she came and went,” Morrell added with bleak humor.

“Did she tell you more?” Conrad turned to me. “You spend a lot of time in that apartment, right?”

I smiled. “That’s right, Commander, but Marcena didn’t confide in me. She did say that Bron let her drive his semi the first night they met, and that she almost took out a shed or something in the school parking lot, but I can’t remember her talking about him more specifically.”

“Ms. Czernin said the Love woman was screwing her husband,” Conrad said.

Mr. Contreras made a noise at the vulgarity, which wasn’t typical of Conrad—I figured he was trying to get Morrell off balance, to see what indiscretion he might blurt out.

Morrell gave a tight smile. “Marcena didn’t confide her private business to me.”

“Or to you, Warshawski?” Conrad said. “No? One of the girls on your team said that everyone in the school knew about it.”

My face grew hot. “Why are you harassing my team, Conrad? Do you imagine one of them killed Bron Czernin? Do I need to make sure my girls have a lawyer?”

“We’re talking to everyone who knew the guy down there. He had a way about him around that neighborhood—a lot of men might have had a reason to kill him over the years.”

“Why would the men of South Chicago go for him now if he and Marcena were an item? I’d think they’d be glad he was finding more distant pastures to roam in—except maybe Sandra, and I don’t see how she could have beaten up both her husband and Marcena and dragged them to that pit.”

“She could have had help.” Conrad tipped his head toward Morrell, who looked at him in bewilderment.

“Am I supposed to have been jealous of Czernin?” Morrell said. “Marcena and I are old friends, which is why I’m putting her up, but we’re not lovers. She has wide-ranging and eclectic tastes. When we were in Afghanistan last winter, she got involved with one of the orderlies at Humane Medicine, a Pakistani army major, and someone from the Slovenian wire services, and those were the three I knew about. Believe me, if I were a jealous lover who wanted her dead I would have done it up in the Pathan hills where no one would have cared.”

Conrad grunted: maybe he believed it, maybe he didn’t. “What about her work? What was she writing?”

Morrell shook his head. “The series was on the America Europe doesn’t know. After she met Czernin, she decided to focus on South Chicago. She spent time out at By-Smart headquarters—old Mr. Bysen seemed to like her, and she had a couple of private meetings with him. That’s all I can tell you: she played her cards close to her chest.”

“Not that close, if you knew about her Pakistani major and the orderly and so on,” Conrad said. “I want to see her notes.”

“You think the attack had to do with the story she was working on? Not someone who was out to get Bron and hit her because she was there?”

“I don’t have a theory,” Conrad grumbled. “I only have a woman whose daddy is in the British Foreign Office, so the consul has called the super five times and he’s called me ten times. Czernin gave horns to any number of guys in South Chicago, and we’re looking at that. I don’t think it was a routine gangbanging, because whatever happened to them took a lot of work, and even though my punks in South Chicago have way too much time on their hands they don’t go in for elaborate murder. So I’m looking at people Czernin pissed off, and I’m looking at what Love was working on. I can get a warrant to search your place, Morrell, easy, because the mayor is yanking the super’s chain and the super is yanking mine—any judge will be happy to oblige. But it would be real, real nice if you’d save me the trouble.”

Morrell studied him thoughtfully. “Police departments are walking off with people’s files these days under cover of the Patriot Act. I don’t want to invite police into my home so that they can take my machine or someone else’s.”

“So you want me to waste time on a warrant.”

“I don’t think legal protections are a waste of time, Rawlings. But I won’t ask you to go to a judge if you’ll come with me yourself, and go through Marcena’s computer with me file by file. If she has personal material on it, we’ll leave it lay. If she has notes that may suggest a perpetrator, you’ll copy them and take them with you.”

Conrad didn’t like it. He is a cop, after all, and cops don’t like civilian oversight of their work. But he’s a fundamentally decent guy who doesn’t want to harass citizens for the pleasure of it.

“I’m a watch commander. I can’t take that kind of time, but I can give you a good detective and a uniformed officer. With orders not to take anything you haven’t seen.”

“With orders to take copies, not originals,” Morrell said.

“With orders to take anything that looks relevant to the work the Love woman was doing in South Chicago.”

“As long as it’s a copy, and her machine isn’t impounded.”

“This is like watching Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood,” I complained. “The standoff could go on all afternoon. I’ve got to get to my office, so I’m going to leave you two to sort it out; Mr. Contreras will be Eli Wallach. He’ll let me know which one of you gets the gold.”

Conrad gave a grunting little laugh. “Okay, Ms. W., okay. I’ll let your boyfriend monitor the files, but I get to choose what I copy. Or my detective does. Her name is Kathryn Lyndes; she’ll be at your home in ninety minutes.”

The mayor was riding hard on this case, if Conrad could guarantee a detective running all the way from South Chicago to Evanston at a moment’s notice.

“Marcena’s father must be something pretty important if the consul is making the mayor care about a South Chicago mugging. Do you think you could spare a resource for someone who isn’t connected? I told you I was looking for Josie Dorrado when I found Marcena and Bron. She still hasn’t turned up, and I’m out of ideas.”

“Tell the mother to go down to the precinct and file a missing persons report.”

“And someone will jump right on it and start scouring the abandoned buildings and vacant lots?” I was scornful.

“Don’t ride me, Ms. W. You know what resources I have, and how tight I’m stretched.”

“Last week, you told me to butt out of South Chicago. This week, you don’t have the resources to look after the neighborhood.”

“Whenever you and I start to get along, you decide to open a machine gun on me,” Conrad said. “If I put you down last week over that fire, can you blame me?”

I took a breath: a who-said-what fight was a losing battle for everyone. “Okay, Conrad, this isn’t an attempt to put a machine gun on you, but have you found out anything about the fire? Who set it, or even why they were after Frank Zamar?”

“Nope. We don’t even know if Zamar set it and couldn’t get out of the building on time, although I don’t believe it. If the place had burned down last summer, when his business was slumping, it’d be a different story—he’d done a ton of business with By-Smart when everyone had to have an American flag; he’d even added an owl shift, and taken on a debt load with some fancy new cutting machines. Then that contract stopped abruptly and he had to shut down the owl shift. But not long before the fire, he’d signed a new contract with By-Smart to do a line of flag sheets and towels.”

Sleep at night on Old Glory and in the morning dry your bottom with the flag. In its way, it seemed as outrageous as burning, but what did I know? Was that the second job Rose had taken? Running the towel factory for Zamar? Why was she so defensive and secretive about it—it seemed perfectly legitimate.

I shook my head, unable to figure it out, and said to Conrad, “Just so you know, the Carnifice guy looking for Billy the Kid, he does have a lot of resources. I think Josie Dorrado is with Billy. The Bysen family has cast her in the role of blackmailing wetback trying to squeeze money out of Billy. I’d hate for her to get hurt.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Ms. W., I’ll keep that in mind.” Conrad spoke heavily, but he did scrawl something in his pocket notebook. I’d have to be content with that.

Morrell limped out of Mr. Contreras’s apartment with me. “I’m going to catch a cab home right now so I can look at some things before Rawlings’s detective arrives. You going to be okay?”

I nodded. “Desk work is all I’m good for today. Are Marcena’s parents flying in?”

“The Foreign Office is trying to find them—they’re inveterate trekkers, and right now they’re in a remote part of India.” He smoothed the hair out of my eyes and kissed me. “We had a dinner date last night, darling, but you stood me up. Should I trust you with a second chance?”

Conrad came out at that moment, and, against my will, I felt my cheeks grow hot.