Fire Sale (35 page)

I couldn’t help laughing. “I don’t think I will come to that. But if it does—
muchas gracias
!”

40

An Acid Touch

T
he lights were on in the church when I pulled up to the corner of Ninety-second and Houston. I went up the shallow step to the front door to see what was going on. Thursday night Bible study, six-thirty to eight, November topic, the book of Isaiah. It was just after six-thirty now, so the pastor was hard at it.

Directly across the street from the church was a vacant lot where a handful of cars and trucks were parked at skewed angles—including a Dodge with big speakers in the back and a license plate beginning “VBC.” Next to the lot, three decrepit houses propped each other up. Cocodrilo, the bar where Freddy drank, was on their far side. The bar was really just the ground floor of a narrow two-flat, whose clapboard sides were sagging and peeling. The windows were covered with a thick mesh screen that didn’t allow much light to seep out.

I had called Morrell from the car to let him know I would be a little late, just a little. He had sighed, the exaggerated sigh of a lover who is always being stood up, and said if I wasn’t home by eight he and Don would eat without me.

The exchange sent me into Cocodrilo in a bristly mood. I let the door bang shut behind me, like Clint Eastwood, and put on my Clint Eastwood face: I own this bar, don’t mess with me. There were maybe fifteen people inside, but it was a small place, and dark, just a narrow room with a high counter and a couple of rickety tables jammed against the wall, so it was hard to survey the crowd.

The television over the bar was tuned to a soccer match, Mexico versus some small Caribbean island. A few men were watching, but most were talking or arguing in a mixture of Spanish and English.

Cocodrilo seemed to be a young man’s bar, although there were a few older faces—I recognized one of the men from this afternoon’s construction site. And it was definitely a man’s bar: when I walked in, conversation died down as they eyed me. A trio near the door thought they’d try a smart remark, but my expression sent them back to their beer with a surly remark in Spanish—whose meaning I could certainly guess, even though it hadn’t been in my high school text.

I finally spotted Diego, my center Sancia’s boyfriend, in a small knot at the far end of the room. The man next to him had his back to me, which made him easy to recognize—he had the thick, dark hair and camouflage jacket I’d trailed through the warehouse a couple of hours earlier.

I pushed my way past the trio at the door and tapped him on the shoulder. “Freddy! And Diego. What a wonderful coincidence. We’re going to talk, Freddy.”

When he turned, I saw Rose was right: he did have sort of pretty-boy good looks in his high cheekbones and full lips, but she was also right—indolence and drugs were eating away at them.

Freddy looked at me blankly, but Diego said, “The coach, man, she’s the basketball coach.”

Freddy stared at me in dawning alarm, then shoved me hard enough to send me reeling. He barged down the narrow length of the room to the front door, knocking over a bottle of beer as he went.

I righted myself and took off after him. No one tried to stop me, but no one moved out of my way, either, so Freddy was out on the street before I caught up with him. I put on a burst of speed, forgetting my sore thighs, my swollen hands, my shoulder. He was crossing the vacant lot to Diego’s truck when I launched myself at him. I knocked him to the ground and fell heavily on top of him.

I heard applause and looked up to see three of the men from the bar, including the guy from the jobsite, laughing and clapping.

“Hey, missus, you go see Lovie Smith, you play for the Bears!”

“What this
chavo
done to you? Leave you with baby and no money? He got two babies already and no money for them!”

“She’s not the kind, not the kind, Geraldo, mind your mouth.”

Freddy shoved me aside and scrambled to his feet. I grabbed his right ankle. When he started to kick at me, an audience member moved in and pinned his arms. “Don’t run, Freddy, the lady, she worked so hard to catch you, is very rude to run away.”

The rest of the men trickled out of the bar and stood in a half circle around us, except for Diego, who moved uncertainly halfway between Freddy and the truck.

I got to my feet and pulled on my mittens. “Freddy Pacheco, you and I are long overdue for this talk.”

“You a cop, missus?” the man holding his arms asked.

“Nope. I’m the basketball coach down at Bertha Palmer. Julia was a good student and a good ballplayer until this
chavo banda
ruined her life.”

A murmur in Spanish rippled through the trio.
El coche.
Yes, but a detective, too, only private, not police; Celine, his
sobrina
, she was crazy about
el coche. Sobrina
, my tired brain fished in my high school Spanish. Niece. Celine, my gangbanger, was this man’s niece; she was crazy about me? Maybe I was misunderstanding him, but the notion cheered me no end.

“So what you want to know from this piece of garbage, missus?”

“The soap dish Julia gave you for Christmas last year, Freddy.”

“I don’t know what you talking about.” He was looking at the ground, which made it hard to understand his whining.

“Don’t lie, Freddy. I sent the dish to a forensics lab. You know what DNA is, don’t you? They can find DNA even on a soap dish that’s been through a fire. Isn’t that wonderful?”

He balked some more, but after more prodding and a few threats, both from me and the men, admitted that he’d given it to Diego, who’d given it to Sancia Valdéz. “What Julia think I want with a girly present like that?”

“And Sancia was mad when she learned that Diego hadn’t bought it for her. Secondhand goods, Sancia called it, and she didn’t want it, so she gave it back to Julia. Isn’t that right, Diego?”

Diego backed away from me in alarm, but another of the men caught his arm and dragged him back to the group, with a guttural command.

“So, Freddy,” I picked up my narrative in a bright, schoolteacher voice, “recently you changed your mind. And you went to the Dorrado place and took it back from Julia. Why did you do that?”

There wasn’t much light on the street, just what little was spilling out of the bar, and the one streetlamp across the road in front of the church, but I think Freddy was giving me a calculating look, as if to decide how big a story he could get me to swallow.

“I was sorry I treated her mean, man, she tried to do something nice for me, I shouldn’t have been so mean to her.”

“Yeah, Freddy, I believe in the Easter bunny and all those other warm cuddly stories, too. If you wanted it so bad, how did it end up at Fly the Flag?”

“I don’t know. Maybe someone stole it from me.”

“Yes, a three-dollar soap dish, that’s worth breaking and entering for, isn’t it? Here’s the problem.” I turned to the men from the bar, who were listening to me as closely as if I were telling their fortunes. “That soap dish was used to start the fire at Fly the Flag. Frank Zamar died in that fire, so the person who set it is guilty of murder. And it looks like that person was Freddy, here, maybe with Bron Czernin’s help, maybe with Diego’s.”

Shocked comments in Spanish rippled through the group. Had this
gamberro
and his cousin killed Frank Zamar? Destroyed the plant?

“Why, Freddy? Why you do this?” Celine’s uncle slapped him.

“I didn’t do nothing. I don’t know what she talking about!”

“How that soap dish start the fire?” one of the men asked.

I pulled the crude drawing of the frog from my pocket again. They crowded around to study it in the dim light.

“I don’t know who made this drawing—maybe Bron Czernin, maybe Freddy. But here’s how it worked.”

Pointing at the drawing, I explained my theory, about the nitric acid and the wires, and there was another buzz of talk. I caught Andrés’s name, and Diego, and
“carro,”
which at first I heard as the Italian
“caro,”
darling: Diego was some-body’s darling? No, the pastor had done something to Diego’s darling, no, to his—not his wagon, his truck, that’s what it was.

The first time I visited Rose Dorrado, Diego was outside her apartment, playing his stereo at top volume, and Josie said if Pastor Andrés came around he’d totally fix Diego’s truck like he had before.

“What did the pastor do to Diego’s truck?” I asked.

“Not his truck, missus, his stereo.”

“Diego, he starts parking his truck right here, in front of Mount Ararat, during the services,” Celine’s uncle explained. “He crank his stereo up real loud. No one even knows why, was he playing to Sancia, trying to get her to come join him, or bugging his ma, she’s real religious, her and Freddy’s ma, they’re sisters, they both pray at Mount Ararat, but Pastor, he warn Diego two, three times, you turn that off during the sermon, and Diego, he just as much a
chavo
as Freddy, here, he jus’ laugh. So Pastor, he fix up a metal dish with a rubber plug, put in some nitric, put it on the stereo, acid go through the plug, go through the wires, shut Diego down ’bout halfway through the worship.”

In the poor light, I couldn’t make out anyone’s expressions, but I could tell the men were laughing.

Freddy was furious. “Yeah, everybody think, whatever the pastor do, thas cool, he cost Diego here three hundred dollars to fix his amp, his speakers, and you guys think it’s all a joke because the pastor did it, but the pastor, he put glue in the locks at Fly the Flag, I saw him.”

In the shocked silence that followed, the man holding Freddy must have loosened his grip, because Freddy broke free and bolted for the truck. Diego ran ahead of him and jumped into the driver’s seat. I tried to follow but tripped on a piece of rubble and fell hard. As one of the men helped me back to my feet, Diego laid down rubber and the taillights of the truck disappeared down Houston.

I could hear the murmur in the group. Was this true? Could you possibly believe Freddy Pacheco? One man said, yes, he had heard the same thing before, but the man from the jobsite said he could not believe it of Roberto.

“He’s at the church now with his Bible study. He has to tell us, tell this lady, here, did this
chavo
tell the truth or not? I work with him every day, he is the best man on the South Side, I cannot believe this.”

Five of the men returned to the bar, but the rest of us crossed the street, an uneasy band, not talking, no one wanting to be the person who confronted Pastor Andrés. We pushed our way into the church, through the sanctuary to the big room in the back where they’d served coffee after the service on Sunday. In one corner, some toddlers were playing with plastic trucks and dolls, or just lying on cushions sucking on bottles. At a deal table near the door, Andrés was sitting with a group of some dozen parishioners, mostly women, hard at work on the Prophet Isaiah.

“What is this?” Andrés demanded. “If you have come for Bible study, Missus Detective, you are welcome, but if you are here to interrupt then you must wait until we are done. The Word of the Lord takes precedence over all human worries.”

“Not all, Roberto,” his coworker said. “Not when it is life and death.”

He switched to Spanish, speaking so fast I could follow only in part.
El coche
, that was me, then something about Freddy, Diego, the fire, the factory, and
pegamento
, another word I didn’t understand. Andrés fired something back at him, but the women at the table looked shocked and started speaking, too. Andrés realized he was losing control of his group and shut his Bible.

“We will take a five-minute break,” he announced magisterially in English. “I will talk to this detective in my office. You may come, too, Tomás, doubting Tomás,” he added to the man from the jobsite.

All of the men who had come with me from Cocodrilo followed us through the robing room to the pastor’s study. There were only two chairs in it, besides the seat behind his desk, so the men, and many of the women from the study group, crowded around the doorway.

“Now, Missus Detective, what is all this? Why do you keep harassing me, especially in church?” Andrés said when he had seated himself behind his desk.

“Freddy says you put glue in the locks at Fly the Flag. Is that true?”

“Yes, Roberto, did you do this thing?” Tomás asked.

Andrés looked from Tomás to the group at the door, as if deciding whether to bluff it out, but no one gave him any encouragement. “Frank Zamar was a man who had to choose between what is right and what is easy, and he didn’t always know how to choose wisely,” he said heavily. “After 9/11, he was busy making flags for everyone in the world, and he got a big order from By-Smart. He added a second shift, he bought new machines.”

“Then he lost the work,” one of the men said. “We know all that. My old lady, she one of the people got laid off. Why you go put glue in his doors because he lost his contract?”

“It wasn’t because of that; when he lost the contract, wasn’t I the first one there to help your wife sign up for unemployment? Didn’t I find housing for the Valdéz family?” Andrés burst out.

There were murmurs of acknowledgment, yes, he had done these things. “All the more reason to ask, why the glue, Roberto?”

Andrés looked directly at me for the first time. “It’s what I told you this afternoon, that Zamar signed a new contract with By-Smart in a panic. And to warn him—I am sorry to confess it, I am ashamed to confess it—I did put the glue in his door to show him what could happen to him if he hurt the neighborhood. It was a child’s trick, no, a punk’s trick, now I am sorry I did it, but for me, as for many, repentance has come too late for amendment of life.”

His voice was bitter, and he paused, as if swallowing his own bitter pill. “After the glue, first Zamar made threats, saying he will take me to court, but we talked, and he promised me, he will go back to By-Smart—like I told you already.”

I nodded, trying to evaluate his tone, his eyes—his truthfulness. “Whoever destroyed Fly the Flag did it very carefully so as not to kill the illegal immigrants working the graveyard shift. Rose Dorrado said if you knew about the sweatshop Zamar was running, you would be furious—were you furious enough to burn down the plant?”