Fire Sale (39 page)

“Where was Josie while all this was going on?” I asked.

“Oh, I was waiting in the Miata.” It was the first time Josie had spoken—it was almost as though she hadn’t been there.

“In the Miata? It’s a tiny two-seater!”

“We had the top down.” Josie’s eyes were shining with pleasure at the memory. “I crouched behind the seats. It was so fun, I loved it.”

On a cold November afternoon, yes, fifteen, close to death and to love at the same moment—that was fun.

“How did Marcena get into the car, then?” I asked, trying to figure out how all these people had ended up together.

“Bron picked her up in the truck. She was interviewing someone, or looking at something, I don’t know what, but he told me he was going to get her, and he wanted to know was it okay if she drove my car. See, before I heard Grobian and Bron talking, we—Josie and I—were planning to run away to Mexico together, find Josie’s great-aunt in Zacatecas. We were going to take the train downtown to the Greyhound station. Josie doesn’t have an ID, so we couldn’t fly, and, anyway, if we flew my dad’s detectives would find us. We were going to take the Greyhound to El Paso and then hitchhike to Zacatecas.

“But then I decided I had to go back to Fly the Flag first—I had to see who from my family would be there, and I didn’t want Bron to know I was doing that. If I had known what they were going to do, I’d never have brought Josie, you have to believe that, Ms. War-sha-sky, because it was the most awful—” His shoulders started shaking; he was trying not to sob out loud.

“Who came?” I asked in a matter-of-fact voice.

“It was Mr. William,” Josie said softly after a minute, when Billy couldn’t speak. “The English lady, she drove up in Billy’s car. Mr. Czernin dropped us, see, over at the train station on Ninety-first Street. The factory is only, like, six blocks from the station. Billy carried my backpack, and we walked up, we picked up a pizza and stuff, and then we just went into the factory.”

She kept talking in the same soft voice, as if she didn’t want to startle Billy. “The big room where Ma used to sew, it smelled from the fire, but the front was still okay, you know, if you didn’t know the back was gone, you’d think it was still okay. So we waited, it was, like, I don’t know, three hours. It got kind of cold. And then suddenly I heard Mr. Grobian’s voice, and he and Mr. William came in. We hid under one of the worktables—the electricity was off because of the fire, and they had this big, portable work light they turned on, but they couldn’t see us.

“And then April’s dad came in with the English reporter. They talked back and forth, about April’s surgery, and what Mr. Czernin had done for Mrs. Jacqui and Mr. Grobian, and Mr. William, he said to the English lady, Mr. Czernin say you have—I mean, Mr. Czernin, he
says
you have a recording of all this?

“And the English lady, she said she had a tape recording, but she was just going to read them the—I can’t remember the word, but she’d written it all down, copied it from the tape recording, I mean. Because she said they couldn’t have her tape recorder, she knew what would happen to it if she let them at it.

“So she read this whole thing where Mr. Grobian was telling Mr. Czernin to wreck up the factory, wreck up Fly the Flag, I mean. Billy’s aunt, she was at the meeting, not in the factory, but the one where they told April’s father to wreck up the factory. So the English lady read about what they all said, and how Mr. William himself said this would prove to the old man—he meant Billy’s grandpa—that he knew how to take strong action.

“So when she finished, Mr. William, he gave this kind of phony laugh”—she darted a glance at Billy as if he might be offended—“and said, ‘I see you were telling the truth, Czernin. I thought you were making empty threats. We’ll work it out. You get the truck loaded up, we found the sheets okay, they’re in these boxes here, and I’ll write you out a check.’”

Josie gave a startling imitation of William’s precise and fussy manner. Billy sat, glassy-eyed, as if he were in a drunken stupor. I didn’t know if he was hearing Josie or just reliving the evening in his head.

“Then I don’t know what really happened, because we were under a table, but Mr. Grobian and Mr. Czernin, they loaded up the forklift, and the English lady, she said, oh, she would adore to drive the forklift, she’d done tanks and the semi but never a forklift, and Mr. Grobian said he would back the truck up to the loading bay and Czernin could show her how to handle the forklift. Only somehow the forklift went over and they fell off, the English lady and Mr. Czernin. She screamed, kind of, but Mr. Czernin never made any sound…” Her voice trailed off; suddenly it wasn’t exciting anymore, it was frightening.

“What happened?” I was trying to picture the scene—the forklift driving up to the truck and then over the edge. Or Grobian and William dumping a load of cartons on Bron and Marcena.

“I didn’t see it,” Billy whispered. “But I heard Dad say, I think that’s done it for them, Grobian. Load them into the truck. We’ll take them over to the landfill, and their nearest and dearest can imagine they’ve run off to Acapulco together.”

He started to cry, loud retching sobs that shook his whole body. The outburst terrified Josie, who looked from him to me with scared eyes.

“Get him a glass of water,” I commanded her.

I went around the table to cradle his head against my breast. Poor guy, witnessing his own father commit murder. No wonder he was hiding. No wonder William wanted to find him.

I jumped as a voice spoke behind me. “Oh, it’s you, Victoria. I might have guessed from all the racket that you’d shown up.” Mary Ann McFarlane was standing in the doorway.

44

The Recording Angel…or Devil?

W
ith her bald head atop her scarlet tartan dressing gown, Mary Ann made a startling sight, but all three of us responded at once to her authority. Billy’s ingrained good manners brought him to his feet; he drank the water that Josie had been holding out to him, and apologized to Mary Ann for waking her up. After we’d gone through the bustle of greetings, and how I’d happened on the fugitives, Billy finished the tale, by explaining how they’d ended up at Mary Ann’s.

They’d spent the remainder of Monday night huddled under the worktable, too shocked and frightened to try to leave. They thought they’d heard more voices than just William’s and Grobian’s, but they weren’t sure, and they didn’t know if someone was watching the plant. But by morning, they were cold as well as hungry. They risked getting up to use the bathroom, which was in the intact part of the plant. When no one attacked them, they decided to leave but didn’t know where to go.

“I wanted to call you, Coach Warshawski,” Josie said, “but Billy was afraid you might still be working for Mr. William. So we came here, because Coach McFarlane was the person who helped Julia when she got pregnant.”

I shadow-punched Mary Ann. “What was that you said to me this afternoon—about not knowing the Dorrado girls very well?”

She gave her grim smile. “I wanted them to go to you, Victoria, but I’d promised I’d keep their secret safe until they were ready to tell it. Trouble is, I thought Billy was hiding while he sorted out the ethics of his family’s business—I didn’t know ’til I heard him just now that they’d witnessed Bron’s death. If I’d known that, please believe I’d have called you
quam primum famam audieram.
”

Mary Ann breaks into Latin when she’s agitated—it calms her down, but makes it hard for people like doctors and nurses to know what she’s saying. I don’t follow her easily myself, and, right now, I was too overwhelmed by Billy’s narrative to make the effort.

“You said Marcena read from a transcript, that she didn’t play the recording,” I said to Billy. “But did you see her recorder at Fly the Flag?”

“We didn’t see anything,” Josie said.

“And Billy’s dad didn’t see you?”

“No one saw us.”

I could see why William was looking so desperately for the recorder. They’d gotten her computer, but they didn’t have the original. But why was he so desperate to find Billy if he didn’t know his son had been there? I asked Billy who else he had told.

“No one, Ms. War-sha-sky, no one.”

“You didn’t instant-message anyone?”

He shook his head.

“What about the blog—April said there’s one you and your sister use to stay in touch.”

“Yeah, but we use nicknames, just in case. Candy’s at a mission in Daegu, that’s in South Korea, my folks—my dad, he sent her there after the—the abortion—to keep her out of temptation and make up for the life she’d taken. I’m not supposed to write her, but we post to this blog, it’s devoted to Oscar Romero, on account of he’s my—my spiritual hero. My dad doesn’t know about it, and when I write her I use my blog name, Gruff, but—”

The hair prickled on my neck. “For ‘Billy-the-Kid-Goat’s Gruff,’ no doubt. Did you tell her about Bron and your dad?”

He was looking at the linoleum, tracing a circle with his running shoe. “Sort of.”

“Carnifice could track your blog postings through your laptop, even if you’d used the world’s cleverest nicknames.”

“But—I told her about Bron through Coach McFarlane’s computer,” he objected.

I yelped so loudly it sent Scurry running down the hall for cover. “They have your nickname, so they can look for any new postings you make! And now they can trace Mary Ann’s machine. If you’re trying to lay low, you absolutely cannot be in touch with the outside world. Now I need to figure out where to park you two—it’s a question of hours before your dad’s detectives track down Mary Ann’s machine. We may need to move you, too,” I added to my old coach.

Mary Ann said she wasn’t budging from her home, tonight or any other time; she was staying here until they moved her to a cemetery.

I didn’t waste time arguing with her or trying to persuade the kids to move; my most urgent task was to find Marcena’s recorder before William’s Dobermans did. Since she seemed to carry it everywhere, she must have had it on Monday. Maybe she’d only read from a transcript because she was recording the meeting, or she was wary enough not to let them see her device.

Her big Prada bag, which she also took everywhere, hadn’t materialized after the assault, so William must have gotten that. He’d searched the remains of the Miata. If the pen wasn’t there, or at Morrell’s, or the Czernin house, then I was betting she’d lost it either at Fly the Flag or in the truck that took them to the landfill. Or at the landfill itself, I suppose. Since I didn’t know where the truck was and couldn’t look at the landfill until morning, I’d swing by the plant now, before William had the same idea.

I hoped Billy and Josie would continue to be safe if I left them behind. It was hard to live with so much uncertainty. I’d been trailed yesterday, but not today—as far as I knew. But I’d been using my phone this past hour, and Billy had been using Mary Ann’s computer. I went to the living room and peered through a slit in the drapes. I didn’t think anyone was watching, but you never know.

Josie had gotten them this far. She was four years younger than Billy, but a harder-headed urban survivor. It was she I coached to put the chain bolts on both doors and not to open them for anyone but me; if I didn’t come back tonight, then tomorrow they had to tell a reliable adult what was going on.

“You two have been smart about not speaking on Coach McFarlane’s phone, and you need to keep doing that, but you have to promise me that you will call Commander Rawlings in the Fourth District if you don’t hear from me by morning. Don’t talk to anyone but him.”

“We can’t go to the police,” Billy objected. “Too many of them owe favors to my family, they do what my father or—or grandfather tells them.”

I was about to say they could trust Conrad the way they trusted me, but how could I be sure of that? It might be true, but Conrad had superiors, he even had patrol officers who could be bribed or threatened. I gave them Morrell’s number instead.

“When I do come back, I’m going to take you home with me. I don’t like leaving you here with Coach McFarlane—you’re too exposed, and it puts her in danger.”

“Oh, Victoria, my life is too close to the end to worry about danger,” Mary Ann protested. “I like having young people in the place. It keeps me from brooding over my body. They’re looking after Scurry, and I’m teaching them Latin—we’re having a grand old time.”

I smiled weakly and said we could figure that part out later. I showed Josie the place in the curtains where she could see the street, and told her if she saw someone follow me she should call me. Otherwise, I’d see her in the morning.

I zipped up my parka, kissed Mary Ann on both cheeks, and let myself out the door. Billy came behind me and pulled briefly on my arm.

“I just wanted to say thank you for helping me out when I fell apart just now,” he muttered.

“Oh, honey, you’ve been carrying way too big a load. You didn’t fall apart—you just felt safe enough to let me know how hard it’s been.”

“Do you mean that?” His wide eyes studied me for mockery. “In my family, not even my grandma thinks it’s all right to cry.”

“In my family, we think you shouldn’t wallow in your tears, we think you should act—but we believe that sometimes you can’t act until you’ve cried your heart out.” I put an arm around him and gave him a brief hug. “Look after Josie and Coach McFarlane. And yourself. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

The skies had cleared. When I got to my car I could see the Big Dipper low in the northern sky; the moon was almost full. This was both good and bad; I wouldn’t have to use a light to find the factory, but I’d be visible if anyone was watching Fly the Flag.

I checked my flashlight. The batteries were good, and I had a spare pair in the glove compartment. I put them in my pocket. Checked for my extra clip to the Smith & Wesson. I left my phone on until I was a couple of blocks from Mary Ann’s, heading north, toward Lake Shore Drive and my home. At Seventy-first Street, I switched off my phone, then turned west and looped around the neighborhood until I was sure I was clean. I turned south again and made my way to Fly the Flag.

Once again, I parked on Yates and walked down to the factory. The Skyway embankment loomed in front of me, its sodium lights forming a halo above the street but not shedding much light below. Most of the streetlamps were out down here at ground level, but the cold silver moon lit the streets, turning the old factories along South Chicago Avenue into chiseled marble. The moonlight cast long narrow shadows; my own figure bobbed along the roadway, like a piece of stretched bubble gum, all skinny lines with little blobs where my joints were.

The avenue was empty. Not the quiet emptiness of the countryside, but one where urban scavengers moved under cover of the dark: rats, druggies, thugs, all looking for a fix. A South Chicago bus labored up the street. From a distance, it looked like
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
—its windows were filled with light, and the headlights looked like a grin underneath the big front window. Get on board, ride home in warmth and comfort.

I crossed the road and went into the factory yard. It had been over a week since the fire, but a whiff of smoke still hovered faintly in the air, like an elusive perfume.

Even though the traffic on the Skyway was loud enough to muffle my sounds here, I walked along the edge of the gravel drive so that my running shoes wouldn’t crunch in the loose stones. I went around to the side, to the loading bay.

I saw at once what had happened to Bron. Just as he had the heavy front load of the forklift suspended beyond the lip of the dock, ready to drop his load in the truck, Grobian had pulled away. The forklift had pitched headfirst off the dock, burying its forks in the ground. The cartons Bron had loaded on the front end were scattered in a wide circle around it. The fall itself must have broken Bron’s neck; the wonder was that Marcena had survived it.

I shone my flashlight around the ground. Sherlock Holmes would have seen the telltale broken weed, or displaced piece of stone, to say whether Marcena had been in the truck when it went over. I could only guess that her war zone training had given her a sixth sense of the danger, so that she jumped clear of the forklift as it fell.

I climbed around the machine. I looked underneath it as best I could, but I couldn’t see Marcena’s red pen. Maybe it was buried under the front end, but I’d save that possibility for last—it would mean hiring a tow truck to raise the forklift.

I moved in a circle around through the weeds and the gravel. This side of the building faced away from the fire, so I didn’t have to contend with the broken glass and charred remnants of fabric I’d found when I searched here last week, but there was still a tiresome amount of debris, jetsam from the Skyway, flotsam from the street. I’d read recently that Chicago’s landfills were just about at capacity and we were starting to ship our garbage downstate. If all the bags and cans I’d seen on the streets today had been put into the garbage, maybe we’d have filled our landfills even sooner. Maybe litterers were saving taxpayers money.

After an hour, I was as sure as I could be in the dark that the pen wasn’t out here. I put a foot onto the forklift and climbed up onto the loading dock. I sat on the lip and stared into the tangle of brush, trying to imagine Marcena.

Now that I wasn’t moving around myself, the night noises started to sound loud. I strained to listen under the whoosh of the cars and grinding gears of the semis overhead. Were those rats and raccoons rustling in the brush, or humans?

Marcena wanted Grobian and William on tape, or chip. She saw she was onto a much bigger story than she’d thought; she knew the power the Bysens had—if she tried to publish the story, they could squash it, sue the paper, sue her. She needed their voices, saying what they were doing.

Maybe she’d had her recorder in her hip pocket, but maybe she’d put it where she thought it would pick up any private remarks the two men made. I pushed myself to my feet. Despite my parka, I was cold now, and I didn’t want to go inside the dark, cold building alone.

Billy and Josie spent a night here, I scolded myself. Be your age, be a detective. I turned on my flashlight again and went into the loading room. Shelves ran along its high walls, filled with flat cartons ready to be made into flag boxes. There were still some bolts of fabric in their plastic sheathing, waiting to be carried to the cutting area. After two weeks, a thick layer of sooty dust covered them, and the edges had been eaten by rodents, charmed to have such soft nest-building material laid out for them. I heard them scuttle away as my light drove them from their work.

I gave a cursory look around the room, but the floors were bare; I think I would have seen the recorder if she’d dropped it here in the open. I did check walls, and under the shelves, to see if it might have rolled out of sight, but found only rat droppings. I shuddered and moved quickly into the workroom where William found, or claimed he’d found, a load of sheets.

Here was where the fire damage was obvious. There was a gash in the front wall where the firemen had axed through the entrance. Ash lay on the sewing machines and cutting tables, heavier toward the southwest corner, where the worst of the blaze had been, but sprinkled with a liberal hand where I stood, near the other end of the room. The big windows in the back had broken. Glass lay everywhere, even near the front of the room. How had it traveled so far? Pieces of window frames, chair legs, half-sewn U.S. flags—all these were strewn around, as if some giant playing dollhouse in here had a temper tantrum—she got tired of it, picked up all the pieces and dropped them any old how.

Marcena would have wanted as much material as she could get for her hot story; she would have tried recording Grobian and Mr. William while Bron loaded the forklift. So maybe she put her pen down near where they were standing.