Fire Sale (41 page)

46

Behold: The Purloined Pen

T
he night ended for me as far too many had already this month: in a hospital emergency room, with Conrad Rawlings staring down at me.

“Whatever you have for breakfast, Ms. W., I want to start eating it, too: you should be dead.”

I blinked at him hazily through the curtain of pain blockers shrouding my mind. “Conrad? How did you get here?”

“You made the ER nurse call me. Don’t you remember? You apparently had ten kinds of fits when they tried to put you under, that I had to get here before you’d let them treat you.”

I shook my head, trying to remember the shreds of the night behind me, but the movement hurt my head. I put a hand up to touch it and felt a sheet of adhesive.

“I don’t remember. And what’s wrong with me? What’s on my head?”

He grinned, his gold tooth glinting in the overhead lights. “Ms. W., you look like the lead zombie from the
Night of the Living Dead.
Someone shot you in the head, which, if I thought it would pound any sense into it, I can only applaud.”

“Oh. In the warehouse, right before he knocked me out. Grobian shot me. I didn’t feel it, just the blood pouring down my face. Where is he? Where’s William Bysen?”

“We sort of have them, although the Bysen legal machine is moving into action, so I don’t know how long I’ll get to keep them. When I got here, they were trying a story out on the cop on duty in the emergency room, that you had hijacked one of the By-Smart semis and they’d fought you for it, which is how the truck got knocked over. The fire department crew that brought the three of you in objected that your hands and feet were tied, and Grobian said they’d done that to keep you from overpowering them. Want to comment?”

I shut my eyes; the glare from the overhead light hurt too much. “We live in a world where people seem willing to believe almost any lie they’re told, no matter how ludicrous, as long as someone with family values is telling it. The Bysens prattle so much about family values, I suppose they can get the state’s attorney and a judge to believe this one.”

“Hey, Ms. W., don’t be so cynical: you’ve got me on the case now. And the city garbagemen have some evidence that the Bysen story doesn’t exactly explain.”

I smiled at him in a muzzy, dopey way. “That’s nice, Conrad, thanks.”

The pain blockers kept carrying me off on their tide, but on my rides to the surface I told him about Billy and Josie, and as much as I could remember of my night at the warehouse, and he told me about my rescue.

Apparently, when the semi toppled over at the landfill, the city crews had sprung from their trucks and raced to the accident scene—as much voyeurs as Good Samaritans. It was then that one of them had caught sight of me, feebly flopping about the hillside. They’d called for help, and gotten a fire truck but no ambulance, so after the firemen freed Grobian and William from the tractor the three of us rode a hook and ladder together to the hospital.

I sort of remembered that; the pain from bouncing up Stony Island Avenue at top speed in a fire truck had woken me, and I had a dream-dazed memory of Grobian and William shouting at each other, blaming each other for the mess they were in. I guess it was only when they got to the hospital, and had to give a story to the police, that they’d decided to join forces and blame me for their mess.

I tried to stay awake enough to follow Conrad’s story, but behind the pain meds my shoulders throbbed from being pulled from their sockets. My kidneys ached, my whole body, from head to toe, was one pulsing sore; after a while, I just let go of it all and went to sleep.

When I woke again, Conrad had left, but Lotty was there, along with Morrell. The hospital wanted to discharge me, and Lotty was taking me home with her.

“It’s criminal to move you now, and I said so to the director, but their managed care owners decree how much care a battered body gets, and yours gets twelve hours.” Lotty’s black eyes flashed—I realized that she was only partly indignant on my behalf—she was furious that a hospital could pay more attention to their owners than to an important surgeon.

After his own recent injuries, Morrell knew what to bring for the battered body to wear home. He’d stopped at a fancy Oak Street boutique and bought me a warm-up suit made of a cashmere so soft it felt like kitten fur. He’d bought fleece-lined boots so I wouldn’t have to deal with shoes and socks. As I dressed in a wobbly, lethargic way, I saw that my skin looked like an eggplant harvest, more purple than olive. On our way out, the nurse gave me a bag with my slime-crusted clothes. I was even more grateful to Morrell for keeping me from having to look at them this morning.

Morrell helped me into a wheelchair, and laid his cane in my lap so he could push me down the hall. Lotty walked alongside like a terrier, her fur bristling when she had to speak to someone on the staff about my discharge.

Not even my injuries could keep Lotty from treating the city streets like the course of the Grand Prix, but I was too dopey to worry about her near miss with a truck at Seventy-first Street.

Morrell rode with us as far as her apartment: he would take a cab back to Evanston from there. In the elevator going up, he said that the British Foreign Office had finally located Marcena’s parents in India; they were flying into Chicago tonight, and would be staying with him.

“That’s nice,” I said, trying to summon the energy to be interested. “What about Don?”

“He’s moving to the living room couch, but he’ll go back to New York on Sunday.” He traced a finger along the line of my head bandage. “Can you stay out of the wars for a few days, Hippolyte? Marcena is having her first skin graft on Monday; it would be nice not to have to worry about you as well.”

“Victoria is not going anywhere,” Lotty pronounced. “I’m ordering the doorman to carry her back upstairs to bed if he sees her in the lobby.”

I laughed weakly, but I was fretting about Billy and Josie. Morrell asked if I would feel better if they went to stay with Mr. Contreras. “He’s aching to do something, and if he had them to fuss over, it would help him not mind so much that you’re staying here with Lotty.”

“I don’t know if he can keep them safe,” I worried.

“For this weekend, Grobian, at any rate, will still be in custody. By Monday, believe it or not, you’ll feel a lot stronger, and you’ll be able to figure out a better plan.”

I had to agree: I didn’t have the strength to do anything else right now. I even had to agree to let Morrell send Amy Blount down to Mary Ann’s to collect the runaway pair; I hated not looking after them myself, hated Morrell for adding I couldn’t manage the world all by myself, so to stop trying.

I slept the rest of the day away. When I woke in the evening, Lotty brought me a bowl of her homemade lentil soup. I lay in her guest room, luxuriating in the clean room, the clean clothes, the peace of her loving care.

It wasn’t until the next morning that she showed me Marcena’s red recording pen. “I took your foul clothes to the laundry, my dear, and found this inside. I assumed you want to keep it?”

I couldn’t believe it had still been on my body after all I’d gone through—or that Bysen and Grobian hadn’t found it when they had me unconscious and in their power. I snatched it from her. “My God, yes, I want this.”

47

Office Party

“I
f the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral.”

William’s thin fussy voice hung like a smear of soot in my office. Buffalo Bill’s full cheeks were sunken. His eyes under their heavy brows were pale, watery, the uncertain eyes of a feeble old man, not the fierce eagle stare of the corporate dictator.

“You hear that, May Irene? He wants me dead? My own son wants me dead?”

His wife leaned across my coffee table to pat his hand. “We were too hard on him, Bill. He never could be as tough as you wanted him to be.”

“I was too hard on him, so that means it’s all right that he wants me dead?” His astonishment brought some of the color back into his face. “Since when did you sign up for that liberal swill, spare the rod, spoil the child?”

“I don’t think Mrs. Bysen meant that,” Mildred murmured.

“Mildred, for once, you let me speak for myself. Don’t go interpreting me to my own husband, for heaven’s sake. We’ve all heard the tape that Ms. Warshawski played; I think we can agree it’s a sad chapter in our family life, but we are a family, we are strong, we will move past this. Linus has kept it out of the papers, bless him”—she directed a grateful look at the corporate counsel, sitting in one of the side chairs—“and I’m sure he’ll help us work out an arrangement with Ms. Warshawski here.”

I leaned back in my armchair. I was still tired, still sore around the arm sockets from having my arms lashed behind me for two hours. I had a couple of broken ribs, and my body still looked like a field of ripe eggplants, but I felt wonderful—clean, newborn, that euphoric sense you get when you know you’re truly alive.

By the time Lotty came on the little recording pen, its battery was dead. She wouldn’t let me leave her place to get a charger, but when I explained why I was so desperate to listen to it she relented enough to let Amy Blount bring my laptop over. When I hooked it up to my iBook, it sprang obediently to life and spilled its digital guts for me.

Thursday night at the warehouse, there had actually still been enough juice in it that it had recorded William, Grobian, and Jacqui. Grobian’s shot at me echoed horrifyingly through Lotty’s living room, followed by a satisfied exclamation from William that I hadn’t heard at the time. The pen had died on the way from the landfill to the hospital; it only gave me part of Grobian’s and William’s quarrel, but I got enough of Grobian’s highly colored language that I could really grow my vocabulary if I replayed it a few times.

After we downloaded it to my Mac, I asked Amy to make about thirty copies: I wanted to ensure they were spread far and wide, so that even the best efforts of Linus Rankin, or the Carnifice detectives, couldn’t eliminate them all. I sent a bunch to my own lawyer, Freeman Carter, put some in my office safe, sent one to Conrad and another to a senior police officer who was a friend of my dad’s, and, after debating it up and down with Amy and Morrell, finally sent one to Murray Ryerson at the
Herald-Star.
Murray was madly trying to persuade his bosses to let him go up against the Bysen money and power; whether they’d ever let him dig into the story was still up in the air.

In the meantime, the recording so bolstered my story that it forced the state’s attorney—nervous about going up against Bysen money and power—into motion. Grobian and William had been charged on Friday with assaulting me, but were released almost at once on I-Bonds. On Monday, though, Conrad’s team arrested them again, this time for murdering Bron.

The cops tracked Freddy to earth at his new girlfriend’s place and charged him with second-degree murder in Frank Zamar’s death—since he hadn’t intended to set a fire, just to short out the wires. They arrested Aunt Jacqui as an accessory—which somehow seemed really fitting: if charges stuck, if she ended up in Dwight doing time, she could run a class on how to accessorize your wardrobe with a murder charge. William and Grobian made bail within hours, as did Aunt Jacqui, but poor old Freddy was left to the mercy of the public defender, without money for bail—he would probably spend not just Thanksgiving in Cook County, but Christmas and maybe Easter, given the speed with which the state brings people to trial.

When Freddy realized he was being hung out to dry by Pat Grobian, he started to sing like one of Mt. Ararat’s choristers. He told Conrad about his meeting with Grobian in the warehouse, the one I’d seen, where Grobian ordered him to break into Bron’s house to look for Marcena’s recorder. He told Conrad about planting the little frog full of nitric acid at Fly the Flag. He even told Conrad about driving the Miata into the undergrowth below the Skyway for Grobian: he was bitter about that, because he thought Grobian should have given him the car in thanks for all his, Freddy’s, hard work, but all he’d gotten out of his night’s labors had been fifty dollars.

Conrad didn’t tell me all this at the hospital, but when he came by Lotty’s to ask me more questions, he filled in gaps in the story. He added that it was a source of pure pleasure to him to listen to Grobian and William turn on each other. “That’s how they got that big old semi over on its side—they were arguing over whether William was really a weasel or Grobian was a thug—I kid you not, Ms. W., the two reenacted their fight for my benefit—and William grabbed the steering wheel, saying he was a big enough man to drive the truck. They fought for control of the wheel and the truck went over. I love it, I really do, when the rich and famous carry on with the same attitude that my street punks do.

“By the way, that truck you rode in was Czernin’s rig, or the one he’d been driving the night he was whacked. Why Grobian didn’t scrap it is beyond me: we found Czernin’s and the Love woman’s blood on that conveyor belt dohingus, along with your own AB negative. Trust you to have the weirdest blood on the planet.”

I ignored that crack. “What about Aunt Jacqui? She was at the factory with them Thursday night; where was she when the truck went over?”

“She’d driven back to Barrington Hills. Now she’s saying that she was acting under Buffalo Bill’s orders. She says when she told him that Zamar was welching on Fly the Flag’s deal with By-Smart, Buffalo Bill told her she needed to teach Zamar a lesson, that he used to do it all the time in his younger days, until word got out on the street that no one messed with By-Smart. If they’re forgetting their lessons, we need to teach them again, she claims the old Buffalo said something like that.”

Conrad said Jacqui insisted that Buffalo Bill told her dealing with Zamar was supposed to prove she was ready to sit at By-Smart’s management table. With that bunch, I could believe anything of any of them. I could hear the old man say it, going “hnnh, hnnh, hnnh,” but if Jacqui thought she was any match for the old buffalo she was either gutsy or delusional.

Tuesday, when Lotty was in surgery, Morrell came by her apartment to visit me. He’d been over at County Hospital to see Marcena, who was recovering from her first skin graft. She was in intensive care, but she was finally conscious, and seemed to be recovering well—she was alert, with no signs of brain damage from her own ordeal in the By-Smart semi.

Having gone through the same harrowing ride as she had, with the semi’s hand conveyor belt rolling over me, I felt a more personal relief at her recovery than I might have before. She couldn’t remember the moments leading up to her accident, let alone the accident itself, but now that he knew where to look Conrad had sent a forensics team into Fly the Flag. They figured that Marcena had jumped clear of the falling forklift, but that Bron hadn’t; the fall broke his neck. Marcena was probably knocked cold when she hit the ground, with the rest of her injuries coming during the ride to the marsh.

Another point that we could only speculate on was Marcena’s scarf, the one Mitch had found that had led him to her. The forensics team guessed it was coming loose from her neck when Grobian tossed her into the trailer; perhaps it got caught in the doors and then was snagged on the fence when the truck left the road to go cross-country to the landfill.

These were just little points, the ones that I worried over. I had a private belief, or wish, that Marcena regained consciousness and left a deliberate trail: the scarf had been torn, with a big piece on the fence, and a smaller piece that Mitch found first. I liked to think she’d taken some kind of active steps to try to save herself, that she hadn’t lain passively in the truck, waiting for death. The idea of anyone’s helplessness terrifies me, my own most of all.

“It’s possible, Victoria,” Lotty said, when I talked it over with her. “The human body is an amazing instrument, the mind more so. I would never discount any possibility of remarkable strength and contriving.”

That same Tuesday, I started picking up the reins of my business again. Among dozens of messages of good wishes from friends and reporters, and a van full of flowers from my most important client (“Delighted to know you’re not dead yet, Darraugh,” the card read), my answering service reported at least twenty calls from Buffalo Bill, demanding a meeting: he wanted to know “what fabrications I was filling his grandson’s head with, and straighten out once and for all what I could and could not say about the family.”

“Boy won’t come home,” the Buffalo said to me when I called him back Tuesday afternoon. “Says you’ve told him all kinds of lies about me, about the business.”

“Careful with the words you toss around, Mr. Bysen. You accuse me of lying, and I could add a slander suit to your family’s legal troubles. And I don’t have any power over Billy—he’s deciding for himself what he will and won’t do. When I talk to him, I’ll see if I can get him to agree to meet with you—and that’s all I’ll do.”

Later that same afternoon, Morrell came by with Billy—and Mr. Contreras and the dogs. Josie had gone back to school—under protest, according to her mother. I myself had canceled basketball practice yesterday, telling the team I’d have to let them know when I was strong enough to return. They’d responded with a get-well card big enough to cover the wall in Lotty’s spare room, filled with encouraging messages in English and Spanish.

Amy Blount had already filled me in on Billy and Josie, because she hadn’t been able to persuade them to leave Mary Ann’s place when she drove down there on Friday. Rose Dorrado had been more forceful, dragging Josie home and compelling her to return to school.

As Amy described it, the reunion between Rose and her daughter was a predictable combination of joy and fury (“You were here, not two miles from me, clean, well fed, safe, and me, I have not slept at night for worry!”).

Billy, shell-shocked by his father’s behavior, stayed on at Mary Ann’s. He’d called his grandmother, and spoken briefly to his mother, but he wouldn’t go home. He didn’t even want to go back to Pastor Andrés: he thought the minister shared the blame in Frank Zamar’s death because of the pressure he’d put on Zamar to back out of his contract with By-Smart.

The main reason Billy wouldn’t leave Mary Ann’s, though, was because he didn’t have the energy to pack up and move one more time. He’d been at the pastor’s, he’d been at Josie’s, and then at Mary Ann’s, all in the last ten days. He was too upset to organize himself mentally into another move—and my coach definitely liked having him living in the apartment with her. Now that he wasn’t hiding, he walked the dog three or four times a day, and he brought all his intensity to studying Latin with her. Its rules, its complex grammar, seemed to be a haven for him right now, a place of purity, regularity.

On Tuesday, in Lotty’s apartment, he tried to explain some of that to me, and some of his reluctance to see his family again. “I love them all, maybe not Dad, at least, I find it hard to forgive him for killing April’s dad and Mr. Zamar—and even if Freddy and Bron made the plant burn down, I think it was really because of Aunt Jacqui, and—and Dad, that Mr. Zamar is dead. I even love Mom, and, of course, my grandparents, they’re great people, they really are, but—but I think they’re shortsighted.”

He curled his hands in Peppy’s fur and spoke to her, not to me. “It’s funny, they have such a big vision for the company, how to make it an international giant, but the only people they really recognize as—as human—are themselves. They can’t see that Josie is a person, and her family, and all the people who work in South Chicago. If someone wasn’t born a Bysen, they don’t count. If they are Bysens, it doesn’t matter what they do, because they’re part of the family. Like Grandma, she is truly against abortion in every way, she gives tons of money to antiabortion groups, but when Candy, when my sister, got pregnant, Grandma whisked her off to a clinic—they were mad at Candy, but Grandma got her an abortion that they’d never let Josie have, not that Josie’s pregnant.” He turned beet red. “We—we did listen to what you said, about—well, being careful—but it’s just an example of what I mean about how my family sees the world.”

“Your grandfather wants to talk to you. If we did it in my office, would you come?”

He worked furiously on Peppy’s neck. “I guess. I guess.”

So the day before Thanksgiving, much against Lotty’s wishes, I went to my office for a meeting with Bysen and his retinue. For once, I had enough people in my office to make me glad of my huge space. Billy’s mother was there with his grandparents, Uncle Roger, and Linus Rankin, the family lawyer. Jacqui’s husband, Uncle Gary, had also shown up. Of course, Mildred was in attendance, gold portfolio in hand.

My team included Morrell and Amy Blount. Mr. Contreras insisted on being present, with the dogs—“just in case those Bysens try anything on you in broad daylight; I wouldn’t put nothing past them.” Marcena’s parents also attended, curious to see the people who had nearly killed their daughter. I’d had to borrow five chairs from my warehouse mate’s studio so everyone could sit down.

In the middle, stubbornly sitting next to Peppy after giving his grandmother a hug, was Billy. He wore an old flannel work shirt and blue jeans, setting himself apart deliberately from his family’s gray business suits.

When Billy’s grandmother said she was sure Linus could work something out with me, Mr. Contreras bristled at once. “Your son darn near killed my girl here. You think you can come in here and wave your big fat wallet around and ‘work something out’ with her? Like what? Give her back her health? Give the Loves back their daughter’s skin? Give that poor sick girl on Cookie—Vicki—on Ms. Warshawski’s basketball team her daddy back? What’s going through your head?”