Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (16 page)

At
seven-thirty I got up to go. They were moving on to a restaurant for dinner,
but I’d had too long a day. I just wanted to get to bed.

Michael
stood up with me. “We’re flying back to London tomorrow. I’ll go downstairs
with you to say good-bye, Vic.”

I
thanked Max for his hospitality. “Good-bye, Or‘. Good to meet you—and to hear
your music.”

The
composer swung her arm in a farewell, as if signaling an orchestra. She didn’t
move from her chair. As Michael shut the screen door to the hall behind him I
heard her commenting on the Cellini Quintet, which Max and Lotty knew well.

Michael
held the door to the Trans Am for me. I shook his hand through the open window.

“Have
a safe journey to London. I hope you didn’t mind playing for those musical
cretins last week?”

He
flashed a grin. “At the time, I was ready to break my cello over their heads.
The only thing that stopped me was its age. Now I can shrug them off with good
grace. Or‘ and I will play her concerto at the Albert Hall this winter. She
should get the response she deserves then. We raised a good-sized amount for
Chicago Settlement; I keep reminding myself that that’s the only reason we did
it anyway.”

“If
I’d known my ex-husband was going to be filling the place with lawyers and
tycoons, I could have warned you what the audience would be like. At least I
can promise you he won’t be in London.”

He
laughed and waited by the edge of the drive until I’d backed into the street.
He didn’t look much like Max, but he’d inherited his father’s beautiful
manners.

I
honked at a maroon Honda that had suddenly decided to turn into traffic from a
driveway. I turned the radio back on in time to hear Ellen Coleman’s nausea
again over finding the bloated body in the Sanitary Canal. I suddenly
remembered Mitch Kruger. With the emotion I’d packed into worrying about
Harriet Frizell I hadn’t had a thought to spare today for the missing
machinist.

Stickney.
That was miles west of Kruger’s hangouts around Damen. It couldn’t possibly be
he. But the old man could have fallen into the water, wandering around drunk
and disoriented. I didn’t know if the canal had a current. How far could a body
travel in it in the course of the week since Kruger had last been seen?

I
made the turn from Sheridan onto Lake Shore Drive. The traffic around me
quickly speeded up to sixty, a good fifteen miles over the limit, but I dawdled
along in the right-hand lane, trying to calculate how far away Stickney was and
how fast the water would be moving to get a body down there. It wasn’t a
straight run, though. A corpse might get caught in the pilings going round a
bend and be hung up for a few days.

I
realized I didn’t have the data to make any kind of analysis. Checking the
traffic, I moved the Trans Am into a higher gear. A Honda hovered a sedate two
lengths behind me on the left; everyone else was zooming past at a good clip. I
watched the Honda for a second to make sure it wasn’t gaining on me, flashed my
signal, and gave the car some gas.

It’s
stupid to buy a car whose cruising speed is one-twenty when the limit in your
area is fifty-five or under. Stupider still to nose it toward its maximum
without checking for blue-and-whites. One of them brought me down a few blocks
north of Belmont. I pulled over to the verge and got out my license and bond
card.

I
squinted at his name badge. Officer Karwal, not a name I knew. He was“ in his
fifties, with deep lines around his eyes and the usual slow moves of the
traffic detail. He frowned over my license, then looked at me intently.

“Warshawski?
Any relation to Tony Warshawski?”

“He
was my father. Did you know him?” Tony had been dead thirteen years now, but
there were still plenty of men on the force who’d worked with him.

It
turned out Officer Karwal was one of the many rookies who’d trained with Tony
during the four years my dad spent at the police academy. Karwal spent a good
ten minutes remniscing about my dad with me, patting my arm as he told me how
sorry he was Tony had died.

“And
you’re all alone, huh? I never knew your ma, but everyone who did was crazy
about her. Now, you know what Tony would say if he heard you’d been hot-rodding
in that sports car of yours.”

I did
indeed. I’d been grounded for speeding when I was eighteen. Tony had pulled too
many bodies from mangled cars to tolerate stupid driving.

“So
you be careful. I’m not going to write you up this time, but I will if I have
to stop you again.”

Promising
to be good, I meekly put the Trans Am back into gear and drove to the Belmont
exit at a placid forty-five. It was when I was stopped at the light on Broadway
that I saw the Honda again, two cars behind me. Under the streetlamps I
couldn’t be sure it was maroon, but it looked that way.

Of
course, Hondas are a dime a dozen and maroon is one of their more popular
colors. Could be coincidence. I flashed my right-turn signal and dawdled up
Broadway to Addison, then made a quick unsignaled turn onto Sheffield, where I
parked next to Wrigley Field.

I
walked briskly to the ticket booth, made a show of examining the hours it was
open, then swung around to my left. The Honda had pulled over on the far side
of Clark. I didn’t stare at it, didn’t want to let the guy know I’d spotted
him, but walked briskly back to the Trans Am. He was in trouble, anyway; I
could just head up Sheffield into the night and there wasn’t much he could do
about it.

I
made a quick right onto Waveland, then took Halsted down to Diversey, where I
headed for home. With an effort I remembered the name of the man I’d met at
Diamond Head on Friday. Chamfers. He’d said he was going to investigate me—it
looked like he was doing it.

I
needed to talk to Mr. Contreras, but first I wanted to bathe. Just a short bath
and a short nap and I’d get back to my appointed rounds, I promised the
conscience gods. The whisky I drank while I soaked was a mistake: it was after
nine-thirty when the phone woke me again.

I
stuck out an arm for it, but when I picked up the receiver the line went dead.
I rolled over again on my side, but without fatigue and Johnnie Walker to numb
me I remembered Mitch Kruger and the unknown body pulled out of the Sanitary
Canal. I sat up in bed and began massaging my neck, stiffened from the anger
I’d carried around most of the day.

I
moved sluggishly to the kitchen and made coffee. Drinking it in quick, burning
gulps, I whipped together a frittata out of onions and chopped spinach. I ate
it while I dressed, in cotton slacks and a cotton shirt since the evening was
still muggy, and left the plate by the front door on my way downstairs. Mr.
Contreras was still up; I could hear the faint blare of the TV from the other
side of the door when I rang the bell.

“Oh,
it’s you, doll.” He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt over old work pants.
“Let me just put something on. If I’d known you was coming I never would have
got undressed.”

I
wanted to tell him I could stand the sight of his armpits, but knew he wouldn’t
feel comfortable talking to me without a shirt on. I waited in the doorway
until he had covered himself.

“You
got some word on Mitch, doll?”

“Can
I come in? I don’t. At least, I hope I don’t. I got sidetracked today.” I told
him about my abortive efforts to go on the offensive with Todd Pichea.

Mr.
Contreras spent several minutes on a highly colored description of both Todd
and my ex-husband, ending with a predictable chant that he didn’t know what I’d
ever seen in Dick. “And it don’t surprise me to hear Ryerson wouldn’t help you.
Guy’s only interested in himself, if I’ve told you that once I’ve told you a
hunnert times. I can see why you haven’t had time to worry about Mitch, and
anyway, you was down there yesterday, down at his old place. I guess I was
jumping off the deep end, worrying about him. He’ll just turn up again one of
these days, like the bad penny he is.”

“This
is the hard part,” I said awkwardly. “When I was listening to the radio on the
way home, they had a report about pulling a man out of the canal. That was over
in Stickney, so I don’t see how it could be your friend. But I couldn’t help
wondering.”

“In
Stickney?” Mr. Contreras repeated. “What would Mitch’ve been doing down in Stickney?”

“I
agree. I’m sure I’m wrong. But I thought maybe we should take a look at the
guy’s body anyway.”

“Now,
you mean?”

“We
can wait until morning. If it isn’t Kruger I can’t do anything tonight to find
him. And if it is, well, he’ll still be at the morgue in the morning.”

Mr.
Contreras rubbed the side of his face. “Well, if you’re up to it, doll, I guess
I’d just as soon go now and get it over with.”

I
nodded. “I brought my car keys with me just in case. You ready to leave?”

“Yeah,
I guess. Maybe I’ll just let the princess out first.”

While
I waited for Mr. Contreras to go through the laborious business of securing his
front door, I suddenly thought of the phone call that woke me up. If I’d lost
someone I was following that’s what I might do: phone her home base to see if
she answered. If my companions were back in business, did it matter if they
followed me to the morgue? If they belonged to Diamond Head it couldn’t
possibly be of interest to them.

“What
did they say that made you think it might be Mitch?” Mr. Contreras asked when
we were buckled into the Trans Am.

I
shook my head. “I don’t know. It just sounded possible. I’d been down Friday
looking at the Sanitary Canal. Diamond Head fronts it; Mrs. Poker’s
boardinghouse isn’t that far away. I could just see it happening somehow, his
being drunk and going over the side while trying to make his way around the
Diamond Head property.”

“I
ain’t saying you’re wrong, but Mitch and me worked there forty years, just
about. He knows that place.”

“You’re
right. I’m sure you’re right.” I forbore reminding him that it had been over a
decade since they’d quit. I couldn’t have found my way around the public
defender’s office drunk and in the dark after all these years. Probably not
sober, either.

I
turned right onto Diversey without signaling and looked in the rearview mirror.
A couple of seconds later another set of lights followed me around the corner.
It wasn’t a Honda. Maybe someone else going down Racine to Diversey, or maybe
they realized I’d spotted the Honda and had changed cars. At Ashland the second
car let a few people turn onto the street in front of him, but it was still
with me four blocks later when I started south on Damen.

Mr.
Contreras was rambling on about some of his drunken adventures at Diamond Head,
which were meant to prove you wouldn’t fall in the soup even if you were
stewed. I debated whether to tell him about the tail; it would take his mind
off his worries and get him prepared for battle, if it came to that. Although
my friends were following carelessly enough to invite confrontation, I didn’t
want to push it. Giving in to my angry impulses over the last four days had
brought me nothing but misery. I wasn’t going to compound my problems by
confronting thugs when I wasn’t at my best physically or mentally. I let Mr.
Contreras ramble on, checking periodically to make sure they weren’t going to
ram us or start shooting.

The
morgue was uncomfortably close to Cook County Hospital, just on the other side
of Damen from it. An easy progression from surgery to autopsy. As I pulled into
the lot outside the concrete cube housing the dead I glanced up the street,
wondering what Mrs. Frizell was doing. Was she still lying like a corpse on her
bed? Or was she trying to get well enough to go home to Bruce?

I turned
off the ignition, but didn’t get out until the car that had been tailing us
continued east on Harrison. In the dark it was impossible to tell what model it
was: anything relatively small and modern, from a Toyota to a Dodge.

An
ambulance had pulled up outside the big metal doors marked deliveries. Really,
it was just like the loading bays at Diamond Head and the neighboring plants
I’d seen on Friday. Here it was bodies instead of motors, but the attendants
handled their load with the same casual familiarity.

I
waited with Mr. Contreras for someone to buzz us in through the main door. The
place was kept locked even during the day. I don’t know if the pathologists
needed protection from the demented bereaved, or if the county was afraid
someone would run off with evidence in a murder case. Finally one of the guards
deigned to listen to the doorbell and release the lock.

We
went to the high counter immediately inside the entrance. Despite having
watched us through the reinforced glass for five minutes, the attendant on duty
continued his conversation with two women in lab smocks lounging in a nearby
doorway.

I
cleared my throat loudly. “I’m here to try to identify a body.”

The
attendant finally looked up at us. “Name?”

“I’m
V.I. Warshawski. This is Salvatore Contreras.”

“Not
yours,” the man said impatiently. “The person you’ve come to ID.”