Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (22 page)

saw
she was hurt. She had a graze and a purple lump on her forehead and I could see
a stream of blood mixing with the rainwater on her left arm.

“Lotty!”
I pulled her to me. “What happened to you?”

“Someone
hit me.” Her voice was dull and she held herself stiffly in my embrace.

“Hit
you? Hit the car, you mean?”

“You
know, Victoria, I think I would like to lie down.” The precision of her speech
and her frozen posture frightened me as much as her wounds. I wondered if I
should get her to a hospital, but decided to take her home and try to find
someone to come look at her there. Maybe she needed her head X rayed, but
hospital emergency rooms are cold comfort for someone in shock; I’d rather get
her warm before a doctor decided on the next move. I fumbled in my purse for
the bills to pay my tab, couldn’t find any and ended up just tossing a twenty
on the bar.

I got
an arm around Lotty and half lifted her to get her outside. She’d left the
Trans Am parked rakishly against the curb. Despite the rain, which had darkened
the sky, I could tell that the windshield was cracked. I couldn’t help
inspecting the left fender as I ushered Lotty into her own car. The headlamp
had sprung, and the grille and the body had inverted their normal positions. I
suppressed a twinge of anger: Lotty was badly hurt. The car was only a chunk of
glass and metal, repairable after all.

My
place is just around the corner from the restaurant, but Lotty would be more
comfortable in her own home. Cursing the Cressida’s slippery gears I made my
way through the downpour to her building on Sheffield. She didn’t say anything
during the fifteen-minute drive, just stared in front of her, occasionally
pressing her left arm, the arm that had been bleeding.

As
soon as I got her undressed and tucked into bed with a cup of hot milk I called
Max. When I described her injuries he demanded to know why I hadn’t taken her
to a hospital.

“Because—I
don’t know—I don’t like hospitals. I’ve sat in emergency rooms with bruises and
cuts like hers and they only make me feel worse. Can you find someone to look
at her here? Let them decide whether she needs to be fed into the machine?”

Max
didn’t like it. As a hospital administrator he sees the places differently than
I do. But he agreed that since she was home it would be a mistake to move her
again right now. He was coming over himself, but said he would first roust out
Arthur Gioia, an internist at Beth Israel.

“You
don’t know what happened?”

“She
hasn’t been talking. I wanted to get her into bed first.”

When
he finally hung up I went back to Lotty. I brought in a sponge and a bowl of
warm water to clean the blood from her forehead and left arm. She had finished
drinking the milk and was lying with her eyes closed, but I didn’t think she
was asleep.

I sat
down next to her and started bathing her wounds. “Max is going to come
over—he’s pretty worried. And he’s hunting up a doctor to take a look at you.”

“I
don’t need a doctor. I am a doctor. I can tell there’s nothing serious the
matter with me.”

It
was a relief to hear her speak. “Do you remember how the accident happened?”

She
frowned impatiently. “It wasn’t an accident. I told you at the restaurant,
someone hit me. Could you bring me some ice for my head, please?”

I
sighed to myself as I went back to the kitchen. The accident was going to go
into Lotty’s annals of traffic mishaps—someone had hit her. Just more
forcefully than usual.

I
wrapped the ice in a kitchen towel and placed it gently on the purple bump.
“Did you report it to the police?”

“The
police came. They tried to make me go to a hospital, but I knew I was late to
meet you, and I had to see you, Victoria.”

I
gently squeezed the fingers of her injured arm. She lay silent for a few
minutes.

“I
think they wanted you, you see.”

“The
police want me?” I asked cautiously.

“No,
Vic. The people who hit me.”

The
ground shifted underfoot. “Lotty, darling Lotty, I know you’re in pain and
maybe concussed besides, but can you please tell me what happened? I thought
you were in a car accident. I know the Trans Am is bashed in.”

She
nodded, then winced. The towel with the ice fell off her head onto the pillow
with her movements. When I’d retrieved the cubes from the bed she marshaled her
wits and told me her story. She’d come home from the clinic to shower and
change. On her way out, just before she turned from Sheffield onto Addison,
another car had come out of nowhere—as they always did with her—and ploughed
into the front of the Trans Am.

She
frowned. “I must have hit my head on the windshield then, but I don’t think
that cracked it—I think they did that when they started hitting the car with
their bats. Anyway, I was furious. I can’t stand these reckless drivers. They
were never like that in London, and London traffic makes Chicago look like a
cow town. So I got out of the car to tell them what I thought of them and to
get their insurance information. That’s when they climbed out and started
hitting me. I was too stunned to react. Besides, I’m not like you, I didn’t
train under Muhammad Ali.

“I
was yelling for help, but the rain was starting; no one was on the street. Any
passing drivers were keeping strictly to themselves. The men were pounding on
me and telling me to learn the hard way to mind my own business when a police
car came by. As soon as they saw the police the men ran down the street. One of
the policemen got out and tried chasing them, but of course they had a head
start. They just abandoned their car right there. But as we were driving home I
thought, they must have been confusing me with you. Because I was driving your
car.”

She
was right. I knew she was as soon as she told me the men leaped out of their
car to attack her. How many men, and what did they look like, I wanted to ask,
but she wasn’t in the mood for interrogation. And it explained why she’d been
in such a peculiar state: not from shock, but anger with me for putting her at
risk.

“I’m
sorry,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She
kept her eyes shut, but her mouth twisted in the parody of a smile. “I am too.
More than you, no doubt.”

“Is
that why you came to the restaurant? To twist a knife into my side?”

She
opened her eyes at that and looked at me from under the ice pack. “No,
Victoria. I came to you because I’ve never been so scared in my life, at least
not since coming to America. And it seemed like your business. Something you
might perhaps fix, make right for me, so I’m not frightened every time I step
outside my house into my car.”

I got
down on my knees and put my arms around her. “I’ll do my best, chief.”

She
shut her eyes again and lay there, breathing lightly, holding my hand, while we
waited for Max and Art. I shivered to myself, picturing her under the assault,
wishing I could remake the last few days and have it turn out that I’d kept the
Trans Am, that I was the one they stopped. How far would they have gone if the
police hadn’t shown up? Left her with some broken bones? Maybe lying
unconscious in the street, brain-damaged, or dead?

I
couldn’t keep my mind from its feverish circling. It was a relief when Max rang
the bell, even though it was the prelude to a tough encounter with him. He
hadn’t found Art Gioia, but he’d brought Audrey Jameson. She was one of Beth
Israel’s more promising young house physicians; I knew her because she spent
fifteen hours a week helping Lotty at the clinic.

Max
went straight to Lotty, but Audrey stopped to talk to me before going to look
at the patient. When I told her what had happened she clicked her tongue
impatiently and followed Max into Lotty’s bedroom. I sat under the fire-red
painting in Lotty’s living room and thumbed through a back issue of National
Geographic. Max joined me a few minutes later.

“I
can’t believe you would do that to Lotty. Put her life at risk in that way.”

I
leaned back in the couch and squeezed my forehead with my left hand. “I don’t
want to hear about it, Max, at least not in that angry way. You must know I
wouldn’t have traded cars with Lotty if I thought there was a physical risk
attached. And if you think I would do such a thing, then there’s no point in
talking.”

“Why’d
you do it, then?”

“I
was being tailed. I wanted to move around with some freedom. Lotty agreed to
trade cars with me. I see now I shouldn’t have done it—but I couldn’t have
known it then.”

Whoever
had been following me didn’t know me by sight or they wouldn’t have jumped
Lotty. Would Chamfers have used his own men instead of a detective agency? I
thought of the guy I’d met on the loading dock last week. Bruno, I’d called
him. What name had Chamfers used? I couldn’t remember—my brain was scraping at
the edges, like a needle on a record that wouldn’t lift itself clear.

“I’ve
known Lotty since she was fifteen,” Max said abruptly. “She’s sometimes the
most infuriating person in the world. But I can’t imagine the world without
her.”

“I’ve
only known her since she was forty, but I can’t imagine it without her either.
Anyway, you can’t blame me more than I blame myself.”

Max
finally moved his head, an almost-nod of not-quite assent. He went to the
cupboard where Lotty keeps her brandy and poured some out. I took a glass from
him, but set it down beside me untasted. We sat without speaking until Audrey
came back out.

“She’ll
do. I’d like to send her in for X rays—I think her arm is cracked and should be
in a cast, and just to be on the safe side she should have a CAT scan of her brain.
But it’ll keep till morning. I wrapped the arm up and gave her something to
make her sleep. The only thing is, she wouldn’t take it unless I promised her
that Vic would stay here tonight. Okay with you, Warshawski?”

I
nodded. Max, hurt that Lotty hadn’t chosen him, offered to stay with me.

“Fine
with me. You can have the spare bed—I’m going to pull the mattress off the
daybed here and sleep on her bedroom floor in case she needs me.”

Audrey’s
teeth showed momentarily, white against her mahogany skin, as she gave a snort
of laughter. “No need to be a Victorian damsel, Vic. She’s really going to be
all right. You don’t need to sponge her with lavender water or whatever they
used to do for fever victims.”

“It’s
not that—it’s just that she was badly frightened. If she wakes up disoriented I
want to be there for her.” It was the least I could do, after all.

“Whatever
you want… How about a snifter of that brandy before I head back into the rain?”

Before
Audrey left she reminded me that she needed to report the assault to the
police. She spoke belligerently, as though expecting me to try to conceal it.

“No,
I agree,” I said. “In fact, I want to call the local station and see what they
know about it. You want to wait while I do that? They might send someone
around.”

Audrey
went to the kitchen to make coffee. Like Lotty, she’s an abstemious drinker—one
glass of brandy would tide her over for the rest of the month. Max was on his
second snifter, but then Lotty only buys Cordon Bleu for him.

I was
in luck when I called the district station. Conrad Rawlings, a sergeant I know
and like, was working the four-to-midnight shift. He promised to look up what
they had on the assault and send someone over to talk to Audrey and me. Half an
hour later, as Audrey, Max, and I were making laborious conversation, Conrad
showed up in person. He had another officer, a young woman whose head barely
cleared his armpits, in tow in case Lotty was up to making a statement.

“Absolutely
not,” Audrey said firmly. “She’s sleeping now and I hope she’ll keep on doing
it until morning.”

“Skolnik
and Wirtz—the officers who interrupted the attack—got a sketchy statement from
her,” Rawlings said. “So I guess it can wait until tomorrow. But she wouldn’t
let them take her to a hospital—kept telling them she was a doctor and she
would make decisions about her health care. They thought she was in a pretty
good state of shock, maybe concussed besides, but her car was drivable and she
could drive it, so they couldn’t force her.”

He
waved an arm at the young woman. “This is Officer Galway. She’ll be keeping
some notes as we talk. Since we can’t ask the doc, you tell us what happened,
Warshawski, and why.”

Audrey
brought the coffee she’d made from the kitchen. Everyone took a cup except for
me. I just couldn’t feel like eating or drinking while Lotty slept off the
blows that had been meant for me.

I
told Rawlings everything I knew—my visit to Chamfers five days before, Bruno
the dockman, the tail, switching cars with Lotty. “I think the attack was meant
for me. Especially because they kept telling her that maybe this would teach
her to mind her own business. She said they abandoned the car—whose was it?”

Rawlings
made a disgusted face. “That’s one thing we do know. It belonged to an Eddie
Mohr, who reported it stolen this morning. He lives south, near Kedzie.”